Chapter Seven:
Browning M1911
Friday
The Motel of Opioids
Hurricane, UT
Richard was sitting in his motel room, watching bad television and fuming. Yesterday he had called a tow truck and waited for over an hour in the sun and the heat with little water and no food. The tow truck took him to a gas station outside of Zion National Park where there was a small auto repair shop. He’d grabbed his belongings, including, after a second thought, the rifle case (so someone wouldn’t steal it), and which, looking inside the case, he found also contained another small Browning he’d forgotten about. Richard had half a dozen guns and lately hadn’t been able to place where each one was until they popped out and surprised him on a table or sofa, or, in this case, as a small addition to his rifle case. He then found a small motel Thursday night to await the death sentence on his truck.
He wondered if his truck breaking down was God’s way of telling him to not go through with his plan. Probably. It was a silly plan, a foolish plan, a violent plan that probably wouldn’t have worked anyway.
Oh well.
His truck had spent most of Friday morning in the shop, still not done.
He switched channels till he found an interesting little segment on Porter Rockwell, the “Destroying Angel of Mormendom.” Richard had heard the name before, knew there was a trail in Draper named after him, but couldn’t remember the specifics.
“Rockwell was a bodyguard to both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young,” the program announced (on BYU television), “a loyal and brave servant to the faith.”
Rockwell looked like the quintessential Western Mountain Man. A gunslinger, U.S. Marshall, and a Danite—a vigilante group that had taken part in the “Mormon War” with the U.S. government in Missouri.
As the program continued, Richard decided he liked this Porter Rockwell. He liked that Rockwell was a badass gun-slinging loner who did the dirty work that needed doing. Rockwell operated a hotel and brewery at Point of the Mountain and drank Valley Tan Whiskey, alcohol apparently, not yet prohibited by the LDS Church. He was tough, relentless, and found violence and killing necessary.
As he watched, Richard took some mental notes of Rockwell’s actions and quotes, one of which startled him: “I never killed anyone who didn’t need killing,” Rockwell apparently said.
Richard thought that perhaps he’d have to rethink his plan. Maybe innocent people didn’t need to die. Maybe he’d just fire some rounds off into a crowd. Wait for the cops to come and kill him. Even ruthless Porter Rockwell wouldn’t kill random people for no reason.
That evening, around 6:00, Richard got hungry and wandered over to the only source of food within walking distance, two vending machines—one with snacks, one with sodas and PowerAde. He slipped the few quarters and crumpled up dollar bills he still had left to his name (a machine that still took cash!) through the tiny, black metal slot and bought some pretzels, cheddar-flavored snack mix, a Rice Krispy bar, and two Dr. Peppers.
On the way back to his room, he noticed a little girl, maybe around the age of five, sitting alone in the backseat of a grey, beat-down Toyota. The front passenger window covered up with a shirt and duct tape. Richard paused. He looked around. Saw no other signs of human life in the vicinity. The car was parked outside room #5 and Richard assumed the girl’s mom or dad or whoever was inside. He shrugged and walked back to his motel room, minding his own business.
Richard went back to his room, took off his boots, and turned the television on while he ate his “dinner.” A fitting last meal for him, he thought. He looked at the phone and thought of calling his ex-wife, Linda, to say goodbye. Or his son, Lucas, his daughter, Marian. They’d taken Linda’s side in the divorce. He couldn’t blame them. He was an angry father, a distant one. He drank too much, was prone to violence.
He’d come back from Afghanistan with an honorable discharge by the Army, deemed mentally unstable and exhibiting signs of PTSD. Lucas would call him every now and then and sometimes Richard would pick up, sometimes he wouldn’t. He hated to admit it, but as much as he was deemed unfit for service by the military, he was even more unfit to live as a civilian.
He had a darkness upon him. A curse. Made worse by continuous bad strings of luck. Maybe some of it was due to the war. Maybe not. He’d never really dealt with it, preferring to isolate and drink his problems away, moving from state to state, city to city, every couple years, afraid to look inside himself for what he might find.
While he watched TV, an ad for Zion National Park came on the local radio station and a new thought came to Richard. He’d never been to Zion National Park. Perhaps he’d go. Make it one last hurrah. Then maybe he’d simply wander off alone into the wilderness and die in peace, the way animals and Native Americans did. Did they actually do that?
Before bed, Richard went outside to smoke a cigarette. As he pulled out his pack of white Marlboro’s, he looked at the beat down Toyota, one of only three other cars outside the motel. The girl was still inside.
What the fuck was going on?
He walked up to the car and knocked on the window. The girl looked up, startled, sitting there with messy pigtails, a doll, and a coloring book, the black night slowly descending over the shitty motel parking lot in the desert.
“Hey,” said Richard, rather loudly, scaring the girl. “Where are your parents?”
The girl didn’t respond.
“Is your mom or dad in there?”
He pointed to the motel room.
The girl blankly nodded.
“Your mom?”
The girl nodded again.
“Are you hungry? Do you need something to eat?”
The girl nodded again.
Richard proceeded to the motel vending machine where he bought a few more snacks, then brought them back to the car and made a motion for her to open the door. She refused.
“It’s okay,” he said, “I’m not going to hurt you. I’ll just put these outside here.” He put the snacks on the ground. Richard then proceeded to the #5 room door where he pounded on it with all the might of his fists.
“Hey!” he shouted. “Hello! Open the fucking door!”
After a few seconds, a strung-out looking man opened the door and Richard barged in.
“Hey! said the man. “You can’t come in here!”
Richard lifted up his shirt to show him his gun.
“Is that your girl?” Richard asked the woman, sitting on the bed, also looking strung out, with day-old makeup and unbrushed stringy brown hair, pointing to the car. He noticed bottles of empty orange prescription bottles sitting on the nightstand, a small pipe, and a couple beer bottles.
The woman, suddenly horrified, covered her mouth.
“Oh god.”
She ran out to the car. Richard and the man followed her.
“Sweetie, oh sweetie, hi, Mommy didn’t forget about you,” she said as she opened the door and took the girl out. “I’m here. It’s okay.”
Richard shook his head in disgust.
“You should be ashamed, take care of your fucking kid! And clean yourself up. I should call CP fuckin S on you.”
The girl motioned with her hands for the snacks over the woman’s shoulder. The woman and the man were oblivious and so Richard walked over to the side of the car and picked the snacks up from the broken-up asphalt.
“These are for her, you understand?” he said, as he gave the girl the snacks. The woman nodded, looking scared, which made Richard feel better, and the three of them walked back into the motel room.
Richard stared for a second after them, thinking of calling the police or CPS, thinking of killing both of them in their sleep, dropping the girl off at the police station. But he had no car. No way to escape.
God, he thought, this world was going to hell.
You know what, he thought, I’m going to remove temptation from them. Before the door to their motel room could close, he rushed over and stopped it with his foot.
“Hey!” the man shouted. “What the,” but he did nothing. Both of them still high and terrified.
Richard stormed over to the nightstand and swiped two bottles of prescriptions. The woman lunged at him, her hands nearly closing in around the bottles, but Richard shrugged her off without much work and retreated into the night, the door slamming behind him.
The sight outside the motel, for some strange reason, relit Richard’s desire for some type of action, however small. How the hell else was anyone going to pay attention? He tried to scribble in his journal before beginning to drift off. The pills were now on his nightstand, and they beckoned to him.
Just one to sleep, he thought. He’d had a hard day, after all.
As he fell asleep, Richard thought of the Supervolcano up north; he hoped it really would go off. It would yank everyone out of their misery, maybe even beat him to the punch.