Mission to America (13 page)

Until Lara and Elder Stark appeared. Her head poked through the door first and when she saw me there, at home with the president-electing Effinghams, holding a cola from their private refrigerator, and, at that particular moment, being congratulated by Eff Sr. for helping to solve a word problem that Connor had been struggling with, her face seized up with anguish and hostility. The look didn't last, though. Errol had just come in again, and when Lara spotted him she turned all twinkly.

“Hi, everybody. Hi there, Mr. Eff,” she said. Then, to Errol: “Hi, where've you been hiding?” I gathered that she hadn't found him earlier.

“Nowhere. Here and there. Come in,” he said. He seemed startled and a little depressed.

“I have a friend,” she said. She opened the door the whole way. My partner bowed. Not a deep bow, but a bow. There were stains on his shirt that I assumed were bison grease.

“Who is that young man?” Eff Sr. demanded. He knew who it was because I'd pointed him out to him, so maybe the idea was to teach Lara a lesson about popping in without knocking properly.

A silence took hold. Poor Lara looked terrified. She started to back away. I was thinking about how to save things when my partner said, solemnly, deliberately, and—as events would show—not unpersuasively:

“Someone who can help, sir. Elder Stark. I've come from Montana to help you eat again.”

A few mornings later
Betsy met me at the van. I'd suggested a rendezvous at the coffee shop, but there was somebody who worked there whom she was trying to avoid. She didn't give any details, but I suspected she meant the son of the yellow-marker tycoon. He was the only employee near her age and he had, I'd heard, quite a history with the girls in town, who were said to admire his bobsledding ambitions. I'd learned that “Olympic hopefuls” were common in Snowshoe, and that the community had more “medalists” than any place of its size in the whole country. Indeed, Elder Stark had done some checking around after Betsy finally phoned me and discovered that she was a former snowboarder who'd quit the sport at twenty-one when her best friend was chosen for the Olympic team and Betsy wasn't. I didn't plan to ask her if this was true because I didn't want to make her feel bad.

She showed up at our campsite in a silver Ford Explorer waxed to the luster of a Christmas ornament. My partner was just leaving on his bike, bound for one of the mysterious appointments that had been occupying his afternoons since the party at the Effingham ranch. We hadn't spoken much since then. He wore his Hobo aura around the clock, studied
Discourses
late into the evenings, and spent hours on the phone with Lauer, who was lecturing in Japan that week. It was hard to imagine what could justify such costly international hookups. When I'd asked him if we were paying the bills, he'd answered curtly, “The funds exist.” His schemes had dissolved our partnership. When Betsy's Explorer appeared, he biked right past it, incurious and fixated. I hated him.

“I'm sorry I'm late,” she said, though she wasn't late. She'd said that she'd come at ten and it was ten, at least according to my watch. Hers, I saw, was running ahead of mine by a minute or two, but a minute or two wasn't late. Except for her, I'd learn.

“That's where you've been living?” she asked. “I'm sorry.”

“Don't be. Don't always be sorry for everything.”

“I am, though. That's just how I am. I want to see this.”

I'd prepared for her visit by consolidating our boxes of books and our bales of tracts and pamphlets into a big solid cube at the far rear. The van looked as neat and spacious as it ever had, but there was no hiding the odor of Elder Stark's cheeseburger-and-burrito-related night sweats. They clung inexpungibly to the layer of carpet—a low-pile, faintly textured orange material—that started midway up the walls and covered the ceiling. The van had come off a lot outside Missoula, and the salesman had told Lauer little about its history other than that its last owners had been arrested for something and forfeited the title to the police.

“I think sometimes I'd like to live like this. The gypsy life,” Betsy said. “But maybe not.” She leaned down over my bunk and fluffed my pillow, then tightened the sheet and smoothed it with both hands. There were rings on both ring fingers that I hadn't noticed before: thin white-metal diamond-encrusted bands. “It is what it is in here. It makes me sad, though.”

“We do just fine.”

“Not sad for you. For people.” She opened one palm and held it on her cheek and lowered her eyes to the toes of her suede boots. “Ugly things actually hurt me. It's a problem. Sometimes an old car will go by, let's say a station wagon, with the kids crowded into the back and half the windows blocked by all the family's clothes and junk, their moth-eaten blankets, their crappy pots and pans, and the mom and the dad aren't talking to each other, and maybe one of them's smoking, and I just think: I'd rather be dead.”

“Than have to live that way?”

“Than even to have to see it.”

I let Betsy stew in her mood for a few seconds before I said, “You don't know—they might be happy in there.”

“That's even worse. That hurts me even more.”

Eventually Betsy raised her eyes, inhaled, exhaled, then forced herself to smile. It took a moment for the smile to stick. “You have to replace those poly sheets you're using with one hundred percent cotton. Promise me.”

“We're short on money nowadays.”

“I thought Dale hired you to mystery shop?”

“He was supposed to call me with instructions.”

“Dale's an airhead. He fried his brain on meth. I'll call him at his office. I'll handle it.”

I thought Betsy meant tomorrow or the next day, but she was already unfolding her little white phone, the exact size and shape of a well-worn bar of soap. The whole conversation took about two minutes. Its results were conclusive: Boulder, Thursday morning, Betsy would drive me, dress like “someone normal.”

“I think I need to get out of here now,” she said.

Outside, as we leaned against her car and talked about how we might spend the afternoon—Betsy suggested a short hike and a trip to a mall to buy me some new shoes—she became distracted by our tires, which she said weren't black enough. I didn't know quite how to take this comment, so I did as I often did: I apologized. She told me it wasn't my fault; most people ignored the color of their tires.

“It's me,” she said. “I'm a freak. Things bother me.” She walked to the back of her Ford and opened the tailgate, brought out a spray can of something and a rag, squatted down next to the van, and set to work. Her squat pulled away the waistband of her jeans from her lower back, disclosing a dark heart-shaped notch I couldn't help staring at.

She wouldn't let me assist her, so I asked questions. “How old are you?” I had to get this settled.

“Twenty-six.”

“Any sisters or brothers?”

“Two and one. Mimi, a nurse practitioner in Portland. Jenna, a paralegal in Santa Fe. Mark, who's gay, an electronic imaging specialist supposedly living in Washington, D.C., but probably in an AWACS over Syria. All three are married, Mark the longest. Parents divorced twelve years ago. Father a luxury-car dealer in Denver, and Mother a massage therapist here in Snowshoe. Everyone scattered, absorbed in their own lives, too busy to call each other except on holidays, and financially okay but panicked anyhow. The Decline of Civilization, chapter seventy. Look: your tires are black now. I feel better.”

“So what do
you
do?”

“Nothing. I don't work.”

“Where do you get money?”

“I made a little a few years back and saved it. Most of it's gone now, but I can get it back because I recycle. I recycle money.”

“How does that work?”

“I spend it on things that hold their value and don't really cost much in the first place. Vintage fashion items, mostly. When I'm broke, I sell off my collection, and then, when I'm bored, I start building it back up. But I hate myself for it today, so please don't ask. Admit it—clean black tires change everything.”

We drove to a trailhead in the national forest and hiked in the aspens for the next three hours. Betsy carried a pocket-size case of watercolors and a spiral-bound sketchbook whose plastic cover was decorated with a B, in glitter. Her painting style was wispy and suggestive. A bird in flight was two linked curves for the wings and a couple of swoosh marks for the wind behind it. A river was just its ripples. Because Betsy kept stopping to capture the essence of things, often very small things—a curled dry leaf, a beetle's molted husk, a shard of violet bottle glass—we never achieved much momentum on the hike. It was also hard to talk. I probed for information about the Effinghams, figuring that everyone in Snowshoe probably gossiped about them from time to time, but Betsy said only that she'd heard their wolves once during a camping trip with AlpenCross. Then she spotted an agate she wanted to paint. When she finished, I asked if her AlpenCross involvement had satisfied her spiritual longings. She told me no, it had extinguished them. Finally I tried to join her in her artistry by pointing out a cluster of purple berries swarming with infinitesimal fleas or aphids. “Wow,” she said. But she didn't bother to paint it.

By the time we returned to Betsy's car my calves ached and my hopes for us had dwindled. She struck me as a beautiful sealed envelope, stapled, glued, and double-wrapped in tape. Her life, or what little I knew of it, consisted of ironing wrinkles, masking blemishes, patching tears, and shining dullnesses. Our interactions on the Thonic plane were manifesting on the Matic as an empty dry sensation behind my tonsils and down into my throat. I suspected that Betsy was feeling something similar.

“Maybe,” she said as we drove the road toward town, “it's not so crucial to buy you shoes today.”

“No,” I said.

“Maybe some other time.”

“These shoes are fine.”

The aspens thinned and houses appeared. Maybe I'd read this evening, or call my family. Maybe Elder Stark would get back early and we could make peace and visit our first movie theater. The one east of town had seven different screens, and all the titles I'd read on the marquee seemed equally intriguing. I'd let him pick.

“Let's bag the mall. Let's just go home,” said Betsy.

I settled back into my seat, looked out my window. “Good idea,” I said. We passed the coffee shop. The bobsledder was standing in the front window. He raised one arm as if about to wave, then stopped himself, perhaps when he saw me. Betsy and he were probably quite well matched, a pair of accomplished winter sports enthusiasts, and time would reunite them, I had a feeling.

“Tired?” she said. “You look tired.”

I just shrugged. Was this a shortcut to the campground? I'd never been down this street before.

“I hope not too tired to rape me,” Betsy said.

         

Betsy lived in the basement of her mother's house, a triangular redwood structure with tall bay windows built against a brushy eroding hillside where the sidewalks of Snowshoe's downtown neighborhoods turned to narrow dirt paths, then petered out. Cars shared the driveways with boats and campers and motorcycles—thousands of dollars of gear for every household and most of it looking forgotten, barely used. I'd stopped wondering on my fourth or fifth day out where all the money came from in Terrestria—from nowhere, apparently; it simply
was
—but the ways people found to waste it still dazzled me.

Inside, Betsy turned on a yellowed ceiling light, revealing dozens of stacked-up plastic grocery sacks knotted shut and containing what looked like clothing. “My thrift-store addiction,” she explained. The piles left little space for furniture other than a queen-size mattress and box spring resting without a frame on the bare floor. Betsy asked me to excuse the clutter but there wasn't any clutter; the bags appeared to have been placed by a trained mason.

She crossed to a little half bathroom, shut the door, and a moment later I heard water running, followed by the high annoying whine of what I supposed, though I'd never heard or seen one, was an electric toothbrush. It sounded painful.

We sat on her mattress and ventured a first kiss that began with such force it had nowhere left to go and had to be abandoned and restarted. Her front teeth, which had looked smooth and glassy at the restaurant, had two tiny chips that kept rasping against my tongue tip. Her mouth and her breath were absolutely odorless and her saliva reminded me of mineral oil—slippery, tasteless, and neither warm nor cold. I suspected that she was the cleanest human being I'd ever touch, and this scared me for some reason. I feared it might spoil me for anyone else.

We stopped to rest after ten or fifteen minutes and regarded each other's faces from inches away, our chins rubbed raw, our lips all gnawed and puffy, and in her eyes (I could only guess how mine appeared) was a misty, vague, anesthetized detachment that convinced me she was seeing a composite of all the men she'd ever done this with.

“I want you to be mean to me,” she said.

“How? In what way?”

“Whatever way you feel like.”

“Mean like cruel?”

“Like my feelings don't matter. Only yours do.”

I translated this into Casper Wiccan terms. The doe was asking the stag to romp unchecked.

I tried to satisfy Betsy's wish, aware the whole time that meanness on request isn't meanness at all, but kindness carried too far. I squeezed her left arm above the elbow until all I could feel was the pulse in my own thumb. I turned her face to one side by pushing her cheek and dragged my teeth down her neck from ear to collarbone. Still, I sensed she was frustrated with me. I hadn't uncoiled, I hadn't blasted through. To want this, she must have had it before, I realized, and I wondered from whom, and how recently. This froze me.

She pulled away and said, “I want to play now. I want to play dress up with you.”

“I wasn't mean enough.”

“That's okay. It's hard when you still don't know someone,” she said.

She started untying and picking through the sacks. “There's a shirt somewhere here I want you to try on. I found it last year at a Santa Fe Goodwill and thought it might suit this man who I was seeing, but he said it was too ‘cowboy,' too ‘Roy Rogers.' It's vintage. It's funky. Me, I think it's manly.”