“Of course you do. It’s in the paper.”
“There’s not enough evildoers here in our corner of paradise to heap up this much mayhem.”
“I don’t know. It’s just not a picnic without the ants.”
“This has gotta be an outside job.”
“Nobody says ‘outside job,’ Stan.”
“What did you come here for? Seems like you should be too busy for a social call.”
“I need to put my ear to the rail. What are your crazytown internet friends saying about all this?”
Stan ate a couple fries and looked at Dalton with half a smile. “Am I under arrest?”
“No.”
“Well, I think you’re coming on a little strong.” Stan sucked his Coke dry and tried to catch the server’s attention.
“I need to figure out what’s going on, or this thing’s going to escalate.”
“Going to?”
“Stan, for crying out loud. I just need some information.”
“In a free market, that information comes at a price.”
“You want to turn snitch?”
“I was thinking a little quid pro quo.”
“Come on,” Dalton said.
“Fine,” Forsythe said, inching out of the booth, to show he was serious.
“Okay, what?”
Stan scooted back to his place. “We got Feds coming back through here like they did a few years ago? Do people have to start worrying about losing their property?”
“You know who’s in the White House, Stan. Do you think that’s what’s going to happen?”
“I don’t trust any of them. Your answer, please.”
Dalton sighed. “No, there’s nothing coming at us from the Feds. You think they’d tell me if they were? My turn. Raylene Cluff says some woman was hounding Bruce about his maps. It’s been going on for months, maybe longer. What do you know about that?” He leaned forward on his elbows.
Stan’s mouth pulsed a little, then he said, “Folks are saying we’re going to see the monument downsized. All kinds of people are lining up at the trough.”
“What kind of people?”
“Energy people, mostly.”
“I need a name.”
“There’s a lot of chatter going around lately about Ishtar Energy. It’s on the rise, run by a woman who used to work in the Obama administration. These operations are all fronts, done with shell corporations. It takes a while to trace them. Bruce told me his phone was ringing off the hook. My turn. Did Bruce kill himself?”
Dalton shook his head.
“Is that no to my question, or no, you aren’t going to answer?”
“You’re going to have to work that one out on your own or wait for the press release. These energy types, are they the kind of people who’d hire a killer?”
“Of course they would. These people run with the Dick Cheney crowd, even Ishtar Energy. They’ll do anything for money. The plutocracy is real. It’s a game to them, but you should see their community chest. It’s all get-out-of-jail-free cards. Bailouts. Tax write-offs. You don’t want to play with these people.”
The server came and asked if Dalton wanted anything. He asked for a Diet Coke, to go. Stan shook his cup for a refill, but the woman had already left.
“My turn. What’s going on with that fire at the Ashdown place in Cane Beds?”
“Trailer burned down,” Dalton said.
“Were they in it?”
“Probably not.”
“What about this rumor I’m hearing about how they got into a run-in with a park ranger out by Antelope Flats? The pictures are pretty grisly.”
“What the hell? How did you hear that?”
“Remind yourself not to play cards, Dalton. Your poker face is terrible.”
“Seriously, how did you hear this?”
“It’s all over the internet. Some tourist from California posted a bunch of pictures last night. This is a good game. Let’s keep going.”
“How long is it going to be before the place is crawling with sickos?” Dalton asked.
“That ship has sailed. It’s a snuff pilgrimage now. Geotagged and everything. #nocountryforoldmen,” Forsythe said.
“Let me back up. Who’s talking about Ishtar Energy? Is this your internet buddies or somebody local?”
“I can’t say.”
“That’s not how this game works,” Dalton said leaning forward.
“Look, he’s local but he doesn’t want anyone to know. But he knows. He’s been inside their computer system, says uranium is driving the whole thing.”
Dalton took a deep breath and stared at the ceiling, then leveled his eyes at Stan. “If this conspiracy nonsense is coming from Dreamweaver, I swear, I’m going to go supernova.”
“You can’t tell him I talked to you. Really, you can’t. He’ll take down my website, or worse . . . Dreamweaver’s created a thing he calls porn bots. You don’t even want to know what that is.”
“I do want to know, Stan, very much,” Dalton said.
Stan’s face grew red and furious. “He’s got this way of, rewriting your website code so all the pictures turn into porn.”
“You could get more traffic,” Dalton said.
Stan looked around for the waitress. “You think she’s gonna get me a refill?”
“So, you know Dreamweaver’s crazy, right? With a tinfoil hat and everything.”
“The thing is, his tinfoil hat actually shuts down all Wi-Fi and cell signals in a twenty-foot radius. And by the way, crazy is not a synonym for wrong.”
“He’d be useless in a trial.”
“You’d never get him into a courtroom anyway. He’d be halfway to Cambodia by the time you got out there to pick him up.”
Dalton dropped his head into his hands. “Stan, Bruce was a dentist who loved old pots. I’m just trying to figure out what happened to him.”
“His pots are in the way of progress. All of us are,” Forsythe said. “So, what’s your next move? Wait until another body turns up?”
“I don’t know.”
The server brought Dalton his Diet Coke. “It’s on the house. The manager says thanks for keeping it down this time.”
___
When they drove out of the orange-and-almond-colored canyons onto the monochromatic plain, the children were asleep, the girl flopped back against the seat, the boy with his head upon the armrest. Euphrenia stroked the boy’s hair as she drove. Reinhardt slipped in and out of sleep, rocking with the turning of the road. Paul cradled his hurt arm with the good one, his eyes closed and a meditative look on his face. Sophia watched everyone, her thoughts swirling.
At intervals, Euphrenia lifted her sunglasses, looked back, and caught Sophia’s eye.
“Thank you for not abandoning us,” Sophia said.
“You can’t leave people in the desert. That’s the first rule of this place.”
“My mother is from a similar land. She always talks about hospitality.”
“Where you from?” Euphrenia asked.
“I was born in the States. North Carolina. My mother is from Iran.”
Euphrenia nodded. “You said that. Never been over there. Read about it in the Scriptures, though. It’s Babylon, right?”
“That’s Iraq. We’re Persia. It’s beautiful. Mountains and desert. It’s a lot like Utah.”
“We’re in Arizona now,” Euphrenia said. “Being from I-ran. Does that make you a Muslim?”
Sophia shook her head. “My grandparents are. When my mother left the country, she didn’t bring anything with her. It was the Cultural Revolution. She hated what Khomeini’s kind of Islam did to women, so it ended for her when she came to the States.”
Euphrenia nodded, then turned for a moment to look out the side window. She took off her sunglasses and set them on the console. “Muslims are some of the only other people with families like ours.”
“You mean polygamous?”
“That’s right.”
“I’d like to t
alk to somebody else who’s living this way.” Euphrenia took a breath. “Well, I’m supposed to take you to stay with Kimball Tillohash, but he’s gone until tomorrow, so we’ll have you stay with us. It’s probably a good idea you didn’t stay another night with Dreamweaver. He doesn’t do well with people.”
“I wasn’t going to say it.”
They both laughed.
“We owe Dreamweaver a debt. He helped us get shed of a vexation.” The Suburban vibrated across a cattle guard, waking up Reinhardt and the boy at the same time.
“Are we here?” Reinhardt asked.
“Wherever you go is always here,” the boy said. “Where you left from is always there.”
“Hush, Enoch,” Euphrenia said. “Nobody wants to hear it.” She stopped the vehicle. “What he can do is get the gate,” she said. Enoch hopped out and rode the gate until it was all the way open. When they drove through, he shut it, then rode the rest of the way to the house on the running board, hanging on to the side mirror.
They pulled in front of a massive three-story house with pale yellow siding halfway down one of the exterior walls. The rest of the exterior was bare plywood, weathered to gray. A stack of unused siding lay on the ground under the eaves, weighed down at intervals by three large plastic buckets. The windows were small and numerous and set at intervals that must have made more sense from the inside. There was no proper front door, only a series of side entrances marked by large double doors made of steel with narrow vertical windows, the kind of doors common in schools and hospitals. On the far side of the house was a lush and expansive vegetable garden and greenhouse. The rest of the land was dry, mostly untilled dirt the color of unmixed cement.
Euphrenia woke the girl and told her to get some help bringing in the groceries, then she turned and pointed to Sophia. “You can come with me. Enoch will take the men to the bunkhouse to get cleaned up.” She switched her attention to the boy. “They can wear some of David Hamblin’s clothes, if they fit.”
They split off, Sophia heading toward the house, Paul and Reinhardt following the boy down a gravel path toward a barn with a flatbed truck parked in front of it and a Bobcat skid steer parked to one side. The afternoon shadows pulled long to the east.
The interior of the house was clean and open and beige. The kitchen held three refrigerators of different colors and models, and there were two massive stainless-steel sinks. Over one of them hung a spray nozzle like the ones in restaurants. Four girls in matching dresses cut from the same bolt of fabric and wearing nearly identical braids brought in the groceries and quickly sorted the items onto the open shelves. They fawned over two packages of generic sandwich cookies until Euphrenia said, “Whoever opens those is mucking stalls tomorrow.”
The room was filled with the cloying but not unpleasant smell of fresh milk. At the long dining table, a small boy in a plaid shirt sat drinking lemonade from a Mason jar, which he held with both hands.
Another woman came through the unlit hallway into the kitchen. She was shorter and older than Euphrenia, with ruddy cheeks and a shock of silver hair flying out of her bun like a solar flare. She looked Sophia over, then set her jaw.
“This is a favor for Dreamweaver,” Euphrenia said.
“Is she his girlfriend?” the woman asked.
“Don’t think so.”
“Daughter?”
“Probably not. They are in flight, Bethany. Dreamweaver asked us to deliver this one and her two friends to Kimball Tillohash tomorrow.”
“Where are the others, then?” Bethany asked.
“The men are in the bunkhouse. They will be neither seen nor heard.”
Bethany smiled, and her eyes lit up. “We like it that way.”
Sophia laughed once, then folded her arms across her chest.
“You’ll want to clean up,” Bethany said, stepping forward to pinch the corners of Sophia’s clothes. “How tall are you?”
“Five seven,” Sophia said.
“I think we’ll have something for you,” Bethany said, then returned down the unlit hallway.
Euphrenia led Sophia up a set of carpeted stairs covered in a clear plastic runner with worn grooves. There was no handrail. The upstairs hall was full of doors, and she was led into an open room at the far end of the house. There were three separate sinks and mirrors. Each cupboard was marked with a strip of masking tape and the name of a different woman handwritten in marker. Beyond that the room had a shower, toilet, and a large bathtub with a sculpted seat and a dozen jets. Euphrenia crossed to the tub and began filling it.
“Oh no,” Sophia said. “A shower will be fine.”
Without answering, Euphrenia opened a cabinet and took out a bag of Epsom salts. “This will draw out some of the ache.” She set the bag down and fetched two towels. “The body is a tabernacle. Caring for it is one of the small joys. Men are more interested in their bellies.” Euphrenia sat on the edge of the tub as the water filled. She ran her fingers through the water, watching them pass back and forth. As the water rose, she added the salt and stirred it.
“I haven’t had a bath in forever,” Sophia said.
“What happened to you and your friends? It’s certainly none of my business, but it seems like a calamity.”
“I’m not sure, really. A man came after us, we’re not sure who sent him or why. This seems like something from a movie, not real life. We’re trying to figure it out.”
Euphrenia nodded and tested the water, shaking her hand dry when she was done. “Being hunted by a man isn’t nearly as rare as it should be. I’ll leave you to your bath. You’ll want to lock the door. This room is in one of the busier parts of the house.”
“You’ve been too kind,” Sophia said.
When the door closed, Sophia undressed, each layer of her clothing stiff with sweat and dirt. She folded each garment into a crude square and stacked them on the counter. Around the scoop of her neckline, at her biceps, and at the ankle there were sharp lines between her exposed skin and the rest of her. She set her wristwatch on top of the pile and lowered herself into the bath. The heat alone released her muscles, but when she remembered the spa button, she was unprepared for what it would do to her. If she had not been sitting already, she would have passed out.
Instead, she ran a soapy hand down her forearm, and cappuccino-colored suds branched down each side. She scrubbed her body, washed her hair, then drifted into a daydream, all around her the dull roar of the jets. She imagined herself in a living room, watching everything like it was a Netflix movie. She did not know the title when she clicked on it, but it had a 95 percent compatibility rating, so she let it begin. It was one of those screwball comedies, with love but not right away. You’d roll your eyes over the bickering, but that’s okay, there’s always some daffy fight. Think about the great ones: Cary Grant, Carole Lombard, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn. There’s a third wheel for comic relief and somebody to talk to. Sometimes it’s a leopard, sometimes a German doctor. The next part of this impossible recipe is danger. Put them on the run. The audience leans in because it’s all so delicious. The star-crossed lovers wander through the seedy underside. It’s a cavalcade of weirdos and outlaws. Then suddenly you find yourself in a polygamist’s Jacuzzi. It’s not a movie, or a myth. It is simply a sentence you never in your life thought you would say, not even to yourself.
There was a knock at the door and Sophia jerked awake. A voice asked if she was okay. She said yes and turned off the jets, stepped out, and wrapped herself in a towel.
“We have fresh clothes for you,” the voice said.
Sophia opened the door and an arm passed through a folded stack of clothes that turned out to be a single handmade dress and a pair of dark socks. The dress was unbecoming, but somehow it fit better than any clothes she’d ever worn. As she smoothed down the front of the dress, she realized there were pockets in it. Real pockets.
She wished there was clean underwear and thought for a minute about what it would take
to hand wash hers. She abandoned the idea and dressed in what she had, then gathered her filthy clothes into a towel and coiled her hair up into a second one that was by the tub. When she emerged, three girls dressed exactly like Sophia smiled and reached for her hand.
“We could do your hair,” one of the girls suggested.
Sophia refused at first, then seeing the dismay on their faces, she smiled and agreed. They led her to a room that had been set up for the occasion with combs and brushes fanned out on a low table. The girls sat Sophia down in a plush burgundy swivel chair. One girl came behind Sophia and removed the towel from her hair and began drying it carefully, dabbing, picking out tangles with the pointed tine of a comb. The other two girls sat cross-legged on the floor at Sophia’s feet. One of them folded out a piano keyboard printed on heavy paper and began practicing imaginary scales, humming the notes as she played. The other girl shaped her nails with a wide black emery board. When she saw Sophia looking, she took her hand and started massaging it gently, starting at the center of the palm and working outward.
“Are you girls sisters?” Sophia asked.
“Yes, kind of,” said the girl doing Sophia’s nails. “We have the same father.”
“I see,” said Sophia.
“Had,” said the girl practicing scales.
“He’s dead now,” said the one combing hair.
“Passed on,” the girl practicing scales corrected. “Now it’s just the mothers.”
“And us.”
“And the boys.”
“I’m sorry,” Sophia said, remembering what Euphrenia told her. “My great-uncle Zervan was married to two ladies.” The girls looked at each other and grinned. “My aunts were Fatemeh and Nahid. I never met them because they lived on the other side of the world. My mother talked about them all the time.” These girls reminded her of her own cousins, or really the stories of those cousins. Some wore the veil. Some of those who lived in France and England were punk. Sophia ended up as a person with no particular style at all.
The girl playing imaginary piano said, “Since Papa is gone, you’re not here to join the family, are you?”
“Zina,” the hair-combing girl snapped.
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