Bronson dragged Dirk’s lifeless body over to the edge of the hole, grabbed an arm and a leg, and, spinning circles, tossed him in like an Olympic hammer thrower. The three men down in the hole screamed and cried out when Dirk’s corpse landed on them. It would be awkward for Bronson to safely get a shot at them. He could point his gun down there blindly and shoot around, but it wasn’t worth wasting bullets, or exposing himself to their desperate aim. He admonished the overly curious boy. “Don’t get too near that hole, son.”
He decided to walk away. He shot the tires out of the ATVs and grabbed the keys. If the trapped men tried to claw out of the soft sand walls, they’d bury themselves alive. And if they didn’t try to dig out, the blades, snakes, and heat would kill them soon enough. And if they managed to survive long enough to be rescued? That was fine as well, let it be; Bronson just needed them off his ass for a little while. God, or the devil, would decide the details.
Bronson and Hyrum got back on their horses and rode away from the wailing men back toward the house. More men, better men, better trained with better weapons, would be coming soon for his boy, to protect him, they thought, but they’d only damage him. They knew not what they were doing. He had to prepare. It would be 100 degrees in a couple hours, the hot wind was already shifting restlessly, picking up—the Santa Ana, a crazy-making wind—and there was still much to do.
41.
HOURS PASSED, and the time that Dirk was supposed to call and check in with Maya had come and gone long ago. But Maya was still procrastinating at the Shutters bar with a now sloppy (three whiskey sours in) Sammy Greenbaum. She was afraid to move and lose a call in the spotty coastal service, so she was trapped there at the edge of the Pacific on a certain barstool that gave her phone full bars. Apparently, Sammy Greenbaum was going to change the world with a horror movie.
“Like Get Out changed the world,” he said, savoring his third maraschino cherry.
“Did it?” she asked. “Change the world?”
“Fuck, yes. For like a whole year. More even. More than fucking Ghandi.”
“The person or the movie?”
“Both. Either. Why you keep checking your phone? You got a boyfriend or something?”
“None of your business.”
“Oh, girlfriend … twist?” he asked hopefully, raising his eyebrows.
“No,” Maya said, “no boyfriend or girlfriend.”
“Well, I was kinda hoping you did,” Sammy slurred, ordering that fourth whiskey sour. “I’m in the mood for an ill-advised affair with a mature woman.” Fuck Praetorian, fuck Hammer, and fuck the world, this mature woman was about to deck the little prick when her phone finally, mercifully for Sammy, buzzed. But it wasn’t Dirk calling, it was Janet Bergram. Sammy snooped the caller ID. “Oooooh,” he cooed, “Janet … who Janet be?”
“The ball and chain,” Maya said, winking at Sammy and excusing herself. She didn’t want a sloppy Sammy to overhear anything.
She walked back outside the hotel, keeping an eye on her reception, which was holding at one and two bars, but there were people milling about everywhere, waiting for the valet, so she told Janet to hold on a moment, took off her heels again, and made a right onto the sand, which was now cold on her toes. A clear, windless night had fallen, and the beach was mostly empty, but the full moonlight was so bright, she cast a shadow.
“What the hell is going on?” Janet asked. “I called Deuce and he said to call you.”
Maya walked for privacy down toward the shoreline. Though she had to raise her voice a bit to be heard above the surf, she relayed to Janet her discussion with the kids about this crazy “blood atonement” stuff and the decision to send the rangers in, not the cops. “Are you fucking crazy?” Janet wasn’t on speakerphone, but it sounded like it. “Those rangers aren’t cops—they’re not trained like that. They’re like mall security. You gotta call the cops and walk away, Maya. This is serious shit. Way too serious for me. If you don’t call the cops, I will. Right now.”
“Pearl and Deuce didn’t want me to.”
“They’re kids, be the adult, use your fucking head, Maya. You wanna be an accomplice? It’s time to step back. Hyrum was not to leave Rancho Cucamonga. Bronson kidnapped his kid. He broke the law. Period. I’m calling the cops right now.”
“Don’t.”
The cops would mean the end to the deal no doubt, the end to her big score. Maya was still holding out hope for a quiet resolution followed by a land grab that would make them all rich. She also didn’t like being told what to do by a holier-than-thou civil servant.
Janet didn’t see it that way. “Look, Maya, you got what you wanted. Call in the cops, Bronson gets arrested and loses his kids. Why are you having an attack of conscience all of a sudden?”
Janet’s righteousness and certainty were wearing thin for Maya. “Who do you care about, Janet?”
“What now?”
“You heard me.”
“I don’t think I did.”
“You don’t care about Bronson.”
“Perhaps you care too much about Bronson.”
Maya ignored that jibe and plowed on. “I don’t know if you care about Pearl and Deuce aside from how you can use them, how it reflects on you. I’m pretty sure you don’t care about Hyrum. You care about your schools and the money coming into your community.” Maya waited for Janet to defend herself. Nothing. Maya thought maybe the call had been dropped. “Hello? Hello? Janet? Fuck.”
“I’m here. And I’m not going to have this discussion right now with you, Maya. I’m calling the cops. But to answer your question, yeah, I care about those kids, but I care about all the kids, and I try to calculate the greatest good for the greatest number. That’s what I believe in. Math. These are just three kids, three kids compared to thousands who never get a shot and more born every year. I care about the thousands more than I care about the three. You wanna call me names because of that? I can live with that. I’m calling the cops.”
Janet hung up on her. A big wave curled and crashed on the sand like the roar of some infinite slouching animal, startling Maya. The frothy white water rushed up at her suddenly, hitting her at knee height with such force she almost lost her balance. She hadn’t realized during the heated conversation that she had nearly walked out into the ocean. Her short black dress was soaked with cold spray as the receding wave pulled at the back of her legs, like an insistent, unreasonable being, urging her to let go of the sand, to go deeper, to sweep her out to sea. Maya looked up as a three-foot set came surging in, and beyond that, to the moonlight sparkling off the water like flashing knives.
42.
MARY WOKE GRADUALLY to strange sounds. Her sleeping ear had acclimated to the constant ambient noise of Rancho Cucamonga, so at first she had slept through the sounds of engines and men arguing. She threw on some clothes and stumbled out into the kitchen, half awake. “What’s going on, Bro’? Did I hear some yelling and some ATVs?” Bronson was staring out the kitchen window, a preacher’s look upon his sweaty face, agitated, faraway, mad with the prospect of salvation. She had taken the last of her Percocet stash last night and was still a bit groggy. She was gonna have to go cold turkey now, not a pleasant thought to start the day. She wanted a coffee.
Bronson chanted, “‘And the Lord said unto Joshua—Stretch out the spear that is in thy hand toward Ai; for I will give it into thine hand. And Joshua stretched out the spear that he had in his hand toward the city.’”
“And a good morning to you, too, Bro’.”
Bronson didn’t smile. She knew what he was referring to, an alternative legend to the naming of the Joshua tree, so called not for the prayerful stance of Moses in Exodus, but rather the outstretched arm of Joshua himself holding a spear in preparation for violent battle in Joshua 8. “Today, my hands are raised not in prayer. My hands are raised holding a spear. Get the kids up and together, and Mary, get your gun.” He walked out behind the house. Mary followed.
“What? What’s happening?”
“They’re coming for us, Mary. But I’m not gonna let any of the kids get hurt. Understand?”
“Yes, but what do I need my gun for?”
Bronson stopped; he took her in his arms. “In 1844, Joseph Smith declared martial law in Nauvoo. I am declaring the same in Agadda da Vida, Joshua Tree, today. There will not be another Hawn’s Mill.”
“What? Baby, you can’t declare martial law.”
“‘One law for the lion and ox is oppression.’ They’re coming for us like they came for Joseph and Hyrum in Carthage in 1844. The mob painted their faces black with gunpowder and they came to kill.”
Mary knew the Mormon stories, bouncing between the ancient biblical texts and Joseph Smith’s nineteenth-century additions, its constellation of allusions, myths, and histories. She had learned well from Jackie and Bronson. She knew Bronson was calling out to the murderers of the prophet Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum, and as she looked at her man, she didn’t know if he, too, was back in 1844 in his mind, if he had so thoroughly identified with the founder of a family and of a religion, Joseph Smith, or was he a confused, conflicted man in 2020. Is that why he’d come to the desert in the first place? To enter into mythological time, geologic time? For what was 176 years to the dusty earth but the blink of an eye? To the boulders and sand beneath what used to be an ocean, was not 1844 barely a millisecond before 2020? And was not Bronson Powers himself mythological, a human extension of the desert? A Joshua tree come magically to life as a man with supplicant arms?
Bronson must have seen Mary processing hard, because he took her hands in his gently. “Do you think I’ve lost my mind?”
He asked with such a direct innocence and vulnerability that she wanted to hold him and pat his head. After Jackie had died, she had tried to take her place as his rock, though no one could replace Jackie, and Mary was no rock by nature. But she had been the first non-Mormon to tell him his vision of a life out in the desert wasn’t a ridiculous scam. That was a lot. She had always tried to be, even before she fully believed herself, the solid ground beneath his feet. She could no sooner pull that ground out from under him now than jump up and pull the burning sun from the sky.
“Oh, Bro’.” She sighed. “No. I think maybe you’ve just lost your way.” She saw a veil drop from his eyes as he took this in.
“Lost my way?” he repeated, though it sounded more like an affirmation than a question. He was back, a rational twenty-first-century man who saw religion as a guideline for a loving Christian morality, not a set of intransigent, bloody rules, not the prophet on the run in 1844.
“Yes, baby,” Mary gently said. Bronson looked like he might weep, like he might collapse into her waiting arms, but then cocked his head like he heard something, like he was tuned to a frequency only he could hear suddenly getting sharper; for Mary heard nothing. And just as quickly the veil, invisible but every bit as blinding as his peep stones, dropped down again over his eyes, and he hardened. He was swaying now, almost davening. Sensing that his vulnerability was quickly fading, Mary now usurped the role of preacher and reached for scripture, Malachi 4:6, hoping to call her man back to reason with the foundational words she heard in her mind. “And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.”
“They’re coming now,” he said.
Mary knew she had to say it out loud and right now. “He’s just our boy, Bronson. Just a little boy.”
Bronson nodded, but he was gone, gone to a past that was the eternal present in mythic time, lost to a vision of himself as an actor and stuntman, a celluloid hero in an ancient story. He was no longer acting as if, as they used to say in NA; he wasn’t acting at all, he was; and he was certain. His original faith was not founded on brotherly love and good works, Hallmark Jesus loving his enemies and turning his cheek, but on the bloody mystery at the heart of it all, a very mortal man on a cross suffering under the passive gaze of a Father who refused to lift a hand to save His boy. Bronson felt that holy filicide in his bones, like marrow, because without it, the religion he had accepted was just a bunch of dos and don’ts and lullabies. It wasn’t that he was a natural-born killer himself, no, he was a gentle man, but he needed to feel that annihilating darkness, because without darkness, no contrast or vision, no truth, no resonance. This is where it begins and ends—Christ, the perfect imperfect son, suffering all the pains a human body can offer, slowly bleeding and suffocating to death as his inscrutable, unknowable Father looks down from Heaven. This was the Father to love and to do battle with. Bronson thought of his own father and then of his own son. He felt a jolt like lightning course through him, a fortification of his soul, pushing him onward; he was filled anew with rage and love.
As he was reaffirming the origins of his faith, Bronson could see that Mary thought he was lost, and that pierced him with some sadness, made him feel alone in this, but that was only because, he told himself, he had run so far out ahead of her, yes, of all of them, that they’d lost sight of him. She would follow; she would catch up, his footsteps, solitary and visible in the sand, would show her, show all of them, the way.
“Do you trust me, Mother Mary?”
“With what?” She did trust him, absolutely, but that did not mean she felt safe with him.
“Everything. I wouldn’t do anything to damage the boy. I need your faith right now.”
Mary looked again at Bronson davening, revving himself up; saw that old need in his eyes. This was the man she’d thrown in with; yes, he was flawed, flawed in the way so many men were, but she’d been away from him for almost a year and had seen nothing out there that convinced her that there was a better life to be had elsewhere in civilization. This was her life, with him, with this family, for better or for worse. Pearl and Deuce were safe and free; they had futures away from here. Bless them. She’d done her job. She would stay and make sure the rest of the kids made it through and out, too. She would stay in Agadda da Vida and be a roadblock when necessary, a loving roadblock. She smelled something strange, though, and it stole her immediate attention, an odd but familiar smell from her past like rotten eggs that she couldn’t pin down through her Percocet haze; and there was a clear, slightly gooey substance on Bronson’s hands, almost like snot, some on hers now. “What’s that smell?”
Bronson let go of her hands, wiping his palms on his pants, and headed toward the house, calling back to her, “Get your gun, Mother Mary, and take the rest of the kids to the barn. Hyrum and I will stay in the house. Just stay in the barn. Everything will be all right.”
She tried to stop him one last time, putting all the love and worry and history she had into one word. “Bronson!”
The tenor of the word stopped him cold. He thought of how Mary always called him “Bro’” unless she was pissed; when she called him “Bronson,” he knew he was in for it. He recalled, briefly, a cascade of earlier times of domestic bliss and squabbles, a pleasant, nostalgic pang. He turned back to face her slowly and smiled deeply, thankfully, for all of it; whatever he was up to, he was utterly in control. He winked and said, “I gotta get down with the ’boon.” And then he turned his back and walked away.
43.
THE THREE COP CARS from San Bernardino were responding to a domestic disturbance/possible kidnapping at an address they’d never been to, had never heard of, and that didn’t exist. They had to be helped by GPS into the middle of the desert, over terrain that damaged their vehicles. It took a few wandering, frustrating hours until they finally saw a house rise up miraculously before them, like a mirage. It wasn’t a mirage. They crawled toward it cautiously, punching the siren to announce themselves, and speaking over the megaphone, “San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department.” They got no response.
They got out of the vehicles, and called out again, “San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department.” A bullet shattered a headlight. They ducked for cover behind the cars.
The men chat
tered nervously—“Jesus, guess he’s not in the mood to talk.”
“Some kind of crazy-ass Mormon.”
“Gotta be to live out here like this.”
“Mormon? Thought they were the good guys.”
“We’re the good guys,” the sergeant, Paul Dark, said. Dark had thirty years on the job, and his sonorous, unhurried voice drawling commands through a thick gray mustache inspired confidence in his men and many a comparison to the actor Sam Elliott. He was known affectionately as “Sergeant Coors.”
“How many you see?”
“I see one man by a front window left side, Sarge.”
“I see a boy, window right side.”
“A man and a boy? That it? There’s supposed to be more kids.”
“Let’s call him, talk to him.”
Sergeant Dark said, “He doesn’t have a phone.”
“No phone? Now I’m scared—that is some crazy shit.”
“No, he’s some kinda hoarder survivalist, off the grid.”
“White supremacist?”
“No intel on that. I have no background other than Mormon and mad about his kid,” Dark said.
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