As he could pass, Heber’s been turned loose himself, as a gobetween, a messenger, sent up north to unofficially monitor Mormon HQ, to relay reports from the Quorum of Elders and its High Priesthood lately governing the territory while engaged in seccession talks with D.C.: one generous jowl they are, an entire wifeload of trustworthy deportment — even with a volunteer army and, gevalt, a reenfranchised militia or two massing at the southwesternmost nib of Wyoming. A deal’s offered to turn him doubleagent: Ben for a pardon’s what they’re proposing to Heber, come back to the fold, ingather, deliver your mensch and avert the wrath of your people, your father you escaped for opportunity east — that and just name a sum involving as many zeros as fair and smiley enough that you could drive your limo dead through them and into any future that pleases…Heber — having been uncovered, blown as Gelt’s facilitator, zeroing in on the holes not only in their thinking but those in which Ben might’ve been abandoned for sale in the west (peering in pits, casing the caves) — instead failing the directive to become his own brother-in-arms’ lock-&-keeper, to make sure we’re both in the same interest here, on the same page, which is blank…IA not just the acronym of the home of the recently influential Des Moinesher Rebbe, it’s also the abbreviated shibboleth for paranoia, affairs as internal as they’ll ever get: not trusting your left hand while his right grips the wheel, pulls southerly out, deported with escort through the pearly gates and back through Nevada into Californ-I-A and its Angels on a wink and a prayer, with nothing to declare save further disillusion. Wives are huddled into a single skirt. Splinter factions are formed by the wind like the violent sharps of badlanded cliffs. A blond nation’s laying in supplies for their lattermost days, growing blonder by the night, accounts have it, unto transparency, is what a handful of Mormon defectors report; until you could see right through them, see through the whole state to the other side, eventually, and their intentions, their modus immodest: a nation of light, pure; up there days’ll last forever even in a winter as wintry as this should’ve been summer, and so maybe Ben did have the time — or else, Gelt thinks, maybe ursine He’s due in for an appropriately unseasonal hibernation, Yo Semite National Park, or a low lie in the Dakotas, those Badlands then the worse lands and then the lands that get just evermore progressively terrible up toward the Canadian border, dynamited Rushmore territory and further, Alaska, when Gelt he’s in enough of a rush already, out here alone, payphoning collect to the opposite coast, will you accept the charges back to the Garden and Der, who’s returned to the east himself, to plan for any eventuality, his own and Ben’s both. Not that it’s just hushed, unofficial, that they’re biding their bidden: how it’s public, too, citizenry called to account — they’re told, search Him out under your beds, in your closets, pianos, bathrooms, stuck one leg down your laundrychutes, where. Warrants might even be waived for futz anyone knows, issuance, free license to bounty Ben made implicit; I swear it’s around here somewhere or other, and Gelt pats himself down.
Not alone, Gelt has judgment on his side, though it might be as impetuous as it’s interpretive, perpetually arguable, given down in a stone that can always be smashed in confusion. After all, this needs be held accountable to a Law ever newer, or older, just greater: pursuant to article, nu, who knows which, and which is whose portion, who are we to prosecute or judge (the punishment for the sin of a tiny quill slipped amid margins, the only sign of a letter omitted from record — that’s why this detail, that’s why this depth) — unless, that is, suspect heads for a refuge, one of an ornamentally small but for now holding steady number of participating outlets that still dot the interior, stipulated autonomous; the suspect, the large-at-large, having picked up this useful schmeck of information, follows His own finger pointing due east, makes it inland to the foot of a hill, there stops a mensch and his whinnying, reeling horse, the both of them stuck in the mud.
Know where I could find a haven around here? Ben asks him or the horse, rolling up His sleeves, off the cuff casual, and the mensch points, a hairy stump raised to a sign up the road iced ahead, summitting its hill, a tatter of poster tacked to the flesh of a leaning oak:
