Hyrum was immediately stoked to be home. It was the dead of night, but he hollered and ran into his old spaces, got his old bow and arrow, and went careening out of the house again. Probably to go check in with his beloved cow, Fernanda, before wandering out into the desert to roam like a wild thing. Home free. Bronson didn’t ask him where he was going. It didn’t matter. The desert was empty of man, safe, and Bronson had a lot of work to do. He grabbed some books to consult. The well-worn edition of speeches and letters of Joseph Smith. Brigham Young, too. He must be sure. He must know the words backward and forward. He heard Hyrum’s laughter somewhere outside, unencumbered and joyous. The sound filled him with hope and regret. The boy was safe. The boy was with his father now. The boy was home.
38.
IT WASN’T UNTIL MID-MORNING that Yalulah realized that Hyrum was gone. She was letting the overstressed kid sleep in, and didn’t crack open his door till about 11 a.m. She freaked a bit when she saw the empty bed. Had no idea where he was. She ran out into the street, but there were those fucking looky-loos and the stray reporter, random nosey people yelling slogans and threats, and a cop car parked across the street, so she turned around and ran back inside. If you’d been basically out of society for twenty years, this was not the situation with which to reintroduce yourself. But she had no choice. She called Deuce and Pearl on the landline to see if they knew where he was. Pearl was at Josue’s and said she hadn’t seen him this morning, had assumed he was sleeping. Deuce said he’d be right home.
Deuce seemed very troubled by Hyrum’s disappearance. He told Yalulah he didn’t think Hyrum had run away; he feared there’d been some type of vigilante revenge, another fight maybe, or that maybe, and he hoped this wasn’t the case, his father had taken him. Deuce called Pearl and asked her to come home. Yalulah didn’t think Bronson had taken him. She kept trying to call Hyrum’s phone, but it was off. She said she’d go crazy sitting on her thumbs, so Deuce showed her how she could sneak out the back of the house and through a neighboring yard to avoid the scrum out front. She put on a hat and glasses, determined to drive to the mall, check the places that Mary said Hyrum had taken to hanging out in—the park, the food court, the game room at the mall. “Call me if he comes home.”
“You don’t have a phone,” Deuce called back.
“Oh yeah,” she said as she disappeared into the neighbor’s hedges. “Send up a flare.”
While Deuce waited for Pearl to get home, he called Janet Bergram, but she didn’t answer and her voice-mail box was full, so he couldn’t leave a message. Pearl texted him to call Maya Abbadessa, that Bronson liked her and trusted her; he was able to leave an urgent message with her that he wanted to talk. Maya got the voice mail almost immediately, but Deuce didn’t pick up when she called back, and, fearing something bad had happened, she decided to jump in the car and head to Rancho Cucamonga to see what the problem was for herself, see if she could help, just in case.
Pearl got home around the same time Maya got to their house. Yalulah was still out hunting for Hyrum. “Anything?” Deuce asked Pearl. Pearl shook her head. The two children looked at each other. Pearl motioned for Deuce to come to her.
“There’s something I need to tell you.” They drew close and Pearl whispered something in his ear, just as she had whispered to Josue. Maya couldn’t make out what she was saying, but it looked very intimate and personal, so she turned away.
Deuce shook his head, pulled away, and said, “No.” But Pearl held him, consoling him. “That bastard. That fucking bastard,” he whisper-spat. Maya had never heard Deuce curse before. He wasn’t good at it. Deuce sat down, his head in his hands, and kept repeating, “That bastard, that bastard.”
Maya waited awhile before speaking. “What’s going on?” Neither child answered the question.
“Family business,” Pearl said. “Yaya’s not gonna find him.”
“How do you know?” Maya asked.
“’Cause Dad took him.”
“Bronson?” Maya asked. Pearl nodded.
“Took him where?”
“Agadda da Vida.”
“That bastard.” Deuce was still muttering.
“You saw him?” Maya asked.
“No.”
“Then how do you know that?”
“Because I know my father, okay? Deuce?” Pearl turned to her brother and said to him gently, “I need you.”
Deuce looked up, his eyes wet and red. He cleared his throat a few times like something sour and sharp was stuck back there that he could not dislodge. “We’re afraid to involve the police.” Pearl continued to speak for both of them. “We don’t want our father arrested for kidnapping. Can you figure out a way to get him under control without the police?”
“I don’t know. What have you got against the police?”
“Nothing.”
“If you guys don’t tell me what the fuck is going on, I swear I’m gonna call the police right now.”
Pearl stepped back to Deuce and took his hand in hers. Deuce cleared his throat again and finally spoke, though there was a quavering, covering quality to his voice now, as if he were holding down something weighty. “When we tell you what we’re about to tell you—we don’t think the police, or the government will … respect … our father enough.”
“We love our father. Bronson gave us everything,” Pearl added.
“What do you mean ‘respect’? What are you talking about?” Maya asked.
“Respect his religious beliefs,” Deuce explained. “Respect that his religious beliefs are more important to him than the laws of this country, and he may be doing things that are against the law, but that are for him, of greater moral necessity.”
She couldn’t believe this kid was seventeen. He was a very impressive human. When I was seventeen, she thought, I couldn’t’ve strung a sentence like that together. She wasn’t even sure she could talk like that now. Still, she wasn’t exactly clear on what he was getting at. The kids seemed like they were hiding something. “Okay, I think I can promise that, something like that, though I don’t know exactly what it is I’m promising. You need to keep talking. You’re talking about kidnapping?”
“No,” Pearl said.
Deuce took a deep breath. “Have you heard of ‘blood atonement’?”
Maya’s immediate thought was that it sounded like a movie she had somehow missed out of the Hammer catalogue—Blood Atonement of the Valley Vampire Vixens.
“Blood atonement? Seems like maybe,” she said, “but I don’t think so. No.”
“Blood atonement is a later Mormon precept,” Deuce elaborated. “Joseph Smith didn’t write much about it, but later Church elders did. Brigham Young. It’s a hard-line stance, not universally accepted—and it was jettisoned ‘officially’ along with polygamy in the late nineteenth century, but it is something that Dad, who’s an originalist and deeply skeptical of any pragmatic modifications to religious truths under the influence of the government, believes in, and it’s something he taught us.”
“Okay. What does it mean?”
“It means,” Deuce explained, “that under certain circumstances taking another man’s life is such a serious crime that the sacrifice Jesus Christ made on the Cross, the atonement he gave to a fallen world with his death—is incomplete for the killer. The murderer’s soul is beyond the forgiveness of Christ’s Crucifixion, and the only way to come back to grace is to offer up his own blood as ransom, to be killed or sacrificed himself; only his own blood can atone for that bloodshed. Blood atonement.”
“What kind of circumstances?” Maya asked.
“That’s unclear.”
“Unclear?”
“Seems to be a matter of personal, spiritual judgment.”
“Whose personal judgment?”
“Church elders. Divine revelation. It’s unclear. I suppose the person who is in the position of judging and has the power and will and the righteous inspiration to carry it out.” Maya felt off balance, like she was learning the rules
of a game she was already in the middle of playing in an unfamiliar country with unfamiliar customs. She scrabbled hard to make sense of it.
“So it’s what, like an eye for an eye?”
“Something like that, yes. Ultimately, the Church gave up on it to show the federal government they would bow down to their laws, not God’s laws,” Pearl explained patiently.
“Okay, I get it, I get that concept, I think—capital punishment, basically—but—first, Hyrum didn’t literally murder anyone, he was probably defending himself, and it was an accident; and two, he’s eleven years old!”
“That won’t matter to Dad. Joseph Smith believed that eight years old was the age of accountability.”
“Eight years old? An eight-year-old accountable? Accountable for what? Wiping his ass?”
“I don’t want to debate that,” Deuce answered evenly. “I’m saying that Hyrum’s age might concern the law, but not him. His only focus is the eternal state of Hyrum’s soul, what we call his ‘first estate’—Dad might see himself in the position of having to save Hyrum’s first estate even if it means ending the body it’s been incarnated into.”
“That’s insane,” Maya said.
“Are you a Christian?”
“Sort of. Maybe. I guess. Sure.”
“Is it more insane than the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection?”
“Well, no. But no one really believes believes that stuff. It’s a story with a moral. And nobody kills over the Virgin Birth.”
“Are you sure about that?” Deuce asked.
“The Crusades. The Spanish Inquisition, the Reformation…” Pearl added.
“Water into wine? Wine into blood? Heaven? Hell? Dozens of other irrational religious tenets millions have been killed and killed for—”
“Not children!” Maya cut Deuce off.
“Yes, children,” Pearl said.
“Not your own child! It’s insane.”
“Not to Dad. I’m not defending him, I’m trying to explain him.”
“And I don’t think Mother Mary has the will to stop him right now,” Pearl added.
Maya thought they both sounded absurd. “I don’t believe that,” she said. “I know Bronson a little. He’s not unreasoning like that. He’s not barbaric. He’s a good man.”
“This is beyond good and evil.” Pearl had read some Nietzsche in her psych class.
“We don’t think he’s really himself right now,” Deuce said.
“What do you mean? Like he’s off his meds?” Maya was lost. Deuce looked to Pearl as if she was the one to explain this.
Pearl stepped forward now and said, “No, he’s not off his meds ’cause he’s not on meds. Look, let me explain something to you about our father, something that I’ve learned this year being away. He may look like a man you know, but he’s not like any man you’ve ever met.”
“I believe that,” Maya concurred.
Pearl continued, “He’s not a man of this century. He doesn’t believe in psychology and feelings. He believes only in his bible and his Joseph Smith. And even though he may not believe in psychology, he still has one. Know what I mean?”
“No! I don’t.” Maya was getting frustrated. “Keep talking. Or stop talking. But keep talking.”
Pearl spoke carefully. “Things have happened over the course of the year—the family splitting up, maybe losing the land, Hyrum, me—it’s fucking with him. Bad.” She looked away.
“Lots of things,” Deuce added, making a gesture with his hand out by his side and behind like a parent does to keep a child from crossing a busy street, to hold something at bay, to hold all the things that might be troubling his father back from crossing into this conversation. “Dad blames himself for what’s happened. He might blame the weakness of his own faith, and his reaction won’t be to figure out why, like you might, to, you know, grow, learn, dig out why something in his past may have caused him to be a certain way; his reaction will be to contract, to go back to the bible, to Smith and Brigham Young, to go back to the letter of the law. And it’s not like he’s gonna debate about mercy either. He’s a tough guy, but he’s not a bad guy. Hey, Pearl, remember Black Bart?”
Pearl smiled and nodded sadly. Deuce softened. “Oh man, Dad was always trying to make me better—when we would play Wild West, when I was a kid, I always wanted to be the bad guy, wear the black hat. ‘Black Bart,’ he called me, and I’d make him be the white hat, the sheriff, and he’d catch me out and bring me to justice for cattle rustling or killing the previous sheriff, whatever. We’d have these great horse chases, epic chases, me on my little horse, Tamsin, and he’d run me into a dead end somewhere in the desert and pull out his pistola, he called it, smiling—don’t get me wrong, I loved it—he’d put on this heavy western accent, he’d say, ‘Ah, you think being the bad guy is fun, huh, Black Bart? But now it’s time to pay the piper.’ And then he’d quote Joseph Smith in that goofy voice as he twirled his gun: ‘I am opposed to hanging, even if another man kill another, I will shoot him, or cut his head off, spill his blood on the ground and let the smoke ascend thereof up to God … now what you think of them apples, Pilgrim?’”
Maya gazed at this young man smiling fondly at a memory of his father and felt a certain vertigo, like she was on the precipice of some personal revelation, even as she was beginning to get a glimmer of what this man Bronson really was through these children who both loved and feared him in equal measure. Pearl was crying now. Deuce stepped closer to Maya, his voice tender. “If Dad questions Hyrum and decides that he killed that kid out of anger or retribution, and he was probably pissed off during the fight, right, self-defense doesn’t matter and his age doesn’t matter, murder is murder. God doesn’t care about circumstances and excuses, does He? And maybe Dad doesn’t either.”
“Holy shit,” Maya whispered. The man they were describing was a type of monster, like a Hammer villain for real, no joke. A man who had been in her bed not long ago. A man she had felt safe enough to fall asleep next to.
“Let me say it out loud so you can check me.” Maya spoke slowly, listening to herself as she talked. “You’re saying Bronson is unstable and kidnapped Hyrum and is going to kill him?” The twins looked at each other again.
Pearl controlled her sobbing and spoke. “We don’t really know what Dad is thinking. He doesn’t think like us. But it might be that.”
“That’s insane.”
“Is it?” Deuce asked. “You keep using that word, but is it more insane than gun violence or ignoring climate change? Dying for a flag? Killing for a flag? Dad’s trying to keep order in a world he sees as out of control with the tools that he has. His tools are blunt, but they’ve saved his life before.”
“You were just calling him a bastard,” Maya said.
“Yes,” Deuce replied, but added nothing further.
Maya felt like she wasn’t getting the whole story from these kids, but then again, she felt like the whole story might be impossible to get, ever. She would try to understand it rationally, psychologically, but she sensed there was something more ancient and animalistic at play here. Almost as if her first vision of Bronson—when she was tripping and she imagined he was an early man, like a Homo erectus, just out of Africa—was the truth. Somehow he’d been transplanted to the present day. Jesus, he really was an unfrozen caveman lawyer. That’s how she understood what the kids were saying. And yes, it was nuts.
“Why won’t you guys stop him?” she asked. Deuce and Pearl looked at each other again; they never seemed more like twins to Maya than they did in this moment.
“You don’t understand—I can’t go to him right now,” Pearl said.
“Make me understand.”
Deuce looked at Pearl and shook his head no, making that protective, covering gesture with his hand again to keep certain things from ever being spoken. “If we were to go against him,” he said, “it would break his heart, and if we couldn’t stop him, we would have to kill him to prevent him, and we can’t do that, we can’t kill ou
r father any more than we can allow him to kill our brother.”
“Holy shit.” Maya was hyperventilating now. “And you don’t want police?”
“No,” Deuce said. “I think the presence of the cops will act as an accelerant, and force his hand too quickly. He doesn’t recognize their authority, but he will recognize a threat, and many may die.”
“Wow, okay, okay, sorry I keep saying wow, wow—how are you two so smart and calm? I’m freaking out.”
“We are as our father made us,” Pearl said. “He gave us everything of himself, and we won’t abandon him now in his time of greatest need. Please, please, help us…”
These kids blew Maya away; she drafted off their focus, their seeming clarity and desperation, and said, “I think I can do something. Do you think he’d listen to me?”
“He might. That’s why we’re telling you. He likes you. I’ve seen how he likes you, and listens to you,” Pearl said, as she looked at Maya with something akin to derision and thanks.
Maya thought about asking what she meant and how she knew that, but Deuce picked up the thread too fast: “And, be careful, because I also think,” he warned, “that if he is dead set on this course, he will be hard for anyone to stop. My father is a capable man. He will be the Hand of God.”
39.
MAYA REALLY WANTED to call the cops in, that was her instinct, but she’d given Deuce and Pearl her word, and they seemed to have insight on how to deal with Bronson and these arcane archaic Mormon beliefs. She checked her phone; she had to head right back to Santa Monica to meet with fucking Sammy Greenbaum again as she’d promised. She trusted those kids and the kids trusted her, and they were good kids, and she’d already done enough to upset this family. Possibly she could make up for it, atone. But screw atonement, blood atonement—what kind of crazy, primitive, eye-for-an-eye nonsense was that? And what of Bronson? He’d been in her home, in her bed, in her arms; she had stepped up to the edge where she could’ve fallen for him, and he was this irrational, horrific, ancient, biblical person? How could she not have seen that? He said he was a man from the past. He said it and she wouldn’t hear it. Of course he was a religious zealot, that was his calling card basically, but she had chosen to look past that, to see it as an attribute, one of many, like a hobby, and not the fundamental bedrock to his character. What was wrong with her radar?
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