Lena Jones 02 - Desert Wives

point. Maybe we’ll catch this one before anybody gets hurt.”
    I started to ask if Dusty had called the office, but changed my mind. I had more important things to do than worry about my own love life.

Chapter 7
    “Remember, keep your eyes on the ground and never contradict a male,” my new “husband” warned me as his ’86 Chevy pickup trundled southeast along the private dirt road straddling the Utah/Arizona state line. The evening’s lengthening shadows made the creosote bushes sprinkled along the flat desert floor appear twice their size, almost monstrous.
    “I’ve been practicing,” I said, breathing deeply, trying to quell my panic.
    Since leaving West Wind Guest Ranch, we’d dropped enough in altitude to make all the difference between tree-bordered streams and an arid no-man’s land. The terrain alone helped explain why so few women escaped from Purity. Nothing other than miles of sand, rock, and creosote bushes stretched to the south. True, the blazing reds and oranges of the Vermillion Cliffs rising steep-sided on the north furnished some visual drama, but otherwise, the landscape resembled the surface of the moon. And it functioned little more hospitably. The Arizona Strip was an alien landscape governed by men who recognized no laws but their own. The polygamists had chosen their paradise carefully. Because of the area’s remote bleakness, tourists, whose curiosity might have proven problematic, never did more than pass quickly through.
    Now I had willingly entered this desolation again, but this time “married” to a man I had just met. What if Saul’s helpful demeanor had baser motives? After all, he’d told me the polygamists routinely used lies and manipulation to entice prospective brides. Had he followed suit with me? And would he, frustrated from years of an unhappy marriage, creep into my room tonight? I closed my eyes and counted backward from one hundred. It didn’t help.
    “Lena, can you cook?” Saul’s voice halted the countdown somewhere around thirty.
    I opened my eyes. “You must be kidding. My culinary skills run to ramen noodles and Michelina’s TV dinners.”
    His expectant look faded.
    We rounded the final turn in the road and Purity came into view. I’d seen the place before, of course, but I’d been too distracted by Rebecca’s situation to pay much attention to the architecture. Now I noticed how dismal the place looked. With the exception of the sturdy brick church and one other brick building, Purity could have modeled the Before of a civic Before-and-After project.
    Like most of the polygamy compounds on the Arizona Strip, half its buildings sat on the Utah side of the border, the other half in Arizona. This way, if the Utah authorities raided the compound, the polygamists would amble across the road to Arizona, only ten feet away. If Arizona raided, everyone would shuffle off to Utah. However, this simple but effective plan had never been tested due to both states’ continued assertion that polygamy was a victimless crime.
    The town’s layout was simple, if drear. Two curved rows of houses, bisected by the dirt road, faced each other across the state line, with Prophet’s Park, the bare circular area between, doubling as a children’s playground and a graveyard for junked pickup trucks. Approximately thirty ramshackle houses the size of small hotels sat at odd angles on litter-strewn dirt lots, their roofs covered in an untidy mélange of tin and unmatched shingles. None were painted. Instead, tar paper siding fluttered in the evening breeze, making the shiny satellite dishes attached to each house look wildly out of place.
    At the far end of the compound, just to the side of the square-steepled church, I counted four Quonset huts and a dozen battered trailers, probably used as overflow homes for Purity’s extra wives. Behind these rusting hulks ran a series of chicken-wire paddocks containing chickens, pigs, goats, and a few cows.
    The brick church, which normally would have provided some semblance of construction competence, hunkered under rickety-looking scaffolding and flapping canvas. It looked like some huge mythical beast about to pounce.
    “The Church of the Prophet Fundamental,” Saul said, pointing. “Someone got the bright idea of having a stained glass window made documenting Prophet Solomon’s holy works, so they’re spiffing up the joint first. Paint on the inside, sandblasting on the outside.”
    “Too bad they don’t do the