Pillar of Fire

by R. R. Irvine

  “Perfect timing, Mo,” Tanner said the moment he picked up the receiver.

  “Are you alone now?” Traveler asked.

  “As much as anyone can be in my position.”

  “What have you got for me on the clinic?”

  Traveler heard background noises and wondered if Tanner were starting or stopping his audio tape system.

  “There now,” Tanner said after a while, “that’s better.”

  “Willis, I’m in bed with a concussion. My head aches, I’m seeing double half the time, so get to it.”

  “That’s easy. Places like the Echo Canyon Clinic make me feel proud of this country. Who else but Americans would spend millions of dollars on medical research?”

  “Stop with the press release, Willis, and tell me if it’s connected with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.”

  “At one time, with the old Atomic Energy Commission, maybe.”

  “I’ve been there. They all wear radiation badges, Willis. I have a cat carrier stamped RADIATION PROTOCOL.”

  “It’s cancer research, Mo, what else?”

  “The last I heard Down syndrome didn’t respond to radiation.”

  “I’ve done my homework, Mo. I know you’re working on a retarded boy who’s missing from the clinic. Petey Biscari, isn’t it?”

  “If you know that, you know a hell of a lot more too.”

  “It’s a government facility. Much of the work done there is classified. They’re not going to tell me secrets just because I ask. Sure, I’ve heard the rumors. But I don’t believe them.”

  “Okay, Willis, you’re off the hook. I won’t quote you.”

  Tanner sighed. “The word is they’ve been running tests on federal prisoners for years. You know the kind of thing. So many years off your sentence if you let them shoot you full of radium, or some damned thing. Volunteers only, Mo.”

  “And Petey?”

  “They tell me that that part of the research is strictly separate, nothing to do with the rest of the clinic.”

  “Who tells you?” Traveler said.

  “You know the church’s position when it comes to national security. We back the government all the way.”

  “Like turning a blind eye when St. George became Fallout City.”

  “Now, Mo.”

  “One word from the prophet, and the government would have backed off aboveground bomb testing.”

  “We look at it this way. There are some risks worth taking. For the greater good, you understand. For argument’s sake, let’s say testing certain groups of people might save other lives someday. Wouldn’t that be worth it?”

  “Would you let them run their tests on you, Willis?”

  “Ask yourself this, Mo. What if brain damage and retardation could be reversed medically? Would you support such research?

  “Goddammit, Willis, what are they doing to people like Petey?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you going to find out?”

  “We never had this conversation, Moroni.”

  23

  TRAVELER AWOKE from a nightmare bathed in sweat. He must have called out in his sleep, because he heard Ruth’s footsteps rushing down the stairs. The kitchen light snapped on. She hurried into the living room, took one look at him and said, “You’re soaking wet. I’ll get a towel.”

  He swallowed dryly and looked around the room half expecting to see Josiah Ellsworth and his Danites out for blood atonement, but they’d been chased away by the light.

  His headache was back, along with a stabbing sensation along the left side of his rib cage. His pain seemed to lessen as she wiped him with the towel and then handed him a dry pair of pajamas. She told him that she’d salvaged them from storage in the garage. They were with some of her husband’s things which she’d been meaning to give away for a long time.

  “Do you need help changing?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “I think you’re as shy as my husband.”

  Leaving him to struggle with the pajamas, she fetched a glass of water and a pill from the kitchen. After he took it, she touched his brow as if checking for fever, then took his hand and held it.

  With a sigh, he closed his eyes. Suddenly, it was his mother’s hand he felt, remembered from the nursing home after her stroke. He’d found her in the day room, kissed her forehead, then knelt beside her wheelchair to clasp her hand, trying desperately to communicate after so many years of silence between them. But she’d stared straight ahead, ignoring him and the roomful of patients and visitors.

  “Mother,” he whispered, “it’s me, Moroni.” Her only answer was to jerk her fingers from his grasp and hide them in her lap as if she wanted no further contact with him.

  He’d spoken to her for a long time after that, at first reassuring her that she’d soon be home, then moving on to shared memories, picnics in Parley’s Canyon, family outings at Liberty Park, ward dinners, anything he could think of.

  Never once did she look at him.

  Finally, when he could bear it no longer, he rose to leave. Only then did she raise her eyes to him. In them, he saw a look of derision.

  It was the last time he’d seen her alive.

  24

  A ROOSTER crowed, in the backyard by the sound of it. Despite feeling rested and refreshed, Traveler opened his eyes tentatively, half expecting the pain to reassert itself, or maybe a flood of dizziness to overwhelm him.

  Ruth was sleeping beside him, though outside the quilt. A ray of morning sun haloed her hair. Traveler immediately became conscious of the soft smell of her, and his own physical reaction to her presence.

  As quietly as possible he slipped out of bed, hesitating momentarily to make certain his balance was stable, and tiptoed into the bathroom. While there, he washed his face and shaved, but that only emphasized the bruising on the side of his face, caused by a whack of the ax handle he’d been too far gone to even feel at the time.

  With probing fingers he examined the rest of his bruises, which were no worse than any Monday morning following a football game. But that had been a decade ago. Time had been no kinder to his face than Liz Smoot’s batting technique.

  He looked, he thought, like a dog’s lunch, but the pain was gone at least.

  Creeping from the bathroom, he headed for the kitchen intending to make coffee. But one look at the clock told him the rooster must have been on daylight saving time.

  Somehow, he managed to slip back into bed without waking Ruth. In his absence, she’d burrowed beneath the quilt, leaving only the top of her head and one ear showing. Smiling, he leaned close and kissed her.

  She reached out to him without opening her eyes. When her lips touched his, he wondered if she was fully awake, if maybe she was remembering her husband. But she whispered “Moroni” into his mouth.

  His tongue answered hers.

  Breathlessly, she broke contact to say, “Were you asleep yesterday when I spoke to you?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She tried to turn away from him but he held her tight. “Thousands of women have mastectomies, Ruth. That doesn’t stop them from leading normal lives.”

  “My dear, Moroni, this is Utah. Here only men lead normal lives.”

  Rather than respond, he transferred his lips to her neck, still soft and warm from sleep. She raised her chin to accommodate him.

  “About my breasts,” she breathed into his ear.

  “It doesn’t make any difference,” he murmured.

  “I’m wearing my bra under my nightgown.”

  “So you are,” he said, exploring.

  “If it’s all right, I’d like to keep it on while we make love.”

  He kissed her gently, moved by her trust, aroused by it too, more than he had been in years. “You’re a desirable woman just the way you are.”

  Her hands slid over him. “I can feel your sincerity.” A few minutes later, in the excitement, the bra came off.

  25

  BY BREAKFAST time, Travel
er was ravenous.

  “Time out for food,” he told Ruth, who was beginning to stir in his arms again.

  “And you said you could go all day.”

  “A cup of coffee at least, to bolster my strength.”

  Her hand latched on to him. “I promised your father I’d make you stay in bed all day.”

  When he began to respond again, she rolled away, laughing. “You know what they say about the way to a man’s heart. How about hotcakes?”

  “What would Martin say?”

  “I’ll tell him I served you in bed.”

  ******

  An hour later, showered and refreshed, Traveler asked for a guided tour. “Sightseeing only,” he assured her. “No confrontations.”

  Holding hands, they ambled along First Street, renamed Nephite by Moroni’s Children, for a couple of blocks before turning east on Brigham. After a block and a half, Brigham’s pavement ran out, continuing as a steadily rising dirt lane that wound its way toward the foothills of the Furnace Mountains a mile away.

  When they reached ground high enough to overlook the town, Ruth stopped and squeezed his fingers. “This is where I got my first kiss,” she said.

  He gave her another.

  “I married him,” she said.

  He kissed her again.

  Tears filled her eyes suddenly. “There were nights half the town came here to watch the bomb testing. We thought it was beautiful.”

  He wrapped his arms around her until she sighed.

  “It’s time you learned your way around, Moroni.” She broke free of him to point toward the foothills. “You see where the road ends and the boulders begin? Behind them is Coffee Pot Springs, an old ghost town, dead since the mines closed. Jason Thurgood pitched his tent up there when he first arrived. For the view, he said at the time, though most of us figured he just wanted to be alone. Now his hospital’s up there, an even bigger tent pitched in the middle of what used to be Main Street.”

  “Where do the Children live?”

  “Just down the road. Most of them anyway. I’ll show you, but only if you promise to be good.”

  “What’s your definition of good.”

  “Getting me into bed one more time before your father gets back.”

  He kissed her. “That’s the best offer I’ve ever had.”

  A block later, they passed the abandoned schoolhouse, a red-rock building two rooms wide with separate arched entrances for boys and girls. Four lines had been spray-painted on the side of the building, in the same red Day-Glo that defaced the sign on city hall.

  A is for atom

  B is for bomb

  C is for cancer

  D is for death

  “That’s how we teach the ABCs in downwind country,” Ruth said, tears creeping down her cheeks.

  In the next block, a neighborhood of dilapidated miners’ shacks, she pointed to a new street sign. “By town proclamation, this is now Snelgrove Road. For a while there was talk of renaming Brigham Avenue too. They were going to call it Orrin Porter Drive, but even the Children were leery of messing with a street named after Brigham Young.”

  The shacks, blackened by time and the desert sun, had no front yards, no lawns, no flowers, only weeds that had been trampled into paths here and there. All would have looked derelict if it hadn’t been for the vegetable gardens in the side yards and the large numbers of young children playing in the road.

  “Maybe it’s time you thought about leaving this town,” Traveler said.

  “On my own, maybe, but nobody’s going to run me out.”

  They continued on another block, to Jaredite, the town’s northern limit. There, next to the last house, Ruth introduced him to a man who was hoeing a good-size vegetable garden, Earl Hillman. He tipped his hat but said nothing.

  Once out of Hillman’s earshot, she said, “Except for the kids, Earl’s the only one of the Children I feel sorry for. I can’t understand why he and Vonda ever joined them. Vonda’s a strong woman, not the kind to put up with her husband taking more wives, which is the only damned reason I can figure for men signing on with these people. If she was going to shoot anybody, it should have been Horace Snelgrove. That man can’t keep his pants zipped.”

  “I know the feeling.”

  She punched him lightly on the arm. “Only one woman at a time for you.”

  By now they were paralleling Fire Creek, dry for the moment. Over the years, a deep channel had been cut into the red earth, its vertical sides reminding Traveler of a miniature Grand Canyon.

  “We used to climb down and play hide and seek when I was a girl,” Ruth said.

  The gully looked to be twenty feet deep, its bottom strewn with jagged red boulders partially concealed by waist-high weeds. The closest house was a block away.

  “This is the south end of Fire Creek,” she said. “It floods during cloudbursts, though we haven’t had one in years. At one time there was talk of turning the creek into a concrete storm drain. It was about then, though, that the downwind effect started to hit hard. Remember all those movie stars who started dying after making a picture in southern Utah? After that, nobody wanted to move here, not even miners. As for the rest of us, it was too late anyway.”

  “Don’t talk like that.”

  Ruth went up on tiptoe to kiss him. “That’s some pistol you’ve got in your pocket.”

  “Armed and dangerous, that’s me.”

  She stepped back to look him in the face. “I want you, Moroni. Maybe even more than I ever wanted my husband, but I have no illusions about us. You’ll be going back to Salt Lake soon enough and I’ll still be here in Fire Creek waiting for the cancer to hit me again.”

  “There’s nothing here for you anymore,” he said.

  “There’s memories.”

  “We’ll make new ones.”

  “I don’t like the Children, I admit it. But this is still my home. I have friends here, people I’ve known all my life. Fewer and fewer all the time, I admit that too, but I don’t want to live among strangers.”

  He started to respond but she silenced him with a touch of her hand to his lips. “Sometimes we women get together, our society of one-breasted women, and talk about the look in men’s eyes.”

  She blinked, spilling tears onto her cheeks. “Dear God, I wish I were whole for you, Moroni.”

  “What do you see in my eyes?”

  She laughed. “Lust.”

  He was about to kiss her again when he heard growls coming from the creekbed. Traveler leaned over the edge of the embankment. At first he saw nothing, only a narrow overgrown trail that ran along the creekbed.

  Movement caught his eye. There, in the shade of the overhanging cottonwood, a small clearing had been trampled in the weeds. In it, two dogs were tugging at a body, whose blue checkered shirt was the same as Norm Shipler had been wearing the previous day. A flash of white, glimpsed through the weeds, could have been the man’s leg cast.

  “Get away,” he shouted at the dogs.

  They looked at him, wagged their tails, then went back to work.

  “What’s the best way down?” Traveler said.

  She led the way upstream until they reached a steep path with crude steps gouged into the red soil. Traveler climbed down backward, as if descending a ladder, while Ruth waited. As soon as he reached the bottom, she followed.

  The dogs, the size of German shepherds, looked up from their prize and snarled when Traveler and Ruth got within a few yards.

  “They belonged to Mayor Gibbs,” Ruth said. “They’ve been running wild ever since he went missing, though I think Norm Shipler’s been feeding them.”

  Traveler drove them off with a barrage of rocks, making sure every one thrown was a near miss.

  “You’d better stay back while I take a closer look,” Traveler told Ruth.

  Ruth shook her head. “I nursed my husband, watching him die. Nothing could be worse than that. Now, let’s get this over with.”

  Shipler’s hands and fingernails we
re ripped to pieces, but not from the dogs, Traveler thought. More likely he’d tried to claw his way up the side of the embankment. His scrambling could have dislodged the bloody rock that lay nearby, one that seemed to match the jagged hole in his forehead. Judging by the state of his shoes, the dogs had been tugging at his feet mostly. Probably trying to get him home.

  “The poor man must have fallen in,” Ruth said, looking up at the steep embankment and shuddering.

  Being careful where he stepped, Traveler checked the immediate area but found nothing.

  “You go get Marshal Peake,” he said. “I’ll stay here in case the dogs come back. Or something worse.”

  Ruth looked around warily. “You don’t think it was an accident, do you?”

  He shook his head. “His crutches should be here.”

  “Norm’s not going anywhere, dogs or no dogs, so you’re coming with me. I don’t want to be alone right now.”

  She didn’t want him to be here alone, either. He could tell that from her tone of voice. Against his better judgment, he left with her.

  26

  BY THE time Traveler and Ruth led Marshal Peake back to the location, Norm Shipler’s crutches were resting on the lip of the creekbed, almost directly above the body. Ruth raised an eyebrow at Traveler but said nothing.

  Peake said, “The last time I saw Norm he was drinking. He told me he’d lost his daughters and his faith, so what the hell difference did it make if he broke the Word of Wisdom.”

  “The crutches weren’t here when we found him,” Traveler said.

  “You could have overlooked them in the excitement.”

  “We didn’t,” Ruth said.

  Peake, standing on the brink staring down at the body, shook his head. “The fight went out of Norm when his daughters took up with Porter. You know that and so do I. He could have lost his balance. He could have jumped in, too.”

  “Bullshit,” Traveler said. “The creek’s not deep enough to guarantee suicide. I suggest you climb down there and look at his hands.”

  “I’ll do that while you two stay here.” Peake, who’d brought a rope and a tarp from his office, tied the rope to a small tree and lowered himself over the edge after tossing the tarp in ahead of him.