by R. R. Irvine
“It’s two in the afternoon,” she said. “Ed Peake carried you here about nine last night. Before he did, he got a radio message through to Jason Thurgood and your father.”
Martin said, “We were in the middle of nowhere. It was pitch black and he still managed to get the two of us as far as an old mining road, where the marshal picked us up in his truck and drove us back into town. It was Thurgood who examined you last night. Don’t you remember? He gave you something to make you sleep after he was certain your skull wasn’t cracked.”
“I remember the voice.”
“Jason’s not a man you can forget. Now tell me what happened at Shipler’s, and why the hell you were dumb enough to go up against Orrin Porter without me backing you up?”
“I thought I could take him. I didn’t count on the women and I didn’t count on him being so well prepared,” Traveler answered.
“What the hell do you two expect,” Ruth interjected. Both men stared at her. “You drive into town and start asking questions. You’re on Porter’s turf now. One way or another this whole area belongs to him. The church wants nothing to do with this mess. It’s afraid of being embarrassed by being reminded of its own early days when the real Orrin Porter Rockwell was at work.”
“You’re right,” Traveler said. “I should have seen it coming. Only I was keeping my eye on Porter when one of his women hit me from behind with an ax handle.”
“Who?”
“I’d never seen her before.”
Martin looked at Ruth and grinned. “That’s the Traveler curse, you know. We have no luck with women.”
“Describe her,” Ruth said.
Traveler’s glimpse of her had been fleeting and filtered through a haze of pain.
“Older,” he said. “Forty, maybe forty-five.”
“Thank you very much,” Ruth said.
“Not like the Shipler girls, anyway.”
“No name?” Martin asked.
“Liz.”
“I thought so,” Ruth said. “The word’s all over town. It’s a big joke. Goliath brought down by a woman. It was Liz Smoot who hit you.”
Martin nodded. “You see. That’s the curse at work. Clobbered by the daughter of an apostle. Thank God we don’t have any witnesses. Otherwise we might have to do something.”
Ruth sighed. “When the marshal went looking for Liz Smoot, everybody at Shipler’s told him that you’d tripped and lost your balance in the store, and that brought a shelf of canned goods down on your head. They said they’d swear to it in court if necessary. Now finish your soup.”
As soon as he’d complied, she took the empty mug from his hand and stood up. “I’ll fix you something solid now. Even a fallen Goliath has to keep up his strength.”
She hesitated in the doorway. “I’ll close the kitchen door so you two men can talk.” She shook her head. “The curse of the Travelers indeed.”
When the kitchen radio came on a moment later, Martin said, “What have you done with Bill and Charlie?”
“I was worried about covering your back, so I stashed them at a motel, out of harm’s way.”
“Do you think they’ll stay put?”
“Probably not. You didn’t either. You went off to see Thurgood on your own.”
“Somebody had to talk to the messiah.”
Traveler groaned. “All right. Tell me what he’s like.”
Martin paced for a moment before answering. “When you’re with him, you seem to understand him perfectly. You look at him, you listen to him—it doesn’t matter what he’s saying—and you know he’s special. But when you’re away from him . . .” He gestured impatiently. “He eludes description somehow. Yet I’ve seen him at work, helping people. People with no money, no way of paying him, which he didn’t ask for anyway.”
Traveler’s eyes were slightly out of focus, a complication of his concussion, but he could still see the glowing look on Martin’s face.
“We talked about childhood mostly,” Martin went on. “About growing up. And growing old, too, when the fires of ambition burn less brightly. And we talked about living with what we’ve made of ourselves over the years.”
Traveler closed his eyes. “You liked him, didn’t you?”
“I think he’s a decent man. I think he’s come here to help people without expecting profit.”
“And his motives?”
“I know what he told me, that he had a debt to pay and a guilty conscience to keep quiet. We’d just gotten around to discussing it when the marshal radioed that you’d been hurt. So all I got was the fact that he worked for the Atomic Energy Commission at one time. He made it sound like a summer job. Apparently they armed him with a Geiger counter and put him up in a motel in St. George to monitor fallout during one of the bomb tests.”
“And?”
“Nothing. We never got around to any more.”
When Traveler opened his eyes, the room began to spin. He slipped a leg over the side of the bed to anchor himself. The spinning stopped, though the pain inside his head blossomed brightly like napalm.
“One thing’s for sure,” Martin went on. “He’s a man with a mission. Being with him, watching him set a broken leg, makes you . . . feel healed yourself, though you weren’t even sick.”
“You sound like you’re the one who got hit on the head.”
“When you meet him, you’ll understand what I mean. People come to him because they believe in him. You can see that in their eyes.”
“They showed me the videotape again down at Shipler’s,” Traveler said. “I saw the eyes of the woman who shot him. They were filled with hatred.”
“You’d have to be insane to shoot anyone, especially a man like Jason Thurgood.”
Traveler levered himself into sitting position. The movement intensified his pain. “You sound like a true believer.”
Martin shrugged.
“Like someone who’s found the messiah.”
“I asked him, you know. ‘What do you say to people who are calling you the messiah?’ In response to that, Jason Thurgood looked me in the face and then started laughing like hell. He kept it up until tears were streaming down his face. ‘Only in Utah,’ he said when he finally caught his breath.”
“I’m going to have to meet this man for myself.”
“To hell with that. When your client’s daughter attacks you with an ax handle, I say the job isn’t worth it. I say we invoke rule number one and leave this place as soon as possible. What kind of daughter did Josiah Ellsworth raise anyway?”
“She’s a mother who’d do anything to save her son. Chinese herbs, acupuncture, Jason Thurgood, or Moroni’s Children. And maybe she thought I’d come to stop her.”
“Haven’t we, in a way?”
Traveler squinted at his father, who suddenly seemed to be receding into the distance. “Nothing was said out loud, only an exchange of looks, but I’m positive that she attacked me on orders from Orrin Porter.”
“If that’s true, if he gets other people to do his dirty work, then he’s more dangerous than we thought. Frankly I don’t see his attraction to women.”
Traveler collapsed back onto the pillow just as the kitchen door swung open and Ruth arrived, carrying a tray. “I’ve made custard pudding,” she said. “That ought to go down easy. There’s enough for two, by the way.”
Martin shook his head. “I’m going down to Shipler’s and talk to Orrin Porter myself.”
Clenching his teeth, Traveler struggled up again. “It’s too dangerous to go alone.”
Ruth pushed him down and held him there. He tried to resist but didn’t have the strength.
“You’re forgetting something,” Martin said. “As of now, I’m a friend of Jason Thurgood’s. I’m under his personal protection. Besides, Thurgood himself invited me down to Shipler’s this afternoon. They’re showing home videos of his work.”
22
TRAVELER MANAGED the custard by himself, but only after Ruth threatened a force feeding. While he ate,
he had a hard time focusing his eyes. Whenever he looked up from the bowl, her image blurred. When he managed to bring her into sharp definition, everything else in the room went hazy. She was wearing a man’s shirt again, like the first time he’d seen her, and reminded him of a long-ago girlfriend.
Once the custard settled, she fed him another pill and soon her words were fading in and out, some sounding shouted, others whispered.
He licked his lips, tasted pudding residue, and something bitter. What kind of pill had he taken? he wondered and thought about asking, only he lacked the will.
After a time she began speaking. Her voice sounded distant and not quite discernible. Maybe yawning would clear his ears, but by now his jaw muscles felt slack and lifeless. His eyes wouldn’t open either.
Sleep brought ax handles, masquerading as Louisville Sluggers, swinging at his head. In self-defense, he managed to get one eye open far enough to see Ruth sitting in a chair beside the bed. An open book rested in her lap. Her head was bent over the pages; her lips moved as if she were reading to herself, only now he could hear the words.
“My husband and I were in the high school hiking club together. That’s when we first climbed Lost Peak. Seven thousand feet was quite an accomplishment, we thought at the time.”
Her pause made Traveler wonder if he hadn’t been carrying on a conversation with her and that a response was now expected of him. But his only memory was of swinging ax handles.
“After we were married,” Ruth went on, “we used to hike up there to watch the bomb tests. Sometimes we’d camp overnight and it would be like the Fourth of July when the sky lit up. I guess we lit up, too, with all the radiation. Only we didn’t know it at the time.”
His eyelid closed of its own weight.
“That’s where we got our cancer. The doctor thought so anyway, but he couldn’t prove it, so the government ignored us like everybody else, even when my husband took sick.”
You were lucky to have escaped, Traveler said, or thought he did, though the words sounded funny, as if they were inside his head and not spoken out loud. Or maybe there was an echo, her words bouncing around inside him.
“I didn’t escape,” she said.
He struggled to reopen his eyes, to confirm that she was actually speaking, but the pain had come back, strong enough to blind him, yet impotent against her confession.
“Like half the women in this town, I had a mastectomy. We’ve become a society of one-breasted women, to be shunned, to be invisible to people because we make them uncomfortable, because we remind them of their own vulnerability. They look at us and wonder what seeds of fallout they carry within themselves.”
He must tell her to stop, he thought. He took a deep breath, steeling himself against the pain, and unclenched his teeth to speak. But in that instant, the realization hit him. She was speaking her thoughts, more to herself than to him. To acknowledge that he heard them would be a terrible intrusion on her privacy.
“They give you something to fit inside your bra,” she went on. “A prosthesis, they call it. ‘It’s undetectable,’ they tell you. ‘No one will know.’ But you know. You only feel safe with your clothes on. Never again can you undress for a man. To do so, to see the look on his face would be . . .” Her voice caught. “Thank God, my Frank had passed on by then. Thank God I didn’t have to see the look in his eyes.”
Traveler willed himself not to move, not to give away the fact that he was awake.
“Maybe one of the Children would take me on, an older woman to help with the cooking and the sewing. What would you say to that, Mr. Traveler? Does a woman need a man that badly?”
He stirred and shook his head despite the pain, anything to convince her that he was just now coming awake, that he couldn’t have overhead her revelations.
“Are you feeling better?” she asked.
He opened his eyes but couldn’t speak. The shaking of his head had started the room spinning. The sensation brought bile surging up his throat. He swallowed convulsively and panted.
“You look like you need another pill,” she said, then helped him sit up, and held the glass to his lips so that he could wash down the painkiller.
“Try to sleep.” She settled him back onto the pillow and wiped his brow with a damp cloth.
But he couldn’t close his eyes without heightening the dizziness. When he reached out to steady himself, she caught his hand and held on tightly.
“Relax,” she whispered.
He breathed deeply through his mouth, concentrating on the rhythm of filling his lungs. Gradually, the pain ebbed and with it his vertigo. He hadn’t felt this bad since the game against Dallas, when he’d played the last quarter with double vision.
When her words came again it was as if in a dream, “I heard Eula and Vyrle talking about Orrin Porter. They said he was hung like a . . . well, it doesn’t matter what they said, because they knew I could overhear them. They probably thought it was funny because I don’t have a man, and don’t have a chance of getting one.”
The floorboards creaked. Probably she’d left the room. He sighed, relieved that he was no longer a prisoner to her confidences. When he opened one eye to confirm that he was alone, he was looking at Ruth’s back. She was standing at the window, staring out at Fillmore Avenue.
Without turning around she said, “How long were you awake before?”
He wet his lips. “I just woke up.” Gingerly, he raised his head a few inches, waiting for the pain, for the dizziness. When nothing happened, he sat up. From there, he could see that her neck had flushed a bright red. He was trying to think of something to say when he remembered Bill and Charlie.
“Has my father come back from Shipler’s?” he asked.
“He’s come and gone, off to St. George to rescue your friends.”
Ruth left the window to tuck the sheet around him. The room temperature had to be somewhere in the eighties, maybe even more.
Traveler sighed. “I think I’d better make a call to Salt Lake.”
As she leaned over the bed to hand him the phone, Ruth’s shirt billowed open at the throat. He stared despite himself. The plump swells of both breasts were clearly visible. Both looked normal and inviting.
“You are feeling better,” she said, trying to make light of his stare, but color drained from her face.
“You’re . . .” What the hell had he been about to say, You’re a beautiful woman? It was true enough, but would she believe it? “. . . I’ll call collect,” he said for lack of anything better.
“Do you want me to get the number for you?”
Traveler looked down at the phone. By squinting tightly he could bring the buttons into focus.
“I’m fine.”
“That’s a relief.” She left the room without another word, closing the kitchen door behind her. A moment later the outside screen door banged.
Traveler clenched his teeth and dialed the Joseph Smith Memorial Office Building from memory. Since he didn’t have a direct number for Josiah Ellsworth, he went through a succession of assistants before the apostle finally came on the line.
“This is Josiah Ellsworth,” he announced. “I hope you have good news for me, Mr. Traveler.” He pronounced each word precisely. Some men did that when they’d been drinking. In Ellsworth’s case, Traveler had the impression that the apostle expected his every word to be recorded for posterity. Or maybe the church recorded everything going through the Smith Building’s switchboard.
Traveler said, “You lied to me.”
“I’m an apostle of the church, Mr. Traveler. Maybe you didn’t ask the right questions.”
“You told me your daughter took your grandson here to Fire Creek for a cure.”
“Correct.”
“You didn’t tell me she was a member of Moroni’s Children.”
“You’ve made a mistake,” Ellsworth said. “My daughter would never forsake me or the church.”
“She’s in their power, you have my word for that.”
He did, recounting the details of the attack.
“Are you sure it was my Liz who hit you?”
“I’m told that’s who it was, though I haven’t confronted her.”
“You have my authority, Mr. Traveler. Steal her away from those people.”
“And your grandson?”
“Yes, him too.”
“I don’t do kidnapping.”
“When I knew you were calling, Mr. Traveler, I asked Willis Tanner to be present. He’s on the line with us. As you know he speaks for the prophet.”
“Who speaks for you?” Traveler asked.
Ellsworth ignored the question. “Say hello, Willis.”
“Mo, it’s me.”
“So?”
“You recognize my voice, don’t you?”
“Yes, Willis.”
“The prophet has his eye on you, Mo. If necessary, his spoken word is available.”
Traveler thought that over. The last thing he wanted to do was talk to the head of the church. If a man like Elton Woolley asked for a favor, even a kidnapping, to say no would be unthinkable, at least if Moroni Traveler and Son wanted to continue operations in Utah.
“That won’t be necessary,” Traveler said.
“Then you’ll do it,” Tanner said. “You’ll steal Sister Smoot and her boy away from those people?”
“I’ll talk to her first, Willis. After that, we’ll see.”
“When?” Ellsworth asked.
“When my head stops ringing from the whack your daughter gave me with an ax handle.”
“Do you need help?”
“When you came to me,” Traveler said, “you wanted someone here in Fire Creek who didn’t represent the church. You said the church couldn’t afford to be linked with the likes of Moroni’s Children.”
“Have you seen Thurgood for yourself?” Ellsworth said.
“My father has.”
“And?”
“Thurgood denies being the messiah.”
“Are you satisfied with that?”
“I’ll let you know when I’ve seen him for myself.”
Traveler hung up, counted to one hundred silently, then called Willis Tanner’s coded office number.
