The Hosanna Shout

by R. R. Irvine

  “He never goes anywhere without a cellular phone, even to bed,” Martin said.

  Shaking his head, Chester shoved pieces of the eternal flame aside to clear a space on the counter, then carried over his phone and set it on top of the oily glass as if issuing a challenge.

  Traveler dialed Willis Tanner’s unlisted number. When a machine answered, he entered an access code that Tanner had assigned to him.

  “Mr. Tanner is unavailable for the next few days,” a recorded voice said. “Please stay on the line if you need further assistance. If you wish another extension, enter that code now.”

  Traveler waited until a live female voice said, “How may I help you?”

  “My name is Moroni Traveler. I’m trying to reach Willis Tanner.”

  “Could someone else help you?”

  “How about Elton Woolley?”

  The woman caught her breath as if no one had ever asked to speak to the prophet before.

  “Jesus Christ!” Chester said, grabbing for the phone. “Church security is probably tracking the call already.”

  “Never mind,” Traveler told the operator and relinquished his hold on the instrument.

  The phone rang as soon as Chester replaced the receiver. He backed away from it immediately.

  Traveler started to reach for it, but Martin dragged him away.

  “What am I going to do?” Chester called after them.

  “Tell them it’s a wrong number,” Martin answered just before pushing Traveler through the revolving door.

  13

  ANSON HORNE’S patrol car, if Traveler remembered the license number correctly, was parked in front of the temple gate across the street. He pointed it out to Martin and said, “We’ll ask him about gentling the Gentiles.”

  Since the car was empty, Traveler and Martin entered the temple grounds. The missionaries at the gate said Horne was inside the temple itself, and therefore out of bounds to the likes of Traveler and his father.

  “I wonder how they knew we’re Gentiles?” Martin said once they were out of earshot of the gatekeepers.

  “Can you spot missionaries without being told who they are?”

  “I see what you mean.”

  They sat on the lip of the Sea Gull Monument’s reflecting pool where they could keep an eye on the temple, though chances were Horne would be coming from the direction of the annex that connected with the main temple via a ninety-foot tunnel. In either case, Horne couldn’t reach the gate without passing by their vantage point.

  “How long do we wait?” Martin said.

  “Indian summer here in town means the salt flats will be as hot as a frying pan.”

  “We should have brought lunch and something cold to drink.”

  Traveler said nothing. They both knew picnicking, like smoking, was strictly prohibited inside the temple grounds.

  “Do you think we’re procrastinating?” Martin said after a while.

  “About the boy, you mean?”

  Martin nodded.

  “Maybe it’s better not to know if Claire was lying to us.”

  “Maybe it’s the responsibility we’re afraid of.”

  Traveler thought that over for a moment. “He won’t be ours even if we do find him.”

  “If I find a grandson, he’ll be mine.”

  “With no blood tie, there’s no guarantee of visiting rights.”

  They talked about child rearing and strategy for hunting down Bill and Charlie until Horne and Sergeant Belnap appeared, heading their way from the direction of the annex.

  Traveler and Martin stood up to meet them.

  Horne’s hair was wet and slicked down; Belnap’s crew cut looked matted. Both smelled distinctly of chlorine. Traveler suspected they’d been spending their lunch hour at the baptismal font inside the temple, raising souls. The ritual was accomplished by proxies submerging themselves in the huge cast-iron and porcelain font that stood on the backs of twelve life-size bronze oxen, a design taken from a biblical description of King Solomon’s temple. Most likely the policemen had provided relief to the relay teams that conducted continuous baptisms to keep up with the constant demand of raising lost souls to glory. At last count, the church had plans for the raising of a hundred and fifty million.

  “I pray for the day when you two will give me an excuse to arrest you,” Horne said.

  “Amen,” Belnap intoned.

  “If anyone’s broken the law,” Martin said, “it’s your partner.”

  Belnap poked a finger in Martin’s chest. Traveler reciprocated with a handhold on Belnap’s wrist.

  “Everybody back off,” Horne said. As soon as they had, he glared at Martin. “Let’s hear what you have to say.”

  Traveler watched Belnap’s face closely.

  Martin said, “Why don’t you ask your partner if he’s been gentling the Gentiles?”

  Belnap’s eyes gave him away. Horne must have known too, because he looked away before answering. “That’s nothing but an old wives’ tale.”

  “Bullshit,” Martin said. “We all know it’s the third degree, Mormon style. Bleached bones in the desert along with the leftovers from the Donner party. Only the buzzards do well out there.”

  Horne turned Belnap around and started him in the direction of the Three Witnesses Monument. “Wait for me there, Earl.”

  The back of Belnap’s neck reddened as he walked away. He stopped a few feet from the monument to stare at the gray granite block covered with bas-relief depictions of David Whitmer, Oliver Cowdery, and Martin Harris, the men who testified that the Angel Moroni had shown them the golden tablets that revealed The Book of Mormon to Joseph Smith. From a distance, Belnap’s hunched shoulders made it look as if he were denying any such revelation.

  “I’ll have a talk with Earl,” Horne said.

  “If anything’s happened to Bill and Charlie,” Traveler said, “I’ll be coming for him. You tell him that.”

  Horne stared at Traveler, narrowing his eyes as if trying to assess the threat. Finally, he nodded. “Let’s say Earl did it—and I’m not admitting anything—well, he’s no fool. He wouldn’t risk killing them. He’d be careful to dump them within walking distance of Wendover.”

  14

  GOING WEST from Salt Lake City, I-80 climbs out of Skull Valley into the seven-thousand-foot Cedar Mountains. Once beyond them, the highway descends gradually into that great four-thousand-square-mile sinkhole known as the Salt Lake Desert, the bed of prehistoric Lake Bonneville. Even on maps, it was portrayed as white, the color of salt; it supported no life of any kind.

  Traveler lowered his sun visor, which failed to dispel the shimmering water mirage into which the highway seemed to disappear. Above the water, a phantom mountain range glided across the horizon as indolently as a Gila monster.

  Eighty miles out from the city, he shook his head hard to make certain that Knolls, the old Western Pacific Railroad siding, was real. Beyond Knolls, I-80 didn’t so much as curve again for forty miles.

  To keep awake, he switched on the Cherokee’s radio, which Martin kept tuned to KBYU, the church’s university station, which played classical music. This far from town, its signal was overridden by country and western booming somewhere out of Nevada.

  “Find something else,” Traveler said. “I’m having trouble keeping my eyes open”

  “All you have to do is close them,” Martin answered, “and you can see the Donner party. Out there in the desert, their wagons sunk to the hubs in the crusted sand, struggling, spending themselves even before they reached the Sierras. Nowadays our military would put those pilgrims out of their misery here and now.”

  He was referring, Traveler knew, to the vast Hill Air Force Bombing Range that lay to the north of them; to the south was the Dugway Proving Grounds, where the army tested the nastiest of its chemical weapons, often as not on the livestock of nearby ranchers.

  Martin fiddled with the radio but the only strong signals belonged to rock-and-roll and country-music stations.


  “Your choice,” Martin said.

  “Talk to me.”

  Martin turned off the radio and said, “Do you remember the I & M outings?”

  “One of them. I was seven or eight, I think. I remember playing softball, eating hot dogs, and drinking sodas, but mostly it rained.”

  “That was my last company picnic, up in the Heber Valley, behind Mount Timpanogos. Shortly after that, I left the I & M and took up police work. That decision changed my life. Yours too.”

  The I & M Rug and Linoleum Company on South State Street had been a magical place to Traveler as a boy. Its vast warehouse filled with carpet rolls, furniture frames waiting to be upholstered, lines of sofas, and unopened cardboard cartons stacked ceiling-high was the perfect place for games of hide-and-seek on those days when Kary dropped him off. I have shopping to do, she’d say. Stay out of the way. Don’t cause trouble. What she really wanted, Traveler had sensed even then, was to be rid of him for a while. Your father won’t be long, she’d say. But sometimes she dropped him off right after lunch, which meant a five-hour wait until closing, a long time to play hide-and-seek without a seeker.

  “Do you remember why I left the I & M?” Martin asked.

  “To better yourself.”

  “That was your mother talking. That’s what she insisted I tell you at the time. It was one of those periods when your mother and I weren’t living together.”

  “You were a carpet layer at the I & M,” Traveler said.

  “That’s what Kary called it. Actually, I was on my way to being shop foreman. With profit sharing, it would have paid a lot more than the police department.”

  “If you hadn’t been a cop, there’d be no Moroni Traveler and Son.”

  “Your mother hated that worse than carpet laying.”

  “You didn’t last long as a policeman.”

  “Your mother kept after me to go into business for myself. I owe her for that. For you, too.”

  Traveler concentrated on the road ahead, running through conversations with his mother. Your father has no ambition. If you’re not careful, you’ll end up just like him. Don’t come crying to me when that happens. I want people to look up to my son. I want him to be someone.

  “Why did you move out that time?” Traveler said.

  “Knowing your mother, you shouldn’t have to ask.”

  “Another man?”

  Martin snorted. “That woke you up, didn’t it.” He bent over the radio again, tuning up and down the dial until he found a weak-signaled news station.

  Traveler was still wide-awake thirty minutes later when they reached the city of Wendover sprawled across the Utah-Nevada border. Originally founded as a watering hole for the Western Pacific, Wendover became an oasis for motorists in 1925 when the first highway was completed. During World War II, twenty thousand people were moved there to service a gigantic air force base that eventually trained the atomic-bomb pilots. Wendover’s present-day population had subsided to a thousand or so.

  “Where do we start looking?” Martin said.

  “That’s as good a place as any.” Traveler indicated the Hard Times Redemption Center, the first pawn shop on the Utah side, where Kary had once sold Martin’s car to pay for one of her sprees to the Coast.

  “Redemption,” Martin muttered. “Bill and Charlie would like the sound of that.”

  The pawnbroker remembered the pair immediately. “They weren’t your usual gamblers,” he said. “I could see that right off. In the first place, they weren’t dressed well enough. They sure as hell didn’t look like they had anything worth pawning. They fooled me, though. That’s what I love about this business, the people you meet. Where else would you run into an Indian and a guy on crutches claiming to be God’s prophet?”

  The pawnbroker held up a Navajo amulet. “The Indian was wearing this under his shirt, along with a medicine bag. I get softhearted once in a while so I gave them ten bucks’ eating money for both items.”

  “What was in the bag?” Martin said.

  “Empty, I’m afraid.” The man winked. “I would have paid more otherwise.”

  “I’ll redeem them,” Traveler said.

  “You don’t have a receipt.”

  “Those are sacred relics.”

  “I’ve heard that before.”

  “Here’s my card. You can come after me if there’s any trouble.”

  “I’m trusting you,” the pawnbroker said, “along with a redemption bonus, of course.”

  Once Traveler had the medicine bag and amulet, he said, “Do you know where they went from here?”

  “The last I saw, they were like everyone else I meet, heading in the direction of the nearest casino.” He went to the window and pointed toward the State Line.

  ******

  The State Line Casino straddled Utah and Nevada, with a painted white line running down the middle of the floor to mark the demarcation. On the Utah side only 3.2 beer was legal; on the Nevada side, everything that money could buy was available.

  The security man at the door, a two-hundred-pounder trying unsuccessfully to look like a patron instead of a bouncer, pointed a finger at Martin. “The gun stays outside, old-timer.”

  Most times Martin would have bristled at being called old, but at the moment information came first.

  “I must be getting past it,” Martin said with a self-condemning shake of his head. “I forgot all about the damned thing.”

  While he went to lock the .45 in the Jeep, Traveler handed the bouncer a twenty. “We’re looking for some friends of ours. A tall man, my height, pear-shaped around the waist, walking on crutches. He has an Indian with him.”

  “If you’re going to drop the hammer on them, pal, don’t do it around here.”

  Traveler surrendered a business card along with another twenty.

  The bouncer nodded before tucking away the offerings. “They didn’t have any luck at all. The slots wiped them out in two minutes. When they started panhandling, I had to escort them on their way.”

  “Gently, I hope.”

  “They didn’t cause me any trouble, if that’s what you mean, though the Indian did say something weird, something about recharging his medicine in the desert.”

  Martin returned, pulling up his shirttails to show he was unarmed.

  “Take it from me,” the bouncer said after giving him the once-over, “the management here doesn’t want word getting around that they’re taking the sucker’s prescription money. So I says to the Indian, ‘If you’re feeling sick, maybe I can get you something.’ The Indian doesn’t say a word to that, just folds his arms and stares at me. That’s when the other one, the guy with the cast on his hoof, asks for directions to the nearest Indian settlement. ‘I’ll be damned,’ I says to myself, but I’m a Good Samaritan. So I dug a road map out of my car and came up with the Skull Valley Indian Reservation.”

  Martin groaned. “That’s a hundred miles back the way we came.”

  “I told them the same thing. You know what the big guy said to that? ‘God will show us the way. His desert will purify us.’ I’ve heard a lot of hard-luck stories, I can tell you that, but nothing that crazy. For a minute there, I figured it was just talk, what with him claiming to be a prophet. Besides, I make it a rule never to get involved with the customers, though sometimes their sad faces can eat you alive. But this time I said to myself, ‘You don’t want these two on your conscience.’ So I sprung for some bottled water before sending them on their way.

  “I stood right outside the door and watched them head for the highway. And you know what? The big guy was right. God did provide. They hadn’t gone three hundred yards up the highway before an old pickup truck stopped to give them a ride. Considering the way those two looked, it was a miracle. I sure as hell wouldn’t have picked up hitchhikers like that, but Bob Campbell’s softhearted. At least, I think that’s who was driving. It looked like his truck anyway. Bob’s got a place out on the Dugway road, halfway to the reservation. Sort of a rest stop for
tourists, with live rattlesnakes and things like that. An oasis, he calls it.”

  15

  TRAVELER GASSED the Jeep and checked the radiator before heading back toward Salt Lake. During the drive, they kept a constant watch on either side of the highway for any sign of Bill and Charlie. When they reached the railroad siding at Knolls, Traveler pulled off the road and stopped. “Why would Charlie head for Skull Valley? That’s a Goshute reservation, not Navajo. They wouldn’t have him even if he did show up and ask for asylum.”

  “So where does that leave us?”

  Traveler spread the auto-club map across the dashboard, which was hot to the touch in the ninety-degree sun. “Here’s where the Dugway road turns off at Rowley Junction.” He pointed to a spot thirty miles ahead of them on I-80, then ran his finger along the base of the Stansbury Mountains, past the Skull Valley Indian Reservation, and into the town of Dugway, a distance of about seventy miles from their present location. He backtracked to point out the only intermediate stop, an old ghost town named Iosepa.

  “I remember that place,” Martin said. “The church settled Hawaiian converts there in the 1880s. The desert did its best to kill them, but it was leprosy that got them in the end. Even Bill isn’t goofy enough to head for there.”

  Martin thumped his forehead with the palm of his hand. “I remember now. There was a roadhouse on the Dugway road we used to go to just after the war. In those days, it was considered the thing to do, drive out in the dark, get drunk, and drive back like maniacs. I think it was called the Last Stop Oasis. It must be the place the bouncer told us about.”

  ******

  The Last Stop Oasis, built to look like an oversize log cabin, was now called Bob’s Big Indian. Gaps showed in the chinking between the logs, and the leaning rock chimney was braced by weathered two-by-fours. Two fake tepees, decorated with faded buffalos, stood out front in the dusty gravel parking area, along with a battered pickup truck. Charlie sat cross-legged in front of one tepee door slit, Bill the other. Both were stripped to the waist and covered with war paint, which Charlie had once claimed to be the perfect sunscreen. Both pounded on drums, keeping the beat as Traveler and Martin marched toward them. Both sat on thick books to protect themselves from the sun-scorched gravel, which Traveler distinctly felt through the soles of his shoes.