Elders (18 page)

“Almost.”

“How can you sleep in this?”

“You get used to it,” Passos said. He kept his eyes closed, but a slow smile spread across his face. “When you win this many titles …”

He held that smile into the evening, he and the rest of Brazil. At the first reddening of the sky the elders started for Josefina’s, still on foot, and every face they saw in the street seemed caught up in the same private lovely thought. It almost made Elder Passos forget what he’d said. That they’d baptize Josefina this week. She’d backed him into it, and now what? He could tell her that the paperwork was taking longer than expected, or that the
mission president was out of town, or something. But of course then McLeod would know, and Passos wasn’t in the habit of lying. Maybe he should explain it to Josefina. Or maybe Leandro would actually be there. Maybe now that the championships were over he’d take more interest, he’d soften. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. On a day like today almost anything was possible.

They passed
barzinhos
letting out a fairly steady stream of revelers. Car horns still pierced the air now and then. On the other side of the street Passos spotted a family of Pentecostals walking, he assumed, to Sunday-evening services, the father in a dark suit, a Bible under his arm, and his wife and two daughters following close behind him. They all walked bolt upright, like a phalanx of imperial soldiers, but even
they
appeared to be smiling. Passos watched them turn off the main street with something close to tenderness. He started whistling, unconsciously at first, but then he matched the words to the tune and it made sense.
We are all enlisted till the conflict is o’er. Happy are we, happy are we …

Was that what
he thought it was? Was that—He listened as the melody dropped down into the chorus, marching, marching, a martial line. It was. Elder McLeod hated the hymn, always had. His companion continued his quiet whistling, quiet yet clear, a sharp stream of air that cut through the reveling noise around them. Passos started into another verse and McLeod said, “Do me a favor?”

“What?”

“Knock that off. I can’t stand that hymn.”

“ ‘We Are All Enlisted’?”

“It sets my teeth on edge. Seriously.”

“Ah, it’s a great hymn, Elder. It’s a great hymn.”

Passos kept on with his whistling—down into the chorus, then up into yet another verse—as if McLeod hadn’t said a word, as if he’d actually encouraged him.
More terrible-hymn whistling, please. Louder!
But in fact he’d meant what he said and he’d said what he meant—no sarcasm, no trifling. At the edge of the fourth verse Elder Passos stopped his whistling. McLeod muttered a thank-you, but his companion didn’t acknowledge it. Passos had stopped his walking too. He stood in the middle of the sidewalk, straining his eyes at something ahead of them. “No,” he whispered.

McLeod followed Passos’s gaze to a huddle of men in front of a
barzinho
across the street, all of them nursing dark bottles, some
nodding to the music. One man in particular, dark brown, lanky, cocked his head drunkenly back at them. He separated himself from the group, steps hitching, starting across the street. At the first sound of his voice—“Elders?” he shouted. “Is that you?”—he became Leandro. “Elders! Oh Elders! Wait for me!”

Passos had started walking again, and McLeod couldn’t tell if he intended to hurry
to
Leandro or past him. He followed behind as Leandro veered onto the sidewalk ahead of them, and Passos abruptly stopped. Josefina’s husband looked looser, shufflier in his walk, as if he’d been deboned in the legs and arms. He moved in ways that seemed to surprise even him.

“Oh Elders!” Leandro said. He closed the last yards between them holding a sad-looking brown bottle shorn of its label. McLeod could hear what was left in the bottle sloshing from Leandro’s movements. He wore a faded yellow Brazil jersey, mesh shorts, rubber sandals. He looked even tanner than the last time they’d seen him, rangier, his goatee gone to seed. That he worked construction seemed suddenly fitting to McLeod: it looked as if a loose jumble of two-by-fours was sidling up to them, was smiling at them, laughing a loud stupid laugh.

“Oh Elders,” he said, “you see the game?”

Leandro’s breath shocked of foul
cachaça
. His pink eyes swam in their sockets.

Passos stepped forward and gestured his hand at McLeod as if to keep him back—something tender in this, McLeod felt, but also patronizing. His companion ducked his head, tracking Leandro’s. “How much have you had to drink, Leandro?”

“I’m talking about the
game
,” Leandro said. “The game! Did you see it?”

“Missionaries aren’t allowed to watch TV,” McLeod said. “Remember?”

Passos turned to him and shook his head—
I’ll handle this
. He turned back around just as Leandro swung his left arm over Passos’s shoulder. Leandro lifted his other arm, disjointed and exultant, waving the
cachaça
bottle like a flag. “We won!” he shouted. “Again! What joy to be Brazilian!”

Elder Passos slipped Leandro’s beery embrace like a prizefighter, ducking under and out with such agility that Leandro lost his balance, listed left, then right, overcorrecting. The brown bottle sang as he threw out his arms for support. Passos took Leandro by the shoulders, steadied him. “Why don’t you come home with us?” he said. “To
your
home. We’re on our way there to visit your wife. Leandro? When’s the last time you were home?”

“My wife! Of course! Hey guys,” he shouted, wheeling around to address his huddle of friends across the street, which had since dispersed. “Guys, where are you? These are the kids I was telling you about. Guys?” He visored his forehead with his left hand and bent a little, straining his gaze in the direction of the bar. “Ah, fuck,” he muttered. He turned back to the elders. “Of course you’re going to visit my wife. You love my wife, don’t you? Especially gringo here.” He jerked a thumb past Passos to McLeod. “Don’t you, Elder Gringo?”

McLeod thought he hadn’t heard him, or understood him. But his face began to burn. Leandro swung his arm around Passos again and said out of the side of his mouth, “He comes to our country, eh Passos, and tries to steal our women, eh?”

Passos ducked out and under again. “You’re drunk, Leandro. Go sleep it off.”

“Go home,” McLeod said. His voice sounded hoarse all of a sudden, obstructed.

And all of a sudden Leandro straightened, clamped his eyes on McLeod. “What are you doing with my wife?” He shouted, “Are you
fucking
my wife?” Leandro lunged and threw a loose, waving punch at McLeod, narrowly missing. His body pitched forward with his arm’s momentum, landing him facedown in the street.

Adrenaline fired in every cell of McLeod’s body. His heart thudded high up in his throat. Passos put a quick hand under McLeod’s chin. “He didn’t get you?”

Leandro tried to lift himself from the street, collapsed. He tried again and collapsed again. He writhed like a catch in its throes, struggling for something it no longer has the means of. Escape. Dignity.

“Help!” Leandro wailed into the pavement. “Help me up, for Christ’s sake! Elders!”

Passos moved McLeod back another step, then bent down and rolled Leandro onto his back. The man blinked several times, his right cheek coated in dust. Passos held out his hand. “Come on.”

Leandro took the hand and mocked, “Come on, come on. Let’s go fuck Leandro’s wife. That’s what you do when I’m not there, right? Just like your Joseph Smith. The church of the wife-fuckers.”

Passos wrenched his hand away and sent the jumble of a man back down to the dusty street. Leandro tried to prop himself up from his back now—his legs spread, crablike—but he fell back. Elder McLeod stepped forward and his companion said, “No. Leave him where he is.” He took McLeod by the wrist and upper arm and rushed him off down the street as Leandro screamed after
them, a torrent of imprecations that Passos covered with a low, rapid voice in McLeod’s ear: “Leave him where he is, in the dirt, in the filth, just leave him, don’t even look back …”

An hour later the scene still spun in McLeod’s mind in a sort of horror-movie loop: Leandro’s voice catching on the
f
of
Are you fff-fucking my wife
, McLeod literally flinching at the word, he and Passos both, the burn of
cachaça
in their nostrils, and again. It felt surreal at moments, or if not quite that, if not quite past reality, then past explanation, exempt from it. But no. McLeod arrived with his companion at the edge of Josefina’s street and knew that a very real reckoning must come.

“Just …” McLeod said. “Just give me a minute.”

In the near distance the river ran brownish pink and red. The sound of it promised calm. McLeod walked to it, his senior companion following after. They sat in silence on the corrugated guardrail that separated the road from the shallow bank beneath them, the occasional prods and nubs of drainage pipes sticking out of the dirt like uncovered limbs. The low sun making the color on the river. For the moment it looked blood-red.

McLeod spoke first. “Now what?”

“We baptize Josefina.”

“You mean—”

“We baptize Josefina without Leandro. We don’t even tell her that we’d changed our minds. She doesn’t need to know that. We pick up where we left off Tuesday night.”

A long silence soaked into the air around them. They heard no
fireworks anymore, no car horns—only the runs and riffles below, a continuous sound but somehow dislocated, fragmented, like the glow on the water. McLeod asked about the time.

“We were supposed to be there half an hour ago,” Passos said.

“Okay,” McLeod said. “One more minute.”

The elders knocked
at Josefina’s door and waited for what seemed to Elder McLeod like a very long time. She came to the door, smiling, still in her Sunday best. McLeod exhaled. Inside, the elders took their usual seats as Josefina started toward the kitchen. Passos called her back. “No need for snacks tonight, Josefina. But thank you. We won’t be taking that much of your time.”

Josefina hesitated in the kitchen doorway. “It’s just water and some cookies—nothing heavy.”

“We appreciate that,” Passos said, “but please,” and he motioned at the catty-corner love seat. At length Josefina sat down—on the side away from them, Elder McLeod noticed—smoothing her knee-length skirt, her legs tight together. Was she self-conscious in front of them? In front of me? Does she know? Did he tell her?

McLeod thought of Leandro with hatred. He kept his head down. For long minutes he fixed his eyes on the patch of pocked cement between his shoes. If he had to look up at Josefina, if she mentioned him by name, he looked her straight in the eyes, the pupils, those mute black dots like the points on a compass. He moved between those poles: the floor between his feet, the very center of her eyes. Elder McLeod wished he had run from Leandro,
sprinted
, no matter how rude or cowardly it might have seemed, for now he could think of little else but what Leandro had said, and how he’d said it—that initial
f
, the explosion past it—and how the very word had created something in him, a rank world, the images storming
his mind now, spinning past the backs of his eyes like the women from Passos’s magazine, all of it running together, and he couldn’t stop it, he couldn’t make it stop, the thought of her pregnancy couldn’t even stop it. He blamed Leandro. He blamed Leandro for all of it. Leandro Leandro Leandro. Elder McLeod glared at the floor and considered the name with such vehemence, such hate, like a sort of crazed mantra—
Leandro Leandro Leandro
—that he couldn’t be sure if he’d imagined the name or if he’d heard it come out of Josefina’s mouth.