Mission to America (4 page)

One day I confided in him about Sarah, and Elder Stark described to me how he'd dispatched his own girl: swiftly, in one slashing cut, by criticizing her looks. He'd told her that her eyes were set too close and that her waist was too long for her short legs. He took a kick to the shins for this, he said, but the kick didn't hurt because it was the last kick.

“Sarah isn't concerned about appearance. That wouldn't work with her,” I said.

“I think your plan is screwy. I think it's doomed.”

“I'm trying to be merciful.”

“By pretending you've been with men? She won't believe you.”

“I'll deny it, but not convincingly,” I said. “She'll believe me if she thinks I'm lying.”

“You're too sloppy, too slouchy. Those boys are fresh and springy.”

The next Sunday, at last, it came: the conversation. Sarah's mother, who knew what loomed, sighed and stared at her plate during the meal in a way that suggested she felt sorry for us, and not just for Sarah and me but for all of Bluff. Sustaining ourselves had become a chore and perhaps too much of one. Our faith had sequestered us in a mountain valley, drier, higher up, and farther back than anywhere human beings should have to dwell. The helpful talc mines still held tons of talc but the deposits were harder and harder to get at. Yes, we were safe from assault, debased philosophies, bewildering images, and harmful foodstuffs, but in our safety we'd thinned and paled and dwindled. Our blood was weak, like children's milky tea, and though our digestive tracts were scrubbed of residue, it seemed that we'd lost some essential vital filth, some energizing compost required for growth.

We retired to the sofa after our iced-fruit puddings. Paul sat on the rug and arranged his fossil insects according to age, assembling a time line that made me feel marginal and indistinct. I sensed that Sarah was working up to something but slipping sideways as she went. The struggle enriched her complexion. It pinked her earlobes.

“You're eating poorly,” she said. “You yawn and slump.”

“Because the windows don't open in your house.”

“Drink some bentonite clay mixed in grape juice.”

I promised I'd have a glass when I got home. Sarah took my right hand and cupped it on her bare kneecap, its surface creased and pebbled with childhood scars. Kids in Bluff grew up by falling down, by crashing and tumbling, girls and boys alike. The divisions came when we got older. The final division happened at the Frolic, when we were pushed together by our elders. We'd already been together, many of us, but in our own fumbling ways, on our own time, not in the ordained way and on their time.

“This is terribly hard for me,” said Sarah. She had all the tales and tidbits. She had her case. She'd make it delicately and diplomatically, and then I'd be mean to her, protest, act insulted, and she'd feel well rid of me and want someone else.

But she took a route I hadn't anticipated. “I need a favor, Mason. An indulgence. Set me aside. I'm not good for you or anyone. Everything you've accused me of is true. I'm greedy and I'm a scold and I'm a needler. I need to repair those weaknesses. In solitude. Not in a house together with a husband.”

We sat there in silence as Paul replaced his rocks in a tissue-lined shoe box whose lid was marked “Prehistory.” I should have known by his presence that his big sister had decided not to say hard things to me or repeat hard things she'd heard from others. But he needed to go now, because this wasn't over yet. I pointed at him. He knew. He took his box away. We'd given him plenty to chew on as it stood.

“Is that all you wanted to say to me tonight? I think there might be more,” I said.

“I wish it weren't so simple,” Sarah said. “I'm wrong for you. Just please don't always hate me.”

“Impossible.”

“Thank you.”

“This is nonsense, Sarah. It's me who's not fit for you, and you know why. You're sparing me because you think I'm weak. You think I don't know what people say about me and you don't want to be the first to tell me.”

A snorty chuckle, rich with nose juice. Sarah covered her mouth with her left hand.

“Listen to me,” I said. “Be serious. Sarah, I am a different kind of man. I am a man who can't . . . I mean who doesn't—”

Wiping her eyes and trying to hold in laughter. Rubbing away the juice under her nose. Finally saying, “Don't cook things up—just
say
things. You know what I wanted to spare you from, you goofhead? Wait—just let me laugh and get this over with.” It took about a minute. “Done,” she said. “What I wanted to spare you from, you silly knothead, was this, this whole ridiculous performance. Mason LaVerle, the tortured secret dandy!”

“Someone told you. Recently,” I said. “Last week, when we talked about mammoths, you thought I was one. And it made sense to you. I use the library.”

“And then I paid a visit to your proud father.”

The midwife's thumb.

“Who hated the plan all along and told me this: ‘I know you don't have any way to judge, but I can assure you, young lady, my only son was specifically crafted in Preexistence to deliver mighty carnal pleasure to the most tender depths of womankind.' He's a poet, your father.”

“Not usually,” I said.

“On the subject of his son, he is.”

“I'd like to leave on a mission. May I?”

“Do.”

“You shouldn't wait for me.”

“I won't. We're incompatible and I want a Saab. The All-in-One made this work out perfectly. Go declare it, Mason. Tell the world. ‘Our habit of wishing backward from what is to what might have been,'” she said, quoting the Seeress, “‘is the soft but persistent tapping that cracks the crystal.'”

“I need to memorize that one.”

“You need to go.”

We kissed goodbye on the front steps. I thought back to the Frolic, under the mosquito netting, when we'd breathed for each other. We'd managed the feat again. Maybe we can all do it, at certain times—any willing, good-hearted two of us. Maybe we're all fine matches for one another and someone should just throw us in a sack and shake it until we're jumbled up together and then pick us out in pairs and send us off. Maybe everything would come out the same. But things would have to come out somehow, surely, and when they did we'd have the choice we always have, and our only choice, really: approve or disapprove.

Once I'd obtained my release, events moved swiftly. One half of one moon cycle later, on June 10th, after an outdoor party and a feast attended by every living person I knew, all of whom lined up to wish me well and many of whom stuffed money in my pockets or verses they'd copied out or little charms they'd made, I left my home with another AFA whom I had not chosen or been chosen by to show a people quick to disapprove (or so we'd heard, and so we both believed) that constant approval had a faction, too. We'd invite them to join it. Come along, we'd say. And if they asked us why they ought to, or asked us why we were so few and growing fewer while they were so many and ever multiplying, we'd smile at them in the way that people smile when they want others to ask them why they're smiling—as though we knew something they didn't, something obvious.

I just hoped my partner could tell them what it was.

On our seventh night away
from Bluff we parked and locked the green Dodge camper van that we were supposed to sleep in to save money, paid for a motel room near the interstate by raiding the box of rubber-banded dollars presented to us by the lady Crafts Fair magnates, ordered by phone two tubs of cayenne chicken wings and two Dr Pepper soft drinks in barrel-size cups that advertised a movie called
The Flip Off
, and then lay on our stomachs on our queen-size beds, our neckties flipped onto the backs of our white shirts and our discount-store dress shoes kicked off on our pillows, and watched TV for the first time in our lives—seven hours of TV, without a break—until we were satisfied we'd been told the truth and had indeed come to a land of disapprovers.

“You watch,” Elder Stark said, “she'll pick the federal marshall. Mustache, sidearm, badge—he has it all.”

“Not the professional golfer?”

“He wears pink slacks.”

“He's rich, though. He owns a boat.”

“It doesn't matter. These women out here want killers. They want menace.”

The show was one of those real-life dating programs that we hadn't known existed until that night but had now seen three of and couldn't turn off. The women wore blue jeans slung low around their hip bones and kept glancing down at their candy-colored toenails as they strolled along white beaches in floppy sandals, kicking up sand to display their playful natures, followed by panting nippy little dogs that they clapped at now and then to hurry up even though the dogs' tongues were hanging out. The men were suntanned brutes in pretty shirts, with dull, narrow eyes, blond hair peaked up with hair spray, and mouths that didn't quite open when they spoke or fully close again when they finished speaking. They were actual people, supposedly, not actors, but they moved and pulled faces as I imagined actors might.

“We haven't discussed the teacher,” Elder Stark said.

“Not going to win. Too serious. Too stiff.”

“Too much like us, you mean.”

“We improved today. Especially at the end there. We relaxed.”

Elder Stark crossed his ankles on the pillow and returned his attention to the program, the last in a series of twelve, apparently, and the one where the woman would select a mate. Decision making fascinated my partner. He'd grown up in a bedroom that shared a flimsy wall with his mother's spiritual counseling office, where she interpreted her patients' dreams, adjusted their diets, and heard out the regrets that AFAs are encouraged not to have but still need a kind ear for when they do. He'd learned a lot through the Sheetrock—too much, he told me—and the main thing was that we're strangers to ourselves, pointed from birth toward outcomes we resist, even though we've obscurely chosen them. He said that his years of spying had revealed to him the key to happiness and satisfaction: rush at high speed toward wherever you're headed anyway. “Momentum, Mason. It's everything,” he said. “Frustration comes from fighting your own momentum.”

As he sucked the wet meat from another chicken wing, I went to the bathroom and peeled a sheet of cling wrap off a water glass. At the bottom lay a curled dead spider. The motel's staff was a band of red-eyed wrecks, like stragglers from a disbanded traveling circus, and I suspected they'd placed the creature there as a tiny act of vengeance on people who weren't as yet in such bad shape. At check-in a girl with a faded neck tattoo depicting a pair of strangling male hands had blown her nose on the shoulder of her T-shirt while she was programming our plastic key cards. I offered my handkerchief and she said, “Ick.” Elder Stark set a tract on her counter but she ignored it, and we didn't press her; we collected our keys and left. On a mission of just nine months we couldn't waste time on those who wouldn't have us.

“It's rough,” Elder Stark had said when we reached our room, “leaving folks alone like that to suffer.”

“Tomorrow we'll try harder. We're tired,” I said.

“You noticed that little cross around her neck?”

“Yes.”

“Those trinkets discourage me,” he said.

We'd been seeing crosses everywhere. Also, roadside billboards for the Lord, T-shirts and sweatshirts for the Lord, and stickers on cars and trucks with sayings like, “Believe in Him. He still believes in you.” I wasn't sure how seriously to take these things—some of them seemed to be decorations, or jokes—but my partner regarded them as evidence that we'd arrived too late. These fields had been harvested, harrowed, and replanted so many times that the soil was dead, he feared.

I rinsed out the spider and purged my sticky mouth of the cayenne and Dr Pepper tastes with three or fours swallow of neutral tepid water that made me miss the water back in Bluff, so hard and sharp, like icy liquid stone. I considered making myself vomit as I stood at the sink and faced the mirror and probed my belly with my fingertips to feel the hard, engorged outlines of my intestines. I'd mistreated them and I vowed to stop. We'd dined responsibly for the first five days, relying on almond slivers to keep from snacking and seeking out dinner spots with salad bars featuring radishes, beets, and turkey cubes, but then two nights ago, desperate for hot showers, we'd pulled into a truck stop west of Billings. I ordered the fish but the waitress wouldn't serve it, explaining that the freezer where it was kept had been contaminated by a busboy who'd urinated on the floor and walls after learning that he'd been fired. To be safe, we ordered sourdough pancakes. The corn syrup and white flour sapped our wills, and we'd been craving garbage ever since.

I opened my toilet kit and removed the products I'd picked up that morning at a Sheridan drugstore where I'd gone to buy razors and shaving cream while Elder Stark handed out pamphlets in the parking lot. The store's health-and-beauty aisle had overwhelmed me. I'd filled my basket with lotions, creams, and gels that I knew full well I couldn't afford but whose labels made claims I was powerless not to test.

“It's the golfer,” my partner called in from the bedroom. “I'll be danged. She picked the golfer. Frick.”

“You can use bad words. It's only me.”

“Damn it, she picked the golfer. Watch with me.”

“I'm getting ready to whiten my teeth,” I said.

“What's wrong with your teeth? They're fine.”

“You've seen the teeth here.”

Even after seven days in the van, my partner and I were still learning about America. The Church's founders had called the place “Terrestria,” refusing at first to vote in its elections, supply troops for its armies, or recognize its currency, and though they capitulated in 1913 in a bid to escape imprisonment, Bluff had remained a world apart. As schoolkids, as part of a secret curriculum we were forbidden to mention to nonmembers, we'd learned to refer to our incorporation as “the Arrangement” and think of it as temporary, lasting only until that fateful day when Terrestria succumbed to chaos and the Apostles were left to sift through the wreckage and usher in the New Edenic Covenant foretold by Mother Lucy. Elder Stark felt this day might come during our mission and he'd joked that the prospect excited him because it would offer us a chance to loot, starting with the luxury-auto lots. Elder Stark wasn't satisfied with the sluggish camper van that never seemed to shift out of second gear. He wanted a Range Rover with a V-8 like one we'd seen parked in Missoula our first day out.

“I'm eating your next-to-last wing,” he said. “Also, I'm switching to news. We need to pay more attention to the news.”

“Why is that?”

“The worse it gets, the better the chance they'll give us a fair hearing.”

“That's a mean thing to wish. The news is bad already.”

“It's hard to tell. We don't know what they're used to.”

I pricked the plastic tube of whitener open with its pointed cap. The instruction sheet promised results that you could see in only fourteen days, but I hoped to cut this to seven by applying a thick double coating. I couldn't wait two weeks. Women who struck me as fine potential mates were already passing me by without a look. They seemed to sense it when I looked at them, though, and yesterday one had reached into her bag as if for some instrument of self-defense.

“They're broadcasting a hostage difficulty. Texas clinic. Disgruntled young male nurse. The SWAT team, whatever they call it, has bulletproof breastplates and some kind of scope or camera that sees through walls. Watch this thing with me.”

“Once I'm done in here.”

“Should I whiten my teeth, too?”

“That's up to you.”

“Why don't I stay natural and you go whiter and whoever has more luck in meeting people, he'll be the leader. We need to choose a leader.”

“You go ahead. You're older.”

“You're clearer headed.”

Elder Stark was being disingenuous. He knew that he'd been in command since we set out and that he had no intention of yielding power. How he'd assumed control I wasn't certain. I only knew that the first time we'd bought gasoline he'd insisted on premium, for better mileage, and that was that—the pattern was set. Next he was pointing out which passersby we should try to talk into taking the Well-being Quiz and which ones we should allow to meet their fates.

“My mom had a man she counseled who took a hostage once. He dreamed it before he did it,” Elder Stark said. “He tied up his wife with twisted plastic trash bags to keep her from leaving him for another man, then locked her in a shed behind the house while his neighbors searched the woods. After a week he set her free and she refused to report him. They're still together. That tying her up with trash bags did the trick.”

“This happened in Bluff? I never heard a word.”

“It happened when we were little. You've heard of ‘angel babies'?”

“Never.”

“They're the newborns who don't come out right. The Church owns a house in Spokane where people care for them. Big heads. Short arms. Stubby fingers. Angel babies.”

“Stop it.”

“I heard about them through the wall.”

“You make stuff up,” I said. “It isn't that funny. A lot of it's danged disgusting.”

“Say it: ‘damned.'”

When he bantered this way, out of sight, without direction, I knew what Elder Stark was really doing. He'd unhitched his belt. One hand was in his underwear. It had happened after lights-out in the van on our second night and again the following night. I'd done it, too. An agreement took shape. We could carry on as we pleased in our own bunks as long as we spared each other the sights and sounds.

I dipped a small wand into the plastic tube, drew back my lips so they wouldn't spread saliva, and covered my incisors and bicuspids with a layer of bleachy-tasting gel. The tooth discoloration was due to diet, and particularly the “strong digestives” such as anise jelly and sweetened pine pitch that we took after heavy fatty meals. The results of this regimen, for me and others, were clear, unusually elastic skin, urine that sometimes smelled strongly of burning leaves, and tooth enamel scored by hairline etchings that I feared were the beginnings of ruinous cracks. Eating as Adam was thought to have was perilous, but at least it warded off the bloating that I was suffering from that night.

“They're saying there's no sign of life inside the clinic. It's over. The SWAT team is taking off its breastplates. I feel like we should go back to the lobby and give that poor girl with the cross another chance.”

“This stuff needs to sit on my teeth for fifteen minutes.”

“Shiny beautiful teeth look strange on men. That blond guy in Bozeman—the one who bought us coffee and said we could stay anytime in his spare room—his teeth were so white they were almost clear, like glass.”

“I'll stop before that.”

“Come watch with me. I'm lonesome.”

“So sleep, then. Turn it off.”

“I can't,” he said. “I'm lonesome without it. I don't know how that happened.”

“I do.”

“How?”

“It's hard to put it into words. You forget how quiet it was before, or something. The quiet scared you, but you didn't know it. After you turn off the screen, you know it, though.”

“We've never turned it off.”

“It's a prediction.”

Lonesomeness was a problem with Elder Stark. I'd known him before as a schoolmate and a Church friend but I'd only grown close to him during the last few training seminars, after we'd moved into Lauer's house so we could spend more time practicing being Person One. I'd learned that my new friend couldn't sleep in stretches longer than two hours due to nightmares, and sometimes, in the middle of the night, waking up on my bunk in the makeshift basement dormitory, I'd hear him sucking cough drops or crunching almonds as though trying to drown out troubling thoughts. A few times I heard him talking to himself in a croaky old man's voice. I got the tones and the rhythms but not the words. When I asked Elder Stark about this in the morning his face tightened up and he told me I'd been dreaming. A few hours later he confessed, “The Hobo paid me a visit. He keeps me company. Was he being critical or kind?” I told him the voice sounded very faintly critical and asked him what the Hobo looked like, afraid to ask him how real the Hobo was.