The Wicked (The Righteous)

by Michael Wallace

  Madeline pulled away and shuffled backward across the mattresses. “You don’t know anything about me. You have no idea the horrible things I’m capable of doing.”

  “Tell me. Maybe I can help.”

  “I had a boyfriend. Lots of them, actually, but one in particular. I got pregnant, halfway through my freshman year, can you believe it? I was going to get an abortion.”

  Eliza tried to keep her tone neutral. “And did you?”

  “I would have. I had an appointment. God gave me a miscarriage instead, but I was going to.”

  “So you didn’t actually do anything.”

  “I had the intent, that’s the same thing. I’m a horrible, bad person and Satan keeps trying to get me.” She sighed. “Don’t you ever feel that life itself is too painful to bear? Sometimes, suffering feels like an escape.”

  “Is that why you cut your arms? Is that what caused the scars?”

  “I don’t want to talk about that,” Madeline said.

  “You’re doing it because you think you deserve to suffer? That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? You’ve found a new way to punish yourself and you’re telling yourself it’s about God.”

  “Yes, I was cutting,” she snapped. “It only made things worse. Can’t you see? That’s why I need this, it’s why I need these people. Only after I’m purified and sanctified am I good enough to go out and cleanse the world. Right now I just have to watch.”

  “By cleanse, do you mean the part where you go out and assault people?”

  Madeline hesitated for a moment before saying, “We only attack the worst, most unrepentant people. Drug dealers and murderers.”

  “Let me tell you about one of those people. Do you remember the guy with the produce truck, down past the ravine? Where you stole all this lettuce?”

  “How did you know about that?”

  “I know because that guy is my brother. I found him in bed, lucky to be alive the way you beat him nearly to death. And what did he ever do to you?”

  “David was Benita’s old boyfriend,” she said.

  “Really? So that’s how they singled him out?”

  “He was leading her into a lifestyle of sin and addiction. We had to cleanse him in order to help her.”

  “It was a cruel thing you did,” Eliza said. “He didn’t deserve it, whatever you think. You don’t know anything about my brother, and I swear he’d have never led anyone into any sort of lifestyle. That’s just another lie they told you.” When Madeline didn’t answer, she added, “Let me tell you about my brother. I have seen David teaching young children to read. I saw him carry spiders outside because he didn’t want to kill them, saw him sit all night with an old dog who was about to die. He was a good kid, maybe a little distracted and maybe didn’t take things seriously enough, but he would never hurt anyone. I come from. . .well, a religious family, and my father kicked him out for not being good enough. That’s when things went bad for David, when he started abusing drugs and living a fast lifestyle. But whatever he’s done, I can tell you that he didn’t deserve what you did to him.”

  Eliza took a deep breath, tried to fight down her anger, then crawled through the darkness to Madeline’s side again. “And you don’t deserve what you’re doing to yourself.”

  “It’s the only way. Otherwise I’m going to burn.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “The world is coming to an end. Everything will burn up.”

  “You know what? I’ve met a dozen guys who claimed the world was coming to an end on this day or that. Nobody knows when it will happen. It could be tomorrow or a thousand years from now. The Bible says, ’like a thief in the night.’” She put her arm around Madeline. “The Disciple is a fraud. You can tell by the things he’s doing. That’s not from God. He can’t help, he can only hurt you.”

  “No, you’re wrong. I’ve felt Satan, he’s real. I’ve awakened in the night to find him sitting on my chest, I’ve heard him whispering. I cut myself to make him go away, just for a few seconds. Only the Disciple can make him leave me alone.”

  “Madeline, I don’t know what that was. Maybe it was Satan, or maybe, I don’t know, you just need counseling and medication.”

  “That’s not true. You don’t know what you’re talking about. It was Satan, I swear it.”

  “Listen to me,” Eliza said in a hard voice. “I don’t care. Forget about the Disciple for a moment. What if a friend came to you and said she wanted to join a religious group. And when she did, she could never speak to you again, or to anyone in her family. The leader would make her sleep in dumpsters and eat garbage. Then she’d go live in the desert and be thrown naked into a pit for weeks at a time, with nothing to eat except for lettuce. When they dragged her out, they’d rape her. Then they’d take her into the city where she’d join a mob and beat strangers, break their bones and leave them a bruised, bloody mess. Two people in this group would freeze to death in a back alley, another one would jump from the Hoover Dam to her death. And your friend told you this was the will of the Lord. What would you tell her?”

  “You make it sound so wrong. But it’s not like that.”

  “It’s exactly like that.” Eliza wanted to scream, to shake Madeline until the girl woke up. But that would be absolutely the wrong tactic. “How about you promise me one thing?”

  “What is that?” Madeline asked.

  “Promise me that as soon as we get out of here, you’ll sit down and talk to your mother. It’s the least you can do.”

  “I don’t know if I can do it. I’m afraid she’ll talk me out of it.”

  “Shouldn’t that be telling you something? She loves you, she at least needs to know that you’re alive.”

  “That wasn’t even my mom you talked to, remember?” Madeline asked.

  “It doesn’t matter. Your mother is still the leader of a group of parents trying to find their children. That part is real, that’s what you need to hold onto. All I’m asking is that you talk to her. Can’t you promise that much?”

  “I’ll tell you what. If you still feel the same way when we get out, I’ll talk to her. But I don’t think you will, I think you’ll change your mind.”

  Eliza was taken aback. “After everything I just said, you think I’m going to change my mind?”

  “You don’t get it, do you? We’re trapped down here. Seventeen days for me. Thirty for you. One head of lettuce a day, that’s all. When you’ve been here a few days, you’ll see. Fasting weakens you, it makes you humble. You don’t know that yet, but you will.”

  “I know what fasting is. This isn’t fasting, it’s forced starvation.” Eliza groped around the room until she found the box with Madeline’s wilted lettuce, then her own box. “And I’m not going to play that game.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Getting you some of my lettuce, it’s fresher than yours. It’s barely even food, but it’s all we’ve got. Here, eat as much as you can. We’ll wait an hour and you can eat another head.”

  “You can’t do that,” Madeline said. “You’ll never make it if I eat your lettuce.”

  “I don’t plan to make it. I plan to get out of here. I’m going to do something and I need you strong enough to help.”

  Madeline hesitated for a long time and it seemed she was going to refuse, that nothing Eliza said had penetrated. That she would crawl back into her corner to suffer in silence until she somehow survived seventeen more days in this hole. Or didn’t.

  But at last, she took the lettuce. “Okay. I’ll try.”

  Chapter Fifteen:

  When he was seventeen, Abraham Christianson was ordered to kill a dissident. His uncle, an elder in the Church of the Anointing, took him to the Ghost Cliffs, put a deer rifle in his hand and told him to shoot the man through the heart.

  Abraham’s childhood in the 50s and 60s had a hard element. He’d grown up castrating lambs with his teeth. He was eight when his father showed him how to pin the lamb by the back legs, shove his face forw
ard and grab its balls with his teeth, then slice them off with a knife and spit them to the ground. The lamb would scream, stagger away in dazed terror and pain, while Abraham moved on to the next animal. He could castrate the entire flock of spring lambs in an afternoon by the time he was twelve.

  He’d winched pigs off the ground by their hind feet, while they fought like hell to get free of the chains. Nothing smarter than a pig on the farm, not even a dog, and they damn well knew what was coming. It was no easy thing to forget the screaming as you brought the knife to its neck, the gush of blood, an endless river of it. Abraham had also put down old dogs, drowned unwanted kittens, and whacked off the heads of hundreds of chickens, ducks, geese, and turkeys over the years.

  When he was nine, he sat by his grandmother’s bed, holding her thin, papery hand while she suffocated on her failing lungs. Pneumonia. Probably curable, but there wouldn’t be a doctor in Blister Creek for another twenty years. Everyone knew that penicillin was toxic, the small pox vaccine sterilized those dumb enough to get the shot, and fluoridated water would cause dementia over time.

  But Abraham was unprepared for what his uncle pulled out from under a tarp in the back of his 1947 Ford pickup that summer morning. It was Elder Tomlinson. He was about thirty, had just taken his second wife. He was already mostly bald, with a few strands of hair in an optimistic comb-over, and the bushy remnants around his sideburns and above his ears turning prematurely gray. When he sat behind the pulpit, nodding sagely at Elder Kimball’s sacrament meeting talks, he had a serious, distinguished appearance. His wives sat in the front row, knitting, feeding babies, calming toddlers.

  Uncle Heber dragged Elder Tomlinson out of the truck and pulled off the blindfold. The man’s eyes were wild. Heber pushed him, and he flailed, trying to catch his balance, but someone had taped his feet and hands. He sprawled to the dirt.

  It hadn’t rained for weeks and wind scoured dust off the Colorado Plateau and swept it across the Ghost Cliffs. There were few plants near the edge of the gorge, just low, scrubby brush, cactus, and a pair of bristlecone pines growing from the hard ground, their branches twisted by hundreds of years of winds howling over the plateau. That wind kicked up now, knifing through Abraham’s jacket and making his eyes sting.

  Heber dragged Tomlinson to his feet, ripped away the electrical tape over his mouth. The man started pleading. “Please, don’t do it. It isn’t true, I wasn’t going to do it. I was just talking, don’t you see? My big mouth got away from me. I should have shut up, I know it, but it was just talk, there was nothing serious.”

  Heber pinned him against the truck with his forearm, reached into the back seat with his other arm and grabbed the rifle. He checked to make sure it was loaded, then shoved it into Abraham’s hands. The boy looked down at the gun as if he’d been handed a snake.

  “Listen to me,” Elder Tomlinson said. “I was mad about the Luskey girl, that’s all, so I started running off my mouth. It won’t happen again.”

  Heber slapped him across the face, so hard his head rocked and he nearly fell. Abraham, without thinking, shoved out the rifle barrel and caught the shoulder strap of Tomlinson’s overalls to keep him from falling. The man regained his balance.

  “It’s not about the girl,” Uncle Heber said. He spoke in that slow, rural Utah twang, where everything was “Is this fer me?” or “givit tuh them,” wolves became “wooves,” and a greeting came across as, “How yuh doon?” It gave the impression of a harmless rancher, still young enough to dig an irrigation ditch by hand, but with skin tanned to leather by decades in the sun. There was nothing harmless about the edge to his voice now.

  “You asked,” Heber continued, “the quorum met, we decided it wasn’t time. You’re only thirty, you’ve got two wives already. You were there, you bowed your head and said ‘thou sayest.’ And then you walked out of the temple and the evil began. You gossiped, you complained. Back-biting, evil speaking of the Lord’s anointed. Even then, when you were warned, if you had simply bowed your head and said ‘thou sayest” again, and meant it this time, it would have ended.”

  “I know, I—”

  Heber grabbed the man by the throat. “If this man says one more word, shoot him. Do you understand?”

  “I understand.” Abraham held the rifle against the man’s chest. He could feel Tomlinson trembling through the barrel.

  “You didn’t say those words, you kept talking. You poisoned the minds of your family against the prophet, you whispered in the ears of the young men of the quorum. You schemed with your friends to move your wives and families to Wayne County. To divide Zion. If it had been just you, we would have stripped you of your blessings, taken your wives and children to give to the faithful. But it wasn’t just you. We need to be sure that you won’t come back in the night and whisper in the ears of the saints.”

  His eyes widened, but wisely, he said nothing.

  Uncle Heber looked around. The wind howled across the cliff, blowing a talcum-fine mist of dust over the edge, like a waterfall. He told Abraham what to do and the two dragged Elder Tomlinson toward the edge. When they got there, Heber fisted the front of Tomlinson’s overalls and shoved him toward the cliff as if he were simply going to push him to his death. Hands and feet taped, the man heaved backward like a dead weight. Tomlinson screamed. At the last moment, Heber jerked him forward and stood him straight, a few inches from the cliff. A dark spot spread down the man’s pant leg where he’d lost control. Abraham’s heart felt like it would hammer out of his chest.

  “Brother Tomlinson,” Heber said in a loud voice. “Thou art guilty of the blood and sins of this generation. By the power of the Holy Melchizedek Priesthood, we now seal thee unto death.”

  “No,” Tomlinson whispered.

  “Come with me,” Heber told his nephew. “If he moves from that spot, shoot him.”

  “I understand.”

  They walked slowly away. Heber clamped a hand on Abraham’s shoulder. “You’re a good boy. Like your father, but he might be a little soft. Certainly, he doesn’t have the stomach for this, and anyway, we can’t bother the prophet with this sort of thing. He has to be above the conflict, a leader of all men and that means we have to take the hard measures.”

  “Are we just trying to scare him? You’re not really going to kill him, right?”

  “No, I’m not going to kill him. You are.”

  Abraham swallowed and looked down at the rifle. Shoot a man like a coyote among the sheep? He couldn’t.

  Uncle Heber studied his face. “It is better for one man to perish than a nation to dwindle in unbelief.”

  They were the words of the Lord in the Book of Mormon, when Nephi went back to Jerusalem to retrieve the Brass Plates. When Laban had refused to surrender the plates, the Lord ordered Nephi to cut off the man’s head. Nephi had initially balked, and now Abraham did, too.

  “He’s just one man and a few weak followers,” Abraham said. “If they’re stupid enough to follow Tomlinson, they deserve to be cut off.”

  “And their wives, too? And their children? Why, that’s fifty people. Isn’t it better that one man die than lose fifty souls to the adversary? And it’s a mercy for Elder Tomlinson. You’ll shoot him through the heart and his own blood shall atone for his sins. It will give him a chance to be forgiven on the other side. Now quick, lift the gun, do what needs to be done.”

  Abraham had a hard time steadying the rifle in his hands. His mouth was dry. He looked down the sight. It was only thirty yards. His Great-grandmother Cowley, ninety-six years old and born on the plains of Wyoming in the back of a Conestoga wagon, could have made the shot without standing from her rocking chair. But the way the gun shook in his hands, he’d be lucky not to blow off his own kneecap. Elder Tomlinson found his voice. “Please, I know I was wrong. It was a terrible sin, but I’m sorry. Have mercy, I beg you.”

  “He is suffering the regrets of the damned,” Heber said in a low voice. “It is not true contrition.”

  “Uncle Heber,
please. I don’t know if I can do it. How about a warning?”

  A sigh. “And what would be a sufficient warning? A wound?”

  “Yes, that’s a good idea.” Abraham’s words spilled out, one on top of the next. “Just a wound, maybe on the thigh. It wouldn’t kill him, we could take him back to Blister Creek and he’d know that next time would be it, there wouldn’t be another chance, he’d die if he defied the prophet a second time, what do you think?”

  “Maybe.” Heber was quiet for a moment. “Not his thigh, though, that’s too easy. How about his shoulder. Can you hold your gun steady enough not to miss low?”

  Abraham let out his breath. “I can do it. But he’s too close to the edge. He’ll fall back and he might go over the side.”

  “Hmm. Good point. Wait here.”

  Uncle Heber walked out to Elder Tomlinson on the edge of the cliff, while Abraham tried to steady his nerves. He’d been breaking a horse just two hours earlier when Uncle Heber had pulled up in his truck. His original plan for the day had been to join the survey team working at the edge of federal land on the west side of town. He wanted to teach himself how to use the theodolite. He couldn’t remember why he’d changed his mind and stayed at the ranch. If he’d stuck with the original plan, maybe he wouldn’t be standing here with a rifle, getting ready to shoot a man.

  His uncle said something to Tomlinson, who whimpered and begged. When he slumped down, Heber dragged him back up and said, “Do this with honor and there may be mercy. Here or on the other side, the Lord will decide.” This stiffened him a little and Heber moved him to a new spot, so that Abraham could get a safe shot to the shoulder.

  Heber walked back toward Abraham as the boy lifted the gun. His hands were steady now, and he said a silent prayer that the Lord would guide his shot. It had to be clean. Through the shoulder and the man would be okay. If he missed low, he’d kill Tomlinson. If he missed high, Uncle Heber might grab the gun and finish the job.

  “Ready?”

  “I’m ready.”

  “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord,” Heber whispered.