[Rick Lee]

Make that three parts. Part 3.

In 2003, Icke fell in love and married a woman 14 years his senior. They eventually made their way up to Salt Lake City, where he got a job laying carpet. When his wife began to suspect that she was pregnant, Icke felt panic setting in again. He was 19 years old, with only a high school education, and no job prospects beyond construction. "I couldn't handle the stress of day-to-day life anymore," he says. "I felt like I needed someone to guide me and tell me what to do, because I clearly wasn't figuring it out on my own." In his third month in Salt Lake, a fellow Cricker advised him to seek help from a nonprofit called the Lost Boys Foundation, which was founded by Dan Fischer, a dentist and former member of the FLDS.

Fischer left Colorado City in 1993, after his financial support of a play critical of polygamy got his kids kicked out of an FLDS school. Soon afterward, he and his wife began taking in boys who had been cast out of the church. In 2003, Fischer turned his ad hoc philanthropy into a formal nonprofit venture. It was a fiasco. Fischer is a genteel man with a soft heart and deep pockets, and the kids smelled his gullibility. Giddy from the freedom of life in the world, Crickers would go to Fischer with sob stories about not being able to pay their rent or their heating bill, then blow the check he handed them on pot and whiskey and prostitutes. If phase one of leaving the Crick is loneliness and despair, phase two is indulgence. After being penned up in a place where pleasure is strictly forbidden, expelled boys are suddenly free to indulge in every hedonistic thing they've ever dreamed of -- and most do.

Fischer decided to regroup. He hired a stocky, take-no-prisoners guy named Dave Bills as director of the foundation and gave him a mandate to get tough. He warned Bills that the kids had harassed the former director, calling her at all hours of the night to ask her to order them pizza and prostitutes. At his first meeting with the kids, Bills let them know that he wasn't going to take any ****. "You want to call me up at 6 a.m. and order a pizza, I'll get you a pizza," he told them. "But you'll find it hard to eat after I've shoved it up your ass."

The first change Bills made was to draw up a contract outlining his expectations of the kids and requiring them to sign it. Among the requirements: Every kid who got financial help had to be in school, get passing grades, keep his apartment clean, and stay off drugs. "A lot of the kids thought I was an *******," Bills says. "Some of them dropped out. They didn't tell me. They'd just stop showing up or calling me back."

For others, though, the structure was just what was needed. Following rules was familiar to them, almost comforting; after all, they'd grown up with mandates governing every facet of their lives. One year after meeting Bills, Icke has aced his GED and enrolled in accounting classes at a Salt Lake City college. He now works part time as an engineer at Fischer's company and rents a house with two friends -- who share the rent.

"If you had told me when I was living in that trailer park that in a few years I was going to be going to college, getting A's, and working a good job, I would have said you were crazy," Icke says. "Back then, the only thing I hoped for was not to die."

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Once the boys have been outcast -- once they've had that awakening -- few want to return. They realize they were secretly skeptical about the prophet's teachings -- all that foolishness about the Destruction that never happened, the arbitrary rules about not wearing red or going bowling. Seeing it all from a distance only confirms their doubts. There's no way they can go back. They'd be living a lie.

"Now that I'm out in the real world, I realize how much bull**** and corruption is going on at the Crick," Black says. "That's a part of my life I'd never want to repeat." Today, like other exiled kids who have found their bearings, Black is more of the world than of the church. In December, he married a woman named Brooke, a Gentile, and they moved into a one-bedroom apartment in St. George. He drives a sporty canary-yellow car, listens to Eminem and 50 Cent, and hangs out with more Gentiles than Crickers. But he's still nostalgic for the Crick, in a desultory way. On a recent Sunday, he and Brooke decide to drive to Colorado City and visit the house where he grew up, the places he used to party, the high-walled compound where the prophet held meetings with wayward boys.

As Black drove down the lifeless streets where he once lived, he spotted a boy riding an old-fashioned upright bicycle. The kid wore a red-and-blue plaid shirt buttoned to the top, and his hair parted neatly on the side.

"There's a plyg kid," Black said, jerking the wheel of his car to the right to follow him. He spit out the word like a wad of stale chewing tobacco.

The boy pedaled into the empty church parking lot, and Black followed close enough behind him to be slightly menacing. The kid glanced over his shoulder, sped up a bit.

"He knows we're from the outside," Black said, a hint of glee in his voice. "No one here would drive a car like this."

Black rolled down his automatic window and craned his neck, preparing to yell "Plyg!" at the kid.

"Richard, don't!" Brooke pleaded from the back seat.

"Why not?" he asked. "People used to do it to me."

"Exactly."

Black hesitated for a moment, his hand still on the window switch. Then he pressed the silver button and the window glided shut, and he watched as the kid pedaled frantically toward a row of uninhabited houses, not daring to look back.