In the Beauty of the Lilies (47 page)

The gun was surprising: provocative like a woman, both lighter and heavier than he would have thought. The seven or eight pounds of severely interlocked and fitted metal was somehow buoyant, ready to become a magic wand. The stock was plastic instead of wood, and the sight a little intricate house of dull black.

“Ever held a gun before, Esau?”

That name had been bestowed upon Clark when he had finally broken all his connections at Bighorn, telling both Johnny Ponyfoot and Art Marling what he thought of them at Golddigger’s one last hard-drinking evening, and he had come here to stay. The name did not feel like him yet; he was still Clark to himself, in the credits in his head. He felt a mockery in the name, after he had read about Esau in Genesis: Isaac and Rebekah’s firstborn, born red and hairy, a rough hunter who was his father’s favorite but was cheated of his birthright by his twin brother, Jacob, who had been born clinging to his heel and became their mother’s favorite. With her connivance Jacob had cheated Esau of their father’s blessing, deceiving the blind old man with the hides of kids laid across the backs of his hands. Esau had been a rube.

But Hannah told him that the secret of the story was that Esau later forgave his treacherous twin; he, Clark, had a good heart. He was not allowed to live with Hannah, as he had thought he might; he was instead assigned to a men’s dormitory at the other end of the compound, and compelled each night to dive for sleep amid the coarse barnyard snoring of the other men. Rubes, he had come to dwell among strange rough rubes. Just as Esau founded the nation of Edom, alien to that of the Israelites, so he had come from a world alien to that of most of the Temple-dwellers, who were men and women of rural background, haunted by the apocalyptic expectations of Adventism. Adventism should have died near its beginning, when the predictions of its founder, William Miller, met, in 1843, the First Disappointment, and then, revised to October 22, 1844, the Great Disappointment. For all the chances they gave Him, Christ declined to come. But rubes are accustomed to disappointment, and the Millerite
sect trickled on without Miller, twisting and splitting and arriving in one of its rivulets at the sensation in Jesse Smith’s balding head that God was about to act through him.

“Not that I remember,” Clark answered.

“You’d remember,” Jesse said, and leered. “It’s like sex—you don’t forget that, now do you?”

In truth, Clark did. Healthy airheaded girls you met at the beach or a club and were next day a dim part of an acid trip or coke binge you wanted to forget. It made him uncomfortable when Jesse talked about sex: sex ran like a widening crack through the image he projected as their lord and savior. He had become obsessed by impregnating as many of the Temple women as he could, so his seed would be richly represented in the hundred forty-four thousand of the saved after the Reckoning. Hannah was pregnant. Clark thought he could not be the father, because he and she, in their infrequent, sneaked times together, always used condoms.

Jesse sensed his unease, his virginity in regard to guns, and pulled a bigger weapon from the concealed array. “Now, this is what we were up against, the daddy automatic rifle of them all, the AK-47. The good old Kalashnikov. Developed in Russia, now mostly manufactured by the Chinese. The gun of choice for all those who wage war upon Gog. See this banana clip? That’s the identifying mark. Thirty rounds; you ram it in her slot. There must be fifty million of these old girls out there in the world, making things hot for the Devil and his crew.” He elevated the gun so its barrel exactly bisected his face, there in the shadows of the loft; he focused on the barrel and slowly went cross-eyed.

What did they mean, Jesse’s bursts of clownishness? That he kept for himself not only the privilege of sex but that of joking? Who was the joke on?

Clark could not remember when he had decided to believe in Jesse; the big man had just stepped into him like a drifter taking over an empty shack. In Jesse’s presence he felt possessed of a value he possessed nowhere else—not in the presence of his mother, to whom motherhood had been an interruption of her real life, nor of any of those to whom he was, foremost, his mother’s son. Jesse in his canny craziness saw around the corners of Clark’s soul to what had been overlooked. Clark was the least of Jesse’s cubs but was licked and cuffed with the others. He could not project for himself the moment of his conversion; in one frame he was on the outside, wondering how Hannah had tricked him into this rattrap, and in the next he was inside, unable to leave, tied by gravity to this savior’s unpredictable orbit.

“ ‘And I will call for a sword against him throughout all my mountains, saith the Lord God; every man’s sword shall be against his brother.’ Know where that’s from, brother Esau?”

“Ezekiel, somewhere.” Jesse’s interminable sessions of Bible study often put Clark to sleep, weary as he was with his work at the Temple, helping Luke and Jonas and Mephibosheth build more barracks for the expanding tribe of children, wielding a hammer and saw all day as the hot summer winds swept up across the grasslands, whitening in waves the slopes the voracious sheep had not yet nibbled bare.

“Ezekiel, thirty-eight twenty-one. ‘And I will plead against him with pestilence and with blood; and I will rain upon him, and upon his bands, and upon the many people that are with him, an overflowing rain, and great hailstones, fire, and brimstone.’ That frighten you, son?”

“Not if you are my friend, Jesse.” This was a rote answer, chanted in Bible study.

“You know who he’s talking about, don’t you?”

“His enemies. The Lord’s enemies.”

“Not just any old enemies. He’s talking here about Gog, of the land of Magog, chief prince of Meshech and Tubal. You remember my telling you all who Gog really is, don’t you? Think about it—G, O, G.”

Clark let the letters revolve in his head, but all that came to him was how close they were to spelling GOD. These fervent believers seemed to him always skirting the edge of blasphemy. Blasphemy was everywhere, like sex in the movies before the Production Code was abandoned and scenes became explicit, and boring. He was staring down at a skeletal little stubby gun, still in its plastic wrap and form-fitting packing of Styrofoam. He guessed, from Arnold Schwarzenegger movies, that this was an Uzi. “Made in the Holy Land,” Jesse said softly near his ear. “By the same Israeli craftsmen who have brought you the Galil rifle. The genius stroke of the Uzi was to fire a dandy little pistol bullet, nine millimeter, full metal jacket. A fold-out butt for compactness. G, O, G. What have you come up with?”

All this hay scratched Clark’s sinuses and the image flashed through his mind of how quickly the building would blaze if a single match were set to it. Sheep screaming below, ammunition exploding up here.

“Government of the Godless,” Jesse pronounced, with satisfaction, lowering the Kalashnikov. “That’s what Gog means, and that’s what we’ve got. This fake cowboy Reagan says he believes in God but he never goes to church, you’ll notice. Scared to step out of doors since that other movie actor plugged him.”

“Not an actor,” Clark said; though Jesse didn’t like to be corrected, Clark felt, after being lectured about guns, entitled to make a point. “A young psycho who was in love with an
actress, Jodie Foster.” He passed over the M-16, glad to be rid of it. It wanted to come alive in his hands.

Jesse went on unheeding, “And he let the Pope into the country, to go around spreading his infernal poison. Come the Day of Reckoning, those two will be Number One and Number Two Antichrist, begging these mountains to fall on them and hide them from the Wrath of the Lamb. Sure as manure.”

Clark had been too young for the President’s films, but
Knute Rockne—All American
used to show up on Channel Nine and what enchanted Clark was the giant soaring kick, from the bystander in street clothes, and the dodging, dancing run the length of the field that had signalled Pat O’Brien that a miracle was at hand. You knew all along that somebody as good as George Gipp was bound to die. The world can’t have perfect people in it; it throws off all the tolerances. A strange thing was that, until he got to be President, Reagan’s greatest scenes were in bed: dying and asking they win one for the Gipper, in
King’s Row
asking where the rest of him was, and in bed with Bonzo.

The movies in Clark’s head were flickering too fast; he was beginning to panic up here in the dark triangular loft, with these mummified bundles of guns smelling of the oil that kept them eternally young. Jesse with his preternatural alertness sensed Clark’s discomfort and held the two rifles aloft in a priestly gesture, one in each hand, prolonging his disciple’s torment, confident that torment is what holds a disciple to the master. Torment is interesting.

“ ‘Thus will I magnify myself, and sanctify myself,’ ” Jesse said. “Swordpower, they called it back then.
Gun
power’s what it is now. ‘She brought forth a man child, who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron.’ Revelation, twelve five. I bet you
thought Jesse’s rod meant my prick, didn’t you, brother Esau?”

“I hadn’t thought about it,” Clark said, moving around the bales toward the built-in ladder that would take him down from this claustrophobic, scratchy, oily-smelling loft.

Jesse followed him down. Clark watched the older man’s Birkenstocks grope, slippery and cautious, on each worn ladder rung. Jesse arrived on the barn floor, with its litter of stray straw and sheep pellets, slightly pink in the face, and panting. He wore a buckskin vest over a red flannel shirt and Clark could see his pounding heart moving the leather just slightly, like the featherless bald wings of a bird still in the nest. In a skip of his brain, a slip of the sprockets, Clark perceived Jesse as himself trapped, trapped by his mission, by something like live worms in his head. Jesse had the two-edged gift of inspiring pity as well as obedience. He said, as if apologizing for having alarmed Clark in the loft, “We need to defend ourselves, Esau. The unrighteous are relentless. Gog keeps saying we owe them taxes. County, state, Lower Branch Collector’s Office, we keep getting these envelopes with little windows in ’em every day. I ask Zebulun, what’s this and what’s that?—he doesn’t know. He’s a strong believer, and a mighty man of means, Zebulun, but he’s not a man for figures. Me neither, brother Esau. The ways of the world are not mine.”

Zebulun was a young rotund Hawaiian of complicated bloodlines who had been recruited by Matthew in a Pacific fishing expedition among Seventh-Day Adventists impatient for the Second Coming. This sect of Millerites, the most successful of a number, had explained the Great Disappointment by saying that on October 22, 1844, an investigation had been launched in Heaven to lay the proper foundation for
the Judgment Day still in the future. Like other heroic believers—like Mormons or Moonies or, for that matter, adherents of the Athanasian Creed—they had grown over their fantastic elaborations a skin or scar of worldliness, of conventional dress, business success, and pleasant manners; yet underneath burned a pus of frustration, an inflammation of hope deferred. Matthew, like his namesake, could promise that “it is near, even at the doors.” Matthew told Zebulun that the Prophet had come, and was living a few miles north of Lower Branch, Colorado, in Burr County. Zebulun’s father owned Honolulu real estate and pineapple fields on the Big Island, and his access to wealth had given Zebulun the position as treasurer to the Temple, though he was in Clark’s view a butternut-colored mental defective tranquillized by Jesse’s good news. It must be he who was paying for the guns.

Jesse continued his lament: “Gog has more snoops in his employ than there are devils in downright Hell. Some Board of Sanitation inspectors has heard our plumbing isn’t up to code and wants to come sniffing at the septic tanks. Some damn social worker got as far as the inner gate, saying there’d been reports of child abuse—child abuse, when we’re giving our little ones the only true religion that will keep their hides from frying in the everlasting flames! Luke was on guard duty that day—he put a bullet next to her front tire and said he wouldn’t miss next time.”

“If I may say so—” Clark hesitated, testing.

“Speak, Esau.”

“You need better PR. There’s ways of avoiding such incidents. In Hollywood I used to work for the Nova Talent Agency—one of our jobs was to keep these young stars out of scrapes.”

“I never should have come down,” Jesse confided to him,
taking off the little round wire-rim spectacles he had worn to admire the guns and rubbing his eyes with pinched fingers as if milking them of sadness. “I never should have come down this low.” From the wide square mouth of the barn they gazed east to the mountains above them, the grassy slopes turning into rocky heights and then to a distant ragged and unapproachable profile tinged even in August with snow. “Up there where I was, you don’t owe anybody and they don’t owe you. You eat what you shoot and burn what you cut.”

“So what happened?”

“I got the call. Faith filled me like a fire, hot and cold. I had to share the news.”

A half-moon was emerging from the blue sky, like a stone from an ebbing tide. “That must have been a wonderful feeling,” Clark said, politely.

“No, it was terrible. The responsibility was plumb terrible; it was pure terror. That’s what I do for you folks—I carry off the terror. To carry off the terror for all mankind—believe me, I begged for the cup to pass, but it didn’t. Back from ’Nam a couple years, and just finding my feet under me, looking for an old played-out ranch to make my own, and the Lord hit me with this.”

Among the things Jesse believed in was not washing too often; his aura was at times, with a shift in the air, unbearably strong. Clark felt a desire to get away and meditate upon his vision of the guns. They inarticulately held a deep meaning for him, he believed.

“It hit me like a grizzly bear’s hug,” Jesse was telling him, caught up now in a movie of his past. “It put a weight on my mind that near drove me off my head. It’s damn lonely, being the bridegroom the universe has been waiting for.” Jesse looked at Clark intently, testing him, seeing if Esau would
betray him. “Don’t tell the others everything I tell you. They’re simple folk, by and large, and can’t take too many mysteries at once.”