Righteous - 01 - The Righteous

by Michael Wallace

  As for what he’d taken, Gideon had withdrawn the larger sums via bank teller. No ATM would dispense tens of thousands of dollars, not even in Vegas. He’d gone to the ATM for the smaller amount. But really, what was a thousand dollars next to the earlier seventy grand? No, the problem was that Taylor Junior didn’t know where the money was going, and he didn’t like it.

  One of the guys outside the window knocked again, then cracked the door. “Are you done?” asked the one with the sunglasses. “Or are you in there jacking off?”

  “Find another machine,” Gideon said over his shoulder. “Listen,” he continued, trying to reason with his brother. “What’s another couple of thousand? I was short. I needed the money.”

  “That’s for Father to determine.”

  The guy with the sunglasses wouldn’t give up. He sounded pissed, now. “You don’t get out of there and I’m going to come in and drag you out.”

  Gideon turned to the men. His nose felt better, but his head still throbbed and he hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours. He knew he looked like hell. And was in a mood to match. “You step into this room and you’ll never walk out of here alive.”

  The man eyed him, no doubt wondering. Crazy guy? Mob? Drug dealer? Dangerous types filled Las Vegas. Apparently deciding not to find out for sure, the two moved on.

  Wise move.

  Gideon still fumed from that humiliation with Jacob Christianson in Enoch’s apartment. Jacob had tried to call down some sort of priesthood power on him, and Gideon had actually stopped. Stopped dead, in fact, and he could not forget or forgive the way he’d faltered. A moment of weakness. It had made all the difference in the subsequent fight. One man and his teenage sister had defeated them.

  God, how he hated Jacob Christianson. He’d hated the man since childhood. He had never managed to intimidate Jacob. The reverse, actually. How he wanted to crush Jacob, kill him, take his sister and oppress her.

  Looking on the bright side, Gideon’s failure had reinforced his weakness to Father. That was a carefully cultivated image that masked an undercurrent of deception. Gideon had his own plans. They did not always involve Elder Taylor Kimball. And certainly not his most pathetic of sons, Taylor Junior.

  “Trouble?” Taylor Junior asked. Hopeful, it sounded.

  “Not anymore. Look, I need that PIN.”

  “I don’t think you do. Look, I just got in. There was flooding at the Jameson Young farm and I’m cold and wet. I’m going to take a shower. Why don’t you take it up with Father next time you see him?”

  “Good idea,” Gideon said. “Maybe while I’m at it I’ll tell him about the women’s panties. Wonder what account paid for those.”

  He reserved such cards for special occasions. Play them too often and they would lose their efficacy. Now was one of those times. The man he was meeting tonight did not accept credit.

  Taylor Junior was quiet. No doubt weighing the threat behind Gideon’s words. And wondering how the hell Gideon knew about the underwear.

  The truth was, Gideon didn’t know why his brother had ordered the women’s underwear. Maybe it was for a special girlfriend. Perhaps one of Father’s younger wives who liked to take off her long underwear—temple garments—once in awhile to feel sexy.

  Or maybe the pervert liked to wear panties while he fondled himself. Gideon didn’t care. Taylor Junior had grown weirder and weirder about sexual matters over the years. Much of that was Gideon’s fault.

  When Gideon was twelve and Taylor Junior eight, the two brothers had entered an extended period of struggle. Gideon had recognized the need to dominate his brother—at least that was how he framed it now; at the time he wasn’t conscious of motives—and set about bending Taylor Junior’s will to his own.

  Once, when the two boys were swimming at Blister Creek Reservoir, Gideon had asked, “How long can you hold your breath under water?”

  Taylor Junior had eyed him suspiciously, perhaps alerted by the overly-casual tone in Gideon’s voice. “I don’t know. Thirty seconds?”

  They’d swam out to a place known simply as the Black Rock. It was about fifty feet from shore. Other kids climbed on the rock and dove in, or used it as a point of reference on swimming races. No adults around.

  “Because, you know,” Gideon said, “the top swimmers can all hold their breath for a long time. Take the Olympics…”

  “I don’t want to swim in the Olympics. That’s a worldly pursuit.”

  “Come on,” Gideon scoffed. “Everyone wants to be in the Olympics.”

  The truth was, Gideon knew, Taylor Junior had always been a little afraid of the water. He was a good swimmer when he could see the Black Rock, or when he stayed in shallow water. Get him into deep water, where your toes kicked at the colder, darker water beneath, and he would lose his nerve. The water was deep around the Black Rock.

  “Now, I’m going to teach you how to hold your breath.” Quickly, he struck. He wrapped his arms and legs around Taylor Junior and used his weight to drag the boy under water.

  Gideon was not so much bigger than Taylor Junior that he didn’t have to go under too in order to hold his brother down. But he was not panicking. That made a big difference.

  Taylor Junior was crying when Gideon let him up a short while later. He swam for the rock, now some ten feet away. Gideon grabbed him before he reached the stone.

  “Help me!” Taylor Junior screamed. But the only person on this side of the rock was Gideon’s friend Israel Young. Israel watched with a grin.

  “That was pretty good,” Gideon said, treading water out of reach of his brother’s flailing arms. Whenever Taylor Junior swam for the rock, he would grab the boy’s ankle and pull him back. Otherwise, he stayed out of the way. “Let’s go for a minute this time. No, two minutes. Oh, and don’t scream. Your voice is so annoying it just makes people want to drown you.”

  The younger boy was weak from the struggles and it didn’t take nearly as much effort to push him under a second time. This time Gideon was able to come up for air while keeping his brother under. When he let the boy loose a couple of minutes later, Taylor Junior screamed and coughed up water. He climbed onto Black Rock and sat there trembling and sobbing for a long time. Eventually, Father had to swim out to pry him loose and bring him back to shore.

  Taylor Junior had told on Gideon, of course, but adults only listened to the whining of a child with half an ear. Gideon had been scolded and lost his dessert privileges for the night. A worthwhile trade.

  It had been a good start. The second opportunity came a couple of weeks later when Gideon and Israel came upon Taylor Junior wandering by himself down a dry wash on the edge of Witch’s Warts.

  “Hey, TJ,” Gideon said. “You want to play bounce with us for a little while?”

  “What do you mean, bounce?” Taylor Junior asked with narrowed eyes. He’d already glanced behind him as if wondering whether or not he should run.

  “That’s where we drop our pants and push our bodies next to each other and all bounce up and down at the same time.”

  Taylor Junior wrinkled his face. “What? Why would we do that?”

  They’d showed him. Taylor Junior, of course, hadn’t been the one doing the bouncing. He’d been standing unhappily in line while the other two rubbed their penises against his naked bottom. There hadn’t been any penetration; that wasn’t the point.

  Taylor Junior had submitted to the bouncing, but had looked sullen and unhappy when the two boys grew bored and let him pull up his pants.

  Gideon said, “You’re a fag, TJ.”

  “Yeah,” Israel had said. “You just got bummed. Homo.”

  Over the years, Gideon had taken whatever opportunity had presented itself to reinforce this impression. He had made Taylor Junior put on his sister’s panties. He had snapped him in the balls with a wet towel when he came across him getting out of the shower. It had worked to the extent that Taylor Junior played the same tricks on his own younger brothers and sisters. Gideon knew of at least two girls
and a boy that he’d fondled over the years.

  But that game had grown too fun, and Gideon had not been smart enough to leave it alone. Later, when they were teenagers, he had ordered gay porn delivered to the house in Taylor Junior’s name. He would collect the magazines from the mail and leave them around his brother’s room. Taylor Junior would search his room several times a day in paranoia. He must find them before someone else did.

  And someone did discover the magazines. It happened when Gideon was back from college on Christmas break. Charity Kimball walked in while Gideon was thumbing through the magazine to see all the disgusting things that fags did and wondering how long it would take Taylor Junior to turn to faggotry.

  Two hours later and Father was pushing Gideon from the car in the 7-11 parking lot with sixty bucks and a single change of clothes. A Lost Boy. He was two weeks short of nineteen. Tuition and rent due. No job or employment history. It had taken years to worm his way back into his father’s confidence.

  But Gideon had never lost the ability to bend Taylor Junior to his will. One of those times was now, and Gideon’s brother reluctantly agreed.

  “Okay, fine,” Taylor Junior said over the phone while Gideon sat in front of the ATM machine. But instead of giving the number, he recited a verse of scripture. “And with righteousness shall the Lord God judge the poor, and reprove with equity for the meek of the earth. And he shall smite the earth with the rod of his mouth; and with the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked.” A pause. “It’s a mnemonic. The PIN is the chapter and verse. You do know the scripture, right?”

  There were people who could recite entire chapters of Biblical or Book of Mormon scripture from memory. Most knew hundreds of verses at the very least. Gideon had never been one of those people and Taylor Junior knew it.

  “Give me the damn number.”

  “Look it up, asshole. You should remember the part about the Lord slaying the wicked. It is especially apropos.” The line went dead.

  Gideon boiled with rage. He tried to remember the scripture. Something about reproving the meek and the breath of God’s lips. And slaying the wicked, of course. It should be easy enough to find from the index. But that meant returning to his apartment for a set of scriptures. He had no choice.

  Gideon left the booth. He met the two punks in the street and gave them a ferocious glare as he passed. They stared back, but he could see fear behind their bravado.

  His rage toward Taylor Junior only grew as he thumbed through the scriptures back at his apartment. He’d make his brother pay for this.

  Here it was. 2nd Nephi, chapter 30, verse nine. The PIN would be 2309. The mnemonic still meant nothing to Gideon. But he could remember a four digit PIN number that guarded an account with half a million dollars easily enough.

  And then it came to him. The perfect revenge on his brother. Taylor Junior wanted this girl. Eliza Christianson. His first wife, so very important. And Taylor Junior had half-convinced himself that he loved the girl. The fool.

  Gideon would take Eliza for himself.

  The idea was perfect. It would punish Taylor Junior, while delivering a blow to Jacob Christianson and the whole miserable Christianson family. And Eliza herself was a good catch, pretty and intelligent. Perhaps overly headstrong, but that would be a pleasant challenge. A smile came to his face.

  PIN fixed firmly in memory, Gideon left the apartment with his mood completely altered. Time to get that money, and with it buy the LSD for the temple.

  #

  Abraham Christianson called from Canada while Jacob was in the shower. The work at the Jameson Young house had left him wrung out, but a hot shower restored his spirits. It was still night and he hoped to sleep a few more hours.

  He stepped out of the bathroom to see his cell phone blinking that he’d missed a call. He glanced at the clock. It was almost four in the morning. Abraham Christianson was a famous early riser, getting more work done by breakfast than many men accomplished in a day. Still, this was early even by Father’s standards.

  “Ah, it’s you,” his father said when he returned the call. “How is the investigation going? Give me high level details, not specifics.”

  “High level? We were right. It wasn’t the Mexicans. I have a few leads, but nothing concrete yet.”

  No need to alarm his father about the attack in Enoch’s apartment. Further, he didn’t want to overplay the involvement of the Kimball clan until he was certain which of them were involved.

  Instead, he talked about how Fernie and her children were doing, knowing that his father would appreciate details about his adopted daughter and his grandchildren. He talked about the flood; father hadn’t heard. He was friends with Jameson Young and wondered if he should send help. Jacob assured him there were more than enough resources in Blister Creek to clean up the mess.

  Jacob stifled several yawns. “I’m sorry, but I’m really tired. Haven’t slept much in the last couple of days and I need a few more hours. Is there anything else?”

  “You know there is,” Father said. “How is this other business coming?”

  “You mean Eliza? My hands are full with the murder investigation, Dad. I don’t have time to interview potential husbands.”

  “Elder Johnson calls almost every day. He’s growing insistent.”

  “Dad, Elder Johnson is seventy-four years old. He had a triple bypass four years ago and a broken hip last year. Surely we can do better.”

  “He’s an Elder of Israel and close friend of the prophet. Short of marrying Brother Joseph himself, there are few better matches.”

  “Politically speaking, sure. But what’s his life expectancy? A year? Two? How many children would Eliza give him anyway?”

  “So she’d be free to marry again, maybe this time someone of her own choosing.”

  Jacob considered. A couple of years of unpleasant marriage for the opportunity to arrange her own marriage at a later date. A woman had much greater leeway after her first husband died. She’d already been sealed eternally in the temple to another man, as would be any children born to her by a second husband; it lowered her value.

  Father interrupted Jacob’s thoughts. “So you’re not crazy about Elder Johnson. That’s fine. You have two other men to consider. Has Eliza met them yet?”

  “She met Taylor Junior.”

  “And?”

  “Not impressed. Neither was I.” An understatement.

  “I’ve never cared for the Kimball boys myself,” Father said. “Bright enough, but morally weak. I certainly don’t relish marrying my daughter to one of them. Didn’t even care to see Fernie marry Elder Kimball. But this might be the best choice.”

  Jacob said, “Why the rush? She’s just not ready. If we push her, she might resent it for the rest of her life. And Eliza’s still got some growing to do. Maybe college…” “College? It’s not a woman’s duty to seek self-actualization, Jacob. Meanwhile, so long as your sister stays unmarried, it’s your own growth that remains stunted.”

  “Meaning, no wife for me.”

  “Exactly. How can I ask the prophet to sanction taking some other man’s daughter without offering my own in return?”

  “Frankly, it’s a tradeoff I’m willing to accept while we wait until she’s ready. It won’t be forever. Maybe a few years. When Eliza’s older. Just not now.”

  A pause. “Are you a homosexual, Jacob?” his father asked.

  Jacob couldn’t say that he was surprised by the question, even if the timing was abrupt. His mother had asked a similar question when he was a teenager and had been more interested in books than girls. You do like girls, don’t you Jacob?

  “No, Father, I’m not a homosexual.”

  “Because, you know, I’d still love you. Having homosexual feelings is not a sin, only acting on them. We can suppress our desires, even the unnatural ones, in service of the Lord. I know that some are born with this burden, through no choice of their own.”

  “I’m not gay,” he repeated. It must have take
n a terrific effort for his father to acknowledge that some men were born homosexual. Most took a harder edge. Few things inspired greater loathing than the sodomite.

  “Then what is it?” Father’s voice sterner, now. “Men fight for that first wife. You know better than anyone that you won’t be a full member of Zion until you take a wife. Every minute you stay single you put yourself at risk. Others, more aggressive, will look to supplant you.”

  “Yes, I am fully aware of the ramifications of my ongoing bachelorhood. And we’ve had this conversation before, haven’t we? How many times? Ten, twenty?”

  “Then what is it?” Abraham Christianson asked. “Why don’t you take what’s offered? It’s yours. Reach out and grab it.”

  Jacob didn’t have an answer. Nothing his father would accept. “I can’t, Dad. Not right now. I need to stay focused on this murder. If I don’t, there will be more deaths.”

  “You really believe that?”

  “I don’t just believe it, I know it. Now, can we give this a rest? Until Eliza and I return from Blister Creek, at least?”

  A sigh from the other end. “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Jacob. The pressure on both you and Eliza is growing too great to resist. But it’s not like you don’t have options. There are three acceptable choices. All three men have at least one daughter on the table.”

  On the table? The talk of trading girls like so much livestock was repellent. “Okay, let’s get this out in the open. Pros and cons.”

  “Good, now you’re sounding reasonable,” Father said. “First, Taylor Junior. I know what you think about the man. But Elder Kimball has three daughters between the ages of fifteen and seventeen and two more who will turn fifteen within the next few months. They are all good girls, and some are quite pretty.”

  True enough. But Taylor Junior? Jacob would sooner smuggle his sister to those anti-polygamy crusaders in Salt Lake than condemn her to that marriage.