Avenging Angel (10 page)

“And Cynthia’s still afraid?”

“She was there. I did the story on it, and she was one of the witnesses. Three masked men kicked open the door, shot the old man, and drove off, just like that.” A series of jolts rattled the truck. “The land case never did go to court; no Moreles has mentioned land grants or Mormons since. Not loud enough to be heard, anyway. But I can’t blame Cynthia for being afraid. The Moreles claim could still go to court.”

Wager stared out the window at the surrounding land. It had gradually dried out, and the grassy meadows near town were replaced by a carpet of lumpy, gray-green sagebrush. Here and there a Hereford lifted a white face with dull pink eyes toward the sound of the truck. What Winston had told him could explain the girl’s fear. Cynthia was somewhere in her mid-twenties, and a memory like that, reinforced by the wailing family, the funeral, the police, and officials and reporters—all speaking English—it would be bitter and long lasting. “Was any of that property near Mueller’s?”

“No,” said Winston. “Good try, but it was all down here. We just crossed over some of it.”

The dry rangeland glided past the quivering glass of the truck’s window. “This isn’t open range?”

“It is now. BLM land—Bureau of Land Management—since we crossed that cattle guard. The ranchers lease it for their cows.” He turned the truck onto a dirt road marked only by a Stop sign. It led straight west for a mile or two and then, without warning, tilted sharply down in a sequence of switchbacks. Winston halted the truck at the edge, and Wager felt as if they were at the bow of a gigantic ship that nosed into a stiffened sea of stepped and falling waves. In a series of giant benches, the plateau they stood on dropped away, gradually leaving behind the clusters and dots of juniper, the clinging sage and cactus, and becoming almost totally naked sand and wind-polished rock. Past each shelf of land, troughs of red and purple led to deeper troughs, which dropped out of sight. Rising from unglimpsed depths, flat-topped mountains and spires of rock and mesa seemed poised to fall. After turning off the engine, they got out to stand in the hot wind that rose steadily from the treeless rock and sand below. Its sough was as vast as the space it scoured, and was deepened by the distant shrill scream of a hawk gliding along one of the faces of rock below.

“The benchland.”

Winston spoke with awe, as if he had said “the promised land” or “the magic land,” and Wager wondered just how far the newsman really was from his Mormon past. “Is this where you were raised?”

“Born and raised. Over in that canyon—Green Water Canyon.” He pointed to a large notch that twisted between two mesas painted red and orange and white in the morning sun. The bottom of the canyon was out of sight, its lower reaches dim with the haze of distance and the shadows of massive walls. “That’s forty-five miles away, line of sight. Over a hundred on the ground.”

And, Wager thought as they climbed back into the truck, maybe a century or two in time. If time meant anything out here.

The switchbacks led sharply down the escarpment to drop into the shadow etched across benches and slopes. Despite the shade of the east rim, the dry air warmed the cab and both men lowered their windows. A low streak of dust twenty miles away marked the passage of some other vehicle, but that was the only motion besides their own that Wager could see in the hundred miles of broken horizon. He recalled reading somewhere about the upheaval of these mountains now out of sight behind them, the newest version of the Rocky Mountains. Here, they must have lifted out of some shallow sea, sending oceans of churning, carving waters through layers of sandstone shelves and loose sediment, knifing first a fissure, then a gully, then a canyon as the fall of water became steeper and its grit abraded faster and deeper through the colored rock: red from iron oxide, the black of lava ash, pale yellows of bleached ocean sands, the thin green of copper or sulphur ash. What streams remained now twisted their way to join the Colorado, their muddy, boiling water draining from the snows of the mountains behind. Here and there they dammed a lake, whose own gigantic size was dwarfed by the spread of empty rock and vacant sky. Then the water once more became a thin vein, sheltered from the thirsty sun by towering cliffs, and rushing to reach the Gulf of California before it disappeared into the dry air or hungry sands.

“This here’s an arm of Escalante Canyon.” Their road ran straight out on a nose formed by one of the benches, then branched off into more steep switchbacks. “That way takes you over to Lake Powell and the Indian reservations.” He pointed to a purple notch on the horizon. “This way’s the road toward Green River—except you can’t get all the way there by car. We’ll get to the bottom pretty soon.”

But by the time the dirt track finally leveled out, Wager felt himself numbed by the glare of sun bouncing off the tilted rock surrounding him, the ceaseless rush of hot wind, the endless shifting of canyon walls that slowly drew closer to the road. Even the swirl of dust devils spinning across the dotted waste failed to startle him awake anymore. Dulled by the heat and the motion, eyes heavy from squinting against the sun, he felt suspended, as if he were a fixed point, and the rock and sand and glare swung and jolted past him.

Winston turned off the larger track onto a two-rut lane that occasionally disappeared entirely as it wound upward and through a saddle between steep red cliffs, then down again over lurching wind-polished slabs of rock. “Here we are.”

Ahead, like a mirage, Wager saw a startling swath of green ridged by irrigation ditches. A line of flickering Lombardy poplars ran beside the main ditch leading from the river into the maze of field branches. At one end of the clearing, masked by the sun-blanched green of willows and the taller, restless leaves of cottonwoods, a collection of buildings and sheds and pens sprawled in the shade.

“It looks deserted.”

“They know we’re coming—we raised plenty of dust coming through the notch.” He added, “I hope he ties up them damn dogs.”

Gradually the trees revealed a two-story square house sitting like a carved block of stone in the deep shade. As they approached, a single figure walked slowly into the whiteness of sunlight and stood motionless for the ten minutes it took the truck to wind down the wall and across the rough canyon floor. When they finally pulled up to the man in a swirl of pink dust and clatter, he nodded once, wide straw hat bobbing down and up briefly, and said, “Orrin.”

The newsman nodded just as curtly. “This here’s Gabe Wager. He’s a lawman from Denver, Zenas. I brought him because I trust him. You can too. He’s got some pictures. Gabe, Zenas Winston.”

The fully bearded man did not offer to shake hands. Like Orrin, he was slender but broad-shouldered, and there was some similarity in the nose and especially the dark eyes. Wager couldn’t see much of his mouth or chin beneath the squared-off beard.

“All right, then; come on in.” He turned abruptly and raised his voice to the unseen but noisily wailing dogs, “You, Pious! You, Leo! Hush up!”

They followed the man’s work-stiff stride into the shade of the trees, where the weight of sun suddenly lifted. Wager caught glimpses of towheaded children peeking like animals hiding from a predator behind outbuildings or screens of willows. The sound of the shallow river blended with the rustle of cottonwood leaves, and somewhere behind the outbuildings a bird whistled persistently above the flat clank of an animal’s bell. Zenas led them to the farmhouse. Its mortarless walls were of brown sandstone, its windows and doors framed in thick wooden timbers that had faded almost to white. The concrete entry slab was patterned with brightly colored stones set in some kind of awkward script that Wager couldn’t make out. Upstairs, a baby cried fitfully, and Wager had the feeling that the life of the house had drawn back to watch and listen invisibly until the strangers were gone. The parlor was a small room, sparsely furnished with a dark shiny table and a few overstuffed chairs that Wager’s ex-wife would have called “antique Victorian.” One wall was hung with photographs, the top rows having the brown, stiff look of tintypes; the bottom ones were stiff, too, but in a more modern way, as if both subject and photographer knew the picture would go on that wall. Wager did not think he saw Orrin’s face among the generally young men and women who peered back. A dark oak chest of drawers filled another wall, and closed doors led to the rest of the house. Wager suspected that this was a room for meditation or prayer, or formal counsels. Zenas, taking off his straw cowboy hat to show his own strip of balding scalp, pointed a work-thickened finger at the chairs. “Be comfortable.” He waited until Orrin and Wager sat, then he sat himself in the largest of the chairs, the only one with arms. As soon as he was settled, one of the white doors opened and a woman wordlessly brought in a large pitcher and three glasses. She filled them silently, serving first Wager, then Orrin, and finally Zenas, who was equally quiet until she disappeared, her ankle-length dress whispering across the frame as the door closed behind her.

“Ease your thirst.”

Wager was not certain whether Zenas was used to giving orders or unused to showing manners to infidels. Probably a little of both, plus a strong sense of the patriarchal dignity needed to govern his tribe. He was certain that the man was not acting this way to impress Wager; what a stray Gentile might think would never trouble Zenas’s mind.

When the glasses of cool, tart apple juice were emptied, the man gazed at Orrin. “Well?”

“He don’t know the names of the two, so he’s brought some pictures to show you.”

The dark eyes turned to Wager, who held the photographs out to Zenas. The man carefully studied first one face and then the other until, without a sound, he rose and went into another room, shutting the door behind him.

“He’s gone to show them to Miriam. She’s the one who brought in the drink.”

“Which wife’s she?” murmured Wager.

“First. That’s why she served the drink.”

“The tribe of Zenas.”

“Lo, they wandered in the desert until the Lord delivered them unto Zion.”

“And showed them the way of the righteous.”

“The way of the self-righteous.” Orrin winked.

When Zenas came back he handed the pictures to Wager and sat and stared at the wall of photographs.

Wager gave him a few minutes. He heard footsteps somewhere on the second floor. The baby’s cry had stopped abruptly with the muffled sound of feeding, but a young voice drifted through the curtained window, earnestly talking about something indecipherable. A bird whistled. Wager raised an eyebrow at Orrin, who gave a slight shake of his head and sat still. Finally Zenas sighed, as if waking from a light sleep.

“We know them. Both of them. They are brethren of the church.”

“Names?” said Wager. “Can you give me names, Mr. Winston?”

“I can. This one is Asa Kruse.” The thick finger moved to the face of the man found in Denver. “This one is Ervil Beauchamp.”

When Zenas said nothing more, Wager asked, “Can you tell me why somebody would shoot them?”

Zenas, looking at Orrin rather than at Wager, said bitterly, “They were killed by the Antichrist!”

Again Wager waited, until finally he had to ask, “What’s that mean?”

“Tell him, Zenas,” said Orrin. “You can trust him.”

The beard wagged once, in either agreement or resignation. Then he began to speak in a kind of biblical cadence. “There were two brothers, Ervil and Willis Beauchamp, sons of Jonathan Beauchamp, who saw that the Salt Lake people had turned from God’s commandments, and followed a false prophet, and refused to return to the ways of the Lord. So Jonathan Beauchamp gathered up his people and fled. He fled first into Arizona to Short Creek, where he lived in peace until the Lord saw fit to visit punishment upon his people by sending the Gentile police down on them. Once more he fled, going down into Mexico, where the Lord saw fit to gather up Jonathan. Before he died, the progenitor anointed the head of Ervil, naming him President of the High Priesthood. Then the sons of Jonathan settled their wives and chattels in Mexico. There, after much travail, the Lord rewarded them for their faithfulness to his Word and they prospered, for what the Lord taketh he returneth a hundredfold to the faithful. But the enemy of the faithful never sleeps.” A calloused finger rose in warning.

Wager listened to the man recount the religious history of an obscure handful of fanatics in the only formal language he knew, and he found nothing at all to laugh at.

“Dissension came between the brothers, and Willis, the younger, claimed to be Prophet, Seer, and Revelator. Ervil spoke against this false claim, and their people divided into a true and a false church and warred among themselves. And it brought down the armies of the papists who, like the armies of the pharaohs of old, only awaited their chance to move against the children of righteousness whose lands they coveted. And Willis, listening to the Enemy of God, did denounce his brother, Ervil, and join with the papists to drive them from their homes and scatter Ervil and his followers to wander without rest in the lands of strangers.”

Orrin sat up suddenly, eyes wide. “Is that who came here, what, two or three years ago?”

“He and some of his people came asking help, and the Lord moved my heart to charity.”

“Where did they go from here?” asked Wager.

Zenas still spoke to Orrin, as if the story had to be filtered first through half-faithful ears. “They went to hide among the Gentiles, abiding the Lord’s time until Ervil could gird up his loins to strike back at Willis and destroy this false brother and false prophet.”

“But where?” Wager insisted. “What was his last address?”

“Zenas, it’s the only way. Already those two are dead. And Mueller, too.”

“Mueller is a Gentile. He’s not important dead or alive.”

“But not Asa or Ervil,” Orrin said. “And their families—you know what the destroying angel means.”

The bearded man closed his eyes for a long moment, as if asking once more for strength or guidance from some inner voice. When he opened them, he looked directly at Wager. “West Mosier Street—2444.”