“I saw it on the news, yeah.”
I hesitated, thinking over what I was about to say. Somehow it made it easier, knowing Caleb wasn’t related. “Well, before he tried to kill me, he shared a little secret he’d been holding on to. Said that Darla wasn’t dead. That he’d helped her run away.” And it sounded strange hearing myself tell it for the first time. “She was pregnant with Marcus’ baby.”
Caleb put two and two together, pointing back at the news. “Let me guess. Marcus was the stepbrother?”
I nodded. “It wasn’t Yehoshua back then.”
Caleb got to his feet, holding his glass out. “Do you mind?”
“Knock yourself out.”
Ice rattled in the tumbler behind me. “You think he knows where your sister is?”
“Assuming she’s still alive. The problem’s getting a chance to talk to him.” Flies swirled around the shitty thought in my head. I bit one fingernail to the quick and spit it out. “Maybe I should hop a plane out there, what do you think?”
“Have you been looking at the TV?” Caleb snapped open the recliner he’d fallen back into. “The place is surrounded by the FBI. It’s a damn zoo. You’d get yourself killed—if you even got past them. Plus, there’s the whole problem of etiquette. I’m not sure knocking on the front door gets you an invitation.”
“So what are you saying?” I joked.
“What if your stepbrother’s not big on family reunions?”
The meaning of his words slipped off my back like water to a duck. The alcohol was talking by then. “Only one way to find out.”
Thirty minutes after Caleb passed out, I climbed into bed.
The last of the dreams started, pleasant enough, in a beat up green VW of some vintage that the floors were actively rusting holes. The road could be seen rushing past our feet while we drove. In the dream I rode with Darla, who was only ten or twelve from what I could tell. She drove the car on a stack of phonebooks, but I complemented her anyway, regardless of the fact that her toes never seemed to touch the pedals. In the back seat sat three men, each with a stack of Bible tracts in their hands, singing hymns and arguing over who should lead. When they did sing, I found myself amazed at the sound; they were thumb-snapping great, which, out of some bizarre compulsion, I did uncontrollably.
After a short drive, we arrived at a small home in the woods. All three men climbed out of the station wagon together, carrying enough tracts to choke a horse. The three choir singers all ran to the door together. My sister smiled and patted me on the leg with her little girl hand, saying they were all very polite. But something about the way they rushed to the door scared me, their knuckles almost dragging the ground like beast of the field.
When a frail looking woman came to answer their rapid knocks, they all handed her a tract. And I thought for a second, this wasn’t so bad. Then they all pulled handguns out of their belts and shot the woman in the head and chest until the tracts she held were like bloody leaves around her feet. I started screaming in disbelief.
“Really, they’re each a good boy. And this is how the story should go. Leave it to me, they make this a joy,” my sister said with a rhyme, beaming after them as if they were X, Y, & Z from The Cat in the Hat Comes Back.
Once they climbed back in the car, I was startled to see Yehoshua, sitting in the back cargo compartment, overhanging the seat like something out of The Muppets. His smile cut sideways, a ring of thorns pressed into his scalp. Blood oozed from the rather severe punctures brought on by the crown. And then, as though noticing me for the first time, he waved with a hand just as the choir boys began to sing.
“Lee, you must see, that for all good things to grow, you must first be willing to sow.”
I captured a look from my sister, hands steering exaggeratedly back and forth like an inspired performance racer, which would have killed us, had the VW actually responded. We were driving to hell, or maybe we’d already gotten there with Darla’s magic feet never touching the pedals.
There was no talking my way out of this. Pure adrenaline pumped through my veins. Reaching for the door handle, it broke off in my hand. Then dropped down between my legs to the floorboard with a clang and, chipping off a huge section of rusted metal, hit the pavement below. I turned to see it cart wheeling end-over-end as it struck the road repeatedly.
Yehoshua lifted off his crown of thorns and smeared blood away as if it was sweat, then resituated it somewhat, moving various thorns here and there as if he were sprucing up a flower arrangement, and then yanked it violently back over his forehead until red began to flow into eyes.
He smiled politely and said, “Fitted crowns, I hate it when they give me the wrong size. What’s a Christ gotta do around here to get some respect?”
The dream ended at 6:43 in the morning, which was when I woke up dehydrated and moving a headache through my head like broken glass being dragged across the floor of my skull. I put coffee on and popped two Excedrin with some eggs and toast and waited for Caleb to wake.
CNN was still covering the standoff in Chimayo when I walked to the computer and logged onto Southwest Airlines out of Birmingham International and punched up flights to Albuquerque, New Mexico. Answers to questions lingered. And as futile as Caleb felt it might be, I had to try something.
*****
Albuquerque in February was not entirely miserable weather, but it did require extra layers of clothes. When I stepped out of the airport with my luggage bag, the collar of my jacket lifted against my cheek, buttressing my neck from the cold. The Southwest pilot had said the temperature was forty-six degrees; the wind made it seem colder.
I picked up a car from Hertz, set the navigation for Chimayo and headed north to Santa Fe on I-25. It would take me close to an hour and a half to get there. I found a local news channel on the radio covering the standoff, now in its fourth day, I learned. Using the navigation system, I pulled up lodging and hotels and began dialing numbers to see if anything was available. And I took the first B&B without a question.
Up the road the Sangre de Cristo Mountains ascended the desert horizon, shoulders of stone cobbled together by the hands of time. Santa Fe appeared riddled with broken rafters of dense gray clouds, and the presence of blackening borders promised rain. Pueblo style homes populated the natural landscape with stone and mud adobe brick. Cedar-exposed vigas accented the exterior walls, and the familiar Anasazi Indian styles were prevelent in most of the archetecture. Rock formations and pinon-juniper spread throughout the desert, running high into the mesas.
Along US-285, ten minutes out of Santa Fe, reports of an exchange of gunfire between God’s Arm and the FBI, during the early morning hours, revealed no casualties from the authorities’ side. I jerked the car off the road and listened to the news flash, knots tightening in my stomach with the mess up the road.
I remembered the Waco Davidian aftermath, and how David Koresh, the self entitled “Lamb of God,” had killed something like 80 people during the final stage of his 51-day-standoff with the FBI, burning most of them alive. Was Marcus capable of that? Does a bear shit in the woods?
My stepbrother grew infatuated with the study of the Hebrew text the older we got. He used to say if he could be one person in the Bible, he would be Joshua, the appointed leader of the Israelites following Moses’ death. He wanted to be prepared to battle for God like Joshua when the time came. In Hebrew, the interpretation for Joshua was Yehoshua. And I knew beyond words, beyond any and all text or sited revelation, for my stepbrother, the battle had begun. And like most Old Testament leaders in the Bible he would take the battle to them, no matter the outcome.
News trucks and TV reporters clogged the streets. It was obvious the luck involved at stumbling on a room. Rain pelted the ground as I climbed out of the car and headed to check in. Flipping on the TV, I grabbed a towel and sat down on the edge of my bed, gazing in disbelief at the latest exchange of gunfire.
A film crew had recorded a one-sided exchange between the FBI and someone ins
ide the barracks. During the night the FBI brought in several high-powered spotlights and staged them around the compound. The main farm house, a large barn, a covered walkway leading into the side of a mountain, and two military-arranged aluminum-sided barracks situated side-by-side behind the main farm house glowed in the dark. An intricate network of raised wooden paths spiderwebbed between the buildings. The news footage jumped out of focus, panning to one of the spotlights, which exploded around dawn, following a short hail of semiautomatic gunfire. Seconds later, another camera managed to capture several rounds of starburst muzzle fire as it poured out of an aluminum barracks window into a second spotlight. There appeared to be no return fire from the FBI.
Yehoshua had stockpiled an arsenal of weapons, it seemed. The reporter on the screen for CNN, having uncovered several leads in the ongoing standoff, revealed several known felons linked with or purported to have joined the faction known as God’s Arm over the past several years. Pictures of the five men displayed on the TV were mostly of mug shots from previous arrests, their deadly expressions a tangle of snarls and unsettled brows.
I was flush with thoughts when I left the room, the turn of events from last night gnawed at me. More people were going to die. I walked down the street, puddles of water glistening across the pavement as my feet pounded through them, hand gripping tight a map of Chimayo. Several blocks away at the Sheriff’s department, TV crews reported live feeds in follow up to the shooting deaths of the two deputies killed by God’s Arm. One attractive-looking female practiced her opening statement several times, stopping only to smile in the side view mirror, her finger brushing against her pearly teeth as she suggested to the cameraman they try it again.
Two black Suburbans, parked outside, carried government issued plates on the back. A man stood beside one, staring across the hood at a plastic coated map, talking into a walkie-talkie. He wore thin, wire framed glasses and was dressed in tactical assault gear. I walked up to the small Sheriff’s office and weaved through a group of reporters.
Inside, the feeling of the office was depressing. Red eyes and deflated faces. Somber reflections carried over in the loss of several officers. Through the glass of the front room I could see the Sheriff sitting, staring absently out the window. To his left were three FBI agents, one on the phone, the other two discussing something between them. I knocked on the door and was met by one of the agents. Sheriff Henning looked over from his desk momentarily.
“I was wondering if I could speak to Sheriff Henning?”
He waved his fingers to come in. “If you’re with the press I’m not giving anymore interviews right now.” He pointed out in the hall towards the entrance. “Sign says no fucking reporters past the door. So you can just—”
“I’m not.” A miserable quiet seeped through my bones. I waited for what seemed an eternity.
He waved his fingers at me to enter and looked back out the window. All three of the agents left the room as though silently commanded.
“What can I do for you?”
I introduced myself and said, “First off, I wanted to tell you how sorry I am for everything that’s happened. I know you must be dealing with a lot on your plate right now. Have you heard anything from anyone on the inside? I wanted to find out a little more information on the group that’s living out there.”
He twisted around in his chair and stared through my chest mostly, almost as if I wasn’t there. Eyes darkened by lack of sleep, exposed a face marked with pain and loss. A haunted expression transfixed his features, and he reminded me of a tormented ghost. Some lost soul trapped in the police station, wandering the halls in search of justice.
“I’m sorry, but who in the hell are you again?” He looked at me as if I defied logic.
“You need a reason, right?”
“Only if you wanna stay.”
I looked at the chair opposite his desk and pointed. “Do you mind?”
“No, hell no, let me fix you a sandwich, while you make yourself comfortable.” He never moved.
“The guy leading God’s Arm, Yehoshua—” I cleared my throat and started again. “We’re sort of related. He’s my stepbrother.”
“Well, you’ll have to excuse me, I’m all out of award ribbons right now.” Henning rocked back in his chair and put his boots up on the corner of the desk. “But let me guess this next part, you’re going to tell me he was the embodiment of normalcy growing up, but just a little bit queerer than the other kids, peed sitting down when he had the chance, stuff like that.” He balled up a sheet of paper on his desk and shot it across the room at a trash can that was overflowing with litter. “So what is it you want?”
“That’s just it. I don’t know why I’m here, really. I thought maybe I could talk to him or something. His father was a minister—or a monster, depending on which way you looked at him. Maybe I could shed some light on what he was like growing up.”
He nodded his head and turned slightly toward the window again. “It’s gone out of my hands, Mr. Macon. And even if I could help you, I’d be inclined not to.”
“Do you think it would be possible to speak with someone inside there?”
Henning smiled rather arrogantly. “There hadn’t been any contact with them yet. They don’t pick up the phone or come to the door.”
“Actually, he doesn’t care,” I explained.
“I suppose he don’t he right now.” His broad chin made his ears move when he spoke. “But he killed two of my men and has a third one hidden somewhere on that goddamned farm. And I aim to see he does.”
I nodded. “How much do you know about the Bible, Sheriff?”
“Other than a plague of crickets and watching Charlton Heston part the Red Sea, not much, I reckon. But I’m guessing you’re about to give me a lesson.”
Nothing about him made it easy to relax. “Has anyone told you anything about the name that he goes by?”
“That it’s not his real one. But they never are.”
“No.” I pulled my jacket out from under my seat. “It’s definitely not his real name. He was born Marcus Freeman Tucker, although he had a thing for Joshua in the Bible, a sort of hero worship, you could say. The name for Joshua in the Hebrew text was Yehoshua. He was the Israelite leader that succeeded Moses after his death, eventually conquering Jericho. You ever heard the story where the city walls fell down?”
“Really, Mr. Macon, it’s a nice history lesson, but I don’t have time for this.”
I felt a wave of vertigo flash through my head. He had to be kidding. I leaned over at his desk. “You’d better make the time or a lot more people are going to die, I can promise you.”
Henning sat there with a vacant expression. “It’s out of my jurisdiction.”
“Joshua divided the twelve tribes of Israel after he slaughtered everything in God’s way. Sheriff Henning, if my stepbrother is planning something, it isn’t to roll over, I assure you. If he thinks God’s on his side, he’ll be prepared to go to war with anybody that gets in his way.”
“That would be with the FBI now, wouldn’t it? Because none of my people are going out there again—what’s left of them. And that’s as simple as I can put it for you. They half shot off one of my men’s heads yesterday.” He dropped his feet off his desk, a hand coming to rest against his forehead. “We couldn’t find the right side of his face. It was blown off. Court ordered eviction notice still clinched in his hand and his gun holstered.” He looked over my shoulder through the glass of the office, almost whispering, “He had a two-year old and a four-year old.”
“Again, I’m sorry. I just…I wanted somebody to know.” I stood to leave, a sinking feeling in my stomach brought on by failure.
Back outside, I exhaled the cold afternoon air. Caleb was right, I shouldn’t have come. I’d been in Chimayo for two hours, and I was as lost as I was in Alabama watching it on TV.
The weather drew chilly and another rush of storm clouds had moved in, this time for the duration. I pulled up the flap of my jac
ket. The drop in temperature banded across the skin of my shoulders, sending shivers down my back. Looking at the sidewalk, I turned to make the slow march back to the B&B and was startled by the grip of a hand across my bicep.
“You feel like grabbing a drink with me?”
I shifted around to see the sullen face of Sheriff Henning standing behind me. In the graying light his eyes sat pale and empty. For an instant I wondered if he felt as useless as I did, if he absorbed terrible news like a sponge and never quite expelled the sour smell of it all. I stepped off the curb and followed him across the street.
A heavy set bartender pegged us as we entered, and I caught him pulling a glass out and free pouring Makers Mark. Up on the wall of the bar, a large plasma TV carried on the stalemate as it continued to unfold.
The sheriff dropped his jacket across the back of the bar stool, tossed up a pack of cigarettes and lighter, and grabbed the Makers Mark, slamming it back as the bartender waited to refill it.
The Weight of Glass Page 20
