Jericho's Razor (14 page)

Eli shrugged, as if such a concern was beyond him. You did not ask Peter why he gave you a job on our ranch. You just did it and thanked him for trusting you.

“Who knows? Maybe he wants to give you your birthday present.”

“Sure.” I started to walk away when Eli called out.

“You want me to take the .45?” he asked.

We spent the morning shooting cans before pulling out the canoe. Eli was a more accurate shooter and could hit his targets from farther away. So I chose to better him with superior firepower. Growing up in Montana, boys had guns as routinely as bicycles and baseball cards. Mine was a Smith & Wesson revolver given to me on my thirteenth birthday. Eli tried to get his hands on it whenever he could. I hollered back that he would get it when I was dead, and made my way to the chapel.

The doors were ajar, allowing me in, but only if I was really sure. I had never been comfortable inside Peter's church. The dozen men and women who stayed with us in the guest houses gathered there frequently, singing praises, hanging on Peter's sermons. My attendance was required on Sunday mornings, encouraged on Monday nights, and forbidden on Wednesdays. Unlike Eli and my three half-brothers and two half-sisters, I harbored no curiosity about what occurred when the services were “invitation only.” I was the oldest and had the most jobs on the ranch. But the distance I kept from Peter's gatherings was because I always sensed a malice to the masses. Behind the singing and rejoicing, I always detected something sinister. It was vague enough to prevent me from identifying, but clear enough for me to stay away.

I found my father praying at the altar. He knelt with his back to me, head downward, hands steeled. Latin incantations rose high in the rafters and echoed with furor and passion. I knew better than to interrupt. I also knew it could be a while. Peter would often pray for hours. Interruptions were not permitted. It was a lesson that both Eli and I had learned through force. I stood rigid, as silent as the figures in the large stained-glass windows overhead. When Peter was finished, he rose, crossed himself, and turned to face me.

“Jericho. Come.”

I followed him through the backroom into his office. It was one of the forbidden areas, strictly off-limits to me and my siblings. My eyes took their chance to look around, my teenage mind silently reveling in this look behind the curtain. Peter opened a door. He looked at me with his cold blue eyes, eyes like my own, and spoke very deliberately, as though what he was about to say was the most important message I would ever receive.

“I want you to go down the stairs. I want you to stand in the middle of the room and see what is down there. You will want to react. It will be surprising at first. Possibly shocking. But I urge you to stay calm. Stay focused and take in
everything
you see. It will be critical to your spiritual growth. Can you do that, Jericho? Can you see
everything
?”

I had no idea what the hell he was talking about. Surprising? Shocking? It was more than I could remember Peter ever saying to me at one time that did not involve a sermon on how I was on course to a life of damnation. Now I was supposed to follow his directions into a dark room and try not to be shocked? I nodded and walked down the steps into the basement from which in many ways I never returned.

I didn't learn her name until later. It was Sheila Kerrigan. She was twenty-nine years old. Born in Boulder, Colorado, to a single mother who died from a drug overdose when Sheila was sixteen. Sheila danced at a topless bar in Denver under the name Summer Rain. I found her naked and strapped to a concrete platform that rose from the floor. Her mouth was gagged. She had been beaten. Purple and gold bruises covered her face and most of her body.
No
, I thought. More than beaten, she looked like she had been hit by an eighteen-wheeler.

My breath rushed out of my body. I keeled over as though vicariously feeling every blow, every bruise I saw on her body. Sheila sat up as far as the restraints would allow and turned my way. Bloodshot eyes pleaded with me for release. Muffled screams reached my ears and tore through them like shattered glass. I could not hear the words she tried to form, but I understood them as clearly as I had ever understood anything.

Help me! Please help me!

My legs would not move. The scene before me was too much to process. Thirty minutes ago my biggest concern had been how to catch more fish than my kid brother. I had since gone down the rabbit hole into my father's macabre double life.

Framing the platform were pictures. They showed the woman before me in several frozen moments. Naked, mid-dance. Straddling men in dirty overalls. Snorting a line of white powder off a table. Some of the pictures were of her holding a young girl: dark hair and freckles, maybe ten years old. Her daughter, clearly.

The stairs creaked, jolting me, but I didn't turn. Couldn't turn. As footsteps announced the arrival of my father, my eyes pivoted slowly to a large mirror in the corner of the room. It was positioned so that I could see Peter entering the basement just over my shoulder. I saw him look at me in the mirror, his eyes boring through me, finding places I had not known. He was dressed in a flowing ceremonial gown, white with a red Gothic cross displayed prominently across the chest. He stood at my side, looking like a warrior from the Crusades ready to slaughter the infidels.

“What the fuck is this?” I stammered. It was the first time I swore in Peter's presence and did not receive a strike across the face.

“This, Jericho, is your birthright. This is the time for me to bring you into the inner circle of our flock. This is where you learn who you are.”

The woman thrashed on the offering table. I was still not sure why I had not yet cut her loose. But she had not yet given up hope that I would.

“You're a fucking lunatic.”

“Pull yourself together.” Peter approached the woman. An accusatory finger called attention to the photos.

“This woman, look at her! Look at who she is! She is a whore. A heathen who sells her body to weak fools. Prostituting herself. Defiling her body. The body is God's temple, Jericho. Look how she desecrates that temple. Carrying diseases. Taking drugs she uses sex to acquire. She is a plague. A blight on an enlightened and God-fearing society.”

Peter reached in a pocket in his robe and drew a knife, although “knife” did not do the weapon justice. The blade was maybe a foot in length and ended in a bone handle.

“She must be eradicated.”

“Eradicated? What the hell?”

“No, Jericho.
To
Hell. This is our mission.”

“Mission? What the … how have you kept this from Mom?”

“Kept it from her?” Peter wore the smile of a devil who was finally able to show his true face. “The union between man and wife is blessed, Jericho. Your mother and I share all things. We are one in our service to the Lord. One in our mission.”

“You mean … Mom kills people too?”

“She has stricken down many sinners who would spread their poison on our way of life. On God's plan.”

“God's plan? I don't think it's God's plan for me to kill this lady.”

The finger swung my way. “Do not second guess the Almighty, Jericho.”

I pointed to the pictures. “She has a daughter! She has a little girl! Are you going to kill her too?”

“The child may have the chance for a rewarding life away from this vile witch. Do you know she makes the little girl sit in the car while she dances and services these men? While she does drugs?” Peter pulled a photo off the wall and held it before me. It showed the little girl sitting in the backseat of a beat-up sedan. Her small hands clutched a ragged bear.

“Is that a mother? Is that a person who should have the honor of raising a child?”

Peter came to me. The knife was held out before him with the handle being offered to me.

“Take it, my son. Take this, which is your birthright, which I now give to you. You are the eldest, whom I have named Jericho, and upon you a holy nation will be built.”

The knife was pressed into my hand, and Peter backed away. The woman thrashed and pleaded, scared and cold and knowing she was about to die. My father waited, looking at me with more pride than I had ever seen from him. In his mind, it was a foregone conclusion that I would do as he asked. I would kill this woman who I had never met and spill her blood in this unholy sanctuary.

I tossed the dagger at Peter's feet. The steel clattered on the cold, hard floor.

“You're a fucking lunatic. And you can go to hell.”

Again, the cold gaze found me. The eyes that as a child I was too scared to look into. The eyes that were so similar to my own, and yet so different.

“I urge you to reconsider.”

“Reconsider? I don't need to reconsider! I always knew you were ... different. I mean, the bible thumping and the herd of brainwashed disciples you always have following you. But you are absolutely fucking insane!”

Peter picked up the knife. The steel sang off the cold floor. He turned away from the woman on the table as though forgetting she were there, all of his attention centered on me.

“And I always knew that you were corrupted. Corrupted by society and it's degradation of God's will. I had hoped that once you were shown the way, you would accept your destiny. But you have chosen to the path of evil. And for that, you will be punished.”

“What?” I asked. “Are you going to kill
me
now?”

His eyes answered for me. Faster than I had ever seen him move, faster than I thought he could move, Peter was upon me. The knife dug into my chest, tearing muscle, spilling blood. I screamed and fell to the floor. Peter, my father, stood over me, his hands and robe covered in my blood. He looked down on me in shame.

“My son. How you have forsaken me.”

I had turned at the last possible second. The blade had caught me in the side, missing the major arteries. But blood was pooling in my fingers against my soaked shirt. My fingers probed the gash and found bone. The knife had gone all the way through, leaving jagged tears in the front and back of my shirt. I dug my fingers into my side, stemming the flow of blood, focusing on the pain to keep myself from passing out.

Peter moved toward the table. Sheila's screams rose higher through her gag. They reached a crescendo as he plunged the dagger into her chest. Through blurry eyes I saw him stab her over and over and over, blood spraying his gown and spotting it like crimson rain. I listened to the screaming turn into sobs. And then nothing. Peter came back over to me, as though suddenly remembering that I was even there.

“Do you see now, Jericho?” he said. “God's work cannot be derailed.”

Peter stood over me with his head raised to the heavens. His blood-soaked arms were stretched out in a pose of attrition.

“I have shown him the way, Lord! The way to peace, to holiness, to everlasting life! And he has chosen the way of evil. Bless me, Lord. Bless my hand as I send him to you, for your judgment!”

As before, his eyes were closed as he finished the rest of his prayer in silence. I knew I had only moments to act, to find a way to leave the basement alive. The bulge at my hip reminded me of what was tucked in my coat. My hand groped for the handle, gripping the steel in blood-covered fingers. Without thinking, without aiming, I raised the .45 and fired. The repercussion was deafening. With my ears ringing, I pulled the trigger again and again and again, until all I heard was the hammer falling on empty cylinders.