Mission to America (22 page)

The bird, a red-tailed hawk,
refused to fly, making me wonder if Lara had come back to us. My partner too, I saw, glanced down into the hole as though unsure the casket remained sealed. The regal bony mother, fully veiled, and her brawny sun-scarred new husband, in blue short sleeves, held their white feathers out in front of them the way that Christmas carolers hold candles. The Effingham men, in charcoal suits, stood between silky Hadley and dashing Lance, who'd attired himself in buckskin for some reason and wore a chunky cross of bleached gray wood inlaid with reddish agates and flecks of quartz. He patted Little Eff's back and rubbed his shoulders as the bearded young falconer whispered to his bird, then thrust his leather-clad wrist up toward the sun. Dozens of chins lifted, but not the priest's. He'd seemed out of sorts since Elder Stark's short talk, which hadn't sounded memorized like his had. When the hawk didn't fly again, the priest looked pleased, but then, when it finally launched itself, spectacularly, circling just a few yards above our heads before scooping down hard with its wings and streaking straight up until it was just a dark sliver in the glare, he busied himself picking lint from his black uniform.

Tilted heads swiveled, tracking the hawk's wide spirals. Elder Stark cleared his throat for attention and tossed his feather. I tossed mine and a flurry of them followed, many settling on or near the casket but quite a few of them catching a sideways breeze that fluttered them over the hole toward other mourners, who seemed confused about whether to retrieve them and try again to land them in the right spot. People here were too concerned with marksmanship. Feathers will drift. They aren't missiles. They aren't spears. Lance, whose feather had blown right back to him, picked it up off the ground and cocked his arm and threw it like a dart. It struck like a dart, in the center of the casket lid, and he smiled with his eyes as though he'd truly accomplished something.

Black Suburbans bore us to the Effinghams', where a new cook had covered several picnic tables with platters of thinly sliced rare bison meat (diseased, perhaps, but still fit for guests, apparently) and wedges of various cheeses whose blended stench killed my interest in all the other delicacies. My partner, of course, devoured everything, coating his plump fingers with crumbs and grease that he smeared on his sleeves before shaking hands with people. His funeral performance had won him many admirers—not only for his talk on Preexistence, which hinted that Lara's death fulfilled a plan she'd decided upon before embodiment, but also because they seemed to credit him personally for the astonishing antics of the hawk, which found another hawk behind a cloud somewhere and joined it for a synchronized ballet that climaxed with a high-speed double plunge.

I watched as Elder Stark consoled and hugged Lara's slim young cousin, Marguerite, whose leaf-and-vine patterned fluttery green dress was just the dress I would have worn myself that day if I'd been female and unmarried. He'd told me, when he found out about Betsy, that though his interest in securing a bride might not show in his actions or conversation, it emerged almost nightly in his dreams. Indeed, the Hobo had taken his right hand one day and guided it through a sketch of the girl's face, he said. I asked to view it, as a test. If a real girl appeared on his arm who matched the drawing, I'd concede that the homely tramp existed after all and wasn't just a device my partner used to make himself look prophetic after the fact. “I'm sorry,” he said when I asked. “I had to burn it. I couldn't afford to have it stolen.” I asked him who'd want to steal it and he said, “Entities.”

I kept my distance from the other mourners, especially my partner and the Effinghams, who, in the wake of Edward's liberation, only tolerated my presence, I sensed, because other matters absorbed them: this afternoon's burial, tomorrow's slaughter, and Sunday's pack trip for the luminaries. My partner had been invited to go along to help feed and water the mules and llamas, and he told me the celebrated Ronald Howard would also participate in the expedition. “What about Cher?” I joked. She represented a type for me—I wasn't referring to the woman herself. But my partner was when he said: “She pled exhaustion. People had their hopes up. It's a shame.”

The mourner I least wanted to spend time with had been slipping me periodic private glances, as though signaling me to wait in place until he satisfied other obligations. Since wiggling in beside him in the church pew, Lance had attached himself to Little Eff, continuously touching and stroking him. He behaved like a coach with a defeated athlete. Once in a while they'd slip off as a pair and Lance, drawn up square and in his fringed buckskin, his mighty crucifix knocking against his chest, would direct what appeared to be lofty words of solace and manly injunctions to be brave at Little Eff's shrunken, downturned face. The picture was one that early in my mission—before the stickiness with the Casper Wiccans, and maybe only for those first few hours when I-90 still felt like a road to princely feats—I'd imagined myself appearing in, my bearing and demeanor much like Lance's, sympathetic yet commanding. But genuinely so, I liked to think. Lance thought the same thing of himself, perhaps, and he probably still would after he finally killed someone.

Hadley neared, four or five steps behind her perfume. She had a pink drink with a cherry, which no one else had. She must have treated herself at the main house while changing out of her solemn slate-gray suit into the silvery T-shirt and denim skirt that announced the end of her long workday grieving for someone whom, she'd told me earlier, she'd met only once, under terribly awkward circumstances. “There's a reason that bedrooms have doors on them,” she'd said. “I tried to explain it to her. Then she bit my tit.”

When her body caught up with its perfume, Hadley gave me her drink to hold while she bent down and tightened one of the three black leather straps that fastened her left sandal to her left foot by wrapping around and around the ankle and calf, forming Xs where it crossed the other straps. The whole business looked cruelly complicated and painful, which might have been why it grabbed the eye and held it.

With her drink back, she said, “Where's your honey? You didn't bring her?”

“It was a funeral, not a birthday party. Anyway, we're apart now.”

“Was it Aspen? He does that with new women. He pees on trees. He picked it up from his wolves, I think.”

“Not Aspen.”

“Errol briefed me about her. She used to dance, he told me. Contemporary American exotic.”

“Only on computers.”

“That's where it's at now. May I vouchsafe some good pragmatic advice?” The words this woman used. It was as though she was being paid to test them. “Pretty twentyish women need money, too. Sometimes they earn it in expensive ways. Then they get older and wiser. Or uglier. Put it out of your mind. Make room for other things. Have a peek at her medical records, if possible, and then, if there's nothing alarming, forget about it.”

“None of that was my concern,” I said. Just then, I couldn't remember my concern. I missed my Betsy. I missed her cleanliness. I missed the way she sterilized the tweezers by holding them over a lighted wooden match before she extracted pimples from my face. She made a procedure of every little task. After she bathed, she'd rinse her bar of soap and dry it with a washcloth, then rinse the washcloth. Why had I wanted to spare her? From what, exactly? She'd made her own life hard enough. Still, it seemed best to leave things where they stood. A new tire will go ten thousand miles without a leak, but patch it once and it starts to pick up nails.

Hadley tipped back her empty glass and let the cherry roll down onto her tongue. When she opened her mouth to speak, the cherry was gone, although I hadn't seen her chew it. “Who's John the Baptist? Or is it Davy Crockett?”

I offered a charitable summary of Lance. I left out his canvas-sack experiment. I left out plenty. The few things I left in, I trimmed and tidied the way my mother salvaged burned slices of toast.

“Poor Errol's ripe for the picking,” Hadley said. “He blames himself for the psycho's overdose. By tomorrow, you watch, he'll be a Holy Roller and I'll be flying home commercial, economy class, eating bagel chips for lunch. Oh well, it happens. They all come back eventually. The King of Kings gets his turn, then I get mine. We've learned to share.”

Hadley seemed to be waiting for someone to take her glass and looked deeply let down that it hadn't already happened. So I took it. She smiled. Her brow uncrinkled. Never having to hold an empty glass was part of the bargain she'd struck with life, I speculated; one that helped make the deal's other conditions more bearable.

“What's your buddy the scheming suck-up's name again? Eff Sr.'s new guru slash gastroenterologist?”

“Elder Stark?”

“Look at the dunce.” She aimed her nose. “He's practically being visually cannibalized by a buxom olive-skinned size two who's never, that I can see, had any work done, except perhaps for a laser around her eyes and maybe a peel or two—just maintenance—but all he can do is stare daggers at Daniel Boone hypnotizing poor Errol with that big cross thing. I detect covetous territoriality. Territorial
ism
?”

I wasn't sure about the word, but Hadley appeared to be right about my partner. In Celestial Hall a dozen pillars were distributed around the seating area, blocking the view of the stage for many congregants and forcing them to lean way out of their chairs. So fixated did Elder Stark appear on our new benefactor's son's looming Christianization that he was treating Lara's cousin like one of those pillars. But unlike the pillars, the girl was mobile. Whenever he tried to peer past her, she shifted her stance so as to keep herself centered in his vision. If she knew what she was doing, she had no pride. If the dance was a reflex, instinctive, she'd fallen in love. Either way, she needed help, I felt.

“Excuse me,” I said to Hadley.

“I'd rather not. I was thinking we could trade back rubs in the guesthouse. Yours seems stiff, and I know mine is. Too much churchy correctness makes me spasm.”

My best reason for declining this proposition—if I really wished to, because it did present interesting opportunities, from taking revenge on Little Eff for Aspen to honing my crude romantic skills under the tutelage of a trained expert whose lathed and polished appearance I was used to now—vanished the very next moment when Elder Stark patted Lara's cousin on the cheek and hurried away to defend his vulnerable flock. I expected Lance to rebuff him, but instead he walked off toward the food, cleverly leaving Little Eff alone with someone too insulted and agitated to raise his spirits or regain his loyalty. He'd lose this particular contest, I predicted, and the prospect buoyed me. I wanted him back, and he needed to return to me. I knew him. No one else did. Maybe we could drive off toward Omaha, whose enchanting name excited in me a mysterious optimism, or maybe just straight north and home. We could throw our white shirts in the laundry, or in the garbage, and formally declare defeat to Lauer, whose own trips through Terrestria should have taught him that people here often felt that they'd been saved already—three or four times over, some of them, and by too many methods to keep track of—and the few who had no faith but wanted one were either so rich or confused or beaten down that enlightening them meant going crazy yourself.

Maybe Lara's cousin would come with us. He could impregnate her on the drive up and if Bluff disappointed her, she'd be stuck. By the time she gave birth, if she still wanted to leave, Elder Stark could adopt the baby and let her go.

“Okay, no back rubs. Oral copulation. That's all I can provide this time of month. If you're rugged enough to reciprocate, I'll let you. Whatever, though. We can eat Ding Dongs and play the Price Is Right. Which I bet you're really, really bad at. Which might precipitate riotous hilarity.”

“Do you read the dictionary before bed?”

Hadley's face puckered up as though I'd pulled its drawstring. A scar I'd not noticed before near her left temple purpled slightly and became conspicuous.

“I try to make jokes and I'm not the type who should,” I said.

“It's fine. It was funny. A wee bit obvious. ‘Thesaurus' would have brought it up a notch.”

“That's why I'm not the type. I'm obvious. If you're joking about a person, be original. Make that extra effort. They'll feel special.”

“You asked me a question. About my verbiage.”

“Mmm.”

“Would you stop acting like you need to go somewhere long enough to listen to the answer? You do that a lot, you know. It's rude.”

I looked over at Lara's cousin, so alone, and then at my partner, failing with Little Eff and probably feeling the deck begin to list as the great treasure ship scraped against a reef. There was always somewhere else to go and someone there in need of more assistance than the person standing in front of you. Universal helpfulness wasn't possible. Even the fireman rescuing a child was turning his back on some famine that was killing thousands.