Mission to America (21 page)

Edward's mother, a widow who cleaned motel rooms, kicked him out for stealing a pack of cigarettes from a carton she'd saved for weeks to buy. At the prize dinner Eff Sr. had invited him to visit the Rocking F at any time, so Edward bought a bus ticket to Snowshoe, obtained a decent clean suit at Goodwill, and presented himself at the guardhouse. Little Eff was somewhere in the high country hosting his annual society pack trip and Eff Sr. was at a Minnesota clinic, but Edward, by showing the guard his prize certificate, managed to reach the main house. He told a housekeeper he'd been hired to write Eff Sr.'s biography and, once situated in the guesthouse, he promptly went to work on its first chapter, a poetic description of the ranch itself. He couldn't lie, remember, and two weeks later, when Eff Sr. returned from his stomach operation, Edward politely reintroduced himself and handed over the scenic opening pages of his proposed
American Maverick: Errol Effingham's Long and Lonely Ride to Riches
.

The bluff succeeded. Impressed by Edward's bravado and delighted by his prose, Eff Sr. had his lawyers draft a contract that offered him a quarter of a million dollars to complete the book, which had been reconceived as a “personal memoir” bearing Eff Sr.'s name and no one else's. There was one condition, though, based on Eff Sr.'s annoyance with the way Edward had dissipated his prize money: the payment was split into equal halves, and the first half, due immediately, was converted into Effingham Systems stock that couldn't be sold, not one share, before the day that the second half came due. Until then, Edward would have free room and board and a monthly cash stipend of three hundred and fifty dollars, which Eff Sr. joked he'd have nowhere to spend because he planned on chaining him to his desk. If Edward desired female company, Little Eff would have it flown in on the Gulfstream. Edward declined this kind offer, but signed the contract.

That was a year ago. The book had changed since then.

“This business about the Keepers and Shadow Managers is pretty simple, essentially. The man has read two modern authors in his life, whom his soft brain found equally persuasive, and he's taken synthetic narcotics since he was thirty. First came
Atlas Shrugged
, that fabled ‘objectivist' bible of individualism by a woman who I've heard was very fond of threesomes. Then came the works of Carlos Castaneda, the mock-anthropologist and pseudo-shaman who the old man's son was quite taken with in college. Mix those up with lots of Percocet and a loony hysterical Baptist mother who suffered from crippling libidinal blockages, and—”

“Have some more warm milk,” I said. Edward's eyes were popped out an inch in front of his face and his lips were cracked from constant nervous licking alternating with stretching.

“The Keeper's obsession was a minor eccentricity. Then we got up to the laboratory years, to the thousands of apes he tortured with syringes or peeled back the skin from and rubbed with hair conditioner to test for allergens. That's the gentle stuff. I'm skipping the amputations, lobotomies, the CIA-funded torture experiments, and the organs they extracted and sent to space to check for chromosomal mutations. Which he was candid about, astonishingly. For about five manic hours. Then he stopped talking. I looked in his eyes and I saw the lights go out. When they came back on, the old crow was in a rage. ‘Sell your stock. You're fired,' he told me. And that's when I sinned,” said Edward. “When I transgressed.”

I coached him to drink more milk by raising my own mug. He mimicked me, nothing but reflexes by then. His brain had abandoned ship. It swam alone.

“The stock was down sixty percent from where I'd bought it, so instead of running for daylight, I stayed and coddled him. I asked him to tell me more about the Keepers and about his opinions and ideas in general. Then I pretended to find them interesting rather than an abominable hash of incoherent paperback cosmologies, opiated hallucinations, and hardtack oil-patch BS like ‘Don't go crying over a dry hole and don't go grinning over a gusher. Just keep drilling.' He thinks he coined that one, and I encouraged him to. I drew the line at ‘A penny saved is a penny earned.'”

“And this,” I said, “is the book that you've been writing?”

“Pretending to, while waiting for the stock to rise. Your friend, the fat one, is keeping him distracted. He listens, he shows interest, he asks questions. I'm no longer capable of that. I've devoted myself to watching the ticker. It almost broke through at twenty, but today it fell back to twelve. I started smashing things. I figure I can cash out before he notices and beat the bounty hunters to the state line, but there's not enough money left to buy an automobile. I'm a snob there. I like European and turbocharged. I'd rather crawl on my belly over cactus than drive the new Chevrolet Impala.”

“Run away in our van. As soon as it gets back.”

“Dodge,” said Edward, “is worse than death, particularly in van form.”

“Be serious.”

“Tragically, I am. I'm forty-six. No partner, not a single trusted friend, my work's out of print, and I lack integrity. I demand compensation. I demand a BMW. Until I can buy one, I'll swear before the court that ‘Try, try again' and ‘Teach a man to fish' are the words of none other than our gracious host, the long, lonely maverick of the Rocking F.”

“I'll drive you to the bus station in town. You can't let this man keep zworking you,” I said.

“Is that the word for it?”

“It's my word for it.”

Edward gazed past me, at an antique wall clock Eff Sr. had told me belonged to Buffalo Bill and had come down to him through a series of poker matches played in the game room of the Terrestrian White House on every tenth Good Friday since 1900. The matches commemorated the Roman soldiers who'd gambled for the possession of Jesus' garments.

“It's dinnertime,” Edward said, “but there's no cook. We'll have to raid the fridge at the big house. You go first. We can't be seen together.”

I didn't know how to tell him that two hours ago I'd seen Little Eff out the window and he'd seen me. He had on boots and a swimsuit, carried a book, and appeared to be headed for the pool. His face, though it wore a white mask of anti-sun cream, betrayed an acute displeasure, which I'd ignored. I was decaying inside from postponed consequences. It was time to breach the dam and breast the flood.

“My partner will be back in a few minutes and you can sneak into the van and ride downtown with me. I think I have eight dollars for chicken strips. You can start out once you've eaten. I'll draw a map.”

“To where?”

“To Bluff, Montana. My parents' house. You can rest there, you won't be followed. You can heal. It's close to Canada, if you need Canada.”

“What I need is a BMW sedan, turbocharged, pearl paint, stitched leather seats. That, or a merciful point-blank execution. I could line up with the bison at this ‘safari.' What a sadistic bloodbath that will be. Have you ever seen those leviathans go down? The impact ripples the ground like a damned trampoline.”

“I heard he relented.”

“Just to please his foreman, who quit last night because he has a family he'd rather not see cursed for generations. By tomorrow he'll find a less conscientious lieutenant, and by Saturday, when the pack-trip guests arrive, the cannons will be oiled and primed. I know this because I spied your paunchy partner cleaning the Gorgon's lever-action Sharps. It was custom-built for Teddy Roosevelt but lost in a card game to a Scottish earl who lost it to someone who lost it to Samuel Goldwyn, who didn't play fair and locked it in a safe which JFK paid the Mafia to crack, ensuring continued fine sport for future plutocrats.”

“That clock there.” I turned and pointed. Coincidence.

“Shotgun, clock, whatever. The maverick is sloppy on the details. Blame all the Vicodin he shovels down.”

I knew this name—from the pill bottle I'd pilfered. The drug had worn off by then, or maybe it hadn't; maybe I'd just grown accustomed to the way it slowed down the suddenlys, stretched them, blended them. Maybe I'd changed forever, as Edward felt he had and I worried that my partner had. But that didn't invalidate Perfection. I was as I must be to do what needed doing, which, just then, was to stand up from the table, greet Elder Stark as he lumbered through the door, and lead a drooping Edward to the van.

“I'll need cash,” he said when we got there. “It's in the microwave.”

The bills, neatly rolled and secured with rubber bands, fit, just barely, in a shoe box Edward had used as a file for yet more index cards. I read one before I dumped them in a wastebasket. “Today I ate three hundred and eighteen seeds,” it read.

On my way back out, as I was crossing the driveway, my partner waved to me from our front door, and then, when I kept walking, hustled over. “Illegal,” he said. “Violation. That man stays put.”

“He can't anymore,” I said. “He did his best here.”

“He's a paid amanuensis.”

Everyone now was speaking Andromedan. Elder Stark raised an arm to block me—I strode right into it. I gripped the arm by the wrist and tried to lower it as he punched my rib cage with the other one. In Bluff, the old ladies forbade all fisticuffs, and when fights broke out anyway, they were clumsy, symbolic affairs in which the combatants sought to prove with sour looks and surly swaggers that they would have hurt each other terribly if they'd grown up elsewhere and been allowed to. This punch had aim and acceleration, though, and his next two blows met its high standard. They brought me down. I kicked at him from the ground, but had no leverage, and he calmly sat astride my heaving chest, pinned my arms to the ground behind my head, and brought his damp red sugar-blemished face so close to mine that I couldn't see sky around it.

“The roof of Celestial Hall collapsed,” he said.

“That's been coming for a while now.” I tensed my arms and yanked them free, but only for half a second. It exhausted me. The weight of a thousand chicken wings, large Pepsis, spiral-cut fried potatoes, and bearclaw pastries could not be displaced by fussy struggling. Guile was required. I went limp and tried to summon some.

“It's thirty-nine thousand dollars to repair. They need trained engineers, a crane, slate tiles from Scotland. Those sort of things can't be bought with Virtue Coupons.”

I shook my head, which he permitted, and snatched a peek at Edward in the van. He appeared to be sleeping sitting up—not a relaxed sleep but the sleep of one who knows that doom will arrive very shortly, and right on time. Might as well be rested up for it.

“So Eff Sr. wrote a check. I asked, he wrote a check. I sent the check to Lauer. It was cashed. The engineer is driving up from Billings, the tiles are being loaded on an airplane. The donor won't even accept a modest bronze plaque. He understands history. Plaques don't last, he says. Correct ideas last.”

In front of the main house, beyond my chin, Eff Sr. was standing with someone I'd not seen before. Both had binoculars hanging from their necks. Eff Sr. raised his to his eyes and indicated with an extended arm the direction in which the other was to look. The man obeyed, conspicuously submissive. He even let Eff Sr. touch his hip and slightly reorient his stance.

“This generous man who wants nothing but a hearing, a sincere, honest hearing, no plaque, no monument, is the man you're about to offend so grievously that even if Bluff and its people all caught fire—your friends, your teachers, Lauer, your sweet little five-year-old cousin with the limp—he wouldn't so much as spit to cool the flames. Don't make an enemy. Reconsider. Tell your writer friend he has obligations here.”

I nodded, which he allowed, and then he went further by standing up off of my chest and slapping the dust from the knees of his dark slacks. I raised my sore back and sat up. Eff Sr.'s new underling had made a gun with his fingers and was shooting it, jerking up his hand to mime the recoil. Great beasts from the Ice Age were about to bleed, their necks too stout to turn and lick their wounds.

I sprang up and ran then. My partner's soggy bulk shuddered but didn't shift. I saw Eff Sr. elevate his binoculars to throat level as he and the other man watched me start the van, back up, go forward, and back up again, hemmed in between a machine shed and a fence. Edward woke up as I touched the van's back bumper to one of the fence posts, angling for more room. He raised his door handle, but not all the way. I finally got clear and straightened out the wheels. I'd dropped Edward's box of money in the fight and I thought about driving past it and reaching down, even if that meant running over my partner, but Edward, suddenly wise, said “Go. Just go.”

Suddenly, out of nowhere, like life itself. It might sound like a lie in books, but it's the truth, and he knew this now, too. I'd sworn off proselytizing, but Edward had converted anyway, and Bluff, if Bluff still stood, would have to welcome him. I wished I could go away with him on the bus, but I had a funeral here. And a friend in danger. I watched him shrink and dwindle in my mirrors and wondered if he knew that I'd be back.

“I'm going Greyhound,” Edward said. “I. Am. Going. Greyhound.”

“I hear it's slow,” I said, “but comfortable.”

“For some of us,” he said, “it's a rolling existential crucifixion.”

“You're different now. You belong to a new ‘us.' There's a bed and a sink in my parents' extra room. If it gets hot, there's a fan. It might need fixing. There's also a chair and a table where you can write. If you're bothered by mice, set a trap, or just try not to be.”

“It sounds like heaven,” he said.

I nodded. It was.

“I believe that I'm starting to get it,” Edward said. “Think like a castaway. Adore the coconut. Forget the steak. Forget the chocolate ice cream. You live on a desert island. Adore the coconut.”

Three or four hours in my kitchen drinking milk and he knew as much as I knew. On the ride to the station I had him roll down his window and stick his head outside, into the wind. Then I baptized him. All it takes is fresh air, a “Yes” or two, and less than a minute of your precious time.