“All of us have monarchs and sages for kinsmen; nay, angels and archangels for cousins; since in antediluvian days, the sons of God did verily wed with our mothers, the irresistible daughters of Eve. Thus all generations are blended: and heaven and earth of one kin: the hierarchies of seraphs in the uttermost skies; the thrones and principalities in the zodiac; the shades that roam throughout space; the nations and families, flocks and folds of the earth; one and all, brothers in essence—oh, be we then brothers indeed! All things form but one whole.”
—HERMAN MELVILLE, MARDI
SOMETIMES TYLER AND the other cops talked about it, about what was happening to the world, and America, and what was missing now that hadn’t been missing before. And if a word came up regularly to describe what was missing now, what was fading away more and more with each year in the country, it was this: community. It used to be built around the churches, the churches with their leaders who, Tyler now knew, were sometimes flawed in terrible ways. Tyler knew most church leaders weren’t like that, and he certainly knew that most Mormon leaders weren’t like that. He respected the religion he’d grown up in. But the fact that it could happen at all . . . that there could even be people like that, and that they could get away with it, at least sometimes, signified to him that the fabric was wearing thin, that it was now more susceptible to rips and tears. And that just ate him up.
Tyler and I are twenty-three years apart, and among the many generation gap items that separate us is music. But one day I couldn’t resist referencing a song from the years when I was his age. “You know that Guns n’ Roses song ‘Sweet Child o’ Mine’?” I once asked him.
“Oh sure,” he said. “Everyone knows that song.”
“Well, you know that part at the end where Axl just keeps asking, ‘Where do we go now?’ I always kind of thought Axl had America’s number pretty well there. You know, like—where do we go now?”
“Yeah,” said Tyler. “That’s the problem for sure. Where do we go? I ask that pretty much every day.”
Like a lot of Mormon communities, Spanish Fork isn’t unwelcoming to other churches, other faiths. Tyler’s mom, Pam, told me about a group of Hare Krishnas who were, if not a prominent, certainly a highly noticeable presence in the area.
“Hare Krishnas?” I said, incredulous. (I have to admit I’ve long held a grudge against the Hare Krishnas for pushing a copy of the Bhagavad Gita on me in an airport back in the early seventies when I was too young to realize I was being swindled.) “So what are they like?”
“Oh,” said Pam, “they couldn’t be nicer. They have a food co-op at the end of Main Street, and a wonderful float on Fiesta Day.”
“Fiesta Day?”
“Yes, it celebrates the day the Mormon Church was founded here.”
Tyler, it seemed to me, with his upbringing in such a forgiving town, with his natural faith in life and his unforced outrage at what the world had become, was a real-life embodiment of a type of character who appears often in fictional stories: the Good-Hearted Soul or Noble Innocent. This character tends to have a rocky time of it, for he starts out believing that the world is a good and pure place but learns by hard experience that it is not quite as good as he had thought, that there is injustice and downright evil mixed in with it as well. That it’s also not a place where good always triumphs and evil is always brought to justice. It is, instead, a place where you get a dog, name him Lucky, and a jerk down the street runs him over. A place where a man, crazy from grief or anger or both, can throw his own son around his house, then place him carefully in bed and go down to the basement and shoot himself. A place where good exists, to be sure, but where evil exists as well, and all too often seems to be far more prevalent and powerful.
Yet in literature at least, if this hapless yet noble character perseveres, he often arrives at a moment of understanding. This moment can be big and dramatic, or so small that the reader might almost miss it when it happens. This is the moment when, for the troubled young hero of the story, the jar breaks. The moment when he (or, of course, she) sees that though the world is indeed a terrible place, there is far more going on in it than first meets the eye. For behind it there lies another world: one where Good and Evil are both extremely real, but where Good is triumphant in exactly the way it so often fails to be in the ordinary world.
Throughout our interviews, I’d pushed Tyler to tell me about his life in as honest and forthcoming a manner as possible, and he’d made a truly heroic effort to comply. He had, I was more than aware, not enjoyed telling me how Jenny’s face had looked when he and the other policemen had succeeded in turning over her car. He had not enjoyed telling me about the boy thrown around the house by his father, or the way the Boren clan had looked, lined up in bed. These were horrors, all of them, and I knew, as I asked Tyler for one detail after another, that a part of him was wondering what my purpose could possibly be in asking him about them. Toward the end of our interviews, then, it was no surprise that he made a point of telling me how he was different now—how what happened at the Spanish Fork Bridge had tripped some wire in him that had allowed him to move from despair, to a new state of mind: one he was still in the process of understanding.
Some of the details he gave me in these final interviews were pretty amusing. In one, he told me how he’d pretty much stopped having a drink of Crown Royal when he got home now—that he didn’t need to numb himself after work so much, even if it had been a really bad day.
“Whiskey?” I said. “I thought you said you drank beer!”
“Yeah,” Tyler said guiltily. “That was the one thing I told you that wasn’t true. I thought if you knew it was whiskey it would make me look like a really bad guy.”
Tyler told me about how two or three times a week, he now likes to hike up to the big concrete “Y” that sits over Brigham Young University, and how he sits in it and looks down at the whole stretch of the Pioneer Valley and all the towns in it, and out to Utah Lake, and, beyond that, to the horizon. “The world’s still going to hell,” Tyler told me. “But it’s different now, it really is. This probably sounds corny, but it seems to me that maybe God puts us down here to test us. That this is all some big way of allowing us to find out who we really are.”
As someone who had spent a fair amount of time reading about myths, legends, and the way the details of ordinary human lives often line up strangely with the plots of those myths and legends, I had long since given up on worrying where Tyler’s thoughts and experiences would lead him next. I was, at this point, simply along for the ride, so I just asked him if he had anything else he might like to add to the story of what happened at the Spanish Fork Bridge, and the days and weeks after, and how it had changed him.
“Well,” said Tyler, hesitation in his voice, “there is one particular thing, yeah.”
“What was it?”
“Well,” Tyler said, “it’s kind of negative.”
“You leave that to me to worry about,” I said. “Just tell me the story.”
“It was back in July,” Tyler said. “When we were about halfway along with all this. It was around three in the afternoon. I was in my squad car, and a call came out that there were reports of a guy acting erratically, walking around and just saying crazy stuff. One report said he had a gun. The last report put him near a Mormon church on the corner of East and Center Streets. I headed over there, and so did another cop, a friend of mine, in another squad car.
“I get to the church and there’s a big field next to it. I decide to pull up and see if I can see anyone out in the field. I’m scanning around, about to get out of my car, when suddenly four shots go off right behind me.”
“What did you think it was?” I asked.
“I knew what it was,” Tyler told me. “I knew exactly what it was. My buddy had pulled into the lot behind the church, and obviously he’d run right up on the guy. One of the two had been shot. I got out of the car and ran around to the back of the church. I didn’t know what I was running into, just no idea.”
Tyler turned the corner and froze. There before him in the lot behind the church was the man the reports had come in about, lying on his back. The reports that he’d had a gun were correct. It was in his hand. Facing him was Tyler’s buddy.
“So your friend shot him.”
“He had to,” Tyler said. “My buddy said, ‘He raised his gun on me.’ He said it in a daze. When someone raises a gun on you, you have to fire first. You just have to do it, instantly. It’s trained into us. Otherwise you’re dead. I ran over and did CPR with the breath bag and tried to bring the guy around. But there was nothing. He was dead.”
“What did you do next?”
“I got up and walked over to my buddy. He was just standing there, starting to tear up. I mean here’s this guy, he’s standing there with a handgun in this year of all years, where everyone thinks if you wear a cop’s uniform you’re a killer. And I can see he’s just a total mess. He’s taken a guy’s life. This cop, my friend—he’s one of the good guys, and he’s shattered by what’s happened. Not because he thinks he’s made a mistake, but because he understands the implications, the enormity, of taking another person’s life. It’s like he’s stepped out of the human rule book and into God’s. In a situation like this, even if you know it was the right thing to do, in that it was the only option open to you, all the same, you suddenly see how big the universe is, and that maybe there’s other laws, and who’s to say if you haven’t just broken one, and what it really means?”
“So what did you do?”
Tyler paused a moment. “I just hugged him and said, ‘You did the right thing.’ ”
From the way he told me this, I knew that Tyler must have done so without a moment’s hesitation. Almost as if a little voice had told him so.