Through a Glass, Darkly (Assassins of Youth MC #1) (6 page)

“You worked a computer before?” I asked, stripping off my cut and wifebeater. I was going to shower, then take a trip out to the ominously named Altar of Sacrifice Mine. I think it was actually named for a rock formation inside of Zion National Park, but still. Sort of creepy.

“No,” said Dingo with wonder, hovering his hand over the keyboard. He fluttered his fingers as though they had little bells on them. “I mean, don’t get me wrong. We
had
a few computers inside Cornucopia. But school only goes through eighth grade there. After that, you’re on your own. Boys age twelve become ordained deacons. It’s the same on the outside, too. Age fourteen you’d be ordained a teacher, then at sixteen a priest, but I didn’t make it that far.”

“What? How old were you when you were…”

“Excommunicated? I don’t know. I stopped counting when I didn’t become a priest. I’ve seen three winters on the outside since then, so I must be eighteen? Nineteen?”

“You’ve been living on the outside for three fucking years?”

He hung his head, as though it was his fault he’d been booted for being a surplus male. “I guess so. You know what is ironic? I only want one wife. I wouldn’t have taken up very many of them. One is fine with me.”

I chuckled. “You make sense, buddy.”

He turned to me, earnest. “Women are too expensive.”

I laughed all the way into the bathroom as I turned on the water.

Out of the mouths of babes.
He’d said a mouthful.

Women are too expensive.
Maybe I should be happy I hadn’t won Chelsea’s hand. I needed to forge my own way before I had anything to offer a woman. Right now, I was a fully patched member who was practically out bad, exiled to a remote Bumfuck corner of Utah. I had a lot to learn. And a lot to prove.

MAHALIA

P
lease let me
see the mystery of my being.

I was awash in confusion as I sat at my desk in the Relief Society office. I knew we were not expected to feel a romantic sort of love for our husbands—especially having been dragged to the mountain to be sealed, kicking and screaming as I practically was—but was it wrong to feel a sexual longing for another man? Of course, intercourse was strictly for the purposes of childbearing. Since I hadn’t been pregnant the entire time I’d been with Allred, it was a wonder he still visited my bed. I tolerated it, of course, as any wife does. There were now forty-five of us, so it didn’t happen that often, given the rotation schedule. But some older ones being sick with “the cancer” meant his visits came much too soon for my liking.

For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face.
To me, this meant my vision was muddied, that I hadn’t been seeing clearly until coming face to face with Gideon Fortunati. Those tiny quiet moments I had been thinking were a divine spirit, those minuscule miracles I thought were the answers to my prayers, all of that I now dismissed as fleeting moments of insanity. I hadn’t been seeing the truth. Insignificant things, finding a parking spot close by when I went into St. George on business, my adding machine tape coming out right the very first time, the clothes washer actually getting out the wet stain on the back of my dress after the encounter with Mr. Fortunati—all these things suddenly became just coincidence. Given the laws of odds, it was a likelihood that
some
of the things would work out
some
of the time.

Every time I struggled to find meaning in my existence, my brain was trying to arrange incidences into a pattern that it could grasp. Now I saw there
was
no pattern. My life had been a futile and ceaselessly patient waiting for Mr. Fortunati to wander by, only to see him ride off forever once more. Or had he? Kimball had overheard Allred on the phone asking Mr. Fortunati to oversee his mine for a short time. Immanuel Zabriskie, the old manager, had also mysteriously disappeared, mostly likely to “Texas.” His wives had been quickly absorbed by elders.

But that news came after Allred had a stern discussion with me. I was actually expecting him. After watching Mr. Fortunati ride off toward the gates that day, I’d tried to quickly clean up in Allred’s kitchen. But I wasn’t quick enough.

“Evil flourishes when good men do nothing.”

I actually gasped and dropped the rolling pin I was about to wash. It fell with an excruciating thud right smack onto the big toe of my shiny black shoe.

My natural reaction was to wince and bend over, but he was right behind me, so I had to stand erect and face him. “Yes, indeed,” I said hollowly, having no idea what he meant. I blinked back tears of pain.

He came closer. It was always menacing the way he practically crawled like a spider when he walked, making great swimming motions with his hands. “The God that dangles you over a hell pit, just like one dangles a bug, he loathes you, Mahalia. When God looks for neophytes, he will have no mercy upon you.”

The next time I blinked, a tear did roll down my face. “Yes, my Prophet.”

I truly had no idea what he was referring to until he added, “I am the hand that giveth and the hand that taketh away! That demonstration you put on in there for the benefit of our guest was inexcusable.”

“Demonstration?”

He was now close enough to see my tears, and for me to smell his whiskey breath. How many times had I wished we were a sect that had abolished liquor! But the tears seemed to soften him up. He must’ve mistaken them for repentance. “Only one man on the planet at a time has the jurisdiction to do God’s will, Mahalia.”

Of course, that man was him. “I understand.”

“Your lack of fellowship with me is driving me away. You will lose your place in the heavenly line if you do not exhibit more warm enthusiasm for me.”

“Yes, sir. I agree, sir.”

Now this was where he’d grab my boob. Allred Lee Chiles was very interested in boobs, and bottoms too, I suppose. Oh, he was into anything that was base or sexual in nature. Every corrupt and perverted version of a sexual act and Allred was an expert in it. He didn’t just mildly paddle a woman to achieve her sexual arousal, as my first husband had done with his hand from time to time. No, he had to beat her silly with a painful weapon, like the rolling pin he now snatched up from the floor.

Shoving me so I caught my balance with my hands on the edge of the counter, Allred went about gathering my skirts above my waist. “Why do you persist in wearing red? Don’t you know it’s the color Christ will wear when he returns? Ah, your ass is just begging to be whipped!”

He tucked my skirts into the waistband of my apron and set to whacking my bottom. He made women wear those long johns with the drop door in the seat for just this purpose. It was unbearable in the summer, like now, but he’d never made any exceptions for our comfort. Being wed to Allred Lee Chiles was a living hell. Some of his other wives, mostly the newer, younger ones, had even admitted it to me. They found their life a burden to be endured until they walked once again in the celestial kingdom.

I had no choice but to see it that way, too. “Ah!” Allred enjoyed bizarre proclamations while beating us. “God has restored the celestial law of polygamy just for me!”
Whack
! The rolling pin hit my bottom, and I’m telling you, it’s a good thing I have a lot of padding back there. I knew of some wives who would’ve been in serious trouble after being hit with a wooden pin like this. To me, it just stung, it would leave purple bruises, but it would do no lasting damage.

As he whacked me, he humped the bundled-up fabric at my hip, like a dog. Even through the layers of fabric I could feel his bone-like dingle-dangle jabbing away at me. I knew it was abnormally knife-shaped because, well, Field had been shaped normally, like the men on the internet. And I had looked at my fair share on the internet before being brought here.

“Ah! You did wrong because you chose to do so. Your guilt will now display that you knew you had free will and you could have done otherwise than to make eyes at that filthy biker!”

I knew better than to protest. What I could do was reaffirm my loyalty to Allred. “But Prophet! You know I would make eyes at no one but you!”

Whack
! “Your guilt tells you that you had free will, a choice, and you made the wrong choice.”
Whack!
“You find your life is tragic”—
Whack
!—“because you need to choose between good and evil”—
Whack
!—“and you will pay the price”—
Thwack
!—“of an arduous, dire life!”

One final sob-inducing wallop with the wooden roller and Allred let out a strangled cry. I cringed inside, not because I was crying from pain, but because I knew he was ejaculating against my hip like some kind of sad mongrel who couldn’t do it any other way. He could have penetrated me, of course, with his bean tosser, but maybe he saw this as a worse punishment for me. His ego was so overwhelming, maybe he didn’t want to bestow on me the gift of his heavenly bologna, or some such shiz.

Sometimes the anger flowed through my lungs almost like a color. That color would be flame red, the color I wore in defiance of Allred’s strictures. I did this on purpose. I didn’t sew my own dresses, being too busy with the Society and Allred, but I always bought red fabric when I went to St. George, and told my sisters how and what to sew for me. That day, I was practically heretically cloaked in a robe of red, like Jesus.

He slammed the roller onto the counter top, almost cracking it as my skirts dropped to my ankles. He panted heavily like some prizefighter while my heart hadn’t accelerated a whit. I was used to this sort of manhandling. At first, it had been traumatic, of course. Slowly, for better or for worse, I was being acclimated to his abuse. Of course it was abuse, although some sister wives claimed to see it as “attention” or “praise.” I’d been married to a man on the outside. I knew better.

Zombie-like, I even started washing the roller in the sink as Allred gathered himself. He didn’t even go to the bathroom to wash up before starting in on me again.

“I have had a revelation,” he orated, “that Vonda shall be sealed to Orson Ream.”

Again, I dropped the roller. In the sink, this time.

And twirled around. “
What
?”

I had known this day was coming. I’d known my daughter would be shunted off to be sealed to some old, well-respected bastard in the community. Vonda Warrior was fifteen and pretty as a spring shower. She had already told me she wanted to be a fashion designer, not someone’s tenth wife, and I had smiled on that. But I had not expected it to come this soon, and this bluntly. Orson Ream was only about forty and not yet too physically repulsive, the owner of at least two construction concerns. And he only had two of the requisite three wives required to reach the highest level of heaven.

“She will be taken to the Court of the Patriarchs on the mountain, overlooking the Virgin River, and sealed for all eternity to Orson…”

I sort of tuned out his speech after that, maybe because I dared interrupt it. “How could you? Allred, she’s only fifteen! She only barely started liking boys!”

He closed his eyes patiently. “It has been decreed…”

“No!” I whipped off my apron and slung it across the room. “No! It has
not
been decreed! You just decided because you want to curry favor with Orson Ream and he needs a goddamned third wife!
You’re
the one who has decreed it because you’ve gotten rid of any boy Vonda or her friends could possibly
like
, and they have no one left to wed except ugly old men like Orson! I am
not
going to let my daughter be raffled off in some sleazy, underhanded lottery to the highest bidder! Do you know how akin to slavery this is?”

It was uncanny, his ability to maintain an outer calm no matter what the circumstances. I’d seen it before, when outsiders had come to rant and rave at him for business reasons when he’d tried to call the loans of small businessmen, loans given out at exorbitant interest rates. And of course over the years I’d comforted the sufferings of women in similar shoes as me now, women forced to hand over their daughters to wizened old men, or even to robust younger men who later vanished. Either way, it was a travesty I still wasn’t accustomed to, no matter how long I’d been inside these gates, and Vonda sure as hell wasn’t going to go lightly either.

Allred narrowed his eyes at me. “You
will
obey the revelation, Mahalia,” he said, and turned on his heel to exit.

I picked up the first thing I saw, which turned out to be a metal flour sifter, and threw it right smack at his head. Lord forgive me, but I did! Sometimes the body just overtakes one’s muscles, one’s nervous system. Has that not happened to everyone? Your body does things unbidden, without forethought? Especially when under siege by a surge of emotion and hormones, the adrenaline shock of sudden bad news.

Well, it was actually my sheer luck—although at the time I was crestfallen—that the sifter didn’t strike his asinine head. He closed the swinging door in time, and the sifter just hit the door in an explosion of flour. The tinny clang as it bashed against the floor was no satisfaction at all, and I turned and pounded my fist on the counter for a long, long time. I hated God, this earth, and everyone on it. I hated every tree, every goddamned fish that leaped, every god damned bird that dared chirp an idiotic song.