In the Beauty of the Lilies (52 page)

There was an innocence flickering through the supposed French maid’s act, a down-home girl from somewhere’s simple wish to please; the sound track under its disco throb caught little words she said softly, “Nice” and “Mmm” and “Oh, yes,” less for the camera than for the other performer, encouraging him to keep up his end. When her turn came in the unvarying
scenario of these films to blow the butler, she really put herself into it, her whole head thrusting down the shaft with a little extra effort, deep-throating, teasing the veined skin with her slightly buck teeth, her lips pushing all the way to his pubic hair while her hand with its long red curved whore’s nails played scratchingly with his balls. The guy’s hard-on got big enough to choke on; some of these girls can never produce the excitement, the spaces of sly tenderness that bring a man up amid the harsh lights and tight schedule and silently scoffing cameraman. Clark had been involved over in the Valley with a couple of hard-core productions and he knew the technical problems. The “wood” problems. Women on women was much more dependable. He had slipped his pants and underpants down on the bed and with his left hand matched the brunette’s mouth stroke for stroke, as she kept glancing hopefully upward to the male face, which was off the screen—his mother’s look of bright expectancy at its purest, a look he seldom saw any more, as she expected less and less of him. He’d show her, the bitch. His own eyes rolled back into his skull and his airplane lifted off with a shiver of propulsion and a set of diminishing throbs. When he looked again the butler was jerking off on the maid’s face, white gobs like Elmer’s glue which she was licking off her fingertips, still girlishly, shrewdly eager to please, and Clark had come all over himself, his hand and pubic hair and the band of his underpants. God, people are disgusting. The roach still burned in his other hand. He took one last toke deep into his lungs and resolved to get out of Los Angeles, out of reach of the fucking movies.

The Temple didn’t grow, but it didn’t shrink much either. Zebulun’s parents came to visit all the way from Maui, and
though the shy old couple—like a pair of carved dolls that couldn’t stop nodding—didn’t stay, when they left there was more money available for defense weapons and stockpiled canned goods and frozen food in the giant humming freezers installed in the buried school bus, now that they had electricity. Jesse’s sense of foreboding and his readings of Revelation grew more dire. He asked that white robes be made for his disciples, to be worn at Bible study, in accordance with Revelation 7:9, wherein multitudes stand before the Lamb “clothed with white robes,” and with 6:11:
And white robes were given unto every one of them; and it was said unto them, that they should rest yet for a little season, until their fellowservants also and their brethren, that should be killed as they were, should be fulfilled
. Putting on one of the gowns the Temple women had made from bedsheets, Esau felt the slither of death’s touch. Yet he continued to drive the Ranger pickup into Lower Branch, its scattering of steep-peaked houses and its Total gas station and 7-Eleven and, below where the branching road made a triangle, Mildred’s Breakfast and Diner and J.C.’s Café and Tru-Value hardware store and a struggling unpainted non-denominational church and the two-story cement-block civic building combining town hall and police headquarters and a one-cell lockup: there he would deal with the minions of Gog—paying the tax collector, placating the social worker, striving with the sheriff’s deputy to keep the Temple within the letter of state and county law, arranging with the occasional newspaper or TV reporter an interview with Jesse and a carefully supervised tour of Temple premises. Returning then, besmirched by contact with the corrupt world, to put on his disciple’s gown and sit and listen to Jesse rant upon the most ghastly passages of Ezekiel and Jeremiah and Revelation, pounding this desert lode of old grief into a present furious sword until his hoarse voice croaked
shut, was no more strange, Esau told himself, than shifting from one to another of any of the layers that make up human existence—from wakefulness to sleep, from social dress and conversation to the mute nakedness of lovemaking, from eating blessed cereal at a ceremonial table to shitting in hunched solitude on a cold bowl. Man is a mixed bag, a landscape of swamps and caves as well as sunlit slopes. Reality is a kind of movie the self projects, and the director of special effects just needs a decent budget to turn the sun as black as a sackcloth of hair, and roll back the scroll of the sky, and cast the stars down from the sky as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs when she is shaken in a mighty wind.

The fall of 1989 turned bare and brisk. Karen, the oldest of the three children that Mercy and Mephibosheth had brought to the Temple, brought back from the regional high school, where she had been placed in the tenth grade, word that her biology teacher, a smart-aleck young son of Ham from the Five Points section of Denver, had told them that though so-called creationism was a theory still entertained by many backward people, including state legislators, the evidence overwhelmingly rules out a Creator in favor of random cosmic events producing amid many hellishly hot or frigid planets one suitable for life, life which arose when accidental permutations of complex molecules present in the warm primeval soup or sludge fell into combinations that replicated themselves; from there on it was all the carnage of big critters eating small ones and survival of the fittest as described by the self-employed English naturalist Charles Darwin, one of the nineteenth century’s great men. When Karen had shakily asked her African-American instructor about Jesus Christ, he had said, in front of the whole class, that, while Jesus and the rumors that attached to him have been a fixation of white-dominated
European culture since about the year 300, the vastly greater majority of the world’s population have through recorded time believed in other gods or no distinct god at all. And their lives, he added, were probably no less happy and unhappy than ours. Religion is a curious appetite, the instructor mused, and as with the appetite for food a great variety of substances will satisfy it, including some pretty bizarre dishes if the hunger is strong enough. The girl, though she knew there was evil out there, had never heard it expressed so bluntly, by a teacher and not a rudely taunting other child.

The next morning, in the heavy dew, Luke told the children to stay in the Temple and went out, into a swale in the lower right-hand meadow where a thicket of little gambel oaks grew, with an M-16 he had fitted with a telescopic sight. When, at seven-thirty, the orange-yellow school bus came along the macadamized road, and stopped and tooted at the end of the Temple’s dirt road, Luke from about a hundred fifty yards away shot out the two tires on his side. It was a crisp November morning, with the foretaste of winter in the wind and the sky overhead as blue as a lupine and the leaves of the little oaks turning a papery khaki color. In his telescopic sight, with the rifle steadied on a low branch, he could see beautifully. He could see the bus driver, a plump bleached blonde in an ochre suede jacket, roll down her window to look at her front tire; he could see the glint on the chrome edge of her side mirror. He could see, as he swept the rifle in a gentle arc, the little faces cramming up against the cloudy windows in curiosity. The windows made their faces look dirty. Their mouths were open making a shrill noise he couldn’t hear. When he took out the back tire and swept the sight back, the faces had all disappeared—ducked down, he guessed—so he took out a few of the windows for good measure.
It made him cackle to see that safety glass vanish into a thousand crumbs. The bus driver was so foolish or noncomprehending as to lever open her door and stand there, looking first up the road and then in his direction. That woman should lose some weight. Luke rested his crosshairs on her round blond head, that painted hair pinned tight against her head, but you could bet she let it down at night, this pig-fat hussy hauling off righteous children to drink from the foul wells of Godlessness. It would be a righteous deed to put her out of her misery, but he contented himself with the elongated mirror glinting a foot above her ear. When it shattered, she ducked as fast as if the spinning lead had grazed the shining yellow hair of her harlot’s skull. There was a silent peace, an utterly still intimacy in the gunsight that he hated to leave, like a peephole drilled straight through to Paradise, but he figured he better hightail it back to the Temple walls, having made his point.

He came in the back way and the men of the Temple, having heard the shots and seeing the stalled school bus from the upper windows, greeted him in the kitchen with a gabble of agitated voices. “I can’t believe you did that,” Esau said. Luke sneered at the soft recruit’s face, which had gone pale above the ruddy crescent of its pseudo-Biblical beard.

“You’ve been flirting with the Devil’s troop too long, Slick. Go on out to them, now’s your chance.”

But Clark doubted that he would get very far down the road without a bullet in his back. His groin went watery at the thought; he pictured his body as terribly apt to puncture and tear in the jagged company of these hard men, hard by nature and hard by creed.

Jesse came down from his bedroom, looking like an old woman in a loose nightshirt of striped flannel. Of late he had
been sleeping the mornings away, sometimes to noon, his duties with the women and his study of the Bible keeping him long awake. The women reported in whispers how visions churned in him at night, making him shout out and break into a sweat. The skin of his face was unshaven and slack, and his bare feet below the hem of his nightshirt touchingly lumpy, chafed pink in spots and callused yellow in others, as if they had never been made to be walked on. He listened to Luke’s account and tension returned to his face, and light to his tawny eyes, naked of their circular glasses. Jesse lifted his sleeved arms now, there at the end of the long harvest table where they ate, and announced, “ ‘The days are at hand, and the effect of every vision. For there shall be no more any vain vision nor flattering divination within the house of Israel.’ Ezekiel twelve. The meaning of that, my brethren, is, the fat’s in the fire. ‘These shall make war with the Lamb, and the Lamb shall overcome them, and they that are with him are called, and chosen, and faithful.’ ”

The other mountain-men, Luke and Jonas, sent up a jubilant whoop, and Zebulun and Mephibosheth shut their faces against any course other than following their master. Esau looked toward Tom and Jim and saw there shades of his own trepidation, but then Jim, the married one, caught Esau’s eye and winked and shrugged; so Esau felt complicit. He was conscripted. He had been too young for a military draft and the most danger he had known had been from hard drugs and cars driven fast along the curves of Mulholland Drive in a fog. He was in some underdeveloped sector of himself gratified. The time had come to convert his faith into deeds. He imagined that Jesse’s sore-looking eyes had turned toward him when the prophet had spoken of vain vision and flattering divination—as if Esau’s traffic with the civic forces surrounding
them had been a betrayal instead of a service, the propagandizing of the Lamb’s good news. He’d show them.

The ruckus had drawn the women and the children downstairs and in from their rooms along the wooden corridors. “Fear not, my gentle ones,” Jesse announced to them. “The day of our glory approaches.” The women were told to prepare for a siege, and to gather warm clothes and bedding and all that was needful and to repair with the children to the underground bunker. Zebulun and Mephibosheth were instructed to fetch guns from the places where they had been hidden. Jonas and Jim were commanded to mount watch from the roof, which Mephibosheth had made accessible through building a trapdoor and a small platform behind the chimney. Within minutes these sentries shouted down that the bus driver had opened the emergency exit on the far side and was ushering her charges in double file along the road, in the direction of the neighbor a mile distant. “Shall we give ’em some lead?” Jonas asked in a yell.

“Those are
chil
dren!” Esau told Jesse.

Jesse had dressed himself in jeans and sneakers and several sweaters and over them a bulky green vest, his Army combat vest with its many square pockets. He was moving faster, with more energy and grace, than Esau had seen for months. “
Negative!
” he yelled back. “Hold your fire!”

“The man’s crazy,” Esau told him.

“Some would say inspired,” Jesse said huskily, his eyes darting about the living room, checking the windows, the other men coming in and out, the crystalline out-of-doors. Yet he found time to minister to this one of his flock. “Brother Esau, it was bound to come. It’s all in the Book. There has to be a day of wrath to pare it down to the hundred forty-four thousand of the saved. That’s the math of it, and the truth of it. There has to be a winnowing. Scared?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been in a fight like this.”

“Some take to it, some don’t. You might surprise yourself.”

Jesse and Luke calculated that the bus driver would need half an hour to shepherd her children to the neighboring ranch. If she met a hired hand out in a vehicle or on a horse, the time could be less. Then allow the authorities a half-hour to get organized and drive out from the center of Lower Branch.

Sure enough, within half an hour the phone began to ring, piercingly, upstairs in the Temple office. Esau raced to answer it, but somewhat to his relief Luke, with an olive-green cloth bandolier of ammunition magazines slung across his shoulder, was explaining in a patient twang, “Well, see, that was a kind of lawful protest against your hauling off our children and filling their innocent heads full of a lot of atheistic propyganda. Wasn’t nobody hurt, that’s the way we intended, but any armed men come around I can’t make that same promise. We got a God-given, Constitutional right to defend ourselves.”

Esau picked up the extension on Jesse’s unused desk and said, “Eddie, that you? We’ll pay for the tires and the windows—send us a bill. Just don’t send anybody around. Things are touchy right now. The mood here is explosive.”