“Maybe it’s better to leave em standing,” said Rain. “Maybe there’s a lot of folks like to remember how tall we once stood.”
“What’s to remember? They built tall buildings and then they let em take a bath, what’s to brag for?”
Deaver was trying to get her not to talk about the old days, but Lehi seemed to like wallowing in it. “You ever here before the water came?”
Rain nodded. “Saw a parade go right down this street. I can’t remember if it was Third South or Fourth South. Third I guess. I saw twenty-five horses all riding together. I remember that I thought that was really something. You didn’t see many horses in those days.”
“I seen too many myself,” said Lehi.
“It’s the ones I don’t see that I hate,” said Deaver. “They ought to make em wear diapers.”
They rounded a building and looked up a north-south passage between towers. Rain was sitting in the stern and saw it first. “There it is. You can see it. Just the tall spires now.”
Deaver rowed them up the passage. There were six spires sticking up out of the water, but the four short ones were under so far that only the pointed roofs were dry. The two tall ones had windows in them, not covered at all. Deaver was disappointed. Wide open like that meant that anybody might have come here. It was all so much less dangerous than he had expected. Maybe Rain was right, and there was nothing there.
They tied the boat to the north side and waited for daylight. “If I knew it’d be so easy,” said Deaver, “I could’ve slept another hour.”
“Sleep now,” said Rain.
“Maybe I will,” said Deaver.
He slid off his bench and sprawled in the bottom of the boat.
He didn’t sleep, though. The open window of the steeple was only a few yards away, a deep black surrounded by the starlit grey of the temple granite. It was down there, waiting for him; the future, a chance to get something better for himself and his two friends. Maybe a plot of ground in the south where it was warmer and the snow didn’t pile up five feet deep every winter, where it wasn’t rain in the sky and lake everywhere else you looked. A place where he could live for a very long time and look back and remember good times with his friends, that was all waiting down under the water.
Of course they hadn’t told him about the gold. It was on the road, a little place in Parowan where truckers knew they could stop in because the iron mine kept such crazy shifts that the diners never closed. They even had some coffee there, hot and bitter, because there weren’t so many Mormons there and the miners didn’t let the Bishop push them around. In fact they even called him Judge there instead of Bishop. The other drivers didn’t talk to Deaver, of course, they were talking to each other when the one fellow told the story about how the Mormons back in the gold rush days hoarded up all the gold they could get and hid it in the upper rooms of the temple where nobody but the prophet and the twelve apostles could ever go. At first Deaver didn’t believe him, except that Bill Home nodded like he knew it was true, and Cal Silber said you’d never catch him messin’ with the Mormon temple, that’s a good way to get yourself dead. The way they were talking, scared and quiet, told Deaver that they believed it, that it was true, and he knew something else, too: if anyone was going to get that gold, it was him.
Even if it was easy to get here, that didn’t mean anything. He knew how Mormons were about the temple. He’d asked around a little, but nobody’d talk about it. And nobody ever went there, either, he asked a lot of people if they ever sailed on out and looked at it, and they all got quiet and shook their heads no or changed the subject. Why should the Lake Patrol guard it, then, if everybody was too scared to go? Everybody but Deaver Teague and his two friends.
“Real pretty,” said Rain.
Deaver woke up. The sun was just topping the mountains; it must’ve been light for some time. He looked where Rain was looking. It was the Moroni tower on top of the mountain above the old capitol, where they’d put the temple statue a few years back. It was bright and shiny, the old guy and his trumpet. But when the Mormons wanted that trumpet to blow, it had just stayed silent and their faith got drowned. Now Deaver knew they only hung on to it for old times’ sake. Well, Deaver lived for new times.
Lehi showed him how to use the underwater gear, and they practiced going over the side into the water a couple of times, once without the weight belts and once with. Deaver and Lehi swam like fish, of course-swimming was the main recreation that everybody could do for free. It was different with the mask and the air hose, though.
“Hose tastes like a horse’s hoof,” Deaver said between dives.
Lehi made sure Deaver’s weight belt was on tight. “You’re the only guy on Oquirrh Island who knows.” Then he tumbled forward off the boat. Deaver went down too straight and the air tank bumped the back of his head a little, but it didn’t hurt too much and he didn’t drop his light, either.
He swam along the outside of the temple, shining his light on the stones. Lots of underwater plants were rising up the sides of the temple, but it wasn’t covered much yet. There was a big metal plaque right in the front of the building, about a third of the way down. THE HOUSE OF THE LORD it said. Deaver pointed it out to Lehi.
When they got up to the boat again, Deaver asked about it. “It looked kind of goldish,” he said.
“Used to be another sign there,” said Rain. “It was a little different. That one might have been gold. This one’s plastic. They made it so the temple would still have a sign, I guess.”
“You sure about that?”
“I remember when they did it.”
Finally Deaver felt confident enough to go down into the temple. They had to take off their flippers to climb into the steeple window; Rain tossed them up after. In the sunlight there was nothing spooking about the window. They sat there on the sill, water lapping at their feet, and put their fins and tanks on.
Halfway through getting dressed, Lehi stopped. Just sat there.
“I can’t do it,” he said.
“Nothin to be scared of,” said Deaver. “Come on, there’s no ghosts or nothin down there.”
“I can’t,” said Lehi.
“Good for you,” called Rain from the boat.
Deaver turned to look at her. “What’re you talkin about!”
“I don’t think you should.”
“Then why’d you bring me here?”
“Because you wanted to.”
Made no sense.
“It’s holy ground, Deaver,” said Rain. “Lehi feels it, too. That’s why he isn’t going down.”
Deaver looked at Lehi.
“It just don’t feel right,” said Lehi.
“It’s just stones,” said Deaver.
Lehi said nothing. Deaver put on his goggles, took a light, put the breather in his mouth, and jumped.
Turned out the floor was only a foot and a half down. It took him completely by surprise, so he fell over and sat on his butt in eighteen inches of water. Lehi was just as surprised as he was, but then he started laughing, and Deaver laughed, too. Deaver got to his feet and started flapping around, looking for the stairway. He could hardly take a step, his flippers slowed him down so much.
“Walk backward,” said Lehi.
“Then how am I supposed to see where I’m going?”
“Stick your face under the water and look, chigger-head.”
Deaver stuck his face in the water. Without the reflection of daylight on the surface, he could see fine. There was the stairway.
He got up, looked toward Lehi. Lehi shook his head. He still wasn’t going.
“Suit yourself,” said Deaver. He backed through the water to the top step. Then he put in his breathing tube and went down.
It wasn’t easy to get down the stairs. They’re fine when you aren’t floating, thought Deaver, but they’re a pain when you keep scraping your tanks on the ceiling. Finally he figured out he could grab the railing and pull himself down. The stairs wound around and around. When they ended, a whole bunch of garbage had filled up the bottom of the stairwell, partly blocking the doorway. He swam above the garbage, which looked like scrap metal and chips of wood, and came out into a large room.