Through a Glass, Darkly (Assassins of Youth MC #1), page 2
My haven turned to hell when I was ordered to be sealed to Allred Lee Chiles five years ago. I was a miserable wretch, a zombified servant to people I despised, long before Gideon Fortunati walked in those doors.
Gideon Fortunati. What an omen of a name. I first heard Allred blathering his beautiful name when I served him coffee and red velvet cake in his office. Yes, we can drink caffeine, and liquor too. Fundamentalists split from the mainstream Latter Day Saints before those Saints enforced strict health codes. Alcohol probably hasn’t helped reign in some of the more “whacked” ideas Allred came up with, either. He sure did love his scotch whiskey. Booze and smoking were allowed, but food and gluttony were still numbing to one’s spirit.
“Mr. Fortunati…blah blah blah…Mr. Fortunati…blah blah blah,” was basically all I heard because I had developed a habit of not “eavesdropping” on his conversations. I used to listen to everything that went on, thinking that somehow it would assist me some day in my escape. But as the years went on and my sentence appeared eternal—and I was chastised over and over by Allred for listening to his business—it all became a dull drone. I figured it gave me time for my own thoughts this way. My own thoughts were sometimes of a forbidden nature. It was just something in my character, a base, hormonal inclination of my senses that could be as easily stopped as a tidal wave.
As we used to say in the outside world. A woman can dream, can’t she?
But that day, the name of Gideon Fortunati rang in the stale air. Allred and the Stake President, Parley Pipkin, were both smoking cigars. The open window that let onto the schoolyard didn’t dispel all of the smoke. I hated being in there, but suddenly I was intent on setting their paper doilies exactly so on their side tables, in making sure the fans cleared the air but didn’t muss their hair.
“Military weapons, M16s, AK47s, MP5 submachine guns, lots of assault rifles,” Allred was telling Parley.
I had to dally until they brought up this Gideon Fortunati guy again. I didn’t care if he was an arms dealer. People had to resort to some low, amoral things in this life of travails. While, of course, I advocated peace—I had constantly received inspirations that I needed to stay in Cornucopia, remain placid, and protect what remained of the bosom of my family—I wasn’t one to deny a man the right to make a living. And, I suppose, the fact that he was an outsider piqued my interest too. I needed constant reminders of the life outside, reminders that there were other ways of doing things.
“Where’s he getting them from, the Mexicans?”
Allred spewed a thin stream of cigar smoke. “I don’t know and I don’t care, Brother Parley. He’s the middleman so we’ve got no connection to them beaners.”
“Or those pinkos, whichever the case may be.”
“Russkies, pinkos, my point is, I don’t care the origin. Mr. Fortunati’s made sure they’re all clean.”
“No serial numbers on any of the irons?”
“None. Leastways, there’d best not be.”
Parley asked, “If there are so many, why don’t we sell some?”
Allred drew his head back like a lizard. I’d seen that look many a time before, right before he struck. His eyes narrowed, his nostrils flared, and his head even seemed to take on a reptilian shape. “Sell? And risk being connected to an arms shipment?”
Parley fluttered his hands. “Never mind, Prophet. We need all the protection we can get here in Cornucopia.”
“You bet your ass,” the lizard said. Then he looked up at me. I was aimlessly polishing a silver sugar bowl with the hem of my apron. “Ain’t you got nothing better to do, woman? Why you want to be listening in on the conversation of men, anyway?”
“I wasn’t listening,” I protested innocently. “As you know, Prophet.” But I put the silver bowl down and made my demure exit.
Parley yelled after me, “Sister Mahalia. We want them little meat popovers. Nice and glazed!”
He meant empañadas. Being a mixed race, part Latina woman myself, it irked me when people couldn’t use the correct name for things.
I was frustrated, too, that I hadn’t heard more about Gideon Fortunati. I shuffled back to the kitchen in my sensible shoes. On the outside, I hadn’t been forced to wear this restrictive, dull garb. After five years of looking exactly like every woman in Cornucopia, I still wasn’t used to it.
“Kimball,” I told my friend, “they want those extra glazed. Here, you keep crimping them. I’ll beat some eggs.”
But I guess I was sighing heavily while beating the whites with a fork, because Kimball soon asked, “They say anything about that Mr. Fortunati guy?”
“No,” I said, with more force than was necessary. “And it’s driving me up a wall. I have a feeling he’s handsome.”
“You said he’s in a biker club, right? He probably looks like that Mr. Grillo guy who came last year to sell arms.”
“Oh, Lord!” The bowl nearly slipped out of my hands, I was so aghast. “That Mr. Grillo guy was a nasty condom breath! His filthy pants were sagging low, he smelled like motor oil and something worse, and his hair looked like a greasy Medusa. No, thank you! I had to spray the chair with Lysol for days after he left.”
“Oo.” Kimball pretended to be shocked at my use of “condom breath.” She’d been born here twenty years ago and had never known any other way of life. But she read widely, as did I, so I knew she wasn’t really shocked. She was Allred’s thirty-ninth wife. I was his fortieth. “Yes, he was a nasty customer, all right. But remember that tungsten salesman from near Salt Lake? Now he was something to look at.”
It was racy, discussing outside men like this, but we liked to do it. I was President of the Relief Society, organizing donations to the needy, and Kimball was my counselor or Vice President. I loved her like a sister, having left my biological sisters behind on the outside. “Oh, that Mr. Lawler was one giant stud. I’ve never seen a belt buckle that big. Guess everything’s bigger in Texas. Here, let me swipe your fluffy pockets.”
We giggled like idiots as I slashed the empañadas with a pastry brush. I even smiled to myself when I heard the remote buzz of a motorcycle’s tailpipes approaching Allred’s mall. My eyes flickered to Kimball and we grinned wickedly. My husband Field—sorry, my first husband—had owned a motorcycle. Not a Harley, more like a rice rocket, but still, we used to enjoy “canyon carving” out in Arches National Park, Bryce Canyon, and all the natural wonderlands of Utah. Things were so much different then, on the outside.
Oddly, a different bike’s engine joined in, creating a stereo roar as they approached. Two bikers? This would definitely be the highlight of the month. I hurried my pace with the brush as the two bikes cut their engines out front. There weren’t too many vehicles per capita inside Cornucopia, so it was always easy to get a parking spot anywhere. However, I dropped the brush when the loud barking of two men started down there.
“Shiz!” Not bothering to stick the little pies in the oven, I rushed to the window, Kimball close at my heels.
And saw a sight that had never taken place inside the walls of Cornucopia.
Two rough and tumble bikers were vehemently arguing down there. One was heavily muscled with tattooed sleeves and leather cuffs. His flimsy, thinning brown hair stuck out from under a wool beanie. The other was tall, rugged, and sinewy in his leather chaps. He’d shoved the beanie guy in the chest, so his black “wifebeater” shirt was hiked up to reveal a strip of lean, white flesh.
My mouth watered.
That had to be Gideon Fortunati, not the brutal, dumb beanie guy. Had to. Just had to.
Oh, how I wanted that to be Gideon Fortunati, with his shock of reddish auburn hair, his clean-shaven, sensual face. He had long arms, too, not those stunted-looking appendages of Mr. Beanie and other Cro-Magnon men of my community. His features were shapely and well-modeled, even when shouting at his friend.
Wetness bloomed between my thighs. My heart sped up as my yearning for this man increased.
Their language had never been heard in this saintly valley, either.
“You weren’t even invited to this fucking meeting, Breakiron! Back the fuck off!”
Breakiron poked Gideon in the chest. “This is my run, doofus! You wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for me. I should be Reed Smoot, not you.”
Which was odd, because Reed Smoot was a Cornucopia member who had vanished without a word about six months earlier. How did they know Reed?
Gideon bellowed, “You were told not to come!” By this time, other brethren had gathered around the arguing men. Men resembling blue-collar workers with shirts buttoned to the neck, men with hair cut as though a bowl had been placed over their heads. I still hadn’t gotten used to Cornucopia’s sense of style. “You blazed your way through the fucking gate without anyone inviting you.”
Kimball and I actually gasped loudly when Gideon grabbed the finger Breakiron was poking him with and wrenched it. I thought I could hear the crack of the bones—but maybe that was Breakiron’s ungodly howl. His face screwed up, his legs collapsed under him as Gideon wrenched his finger. Gideon’s jaw jutted, fire in his eyes. I’d never seen anything more manly in my life.
I was witnessing some primal, bestial scene. Gideon was asserting his authority over Breakiron, and the brethren gathered around seemed to know it. No one made a move to break it up. When Gideon kneed the screaming ape-man in the groin, it was all over. Breakiron fell to his knees, his free hand flailing, as though unsure whether to bash Gideon or protect his genitals.
By that time, Allred and Parley were on the scene, Parley with a gun drawn. At a barely perceptible nod from Allred, men lunged forward to snatch Breakiron by the arms and haul him off. I’d seen these motions of Allred’s, noticeable only by remote satellite and dogs. The men who surrounded him, though, were attuned to these signals, and as they hauled the biker back to his Harley, Allred shook Gideon’s hand.
Kimball and I looked at each other with shining eyes.
Then we remembered the empañadas.
She yanked the oven open, and we both grabbed a cookie sheet of little pies from the counter.
“What do you think?” I asked. “I was right, wasn’t I? He’s handsomer than Granite Mountain.”
Kimball shoved her sheet in. “Prettier than Temple Square. But just like that Grillo fellow, he’s going to leave tonight and never be seen again.”
Kimball saying “never be seen again” reminded me of something. “Did you hear him mention Reed Smoot?” We’d often discussed how Reed had simply vanished. Most people say they didn’t know what had happened to him, and a few said he went to our compound in Texas. But Reed had been a high priest with four wives, one of whom had since been sealed to Orson Ream. It was all very strange. If he had just gone to Texas, why hadn’t his wives gone with him?
“Yes, I did! He said he should be Reed Smoot. Why are they pretending to be Reed? Do they have something to do with how he vanished? What are you doing?”
“Serving them coffee to go with their whiskey.” I was going to make my serving tray extra nice. I was even going to put a sprig of violet alfalfa into a vase with a contrasting spray of mulberry paintbrush. I liked wildflowers. When I was allowed outside the gates on Relief Society business, I liked to gather them.
“You sure are dolling up that tray. Using the outside sugar? How do we know these rough bikers don’t have something to do with Reed? After what happened to Field, how can you be serving him expensive sugar?”
My first husband Field had also been “disappeared,” but I thought I had more of an idea about what had happened to him, due to OSHA ordering an investigation, as it happened on the job. “Well, at first I wanted to see Gideon because I wanted to stand next to a virile man who wasn’t related to Joseph Smith. Now, like you said, I want to find out if he has something to do with Reed.”
“Mahalia! You’re getting in over your head.”
Oh, how many times had I heard that one? Yet I was still President of the Relief Society and was still allowed to personally serve Allred, for better or worse. I must be doing something right.
I knew this was a selfish and conceited thought. I scurried through the dining room and into Allred’s office before Kimball could berate me some more. If the truth was known, I doubted that Gideon Fortunati had anything to do with the disappearance of Reed Smoot. For a year or so, there had been an odd rash of people coming into Allred’s office using the names of men who had “gone away to Texas.” The truth, at least about the names, was probably not so nefarious.
Oh my sin, that man was handsomer than a pat of butter melting on a stack of pancakes. Just being in the same room as Gideon made my pulse throb in my wrists as I set the tray down on a sideboard. It wasn’t my imagination that his eyes kept flickering from Allred to me. Gideon Fortunati was even more impressive close-up. Observing him in profile like that as he sat in an armchair with hands gripping each armrest, I admired his classical features. So what if he was clad in black leather chaps snapped tightly around each thigh? So what if I strained to see the picture displayed in a biomechanical tattoo that laced around his bare bicep? Biceps alone were a tantalizing sight in Cornucopia, but this man’s masculinity sucked the potency from each man from here to Salt Lake.
He was glancing at me. I know he was.
“I must say, I’m impressed with how you handled that, ah, that associate of yours.” It was rare that Allred praised anyone. He was flattering him for some self-serving reason, I instantly knew.
“I have to apologize for Breakiron,” said Gideon, with a slight hint of Arizona drawl. “He just blazed in through the gate when I was talking to your man.”
“Yes, my man told me something like that. You handled him like someone who’s accustomed to being in a…security position before.”
Gideon looked confused. “Security? Not really. Back home, I run a rock quarry. A small one, not like the ones I’ve seen out here. Aggregate, riprap, gravel for building materials around Bullhead City. Nothing exciting.”
“Yet you’ve been sent here.”
Gideon obviously had no forewarning of Allred’s peculiar form of drawing information from someone. “Yes, I’ve been sent here.”
“And no one’s minding the store?”
“Excuse me?”
“No one’s running your quarry.”
“Oh, I suppose my partner’s doing an all right job. Now, about this military iron. We’ve got some Grade A Russian ladies coming into the Port of San Diego from Armenia.”
It was Parley Pipkin who held up his hand. “Please. Wait until Sister Mahalia has finished serving.”
Shiz! Since when did they censor any of their boring blather in front of me? But Allred appeared to be agreeing with Parley.
“Right,” he said chummily. “We wouldn’t want to shock the lady’s sensitive ears.”
Sensitive, my bottom! But I had no choice other than to smile pleasantly while handing Gideon his coffee cup on a saucer.
“Sugar or cream?” It was almost embarrassing, how thrilled I was to be talking directly to this man. I was even justified in bending over and placing my hands on my knees as I waited for his response. What a sad world, where this was the apex of my entire month. And, quite possibly, year.
He almost looked abashed as he lowered his gaze from mine. “Black is fine.”
Wow. Was I the only one who had caught the double entendre? Or did Gideon not notice I was part black? I was a crazy mix of things from Mexican to black to Navajo. Apparently back in the mid-1800s when Mormonism was in its infancy, wives had been at a premium, so some had chosen whoever was at hand to fulfill their quota to attain the highest degree of salvation. I was zbini, the Navajo word for black, among many other things. I was such a misbegotten mish-mash of ethnicities, I was continually surprised that Allred pursued me for his wife. I wasn’t even that beautiful, with my frizzy hair that continually had to be tamed, my wide bottom. But then, Allred had many arcane desires, theories, and viewpoints.
I was chagrined he didn’t want me to do anything else for him, as now I was forced to move back to the sideboard while the men sat in uncomfortable silence.
Gideon broke it. “So your daughter here can’t keep a secret? I doubt she’d blab the business dealings of her dad.”
A giggle bubbled out of my lips. I could see Gideon in the large gilt mirror above the sideboard.
He chuckled, too. “What’s so funny? She seems perfectly discreet.”
I was way past flattered that he would consider me Allred’s daughter. And “discreet,” too! No one had flattered me like that in years. In Gideon, there were untold mysteries yet to be revealed. I wanted to know ever so much more about this man!
Parley said, “She’s not The Prophet’s daughter. Sister Mahalia is his wife.”
Oh, my squash. Now that the cat was out of the bag, he’d never talk to me again. But what was I thinking, anyway? So what if I somehow managed to finagle a moment or two alone with this rugged, tough biker? What would that accomplish? I was sealed to The Prophet, and there was no going back on that one.
Allred addressed me now, so I turned and folded my hands in front of my apron. “Mahalia is a newcomer to Cornucopia, but she’s already been made the President of the Relief Society for her skill with bookkeeping.”
I felt I was being allowed to speak. “I was a CPA on the outside.”
Allred continued. “Mahalia is my spiritual wife in the new and everlasting covenant of marriage. I know some find it strange, but that’s of no concern to us.”
“No concern, indeed,” echoed Parley.
Allred said, “These practices were wrongly abandoned by the mainstream. I’m a Brighamite to the core. Plural marriage is a requirement for the exaltation that’ll allow us to live as gods and goddesses in the afterlife.”
I could tell Gideon was doing his best to hold in a guffaw. I sympathized with him. I didn’t believe I’d ever become a goddess, either. So much had been ripped from me in my thirty years. I was pragmatic. What had I seen with my own two eyes that would lead me to believe such scrud? Now I was ashamed that Gideon Fortunati knew I was sealed to a crusty, ridiculous old man such as Allred, as though I’d had any choice. The best years of my life had already passed me by. I had only decades of sameness to look forward to.
