Deseret (6 page)

So what in hell was all this garbage in the paper?

“Choo choo!” John Moses yelled as the train lurched forward
and pulled out of the station.

His excitement was so infectious that the dwarf felt
compelled to holler with him.
 
“Choo choo!”
 
He knew he was
drawing stares from everyone on the car.
 
Secret agent or not, for just one moment, he didn’t care.

Jed wasn’t one hundred percent sure, but looking out his
window as the train pulled away, he thought he saw a man in a porkpie hat,
jumping onto the very back of the train.

*
  
*
  
*

Sam checked the handwritten note he’d been carrying in his
alligator-skin billfold twice to be sure.
 
The numbers he’d written down matched the address of a windowless brick
building set back inside a city block, away from the Great Salt Lake City’s
wide streets and crowded on all sides by the uncaring backs of warehouses.
 
Pipes, including glass message
channels, ran out from the brick building in all directions, into and around
and above its neighbors.
 
The
building
hummed
with a low, pulsating
throb like the distant playing of Indian drums.

“By the shores of Gitchee-Gumee,” Sam found himself
chanting.
 
“By the shining
Big-Sea-Water.”

This was the place, all right.

Sam was no spy, not in his heart, but he’d been given very
precise directions by men that really, truly
were
spies.
 
He circled the
block to be sure he wasn’t followed.
 
Then he found the door.
 
He
didn’t knock and he didn’t look around to see if anyone was watching him; if
anyone
was
, that gesture would
surely mark him as a trespasser.

He just turned the knob, walked in like he owned the place
and shut the door behind him.

Inside, the throbbing got louder, and was joined by the
steady tumbling sound of falling water.
 

There were windows to the outside, he now saw, but they were
like arrow slits, high on the walls, long and narrow, and the strips of light
they cast were brilliant but thin.
 
Sam waited a minute and let his eyes adjust.
 
He stood on a catwalk of plascrete, and after a moment he
was able to see well enough to realize that only a waist-high iron railing
separated him from a serious fall.
 
Below, he heard and smelled churning waters, and he felt faint humid
spray on his face and hands, but even when his eyes had grown accustomed to the
gloom he could see nothing in the abyss.
 
Mixed in with the cool green smell of the water, he detected the
comforting tang of engine oil.

Pipes, brass pipes big enough that if they were lying flat a
man could have walked inside them, shot up out of the unseen watery depths
below and exploded over his head, radiating outward like flower petals or the
spokes of a wheel.
 
The pipes were
the immense boles of trees in this strange jungle, and the flowers were a
profusion of gauges, dials, wheels, clamps, levers, hanging chains, pulleys,
switches and other paraphernalia.
 
In the dull light it all loomed huge and glowed like old bronze.
 
Staircases climbed up and also down.

Sam was curious what the waters below looked like.
 
He imagined an egg yolk hell full of
dead sailors and blind, translucent sharks, or the slimy blue seas of creation
and a gate to a secret inner world, or at least a vaulted and columned lake
like he’d read about under the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.
 

But Sam Clemens had his instructions, and left the itch of
his curiosity unsatisfied.

Instead, he found the nearest staircase and began to climb.

He had just set foot on the third and uppermost catwalk,
grateful that it was too dark inside the water station to really see down to
the ground below him, when a second person entered the building.
 
A brilliant square of light opened
without warning ahead and slammed shut again with a
clang!
and then he heard the slow pacing of feet as a man
walked towards him.

The catwalk was narrow, and Sam fought down a momentary fear
that he had been betrayed for the fortune he carried in his pocket.
 
After all, if he were thrown over the
catwalk here, he knew he would surely die.
 
On the other hand, his murderer would lose the rubies,
too.
 
Still, the plascrete ledge
felt humid, clammy and every-so-slightly slippery under his feet, and he rested
a hand on the iron railing to reassure himself.

A blue light snapped into being, chest height, in the
darkness.
 
The fizzling
will-o-the-wisp electricks illuminated the face of an old man, bearded and
crag-browed, with goggles over his eyes.
 
He wore a simple dark wool suit, and the white hair on the back of his
head was swept straight up behind him to make a kind of crest or cock’s comb
that caught the blue crackling light and reflected it like an off-kilter halo.

“The light is for your benefit,” the old man growled.
 
“I can see fine without it.”

“Thanks,” Sam said dryly.
 
“I suppose you must be the—”

“You first!” snapped the old man.
 
“Didn’t you get instructions?”
 
He sounded like a northerner, Sam thought, like a New York
or a Vermont man.

“I did,” Sam admitted, “and I apologize.
 
I am neither a cloak and dagger man nor
a Freemason, so I find this all a little...”
 
He stopped himself before saying anything insulting and
cleared his throat.
 
“I am the
Boatman,” he declaimed, trying to imagine that he was in a school play, and
everyone else was just as embarrassed as he was.
 
He’d felt like an idiot memorizing these lines, but sure
enough, this old fellow was going to insist on them.
 
“I come seeking the knowledge of the air.
 
Are you Pratt, by the way?”
 
It had never been made clear to him
whom exactly he was supposed to meet.

“Shh!” the old man chastised him.
 
“I am the Seer, keeper of the knowledge of the air.
 
By what token shall I know thee,
Boatman?”

Sam felt like a fool.
 
“I have the rubies, dammit!” he snapped.
 
“Do you want them or not?”
 
He pulled the bag from inside his jacket and held it up in
the blue light.
 
It was a fortune,
he knew.
 
More than once, he told
himself that a smarter man than he was would have simply taken the rubies and
fled the country.
 
For that matter,
it wasn’t too late for him.

He was out of the country already.

“Yes!” the old man yelled, his voice echoing over the rumble
of the waters below.
 
“And yes, I’m
Pratt!”
 
The blue light winked out,
and Pratt snatched the bag out of Sam’s hands in the darkness.
 
So he really
could
see; Sam assumed it had something to do with the
goggles the old man was wearing, and was duly impressed.
 
“Have you no respect for my need for
secrecy?
 
How was I to know I was
dealing with the right man?
 
Don’t
you understand how dangerous this is?
 
Do you think we’re playing a game, you and I?
 
Do you want the whole thing to collapse around our ears, and
all of them to come down on us?”

The old man’s voice dropped in volume at the end of his
speech and Sam heard his feet shuffling away in the darkness.
 
“Wait!” he called.
 
“Wait a minute!
 
Don’t you owe me something, Mr. Pratt?”

The shuffling stopped and Orson Pratt laughed, a high cackle
in the gloom.
 
“Yes I do, Mr.
United States, yes I do.
 
Meet me
tomorrow morning.
 
Tomorrow morning
at eight o’clock at… at the north doors of the Tabernacle.
 
I’ll bring all the plans.”

Creak.
 
The square of light appeared again,
searing Sam’s eyes.
 
He held his
hands up to shield them, and Pratt slammed the door shut.

Boom!

The echo of the door banged back and forth for a long time
in the darkness, and Sam felt vaguely defeated.
 
Pratt had sounded like he was making up the rendezvous time
and place on the spot, and Sam wondered if the inventor had any intention at
all of holding up his end of the bargain.
 

Well, if Orson Pratt wouldn’t sell the plans for his flying
ships to the United States, Sam would just have to succeed in his primary
objective.
 
He would persuade
Brigham Young to join with the United States government in preventing war.

And if that failed too, well, Sam had come prepared do bad
things.

*
  
*
  
*

Ogden was a railroad station in the center of a tiny town
surrounded by farms—Jed saw it all from the window as they rolled in,
less than an hour after leaving the Great Salt Lake City.
 
The station here was smaller, just two
platforms for two lines, and he and the boy spilled out in a wave of hayseed
farmers and small-town businessmen and a couple of ladies with shopping bags
and were swept along almost instantly in the street.
 
It felt like a thousand small towns Jed had ridden into as a
carny in his youth, and his eyes instinctively raced up and down the street in
search of policemen.

“Where’s the loc?” he muttered.
 
“I mean, where do you live, kid?”

“Come on,” John Moses said, pointing up a broad
hillside.
 
“My house is just up
there.”

Jed shot a suspicious eye over his shoulder several times
before they lost sight of the station, but never saw a porkpie hat.

Trudging up a graded gravel road in the warm shadows of
black walnuts and elm trees, Jed Coltrane suddenly became conscious of the fact
that he smelled bad.
 
He probably smelled
bad most of the time, he thought, only most of the time he just didn’t give a
rat’s ass.
 
Now, for some reason,
it bothered him.
 
He was rumpled,
too, disheveled and beat up and chafed and generally unfit for human company.

He laughed out loud.
 
Coltrane, you idiot, he thought, you’re acting like you’re about to meet
the parents of your sweetheart.
 
Cut it out.

“This is it,” John Moses said.

The dwarf looked up and down the street.
 
The buildings were red brick bungalows,
each on a small farm or orchard lot, and half of them looked like they belonged
to some kind of tradesman.
 
Jed saw
a smithy, a dry goods store, and a tailor.
 
And John Moses’s parents’ house had a wooden signboard out
front like an old tavern, with a pair of crossed six-shooters painted on
it.
 
Out behind the bungalow were
rows of cherry trees, and a big brass pump station, quietly emitting a faint
coal-smoke tail as it humped up and down and up and down, trickling water out
of a cone-shaped spout into a maze of irrigation ditches swirling out in a
circle from the center where it stood.
 
Off to the side was a brick outbuilding with doors and window trim
painted a bright fresh white, to match the bungalow.

No porkpie hats in sight.

“Let’s go in, then, kid.”

There was a knocker on the front of the bungalow’s door, but
no amount of hammering brought any result.
 
“My mammas might be running errands,” John Moses adjusted
his slouch hat, a little nervous.
 
“I guess we should go talk to my poppa.”

Mammas?

Jed’s scarred knuckles rapped on the door of the outbuilding
and produced an immediate result.
 
“Coming!” called a man’s voice, and then the top half of the door swung
open and inward, leaving the bottom half shut with a sort of built in shelf at its
top like a little business counter.

The man who answered the door had no hair right up to the
very top of his head, nor on his face, but thick brown sprouts of the stuff all
around his ears, behind his skull, and under his jaw.
 
Someone who liked the man might have suggested he looked
like a lion; an observer in a less flattering frame of mind could have
commented that he looked like a color-inverted black-eyed Susan, with a white
bud of a face poking out in front of a dark curly bed of petals.
 
Jed Coltrane didn’t care either
way—he’d seen uglier.
 

Time was, he saw uglier all day, every day.

The thing that struck him was the apparatus on the man’s
face.
 
It looked like a shiny brass
lobster, wrapped halfway around his head, front and back.
 
One thin claw curled up along his bony
cheek, forming a loop over his right eye, inside of which was wedged a convex
lens of shiny glass.

The man looked over both their heads for a moment, and Jed
cleared his throat.

“Hello,” the man said, looked down at them, and
blinked.
 
His right eye was
gigantic, seen through the lens.
 
“John Moses.
 
And a short
person.”
 
He squinted through the
monocle.
 
“An adult.”