“The statue’s just gold plate anyway. I’m tellin you those old Mormons hid tons of stuff down in the Temple, just waitin’ for somebody who isn’t scared of the ghost of Bigamy Young to—”
“Shut up, snotsucker, OK? People can hear! Look around, we’re not alone!”
It was true, of course. Some of the other people were glaring at them. But then, Deaver noticed that older people liked to glare at younger ones. It made the old farts feel better about kicking off. It was like they were saying, OK, I’m dying, but at least you’re stupid. So Deaver looked right at a woman who was staring at him and murmured, “OK, I’m stupid, but at least I won’t die.”
“Deaver, do you always have to say that where they can hear you?”
“It’s true.”
“In the first place, Deaver, they aren’t dying. And in the second place, you’re definitely stupid. And in the third place, the ferry’s here.” Lehi punched Deaver lightly in the stomach.
Deaver bent over in mock agony. “Ay, the laddie’s ungrateful, he is, I give him me last croost of bread and this be the thanks I gets.”
“Nobody has an accent like that, Deaver!” shouted Lehi. The boat began to pull away.
“Tomorrow at five-thirty!” shouted Deaver.
“You’ll never get up at four-thirty, don’t give me that, you never get up…” But the ferry and the noise of the factories and machine and trucks swallowed up the rest of his insults. Deaver knew them all, anyway. Lehi might be only sixteen, but he was OK. Someday Deaver’d get married but his wife would like Lehi, too. And Lehi’d even get married, and his wife would like Deaver. She’d better, or she’d have to swim home.
He took the trolley home to Fort Douglas and walked to the ancient barracks building where Rain let him stay. It was supposed to be a storage room, but she kept the mops and soap stuff in her place so that there’d be room for a cot.
Not much else, but it was on Oquirrh Island without being right there in the stink and the smoke and the noise. He could sleep and that was enough, since most of the time he was out on the truck.
Truth was, his room wasn’t home anyway. Home was pretty much Rain’s place, a drafty room at the end of the barracks with a dumpy frowzy lady who served him good food and plenty of it. That’s where he went now, walked right in and surprised her in the kitchen. She yelled at him for surprising her, yelled at him for being filthy and tracking all over her floor, and let him get a slice of apple before she yelled at him for snitching before supper.
He went around and changed light bulbs in five rooms before supper. The families there were all crammed into two rooms each at the most, and most of them had to share kitchens and eat in shifts. Some of the rooms were nasty places, family warfare held off only as long as it took him to change the light, and sometimes even that truce wasn’t observed. Others were doing fine, the place was small but they liked each other. Deaver was pretty sure his family must have been one of the nice ones, because if there’d been any yelling he would have remembered.
Rain and Deaver ate and then turned off all the lights while she played the old record player Deaver had wangled away from Lehi. They really weren’t supposed to have it, but they figured as long as they didn’t burn any lights it wasn’t wasting electricity, and they’d turn it in as soon as anybody asked for it.
In the meantime, Rain had some of the old records from when she was a girl. The songs had strong rhythms, and tonight, like she sometimes did, Rain got up and moved to the music, strange little dances that Deaver didn’t understand unless he imagined her as a lithe young girl, pictured her body as it must have been then. It wasn’t hard to imagine, it was there in her eyes and her smile all the time, and her movements gave away secrets that years of starchy eating and lack of exercise had disguised.
Then, as always, his thoughts went off to some of the girls he saw from his truck window, driving by the fields where they bent over, hard at work, until they heard the truck and then they stood and waved. Everybody waved at the salvage truck, sometimes it was the only thing with a motor that ever came by, their only contact with the old machines. All the tractors, all the electricity were reserved for the New Soil Lands; the old places were dying. And they turned and waved at the last memories. It made Deaver sad and he hated to be sad, all these people clinging to a past that never existed.
“It never existed,” he said aloud.
“Yes it did,” Rain whispered. “Girls just wanna have fu-un,” she murmured along with the record. “I hated this song when I was a girl. Or maybe it was my mama who hated it.”
“You live here then?”
“Indiana,” she said. “One of the states, way east.”
“Were you a refugee, too?”
“No. We moved here when I was sixteen, seventeen, can’t remember. Whenever things got scary in the world, a lot of Mormons moved home. This was always home, no matter what.”
The record ended. She turned it off, turned on the lights.
“Got the boat all gassed up?” asked Deaver.
“You don’t want to go there,” she said.
“If there’s gold down there, I want it.”
“If there was gold there, Deaver, they would’ve taken it out before the water covered it. It’s not as if nobody got a warning, you know. The Mormon Sea wasn’t a flash flood.”
“If it isn’t down there, what’s all the hush-hush about? How come the Lake Patrol keeps people from going there?”
“I don’t know, Deaver. Maybe because a lot of people feel like it’s a holy place.”
Deaver was used to this. Rain never went to church, but she still talked like a Mormon. Most people did, though, when you scratched them the wrong place. Deaver didn’t like it when they got religious. “Angels need police protection, is that it?”
“It used to be real important to the Mormons in the old days, Deaver.” She sat down on the floor, leaning against the wall under the window.
“Well it’s nothin now. They got their other temples, don’t they? And they’re building the new one in Zarahemla, right?”
“I don’t know, Deaver. The one here, it was always the real one. The centre.” She bent sideways, leaned on her hand, looked down at the floor. “It still is.”
Deaver saw she was getting really somber now, really sad. It happened to a lot of people who remembered the old days. Like a disease that never got cured. But Deaver knew the cure. For Rain, anyway. “Is it true they used to kill people in there?”
It worked. She glared at him and the languor left her body. “Is that what you truckers talk about all day?”
Deaver grinned. “There’s stories. Cuttin people up if they told where the gold was hid.”
“You know Mormons all over the place, now, Deaver, do you really think we’d go cuttin people up for tellin secrets?”
“I don’t know. Depends on the secrets, don’t it?” He was sitting on his hands, kind of bouncing a little on the couch.
He could see that she was a little mad for real, but didn’t want to be. So she’d pretend to be mad for play. She sat up, reached for a pillow to throw at him.
“No! No!” he cried. “Don’t cut me up! Don’t feed me to the carp!”
The pillow hit him and he pretended elaborately to die.
“Just don’t joke about things like that,” she said.
“Things like what? You don’t believe in the old stuff anymore. Nobody does.”
“Maybe not.”
“Jesus was supposed to come again, right? There was atom bombs dropped here and there, and he was supposed to come.”
“Prophet said we was too wicked. He wouldn’t come cause we loved the things of the world too much.”