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:
Refuge (nearer than you think)
Ben thanks the mensch with involuntary gropes and grabs, hugs, kisses, throws His weight under the horse’s sagging stuck belly, one thrown rider more away from being turned into glue (with which to bind a book, perhaps, whose pages, hymn, let’s only hope they contain a ruling against that that prohibits even the emergency consumption of the species), and the two, peasant and pursued, groaning, with their shoulders, bone bursting under their skins, free the animal, which stomps then kicks wildly a tack of knobby limbs. To quit them then ascend the hill, Ben slips down the slope with the wind, in the direction of His ascent down to the most starved flank of the horse unstuck and the mensch just past tugging always tugging, who kindly points out to Him the sign again with a wave to stay away. And so He goes to ascend again and then again slides down on His haunches, atop His tush, His face forced down against the wind, squinting, a nosebleed…and still behind, the horsemensch heading in an occidental direction. And so to shimmy up on His stomach, to snakewriggle, sidewind atop ice — to top the violently sloped, cloudbound hillside, then right Himself at its summit with nicks at the elbows and knees and stomach scraped red under the useless white of the sun and the shadelessness of the leafless oak.
Incomprehensible walls line the interior of the valley below, obscuring, this delimiting haze regular and yet in motion, rising and falling only to rise again, then fall — lips of mouths, they seem…teeth, they’re masticating furiously, falling and rising on their own, individually, the entire eastern slope of the hill a vertiginous swarm of rusticated, unserviced dentition between the individual ords of which, deep amid their crenatures, hang other people, flayed carcass and spewed corpse, the face of the whole an inconstant, dizzying up down up down that’s impossible to focus on simultaneously and so He shuts His eyes to understand — to chip and chew at an image frozen, this newest memory, a revelation made of shock. Not walls now or teeth, but teething people…or the walls are themselves people, babies crying, wailing, walling. This is a city of people, of maybe thousands of them, a million, who can count, He wouldn’t know where to begin; the valley nests them, holds in their reek, their scum, their noise, and is them, as well. Bebabbled kibble. Heedlessness sustains. Ben sits tushed at the summit, gazing down upon the valley’s munched mass: moving forms, shadows, moving so much now and so fast it’s as if they don’t move at all, tornadolike going nowhere, a stationary whirlwind as if the about to address you presence of God Himself, His vocal wrath. Ben slides in, Pyramidal once again: down He goes down the iceflume, accumulating speed and mass, weather rounding form — to hit the wall, wall’s people, knocking them inside, sliding directly into the dead, exact middle, into its totally trampling rampage, to surface from out of that maw of knees, elbows, shoulders, and palms to air, only to be swarmed, then trampled again to the earth packed hard with the stomping of feet on the frost.