In a hotel room in Dallas, Tryp squinted to look through the peephole in the door, expecting to see groupies wearing postage stamps and rubber bands who had finagled their way up, which usually happened at least once a week. Some of the other band members, especially Cadell, ranted about “boundaries,” but Tryp kind of liked it. He had really liked it before he had discovered what was under the stage, but now he usually invited them in for a drink and then sent them on their ways. He picked up his own women elsewhere.
Or he used to.
Tryp stared at them through the fish-eye peephole that bent the hallway backward.
There were no chicks wearing scraps of cloth outside his door.
Two men stood, looking around.
Groupies didn’t wear brown suits.
Tryp hoped they weren’t feds. He had an accountant for all the IRS stuff. He wondered if he should flush his stash, but if they had a warrant, they would have had the hotel open the door or broken it down.
Tryp flipped the locks and opened the door. “Uh, yeah?”
The man on the left removed his sunglasses. “Brother Tryfon, we need to speak to you.”
One man was about Tryp’s age, but those pale blue eyes, that nose that was a little bulbous on the end—Tryp took a shocked step backward. “Nephi?”
Tryp reached across seven years of heartache, loneliness, and struggle back to the last time he saw Nephi Christianson, who was fifteen when Tryp was set out on the highway. The day before Tryp held Sariah’s hand for ten ecstatic minutes, he and Nephi had helped build some extra warehouse space for the feed store downtown before Tryp had to go practice piano for three hours and Nephi had to go study scripture with his grandfather.
Nephi nodded. “And you remember Brother Teancum Smith.”
The last time Tryp had seen Teancum, seven years ago in New Empyrean, he had been too naive to laugh at the man’s name. Now, he was too much of a man to do so, but he rubbed the side of his face, glad for his sake that Teancum had grown up in a place without a public high school.
Nephi asked, “May we come in?”
“Sure.” Tryp stood aside, opening the door. When they were inside and Tryp closed it behind them, he asked, “Are you all right? Do you need help?”
Nephi frowned. “Why would we need help?”
“They set you on the road, same as me, right? I mean, you guys must’ve heard me on the radio and known I would help you.”
“No,” Nephi said. “Brother Tryfon, we need to talk to you about that radio interview and the one in the magazine, Rolling Stone. We’ve come on behalf of Prophet Spencer Christianson.”
“Your dad is the prophet now?” So Nephi must not have been turned out at all, since he was speaking for the prophet. Homesickness slammed Tryp, surprising the hell out of him, and he wanted to punch Nephi for not getting thrown out of his home with only the clothes on his ass and twenty bucks.
“Yeah.” Nephi shifted his weight to his other foot. “Brother Teancum, could you make sure we aren’t disturbed?”
Teancum moved out to the hallway and closed the door behind himself.
“Okay,” Nephi said. “We can talk.”
Tryp walked over to the bar, stacked three deep with dark bottles. “You want a drink?”
“No, thank you,” Nephi said, sitting on the couch.
“I won’t tell.”
“Teancum would smell the liquor on me and report back.”
“Do you want a soda?”
He sighed. “No, thank you.”
Nephi had had three older brothers, two of whom had disappeared before Tryp had left. Questions were punished, so it took Tryp months, even after he had been cast out, to figure out that they had been set out on the road, too.
But Nephi’s eldest brother had been twenty-seven on Tryp’s last day in New Empyrean. “How’s Joseph?”
“He’s well.”
“Still there?”
“Yes. He will probably become prophet after our father is called home by Heavenly Father.”
Which meant that Nephi’s position as the second, spare son was tenuous. “How many wives do you have now?”
Nephi bit his lip for a moment while he judged Tryp, his blue eyes weighing just how much apostasy Tryp harbored while he stood beside the bar, a drink his hand, tattoos on his flesh, and piercings through his ears.
Nephi said, “Three.”
“Any kids?” Loss squeezed Tryp’s heart.
“Four.”
The bastard had four kids. Tryp looked out the window over the skyscrapers of downtown Dallas and waited for his aching heart to slow to normal.
Tryp sipped his harsh whiskey and water and came back to sit with Nephi in the living room group. He set the half-full whiskey bottle on the coffee table between them, an aggressive display of just how much he had changed in seven years. “You doing okay?”
“Sure,” but Nephi’s guarded expression told Tryp otherwise.
Twice when Tryp was a kid, a couple wives and their children had been added to his step-father’s household when one of the few adult men was accused of apostasy or heterodoxy. Adult men were given an old car to drive out of town, but all the property, all the real estate, and all the businesses, everything that everyone had built for decades, were all legally owned by the church. This meant that no one paid taxes, state or federal, and that anyone who left did so with absolutely nothing, not even their wives or children.
Only three wives, and only four kids. They would be easy to reassign to someone else if Nephi put a toe out of line.
If Tryp were Nephi, he wouldn’t have accepted that drink, either. Children were too precious to risk. New Empyrean had one thing almost right: true wealth was the love of a good woman and children around you. They just fucked up how they did it.
“So what are you here for?” Tryp asked.
“We cannot do Heavenly Father’s work if you continue to expose us to ridicule like this. Mammon is against us, and we are under siege from every corner. We’re here to beg you to retract your interview, say that you were intoxicated and made it all up, to remove your recording about the road from sale, and to say that Sariah was older than you remembered, at least eighteen.”
“But she wasn’t. She was fifteen.”
“Heavenly Father decreed that she should marry.”
“Bullshit. Prophet said she had to marry Kumen.”
Nephi sucked air like Tryp had socked him in the gut. “Such language, Brother Tryfon.”
Nephi was shushing him for language? Tryp could not fucking believe it. “How old were your wives when you married them?”
“Heavenly Father decreed that I should marry them, that they were mature women and would be obedient wives and loving mothers.”
“How old? Fifteen? Fourteen?”
“My family is none of your concern. I need you to retract your statements about us. You know in your heart that they are untrue, that we don’t abuse children or marry women who are too young.”
“Fucking bullshit, Nephi. Kumen raped Sariah that night. I saw it.”
“She went to the temple and his bed willingly, and her maidenhood was his to take.”
The whiskey backed up in Tryp’s throat, choking him, and he tugged his drumsticks out of his back pocket to spin in his fingers. “I can’t believe you would ask me to do this. We were friends.”
“You’re lying about my home and my family.”
“It was my home and my family, too, until they threw me out.”
“You committed apostasy, Brother Tryfon. You were usurping Sariah’s husband’s privilege by taking her chastity.”
“I held her hand! She was crying because her brother had gone missing and she didn’t know what happened to him, and I held her hand!”
“You said that you loved her, at the time, on the radio last week, and in the magazine article.”
He spun his drumsticks around his hand. “I was fourteen and had a teenage crush.”
“You had no right to love her, Brother Tryfon. She belonged to Heavenly Father until He gave her to her husband. Love means nothing.”
“It’s the most important thing! It’s the only thing! Don’t you love your wives and your children?”
“I provide for them and protect them as Heavenly Father has decreed, so that Heavenly Father will allow me to continue to be their husband and father.” Nephi’s blue eyes were as lonely as a faraway shallow sea.
That cult had perverted every sense of a man’s love for a woman and even his children and turned them into religious hostages, and he just had to pay for the house, fuck the underage girls until they gave birth, and control the children. It sickened Tryp, sickened him to death. He flipped his drumsticks around his knuckles and picked up spinning them again.
Tryp said, “I swear to God, I will continue to play that song every fucking chance I get, and I will tell every reporter that I talk to that you guys are sick and that you abandon children by kicking them out of the car on the highway and that you rape underage girls and force them into marriage.”
Nephi shook his head. “You leave us no choice, Brother Tryfon. We tried to reason with you, but we have over twenty-two hundred adults in New Empyrean, and every one of them will write a scathing, one-star review of your single and all of Killer Valentine’s albums, though we certainly won’t stoop to your kind of profanity. For your next album, we’ll have them up on the first day everywhere that sells it.”
Tryp caught his drumsticks and held them with white knuckles. If Killer Valentine went down in flames, the tour would disintegrate, and Elfie would leave him when she went elsewhere.
A gaping hole the size of a tiny blonde ripped down his core, and his face flushed hot. He would die. He would drink himself to death without her, willingly, purposely.
Tryp said, “Everyone will know what you guys are doing.”
“You can tell people that it’s a conspiracy, but then you’ll look like a raving lunatic and it’ll cast doubt on everything you’ve ever said, including what you’ve said about us. We don’t want to do this, Brother Tryfon.”
“Why the fuck are you calling me ‘Brother?’ I was excommunicated seven years ago, as a child.”
“If you recant publicly, a church court will allow you to be baptized again.”
“You have got to be fucking shitting me! No fucking way would I ever go back to that church that fucks over children!” He stood.
“I am disappointed, Tryfon. I am leaving my phone number.” Nephi laid a card on the coffee table. “I beg you to reconsider. Perhaps you’ll listen to Sariah.”
Nephi held up his cell phone, a surprisingly modern smartphone with video. The young woman on the screen wore her hair in a bouffant bun instead of braids, as befitted a married woman. Tryp caught his drumsticks and clenched them in his fist.
Nephi clicked the video to play.
On the tiny screen, Sariah said, “Brother Tryfon, I’m begging you not to spread these lies about me.” She looked at whomever was holding the video camera.
A cramp of panic hit Tryp. Living with a violent man as a child had taught Tryp to learn to read nuance.
She continued, “Please tell the reporters that they were lies. Please don’t tell them any more lies about my—” she glanced up again, “happy marriage to my husband. I am a happy and obedient wife, and lies will cause discord in my marriage.”
Her last, fearful glance up broke him. A stripe of pain lashed Tryp’s chest. He understood the threat. He squeezed his drumsticks so hard that his knuckles ached.
Nephi snatched the phone back, and his cold stare was more confident. “You need to remove the song from sale, retract your statements, and say that Sariah was older than you had remembered. You have a week before the one-star reviews begin hitting your albums and Kumen becomes angry with her failure to sway you. I look forward to your call.”
He strode out of the room, leaving Tryp alone with his bottle of whiskey on the coffee table.