Days of Atonement

by Walter Jon Williams

  “If it is a miracle,” he said helplessly, “what does it mean?”

  Rickey flashed a smile as he slipped his metal bows over his ears. “I thought we settled that. God’s grace.”

  “God’s grace for who? For me?”

  “An impetus to belief. For you, for anyone.”

  Loren’s head spun. “The miracle was there. And h— and it was taken away. Before it could be seen by anyone but me.” He looked up at Rickey. “So what was the point? What’s the point of a miracle that no one sees?”

  Rickey stared at him levelly. The amber eye of his monitor glowed with spiderwebs of scripture. “You saw it, yes?”

  “I saw it. No one else.”

  “Maybe it was for you.”

  Loren blinked. An ache began to throb in his heart. “I don’t want to hear that,” he said.

  Rickey cleared his throat. “You have to understand that our church has always been torn between its gnostic origins— Samuel Catton’s revelations and miracles— and its own establishment impulse. With the death of Catton and the foundation of the college, the church establishment became dominant. Miracles, you see, change things. They tear things up, turn everything upside down. An established church doesn’t like tales of miracles, at least not outside of scripture, in the here and now. They’re so . . .uncontrolled. That’s where the Mormons are going wrong, in my view— they’re trying hard to become an establishment church, and they’re just not. They were revolutionary in their day— the Book of Mormon addresses every single political and spiritual question that beset New York in the 1820s. Maybe that’s why it’s so hard to read now.“ He flashed a smile. “And the Apostles were rebels against even the Mormons, which should make us even more antiestablishment. Our social programs were a century ahead of their time.“

  Impatience welled up in Loren. “I don’t know what any of this has to do—”

  “What can this miracle, this vision or whatever it was, mean to you? To your spirituality? That’s what our gnostic tradition addresses, just you and God and no one in between. If you were the only person to see this miracle, then God was talking to you.”

  “I don’t know what it means!” Loren realized he was shouting, waving an arm. He dropped his hand into his lap. “It wasn’t like one of the miracles in the Bible, where it’s obvious. Wheels in the air, angels appearing, prophecy, the walls of Jericho falling, a rain of blood and toads . . .” The dead rising. “The meaning was unclear,” Loren said.

  “Think about it. Offer prayer. An answer will be granted.”

  Loren thought of Randal spitting blood that reeked of bourbon. More blood fountaining from John Doe’s gasping mouth. “I don’t know.”

  Rickey gave a barking laugh. “Trust me on this one. I’m an authority.”

  “Okay.” Loren passed a hand over his brow.

  “Is there anything else you need to talk to me about?” Abowt.

  “I guess not.”

  “You haven’t made your report in a while.”

  It would be a relief, after all this. “I guess we can do that,” he said.

  “Sure.”

  A slight smile ghosted across Rickey’s face. “Have you then, in the words of Mr. Catton, ‘any matter which disturbeth the minds of the elders or the heart of the congregation’?”

  Loren gave Rickey a look. Had he just heard a touch of irony? He couldn’t quite tell.

  “I can’t think of anything,” he said.

  “It’s been a violent weekend.”

  “I haven’t done anything I’m ashamed of.”

  Rickey was looking at him intently. Loren felt himself shift under Rickey’s gaze.

  “Any violence done by me,” he said, “was justified.”

  “Even when you hit Mack Bonniwell on the steps of the church?”

  “Who told you that?” Loren demanded. Outrage plucked at his nerves. He dismissed the action with a slice of his arm. “Mack’s crazy over what happened to his kid. Len broke the law and Mack wants to blame me.”

  “So you didn’t hit him?” Rickey’s gaze was intent.

  Loren opened his mouth to deny it, then saw Rickey’s look and figured out he was about to be bushwhacked.

  “I slapped him,” he said. “An open-handed slap.”

  Rickey nodded. “I’m glad you said that,” he said. “Because I saw it from where I was standing. I was looking back to see if it was time to close the doors.”

  Blood hissed in Loren’s ears. The hairs on his arms prickled. Alertness swept through him, an intentness like that he’d had in the ring, those midnight smokers at the old Ringside, when he locked eyes with a tattooed, battle-scarred opponent from the state pen and realized for the first time the kind of danger he was in.

  “He was working his way up to hitting me,” Loren said. “If I hadn’t slapped him down, he would have swung at me, and I would have had to haul him off to jail.”

  Rickey’s expression remained intent. “In other words, you hit him because if you hadn’t, you would have had to jail him for assault.”

  “Yes.” Loren leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “That’s exactly what I did.”

  Rickey tilted his head and considered this line of reasoning. “A preemptive punch-out. I’m not quite sure how to put it in terms of ethics.”

  “I don’t know much about ethics. But it’s a small town, Pastor. I do things informally when I can. You probably do the same sort of thing yourself.”

  Rickey gave a thin-lipped smile. “Hit people? I don’t think so.”

  “I mean,” hastily, “deal with problems outside of channels. The thing was, Mack’s words and body language were threatening. I had to deal with it.”

  “And you don’t have a problem with it.”

  “No.”

  “And Len?”

  “I thought he had a gun. I was wrong, but things were moving fast and there was no way of knowing. In a big city, they probably would have shot him.”

  Rickey nodded. “From what I’ve seen, that’s not unlikely.”

  “And if I’d let him shoot me, he would have been executed.”

  “And you’d be dead.”

  Loren barked a laugh. “That, too.”

  “So it was another preemptive strike, if you like. To keep Len from going to death row.”

  “Yep.”

  They stared at each other for a moment, Rickey’s look probing, Loren’s defiant. Finally Rickey shook his head.

  “I have examined your conscience, and it would seem to be at peace. I have no way of knowing whether it ought to be at peace, and therefore can say nothing further.”

  Loren restrained an impulse to shrug.

  “Is there any other matter that falls within my sphere? A family matter, say?”

  “My family life,” Loren said, “is perfect anymore.”

  Rickey looked at him. “Why do people out here use that expression?”

  “What expression?”

  “‘Anymore.’ When what you really mean is ‘now.’ ”

  Loren shrugged. “I didn’t know people didn’t use it that way.”

  Rickey nodded. “Very good.” He rose from his chair and offered his hand. “Thank you for making your report.”

  Loren rose and shook the hand. “Thank you.”

  “Tell me how your miracle turns out. I would like to know.”

  “If I ever figure it out.” Grimly.

  Loren left the parsonage and stood on the walk. The door closed softly behind him and the porch light winked out.

  Cool, still October surrounded him. A slight breeze tugged gently at his senses. He looked upward, at the high stars, and asked them what to do next.

  A sawmill snore answered him. Loren stepped forward, opened the gate, saw Roberts the Prophet lying propped up against the rail, his paper bag in his hand.

  “Aw, shit.”

  A snore answered him. Loren opened the passenger door to the Taurus and then turned to lean over the former mayor. He shook Roberts by th
e shoulder.

  This man was once my boss. The recollection had a taste of surprise.

  “Hey, Al. Wake up.”

  The prophet mumbled, shifted, knocked over his bottle. The scent of bonded bourbon tainted the air. Roberts’ flock was apparently bringing in enough money to enable him to enjoy the good stuff.

  Loren grabbed Roberts’ clothing and shoved him rudely back and forth.

  “Wake up, Al.”

  The prophet’s rheumy eyes leaped open. He gave out a cry of fear, shrank back, then blinked up twice.

  “Hi, Loren.” His expression softened.

  “Can you get up? I’ll take you home.”

  “God loves ya, Loren.”

  The man’s knees wouldn’t support him. The bottle went skating into the gutter as Loren dragged him across the sidewalk. Loren wrestled the prophet into the passenger seat, then stood. He was panting for breath.

  “Puke in my wife’s car,” he told the prophet, “and you’re history.”

  Roberts waved a hand. “Bless you, my child.”

  Loren closed the passenger door, then walked around the car and got in. Roberts’ smell was appalling, all bonded bourbon and body odor. Loren rolled down his window and started the car.

  Roberts and his clan lived in a three-story house built in the Queen Anne style, complete with a conical-roofed Charles Addams turret, a house saved from the wreck of 19th-century Atocha in 1924 and carried on a big Riga Brothers truck to a block and a half from where Loren lived.

  The lawn was shadowed by a dead elm and overgrown with mature weeds, Russian thistle, and brown range grass. Miscellaneous junk, an old cabinet, a car transmission, a screen door and a broken toilet bowl, gleamed in starlight among the weeds. Loren pulled up and got out of the car.

  He had barely opened the passenger door before a couple of the faithful, Roberts’ wife and his pregnant concubine, were out the front door. They were dressed in simple ankle-length homemade dresses. Loren looked into the blank face of the pregnant girl and remembered those sad calls to the switchboard that morning, all the parents seeking their lost children, and wondered if this girl was being looked for, or whether she was here because there was simply no place else.

  The two women began to move Roberts out of the car, throwing his flailing arms over their shoulders. “Can I help?” Loren asked.

  Amy Roberts looked up, her thin face defiant. “He’s not always like this.”

  “I remember him, Amy. I worked for him.”

  “He’s the messenger of God.” Insistently. “You remember that, Loren Hawn.”

  “Okay, Amy.” Shrugging.

  Her sharp voice lifted in anger. “You always were an evil son of a bitch, Loren. I never liked you. Never.”

  Surprise rolled through Loren at the unexpected anger. He watched in silence as Amy Roberts dragged her drunken prophet down the walk.

  Never liked me, he thought. He remembered the way her lips had opened under his, her hot tongue stabbing into his mouth; he remembered her moving under him, naked and wet atop a beach towel stretched out next to a hot spring on the Apache reservation. He remembered the sulfur smell of the spring, the funny way she made noises, the sounds that seemed to force their way out of her, odd little baby noises, a small child whimpering.

  Hell, he thought. Coulda sworn she liked me then. At least a little. Before she threw me over for a guy with a college degree who looked like he was going places, who kept regular hours and didn’t spend his days training to turn cons into hamburger at midnight county smokers.

  Maybe there was some kind of justice here, after all.

  He got in his car. Rising into his mind came thoughts of Amy, young and wet, moonlight playing on her skin. And then guilt stabbed him to the heart.

  God was talking to you. Rickey’s voice.

  Loren decided he needed to find out.

  *

  He drove to Len Armistead’s service station on the east of town. As he drove, he watched carefully to see if he was being followed. No one appeared to take any interest in him.

  The station was in the process of closing. When Loren turned off the highway he drove around back, parking out of sight behind Armistead’s wrecker. It had a bumper sticker reading OUT OF WORK? NO MONEY? GETTING HUNGRY? EAT YOUR IMPORT! A bulldozer, a snow-removal blade for Armistead’s jeep, and a backhoe, the type with a scoop on one end and a blade on the other, stood quietly rusting behind the building. Loren got out of the car.

  The bear hunter came around the cinder-block corner of the building. One bulging cheek was loaded with tobacco. “What’s up, Loren? You need something?”

  “I need to rent your backhoe.”

  “Sure. Tomorrow?”

  “Tonight. Right now.”

  Armistead looked surprised. “Okay,” he said. “You know how to operate it?”

  “Sure. You got a shovel I can use?”

  “I guess.” He spat a quid of tobacco onto the decaying blacktop. “What you need this for, exactly?”

  Loren looked at him. “Something confidential. An investigation.”

  Armistead tilted his gimme cap forward and scratched the back of his head. “Okay.”

  “How much?”

  Armistead told him.

  “Can I write you a check tomorrow?”

  “Sure, Loren.” The big man grinned. “I reckon if you don’t pay, I can always get the law on you.”

  Loren put on his jacket inside out, so the big gold letters that spelled POLICE wouldn’t show. He got the bolt cutters and a long eight-battery flashlight out of the Fury and put them in a metal toolbox on the backhoe. He strapped the shovel on the backhoe with a bungee provided by Armistead. He started the backhoe, turned on its lights, and drove farther east on 82. No one in the few cars paid him any attention, an anonymous figure in dark clothing. He turned down the side road to the cemetery, then stopped by the big metal gate.

  Southwestern cemeteries were always more forlorn than most. No green growing, just dust and weeds and fading artificial flowers. He was glad that this one was dark. The stars were beginning to come out, their images wavering in the rising warmth of the land.

  The cemetery gate, Loren found, hadn’t been locked. No one came out here except for a funeral. He wouldn’t need the bolt cutters.

  The Dudenhofs’ grave marker was easy to find, marked by a gray weathered Mormon angel with a trumpet, a copy of the gold Moroni atop the Salt Lake City temple. Loren brought the backhoe up to the grave, reading the carved words in the light of its headlights. HERMAN, the stone read, FATHER. PATRICIA, MOTHER. ADAM, SON. RANDAL, SON. And dates. And little white headstones marking the grave of each.

  Loren blinked at the third name and calculated figures. Randal had a brother besides the one who had died in San Francisco, an older brother who had died at the age of six, when Randal himself was maybe two. Loren hadn’t known.

  Only three children. Small for a Mormon family. And all died young. The graves were untended by anything except dead brown grass. The mounds had compacted into smooth concave depressions. Loren found Randal’s headstone in the dust and positioned the backhoe.

  By the time he struck the coffin he was sweaty, covered in dust, and deafened by the sound of the backhoe. Cars had flashed by on the highway, but none had shown any interest. Loren pulled the backhoe away, killed the engine, left the lights on, and took the shovel and flashlight.

  He got the coffin open finally, after a furious, sweating ten minutes. Violet had bought the most expensive box she could find for her worthless husband, hoping perhaps to increase his value thereby. It was a round-topped bronze thing with a lead lining, its exterior now different shades of green, rippled and textured like an impressionist sea. Loren beat Armistead’s shovel into a lump of metal by the time he finally pried the inner lid up and gazed down at what lay on the rotten satin pillow.

  Loren’s sweat pattered into the metal box as he turned on the flashlight. His breath grated in his throat. The body wore a blue suit with
gold threads. The nails and hair were long, and there was a prickle of beard on the face. Even though Loren knew this was an illusion, that it wasn’t the nails and hair that grew, but the flesh that shrank, he still felt a shiver run up his spine.

  The flesh was shrunken, browned, nothing more than a thick layer of varnish over the bones. Though it wasn’t completely recognizable, the body seemed more reminiscent of Randal than not.

  Loren knelt and played the flashlight beam over the body. There was a musty smell in the coffin. Loren’s heart gave a little lurch as he saw, through translucent skin, the little blobs of glue that held the eyelids shut. A gold wedding band was on the desiccated hand. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine Randal, call his image to his mind, but all he kept seeing was the man dying on the old white tile of the police foyer.

  He opened his eyes again. He couldn’t honestly tell.

  He reached out and took the corpse’s nearest hand and moved it to the side. It was surprisingly light and there was no resistance. He did the same with the other hand. Then he flipped up the corpse’s tie, opened his jacket, opened his shirt.

  And there it was, black and tattered, broken ribs lying under the sutured varnish of skin— the deep wound where the steering column had entered Randal’s chest. Loren gave a little sigh.

  He’d dug up the grave for nothing.

  If John Doe was Randal resurrected in body, resurrected by the divine hand as in the Book of Revelation, there should be no body here at all. The papery flesh would have been reanimated and the broken chest restored; Randal would have walked the Earth in his old skin.

  If John Doe was another type of resurrected Randal, a Randal taken from a time before his death and brought forward by some bizarre side effect of the big accelerator run at ATL, then Loren figured this body should not be here, either, because he would not have died on the Rio Seco crossing and not been buried. And in that case the headstone and coffin wouldn’t be, either, because history would have changed, and Loren would remember Randal as a missing person, not an accident victim.