13 Tales of Nephi Gass -- an epic poem in American vernacular

13 Tales of Nephi Gass An epic poem in American Vernacular By Dee Wolfe THIS IS TWISTIFICATION Nephi Gass, a friendless man for so long now he could not remember, a disheveled man of 29, without means, owning nothing more tangible than a suitcase filled with books and laundry, head filled with dreams of glory, held a broom handle, pretending it to be a prophet’s staff. He stood this way on this particular May morning in the year of 1984 facing north while a breeze blew from sunrise, and this made him think he would like a smoke or, better yet, a hot breakfast up the street. Presently employed at Mad Jack’s Discount Furniture below 9th and State, he could not help but wish for better things, but opted for the easier task of pushing a broom. In beautiful dreams he held the prophet’s staff and gazed up at the sky, and saw himself in skins and sandals, a heavy wizened beard, a prophet’s beard that hung with great dignity from his chin. He marched along Main street uptown toward the heart of Salt Lake, toward the two malls near Temple Square as drivers slowed to study him, and gathering multitudes around him gazed in awe, for he was a Prophet of old, like Samuel of the Old Testament, or Samuel the Lamanite. He had weighty, important business to attend to at the mall, a place of wickedness where he would tap his staff just once and preach unto this generation, yea, prophecy of dark days to come, and all must hear him or ignore his words at their own peril. Yea, verily and it came to pass that he entered the west doors of the Mall and stood statuesque and manly in the dark interior as all began to gather around, flirtatious young things in lipstick and long legs attentive to their manicured missionaries in their suits and ties, so smug, so full of importance, so ready for the enema they were about to receive from one who was the true prophet in the full face of their fraudulence. One delightful blonde sized him up from his sandaled feet along his muscular legs to the majestic chest and arms, the belt around his skins, the stone knife, the tall staff that made her eyes flutter in a near swoon. For verily it will come to pass… “Gass!” …that in the fullness of times when the moon hangs low as it tumbles to and fro… “Curse you, Gass!” …can you tie it in a knot, can you tie it in a bow— Nephi came out of his fetching vision and turned to see Mad Jack, his boss of the moment, a stout flushed man with the scowl of an Incan god, coming at him with the unmistakable air of menace. “What in the dawn of damnation do you think you’re doing?” “I thought you wanted me to sweep the driveway.” “After you clear the junk out of the attic!” “Well, I thought it would be best to sweep the driveway first before it gets hot--“ “Wow, you almost used your brain. You sure weren’t sweepin’!” Nephi followed Mad Jack back inside and was led past the display rooms, past the sales people, past the clerks and secretaries all sidewise watching this little parade of the highest and the lowest as they marched up the stairs through the open door of the attic where both had to bend down to avoid bumping their heads in the stifling dust. Already it was hot inside. “You need to sort the financial information in these boxes. Anything older than seven years you dump; the rest I want stacked according to date.” “Seven years from today?” “What do YOU think? Yes. But check inside the boxes. Some of these records have gotten mixed up.” He paused at the door before going down the stairs into the blessed cool of the show room. “I want it done right and I want it done today.” No friend there. He shut the door then and Nephi could hear him pouncing down the wooden stairs, leaving the would-be prophet in darkness, otherwise one dangling yellow light bulb that seemed to make the darkness all the darker. He pulled a box toward him, a banker’s box stacked with carbon copy receipts clipped together monthly and spanning several years. He did not know what they were or what they meant, and could not quite read their faint lines. He may as well be in a cave. And so he was, the prophet Nephi in his cave of candles and ancient volumes fastened together with metal and bound in leather, portentous scrawls all dense with meaning and foreboding. The truth lay in a book or else the truth lay in a look as Nephi looked to the mouth of his cave lair where the leggy young blonde from the mall approached slowly. Wide eyed and innocent was she, impressed by the manliness of the place, the great books brimming with the mysteries of the ages, the truth poured through the eyes, his eyes, her eyes. “How may I help you, Child?” He asked. Slowly she approached, sultry, seductive yet innocent and wanting him, the father figure missing from her Sunday School visitations. She stood slender and long legged, bouncy blonde hair and eyes that were large with astonishment to see and feel and know the authority of masculinity, the powerful jaw set jutting like a rock from a mountain, as ageless and unyielding. Nephi yielded and swept her up in his arms and carried her to the iron bunk with its burlap mattress stuffed with straw, there to lie with her, a secret lover in the hills above town… He did not notice the ember from his cigarette that had fallen into the box of old receipts he had pushed aside. He did smell smoke but by then it was a merry flame consuming the carbons prodigiously. “Ah!” He stomped the box out and looked past the spreading smoke to see that most of the receipts had burned to ash. Smoke had curled out past the attic door doing a little curly cue dance into the show room. There came a stomping up the stairs and the door flung open to the fiery face of Mad Jack: “What are you doing? What?” He appraised the situation and rendered verdict: “you’re fired!” The smirking clerks stood aside and watched as the scowling secretary for whom life was a daily grind of payroll adjustment sourly made him a check then and there. Less than half an hour later, Nephi was back in the street, State Street, moping along the road toward the nearest bank, check and blue slip in his hand and tears in his eyes. He wiped them away and said “Who gives a good doggone? Miserable old sourpusses…” Who wanted to work anyway? He had enough in the bank to cover a month’s rent as it was. Time had come to take time off and haunt the bookshelves for the special book, the one with all the truth in it. He cashed the check and left the bank, and folded the blue slip into a little boat as he walked along near a busy gutter. The spring runoff was ample and washed away the tiny blue boat into a culvert where it managed to overcome debris and slip through the grate. The flood the year before had left the whole street gritty and swirling with silt but the air seemed fresh and alive to Nephi, now. He would find another dead end job, enough to keep him in smokes. He lit one now and thought about his stomach, and didn’t care if he ever held another job in his life. He stopped before a door that was a bright mirror and took the measure of self with a cigarette dangling from his lips and tried to look like the strong silent type of cinema, and yet through the façade of wishes came the ghastly truth. He saw a puny man with a small mouth and a trembler’s chin, little arms and a long narrow torso, short legs, and tousled hair on his head: such monumental dreams for so inadequate a man. He was afraid of…what? He could not quite say or admit to himself, but a demon haunted him, somehow let through the fissures of his mind, which presence caused him panic in a state of blind darkness as if pursued through a rabbit warren. He found all other men to be a little frightening, and feared a bully all the more, and felt the deep shame of it. Mad Jack was such a one, a bully from the instant Nephi went to work, so wanting to be the man Jack wanted. But the truth was launched away on the same stream that moved the boat of his defeat, yes, down a culvert over asphalt. He wondered: should I grow a beard? And rubbed his chin where two days growth now made a bristly rub. He could hide behind a beard. Where was Kayleen, the long lost love from high school? How he thought of her, unable to remember her last name and so never took the risk of calling her. Kayleen…Rogers? Richards? He walked on and saw a nice café lying ahead to his right, and its marquee proclaiming “today’s special: shrimp boat and fries,” that and a tall Cola with ice and a long afternoon spent sitting and watching the life flow by. A shadow blocked part of the message and Nephi had to blink to see it was a man on a ladder propped against the sign’s edge, as he reached in and pulled out a long white stem. Nephi approached and stood awhile beneath the sign, gazing up at the long tall hippie on the ladder who looked vaguely familiar. The man called down to a young woman opening a long box of lamps. “Eris, he said. I was wrong. It ain’t the lamps. It’s the ballast. That ballast is bad.” “Well ain’t that typical,” she said. “Would that be twistification?” the man asked her. “That would be just that,” she smiled up at him. Nephi studied her, a petite, well proportioned blonde woman with a pony tail that bounced behind her. She wore old faded denims that hugged an alluring curve, and an apron around her waist with pockets, a heavy sweater pulled over and soiled white, and grubby canvas shoes. “We’ll have to pull that face then,” she called up. “Shouldn’t be hard though. It’s a side-mount which means the ballast is likely bolted to the pole. Just remove that retainer and pull the face your way a couple of feet and we’ll have it.” “Eris, what would I do without you?” “Give me a raise, then!” She laughed as the man on the ladder removed a pair of screws and pulled the plastic face of the sign his way. He came down the ladder and walked directly to the truck bed and took a utility towel to his hands. Then he saw Nephi and his eyes widened. They recognized one other at once. “I remember you: Nephi Gass from Davis High School, class of ‘72. Do you remember me?” The man stood for the world like a throwback to the mid 1970s, shoulder length hair, a heavy vest around his cotton shirt, wide leather belt, slightly flared denims and heavy Wellington work boots. “Kenny Cross. I’d know you anywhere,” proclaimed Nephi with a shake of his head. “You haven’t changed much. Who are you working for?” “Myself. I own the company.” He presented the service truck door to Nephi with an elaborate wave. The legend read “HEAVENLY NEON—Service Guaranteed.” “Wow, that’s sump’m’,” Nephi admitted. “We’re about to replace a part up there. Can I buy you lunch?” he asked and Nephi blinked. “Here?” “Sure, here, if you want to. I don’t care. How about you?” He nodded to his co-worker. “Suits me,” she said, and eyed Nephi sidewise as she moved past him. “Oh, I’m sorry,” Kenny said. “Nephi, this is Eris O’Brien, our plastic fabricator. Cutest little gal you’ll ever meet or else she’ll knock you on your rear.” At that Eris came up to Kenny, showing her teeth, and punched him in the side. “Shut up, you,” she said. “She’s shy too,” Kenny winked through his wince. “She’s my girlfriend. Just don’t tell my wife.” For a moment Nephi envisioned himself beside her on a bed, their lips locked together, wide-eyed and brazen, but fought the image into hiding lest they read it in his face. “Let’s get this sign fixed. I’m hungry,” she said and moved the ladder over to the open gap, running up to the opening like a monkey. She took a pair of wire cutters out of her apron and cut the ballast away, and then loosened the nuts with a small wrench, brought it down the ladder and threw the ballast in the truck bed, pulled another ballast out of a service bin on the side of the truck and scampered back up the ladder. A few minutes later she called down “Kenny, I’m out of wire nuts.” “What size?” “What do you mean “What size? Sixteen-gauge, you dope! Just get me the whole bag out of the truck.” Kenny tossed it up and Eris caught it in one hand. A few minutes later as he and Nephi watched, she called down “Done! Let’s get a couple more lamps in this thing and call it quits.” In no time at all she was on the ground moving around quickly, tossing parts and tools back in their various bins. Her eyes were downcast but determined as she moved along, and Nephi could not but notice how her thighs filled her denims and how gracefully she moved as she removed her apron. Suddenly she looked up with a smile and took him by the hand. “Eris. Happy to meet you. Want some lunch?” “Starved,” said Nephi. Kenny joined them. “I don’t have a lot, so go easy on me,” and grinned as if it was expected he was supposed to be cheap. Inside they were seated at a booth in the corner where light came in from two tall windows merging. Kenny explained he liked the light, the more the better, and ordered a simple hamburger and coffee. “I’m paying for my own, you cheapskate,” Eris said and told the waitress she would have the shrimp boat special and a nice large cola. Nephi’s hunger fluttered for the very thing, but Kenny was paying for it and so he lamentably ordered the hamburger and coffee. “You sure?” Kenny asked him. “Sure you don’t want the shrimp boat?” But the waitress had moved away from them to the next table. “So where you working, Gass?” Kenny asked. “Oh—“ Nephi was hesitant. “Just a job.” “Just a job!” Kenny brightened at Eris who smiled broadly. “How do you like that. I want one of those.” “Furniture company…” Nephi muttered and thumbed behind him back toward State Street. “Mad Jack’s? ” Nephi glanced up in shock. “Surprised you didn’t see us. Put up their sign about…when, Eris?” “Been a couple of months.” “Two weeks tops for me,” Nephi said. “Three, maybe.” Kenny made a face. “Not much of a job, I take it. You like it?” “It’s alright,” Nephi lied. “You don’t sound too enthusiastic. You on your lunch hour?” “Mmmph,” Nephi managed. “Tell you what,” Kenny slapped the table. “I’ll drop you off after lunch and I’ll go in and tell that old grouse to treat his people better. I’ll get you a raise!” Nephi played with his fingers. “You really don’t have to do that.” A few minutes later their orders arrived and Eris tore into her shrimp basket, and Nephi could smell the savory bread crust deep fried and filling his gut with a longing as he watched her dip each little shrimp tail in the red sauce and bite into it. “Sure good,” she said to the basket, and took a long sip of her drink. He watched her chew and liked her lips. Kenny said “Why is it they always make the ads for these hamburgers look like something out of hamburger heaven but when you get them they look wrinkled like raunchy old hags?” Nephi stopped in mid bite and stared at Kenny. Eris shrugged as she bit another shrimp tail. “That’s what I call twistification. Things are never what you expect, good or bad. When you finally get that thing you hoped for, well, next thing you know you’re dead. So, when twistification comes at you it usually means you’ll live through it, but you maybe won’t want to settle for it. You know you’re twistified when you don’t quite get what you expected.” “That’s heartening,” Kenny wiped his mouth. He turned to Nephi. “What about you? You want to come work for us?” “I’d have to think about it,” Nephi said. “I’ve got the other job and all, and don’t want to let them down.” “Come on,” Kenny said. “Let’s get you back to your job. I want to talk to Jack, anyhow.” “We don’t have to, really.” Nephi almost whined but stopped himself as the others got up and Kenny left a miser’s tip on the table, to which Eris added enough to make it respectable. At the cash register Kenny and Eris divvied up the bill as Nephi stood aside watching out the foyer at the sunlight of the afternoon. He remained silent and trapped as a wild hare as Kenny and Eris set him between them, and Kenny backed the truck out of the lot and veered onto State Street. Northbound now, just a few blocks later, Kenny pulled to the curb next to Mad Jack’s Discount Furniture as the dread began to overwhelm Nephi and sent him down the seat to hide from the view of the wide display windows. He wondered at the wonderful fragrance filling the truck’s interior and realized it was Eris and glanced up to see a small curling smile. Kenny hopped out of the truck, saying “I’ll be just a minute,” and fairly skipped off to the glass door from which Nephi had departed with a blue slip only a little while before. Eris turned to Nephi and asked him “Shouldn’t you be going inside?” Nephi said nothing. “Don’t you want to?” He glanced over and slowly shook his head. “Don’t tell anybody, promise? Especially not Kenny.” “What?” “Jack fired me today.” Eris gasped and as quickly smiled at him. “I heard he’s a rotten boss to his people, mean, always stressed out about somebody. Face goes red, acts like he’s going to pop his cork. I sure wouldn’t work for him!” Her wide eyes laughed at Nephi. “I won’t tell,” she said. “It looks like you know all there is to know about Mad Jack,” said Nephi. A minute later Kenny came out the door, head down, moving quickly toward the truck. As he jumped in he said “Well I sure do hope we get paid!” “Why?” “Jack had a stroke. He’s in the hospital. Nobody knows what to do. Nephi, it looks like you’re out of a job. That old secretary is canning clerks right and left in there.” Nephi stared out the windshield with a look of utter disbelief. “My word,” said Eris and patted him on the knee. “That is twistification.” Kenny had no idea what she meant and gave her a look that said so, and pulled the truck into traffic, made a U-Turn and gunned it for the I-80 onramp. He cranked up the radio and KJQ blasted throughout the cab with rhythmic synth-pop as Eris clicked her fingers and clapped her hands, and hummed along. “She loves this garbage!” Kenny shook his head. “You ought to see her dance!” “It’s called skanking,” she corrected. Minutes later the truck careened around the bend of the off ramp onto Redwood Road and went north, the music still blaring happily and Eris singing out the open window, now and then glancing back at the two men with a satisfied smile. Kenny made a sudden left and into a driveway next to a long, low rambling building, a narrow shop of gray cinder blocks and south side bay doors that went back into a field of weeds and junked signs. Chinese elms provided shade front and back, and Nephi instantly loved the place. A sign out front proclaimed the same legend as the service truck door: “Heavenly Neon.” “This was Pop’s old place, and now it’s mine,” Kenny proudly proclaimed. “I’m a signman and a signman’s son. And Eris, here, her dad and my dad were competitors.” But Eris didn’t hear him. She jumped out of the truck and proceeded to skank in circles while the radio played British synth-pop to an island beat of ska. “It’s gonna be a good year, Nephi, I know it. The world is alive with new energy and wealth is everywhere! You come and work for me, starting tomorrow. Got it?” “Alright,” said Nephi. “You won’t let old Kenny down?” “Never,” said Nephi and wondered at his strange fortune. Twistification, indeed. The song ended and Eris fell back against the truck, panting and laughing as Kenny reached in and took out the keys and shut the volume knob off. As he came around she grabbed his vest and pulled him to her, and they hugged like brother and sister. He could not help watching her, the little crinkle in her denims where her legs met full, and felt a longing to lie with her and a stab of envy at the happiness in Kenny. He sighed and lit a smoke and smiled through the tobacco spirit rising around his face. In spite of all, though, he had found friends, somehow, and a job he had no idea about, and it had found him, and this was indeed a twist on the usual expectation. The profit shunted the prophet away into a corner of interior desires, there to await the agonizing hope and soothe it under a soft daydream of old visions and desires gone to disappointment. Eris smiled at him and said “You’re gonna’ like working for us,” and put her arm around him and drew him close to her enough that her breath filled his ear with sudden warmth. Twistification, truly. He wondered how long it would take to disappoint them. SIGNMAN’S SON Nephi Gass had found a home of sorts at Heavenly Neon, owned by his friend, Kenny Cross, the promise of a steady paycheck, and all he had to do was waltz a push-broom over polished concrete every day, a little mopping, empty the bins, and be an available flunky, a go-for, go for tools and rivets, parts and paint cans, go for donuts and coffee, and be a constant presence to assist the sign makers in any way he could. Yes, admittedly, he still worked the janitorial shift but now he had been risen by his bootstraps all the way to the enviable title of flunky, a lofty title that is heads and shoulders over beggars and street bums, even dishwashers and booth sitters, easily on par with telemarketers; and, as anyone will tell you, flunky is just this side of apprentice. Indeed, our boy had moved up in the world. Heavenly Neon sat back off a long dirt driveway on the west side of Redwood Road, above 13th South on the west side of Salt Lake City, a low shot-gun layout of cinderblock: front office facing the street under the shade of Chinese elms, with a smaller office just north. The next room to the south served as both break room and lettering room where the letters to become signs were drawn out on an 8 by 16 foot drawing board on the north wall, upon which butcher paper strips held together by masking tape were tacked to its surface. This faced the break table where the coffee pot stood. On the corner wall adjacent stood the punch clock. On down the wall the nine bay doors opened to sunlight and a spring breeze, one directly opposite of the drawing board, and all were sprung open every morning as the tiny crew arrived to clock in and make the morning’s coffee. Eris O’Brien, the diminutive plastic fabricator, arrived first to get the pot going, saying as she did so that no one else could make coffee to save their lives. She filled the pot from a small sink beside the punch clock, an old chrome percolator that heaved and hissed for twenty minutes. She would set a box of sugar donuts on the table, free for the taking and wander back to her vestibule just west of the drawing room, an enclosure wherein sat a workbench across from a single bay door, a wall saw, and several tilted sheets of plastic, Acyrlite and Lexan, her tools, her radio, etc. She was a small blonde woman in a pony tail and rugged work clothes that barely hid the fact of her feminine nature; but her language was the rough talk of the sign trade as she had been in it all her life. To the south a larger room had two bay doors and two work benches, a cornice break, welders, several machines including a seamer and a spot-welder, and a wall of exotic tools that impressed Nephi as verging on the alchemical, or some strange arcane geometry of rarified free-masonry, secrets of the grand architect. He wondered at the mysteries stashed in such a mind. On south stood the paint room and beyond that strange place of lurid colors on a cloth curtain like some entrance into a crazy carnival, the back room which was mostly comprised of junk stacked up in corners and along walls, and all according to mysterious logic in the mind of the head installer, Wild Bill O’Brien. He was like his sister Eris, a child of the trade who had come into his own, and he approached the craft like a cowboy who’s just discovered yachting. His big frame behind a denim vest, bald head under a battered Stetson, he ought to be carrying shooting irons, Nephi thought as he watched the big man swagger to the front offices to yell at Kenny Cross about some thing not quite to his liking. Florenzo Weed, the sheet metal bender and welder of pipe and angle iron, appeared to Nephi as the alchemist of medieval lore, a wizened beard hanging thickly from his chin in the manner of the prophets of old; and his eyes all glass behind his round spectacles that made him seem owl like. He was a quiet and serious man in bib overalls, a contemplator in manners of mysterious formulae drawn on a scrap sheet of paint lock as he slid the cursor over the mantissa scale of his pocket slide rule and stopped to scribble the arcane results, just like a master builder, all knowing and all wise. To see it, Nephi remembered his father’s job performing maintenance for an architectural firm, how the old man envied the grid of young technocrats with their smug smiles and heavy glasses in a warm room where only a fan blew from a corner and all the windows were up on hot days as they sat at drawing tables armed with t-squares and triangles. Gus Gass loved the romance of it and took a mail order course in drafting and received the tools of the trade in packages along with books of instruction and tests to take, and passed his auto-didactic schooling with a flawless grade and diploma. This he hung in the dining room on the wall across from where he sat, and proudly proclaimed to this wife and son that whether he was hired or not, a draftsman he was, indeed. He had gone to the company armed with new credentials and in a suit and tie, and aftershave, and asked for the promotion. The old boss mulled it over and got back to Gus with an affirmative ‘maybe,’ and sent the disconsolate soul on his way with a thanks and a pat on the back. Traveling back home to change his clothes, he realized with a pang how sick he was, and so began his passage out of Nephi’s life. Nephi suspected out of jealousy that God had doomed his father. He contemplated God, the grand designer dutifully at his drawing table twirling compass nocked to ruler, tracing with his great mechanical pencil perfectly wedged at the point, CEO of Cosmic Corporation, designing a better universe for everyone. He could not stand the competition of one more pretender. Nephi pictured Him owl-eyed and bearded like Florenzo, dressed in flowing toga, not unlike the hoary Sistine God, a regiment of missionary types behind Him, grinning smug in heavy glasses, white shirts, black ties, knowledgeable and sneering, applying arcane formulae to scrolls of vellum, perspiration in their armpits, married to officious little hens with broods of sassy little roosters and pouting pullets pecking along, yes, and off to church we go. And it came to pass that Heavenly’s contract salesman came to call, and met Nephi, and gave him a hearty pat on the back and a “how you doin’, Buddy?” He was a big imposing presence in a blue suit and tie, a sunrise of a man whose smile and scent of cloves went side by side. Nephi liked him immediately. He was Roy Sunset, whose office was a briefcase and a pager, who worked out of a shining baby blue Buick Roadmaster. He had conquered life and done it with a smile. So Nephi had met them all and the week went by like a dream of waltz music over a vast ballroom floor. Kenny Cross, Nephi’s high school chum, now the lord and master at Heavenly Neon, bent the glass himself as his own dead father had taught him, leaning over a hot gas burner as he laid the near molten shapes carefully upon used asbestos sheets that were now banned. Kenny father’s had died the year before and left the company to his son to run as he saw fit, and so the signman’s son did run it with a small group of trusted professionals, the best in the business as he put it, giving Eris a hug as he said so; and Nephi felt himself a part of an elite team, the few and the proud, and so pushed his broom with renewed enthusiasm. Nephi’s father had been dead for nearly two decades and so he felt a twinge of envy to behold a son’s inheritance like this and the sense of power and responsibility it must bring. An old long hair hippie, a hold over from the 1970s, Kenny liked to imbibe the weed now and then but kept it secret between himself and Eris. His wife and three children did not know, had no idea of their father’s appetites, nor of his ongoing affair with the cute Eris O’Brien. She was a little sweetheart, and certainly friendly but Nephi knew his place and stood to one side, pretending to mind his own business. He had no clue as to what the Mrs. Cross looked like and so stopped her in the break room on a Friday afternoon and could not understand her fury, let alone her name as she became quite cross, her double jowls shaking with a frothing rage that sent him stumbling backward. “I don’t know where he is,” Nephi protested. “Well, I do! I saw them through the blinds!” She shouted as she pushed Nephi aside and slammed the door to Kenny’s back office with her fist. “Open this door at once!” With a kick from a heavy leg she burst the door from its lock and sent it flapping on its hinges as she walked into the tiny room where Kenny and Eris struggled to pull their denims up and snap them. “You can keep your company!” She shouted. “I’m taking the house and the kids!” As she stomped back into the front office, Nephi remembered her from high school. “You’re Robin McBride,” he said. “You were a cheerleader.” “And I know you too and YOU were a LOSER! Get out of my way,” she snapped as she charged from the front swinging glass door and went out. Somehow, the ‘Mcbride’ had found a stray brick and hurled it into the door, shattering glass into the office to the horrified eyes of Nephi, and now Kenny and Eris, who stood closely together but not quite hand in hand. Kenny looked on in wonder. “I married that woman right out of high school.” And that ended Nephi’s first week at Heavenly Neon. Kenny asked them all to come in on a Saturday morning and put the whole crew on the clock; but rather than pursue the completion of a sign, they followed his pickup truck to Kenny’s Granger home, where his personal property awaited in a cloud of the bitter rancor of a scorned mate. He packed it in several suitcases. Mrs. Cross stood by with her hands on her hips while the children clung to her silent and agape. There really wasn’t much there to pick up, and Wild Bill could not understand why the whole crew was needed, but noticed how Nephi dithered on the lawn outside while the rest went in to gather Kenny’s belongings. Bill’s presence for moral support as it turned out, and leverage should Robin’s brothers appear, both of whom had played defensive tackle at Davis High years before. But all went well enough, and out came Kenny’s personal property into the truck, and Wild Bill spotted Nephi standing around “playing pocket pool” and asked him “what are you for, boy?” Eris told her brother to “leave him alone.” But Bill said “Let me show you sump’m, boy. See these?” As he held up his big rough mitts with the fingers splayed in Nephi’s face. “These are workin’ man’s hands, boy. Lemme see yours.” He took Nephi’s hands gently in his own and massaged them and gave Nephi a twinkle that filled him with unease. “Soft as a woman’s secrets. Can I come to you for a little lovin’ later, honey?” “Billy!” Eris screamed. “Get in the truck and let’s go!” Nephi followed and got in the bed again, as Bill’s disdainful thumb pointed the way. All the way back Bill drove erratically, weaving in and out of other traffic, gunning and braking, careening around corners while his frightened passenger lay low in the truck bed and held on tight. Kenny had noticed and, as they pulled into the parking lot of Heavenly Neon asked “What are you trying to do, kill our shop flunky?” “Oh, is he still in the truck?” Bill asked in mock surprise. Nephi climbed out, shaking from the ride, sat down and lit a smoke, and let the others carry Kenny’s luggage in. He put out his cigarette and walked in to clock out. “Where you going, man?” Kenny asked him. “Clocking out. I’m going home. I’ve had enough.” “Naw. Stick around. Clock out if you want to but let’s have a few beers first.” “Beers?” Nephi perked up. “Yeah,” said Kenny pulling a fifty out of his wallet. “You and Eris go for beer and fried chicken. Take the utility truck. We’ll be right here when you get back.” Nephi nodded and followed Eris back outside and got in the truck as she took the wheel. She screeched the tires out onto the open road and asked Nephi about himself as they sped south along Redwood past Chesterfield. There Nephi pointed east and said “I live right at the edge of the Jordan River. Just a little place, a duplex. Real cheap on rent but I like the view. Lived there with my cousins but they moved out. Mike and Renee.” “So,” she asked him. “What do you think of the place?” She added “Usually not so eventful.” “Yeah,” Nephi nodded, and held up a hopeful cigarette. “Go ahead,” she said. “Kenny likes his weed and he don’t hesitate.” The memory of the stench of old pot mingling tobacco made him nearly nauseous with anxiety. He feared the shadows on the frontiers of old bad dreams. He had opened a door and let the whirlwind in and felt himself pursued by a devil. He fought the fear and held on. Eris drove on oblivious. Nephi thought to ask with a forced smile “Is that why he hires hippies and cowboys?” They both laughed. “You know,” she said. “I’d marry Kenny in a minute if he’d have me but now with his wife kicking him out and all, I don’t know when it would sour for us…” her eyes narrowed into Nephi’s. “You know? God knows I love that man and would do anything I could for him, but he’s already backing away for some reason I can’t figure out. I figure if it’s out, let’s flaunt it but he wants to lay low. I don’t know why.” “But you’re sure you love him—“ “Sure I’m sure,” she said. “Never surer. I love him so much I’d marry him like that if he’d have me.” She clicked her fingers. Nephi stared out his window and smoked in silence until Eris asked him if he and Kenny had been friends in high school. “Mostly,” he said. “We had our bad times. We got in a fight over a girl and he won of course. I didn’t see him after that, until now.” “Was it Robin?” Nephi shook his head. Eris pulled into the drive-thru of the KFC and bought a bucket of chicken. Then she pulled into a convenience store a few blocks down from the shop and sent Nephi inside with the change. “Two cases. Cheap. Don’t get no lite.” When they got back Kenny tossed the lid to the chicken bucket behind him and found a breast. Nephi handed beers all around, and Bill said “Thanks, Sweetie,” but scowled back when Nephi said “Think nothing of it, Sugar.” Florenzo laughed outright and slapped Bill on the back. “He got you that time, Billy boy.” “Yeah, I guess,” said Bill. “Jackass.” But when Nephi grinned at him he managed to grin back and held up his beer. “Here’s to fairies everywhere!” He bellowed. Nephi drank to that and grabbed another can. Soon enough, Kenny had an arm around Eris as he held up his beer and saluted the profession: “As the great Ben Jones, may he rest in peace, once told my father “The sign trade is the cornerstone of advertising! Of course he said to me something more along the lines of ‘get a haircut, kid!’” “Nobody’s ever told me that!” said Bill who removed his hat and showed off his glistening bald pate. Kenny said “Florenzo, how long you had that beard?” Florenzo rocked back and then leaned forward in his chair and reached in for another piece of fried bird. “I don’t remember what I look like without it. If I was to shave, my wife and kids would run screaming.” Nephi noticed how he carefully nursed the first beer he had been given. “Not much for beer, huh?” “Old habit,” said Florenzo. “I’ll bet a monkey’s balls you’re still in your Jesus jammies, Weed!” said Bill with a stomp of his foot. “You can take the boy out of the church but you can’t take the church out of the boy.” “Are you still LDS?” Nephi asked. “Mmmm,” said Florenzo with his head hanging down, and then looked Nephi in the face. “Call me a Mormon existentialist… Either Or, with a twist of irony that the middle holds all the cards.” Nephi held up a finger. “Sounds a little like Kierkegaard.” “Marry and you’ll regret it. Divorce and you’ll regret that. Laugh at the world and you’ll regret it; weep for the world and you’ll regret that. Kill for money? No doubt a mountain of regrets. Kill for love? I wouldn’t regret it. But maybe I should.” Florenzo paused for a bigger swallow. “Yeah, whatever,” said Wild Bill and swallowed the last of his beer, too, and began to sing: “My father always told me Money will set you free If you will murder that dear little girl Who’s name is Rose Connelly. And now he stands on his own front porch A-wipin’ his tear stained eye To see his one and only son Upon the gallows high…” “Considering the day’s events,” Florenzo cut in. “I don’t think that any song about murder or marital discord that leads to murder is going to be terribly helpful.” He directed attention to where Kenny sat morose now and lachrymose with beer running out his tear ducts as he leaned toward the table, the seat beside him where Eris had sat, now empty. Quietly she had gotten up and clocked herself out and went through the front office, and home to Kearns. Kenny looked up. “What did I say?” “What DID you say?” Asked Bill. “Nothing to do with the song. I told her I didn’t want to marry her.” Kenny brooded in his beer and drank from the sour can. He said “sing some more, Bill. I want a good bloody murder ballad.” But a melancholy had seized old Bill and he sang a lament that broke the heart of Nephi who had heard the ancient thing before but could not quite account for it, an ageless theme and melody lost in the bowels of human psyche, a haunted palace of hammered dulcimers weeping to the stars forever and ever: “Remember in the garden path Love, where we used to walk? The finest flower that ever was seen Is withered to a stalk. The stalk is withered dry, my love, So will our hearts decay. So make yourself content, my love Until God calls you away…” “Sing some more,” said Kenny and so Bill searched his bald cranium and brought them up like old sunken treasures, songs so old and lost to memory it amazed Nephi that they should have taken refuge so happily in the blunt and tactless heart of a wizened jerk like Wild Bill O’Brien. He sang into the night old ballads about ghosts and sunken ships, stabbings, mayhem, hangings and ‘the red rose around the briar.’ Nephi left the company to fade into darkness finally and walked to the bus stop quite drunk in the twilight of summer evening, his own view altered in the d-minor world of Wild Bill, imagery of an Eden forever vanished, a sudden flash of blade while lilacs waved beside the ruins of a stone cottage. In the days that followed Eris kept mostly to herself although she did cheer to see Nephi bringing her a morning cup of coffee. “My turn to make it,” he said, and she had to admit he was not the worst at making coffee. Two new jobs came in and Kenny said “this will keep us in beer and chicken.” One was a pole sign in Kearns, the other neon letters on a building face in South Jordan. Eris was all business as Kenny went over the plans with her, listening attentively and turning away to wrap her tool apron around her waist. Kenny strode past Nephi who held his push broom as if he were little more than a wooden figure holding up cigars, and on into the sheet metal room where he leaned on the bench with Florenzo for some time, talking shop with the bearded philosopher resting upon his elbows while the flat pieces of a slide rule slid back and forth in his fingers. Then Nephi watched as Kenny rolled up the blueprint and walked through the door into the paint shop. “Bill? You back here?” He called in a voice that sank away into the dark secrets of the old building. Nephi turned to Eris and smiled. When she saw him her eyes went wide and she smiled in return. He wished her to know that he was a friend no matter what. No better way than to reassure with a quiet gesture. She seemed to understand, but said “Get lost, Nephi. I can handle it.” But that smile held to him like glue he could not shake and he made his mind up that come Friday he would ask her out, he would take Eris to a movie and pay for it if she agreed to do the driving as he owned no car. He would buy dinner too. He would bring her flowers. He would thank her for everything, and maybe she would kiss him later, open her secrets to him in the musty darkness, the fragrance of clumsy lovers commingling under cover. Maybe she would marry him. Come Friday morning he had donned fresh duds from a last night’s visit to a Laundromat, combed his hair back and dumped a fair amount of aftershave on his face and armpits. He thought he looked better. Certainly he smelled better. The plastic razor, caked and ruined, was a literal scream, but the stubble scraped away into a sink of bar soap foaming at the drain. He was ready. He wandered down the long Parkway through Stratford Avenue and made his way to the bus stop. North of California Avenue it tossed him off and he bounced across the street to see that Eris was already parked and ready. No doubt coffee was brewing. He saw as well a small black Subaru wagon parked next to Kenny’s truck and wondered briefly but thought nothing of it really—one of Kenny’s cronies he had yet to meet, and went in through the patched front door convinced that nothing would ever come between himself and a night out with Eris. For a brief moment he saw them married and working together in the trade, himself a signman bringing up a signman’s son. He dared think it in a flash of desperate hope. But there she stood beside Kenny standing closely with an arm behind her slender back, holding to the other arm, her long dark hair, auburn and lovely on her slender brown shoulders playing lightly on her high neck as she tilted her head. A vision, a dream. She was tall and golden and willowy, and bent like a willow when she crouched to study the tail of a Y that Kenny had drawn, and her short shorts showed long legs that curved subtly to her flipflops and her little painted toes at the ends of those beautiful feet. She wore a sleeveless blouse buttoned up front and her smile was darkly superior, the gate to a mind far vaster than his, and Nephi knew her. She had come a long way from their starry kissing under locust trees beside the culvert of his parents’ farm. The breeze whispered soft as her hot breath in his ear as she said ‘you kiss this way,’ and her tongue found his. They were all of twelve those nights of forever ago. Nephi had let his hair grow out the summer long until his father grabbed him by the ear the while she watched and set him down for a crew cut, saying as he did so “I’m not raising a hippie.” When she saw the newly shorn Nephi grinning sheepish, she stood up and walked away from him, and he did not see her again until high school. By then she was a non-entity, dressed poorly in rain boots and old fashioned skirts, her hair in tight braids, pimply, self aware and hating her own being for its secretions and nose bleeds. She was made fun of by the crueler students at Davis High, and there were more than enough of those, and so she drew into herself, and Nephi watched her board the school bus home, sitting alone, quietly bleeding into an embroidered hanky. Now here she was. Kenny remembered her, as well. He had to. He had just hired her. Nephi stepped forward. “Nephi, meet our new employee. She’s going to take over work at the big board. She has an associate’s degree in commercial art, and I think she’ll be a real boon to the company.“ “I know,” said Nephi, taking her soft hand in his. “Amanita Florez. Do you remember me?” She studied and started to shake her head. She squinted and laughed outright. “You’re Nephi, she said. “My first love and you were such a good kisser.” She laughed at the comical memory. I remember you had that terrible haircut.” “That’s right,” Kenny pointed out. “We all went to Davis High together. Nephi and I were in the geek squad. How about you?” “I was the crowned princess,” she laughed. “I didn’t win any popularity contests.” I imagine you would today,” said Kenny. “Look at you.” “A girl learns,” she said. “You’ve done well for yourself, and I’m happy to have you aboard. Here’s Eris,” Kenny said as she came up slowly from the plastic shop, eyeing Amanita with a cold suspicion, and not bothering to shake her hand. Eris looked at Kenny, her eyes welling up with questions. “Amanita,” Kenny said carefully. “This is Eris O’Brien, the best plastic fabricator that ever lived.” “Not really,” said Eris. “I’m just a little old nobody.” “I’m sure you’re not,” said Amanita, taking her hesitant hand. “Amanita has an associate’s degree in commercial art. I think she’ll be quite useful to us, Eris.” “Couldn’t you afford a PhD?” She asked and walked back toward the plastic room. Kenny groaned audibly, and turned back to Amanita. “She’s a tad tense right now.” Amanita nodded and had the look of one who thought she had perhaps made a mistake. She folded her arms and shrugged from the chill she felt though the room was warm. She turned and eyed the exit, met Nephi’s gaze and turned away. Kenny could sense it. “Twelve bucks an hour,” he said. “Over the nine you told me this morning?” She asked and her mouth hung open. “You’re worth it. The only other guy I pay that kind of money to is the contract glass bender I bring in on rush jobs. “I need you,” he said. At that moment Nephi backed away quietly and walked on into the plastic room where he saw Eris sitting on a stool and crying in her arms as she leaned into her bench. He wanted to go to her, to comfort her, to ask her out, to be a man to her, but she would not have him now. She must know what he was, nothing of a man, a worker for low wages who swept floors for four little dollars an hour: a nobody, a janitor, a flunky. No education. No future. No bright promise, and he realized all of a sudden how much he truly hated his old friend, an arch-user of people who would win and win again if Nephi lived to see a thousand years of inferior status in the face of such power. In that instant he hated Amanita, too, she with her lofty degree and her future all smiles and gold-paved highways to Emerald cities and a Hollywood choir. Yes, he hated her. He hated the lot. He wanted to walk away and start over but who would take him now? Even to consider trying exhausted him in his guts, and so he reached for a cigarette, and glanced back into the break-room toward tall and lovely Amanita Florez with her back to him and her shapely hips like the dream of centuries. How he wanted her. The old ache came again on a low flying cloud of dismal sensations and smells and talk from his mother who confessed that she was mostly perplexed by his attitude, that day his dad had shaved his mane away, the day that Amanita turned her back on him, and made him long for her and ache for her and dream about her on the masthead of a barren sock night after lonely night. She ruined him for schooling. He had lost all enthusiasm and floated through high school like a leaf on a mud puddle, or the leaf of a love note passed on to him anonymously from whom he could not say though he was sure it was in the loved, sweet hand of Kayleen Roberts, who might have saved him. She pined for him from the shadows of that cruel, sad school in Kaysville where love died in the killing bite of mockery, where he dared not speak his feelings. Little came close to his desire for Kayleen, and had they mutual courage they might have found one another, but Amanita had spoiled him for marriage. When he saw her again moping in the halls of Davis High, laden with books, head down, fighting the constant bloody nose, he felt himself a cosmic joke, a butt of God, Himself, and flew wretchedly to a far horizon where only dreams were real, and immersed himself in arcane mysteries to sublimate his longing. Her ruined beauty had ruined him. He feared the unnamable even as he longed for her. Now she had gained perfection. He adored her. A CIRCLE OF STONES Nephi Gass awoke with the sunrise and was full of hope, this morning. He had found a book he was sure would please the lovely Amanita Florez, a book of love ballads, anonymous and old, as ancient as the tongue of the Anglo-Saxons, and some likely older, passed down the generations from time lost in the fog of the ancient struggle. These were sad laments filled with the loss and heartbreak of our race, of love unrequited, death and ghosts that haunted the leaning stone manors that gazed upon sunless moors. He would give her the book and announce his love once more as he had when they were children huddling in the darkness of a dry culvert in Fruit Heights, touching their mutual private places with a catch of the breath of bubblegum and night breeze. How he had loved her, wanted her then, to grow into her as the years moved gliding on the passing horizon. So he wrapped it in newspaper and wrote her name in magic marker, convinced that she would be touched by the gesture. He ate quickly and ran down the long road out of Chesterfield to the bus stop on Redwood Road. As he came through the second door at Heavenly Neon, and into the break room and clocked in, Amanita was there already in summer shorts, and long dark hair upon her shoulders cascading and hiding most of her smooth and slender face, stooping gracefully to draw a tail on her own long Y, the long Y of her legs meeting at that secret place he had once touched luring him to her feminine essence, that he wanted to shout out ‘I Love You Amanita!’ but held back for fear and merely handed her the book. “What’s this?” She asked rising and smiling as she stood erect now and took the book from his fingers. “A present!” she announced as if a child had given it. “For me?” she smiled coquettishly, and opened the wrapper. “Oh, Nephi, you shouldn’t have. It’s a…book! A book of…ballads?” Nephi nodded. “It’s a very nice book,” she said. “I don’t really know when I’ll find time to read it but I do appreciate it,” she tried to sound reassuring. It was then that Nephi noticed the bracelet of twelve opal agates linked loosely with engraved silver rings on her left arm, and pointed out how nice it looked. “Oh,” she said. “You like it? Kenny gave me it. He calls it a circle of stones. Says it’s biblical, protective spirits.” She pursed her lips doubtfully. “Gilgal,” Nephi said glumly, “the circle of standing stones.” Kenny had outdone him again. Curse that joker. “There’s a beautiful place in uptown Salt Lake, Gilgal Gardens. I’ll take you sometime…if you want to go.” “I love gardens. Maybe we can all go,” she said. “I have another old paperback I picked up for nothing downtown. The author believes that the ancient American City of Gilgal sank into the earth in a mudslide the day that Lake Bonneville broke through its northern wall. He thinks the city’s buried under Fairmount Park because he says he dug down and found it. Took a picture of a beautiful woman drawn on a wall next to an inscription he can’t decipher. "Says that—“ But at that moment Kenny Cross, the tall confident hippie came in. “Nephi,” he nodded by way of greeting, and then, to Nephi’s astonishment he put an arm around the waist of Amanita as their lips met in the affectionate kiss of a happy couple. “Hello, Darling,” Kenny said. Nephi turned and walked away as despair clutched him and forced him toward the open door, to walk away from Heavenly Neon, go home and drink himself to death. Quit it all. Quit life. Quit the treacherous god who had tricked him. Embrace Hell! Instead he went into the sheet metal room to await his orders for the day from Florenzo Weed who seemed after awhile to study him quizzically, who finally said after the day had mostly gone by, that she had found the man she wanted and there was nothing he could do about it. Nephi nodded but said nothing. He had skipped lunch and chose to smoke alone among the rusted hulks of discarded metal signs, watching spiders chase each other in a web across an open frame where the tall grass grew green. The summer season was early yet and no dry heat to sear the skin, to burn away this awful image forever from memory. He spoke to no one after that, clocked out and walked, walked, walked to the Silver Dollar Saloon on Redwood Road, and went inside to mill among his fellow broken sinners, old women weeping in their schooners while Patsy Cline lamented their loss; and the great existential poet, George Jones wailed bitterly to the silent gods of endless highway and loneliness like a hollowed corpse upon the bubbling tar. Was this his lot then, the stench of pissed beer and empty arms to the end of his days? He ordered another pitcher and drank it and was soon enough a weeping souse himself, until the barmaid kicked him out into the late night air. He staggered home, then, a soul betrayed, a whispered name on foaming lips that clung to the cold detachment of stars, “Oh, Amanita. I love you, love you, love you. Come to me, my friend and take me to your naked generous self, your mysterious forest rising to my groin, your eyes desiring me alone, your heaving breasts, your gasp of excitement. Let me have the old love one more moment.” Then the tears came again and welled up from his gurgling throat the cry of her name to the shadows of Stratford Avenue. The door to his dingy duplex hung open but he remembered he had left it that way in his hurry this very morning. Ah, well. He fell to his musty bed in a dizzy haze and clung to his pillow and made it wet with his tears. But after awhile he fell into a deep sleep and dreamed of Gilgal, how the moon hung low in the western sky illuminating the crinkling sea of Sebus to the far horizon, and the lights of distant cities on the far shores glowing faintly red. A young gallant rode for the closest of these on a handsome red horse, racing over sand as the breakers sounded in his ears. He was a captain fitted in the high regalia and gold helmet of the guard, and he made full speed for the fortified city of Gilgal, braced between two narrow mountains overlooking the sea. The one gate into the city faced westward toward the great sea and the young man rode from the North until he reached the creek that fed into the waters, thereof. This he crossed until he and horse stood waiting at the high gate and there asked entrance. Queen Theba arose in her chambers and came to the wide window of her tall tower to gaze upon the young captain, commanding that the gate be opened, and so he rode his horse inside, and there became a magnificent spectacle, having dismounted, now striding the stairs to the palace, a muscular young man with the high cheekbones and golden hair of the Nephites. Summoned before the Queen in her regal robes awaiting him in the palace though it was late, he knelt and offered his service as commander of her army and navy to defeat the Lamanite horde waiting to take the city from the south. “I am Captain Aha, the one you sent for, Majesty,” he said. “A son of the ancient race?” Theba asked. “A son of Nephi,” and he bowed yet lower. “That’s heartening,” she said with slightest sarcasm. “Rise and let me see you.” He did so. “Turn,” she said simply and he did as she said. “So, what do you bring me?” “Only my sword and my strong right arm, my service as a soldier and my willingness to die for you, Highness; otherwise,” he shrugged. “I haven’t a shum.” “What is a shum but a sum? And what is a man but a cause to celebrate?” She arose from her throne and descended the stairs until she stood beside him, a tall and raven-haired woman whose eyes were wise and intelligent, her face soft upon a long and slender neck, the body tall and slender but perfectly endowed. He had never beheld such beauty, not even in his own wife left behind in the kingdom of Bountiful, childless and lonely. Theba felt the big right arm of the young captain and batted her eyes and said “We have a great deal to discuss in my chambers upstairs,” and led the reluctant but relenting Aha upward along the winding steps, all the while instructing her servants that she was not to be disturbed, and a flash of hate as well to the courtiers and courtesans who stood in wait and were known to gossip far and wide. She turned to Aha and told him “They hide the mirrors from me as they believe I would go mad were I to behold my own beauty.” She laughed. “Isn’t that hilarious? I have no idea how beautiful I really am.” The laugh became a smile. “You must be very hungry. Have you heard about our wine?” Past the door into her private chamber, Aha saw a large stone table before him where a feast awaited: pheasant and fruits of the New World, corn and bean dishes, baked squashes and fresh berries, and wine of the concord grape, foaming thick and bitter sweet in a large clay pitcher. He fell to it, stuffing himself and drowning the masticated mess in great swallows of purplish juice that dribbled down his shaven chin. “Thank you, Highness! I haven’t eaten for a couple of days, so hard I rode for Gilgal, thinking of nothing else. I admit I am famished and tired. I am truly grateful.” As he spoke he noticed that she had put her arm around him and bore her eyes into his head, and held his eyes to hers when she found them and locked them to her. “Have you energy enough to lie with your Queen and serve her deepest need?” He stopped chewing a moment, and glanced away. “Highness, I’m a married man!” She drew him closer still and pulled his golden curls to her breast and spoke in the soft throaty way of the siren calling like a tiny holchoko over cedars in the whispering night of warmest summer. She said “We have a saying in Gilgal, Captain Aha: Love the one who’s with you and you’ll know no melancholy…” and kissed his face and licked his ear, nibbling the lobe and sending him into shivers of anxiety. Warmed to the wine he turned to her face to face and she kissed him. They arose together and he carried the queen in his arms to her great bed and lay beside her fondling and kissing in abandonment until he spent his exertions in the pulsing muscles of her womb while her glistening thighs lay spread and a smile upon her held him in captivity. When he awoke the sun was high in the sky over Gilgal. And what was he defending but a circle of stones? They wrapped a population of bawling merchants trucking their wares in the large plaza near the palace, every one of whom seemed oblivious to the menace approaching outside the city walls. He feared for such people. He found an army of two thousand smirking men awaiting him along the beach before the fortified city. They were Nephites mostly, but a several Lamanites and more than a few yellow jackets among them, all armed with shield and spear and a small regiment of bow men. In the tiny cliff-side kingdom of Gilgal gossip traveled quickly, and it was no mystery that he had lain with the wicked and insatiable queen. As he found himself catching the occasional surreptitious glance he wondered how far down the line he enjoyed the queen’s endowments and sense of charity. He approached a puny little bandy-legged red man in the line, truly a meager looking man of the sword but quite stout-hearted, so it appeared. “What is your name, Soldier?” The little man looked up bemusedly and tapped his chest and looked around him to make sure he really was the target: “me?” “No one else,” Aha assured him. “Oh, well,” he glanced around him as if eyeing the escape routes and said at last “I’d be Cayman the Lamanite, born just outside the walls here not 27 years ago.” “Who would you rather serve?” Asked Aha. “An imperfect Nephite? Or a perfect Lamanite bastard?” Cayman bowed low and said “Truth is, I serve her majesty, the wise and beautiful Queen of Gilgal, whatever she desires.” Aha stepped closer to the little man and whispered in his ear: “Tell me truthfully, Cayman the Lamanite, and quietly please because I have my suspicions…” and here he whispered: “Have you lain with the Queen?” He was overheard nonetheless as soft titters erupted down the line, but he gave them a stern look and they shut up and were silent. “No, Captain. Never. I am nothing to her though she is everything to me.” “I see,” he said and stepped back. More loudly he asked “And what is your profession, Lamanite?” “I’m a poet!” Cayman announced proudly, and a few guffaws erupted from the other men. “He scribbles filthy verse!” cried someone with a snort from the rear. “Silence!” commanded Aha, and continued with a tired sounding “thank you” as the men complied. He turned to Cayman and said “well at least you know where your bread is buttered. Of course,” he mused, “if we all did the world would lose half its fun and all of its poetry.” He smiled slightly at the little man, meeting eye to eye, and Cayman suddenly realized they were friends. Aha stepped back and announced loudly “in two weeks time we will meet the Lamanite horde on the beach and on the sea! We will defeat them completely for I have a plan! Meanwhile, avoid drink but eat well and stay fit!” The men glanced around uncomfortably and some muttering was heard to rise in the ranks. Aha searched them for a sign. “Yes?” He asked. “Shouldn’t we practice on the beach?” asked one. “Shouldn’t you inspect our weapons?” asked another. Aha held up a hand. “Please,” he said. “Would someone be so kind as to point me to the fleet?” The fleet turned out to be comprised of precisely one sailing ship, and old and blistered by age and sun, a small one-mast vessel of old Phoenician design that looked readier for trade than warfare. Aha’s heart sank but he commanded that the small boat be dragged from dry dock and put into the water. Importantly he strode up the plank into the now moored bark only to see that she was listing slightly to stern and seemed to be taking water. The day progressed and, while the army maneuvered around the beach and fought with wooden sticks for practice, Aha concerned himself with making all that existed of Gilgal’s navy seaworthy and fight ready. A clay urn full of black sticky substance was carried aboard, indeed a great deal of tar but in Gilgal, Aha learned to his consternation that it was called ‘goddammit,’ as it was a thing that stuck forever wherever applied and tended to stay on skin until the skin wore away. Happily, however, it stopped a leaking boat from sinking all the way, add to that a new coat of varnish and the tiny wooden sailing ship became a man o’ war. Aha selected a small troop of archers and spearmen and taught them to sail and paddle the little ship around in the breakers that loomed west of the city. This training event turned into quite an ordeal for Aha, and resulted in a drowning and the near capsizing of the one vessel they had. Twice the trainees nearly scuttled their boat but by the end of the day they had advanced to mediocre sailors, and Aha felt slightly better about their prospects. As the two weeks wore away they seemed to have gained some mastery of the fickle waters of Sebus, and now the battle at hand lay two days away. Weary with the day’s workout Aha climbed the spiral stairs to the queen’s private chamber where he was embraced and fed, hugged and nourished, made drunk and erect and spent his seed into her willing body spread wide before him as she held her feet and curled her dainty toes. Again he slept past sunrise. He arose and donned his gear and marched out to see the men already practicing on the beach or else fighting the sails out on the open seas as the one ship of the fleet bobbed about in circles. Ruefully he thought to himself tomorrow we fight and wondered how easy it would be to point his faithful horse in the direction of Bountiful and keep riding northward along the beach. Home lay twenty miles up the coast, home and a comely wife, though a little homelier than Theba to be sure, where dinner would be a simple tamal or two served up with a side of beans and humble clay cup of warm spearmint tea. How he missed her innocent smile, her sweet and unadorned face with the golden curls tied back in a long tail above her ears that were slightly pointed. Her eyes were almond and brown and guileless; and he could see them again as they were when the tears filled them to hear that he was going away to fight in a campaign, and he would be gone for at least a month. There was no child between them and no hint of a child as yet. Cayman the Lamanite was not so wealthy as that, living in the dire simplicity of a small two-room adobe hut that had been formed to the outside walls of Gilgal in the manner of the southern people, with slanting timbers for a roof and tiny rooms with windows facing out. He and his wife, Ruth and their three daughters lived on the south side of the city fortress, up an incline a hundred feet or so left of the gate, and so enjoyed a perfect view of the southern half of the great sea, and were shaded by cedar trees and pines. He was not one to complain as he at least had access to the library where he brushed poems from a bluish-black ink into sheets of shaved bark. At home he stenciled his compositions into the very walls in his poet’s trance, ignoring the hectoring of his skinny and severely angular Nephite wife as she slammed things around trying to get his attention. “Oh, woman!” He lamented as she bumped his arm moving past him. To the little girls as they sat around the family fire watching yet another crock of beans, he sang the old sagas of the ancient and holy land they had left, the tales of Father Lehi and the great disbursement, the division of into Lamanites and Nephites, and the tireless struggle of good people to reunite them. His littlest daughter asked him “where did you learn all those songs?” “Many were handed down,” he said, “but the best were put in books that are kept in our library. Not a day goes by that I don’t thank the Lord for making me a poet.” “I’d have preferred a good farmer,” Ruth said with a mock scowl. “Well,” he motioned toward the door. “Go marry one then. The court pays me a stipend for my verse and I have been hired to write new hymns for the religious dedications coming up.” “To Momboss?” She asked. “To that nose-picking devil? That stone obscenity with one finger up its nostril and the other up its rectum? What can you possibly say good about it?” “Hush, now! It doesn’t affect us,” he said. “And it’s a living. As a poet I can lie with the worst of them and come away untainted. Besides, dear Wife, what land can we afford to buy? I inherited nothing but my mother’s songs and my father’s legs. And you forget I receive regular pay in the Queen’s army. Granted it isn’t much but we aren’t starving or cold. You can thank the Queen, herself for all these warm blankets.” “Hmph,” Ruth said and stirred the beans, spooning them into small corn tortillas and handing one to each of her family. After that, Cayman sang the ballad of a long dead Lamanite princess who had drowned herself in Sebus because she could not marry her Nephite lover. “No one lives that way, anymore,” he told his little girls. You can marry whomever you please.” And then he saw them to their beds all wrapped and warm while the cool night air came through the open windows and crickets sang of the birth of music and meaning, an old story he told his daughters night after night. “The crickets are the oldest of all poets, and beloved of their mother Earth, their songs in rhythm to Her own beating heart,” he said, and kissed his girls on their soft foreheads, their hair trimmed in the fashion of the Hopi. “My little friends, sleep well.” He sang to them a lullaby as old as his race, and learned perhaps, he wondered, from the crickets themselves. Tomorrow he may die, and prayed in silence to the glittering stars in the tiny square window: “Lord, protect your poet, and keep his family safe.” In the palace it was as well the night before battle but Theba demanded satisfaction from her exhausted paramour and cursed him to his face for his flaccidity. “A little more wine,” she snarled as he become more drunken and helpless, falling about the room, finally letting slip that his own wife’s name was Gavina as he called for her in the room’s snuffling gloom that smelled of spent sex and wine stains in the sheets where the sweat of their bodies had stupidly commingled. “Gavina, is it? She’d best not come sniffing around or I’m liable to have her nose removed. Does she tend to the tubers back in Bountiful? A smelly little farmgirl? Does she catch ducks on her knees?” “She’s not as pretty as you, I admit,” he said to the ceiling. “That’s what I wanted to know—“ “But she is sweeter—“ Theba fetched the flask from the table and brought it back to the bed. “Have a little more wine,” she said. Come morning a sentinel sent word that the Lamanites were not far from the city, ten miles at best, and a messenger delivered the news while Captain Aha sat naked on the Queen’s bed holding his pounding head in his hands. “How many would you say?” He asked. “Thousands,” the messenger said. “Ten thousand, maybe.” Aha rolled his eyes in a panic and got to his unsteady feet, rocking back and forth on them and nearly falling to the bed, but the messenger held him up and helped him into his tunic and boots, his helmet, his cape…”Where’s my sword?” The messenger searched the room. “My sword! Quick, man!” The messenger turned over cushions and pushed couches aside and finally found the sword beneath the dinner table under a platter of spilled and bruised fruit. In another part of the room where it had been trampled underfoot lay the belt and scabbard, all so tawdry that shame-faced Aha put them on quickly as he spun away to face the great window to the sea. Unsteadily and head aching he descended the stairs and went out into the blinding light of day. “What today, Captain?” Asked an old Lieutenant, a bearded and scarred veteran of wars too numerous to count, as Aha flung himself into his saddle. “Today we fight,” he said as he leaned over to throw up in the sand. “May God be merciful, then,” the grizzled veteran said with no need for irony as he went to summon the soldiers and the fleet. And so it came to pass that a small garrison of Nephites marched ten miles down the coast of Sebus to meet the Lamanites in battle; and as they moved along, the fleet of one ship moved alongside, rowed by the spearmen as the archers stood with their arrows nocked and ready to pierce the bare red chests of their cousins. They could hear the drums and rams-horn trumpets of the enemy playing wildly as feet stomped the earth and made it echo in a pulsing rhythm that sent shivers down the spine. Cayman, marching way back in the line felt a growing horror that he would soon be killed but knew in his heart he could reconcile the matter as he had directed his wife to take refuge with their daughters to a mountain cave to wait out the battle. Briefly he considered changing sides but thought of his love for the Queen and how better, indeed blissful it would be to die for her, preferably in her arms, but thought better even of that. At the tail end of his contemplations one fact remained: the horror of annihilation he could not escape. He trembled at the knees and tried to compose a song. He looked over to see Captain Aha riding alongside him. Aha dismounted and led his horse as he walked beside Cayman. “Soldier, if we lose the day I will die in defeat, as you already very likely know.” Cayman nodded quickly. “But should we win,” he went on, “I’ll need a favor from you.” Cayman glanced up in surprise. “Hmm?” “I need to get back to my wife in Bountiful. But I’ll need an alibi. I’ll be at the gate waiting for you, sitting on the large boulder that sets between the city and the sea. Look for me there. I need to figure this thing out and you must help me as you are an intelligent man. I really loused things up and I can’t square it by myself…” He shook his head, bitterly. “There’s bound to be a way,” Cayman tried to smile. Then Aha remounted and galloped off for the front of the line. At this point the beach widened considerably into a large sandy plain under mountain islands that grew gigantically above. Tiny wispy clouds moved merrily about the peaks pointing to a calm and lazy day of fishing and lying back in the warm sand, any other day but this one. Before them now a vast regiment of Lamanites stood, feathered and disciplined, armed with bows and arrows, spears and long tomahawks. The drumming and trumpeting had ceased and an eerie quiet came on, enough that Aha could hear the pounding in his ears that seemed to coincide with the breeze playing the feathers atop the heads of the Lamanites before him. It was not good to die in mid-August. Better in winter when he wouldn’t miss the beautiful earth so much. Though dark clouds had formed along the sea at the south-west horizon, the sky above was like a sparkling gem of iridescent blue. The waters of Sebus yielded great grinning catfish. How fetching the otherwise that would allow him a long pole to fish with. Aha drew his sword and advanced astride his horse toward the other army. “What business have you in Gilgal?” He shouted. The Lamanite chieftain came forward on foot. “We come to take it!” He shouted back. “Not much of a port but we want the trade!” “Oh! Mercenaries, I see! Come and take it then!” He replied and galloped back toward his own men. The old lieutenant eyed him wearily. “Is that the best you could manage?” Aha said nothing but looked to the southern sea where a fleet of ten sailing boats had appeared and were starting to circle the lone Nephite ship. He raised his sword and shouted “arrows!” So commenced the battle of the south beach of Gilgal, heralded nowhere but here as arrows flew and spears quivered in flight, as sword met tomahawk and flesh was cleaved to the bone. Men fell screaming to their deaths and Aha leaned from his horse to hack at Lamanites, all of whom were on foot; and it seemed that all he had ever done was hack at men’s torsos and would go on doing it forever, lifting his sword and bringing it down in a splatter of gore and a final wail to the blood soaked sand. The Lamanites kept the upper hand, their fleet having sunk the lone ship of the Nephites in one little gulp of water, firing arrows into the backs of the flailing mariners fighting for breath and shore. Soon the Lamanite fleet moved parallel along the sand in tandem sending their missiles into the ranks of the army that was now in disarray. Truly defeat was on them, enough that Cayman dropped his own sword and fell to his knees in desperate supplication for Divine intervention. Indeed the miracle came from the sea, a whirling cloud moving at ferocious speed in the midst of a storm that had started from nowhere but flew up from the southwest, hitting the beach in a clap of thunder and bolts of lightning that played the sea like fingers shaking the water. A whirlwind it was that sent the remainder of the besieged Nephites up the beach to cower behind trees and stones while the Lamanites looked on in stunned surprise to see their entire navy airborne, whirling about and above their amazed heads. Those who were in the sea crashed to the beach and those who were on the beach were flung far out to sea, along with a few Nephite stragglers too rattled to take cover. The wind left as quickly as it had come though a gray sky drizzled about the survivors, less than a thousand now on either side. The Lamanites stared in wonder at their enemy and then at the sky and sea, and lastly on the broken corpse of their dead chieftain. They picked up their weapons and walked away, south down the beachhead, the way they had come so arrogantly not more than an hour before. Cayman found his feet and stood up behind the rock that had hidden him, and shook his head at the debris both human and otherwise floating and drowning and bleeding in the calm crimson waves before him as bodies washed ashore. Aha came to stand beside him and looked wildly out, unable to believe his own eyes. He put a hand on Cayman’s shoulder and said “I’m a little flummoxed.” “Please to meet you,” said Cayman as he held forth the gore-stained hand he had wiped on his tunic. But Aha appeared not to have heard and moved away like a man in shock, making for the beach where his horse awaited him, itself nosing the bloody waters for a clear sip. He mounted and for a long time stared at the sea in wonderment. As the remainder of his army gathered around him awaiting orders, he turned a face of terrible longing toward them and heaved a great sigh. “Men, let us leave this place and go home,” he said. With that, skinny-legged Cayman sheathed his sword and nearly danced skipping along in the rain the trail back to Gilgal to his hovel. There he found his wife and daughters smiling at the door, and they embraced him with gratitude, and his wife moved the lid to a batch of beans she had started earlier that morning. His family had not gone to the cave but stayed behind to wait for him, and the thought filled him like a happy dream. “Do you want to eat?” She asked and he said “Yes but I need to sleep first. I’m so tired but I feel a ballad coming on. We won by the way. Don’t ask me how.” He lay down on a spread of blankets as his wife threw one over him, and sat beside him patting his back until sleep overtook him. In the palace that evening it was all a wrathful Theba could do to arouse her Captain and show him the love he had earned. He wanted no part of it and moved away trying to curl up in sleep as she shook him. “Sleep then,” she snapped as if it were a commandment of hers, and left the bed to pour a foaming cup of the purplish wine. She took it to the window and silently saluted the sea with cup upraised, brought it too her lips and drank all down in one voracious gulp. She wiped her mouth with a hand and curled her lips disgustedly at the sleeping Captain. “The devil take you. Don’t you see that I love you? That you could be king of Gilgal?” Her words were enough to rouse the young Captain and bring him to his feet. “I don’t want to be king,” he said. “I want to go home.” “Home!” She looked hurt. “To your dear little wife and your little stone house and your cornfields you work without servants? What about me and all I’ve given you? Don’t you have any feelings for me?” “I came here to do a job and I’ve done it and now it’s time for us to part, Highness.” “Don’t highness me, you common thug. I let you farm me like a ploughed field, and where did it get me? You want go back to your wife? You told me yourself she’s homely!” Aha worked his clumsy drunken way into his undergarments. “Yes," he said. “That is what I want to do. I want to go back to my homely wife.” And Theba watched as he put his sandals on and his tunic and breastplate, as he found his sword and scabbard and his proud helmet with its red plumage. She clung to him as he dragged her toward the door. “I love you. Please stay with me and love me back, Aha. I will make you king. I will bring you glories you have never known nor will without me. Through Momboss I can make you king over all these lands.” “I will not serve your idiotic stone god,” he said flatly. “At least let me love you.” “You already did that. And where do we go from there?” She stood back. “Fine, then. You’re leaving and there’s nothing I can do to make you stay.” “Looks like it,” he muttered and moved to exit her majesty’s private chamber as she stood between him and the door. He tried to brush past her. “No it doesn’t,” she countered, bringing a dagger from behind and plunging it into the soft flesh of his left side where no breastplate could protect him, and again this time on into his heart. “No one crosses Theba,” she said as young Captain Aha collapsed at her feet at the door’s threshold. As night drew on Cayman aroused himself from anxious dreams to get up and go to his door and stare out on the calm sea and down toward the front wall of the city fortress and the boulder where Captain Aha had promised to meet him. He must have slept soundly not hearing any movement below. This time he cheered, as clearly he could see the helmeted head as the captain leaned at the boulder waiting for him. He tiptoed out into the starlight and made his way down the trail alongside the high walls until he had reached the beach. “I am glad to see YOU,” he said as he moved toward the Captain but stopped short and stared as sickly fear consumed his bones and muscles to paralyze him where he stood. He moved forward again more slowly and studied the face. Indeed it was the captain, the eyes partially open though not really noticing him but something far away perhaps. The mouth hung open and the tongue was set way back in as if pushed. At least the man had all his teeth. That was a plus. A sudden strange madness overtook the frenzied thinking of Cayman the Lamanite then as he left young Captain Aha and went back up the trail to fetch a black crayon. He skipped on his little bandy legs to the front wall north of the gate and drew a great picture of the Queen, tall and in black hair and gown, a pearl necklace around her neck, as beautifully as he knew how to manage it, and then wrote: Queen Theba rules Gilgal it’s said With fear and with blood and with dread. Should you cross the old whore She’ll turn nasty and sore And reward you your own severed head. The deed done, Cayman crept back to his hovel past the unseeing eyes of his Nephite friend and slept nightmarishly in a fever dream as the dead Captain kept calling for him from a whirlwind that spun off the immortal sea of Sebus, howling like an angry, scorned god; and that is the swound of Nephi’s own fever dream as he began to rouse in the darkness of his room sweating out the excess beer, still seeing the vision of frightened Cayman. At one point their gazes met and locked and the shock of familiarity held them as they stared upon one another as if on a foot bridge spanning the gulf of ages. Cayman held his hand toward Nephi who took it and held it fast until he saw the fright in Cayman’s eyes boring into his own, as Cayman cried out “You have a demon!” He dropped Nephi’s hand as Nephi yelled into the whirlwind “Fix me! You know what to do!” The dawn came blindingly, then. IT’S A MAN’S JOB TO DIE Four Employees of Heavenly neon drove south and west into the aging fabric of Kearns to hang a sign, all sitting cramped in the cab of the only installation truck the company owned. Wild Bill O’Brien sat at the wheel, his sister Eris, the plastic fabricator, beside him. Squeezed between her and bearded Florenzo Weed, owl-eyed behind his black round glasses, sat Nephi Gass. Though he was at the moment still shop flunkie, they were trying him out for other things, and those new things included the simple installing of a sign. Nephi gazed past Florenzo, watching the world roll by in a blur outside the window, the homes and trees and businesses that littered the side of Redwood Road, little mail boxes leaning precariously, a redbrick home with a corner out, bricks scattered on a lawn, broken fences, trash caught in chain link, a welfare mother pushing a stroller along the sidewalk, ponytail and cigarette and face set grim. He wanted to light a smoke just then but he was out of smokes. He wished so he were back in bed, redeemed in dreaming. Wild Bill was in a mood today, worked up as he tended to be about the lazy cowardice of men in general as he bore witness to the sorry spectacle. “It is,” he said, a man’s job to go and get hisself killed if he wants his life to mean anything to anybody. Men these days just play around, don’t they. That’s all they do, pound mud and power out and cower before the almighty boss-man. If they had any sense they’d go out and get themselves killed.” “Can’t help but notice you’re still alive,” said Eris to the windshield. “Wild Bill gave her his tired look: “That is because I am a survivor, little sister.” “Yeah,” she said. “Why? The logic don’t follow.” Florenzo glanced at her as Wild Bill adjusted his battered straw Stetson around the balding angularity of his head and showed a skull’s worth of grinning teeth, a pair of which were missing. “That is because I ain’t got a woman to die for.” “Not even Amanita Florez?” “She likes me as much as she likes her menstrual cramps. Unless she loves them. Some women are funny that way.” Nephi, for whom the aching desire for Amanita culminated night after night spent on the tail end of fantasy, said nothing, too ashamed to admit to the lot of them how often he squeezed hope like a caught lizard out of love for the cold reptilian eyes of her. But he had lost her forever to the gangly arms of Kenny Cross, the boss before whom he cowered in trembling every day while she stood by, the cool, indifferent goddess of his being. Melancholy killed enthusiasm. His only wish was to lay with her, to feel the seed surging in her source of magic, her lovely shame, the forest of mysteries, the garden of Tlalocan, himself the wise serpent seeking knowledge. He had touched her hand and, in surprise, she had yanked it away. Assuming a slight, he had slipped away in shamed silence. Wild Bill seemed to speak for him: “She’s a beauty, I’ll grant you that but that warm and leggy body is for Kenny Cross alone to fondle. The rest of us get the scraps.” “Speak for yourself,” Eris said with bitterness. “Suppose HE’D die for her?” Florenzo asked the windshield, sipping coffee from a thermos cup, spilling drops of it into the hairs of his stained beard. “I’ve yet to hear him say he loves her.” “Who knows?” Wild Bill surmised. “I’d die for a woman’s love but never her indifference.” Eris shook her head. “You’re full of it, Billy.” Nephi, who had nothing to contribute to the conversation worth hearing gazed ahead and lost himself in gossamer dreams of the beautiful Amanita, whose eyes brought back his lost childhood, his infancy perhaps. Her name was strange to him, Spanish, as he had always called her ‘Ammie’, the full name given to a class of poisonous mushrooms, according to Florenzo Weed who read widely. She had an associate’s degree in commercial art and therefore wider horizons than he; and Nephi had this job and nothing else, and truth is he barely held the job at all. If only he could be paid to dream all day. Now there was a job for which he felt no inadequacy. He would dream of Amanita and they would pay him a wage, and never suffer again the accusations of Wild Bill, loud Bill and his threats and insinuations. At 5400 South the truck veered right through suburbs built on old dairies and hay fields. Some of the neighborhoods were aged, themselves, and grown over with Chinese elms that clung to dented metal fences on corner lots where the deep shade hid whole lives from sight. How many people had moved therein to finally pass from the scene, unknown, unheralded, perhaps unhappy as Nephi was unhappy. Or were they free of his sickness and gone through the gauntlet of life knowing only the small pangs, happy in their fulfillment of life’s promise? Finally the truck had reached the heart of Kearns, a suburb that had stood upon this desert landscape of rattlesnake nests since the end of the Korean War, a place of ancient heartbreak and rich with ghosts that tarried in the tiny lots between the cinderblock and cedar. Some had lived entire lifetimes in this micro-world of bitter mystery and beguiling charm. Even a franchise that is anywhere else a tawdry display in a strip mall, made mythology here. Rumors were epic poetry in the bubbling tar of avenues connecting wards and schools, cross-walks and gas stations. Nephi smelled breakfast cooking, potatoes and onions and beef patties rising under salt and felt a flutter of hunger. He could love Kearns. Oh, to have a little home here in the shade of great trees, to live a simple life with Amanita Florez; but she did not love him and he would never have her love, no, never, never, never. Wild Bill steered the big truck into a large parking lot next to where a tall pole had been set in concrete the day before yesterday. The Wasatch seemed to loom nearby, and breakfast hash-browns filled the air with energy. The shadows of morning brought the fingers of sunrise searching for souls to cheer. And Nephi might have been cheered. However, as Wild Bill parked the truck he turned a bitter scowl on Nephi Gass: “Here’s where the shop’s gonna find out if yer gonna be a boy or a girl. Yer gonna work for me today, Bud, and dogged if I ain’t gonna’ get my money’s worth out of your worthless butt.” Nephi hurried after Florenzo Weed to get out of the truck and stood behind him. He could feel the tears beginning and fought them back. Life is battle in despair when a man is alone. He envied the happily married. “Can it, Billy!” Eris snapped. “We’re here to get this sign hung and that is it. You ain’t gonna lay a finger on that boy.” Nephi blanched at her. She had her own demons, and a sour recognition in her eyes that made her turn away. “Boy. Huh. you got that right…” Wild Bill muttered, and went over to grunt out the outriggers, while Eris and Florenzo climbed atop the truck bed to untie the ropes that held a large fluorescent sign can against the crane. Nephi, knowing not what to do, stood by and waited and watched hoping he might at least learn something by watching, but such was not to be. Wild Bill noticed: “Get yer butt over here and help me with these riggers!” Alas, a man in ignorance cannot be saved. No redemption for the shop flunky, not today. “Pull that bolt out first! Or you’ll yank like a ninny all day at it!” And it turned out the pin had to go back in at another place, to hold the pads so the truck wouldn’t slide, and these had to be held in place with a cotter key. It was all new information, an overload, but Bill had no patience. Everything has to be learned for the first time at some point and no getting out of it. “Now what are you doing?” “I don’t know what you want…” “No kidding, Bill!” Eris snapped. “Nephi came to hold a tagline and that is all he is required to do! How is he supposed to know what you know? Back off!” “Fine!” “Help us take the sign down.” Together all four slid the sign over its carpet bed to the side of the truck and lifted it carefully down to the ground. It was not a large sign, but big enough, and it was all Nephi could do to grip the angle iron inside it and bring it down without dropping it as it pressed into the soft flesh of his flunky’s hand. A moment later it sat upon a pair of two by fours, one at each end. Florenzo set the hook to the clevis at the center link of a chain connecting the two top corners of the open sign. Bill, at the controls of the crane slowly lifted it again, and here a long rope was looped around each bottom corner. “What are those?” Nephi asked. “Those are taglines so we can balance the can over the pole when the time comes,” Florenzo said. “What else would they be?” Wild Bill yelled down from crane controls. Eris called Nephi from the truck bed and together they unfastened the two plastic faces and slid them down to lean against the truck, one atop the other. Florenzo brought down a box of fluorescent rods. “These don’t go in until we get the sign hung,” he said. There’s always little twist in a can until you get it settled. They’ll shatter from the stress of lifting them. Best to be careful.” “That means SOMEBODY’S gotta climb up a ladder and slide ‘em in one at a time,” Wild Bill said with a sneer. “You afraid of heights?” “Yes, I am,” said Nephi. “Did you ever fall from a sign?” “Sure have,” Bill said with a swagger away from the can. He leaped onto the truck bed and strode to the crane box like a sailor climbing the ropes. “Yes, but he always lands on his feet for no good reason I can tell,” Eris pointed out. “The only way to fall,” Wild Bill said, but then I’m a man, Gass, a man. Know what that is? Pull your head out. That’s the first law.” Eris called Nephi over once more and showed him the proper tying of knots. “Don’t pay no attention to him. Now look. You have to knot them so they don’t come loose except at this end, and she pulled the knot free of itself like that. “You don’t want to be on top of a ladder fighting a knot,” she said. “Try it,” she said. “Tie the knot, yourself.” But it was a mess the first time and Nephi had to be shown again. Finally… “Knotted right?” “I think so,” Nephi said. “Better know it!” Wild Bill offered. “Them knots come loose it’s gonna be yer job!” “You know, Bill,” Florenzo said as he connected the chain to the eyebolts protruding from the top of the sign, a clevis at center, and the crane hook through that. “You know we can all make this a pleasant install. All you have to do is lay off the flunky.” Bill said nothing but made a scowl at Nephi as if to say “never.” Nephi was given a rope to hold, and Eris the other. The sign arose in the shine of early day until it hung suspended over the pole. At this point Florenzo climbed a fifteen foot aluminum ladder and guided the sign over the pole and fought with it trying to center the hole to the pipe, but a breeze had come up to play the sign away from the pipe. “Eris! This way!” But she overshot the tug of the line. “Nephi! Pull your way!” But Nephi did not pull so much as jerk the line and when he did his knot came free. The sign swayed violently away from him, grazing the top of Florenzo’s scalp enough to cause him to miss his footing and nearly fall from the ladder. He held to the pipe with his hands and the ladder with his feet and stayed that way trying to catch his breath. Wild Bill told him “Come down off that thing before you kill yourself!” “Gladly,” Florenzo said, and worked his way down the ladder. “Then Wild bill bellowed “Alright, Gass! Take the rope and climb the ladder and tie it around that sign again!” “Don’t make him do that!” Eris cried out. “He don’t have the experience!” Nephi held up a hand: “He’s right. I screwed up. I have to fix it.” “Right you do!” Wild Bill agreed. Nephi reached down and picked up the tagline and slowly ascended the ladder, taking baby steps, stepping up with one foot and bringing the other to join it until he had reached the bottom of the sign. He was chest level with the top rung as it set precariously against the slender pole. He could see the roof of the business across the way. He looked down and everyone seemed so distant. A sickening sense of vertigo swept through him and he was momentarily dizzy. “Yer gonna’ have to climb up a couple more rungs to get at that sign!” Two more steps up and he felt himself in empty space, and only the sign to hold him. “Go on!” Nephi looped the rope around the can and let the end fall out the other side. He reached under and felt a jolt of imbalance but not the rope. He fought the air trying to grasp the rope. “It’s right in front of you!” Nephi called down “couldn’t you lower the sign a little?” His shins against the top rung of the ladder, he could feel it wobbling now, and so held frantically to the sign. He kept feeling for the rope he knew was likely right there. Miraculously he found it and held tight and pulled it over. He could not remember how to tie the knot. He stared at the rope for a long time trying to recall the first little loop. “We don’t have all day!” He went ahead and tied a quick stack of knots but the procedure threw his balance off. The ladder shot out to the side from under his feet as he grabbed for the sign and hung from it in open space. The sign lost its center and slid Nephi to the corner. He sliced his right hand in sliding and made a bloody mess of the razor sharp retainer. He reached for the rope and grabbed it and found himself dangling in empty space. They were all yelling from below, and Eris was telling her brother to lower the sign but he was too busy laughing at the hapless fool hanging above the ground. To hang from a rope is difficult enough, but to hang with a slippery, bloody hand is all the harder given the sheer agony of it. Nephi held as long as he could but finally lost his hold and fell to the ground. He landed on his feet but twisted the left ankle, and so lay on his side groaning in agony. “Bill!” Eris shrieked. “Yer gonna get fired for this! I’ll see to it! Why did you do that to him?” “If I’da known he was gonna screw it up…” “He’s just the shop flunky, Bill! You’re the one who screwed it up!” She sank to her knees beside Nephi, and tried to lift him. “Think you can stand up?” Nephi let her help to sitting and clutched his bloody fist. “Let me see that,” Florenzo came over and examined the open hand. He tsked. “Stitches, looks like. Bleeding very nicely.” Nephi shuddered at the thought, and tried to get up. “I think I broke my foot.” “Stand up on it and let’s find out.” Eris and Florenzo helped him to his feet. He winced limping and dared not take another step. “Is it broke, Sweetie?” Her maternal concern came like a breeze he didn’t want but needed more than he dared admit. He found himself fighting tears at that point, tears that might be desperate and grateful, and it was all so appropriate that his tears should mingle with the dust of Kearns, the bittersweet longing for beauty that is lost forever, but he held back in his desperate pride. He took a ginger step then, half hoping for the worst, simply to bask in her kindness. The agony was not unbearable. He could stand on the sprain and limp around on it. “I can work,” he said, and wiped an arm across his eyes. Eris had gone to the truck and come back with a long strip of white cloth, mostly clean, and wrapped it around the injured hand and knotted it. “We need to get you to an Insta-Care right away,” she said. “We can get the sign up first,” he said hollowly. “I can hold the tagline, I think.” “Let’s make sure it’s knotted right,” she said and worked the knots out of the rope of the lowered sign. Then she retied the knot properly. That’ll do it. You’ll get the hang of this stuff.” She gave her brother a fierce look but Wild Bill closed his eyes and looked away with a shrug. Once more he raised the sign can while Eris and Nephi held it firm, raised it over the pipe until this time Florenzo at the top of the ladder was able to lower it down the shaft until it rested firmly inside the top angle iron cradle. Then he motioned to Eris to pull her tag line slightly to her right, and she motioned to Nephi with a finger. “Perfect! Right there. He slid down the ladder and went to the truck to fetch the welding leads, started the generator and flipped the switch to the arc-welder. Momentarily he was up the ladder again in his welder’s mask. In a flurry of sparks and agitated welding the sign was set top and bottom and very likely forever. It was done. The electrical wires had been taped to the inside of the pole. These Florenzo pulled through a hole-sawn opening in the pipe and joined them to the ballast wires with plastic nuts. That finished, he unbolted the chain from the top of the can, unhooked it from the crane and let it fall to the ground. Wild Bill swung the crane over to the bottom edge of the sign, and then Florenzo and Eris ascended the crane ladder and eased each of the faces along the retainer tracks to the vertical retainer on the other side. The final retainers firmly in place, the two climbed back down, and Wild Bill put the crane to bed. By now it was mid afternoon, about two o’clock. They cleaned up their tools and junk around the jobsite and lay the boards they had used upon the bed for the next sign. Wild Bill said to Nephi “Lemme look at your life-threatening wounds, boy.” He unwrapped the cloth and examined the cut, and cursed. “That is enough to make a man cry, and I thought you were being a big baby about it. Eris will take care of you. God knows you need a mother to look after you.” “I hope you have a job in the morning, Billy,” Eris growled. Nephi gritted his teeth and spoke words he hated saying: “I suppose you’re right about me, Bill.” “No he’s not,” Florenzo countered. “You don’t deserve that, Bill,” Eris said. “She’s right,” Florenzo joined in. “You don’t, Bill. What you did today bordered on criminal negligence.” “You ought to go to jail for a month or two and see how that works for you!” Florenzo continued: “One of these days somebody’s gonna snap and drive a sharp length of angle iron right through you, and it will be ruled self-defense, because you have it coming. You’ve driven more good men out of the sign trade than I can remember. You are nothing but a problem to us.” Eris said “You’re the one who needs to pull his head out and start treating people like human beings, Billy!” Quietly, Bill took their abuse while he shoved the outriggers back in and picked up tools. A little later, a not so Wild Bill drove the big truck and the sedate crew to the nearest Insta-Care, where Florenzo flashed the Workers Compensation card and filled out the necessary paperwork as Eris pushed the limping shop flunky through the double doors and into the waiting room, where he sat with his good hand in his lap. She reached to take it, her fingers grazing the source of so much trouble, a slight thrill that brought their eyes together searching. As if to reassure him she patted his thigh with the other hand and smiled brightly. He did not dare admit to her or anyone else his terror of shots although his quiet trembling told the tale quite clearly. Eris seem to understand and, like the mother she was meant to be, tried to force his head upon her shoulder but he fought the gesture and so she patted him in the small of the back and told a joke as the needles went in to deaden the pain in his hand, followed by a tetanus shot in the shoulder. Hot tears threatened once more to roll forth not for the pain but the shame of failure. He fought them back and gazed at the ceiling as he said “please don’t tell them at the shop about Bill and me. I don’t want Kenny to know what a failure I was, today.” “Failure? You did fine. You went above and beyond. Don’t you know that? And here you are willing to let my brother off the hook. You’re a good person, Sweetie and time will prove me right.” She fingered the hole where the shot had gone. “That will ache tomorrow,” she said, and then removed his boot and sock so the chuckling physician’s assistant could examine the injured foot. “A bit of a sprain,” the P.A. said. “How far did you fall?” Nephi managed to say “About twelve feet, I think I landed a little wrong.” “It could have been a little worse,” and the P.A. wrapped an Ace bandage around the foot and prescribed pain killers. Eris wormed Nephi’s dirty sock along his bandaged foot and slipped his boot over the top. She laced it loosely and told him to stand. She patted him on the back and kissed him on the cheek. “That’s for acting like a man,” she said to his surprise. From the windshield Wild Bill watched as they came out the door, Eris supporting Nephi along with an arm. Florenzo muttered “And a little child shall lead them. Nephi has passed through the fire.” He slid over next to Wild Bill as Eris opened the door to motion Nephi inside and got in herself. She held his injured hand in her lap and reached over to fleck the dirt from his hair. Wild Bill noticed her way with the shop flunky, and grimaced. “You gonna turn me in, Gass?” Nephi shook his head but stared away out the window. He remained fearful and ashamed though something of a victory had occurred that seemed beyond his present understanding. He could not look at the other man without glancing away. “How ‘bout you, Sis?” “Not if he ain’t,” she said. “I keep thinking you’re redeemable. I won’t give up on you.” “Oh…” Wild Bill started but fell off. For awhile he was silent. “You remember that time Grandma caught you and me having a smoke in the tool shed? She said I would go to Hell for sure. An’ I said I’d go to Hell for a lot better reasons than that, and she took a stick after me. Remember?” Nephi let the others laugh at the ludicrous comment and found himself smiling at the confession as he thought about it, and Eris said “I remember all too well.” “I miss that cussed old gal. I know she loved me in her ornery way. I was always first in line for the clobber and first in line for the cobbler, too. She made the best.” Nephi glanced over to see that Wild Bill’s eyes had reddened some with a glistening in the hollows. “I said it’s a man’s job to die, but I meant to say it’s his pleasure to die for the people he loves,” the old cowboy made a long sigh. “I would do anything to see her again.” “Ah, Billy,” Eris said. “It’ll be fine. You don’t have to talk that way.” “I know,” he choked. “Gass, you’re that kind of man. You took it on the chin and you didn’t go squirrelly. I know you’ve taken a lot of thumps in life and they show. Eris likes you. I guess I do too. You hungry?” “Don’t have a cent on me,” Nephi spoke to his pockets while he patted them. He said nothing else. “A man can’t work that way! I’ll buy you a late lunch,” he said and wiped his eyes, enough that Florenzo was amused but quietly, and Eris smiled a little sadly. “Why do you bring so much trouble on yourself? When are you going to change?” Wild Bill shrugged as he turned the wheel. Nephi glanced over to see tears on his face and looked quickly away. Bill wept not Nephi Gass who had been injured. Life moved contradictory to the center of being. Compassion would have been a fine and noble response to such admission of human weakness but Nephi felt only shame and hatred for the man. He wondered what moved Bill in his bed alone in the empty night. He wondered at incestuous and clumsy embraces borne of loneliness. He gazed out the window and felt mainly hunger. He slapped the wheel. “Where’s that little diner we smelled this morning? My treat,” as he reached over to take Nephi’s good hand and held it as if it were the side of a boat. LAMENTATIONS OF A THEORIST Nephi admired Florenzo Weed and always enjoyed the sight of the stalwart welder and tin bender marching into the metal shop every morning, the confident steps, the beard outthrust as if he were an Old Testament prophet, the eyes that searched for meaning in the cavernous room. On a warm summer’s morning the bay doors were open all the way and a south breeze came through, and it would be a hot day but Florenzo wore his bib overalls anyway as they provided a home for a motley regiment of pencils and a pair of safety glasses. “Good morning, Nephi,” he said as he stepped up to the table upon which Nephi leaned. “How’s that hand?” The hand in question, ripped and bandaged two weeks prior was healing nicely but Nephi had not opened it to check the wound. Florenzo said “We should take a look at it. I think it’s safe. Eris!” He called back to the plastic room. “Come over here and give me a hand.” Here she came, diminutive little blond Eris O’Brien, her ponytail flopping side to side as she stepped along in her workboots. “What’s up?” She asked. “Nephi,” lay your hand out on the table,” Florenzo told him. At first Nephi set his good hand out as Weed asked him what he was doing. “Oh,” he smirked as Eris shook her head, “you are hilarious.” “Hold it right there,” Florenzo said and went to his box. When he came back he had a pair of rusty scissors and, as he began to cut the bandage away, Nephi jerked his hand away—“ouch!” “Coward!” Laughed Eris. “Yeah,” said Florenzo. “Be half the man Eris is.” As she scowled at him he inserted the scissors one more time and began to cut the bandage away. “By all means, let me know if I’m hurting you.” “You DO have permission to yell,” said Eris with a wink and watched as Florenzo cut the cloth carefully away and began to part the sticky mess with his fingers. This freed up old odors of sweat and iodine, the palm of his left hand painted a pale blood red. Stitches lay along a closed line, the scene of recent tear. Florenzo touched the palm gingerly. “Sensitive?” “A little,” said Nephi. “Let me cut that stitch at the knot and then see if you can pull it out.” Florenzo set the tip of the scissors over the knot and squeezed, and this caused more tenderness in the hand that made Nephi hiss and grimace and turn his head away in a squint. “Flo, let me do it,” said Eris. “I’m a lot gentler and I know Nephi likes a girl’s touch.” She grinned up. “Don’t you?” Now he could not name the source of his palpitations but Nephi watched as Eris hurried back into her room, her round butt wagging side to side as she moved, and came back carrying an Exacto blade, and stood by and let her cup his hand in hers, carefully inserting the blade under the first knot and prying up. Nephi gritted his teeth but then the knot was cut and she went to the next one and pried up again. After a moment all the knots were open but the skin held firm. “Healed up,” she said, and Florenzo nodded. Before Nephi could protest she had pulled the first string out of his hand and he winced from the burn it caused. “Hold still,” she said and pulled out the rest of the knots. No stitches now, but the hand looked odd to him with its white line running thumb to pinkie and its little white holes standing out like a design. “I’ll bet that was a thrill,” she said. Bill O’Brien in bald head and Stetson came up then wondering what was going on until he saw the stitches. “Got them pussy things out, huh? Let me see that thing.” His eyes widened. “Substantial injury. I’m proud of you. Welcome to the sign trade!” And he slapped Nephi on the back and strode gigantically toward the front office. “Can’t do anything in this life without injury,” Nephi pointed out as he gazed upon his hand. Eris had turned back toward the front office. Florenzo took his scissors to his tool box and flung them inside. “You could bank a religion on it,” Nephi added. “How about a philosophical system?” Florenzo asked. “Granted that’s a rhetorical question but the truth is I already have, and I can prove it by using a logical system I came up with that I call existential logic.” To Nephi’s dumbfounded look he added “I wrote a treatise on the subject.” “You don’t say.” “I say. Many years ago I attended college for awhile, dropped out of course, but while I was there I took courses in formal and symbolic logic. Now, the truth is that logic exists for one reason and that is to validate or else invalidate an argument—you know [to Nephi’s befuddlement] prove it true or false. But on the last day of class our professor challenged us to come up with a multi-valued logical system, one that was not simply a matter of true or false but had multiple values by which you could say it was neither either-or but a thing that was changing its definition.” He drew Nephi over to a small sheet of paint-lock scrap metal over which he was drawing circles. “The problem is one of identity. If you have an unripe peach, a ripe peach, an over ripe peach and a rotten peach, which peach is the real peach to you?” He answered the question himself with a cryptic “precisely. The ripe peach is the peach we think of, and this is the sort of ideal Plato was looking for, the queer old humbug. The other peaches are not complete peaches to us because something is lacking in the definition we make of ‘peachiness.’ Only a ripe peach will do. An unripe peach will not do any more than a rotten peach. And yet all are peaches. “That is because everything changes, Nephi. Things are forever changing and moving toward their peak definition, and that is as close as we ever come to an ideal. A young person in the prime of life looks healthy and beautiful to us but young people are incomplete and old people are incapacitated by circumstances. That’s just life. But what is life? Life is change, life is a movement into and out of existence like a shooting star. We call them shooting stars because they only last an instant. They are never something you see only something you saw. “I realized that logic does not quite work where life comes into play. Logically, no variable can imply its own negation. But I see life ending in death all around me. Things change. Here today and gone tomorrow. My question then became ‘does death equal negation?’ It depends on the definition. Once a peach always a peach. A peach pit is the end of the path for every peach out there. We pick it up and we do not call it an apple. We say it was once a peach. Just as when you and I die we will leave a pile of bones but our names will still be there. “Anything that comes into existence goes out of existence but it does not imply its own negation. It is still defined as it is and was in time not space. So I got to thinking and I am reasonably certain that it is the very imperfection of the universe and its quantum particles that causes the hum and vibration of all things, that this vibration will cause any celestial body to vibrate off center and, doing so, cause it to spin. And that is why the planets and stars and galaxies all spin; but it is this act of movement that brings these very bodies into existence and eventually implies their non-existence and it is movement that does this. It’s a form of dynamism. When you have everything moving around all at once you cause friction and friction begets heat and heat changes matter. Hence, anything in movement will change, and anything in existence will eventually change sufficiently to go out of existence. Nothing in this universe is immune.” While Florenzo gabbed, Nephi took the whisk broom and wiped the table down, and then he took the bigger push broom and swept up the dust in the metal shop, making a neat pile. As he shoveled it in the big trash bin, Florenzo continued: “So I came up with a logical system to track these changes in definition from, say, an unripe peach to a ripe one, to a rotten peach to a peach pit. Come here and let me show you.” Nephi laid the broom back and went over to the table to see that Florenzo had written out the capital letters P Q R and S. After P he wrote abcd, to look this way: Pabcd, and did the same to Q, or Qabcd. “As you can see, the variables P and Q contain the precise same definitional qualities but if we say instead that Q was negated in each of those qualities, Q being not a, not b, not c, and not d, then P is equivalent to not Q. Using the tilde for not P we write ~P, which is the same as writing Q~a~b~c~d so far as P contains Pabcd. But what if P has changed its definition slightly so that it says Pabc~d, then it’s not merely a case of saying ~P anymore. P is moving toward ~P but is only one step toward it. A change has occurred in the definition of P but P is still mostly P.” At this point Florenzo threw his hands in the air. “I have tried to talk to the egg heads at the U of Utah but those jackasses are out of touch with anything that doesn’t protect their tenure or guarantee some big department grant. What do they care? I don’t have any credentials and I feel like a man trapped. These are the lamentations of a theorist.” “So,” Nephi wanted to broach the subject politely but instead asked outright “What about God?” “What about God? What about roast beef? Ask that. That’s something I can sink my teeth into. What about God, indeed. What ABOUT God?” “Well, if God exists…” “Yes, Nephi. If God exists then God dies. If God is in movement then God must face extinction.” “But you’re not taking into account ‘eternal progression.’ It’s the one thing that would keep God unchanging and eternal.” “You should hear yourself. You’re embracing a contradiction.” “How? I don’t see it--” “Is God progressing?” “Yes, forever and ever.” “If God is progressing does that imply movement?” “It would seem so…” “Movement is a change in position?” Nephi could feel something coming. Tentatively he offered “yeah…” “So a change in movement is a form of change.” “All right.” “Well, Nephi.” Florenzo threw his arms up again. One can’t be both changing and unchanging. If eternal progression is the only thing that accounts for God’s alleged and contradictory immortality then he is forever changing and not the God he was to Joshua or Paul. How can we know Him, therefore?” “We wouldn’t,” Nephi agreed. “That’s why I don’t bother with God,” Florenzo said with an air of smugness that was unavoidable. Eris approached and asked if one of them or both would mind giving her a hand a moment. They followed her to plastic fabrication where a simple white face stood on end in the wall saw. She said “the can’s out of square up in Ogden. Old Marveon quality. You had to prove you could sniff paint to hire on at that place.” “Oh, now they weren’t that bad,” Florenzo scoffed. “I knew a couple of them...” “Here,” she said. “Take that other edge and tilt it this way about a quarter of an inch.” “That much?” “I rest my case,” said Eris. “That enough?” “Bring it back just a hair,” she said. “Hold it right there and don’t budge.” She fired up the saw and sent the rotary blade from the top down, a buzz creating a cloud of white plastic dust. “That’s the only face. Just a cheap wall-mount. Bill’s up there slapping a coat of paint on it this morning and replacing all the rusted out electrical.” “What’s it gonna’ be?” Florenzo asked as they shooed Nephi from the table and laid out the plastic sheet. “Gravy Train Cowboy Grub Buffet.” “Urp,” said Florenzo. “I don’t know,” she said, grabbing a paper menu. “Bill brought this back yesterday with the measurements. Can’t be any worse than your pile of fried snot. Look, here’s Saturday through Thursday’s daily menu: chicken fried steak, beans and bacon, cornbread. Fry bread. Baked bread. Salad bar. Spaghetti on Wednesdays. Friday nights all seafood with a dozen shrimp dishes.” “Shrimp?” Nephi asked, imagining a bus ride north. “Essential cowboy fare,” Florenzo pointed out. “Come on, Gass,” he thumbed back toward the sheet metal room. “As I was saying…” he began. Kenny came into the room bearing blueprints. Amanita was with him. She was silky soft in her long bare legs and thongs and eyed Nephi with the merest gesture of friendliness. It would take an act of God, he was certain, to bring her to him and let him help her wriggle her dangles down those lovely thighs. He sighed and turned away as she looked off elsewhere. “Okay, shop philosopher!” Kenny laughed abruptly. “Are you done gabbing for the morning? I hope so because I’ve got the next big job and this one is a beaut. He spread the blueprint out on the table as Florenzo adjusted his glasses. “That’s a big sign.” “Snowville account. They’re paying us half now and half on completion. The Sleepy Time Inn wants a big bright sign to lure sleepy drivers off the interstate and into warm and cozy queen size beds and cable tv and an indoor pool and breakfast lunch and dinner and a tank of gas for your Suburban. And we are going to be rolling in the dough for awhile but spend it wisely. “From the instant I get an okay and a signature until these babies are up and shining, my profit margin does this,” as he held his palms apart and brought them slowly together. He had done it before and it was a great teaching aid, but now Nephi could not help thinking of Florenzo’s philosophy of change and his existential logic. Kenny left the blueprint on the table and walked back to the front office with Amanita in tow, the floor slapping under her flip flops as she rolled her hips along, a sight not ignored by dissolute prophet or clam-baked philosopher. At length, Nephi turned to Florenzo, who was now studying the blueprint with interest, jotting down costs for materials, and asked him “Do you believe in God?” “Not exactly,” said Florenzo though a little absently and somewhat distracted. “Okay,” Nephi turned back to his sweeping and felt no contentment at the answer. Florenzo straightened up and put his pencil in his pocket. “If there’s a God and that God is unchanging then that God must be change itself. Change is the only thing we can count on in this universe. It is itself immortal and unchanging. Such a mystery, I would have to name it ‘Enigma,’ and its symbol is the question mark,“ he said as he drew in the air with his finger, dotting it for emphasis: “The cat’s tail and his little puckered butt. I’d give anything to really know for sure.” Nephi made a smirk and went on sweeping the other side of the room around the second bench, pulling dust from under the edge cutter and the spot welder. He said “But if you knew would you be happy with that? I mean, isn’t it always the case that people never get what they want because they don’t want what they get?” Florenzo made a surprised face and laughed outright. He asked as he stroked his beard, “Okay, Mister ‘Convient Bromide,’ You want to come over for dinner tonight, meet the family?” “Me?” “Good grief, who else? My wife is making stuffed peppers, and I always have a cold beer with dinner. Helps me relax.” He winked. “Takes the burr off the day.” “Sounds like me,” Nephi said, and it seemed like such a good thing that he went ahead and starved through lunch but sat off behind the shop sitting on an old metal box as he read one of his tomes. He lit a smoke and felt grand but saw Amanita come past although she did not seem to notice him at all. When she came back the other way she must have seen him but acknowledged nothing and, he noticed with some sadness, went back into the shop. Hmph, he thought. Some things never changed. That night Florenzo drove Nephi to his Decker Lake home, a quiet suburb of toys and clutter and oil spots in the driveway. Boxes of personal mementoes half filled Florenzo’s carport and were lined up alongside the side door. The back lawn lay lumber strewn around a small vegetable garden of wilting leaves. The front lawn remained yellow although they watered constantly. Inside a baby was bawling, sick smelling in its diaper and the whole house reeked of it. The other two were in a struggle for a toy in a back bedroom. Florenzo’s harried wife came out of the bathroom slamming the door behind her, hair severely and hastily tied behind her. She moved in grubby clothes. “Didn’t you go to work today?” Florenzo asked. She looked put out. “School’s out until Monday and I couldn’t get a babysitter to go shopping and the little one’s got diarrhea, and I’m stuck riding the bus as it is.” “Alright. Alright.” Florenzo held his hands up in defense. “Dinner made?” “Are you kidding me?” “So no dinner.” “If you make it. But please,” she said as she swooped the bawling baby up in an arm and started for the back bedroom, “No hamburger gravy on white bread, again.” Florenzo made an embarrassed smile. “She’s a little stressful. Well, no stuffed peppers tonight. Sorry about that.” Florenzo made a cursory search of the kitchen cupboards and sent Nephi to sit at the cluttered table while he put on a pot of coffee and did the dishes. He made the older children help, who whined but, in a few moments they were sitting around a clean table. Such were the mysteries of human beings in the face of change, Nephi thought to himself. “Not much to work from here,” Florenzo lamented, taking a loaf of bread out of a cupboard, and a block of burger from the freezer. “Oh, Good,” said a daughter of six as she smacked her lips at Nephi, “my favorite!” “That’s not what your mother wants,” Florenzo sadly shook his head. “So let’s see if we can come up with something else. He studied several cans of vegetables, pork and beans, tomatoes, and then went to the potato bin and raked through it, finally rising with a resigned sigh. He called back to his wife “Are we out of onions?” “I don’t know…” she answered distantly from a back room. “I think so.” “Well that’s dandy,” he muttered and opened the fridge, squatted on his knees and searched the bins there and came away empty handed. He turned around and pulled out a pint of cottage cheese and opened it and sniffed it. “This might do.” And brought out a head of lettuce. From the cupboard came a can of pears. He set those aside. As he muttered to himself about the lack of materials at hand, he heated a skillet on the stove and put a little grease in it, dumped in the frozen brick of hamburger, set the heat on low and put a lid on that. He turned to Nephi and shook his head. “You know, Gass, the key to survival is the ability to improvise.” He opened the pears and set out some small plates. Into each went a leaf of lettuce, a pear on top of that and a scoop of cottage cheese into the hollow. Each child at the table got a plate, but the youngest wouldn’t touch his, complaining that he didn’t like cottage cheese. “May you live to be a philosopher, and may you lament the folly of your misspent youth,” he told the scowling twerp. He poured a couple of cups and brought them to the table, sliding one to Nephi who sat grandly awaiting his feast while he took a tiny corner of the table. Florenzo wiped his hands on his bibs and said “I’m all out of beer. As Eris would say, this is twistification.” “Don’t burn the hamburger again!” His wife exclaimed from a back room. “Oh!” Florenzo got up and turned the burger over and crumbled it, and added salt; and then scooped flour and milk into the meat now sizzling hotly. Steam arose from the pan, and Florenzo worked it around and around. He added more salt and pepper and kept tasting it. Finally he pronounced it done if anybody wanted it and served it up on slices of white bread in several more plates. His wife came in and took Nephi’s hand. “I’m Connie,” she said, and then wrinkled her nose at the feast before her, now getting chowed down with brazen masticating by Nephi, at least. “Oh,” she frowned. “hamburger gravy on white bread after all.” The old philosopher made a tragic expression toward Nephi and said “You can’t please ‘em.” “You never cook anything else!” She folded her arms and shifted her weight and nearly gave in to stamping her foot but held back. “Well,” he offered. “If you would shop once in awhile…” “What don’t YOU shop once in awhile?” She asked. Florenzo rubbed his fingers on his forehead and glanced over in embarrassment at Nephi. But Nephi had cleaned his plate, and got up for more. “At least he likes it,” Florenzo pointed out. “He’s got a cast iron stomach like you.” “It ain’t that bad,” Florenzo muttered, and looked over at his young daughter, the one aged six, who had eaten most of hers. Connie said “I’m going out for a hamburger. Any of you kids want to go?” In the flurry that followed, plates of untouched portions of Florenzo’s desperation dinner went to the counter top as several little bodies scampered after their mother. Florenzo was left watching Nephi, alone at the table, enthusiastically tearing into his fine dining. Florenzo stared ruefully off at the door and took a sip of coffee. “She’s always been this way.” Nephi offered through a mouth full of food “Maybe things wouldn’t change so much if people would.” Florenzo gave him a sour look and almost said something unkind, watching as Nephi filled his face. “She does what she wants,” he said. “I’m not her lord and master.” Nephi nodded through a mouthful of hamburger gravy. Florenzo continued. “I don’t see myself as some grand biblical patriarch telling my woman what-for every second of the day.” Nephi nodded and chewed. Florenzo egged on. “This goes right to the root of my trouble with the ‘one true church’ and the way they insist that we all live our lives their way, their bullying tactics; and hardly anyone ever stops to question the damage they may be doing, or the validity of their so-called scriptures. This whole shoulder-to-the-wheel group-think is the very reason I dropped out. I claim my right as a sovereign human being to think for myself and question the beliefs and motives of all belief systems.” “Any chance for thirds?” Florenzo took the plate, nearly wiped clean and refilled it, the hamburger gravy over a slice of white bread, and clacked it on the table before his guest, and watched with growing anger as Nephi gulped it down. “Don’t you ever question anything?” Nephi glanced up in surprise. “Don’t you ever get the feeling that you’ve been sold a bill of goods? That you’ve been lied to?” Nephi stopped eating and swallowed hard. He narrowed his eyes on Florenzo trying to see through the defiance leaning toward him, and felt suddenly anxious. “By who?” He asked. “Whom. The word is whom not who.” Nephi shook his head. “Don’t you see? When you think you have the truth handed to you on a silver platter all intellectual curiosity goes out the window. What’s the point of finding out the real reason for something if you can just say God did it and His ways are mysterious?” “I probably should get home,” Nephi announced to his half full plate. “I’ll walk you,” Florenzo said. “You’re not getting off that easy.” They left the house and wandered northward. “Tell me something, Nephi. If you’re a one hundred percent gospel-accepting Mormon, why do you read all these crazy books about flying saucers and prophecies?” They were moving along the quiet suburban sidewalk past little houses lit up like over sized toys while a warm breeze blew from the south and the smell of grass mingled with the fumes of Redwood Road. Nephi had moved on ahead. He turned back and shrugged. “I ran out of scriptures. I spent years reading those things over and over again trying to get at some truth that eluded me. I read the lines and then I read between the lines and started to think I was going in circles and then I began to understand something that seemed pretty profound at the time, at least to me...” “That you had found what? The truth?” It was a question sarcastically asked. Nephi laughed at that. “No. That I was going completely crazy. Meanwhile I’d built up quite a library of zany reading, I must admit: Flying saucers, prophecy like you said, ancient astronauts, lost continents, lost civilizations, apocalyptic beginnings and ends and predictions of hell fire. It all makes more sense, now…” “Oh!” Florenzo was suddenly very put out. “What was that again?” Nephi shuffled his feet and looked sheepish. “About three years after my dad died I dreamed he came to me and told me everything about the hereafter. He said it’s no secret. It was never meant to be. Didn’t you used to be LDS, yourself?” “Yeah. So?” “So what happened to you?” Florenzo said “somewhere between my own dad’s backhand and my mother’s wail I lost my faith. He would grab his book of Mormon and she would go after her New Testament, and then would come the hitting and screaming. At some point while running away I fell across ‘Five Great Dialogues of Plato,’ and it offered me a better solution.” He paused to relish his memory of personal redemption in a wrinkled paperback he wore in his back pocket, a yellowing book he read again and again and again. He narrowed a sideways gaze at Nephi: “So, your dad came to YOU in a dream.” “Oh, yes.” Nephi lit another smoke. “Dad said the Mormons were mostly right about eternal progression. When they say that the glory of God is intelligence they aren’t just whistling out their hineys.” Both laughed but Florenzo’s laugh was edgy. “According to Dad,” Nephi went on, “Everything, even the rocks and trees, actually especially the trees possess as much intelligence as we and a fair amount more. The stones are the flesh of our mother, and the trees her favorite children who sing for her when she sends the winds of the night to them. This is what Dad told me. The trees speak to us of Her love but we hear only the wind blowing.” “Oh, God Almighty! Okay, I understand you. The earth is our mother. That’s just all that Gaia crap you’re talking. Just more unsubstantiated assertions.” He picked up a pebble and threw it down the sidewalk. “So what? That’s my problem with you people. You accept everything at face value! Really, no offense, but what in the hell do you know about anything?” Nephi stopped and stared off into the gloom of Chesterfield. He pulled a long draw of smoke and gazed up. Strangely, he felt less anxious with a smoke in his mouth, as if appeasing the tobacco demon. She was all leaves and had sharp, cold eyes, and a demon’s indifference to suffering. Nephi said “What I know is too terrible to know. Some nights I don’t sleep at all.” “What, are you superstitious, too? Are you the kind who falls for anything?” “I said it was only a dream I had. But that’s the reason I began to read anything I could find. I even read some philosophy but it lost me.” “Well, I’ve read nothing but philosophy. And yet you stand ready to believe a dream, of all things. Right. A dream. By all means let’s believe that! So what about God? What did your dad have to say about Him?” Nephi frowned as he remembered. By now they had crossed Redwood Road and were moving north as cars whooshed past with their receding demon eyes dull red. “According to my dad He’s really literally our Father in Heaven. We often confuse Him with the God of first creation. Truth is as His children we are the least of the least of the least and this is our one chance at redemption, to go on in His light and become Suns and Planets ourselves. But we are so immersed in the evil and wretchedness of our primate ancestry that it’s a surprise to Him that so many of us make it to His presence. If we can make it past the present dispensation, then we go on after this to the next stage of our development, become as He is, one of the worlds without number. The males become suns and the females become planets in a state of music, and they are born in star nests that sound like vast hymns sung by choruses of men and women, and this music begets meaning, the meaning of which lies at the center of being, and this is sexual love. All love wrapped up in it but sexual love is the love that makes life and life is everything we are after. Sex is the chief ambition of living and that is why its fruit are set at the crux of our selves. The face is a ruse, Dad said, a lie. We are not really face to face but groin to groin. Everything else is just horseplay.” He raised an eyebrow in mock astonishment. “And it is the most beautiful thing Dad said he had ever beheld. Our own sun is God to us just as ancient people knew, and Earth is our mother.” He stamped out his cigarette. “I woke up to the possibility of girls after that,” he smiled. “I see only beauty in women and love them all.” “Can’t blame you there,” Florenzo admitted. “That’s a lot to believe, though, and I’d rather live without the burden of belief.” “I think that the Book of Mormon is a fiction that points to a great secret truth that doesn’t have to be believed. I have been trying to get to the center of it for years. I think that despite itself it may be the truest thing ever written, especially if I accept Dad’s belief that God is greater than the sum of our contradictions.” Florenzo shook his head. “You know, that’s plain irrational. I never thought I’d hear myself say this, Nephi, but you think too much, or else you dream too much. It took Darwin twenty years to cull together his data and produce his book, Origin of Species, a truly great work, if you ask me. He never called it the truth, but it comes close. Joseph Smith dashed out the Book of Mormon in six weeks and people have tried to pass it off as the word of God, ever since. And here you are with your own variation of that crazy gospel all based on a dream you had. Personally I think Darwin wrote the better book.” “So do I; but the Book of Mormon is music. Dad told me that the truth of a thing hides behind its meaning, and the meaning of a thing is in the music,” said Nephi but paused as they strolled along Redwood Road, and looked up in the clear summer sky above them at the myriad of stars distant and feeble to sight. “Every one of those little lights was once something akin to a man, some better than us and some not so. The sky is full of them and endlessly. Worlds without number. All are alive and intelligent, and almost all have planetary wives mothering their countless children. It amazes me to think of it...” “Hmmph,” Florenzo scoffed. “Just gratuitous assertions. That’s all you make. You have to believe it first to make it true. So tell me, are the Mormons right, then?” Nephi glanced over in surprise. “Right about what? I always thought for myself they made a bureaucracy of salvation and exaltation, all this adventure that is life reduced to standing in line waiting to get your papers stamped, while some authority does your thinking for you, lives your life for you so you don’t muck it up. I hated that. But when you know the truth, it doesn’t matter what anybody else thinks. You can leave that person to live for himself as he sees fit. But when you aren’t sure, then the strength of numbers is what you’re after simply to assure yourself you’re right. I always wanted to live my life as I pleased without pressure to go out and preach or make a job of believing what I thought was a moot issue anyhow. My dad told me in the dream plain as day that God is greater than the sum of our contradictions. It never mattered what we believed or what we thought we knew. Those things don’t give you a guilty conscience. What matters is how you treat other people. That’s why children go into Heaven first. We are judged not by our thoughts but our actions. He won’t be looking at our report cards. He’ll be counting our scars.” “That’s a mouthful of flumdiddle. You really believe this claptrap?” “I accept it as a dream vision, the last gift I ever got from my dear old dad. What I want to believe is that I’ll get to see the old man again and talk to him and tell him how I miss him, tell him about my life and my mistakes and victories since he left.” “Victories, eh? Florenzo scoffed. “Where’s the evidence that any such thing will ever happen?” Nephi stopped to light up again and blew smoke at the warm sky above them. Florenzo asked “When did he die? If you don’t mind my asking.” “I was fourteen at the time so...about 15 years ago.” “Cancer?” Nephi nodded. “Lung cancer,” and drew another deep puff. “You amaze me!” Florenzo said. “What kind of faith is that you’re showing?” “Who said anything about faith?” Nephi asked. “I’m like you. I’ve got nothing but questions and no answers.” “Yes, but you said—“ “I told you it was all a dream,” Nephi smiled and went on into the little neighborhood of Chesterfield along Stratford Avenue. “Dreams are all I have. See you tomorrow,” he called back. Florenzo watched him vanish into darkness as he felt himself calming down enough to realize that it was Nephi who had shown no anger at all. He was the one, Florenzo, who let it best him in a simple discussion as a shudder moved through him to think that his old religion was still so much baggage he could not slough off. His theory informed him that time and space did not really exist, that there was only movement and vibration and waves on waves and eternal change, and he suspected he had reached the glass ceiling of his intellect already, and felt that great mysteries lay just out of reach. If only… A shooting star shot to the west as he looked up, a long trail that hurtled into atomizing atmosphere in a flash of fire and instant cinders, and he realized he knew nothing at all, but at least he could be a philosopher. FIFTH NEPHI Now that Nephi Gass was no more the mere flunky at Heavenly Neon but a substantial employee, an apprentice full time, he felt himself as well to be a full partner in the beauty of the place. The pleasure became all his, Monday through Friday, stamping his card in the slot in line with the others, coming in on a Saturday half day. He loved the feel of his arms and hands that shaped and held the metal. No cold thing this sheet of iron but warm and pliant, warbling forth its song to the world as he and old Florenzo slid it in the cornice break and bent it into a box. Nephi did not mind so much these days the fact that Kenny Cross, his childhood chum spent Saturdays with other friends digging for whiskey bottles, going out into the desert with the love of Nephi’s life, the lovely Amanita Florez, magnificent as stars in myriad cluster, unspeakably beautiful but as cold and distant. She was a warm-toned girl of Mexican heritage, a tall and slender woman with long auburn hair, who moved like liquid gold traversing hallways in and out of shadow. She had bewitched and beguiled the bedeviled Nephi into daily heartbreak. What was he but a mess? He had no credentials, no prospects, only the smelly clothes that covered him and a few old books on occult matters. She had an associate’s degree in commercial art. He had a welding burn on his right fore-arm. She had run to the arms of Kenny Cross who had no need of her and that was most galling of all. He could feel the weight of life upon him as the world wound weary and the gristle of existence dangled on a thread; the dreams of boys and girls became the reconciliations of men and women, the resignation of the old in their stifled hopes. The flesh neither forgets nor forgives. Thirty years old now, Nephi saw his age as a train switch: and where to go from here? Life is not a boundless meadow but a track through unlit tunnels leading to the end of days. He had no prospects, not for love nor opportunity, only the daily noise of metal work revolving around and around, reverberating down the hallways of the sign shop. He liked to think he loved it, that the job loved him; but only a week before had Kenny fired a part timer and for the least offense. The street lay ever a paycheck away, an open pocket stroll down Redwood Road. Strange how fear manipulates the helpless into taunting the feared. Eris O’brien working in the plastic shop day after glum and silent day had sunk inside herself and spoke to no one but her brother, Wild Bill. For Kenny, however, she had surliness to offer. He would shrug and walk away and leave her to her silent tears, the blade of her razor cutting trace lines in a plastic sheet of letters while she wept and wiped her eyes on her sleeve. Nephi began to speak to Kenny as an equal, as he had when they were boys, and said to Kenny on a Friday afternoon in August, as he heard the other making plans for Saturday, “why don’t you take me out bottle hunting for once?” Kenny, who was long and lean, an old long-hair hippie from the bygone 70s, leaned way back as if to say ‘whoa,’ his eyes surprised, his mouth agape, and all he could offer was “Bottles? Never thought you had an interest, man.” He turned to Amanita, standing like a goddess of ancient myth, a roll of paper in her folded arms, perhaps in its containment the whole of the law that governed interactions of boys and girls. Her eyes were a slit, her smile superior and private. Did she study Nephi or had she gone somewhere inside her soul, a secret garden only she could gaze upon? Nephi said “I’ll admit I don’t know much about the business of bottles, but I’d love a trip to an old ghost town.” Kenny scoffed but then he nodded. “Right,” he said. “Tomorrow we’ll head out west to Salpetre on the lake, out on the west side. Y’know, it used to be a little town of salt miners in the way back when. Just a cross-roads linking no place to no where, and a couple of walls. Of course, Amanita will be going,” as he wrapped her in an arm and drew her close to him. Nephi cleared his throat. “Okay.” “Got a shovel?” “Well, no.” “Aw, hmmm.“ Kenny peered into the future. “We can help you out. Fix you up. We pick you up at your place right on top of six in the morning. So be ready to go. You know how I don’t like to wait.” In the flash of an instant Nephi felt glorified, important, invited in, and hope cried out for expression. Naturally he took it to Eris and gushed on in his excitement while Eris bent to her work. And after all that she only said “He don’t invite me no more.” The mask of smiles she wore had fallen away and she had only a scowl to show the world. Come evening Nephi wandered out of Chesterfield upon the river of ceaseless traffic, Redwood Road with its gas fumes and oiled soil, stretching forever between two seas, aligned with tawdry dwellings or shiny franchises eerily in the night. It had its bars, too, and Nephi found himself a few blocks North beyond the I-80 overpass before the entrance to the Silver Dollar with its tiny portal windows set in red brick, its honky-tonkin’, nasal lamentations from a jukebox, dirges twanging out of sour milk and soiled souls and marriage gone mildew in a leaning trailer off a long forgotten highway. A dissipated, angry barmaid slammed a glass down. “A beer for you?” Old fat Royd at the bar sat leaning, perched and greasy on his barstool, downing the suds of a pitcher of lager, and knew without a glance that Nephi had come to sit and gab again, and pushed the ashtray over to the flash of Nephi’s match. “You are the only man I know who smokes non-filters,” he said with a slap on Nephi’s back. “Going west, tomorrow,” Nephi said with pride. “Collecting bottles!” Here he pictured a harvest of whiskey bottles piled up in a wagon like a load of corn. “Where to?” Nephi studied the counter. “Kenny mentioned it…some little ghost town out on the lake…beyond, beyond…God knows where.” “Great Salt Lake?” Nephi nodded. “Likely Salpetre, then,” said Royd. “A failed salt mining enterprise, failed in a big way, catastrophically, you could say and no one would argue with you. Oh little town of Salpetre laid waste by an epidemic of the flu. Lost every single child to the graveyard on the hill that overlooks the lake and the town.” He paused to drink more beer. “The graveyard tells the tale.” “It does?” Nephi felt a slight shiver of old ghosts. “A curse was on that town. They hanged the witch that lived among them. She’d buried something at the cross-roads at the moment when the children all began to die in mid winter; and so they dragged her to the Wheelwright’s place, and there they held their guns on the wheelwright and hanged her from the cottonwood, the only tree in all that desolation. They threw a rope around the lowest limb and slapped the horse they’d put her on and so she dangled and fought for life until she suffocated. Only the wheelwright shed tears as he’d been the witch’s only true lover. They hanged that gal on purely circumstantial evidence, the wheelwright said; and he took her body down and buried it under the cottonwood, and stayed on after all the others moved away and built a monument to her, a wind chime that played a sad song. It’s all still there, a house or two, the tree, the graveyard.” “A real live witch…” Nephi mused at his beer glass. “A real dead witch, you mean. She was a Blackfoot woman, beautiful as only Blackfoot women are, and fierce too like the desert, black-eyed as a raven when it watches you. The married men would come to her in secret, leaving their pious wives alone to snore in bed, her own bed soft, perfumed, a lair for hypocrites who like to preach that love is to be gelded and regulated. Why these people get to rule the world is a mystery to me. The children were the ruse. The husbands hanged her out of dire necessity. They killed the only love they ever knew, would ever know. And so they buried their children, pushed their frumpy, nagging wives back in the wagons, and went on west beyond the Salt Flats, out into the basin and the zephyrs of old Washoe, and…” he paused to drink, “oblivion, I suppose. Only the wheelwright stayed awhile.” Nephi could only imagine the cursed place, the porous husk of useless Chesterfield soil standing in for the desolation described by Royd. A thirsty place, too, enough that Nephi ordered another pitcher, seeing himself in the mirror across the way, a isolated man beside a friend he didn’t really know, whose own dilemma must be all the lonelier, for he was never anywhere but here. The night wound around, and Nephi staggered home at closing time, South on Redwood Road, diminished traffic low enough that crickets sang out from the weeds along the pavement. Come the day like shades rolled up and flapping, and the honking horn from Kenny’s pickup, Nephi flew from sleep and sailed into his pants and shoes, wormed his way into his one shirt sweaty and smelly. He had not shaved nor eaten and the nausea of last night’s excess soured on his breath and made him wretch, and made his legs wobbly. Grabbing his baseball cap, he shoved it on his matted hair and ran out the front door facing the Northbound Jordan River, slapping it shut behind him. Kenny hollered out his window, “Get a move on, Gass! It’s after six! The day won’t wait!” Amanita slid across and put her hand down Kenny’s thigh with a slight smile as Nephi climbed into the cab. She was quite the sight in tiny cut-off jeans and long and creamy legs that made a lonely man like Nephi bite his lip in longing silence. In her bra-less tank top with her dainty nipples poking through she drove him to avert his eyes, pretend to study the world outside his window. Not a word from her, he noticed. No hello. Her eyes were only for Kenny. “Where’s your manners?” Kenny asked him. She won’t bite you. Maybe kiss you.” Amanita turned her icy reproach to Kenny then as if to say oh no she wouldn’t, as Kenny threw the truck in gear and lurched away back toward Redwood Road. “I guess not, Gass,” he laughed. “I tried though!” Nephi turned away and fought a sigh of mourning and lost that battle, and watched the town of Chesterfield awaken on a Saturday morning, a meadowlark calling on a wooden fence. But he was stuck now. He could not get out of it. All day would be like this, he thought. They stopped for gas and snacks, and headed North from there, and made a left onto I-80 Westbound out of Salt Lake County, sailing upon black ribbon in the rising heat of day, and on into Tooele Valley to the point of the Stansbury range and past that to Skull Valley toward the tiny hamlet known as Delle, a gas pump in a waste of grit and greasewood. Here strolled dust devils tall as mountains over tracts of desert spread like moonscapes into blurs of blue and gold, and endless ant bed cities striving in the glare of sunlight. Kenny pulled along the shoulder West of Delle and made a right that took them Northward over bumpy road through sage and yellow grass. Ravens flew into the sky and circled. Antelope bolted off in no particular direction. Kenny charged along the bumpy road enough that Amanita spoke for the first time: “Slow down a little.” Kenny did not seem to hear but took the truck along a hillside, climbing slowly to its crest, and then they saw as through a parted veil, the shimmering blue of the Great Salt Lake before them. Then the road went steeply down the hill and Kenny shifted back into the lowest gear and let the pickup growl its way into the ruin of the town of Salpetre. Nephi saw the cemetery first, the little wooden crosses slanted in the alluvium matted down with yellowing grass. Below, a crisscross print of streets arrayed out to the shore of a long beach. Beside a slough a house sat at the end of land, as well, close by a single tree still stood but mostly leafless now and barren. And near that the oddest thing imaginable, a great iron ball of upraised crenellations on its surface, standing slanted on a pivot, turning slowly in the breeze, and playing out a tune of chimes. A thrill of terror went through Nephi, then. He felt the presence of a ghost. Kenny stopped the truck and Nephi was out of it before the idle died. He stepped into a warm breeze moving off the lake, and strolled directly toward the wheelwright’s old home, a shambles now beside the slough of brackish black water where old planks trembled on the surface. Here as well the cottonwood tree stooped dying, beaten by the years and its thirst, most of its bark gone. Only a scant flourish of leaves high on one end still struggled, exposed wood layered in crystalline patches of salt. There stretched the low limb from which she hanged, and melancholy fell upon the face of Nephi. He turned away to see the wind chime that, according to Royd, was built by the wheelwright in honor of his murdered lady. It was a large spherical fan of blades bent so that the wind could catch them and turn them. Sufficient breeze would spin the fan a little and slowly, creating a dirge as the chimes inside played to a metal prong, a song in a minor key. The breeze had died and only blew enough to make the ball turn slightly and fall back, presenting a singsong pair of intervals to hypnotic effect, a little like a child’s swing or a creaking door. The wheelwright had painted the ball shaped fan to slow the rust and though some rust had claimed the surface here and there, overall the ball remained intact and rolled forever on its pivot making its sad lament in the howling winds that came off the Great Salt Lake. A breeze blew up at that remarkable moment turning the ball and making a sad lament to Nephi, a song between two broken hearts; and he removed his hat and held it to his heart and heard the melody erupting to the desert its eternal anguish. He had not seen Amanita coming up behind, standing only inches off, now. “Why did you do that? Why did you take off your hat?” He started at the sound of her voice and whirled to see her pointing from the hat to the slowly spinning ball. And there before him stood the all of Amanita Florez, desired profoundly, the almond eyes of resonating gold luster, the sweet face and slender form of her, the long bare legs enticing to that apex of all male longing, the golden Lamanite she was that filled his understanding with a horrible truth, that she would never have him. He walked away to stand beneath the cottonwood and gaze into it as the melody played on, as here the reason yet lingered in half life. “Her name was Louise,” he said. “Who?” Asked Amanita. “The woman they hanged from that lowest branch for witchcraft.” “You’re kidding,” said Amanita. “I don’t believe you.” Nephi donned his cap and went back to the ball that had stopped with the wind’s cessation. He turned it by hand and again the melody played its mournful and whimsical dream song. Only the wheelwright had truly loved Louise, the Blackfoot witch. “According to the story, the man who built this wind chime did it to honor the woman they hung, and tried to stop the hanging but took a bullet and nearly died from it. He was the last to leave the town, stayed long enough to build this monument and off he rode into the sunset which would be, I guess, Nevada somewhere…” But Amanita had walked away, and Nephi saw her standing near the kneeling Kenny digging in the heat of the late August morning, sweating already as he struggled scraping the dirt at the base of the hill. Nephi went to join them and asked “Why here, Kenny?” “Because it’s a crapper, Nephi.” “I don’t get you.” “BECAUSE, Nephi.” More quietly then he said, “Men’s wives just as nowadays tended to frown on drunken husbands, so their men had to keep their drinking a secret. They would lower their bottles down these holes on strings and let them dangle, and when they wanted a snort with their whiff of waste, well, this is where they came to. Married to the sorts of old gals they were, not unlike my ex, they couldn’t help but drink a little now and then. And when they finished a bottle they just dropped it down the chute and started over.” Kenny used a short spade and his hands to rake the soil up and out but though he dug deep no bottle manifested any presence. “Sure,” he said. “You’d take it for granted that some drank more than others.” Nephi gazed beyond to take the town into his sight, saw the streets that climbed the hillside and, above them on the hilltop, tiny wooden crosses standing at the cemetery. He stepped to the pickup truck and took the other spade from the bed and hiked up the hillside to get a better view of the street layout, still visible after more than a century of abandonment. He climbed to the cemetery itself and turned to gaze out over the vastness of the inland sea of brine, a shimmering turquoise toward Stansbury Island, beyond that, the supine beast of Antelope Island and, enwrapped in mist, the Wasatch mountains towering in the distance. Turning his gaze back to the town around him Nephi studied the roads below until he noticed the faintest track of a dugway winding along the hillside from away to the south east around the lake, indeed a separate route into the town, and could not help but notice with a little leap in his hope that it crossed the road they’d taken over the hill and did so not twenty yards east of the truck. He climbed down the hillside all the while his eyes upon that self same spot lest he lose it, so close it was to mere illusion or delusion. All the same as he approached it the delineation become quite faint, faint enough that he had to climb the hill once more to see it again. This time he thought to focus on a nearby stone to set his bearings, and entered the spot once more. Judging the center as closely as he could he stabbed the hard ground with his spade and brought up a bit of the barren place. A few brine flies scattered but settled back as if curious to see a fool digging the gritty dry soil. He stopped a minute for a smoke and contemplated the nature of his effort. He was not after bottles now but something else, something that might afford him the meaning denied in a lifetime of yearning just out of reach. He smoked the stub away and threw it on the ground, picked up his spade and went after digging again, tapping down and scraping up a lot of dry hot dust. It occurred to him that many others very likely might have come to dig upon this very spot. The story had to be quite old. Kenny stopped his own digging to watch in wonderment, got up from his knees and walked over with Amanita to see for himself a thing that defied his understanding: “What are you doing?” Nephi paused to remove his sweaty shirt and whipped his forehead with it. Glistening and sweaty he dug the more. “You ain’t gonna’ find any bottles in the middle of Main Street,” he said. “Never know,” said Nephi, still digging. “You’re an idiot,” Kenny told him flatly with a peevish smirk to Amanita and a sorry shake of his head slowly for emphasis. Nor was there any denying the disdain she showed the fool, as well. She did not believe him but she did believe in Kenny, and walked hand in hand with him back toward his own dig. It was at that moment Nephi’s spade touch glass, unmistakable tinkling that brought Kenny to a sudden stop and whirled him around as he let go of Amanita’s hand. Nephi took his pocket knife and pulled apart the longest blade, got down on his knees and leaned forward to find the boundaries of the glass and part them from the hard ground. “A shard, no doubt,” said Kenny, who had come back. “You’re likely right,” said Nephi with a grunt but still excavating with high hope. “I’ll be done here in a minute and I’ll join you after.” “Naw,” said Kenny. “Just stay here. Take all day!” He went back to his own hole with Amanita still beside him. Nephi continued to work the knife on his knees. So far no breakage and that seemed promising. He widened the hole around the glass until he felt the neck of it and slid the knife around the top and realized he had an entire bottle in outline, a foot and a half into the hole. Why had no one seen this before? It was mystifying. Finally the whole of the bottle lay before him but it would not budge. Carefully he slid the knife blade under the base and pried as gently as he could. It gave and Nephi brought the intact bottle from the hole and held it to the sunlight. It was full and corked as well, and unbelievable. He gazed into its golden essence bubbling slightly, effervescent like a spring in benevolent daylight. He could feel another presence next to him and turned to see no one. A trick of mind? He felt a sudden clawing of his soul and felt himself in a dark tunnel and no exit, the presence of his demon, beside and in him. For a moment he panicked and shook at the knees. Kenny had seen the entire event unfolding and got to his feet, and dropped his shovel running to Nephi. “You clever little man!” In a moment he and Amanita both stood starry-eyed before the bottle in Nephi’s hands, watching as Nephi wiped the dust away with his soiled shirt. Amanita turned to Kenny: “Is this a common thing?” “Oh, no,” he told her. “Never.” “Never? Really?” Nephi raised his eyebrows. “Mind if I hold it a minute?” Kenny was like a kid now, coveting a prized toy. And Nephi had so long assumed it was law to give in to Kenny, as he had when they were boys, as he did now working for the man, he simply did as Kenny asked. Doing so however cleared his delusions as he felt an argument surging up inside. Kenny studied the bottle for a long time, saying finally “It looks to be an entire fifth of Valley Tan.” Nephi watched him and grew angrier. He asked “Now may I have my bottle back?” Kenny shot him a look. “Your bottle?” He shook his head: “No. No. All finds are mine. Those are the rules. That’s the way it works out here.” He stepped away, cradling the fifth and walked toward the truck, slowly and carefully. The truth of the matter sank deep like an anchor in the pit of Nephi’s groin, the old weakness, the longing for things and the defeat that met him every time. Must everything be given up to Kenny? Who wrote the rules that gave the inheritance to him? The sign company? The woman Nephi loved more than he loved his own life and now the bottle, too? Must he be defeated forever until death took him in its final disappointment? Then a miracle occurred and out of nowhere, from the least source he could imagine. Amanita stepped forward with a pout on her face: “You told me that I could keep whatever I found.” Kenny said “Sure you can, Baby.” “Shouldn’t that go for Nephi too? It’s only fair.” Kenny stopped at the bed of the pickup and stood for a long time gazing down at something past the bottle, trying to think his way out of a sprung trap. He turned back at Nephi with a low frown on his face, and Nephi feared he might drop the bottle on the ground and break it for spite. Instead he carried it back and laid the bottle in Nephi’s hands: “She’s right. You won it fair and square. Ain’t every day you come across a hundred year old bottle of bourbon. It wouldn’t be right for me to take what’s yours.” He tried to grin but a sense of doom drew the lines on his face. “Happy now, Amanita?” “You made those rules, yourself.” “Fine,” he said. “We’ll just go and dig some more, won’t we?” He retrieved his spade: “Many a bare butt met the moonlight in this little town. That means more than a few out houses. Just have to find the old pits and dig.” Nephi did not wish to dig and so sat under the cottonwood cradling the bottle, wondering at the contents, eager to pop the cork and throw back a swig. He did love bourbon. His grandfather taught him the ways, an old Germanic cowboy who had driven cattle from the Canadian border to North Texas. He liked his beer ice cold as he got old, even after he had given up the bourbon, and had been baptized and taken Nephi’s grandmother through the old Salt Lake Temple. Nephi loved his visits to the house, with a cooler full of local lager, a can in secret handed to the teenaged boy: “Here you go, Neeph. Don’t show nobody—“ The breeze picked up as afternoon moved in to cool the sticky sweat of his chest and arms. He had wrapped the bottle in his shirt and set it at his feet. The chimes began to sound again their mournful dirge, the great ball spinning momentarily. Nephi got up and went to it and turned it with his hands, speeding the song along as he did so, hearing it play as mysteriously and dreamlike, sending through him feelings of agelessness. He spun it hard and went off twirling to its rhythms through the sand and low brush. “Can it, Nephi!” Kenny yelled across the way. He was on his knees again digging with fury. But the ball continued to play, and Nephi saw that Amanita was not there beside Kenny. She was at the ball, spinning it on her own, squinting at Nephi while she did so with an inscrutable smile that escaped his understanding. All the same she seemed as enchanted as he. She said to Kenny “What’s it matter?” Kenny climbed to his feet aroused and angry and threw his shovel down: “There ain’t no bottles in this town!” Nephi said to Amanita “He should check the house.” “Why?” “Because the man who built that ball you’re turning lived in that house. He built the wind chime as a monument to her.” “That witch they hung?” “It would be enough to make ME take up drinking.” “You already do. So who’s YOUR witch?” He met her eyes and looked away with a shrug. “Oh, Nephi, don’t,” she said. Kenny descended upon them, and walked with purpose to the base of the cottonwood tree where he reached down and tore the bottle from Nephi’s shirt, and cast the shirt way. “No way you deserve this bottle, Nephi. You could never appreciate it like I would. I’m taking it away from you for your own good and putting it in my collection where it needs to be.” An instant had gone by but Nephi plunged into his boss still stooped over and knocked the bigger man to the ground at the base of the dying tree and reached down to fetch the bottle. Kenny came back up and grabbed it to so that each held to it, and twirled around and around with Nephi, each trying to wrest it from their mutual grasp as Amanita looked on with disgust. The wind chime played as the wind picked up again providing a melody to play the dance for struggle, the bottle of firewater the prize to the winner. Amanita stepped between them. “Stop!” She commanded. “Kenny, if you want me then drop it! Let him have his precious bottle.” Then more gently she said “you have me.” Kenny let go and asked “what do you say to that, old friend?” “Just a dream,” said Nephi. “All she ever was.” Amanita turned to him and smiled bitterly. Nephi found his shirt and wrapped the bottle in it, fetched his spade and followed them back to Kenny’s truck. The shovels went onto the bed with a violent clanging and Kenny motioned to Nephi. “You too, Gass. It’s over with you and me. I don’t need friends like you.” Nephi climbed in the bed with his bottle and rode the way home under the merciless sun of afternoon, the bumpy dirt road that knocked him all about, the hard wind whipping from the open ride as they hit the freeway eastward. Still, he lay upon the hot bare metal of the bed and held his treasure close protecting it within his filthy shirt. He looked away to the west and felt a gnawing in his throat, the hurt, the loneliness of himself that never went away. He wished he had a friend, a friendly word. There was not a smile for him, and Amanita seemed gone forever now, a joke that wasn’t funny in the least. The sense of loss built up inside him structures of a bleak cathedral on a plane of empty longing for one defeated soul for whom the grave seemed liberating. Where is there love for me, he wondered. Kenny’s pickup stopped at the corner of Stratford and Redwood Road and threw gravel at him as he climbed out, lurching its way back onto pavement, hurtling off in clouds of dust. So Nephi had to walk the last half mile to home, the dingy streets of Chesterfield where scruffy children played and called each other in the distance. He walked the long last road home and found his door ajar and slightly off its hinge but went inside and left it that way, turned the fan on in his bedroom window and kicked his shoes off. He set the bottle on the end table and fell asleep in the cooler air of throbbing, mechanical wind. Late that night he came awake in darkness and reached over to the bedside lamp. He thought he saw a glowing phosphorescence in the bottle and took it in his hands, and peered inside to see the tiny ghost within the slightly bubbled glass. Getting up he searched the kitchen for the cork screw he knew he owned, and finally found it under the sink cupboard. He screwed the screw into the brittle cork and pulled but a long while passed before he inched it out beyond the stem where it had left a ring of residue. He sniffed the contents and thought well then that is bourbon. Sour mash corn whiskey it was and a soft flavor to it. It was Valley Tan he held, Brigham Young’s own alchemy. He realized something. The cork had been pulled before. By whom? The witch? The wheelwright? He took his favorite shot glass from the drawer of the end table, a decorated glass with a fine engraving of the Salt Lake Temple etched into it. He poured a shot and held it up and sniffed it again and it seemed fine. So he went ahead and sipped it, and then he knocked it back and felt the usual burn of bourbon in the gut, followed by a soft sensation of warmth and comfort. He had not eaten. He realized he was starving but as he got up he saw that he was not alone in the room. A woman stood in shadow at the doorway, a feminine being angelic in her beguiling beauty, tall and dark, the image of a goddess. But the old fear gripped him and he was certain his demon stood before him free to destroy Nephi’s soul. A hideous vision overwhelmed him and he sank back. “Please…” he managed to say. “I am not your demon but a friend,” she told him. “Sleep a little while and I will wait for you. No one can harm you.” “Who are you,” he asked. “Are you Louise?” No answer but she touched his lips with a finger. Sleep came then, a strange interlude of dreaming, and he knew then that her name was truly Louise. “I think you are beautiful,” he said. “Do you know me?” she asked. “Will you help me?” “I would never have harmed you,” he said with a wince. “No, not you. And that, my dear boy, is the first commandment.” She came to him and sat on the edge of the bed and held him to her breast, embracing him, and said “I know you as my own. You will help me find our Father. You will help me into His kingdom. “I-I’m afraid to,” he admitted. “I’m afraid of the dark.” A door opened, however, and Nephi stepped through it into her perfect presence, and felt the intense rush of pure love like a strong elixir, love without condition, shining love. The demon that dogged him had to be faced and would be. So long as she loved him he could do it. GODS OF THE HIGH DESERT He had been promoted to sheet metal apprentice and the freewheeling days of early on had drained away to reveal the grime of his true nature, his indolence and lack of discipline, his inability to learn easily, and now Nephi Gass perched precariously every day when he got up to trudge off to the place he dreaded most, the sight of Heavenly Neon. An angry outburst would see him in the street, and he feared most the humiliation and the financial straits. But he feared as well the jibes and insults he endured, threats of firing. Just last week Kenny had fired him three times and hired him back all three, saying only “get back to work,” in a growl as he hunched over his drafting table. The anxiety whispered to him “walk away” but he found himself in near jitters clocking in all the same Monday thru Friday and half days Saturday. Florenzo Weed had become dour and silent behind his beard, rolling his eyes heavenward to see the younger flunky enter the metal shop. As well, little could be had from Eris O’Brien who had gone deep within herself and her work, hiding from the lot and showing only a plastic face for a face of her own. “Morning, Eris.” “Morning…” she replied and that was mostly it. All blank faced seriousness she was, her pony tail wagging behind her almost angrily as she slid a sheet of Acrylite into the wall saw and knelt to nudge it along. He suspected all were disappointed in him and sighed to himself. Yesterday, Monday, studying the blueprint, all blurs to Nephi, he had asked “So what are we doing?” “We’re erecting a sign,” Florenzo had told him a day or so ago. “You know what an erection is, don’t you? Picture the little god sitting cross-legged. Think of a fist sprouting out of the ground to which we affix an open hand of pure light,” and his eyes went mock-wild. This morning Florenzo greeted him with “Let’s get this done,” and did as he usually did, pointed without speaking as if Nephi could read his mind, but Nephi knew this time and went for the right-handed snips and brought them to Florenzo as he drew an 8 inch hole in the bottom end of the Snowville Account. “Hammer and screwdriver,” and then Nephi watched as Florenzo punched a hole in the center of the drawn circle and began to work the snips around counter clockwise from the punch hole. A circular scrap of paintlock tossed off, and now Florenzo pointed to the inch and a half frame he’d welded the evening before. Nephi picked up his end of it and set it against the metal flange. “The other way,” Florenzo said tiredly. “That’s right,” Nephi mumbled and turned it over. Florenzo tossed him the wide clamps and Nephi struggled with the slippery steel to pinch metal to metal. “Try not to dent the sheet,” Florenzo said, and came down to readjust the clamp away from the very end. “We have to drill a hole right there.” He plugged in his electric drill, grabbed his riveter from the tool box and pulled a handful of rivets out of the rivet bin and piled them in front of Nephi who looked on mystified. “Think you can handle a riveter?” “What do I do?” “Put a rivet in the rivet gun, slide the other end in the hole I drill and keep squeezing until you hear it snap. Better start catching on now because you will be doing a lot of riveting by the time this beast gets done. This is the Snowville account and a big old sign, a god of a sign. I just hope we can get it built in time. Hold this chalk line about an inch down from the edge.” As Nephi held the end, Florenzo pulled the line taut and snapped it. Then he went along and made one foot marks with a pencil. After that he started drilling little 1/8” holes. “What are you waiting for?” “Rivet?” Florenzo motioned with a low bow to the far hole: “Froggie went a courtin’ he did ride…” and hummed over the hum of his drill while Nephi fought the first rivet down the barrel of the gun and struggled to insert it past the burred edge of the tiny hole. He held it loose and squeezed and squeezed with both hands but nothing happened. “Open it up again. The handle. Spread it wide and squeeze again.” Nephi did so and this time he felt the stem pop free and slide down the back of the barrel. “That’s why you sweep,” Florenzo said then noticed the head of the rivet sticking out of the hole and went to his box for a chisel. “Never time to do it right,” he said, sarcastically, “but always time to do it over,” as he made a clean tap with the hammer and cut the rivet away. He took his drill and pushed the rivet out the other end. “Let me show you what you’re doing. You do it this way,” and he slammed a new rivet through the hole and held the riveter against it hard and squeezed quickly twice until a clean snap parted stem and rivet. “Like that,” and he handed the riveter to Nephi. So Nephi followed behind him, conscious and clumsy of every move he made not realizing until they were nearly done that he had gotten into the swing of it after all. “I always loved these big electric signs,” Nephi said. “We traveled a lot when I was a tiny kid out on the high desert. I don’t know to this day what my old man was after. But I remember I’d see a light in the far distance out on the edge of nowhere, and it was such a pretty light too, and we’d get closer and see it was a big electric sign standing there like some kind of happy god; and I know this is gonna’ sound silly but I always found it to be reassuring.” Florenzo said “Nothing silly about it. Actually, that’s what they’re there for. Gods of the high desert. Interesting image, Nephi. Some religion, though. This looks nice. Think it’ll hold?” And he picked up the braced piece and shook it. “Now we have to trim the side panels and join them to this one.” Nephi watched as he trimmed back the flanges by an inch and cut them at 45 degrees so that a long tongue stuck out. He carried the piece to the cornice break and shoved it in until it stopped at the cut and told Nephi to cramp it down and bend it up to forty five degrees. But Nephi over bent it a little, causing a shadow at the seam. After studying the mishap and stroking his beard, Florenzo decided it was easily fixable, tapped the tongue on upright to ninety degrees. Then he did the same to the other end. He used pliers to bend back the metal flanges and slid the tongue between the sheet metal and angle, drilled a couple of holes and waited while Nephi applied two rivets and then worked the other panel the same way. “Now comes the top,” he said. A similar angle-iron brace went into the top piece but no hole was cut this time. They joined the pieces together until a large 8 by twelve foot square took up the table and extended past it. Lunch had come and gone by now and afternoon beamed through the open bay door. Nephi admitted he was starving, and Florenzo looked at his watch. “Dang, he said. “Where’d the time go?” He took his lunch box down and found a seat on the empty bench across the way. He took out his thermos and a thick sandwich. “What about you?” Nephi checked his wallet and found all of a dollar bill. “Guess I’ll go hungry.” He went outside and lit a cigarette and watched a pair of small spiders chase each other in a web that stretched across a rusted sign can laying down in the yellowing weeds. The shade of a Chinese elm offered little comfort but Nephi took it and sat on a cinderblock, watching as the big rig lurched from the street, making a left into the driveway as Wild Bill brought it slow parading to a stop not ten feet away. He got out and saw Nephi. “Hey, Kitten. Doin’ nuthin’? Help me out here.” Nephi’s stomach fluttered and growled in protest but he got up to confront Bill. “What do you want me to do?” Bill had climbed upon the truck bed and was striding along. “Why don’t you go screw yourself?” He laughed. “Fine,” Nephi said and turned away. “Where do you think you’re going? Get up here and help me with this sign!” Nephi beheld a small white can leaning on a slender pole cut away with acetylene. It was an old-style neon can with a metal face and punched holes and neon standoffs. It had an oval shape nicely formed and held with Pittsburgh seams, about six by four feet. Wild Bill loosened the ropes that held it to the truck bed and slid it over to the edge. Like a nimble cat he hopped down and said “On a count of three: one, two…” and lifted the can from the truck and Nephi strained under the weight of it as they lowered it to the ground. “There’s a piece of junk,” said Bill. “What do you want me to do with it?” Nephi asked. “Why don’t you shove it up your butt?” Came the suggestion, and a loud laugh. Bill marched inside and Nephi sat back down on his personal cinderblock and lit another smoke. He glanced at his watch: ten minutes left of his so-called lunch. Ah, to be anywhere else, to be anything else, to get up and leave and start over doing what he was meant to do, simple custodial work and not another thing else. How he wanted to quit and do nothing at all but read for a month, laze about in libraries looking for that one elusive book, the book of answers to the mysteries whose centers revealed themselves only in his dreams, like lovers in the shadows desiring him and calling to him. He thought of Amanita Florez and saw her face before him like a vision of ambrosia dangling on the tongue in cloistered psyche, and he longed to lay with her in tall grass under the stars serenaded into sleep on a whisper of ancient trees in the borders of a high pasture. At that instant none other came around the corner carrying a clipboard, pausing to clear something from under her feet as only flipflops adorned them. “Kenny’s looking for you,” She said. “I’m having my lunch right now.” “All I know is he sent me out to find you and it’s important.” Nephi stomped his smoke away and followed inside to find Kenny leaning against the door of the neon room waiting for him. He asked “Do you remember what I hired you for?” “To clean up?” “That’s right. Like empty these bins and sweep the floor. Little things like that, right?” Nephi felt a shiver pass through him and he glanced over to see Amanita’s unreadable expression. She looked right at him and then turned to her fingernails. Wild Bill came striding up from the back. “There you are!” His eyes were for Nephi alone. “Didn’t I tell you that sign was junk? What’s it mean when I say that a sign is junk?” Nephi shook his head. “It means it goes out to the junk pile!” “So that’s one more thing you didn’t follow through on,” said Kenny with exaggerated hand flinging. Gass, what am I gonna’ do with you?” “It’s my lunch hour,” Nephi managed to squeak. “Oh, God forbid we bother a man on his lunch hour. You are here for me completely or you are not here, period. You understand?” “Sure I understand.” But Kenny had one more thing to say and it came on the wings of the cruel destroying angels, the liberation and relief of finality: “You’re fired.” Nephi bowed his head and reddened. Aw, the tears he must hide now, the trembling and shame the others must not see. He met no eyes but felt them boring into him from all directions as he walked to the punch-clock and timed himself out for the day. He said nothing as he went through the door in the front office but heard Wild Bill saying “Cross, you didn’t have to do that.” As Nephi walked out the door and kept walking; yes, boy, keep walking. Forget the bus, forget everything. Walk until you drop and die there and let the snow cover you up. Tears came but he fought them back. They came again and he let them go as he kicked a piece of pavement along. Kicking horse apples, that’s what they called it. Payday was Friday and he would have to face that last humiliation but hopefully, by then, he’d be working again. He walked and walked until he made his way to the Silver Dollar, paused at the door remembering he had no money, but pushed on in. Royd was at his usual spot pouring a pitcher, cigarette smoke rising at his ear and greasy black hair from an upright elbow. Nephi took the stool beside him and nodded at the angry dispirited waitress who plopped a schooner down before him as she moved on. When she came back he said “Just the one. I’m down today.” “You look it,” she said and filled it on the house. Nephi gave up his one and only dollar to the astonishment of Royd who said. “You sorry sack. Hate to see a man that way. I’ll buy the next round.” “Know any new jokes?” Nephi asked. “Well this guy goes into see his boss one morning and he’s rolling a ball of whatever around in his thumb and finger like this,” and he held up his fingers. “So he’s rolling them around and around and the boss wants to see it, so the guy hands it over; and now the boss is rolling it around in his fingers and stops to look at it. And then he smells it like this…sniff sniff. And then takes it and tastes and bites it a little and lets it roll around on his tongue, you see.” Royd made a show of just that. “And so the boss takes it out of his mouth and studies it for a long time and finally hands it back to the employee and asks ‘so where’d you find it?’ And the employee says ‘funny thing. I was in the shower this morning and found it hanging out my--’” The waitress interrupted with a yell of shock. She had leaned forward listening to the story and slapped the counter with a loud guffaw and said “That’s the best one yet!” Nephi laughed at it too while Royd poured his glass, and then took a delicious long swig, and thought again and laughed all the more, laughed until he cried. Royd patted him on the back. “Boy, sometimes your best friend is an understanding waitress and an ice-cold beer. Did I tell you the one about…” Late in the evening Nephi staggered home to find a message folded and stuffed in his screen door, and opened it and read as well as he could but the writing was gibberish and he let it fall in the weeds. He went inside and pulled out a frozen entrée and shoved it in the oven and set the timer, fell on his bed and went to sleep. He awoke to the buzzer and ate the slippery blandness and went back to bed again. No reason to drink the Valley Tan, and so he fell asleep without setting the alarm and awoke to a high sunrise and the heat of the day making him sweat under sheets. He arose and removed his clothes and puttered about his ramshackle dwelling in his underwear with the windows and the door wide open for the breeze while he made instant coffee and searched the fridge for something, anything, anything, anything, and settled on the last egg. This he broke through the hole dug out of a piece of bread and fried it in oil, flipping it over and over while the coffee water boiled. Today he would make it but tomorrow and the next day would be oatmeal for the next couple of days until payday. After that he would cash his last check and go stuff himself at a buffet. An hour later, bathed and dressed in decent clothes, shaved as well as he could shave given the physical state of his razor, Nephi left his home and wandered west back down the parkway to Redwood Road. He boarded a bus and went on into town this time, watching as Heavenly Neon lay peacefully under the shade of its elms as if taking a nap. There it was, another notch on his belt of failure, and he felt the lowness that came of that knowledge. He must start over yet again. But no one would hire him, and all his remonstrations fell to heads shaking sadly. He needed a day job so he could take full advantage of mass transit as he owned no car, but they only wanted night help or even graveyard help; and if he took that job and worked from dusk to dawn then he would never see Amanita ever again. For the next two days that was all he heard. He told them thank you no, and rode the bus back down the length of Redwood Road and got off more or less across the street from Stratford Avenue and walked into Chesterfield a beaten man, and made his way along its back roads to the dwelling that faced the Jordan River. He collapsed on his couch and slept until late in the morning. Wasn’t much, Nephi’s home, a duplex he had once shared with his cousins who were now moved on to more palatial circumstances. A quiet Mexican woman rented the other side with a brood of eerily quiet children. Occasionally, through the battered walls he heard the occasional scream and scolding as a tiny arm went out of its socket but mostly they were deathly still over there. The place faced the river. As one entered the door to the living room, the kitchen sat straight back and the toilet next to that with a small high window facing west. To the right lay the bedroom, and all other windows faced east. On Friday morning, a payday he would just as soon forget, Nephi climbed out of bed still dressed in his best clothes and went to the cupboard where the last of his provisions sat in a cardboard cylinder. Oatmeal, the breakfast of men without means. How he longed for a long sausage right about now, eggs over easy, steak and steak sauce, coffee coming on a regular basis. His stomach whined and he lit a smoke, and lit the burner with the same match and started water to boil. Oatmeal and instant, what a life. He sat sweating in his polyester slacks until it occurred to him to take the sticky things off, and his tie and white shirt, all wrinkled now and smelling of his sweating torso. He hung them out to the breeze and tiptoed around the place in his socks and underwear. So what to do today? He had no bookshelf just a pile of books in the living room at the foot of a lumpy couch and found one that read well and brought it back to the table, a nicely written paperback about the Nazcal lines and how they were landing grids for ancient air travel. He imagined the Nephites flying over the Andes in hot air balloons shaped like inverted pyramids and loved the fetching thought, and was lost in a dream of flight when a knock came at his door. Eris O’Brien entered the door at that point and took the chair opposite. She asked “Why ain’t you been into work?” “Would you like a cup of instant?” He got up to find the one more clean cup. “And why ain’t you dressed?” You quit on us, Nephi?” “You heard. Kenny fired me.” “No he didn’t. He just blurted out his foolishness. An hour after you walked out here came Florenzo wondering what had happened to you. Kenny said you were worthless and Florenzo said you’d been working for him all morning and that he needed you on that big sign. He said Kenny was full of it right to his face and that you were a good employee.” To Nephi’s suddenly trembling lip she added “We all do, and so does Bill, and so don’t think his jokes mean anything. He felt real bad about it. So come on back to work.” “I’m afraid to.” “Nothing’s gonna’ happen. I don’t know what went on between you and Kenny, and I don’t care but I like you. You’re a good guy and deserve better than him.” “You think so?” “Come on. Let’s get you dressed.” She followed him into his bedroom and rifled through his dresser drawers trying to find some work clothes. “These all you got? Time to visit a Laundromat.” If she noticed any sudden blossoms trying to burst through his shorts she said nothing, but winked and tossed his pants at him and a pair of socks. Found a shirt and wiped the wrinkles down. “Here you go,” she said. “I’m late.” “I already clocked you in.” She winked again. “You got an extra change of duds to take along in a sack?” “Why?” She went about gathering what she could and folded the lot and stuffed it all in a plastic sack, an impromptu suitcase. He followed her out the door to the service truck and got in. She gunned the engine and spit gravel at the river, flew down to the Parkway and drove like a menace toward Redwood Road. Soon enough came the stomach-clenching sight of Heavenly Neon more hellish than heavenly, now. “‘Bout time!” Wild Bill bellowed when Eris pulled into the parking lot of Heavenly Neon and stopped in a plume of dust. “We got a hole to dig, boy, you, me, Florenzo and Eris.” He threw an arm around Nephi. “Nice work on that can, by the way. Florenzo was sure proud. You kids eaten’? Let’s grab a burger on the way up, then.” “What about the rest of the sign?” “Nice of you to ask. She’s done and ready to hang. But here’s the best part. We get a free weekend stay in Snowville, free food, free use of the pool, and the sign is gonna’ shine across that barren waste like a star of Bethlehem, ain’t that right, little Sister?” And brother and sister shared a sad lament: “Hard is the fortune of all woman kind! They’re always controlled, they’re always confined! Confined by their parents until they are wives! Then slaves to their husbands all the rest of their lives!” They sang as one and laughed at themselves for the song, and Nephi smiled at both and nodded. He realized he could love Eris as easily as he desired the indifferent Amanita, she who held his heart in a clinch of despair, and watched Eris moving so nimbly and quick, so sweet and desirable. As they loaded up the last of the equipment, Wild Bill walked around the big rig, testing the tires and then hopped in the driver’s seat. “This is livin’,” he said. It’s a signman’s life for me!” And he lurched the droning engine into gear and took off down the driveway for Redwood Road and made a left turn. “I wish that stupid fool would listen to me,” Florenzo said. That face is too high and wide to withstand a high wind without added support, but he wouldn’t let me build a simple Lexan brace to hold it in at the center. Says it’s ugly. I don’t see it.” “Maybe later,” Bill said. “Meanwhile the so and so did something right, anyhow. Besides, it’s his funeral,” and he pulled an envelope from his vest and handed it across Eris to fall into Nephi’s lap. Nephi took it up and opened the contents. It was a load of cash. “It’s your pay. We made him do it, cash your check for you, the old buzzard. Count it. You got a raise and a bonus. Your stub’s right there.” “It’s like Christmas day,” Nephi grinned. “You paid your dues. You earned it,” Florenzo said. “You’re not a flunky anymore, but a full fledged sheet metal apprentice. You CAN thank me for that.” The following days were wonderful. They spent the rest of Friday and into the evening digging a hole seven by seven by seven feet, and plunged a 24 inch pipe down it and buried it in concrete the following day. On Sunday they sleeved a smaller pipe into that to thirty feet high, and set the sign down into the smaller pipe. Florenzo welded the two sleeves together around the cradle and joined the wires, and by then evening had softened the sky again. The great sign lit up the desert all around and indeed it was like a god to Nephi and he could feel the whispers of the warm night on the raised hairs of his neck as he saw the parking lot illuminated blue and yellow. He stood in awe, one of four gazing upon the presence of the Divine. Florenzo went back to the truck and brought out a camera, and took several snapshots of the newest god of the high desert, laughing how he told the others he’d gotten the idea from Nephi. Then they retired to their rooms. Come Sunday night Nephi showered and went to bed but could not sleep. He dreamed of Amanita but then he thought of Eris and realized something had eluded him. For a long time he lay abed trying to summon up the courage to rise. Finally he did so and walked across the way to Eris’ own door in his underwear and quietly knocked on it. No answer. He knocked again but there was nothing. Where could she be, he wondered. He climbed into his pants and shirt, and went down the hall to stand at the entry to the café. She was in a corner drinking coffee with Florenzo and Bill, swapping stories. She glanced up and waved. Nephi waved back and went to his room. He opened the curtains and sat staring out and up at the bright blue sign of SLEEPY TIME INN, yellow moon on a deep blue sky of little yellow stars. In a flash of understanding he saw the truth, that human beings erect the gods, and that those gods were not merely cynical shadows of human selves but real and terrible to behold. The alchemy of desire, small seeming, nonetheless creates gods too many to number and too great to ignore. A waking dream of Amanita’s long legs came to him and he parted them in a vision of wretched desire and saw himself break through between them to the pungent place he had once touched on a summer’s night long ago when she had asked him to. He wormed his way within as she closed her eyes and breathed in rhythm to the waving oceans. He sat up straight, his miracle spent in the sock he’d worn all day. He served his own demanding god, didn’t he, the true god of men, the squatting god with its great fist of creation. But which of that duality was that god? The image of a man or his overwhelming monuments? One was god and one was servant, but which? Sudden weakness came on a little dirge of melancholy, and Nephi knew the answer all too well, and the shame of it rode him on a whirling dust devil of despair. The gods must thank us for our generosity, he said to himself and drifted into a sound sleep, and did not hear later in the night as Eris came tapping quietly on his door. A VAST CATHEDRAL At home in his hovel on a hollow night in October, Nephi found he was unmoored from his physical being and hung a few feet above it. He had partaken of the Valley Tan, just a jigger at a time, and stood on the threshold of an entirely new domain and felt the wonderment that anyone should know. He was the recipient of special knowledge and went forth night after night in search of Louise, the Blackfoot witch, who had given him the power of astral projection, and who now awaited in an anonymous sea of faces while he hurried by, a ghostly presence in the world of temporal beings. And yet he could not deny the presence of evil that came like a vile wind through the newly open door. It came in waves of paranoia, the sickening fear that his very soul could be yanked away and destroyed and he felt helpless and alone in the face of the very faceless thing that hovered there in the very umbra of shadows, Hell’s darkness. The Valley Tan seemed to allow it in, the sense that nothing was his, all forfeit and him sent to perdition for the mere act of drinking the whiskey that gave him the power of astral projection. A great and terrible menace loomed about him, and he only felt best when he didn’t drink the Valley Tan. Still… He wondered what is a life that floats above the bed? Is it a dream or a new awakening? Nephi knew that he was still him but he turned around to see his physical form asleep, so deeply asleep that he seemed still as death. So the Valley Tan imparted such gifts, that he was able to move, to open doors and ease himself through cracks and fissures and move in silence over the world, a soul in pilgrimage, a ghost of the living. He wandered naked out the door into the summer night, the stars so dense to his sight he seemed to see them all, their luminous centers and their delicate threads connecting sun to sun to sun. And how is that? He wondered. Every disclosure revealed new mysteries, but isn’t that simply the way of the world? And there was good there as there is good here, and evil. He went out his door and gazed upon a strangely luminous Jordan River as it rolled north forever, while the smiling catfish slept along the bottoms and hid in grottoes away from the swirling currents. He had taken to wandering the streets of the old town and moved both naked and invisible, peering through windows and going in and out of houses watching people and listening to them, always a furtive glance behind as he could feel the very darkness following. He found he could leap high if he dashed and jumped, far over the overpass to the other side. He ran like quicksilver if he cared to, and slipped into his favorite bookshops where in the absolute darkness of their mildewed basements he could browse among the shelves and find his favorite volumes seeing and reading in an eerie light of dreaming. To his surprise, if he stood still long enough people took surprised notice of the naked, pale man slightly luminous and leaning near them. A slight turn and he was instantly out of sight. This went for several days until he realized he was being watched from the crowds he thought he had moved through so effortlessly and anonymously. Strange how he could smell them and feel them, the essence and energy of their physical selves permeating his senses without any buffer, thrilled by this because they could not really affect him, but now she was there. He caught her watching him and was ashamed of his body, and the dread crept up him as he turned to run only to find she had followed and stood before him. She had cornered him in an alley near a dumpster and stood over him as he cowered. “Please…” he said. “We’re friends,” she replied, and offered a hand he took only reluctantly, and pulled him to his feet. He bowed before her crossing his arms against his immodesty, and felt profoundly vulnerable in the piercing gaze of her sight. She was a tall dark woman wearing a tunic of luminescent white and golden thread, and he remembered her appearing at the door to his bedroom saying she would wait for him. She studied him a moment and finally approached him to ask “What are you so afraid of?” Nephi furtively glanced past her and around the alley and squinted his eyes and said “You’re a ghost.” “I am,” she said, “and so are you.” “I-I’m naked,” he stammered as if it was news. “Are you ready to help me?” “I don’t know,” and he sank back to crouch against a wall, clutching his hands and lamenting “Why didn’t I leave the bottle where I found it? There’s something after me and I don’t what it is. It’s in the darkness and it wants to destroy me. I can feel it…” “It is the demon, Molech,” she said. “The thief of innocence who comes to steal and kill and destroy. He will destroy you if he can.” “Dear God, help me…” and he was very weak and small, just then. “I will help you if you help me.” “You’re Louise, the Blackfoot witch,” he said. “I know your story.” “But it isn’t the entire story,” she said. “The angels will not let me in as they seem to think I sinned too gravely in life. But I was a murdered innocent and all murdered innocents are sacrifices unto Molech. The angels fear him too and beat me with their staves until I came tumbling down the stairs from Paradise and so here I am. But you can win against them. You have the life force in you. You can weather all they think they can do to you and be victorious. And only you can defeat him, destroy Molech.” Nephi suddenly blurted “You know, you’re as beautiful as I imagined.” She smiled at that and took him by the hand and comforted him with her warm feminine presence, and together they walked along State Street southward past the old city county building, down into the narrow ribbon of tawdrier commerce, the abandoned businesses, the pallor of defeat. The night opened up above the trees and traffic whispered by as if to say “I see you, I see you, I see you,” and Nephi felt in the resonance of her ghost beside him that had been overwhelmed with the tragedy of betrayal and agonizing death, and felt such compassion for her. She was an innocent who had been blamed wrongfully, and hanged badly and died of slow suffocation on a hastily tied noose before an indifferent crowd that watched without sympathy, fighting for life from the limb of a Cottonwood tree that had somehow managed to grow beside the toxic waters of the Great Salt Lake. Had that tree not grown…well, then… Nephi asked her “Why can’t the angels understand the situation?” “Because they think I’m a witch bewitching everyone I meet,” she said. “Including angels standing guard at the stairs to Paradise. I used them to my benefit, coming and going as I pleased but now they have the upper hand and they remember, those ignorant and frightened idiots. They refuse to acknowledge that I have earned my redemption and they will try to stop you but they will fail and you will lead me into Paradise, and for that I will befriend you, Nephi. I was loved by a man who tried to save my life.” “The wheelwright,” Nephi dutifully pointed out. “Yes,” she said. “He was your mother’s grandfather.” Suddenly stunned, Nephi looked up wide eyed. “I thought he’d disappeared into old Washoe. He was Mom’s grandpa?” “Oh, yes,” she laughed lightheartedly. “And he waits in Paradise to take me in marriage and the greater glory I have been denied. I am unable to gain my way up the stairs, and that is why I helped you find the bottle. My link to him led me to you and so I coaxed you along in your sleep and you did my bidding because I came to you in beautiful visions you don’t seem to remember.” She laughed and squeezed his hand, “because you are smitten by your love for that silly, confused woman. I know that you suffer in life, but you have served me very well, and I will befriend you and find a way to be at your side when the time comes.” “Time comes for what?” He was again at the mercy of his fear. “You will win this fight.” “I can’t win a fight! Look at me!” “Please,” she said. “A little courage, Nephi.” Here they parted ways and Nephi felt a pang of loss and loneliness, and a greater need to rejoin his temporal self asleep on his bed, but it was early yet and he wandered the city alone after that, viewing from a high hill the lights of Salt Lake City, the straight streets vanishing to a far point under starlight while the night breeze moved in the trees and hedges around him, the tall yellow grass on the hillside above town making strange hieratic code as if to tell a story no one would understand, of the true age of Mother Earth and her endless incarnations of new birth. A bat fluttered by and Nephi quietly blessed the creature and envied its innocence. The world was a vast cathedral and all life to the merest blindly driven microbe, a tabernacle of endless hymns; and he thought of Amanita who was not silly at all, perhaps confused, but perfect to him, a temple of purest beauty, and lovelier than stars and brilliant clusters of light, whose warmth eluded his searching hope. She lay with Kenny now, immersed in their mutual exertions and whispers of pillow talk and heightened pulse, the communion of joy denied him. He longed for her with a pain that seemed the more acute in his soul and for reasons he could not say. He came down from the mountain floating then, in search of Kenny’s house on the east side in Central City. The door was locked and the house gone dark as a tomb. A tree above it waved a song on the night breeze, and crickets joined the pulsing rhythm of wave on wave as pleasure is taken and ridden wave on wave, the lovers envied to aching by Nephi Gass. An upstairs window was open slightly and Nephi was able to fly up and worm his way through, and found them in the room and they lay together deep in sleep on Kenny’s bed. Amanita slept bare, and as she breathed her closed eyes gazed sightlessly upon the ceiling, her right breast and brown nipple exposed as she lay turned away from Kenny toward the left hand side of the bed. Nephi approached in silence and could smell the odor of her satiated body still sweating but slumbering and dreaming. He went to his knees and knelt before her, filling his nose with the essence of his need for her, and whispered, “I love you, Amanita. I always did and I always will.” “I love you too, Nephi,” she whispered in reply though her eyes remained closed; and yet they had turned to face him directly, seeing him in sleep, enough that a chill of apprehension ran through him like a shivering blade. So she loved him, after all? Nephi straightened and fled to the open window lest she say more and spoil it, wormed his ghost on through and flew home as quickly as the phosphorescent night could take him. “I love you…” Over and over he played the words in his head trying to re-capture her voice in its soft caress, its comforting touch as a feather that worried him to anxiety. He lost himself in shadowy, anxious dreams where a snarling menace came out to mock him, its oily dark face painted with zigzag colors all lurid and hideous. Come the dawn he felt a surge of hope that worried him into his clothes, and an acrid cup of instant coffee poured down in a hurry. He made toast and flipped a burnt egg over and pushed it down with more instant coffee. Just as quickly he went marching down the Parkway toward Redwood Road, and caught the bus and hummed a little tune to himself as it traveled north to Indiana Avenue. He disembarked with a step that was nearly a dance and ran across Redwood to the west side of the street where sat Heavenly Neon under the shade of Chinese elms. “Hello, Ammie!” He said as he clocked in. She turned to look at him as if searching for a clue and then turned away. “Hello?” He tried again. “Kenny wants to see you,” she said flatly. In his office Kenny sat behind his drawing board gazing off at nothing, his long hair listless on his shoulders and a cup of coffee in his hands. Nephi walked in but Kenny only acknowledged with a frown. He asked “can you describe my bedroom for me?” Nephi, caught off guard, hesitated. “I…guess.” “What do you mean you guess?” “What do you want me to say?” “Amanita claims she saw you in our bedroom last night. She’s as sure as she can be about it.” Nephi knew not what to say and so said nothing. “You were between her and the bedroom door and she heard you say you loved her, plain as day, Gass.” Hostile silence then as Nephi sat down on the couch opposite and stared at his old friend. How could he tell him the truth? It was true but how he gotten into the room was something he dared not try to admit. A can of worms that would be, indeed, so Nephi sat silent. “Fess up, boy. You made a duplicate key when my back was turned and you snuck in there in the dead of night. What were you after? What all did you see?” He got up from his chair and came over to the couch. He hovered over Nephi whose arms were up defensively. “Get up.” Kenny opened the door and pushed Nephi out into the hall, came up behind him slapping him as they moved along. “You got no business coming into my house for any reason!” Out into the break room where Amanita stood scrawling tall letters in charcoal, Kenny shoved Nephi into the break table and toppled the coffee pot onto the floor. Nephi lay in hot coffee afraid to move. “Kenny, what are you doing?” Amanita fairly shrieked. “I’m firing this creep for prowling. And I’ll call the law and have him arrested. That’s what I’ll do.” Amanita said “Calm down, Honey.” She caressed his face and said “I told you I’m sure it was just a very vivid dream. Dreams do that to people. You know that.” “Fine,” Kenny brushed her hand away and moved to confront Nephi who still lay on the floor. “You’re fired. You gave me the best reason in the world to do it.” Florenzo Weed and Eris O’Brien both had come out of the back and stood in awe watching the entire show, little short Eris in her jeans and work shirt and carpenter’s apron, her blonde pony tail wagging on her shoulders, Florenzo in his beard and bib overalls, bemused behind his owl-eyed glasses as he wiped his hands on a towel. Eris spoke up. “We need him here. If he goes then I go.” “Alright,” Kenny jerked a thumb toward the front office. “See you around.” For a moment Eris stared with a shocked look and slight tremble of the lower lip. She spun around and stomped into her workroom and began to pack her personal tools. “Kenny!” Amanita shrieked again. “Nobody pushes me around in my own shop,” he growled. Florenzo said “You know, Cross, I stayed on because I respected your dad so much. You’ve got a lot to learn if you ever expect to fill his shoes. There’s not a sign shop in this county that won’t hire me on the spot. So, I’m quitting too.” Nephi had gotten up from the floor and went to the clock to check himself back out. Eris came by carrying a coffee can of small tools and said, “Come on, Nephi. Let’s go get breakfast.” Florenzo joined them with his red toolbox hanging heavy in his hand, and together the trio went out the front door and were crossing the street to the vacant lot where Florenzo liked to park his truck. They were across the street setting their tools in the bed and talking about breakfast when Kenny came running across the way. “Wait, guys. Can’t you think this over?” “We think pretty quickly,” Florenzo said. Kenny paused and rubbed his eyes with his fingers. “Listen. Don’t go. I mean, I was planning on giving everybody a raise, a dollar an hour. I’ve been exhausted lately, okay? But the raise is for real.” “Nephi too?” Eris asked, and Kenny shot her a look. “Hadn’t really planned on it…” “Think it over while we have breakfast.” Kenny moved between Florenzo and his truck and held his hands up. “Don’t go,” he pleaded. “Nephi’s not fired.” “Tell HIM that,” Florenzo said. Kenny turned to Nephi and said in a hoarse whisper “Let’s go back to work.” Nephi nodded and scuffed his boots in the dirt of the parking lot. He could have used another breakfast but oh well. Eris took him by the arm, and led him across the street. “Guess we’re stayin’, she said. The four went back through the door of Heavenly Neon, where Bill met them with a puzzled bald headed face full of panicked. “What was that all about?” And Eris said to him “You just got yourself a dollar an hour raise, buster!” Then they stepped into the break room where three clocked in once more while a smiling Amanita watched them and then hugged her boyfriend. “You did the right thing,” she said. Kenny muttered something and went back to his office. The rest of the week moved smoothly by and, come payday, Nephi felt a leap of joy to see a two dollar increase on his paycheck. He cashed it that evening and celebrated with a steak and shrimp special at the family restaurant on one corner of 21st South and Redwood Road, and then walked across the street to enjoy a few pitchers of suds at The Silver Dollar on the opposite corner, and sat swiping foam clear into the night trying to flirt with a scowling waitress while his greasy pal, Royd regaled him with tales of the town from long ago. Friday night wound to a close and Nephi stumbled home to his bed and lay there in a half sleep where he could hear himself snoring slightly. “Nephi, drink the Valley Tan.” He opened his eyes to see the form of the witch Louise before him, smiling down her secret ways, dressed in a woman’s tunic. “It’s time to take me home,” she said. “But don’t be afraid. I’ll show you the way to Paradise. You’ll see it’s a beautiful place to come to now and then.” Nephi sat up and turned to the bottle but didn’t pick it up for long time. He was afraid to pour it, fearful of the consequences of moving among the dead and the damned. He said as he gazed into her eyes imploringly, “My dreams have gotten a lot worse lately.” “The demon?” She asked. He poured out a tablespoon and stared into it, seeing in the amber depths the awfulness that dogged him. He turned to her and asked “Why? Why me?” “Don’t you understand? She spoke with a deep sadness. “You opened that door a long time ago when you dreamed of your father. Your desire to be with him again was so strong that it burst the psychic walls. The evil that is Molech is pervasive and everywhere. He is the abductor and murderer of children, and the patron demon of all weak souls who are swayed by him. The lives of children cannot be bartered. They belong only to God. There is no forgiveness for those murder them, only everlasting death.” The strength was there in Nephi, and he swallowed the Valley Tan like cough syrup. He lay back on his bed and closed his eyes. When he opened them again she was beside the bed with a finger on his chest. “Come along my friend,” and took his hand and pulled him up. Nephi noticed his nakedness and blanched and held back as she turned to him with a smile and told him “we’ll find something you can wear,” and led him out the front door and toward the now luminous river where two rows of tiny blue lights glowed like fireflies and bent into the roil like lamps along a sloping banister. “We must hold against the current,” she said and moved to lead him down into the water. But Nephi held back in trembling. “I’m afraid,” he started. “Trust me, dear friend,” she said and held his hand firmly and walked him down behind her into the rushing current. He fought to breathe as his nose went under and choked and then felt foolish. No breathe was there only the illusion of breath. A strange form of baptism it seemed then as they made their way down to the river bottom and walked along a path between two rows of tiny blue lights, one on either side. So dreamlike it was, like a slow and melancholy fugue in a minor key that echoed far in a large and gloomy chamber. He held tightly to her hand and saw the absurdity of the current distorting her shape as if to pull her, stretching her body downstream. But she held herself together and moved along mostly unaffected and altogether unperturbed, and turned back to smile at him, and he realized he was in love and would gladly lay down his life simply to die in that loving gaze. Then they ascended the opposite bank and arose from the river into a strange world that was indeed a wilderness thick with foliage. The scene had changed and he could no longer find his home. “Where are we?” he asked. “The stairs to paradise,” she said and showed him the garments lying about at their feet. As Nephi slipped a tunic over his head she led him to the stairs. “Here is where great Israel wrestled the angel,” she said, and took Nephi to a parting of the trees where a brilliant staircase resembling mother of pearl ascended high into the heavens until it was a point. “And here,” she pointed, “is that angel. Hold my hand and walk me past him.” But Nephi held back and was again afraid as the angel, an winged seraph stood tall and intimidating and muscular and much stronger, and stopped them, waving a wooden stave held as a weapon. Nephi tried to ignore the silent being and moved around him with Louise and proceeded up the stairs. Instantly he felt a nasty sting across his back as the angel beat him with the stave. Another angel joined and for a moment Nephi lay across the steps in agony, trying to get up but the stings smarted where they crossed lines on his torso like Xs. He did not realize it as he cowered cringing in pain and fear but the angels were beating him with all their might, and it was all they could do. “Fight them, Nephi.” Desperately he forced his way to his quivering feet and swiped at a stave, missed it the first but grabbed it as it came to him again, and yanked. The angel let go with a wild surprise and tried to back away but stumbled and fell. Nephi swung the stave at the other angel and hit him hard enough that he flew into the foliage and lost his own stave. The other in a desperate gambit came at Nephi with a snarl and tried to wrestle him down but lifted the angel high over his head and flung him to the earth, reaching down to lift him up again to the reach of his arms and tossed the howling being hard to the base of the stairs again and again until the wretch gave up his stave. Nephi took it and went after the other angel who had found his stave, fencing with both hands until he knocked the creature over, and kicked his stave away. The two angels as one looked at Nephi in awe, and bowed in humility and said “please go in peace, son of the living light.” Nephi tossed the stave he held into a thick growth of foliage and took Louise by the hand, leading her along the stair step upward. “There are more,” she told him. “They will envy you your living light and do all they can to keep you out, but they won’t stop you.” Under starlight they ascended far up the stairs, moving slowly hand in hand. There were no rails to hold too, only empty space beyond the steps and nothing more. They followed as the stairs wound around and around like a corkscrew twisting its way into the heavens. The night sky glowed a sunset blue and stars filled it like so many milky ways all interconnected to the infinite reaches. The two said nothing as the night passed above them until finally they had reached the beautiful garden that was Paradise, a lovely high expanse of hills in deep verdant shade surrounding pillared alcoves that were little temples and gardens growing lush. It was night here as well. Several angels came upon them carrying staves but Nephi managed to wrest the stave from one and used it to beat them all back. Others however stood by approving the passage of the pair. One tall spirit stepped forward, the ghost of a once powerful and handsome man, and bowed and kissed Louise on the hand. “Are you ready to go, my love?” he asked her; and she stepped back and curtsied in return, and then came to him and embraced him in sudden tears and said “I have missed you so! Please take me to the light.” He glanced over her shoulder at Nephi and said with a smile “I know you, Nephi. How is it you are a ghost of the living? How is that possible, Louise?” He turned to her. More of your elixir?” “Nephi found the bottle I hid for him,” she said. “You are full of life, young son, and blessings.” Nephi looked down at himself and noticed a richer and redder luster than that had by the others. His life radiated beyond him in a way theirs did not, as they possessed only spiritual life now as they awaited passage into the kingdom, or so he would learn. And where is that kingdom? He wanted to know but did not ask. He turned to the east with the angels to see the sunrise showing where the stars began to disappear. No one spoke as the great star began to brim upon the edge of the sky the brilliance of all the colors while a choir like a symphony of voices arose from the light. “He is coming,” one of the ghosts cried out suddenly and fell to his knees in tears of happiness and hope, and the several others joined him; and Louise said “Finally!” And turned to Nephi now, her own face streaming with tears of a joy he had never seen, and a sweet contentment he never thought possible in a person. She kissed him then and asked him how could she ever thank him and he said “I should be thanking you. It’s so wonderful…” The star was full before them now, a vast cathedral, magnificent, sublime, a smiling face, a joy to behold. “So the Lord lives in the sun?” He asked. The first ghost, the one beloved of Louise, turned to him with a strange smile and a shrug at the inexplicable nature of existence and said “He is the Sun.” Another said “He is Jove, the most high, our Father. The Earth is our mother and He is our Father, and it is no mystery and was never meant to be, and that is the meaning of Father in Heaven, something you can take to church because now you know. But you always knew in the back of your mind. We all did.” “I haven’t been to church in years,” said Nephi, and the lot laughed at that too, and Louise told that every human being is a church, a temple and a vast cathedral. “Time for us to leave, Louise,” her lover said and together they walked to a high pillar of light that joined a slender thread to the Sun that shone down through a dome of crystal. At the gate two angels stood guard but stood aside and bowed low. The pair paused at the gate and the tall ghost asked Nephi “Do you know who I am?” Nephi looked from him to Louise and shook his head. She smiled and said “Say hello to your great-grandfather,” and Nephi sank to his knees then and wept bitterly. “How could I have known? I am so sorry!” Overcome with the sadness of his life in this strange moment he could not be consoled, but Louise pulled him up by the hand. “You know now. Be happy, child,” she said. “We can’t tell you more but if you can live to be an old man I promise you your grandchildren will adore you, and then you will know the meaning of all of this.” “My grandchildren? He felt a sudden hope for Amanita and thought for a moment that something might be arranged but said nothing, only gazed into sublime face of Louise. She kissed him again, and his grandfather kissed him and held him to his great chest as they were grandfather and grandson. Wordlessly the lovers walked through the gate into the dome and stood hand in hand in the pillar of light. As Nephi watched they became dancing spheres of luminous white energy that hurried up the pillar toward their Father Jove, to be welcomed in a symphony of generous light that never wavered. Nephi fell to his knees again and wept so bitterly to lose his friends that he awoke in his bed in the midst of a bright Saturday morning. He stepped out his door and glanced at the sun moving through mid-morning as always. A warm breeze blew over the rolling waves of the Jordan and shook the tall grass. He watched as he wiped his eyes, but felt the familiar emptiness coming on and thought that a big breakfast might cure it. He went inside and searched the fridge but found only scant offerings. He threw his cap on and grabbed his crumpled pack of cigarettes. He knew where to go where the food was cheap and the coffee endless, where his dinner had been served the night before. Heading down the Parkway he hitched a ride to Redwood Road and walked several blocks to 21st South, and went through the door into a little paradise on Earth where friendly faces greeted him, faces he loved in return with a grateful bow as he removed his hat and was ushered to a booth by a window. The bacon and eggs were excellent, and Nephi spent the morning staring out the west window of the café, watching the flow of life along Redwood Road, and feeling compassion for all that strived on a Saturday morning. He lit a smoke and thanked the Lord for the little things in life. THE HATED AMANITA “Dress me up in me oilskins and jumpers. No more on the docks I’ll be seen. Tell me old shipmates I’m takin’ a trip,mates, And I’ll see you someday in fiddler’s green.” -- Fiddler's Green Lyrics and music by John Connolly November came on a blast of wind and frigid atmosphere that iced the earth over to the far distant hills. The howling brought down poles and power lines, and tipped big semis over on the interstate. But most importantly to the working souls at Heavenly Neon, it blew the faces out of dozens of signs throughout the northwest above the Great Salt Lake; Acrylite shattered and was strewn magnificently across blacktops like a trillion jagged gems, and Lexan bounded over the far wastelands to lie against a forsaken bit of fence alongside tumbleweeds piled up. Back at Heavenly, sitting in his cozy office where the big window opened out to the view on Redwood Road, Kenny Cross had parted the blinds and sat having his morning brew from the company percolator, watching as the snow fell. The phone rang and it was Snowville calling, Heavenly Neon’s big account in Snowville, a Bed and Breakfast called SLEEPY TIME INN for whom they had erected an eight foot by twelve sign on top of a thirty foot pole. It was no small job and had nearly erased Kenny’s profit margin. Now the two huge plastic faces had gone with the wind and were now nothing more than infinitesimal fragments all over Interstate 84. The sign had gone up ninety days before when the weather was good but now it was mid November when the cold winds howled, but the sign was still under warranty and the company had no choice but to replace it. Kenny took out his calculator and tallied up the cost and sat frowning at the Liquid Crystal Display. Wedding plans must wait. Florenzo Weed in his long beard and owl-eyed glasses stooped over the ancient Pittsburgh Seamer showing Nephi Gass how to use it. They were building an oval out of light gauge metal that would become the backdrop for neon letters, soon enough. “Next,” he said, “We cut the oval face itself. Always remember to add a half inch flange when you measure these things. Together they retrieved the long strip of metal from the floor and lay it gently across the length of worktable as if about to vivisect a dead snake. Nephi caught Eris out a corner of his sight stomping through the room from her brother’s domain in the back to the plastic fabrication room. He whispered to Florenzo “She’s on one, today.” “Desire is a heavy burden,” said Florenzo, “Not as heavy as the knowledge of sin, maybe, and for certain not as heavy as regret but heavy enough. I know it all too well.” “I know it too,” said Nephi. “But you’re holding up a little better than you were.” “Don’t have much choice.” “You draw the next breath and go on, don’t you…” “Today’s my birthday,” Nephi said as if suddenly remembering. “I’m thirty years old today.” “November baby, eh? Well then happy birthday. But,” Florenzo held up a finger, “aren’t you a little old to be searching for love?” Suddenly, as if out of nowhere, Kenny Cross was before them and his Amanita beside him as always like the king’s mistress or the poet’s muse or some high priestess out of the ancient occult myths of the world. Why did she have to wear tight clothes that accentuated her wonderful feminine being, causing Nephi to ache in his sternum, and show off the uninvited display of his constant desire? Kenny seemed agitated: “Remember that Snowville sign we put up last summer?” Florenzo nodded. “Are you dead sure you put the retainers in right? You didn’t drill the holes for the screws too far back?” “I always drill the holes dead center in the retainer.” “And we used 18 gauge metal?” “Always.” “All I wanted to know.” He spun back and strode off toward the plastic fabrication room with Amanita behind him, carrying the blueprint for the Snowville job. Nephi watched her go and felt the sorrow of old longing but fought it and turned away to the Pittsburgh seam. Florenzo shrugged at him and took a pencil from the vest pocket of his bib overalls. “Those faces blew out, I’ll bet. I told him what he needed to do but he wouldn’t listen to me. Now he wants to blame somebody.” Instantly they heard a loud thump and a scream and ran toward the plastic room. Eris lay on the floor as Amanita kneeled beside her helping her sit up. They were truly a study in contrasts, Eris short and blonde and just this side of squat being as she was quite muscular; and Amanita, tall, dark and slender but not given to anger and tears as Eris was known to be. Eris held a hand to the side of her head as Florenzo and Nephi came around the corner, and tried to stand. She pushed Amanita away and growled “I’m okay, curse you.” But when she got up she staggered a little and swooned. She held a hand to her workbench and stared at the wall for a moment. “You sure you’re okay?” Florenzo asked. “She cracked her skull, that’s what,” Kenny said with irritation. “I need to talk to you, Eris.” “About what?” “We have to rebuild the Snowville faces. Somebody messed up.” “Me, maybe? Is that what you want to say?” “Somebody did.” Eris climbed up on the table and took up her broom and continued sweeping where she had left off when she fell, a nice four foot drop to painted concrete. She stopped and felt the side of her head and seemed to waver slightly. “You sure you’re alright? You want somebody to take you to the doctor?” “When do you need it done?” She met his perplexed face she so hated and loved, and set her teeth hard, a fist on a hip, a defiant gesture. She had nothing to say to Amanita. “Right away,” said Kenny, tossing his hippie hair behind him. “Stop everything else. This comes first.” At that point Wild Bill stalked in, his denim jacket and his black work boots giving him a sense of imposing bald power. But the look on his face was all fear and wide open concern, the kind one expects from a child: “What happened?” “Nuthin’, Billy,” said Eris, continuing to sweep. The rest milled away, leaving Billy to study his sister like a brooding silence that is filled with ominous threat. Not long after that Amanita came back to the table carrying the butcher paper outline of the design for SLEEPY TIME INN. Amanita set the roll down and Eris shoved it off the table, and turned a vicious look toward Amanita, who asked “Why did you do that?” “I’m not ready for it. Can you lift anything heavier than a charcoal pencil?” “Of course I can.” Eris motioned to the bin of plastic sheets where lay several of translucent yellow hue. She went to a corner and waited in silence for Amanita to get the hint, which she did with a knowing nod, and together they walked the sheet over and leaned it against the table. Eris bent down to lift the bottom corner and Amanita followed. Two more sheets, later, Amanita asked her: “What is your problem with me?” “Nothing. I just hate your guts.” Amanita looked surprised and showed concern, and not a little hurt. She had not guessed, and wondered “Why?” “I thought he was my guy.” The sudden shock and horror were delicious to see but Amanita cooled immediately and even smiled wickedly. “Sorry,” she said and walked away. Eris called after her, “remember to pull the blinds down,” but Amanita did not miss a step. Eris walked into the sheet metal room and faced Nephi and Florenzo. “I’m gonna’ need some help,” she said. They followed her back to the plastic room. “Remember what we did with these?” Florenzo nodded. “All piece meal, one sheet at a time. Lay out the tape, chalk the outline, draw it in and cut with the razor. Nobody cuts a line smoother than you, Eris. The bigger places would pay you better, too.” “Tempting, at this point.” Sheet upon sheet, they worked for the next two days until the entire design was drawn and cut out in silhouette upon the yellow plastic, then taken into the paint room where Wild Bill spray coated the exposed places with a midnight blue latex, as a light blue would have shown an obvious green. Afterward, they took the sheets one by one back down the wide hall into the plastic room and leaned them upright against the desk, then with great care lay them face down upon the table all side by side, three sheets per full face. Eris ran clear glue down the length of two plastic strips and joined the three Acrylite sheets as one huge face that read SLEEPY TIME INN, a sky of yellow stars and moon, and yellow legend upon a blue background. It was a magnificent display, and Florenzo patted her on the back. “You’re a true artist, Eris.” Nephi agreed. “That is truly beautiful.” Eris said “I have a headache,” and took two aspirin from her medicine box. “Are we ready to go, then?” “Not quite yet,” Florenzo said. “I’m going to build a Lexan brace for that face so that it will never blow out again. He didn’t listen to me the first time but he will now. Come along, Nephi and learn something.” He took a four foot scrap of Lexan and set it in the wall saw and cut off a length three inches wide by eighteen inches long and took it back into the sheet metal room, set it on the table and lit the acetylene torch, a few minutes of judicious application of skill and Nephi held a twelve inch length of Lexan with a three inch turn at either end going the same way. “What do we do with this?” “It’s a brace. We’re going to climb up in that sign, the both of us and fasten this to the post with five eighths steel rivets. So make sure to use your happy arm because it’s gonna’ be a hard squeeze. Once the faces go back in we’ll rivet these bends to them with one aluminum five eighths rivet on each side. It will be slightly noticeable but it will hold and those faces will never fly again. I wish that stupid old pot head hippie would listen to me once in a while.” So the day went by quietly as people moved off to their private agendas, no one grunting more than a few blunt words, save old Florenzo, the shop philosopher who loved to work the ears of Nephi Gass about his own ideas, his ‘existential logic,’ and his philosophy of eternal change, the only immortality we can count on, so he said. “Most bibles are rubbish.” “Well what about eternal progression?” “What about it? If and only if you can show me where the Lord lives maybe I could countenance such flumdiddle.” “Flumdiddle…What’s that?” Nephi had gone nasal again, as he always did when all sense of confidence was killed in him. “Flumdiddle is just the sum of unverifiable rubbish you want to believe. Everybody has a flumdiddle scale: belief in God, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, astrology, astral projection…” as he counted along on his fingers. “I don’t disbelieve but I don’t believe, either. I remain open, hoping that God will give me an audience one of these days.” Nephi was about to open his mouth and tell Florenzo the truth about astral projection, that he had been doing it every night on a tablespoon of Valley Tan, the bottle he had found in the desert last summer, the day Kenny and he were no longer friends. “Who knows what paradise looks like?” Florenzo asked. Nephi said nothing though he wanted to. They watched as Eris came out of her brother’s back shop moving quickly past her own department to the front of the building. She was clocking out and heading home. “Wherever paradise may be she isn’t in it,” he mused. The next morning then Kenny called them all together. “Today’s the big day. We’ll be staying overnight in Snowville. The SLEEPY TIME INN has agreed to give us rooms for the night as this is the slow season anyway. So, we’ll stay over and come back tomorrow because it’s quite a drive and they say it is snowing up that way. I hope you’re all dressed for it because once we leave we ain’t stoppin’.” Amanita stood already to go in stylish tight jeans and moonboots, her hair about her face falling out of the gray fur hood of her Eskimo jacket. She was stunning. Eris wore the denim jacket that the rest had on with its soft fleece lining but wore nothing on her head but earmuffs, her blonde ponytail down her back, and a melancholy stare in her eyes, until they met the eyes of Amanita. Then they glittered like fire. Nephi wore his dad’s old service jacket with the company logo emblazoned over the left side, the belly of the thing greased over long since and spotted throughout the front. He looked as if he used it as an apron to a few too many feasts. He wore his usual leather boots, the heal coming loose on one foot, knee holes in his jeans. He had managed to buy a pack of smokes and had one in his face at the moment, hands deep in the pockets of the filthy jacket. He had no gloves. He had brought along one of his occult paperbacks, a yellowed tome and wrinkled. Given his present circumstances of acquired knowledge on the cusp of Valley Tan, he now suspected the book to be pure fabrication, not unlike a neon sign, all light, color and a lot of gas. But he did like the way it read. The itinerary went as follows: Kenny Cross sat the wheel of the service truck with Amanita next to him, close enough that he had his arm around her. Behind the service truck waited the big rumbling crane truck with the two large plastic faces attached to the crane with ropes and boards to keep it firm, a box of replacement lamps and Florenzo’s Lexan brace. Wild Bill sat at the wheel and beside him his sister Eris stared hollowly through the windshield at the truck before them, her lower lip trembling slightly. Beside her was Nephi Gass immersed in his book already, an unlit cigarette in the fingers of his left hand as he turned the pages, lost in some ridiculous notion whose day had died long ago in a slippage of sales receipts. And next to him, riding shotgun at the window, Florenzo Weed made little jots in a notebook. He loved to calculate Archimedean formulae as he drew out curves and slopes; or he would sketch a sign that was out of square, perhaps diamond-shaped or an off-center oval and calculate its wind load capacity. In fact he was the brains at Heavenly Neon but Kenny paid him peanuts. He had long since dropped out of college. He had taught himself in local libraries. Indeed they were all paid peanuts but Nephi was grateful to be learning a trade finally and considered it free schooling, if only he and Kenny could be friends again. He blurred on a paragraph at that point and looked up to see that they were in a white-out. “Where are we?” Wild Bill said “Just south of Brigham City. Where you been, boy?” Fantastic, he thought as the sky suddenly cleared and he looked to the left to see great Willard Bay spread shining like steel under turbulent skies, only to vanish under snow flurry. Exotic and beautiful beyond words. To his right the great mountains of the north Wasatch were an upheaval of ancient strata that were like fingers in prayer to whatever awful god had awakened them. Tiny pines aligned the north slopes and high sage the south slopes. Some were like closed fists, like Wild Bill could be. Florenzo had been talking to Eris and as they made eye contact he said “Hold on a sec, Sis. Look this way. Now hold it. The light of the snow had illuminated her dark eyes enough that he could see it. “Did you know your left eye is dilated slightly?” “I didn’t really notice it,” she lied. She had seen it every morning for the past two days. “You had a concussion and it’s not healed. You really shouldn’t be out on this job. I’m not going to let you climb any ladders.” “Baloney,” she said. “Sorry. Nephi can climb the ladders and help me.” Nephi started in fear. “What? I’m no good on a ladder.” “You’ll be fine, you nincompoop. Think of it as baptism by falling,” Wild Bill said. “It’s the nature of the job.” “Bill’s right,” Florenzo agreed. “Then I should be up there,” Eris said. “Nope,” Wild Bill went grim. “You’re going to get some sleep and tomorrow we go to the doctor and Kenny can pay his side of the workers compensation. We’ll just spring a little surprise on old Kenny Cross.” He winked at his sister and frowned suddenly. “That eye could look a little better.” Meanwhile Nephi went back to reading his book but dozed off again and when he awoke this time it was Florenzo’s hand jostling him. “Wake up, Son, we are here,” he said and swung the door open to hop out his side. “Let’s go check out the damage.” What the six employees of Heavenly Neon beheld was a complete blow out of the innards of the sign they had labored hard to build and erect. The faces were gone, and snow piled up in the bottom corners of the sign. One lamp remained plugged in. Florenzo looked at Eris. “What did we do right on that one?” Wild Bill had a parked the big truck at a perfect spot adjacent to the sign and was off to the outriggers when Kenny said “Let’s break for lunch first. Their treat.” He and Amanita turned as one and went inside the building. Nephi lit a cigarette as he and Eris remained standing out in the wind and snow blowing through the open desolation of Snowville, a barren rise upon the high desert. “What did you ever see in that guy?” He asked her. “What do you see in her?” She replied, and together they walked into the little restaurant of the SLEEPY TIME INN. It was warm inside and smelled of coffee and late breakfast but lunch coming on as the regulars began to drift in. The walls were a deep red and the booths of glittering gold upholstery and gold gleaming table tops. The carpet was already slightly dingy from foot traffic but who cared about that? They were all together at a large corner booth and Kenny was giving orders to an old waitress with bags under her knees and eyes. Why she bothered with lipstick was another mystery but she seemed not too harried and did call Nephi ‘sugar.’ He ordered a hamburger with a slice of onion and tomato, a plate of fries, a cup of coffee. Eris asked for a club sandwich, Wild Bill a steak sandwich, Florenzo a bowl of the ‘homemade’ chili, but Kenny and Amanita ordered identical chicken salads and tea. Eris grimaced at them. At two o’clock Bill raised the crane ladder up level with the sign, and Florenzo climbed it to check the ballast, calling down that he thought it was in good shape. He said “We should bring up the box of lamps and fire this thing up.” “What about the brace?” Nephi called up. “Brace?” Kenny asked. Florenzo shook his head and started back down the ladder. He fetched the Lexan brace from the bed and showed it to Kenny who asked “What are we going to do with that?” “What you should have done in the first place,” Florenzo said. Kenny sneered. “Yes, I remember. You want to rivet this ugly thing to the pipe in the sign and then you want to rivet it to the faces, don’t you. And it will hold together for a million years and the faces won’t go flying off into space like they did because this thing will magically cause them not to, even though it looks like crap.” “That’s about it,” Florenzo said. “Except for the ‘crap’ part.” “Fine. Do it. Hopefully they won’t complain.” The wind picked up. Kenny said “Whatever we do we better get our butts in gear and get it done.” “Let’s go, Gass,” Florenzo said. “Bring the drill along and start up the generator.” Up they climbed, Florenzo moving along like a monkey and Nephi coming up behind cradling the cold metal drill and the knotted extension cord behind it. He crawled slowly, holding to the rungs and as he moved along afraid to look below. “Not that much of a fall—well, maybe,” Florenzo said. “Step into the sign and hold on to something. Bring the riveter?” “Riveter?” “Go back and get the riveter.” Shamefaced and fearful Nephi worked himself slowly down the ladder to find Eris waiting with the rivet gun. She said “I should be up there not you.” Nephi shrugged and ascended once more, shoving the riveter in his back pocket so he could use all fours to hug the precarious ladder. Once more he reached up gingerly, frightened himself and nearly lost his footing. He held to the pipe and set one foot into the can. Florenzeo had drilled a hole and stood waiting. He took the riveter from Nephi and pulled a rivet out of his teeth. He squeezed. The brace was in place. “One more for luck,” he said, and then “Now the lamps.” They descended and stood on blacktop again as the wind whistled and Wild Bill stood calmly at the crane box having a smoke and staring out into the west. He was in his element, the old cowboy. Eris helped them tear a lamp box open. She asked “Where’d the love birds go?” Florenzo searched around. “Hmph,” he said. “Maybe they went to check the breakers.” Together he and Nephi went back up the ladder, each toting two lamps. “Watch your step,” Florenzo said but Nephi moved haltingly. He tried not to look down, tried not to think about the ladder, lost his footing as a lamp slipped from his left arm and shattered twenty five feet below. “There went fifteen bucks,” Florenzo said. “Best get used to this because there are a few more trips up and down this ladder we have to make. Try not to cost us money.” He wanted to think he was getting used to it but Nephi could not get past the gaps between the rungs, the far fall, the distant face of Eris scowling up at them. He held harder to lamp and rung and made his way up with great care, expecting Wild Bill to hop on his backside for crawling like a snail but Bill seemed deep in thought, gazing on a far horizon. Forever had passed it seemed, but finally the lamps were back in their sockets, and the sign instantly came to life blazing a cool blue light across the afternoon sky of overcast and intermittent snow. “Now comes the hard part,” Florenzo said. “Here’s the deal. We have to remove the retainers from this end so that the sign face will not get hooked on the edge of that Lexan clamp. It should slide easily over the bend. Pop a rivet and it’s done.” The two plastic faces were at a sufficient tilt in the truck bed that a pair of two by four boards were sandwiched along the top edge and clamped. Last summer all this had seemed so easy but in the wind the faces wobbled and shook, and waved away as if to so say so long. No more could they use the crane ladder but had to climb the shop’s longest extension ladder. “Why did that son of a bitch go with an account like this? He knows we don’t have the means.” Florenzo grumbled his way up the ladder forcing the corner in the top retainer. “Raise it!” He shouted down, and went up to the top of the can to force the top corner in. “It’s gonna’ snap!” He managed to slip the sign in a foot, grateful to have made the retainers wide enough and square enough that he could rattle the faces down the track. At the top of the sign where he leaned on a steel corner he managed to loosen the first clamp and pry the boards up. Then coaxing to Bill to move the crane toward the sign he managed to slide it in half way. Only six feet to go but the wind was fishtailing the sign and it would snap for certain. Quickly he removed the second clamp and set the boards back a little more and re-clamped, and jiggled the face on in two thirds of the way. He undid the clamp and let the boards fall to the ground. He slid the face on in. When he descended Eris said to him “There really ought to be two ladders up there.” “Not on your life, Honey. You ought to be in bed.” She scowled again and turned away to make herself look busy. She picked up the boards. The second face went up and it was the same adventure as before but this time Florenzo heard a definite crack in the third seam; and by the time he had slid the last third of the face in the seam had broken and a third of the sign shivered independently. He climbed down the ladders very exhausted, and Eris reminded him of the Lexan brace. “Don’t it need a rivet?” “You need a rest. I need a rest.” “I’ll do it,” Nephi said. “No. It’s fine. I’ll do it. Okay? Let’s warm up.” Wild Bill had put the crane to bed and gotten off the truck bed. He was in the restaurant already, ordering coffee and a sweet roll. Twilight slipped a dolorous pink upon the winter white of snowstorm as the sun bent low behind the far hills. Indeed the desert loomed like a vengeful demon squatting in wait but Nephi thought it looked beautiful and told Eris. She said “I’d love it any other time but I can’t see a reason to go on in life anymore. I’ve lost my battles and what is there for me now?” “You got me for a friend, anyhow.” “I appreciate that” and her mouth trembled again as she hugged him and let go. Dang it, Nephi. You and me are in the same boat, ain’t we.” “Maybe we should get together. How about if I say to you I love you, and then I kiss you?” “Not on the job,” she said but she was smiling. “Like this?” and he leaned over to kiss her on her lips. They were cold but her smile widened to a grin. “Where have you been all my life?” She asked. As if a switch had been pulled, Nephi saw in his mind’s eye himself rolling her denims down her bare legs, his arm around soft satin as he raised her up and carried her to his bed, butterflies on raised swells, the laughter, themselves together perspiring in kisses and eyes of brazen desire culminating in a mutual pulse. And so came the realization he could have her, mount the mount, the aromatic hill, the vertical hollow to the membranes of an oozing joy, locked together swooning in an ecstasy that renders words to obsolescence. ‘Smile upon me, little daughter of the ancient blood-flow, through ages immemorial passing in the veins of Mother Earth.’ Comes the burst of cataclysm in the fissures, jazzy, pearl iridescence, the wriggling life down avenues in darkest space to find the mother’s planet and her warmth. “You know I ain’t much but I’m here. Look at this mess I am.” Her tears started. “Me too,” she said, and turned away before he could hug her again. “We’re just the leftovers.” She watched the flurries in flight above the evening. Nephi realized at that moment how much he hated Amanita Florez. “No, Eris, I’m in love with you. Let me take you to dinner this week. Let’s go see a movie. Let them have each other. And you and I have each other.” She smiled through tears. “I have to get past Kenny,” she said. “You know, I’m a signman, by God,” Nephi said as he put his fists on his hips. “Watch me climb that ladder and put that rivet in that Lexan brace. I’ll do it for Florenzo.” He picked up the extension ladder and pushed it up until it was set against the top retainer. He grabbed his drill and rivet gun. He went to Florenzo’s tool box and dug out two aluminum rivets. “Nephi,” she said. “I’m doin’ it,” he said. “Let me. I’ll do it for you.” “Florenzo told you to stay off that ladder.” She scoffed. “I was climbing ladders and putting up neon when I was a little school girl. I’ve got seniority over old Florenzo Weed. If I had a beard it would be to my knees. Go in and get me a cheese Danish, all right?” Nephi hesitated and tried to bluster something. “Alright? I’ll be just a minute up there. Go on in and warm yourself up. Your hands are freezing.” Nephi hesitated as he watched her ascend the ladder, went into the restaurant and waited at the counter but the waitresses were busy. Back in a corner sat Wild Bill lost in thought and coffee. After several minutes, a waitress came and took his order. “One,” he said. “No, make that two cheese Danishes.” “Give me a couple of minutes,” the waitress said. “You want ice cream with those?” “No, that’s fine,” he said, hoping they would be on the house like everything else. A few minutes later the waitress hailed him over to the cash register. She set the desserts on the counter. “$2.54,” she said. Nephi tried to argue “shouldn’t these be on the house?” Amanita came through the door and shouted from the threshold “Bill! Get out here!” Then she saw Nephi. “There you are!” “What?” But Amanita had turned and hurried out the door into the deepening night. As Bill and Nephi followed they saw the rest of the group around the base of the ladder. Nephi stepped close. “What is it? What happened?” Florenzo glanced up at him as if to accuse. “She fell,” he said. Nephi gulped in anxious fear and tread lightly around fearing to face her and found himself looking into the eyes of his old ex-friend who was in tears, and Amanita next to him crying outright and holding Eris by the hand. “Hold on, Baby,” she cried. Blood was everywhere in pools and Kenny’s lap was drenched in it as he cradled Eris in his lap; her eyes kept coming alive and going dead as she moved in and out of consciousness. Wild Bill ran back inside to call emergency but they all knew it was too late. Her skull was cracked open and she was quickly bleeding to death. “Kenny!” she cried. And then “Kenny…” a moment later, as she smiled into his eyes one last time. A GHOST OF THE LIVING “Death speaks with awful voice! Hark! ‘Tis the universal groan Re-echoed through the vast extent Of worlds unnumbered, called upon to mourn…” --old Mormon Hymn In the week before Thanksgiving 1984, the friends and family of Eris O’Brien buried her in a wide lawn cemetery of young planted trees along Redwood Road south of Salt Lake City. She had been a sign builder all her life, working alongside her brother, Wild Bill, installing all varieties of electric signs high above the streets on poles and on the sides of commercial buildings. Yet, when the time came, it was the nature of her work that brought an end to her life. As Kenny Cross pointed out to the small congregation at the red brick ward house in Kearns, the sign trade was one of the more dangerous occupations in the valley, and she had died as she lived her life, her way; and nothing would please her more than to see Heavenly Neon continue. He assured them she would never be forgotten but remembered with fondness. Nephi Gass in a wrinkled and slightly shrunk Sunday suit he had not worn in more than a year leaned into his hands wiping tears away. He sat with Wild Bill, who wore his battered Stetson atop his bald head, folding his knuckles in his lap, wearing a string tie, alongside the rest of the O’Brien family on the front pew. For Bill, the shock of losing his sister had not yet settled into the heavy grief he would come to know soon enough. He had said his goodbyes before they closed the casket with a dumbfounded stare, and put his hand on her cold arm and said “So long, little Sis…” and so the casket closed. Mrs. O’Brien, a widow, whose own late husband had been a contract glass bender, and who had wished her children might have done anything else, patted Nephi reassuringly as she wiped her own tears away. “She always liked you,” she said, but Nephi hung his head still lower and let the grief take him. The chapel, attended on Sundays at least by the widow, was a place of elegant simplicity. Pews faced the lectern and the choir, seats for the bishopric, the usual design of an LDS chapel, not too showy but welcoming. Before the congregation now the casket stood on rollers while the organ played softly “If You Could Hie to Kolob,” and Nephi hoped she could do just that and become one with the miracles, and he would see her again radiant and happy, and he would take her to Kolob, himself riding on a strand of god-light connecting the sons and daughters of the Sun to all the other suns and pleasant worlds there were to illuminate the night between them. Consciousness without memory was Perdition, itself. The sons of perdition had been sent into everlasting Erebus to hover helplessly between the stars and see the beautiful light forever in a constant now of longing and despair, yet themselves devoid of existence, lacking meaning, forgotten forever and nameless and empty and, effectively, dead. So Nephi had been told by the angels of Paradise. Florenzo Weed, a few pews back with wife and children sat blank behind his glasses, discomfort dogging in his suit and tie too tight and itchy. He believed nothing Nephi had told him, taking into consideration as he listened, all those wrinkled paperbacks on Nephi’s shelf at the shop, the conspiracy theories and the UFOs, etc. “Which one of those crappy books did you scrape that crud from?” He’d asked, sidling away with a shake of the head. “Here, take this tape measure and let’s square up this can.” With Eris’ death Nephi became all the more adamant until Florenzo said to him “We all deal with this stuff our own way, but there’s nothing we can do.” Four pallbearers carried the casket to the Hearse as Eris had been small; and they were her brother, her boss, her co-worker and her friend, and that was Nephi carrying his part of the casket at her feet to the open station wagon where it was slid inside with help from the mortician. He nodded to the pallbearers and walked around to the driver’s side and got in. A small parade of headlights trailed back to Redwood Road and the cemetery that was a large lawn of flat headstones and patches of snow, and little vases of plastic flowers under a sky oblique with approaching winter. So she has gone on to glory, Nephi wept to himself as he rode with the O’Briens, and I will not see her again, poor Eris; and he imagined her in the arms of the loving God, caressing her cares away with His benevolent and everlasting love; but the thought pained Nephi deeply for he knew he would never be worthy of that simple gesture, deprived of it here, a thing that never seemed to end. He desired the haughty Amanita who had once been his secret friend. He remembered when they were children and her parents were friends with his parents, and the Gass farmhouse in upper Fruit Heights the only light for a mile up the hillside, a place surrounded by fields and orchards and deep darkness in the magic nights of summer. Their folks played cards into the wee hours, and she would toss a pebble at his bedroom window and wait for him at the culvert, wearing only a tiny bathing suit; and they would stroll together barefoot along Shepherd’s Creek under starlight and the whispering trees, and she would kiss him and let him touch her, a thrill that chilled him in the cool night air. They were only 12 years old, but then she walked away and Nephi did not see her again until high school, and took her loss in a buffer of dreams where always she came back to him. Now they stood at the end of their twenties and she was with his childhood friend, Kenny Cross who had also remembered her; and Kenny was an ex-husband with children of his own, and a wife who had sat alone during the funeral service, who had slipped away before the final benediction to mourn by herself her own troubles, that she had come to the funeral of the woman who had taken her husband from her, and took the children home in her rusty, sagging Oldsmobile that smelled of dirty diapers. The O’Brien family drove behind the hearse and pulled into the cemetery now, following up a slender pavement to a spot near a small honey locust tree that had been roped to the ground. Once more the four pallbearers carried the little casket along and set it on a platform over the grave. All paused to pat the shiny surface and stepped away to take graveside seats for a brief service. Here, Mrs. O’Brien’s Bishop had offered to say a few words about Eris, how he had baptized her and watched her grow up. He was a seasoned expert in these matters and yet even he broke up to mention how her twenty seven years had ended too soon. All wept with the closing prayer and then arose to shake hands. Nephi went to the casket and laid his head against it, letting the tears flow as they pleased, and wondered how he would face the next day. In five minutes they had become potential lovers and five minutes later she had left the world of the living. Nephi noticed Wild Bill shaking hands with Kenny, but Kenny had a surprised look on his face. Nephi went to join them in time to hear Wild Bill say “Sorry, boss, but that’s my decision, something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time.” Wild Bill turned with a sad grin toward his mother and hugged her, kissing the gray hairs and smiling at the winter’s day while tears reddened his eyes. Florenzo Weed had heard the whole thing and said to Nephi “He’s quitting us. Wants to drive truck and hit the highway. Who can blame him?” “Why?” “Why do you think?” A hard slap hit Nephi from behind and he whirled to see Kenny behind him, arm in arm with Amanita whose own gaze seemed to level into him as if expecting some explanation. Nephi shook his head when he met her eyes, and then looked at his feet. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about Snowville, Gass,” Kenny said. “I think you are the one at fault, here. I have to submit an accident report to OSHA, and I’m going to let them know that you had been told to stay by the ladder, and to not let her climb it. The least you could have done was hold the ladder. But you failed her, Gass, and you failed us all.” Nephi dropped his jaw. “No such thing! Nobody told me no such thing.” “Florenzo tells me he told her not to climb that ladder and that you were there as well.” “That’s a lie!” Florenzo took Nephi by the arm. “Simmer down,” he said. “Let’s mind our manners.” “It’s no lie,” said Kenny with a sneer. “You calling me a liar? I’ll fire you for that.” “Wish you would,” said Nephi. “You put that lie in a report and I’ll come back and crack your face wide open!” “Oh?” Kenny laughed and turned to walk away but whirled back with a right that hit Nephi just hard enough to send him back toward the casket. He slipped in a small patch of mud and went down on the wet lawn, got up wiping mud away from his wrinkled slacks and called Kenny a name, but Wild Bill had stepped between them. “Hey hey hey! Let’s not be fightin’ in front of my mother, if you gents don’t mind.” Nephi’s tears were rage now. “I didn’t kill your sister!” He exclaimed to Bill as Bill put his arm around Nephi and walked him away from the casket. “I know you didn’t,” Bill said. “She did it to herself. She was always that way. She killed herself and I don’t know why, except that I know she was in love with that two-timing Cross.” His voice had gone to a whisper. “Can’t see anybody wanting to end their life for the likes of him. He ain’t happy without a scapegoat to blame his troubles on.” “I know it all too well,” said Nephi. “He’ll show Amanita too in time. I can’t work for him anymore, not with Eris gone. I’m hittin’ the road, Nephi. Had to have my CDL to drive for Heavenly, anyhow.” Nephi nodded and turned his head back to the casket, slogged over to it and patted the surface again as the anger slowly dissipated, and he thought of her lying beside him in a bed that was never to be. He would have loved her and she would have helped him, and there would be no painful longing for impossibilities. “Where are you, Eris? Where did you go?” He noticed Amanita behind him, watching with a swelling sadness on her face. She stepped toward the casket and said in a hoarse whisper “I did it, Nephi. I killed her.” Nephi shot up. “How?” “I took her man away from her. That day she fell off the table, I was the one who had scared her into falling. I didn’t mean it. It just happened, that’s all.” Her lip trembled slightly as she met Nephi’s eyes. “If we’re all to blame then nobody’s to blame. Nephi?” He glanced up. “I am sorry,” she managed to say as Kenny came up with an icy stare at Nephi, and led her away by the arm. A little while later, Wild Bill found Nephi leaning at the casket speaking to it and said “Nephi, old son, let me be a friend to you if I can. I’m sorry I was down on you in the old days.” “Bill, I’m gonna’ bust out bawling again.” Nephi said with a bitter laugh. “Then let’s go get a beer,” he said. “But let’s take Mom home first. Someone ought to be with her for awhile since Eris was the one who lived with her.” So they went back to Kearns the way they had come, with Wild Bill had the wheel of his pickup, his mother in the center and Nephi at the window. He gazed out on the life that continued along 5400 South as they drove west into the township of Kearns, the cars and pedestrians, dogs, cats, children yelling in back yards, all seemingly oblivious by the opacity of their faces that met Nephi’s blankly, to the emptiness that death brings. Life went on. The small cinderblock home stood on a corner in the north neighborhood of 5400 South in crossed tendrils of tiny streets and houses flanked to the north by a large Stake Center. Trees and hedges lined small avenues where a bend in the road ran past a wide driveway, where at the corner as the street curved around, the O’Brien house stood a light blue with a small covered carport. “Here we are,” Wild Bill stated, pulling into the driveway. He walked his mother around to the front door facing north and held the door for her as she limped in to collapse in her husband’s old recliner. She lay back in it and faced the ceiling for awhile. “Show him Eris’s room,” she said to Bill. Behind the door, the room lay illuminated in natural soft light. A single bed of heavy wood frame lay under a flower quilt and several large pillows, and a stuffed dog where her feet once curled. Across on the opposite wall next to the closet, a pink vanity held up an oval mirror that was covered in photographs while several more snapshots littered the floor around it. Nephi studied the pictures on the mirror and was flattered and saddened both to see one of him peering back in surprise from where he leaned with Florenzo over a worktable. He remembered the day. He bent down to retrieve a photo from the floor. It was one of Kenny from the old days with his arms around a struggling Eris who was smiling broadly while someone else took the picture. Happier times. He fetched another and it was a picture of Kenny looking a little put out to have his picture taken. He picked up another, again Kenny. They were all pictures of Kenny Cross and all were on the floor. Nephi felt a chill run through him though he knew better. “She comes here, sometimes,” her mother said from the doorway, and Nephi bumped his head on the vanity as he got up from the floor. “What?” “Her ghost. She haunts my house,” Mrs. O’Brien flatly said. “Now, Ma,” Wild Bill tried to say. But Mrs. O’Brien pointed a finger at Nephi Gass. “He knows all about it. He can tell me why my little girl ain’t in Heaven.” “No he can’t,” Wild Bill shushed. “Now go lie down.” He came back into the room after walking her to her bed and said “I think she mighta’ overheard the fight, don’t you?” Nephi shook his head helplessly. “That’s fine. We both know you had nothing to do with it.” “I would never hurt Eris. She knows that.” “Of course she does,” Wild Bill spoke solicitously like someone trying to put someone else to bed. “Well,” Nephi threw out his arms. “Something I need to tell you.” But Wild Bill grabbed his Stetson. “Save it for the Silver Dollar.” He led the way out the side door, closing it quietly behind him with the merest snap, motioned Nephi into the passenger side of the cab, put the truck in neutral and backed it down to the street. There he started the engine and pulled away from the direction of the house down a side road. He went east from there a few miles and made a left turn at Redwood Road, and now they were northbound toward the Silver Dollar. Already the place was beginning to pick up. Nephi and Wild Bill were the only customers in suits and ties, and the other clientele took notice. The waitress came back to their table with a big grin on her face and said “those morons at the bar want to know if you two are cops.” Bill stood up and yelled “Hey!” as they turned on their stools to face him. “It’s me! Wild Bill O’Brien! I’m a sign hanger not the FBI!” The drunks at the bar cheered and raised their schooners in salute and this brought an elaborate bow out of Bill. He sat back down and slapped Nephi on the back and asked “So what were you gonna’ tell me?” Nephi said “A pitcher first.” “You’re not gonna’ tell me any of that astral projection malarkey again, are you?” “Give me a couple of beers first,” Nephi smiled. “You are then! Oh, boy!” He made a dizzy gesture in his seat and lit a smoke. “I guess I’m game for anything, Boy.” The waitress brought a pitcher and two schooners and Nephi paid her, poured for both and then picked up his glass. “Here’s to eternal life,” he said downed it in one gulp.” “Ain’t you the old pro!” Nephi poured another and drank it back a little more slowly. “Next one is on you.” “I’m good for it. As you was sayin’?” Nephi lit up and leaned back, staring at the door for a minute trying to muster his thoughts. “Yes,” he said finally. “I can astral-project myself out of my body.” “Oh, here we go. Well, if you do, where’s Eris?” “She’s in her coffin, I think.” “You think? Listen, chum. I ain’t blaming you for her death, but if you’re feeling guilty about it you ought to speak up and get it off your chest because you see I don’t believe this other mumbo jumbo.” “Maybe it’s for the best,” Nephi said hollowly. “You know, I’ve lived on this world for 42 years and I ain’t seen anything yet that was for the best.” “I know there’s a God and that there’s a life after death,” Nephi said with a half smile as one who no longer needs to boast. “I have seen it with my own eyes. Seen Him, I have seen the face of God. “So, where is He?” “You’ve seen Him too. All you have to do is step out your door and look up in the sky.” By now the pitcher was gone and Nephi ordered another. “I’ll pay!” “No, I’ve got it—“ as Nephi searched his pocket for a crumpled up ten. So they launched into a new pitcher and had finished that, Wild Bill having changed the subject to a critique, indeed a criticism, of Kenny’s managerial skills. He ended by asking “did you really sneak in to their room to see them going at it like rabbits?” “They were asleep by then. I only did it one time, and…oh, forget it.” “No. I want to know. What’s she like?” “She’s beautiful.” “Did you sneak in on my sister?” “No.” “Why not?” Wild Bill looked suddenly insulted. “I didn’t know where she lived.” “Oh. I see.” Wild Bill growled. She ain’t good enough for you. She ain’t good enough for Kenny, neither. You’re just a rotten little creep after all, ain’t you? You can’t get a woman for yourself so you’re a prowler, a pervert. You sneak around and you watch women get undressed and you get your horn goin’, don’t you. I ought to bust you in half.” Bill stood and reached down to pull Nephi up by the tie and held him close to his nose and said “I ought to rid the world of your worthless hide!” He shoved Nephi back onto his chair which flipped back and spilled across the floor. He flung a foot forward but Nephi caught it and pushed the big man backward onto the floor where he slid and knocked over an empty chair. He found his feet and came back but Nephi stood his ground this time, his own fists up and ready to fight. He knew he would lose but he would not go down in begging. He watched as Bill began to melt, the shoulders of the sign hanger tremble and, after a moment, sat down and slid his own chair back to the table. He put his hands on the table top and watched his friend and then poured himself another beer. When Bill looked up, Nephi asked “Are we alright?” “I don’t want to fight you, and I know she don’t want it, neither,” he said. After a moment of staring off into space, he added “I want to go away. I can do that much.” Nephi said “Well, you’re right about me, Bill. I did fail. I should have stood at that ladder.” Now he was drunk with beer and eyes gone red and wet, and Wild Bill patted him on the back. “I am truly sorry about that, buddy. You and me, we need a little change of pace. What happened, happened. We did what we did and we did our best and sometimes it ain’t enough. I’m goin’ home.” As he stumbled standing searching his pocket for a tip, Nephi got up with him but he said “You stay awhile,” and staggered out the door into the night. Nephi followed him into the parking a minute later to see that he had gotten in his truck and driven off down Redwood Road. Nephi did not bother to go back into the Silver Dollar. Instead, watching the little red lights of the pickup diminish into the south, he followed on his feet, and walked along Redwood for several blocks, crossed the street at Stratford, followed the path as it bent toward the Parkway and strolled the last half mile toward the Jordan River and his own shabby home. He fell upon his bed and slipped into a groggy half sleep of sad and sorry honky tonk tunes whirling around in his head like clothes in a drier. He thought of Amanita beside him at the casket. Nobody at fault? Then everybody is, he countered and soothed himself with the prospect that all are guilty for the sin of living and trying to stay alive, and went into a deep sleep thinking that very thought, a long sleep, so tired was he. Unsettled dreams and the face of Eris intertwined with shadows and the light of one’s interior psyche where rooms spread like stage facades through windows that were vistas of cardboard and powder paint. The next morning he counted his scant funds and decided to take a bus north to see his mother. As Kenny had closed the shop for the week of Thanksgiving, Nephi stayed in Fruit Heights until Saturday afternoon after the Holiday. He suffered his mother’s relatives at the Thanksgiving table who chastised him for his backsliding, his cigarettes, his failure to strive, the fact that he had opted out of missionary service, his beer drinking. Nephi weathered it quietly for her sake and she thanked him with a hug, adding only that she wished he would at least give up cigarettes. “How are you for money?” She had asked and he admitted he was going broke, although he failed to mention the Silver Dollar, because as he pointed out the shop had been closed temporarily, and it was at that instant his face reddened and he slumped before her more hangdog than she had ever seen him, and she led him back inside, and there he told his story, culminating in the death of Eris. He said “I’ve got nothing left. I’m little more than a ghost of the living.” “I hate to see you this way, Son,” His mother said, and gave him fifty dollars in cash, and saw him off at the bus stop, and Nephi got home on a Saturday night, toting a bag of Thanksgiving leftovers which he slid into the tight freezer, and then lit a cigarette for dinner. For a week he worked around the shop with Florenzo, mostly sweeping up and organizing. Wild Bill was gone now and the place seemed quiet as a tomb. Kenny and Amanita stayed to themselves in the front offices, went out together and came back with nary a hello to either employee. As well no new jobs came their way and Florenzo admitted he had seen the writing on the wall. “I’ve got nowhere to go,” Nephi admitted, “nothing substantial.” “I have a wife and kids,” Florenzo said. “They deserve better than the present state of affairs, and I get the feeling this place is going to change drastically. I have to get out of here.” Come Friday the paychecks came as usual and, as Nephi shook hands with Florenzo, he had the sudden sense that he would never see the owl-eyed old metal man again. So he made it his best handshake, and they parted with a mutual slap on the back. Nephi cashed his check and went home and lay in bed and did not go out. With the dawn he got up only long enough to make some coffee. He stepped out on a cold day of December 8, 1984, wrapped in a drab quilt and cringing at the unsettled sky. Snow fell and Nephi stayed inside heating the last of the leftovers and cowering behind a book. He had not touched the Valley Tan, so great was his melancholy. He slept off and on all the day. Mid way through evening as night came too soon now in the twilight of sunset he came to with bright moonlight shining through the window into his face, and got up. He put on his coat and stepped onto his porch where, just beyond, the Jordan River rolled forever north its greasy soup into the morass of the Great Salt Lake. The full moon had arisen above the mountains and cast a strange light upon the winter scene. Clouds had parted momentarily to let the light through as a brush of snow fell about the river. He imagined moonlight illuminating gravestones in a cemetery while the snow fell. He turned and went back in to the warmth of his hovel. He lay back in bed and tried to sleep, and was then just dozing when he heard a plaintive sigh from nowhere and everywhere, a small weeping voice that rose and died with the brush of snowflakes on a slight wind. He sat up and looked around. “Nephi…” the voice called to him. “Nephi…help me…” He sat up again and looked to his window to see a figure standing in shadow looking through the open window directly at him, a small gray human shape with eyes half closed in sleep. “Nephi,” the shaded figure tapped on the window. He shuddered at the sight but managed to collect his wits and went toward the window. “What can I help you with, Miss?” The face looked up at his and it was Eris O’brien staring at him blankly with the dead face of a gray soul. He yelled “my god!” and fell back on the floor, but by now the shade had moved to the door and was trying to turn the handle. “Nephi, let me in. I’m so cold.” Nephi hesitated at the closed door, remembering a crazy woman he had taken advantage of, who had come at him with a knife years ago when he had let her into his apartment, following him around and around with it out while he moved backward, stumbling over everything he owned. “Why are you here?” He asked through the door. “They said you would help me.” “Who?” “The others…” her voice died away as if she had gone elsewhere. He opened the door and peaked through the crack, opened it a little more, and then stepped out on the porch. She had gone. With a sigh of relief he shut the door behind him as he went in, but was abruptly shaken to see that Eris was in the living room with him, standing with her head down and her hair in her face, naked and still as stone and morose with a harsh bitterness. “Eris! What do you want?” He cried and backed away and felt the ugly presence of demons and the doom they heralded. The room seemed a hollow archway framed in shadows of perdition all around him, clinging like parasites from the very bowels of Hell. She came to him and put her cold arms around him, and he could smell the decay of her and the musty earth of ancient cellars. “Please,” she said. “Please help me get into Heaven. I’m too weak to climb the stairs and the angels laugh at me and call me a suicide and tell me I will have to stay upon the Earth until the end of time. Please, don’t let them do that to me. I can’t make it on these legs of mine! I’m so tired” she turned and went into his bedroom. There she lay on the bed and said “Lay with me. Love me, Nephi.” A strange wildness shined in her eyes, desperation, grasping terror. Nephi sighed and sat on the bed beside her. He took up the bottle of Valley Tan and studied its contents. He uncorked the bottle and held it as if to pour it all out on the floor. “Please don’t,” she said. “Just drink it. I know what it’s for. I know all about you, Lover, how you dream about Amanita and waste your effort in some old sock. I feel for you. I understand you.” “What are you saying?” “Everybody knows,” she made a wry smile. “Can’t keep a secret from the angels. They all know.” Nephi sighed. “Even Louise,” I imagine.” He reddened with shame. “Don’t worry. It ain’t no sin,” she laughed as if in another room. “I tell you I have longed for you too, Nephi.” He turned away from the horror of her wild and ghostly face and fetched a shot glass from the drawer, and poured half a jigger, held it up and swallowed it down. A moment later he lay beside the supine ghost as an artificial sleep took him down tunnels into a hanging bleakness of light and cryptic meaning. In a moment he was hovering above his own sleeping form, and told her “Wake up, Eris. I’ll carry you to Paradise, now.” “Lay with me first,” she pleaded, and wrapped her arms around him pulling him down to lie beside her naked ghost. And so he loved her as she wished, as he had wished, supplanting a tactile joy with its ghostly simulacrum, like love in a dream and convinced himself that a tingling sensation tarried where nothing at all could be. He could feel the hair around her vulva as the ghost’s legs parted with a pant of joy, and found his way into the chamber of her groin, and pulsed the perfect poise of love for her and told her so. She whispered through him then “I would have married you.” But it was a ghost’s own voice and hollow as the night itself. Nephi arose from the bed and leaned past himself and lifted the ghost from the bed. Though she was small, a merest ghost-light of a ghost, she seemed heavy to him, far heavier than he could remember. It was all he could do to straighten, straining under the weight of her. He staggered with the spirit of Eris in his arms out to the porch as the full Moon illuminated the river, and he carried her haltingly down the trail to where two rows of tiny blue lights led a pathway down into the water. “This is the way to the stairs,” he told her. Why are you so heavy?” “I regret to say…” she started but stopped in her sleep and drifted off in slumber. Then her eyes fluttered. “I am so heavy. I lived too hard and loved too much and I killed myself long before I died. Where is there a place for me in Heaven?” She frowned with eyes closed, and opened them to stare at Nephi with an urgent clutch upon his chest with her hands. Nephi smiled down as if to reassure. “Hold tight. Don’t let go of me, whatever you do” he said and carried her down into the roiling water until they were under the surface now, moving along an avenue of tiny blue lights at their feet. A haunting fugue it seemed, and he could feel the current distorting them northward but held against it, moving along the river bottom in an eerie light where he could see catfish and carp, themselves somnambulant and waving to nocturnes of exotic melody, hugging the water as they slept. They seemed to be smiling at him. Now he arose with the opposite bank, ascending from the river over a flight of stone stairs, until he had carried Eris out of the water. In the river she had become weightless but now he struggled to climb out and walk toward the luminous stairs beyond the rich foliage that awaited them. Nephi found a tunic lying in the grass and said “here, let me dress you.” He slipped the tunic over her had, his fingers grazing her plump breast and little pointed nipples that seemed so dainty and alive, at which she curled her lip. “You are too kind and decent a guy to go without a woman.” Nephi huffed air and shut his eyes. “The stairs,” he said as he picked her up again. Two familiar angels stopped them at the pearl white staircase and one said “She is a suicide, you know. She can’t carry herself up the steps and we’re not allowed to.” Nephi searched the high rising stairs far above to see other souls lost in shadow slowly ascending, tiny phosphors blurred upon the night and brilliance of stars. It looked impossible. Nevertheless... “Are you ready, Eris?” Nephi gazed into her ghostly face. Eris opened her eyes and searched him to his soul. “I won’t lie to you. I wanted to die for some reason but I know I didn’t do it. I don’t remember how I died but a suicide would know, don’t you think? Do you remember?” “Yes,” he said with a sigh. “Too well, but we were all sure it was accidental.” “I wanted to live,” she said. “I want to be forgiven. I want to be saved and cherished,” as her lips trembled with a sad look of desperate worry. “I’ll see to it.” He started for the stairs but two angels stood to bar his way and one announced with a sneer “she killed herself. She squandered the gift of her life and we won’t take that lightly. Take her back. She isn’t welcome in Paradise.” Nephi set Eris upon the grass and took the angel by the throat and shook him until he dropped his stave, and held him in a pinch. “Don’t you know who I am? I beat you before and I’ll beat you again, Brother.” “Rules are rules—“ the angel squawked. “Rules,” Nephi snorted. Rules are for those who never played the game. You never lived, and yet you judge the living as if you know anything about them. Let me tell you something. It’s agony to live, to face the pain and horror of death, to lose those you love and watch them slip away, as I watched Eris, here. I would have married her. She deserved life more than you could ever know. And that’s because, you see, you miserable runt, to live is to know joy, something you are in no position to appreciate!” “She lost the ability to live,” the other angel stammered in defense. “But she never lost her willingness to try, and that’s the sort of courage,” Nephi wagged a finger, “you and your puny friend here will never know.” It filled him with courage simply to say the word. He wondered that he could face anything, now. The first angel grabbed his stave and swung it at Nephi. It hit him in the flank and stung enough to bring a howl out of him. The angel moved to strike again but this time Nephi swiped the stave away and beat the angels off the stairs to cower in the bushes. He said “You two had better stay out of my way. You want a repeat of last time?” “You have the living light, Brother,” one said with a sniffle. “You can come and go as you please.” “I’ll take her to the Lord, Himself if I have to and argue her case for her,” Nephi said. “No one will stop me.” He looked into the eyes of Eris again and said “As God is my witness I will see you into Heaven, even if it costs me my own soul. I won’t fail you again, my friend.” The weight of regret was a terrible burden, and the ivory stairs in ascension seemed to vanish to a far point in a myriad of milky stars. Lifting her again sent spasms of pain throughout him. Nevertheless, Nephi took the first step with the regret-laden soul of Eris in his arms, and the next, and another trembling step after that. Long the time seemed to pass, an eternity of night high into vertigo where Earth below him twinkled in tinier and tinier lights. One step after another he held her sleeping his arms, and now and then glanced down to see the paleness of her soft, reposing face. He loved her then and kissed the face that slept, the eyelids impish and a strange smile of contentment despite the fact that he carried the heavy weight of her regret. They were far above the Earth now, a distant dot along a slender thread, ascending slowly, and Nephi’s weary feet slipped routinely, nearly losing their footing that would have sent both souls hurtling into open space. An age passed and still he ascended the corkscrew staircase, far into the night, an entity of purpose carrying the soul of his friend. Finally, then he saw it, the meadows of Paradise ringed with lovely poplars breezy under starlight as he arose to meet them. He made the last stair then and nearly tripped forward with his burden but found his footing and so stepped with Eris in his arms into Paradise. He carried her to a nest of soft foliage near a tiny alabaster temple, and set her under the whispering leaves of a poplar and lay beside her then, and put his arms around her and held her close. Two souls together slept then with their arms around each other, one a ghost of the dead, the other a ghost of the living. FALCON EDDIE There was a time when a man could light a smoke in a dark saloon to go with his private pitcher of beer, and there to contemplate in melancholy the textures of his life and wonder how he might have lived it better. So it was that Nephi Gass at bar sat leaning on his elbows, in the year of our Lord, 1984, New Year’s Eve, a lazy, drooping cigarette into an ashtray ashing with a gentle flick, taken up and drawn fully. He was dreaming of beloved Amanita Florez who floated before him like a portrait seen through rain clouds; and old longing came upon the stage, the ache of loss, the grit resolve to get beyond his heartbreak. “Still that woman?” the barmaid pursed her lips, a plump and ruddy gal whose name was Nancy, swiping the counter with a wet towel. “When are you going to get past her?” “I hope to when I pass away at last,” he said. “I have heard it told to me that we are born to bear the unbearable, and that is why we die.” “Oh, that is cheerful.” “Too bad but it’s true to my own circumstance,” he sighed with a wince that came from a place nestled deep in his soul, and drew a long haul and watched the white smoke curl out of his mouth and nose and rise toward the mildewed ceiling tiles, the nicotine yellow of lost opportunity. Nephi poured from the pitcher another glass, and turned to see his one true friend, Roy Sunset enter the Deseret with a push of breeze, and take a stool on over, waving at the barmaid as he did so, a big garrulous grinner in a tie and blazer, a salesman who had before sold signs for Heavenly Neon, but now sold cars. He was a back-slapping fast talker for whom the world was a friend with deep pockets, and his heavy face forever smiled and studied the endless parade of personae with a whimsical amusement. Roy liked a cigarette as well and lit one up and pushed the smoke before him with a slight tilt upward, tapped the ashtray and grinned at the barmaid: “I’ll buy the next round for this poor slouch, alrighty, Nance?” and thumbed at Nephi, sidling over to the stool next to his. “Heard a story the other day,” he said. “You always hear a story,” Nephi smiled. “Yeah, I know I’m a born raconteur…” He paused and drew the last and put the stub out. “You remember that little runt, Falconetti?” “Yeah, I remember. That twerp who used to pick fights over the CB radio. He came out of Bountiful. We’d find him in the parking lot of Lee’s Café and he’d be there with his legs straddled ready to duke it out with anybody…Eddie Falconetti. I always did like that little piss ant.” “He’s still around, and last I saw he’d only recently parted with that old Ford Falcon, that little ’63 white pickup with the red interior and the long stick shift. Of course the story is he wrecked it. Too bad, too because I sold him that car.” Roy pretended to rasp into a microphone: “Dis is Falconetti. Any a you punks want to meet me over at Lee’s Café and get your asses kicked one at a time, take a number and I’ll be waiting next to the Pearl White Falcon…” “Sounds just like him,” Nephi snickered, and Nancy laughed too at the way Roy told it. “I’ll tell you the rest. He’s about 30 now and works for Somerset Expediting out by the old Fisher Brewery, near Mark Steel out in west Salt Lake. He’s been promoted way up from what they hired him for. He was just a shipping clerk last year.” “So who told you the story?” “He did. Still the same old Eddie, still standing up to guys a full foot taller and no sense of fear at all.” And Roy’s story went from there: The event in question happened on Saint Valentine’s Day of 1984, a Tuesday, and it was party time at Somerset Expediting, meaning things would culminate with a company dinner at Garby’s, taking up three tables in the back room, steak and potatoes and a lot of wine and well wishing. And old Garby himself would come out of the kitchen and shake hands. Eddie worked as a shipping clerk in the warehouse and wasn’t allowed to drive a delivery van because he had a bad driving record and a reputation for recklessness. And it didn’t help that he was nervy to his superiors, either, and seemed to really have it in for Brock Matthews, the blond Adonis head of sales, and didn’t seem to care much for Brock’s flashy girlfriend, either, Valerie Somerset, the daughter to old man, Somerset. Had he known what his little girl was up to traipsing around the company’s back offices in nothing but a bikini and flipflops, showing off because that’s what Brock wanted her to do, the old man would’ve popped a vein. Brock did it to intimidate the underlings, and send them off scuttling just to get away from her because they knew it meant real trouble if they eyed her too long in Brock’s presence. Brock seemed the kind of ambitious guy who was a real go-getter but a bully and a prima donna, too, because at the core of his being he had no confidence at all. And this is the terrible secret he carried inside so deep that Valerie couldn’t see it for herself; but she was young and that has to be taken into account. Somerset had made blond Brock employee of the month the umpteenth consecutive time and had the same yellowing portrait hanging in the front foyer with gold letters set unevenly beneath it: BROCK IS A ROCK. Word is that Brock would stop in the foyer as he came in and pretend the photo was a mirror, and straighten his tie. Imagine the middle of winter. Spring a month away, yet, and it’s cold, and not a lot of improvement over the year before when the floodwaters ran rampant and the whole town lay drenched and freezing and a heavy mist hung above uptown the entire month of January. Nonetheless, it’s Saint Valentine’s Day, and enter Brock in through the side door with Valerie in tow and she’s in a bikini and flipflops and a shirt over her shoulders and that was all, and shivering and stamping her feet, and did not seem to be terribly happy. Brock strutted about the back office alongside her, calling underlings over and delivering irrelevant instructions, telling the men to straighten up and button up and comb their hair; and all the while she’s staring vacantly and allowing herself to be led around like a show-horse, but you could tell she didn’t like it. Brock would end his brief assault upon the underlings reminding them, “Remember, I’m not here.” Valerie asked him why he had to treat his people that way and he replied he was the boss and it was just his job. But when he came up to Falconetti he had to glance down to find the guy. Brock was a tall drink, about six two and Eddie five foot five, but Eddie stood against a square pillar, having a smoke, black hair messy and loose on his head as always, arms crossed, and a hand to his chin-hairs sizing up the likes of Somerset’s daughter until she noticed and felt quite put out. “What are you staring at?” “You,” he said. “You look ridiculous.” “Why? Because I dress the way I want to?” “No. Because you dress the way he wants you to. It’s the middle of winter, Babe, in case you haven’t noticed. He put you up to it, didn’t he. All that’ll change, of course. Once you marry the big fairy.” Brock stepped forward then. “What did you call me? And you don’t talk to my woman that way, either, punk. Shouldn’t you be working?” “I am. What are YOU doing, Brick?” “Brock, to you. Mister Brock.” Eddie ignored him and stomped his cigarette out against the polished concrete floor, stepped behind the counter leaning down to fetch a couple of boxes and set them on the countertop. He had a stamp and bills of lading to process next to him. He turned his back to the pair and hurried down a corridor of metal shelves to fetch a few more packages, and brought them to the desk. “Do not turn your back on me until I tell you to do it.” Falconetti glazed across the tall man briefly as he handled the stamp and stamped around the surfaces of several boxes. “You’re not here, remember?” “You don’t talk to me that way.” Brock stepped to the counter, leaning down and in to find his way to Eddie’s face, but Eddie glanced beyond him, a sudden curl of the lip on Valerie, who could not help but smile upon the nerve of the little man. “Hey, Val. You want to hear a joke?” “Her name is Valerie, or else Miss Somerset, to you—“ Valerie withered with disgust. “Brock, it’s all right. Sure,” she said to Eddie. “I could use a laugh.” “Can’t we all,” said Eddie. “Mine come free of charge and full time.” Eyes roving left and right he drew Valerie closer with a finger: “This movie star went on one of these late night talk shows, you know, and she was carrying a Persian cat. So she sits down and sets the cat in her lap, and she’s petting it while she’s talking to the host, you see. So then she says,” and here he held a tentative finger before his chin. “So then she says, hey, you want to pet my pussy? And the talk show host says to her move the cat.” Valerie blurted out a laugh but at that instant Brock came out of nowhere with a sucker punch that bulldozed Eddie crashing back into the shelves. And for a moment he appeared to be knocked out. But by his own account, when he came to, he had forgotten the why of the punch because it was heaven to see Valerie kneeling before him with such concern now watering in her eyes, and it was then he knew he had misjudged her. He simply asked “You really gonna’ marry that joker?” “I don’t know,” she said and frowned. “Well, if that’s the case then I got another joke for you,” he said and groaned a little as she helped him to his feet. Brock stood away several paces waiting for Eddie to fly at him but nothing of the sort occurred. Valerie asked him “Are you sure you want to tell it?” “I’ll write it on your Valentine card.” “She won’t be getting any cards from you, Punk,” said Brock and yanked her away from the counter, and as they turned and were heading toward the exit, Eddie called out “You aren’t here, remember, Brick?” But as he spoke his eyes were fixed on the bottom of Valerie’s bikini visible just below the shirt, the way it rolled with the movement of her long lovely legs. He desired her then, but when she turned her eye upon him with a small furtive smile, he knew then he had fallen in love. “You’ll think ‘Brick,’” Brock yelled back, and held up a demonstrative finger that told Eddie that Brock had lost the fight, had lost his fiancé, scowling as he pushed the naked girl into the chilly day before him. “And your brain is a brick,” said Eddie, but the exit door slammed shut just then, and Eddie added under his breath “yours, too, Valerie, if you stay with that jackass.” So came the moment Eddie planned his move. Garby’s lies to the south of the Avenues in an unpaved lot of little businesses on 5th East in downtown Salt Lake. The time had rolled around to eight in the evening as Somerset’s people pulled in and parked and filed into the big back room and to the tables reserved. The boss liked to see his people dress up a little, throw on a tie, although a few did manage to disappoint and came to dinner in their work clothes. However the sales team were conveniently in their business suits still, especially Brock, and Valerie appeared particularly lovely in a long blue gown and heels, escorted in at the elbow by distracted Brock. Eddie Falconetti came in sharp as ebony wearing an understated blue to black tuxedo that could double as a regular suit, his black hair now combed shiny, as if stepping from a cinematic myth of old world manners, smiled around but bowed down low for Valerie and moved behind her offering her chair as Brock had taken his own place at the table. Brock presented a fierce façade and said “you ought to know your place by now, Falconetti.” Somerset observed and spoke the length of table: “Always the gentleman, Falconetti.” “I try,” smiled Eddie. “You do make it look so easy, son,” the old man laughed. As Eddie took his own chair at the end of the table he reached deep in his coat and brought forth a tiny Valentine’s card and gave it across to Valerie. She took it with a smile, admiring the soft blue envelope. “It had better not be a dirty joke, again,” she admonished, mocking a serious frown. “Depends on your point of view,” laughed Eddie as Valerie slid the card beneath her plate where only a corner showed. Impatiently, Brock tapped his own plate with a fork. “I have an announcement to make,” he said with a stentorian pretense, a man who wished to think he was in charge of littler men, a giant of commerce, head of a sales department somewhere better than some forsaken horizon on an outdated map. “I have a special gift for my woman,” he said, but Valerie who, at one time might have giggled giddily, glanced over at Eddie with an ironic twist of the upper lip. She seemed to fear something. What, however? An engagement ring? Word had it that she was the fiancé but nothing official came announced, and so her father only grimaced at the gritty winds of gossip. Brock took from his coat pocket a small wrapped ring box and placed it carefully on Valerie’s plate, a tiny present with a pink bow atop. “Open it,” he said. Inside she found a large and gaudy friendship ring. A spring hinge opened a lid to show a hollow interior. She smiled at Eddie. “A little box that fits right on my thumb. Perfect. I can stash my pills in it.” They shared a private laugh. “I just want you know how much I care for you,” Brock said with a smile of self-satisfaction. “My question is…,Brock,” Eddie narrowed his gaze, “Would you die for her?” “What kind of question is that?” “A simple one. Would you die for her?” And then he met Valerie’s searching eyes that brightened and blinked at him when he said “Because I would.” “That is so absurd,” Brock laughed outright. “You won’t get the opportunity. You were born to be hanged.” In that same instant Brock snatched Eddie’s envelope from under Valerie’s plate and sent it cart-wheeling past Eddie and out against the wall behind him. Eddie arose to fetch it, to hand it back to Valerie but Brock stood up as well and said “Don’t try,” and Eddie shrugged and slipped it in his pocket. Dinner went by uneventfully after that, Valerie mostly looking at her plate while Brock commanded all the conversation, talking sales this and sales that to his team, carrying on as if old Somerset had given him the company to ride around the place, a horse in circles. Eddie studied Valerie and when she looked up made a face at her, and so she spent the dinner staring at her plate in helplessness. As the time wound down, however, and Brock continued unabated, Valerie glanced across to notice Eddie had his mouth hung open with food falling out, eyes glazed at her boyfriend. Seeing her, he crossed them and fell back as if in a stupor, pretending to snore in his chair. It was a merry assault upon her better judgment and Valerie lost her composure and fell into giggling. Brock stopped mid sentence and glowered past Valerie at the apparently snoozing Eddie, now loudly snoring. “I’m talking some pretty important sales concepts here—“ “That explains it,” Eddie interrupted. “—and you are in no position to appreciate them.” “Thank the Lord for that!” A slow, detesting scowl and Brock stood loftily checking his watch before the table. “Time to leave this place,” he told them. “Valerie, let’s go,” and pulled her by her elbow up to standing as she fought to shift her weight upon the awkward heels. Her father jerked up in surprise and then at Brock, and splayed his hands before them in his wonder. But his daughter only frowned and shrugged and made a motion pointing over to Brock to say that it was all his doing. But she wrenched her arm away to take up her coat, and slipped it on, and then she fetched her purse and followed Brock, tossing her auburn hair behind her. As they left the restaurant, Eddie remembered the card and hurried after but by then they were far beyond the parking lot and in Brock’s Oldsmobile. The car was running and the windows up as Eddie stood on Valerie’s side in the chill air tapping the glass and shaking the card. But as the window started to lower, the car roared to reverse in a plume of dust, curved around past Eddie, and lurched into drive. More dust and stinging pebbles flew at him as the Olds spit gravel heading toward the exit on 5th East, and bounced onto the pavement hurtling Eastward. “That’s the end of him,” Brock nodded. “Think he can take a hint?” “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised,” said Valerie. The Olds flew up South Temple heading to the university and beyond and toward the university hospital and around the loop along the hospital parking lot, this time driving south; and all the while a fading grin of confidence, the chewing of a wad of gum as grimly Brook would turn to peer into the side mount mirror, biting his lip. He rolled his window down and spat the gum out. “The little wiener’s following us.” Valerie whirled around in her side of the seat to scrutinize the car’s rear window, squinting to see and turning back gray-faced, her eyes bright wide with fear. She knew the little apocalypse to be, a sour pull in the base of her stomach filling her with dread and nausea. The Falcon moved behind them, keeping with the Olds as if connected by a chain, and she could hear it rumbling with the zeal of doom that hangs on a nasty fist fight ending badly, as too easily she foresaw the outcome. “Why don’t you let him give me the card, Brock?” Her boyfriend sighed like a patient father at the end of his rope. “Because you’re better than that little loser. You don’t need any of his low class humor to muck up your life. Don’t you understand that?” “It’s just a card,” she said. “Not on Valentine’s it isn’t.” She considered, chewed the fat of the matter round in her head, narrowing at something through the windshield, a mere wisp of realization, until she turned to him again: “You don’t trust me.” “Sure I trust you. I don’t trust him.” “I can handle him just fine.” “I’ll do it for you,” and he slowed the Olds to let Eddie’s Falcon come alongside, and rolled down the window. “What do you want, Falconetti?” “I have a card here for Val. Valerie! See this?” He waved it like a fan. Valerie confessed her worry, fingering her necklace and then reaching out to tap the dashboard, as her face turned from the road ahead to see into the Falcon. “Eddie, forget it. Give it to me tomorrow.” “But it’s Valentine’s Day today! It won’t mean anything to you, then.” “Sure it will!” she called through open space “And why is that?” “Because…” she hesitated. “Because I’m…“ but stopped as Brock turned toward her a sudden wincing spasm of shock and anger. Instantly, he braked the Olds and sent it to a side-winding halt. He put the car in park and stopped the idle. “No you’re not,” he said, and got out. Eddie had stopped and vacated the Falcon and waited like a bantam rooster pacing and ready. They were side by side on a wide dust road at the south east corner just outside the space of hospital parking, and on the top of a barren hill that curved down toward town to the west past several buildings under construction. Brock and Eddie approached each other with their arms ready, and Brock said “Please give me that card, Asshole,” as Eddie tucked it down in a pants pocket. Just as suddenly fists were out and flailing, swinging and missing, swinging and connecting. Brock took a jab in the midriff and doubled over out of breath but came up and put three big fists in Eddie’s face that sliced his left eyebrow and bowled him backwards onto the pebbled hard ground. Eddie was down as Brock clenched the moment to kick him in the ribs and the head, and kept kicking until the smaller man was a crumpled lump in the dust and sweat and sudden blood. Eddie looked like a killed man, and this brought Valerie screaming from the car. “Brock! Don’t!” She knelt down in her limp gown, now soiled at the knees. “Please, Eddie, please don’t be a fool. You don’t have to die for me. I’m not worth it.” Eddie forced a crimson smile and handed her the card from his pocket; but once more it was torn from her grasp by Brock, who ripped it into four large pieces and let them fly. Just as quickly the big shot manager had her tucked into the Oldsmobile and away from the little man who still lay on the pavement, as Valerie told him “You could go to jail for beating that guy like that.” Brock said “I’m not here.” And then, “what do you say we drive up Mill Creek Canyon for a spell, and sit down by the creek in our favorite spot we used to sit?” “Because it’s cold out,” she reminded him. “We’ll just drive then,” he said. But not until they reached the canyon’s entrance east on 39th South did Brock look through the rearview mirror and was jolted in his seat. “I’ll be,” he mused. “Eddie?” Brock nodded. Once again, as they drove up the mouth of Mill Creek Canyon, he slowed to let the Falcon come alongside, and rolled down his window. “What is it, this time?” “Same as always. All I want is to give this card to Valerie, if you don’t mind.” Eddie’s face had bled into a broken mess, and blood smeared on his cheek and sleeve. A little gasp came out of Valerie to see a man so beaten and yet talking as if nothing had happened. “What card? I tore it up. Remember?” Eddie shrugged at the road before him. “So it’s in four chapters, now.” With that rejoinder, Brock roared forth as Eddie moved his Falcon around to the right side and came up smiling at Valerie, whose fear and concern had become a hung sorrow of tears and silent pleading. Eddie noticed and nodded his reassurance and let go of the pedal as the two cars rounded the curve above a ravine. Brock saw his opportunity and sideswiped the Falcon, a move that sent it tumbling down the ravine. His own surprise betrayed the fact that he did not mean to allow what had happened. He stopped the car as Valerie ran out her door screaming Eddie’s name. She slid down the heavy gravel, fighting with it toward the brush below where lay the car now on its hood, tires spinning as if attempting to drive the busted machine. She lost her footing and fell and slid a few times until her dress was a dangling mess of dirt and stains that clung heavy and sweaty; and she broke the heel of a shoe but continued down, stumbling along, a ragged mess of hair tangle and makeup smeared with tears. Eddie lay a few feet from the car on his stomach, his back arched up in a clutch of agony. He seemed certainly dead. She dared not touch the body at first and sank to her knees in horror. “Eddie, I’m so sorry,” and reached over with her hesitant hand to feel the back of his black coat that, only earlier, he had worn with such confidence and verve. “Don’t you die for me!” She wept in her fists, ferociously and trembling. Just this morning she was sure she didn’t like him at all but everything had changed and simply because things change, and so she cried in her knuckles now, afraid she would lose him forever. The human heart is a wilderness of mysteries and monsters but there are angels in it, too, and her angels cried for mercy for the little man. A muffled groan came from underneath and Eddie began to stir. He rolled over on his back, his face blood-drenched from a laceration across his scalp. “Hey, Val,” he struggled to say. “I ain’t so dead.” “But you were thrown—“ He shook his bloody head and fought for breath with quaking and gasping: “I ain’t so sure. I think somebody carried me over here.” “But you were thrown Eddie…” With his unbroken left arm he was able to point past Valerie. She whirled to see behind her, and instantly discerned a benevolent face in a wisp of white spirit that immediately vanished. She had seen a ghost and it stunned her to silence. Roy Sunset, narrating the tale, said at this point “I am reasonably sure I know who it was but Valerie and Eddie didn’t have a clue, though Eddie himself seemed more grateful than surprised.” Eddie said “You want to read that joke now?” “You amaze me,” she blurted. “You aren’t so small, either, are you!” Her tears were laughter as she took his hand and held it, kissing the knuckles. “No more jokes!” “But this is a good one, the best one yet,” as he forced himself to sit up and reached in his coat pocket to give her the envelope that was now in four smeared and crumpled tears; and she took the segments of the card from the shreds of the envelope and sorted the message together and frowned at first and began to quiver and cry, but nodded in a way that warmed him. She was up and on her feet, then, fighting the loose gravel of the hill toward Brock’s idling car. “Brock! Get help! He’s alive but he’s hurt bad!” Brock tarried nervously with his hands in his pockets and started to move toward the driver’s side of his car. He swung the door open and was about to climb inside when he spoke down to her: “I’m not here. As far as I’m concerned you were with him all the time.” And that was the end for them as a couple. In a moment the Olds had turned the other direction growling its way down hill. As Valerie reached the road she called after for Brock to stop but he was deaf to her. Realizing he was not here and never would be again, she ran screaming for help. A couple of days later, Eddie lay in a hospital bed with a few cracked ribs, a broken leg, his right arm in a cast, and a bandage like a turban on his head. He was happy. His own folks stood nearby as did Valerie’s; and old man Somerset shook his finger in Eddie’s face and said “You cost me a load of money, Sonny.” Valerie looked up and beamed at her father and knew by the old man’s manner that Eddie was not about to be fired, and felt happiest to hear him say “As for that empty suit, brickity brackity Brock, his butt’s canned as of now. Just no need for a kiss ass punk like that.” Then he turned to Eddie: “I want to see you back on the job as soon as you can get up and get going. Brock’s a big boy with a big fist but he lacks your courage, and courage is the one thing I admire in a man. So, come back to work and I’ll find you a job that suits you.” “Okay, old man,” winced Eddie. “Yeah, you’re a smart ass too, ain’t you,” Somerset half-smiled. “But I like you, Son. You’ve got the balls.” Eddie trembled in pain as he pivoted to face Valerie and asked “So, did you get my little joke?” “I will,” she said, and took his left hand in the two of hers and kissed the tips of his fingers. “And that’s the story,” Roy proclaimed with a wide array of the arms to the bar and to Nancy who seemed quite moved by it, enough to wipe her eyes with the back of a hand. “Just a story, Sweetie,” he told her. “It deserves a free round,” she said and re-poured the pitcher, filled a glass to treat herself and held it up for a toast. “So, here’s to the land of Saints and Sinners, and other suffering souls, and a happy new year to one and all,” and proclaimed it with a teary snort. “Hear, hear!” Said Roy and downed his schooner. Nephi did likewise, however with an air of melancholy. He already knew the circumstances knowing all too well the very ghost who came upon the scene of the wreckage, who had been sent to save a good soul from his death wish, Nephi’s own dear father not quite the ghost Roy had guessed. He sighed about the matter, though he managed to say “I never found out what happened to Brock.” Roy leaned into the bar and scratched at something in the worn wood surface, and shrugged: “The last I heard he was living with his mother. Never leaves the house.” “Must admit,” Nancy put her beer down. “It was a nice love story. The hotshot won the fight but lost the war.” “You’re right, but actually,” said Roy, “It is a ghost story.” At that, invisible to all else, the ghost of lost love from the ash of a cigarette arose above the table in the mind of Nephi Gass, the smoke of Amanita Florez for whom his heart was broken. Cold eyed and hating him for all his open expression of desire for her, to her, whispered in the bristling leaves of Cottonwoods in lost backyards below the moonlit Wasatch. Her reminder dissipated quickly in the honky tonk of desperation, busted, bruised and broken love still living, still clinging to the tenuous fibers of temporal space. Nephi wept then not for the lucky Falcon Eddie. GO FORTH ON BOUNDLESS WATERS He could feel the evil all around him as dread clung to his legs like oily vines all wet with sin and murk in mid winter. He could feel the presence of Molech in the news of little abducted boys in the ravenous hands of a rapist and murderer. He could not quite discern the face but dreamed in the night of dismembered corpses grinning at him as if to mock, lying in pools of caking blood. He felt hideous, a party to murder and wished to be comforted but could not escape the awful hallucinations. He had seen the demon lately peering past the borders of sleep, face snarling and sneering, the bald head of its oily body painted in zigzag patterns of nauseating washes of sickly paint. He tried but he could not run, and the demon had him by the hair, and he woke up screaming. Certainly the angels were persistent when they came to Nephi lamenting the state of things in Paradise, the sudden upsurge of demons striding celestial hills, set against the angels, themselves who had weakened to a state of near helplessness. “I have troubles of my own,” said Nephi to the ghost of his father. “I don’t want to go back there.” He had given up on Amanita that December, her loss to him a near impossible burden but he held up because as he told himself it was a mere matter of taking the next step. But the Valley Tan provided no escape, a reminder of death and the burden of regret. There was no step he could take in any direction that did not lead him into the morass of sorrow and horror. Oddly enough, Paradise provided no respite. The fight went on. His father persisted. Having the living light, Nephi’s strength was enormous and his presence could affect outcomes for the better. But hadn’t the witch, Louise done the same thing? And did she not pay with a slow and agonized hanging? And hadn’t she been cursed to wander the earth as a ghost for a hundred years before the right sort of sorrowing, searching man could come to life and help her. Nephi didn’t want to think about any of it having passed up on an opportunity with a young and skinny burger flipper of confused sexuality and named Kay, a ferret faced twerp in gigantic glasses he had been kissing and groping in the park above the cemetery. She balked when he tried to unsnap her pants and she rode his thigh dry until a swooning fit overtook her. But such was the height of her lovemaking. She would consent to nothing else. “What about me?” He asked her as they walked together out of the avenues. “What ABOUT you?” She asked as if it were a moot question. If he left his room unlocked she would find a haven and sleep beside him, but come the morning she was dressed and away. “Do I have to pay you?” he asked her and she had said “I sure won’t take your money.” Fed up with it all finally, Nephi stood her up last night and sat with bikers drinking brew at Better Days on State Street. A fight erupted and a derringer went off to much screaming and scattering. No one was hurt, thankfully, and Nephi slipped away and headed toward the staid old Deseret where he could have a beer in comfy darkness to the heartbreak of a juke box, paradise lost for George and Tammy: And the race was on and here came pride up the back stretch, American-Puritan existentialism… He wandered the gloomy streets in fog and disappointment, a shadow and the tiny ember of a smoke in the darkness. Imagine his surprise then when he found Kay crossing 5th and Main. “There you are!” She snapped as he pulled a hand from a pocket and made a half-hearted wave. “Don’t tell me you’re going in there!“ she exclaimed as he paused at the door into the Deseret. “Let’s go to Jodie’s instead,” and pulled him along the sidewalk north toward Second South where the weedy sidewalk lay busted up just east of the abandoned JC Penney Store. Down a flight of stairs they went into a musky cavern of old body smells and ruined women gyrating mostly nude, their bruises telling the tale of their poverty and hardship. But the beer was cheaper and just as sudsy and the music given more toward the top twenty of the era. What a cave, Nephi thought. His girlfriend had a girlfriend, a tall and smiling black girl named Bernice who danced for tips and who now sat between them and whose own aroma lit the fire in the young jack Mormon. Two pitchers later, they were kissing, Nephi’s girlfriend and her girlfriend, but there was no room for Nephi in Kay’s villa, so Nephi left a tip on the small round table next to the stage and slipped away while British pop tunes echoed in the shadows of the basement funhouse, falling away like distant cannon fire as he climbed back to the street. Well, now he knew at least. Out in the night, a non filter smoke warming the cold inside him like a tiny fireplace, he followed its light to his hotel and went up the stairs and fell asleep in his clothes. Moments later he was awakened by a voice that had become familiar to him, like the sound of dead ancestor spoken and recorded and then played as if the presence were in the room. “Dad? Would that be you?” Nephi sat up and took the bottle of Valley Tan in his hands but put it back. “Sorry I haven’t been around for awhile. That place you call Paradise is frankly too depressing.” “Come back with me, Son.” “Why do I have to go to Paradise?” “Trouble,” the old ghost echoed in the hollows. “I have plenty of those,” said Nephi. “What do you need me for? What are the angels for? Why do you come to me?” “Your friend, Eris has not gone into the light. I don’t think she wants to. She acts like a suicide, sleeping day and night. She prefers to sleep and hide away. She’s heavy with regret and can hardly walk around on her own.” “Well,” Nephi offered. “I tried.” His father shook his head and gazed at the floor with a weariness that moved the son. But then Gus asked “How are you sleeping?” Nephi jerked up. “Oh, I know,” Gus ventured. “Your demon has acquired astounding size and strength. He is made of our deepest fears and plans to take Paradise for himself. It’s a wonder you sleep at all.” Nephi felt a sudden surge of panic. “No,” he said. “No, I won’t go back there. I won’t face it. Dad, I’m too scared! I’m sorry but I can’t face this thing any more. It’s too powerful. Aren’t there enough angels to deal with it?” “Not in all of paradise,” Gus said in a slight voice addressed elsewhere. “There is only you.” So, the day had come, and no getting out of it. He must do this thing for them. “Give me a minute.” Nephi got up and turned the light on. He puttered down the hall to the lavatory and came back a few minutes later slightly less harried. He paused before the lumpy bed and sat down on it, hesitating and staring at the floor for a long time, slowly opened the drawer to the end table and retrieved a sticky shot glass, uncorked the Valley Tan and poured a tiny amount in the bottom. “Here’s knowing you,” Nephi announced and knocked the stuff back in a swallow that burned his throat as he fought the gulp down. He fell asleep and instantly he was standing beside his Father who wore something resembling a Roman’s tunic. “Nice to see you again, Pop,” and the old man replied “Let’s hurry,” and took his son’s hand. Together they flew out into the street but Nephi’s father seemed unsure of the way. “I forget,” he said. “I’ll take us to the river,” Nephi said, and led his father in flight south toward Chesterfield and Jordan River ever rolling north into the inland sea, and across the river bottom and up the opposite bank; found a tunic and put it on and, together hand in hand, he and his father ascended the stairs until they stood in Paradise in the deepest hours of the morning. Demons roamed the twilight hills about them, oily green and sinister and full of malice. When they saw the ruddy face of Nephi they ran away cursing the life presence he emitted. They ran to Molech to deliver the bad news. “They’re slowly overtaking the land up here and as they strengthen we weaken. If they keep it up they will guard the gates and then nobody will get through and won’t that be a mess. We’ll have failed outright. The world will show her dead forever wandering and lost.” Nephi searched the face of his father. “Like Eris.” And then, “how did it get so bad?” “Angels aren’t quite what they used to be.” “But somehow I’m the guy to fix it? I can’t even hold on to a dead end job!” “You’re our one hope. You have the living light.” “Don’t tell me that! I can’t possibly be the only one who has that kind of power.” “Afraid so,” his father nodded. “You are.” Nephi walked the hills of Paradise in search of Eris as deep night gave way to twilight and the sun began to rise. Everywhere, demons scampered fearlessly unless they saw him approach, and ran away in panic. Murderers mostly sank back into the earth to be consumed by fire and begin anew as new beings, unless the demons offered them the chance to live in damnation until the end as demons, after which eternal perdition and non-existence came like a like a gift for them. For now they could cavort in all their wickedness so long as the angels failed to act. It is one of life’s mysteries that one can always find the unsought. Meandering the pastures aimlessly, listening to his father’s unending laments of the state of Paradise, he had given up looking for her, and so it was then that Nephi found the soul of Eris curled up in sleep in the tall grass beside a boulder. He shook her awake but she came barely to, opening her eyes and smiling. “Nephi?” she asked. “Eris, why are you here?” “I don’t know,” she said and looked around her. “Where am I?” “Not where you’re supposed to be. I have to take you to the light.” “Oh.” She sighed. “Never mind. They won’t let me in. But I don’t care. Let me sleep. It’s so wonderful to sleep in the shade and the tall grass.” “Why won’t the angels let you past the light?” “I don’t know. They won’t tell me,” she smiled lazily at him and pivoted to see his father standing beside. “I know you. Why do I know you?” Nephi leaned down and took her up in his arms but, though she was very small she weighed heavily and he staggered under the burden. She groaned at the imposition and wished she could lie down, gave that up and said “fine. I’ll sleep in your arms.” “Eris, you have to go on. You can’t stay here forever.” “Why not?” she asked with a mock serious look. “Because there’s no such thing as forever. There is movement only and there is nothing else, and if you don’t move you cease to exist,” he panted under the exertion and wondered at that illusion. Still he managed to make his way to the pillar of light but the angel stood steadfast and would not let her in. “This isn’t right,” Nephi said. “She’s done nothing wrong.” But the guardian said “She’s heavy with the burden of regret and I can’t let her past. The light won’t let her up.” Nephi grabbed the unfortunate by his tunic and pulled him close. “Don’t you ever get regret things?” “I never had to,” the angel replied with condescension, his prissy face sneering with it. “You mean you never got to,” Nephi said and pushed the angel against his fellow guardian who fell against the dome and became suddenly rattled and said “Don’t you dare.” “I can take you both on and I can walk her right past you and there’s not a thing either of you can do about it.” A struggle ensued and Nephi made quick work of the pair, both of whom held as well as he could, applying the stave to Nephi’s arms and legs with vicious swipes that stung and made him wince, but when he thrust a fist it landed, and an angel went down calling for help. He had nearly gained the upper hand when several angels jumped him from behind and brought him down. Now, as Eris lay half asleep in the grass nearby, bemused but amused by the antics in progress, the angels cowered before him but held steadfast at the gate to the pillar of light. “You will have to destroy us completely. We cannot afford to fail. Know this, Son of the living light that every angel in Paradise will set himself against you until YOU are destroyed completely.” He paused and said “I tell you the light won’t take her.” “Have you tried?” “I haven’t the courage,” the angel said. Nephi felt a sudden weariness for the angels before him, a tired understanding as the truth was men were not a little below the angels but above them, and born to a greater glory than theirs. They were the servants of the Sun but he was a son, thereof, something they must envy in their trembling moments. Nephi pitied them and held a hand forward to pull one to his feet. “Forgive me, Brothers,” he said. “But I can’t abandon my friend. I have to find a way for her sake.” He reached down and lifted Eris in his arms. She opened her eyes again and smiled sleepily for all. The first angel regarded her as if mystified in and said “he’ll help you. To live is to find a way.” But the others continued to cower fearfully. Nephi nodded to them and walked away carrying Eris along a path that led to a large lake in a sloping meadow of great round stones and tall pines. “We’ll rest here,” he said, “and watch the breeze play on the water.” He had not noticed the presence of his father until the ghost sat down beside him. Nephi turned to him. “Why are you here, Dad? Why Paradise and not Heaven?” The old ghost turned a little bitter and stared out over the lake. “You and I would fish that lake…under better circumstances, a couple of beers, an old joke or two…” he said and turned to face his son head on. “I am working out the terms of my redemption,” he said upon a pause. “I have to find a way to clear the devils out of here. Whatever you want has to wait.” “But how can I help her? I don’t know, other than what I’ve done.” Nephi said, and was about to say more but stopped to see around him a multitude of dogs and cats passing quickly near them. “What is this now?” They seemed to be everywhere, house pets yowling and mewling, panting and calling, running past them toward the lake. He saw lapdogs and horses, and domestic cats of every breed, small birds and snakes and pet lizards and even a few hermit crabs and the occasional arachnid moving past them filling up the pasture around them, and all gathering at the lake shore. “What’s going on?” He asked. “Eris. Wake up and see this.” She smiled in her sleep and said “I know all about it. Isn’t it lovely?” His father said to him “No one knows the origins of the soul. It is a beguiling mystery. The lower mammals are born without one and few ever suffer the effects. But pets grow into them simply from human contact as they are humanized. It is a mystery even to our Father in Heaven, but He takes them when He can. They are not meant for that progression but many earn it anyway. To comfort them He sends the soul of our Mother Earth and she eases their anxiety. You see, they miss their old masters.” A drooping shame occurred to Nephi as he thought of a dog he turned out to the street outside the Al Kem Ray apartments in the avenues a decade before, who had loved him blindly even though he hated the messy creature that had torn up his furniture and chewed his favorite books and then pissed on his floor. So he kicked the dog out of his apartment and sent the animal howling into the street. A few days later he found it dead on the side of South Temple a few blocks down, and walked away in silent anguish. He had tried to put the episode behind him but it confronted like a mortal sin. He watched and waited. A great beast arose out of the lake, shining and soft gray like a walrus skin. But this was no walrus, instead a huge brontosaurus like beast, a saurian of sorts but for its human face and mammal warmth that radiated with such maternal comfort that Nephi could feel her presence from where he sat, the head rising out of the waters first, the face smiling benevolently as she arose from the deep and moved slowly up the shore to lie down where the sand met the meadow, calling to her children with a sweet song that rang out from the hollows of her sinuses, a mothering sound and then a high melody that gripped Nephi to his very bones. Even Eris came awake to hear it and gazed in wonder at all the little house pets who now gathered around the great mother beast, alighting her long humped spine and clinging to the warm and giving flesh of her great gray body. Dogs nuzzled and wagged their tails. Cats curled up smiling and purring. Birds and snakes, rats and hamsters, exotic pets like tarantulas skittered along happily and played with each other in a state of joy that made Nephi hang his head for shame of himself. “That is the great soul of our Mother, Nephi,” his father said. “The Mother of us all.” “Poor old Bix,” Nephi said of his dog. “I wonder where he is.” “Somewhere here, maybe,” his father nodded. The pets clung to their mother covering all of her self so that she was a living organism of species and breeds in variety, a surging mass of pure happiness that broke the heart. Nephi got to his feet and lifted Eris back. “I can’t take this anymore,” he said, and started to carry the sleeping ghost away. “I have something you have to see,” his father said. “The evil that has come upon us has sent their best to deal with you and it is your demon. Can you beat this thing for us?” Nephi jumped to his feet and whirled about searching for any sign of it. He backed away from his father, back toward the stairs. Oh, to leave, to escape this place and go home to bed. He would destroy the Valley Tan, break the bottle and be done with it, and spend the rest of his life in prayer. “No, Nephi,” his father said. “It’s already done. You will fight this thing. Come and at least see it.” He took his unwilling son by the hand and dragged him along as if to a noose, and Nephi wanted only to wrest his grip and get away, but he knew the old man knew that already. He knew it. He had to go. Over a rise they came across a vast and barren plain of cracks and fissures. Here the demons congregated in an oily multitude that smelled of sickness and retching. They were in mass like a pile of vomit that has come alive and is howling at the sun. A great bellicose voice yelled out “Nephi Gass! Come and be killed!” Nephi fell back out of fright but his father caught him and held him up, and sorrowed to see his boy so afraid. He had died much too soon, he knew. He had left his son to go it alone without his help and teaching, blindly through the world never knowing what was expected of him. “That’s him,” his father whisper. “That’s…the gravedigger, the ghost of the grave robber, Jean Baptiste whom Brigham exiled to Fremont Island. You read of him, before. He disappeared and I believe the lake took him as it tried to take you from me, remember? But the lake is bigger than this fool, and we beat the lake. Remember that?” As a boy Nephi had nearly drowned on the Great Salt Lake when a sudden gust capsized his canoe as he rowed along with his boy scout troop. Now he looked up at the beast demon before him and realized that ‘man’ and salt sea had merged into a thing as big as a truck. It carried a spade and bore the horns of Molech. Louise had spoken true. It had come now, the moment he feared the most, the craven cowardice in him like a cancer. He sank to his knees and wished to die quickly. Nephi turned bitterly toward the elder Gass. “I’m going to die.” “We have nothing else,” Gus told him. “If you can kill Molech then we can get past and drive the demons into those fissures you see. Those are the portals to hell fire.” Nephi sighed and looked at Eris whose own eyes were bright with alarm and fear. “I know that demon,” she gasped. “He kills little children.” He saw the fear in her own eyes and tried to be comfort. He loved her and held her head to his chest and kissed her hair. He made an assuring smile. “I’ll make short work of the big idiot,” Nephi smiled and set her down in his father’s lap. “Stay here and I’ll be right back.” He looked in his father’s eyes and saw real worry. “I’m sorry, Son. They pushed me into it.” Nephi hesitated. “What can he do?” “He can destroy your soul. So be careful,” his father said. “If you can climb on his back the horns might twist off. Otherwise, get the shovel, if possible. He can destroy your soul. Won’t be the first time he’s done that.” Nephi stepped before the great snarling beast and felt a moment’s courage until he recognized the demon that had plagued him for so many years. It toward above him and snarled and spit, and he felt his legs giving way. Suddenly, he turned and fled, deaf to his father’s cries. The shame of his act repulsed him but, if he could just get away he could go home and hide in his bed. How he longed for his bed. The beast strode forward and had him by his collar and he froze as it brought their faces together. He waited for death and managed to ask it “Well?” In answer, the shovel swung at him but he ducked his head into its great fist and the blade just missed his neck. Nephi made a grab for it and held on but the beast picked him up along with the shovel and brought it down to slam the plain with it and Nephi as well. Nephi lay groaning in pain while the beast repositioned itself and brought the shovel down on him again, and again and yet though he pained he wasn’t wounded. Just in time he kicked himself away got to his feet and ran away to cower behind a crop of stones. He met his father’s dismay with alarm and crouched down quivering as the monster grabbed for him and missed. Through his stunned fear he heard his father cry out “Nephi! You have no choice! It’s you or him! You have to fight the damned thing!” No choice. Time to grit his teeth and rise—what? a ghost of living light snuffed out in Paradise, and by a demon out of hell, itself? It seemed all wrong that some middle management deity should have such power. A rage built up inside, a do or die imperative that that pointed the way. He knew he had it in him to destroy the monster Molech, forever. Louise was there in perfect radiance. She said just before she vanished “Cut its calves and it will fall.” Nephi crawled on his hands and knees quickly from the rocks and got to his feet to run around the demon-beast as it twirled trying to catch him. It made a grab and caught him and as it did so it lifted him high in the air, a hand on his neck and another at his ankle. But it had dropped the shovel in doing. The Molech tried to pull him apart, and he could feel himself stretching impossibly, and heard his father crying up to him not to let the beast rend him in half. Panic seized him again, and his courage drained to helpless struggling. He cried out for help to his father but there was no help coming. Despair came then and he writhed in the fists of Molech, crying out and begging for his life, and yet…nothing changed. All he could do was hold against it but it could no worse than it had. Had it reached its limit? Then indeed the living light would see him through, and he felt a growing confidence as fear subsided. He grasped one of the monster’s arms into which so many children had been lain to cry out their last moments consumed in the white heat of its fiery embrace, and as he did so he vowed vengeance for the sake of their innocent souls. When the demon could not rend him, it threw him to the ground again and again while Nephi struggled to find a weakness he could use against it. The Molech leaned down to fetch him up again, and Nephi grabbed a leg and bit deep in the calf, and the monster dropped him and danced in circles. He picked up the spade it had dropped and ran after, swinging the handle and yelling all the while. Across the barren ground they chased each other and up into a small outcropping of craggy stones. Nephi swung again but this time the beast caught the shovel and they both held tight, but the Molech managed to throw him out and onto the hard ground of the plain. He dropped the shovel and lay panting in agony, glanced up and saw the monster reaching for him to pick him up again. He sank a hard grip into the forearm, as he was lifted again high over head, pinching as hard he could with his hands, and held somehow. The beast could not tear his soul asunder after all. Instead it howled in pain and dropped Nephi to the ground. He slid away as quickly as he could go on all fours and grabbed the spade and swung it back against the squat shins of Molech, breaking the skin below the knee and cracking bone beneath. It fell to its knees and made a grab of Nephi’s tunic, pulling him toward it as he swung for the neck with all his might. In the blink of an eye he was drenched in the brackish brine of the Great Salt Lake as the head of Molech flew from its shoulders and impaled the barren plain on one its horns. The rest of the body deflated and withered into nothing on the ground before him like a popped water balloon. It was over and Molech lay dead at his feet. He carried the spade to his father and laid it before him, stood back panting and scowling for all his victory, and then bent over to lift Eris up in his arms. Amazed, she said “I always knew you were a fighter. If only Bill could see this.” Just as quickly he set her down again. “Sorry. I have to rest.” He panted as he took the hard ground down beside her, and then lay his head in her lap as she sat crosslegged over him. “I won’t fail you, Eris,” he said. “Don’t let me fail you. I’ll figure something out.” She smiled upon him and was radiant, and ran her fingers in his hair. Neither noticed the throng of angels gathered behind them, who had seen the fight and its outcome. There came a tap on his shoulder and Nephi glanced past Eris to see his father’s determined face, his eyes afire. He grinned at his son, and presented the shovel. “It’s not over,” he said. “What, now? Don’t I do enough as it is?” Gus pointed to the great plain of demons in multitude. “We have to drive them back and you will lead us.” Nephi glanced past and out upon the vast barrenness milling with demons like so munch stench in brackish water, the very rot of souls decaying and rotting all they came across. How he hated them, then, and wanted only to leave this place. “Just why do you need me for this?” “No one is stronger. You have the living light. Of all the billions that exist upon this world you are the torch bearer crossing two boundaries. It was meant for you to find the bottle. Your own desperate courage and your undying love for the unattainable earned you this place. And to think,” Gus smiled. “You are MY son. You have destroyed Molech. He is gone from the world and lives nowhere but in history books. But you, alive and in love like a true Gass! Your desire will win the day for us.” Nephi angered and scowled upon his father as if death itself were his ultimate betrayal. “All I do is lose the ones I love the most. You and your angels want my help, but what do I get out of it? What about Eris, here? She deserves to be with God. She’s innocent, you know. I will take her before Him and argue her case if I have to.” “You have to get there first.” Nephi glanced away and back at his father whose eyes were on his toes scuffing pebbles on the barren ground of paradise. “Son,” the old ghost started. My boy, He isn’t the God that we’ve been led to expect. He’s not some fire and brimstone judge holding court in a cosmic courtroom. He’s not some Happy Valley Santa Claus in a salesman’s suit and tie. Neither is he the bearded patriarch from scripture. We see Him and we watch but His true nature is too obvious for words, what He does, the whole reason for His existence. His is not the stern countenance of Puritanism. He is so far beyond all that Sunday School moralizing. His is rapture unending, creation itself, new life and new joy so far beyond our ken, beyond our language and our ability to ever express, that we can never comprehend the least of it. His scattered seed moves the Earth, His own dear Love, He sings to as she sings to us in the howling wind but that language is a far vaster vocabulary than we can even comprehend. I promise you won’t find anyone you recognize.” “What do you mean I won’t?” Gus shut his mouth at that point and turned toward the other angels, all of whom were listening. Hurriedly he said “I have no more to say about it. Will you help us or not?” Nephi stood defiantly and folded his arms. “Not unless you agree to help her. I won’t let her stay in this place forever.” “It’s not your place to say—“ “I defeated a demon that not a one of you could. I’d say my say counts for something at this point.” Gus gave a sideways nod, saying “I guess it does,” and adding “you’ll never know how much unless you help us. Nephi sighed at Eris and took a hand to kiss. He sat up and climbed to his feet. He pulled her to standing but she wobbled ungainly as she allowed him to lead her slowly to a growth of lawn next to a small tree. “Rest here and wait for me,” he said. His father handed over the spade. “Use it on them,” he said. “It defiled the dead. Now let it defeat the damned.” Nephi held it in his right hand and took flight toward the great plain below and as he did so a host of ghosts and angels took flight at his heels and followed him down into battle, a great army of the imperfectly righteous armed with their wooden staves flying as a vast flock of starlings over the hill and swooping down into the low valley of fissures. Fires erupted from those fissures and great columns of smoke and steam billowed up rumbling from tongues of flame. The demons stooped in terror as the ghostly army fell upon them and then scattered in screams as the staves began to strike. Either direction lay an open fissure that, as Nephi saw, was a lake of molten lava spewing up crimson soup and yellow flame. Nephi struck with the shovel and as he struck, one demon at least was sent to fly and fall down the fissure and be consumed. A surge of demons bowled him over and pulled him toward a fissure while he fought desperately, beating with the stave in one hand, and clawing the ground with his other. A host of angels fought them off and his father pulled him to his feet. Others were not so fortunate and more than a few of the imperfect good fell into the lava crying out their last and sinking into the molten soup, crying “save me, brothers,” while Nephi and his father watched in horror. How is this Paradise? He wondered. Is there no reward? Is it forever this struggle? Is there no peace? But the battle had turned and the demons vanished to the last into the fissures to be consumed in howling agony. At last only the angels and ghosts of the dead remained standing on the plain, and the ruddy ghost of the living to whom they now bowed in allegiance. Nephi stood amazed. “This is for the best,” his father assured him. For the damned only perdition awaits but the rest will start anew.” Nephi hung his head and threw the spade into a fissure. He asked as he started away from the plain toward the hillside “what about Eris? Must she wait forever? Must she be consumed? She’s innocent. She deserves better than this.” His father followed in silence as together they climbed to the high ridge and turned to see a throng of ghosts and angels in flight behind them. “I am amazed at this strange hierarchy,” Nephi continued. “I would never have suspected it of Heaven.” “This isn’t Heaven,” his father said, “only Paradise, the last stop for a troubled traveler. Heaven is something else all together. You will find, my son, that travelers are but particles in space and that all too many have nowhere to go. God doesn’t judge us. We do that, and the angels read it on us like a written accusation. He creates. His is life abundant.” Nephi went over toward Eris who had fallen asleep again and lifted the small burden in his arms. She seemed so peaceful and it hurt him to worry for her like a little child. He leaned down and kissed her forehead. She opened her eyes and made a curl of her lip. “Hello there, my friend,” she said. He tried to laugh for her but the anguish overtook him as always. “I will try for you,” he answered. “I will never give up even if I have to carry you to every locked door in this universe.” His father said “Alright, Son, the time has come to follow me. Bring her along too,” and led the way toward the sea along a little trail. Gus pointed to the great waters, the boundless waters that seemed to rise into the sky beyond the shore line. “The sea of tears, we call it,” he said. “Why here?” asked Nephi. Gus said “there is a way for you. You’ve earned it, and I will gladly risk it for your sake. I’m sorry I died too soon and left you alone in the world, my son, my sweet boy.” He patted Nephi’s face. “But now I can make up for it and face down a legion of angels in judgment, and do so with the courage you have taught me. And if they throw me in the fissures then Mother Earth can fish me out again and give me a clean start.” “What are you trying to tell me?” Nephi asked, and the old ghost pointed off behind tall reeds growing in a cove near the crashing breakers of the boundless waters. “There,” he pointed. “A boat,” Nephi exclaimed. “A gondola. Think you can handle one?” He parted the reeds to reveal the long white vessel and bade his son to place the ghost of Eris O’Brien down between the planks and let her rest there. She curled up immediately to sleep as Nephi stepped to the back to take the long oar. “Where do you want me to go?” Nephi asked. His father pointed just above the west where the great star, Jove stood poised about to drop below the Earth. “There,” he said. “I’m not supposed to talk about this but there is always another way to Heaven, and this is one. It’s a failsafe. Nothing is perfect in this universe, sad to say. No path is ever straight. The boat will not be easy to maneuver until you get past the far breakers and then you will find calm seas to take you to your destination. Don’t let the boat spill you out into open space or you will float forever away. To reach Heaven the hard way one must go forth on boundless waters. Once you’re there and finished, point the boat this way and it will bring you here.” “you’ve been there,” Nephi gaped. “Several times. But it isn’t safe for a living soul.” “Why didn’t you stay?” “Unfinished business, here,” he smiled. “You, for one thing.” Nephi climbed into the unsteady craft and used the oar to push out into the water steering the great gondola and its precious cargo out into the open sea, holding to the long oar to push until he hit infinite depth. Here the breakers swelled against him, crashing like a storm surge all around, that fought him with terrific force and nearly capsized all into the abyss. Nephi fought with the power of his life, but the surge of sea at one point did capsize them and spilled Eris into the void, and she nearly floated away forever but he reached out just in time and grabbed her by an arm and pulled her close. He strained to hold the long gondola as it whirled off in pools of space, the whole while holding to the vessel while he gripped the arm of dangling Eris. As he held, the waters calmed and so the boat was able to right itself and let him roll back inside it, and Nephi leaned down to pull Eris up after. He stood and took the oar and steered the boat into the more sedate waves of everlasting space the while Eris huddled in the bow, as if to hide in dreams of deepest sleep. As suddenly as the tide had surged they were past it and at last upon the nocturnes of outer space, the calmest of seas. He oared along through whispering music of the night and gazed up into the great stars connected by strands of light like pictures he’d seen of constellations or the gossamer web of spring spiders all dew covered. In awe he watched as the gondola moved quickly along and the great star Jove stood poised closely ahead, brilliant but soft in His light enough that He seemed to Nephi a great domed cathedral of light hanging in vastness upon the far horizon. As he drew closer Nephi discerned with his ghost’s eyes a great quivering, a buzz electric, a shimmering like sperm moving under a microscope, the light blazing through it as it seemed to writhe as one great entity of urgency. Closer still, the boat moving like light, arrived the sight of gigantic flowers forever spreading their fiery petals in vastness, only to rise and bow downward and disappear into the brilliance, and Nephi was stunned into a gaping stupefaction. The gondola came to rest on a beach of brilliant particles all in nervous agitation. Nephi stared in wonderment upon the sight of great phallic pillars of piston-like pistil rising up and curving back into sudden yawning apertures that opened spreading labial petals of pure and intense electric plasma. The constant rising and plunging were multitude and unceasing, and with their pulsing came a fragrance overpowering to him like a room full of rotting irises all obscenely drooping, protruding and orgiastic in a fury of dissolution and decay, yeast and fungus, sperm and egg in overpowering odor that sickened him into exhaustion. It was the smell of spent protoplasm, coughed forth ectoplasm, of animal and vegetable sex far vaster than familiar, the whole abysmal principle assaulting his senses and his puritan expectations. God wore no garments, knew no modesty. Ultimate and powerful He was Father in Heaven, constant in husbandry, unceasing in creation, every instant the first full day of spring and unabated copulation. It was enough of a problem for human beings that genitalia and that genitive purpose lay between their legs and at the center of their being, that they were forced to hide away in fear of their animal selves but He, the Father of all was one great sentient genitalia, all knowing, all wise and benevolent genitalia exploding seed upon the fabric of space in solar flare and prominence, producing every living thing upon the Earth and who could say where else. No space was wasted on the surface of the Sun, the great roiling mass of Him given to the act of creation, great puckered bowels burst out through holes and shot seed afire into the night; and for an instant Nephi thought he understood but lost the thought and turned toward Eris. She was gone. The bow of the boat sat empty. And Nephi stumbled forward and out of the gondola onto the brilliant beach and called for her. He wandered upward crying her name all the while in wonder if she might have fallen out somehow but glanced down to see her tiny bare footprints in the fiery sand. He followed them, cupping his hands to his mouth and calling for her into the magnificent chorus of voices, all sounding a deep heart shattering acclaim of ‘OM…’, coming from the bassoons of a trillion orchestras all at once, the single low, reverberating song of existence. His calling twirled away like bits in a wind and all he could do was follow and search for her. Recollecting with the hollowness of bitter disappointment, Nephi steered the craft the way he had come, the little gondola upon the waves of endless space, making its way home to the azure world as quiet as sleep and poised in perfect velvet. He had not held her one last time, no kiss and no farewell. Where did she go and what did she become? “Goodbye, Eris,” he wept to himself. But she had turned her face to the face of her Father, gone into Him, become a part of His boundless joy, gone into His Kingdom of pure love, into Himself, into Heaven, into Bliss everlasting. Nephi howled into the sky the remorse of his tawdry sins, his betrayals and cruelties, crying for the loss of Eris, the loss of a dog he might have loved, the loss of all that ever mattered to him, the lost Amanita somewhere on Earth now strolling quickly toward a man he could never be, and wailed until he had no tears to wail, and so stood and sighed with a terrible longing, steering the gondola. He wondered if he had doomed dear Eris, having been party to an event that he could never reverse. The grail, shattered, could not un-shatter. So went the philosopher’s rule. When he awoke Nephi sweated on the lumpy mattress of his own bed in his cheap hotel room. He had truly slept. He lay slow waking for a long time and found a crumpled cigarette and lit it, letting the soft smoke drift above him like a meandering ghost. Hunger in him now he dressed in fresher clothes and stepped outside to meet the winter’s day of late morning or early afternoon. He couldn’t say for certain. Winter moved like one long afternoon of leafless shadows spanning avenues like fingers. He walked to Kay’s place over on fourth east below second south where the stench of vagrants filled the stairwell, and climbed the stairs a floor and leaned against the door of her apartment, knocking lightly. No one came. He thought he heard shuffling and whispering inside but no one answered the door; and so he paused to light another smoke and wandered back out into the street. He crossed the road and stopped at the grocery store, stomped out his smoke at the entrance and went inside to wander about the aisles. He had nothing in mind to buy but found his way to produce gravitating toward a bin of hothouse strawberries, and filled his nose with their wonderful fragrance. Memories spilled to flood his mind, the ancient pleasure of strawberries in Fruit Heights, his mother chiding him for eating the lot he was supposed to pick. Something aroused his understanding and he realized how starved for a woman’s love he was. He thought of Amanita, and pinched the fruit bloody in his palm and watched it run in the rims of his closed fingers. So had Eris bled for her. FIX ME It was the tale of Falcon Eddie he found so inspiring. Nephi Gass remembered well on a pitcher of beer and a smoke at the Deseret Lounge just above Fourth and Main: It had been a month or two, a cold December blowing chilled particulates that glittered strangely, and snow packed up and dirty, and a frigid breeze that froze to the bone. He had taken the bus north from his tiny duplex on the banks of the Jordan River. He had walked all the way from the top of the Parkway where his tiny ramshackle duplex faced the river and its snow matted weeds. He had bent with the icy road and wandered down Stratford Avenue past the pillared church, past the garage across the street, the corner barbershop, and walked north to the bus stop and there awaited the bus. North he rode to Heavenly Neon or what was left of it, clocked in and went in the back to see that Florenzo Weed had gone and taken his tools. He stared at the bare walls and sat on the workbench and lit a smoke. Kenny came to face him with Amanita tandem, lovely in denims and soft sweater upon which lay her auburn hair like rills, her arms crossed and a look on her face he could not read. Kenny quietly handed him a blue slip, and Nephi looked at it without quite comprehending the matter. Kenny said “I have to let you go.” Suddenly Nephi understood. “It says I’m fired. Can’t handle the job?” He crossed his ankles in consternation. “I can’t afford to pay you unemployment. And I don’t want you around anymore. Not after Snowville.” Sudden tears came on the image of his friend Eris dying in a parking lot at sunset and Nephi wiped his eyes. He looked at Amanita but her own eyes were downcast. Suddenly he blurted out what he had always meant to say to her: “I love you, Amanita. I always did and I always will. Don’t you feel anything for me at all?” Surprised, she blinked in his eyes and turned away in alarm. Kenny however burned a stare into him. It was hatred. He had struck Nephi once and would do it again without hesitation. Few things in life unsettle more than an old friend with a grudge. Nephi slid from the table and moved away from them toward the front office. He turned and said “I’ll never give you that bottle. For God’s sake this is December. It’s Christmas. You pile.” “Goodbye, Nephi!” Nephi did not leave. Instead he ran against Kenny and shoved him down. Amanita jumped back with a scream. Kenny got up and hit Nephi full in the face and Nephi went down. He got back up again and again until Kenny landed a hard punch to the side of his head, and Nephi lay on the floor in a daze. “I guess that’s goodbye then,” Kenny said as he walked away. “Not by a long shot,” Nephi muttered from where he sat up cross-legged, and rubbed his head. “Please show yourself out,” Kenny said. Nephi watched Amanita following her boyfriend a few paces behind, so beautiful in denims, the perfect hips that rolled like oceans, so lost to him now. It was over, all of it. The dark hair waving gently behind her was a terse goodbye. Go find another job and build another life. That very day he found work mopping floors in a downtown short rise of old offices and yellowed linoleum. Denizens within the walls were few and harried in a quiet sort of desperation yielding sweat in their polyesters. The men were double chinned and quivering and the women skinny and old and in heels that clacked like maracas when they stepped along. Nephi mopped the floors and emptied the baskets, swooped debris in a Sanitaire and slipped out the back for a smoke and a gaze at the winter sky. And there he saw the ghost of Amanita, secretive behind her smile, riding the winter moon across the Wasatch sky. Come evening Salt Lake skies were filled with essence of grilled beef and fried potatoes rising through the low mists, and did so then as Nephi counted the pennies in his pocket, realizing he had not eaten a bite all day. But a cigarette had a way of easing that and so he lit his little pilot light and leaned to it, the warmth and flavor, the comfort of a simple coffin stick to aid him in his need. But then came the day he lost his duplex. An investor bought the property and all that Nephi could carry with him went into a large suitcase he had run away with so often in the past. It contained a few books and a lot of dirty laundry, a comb and several packs of matches and a near empty bottle of after shave, and…the bottle of Valley Tan Whiskey. He hopped a bus uptown and wandered about the soggy wet streets, and found a men’s hotel on State Street, seven dollars a night. He wandered the endless sidewalks after that, finding musty bookstores buried under pavements where the soft tomes slept in dreams of yellowed print and wrinkled bindings. Here were the secrets of the ages, the lost knowledge of old civilizations leaving behind their memories of mysterious races and foreboding prophecies. Nephi swam in their enigmas and came upstairs as if awakening from a long stupor, drawn by the flavor of fried food from a nearby hamburger joint, a cup of coffee, please, and a side of fries. There he would read by a large window gazing out on traffic growling north and south on State Street. He would peruse his paperbacks and await his shift and see the city of the saints moving to the mambo of unending human desire. All that energy, so beautiful her own profane and sacred dance. She belonged to the world, the little town of Salt Lake, the spiritual capitol of this dispensation of the Orphic mysteries and the cult of Dionysus. Pressed in granite the ancient symbols beguiled with truth beyond the ken of human understanding, the bearded prophets gazing skyward, pressed in granite. How he had pressed this city to his breast and held her like a gift, the land of Deseret, her stately temple rising from the desert like a defiant fist against the other churches, upholding the simple and revolutionary fact of eternal progression that he had seen for himself, the smiling visage of the brilliant Lord, a father with His own father and mother, who was no secret to any who would see, whom the morning glories mimicked as they leaned to Him at sunrise, yearning for benevolence and love. Nephi was a far wanderer throughout the city’s boulevards, her secrets where the sidewalk ended on a sudden plume of lilacs, the girls he’d kissed and fondled in secret gardens where the crickets sang--how he remembered! They were beauties giving of themselves, seduced by warm winds blowing out of Wasatch sage, their soft breasts, their moist mysteries that yielded as roses to desire. And he dreamed of her, the lost but not forgotten. How would she ever want him now? Amanita… For another month he lived alone and lonely, knowing only a few old friends from the far past, seeing nothing of Amanita. His anger grew. He had lost everything and said goodbye to a life that looked good to him. He blamed Kenny for yanking it all away, everything but the accursed bottle of Valley Tan that walked him into Paradise whether he wished to go or not. He had helped his friends into Paradise and on to greater glory, into sunbeams blazing out across the universe connected with all the other entities in splendor shining their intelligences, all fulfilled and all progressing onward, all but him. No Amanita. Thanks to Kenny. Let him keep her then. Nephi would have Kenny’s blood on the knuckles of a fist or die trying. He wanted death for himself then if this was the remainder of his life and nothing more to fight for. Must he wait in misery while Kenny got it all, Kenny who deserved nothing but a face full of fist? So he would fight for the fact of despair. And it was in the bleak winds of early February Nephi found the shadow that was Kenny Cross and called him out into the parking lot of what was left of Heavenly Neon; and, as a small crowd grew around them, including Amanita standing crossed before the pair: “Nephi, let it go…” They went at it, fists flying until Kenny showed an upper hand and left Nephi lying against the bricks of a convenience store. Kenny walked away from it, and so did she. Three weeks later in late February Nephi, still hurting but angrier, met Kenny in an open field and fought it out again, but this time Kenny picked up a board with a nail protruding, and stabbed Nephi deep in the groin of his upper thigh. Nephi limped all the way to State Street and rode the bus home and drank himself into a stupor at the Deseret Lounge while Roy Sunset, his friend in sales, tried to talk him out of his binge. “You’ll need a tetanus shot—“ “Had one,” Nephi said, and lit a smoke. “Who cares if I live or die? Just another nobody on the side of the road waiting for the bulldozer into some landfill somewhere.” “You ought to get that stab looked at anyway.” Nephi called to the barmaid. “Nance, could I get another pitcher?” “You’re 86’d as of right now. Roy, walk him home—if he can stand up!” Roy was a big man and yanked Nephi up by his left arm, and right off the barstool where Nephi wavered unsteadily. “Let’s go home,” Roy said. “I’d love to go home, if home would have me,” Nephi said in a fine drunken soliloquy, waving to the mildewed ceiling: “You stroll across the Jordan and go up a little flight of stairs where tiny lights shine the prettiest baby blue you ever saw. And on the shores of the great sea a small boat waits to row me home. I do miss home. I imagine it’s on the other side of the world right now, a beautiful place and nothing to suffer, not even a hangover.” They stumbled out together into the night, Roy and Nephi and no one else, and were weaving to and fro south along Main street toward 4th South. Roy paused to peer into the darkened windows of Utah Book and Coin. “Closed? Is it that late?” “It’s that late,” Nephi said to the winter night and pulled his over-worked spigot out of his pants, wending his slippery way over to the wall where he let fly a stream of the beer he’d just had. “Can’t you wait until you get home?” “Who cares?” Nephi asked. “The cops will drag your hide in for that—“ Roy laughed as he lit a smoke and shook his head. “And I won’t stop them.” “What’s it matter?” Nephi asked. “I’ve got nothing to lose. And she’s gone forever, the ghost I worship, the one thing I ever asked of God. Every night for nearly a year I have prayed for Ammie, to have her, to love that beautiful body of hers and make babies and marry her and raise her children and grow old together. All I ever asked, all the ambition I have ever had. Nothing came of it. All tatters. Like old news rolling down the road. I remember one Sunday coming upon a newspaper in the month of August, blowing across 2nd South right to my feet.” Here he pretended to hold the newspaper open in his empty hands. “’Nixon Resigns,’ and I thought to myself that lucky old bugger. Well, I want to resign too, Roy, old son.” They had reached State Street, and Roy helped his friend across the way as he held out his hand against the scant oncoming traffic. They staggered over patches of dirty snow and onto the salt encrusted sidewalk, and Roy showed Nephi the door to the hotel. “Let me walk you up the stairs,” he said. “Give me your key.” Nephi gave it over, having scoured the bottom of his pocket with his eyes shut and a sickly smile on his face. He continued to waver, and suddenly clenched his teeth. “There’s nothing now but to fight Kenny Cross to the death, punish him for what he did to me. He held the carrot before these hands, and then he snatched it away…” Nephi made the motion of grabbing something in the air and stumbled in through his own door. He staggered to his bed and fell on it, pulling his knees and crying “it’s gone, all of it, gone forever,” repeating to a soft mutter and finally a mumble into his wet pillow as sleep overcame him. Roy took a chair by the window and had another cigarette, found one of Nephi’s cheap tomes, and took the book from the tiny table, a worn and wrinkled paperback with a bent spine and penciled through and through with Nephi’s scribbled comments. One of which stood out above the others: “THIS IS THE BOOK!” And just what book would that be? Roy studied the title: “Shattered Grail, the Case for Timeless Change.” He wondered if the fantastic cover illustration of an inverted pyramid hanging in blue space may have been the catalyst that caused the grubby fingers to swipe the book from its shelf of forgotten remainders. The author had worked in sheet metal, another low-grade philosopher trapped in a tin shop enumerating concepts over the tap of a hammer. He told of making a child’s toy out of pieces of metal, cutting perfect disks for wheels and drilling a hole in the center of the first. Then, he claimed, he thought he might make a pull-string toy of the one of the disks, and drilled two holes close but off center. Absently he poked a rivet stem in one and whirled it and noticed how with the oscillating piston of his hand he set the tiny wheel to spin very quickly; however, when he poked the stem in a wheel with one hole dead center, he could not oscillate it to spin. From this small observation he induced a philosophy of movement borne of the idea of dynamic imperfection, explaining that all particles oscillate, that all things that are off-center will spin, that their very imperfection causes their movement, movement leading to change and change leading to one thing going out of existence and another thing coming into existence. The author went on to suppose that God must be imperfect and therefore subject to these same laws, that the only way to achieve any sort of immortality was to change with the change, to p0rogress eternally. Here, Nephi’s scribbled backtalk took on a frenetic urgency, whole passages underlined with a resounding ‘Yes.’ Then the author tried to prove that time didn’t exist, that it was a hobgoblin of faculty physicists, “the high priests of arcane hogwash not meant for thinking men.” He claimed he could prove that only forward movement was there to behold, and that time was nothing more than rate of change. Try to un-drop a cup dropped to the floor and shattered. One cannot, he said, un-break the grail. Once done, the crucifixion cannot be taken back. Antoinette cannot be un-beheaded. A thing can only at best be fixed after that. Roy stopped reading and glanced over at his dilapidated friend and wondered for him, what could possibly fix so broken a soul. Nephi slept deep in a drunken stupor. Ah, good. Roy dumped the book back, placed the key on the night table near his friend, crept to the door and was about to slip quietly from the place. It was then he saw on the floor beside the night stand, a shattered whiskey bottle and its contents no longer fresh but sticky now and grimy on the worn linoleum, truly a disappointment for a man who loved his liquor as much as Nephi did, he thought to himself, as he left and closed the door behind him. It was not quite midway through March when Nephi called Kenny Cross on the phone again. “Nephi…” He groaned. “Why don’t I just hang up and call the police?” “Of course you would, you coward.” “What do you want with me?” “What I always want with you.” “Where is it this time?” “City Creek Canyon. I’ll be waiting for you on a picnic table. Sunday afternoon about three or so. Bring whatever you have handy because this is gonna be the big one.” “What do you mean bring whatever I have handy? What are you bringing?” “Me, Bub. That’s all.” “What do you mean this is the big one?” “To the death, Cross. I got no reason to live without her and so this is your big chance.” “Without who? Eris? “You know who.” “Forget it, Nephi. She’s gone. Moved out and moved on. She wants no part of you and she wants no part of me.” After a silence, Nephi said “I am going to kill you.” “And I am done with you.” “Well, ain’t you the big coward?” “If that’s the way you want it…” “I’ll be ready for you,” Nephi said and hung up. He spent the next week getting soused at Deseret on his lunch hour. He would stagger back home at three in the morning and wake up in the early hours of afternoon. Indeed, the shadows of late winter seemed to resemble an extended afternoon of long shadows moving through leafless trees and a breeze that blew from the south; a hopeful breeze, but Nephi had no hope to hold to now and told himself he didn’t care if he lived to see the summer. Sunday, Saint Patrick’s Day, 1985, Nephi waited on a picnic table several hundred yards up the winding road into City Creek Canyon. Overcast chilled the day some but an agreeable warmth fed hope into the moment, a hope he refused to appreciate. Nephi had a headache from his bout with the beer the night before, and had an empty stomach that fluttered nausea throughout. He wanted to wretch but he sat punching his fist in his palm while an evil snarl played on his lips. He was ready for a fight, for the worst. He hungered for it. The ghost of his father appeared before him. “Kid, go home. I can’t see the future but I’m telling you to forget this fight and find a way to turn your back on the desire you cling to. I could never figure women out for the life of me, and I stand here helplessly before you confessing that I had no wisdom to give you in these matters.” “I’m already forgetting her, Pop.” “Ha. I can feel her presence in you. The woman rules your whole being and yet she’s nothing but a ghost to you. You have to let her go, Son. Pride is the way to destruction, and that never changes.” “Ain’t pride, this time. This is justice.” “Son. Come on, please.” Gus frowned with a helpless face, and shrugged. Nephi sorrowed to see the ghost of his father. “You were gone too soon. I’d look for you but you weren’t there. I wanted to show you things I did to make you proud of me but I couldn’t do anything. I can’t do anything right. I once had something beautiful handed to me but Kenny Cross took it away.” “You’re acting very badly.” “So?” “Think of the good things you’ve done. Yours is a noble spirit, my son, and I am proud of that, and you should be too. You have done enormous things and have won a war for Paradise. You defeated the demon that has cursed us for thousands of years. We are free of it, finally. Can’t you see that? By the way, do you have the bottle?” “I broke it.” To his father’s dismay he added “Accidentally on purpose. I dropped it a little hard,” and he made a flinging motion. “Why? When we still need you?” “Because I lost her, and that’s all the war that matters.” “Life isn’t set for us to get our way. We don’t get what we want. We get only what’s ours to get. Well, perhaps it’s for the best.” Nephi wept in his hands. “I am so full of rage,” he said. “Fix me, Dad!” The saddened ghost said “The most comforting thing we can know about God is that He is greater than the sum of our contradictions. He sees a good soul with His own eyes. And I’ll be with you in spirit. You can count on that much. Life goes mostly without victory but at least you never backed down. You have hope, my dear boy. The angels will help you. They never forget a friend.” He vanished. Nephi got off the table and paced and began to accuse an imaginary Kenny, and pointed an accusing finger as he did so. “I am here because you killed Eris! You blamed me for it but you killed her because you wouldn’t listen to Florenzo Weed and build that sign right the first time. And you took away my job and the woman I loved, and you deprived me of my future but mostly you got away with Amanita when I loved her more than you ever would!” At that moment, southward along the road came three burly men who had seen and heard him, and Nephi pointed at the biggest one in the green hunting vest. “What are you looking at?” “What are you looking at?” “I don’t know, a curly perm that looks like crap?” and Nephi walked up to the man and swung at him, hitting him on the chin, but he had picked the wrong man or perhaps the right man, as a combination punch and kick to the face sent him flying back into dust and blur. When he was up again Nephi came forward a little groggily and swung and missed as a fist doubled up his gut and a whirling kick sliced his forehead. This time he went right over the table top and fell into a stupor as he kissed the hard ground. A hand appeared and turned him over. “What is your problem, Man.” “Who cares?” wheezed Nephi through a mouthful of dirt. “The time has come to die. I’m done with life.” “I’m truly sad for you if that’s what you think. Why don’t you sleep it off. Man, I’m sorry but you didn’t give me any choice,” the big man said as he rejoined his friends, all shaking their heads in wonder. “You want us to call somebody?” Nephi shook his head and so they walked away and left him to brood in the dust. Nephi barely heard them as they strode away arguing back and forth, as their talk subsided into some vast distance, and their feet carried them far away until after awhile there was only the creek water rushing nearby and the blowing wind that threatened a late winter’s flurry. Nephi lay face down in the dirt listening to it and wishing he had died and wondering if maybe he had, and half hoped he could. Pain returned. With a trembling hand he felt an open wound in his scalp, a little blood in his fingers now. He touched a swollen bruise along his upper cheek. His head was heavy as sin and ached with the beating blood. He lay back in the dust and shut his eyes and felt an eerie half sleep coming on as the faces of Louise and Eris and his father loomed close and retreated in a nebulosity of psyche he could not hold. But there was no Amanita. Never again. The travesty had finished. All the struggle of the past ten months had come to nothing but ruin and defeat. No reason to fight anymore. Why get up? He drifted in and out of sickly sleep for what seemed like a long time in moods of whirling despair. They moved like a fever dream as memories spun about him like flood waters filling Hell’s baptismal font with vistas in his mind of faces and occurrences and the now long gone. He thought he might die for its own sake and sleep in the dust as one who is one with it, a mound of nobody eroded by the wind and waters of spring run-off, becoming anonymous with Earth, Herself. He had lost it all. He did not rise but shut his sight away. “Nephi?” He opened his eyes and saw only the road. He blinked. “Are you really Nephi Gass?” He pulled himself up to sit cross-legged searching past the picnic table into the trees that lined the creek. He bent forward and laid his forehead in his hand. He could no longer tell an angel from a dream. “You are Nephi,” the voice came again, a woman’s voice asking him “are you all right?” “Where are you?” He asked the wind. “I’m right here,” she said and knelt behind him, her fingers playing on the wound in his scalp. “Lie back,” she said, and he did so, into the lap of a woman he thought he knew, a familiar face from the past and eyes that sparkled like summer stars but were filled with sadness. She touched the wound on his scalp, and reached in her jacket pocket for a small handkerchief, daubed it with her tongue and wiped bits of blood and grime from his face. As she did so she spoke in a small high voice that soothed him. “What happened to you, Nephi?” “I got in a fight with a jackass.” He studied her face and glasses, the slightly broad chin, brown hair, gone darker with the years, and maternal eyes filled with concern. “I think I know you…Davis High?” “I’m Kayleen Roberts. Don’t you remember? I had a crush on you like you wouldn’t believe. I saw you from the lockers and I never got up the nerve to tell you so I wrote it in a message and slipped it through the locker door.” She laughed. “God--weren’t we silly in those days!” Nephi remembered finding the note among the crumpled papers of a poor academic legacy, mixed in with his books of prophecy and UFOs. He unfolded it, a brief scrap with a purple heart drawn on it and the old trite message that said ‘I love you.’ Sad to say she had left it unsigned. “I remember wondering if you had written it but I would never have believed it.” “It was me.” “What happened to us?” She shrugged with a cheerful resignation. “You were too unapproachable, and I was too shy.” Nephi grimaced. “I really wanted you, Kayleen, but I didn’t think it was possible. I couldn’t figure you out. I laid low in those days.” He struggled to his feet and a stabbing pain in his knee made him wince as he limped to the picnic table and sat down again. “I don’t believe it, now.” He looked up at her again as if to prove the fact of an illusion. She made a frown as she met his eyes. “Who did this to you?” “I picked a fight with a gorilla in a green vest and a perm,” he groaned. “He was a lot bigger’n me.” “He was with two others, right?” She asked as she sat beside him and brushed the dirt from his hair. She touched the cut above his eye but Nephi jerked his head away. “Yeah. Careful, there,” and he leaned toward her once more to let her examine the gash as her fingers framed it gingerly. “That would be my brother,” she said, her breath warming the wound. “Same old Nephi, aren’t you.” “I never could fight--” “Why don’t you come home with me? I have a place of my own. I’ll take care of your cut, take you to a doctor; and then I’ll make us dinner.” She brightened, and so did he, and appraised her as he did so, seeing how she possessed the same sweet nature she always had, that she alone of all the women he had known cared enough to tell him she loved him. She was a little heavier now but her hips were nicely formed, if tending toward plumpness; and her breasts filled out the sweater she wore in that manner that only the most motherly women possess. Whatever it was she had that had beguiled him, she had yet to lose it. Her eyes were wide as they gazed upon him as if he were a treasure. She wiped his mouth and said “you have a nice mouth. I still love you;” a light laugh at irony. “I don’t understand that at all. Why aren’t you married?” He studied her for any sign of an obvious flaw but could find nothing that matched his own. “I never married, Nephi Gass. I’ve been looking for you; and I hoped against hope that I would find you unmarried and available and as lonely as I’ve been. I know I’m a fool but don’t you feel that same loneliness? Don’t you see that we were always meant for each other? Don’t you suspect that angels brought me to you just now? Had it not been for my brother I would never have found you. I mean it, Nephi.” Tears tried and wet his eyes, and he felt a deep shame that she should see them, and turned his face away. How could he tell her all he had been through, sitting on a picnic table on a roadside in City Creek Canyon of all places, where he had come to die for the stamped dead desire of another who would never have him, for whom the simple gesture of affection had been ruined by death and disappointment, and betrayal; and, worse, the same innate coldness that had made her walk away when he needed her most? Cruel Amanita, but he would never hate her. The need had vanished in a cemetery gone white and ghostly, a stone monument there, a simple reminder of once and long ago. “Lie back,” Kayleen said. “And let me fix you.” As he did so, lying in her lap once more, he said “you don’t have to feel sorry for me. I’m getting along fine.” “Apparently,” she smiled. “How can you possibly want me?” he asked with a sudden shudder. ”I don’t have the strength you need in a man. I lost the war, Kayleen, and all the battles.” “Do you love me?” Tears burst through, tears for the lost battles, the lost job, the lost Amanita, the lost Eris, all the wasted nights of fallacy fired in callous despair, and he managed to choke “Yes, I love you.” “Well then, Sweetheart, you won.” And she bent forward and kissed him on the mouth, and with a desperate courage, and buried his face in her jacket, warming and filling him with the kind aroma of herself, stroking his hair with the lightest touch and power of her longing, hugging his head and cradling it like a treasure, a blessing he had never known. Her voice came as a melody that eased his anxious yearning. She helped him to his feet then and the burning agony raced through his leg, but it wasn’t unendurable. It would heal. It would all heal now. He hobbled alongside her while she held him by the arm and hugged him close. She told him “I don’t know what all you’ve been through but it looks like plenty. Come home with me and let me heal you. I have always loved you and vowed I would find you, and I tell you I passed up a lot of golden opportunities for your sake. I want to live with you. I want to marry you, warts and cuts and all of it. I’m here if you want me, but if you don’t want me, now’s the time to say it.” She hardened a little and let go of him as she spoke these last words. He said nothing while his lower lip fought trembling. He stood apart and glanced away, and with the realization came a slight nod of recognition. The gift had come to him after all. The angels had paid him in full. Kayleen stood before him, still searching. Finally he managed to ask “where do you live?” “Lower Avenues. C Street. Can you make it?” “You hiked up here?” “It’s not far to walk. I came to meet my brother and his cronies but they were on a lark, and I went off on my own. But I found you. Did I find you, Nephi?” “I have to warn you. I tend to hallucinate,” he said, believing in himself he ought to at least let her know, convinced that Amanita had dumped him simply because she had seen him for what he was. He knew as he spoke that Kayleen may turn and walk away as Amanita had done: “I like my smokes and my bourbon. I think too much, read too much, know too little and sleep too long and my dreams are far too vivid. I push a broom for pay. I’m a friendless heretic who can’t sit back and accept what he’s told. Last time I was in church I got in a fight because I disagreed. All I ever had ambition to be was a prophet of God. I’d give it all up.” He shook his head laughing at the notion and shrugged. Kayleen appraised him with a doubtful expression, considering in the secret chambers of her own hopes all the little yays and nays that guide a million minor choices, and shrugged, as well. She leaned forward with purpose and put an arm around his shoulder and said “please don’t give it up.” Then she led him slowly down the road and past the trail that steeped into Memory Grove, up the high road that let into the Avenues; and they moved together while evening deepened and the lights of Salt Lake City glimmered like a vast holiday tree spread to the distant hills. Nephi smelled the fresh wet earth of springtime billowing upward and it quickened his step as realization set in, and a lovely new hope came to overtake him like a mother’s sweeping hug. By God, the battle was his, all of it that mattered. He had found his friend and he would live with her the rest of his life. He would give of himself completely as he had promised the whispering trees on long nights of prayer to the breeze that moved the moon. To himself he thought to thank the intervening angels of Paradise, the Gods without number, his Mother Earth, his Father in Heaven, the stars in magnificent chorus, the grand majestic hum of creation; the starlings, those gifted poets of Earth who sang the ancient tongue that played upon the warming winds of March, and all the mystery at the center of being that brought benevolence like a balm. Instead he thanked the once met friend who helped him now, the only woman who had ever wanted him. He turned to her and said simply “thank you for finding me.” She blushed and kissed him, and spoke without guise or guile, and told him “I have lived for this day, Nephi.” At that, two grateful souls embraced and helped each other southward along the upper road, and moved in happiness as wide as boundless waters into the heart of the city that carried them in the palm of her hand.