by John Updike
The blue van hadn’t come into the courtyard; two of the men in it had produced rifles and were firing from around its corners while the third man, crouching, raced up to the riddled police car with its shot-out windshield. Now the man in the gray suit who had come in the police car emerged from the back of it and began waving his arms in some kind of surrender. Clark recognized his friend Eddie, the sheriff’s deputy. The bead of his gunsight just nicely covered the man’s head at that distance but when he squeezed he evidently missed, because the deputy kept waving and holding his arms out in a wide frantic gesture as of benediction. Jesse, leaning against the frame of the window next to Esau’s, snorted softly and said, “Looks like they’ve had enough of the power of the Lamb. Now they beg the mountains to cover them. What’s your pleasure, Zeb? What do you say, Slick?”
Esau asked, “You can’t shoot men not firing back, can you?”
“They’ve trespassed, brother. They’d never sin again, and would thank us from Heaven.”
Zebulun asked, “Shall I do it? Shall I let ’em have it?”
Esau slipped the bolt back to reload and the naked oily metal in such close-up struck him as obscene, like an aroused dog’s red bared penis.
“ ‘And death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them,’ ” Jesse quoted. “Revelation twenty. Those devils are already dead and damned forever, Slick, in the eyes of the righteous God. We got to brush you up some day on the fine points of true and actual faith.”
The two men by the van had thrown their guns into the grass and were moving forward with a stiff caution, one step at a time, arms out from their bodies, to help with the two bodies. The one first hit had never moved after doing its hippety-hop and the one under the car, whom Esau had shot—though he couldn’t be sure, there had been so many bullets flying around—had rested his head on the earth so the white disc of his face no longer showed. He had lost his fancy hat. A quick round from upstairs, making the dirt leap up in a rope of dust pellets, froze all motion, out there on the bare front yard. Jesse, holding his M-16 with its muzzle down, pushed off from leaning against the window frame and sauntered out to the porch, the creaky porch stacked with firewood, and stood at the top of the steps. Esau had never heard Jesse’s voice lifted so loud—lifted to the hills. “Take ’em away!” he yelled. “Take your carcasses into town and don’t come back! This is the house of the Lord!”
The men upstairs shouted approval, and a line of lifting dust spatters raced toward the men frozen at the gate, and looped back, and made a galvanized bucket by the old pump dance.
Esau tried to remember Jesse firing a single shot, and could not. He was in a daze, like a trembling dog after copulation. His arms were still cradled around the slender gun. The day was darkening; the great slant cloud had lowered so close above them that its outriggers of white fish-scale could no longer be seen. The grazing sheep had moved lower down in their pasture, away from the bullets, but the hawk was still hung high over the valley, hunting in an effortless circular glide. A few specks of snow, dry as ash, skidded through the air beyond the porch rail. At first Esau thought the flakes might be spots in his vision, but no, they were real, tracing agitated paths in the air. In the distance—in long shot—the three tiny men hastened to carry the two limp bodies back into the van, a van, Esau realized, driven here to haul some of the Temple members off into custody. Now all of them were as guilty as hot-headed Luke. And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire. Esau looked within himself at this turning point of his life and found only the sensation that Ezekiel calls “a voice of a great rushing,” a deafening brook of pure being hurling through him in whirlpools and glittering frothy spines, the world’s spacious life accelerated by being funnelled through his narrow self.
Jesse had come back inside and was calling up the stairs, “Looks like they nailed Luke. He’s out there on the tulip bed—fell from the roof.”
Jonas’s voice twanged angrily, “He shouldn’t’ve been put up there, for anybody to take a pot shot at.”
“It was where he wanted to be,” Jesse said. It was not within his divine powers to admit a mistake. If it had been a mistake. Luke had got them into this. There was justice in it, if he was dead.
In its screaming reverse gear, the van was backing back down the dirt road. The riddled patrol car sat there in black and white like a nightmare piece of a junkyard. Jesse went out the door and down the veranda steps and placed his fingers on Luke’s scrawny throat, below the jaw the man had not bothered to shave this morning. Esau and perhaps the others clustering around wondered if the broken body would rise at the touch, but Jesse didn’t say the words that might have done it. Maybe he was afraid they wouldn’t work. Maybe he wanted Luke to stay dead. Luke had been trouble. Esau glanced about and assumed only he had thought these things. He caught Jim’s eye and Jim gave a light little grimace and shrug. He and Jim knew something together, but what was it?
The men and women of the Temple buried Luke behind the barn, in a corner of the upper pasture, where tenacious farmers years ago had grown wheat. That night, four inches of snow accumulated, and it seemed Nature wanted to swaddle the Temple in silence and safety, for snow kept falling, as November became December, and the dirt road drifted shut, and there was rarely the sound of an engine, except that of a news helicopter, a Bell 206, taking photographs and television footage of the snowbound compound of religious criminals, or that of a reconnoitering Huey borrowed from the Colorado National Guard by the FBI or the ATF. The description of the firefight, in which one state trooper was killed and another paralyzed in the legs for life, had convinced the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms that illegal combat weapons or illegally adapted sports guns were stockpiled in the Temple. To the faithful, the approaching and retreating rotors sounded like the beating of the wings of mechanical angels of doom; children would run outside and wave, though Jesse forbade it, promising them they would be machine-gunned.
The helicopters dropped pamphlets, imploring surrender. The guilty would be given a fair trial, the pamphlets said; the rest would be granted safety and freedom and the forgiveness of the state. The authorities had cut off their electricity, within hours. The Temple members lit their kerosene lamps and burned wood in their fireplaces and iron stoves. They hitched up the generator to the freezers to keep the frozen food from spoiling; they had laid in enough food to last months, feeding thirty people—eight men, with Luke gone, and five women and seventeen children, nearly a dozen of them Jesse’s. Then there were sheep to slaughter. And laying hens. Years ago an iron hand-pump in the kitchen had been tied into the well, so that even when the generator ran out of diesel fuel pure water would flow for the faithful.
The main lack, Esau felt, was communication. The helicopters dropped their unctuous ultimatums, and loudspeakers set up on the edge of the neighboring ranch’s property—the Triple H, belonging to Hank and Hortense Harden—poured out, on advice of a siege psychologist, a curious hellish nonsense of acid-rock music and screeching sounds and official pronouncements that drifted their way, when the wind was right. But the Temple had no way to respond; not only had Luke ripped out the office telephone but he or some other zealot had, in the wake of the first assault, cut the phone wires where they entered the house at the corner of the second story. Esau explained to Jesse that, with no communication facilities, there was no way the Temple could get its message out. He said, “Gog’s is the only voice being heard. But there’s millions now who want to hear your side of it.” So he and Jim and Tom got up on the sheep-shed roof, which had a shallow pitch, and stamped out the letters PHONE. But the helicopters, though one came and hovered over them like a giant rattling dragonfly, couldn’t read the white on white, it seemed. They tried giving the letters contrast with straw but the wind kept blowing them away and fresh snow kept falling. Then it occurred to Esau that the Temple was being watched, through telescopes and telescopic gunsights, from the government-operations center over on the Harde
ns’ property to the northeast, as well as from the press encampment that the Temple’s other neighbors, the Menéndez brothers, had allowed to spring up on a fallow rise of their land beyond the road, a half-mile to the southwest. Satellite City, it was jokingly called.
Esau climbed out from his office onto the roof of the porch and slowly waved his disconnected telephone back and forth like a semaphore. His beard had grown longer and the AP telephoto shots of him looked eerily messianic, his beard and uncut hair blown sideways by the winter wind. A number of newspaper captions mistakenly identified him as Smith himself. The next day a news helicopter dropped a radiophone in a box full of Styrofoam peanuts, with several spare batteries, and communications began to flow. “Our leader wants to tell his side of the story,” Esau explained to the press. “We were attacked. We have been consistently persecuted. Our rights have been repeatedly violated. The Temple member who fired at the school bus was himself killed in the shootout. He is a martyr. We are the victims, not the aggressors.” He didn’t believe all of what he was saying, but he loved the sensation of saying it into the little coffee-colored Panasonic phone and feeling the words being drunk up by a thirsty world. It wasn’t like the old days in Hollywood, when he’d do the breakfast meetings at the Polo Lounge and the lunches at Du-Par’s or the Bistro Garden and still nothing would happen—the package had no buyer, the backers backed away, the coke-addled anorectic bitch of a star changed her mind. Esau asked that electricity be restored, so that a computer hookup could be arranged. Their bargaining chip, he knew, was themselves as hostages, especially the women and children. The government could not afford the bad publicity of any more bloodshed. He broadcast into the phone, “We are not afraid to die. We know the Day of Reckoning is at hand, tomorrow or the day after doesn’t matter that much to us, believe me. We welcome the day when it comes. To us, it’s just a trip to the heavenly Jerusalem. In the meantime, let’s talk. The Lamb of God wants to get out his side of the story.”
At first, Jesse was mistrustful. Isolation had bred an intense solidarity with his little flock; his expositions of the Good Book had become, after the first hour or two, a kind of rapture. Men as well as women at moments rose up and gabbled liquidly in tongues and fainted. Esau tried to let the voices in him speak, but something watchful in his head, that little motionless sardonic spectator, though shrunk to the size of a computer chip, prevented it. The mountain-man in Jesse enjoyed the lack of electricity, the cold nights wherein all but those on watch in the four directions of the compass slept in close rows on the floor of the living room with the roaring, sparking, flue-licking fire in the fieldstone fireplace, or else in the kitchen with its woodstove in full blaze. They were all growing thinner on the diet of rationed oatmeal, canned peas and beets, roast chicken and mutton; in the shadow of death, beneath the throbbing clatter of the guardian helicopter, under the erratic barrage of the barking, shrieking loudspeakers aimed at their sanity and resolve, the Temple’s spiritual body became leaner and more supple. Jesse’s first interviews over the radio hookup were stilted and full of sullen, defiant silences, when the questions struck him as impudent or off the point. The point was eternal salvation, preceded by imminent destruction. “ ‘Thou fool,’ ” he quoted, “ ‘except a seed dieth, it is not quickened into life.’ First Corinthians, fifteen thirty-six. That’s the whole Christian religion in a nutshell. Most of you millions out there call yourselves Christians don’t believe it; you’re scared of death. Scared of losing your imported Japanese rattletrap, your mortgaged heap of plywood and Fiberglas, your deck of credit cards. You’re scared of losing out on the abominations of the earth, scared of waking up inside your seven-thousand-dollar coffin with your nose two inches from the wood. You’ve wasted your lives staying in the middle of the stream and now you hear the waterfall roaring; you’re scared of roasting in eternal Hell. ‘So then, because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth.’ That’s Revelation, three sixteen. That’s the voice of the Lord, no wonder you’re all scared. Those two state-employed vermin tried to storm our sanctuary with their Smokey the Bear hats on, they were lukewarm, I spewed them out. They lacked that good hot faith. If they’d of had it, they’d’ve been here on the inside looking out. Right, Slick? Right, Zeb?” Jesse would forget he wasn’t just talking in this upstairs farmhouse room with a few of his disciples but, through the miracles of electronics, to the nation and the world. His unsophistication was very effective. Millions were fascinated, for a time.
Alma had been on location in Turkey, on one of those isolated eastern islands where classic temple ruins have been scarcely disturbed but for earthquake and erosion; she was playing, for a two-hour cable-television drama, a Greek peasant woman who kills a man, an evil snickering German tourist, for seducing her feeble-minded daughter, and then must kill the pregnant daughter. It was based on a true story that had been in the news. Alma’s face, with a few days of Mediterranean sun and some stylized pencilled wrinkles added to the taut corners of her eyes, suited the stark drama very well; the something implacable and Moorish in her spirit had worn through her dulcet youthful skin, the glow of her girlish flesh. Jennifer Sprague, the young female director of The Sharpened Knife, who had done her apprentice work on television commercials—their dizzying quick-cut style and eighteen-year-old epidermal paragons—marvelled, as she peered through the viewing lens, that this bronze crone was the same woman who thirty years ago had so sweetly and demurely sung with Bing Crosby and done Uh-Oh, My Show Is Slipping with Jack Lemmon and Jerry Lewis, including that breathtakingly choreographed section where the trio, fleeing indignant investors, mistakenly get into a bowling alley on roller skates, dodge balls, and hop the gutters. How many takes did it need, that shot where Alma not only slides headfirst into the pins but comes out of the automatic pin-setter actually riding the ball, in her roller skates, up the return trough? Jennifer had clicked the video back and forth and couldn’t find the spot where the stuntwoman was spliced in. Alma must have been blue with bruises. Her natural gaiety and bounce had bridged the utter lack of chemistry between Lemmon and Lewis, and now her flinty, weathered face looked as if she had never smiled, as she leaned in her black headscarf and widow’s weeds against a whitewashed wall, squinting into that black sun of death, her destiny. She would kill, who could doubt it? These old troupers still give you your money’s worth, Jennifer thought to herself, and, what’s weird, still want to. Why would this woman, on the verge of sixty and married to a rich husband and rich on her residuals from her platinum-haired Sixties comedies in any case, want to subject herself to this baking sun, to the Turkish food, to the lonely nights in a fleabag hotel, to the direction of a woman young enough to be her daughter? They shared the evening meals, the two of them plus the head cameraman and the male star, a former East German who was gay to his eyeballs and in a kind of heaven of boys here on this Turkish island. He often vanished in the evening, and the head cameraman joined the gaffers and grips and their local assistants, leaving the two women alone. Jennifer was learning something about devotion to this glorious, much-prostituted art of the cinema, and Alma was realizing how much she had missed by not having a daughter.
Alma’s husband, Caleb Wentworth, didn’t realize for six days, as he busied himself with a bachelor’s rounds in Boston—his State Street office, his Chestnut Hill home, Monday night at the Tavern Club, Wednesday lunch at the Country Club, Thursday dinner at the Somerset—that this religious maniac whose murderous clan figured in the front section of the Globe and claimed a few seconds of the Channel Five news every evening was the same one that his stepson, whom he hardly knew, was involved with. At about the same time, the reporters realized it also. SON OF FIFTIES MOVIE STAR AMONG THOSE UNDER SIEGE. From “Safe at Your Peril” to Real-Life Drama. When her husband reached her by phone, they could hardly hear each other. “I can’t come back,” she screamed. “There’s three weeks left of shooting, all of it of me! Anyway, what can I do? You know how hysterical the media are;
I’m surprised, dearest, you’ve fallen for it.” Ahead of her was the filming of the murder of the tourist, the exoneration by the court, and the final coup de grâce of fate, worthy of bloody Euripides.
But once she was back in Hollywood, ten days before Christmas, Shirley Frugosi urged her to fly to Colorado and show the world a mother’s heart. Alma’s name hadn’t been in the news so much for years. Not just interview requests but real offers were coming in, including the part of a zany mother in a biracial sitcom that had Cosby money in it and was sure to run five years at least.
Her maternal phone call, placed a few days after her return from Greece, had not been very satisfactory. All calls to the Temple went through an FBI switchboard, and it was a four-hour wait before she was cleared through and Clark came to the phone. “How was Greece?” he asked. His voice seemed deeper, brisker.