Mission to America (16 page)

“That it hasn't worked out must hurt like holy hell,” Lance said, reaching for the breakfast bill. He brought out a checkbook, much to my relief, and signed his name, though the checkbook's cover read “AlpenCross.” When he entered the figure in the ledger, I saw that the account held quite a sum: seventeen thousand five hundred and fifty dollars.

“Who's up for a hike?” Lance asked. “Buckhorn Falls, four miles. A little light cardio to start the day. Sunblock, fresh water, and trail mix in my daypack. Maybe we'll come across a calving elk.”

At last Lara spoke: “I still believe in love. I always will. It's my blessing and my burden.”

Our waitress, who'd come up beside her, said, “Ditto, hon.” They shared a long look, then the waitress took Lance's check. Lara watched her walk off with moist pink eyes.

“You need to get right with the Lord,” Lance said.

“Get fucked.”

“There. The first step. The eruption.”

“So hard you hemorrhage.”

“Anally, presumably,” Lance said.

Lara nodded. Then we all went hiking.

         

The boots Lance gave me to replace my dress shoes were tight in the toes but loose around the heels. After walking in them for an hour, up a switchbacking path of mud and jagged stones that was blocked every few hundred yards by fallen pines that the Forest Service had flagged but not yet cut, I could feel my heartbeat in my feet as well as the warm, oily ooze of broken blisters. Instead of pushing the pain aside, I did as my father had taught my buddies and me during a freezing fifth-grade camping trip and forced myself to dwell inside the agony until it started to feel normal.

Lara fell back about two miles up, telling us she wanted to gather wildflowers but looking like she intended to take a nap, and Lance and I picked up our pace, passing the water bottle back and forth until we were gulping each other's blended saliva. I hoped he lived as cleanly as he pretended to. I walked two steps behind him to watch his calves flex, a rhythmic display of focused power that seemed to reveal some obscure, essential lesson about the nature of motion itself. Spirit, according to
Discourses
, was a by-product of activity, like the reflection from a spinning fan blade, and our souls in the end did not reside within us but flowed outward from our movements. This conflicted with certain other doctrines, but such conflicts just gave us topics for debate.

I softened on Lance as we climbed through aspen groves whose mottled profusions of trembling leaf-shaped shadows and rich, humid layers of moss and mushroom smells brought on a feeling of storybook enchantment. His voice sounded more sincere in these surroundings, less distorted by pride and pain. He named the plants we passed, the types of rock. When a ladybug landed on the back of his right hand, he showed it to me, then held it near his whitish, wind-chapped lips and carefully puffed it back into the air.

“How well do you know Betsy?” I wanted to trust him.

“You've seen her since that night?”

“A time or two.”

“She's everything I wanted when I was young and everything I distrust now that I'm not. I guess you can tell that I've answered this question before.”

“Who asked it?”

“Lots of people. The girl provokes that. Why she stays down in the minors I don't know—she could be out there playing the big stadiums. She has the right build and all the moves.” Lance snugged down a shoulder strap on his orange pack by tugging the end of a hanging black nylon tab. “I'd say steer clear, except you probably won't, and if you do, she'll come back so hard and strong . . . can you reach behind me there, the bottom zipper, and maybe you'll notice a medication organizer, see-through plastic, with little flip-up lids?”

He took his pills without water, five or six of them, his chin tilted up and his throat stretched long and tight like a pelican swallowing a minnow. He seemed to be able to track the pills' descent; he didn't look down until they'd reached his stomach, at which point he shut his eyes and mumbled something that might have been a brief, memorized prayer. The man had his layers, his levels; I could see that. AlpenCross was just a wrapping for them.

A hundred yards farther on, Lance said, “Bipolar. But maybe they don't have that where you come from. We didn't have it down here until five years ago. We barely had adult ADHD. I'm always a pioneer with these new things, at least as far as the greater Snowshoe area. I think they kick off in the San Francisco suburbs, or Cambridge, Massachusetts, around the colleges. You've slept with her?”

Once I'd caught up, I fibbed to him.

“Good. Your higher self might have a chance then.” Still, the look Lance gave me was grim and pitying. There might have been envy there, too. Between his eyebrows. It was time that I let him play nature guide again.

We came out in a sandy clearing atop a ridge whose boulder-strewn, treeless shoulders sloped so far down that the ponds at their base looked like shreds of silver foil. Colorado wasn't Montana. It was steeper. More violence had gone into forming its terrain. And unlike Wyoming, which seemed spent and petrified, this place felt restless, charged. I'd never experienced such crashing sunsets, such surging, erupting dawns. Through my boot soles I thought I could feel a deep-down hum, conducted through the granite and the gravel, that was either the echo of a past earthquake or the buildup to a new one. No wonder people in Colorado kept moving, always running, skiing, climbing, racing. No wonder Lance had adopted his swift, long stride. The planet itself spun faster here, it seemed, and just staying upright required leaning forward.

Lance shrugged and dipped one shoulder and slid his pack off. He set it on the ground, untied a cord, and folded back its topmost flap, his movements soft, deliberate, and exaggerated. I could tell he was going for his Bible, since Elder Stark behaved identically toward his copy of
Discourses
—as though it was made of blown glass, and irreplaceable.

Lance held the book in one hand and read it silently, his body angled toward the thousand-foot drop, which was just a yard or two away. The Effinghams' private mountain loomed miles off, and a couple of times he gazed in its direction, trying, it appeared, to clear his thoughts so as to memorize some verse or phrase. I studied the backs of my hands; I couldn't watch him. Other people's devotions embarrassed me, perhaps because, like other people's kisses, they rarely looked genuine when viewed too closely.

He snapped the book shut as though he'd settled something, then tucked it up high and tight under one arm. He opened his stance to me and I stepped closer, into a warm updraft near the ridge. It smelled of green grass from the valley and in its currents star-shaped bits of seed fluff swerved and tumbled.

“I almost pushed someone off here once,” Lance said. “I planned it, I pictured it, and weighed the consequences. I even carried out a little test run. The thing's still down there somewhere—a canvas sack stuffed with a good eighty pounds of rocks and dirt. That's how profoundly effed up I was back then, particularly in regard to women I ‘loved.' What scared me off in the end was how the sack stayed nearly completely intact the whole way down and didn't shred or explode like I expected. It told me that they could identify the body.”

I wasn't sure how to acknowledge these disclosures, delivered so flatly, with such a level stare. I made a rough sound in my throat, glanced down, glanced sideways. I shifted my weight very slightly to my rear foot but decided it made me seem timid and shifted it back. It came to me that I was being addressed not as Lance's friend or confidant but as a dispassionate student of human depravity—as a fellow theologian, really. First, he'd saturate me with ugly storytelling, and then he'd try to show me proof, in the form of the new, redeemed person standing before me, that AlpenCross's god was great and merciful, the only god truly worthy of my loyalty. Then, no doubt, he'd offer me a membership.

Fair was fair. I deserved this, I decided. But I resented the setting Lance had chosen. Elder Stark and I approached prospects in their homes, on the street, in cafés, in comfortable surroundings where they were always free to walk away from us. Up here, though, a person would have to fly away.

At first Lance proceeded as I'd predicted. To the crime of premeditating a murder he added a host of other offenses whose details filled out his earlier chronicle of Snowshoe Springs' decline. He'd peddled a drug known as angel dust, he said, through a regional ring of high-school students, one of whom he'd had a romance with that led to her commitment to a mental hospital. He'd been at fault in a drunken auto accident, which he'd avoided prosecution for because the people he hurt were Mexican peach pickers driving an unlicensed truck without insurance coverage. More recently—just five years ago, he said—he'd enticed three young women to cooperate with a “perverted Web site” he'd created that allowed men from all over the world to direct the girls in various acts, individually and together, that were observable on computer screens. The girls had made thousands of dollars, Lance informed me, and he, their manager, had earned much more. When the prettiest one threatened to expose the scheme after being recognized and contacted by a man who, it turned out, lived just three blocks away from her, Lance panicked. This girl was the person he'd thought of killing.

“But the worst thing,” he said, “was those felt like happy years to me. I drove a classic Mercedes convertible. I scuba dived in Antigua twice a winter. And—please don't tell Lara, don't ruin her illusions—this ridiculous ‘Little Eff' she set her sights on, the guy with the tiny penis and the big jet, we partied together, in secret, several times, in international waters on his yacht. Models, video cameras, black tar heroin, this weird rich young Arab guy who traded platinum over his sat phone while getting his big toe sucked—those sailing trips were Sodom on the high seas. And I couldn't get enough. I gloried in it.”

“At breakfast . . .” I said, my first venture into speech for ten or fifteen minutes.

“I know, I know. I made Lara feel bad for stuff that's far more innocent, but I'm trying to train her to take responsibility. Comparing her sins to mine won't minimize them. I know, though. It's unjust. It's inexcusable. I'm afraid it's a sick old dynamic I slip into and only by grace will it ever be relieved. And believe me, I pray for that daily. Hourly. I'll show you my knees if you want. They're black and blue.”

Lance was speaking and thinking at a furious clip by then, his neck flushed streaky red, his gestures motorized. If his intention was to demonstrate how undeserving he'd been of spiritual amnesty, he'd already convinced me. He couldn't quit, though. Reliving his degradation had struck some spark in him and it was glowing now like a blown-on coal. And his tales had grown outlandish. Platinum? He'd started to say “gold,” stopped at the vowel, wet his crackly lips, and then reached out for something less common, more specialized. I'd seen it: momentum overrunning fact.

To help Lance, to bring him around, I said, “Miraculous.”

He repeated the word, but his thoughts were clearly still shoving him further away, toward some ultimate dark drama that he might or might not have actually lived through but whose telling would let out the pressure inside his skull. Lara, who'd lived with him, must have seen this coming when she excused herself to gather wildflowers.

“Miraculous that you managed to turn back. A voice? Was it a voice, Lance?”

“I don't hear voices. That's never been a part of it.”

“I'm sorry.”

He glared at me. “People should think before they say things.”

“What changed you? That's all, Lance. That's all I want to know.”

“So you are or you aren't prepared to let me finish?”

This was grinding. This was work. My attention strayed out past the ridge and I envisioned my partner's patient labors with Eff Sr., who longed for the pleasure of eating his own bison and might give some share of his fortune for the privilege. If such payment were offered, maybe we should take it. Maybe our services warranted nothing less.

Lance removed his Christian Bible from his armpit and pressed it with rigid, crossed hands against his heart. The comfort this seemed to provide him was real and physical; his breathing slowed, his locked-up hips unstiffened. Next might come tears, if his body weren't so dehydrated. My own need for water felt dangerously acute.

“It's home, but I need to move away,” Lance said. “I meet someone who's not from here and I see that. I'm faking it, man. I act saved, but I'm not. I have history here, and it's thick. It's thick and sticky. I go downtown, it's in half the ladies' eyes; I hike up here, it's below me on that ledge there. I came a whole lot closer than I told you.”

“Thoughts are thoughts and that's all they are, Lance. Thoughts. Read to me from your Bible. Something calming.”

He seemed to like this idea. He traced a finger down a densely printed concordance page. It was one of those scriptures with gold-edged, crinkly paper, and it rustled as he flipped through it. “Here we go now. This is from John. It's my new bedtime verse.” He coughed into his fist, then looked at me. “One last little thing first. A favor.”

“Only one.”

“Now, exactly—I mean this,
exactly
; I need to
see
it; this helps me, I can't explain why; it helps unstick things—what did my little lost Betsy let you do to her? The usual, or past that? How far past that? My savior and I have a deal—he lets me ask these things. He knows how deep the hurt goes. Describe her outfit.”

When I reached the bottom, alone, two hours later, Lara was in her Jeep, with music playing. The way she turned the car key and pushed the gearshift, gently, with minimal motion and no noise, felt like an indirect apology. She knew what she knew, and she knew that I knew now too, and that part of my knowledge was that she might have spared me but hadn't because of her greed for sympathy. When she looked like she might defend herself, or Lance, I raised a stern hand that she was right to flinch from. “He can walk home,” I told her. “Lance needs a long, long walk.” Later, as we drove into the campground, I spotted my partner's bike against the van and asked to be taken back to town and dropped there. I just wasn't ready for his stories. They'd breed with the others I'd heard and hatch new monsters, because there was no such thing as separation here, not once you'd started listening. Never listen.