Mission to America (11 page)

“Deeply.”

“You left out the spirits all around us. You left out animals, old folks, little kids.”

“Except for the spirits, those things all have a place, I guess.”

“And you think of yourself as a sinner first and last?”

“A sinner whose cries for help have gained him mercy.”

“What if I told you that you can save your breath?”

I was arguing with half my brain; the other half was tracking Betsy, whose thought rays I could feel angling my way even though Lance and Tania had pinned her down with what sounded like an aggressive invitation to attend a new round of AlpenCross events, which I got the feeling people had to pay for. I heard Lance use the word “accreditation” and mention something called “level four self-mentoring,” then talk about certain “surreal glacial cirques” with “natural prayer sites that will knock your panties off.” This last expression cemented my view of him as a nasty specimen covered in a tarry spirit-essence similar to what grasshoppers excrete. My partner, in his discerning Hobo mode, would have spotted this substance the moment he first met Lance.

My show of indifference to Betsy was reaching its limits. It annoyed me that she'd let Lance slide in so close to her and speak to her so exclusively. I was about to excuse myself and leave when she set down her wineglass, abruptly cut Lance short, and launched, without any preface, into a story about being harassed that morning by a crew of menacing highway flagmen east of town. She'd found herself in a string of cars, she said, that had been waiting for ages to follow a pilot car over a pass with just one open lane. The flagmen waved the cars ahead, but just as she was passing them a shirtless young hard hat stepped out and slapped her hood, then stepped around to her window once she'd stopped and said into his radio, “Got her, boss. You're right, she's even cuter closer up.”

This story, at first addressed to Lance and Tania, was opened to the whole table as Betsy went on, as though in response to some invitation from Dale and me, who were, in fact, still talking theology. I indulged this masked play for attention only briefly, so Betsy would notice when I resumed ignoring her. Then I started cutting up my steak. I dipped the rare chunks in the blood pooled on my plate, trying to look like a rugged character. Betsy's description of the randy flagmen—some of whom, or so she claimed, had trained binoculars on her from down the highway and, when they saw her spot them, had pounded their chests—convinced me that she had a weakness for beastliness, even though she pretended it repulsed her.

Still acting for her benefit, I tossed back the wine that I'd so far barely sipped at, then attacked the taboo rolls, tearing open their steaming yeasty hearts and wiping up more of the steak blood with the pieces. I swiped my chin dry with my linen napkin, then crushed it up and dropped it onto my plate instead of into my lap. Then, for the first time that night, I looked at Betsy.

“Good story. Excuse me.” My voice was hard and rude.

“You're leaving? Just like that? No name?” she said. It seemed I'd done well.

“Don't worry. I'm coming back.”

In the men's room, trying to wash my hands under a motion-activated faucet that only gave water in skimpy three-second bursts, I permitted myself a memory of home—a good one, the very best of all, of Sarah and me reclining in the dark hayfield, the chaperones off chatting at the picnic tables, the other young voices sifting through the grass, and stretched above it all our peculiar heaven, swarming with secret benevolent entities—and I told myself that for other, future Apostles to ever have a chance at such experiences I had to push ahead with what I'd started tonight. Even if Betsy was just the first of many and not the eventual mother of new Apostles whose blood would sustain us for generations afterward, she represented a start in the great search.

She'd ordered dessert, a slice of layered ice-cream cake, and was splitting it three ways with Lance and Tania when I sat back down in the booth and squared my shoulders. I watched their three forks cross, vying for the gooey parts. She was acting as if she'd forgotten all about me, as if sugar and chocolate were all she needed now.

“You're the three little pigs,” I said. Not nice, but true.

The women stopped eating but Lance cut a new forkful, gobbled it up, and then sucked the dripping tines. Tania patted her stomach and said, “I need to watch it,” while Betsy just glared at me, her plucked eyebrows arched, her nostrils flared, her tiny scar stretched taut. The most beautiful faces have some ugly in them.

“I've been meaning to ask you something all night,” she said. “Why the Iowa sofa-salesman outfit?”

“My great-grandfather was an Iowan. Good guess.”

“But was he in the sofa trade?” she said.

“You mean my shoes. No one likes them. And I don't care.”

“Actually, I mean the whole ensemble. Mostly the short-sleeved dress shirt. My uncle wore those.”

“Because he sold sofas in Iowa?”

“In fact, he sold mattresses in Massachusetts.”

“That job has a ring to it.”

“What's
your
job, anyway?”

The banter had come automatically so far, from a part of myself that I hadn't known was there and that life in Bluff had never made me use, but now nothing came. Nothing clever. I'd run dry. Elder Stark and I needed to start seeing some movies.

“I believe that the main job of people like Mason,” said Lance, a pellet of ice-cream cake clinging to his chin, “is walking the streets spreading Pagan heresies and cadging free meals from vital young Christians like us.”

Dale, Lance's craven disciple, softly chuckled.

My anger at them revived my snap. “Men who turn their faith into a business owe all of us a steak dinner now and then.”

A fat grin from Tania, a choked-back snort from Dale, and from Betsy a slanted, cool, appraising look that I met with a calm, unapologetic stare. The candle flame between us seemed to dim as the energies behind our faces maneuvered on another plane. The Seeress, in a tape-recorded talk entitled “Love Me or Love Me Not” that my mother liked to listen to whenever she was fighting with my father, taught that relations between men and women unfold on two levels, the Thonic and the Matic. For Betsy and me that unfolding had begun. On the higher, accelerated Thonic level, our souls were rehearsing a roster of possible outcomes—a casual friendship, a troubled but passionate marriage, a happy marriage, a cordial but final goodbye—while down on the lower, trailing Matic level our nerves were responding to the flow of dramas with twinges and twitches of sadness, hope, apprehension, pleasure, and the like. Whatever was going to happen to the two of us was happening already, experimentally, but so were all the things that wouldn't happen, and the trick was to feel each one as it swept by and not to fight the feelings or try to hold them. We had no influence. Fate deals only with fate. But because we'd already lived through what would come for us, if only obscurely, we'd accept it when it did.

The waitress broke the moment by bringing the check. She set it by the candle, in a neutral spot. As had happened with the dinner rolls, no one but me seemed affected by its presence. Lance redirected his AlpenCross pitch at Dale, while Tania waylaid Betsy with a question about a new hairstyle she was thinking of trying. As the minutes went by the slip of lined green paper seemed to float up off the table and deepen in color. In my pocket were fourteen dollars in fives and ones and a hard lump of change that I feared was mostly pennies.

The waitress stopped back and informed us that her shift was over in exactly five minutes, then left again. Somebody had to act.

“Fine, then,” said Betsy. “Let's make it my turn.” She flopped her quilted cloth bag on top of the table and unbuttoned the strap that kept it closed. Out came a pen, a lipstick, another lipstick, a black plastic compact, a notebook, a packet of tissues. She was still digging through the stuff when Lance said, “Stop it. Don't be ridiculous, honey. Let Big Daddy. I was just trying to create suspense.”

Before he could reach for the cash wad in his pocket, I covered the check with one hand and dragged it back to me, then turned it over, faceup, in my palm. I tried not to let my expression reflect the total. I doubted it did, since the number was so large—just shy of two hundred dollars—that I found it incomprehensible. I fished in my slacks for the emergency credit card, then twisted around in my seat to hail the waitress. Dale and Lance slid out and left without a word, followed by Tania, who patted my shoulder. Only Betsy and I remained. I held up the bill and fluttered it.

“Leave me your number,” said Betsy. “I have a car. I'm working a lot now, but I'll be freer next week. You can't afford that check, can you? That's okay. You're proud, that's what counts. I like proud, foolish men.”

Whatever had already happened was beginning.

The next day
at lunchtime
we biked back to the coffee shop, having already been there at eight that morning so I could drink my triple Americano, and sat around waiting for Lara to pick us up and drive us to the Effingham ranch. At her house the night before, while eating Chinese food with my partner and watching the movie she felt she'd looked so lovely in, she'd summoned the courage to telephone Errol, who, it turned out, had flown home early without informing her. There were tears, Elder Stark said, and Lara hung up on him, but later, as they viewed the movie again, which Lara had recorded on a disc to serve as a handy emotional pick-me-up, Errol called back and they spoke for almost an hour, Lara telling him about her baptism and how she forgave him for various offenses, and Errol, as Lara reported it to my partner, confiding in her about his pain over his father's deteriorating health. Their talk concluded with Errol inviting Lara and anybody she wished to bring along to a small afternoon party at the ranch thrown to celebrate Errol Sr.'s purchase of his five hundredth buffalo.

Still waiting for Lara, and drinking another black triple Americano while Elder Stark read a story in the paper about a bomb threat to the Grand Coulee Dam, I took a call from Dale, who said he'd gotten my phone number from Betsy, who had yet to contact me herself. Dale gave his location as “ten thousand feet” and told me that he could speak for just a minute or two because he was using Lance's satellite phone. Together with nine other AlpenCrossers, he said, they were about to walk down into an ice cave where the group liked to gather once a year to sit in the dark and fast and pray and sing.

“I was thinking about your employment needs,” Dale said. “I have a slot next week in Boulder for someone to mystery shop a jewelry store and a mondo-giganto home improvement center. The normal rate's two hundred dollars plus gas and lunch, but the best I can give you is one-fifty, considering.”

“Considering it's only my first time?”

“That,” Dale said, “and the danger you just won't get it. You're not really very retail savvy, I have a feeling, and you certainly aren't anyone's target market. Though maybe that will turn out to be a plus. You haven't been desensitized. You'll notice things.”

“I'll do it. I need the money.”

“Bueno.”

“Can I ask you a few questions?”

“No,” Dale said. “This call has cost twelve bucks already.”

Elder Stark looked up from his paper when I was finished. He'd lunched on a caramel roll and a coffee milk shake and, as had started to happen every time he whacked his glandular balance with too much sugar, his throat was as red as a cardinal's and his eyes seemed streaky and glazed, like a glass washed in hard water.

“I found a quick way to earn,” I said.

“That's helpful. Unless it cuts into your duties. You'll tell Lauer?”

“You've been talking to him too much. He stirs you up. He doesn't understand our situation here. How expensive it gets, how busy people are, how dumb the Well-being Quiz is. He's on some cloud. He thinks we can stand in a supermarket parking lot and line up fifteen conversions by noon, bring in twenty subscriptions to
Luminaria
, and win the hearts of two darling banker's daughters who can't wait to move to Montana, drive junky cars, pray in a building with a caved-in roof, have three kids apiece, and eat trout six times a week. He's dreaming.”

“Disaster. Defeat. Collapse. Paralysis. I want you to listen to yourself.”

“I shouldn't drink two of these. One's enough,” I said. “What's sad is I can't even go until I've had it.”

My partner folded back his newspaper to show me a picture of the president, whom I could now recognize from any angle even though three weeks ago I wasn't sure I knew his face, saluting a long line of soldiers in desert camouflage. Behind them a helicopter with similar coloring hung, massive and still, a few yards above the earth. The sky above was Xed with jet trails, some of them sharp and fresh, some old and puffy. The soldier in the middle of the line was a tall handsome Negro and the one at his left shoulder was a young lady.

“This picture is why Lauer's not dreaming,” Elder Stark said. “This is why they'll flock to us someday.”

There was something in his presentation that I couldn't argue with.

“This Effingham helped get that man elected. Lara told me. The father taught him to scuba dive. They own a company that built a tunnel forty miles long through a mountain in Armenia and they also own a plant in Thailand that makes half the fire extinguishers in Asia. That TV channel that shows restaurants and hotels all day, and that other one that shows car races? They're theirs. Now to me, to
my
mind,
that's
a dream.”

I had to concede this point as well. I sighed and turned my hands up. Short, shallow lifelines.

“And yet we're going to meet these people later today,” my partner said. “We're going to drink punch with them from the same bowl. I'm going for a refill. One for you?”

I shook my head. “I'll never get my teeth white.”

“Give that up,” my partner said. “The Hobo told me your teeth will never change.”

Lara showed up at the shop an hour late in flowery cowboy boots with silver toe caps and a short western dress embroidered with striking scorpions. One good Chinese meal had softened her face. She'd also done something appealing to her skin: she'd turned it all brown since I'd seen her, wheat-toast brown, except for a spot in the hollow of her throat. I didn't mention it to her. There are parts of myself I can't see in mirrors, either, especially on the right side of my face between my earlobe and my jaw, where my partner would often tell me I had to shave again. We think we know what we look like, but we don't. Only the All-in-One knows. It may not matter, though.

I stood to let Lara have my leather armchair but she was too antsy to sit down. She opened her purse, made of lizard skin like her boots and inlaid with wrinkled lumps of turquoise that looked to me like pieces of chewed blue gum. She gave me five dollars and asked for a green tea and a packet of sugar substitute, the yellow kind, because the other two kinds, the pink and the blue, she said, were known to build up in women's reproductive organs and pass through to the brain stems of their unborn children. That she cared about such a risk encouraged me. I put her age at thirty, give or take a year, and it was high time that she stopped concentrating on how she looked in a swimsuit or in her underwear and turned her focus inward, to her womb.

         

We stopped at an automated security gate that Lara said she knew the code for, but when she lowered the window of her Jeep and punched in the numbers on the little pad, the gate stayed put. She tried it three more times and I could feel her mood sink with each failure. “They changed it on me,” she said. She sounded devastated. She chewed off and spat out the window a bit of fingernail that looked like she'd taken great pains to grow and manicure.

“It might not be aimed at you,” my partner said. “People think everything's aimed at them. It's not.”

“You sound like a therapist. They changed it on me. I guess they expect me to talk into the thing there and state my name and the purpose of my visit and all that shit that their
yardmen
have to do.”

We sat there in the idling Jeep. I worried that Lara was considering ramming the gate, which hardly looked sturdy enough to protect a family of such prominence or the possessions they'd probably accumulated. Its purpose was probably just as she suspected: to flatter a privileged group of code-holders and to humiliate everybody else.

At last Lara relented. “Ricardo?” she said, facing the box-shaped steel microphone. “It's Lara.”

“Full name, please,” the device said.

“Is that Ricardo?”

“No,” the box said.

Lara looked at Elder Stark. “Not Ricardo. They must have let him go. He's been with them for twenty years. I'm disappointed. These aren't the same Effinghams I fell in love with. There's a major decline going on. I'm sorry, Elders.”

The road to the house, once we finally reached it, was paved in sparkling, mica-flecked dark gravel that appeared to have been mechanically raked and smoothed. We drove through a curving uphill corridor of full-grown aspens, a number of them marked with fluorescent-pink ribbons tied around their trunks. Maybe the aspen doctor was on his way. I looked through my back window at sloping wide pastures that ought to have been full of children flying kites, but the fields were pristinely empty, no horses, no cattle. I asked Lara where the buffalo herd grazed and she waved toward a mountain with scooped-out rocky flanks that must have been three miles away from us.

“Off near the eastern base of Candace there. That's where they had them last. They're always moving them. Soil conservation reasons. They tramp the dirt down. They pulverize the stream banks. Plus, their meat's tough. It's a show herd. A trophy. Take that, Ted Turner! He started this bison fad.”

“A neighbor?” I said.

“Ted Turner. If you don't know, I'm not explaining. I envy people who don't know all that junk.”

“That mountain there is named Candace?” Elder Stark said.

“Eff Sr.'s first wife. The one he actually loved.”

“So it's really only a pet name. It's not official. It has another name.”

“I guess it must. Not that anyone remembers it.”

About every quarter mile along the road there were signs reminding visitors not to drive faster than twenty-five and to watch out for deer or tractors or livestock. I didn't know how much money these people had, and I wasn't certain I'd understand the figure if it were quoted to my face, but their power to set their own speed limits impressed me. Judging by how many signs they'd strewn around, it impressed them, too.

Up, up, up, and still no house, no buildings. We passed a side road with a cable across it that Lara said led to a private landing strip capable of handling Gulfstream jets, a name that meant nothing concrete to me but whose sound conjured lovely, thrilling, far-fetched images that would reemerge in my dreams for weeks to come. I suspected my partner was in a similar state as we drove along listening to Lara explain the Effinghams' sprawling, private fairyland: so dazed by wonders, improbabilities, oddities, prodigies, and mythic inklings that it felt like his very brain was being remade. At one point, as we were crossing a wooden bridge spanning an acres-long chain of man-made trout ponds featuring almost identical grassy islands, I noticed a serpentine rivulet of sweat running down his left temple to his cheek. It was a struggle, taking all this in.

“The rules,” Lara announced. We'd sighted the house by then, large, but as not large as I'd anticipated, set off against a pine-blanketed hillside which had been cleared in one spot for a steel tower supporting several satellite dishes facing in different directions at different pitches.

“Number one, don't drink too much. I don't even know if you do drink, but if you do just realize they'll push it on you all day long as though you'll wound them if you refuse, but in actual fact they find drunkenness repulsive and after you leave they'll stand around the game room repeating all the dumb-ass things you said and imitating your walk, your gestures, everything. That's their great secret pastime: caricature. Eff Sr.'s worse than Little Eff, but the daughter and her weird husband are worst of all. I've seen them eviscerate various Kennedys, Bob Redford. It's vicious, juvenile, ugly stuff.”

My partner thanked Lara for the advice, then pointed, evidently for my benefit, at four enormous wire pens standing on a pair of unhooked semitrailers. “Guess,” he said. “You'll never guess. Lara told me about them last night. They're for an animal.”

“Leopards?”

“Be serious.”

I had been. Leopards seemed possible here.

“For wolves,” said Lara. “They reintroduced twelve of them last spring, the only pack in the entire lower Rockies. And they did it against federal law, with no review, no oversight, no hearings—just up and did it. It'll change the whole ecosystem in a year or two.”

“But wolves eat buffalo calves,” I said.

I knew wolves. Montana had wolves—in the country near Bluff, in fact. One night behind my house after a rain I was shining a flashlight in the grass, looking for fishing worms, when I heard a rustling noise followed by an unnerving raspy yip-yap. I swung my light at it. Two new silver coins, big fifty-cent pieces, not little dimes, hung in the darkness just beyond our garden. I exaggerated the next day and said I'd seen the wolf, not merely glimpsed what might have been its eyes, and my father recruited three friends to help him track it while all over town worried mothers hugged their toddlers. I awaited my punishment, just like in the fable, but that evening the hunters found an intact footprint in a stream bank near the girls' school. My lies were wiped away, and I credited the All-in-One. Now, thinking back on the incident, it struck me that it probably formed the whole basis of my faith. Sermons bored me. Scriptures baffled me. When the schoolgirls presented me with a thank-you card depicting me with a shield and angel's wings, protecting them from a bristling black beast, I felt I'd incurred a permanent solemn debt.