Mickelsson's Ghosts (100 page)

He stood up and came over to stand near Mickelsson, searching fussily for any sign of the manuscript or book or metal tablet, whatever it was they were looking for. “Let me tell you something,” he said. “Nazi Germany encountered one great problem beyond all others; namely,
human goodness.
Members of the Third Reich's mass firing squads kept hanging and shooting themselves. It was a devil of a nuisance. For all the propaganda, most Germans—unlike our friends at Mountain Meadows—couldn't stomach the things the regime required.”

Abruptly he broke off. Mickelsson had torn off the last of the moleboards. There were odd cuts on the inside of the board, as if rats had been chewing it, but chewing very neatly. It did not seem likely that the cuts, or gouges, could be the work of the wreckingbar—but now that he thought of it Mickelsson was uncertain. It was true that he'd been working without thinking, half in a dream. Lawler looked carefully at the space revealed by the tearing away of the moleboard—he dismissed the cuts on the board with just a glance—then pointed, without a word, at the nearest window casement. Mickelsson was sweating rivers. Trembling with weakness, his chest aching, he struck at the wall beside the casement.

Lawler went back, waving away dust with his left hand, and sat down on the bed again. “Shall I continue? Do you like to be entertained while you work?” Mickelsson said nothing. Lawler pondered, sunk in gloom, then at last continued, “German soldiers had trouble killing. What did the authorities do? They took young men, callow youths—the future S.S.—and issued each one a dog, a dog the young man was to train. The young man was to live with the dog, become the dog's ‘best friend'—and then one day on the field—you guessed it—they commanded the whole company of young men to slaughter their dogs. You see the psychology, the
values
invoked: discipline, self-sacrifice for the Fatherland, the assuaging power of community and peer-approval; consensualism, lofty-mindedness: ‘Even the death of my beloved dog I will endure in the name of Deutschland!' Hey? So, little by little, those fiendish masterminds hardened the S.S. to murder—
changing human nature.
It's admirable, in a way—the intelligence involved, the singleness of purpose. But listen: the Mormons never did such things—never needed to! Heavens no! The Mormons have worked—have
always
worked—with human nature as it
is.
The great mass of humanity wants nothing but security, correct? Safety for themselves, responsibility firmly placed elsewhere. I'm not claiming, of course, that the Mormons are unique in their way of working, though I think you'd have to hunt hard to find anybody better at it. We've had since the beginning—since the days of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, that is—our military structure, our tight chain of command, our ‘godfathers, lieutenants, and soldiers,' if you will. Not everybody knows what the people at the top know, but almost everyone obeys.”

Mickelsson had by now torn out the plaster and lath around the last of the window casements. He leaned his pick against the wall and looked slowly around the room, then at Lawler. In all the dust, the man's black form was vague, like some blurred, waiting octopus in its shadow-filled underwater den.

“All right, begin on the walls,” Lawler said. “Then the ceiling.” He glanced at his watch, awkwardly drawing back his cuff with the hand that held the gun and raising his wrist toward his face.

Mickelsson lifted the pick again, held it a moment in his two hands, then swung. More dust poured out into the room, and he coughed, then swung again.

“It's so stupid,” he said, resting for a moment—his voice, even in his own ears, whiney. “If you really believe in Mormonism, how can you believe we'll find evidence that the whole thing's a fraud?” He knew well enough it was an empty argument.

“Keep working,” Lawler said; then, when Mickelsson went back to his increasingly wobbly swinging: “In the first place, assuming it's
not
all a fraud, it might nevertheless be the case that something may exist that could throw doubt on perfectly honest claims. We can't have that, can we?” He puckered his lips, prissily frowning. “And in the second place, if the whole thing
is
a fraud, well, so
what?
Show me a religion not grounded in myths of the miraculous! Are we seriously to believe some old-time Jew descended into hell for three days, then rose to sit at the right hand of God? Or that some barren, hook-nosed hag of ninety had a child that fathered a nation?” His eyes flashed anger. “Or that Buddha met a talking tree?” He laughed scornfully, without humor, as if enraged by the whole stream of humanity back to the beginnings. Then, solitary, accepting the burden, he rocked on his buttocks, trying to get comfortable. “All religions are fraudulent at the foundation, my dear Peter, ‘built on sand,' so to speak.” He coughed, bothered by the dust or by having to shout. “Who wants a God that can't do magic?” He coughed again, repeatedly and loudly. Glancing at him through the veiling dust, Mickelsson saw that the coughing fit had Lawler shaking, angrily jiggling all over. “What counts,” Lawler said when the jiggling had stopped and he was able to speak again, “is not the
foundation
but the
battlements
and
towers
—you'll excuse me if I seem to wax poetic; it's a standard answer.”

“Then why not be honest?” Mickelsson asked, then coughed himself and again rested for a moment. “Admit it's based on a fiction but argue its present spiritual and moral worth—or whatever the hell it is you argue.”

He could just make out that Lawler was sadly turning his head from side to side, his eyes hidden behind the dust on his glasses. “Can't do it,” he said. “Too many people are fools; they need inspiring fairytales. If you're out to convert the whole world, or enough of it to give you significant power vis-à-vis the rest, you must recognize people's weakness and play to it.” The expression of distaste was back. “For their own good.”

“ ‘Good,' ” Mickelsson scoffed, and once more raised the pick-axe. It crossed his mind that in all this dust he might easily hurl the pick at Lawler and then jump him, all before Lawler could get a good shot off. But he did not act. The dead cat was still too vivid in his mind. What bothered him now was not just the horror of the image, the blown-away side of the head. Lawler had fired from the waist, with deadly accuracy, and small as the gun was it did such damage as one might have expected from a weapon much larger.

Mickelsson said, “I think you're wrong—your assertion that all religions start as lies.” He swung the pick and grunted. “I think most of them start with authentic mysteries—maybe the discovery of hypnotism, not fully understood even by the priest who uses it; maybe the discovery of drugs that give visions; maybe even some actual confluence of the natural and the supernatural. I think your people are more unique than you imagine. Your religion's a lie
right from the center.”

Lawler waved it off, unmoved. He'd heard it all before, of course. No such religion could have survived this long without defenses. He did not even bother to mention whatever defenses he had. “Believe me, they were clever, those original Mormons,” he said, pleased that the subject had come up. “The way they wove odds and ends together to make
The Book of Mormon
was the work of true genius. A little from the Campbellites, a little from the Masons, a little from King James, a little from a stupid, stolen novel”—he laughed dully—“a little from popular occult books of the day … And those visions of Smith's—let me tell you—masterpieces! Smith had an advantage, you see. Other prophets thought it was required that they actually see visions. Not Smith! It could be shown—has been shown—that he pieced together the finest visions to be found in print at the time.” Lawler pointed around at random with one finger. “A shaft of light from here, a couple of robed, mumbling figures from there, a sensation like drowning from another place. Theater, Professor! Torch the poor follower's imagination!” He leaned forward, suddenly stern, eager to make a point. “Or take Smith's doctrine on polygamy. It had real daring—not at all like the usual stuff of the day. It even had a sneaky sort of humor in it. ‘Women,' said Smith—piously nasal, we may imagine—
‘have no soul.
The only way they can get into Heaven is by marriage to a Saint.' Obviously the decent, the
Christian,
thing to do is to marry every woman one can get one's
hands
on!” His left hand slapped his mountain of thigh; then he began to cough, nearly gag. He rose from the bed and moved quickly to the hallway door for air. Mickelsson's hand tightened on the pick-axe handle, but even now, gagging and hacking from whatever he'd swallowed with the too quick gulp of air, Lawler had the pistol aimed straight at Mickelsson's chest, and Mickelsson reconsidered. No hope anyway. He stood knee-deep in broken lath and plaster, so that he could run neither toward his enemy nor away from him, and his eyes were burning, blurring with tears, from the dust. When he brushed his hair back from his forehead, he found the hair as stiff as wire. He swung the pick-axe and yanked away the last large swatch of plaster and lath.

“Are you finished? Is that it?” Lawler called through the open doorway.

“That's it for this room,” Mickelsson said, and threw the pick-axe down hard.

Lawler came in, the white handkerchief tied around his face, and, with one eye on Mickelsson, moved slowly around the room, occasionally bending over to examine something or kicking a large piece of plaster aside. He took his time, making sure he missed nothing, his elevated rear end enormous, his shoes toeing outward. At last he waved his pistol at Mickelsson and said through the handkerchief, “All right, we'll do the livingroom next.”

“Why not another bedroom?” Mickelsson protested.

“I don't think so,” Lawler said. He stood musing, only his left-hand fingers moving, fiddling with the lip of a trouser pocket. “No, I think the livingroom.”

Mickelsson could not remember ever in his life, even with Miss Minton, having felt such helpless rage. He picked up his tools and went out, ahead of Lawler, into the hall.

As he began on the moleboard in the livingroom, he asked, “Tell me this, Edward. Who is it you work with? I assume it wasn't you, or at least not you alone, that came in here and ransacked my house that night.”

“Oh no, I was miles away at the time. The Sons of Dan don't do ‘light' work.” He stretched his lips flat, not a smile.

“Underlings, then. I see,” Mickelsson said. “Buck privates in the Army of the Lord.”

“Something like that.”

He dragged the Christmas tree out from the wall, then sucked in breath and swung at another section of moleboard with the wreckingbar. “I assume they drive a plain, dark green car.”

“They may. I suppose they sometimes may.”

“And when they find they can't handle a thing, they come running to the Sons of Dan?”

“More or less. Not knowingly.” He raised a finger for emphasis. “They know I'm a man of authority, a helpful older
advisor,
one might say. They provide me with information—much as
you
do, Professor—but unless they're a good deal more astute than I think, they have no real idea what my role is.”

“Wait a minute,” Mickelsson said, turning, still bent over. Lawler's face was—like Mickelsson's own, no doubt—black with dust except for the eyes and eyelids. The handkerchief over his nose and mouth was now gray. “They don't
know
you're a Danite?”

Lawler said nothing. He seemed to stiffen a little.

“Who
does
know?” Mickelsson asked. “Do they know in Salt Lake City?”

“Keep working,” Lawler commanded, surprisingly gruff. Then he said, “That would amuse you, wouldn't it—to think that I'm self-appointed. No such luck, my friend. I'm definitely official.”

“But I'll bet you can't prove it.”

“Possibly not.” Lawler gave a weary but elegant little wave.

Mickelsson slowly shook his head. “It figures,” he said at last, pausing to wipe sweat from his eyebrows. He swung the wreckingbar with extra violence. “A lone-wolf fanatic. Jesus fucking Christ.” When he pried, his hands slipped off the handle and he almost fell. Lawler jerked his gun in alarm, and Mickelsson understood that he'd nearly gotten his head blown off.

Soothingly, after he'd recomposed himself, Lawler said, “You must be very tired.”

“Sure,” Mickelsson said, and once again seized the wreckingbar, then stabbed in behind the moleboard.

“Well,” Lawler said, “whether I'm really a Danite or just some Latter-Day maniac, here I am, and there you are. The laws governing our behavior seem clear. Isn't that a comfort?”

“Laws,” Mickelsson breathed. A long stretch of moleboard broke away as he tugged. Like the piece he'd noticed upstairs, this stretch too had gouge-marks. Insect of some kind? he wondered.

“Yes, yes you're right to mock,” Lawler was saying softly. With his small, plump left hand he wiped at his eyes, then dropped his hand and blinked for a moment, then briefly wiped them again. “It's an interesting point, the Mormon view of Law. Quite orthodox, really. The early Christians were lawless in a similar way. Christ, they said, brought an end to outer, that is, positive law—the old Jewish food laws, sabbath laws, and so on. ‘Be Christ-like,' that was the only law. A very
good
law, in fact—though devilishly tricky, and now long past its viability. Your friend Nietzsche would doubtless have approved of the old idea, if it had been properly explained to him. You are—I'm not mistaken?—a student of Nietzsche?”

“Not lately.”

“Pity. Well, in any case, I'm by no means the lawless creature you imagine me—quite the obverse! I believe with all my heart and mind in the vision of Joseph Smith Jr., as modified by Young and Pratt and, most important, modern circumstances. A vision, essentially, of man as he is: a small group of brilliant, imaginative thinkers supported in their work by a vast army of obedient, superstitious fools who give us half of all they earn—that's their tithe—which we ‘invest' for them.” His eyes crinkled. “The law I follow—”