Mission to America (14 page)

“This is the collection you were talking about.”

“The idea is to make it a business in a year or two, maybe a storefront or maybe through the Web. I only buy classic stuff in top condition. Those slippery seventies rayon disco shirts. Those wild old bell-bottoms with high tight waists. It's crazy, the prices people pay for those, but it also makes sense because they're hard to find; you have to hit every thrift store, every yard sale. Last year I went from Arizona to Oregon—I put twenty-three thousand miles on my car. The problem is when the stuff is gone it's gone, though, so I really can't take the time to sell it off until I've got most of what's out there.”

“You think that's possible?”

“I can feel it—you're about to preach,” she said. “Yes, I know, it's no substitute for God. It's stuff. It's only stuff.”

“That's what the All-in-One is made of, actually.”

“Not spirit?”

“That, and everything else.”

She found the shirt and held it by the shoulders, her thumbs and forefingers pinched together like clothespins. I reached for it with insensitive cold hands. All the kissing had driven the blood from my extremities into my lower middle region, causing a pressurized, tense, unsure sensation that felt like it might lead to diarrhea unless I managed to discharge it by luring Betsy back to bed. The two urges felt so similar sometimes, like one fundamental urge divided.

The human body is strangely made and sometimes it pays not to think about it too closely.

I slipped off my dress shirt and changed into the new one, confused about why Betsy found it so extraordinary. I'd grown up wearing shirts exactly like it: pearl snaps, colored piping, pointed pocket flaps, and a design of braided thorns and roses embroidered across the chest and upper back. I fastened the cuffs and smoothed out some of the wrinkles and imagined that I was sixteen and back in Bluff, strolling in the evening with my pals, aware that off over the hills and down the highway there was a world that didn't even know us, or knew of us vaguely and didn't care about us. We knew we were missing something by living there, but they, the outsiders, were missing something, too.

“You look like yourself now,” Betsy said. “Stand up.”

I showed myself off.

“I want the back view.”

She adjusted the collar, fiddled with the yoke, and picked off a couple of lint balls from one sleeve. I still regretted my failure to harshly use her, but it seemed that we were getting along much better now. She picked out a belt from a snaky tangled bunch of them and gave it to me with a pair of western pants whose legs were flared to fit over big boots. The bronze buckle was star shaped, like a sheriff's badge, and it weighed as much as a can of Coca-Cola. I snugged it tight and hooked it through a hole and posed like a gunfighter, legs apart, knees bent.

“Bang,” I said.

“Bang is right. Bang, bang.”

I felt it now. A sternness came over me. I motioned for her and displayed my antlered head. She stroked it with her hands, and then in other ways, and then I pushed her down onto the sheets and used it to toss her around and bash and batter her. It was more than a romp. It was closer to a stampede. My hooves came into play as well. All of my staggish parts did, at various times.

Afterward, when she got up to brush her teeth again, Betsy said, “Interesting—you're good at that. That was really just your second time?”

I rose up on my side, with a fist against my jaw. As I closed one eye to clear a stinging sweat drop that had rolled down from my hairline across my temple, I reached between my legs to readjust things. There was still some potential there, though it didn't look that way. In a voice that I couldn't have managed an hour earlier—resonant, full, from the sweet spot of my diaphragm—I asked her to bring me back a glass of water. When she returned and gently passed it to me, and then watched as I drank it, seemingly concerned about whether it pleased me and whether I wanted more, I knew that, at least for the moment, I owned this girl.

“Cold enough?” she asked. She meant the water.

“Yes.”

She seemed happy.

I'd made a person happy.

The day the Seeress predicted
her own death, I was impersonating an average customer at the Boulder, Colorado, WorkMart, a store so vast that the people who stocked its shelves had to travel in electric carts equipped with steadily beeping warning horns. Its parking lot was half the size of Bluff, with two or three times as many vehicles, and after we parked there, I lingered in Betsy's Explorer and prayed to the All-in-One for comprehension. The dimensions of the rectangular beige edifice looming before me, its endless rows of doors sending out a stream of puny hunchbacks monstrously overburdened with crated dishwashers, cartons of tile, toilets, poplar saplings, unassembled bunk beds, hoops of hose, and inflatable vinyl swimming pools tested my sense of spiritual symmetry. I'd always assumed that a balance was intended between human beings and their things, but at WorkMart it seemed that our purpose on this earth was to lift, transport, and set back down stupendous loads of metal, wood, and plastic. This felt backward to me, but backward in terms of what? I had to remember: no False Comparisons.

Betsy had dressed me for the outing in a short-sleeved blue shirt with a penguin on the breast pocket, off-white corduroy trousers, and canvas tennis shoes. She picked my hair into points and froze it that way with a waxy white cream. The costume made me conspicuous to myself and invisible, it seemed, to everyone else. Just inside the store, a middle-aged worker with the low, globed forehead of what my grandmother called a “simple soul” detached a shopping cart from a nested line of them and pushed it my way without a glance of welcome. He didn't seem to register my “Thank you,” he just repeated the favor for someone else.

“That's kind of them, to hire a man like that.”

“All the stores do it nowadays,” said Betsy. “I think it might be a federal law. McDonald's is especially big on it.”

“I think it's very thoughtful.”

“Pay attention here.”

My task was to record and quantify, using a checklist that was folded in my pocket, my reactions to the WorkMart “shopping experience.” Dale had given me a list of items to buy and a number of questions to ask the staff. As I hunted for the lighting department, the right front caster of my shopping cart kept sticking and skidding, turning the whole thing cockeyed and forcing me to wrestle it straight again. “First demerit,” Betsy said. We stopped beneath an array of chandeliers, many fitted with brass or wooden fan blades, and a gleaming profusion of ceiling fixtures. Unable to see what kept them suspended there, I pictured a disastrous, shredding rain of slivered frosted glass and knife-edged metal. For a building so high inside, so wide across, and so overcrowded with tier on tier of inventory—table saws stored thirty feet above the ground!—its construction seemed ominously feeble: an airy grid of beams and cables that barely looked capable of securing a circus tent against a summer storm.

“It's like a gigantic shell,” I said to Betsy. “Should I put down for Dale that I don't feel physically safe in here?”

“That's you. That's not an everyday response.”

“I bet if you asked people, the feeling's shared.”

“Just try,” Betsy said, “to imagine you're an American.”

This stung. I was more American than she was. I'd grown up so deeply buried in this continent, so thoroughly landlocked, surrounded, and enveloped, that I still couldn't clearly envision its coasts; to me the oceans were pure poetic conjecture, no more tangible than asteroid belts. Before the autumn of my fifteenth year, when an elderly Mexican couple passed through Bluff peddling hand-tooled leather belts and boots, I'd never heard a foreign language spoken. My childhood pizzas weren't even true pizzas. As for the Church, its doctrines and its founders—Little Red Elk, most of all—owed virtually nothing to sinister old Europe, with its monks and crusaders, its relics and inquisitions. Ours was a fresh revelation of the New World, as native to this land as pronghorn antelope. The aliens here were the Terrestrians, confusing their transient, preening little empire with the mineral essence of the place itself.

Was Mason LaVerle an American? Nothing but.

Still, as I pushed farther into lighting, searching for a yellow-aproned worker to pester with my scripted questions, I found myself partly conceding Betsy's point. For the purposes of the job at hand, which I hoped to be paid for and to keep, I had to step out of myself, to wear new skin.

“Excuse me, ma'am. I'm wondering how to light a basement workshop. It doesn't have any windows to the outside, it's twelve by fifteen feet in area, and, because I work with dangerous power tools, it requires full, bright, even illumination.”

The woman set her hands on her broad hips and scanned the man-made heaven of dangling fixtures. “Fluorescent?”

“I was hoping you'd advise me.”

“These right up here ones are more your fancy deals that go off your dimmers and such to make a mood, like say if there's wine and your lady friend comes over. You're more wanting plain. For sawing under.”

My brain churned and labored. Betsy said, “Exactly.”

“If this wasn't break, and it's only two a shift now, I'd go along with you myself, but maybe Dan can. If I'd seen the man any. He's not on station, is he?” The woman's head went back and forth, more to establish Dan's absence, it appeared, than to locate him. “Wall treatments, try. Named Dan. Or else he quit.” The woman flapped an exasperated hand at us, or maybe at the entire operation, and headed off toward the store's mysterious rear, where I sensed most of its suffering was hidden. Betsy watched her go, rubbing a fingertip against one temple. I had a tiny headache of my own.

“I have to include all that under ‘Service,' don't I?”

Betsy sighed for both of us.

“With her name attached, don't I? Her tag said Marna B.”

“If that's the procedure, I suppose you do.”

“They'll fire her, won't they? I don't think I can do it.”

Betsy kissed me on the cheek.

“I'm a terrible mystery shopper.”

“Thank God,” she said.

We abandoned the shopping cart midway through our trek to the far-off lawn-care aisle, where Dale had ordered me to choose a riding mower, arrange for its purchase with a salesman, and then, at the last moment, to feign cold feet and closely observe the salesman's behavior as he tried to salvage the transaction. Was he calm and persuasive? Angry and aggressive? Resigned and passive? I'd dreaded this assignment, mostly because of the acting skills it called for. Now, though, having decided back in lighting to dispense with strict honesty today, I looked forward to a revised version of the drama in which I'd pretend to discover I'd lost my wallet and would promise the salesman I'd return tomorrow. I'd award him the same score no matter how he dealt with me: ninety-one points out of one hundred.

“So you're definitely thinking John Deere,” the young man said after I'd sat on seven different models, cranking their wheels and fiddling with their gearshifts. “The fity-one hundred or the fity-two?”

“It's a four-acre yard with a pretty fair slope,” I said, “and most of it's in the shade, which means wet grass. Under certain conditions it's an outright marsh. Also, my wife works nights and sleeps all day, so the quieter, the better.” These details weren't in the script; I'd made them up. Knowing the scene would end happily for everyone had liberated the artist in me.

Without explaining why it suited my needs, the salesman recommended the fifty-two and untwisted the wires that attached the price tag to the neck of the choke knob. I started patting my pockets. A problem arose: I'd neglected to hide my wallet. It bulged in my back right pocket, its natural place, where the salesman had likely already noticed it. I shifted to another plan. I brought out the wallet, smiled, opened it, frowned, frowned harder, and said, “No credit card.”

“You misplaced it?” the salesman said.

“I think I must have.”

“Nobody stole it, I hope.”

“I hope not.
Damn
.”

“You want to call the company? You can give them your password, they'll authorize the sale. You really ought to alert them anyway, in case someone's out there charging on your account. Here, use this.” He handed me his phone.

“I don't know their number.”

“Call up information. Visa or MasterCard?”

“I remember now: I left it on top of my dresser. What a dunce.” I held out the phone for the salesman to take back.

“Just call the company and use your password. The mower's yours.”

“I'm sorry, I can't right now. I'm already late for something.”

The salesman's brow pinched.

“First thing tomorrow.”

“I won't be here tomorrow.”

My inability to sustain my story—I finally just said the mower cost too much and that my old one could last another year or two—brought on a bitter lecture from the salesman about the economics of his job. He worked on commission, and this was his peak sales hour, meaning that I'd cost him quite a sum, he said, by taking up thirty-five minutes of his time with no intention of buying anything. If I thought about it, he said, I'd stolen from him. I'd stolen from his wife and child, too. “That's selfish,” he said. “That is so incredibly selfish.”

“Oh please,” Betsy said to him, stepping in. “Cool off. Come on, Mason.”

“
Look
at me,” the salesman said.

“We have been,” said Betsy. “We're going home.”

“Don't ever come back here. You picked my pocket,
dickwad
.”

I was walking away when he said this. I halted, turned. Betsy released the elbow she'd been tugging at.

“You're going to regret that you weren't nicer,” I said.

The salesman held out his hands. “I'm shaking all over.”

“I'm a person who can tell the future. In five or six days—I see it clearly—your employer will call you back into his office, show you a certain report he just received, and inform you that you no longer have a job here. Unless you apologize to me.”

I counted silently to five. I'd intended to go to ten, but it was pointless: the salesman kept up his mock shaking, unrepentant. I took Betsy's hand and left him standing there, alone with the fate he'd chosen for himself, and for the next hour, from kitchenware to flooring, I terrorized WorkMart's sales floor, sparing no one. Afterward, in Betsy's car, I signed my report and clipped it to an envelope. “Done,” I said. “They got what they deserved.”

“You changed in there,” Betsy said.

“I did my job. You're right: I have to think like an American.”

“I didn't mean
all
the time.”

“That's how it sounded.”

“I like you sweet, though.”

“You said you liked me mean.”

“That was a very different context.”

I'd forgotten this about women: so many conditions. A man shouldn't take them to heart, and yet he does, because he doesn't want to be alone. The woman fears loneliness, too, but she can't help herself, though she knows her conditions may drive the man away. That's why, secretly, she feels relieved when he resists her now and then.

“The service at WorkMart is awful, and I said so. That's what mystery shoppers do,” I said.

“You're playing tough now to show me I don't scare you. Which means I must, or else you wouldn't bother. I think it's cute,” said Betsy. “How cute are you?”

This wasn't the sort of question a man should answer. I stared out the bug-streaked windshield at the store and pictured it collapsing in a dust cloud that would spread over all of Boulder and block the sun. Someday it would happen; it felt inevitable.

“If I scare you, it must mean you like me,” Betsy said. “Well, I like you too, so don't worry.”

“Because I'm cute.”

“No,” she said. “Because you try so hard.”

         

At lunch I rewrote my report to make it kinder, since being employed by WorkMart was its own punishment. We set out for our second stop, a downtown jewelry store, but on our way there my phone rang. It was Lauer. I had to cover one ear so I could hear him. He said he was on a plane above New Mexico and was using his phone in violation of United States government regulations, so he had to speak quietly. When he hung up, I tried my partner's number but couldn't get through. Then I told Betsy we had to turn around.

“What's wrong? You're crying.”

“It's just my eyes,” I said.

“I know it's just your eyes. They're full of tears.”

My explanation consumed the whole drive back, although there were ten-minute stretches when I said nothing, just rubbed the knees of my corduroys and drifted, sometimes backward into childhood and sometimes forward to a future that I suddenly found hard to picture. I understood that no one lives forever, but there are certain people whose power and presence so thoroughly penetrate your view of things that contemplating their absence feels as strange as imagining never having been born yourself.