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CHAPTER ONE
I loathe Salt Lake City. Someone I hadn’t thought of in nearly thirty years signed the telegram that summoned me from San Diego—Doctor Maxwell Taylor. His name was like a flat line in my memory, something as suppressed as the breath and the brain during open-heart surgery. Under no circumstances had I ever thought I would hear from him, or see him again. Just as I vowed I would never again return to Salt Lake City.
In a month’s time I was to take command of my first ship, my promotion to Captain Andrew Lattimore, USN, came through the same day as the telegram arrived. I knew if I did not obey the summons–entreaty?–I may never get my command, something I had worked for all my life. I knew that if I did not rush to the meeting between Maxwell Taylor, Biff Sullivan, and Willy Bowen I might never again draw a free breath.
Perhaps I always knew that someday, for some reason, that telegram would arrive.
On the landing approach I looked down on the glistening, white capped blue of a truly dead sea—the Great Salt Lake. Antelope Island slid under the wing brown as the animal’s hide, dry and desolate as my own interior. The first snow had dusted the Wasatch Front, harbinger of the deep winter, a powdery sugar that as far as I was concerned could pile up and lay like death over Brigham Young’s city for the rest of time and all eternity. There was nothing enigmatic about the seat of this peculiar Theocracy in the fastness of the mountain Kingdom of Deseret. I was born and baptized in the Mormon faith, a fate that I attempted to discard the day I reached the age of reason.
The meeting was set for two o’clock in a Denny’s Restaurant on 2100 South and State Street. It was in the most prosaic setting I could imagine, but that made it appropriate to the business at hand— the banality of evil. Whatever we discussed, decided, would take place in a truly vacuous atmosphere that would make our conversation seem ordinary, necessary. I had no real idea what the meeting would reveal. But the name Hank Shelton in the telegram had enough power to make me drop extremely urgent matters in preparation to go aboard my new Destroyer. At a moment of triumph, I felt as if I was headed for another glimpse of Hell. What remained a mystery, beyond a natural curiosity about Max and Biff and Willy after all these years, would be their state of mind, their conclusions as to what needed, if anything, to be done.
Would Immigration Valley never cease to haunt me?
I took a cab to the Denny’s. The air was mild, and autumn was in its last glory of scarlet maples and cottonwood golds along the broad clean streets of the city. Six blocks south of the white temple I began to notice the unmistakable signs of ghetto graffiti and boarded storefronts. I would never have thought it possible that the church would allow such a thing to happen in Salt Lake City. Skinny whores in short skirts stood brazen as sea gulls along State Street overseen by the golden Angel Moroni perched on top of the temple with his soundless trumpet. Had he any credibility, he would have rained fire upon the abomination of the scenes of State Street. The traffic was as bad as LA.
Doctor Maxwell Taylor, I mused. Doctor of what, I wondered. Chiropractics, probably. But of the five of us, I guess we always assumed that Max would be the one to succeed in life. He had some advantages over Biff, Willy, Clayton and I. His mother was the valley’s only Hotelier for many years thus presumably giving him a more expansive horizon. His father was a railroad supervisor. Both were literate. And he was the brightest of the five of us, as I remembered. Gynecology? Psychiatry? Chiropractics? The latter, I guessed out of some perversity. As the return address on his telegram was Salt Lake I assumed that is where he lived. I had no idea of the whereabouts or the professions–or lack thereof–of my childhood—friends.
My Captaincy was the result of a 20-year struggle up the slippery, knotted rope ladder of the peacetime navy. The medals from Vietnam helped. As XO of one of the guided missile frigates during the Gulf war I earned more recognition, but for the most part it was a tedious, slow, tough grind. But it was what I wanted. From the time I’d run across an old pre-WWII vintage copy of the Blue Jacket’s Manuel when I was 12, I knew I wanted to go to down to the sea in ships. From the time I was eight, I knew I wanted to get out of Immigration Valley and never see it again.
I paid off the cab in the parking lot and went inside. It was just after the lunch hour, but the restaurant was still crowded. I scanned the room for a familiar face, but doubted I would recognize any of them. Then, with something of a shock, I saw a tall, distinguished looking man, wearing modern tinted glasses, impeccably dressed. He smiled at me from the back of the room, and raised a hand in a tentative greeting. It was Maxwell Taylor, and the recognition was instant.
“The Brethren” is copyrighted © 2001 by T. O. McCallister. All rights reserved. You may not republish or reproduce this work without the expressed written permission of the author by any means mechanical, electronic, graphic, including photocopying, taping, or information storage and retrieval systems. Permission can be granted by writing the author at alimed42@yahoo.com. He also welcomes your feedback to this story. All violators will be persecuted.
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