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The Unfitted Places

They were evacuating the children from the polygamist ranch. Ingersoll stood at the border of the property. The SWAT teams and other agents had long since come and gone; Children and Youth Services were now ushering long queues of the interned out of the wooden gates that marked the estate. They came in twos and threes in identical purple dresses or starched blue shirts, all with long, sun-freckled faces. Ingersoll tried to decipher their downcast, half-lidded eyes and somber silences. He determined nothing.

A sign nailed to two high posts read Under the Banner of Heaven. In the desert, strewn with dusty pebbles and flat terra-cotta colored sand, it was a standing testament. A monument. An inaccuracy.

As a U.S. Marshal, it was imperative that Ingersoll be present for all proceedings from beginning to end. It was time to survey the ranch and record all initial findings. Lay the groundwork. Sucking his teeth, Ingersoll entered his souped-up Chevy and turned the ignition before he could feel composed to pause. He rolled past the lines of children in the midst of a modern exodus. A queer thought: they reminded him of souls, filing away to an afterlife.

The false prophet Elder Whitman Harvey had named the ranch New Zion after the promise of a City on a Hill. A fundamentalist sect, the members of New Zion had been devout both to Christ and their Christ-on-Earth. Elder Harvey had used his sway and love of Jesus to suit darker purposes. Inhabitants of local towns saw the droves of émigrés from other compounds in Texas and New Mexico flock to this new pasture, but asked no questions. They feared answers. They suspected, but did not pursue. It wasn’t until years later, when the Bridey girl waltzed into the police station one morning, rushed and breathless, that they had any reason – any excuse – to conduct an investigation. Everything began to unravel and untie. The Bridey girl expounded upon arranged marriages between children and elderly men, some of whom were close cousins or other kin. Incest. Brutal spousal abuse. She rubbed her face furiously with rough palms. Scrubbing dirt. The Bureau became involved, as did the United States Marshals Service. There were aerial photographs taken from government-issued stealth jets, swooping and hawkish.&n bsp; Undercover a gents. And finally, a crackdown.

Elder Harvey had long since run off, hiding in canyons from enforcement like a jihad-obsessed terrorist. The men, too, had left. Women and children remained. Waiting with unblinking eyes. Longing. They prayed. There was nothing else to do.

That is how they had found them. All of them. Silent. Alive, thankfully, with an eerie stillness in their blood. They did as they were told as the different agencies came to take them away. Quiet.

The first structure after the horizon was the water tower. Painted blue, it stood luminous in the white sun. It fought over dominion with the sky. This was the oasis. The life source of New Zion. With his eyes, Ingersoll bore holes into the metal. Burrowing until he hit water. In the film strip of his mind, it burst in an apocalyptic fit. It thundered to the ground. Drowning everything in this daydream.

The school was the cornerstone building in the complex; according to satellite images, these structures formed the shape of a cross. Ingersoll slowed and parked, shaky on the powdered gravel. Stepping out and shutting the door calmly – as if there were anyone left to disturb – he ambled towards the ranch-style house. Though each edifice was whitewashed, the wind and particles of sand and dust had yellowed and peeled the paint like carrot skins. He could not bear to step inside the schoolhouse, but imagined a bare room – save for desks and chairs of unfinished wood; in the corner, a long ruler (U.S. customary stock) for discipline and drawing straight lines with chalk. Ingersoll envisioned taking the stick into his own grip and beating the one who taught the children into a shivering ball. Mercilessly. Until it broke and wooden shards jutted from the teacher’s back. For all the children he flogged until their voices were too hoarse to call out, until they knew better, until they could only ask for a different sort of salvation. He could not help the hot, sour taste gurgling in the back of his throat.

Ingersoll began to walk deeper into New Zion. From different Bureau reports and other eye-witness testimonies, he knew that the next building housed the women: a set of inter-connected barracks. Girls housed on the right, their children interned on the left. Ingersoll cracked his knuckles, tips white from balled fists. One had to imagine what the annexed wings were used for, adorned with dusty mattresses spread haphazardly on the floor. One had to know. Little girls with cow-like stares. Not an hour before, squadrons had raided Elder Whitman Harvey’s personal quarters, sequestered behind the mega-church. It was in a padlocked file drawer that they had found carefully organized photographs (by date, color-coded manila folders, red and pink and blue) of the Elder and seventeen girls, the Bridey child among them. Ranging from twelve to fifteen, they each wore plain white gowns and veils like doilies. They were porcelain dolls. Marionettes. Elder Harvey wrapped his arms around their waists like gurney straps. There were conventional wedding poses in the most unconventional of senses, there were staged photographs of Whitman carrying each of his wives over an unpainted wooden th reshold, their limbs grasped tightly around his sunburned neck like babies clinging to their fathers.

Besides this, the series of image-rendered evidence ended here. It was enough to suffice. It was enough to let the mind wander to other scenarios. A member of the team had gotten sick. Not even a USMS greenie; this guy had seen third-degree burn victims, cars that resembled balls of tinfoil. Other travesties. Walking past the schoolhouse, Ingersoll made sure to step over a brown-green puddle, hardening in the sun.

He was not used to this kind of cultish faith. There were things about the Wild, Wild West Ingersoll was having trouble with. Arid heat. Lack of coniferous foliage. Huevos rancheros. Ranch-style architecture. Caballeros. Spanish-speakers. And now this. Here was the verification of Ingersoll as Other. Even his name harkened to Pennsylvanian settlers of an English breed, married in and mixed with Pennsylvania Dutch. Sol, meaning “tree”, attesting to Appalachian forests. He recognized, in this way, a distantly familial affiliation to the Amish, who seemed to flit about the periphery, grazing in the pastures outside grand Pennsylvanian outcroppings. These Whitman followers, they liked their own kind. Ingersoll’s Amish and their distant relatives, the Mennonites, were integrated. At certain gatherings -- i.e. work functions, double-dates, even family reunions in Lancaster – he retold the boyhood anecdote about the Amish who were shuttled in on short buses (was that even allowed?) to a farmer’s market in Highland Park, near the zoo. During the seventies. Men in flat straw hats sold produce from large wicker baskets. After profiting from these wares, they would close shop and spend some of their earnings on day passes. An afternoon with children in long sleeves and ankle-length shirts. Women in bonnets, women who resembled eighteenth-century pioneers. At the zoo. Ingersoll would see droves of them. They looked at giraffes and dreamed of savannahs they would never see; in turn, small children stared at them and mistook them for Orthodox Jews. He thought this anecdote was charming. Back East, when told, it would receive a warm reception and perhaps the accompaniment of a clinking wine glass. Billy Ingersoll, what a riot! Not so much here, in Utah. Here, where false messiahs roamed the deserts like crazed cahy-yotes, it was much too dangerous to pass such things off as laughing matters. Maybe they had prodigal siblings or born-again mothers. Maybe they had never seen these things, but knew of their existence. Ghosts at sunset in an echoing canyon.

The Temple was the epicenter of New Zion. The centrifugal force. It stretched higher than anything else on the ranch; higher than the water tower, higher than an outreached hand. The cross surged from the coning roof; it yearned to touch the presence of the Lord with its height. Ingersoll was impressed despite himself; he had never seen a church of this size, this caliber, this Notre Dame of the Mojave.

The doors were ornate and of imported cedar. Geodesic crosses were etched in the paneling. Tentatively, Ingersoll pushed them open, too late for Sunday prayers. The muggy heat yawned in his face. Immediately, rivulets of sweat descended from his hairline, rendering his ears as peninsulas, his sun-inspired freckles as archipelagos. He tasted salt and golden dust. A desert baptism.

The purple-red carpet led up to the platform, where, as Ingersoll supposed, Elder Harvey performed from one dawn to the next. The stage itself was simple, with a lonesome microphone in the center. Emblazoned on the far wall were windowpanes of abstract stained glass, twisting the colors of the bright desert sun into the different shades of fire. Censuses taken by CYS tallied roughly five-hundred and fifty-three members of the New Zion ranch. As Ingersoll ambled down the aisle, he felt a secondary, residual echo; the perspiration of cattled-in congregants, little ones sitting on the floor, some nestled in the cradles of their mothers’ laps, flushed all over. But now, this cathedral was empty, slowly relegating towards stati of “relic” and “antiquity.”

The humidity was getting to him, an anomaly in these desert plain states. And this is where, again – it happened to Ingersoll often, especially in times of stress, especially in this modern age – he embarked upon another lucid dream. If these episodes were caused by a mild form of narcolepsy, he refused to investigate; rather, he seemed to prefer the homeopathy of self-denial. There were many theories that could have fit like jigsaw puzzle pieces. Perhaps the expansive western states, so many times larger than their East Coast counterparts, fit manifest dreams inside their massive borders like manifest destinies. Perhaps Hypnos, abstract Sleep, napped with his half-brother Thanatos, abstract Death. Perhaps it was common among Utah men, like pick-up trucks that needed waxing; or maybe something scientific, like the mnemonic induction of lucid d reams, or cycle adjustment, or wake-initiation, or maybe it was an induction device. Or perhaps something cultural, like a subconscious rite-of-passage. Whatever the case, here is what Billy Ingersoll saw, as he closed his eyes for a moment, only just a moment, just a break from a taxing day:

There was the doppelganger of the infamous Whitman Harvey, of photographic and word-of-mouth fame, spoken of but never seen. He stood, center stage, arms out in an all-encompassing embrace. The Elder then dropped to his knees without warning, bowed his head. Ingersoll found himself unable to flinch, despite years of governmental training and an allocation to one of the ninety-four districts, despite the semi-automatic in the holster hidden on his persons. His nerves became arctic. His joints fused. He wondered if this cold veinal circulation was, in fact, the most primal fear man knew.

Harvey lifted his head. If Ingersoll could have managed to control his disobedient body, he would have swallowed a gasp. The Elder’s eyes were devoid of color, dilated to a supreme, soulless black. Without words, he seemed to say: abandon hope. Abandon everything.

ii.

They interrogated the children in a conference room next to the sheriff’s office. It was especially inadequate. A flimsy door, salmon colored-walls. It seemed at first that recording the testimonials would be an arduous task; there were hundreds of evacuees to interview. And then slowly Ingersoll and the rest of the task force began to realize that there were very few from New Zion actually willing to talk. Most gave their replies with abject silences and stares that reminded the team of awls boring into steel. What could any of them too? This wasn’t Guantanamo. Some of the agents were able to coerce the younger ones with half-melted chocolate bars from the vending machines in the lobby, though their peers glowered at these double-crossers.

The first examined was a boy of ten or so. His skin was jaundiced and he was missing a bottom tooth. The boy picked at his chocolate bar with the deftness of a sparrow, savoring each bite longer than Ingersoll felt comfortable with. Ingersoll opened with a routine Call me Bill, it’s all a-okay, but the boy seemed naturally tight-lipped, and didn’t address him directly even once during the interview, only to the kinder child psychologists, licensed for this sort of thing. When asked for his name, the boy replied, They call me Ezekiel. He answered in a hollow monotone Ingersoll could only ascribe to men who had seen and heard too much. Men who should have been boys, but were not. Men who had been thrown into distant warfare.

He first asked Ezekiel about mere preliminaries, day-to-day schedules. Church before desert dawn. Chores. Ezekiel had swept dust to and fro forlornly in the men’s compound. Church. Elder Harvey led incantations. They all replied obediently. Then mess hour. Food with liquid consistencies made en masse. Schooling. Swollen fingers. More church.

Then there was the second tier of questioning, conducted solely by the child psychologists, as Ingersoll looked on. These questions were designed, in all cleverness, to reveal hidden perversities. Ingersoll surveyed their work and line-of-questioning as the shrinks went to it. These guys were big on the school of attachment theory. As they passed in and out of the room – one guy did all the talking, the other two merely took notes – they murmured vague phrases like reactive attachment disorder and Stockholm and MBKT, or maybe MKBT. Crayola washable markers and board games (Ezekiel didn’t know the first thing about the rules of checkers) were employed. Slowly, they wormed questions in, like what about the girls? The women? Were they kept in different places? And what about the babies?

Ezekiel gave no reply.

There was only so much they could do. And there were other children, other answers to prod and pry out of them under the guises of sympathetic smiles and pats on the shoulder. But before they led Ezekiel back to the den with the other children, he turned to the main psychologist, Sanchez. Am I going back to New Zion?

Before Sanchez could utilize New Age psyche, or proffer some sort of vague rationalization, Ingersoll interjected. No, probably not.

Ezekiel turned to him, eyes heavy and solemn. All right, he drawled with the resignation of a man accepting his mortality. They led the boy out of the room, scowling.

iii.

They found that those who did talk were those who demanded an exchange of information. Give-and-take. Most of the members of this camp were the older girls. They wanted to know what had happened to their babies. Babies! If Ingersoll had replaced their old-fashioned skirts and undid their rope-like plaits, substituting them with the modern-day garb of the American teenager – something with a lot of pink and a lot of sparkles – these girls resembled his older brother’s children. His nieces. And then Ingersoll had to stop himself from interchanging the two groups. It was bad for his mental health, to make it so personal.

And what of these babies? What was he supposed to say? He had seen S.W.A.T. men taking them past the gates, cradling them in armored arms, pressing their pink, sea-shell ears against Kevlar vests. Most of the infants had slept through it.

These girls, these children, cried for their own children. It was vexing and complicated. Mere girls with maternal urges, who had breast-fed, who had never kissed boys with tentative, unsure lips. Only hardened men.

He imagined it wasn’t his job to explain. The truth was too taxing.

The boys and girls sectioned themselves off naturally, cordoned to the right and left. Adhering to invisible fences and unsaid, presupposed restrictions. In more innocent scenarios, they could have been obediently listening to a school teacher, or nodding off to sleep during a lesson. And it was these thoughts that unsettled Ingersoll the most. Their undecipherable minds.

iv.

The Bridey girl was ushered in from Salt Lake City; she was currently in the grips of protective custody, foster care. It could certainly be said that her life – which, at this point, had been anything but ordinary – would spiral further still. While waiting for her to enter the room, Ingersoll mapped out the coming years easily. At court hearings, she would be star witness, star testimony; she would encounter a hot flash of publicity after the trials, when her name and image could finally be released into the curious public sphere. Her face would be smattered on the covers of national syndicates. Talk shows and day time personalities would have a field day. They would delight in her immersion of a world so alien to her first, ask her about what it was like to sit passenger in a car, operate a telephone, computer, elevator. They would assume, be presumptuous, marvel at her innocence, naïveté, and childlike wonderment, and ponder how it reconciled with her stained memory and smirched heart. On benchmarked anniversaries – five, ten, fifteen years after her heroic escape and flight from the compound to the town limits, the modern fall of Jericho – there would be updates and “where-are-they-now’s”; her wedding would be considered a great American triumph, an achievement in normalcy, and would be peppered heavily with paparazzi and statesmen. Her psychological profile would be heavily circulated in scholarly psychiatric journals and related crime reports, picked apart like a scalpel in a surgeon’s hand, observing the inner-workings of the still human body. The Bridey girl would live. And never forget.

But now. Now, it was too much for Ingersoll to extrapolate. Contemplation was for off-duty hours, nights of racing thoughts and unbearable insomnia. Now, it was time for preliminaries.

She entered with an entourage behind her, enough to make Ingersoll stand, caught off-guard. Showing respect to a foreign emissary. Flanked by beefy officers, the Bridey girl appeared frailer still; her yellowed hair and pale skin faded her features, albeit dark eyes rimmed with sun-kissed lashes. Already, there were traces of a lifetime left behind: her shoulders sported a dusted freckling, her face a rouge of sunburn near her collarbone. She sported a maroon top, supported by thin straps. Khaki shorts that skimmed the upper-third of her thighs. Thighs, calves, browned knees, tanned feet. Sandals. Parts, which would have otherwise been concealed, lay bare.

She murmured, possibly greeting him. The officers behind her backed away. They exited as if rewound like a videotape, never turning their backs. And then the there were the two of them. Alone.

You can sit if you want, offered Ingersoll. She registered, shook her head. I’d rather stand. There was something antediluvian about her air, perception, speech. An unusual refinement for someone her age. The Bridey girl couldn’t have been more than an underdeveloped fifteen. She took a step forward. The air was inconceivably taut and drowsy at the same time. Suit yourself, he continued.

There was a sweet odor about her, escaping her mouth. She was chewing bubblegum. The tendons of her face slowly pulsed with each subtle gnaw. Ingersoll leaned his palms against the table, glancing expertly over his paperwork, arranged in a fan-like fashion. We haven’t been able to locate your birth certificate yet. What were you called on the ranch? The girl tilted her head to the side. Her eyes scanned his build, musculature, height, hairline, face. Dolly. I was Dolly. She swayed imperceptibly from one foot to the other. Already bored.

And before?

She merely shrugged. Her neat side part shifted. A lock of sun-washed hair brushed against her cheek. These questions were repetitive, the same thing with a different phrasing. There wasn’t a time before.

There was a hint of a half-grin that shadowed Ingersoll’s lips, but only for a moment. You see, that’s what gets me. For you, there wasn’t anything before the ranch. Do you know how you got there?

Her color-less mouth, glazed slightly by the gum, winced. Unsure. My mother, I suppose. She went with Him. Gleaned and gathered after the reapers among the sheaves. They both knew who she meant.

And she told you nothing different from what she knew. You knew. He received nothing more than a blink. And you knew nothing about what was outside. Of New Zion, I mean. A slight shake of the head. No. I didn’t know, not for sure. A stilted pause. Ingersoll rapped his knuckles. So. He breathed, though the air was hot. So.

There was something, she stared, something that…didn’t sit. He told us of sin, the sin that would descend on us, like fog. I’ve never seen fog. Her fingers fluttered along her clavicle. Something that didn’t fit right. I did not know this sin, I did not see it. And to believe it…how? They ascended up to her neck, rubbing at the tense points between her muscles. The way He was there, while I slept. Or someone else. The was no one – she trailed off. Will you tell me, please? What this sin is, what sin looks like, so I can know, so I can hide from it? Her eyes dilated, and words spilled out of her mouth, as if by accident. Do not urge me to leave you or turn back from following you; for where you go, I will go…thus may the Lord do to me, and worse…

And because the air seemed to make everything slower, speech, thought, movement, Ingersoll again became uncertain of his own consciousness. The colors of the room, strangely saturated. It caught him unawares when she, Dolly, the girl, the Bridey girl, moved surely towards him. The way she loomed for an embrace, sadly begging. The way she searched for something to fit; the way he seemed to catch her, rather than meet her, and the way her fingers tremulously touched each vertebrae in his spine, one by one.

The Craziest Literary Magazine in the World

Sunday, September 27, 2009

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