Elders

For my parents     

The two friends stood for a few moments …

not speaking a word, as two travelers
,

who have lost their way, sometimes stand

and admit their perplexity in silence
.

—W
ILLA
C
ATHER
,
O P
IONEERS
!

On an airless
midsummer afternoon in Brazil, in the close, crucible heat of that country, Elder McLeod trailed his senior companion onto a street that looked just like the last one, and the last, and the last. Nothing moved. Or nothing animate, anyway—a soda can rocking on its side, dust scrims, the whites on clotheslines ghosting up above orange-brick property walls lined with beer-bottle shards. Even the gutters looked abandoned, shorn of moisture, a blond sedimentary braid running parallel to each cracking slab of sidewalk. McLeod watched Elder Passos peel off to the left of him, and for a moment all he wanted in the world was to keep walking, epically, all the way back to Massachusetts and the life he had left and the life he ached to have back. He could just ditch the last six months of his mission, light out for home—

“Elder? Elder McLeod? Hello?”

The voice came from behind him, rapid and insistent—already it grated on McLeod. He stopped. He turned his head half around, a half show of resistance, but enough to see his senior companion sidled up to yet another door, waiting, gripping the doorframe with his hand even, like a stubborn child in the toy aisle.

“It’s your turn,” Passos said. “Right?” He motioned his head at the door, which looked just like the last one, and the last: older than the tin it was made of, once blue (or green or yellow), but now, faded and dusted, sun-scored, a blue-gray, the color of dirty mop water. Elder McLeod stared at the door and clenched his teeth
out of a sort of slow reflex. And on his Slump Day, too, he thought. That was the worst part. He thought: Five minutes. I’ll knock for just five more minutes. He looked down at his wristwatch: 3:02. Ten minutes at the very most.

McLeod backed up until he stood beside Passos at the door. He rapped on the thin metal, a thin warping sound, and out of the corner of his eye he watched Passos watching. They had only been working together for a week, and the force of Passos’s earnestness, his sheer newness, could still startle McLeod. Look at him now: yellow-brown, tall and lanky, his face like a tapering ear of corn, and in the center of it, a smile. Big-watted, toothy. At every door Passos smiled like that, a sort of insurance policy, McLeod thought, in the off chance that someone actually came to a door.

After several unpromising seconds at this one, Passos’s smile remained bright.

“How long have you been out again?” McLeod asked him.

“Huh? Oh. Sixteen months almost.”

“Congratulations,” he said, but he laughed as he said it, a thin, tight laugh.
Parabéns
. He pushed air through his nose, shook his head, and stepped away from the door, not waiting to make sure no one was coming. If someone was going to come to a door, you heard it early, heard movement in the house or in the yard, someone shushing the dog maybe, someone calling out
Who is it?
Or someone rushing up to peer through the gap between the brick wall and the outer door, then calling for a parent—a mother, usually. It happened quick. You didn’t need to stand around, a hopeful debutante holding a smile for full minutes. Did Passos really not know that? The Boy Wonder? The climber who had made zone leader at only eleven months out?

Elder McLeod waited, half turned again, and now he noticed the shadow of a frown on Passos’s face.

“Nobody’s coming,” McLeod said.

“I was just making sure,” Passos said.

The elders finished knocking the street, every door a no-show, and started right into the next street. More no-shows. More smiles from Passos. McLeod wanted to throw his head back and laugh. Instead, he slowed his pace, then stopped, looking down at his wristwatch: 3:08. When he looked up again the world was still the same, everlastingly the same: the dust scrims, the whites on clotheslines, the property walls bristling with colored glass, rows of sharp, bared teeth. He could hear the river in the distance now, but only just.

At a sudden gust of wind a pair of blue jeans kicked up above the property wall to McLeod’s left. He thought of the old dress pants he’d laid out on his bedspread this morning, a threadbare sacrifice waiting to be burned. A tradition. A rite. Which he would duly observe tonight with Sweeney and Kimball. He hadn’t seen them in a week, not since transfers and the news that they would both become senior companions, at last. He expected they would razz him, the eternal junior, and that they’d see through his good-riddance routine. It did gall McLeod that he had to take orders now from someone with
less
experience on the mission, and with no knowledge of Carinha at all, the city McLeod had served in for the last six months. But Elder Passos played the game; McLeod didn’t. Passos
stooped
to the game; McLeod wouldn’t.

Over the sound of the river came a different kind of coursing,
much louder and nearer to McLeod. His senior companion stood to his right, upending a squeeze water bottle above his mouth. The bottle exhaled as Passos lowered it, replaced it in his bag. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand, then nodded at McLeod and started for the next door.

“Really?” McLeod said.

Passos turned around. “What?”

“Today’s my Slump Day, man. And nobody’s answering.”

“Your ‘Slump Day’?” Passos said.

“You don’t know what Slump Day is? Are you really that—”

“I know what it is, Elder McLeod. It’s unbecoming of a missionary. That’s what President Mason said at the last zone leaders conference. No more crass names to mark so-called occasions, and no more burning perfectly good clothes either. Didn’t your last zone leader communicate that?”