Through a Glass, Darkly (Assassins of Youth MC #1), page 5
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.
“I have to find a way out of this,” I whispered between clenched teeth.
But I had no goddamned way out of it. If I left Cornucopia, Allred would send Parley Pipkin and his henchmen to track me down. I’d known a couple of women who had tried it. Not only had they been tracked down and hauled back in embarrassing fashion—literally paraded around the square in the center of town while wearing nothing but long johns—they had been made to scrub floors like some latter day Cinderella for years and years. True, it was illegal to drag resistant women back to Cornucopia. But who had money for a lawyer? And according to rumor every local law enforcement officer was in Allred’s pocket.
I believed it. I sobbed for maybe a minute and a half. Those was all the tears I had left inside of me. Vonda was still a BIA Maid, a girl of the Beneficial Improvement Association, and would be for another nine months until she turned sixteen, when she’d advance into the Garland class. It wasn’t until age eighteen when she’d even join my Relief Society, but I was planning to advance her sooner due to her maturity. Now? Now she’d be too pregnant with that goddamned peckerhead’s babies to drive with me to St. George and Cedar City on missions! The thought of Orson Ream lying with my precious daughter was enough to make the bile rise in my throat.
So I sobbed, I pounded the counter until my fist was as blue as my bottom, and then, as was usual for me, I gathered myself and finished cleaning up. I was practical. I had no inkling that anything better would befall my only child. Had anyone ever given me any encouragement, given me a shred of hope that Vonda’s fate would be merrier than mine? No. Not one person.
A few days later I was in my office finishing a profit and loss statement that had perplexed me. My net operating profit was out of whack. It was probably more my own self that was out of whack, to be honest. I hadn’t eaten in three days. Visions of Mr. Gideon Fortunati had been scouring away at my brain cells eternally by that time. I just could not shut them out, unlike the gruesome images of Allred Chiles and his narrow Johnny one-eye poking away so eagerly at me. No, I had already glimpsed what the kids called Mr. Fortunati’s “package” all full and juicy, his jeans so tight they left nothing to the imagination. I could come up with all sorts of euphemisms for that thick serpent that lay nestled beneath his hip pocket, a chain that probably held his wallet and keys draped across it. Unchain my love, I liked to think. Gideon Fortunati was the only man who was capable of that.
The front door opened quietly, and I suspected it was Kimball. She’d been sticking close to me like a tick on a beagle ever since she heard the news of Vonda. Vonda was only maybe five years younger than Kimball. They had more in common with their girlish ways, their concerns about their hair, their figures, their need to “jump on a computer and surf the net.” Kimball was almost as concerned as I was with the turn of events.
The man startled me so, I made a smudge with my pen across the paper.
“Oh!” I gasped, but he looked harmless enough. I know now that danger comes in the most innocent of forms, but back then I was more trusting.
“Sorry, sorry,” he said hurriedly, handing me a business card, then shaking my hand. I barely had time to read it. Something about appliances. “Bronson Carradine, at your service. Only”—he looked from side to side, crouching over a plastic chair—“may I be so bold as to take a seat?”
“Of course,” I said. Maybe Allred had sent him to chat me up about…appliances?
“Is there no one else in the office?” he asked in a husky voice.
“No, just me. Why? What is this?”
“You’re a wife of Allred Chiles, correct?”
“Yes…”
“I heard your name mentioned as one who might not be, shall we say, thoroughly enamored of this place. There was some dissatisfaction.”
At that, a creepy feeling snaked its way into my entrails. “How did you get in? Who was your appointment with?”
“Let’s just say I don’t think Reed Smoot is ever coming back.”
I shut up then. I had to listen to this strange refrigerator salesman. How in blue blazes did he know Reed was never coming back? Did he have something to do with his disappearance? I nodded to indicate he could talk.
He leaned forward and talked in hushed tones like a cop. Which, in retrospect, I guess he was. “Listen, Mahalia. I’m an ATF agent. That stands for Alcohol, Tobacco—”
“I know what it means.” I’d been privy to enough meetings in Allred’s office where that subject came up. The ATF was the most hated enemy of the Church of Good Fortune. Why, I had no idea. We drank alcohol and smoked tobacco. Maybe we weren’t paying taxes on them.
“I’ve heard tell that you might be disaffected. You might be willing to work with me.”
I drew myself up stiff as a board. “Why should I trust you? What makes you think I’m disaffected? The same person who told you about Reed Smoot?” It could’ve been anyone, really, but more and more I was getting a feeling that Gideon Fortunati had run into Bronson Carradine somewhere along the line. “Have you met Mr. Fortunati? He’s a biker.” A very sexy biker. Sex on a stick biker. He’s so sexy he turns straight guys gay, as I’d heard Vonda describe a rock singer once.
“Yes, yes, I’ve met Gideon Fortunati. He’s going to be managing Chiles’ Altar of Sacrifice Mine for him.”
I sniffed snobbily. “Then why don’t you ask Mr. Fortunati what you need to know? He seems to have all the answers.”
“Well, I’d like to hear things from a female point of view, if you know what I mean.”
“No, I do not. I don’t think women know terribly much about alcohol, tobacco, and firearms—”
Carradine crouched over when a couple figures walked by my front window. “It’s not the alcohol and tobacco I’m so concerned with, Miss. We never are. You see, we’ve got intel that Chiles has been stockpiling arms for some kind of Waco showdown.”
I’d heard of Waco before, of course. The government wound up making an even bigger ass of themselves with their trigger-happy, explosive standoff. “That’s preposterous. A showdown against who?”
“It might come as a surprise to you that you have many enemies on the outside. Listen. I’m also interested in the plight of women here on the compound. Underage girls being married off, women ‘assigned’ to men they barely know, basic human rights violations.”
Oh, I had heard of things that would make this man’s toes curl. Surrogate stud men were assigned when men became impotent. The husbands would be forced to watch while the stud men humped their wives. All completely unsavory. I had to at least trust this man in order to draw him out. I admitted, “Yes, some men have been vanishing lately under odd circumstances. Reed Smoot, for one.”
“As I suspected.”
“He vanished a few months ago. Many ‘surplus’ men have been disappearing, I think when they displease Allred. I’m worried about this Mr. Fortunati if he’s going to start doing business with Allred. Maybe we could arrange a meet—”
As though they’d been hiding behind the front door, three men burst through now. They flashed their weapons, sawed-off shotguns and handguns. They fanned out, pointing their weapons every which way. As though Bronson Carradine was some kind of threat!
I rolled back in my chair while Bronson pressed his finger to his lips in the universal “be quiet” gesture. He stood, already defeated, hands in the air.
“All right! What’s going on here?” Parley Pipkin drawled.
“Nothing! He’s just an appliance salesman.” I slid the business card into my dress pocket.
“Yeah, well,” said Parley, “he’s been sneaking into the compound lately trying to talk to people about—well, about various stuff. If you see this bastard around again, Mahalia, call us immediately!”
Although two men had him by the arms and were dragging him out the door of the Relief Society office, Bronson dared to look me pointedly in the eye and make motions like wiggling a phone receiver by his ear.
But the whole thing unsettled me. The way Parley had given Bronson the bum’s rush must mean he was onto something. When the coast was clear, I looked at the business card. Of course, it didn’t say “Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms” on it. It claimed that Bronson Carradine—a made-up name if I ever heard one—was an appliance salesman. I didn’t dare dial the phone number yet, for fear he had the ringer turned up, and Parley would know it was me. But it must be a real number, or he wouldn’t have given me the card.
Amazingly, the second I went back to my spreadsheet, it all became clear. Bing, bam, boom, it balanced like a charm, and relief washed through me. Did the visit of the mysterious dishwasher salesman somehow unclog my energy channels? The spreadsheet I’d been laboring over for hours suddenly all fell together perfectly like a lock and key. I now actually had a few spare hours to myself.
I grabbed my purse and went back home, one of those long saltbox houses built twenty years ago on crescent-shaped streets that all hugged the center town square. Kimball lived with me, and of course Vonda, as well as sister wives Emersyn, Aunistee, Tazmin, and Sarah. I had lost count of their children long ago.
I did something I had never once dared to do. I stripped off my long johns and put my red dress back on again over only a bra and granny panties. I also took a forbidden case of eyebrow powder from a lower vanity drawer and drew my eyebrows in more artistically. Nobody knew that I already waxed them.
And I wafted a scent into the air that in my dreams Gideon Fortunati would approve of—Pine Forest—and walked through it, like Marilyn Monroe in one of her movies. There. That would be subtle enough that no Cornucopian would smell it on me, but if Gideon were to get close enough to—
“Listen to me!” I cried. I stuck out my lower lip at my mirror reflection. I was seeing through the glass darkly, not clearly. Even if Gideon saw me, even if Gideon were single, even if we hit it off…What scrud was I thinking?
What in the name of a motherless goat was I thinking?
I wasn’t thinking. That was the beauty of it.
I grabbed my purse again and left.
CHAPTER SIX
GIDEON
Once Skippy Cavanaugh got to know who I was, that I worked for Allred Lee Chiles, he relaxed around me. The bartender at the High Dive was obviously on Chiles’ payroll, and he admitted as much to me.
“I was just passing through town without much to do. My wife had just died, and I was aimlessly wandering. Parley Pipkin asked if I wanted to tend bar here, and the rest is history.”
It wasn’t really all that historical, but now that Skippy knew I worked for Chiles, he let me in on a few more secrets. He had a sneaking suspicion that Bronson Carradine worked for the feds, for example. He claimed it was just a feeling—the mirrored shades he wore, the government plates on his car, the way he didn’t know anything about French door refrigerators or tempered glass shelves.
