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CHAPTER FOUR

    There is no entering the valley by laterals. A week later I found myself back in Salt Lake City where I rented a nondescript car for the long drive north to Immigration Valley. COMDESRON 4 was understanding of my request for leave due to a family emergency. I can think of nothing that would ever have made me leave my ship except the need for me to go back to Immigration Valley to see if Clayton Bostwick could be persuaded to a deathbed silence. The change of command ceremony was scheduled for a week hence, and I assured the Commodore that I would be back by then. I left the ship in the hands of my XO, and was easy on that account. He was a good man.

    In that dismal plastic restaurant Biff said Clayton Bostwick’s doctor had given him at the least three to six months to live, as if that was in the good doctor’s power. Before I left we had agreed that we should meet again in Immigration Valley for a last effort to talk to Clayton. We would plan strategy then. We were undecided if it should be known that I was back in town– I hadn’t been back since the day I left, except to bury my mother– or if we should try not to be seen with one another and thus resurrect old suspicions, enmities, gossip, and curiosity. I favored openness for the simple reason that my returning to Immigration Valley would be on the wires as fast as a political assassination. There is no keeping of secrets there, and I wondered out of what kind of luck, or fear, we had kept the secret of Hank Shelton’s death to ourselves for so many years.

    To my disbelieving anger, and with no sense of irony that I could detect, Maxwell Taylor informed me that he was the owner of the Hotel Bruxelles with the passing of his parents. “You may stay in any room you like,” he said. “Just tell Mrs. Stoner, the caretaker, that I said it was all right.”

    Had Max forgotten the horror that old Hotel held for me? I looked at him with a surge of such anger I wanted to throttle him, but he remained placid. Clearly, he had other things on his mind. In my nightmares the things that occurred in the Hotel Bruxelles eclipsed the death of Hank Shelton to an insignificant, unremarkable event. The interior of room 211 is the ever-present tableau of my nightmares. The sound of sizzling flesh and snapping bone informs my dreams. The sight of red neon illuminates my particular vision of hell.

    There was no doubt in my mind that a revelation of the sort Clayton Bostwick was contemplating would destroy my career. What it would do to the others did not concern me, although I suspected in many ways it would be worse than any fate I would ever suffer. I had no considerations of church, family, friends, business or reputation to consider. It was testimony to our separate motives for keeping our silence, but when it was all carefully considered, the motives were all, drearily, the same.

    I drove up the articulated snake of Interstate 15 through Ogden and into the Cache Valley. There was a casting of smog that stretched for a hundred miles along the Wasatch front, like an dead ochre skin a reptile had sloughed. The radio warned of a winter storm, the first of the year, and I remembered the winter that I worked in Pete Olson’s garage. I’d had plenty of time to think. There was no question in my mind that if we had come forward immediately after the accident that killed Hank Shelton, the future would have been different for each one of us. Perhaps neither better, nor worse, but certainly different. I had always planned to leave Immigration Valley the moment I was able, so except for suffering the contempt of the elders for my refusal to participate in the church, something to which I was always subject; I would have weathered the subsequent inquiry and nastiness. My primary consideration soon after it happened, my one motive in those panic stricken hours, was what it would do to my mother if it were found out that I had been involved, no matter how peripherally, in Hank’s death.

    Shock does strange things. I recall serving aboard the Ajax as a green Ensign just out of Officer’s Candidate School. We were steaming alongside the British aircraft carrier Ark Royal performing joint fleet exercises off Gibraltar. The Ajax was mated to the huge carrier by the inch thick umbilical of steel lines over which we passed stores of ice cream, and ammunition, steak, and the most recent issues of Playboy. It was not what I had in mind for myself when I was commissioned, but at times the duty was exciting, and gave me a good fundamental education in seamanship and ship handling.

    In the course of the underway replenishment, one of the helmsmen– it was never determined which ship was responsible– strayed a few degrees off course. Despite quick warning the ships drew apart, the steel cables went taut as viola strings. I was on the starboard bridge wing and saw what was going to happen. Fortunately, I was not Officer of the Deck. The line parted with a loud, singing crack, and the bitter end lashed back and severed a deck hand’s leg neatly above the knee. In his shock, the seamen did not notice his missing leg, and lopsidedly flopped about on the deck as he went about his business, blood squirting out of the stump, continuing to nonchalantly coil a line.

    We were in that kind of shock the moment we saw Hank Shelton’s body. I suppose it is called denial. It was clearly an accident, but it was just as clear that it was negligence on the part of both Biff and Willy. Or was it one of those practical jokes by Biff on gullible Willy that went tragic? The rule of unintended consequences. One must understand the rigid Mormon artery of Puritan thirst for vengeance that underlay our every attempt at evasion. In a sense, we feared for our lives. To be ostracized from church and family was nearly as bad as incarceration in the state prison, and both possibilities were certain for some, or all of us, if it was revealed that we were responsible, or had obstructed the investigation into a man’s death. That would be a shame that was tantamount to permanent exile. We could never go home again. The sin of our omission thus, when Hank Shelton died, had come to be every bit as damming as the sin enacted.

    What suspension of irrationality gripped us? We were raised with firearms like appendages, and drilled in firearm safety. Those kinds of accidents were simply not tolerated. This is to say nothing of the obligation to honesty in all our deeds and thoughts. Then there was further the point that Biff made to Willy, in those screaming first moments, about the bias of the local magistrate. There was a long-standing enmity between Hank Shelton and LeGrande Smith–Willy’s father–a dispute over what I never knew. Land or water, I suspect. Such small disputes metastasized easily into violence. I guessed– without any direct knowledge– that the first person Sheriff Alldred would think about when he received the news of Hank’s death was that LeGrande Smith, or one of his sons, had finally squared the accounts.

    Clayton Bostwick, surely, feared for his life at the hand of his father if his presence, witness, and silence were ever discovered. The fury of the little green grocer that his son was present at a murder would taint his business forever. How Clayton made it back to town, and kept his composure that day without our support is something that I never thought him to be capable.

    So panic, coupled with ignorance, annealed with a layer of shock made us do some very foolish things. The remarkable fact remains; despite suspicion, our alibi stayed iron clad. We were taken apart by the sheriff in interrogation sessions hours long, but not a single one of us deviated from our story of fishing up Green Canyon at the time of the man’s death. Can that be testimony to strength of friendship? Or character? I didn’t know. When I left Immigration Valley I was reasonably certain that I would never hear of it again. The only thing I had to suffer was the church and its representatives with their shallow piety and meaningless comforts. In college I excelled, displacing my bitterness with ambition to succeed.

    There was much at stake–real or imagined–for each one of us then to keep the secret, to cover up the truth. And, surely, the passing of the years with the accretions of family, wealth, and status, had given all of us even more reason to never divulge our secret. After so long, I was certain the secret would go to the grave with all of us. I hadn’t figured on anyone actually believing enough in an afterlife to fear for his soul. I recognize that, now, as the arrogance of a godless man.

    I decided to take the Logan Canyon pass over to Immigration Valley on Highway 89. In the fall it was a splendid drive, the colors blazing with summer’s lost passion, but that day it was snowing when I ascended, and by the time I topped out visibility was down to half a cable. Moroni Lake in the valley below lay hidden under thick, white clouds, and by the time I got to the little resort town of Garden City on the south end of Lake Moroni the water was a battleship gray, a pallor of death hours old.

    I rigidly disciplined myself against any feelings that might arise when I entered Alma. I was startled by the changes I noted. The Novelty Theater, the drug store, the clothing and grocery stores were all boarded shut as south LA. It was a town with economic failure seamed into every shuttered storefront. At the end of Main Street the feeble lights of a small gas station shown through the snow. It was Pete’s old station. Nothing had changed with it.

    Across the street from the once sparkling service station, where was the Second Ward church with echoes of Viola Sleight and Bishop Rich was– nothing. The old church was gone. In its place was an empty field growing white with heavy snow and sharp spears of brown grass poked up like barbed wire. I wheeled around in a U-turn at the north end of Main Street as I had done a thousand times as a teenager, and backtracked south. I had, out of some cowardice, avoided looking to my right as I came into town for the sight of the magnificent red sandstone tabernacle and next to it, the Hotel Bruxelles.

    But it was there. The red neon sign still shone in the snow, an unwavering signal to passers by. As I parked, a brief inspection revealed the old two story brick hotel looked as solid as Grant’s Tomb. It had that kind of solemn bulk and permanency to it. Time may have ravaged the rest of the town, but the Hotel Bruxelles looked as if it had not changed at all.

    I did have an alternative. I could have continued to drive north out of town, swung east at Ephriam, crossed the canal and gone into Pleasanton. There were several motels there, Max informed me. He said Appelton was the economic center of the valley now despite the loss of the railroad. I had no interest in Appelton. But, in the past week, a kind of tantalizing tension gripped me at times as I prepared to return to Immigration Valley. I decided to stay at the Hotel Bruxelles. Perhaps to see if ghosts were real. Perhaps to exorcize the events that had taken place within its thick brick walls, or just to have a place to sleep until we got this mess sorted out.

    It was snowing more heavily as I grabbed my old carryall and khaki duffel out of the trunk of the rental. I was uncomfortable in civilian clothes, and truth to tell had only one decent suit that was of good cloth and cut, but it was ten years old. I hadn’t worn civilian clothes for years, and now I had appeared in public dressed like a citizen twice in less than two weeks.

    Six inches of wet snow were piled on the cement steps that led to a wide veranda with white wooden columns. To the right was a door that led to a cafe. It looked to have been closed for a very long time. The insides of the windows were smeared with a chalky Bon Ami, and thick dry leaves and cobwebs were piled between the screen door and the entrance.

    As I entered the lobby by the left-hand door, I heard an electric buzzer sound far down a hallway that led to the rear apartment where Max and his family used to live. My nose caught a strong odor of old cigars, old lies, and old territories. The lobby had not changed. Once it had a comfortable elegance with yellow sconces on the walls warmly illuminating the oriental carpet and the leather rocking chairs. The lobby was verboten when we played in the basement of the Hotel as smaller kids.

    “Yes, sir?” a dour lady inquired. She was dressed in a heavy, hand knit dusty maroon sweater, and wore a shapeless print dress under the bulky garment.

    “Andrew Lattimore,” I said. “Mr. Taylor arranged for a room?”

    “Oh, yes, he’s here now. He said he was expecting someone. Shall I tell him you’re here?”

    “No, I’d just like a room, please.”

    “Well, we have plenty of those, what with the economy and the blizzard.”

    “Sure.”

    “First floor or second?”

    “I don’t care.”

    “Second floors warmer. Heat rises,” she said, raising her head toward the pressed tin square of the ceiling darkened by a thousand cigars and dead business deals.

    “I know. That will be fine,” I said.

    “Well, 211 faces the street, if you’d like the scenery.”

    “No,” I said, feeling the moisture spring onto my brow. “Any other room but that,” I stammered.

    “210, across the hall. You must be pretty important. Mr. Taylor said there would be no charge for the room. Say, Lattimore, aren’t you the one who . . .”

    “No, I’m not the one,” I said brusquely. “Give me the key, I can find it myself.”

    “Well, yes sir,” she said haughtily. I could hear the wheels of her contempt for strangers busily meshing as she formulated fictions to pass along on the telephone the moment she returned to her apartment.

    I picked up my bag, and went down the narrow hallway between the closed restaurant and the registration desk, and entered the long, dark hallway that led to the stairs. At the top I turned away from the street side, and unlocked the room opposite 211. All of the rooms were furnished identically; two chairs, a sagging brass bed, threadbare carpet, single sink and lamp. The room was musty. There were no windows.

    I threw my carryall on the bed and fished out a bottle of Tennessee mash, went to the sink and took down the single glass from the cabinet behind the mirror. It had a crust of dust in the bottom. I rinsed it and poured a measure of the whiskey, added a splash of good spring water from the tap. The water from the town came from the throat of the mountain up Alma Canyon. An entrepreneur could bottle it and get rich in the modern times, I thought. But that would have been too radical an idea for the bankers in this valley.

    I sat in a chair, staring blankly at a dark print of a generic Dutchman, and recognized it was a murky copy of Rembrandt’s dark Watchman. And then I remembered that all of the rooms in the hotel had the same print on the walls. I never noticed that before. I looked at the door, winged my thoughts across the hallway and entered 211. There was nothing there, no anger, no fear, nor terror. It was as if I’d had a precisely aligned laser excise the bloody scene from my brain. I felt neither relief, nor sadness, rather a vague wish for a newspaper or a radio to fill the time.

    I was not startled when Max knocked softly on the door. I opened it, and stepped aside. Closing the door, I turned and saw his grimace in the mirror above the sink when he saw the bottle of whiskey. Had it not been absurd, it would have been funny. A grown man recoiling with proximity to a bottle of whiskey. Max, who was of the brotherhood of the Waste Oil Wine, was now gelded of any other impulse than condemnation.

    “Sit down,” I said, sitting on the creaking bed. Max sat in one of the chairs, and looked around the room as if he'd never seen one before, and then looked to me. His fancy Varilux lenses gave his eyes a slightly yellow cast. He was dressed casually in expensive slacks and sweater.

    “They are waiting in the basement,” he said.

    “Our old pool room?” I asked lightly.

    “Yes.”

    “Do you remember when we tried to make wine with grape juice and yeast? Hid it behind the furnace for warmth, and it exploded?” I was in a malicious mood.

    “Uh, no, I don’t remember anything like that,” he said, acutely uncomfortable. “It’s the best place for us to meet. Nobody saw them. They came down the back way.”

    “In this weather, who’s about anyway?”

    “Yes, well, ah, there’s something I think you have to know.”

    “Yes.”

    “Biff and Willy they . . . proposed . . . after you left the other day, that we go to Clayton and see if he would sign an affidavit, or something . . . It was a stupid notion.”

    “I don’t understand.”

    “They are trying to figure out some way to frame you, blame Hank’s death solely on you. Four oaths against one? I don’t know how they figure Clayton would ever do such a thing if he’s bound to say the truth. They are frantic.  Just take that under consideration.”

    “Ah, friendship,” I said bitterly. “They fuck with me, they’ll be making a mistake.”

    “I know,” Max said, looking at the floor. “I just thought you ought to know.”

    “I guess I expected something like that,” I said. “But I think we’d better get down there and decide this thing, and get to doing it, whatever it is.”

    “Yes, let’s go down. Mrs. Stoner is out for the night.”

    “O.K.,” I said, standing.

    “Wait. I want to apologize for my, ah, insensitivity. I had completely forgotten about the accident you had. It was terrible. I have thought about it often, but it just went blank. You could have stayed in Appelton. I don’t know what I was thinking. I'm sorry.”

    “It wasn’t an accident, Max, it was murder. It’s past, Max. Let’s get the rest of it reburied so I can get the hell out of here and back to my ship.”

“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.