BOOK THREE TO CONDEMN SIN IS TO PROVE DESIRE

BEING A DEAD MAN TO the world behind him and a fugitive in the one to come, Marcus Stallworth kept to the low scrub, traveling by night, into slaps of wind, retracing the path of missionaries and hermits.

On the third day, he rose at dusk and stared west across the Salton Basin, the silt flats stained rose by the sun’s retreat. He could just make out the foothills of the San Jacintos, the loose rope of smog suspended over the interstate. Nearby, a pack of javelinas spit and cackled like fat on a grill. Joshua trees rose from ponds of shadow, their furred limbs pawing the sky.

He saw few signs of man here, the bleached rubble of aqueducts, fractured culverts, the architecture of a fever dream by which businessmen would soak parched soil into emerald farmland. The sun swung down, a red hammer upon the horizon. A Gambel’s quail skittered in withered shrub and shrieked like a party streamer. Purple nimbostratus, lit orange at the edges, released gray threads of rain and creosote spores exploded, emitting a resinous perfume.

Stallworth packed his gear and chewed a breakfast of nuts and dried fruit and drank a quart of water while the sky stitched itself into an indigo quilt. He strapped on his headlamp and marched south. A shred of moon appeared, then the stars and planets. From time to time, he drew a black light from his pocket and swept the ground for scorpions. He couldn’t help himself.

He knelt to greet them. Split tailed devils, slender and harmless; reddish-brown flat rocks. Theirs was a language of concealment and attack, the calm pulse of survival beneath abrupt motion. Just before dawn, Stallworth came upon a cove of cholla cacti. Scorpions—hundreds of them—had collected to lick the dew that gathered on the needles, just beneath their gaudy yellow blossoms. He lay down to sleep amid this assembly, his body like a giant ark, and woke dizzy and scorched by sun. A vulture wheeled above him. Its frail barking ripped the air, a song without color.

DISAPPEARING HADN’T BEEN easy. It took months to figure the staging and the route, to lay in supplies, to create a new legal identity and work the family accounts to arrange purchase of an RV, which awaited him in a used car lot outside Yuma. The real work lay in summoning his nerve. That had taken years.

To discern why Marcus Stallworth had settled upon this course requires an understanding of his childhood. He had been born out of wedlock, to a woman who was, at nineteen, already a devout drinker. The state of Indiana remanded him, at age five, to the custody of a foster parent who called herself an aunt, though she was unrelated to Stallworth by blood.

She raised him as a Christian Scientist, and the central tenets of her faith took root within him. Although he embraced the rigors of science in his schooling, he accepted that the material world was ultimately an illusion, and that his salvation would require a spiritual resurrection of the flesh. It was this belief that his aunt used, starting at the onset of his puberty, to justify certain rites of purification. He was, for instance, forced to present himself for inspection upon waking in the morning. If he had an erection, as he often did, his aunt would strike at it with a small crop while pressing herself against the bedframe in a silent and grimacing fury. The instrument left slender abrasions. Stallworth, who attended private school as a subsidy student, became accustomed to having his body acted upon as a form of penitence.

He escaped Elkhart by earning a scholarship to a small college outside Philadelphia, where, as an excruciatingly shy teaching assistant, he encountered Rosemary Upton, a sophomore enrolled in his section of Introduction to Zoology. The granddaughter of a major industrialist, she was elegant, loquacious, worldly, forthright in her pursuit, and aggressive in her affections. Whatever discretion he might have sought to impose upon their romance, her assurance overran.

Then came pregnancy, a marriage arranged in haste and carried out in a climate of anxious duty. Stallworth was presented as a respectable suitor: a budding man of science, handsome in a rented tux, eager to transcend the defects of his bloodline. They both knew what neither could acknowledge: that she had selected him as a means of defying her family.

Rosemary, woozy with nausea, threw her mother out of the vestibule for suggesting the ceremony be delayed. She wobbled to the altar, her eyes vindicated beneath the veil, as the men of her family, robber barons and quiet drunks in tails, glowered from the rosewood pews. A gaunt bishop murmured incantations, then oversaw their consecrating kiss, which tasted of lipstick and mouthwash.

His own illicit impulses had first expressed themselves with the teenage sister of a nanny. There were kisses, a moment of avid groping. Rosemary refused to cast him out, firing the nanny instead. “I won’t be made a fool by my own family,” she told him, later, in the darkness. The ambiguity of this statement settled over them like a dense fog.

There had been a second episode two years later, in Tucson, where they moved for his graduate work. This one involved a girl of fifteen, part of a private school study group he tutored. Marcus had panicked initially, and driven off with a hastily packed suitcase, before returning home chastened the next day.

Rosemary responded to the accusation by hiring a private investigator who specialized in “familial crisis management,” and who gathered evidence that the young woman in question had engaged in several clandestine sexual encounters. Armed with this evidence, Rosemary confronted her parents, explaining that the girl had become “infatuated” with Marcus and “confused” as to the nature of their relationship. He alone recognized the ferocity of her defense as the most damning evidence of his guilt.

Her loyalty was revenge. She had trapped him within the habitat of his virtue. With the move to Sacramento came an implicit pledge: there would be no more ugliness. This was the phrase Rosemary had used; she nearly choked on it.

And so they put aside these episodes in favor of safer dramas: whether to ask her parents for money and how much, the accompanying fuss over each new home and suitable décor. Regret acted as their central theme. All marriages, he imagined, operated in this way. They were performances staged for the benefit of civilized society, in which two actors valiantly struggled to bear their secrets and hide their disappointments.

He had been able to exhaust himself when the kids were young. But as they grew older, they were no longer interested in riding on his shoulders or camping trips or the little experiments he set up on the floor of his office. He watched, helplessly, somewhat bitterly, as they withdrew into a world of music and movies and clothes, their round faces carved into angular masks, their bodies seized by the sullen riot of adolescence. They became vain, preoccupied with status. Because he had never known his own father, Stallworth could not see the ways in which his disappointment fueled their retreat.

He felt himself drifting into the perverse confusions that had prevailed early in the marriage, beginning to take note of bodies he had no right to regard. Then came the girl, Lorena. He had sensed, from the first night they met, that she possessed the precise qualities to which he was most susceptible: the curiosity of a scientific mind, a hunger for risk, the exquisite neediness of neglect. If he placed his trust in her, she would consent to anything. He could feel it.

And yet his own childhood presented him with another possibility: she had been dispatched as a temptation, a resurrection of the flesh by which he could prove, once and for all, that he had tamed his iniquity. This was why he had led her into the desert and shown her the scorpions and the stars. He wanted to believe he could be someone better. At night, images of her body swarmed him. He struck at himself. He gouged his eyeballs. He withdrew into the desert.

The problem was the girl, her persistence. She kept barging into his office, into him, a plump acolyte bent on damnation. He knew this was nonsense, a form of moral superstition that belonged in the Middle Ages. He was a scientist. She was just a lonely girl, tender and careless and blind. In darkness, she had trespassed upon his burrow.

This time, though, he was prepared. He called the private investigator in Tucson, who referred him to a trusted colleague in San Francisco, a Mr. Van Dyke. Stallworth explained that his work required him to travel into the desert alone and that he worried about his family, should something happen to him.

“Something like a disappearance?”

After a long silence, Stallworth replied, “I want to ensure my wife is given no cause for worry. She can be a fragile person. I need her to be strong for my children.”

“Of course,” Van Dyke clicked his tongue. “The world is a harrowing place. We cannot prevent the unforeseen, but a wise man plans for it.” He briskly outlined terms and requisites: a floor plan of the house, keys, access to an escrow account for contingencies. “It is a sacred duty to serve as a guardian of secrets,” Van Dyke observed, before hanging up. “For they are all that keep us from destroying ourselves.”

In the end, Marcus banished himself before he could strike. That was what mattered. He found a way to protect his family, to spare them the mortification he was doomed to inflict. He drove south and dragged his pack along the sand, erasing each footstep. It was a kind of molting.

For all his calculated preparations, there came a moment when he could no longer deny what he was doing. He looked back at the abandoned Jeep and thought of the years when it seemed possible for him to live as the self others had made of him. He recalled the young father who worked at a university and returned home to a brittle but loving wife, to the squealing of two beautiful children. He had carried them on his back as they sang nonsense into his ears. A searing commenced at his temples; his vision blurred. He stood that way for a long time.

When at last he turned toward the desert, Marcus Stallworth knew the nature of his exile. It was because he was unfit to live another way.

HE’D STASHED HIS first cache of provisions in a cave at the base of the Bullion Mountains, fifty miles east of Barstow: five gallons of water, dehydrated meals, the starched khakis of a park ranger.

These were days of autumnal progress, beneath stratocumulus whose gray undersides shaded jetties of volcanic rock. The Marines used the Bullions for military exercises; its playas were pocked with craters carved by artillery, which bloomed algae after storms and bubbled like primordial cauldrons. From the summits, he could see the hydraulic grooves worn by rain, braids of shale that broadened into alluvial fans near the valley floor. He zigzagged down these channels, onto vast aprons of rock and dunes crowned by wigs of salt brush.

South of Eagle Mountain he turned west again toward the Salton Sea, the faded beach resort now a reeking mirage. He set up camp and climbed a hill of debris to survey his position. Sunlight flashed upon the water. From the north came a swarm of migratory birds—cranes and cormorants, grebes and glossy ibis—drawn by the dead fish floating on the surface. They looped and keened, white notches against a lavender dawn. He listened to the feathery plish as the birds impaled these carcasses. The winds shifted and the stench burned his eyes.

Farther south, he saw signs of the sea’s recession: a wasteland encrusted in salt. The pilings of a pier, the dainty udders of a captain’s wheel, bones leached of feather and scale. Appliances lay scattered about, half submerged and bleeding rust into the saline sludge.

He came upon an entire dwelling whose rooms had been pried apart by time, the intimacies of medicine cabinet and toilet bowl exposed. The kitchen table set for four, a carton of milk, a box of cereal, a teaspoon resting delicately atop a plastic honey bear. In the yard beyond, near a collapsing swing set, stood a headless woman, her torso striated in salt. Stallworth stood for a long time, gazing upon this macabre figure. It was a sewing mannequin. But he saw something else: Lot’s wife, frozen as she cast her gaze backward, toward home.

HE HAD COME to the Salton Sea on a scavenger hunt of sorts. For years, rumors had circulated among scorpiologists, of a species adapted to the extreme salinity of dried seabeds. He himself attended a conference in which a Lithuanian researcher claimed to have discovered a new variety of scorpion in the salt-rich fens that had once been the southern fringe of the Ural Sea.

The little Lithuanian was not a presenter at the conference, but an amateur collector with exaggerated credentials. His evidence did not consist of live specimens or lab data. Instead, he carried with him at all times a small antique box filled with cadavers. The Lithuanian haunted receptions and cocktail hours, an unkempt figure who thrust his “specimen case” at anyone who came near. On the last day of the conference, he cornered Stallworth in the lobby of the conference hotel.

“You are the ones interested in the behaviorials, is this right? Then I must tell you of my species!” The Lithuanian leaned in, as if to caress Stallworth’s official laminated badge. His breath was bitter with old coffee. “I have observed for many months, Mar-cooze. They do not behaves as other scorpions do. The mature male travels with the juvenile female. He protects her. He hunts for her. Why? She is his mate! These female breeds just once, you see. And she kill him! I have seen with my own eye.” The Lithuanian peered at him expectantly, pupils beaded with mania. “Do you understand?”

“I’m not sure that makes sense.”

“Of course it do. Because of the salt content in the metabolisis, Mar-cooze. They have not fully adapted! The mature female makes crystals in the reproductive tract. She cannot breed again. Just one time. Tiny crystals. Like diamonds. I have seen them! Under the microscopes!”

Stallworth glanced around, and the Lithuanian glanced with him; they were now aligned against a vast confederation of skeptics. “You must see the specimens!” The little man took hold of his lanyard, like a leash.

There were half a dozen specimens, three of each gender, pinned like delicate broaches to black velvet. They were barely an inch in length, with slender pincers and thick tails. Their bodies were a chalky white, speckled with symmetrical markings like those on tribal masks. The Lithuanian pressed a magnifying glass into his hands. “Look closer.” What he saw astonished him: the animal’s exoskeletons were virtually translucent and beneath them, as the Lithuanian had promised, hundreds of white crystals.

“You see?” the Lithuanian cried.

“Why can’t you produce a live specimen?”

“That is just it, Mar-cooze! He dies in captivity each time! It is months to find each one. That is how rare. Sometime more. But the minute you remove from the home of soil she stings. Every single time. They are like—” The Lithuanian tapped at his temple, searching for the right word. “Outlaws. Wanted dead and alive. Do you believe me now? You must believe.”

YEARS LATER, HE came across an article in the Journal of American Sociobiology, citing the Cahuilla Indians, who had once inhabited the banks of the Salton. One of the central icons in their folklore was a scorpion known as the Pale God of Death. Its venom, ingested during purification rituals, was said to ignite the heart. Those who survived were cleansed of evil spirits.

Stallworth doubted there was any such species. But he went to investigate the reeking marshes anyway. He had allotted himself three weeks in the wild, figuring his disappearance would be long gone from the news by then. For two nights, he raked the salt beds and midden heaps. All he found were stick-like Diplocentridae, garish Superstitioniidae, a sluggish Hadrurus obscurus; they writhed in the grip of his forceps. At dawn, he returned to his camp, resigned to sleep away the heat of the day.

But he kept hearing a faint scrabbling. He aimed his light into the corner seams of the tent, where beads of condensation gathered. The creature illuminated by his beam was clearly of the family Buthidae, the genus Centruroides. Its morphology was similar to sculpturatus—the same slender pincers and thick tail. But the abdominal segmentation suggested an elongated digestive track, perhaps evolved to absorb brackish water. The exoskeleton was cream-colored and exquisitely thin, like vellum paper. Stallworth dug out his magnifying glasses. Enzymatic prisms—crystals—were clearly visible beneath the exoskeleton. His hands began to flutter.

In winter, scorpions sometimes congregated by the dozens. But this one, a male, was traveling solo. Its cephalothorax was marked by a rust-colored splotch in the shape of a hand mirror. He made a quick sketch of the specimen and bestowed it with a name—Centruroides narcissus—then set it down outside the tent, hoping it would lead him to its burrow. The creature refused to move. Then, without warning, it raised its tail and struck at its own eyes. It was dead within seconds.

ON THE NIGHT he was to depart the Salton Sea, Stallworth heard whoops in the distance, and spotted the flare of a bonfire. He shouldered his pack, intending to melt back into the desert, but turned toward the beach instead. Music pulsed from a boom box. He dimly recognized the tinny wail of the singer. A peculiar rabble encircled the flames: witches, ghosts, a vampire with bloody fangs. It took a moment for the situation to register: Halloween.

Teenagers, drunk on pint bottles of flavored wine. The girls danced in tattered costumes designed to reveal their bodies while the boys dashed about in dizzy orbits, summoning the courage to tackle them. He thought of his own children, the pool parties they had begun to host, their coy postures and mocking banter. They believed, with a faith no warning could undo, that beauty would keep them safe from the perils of desire.

A clown in a fright wig pulled a plank from the fire and held it aloft. He let out a whoop and set the rotting remains of a sloop on fire. A curtain of flames rippled across the oiled surface of the water. Stallworth was so transfixed that he failed to notice one of the girls turn away from the group and jog up the beach, toward the structure behind which he crouched—a dilapidated lifeguard’s stand. He scuttled back into the shadows, stumbling in his haste.

The girl ducked behind the stand and squatted. He listened to the hiss of her urination. She stood. Suddenly, she turned toward the place where he lay pressed to the ground. “That you, Royal?” Her flashlight swept the darkness in a wobbly arc. “Royal? I ain’t playing with you.” The beam passed over his pack then doubled back. “Okay. Be like that.” She began to advance on him. He could hear the slap of her sandals. He needed to snatch his pack and steal away. But she was too close now.

“Royal?”

He rose up, expecting the girl to scream and flee at the sight of him. But she merely stared, sad and unsurprised. There was something in her, a feral courage he associated with the poverty of his boyhood. The hair on his arms tingled.

“Who the fuck are you?” Grease paint whiskers traced her cheeks. She looked to be a hard nineteen beneath the makeup, with scabs on her elbows and a round belly. He couldn’t quite discern her race. Half-breed. Mulatto. Those were the words that popped into his head. A hundred yards off, the fire raged; her comrades whooped. The moon had slipped behind clouds. “Who the fuck are you?” she said again.

“A ranger,” he said. His voice was husky with disuse. “With the Park Service.”

“What kind of ranger hanging round here at this hour?”

Stallworth kept his head bowed. “I’m conducting surveys.”

“Surveys?” She aimed her light at his pack. “That your equipment? You come from Salton City? You part of that government project? You gonna restore the lake?”

He nodded.

“You lie. There ain’t nothing to restore. It’s dying. You can’t undo what God done. You one hairy-ass ranger. The Lone Ranger.”

He could smell the wine on her breath, the cloying spray she used to tame her hair, which sat atop her head like whorled yarn. “How come I ain’t seen you before?” She blinked slowly. “You got a badge?” She aimed the light at his face.

“Please don’t do that,” he said.

“Why you hiding your face away?”

“I’m warning you.”

“Warning me what?”

He took a step backwards and was shocked when she followed. Whatever she had experienced in life had relieved her of caution. “What kind of ranger come round here? Ain’t nothing to ranger for.” She regarded him glassily. “I think you out here for some other reason. Spying on little girls. Sneaking up on us like some kind of Chester. I met guys like you. They come through Bombay Beach. It ain’t so special.”

He began to wonder how long it would take before the others took notice of her absence. She was close enough that he might snatch her light.

“I could scream,” the girl said. “My boyfriend’ll cut your ass. All I got to do is scream.” She took another step toward him and his hands shot out and took hold of her throat. It happened so quickly they were both choked of sound. She tried to twist away but his hands clamped down. Behind them, the fire threw up a blanket of sparks and the music rolled across the reeking barrens. He recognized the song, a clatter of gongs and synthesizers, the distant fragile wailing of a girl with a heart of glass. It had emanated once from his daughter’s room.

He released the girl with a furious shove and lunged for his pack.

The girl coughed and sank to her knees and vomited quietly. She seemed not to understand entirely what had happened.

Stallworth dug into the lining sewed inside his shorts and withdrew a $100 bill. “There’s been a misunderstanding,” he said.

He set the bill down on the ground in front of her, as if it were a saucer of milk for a kitten.

The girl stared at the money dazedly. “Royal got a gun,” she rasped. She touched her belly absently. Royal, he realized, was the father of her child.

“You ain’t no kind of man anyway. Running away from what you are.” She wretched again. “I know what you are and so do God. He got eyes everywhere. You gonna get found. Everyone get found.”

All around them, like a hidden constellation, scorpions had absorbed this commotion through the fine hairs on their forelimbs, and frozen. The girl was still on her knees. She looked squarely at Marcus Stallworth. Her mascara left streaks that bled across her whiskers. “You a dead man now.” She said this softly, without contempt, as she knelt in the darkness.

BEFORE MAPPING HIS route, Stallworth had read about William David Bradshaw, the first white man to traverse the Mojave. In 1862, with civil war raging in the east, Bradshaw set out to establish a route from California to the gold fields of La Paz, in the central Arizona Territory. He managed to befriend the Cahuilla chief Cabezon, who shared the location of springs and watering holes. All along the Bradshaw Trail, ancient tribes had carved geoglyphs into the desert floor; tribute to the gods of cloud and rain.

Stallworth’s course was the inverse. To minimize the risk of detection, he had to skirt any source of water. This was why he had been so careful to lay in supplies. Five gallons of water awaited him, in an arroyo two miles east of Bombay Beach. But now he had made an error, had come out of hiding and assaulted a local girl. So he turned south toward his next cache, buried fifty miles away, beneath the Algodones Dunes. The journey took three nights, his tongue swollen by the end, such that he had to gulp for air. Wind had glued his contact lenses to his eyeballs. He had to steady himself against a cottonwood to read the figures on his compass.

When at last he located the supplies, he poured two quarts of water down his throat. He stripped off his clothes, intending to burn the rancid garments, then lay down, too bloated to move. A new sun nicked the horizon. He thought of his son, as a newborn, the drowsy euphoria that followed his dawn feedings. Glen would spit up, almost joyfully, then his mouth would curl into a pink smile. The memory pierced him and he clung to it and stabbed it deeper, repeating his son’s name until the sound of it was gibberish. He needed those memories gone, pummeled out of him by privation.

THE EARTH WAS shuddering when he awoke. High above, a squadron of jets chalked the sky. He grabbed his binoculars and tracked them as they dipped down and leveled out. Their bomb bays disgorged dark tassels of ordinance. Stallworth knew there was an abandoned gunnery range on the southern fringe of the Chocolate Mountains. He had been careful to bypass the area. But events far beyond his ken had conspired against him.

With the election of Ronald Reagan, policy toward the Soviet Union shifted. The president’s advisors recommended a massive military buildup. Imperial pride compelled the Soviets to keep pace and eventually bankrupted the Kremlin, triggering the collapse of Communism. Marcus Stallworth was witnessing the first consequences of this policy: the revival of bombing runs on long-dormant ranges.

He felt no immediate sense of alarm, for he had stashed a final cache in the Little Picacho Wilderness, a habitat under the protection of the federal government. He turned away from the valley floor, and toward the high desert, scrambling up steep ravines onto slender outcroppings of brittlebush. The air cooled and the sandy soil gave way to burnt orange cobbles. At the summit of each ridge, ramps of polished stone rose into spires. A westerly wind buffeted the mountains and turned the air sodden. The mist thickened. Stallworth opened his mouth and waited for the clouds to release rain. They merely loitered. The sky had begun to play tricks on him.

The terrain was too jagged to traverse by night and so he lay fidgety in his nylon tent, listening to the thin shriek of jets and the deep distant tremolo of their payload striking. When the noise faded, Stallworth stepped outside to breathe in the night. Stars pierced darkness, so vast and luminous that the vault of the universe appeared to swoop down into the earth. The exertions of his ascent, the lack of food and water and sleep, had left him light-headed, so that he honestly believed for a time that he was floating in space. Another plane streaked overhead, this one close enough that he could hear the munitions whistling in the darkness. Then, a most curious sensation: he was cartwheeling through the air. It was as if the wish of every child—to be released from the grip of gravity—had been absurdly and violently granted.

STALLWORTH’S BODY TRAVELED several yards before landing. He had no idea what had happened. Nor did he ever ascertain the source of this cataclysm, which had been conceived and executed by personnel at the China Lake Naval Base, one hundred miles to the north. The Logistics Unit at the base had worked for months to map out targets. Among the young “data engineers” assigned to the project was a scowling private who spent the weeks before his expulsion from the navy tapping coordinates into a computer terminal. His name was Antonio Saenz.

STALLWORTH WOKE IN agony, pinned against a berm of sand by some celestial hemorrhage, his eyes singed, his ears ringing. It took him several minutes to locate the rational explanation: a bomb had detonated near him. He touched at his cracked ribs, then conducted a ginger inventory of his other injuries—burns, abrasions—and waited for his senses to return. The earth around him lay convulsed. His pack and tent were gone, all his careful provisions.

Perhaps the time had come for him to perish. He lay for a time savoring the prospect. Then, with a wince, he rose. Humans loved to pretend they were the engineers of their own fate. An entire catalogue of myth had been manufactured to prop up this fragile deception. But people were no different than any other creature. When slammed against mortality, survival overruled every other impulse.

He staggered for hours in this spectral state, through box canyons and crags of loose shale. Bombs had blasted out sockets of rock, leaving craters etched in black powder. Every time he breathed, his ribs gored him.

South of Picacho Peak, Stallworth reached the maze of caverns where he had buried his final cache—likewise demolished by the munitions. At the mouth of each cave lay creatures who had sought shelter from the holocaust. He came upon a pair of burros, then a herd of desert bighorn, the ewes plump with their unborn. The sand beneath was crimson. Spotted bats sucked indelicately at the congealed blood. A wild pony had been crushed and its wheezing snout peeked from amid the fractured stone, one panicked eyeball recalling Guernica.

Stallworth sat for a long time. He thought—and tried not to think—about his daughter’s infatuation with ponies. Her mother had nurtured this interest; she shared her daughter’s passion for the accoutrements of dressage. There was a period when she had strutted the sidelines of Glen’s soccer games in jodhpurs. In the end, Jenny’s fixation lasted until the precise moment the equestrian coach ordered her to muck a stable. Still, for years, any time she received a gift of any size, someone, usually her older brother, would mutter, “Is it a pony?”

Daylight was rolling into shadow. Stallworth lay down for a moment. When he opened his eyes again it was dawn. In fact, he could open only one eye. The other had sustained what he assumed to be an abraded cornea. Burns along his forearms had begun to blister. He had to get off the mountain, away from the rampaging jets. He figured the distance to Yuma at thirty miles, the nearest road half that span. Then a small motel—or better, a truck stop—where he could clean his wounds. But he needed sustenance to get there. There were no cacti here, only clumps of creosote. His compass was gone, but he still had a knife. He heard the faint snorts of the dying beast nearby. As he drew out the blade and whetted it against a rock, the phrase crept back into his mind. Is it a pony?

HIS ORIGINAL PLAN had been to head due south, to Yuma, where he could take refuge in the RV he had purchased and consider his options. But his condition would invite too many questions. His wounded eye had shut altogether. The flesh around his ribs had swollen. His burns had begun to putrefy.

So he turned west, toward the barren flank of Fort Yuma Indian Reservation. If he continued south, he would eventually cross the border into Sonora, where an American with cash could find a quiet place to recuperate. He hobbled on, through heat that bent the air into waves. Night hoisted a dizzy scrum of stars. The blue lights of a city rose before him, then reeled away. Scorpions floated across the sand.

He kept falling and it hurt every time. An empty highway stretched from nothing into nothing. At some point, he heard cattle lowing in the dusk. Cattle meant water, vegetation. Night fell but he tumbled on. He felt something sting the meat of his calf, then a dozen more stings across his lower body. Had he stepped into a nest of fire ants? Bark scorpions? Vines coiled around his limbs and waist, like something out of a fairy tale.

IT WAS BARBED wire. Stallworth had walked into a fence that ran along the northern edge of a small ranch; then he had collapsed from exhaustion. A young caballero found him the next morning and liberated him with a pair of pliers. The cowboy spoke some words in Spanish, then slung Stallworth over the back of his horse. When he woke again, someone was spooning a sweet gruel into his mouth.

“What is it?” he croaked.

“Pinole,” a soft voice said. “Corn gruel. Eat.”

“Thank you.” He felt the cool lip of a clay jug pressed to his mouth and guzzled. His ribs ached. He sucked at the pinole until he felt his bowels loosen. “I’m sorry,” he sobbed.

“Don’t feel bad.” The voice addressing him was young, female, oddly formal. “You’re hurt pretty serious, sir.”

The view offered by his working eye was of a small room with low wooden beams. The furniture was sparse: chair, bedside table. The girl tending to him was a few years older than his daughter. A bone-white bonnet, knotted beneath her chin, framed her plain brown face. She set down an empty bowl and took up a bucket and a sponge.

“Where am I?”

“Father Ammon says to clean you up. Expect it to sting a fair bit.”

“Father who?”

“Can you lift yourself, sir?”

The girl nudged him up on his side and cleaned the mess beneath. She dabbed alcohol on his wounds and tweezed bits of fabric from them.

Stallworth focused on the room’s sole decorative element, a painting that showed a young man kneeling in a clearing. He wore a shabby waistcoat and clutched a golden box to his chest. A robed angel hovered over him. Owing to some quirk of the artist’s brush, the angel bore an expression that was more ominous than beatific.

The girl continued her ministrations, without pity or comment. When she came upon the dark swell of his ribs, her face twisted. “Don’t fret none,” she said quietly. “To the Lord, you’re just another broken vessel.”

STALLWORTH WAS GIVEN a bell, told to ring when in need. The girl and three older women tended to him, sponging and dressing his wounds. From time to time, unsure as to his whereabouts, he attempted to rise from the bed. Pain stabbed him back down.

At some point, an older gentleman appeared in the chair next to the bed. He looked vaguely like Abraham Lincoln, with a chin- strap beard and deeply creased cheeks the color of butcher paper. His trousers had been handstitched at the seams. He wasn’t Mexican, but Stallworth couldn’t say precisely what he was.

“Evening,” the man said, in genteel English. “Hoped you might be well enough to talk a bit now.”

Stallworth nodded.

“Not so much pain anymore? That’s good, friend. Good. You’re carrying a couple cracked ribs at least. Second-degree burns, if I’m judging right. But one thing at a time. We can start with introductions. My name is Ammon Taylor.” Taylor smiled shyly and held out a long thin hand.

Stallworth reached carefully to take it.

“Your name, sir?”

“Dennis. David.”

“David Dennis?”

“Right.”

“You know why I’m asking, Mr. Dennis?” The man paused. “Because you didn’t have much in the way of possessions when my tenant found you. What he tells me. I know Josiah to be a man of faith.”

“Where am I? In custody?”

Taylor expelled a whinnying laugh. “Custody? Heavens no. Why would you be in custody, Mr. Dennis?”

“I don’t know,” Stallworth said. “I’m a little confused.”

“As am I, Mr. Dennis. We don’t get many unannounced visitors around here. Especially an American in your condition.” Taylor picked a bit of straw off his pant leg. “That tells me you might be mixed up in some sort trouble. Is that the case?”

“No,” Stallworth said. “I was robbed.”

Taylor looked at him steadily. “You had nearly $5,000 in cash on your person, Mr. Dennis. I highly doubt you were robbed.”

“My car,” Stallworth said. “That’s what they wanted.”

“I see. And these injuries?”

“I resisted.”

Taylor studied his face again. “You’ve sustained serious burns, Mr. Dennis. Did these robbers burn you? I must ask you to be forthright. There is a good deal of illegal activity in this area, given our proximity to the border. The smuggling of drugs and other contraband. None of this is my concern. But you are on my property now, and thus, in the eyes of the law, I am harboring you. That is the term of art, I believe. If you have done something wrong, or someone is looking for you, I must ask that you not involve me or my family.”

“No one is looking for me,” Stallworth said. “I was hiking and got robbed.”

“And burned.”

“I live in Tempe. I was on my way to Joshua Tree. The national park. They steered me off the road. Three of them. Mexicans.”

“Mexicans.”

“They took everything I had. My wallet, all my gear, the car.”

“But not your cash?”

“I had that sewed into the lining of my—” Stallworth realized, with a start, that he was wearing a long cotton nightgown. Someone had removed his shorts. Of course. How else would Taylor have found the cash? This meant he probably also had in his possession the passport Stallworth had purchased more than a year earlier, from a company that advertised in the back of Soldier of Fortune magazine. The name on that passport was … Tennyson. Not Dennis. His name was David Tennyson.

“My name is David Tennyson,” he said slowly.

“I see.”

“I live in Tempe, Arizona. I was on my way to Joshua Tree National Park to hike. I was robbed.”

“You mentioned that,” Taylor said. “May I ask your social security number, Mr. Tennyson?”

“My what?”

Taylor drew out an antique silver pocket watch and began to wind the stem. “How about your home address?” After a pause, Taylor continued. “I understand. You’ve absorbed numerous injuries. It is not my intention to put any further strain on you. You can explain it all to the police.”

Stallworth closed his eyes. “Have you called them?”

For half a minute, the only sound was the click of the watch stem. “I am not in the habit of contacting government agencies,” the old man said. “I do have a phone you may use for this purpose. Surely you have family you wish to contact, as well. And if the ribs don’t heal up, we’ll have to get you to a hospital on the other side.”

“The other side?”

“You’re in Mexico, friend.”

Stallworth sat up a little. His mind felt gummed, groggy. “You gave me something, didn’t you?”

“For the pain. Certainly.”

“Where am I, Mr. Taylor? Where exactly?”

“As I told you, you’re on my property.”

“How far am I from the border?”

“Right that way yonder, a few miles. You can see for yourself once you’re well enough.” Taylor nodded at the room’s only window, which was the size and shape of an old-fashioned cathedral radio, with tiny wooden shutters.

Stallworth nodded. He needed time to think. And a clear mind. “You’ve been extremely kind, Mr. Taylor. I should have said that right from the start.”

“The Lord brings us them that are in need.” Taylor rose from his chair and held his hand just above Stallworth’s head, as if uncertain whether to bless him.

“Your daughter, too. I haven’t had a chance to thank her.”

Taylor smiled stiffly. “Why don’t you get some more rest now, Mr. Tennyson? Then, when you feel well enough, you can tell me who you really are.”

STALLWORTH KNEW ENOUGH about religious sects to recognize the markings of one—the antiquated clothing, the austere furnishings. But he couldn’t figure why an aging American was living on a ranch in Mexico. Was he missionary? A Mennonite? Didn’t the Mennonites speak Dutch? Or was it German?

One of the older women brought him supper. They all wore the same long dresses, as shapeless as habits. She made little puffs as she peeled away the stained gauze of his dressing.

“Thank you,” he said. “I’m sorry to trouble you like this.”

She shook her head.

“I’m David Tennyson. Perhaps you knew that. Are you allowed to talk to me?”

“It’s no trouble,” she muttered, without much conviction. The woman put a tray down with a watery bowl of stew.

Stallworth took a few mouthfuls, then set the spoon down. “It’s delicious, but I don’t feel well this evening.”

The woman nodded doubtfully and took the tray away.

Stallworth closed his eyes and waited until the middle of the night. His ribs were aching again, but his head had cleared. He rose from the bed and hobbled to the door. It was bolted from the outside. The drawer in the end table contained an old Bible. Nothing metal, nothing sharp.

He limped to the window and quietly unlatched the shutters. No lights anywhere, just a dull bulb of moon overhead. The breeze smelled of manure and hay. He could hear the distant nickering of horses, the pitter of wind through leafless branches. As his eyes adjusted, a small courtyard came into view, beyond which lay an expanse of pasture. The window was too small for him to climb through.

When Taylor returned the next day, he had combed his hair and shaved his cheeks. “We keep the Sabbath,” he explained, in his courtly fashion. He sat down in the chair next to the bed and placed a small drawstring pouch on the floor. Then he took a minute to appraise Stallworth’s condition. “I understand your appetite has been inconsistent. You must eat to recover. Perhaps you’re concerned about pain medicine?”

“Why am I being locked in this room?” Stallworth said.

Taylor smiled, again, in that way that was not quite a smile. “Have you thought about our conversation? I’m reluctant to call you Mr. Tennyson, as I’m not certain that’s your real name. We also know that you’re involved in some extra-legal activity. The particulars are not my concern. The laws of man bare our imperfections. But the deeds of man—which might bring harm to my family—those are my concern.”

“I don’t understand what you want from me.”

“A true accounting of how you came to be on my property to start with.”

“I told you yesterday.”

Taylor sat up in his chair and laid his palms upon his thighs. The expression etched upon his face was that of a biblical judge, firm in its rectitude and pained by it. “When word of your arrival reached me, I had a choice. I could have left you to die or delivered you, as it were, into the hands of the Romans. I brought you into my home instead. Do you know why? Because I believe God has sent you here. But I can’t discern the wherefores unless you tell me the truth.”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I did.”

“Only one way to know for sure, friend.”

“I’m not your friend,” Stallworth whispered.

Taylor smiled, authentically now, his teeth tarnished and worn. “You’re a believer. No believer can live as a fugitive from the Lord.”

Stallworth felt his eyes start to blur. He had grown up among such men, absorbing their pieties and pompous cadences. They loved God because he granted them the power to act without moral hindrance. That is what Stallworth sensed in Ammon Taylor: a sovereign whose dominion cloaked itself in humility.

His aunt had remitted him to the care of such men, when the burdens of custody depleted her. They beat him for perceived impertinence, in a barren courtyard not unlike the one outside his room.

“What are you running from?” Taylor said, more gently.

“Nothing.”

He felt a hand laid gingerly upon his ribs, just above the cracked bones.

“Please don’t touch me,” he said quietly.

“It’s time now, son. Release your burden.”

Stallworth wanted to recoil from this stranger’s touch, his unctuous plea. But all he could do was twist his mouth. It was true what Taylor said. He believed in God. Not the God Rosemary worshipped, who dressed the family for church, who insisted on everything clean and pretty. But the God of his youth, who flogged the sinful, then cast his love upon them. Taylor’s voice was a benign hum. Let me alone, Stallworth said. That was what he meant to say. His tongue couldn’t shape the words. What greater threat did the fallen face than mercy?

HE DIDN’T TELL Taylor everything, only that he had left his family back in Arizona and he hoped to start over again.

“What does ‘family’ mean?”

“A wife. Two boys. Young men, one in high school, one in college.”

“They figure you’re dead. That’s how you made it look.”

“A son would rather lose a father than be abandoned by one,” Stallworth said curtly. “That’s my own experience.”

“When did you leave?”

“Mid-October.”

“What have you been doing since?”

“Hiking.”

Taylor whistled. “Into the wilderness, where for forty days the devil tempted him.” He produced a pipe from his vest pocket and slid it into the corner of his mouth.

“My wife would have used the kids as pawns in a divorce.”

“What about all this?” Taylor nodded at the bandages that decorated his arms. “You threw yourself off a cliff?”

“That’s the part I don’t expect you’ll believe.”

But Taylor didn’t look surprised by any of it. He clicked at his pipe for a minute, then caught himself and tucked it away. “No wonder you were reluctant to speak. I won’t ask for your name. Better for both of us. Rest easy, friend. I’ve no intention of turning you in. You’re precisely where you were meant to be. We’ll talk more when you’re feeling stronger.” He rose from his chair, then paused and tapped at his temple. “Almost forgot. We found a couple of other personal items in the lining of your clothing.” He handed the drawstring bag to Stallworth.

The first item was his contact lens case. The second was the plastic canister containing the pale corpse of the scorpion he had found inside his tent. The third was the Polaroid of Lorenza Saenz sitting naked on the steps of his own swimming pool, her brown breasts half submerged in glowing blue. Stallworth looked up to find Taylor staring down at him from the doorway, impassively.

“I don’t know who she is,” Stallworth blurted.

“That makes her a stranger to us both, I suppose.” Taylor gave a small bow and shut the door. Then came the sound of the bolt being thrown.

HE’D FOUND THE photo in his daughter’s room, tucked away on her astrology shelf. Jenny had snapped the pic with some vague plan to use it as leverage, should Lorena try to narc about the secret parties at her apartment. The arrival of adolescence had done this to the children, made them calculating. Rosemary didn’t want to know about it. She clung to a vision of their family that was, if not chaste, at least well-mannered.

Stallworth tried to ignore their defiance. But when the house was empty, he wandered into their rooms, searched their closets and drawers. He told himself he was checking for drugs. He reached into the dark recesses of the cupboard under their bathroom sink and found the pornographic magazines and his pulse went rabbity with dread. No one said anything. Still, it was there when they gathered around the table for meals, or edged past one another in the hallways. His children had been infected.

And now there was this photo of Lorena. She had taken off her clothes in his own backyard—a flagrant display. What he noticed in the image, what he fed upon, wasn’t the naked body but the acute shame that registered in her posture, the way her skin bunched at the hips as she leaned over to conceal her breasts in the iridescence of the pool. He should have thrown the photo away. He should have burned it. Instead, he slipped it into his passport.

He crumpled the photo in his fist, then flattened it out again and returned it to the bag, with the dead specimen. Then he opened the drawer beside the bed. To fit the bag inside, he had to remove the Bible, which wasn’t a Bible at all. The gold lettering on the cover read An Historical Account of the New Prophets of the Church of Jesus Christ and the Latter Day Saints in the State of Mexico, 1874–1961.

The volume’s spine issued a soft crack; its pages threw up spores of must. The smell brought Stallworth back to the damp church basements of his boyhood, the verses he was to recite while Elder Rennert stood over his shoulder. He remembered the menacing clang of steel rulers struck against wheezing radiators.

The prose of this strange history aped the King James Bible: thees and thines, elaborate genealogical compendia, soaring odes to the hardships endured as Mormons settled the Western Territories. In 1875, Brigham Young called for a mission to Mexico and several hundred Mormons migrated to Chihuahua and Sonora. These numbers swelled in 1882, when Congress passed a ban on plural marriage.

The narrative was a garish conflation of the Old Testament, the American colonial saga, and frontier mythology. All the elements were there: a chosen people targeted by imperial persecutions, an exile through the desert, a promised land where savage armies lurked.

He read until dark and woke to find Taylor staring at him. The room was frigid with desert dawn. Taylor was dressed in overalls and work boots. He nodded at the book, which lay open on the bed. “Wondered when you might open that. It represents many years of labor on the part of my father.”

“He wrote this? Was he a historian?”

“Of sorts. He served as bishop for the Mexicali Ward. That was before the Quorum of Seventy turned against him. He wanted to make sure the real story got told. There’s almost nothing written about the transmigration.”

“The transmigration?”

Taylor squinted. He had the smell of coffee and bacon on him. “My grandfather Hiram Taylor settled this ranch in 1873. Defended it, too. There’s arrows in this lumber older than me. Lost an eye and part of his right hand to the Cucapá.” Taylor nodded at the book. “My father wrote down everything he could remember, just as it happened. But the Quorum changed what they saw fit and flowered up the language. They sent us that. It’s a fairy-tale book.”

“Did your father object?”

“It was his doing. A man from the Quorum flew down here in a private plane. Said he wanted make sure every missionary got a copy of my father’s account. They shook on it. That’s how the earthly realm operates, friend. If you got the power, you get to make the story.” A fly had begun to circle the room lazily and Taylor reached out and snatched it from the air. He shook his fist until the buzzing ceased.

“Most of us don’t enjoy that privilege. We have to live with the story we’re handed. That’s why people run off to Mexico. They want a new story. You’re like that, aren’t you? For days, I’ve been asking myself: Why would the Lord send such a man to me? What is his purpose? Then I saw that photo of the young girl—”

“It doesn’t belong to me.”

Taylor closed his eyes and inhaled through his nose. “I’ve been patient, friend. But I cannot help those who traffic in deceit. The photo is yours. What a man keeps is what a man harbors. Don’t insult my intelligence further. You are preventing us from understanding one another.” Taylor opened his fist and cast away the fly. “I am of an age where such storms have settled. But they are perfectly natural and necessary within the proper marital arrangement. It is the disfigurement of such arrangements that confounds us. My grandfather settled this land because he had been denied the right to make a family as he saw fit. Do you understand?”

Stallworth nodded.

“No. You don’t. I can see it. You think plural marriage is an aberration. As if man were born to lie with one woman for life. As if Abraham had never taken Hagar into his tent. As if Solomon had never ruled Zion. But why shouldn’t man live like a king? By his labors fortunes are built, by his urges orchards replenished. The government cannot regulate such things. To condemn sin is to prove desire, friend. No honest man would turn away from a girl in the heat of her blossom.”

Taylor rose from his chair and went to the window and threw open the cathedral doors; Stallworth’s cell was drenched in a brightness that made his wounded eye throb. He blinked violently. Outside, sheep bleated, a tractor squalled. Taylor stepped into the path of the sun. “You will remain here as my guest. When you feel well enough, I can show you around.”

“I appreciate your kindness,” Stallworth said. “But I need to continue my journey. Obviously, I would want to pay you for your kindness.”

Taylor showed his ruined teeth. “You still don’t understand, do you? You are here by God’s will. He knows your heart. He answered your prayers.”

THE YOUNG ONE arrived the next morning, bearing his breakfast. His stomach grumbled at the fragrance of smoked meat. “Father Ammon says to try a bit of solid food today.” She set the tray on his lap—a bowl of pinole studded with chunks of glistening bacon. He played the fatty meat between his teeth; his jaw ached with the pleasure.

The girl shyly grinned.

He had been studying her, too. She referred to Taylor as “Father Ammon” but her nose was too wide, her face too round, to be his daughter.

“May I ask your name?”

“Alma.”

“Thank you for your kindness, Alma. I should have said that before.”

“You’ve thanked me many times, sir.”

“Have I?”

She nodded.

“You’re his wife, aren’t you?”

“Of course.”

“There are four of you in all?”

“Five. Eliza passed a year ago.”

“Do you mind if I ask how long you’ve been married?”

“We wed three summers ago. I was fifteen years of age. If that was your next question.” The girl smiled down at him. Her teeth were snaggled but healthy.

Her grandparents had immigrated from Utah at the turn of the century. They traveled in the same party as Hiram Taylor but had established a ranch farther west, outside Morelos. She was honored when her father informed her that Ammon Taylor had asked for her hand in marriage. “Everyone knows Father Ammon,” she explained. “He’s the last of the Taylors. Without them, there would be no mission in Mexico.”

“You’re a Mexican citizen?”

She laughed softly. “The kingdoms of the earth are not the kingdoms of heaven.” She swept the room as she spoke, a little carelessly.

“Why are you talking to me?” Stallworth said.

“Why wouldn’t I talk to you?”

“The others don’t.”

“They wish to protect Father Ammon.” Alma set the broom aside. “He says we’re not to ask your name.”

“You want to know my name?”

“It would be nice to have something to call you.”

“Call me Mr. Tennyson.”

“Is that your real name?”

“You don’t trust me?”

“Your passport is a fake.”

“How do you know that?”

The girl held a finger to her lips and smiled into it. “I have to go. I’m glad you enjoyed your breakfast, Mr. Tennyson. Father Ammon will be gladdened, too.”

“Wait. Why do you call him Father? Is he a priest?”

Alma paused in the doorway. She regarded him curiously, as if the question had never before occurred to her. “Father is a term of honor.”

A DOCTOR CAME to examine him. He carried a scuffed kit and muttered so quickly that the patient, despite efforts to polish his high school Spanish, didn’t understand a word. The doctor walked his fingertips along the ribs in question and aimed a tiny flashlight into Stallworth’s injured eye. Both were mending. Taylor took notes on a small pad, then walked the doctor out. He returned a few minutes later with a pair of Ace bandages and a steel-tipped cane. “It’s about time you got on your feet.”

Stallworth looked at him incredulously.

“You don’t intend to be an invalid for the rest of your life, do you, friend?” Taylor approached the bed and hoisted Stallworth into a sitting position and wrapped the bandages around his torso. Stallworth smelled the pipe smoke and liniment on the old man’s garments. Taylor knelt down and took hold of Stallworth’s feet and gently slipped them into huaraches. “The fallen must learn to rise again,” he whispered.

Stallworth grasped the cane and found that he could walk slowly, with little pain, if he kept his upper body rigid. He teetered through the door and into the courtyard and let the sun warm his cheeks. He sucked at the cool air. Wisps of cirrus drifted across the blue above. In some faint but persistent manner, he began to consider whether he might yet emerge from all this a better person.

Taylor smiled. “You feel that, do you?”

THE NEXT TIME he came, the old man brought him a shirt and dungarees and commenced a brief tour. The stalls around the courtyard had been the stables once, and his own cabin the tack room. They proceeded up a dirt path with Taylor at his elbow. It was like being escorted stiffly into the past. There was an old barn, canted to one side, and an antique red tractor. There was a hog pen with a mud-caked sow, a chicken coop, a grain silo, a smokehouse. A pair of sullen mules lounged in the shade of an empty stable. Beyond the barn a few bony cows nibbled at stubbled pasture.

They rounded a bend and Stallworth gasped. Before him was a cement wall, twenty feet high and crowned with shards of twinkling glass. It appeared to be a work of incremental effort, with distinct strata.

“What is the expression? Tall fences make good neighbors?” Taylor laughed.

The main house of the compound was on a small mesa. It turned out to be something closer to a sprawling cabin, the wood covered with overlapping plates of metal siding, like an armadillo. A couple of women, wives presumably, peered at them through slender window slots. Smoke trickled from a tin chimney nailed into the roof.

Taylor led him to the back porch, where they could survey the crop fields—carrots, peas, radishes—all wreathed in shining tubes. “Drip irrigation,” Taylor said. “It’s how the Hebrews turned the desert green.” A series of low shacks flanked the main house. This was where his “tenants” lived. He used the term with a proprietary delight, as if they, too, had been coaxed from the soil using drip irrigation. To the east, Stallworth spied scrawny orchards, where tenants in smocks weaved between rows with stepladders and baskets. It was the same wherever you went: the human engine of harvest.

Taylor led Stallworth to the meeting house, a two-story structure whose most striking architectural element was an elevated widow’s walk that served as an observation tower. “I imagine you regard this degree of caution as excessive,” Taylor said. “But we are not in America. We do not enjoy the virtues of plenitude here. This is a different geography.” Taylor’s tone had tightened in a way Stallworth recognized. It was how he had spoken to his own children, in the face of their complaints and demands, their innocent and corrosive privilege.

“Let me show you one more thing.”

They came to a small outcropping of log cabins. In the front yard of one, a matron slapped balls of dough into tortillas and set them onto a griddle hung over a cook fire. She bowed as Taylor passed. “This is where my grandfather lived with his family.” Several beams had been gouged with arrows and hatchets.

“He was attacked?”

“The Lord blessed him with twenty-one children. Five survived.”

He brought his fingers to his mouth and produced an earsplitting whistle. A small buggy appeared. “This has been quite a constitutional for a man still recuperating. I expect you’ll want to rest.” Taylor helped ease Stallworth into the passenger seat. “Let us be gladdened by your progress.”

He felt like a prize calf being shipped to market.

THE NEXT MORNING, Stallworth woke to find a giant aluminum tub next to his bed, which a tenant filled with buckets of steaming water. When the tub was full, the tenant departed and Alma appeared, bearing a towel crowned with a cake of soap, a straight razor, and a mirror.

“I gather it’s time for a bath.” His hair had grown sodden and tangled.

Alma smiled and began matter-of-factly unwrapping him. She eased his nightshirt off so that he lay exposed to the cool morning air. “Hurry now. The water won’t hold heat for long.”

Alma turned away and busied herself with the shaving equipment. Stallworth stepped into the water and nearly howled. He recalled the pleasures of bath time, Jenny dipping a toe and squealing, “Owie! Too owie!”

“Can you get in on your own?” Alma said.

Stallworth lowered himself, breathing hard. The raised perimeters of his wounds turned an angry pink; he jabbed the worst of them with his thumbnail until it wept fluid. Why had he survived? He should have been annihilated, his mortal shell blown apart and the spirit within damned to its appropriate depth.

A hand brushed his shoulder. “May I wash you?” The girl didn’t wait for him to answer. She dipped the soap in the water and slid it across his shoulder blade.

“You don’t have to do that,” he said.

“I don’t expect you’ll be able to clean your own back.” Alma took up a small brush and scrubbed while he sat very still. The pleasure was excruciating. She circled his back and came up to his neck and ran her fingers behind his ears. She lifted his arms and steam rose in white spirals. The air smelled of lavender. She began to wash his chest.

“Does Father Ammon know you’re here?”

“Of course.”

“He doesn’t consider this immodest?”

“Was Mary immodest when she anointed him with spikenard?”

Stallworth tried to recall the episode; Jesus reclining like a pasha, Judas smirking from the doorway. “I’m not sure that’s an appropriate comparison.”

“We don’t really know who we are,” Alma said brightly. “That’s why so many get lost.” She tapped at the back of his neck and poured water over his head. She worked up a lather with the soap then let her fingers slither down to his scalp. The room had grown foggy. She placed a washcloth over his eyes so they wouldn’t sting and rinsed his hair. He heard the bark of a chair and felt his feet lifted from the water and set upon her lap. She began to cut away the dead skin and callous. She clipped his mangled toenails.

Then she set down her tools and lathered his calves. He could feel his body roused from the long slumber of injury. The instrument of his desire swelled from the murky bath. The girl carried on, humming. Then she drew in a breath and her hands fell still. They had come to an invisible boundary, toward which they had been, in some half-realized fashion, wandering. The girl leaned over him and he felt the washcloth lifted from his eyes. There was her face, round and red with shame. She smiled; her long snaggled teeth lent her a wolfish beauty. He closed his eyes and felt the washcloth laid gently across his midsection. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Why would you be sorry?” The girl spoke in genuine astonishment.

She carried on, washing his thighs, then took up a brush and a bottle of peppermint oil and began to yank at the snarls in his hair. She combed out his beard and snipped at the edges, dark curls gathering in her palm. She pressed his forehead, so the back of his skull balanced on the rim of the tub. “Be still,” she said. The blade ran across the exposed skin of his throat, the whiskers shorn with a tender scrape. When she was done with his neck, she shaved the tops of his cheeks.

At a certain point, she let out a soft gasp.

Stallworth opened his eyes. Alma was leaning back on her haunches and staring at his face intently, almost fearfully.

“What is it?”

“You look so much alike.”

“Alike who?”

The girl reached for the small hand mirror behind her, which she held up for him to inspect. The figure staring back at Marcus Stallworth appeared plucked from antiquity: hair parted down the middle and fallen to the shoulders, his beard trimmed to reveal his cheeks, and neatly tapered beneath his chin. The bruising was nearly gone, with just a trace of purple beneath his left eye. His face had been restored.

Alma set down the mirror and unfastened the top button of her dress. Then, with a preternatural calm, she reached inside and drew out a small silver locket, which she flicked open with her thumbnail. She leaned close and gestured for Stallworth to take hold of the locket. The metal backing was still warm from where it had nestled. They were inches apart now. The lavender steam gave way briefly, thrillingly, to the pungency of her body. He took in the pink of her tongue, the exquisite pulsation of the veins at her temple.

“Do you see?”

Stallworth had to stanch his foul yearning, so he could focus on the picture: a younger Father Taylor in tidy notch collar. The resemblance struck him as plausible but rudimentary. He nodded. Perhaps this was why Taylor looked upon him as some variety of deliverance. As the girl gently withdrew, he spied the straight razor that lay on the stool beside her. He might have reached out and seized it.

“Do you like it?” She meant his hair and beard.

“Very much,” he said. The water around him had cooled by now. It was milky with soap and filth and dark drifting whiskers.

He made as if to stand and she glanced at the length of his body, lingering for a tense moment, then looked directly into his eyes. “I am glad of it. You’re to take supper with us tonight.”

“Supper?”

“Father Ammon likes for everyone to dress proper on the Sabbath.”

HE FOUND HIMSELF escorted into the plain rooms of the main house and seated at one end of a table laid with food. The walls were covered with aging wallpaper and sepia prints of assorted Taylor forebears, emaciated men and women in formal dress who appeared to be surveying the food below them with grave longing.

Stallworth wore the clothes that had been presented to him that afternoon, a stiff cotton frock, buttoned jacket, dark woolen trousers. His feet had been tucked into tooled leather shoes. Ammon Taylor sat opposite him, on a throne of carved oak, in an identical costume. Four wives sat between them, two on either side.

He recognized all of them. They had fed and bathed him and emptied his chamber pot. But he had never been introduced to the older three. Earlier, Taylor had detained each of them as they bustled from the kitchen with platters of cornbread and sauerkraut. He named them in turn—Sariah, Emmeline, Martha. They curtsied and looked past Stallworth as he thanked them for their kindnesses. Now they sat, somber and erect, like statues wrapped in organdy.

“Heavenly Father,” Taylor began, “in thy name we offer thanks for the food before us and those who toiled in its preparation. We pray for the safety of those not with us, and for patience in abiding those who have yet to find a path to the light. We offer thanks for the recovery of our visitor, who comes among us now as a friend. You have asked us to pray always in the name of thy son, Jesus Christ. Amen.”

Alma ladled a mountain of stew onto Taylor’s plate, then did the same for Stallworth. To the women she doled out a watery portion that might have fit in a teacup. Their plates were filled out with hunks of cornbread and vegetables. It was a flagrant display of inequity, one Stallworth recognized from the church suppers of his boyhood. They didn’t have enough meat—that much was clear.

The greater curiosity was the absence of any progeny. Stallworth had assumed Ammon’s marriages would have yielded several children, perhaps even grandchildren. But the only residents of the property, aside from the tenants, appeared to be the patriarch and his wives. The women ate in silence, while Taylor told the meandering story of his grandfather, who had fooled Pancho Villa into releasing his nephew in exchange for the deed to a silver mine that belonged to the federal government. Villa, Taylor insisted, was a drunk who won fame by the savagery of his men.

“Did you fight in the war of Vietnam?” Taylor asked him.

Stallworth shook his head.

“May I ask why not?”

“I was a college student.” That was only part of the truth; Rosemary’s family had arranged a deferment.

“College,” Taylor said. The word evidently left a sour taste in his mouth.

Suddenly, the wife at Taylor’s right hand spoke. “Where do you come from, sir?” she demanded.

“Arizona.”

“And what is your business here?”

“My business?”

“You heard me. Do you know my son?” The woman’s hair was yanked back in a bun; her cheeks blazed in the flickering of the oil lamps.

Taylor set his hand upon hers. “Sariah,” he said sharply.

“Justin Taylor. That’s his name. Answer me.”

Stallworth shook his head.

“You best hope that’s the truth.” She rose abruptly, still glaring at Stallworth. It appeared for a moment that she might lunge at him. Then she tucked her face away and hurried from the room.

After the meal, Taylor led him into a small front parlor. “You mustn’t blame Sariah. Our boy got himself into some trouble up that way.”

“Why would she think I had something to do with it?”

“Grief clouds the mind. It’s a known fact.” Taylor pulled a sack of tobacco from his desk and began to stoke his pipe. “You continue to heal, which I take as encouraging.”

Alma appeared with two mugs on a little silver tray.

“Thank you, my dearest.” Taylor looked at the girl fondly. “Drink up, friend. A little sweetness to consecrate our Sabbath.” The drink was delicious, hot milk with sugar and cinnamon.

“You’ve been very kind. Your whole family. It’s more than I deserve.”

“Now therefore ye are no more a stranger, but a fellow citizen with the saints, and of the household of God. Do you know the verse? Paul’s Second Epistle to the Ephesians.”

“I’m afraid I don’t qualify as a fellow citizen with the saints.”

“We shall let God judge that.”

“If I may ask,” Stallworth said, “do you have other children?”

Taylor smiled stiffly and took a pull from his pipe. Smoke curled from his nostrils. “They have gone north for a time. To make their fortunes, you might say, among the Chaldeans. You are a father, so I expect you are familiar with this pattern.”

For a piercing moment, Stallworth saw his children: beautiful and haughty in their designer clothes, their muscles and makeup. “I’m sorry,” he said, though he knew these weren’t the right words.

“Sorry for what?” Taylor replied. He removed his pipe and directed it at Stallworth with a wink. “I have everything a man might want. For even if Our Father in Heaven seized this land from beneath my feet, even if he took every pillar and post, every beast and grain of millet from my storehouse, every soul who dwells here, even if he sent plague to ravage my body, as he did to Job, still I would be blessed beyond reckoning. Do you understand?”

Stallworth nodded. He was starting to see the situation—the Taylor ranch was a failing concern, the relic of a life his children had rejected, pious and outdated, like the words he had been made to recite on Sundays. Perhaps the pity registered on his face, for Taylor when he spoke next did so without a trace of kindness.

“I have asked several times why you came among us, friend. Now I will ask you a final time. Gird up your loins like a man; I will question you and you shall declare to me. Who are you?”

“I’ve told you what I can,” Stallworth said.

“No,” Taylor said. “You have let the poison of deceit issue from your tongue.”

“Let me go then. Take what you want of my money and be rid of me.”

Taylor shook his head. “That money never belonged to you. It belonged to your wife.”

Stallworth felt punched of breath.

“It will be best for you to return to your room now. You do not look well. But bear these words with you. If you attempt to leave this property, or cause any disruption, I will alert the authorities, Mr. Stallworth.”

“What?”

“The days of your running are over, friend.”

THE REST OF the evening returned to him in fragments: the night air chilling his ears, a spray of stars overhead, the complaints of a donkey slapped with a switch, a jostling that flared through his ribs; his body laid to rest on his sagging manger bed. Then a tug on his belt, the pants stripped from his body.

The sensations began to swirl. A soft body pressed against his, then carefully wriggled beneath; the plain brown face of the girl stared up at him intently. Was this Lorena? Had she come to him? The warmth of her skin poured out across his and a shy hand took hold of him and his craving lurched awake. Her knees fanned wide and she guided him to the slick notch of her womanhood. There was no boundary. She let out startled breaths of cinnamon and milk; pain shot through his ribs. The damp collision of hips. Her feet clinched around his calves.

Now it was morning. The light of it hammered at his temples. He felt certain he had had a wet dream. The agitation of his bath yesterday, the girl’s provocations. It made sense. He reached down and ran his fingers through his hairs then sniffed at them. The aroma marked what they had done.

STALLWORTH SPENT THE day in mystified agitation. What were Taylor’s intentions? Extortion? The pursuit of ransom? And how did Alma’s nocturnal visit fit into this plan? He deduced that the scorpion specimen must have been the crucial clue. How many scorpiologists went missing any given month?

But the explosion that sent him pinwheeling through the air had blasted a clue from his memory: the tiny, ten-digit phone number secreted on the last page of his passport. It was this number that Ammon Taylor had called five days earlier, reaching the offices of Royce Van Dyke in San Francisco.

Taylor left a message with the answering service mentioning David Tennyson. Van Dyke called back less than a minute later.

“A client of yours has wound up on my property,” Taylor explained. “I want his real name. It shan’t be hard to find, now that I know he’s from Northern California.”

“The less you know, the better,” Van Dyke said breezily. “Trust me on that.”

Taylor fell silent and let the pause gather weight. Van Dyke did not strike him as a man to be trusted. “Each day he remains here, my family bears a risk. I wish to know the precise nature of that risk. My next call will be to the police.”

Van Dyke confessed, then tendered an initial offer, which Taylor did not dignify with a response. Eventually, the two men reached an accord: $2,500 per week for the medical care provided to Marcus Stallworth, another $2,500 for discretion. “Aim him south and I’ll double your stake for doing the Lord’s work,” Van Dyke pledged.

“You would do well not to mock God,” Taylor replied sternly. The phone line cracked and hissed, as if the call were emanating from the distant past.

Van Dyke smirked at the old man’s preening piety. But when he glanced down at his own hand, the one scratching out terms, he found it trembling.

ALMA RETURNED LATE in the night, wearing a cape of muslin, rain damp and clasped at the throat with a plastic brooch.

“What the hell did you do? You drugged me.”

She looked at him, almost amused. “I did not.”

“What are you doing here?”

“You’re angry?”

“Of course I’m angry.”

“You didn’t appear angry last night.” The girl set down her lantern and removed her bonnet and cloak. She fished the clips from her hair and it fell unbound. “You were provided nothing but a Sabbath meal,” Alma continued quietly. “Then you were provided a bed and a woman to lie with. I was that woman. You desired me and took what you wanted. Do you deny it?”

The girl sat in the chair and peeled away her stockings. She had left her shoes near the door. He could see one of them, rimed in red mud. Behind her was the portrait of Joseph Smith, enthralled by the angel he had dreamed up in a fever.

“How does Father Taylor know who I am?”

“That is none of my affair.”

She stood and began to unbutton her dress.

“Please don’t,” he whispered.

“Don’t what?”

“Does your husband know where you are?”

“Does your wife?”

The girl let her dress drop, revealing the thin undergarment beneath. “You are no longer in America, or Mexico, or any other place where the laws are made by men.”

“I’m being held against my will,” Stallworth said.

“You were spared. Then sent to us. That was the work of the Lord, not the devil. Father Ammon saw it at once.” Alma stepped toward the bed and the lantern showed the outlines of her body. “Adam fell that men might be, and men are, that they might have joy. Do you believe that? Would God create desire without design?”

Alma had rehearsed these words. He saw her standing before a looking glass, arranging her face around them, her husband seated behind her listening, nodding.

“I can secure more money. Tell Father Ammon. Tell him I’m willing.”

“Money?” The girl’s face soured. “You think this is about money?”

“Why won’t he grant me freedom?”

“The question is whether you wish to deny your own nature. Do you, Mr. Stallworth? Do you wish to deny?”

He tried to look her in the eye but neither of them could bear it. The girl had begun to shiver; the shadow of her body quivered on the wall.

“No,” he said finally.

“Good,” she replied, and climbed into bed with him.

FOR FIVE CONSECUTIVE nights, Alma returned. She stood by his bed and removed her garments and pulled him into her body with a silent writhing that registered pleasure and apprehension. As he approached climax, her palms pressed him deeper; more than once he had to entreat her to release him. Afterwards, she tilted her hips toward the ceiling, remaining in this posture to the count of one hundred.

Ammon Taylor needed an heir. That much was obvious. His only son had decamped for Arizona or Utah, a wayward soul. His two daughters had married into other clans. Stallworth thought of the Old Testament, its blood-soaked poetry, which redounded, in the end, to patrimony, the endless begats, the senseless slaughter of the Middle Ages, the twisted lore of kingship and kingdom. By some strange logic, he had abdicated his throne only to assume the role of royal stud.

This was how his mind operated when he wished to step back and negotiate with his dilemma. The rest of his day was a quilt of impatience and dread. He took short walks around the courtyard and peered at the walls of the compound, soaring up through the November drizzle like a futile gesture, a fortress locked from the outside.

Inside Alma, he surrendered to sensation: heat and delight, the soft thrashing. With the lamp doused, he could barely see her face. She was neither a coquette nor a courtesan, just a girl devoted to the duties of the cult.

In the minutes after Alma departed, he worried his options. He could attempt an escape and take his chances, but he was without money or any sensible plan, still not fully recovered from cracked ribs. He could stay on and curry Ammon Taylor’s favor. He tried once to threaten Alma with disclosure.

“You’ve defiled me,” she replied calmly. “He’ll kill us both.”

“But didn’t Father Taylor—didn’t he send you?”

For a fleeting moment, the girl hesitated. Then she stared at him in pity, as though he were a child who had failed to grasp the simplest lesson. “God sent me here. Just as he sent you. Our course is set.”

ON THE FOLLOWING Sabbath eve, he was invited to bathe in the main house and he managed to pocket a straight razor. He stashed the razor in his bedside drawer, beside the plastic canister that contained the corpse of Centruroides narcissus. His gaze lingered on the pale corpse, the scythed stinger still lodged in its own eye. He felt a shiver of recognition.

The girl, Alma, had arrived in his bed later than usual and plainly exhausted. After their coupling, he curled away from her and evidently fell asleep, for he was shocked to find her still beside him as dawn broke.

Voices rose suddenly from the hallway, two men whispering fiercely in English. Stallworth thought of the blade inside his bedside drawer. The girl woke in a panic. The door burst open and Ammon Taylor’s face appeared, lit from below by a lantern. Taylor stared at him severely, taking in the roil of bedsheets, the scent of their congress, before alighting on Alma. Her eyes were squeezed shut, as if she might vanish altogether.

It all happened in an instant: Taylor’s face stamped with wrath, Stallworth lunging for his razor, the tiny black eye of a pistol, its deafening report. A wet thud punched the breath from his body and replaced it with a frantic gurgling, his vision clouding as a second man (short, balding, chin dipped) raised a black baton and sent a tiny bolt of lightning into the ear of Ammon Taylor. Then, as Taylor fell, a third figure became visible, squatting impossibly in the shadows of the hallway: Lorena Saenz.