Elders (2 page)

“He
communicated
a lot of things,” McLeod said, laying emphasis on the procedural-speak he already disliked in Passos. He stared at him for a long, hard second. Then he changed his tack. “Elder Passos, we can pick this back up tomorrow, can’t we? I think eighteen months on the mission is worth a little break. Don’t you?”

Passos put his hands at the top of his thighs, arms akimbo, long, stick-figure limbs. He seemed to be weighing his options, which battles and when.

“How about we do five more doors?” Passos said. “Then we’ll take a break, okay?”

McLeod hesitated a moment, then sighed.

The first door was Passos’s. Nothing. The next was McLeod’s. Also nothing. The third door triggered an explosion of barking,
a big dog from the sound of it, each bark like a mortar round. After several bracing seconds of this, McLeod and Passos moved on. When they knocked the fourth door, a flutter of movement came from inside the courtyard. A door handle catching, a door scraping open. A patter of footsteps approaching the outer door. A young face through the gap. Brown eyes, shorn brown hair.

“Well hello,” Passos said.

The face disappeared and the steps retreated. McLeod and Passos heard whispered voices from the open front door, a quick high alto, a dragging soprano. Then the tiny steps again.

“No one’s here, okay?” said the alto voice through the outer door.
Ninguém está aqui, tá?

McLeod snorted at the familiar phrase. It might have been the very first phrase he had learned to separate out from the rapid slur of Portuguese.
Ninguém está aqui, tá?
And that final contracted
tá
, that timidness, so typical of the local style, and so tiring. We’re not interested. We’re not available. We’re not even here. Okay?

“But you are there,” McLeod said to the boy.

“What?”

“I said
you
are there, aren’t you? You’re someone.”

“Yeah but my mom’s not here.”

“Yeah? Who were you talking to just a second ago?”

The boy paused, recoursed again to his line. “Nobody’s here, okay?”

“I don’t believe you,” Elder McLeod said.

Passos turned to him, suddenly furrowed, his dark brows combining in a long sharp
V
shape.
Let’s go
, he mouthed, leaning away from the door.

“But listen,” McLeod continued. “We’re representatives of the
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. You may know us as the Mormons? Well, anyway.” McLeod spoke in a clipped, mock-cheery tone. “I’m Elder McLeod and this is my companion, Elder Passos. ‘Elder’ is a title, not a name, by the way—in case you’re curious. Many people are. But we’ve come here today with a very special message for you and your mother—”

“She’s not here.”

“Of course, of course. But we have a message for the two of you anyway. It’s a message about liars and what happens to them in the—”

“Elder!”

A hand clamped McLeod’s wrist and he was halfway off his feet. He felt the anger in Passos’s grip, tried to shake himself free of it. “Let go of me!”

In the middle of the street Passos swung him loose and stared, his dark brows creased even sharper. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“The kid was lying.”

“Of course he was lying, Elder, but you don’t say that. You never say that! Is this really how you act? Are you really this green?”

McLeod stiffened at the word. “I’m green? You think
I
am green. Who knocks doors for two hours right after lunch, when the whole damn country is asleep? And I’m green?” He turned around and started back up the street. Passos yelled after him, “Where do you think you’re going?” McLeod didn’t answer, didn’t turn around. He shielded his eyes against the shards of light off the river as it crooked into view.

He waited at a nearby bus stop for ten minutes. Fifteen minutes, twenty. Had all the bus drivers in Carinha taken siestas too, all of Minas, the entirety of southeast Brazil? And where was Elder Passos? He had failed to follow after him, failed to turn up at the bus stop at all. He had succeeded, in other words, in surprising McLeod. Maybe there was a touch of earth in him after all. The Missionary Handbook forbade and forbade—no TV, radio, newspapers, etc., no recreational phone calls, etc., etc.—but it proscribed nothing so strongly as being separate from your companion. And yet … McLeod checked his watch, craned his head to see as far down the street as he could. Nothing and no one.

A touch of earth
. Where was that from again? Something by Tennyson, right? Or was it Longfellow? He would have to ask Mom to look it up for him in his next letter home. Why could he never remember anything? Why could he not hold on to knowledge? Already the yield of years of effort in high school, and all the reading and memorizing he’d done on his own—it had dwindled to traces, scraps of language, and most of it floating maddeningly free of its context. Such that someone says now, at some point, and for some reason, that
who loves me must have a touch of earth, the low sun makes the color …
and something else. He would have to check it with his mother.

Soon enough McLeod could check things himself. He could enroll at Boston College or maybe Amherst, or maybe even one of the Ivy Leagues—he could at least apply—and then he could take history and literature classes and study facts, or study fiction, and
put behind him this muddy slosh of the two. Six months more. The homestretch.

McLeod checked his watch again. Had it really been thirty minutes since he last saw Passos, and more than that without a bus? But just then he heard a low, diesel rumble: the rectangular bulk of a city bus rounding a corner, spilling its sound onto the main street. McLeod stood up from the bench with what must have been an expectant look, for by the time he saw that it was an eight bus the driver had already begun to brake for him. The bus pulled up to the curb and unfolded itself: the platform’s sudden hitch downward, the hydraulic sigh of the double doors. The driver leaned on his lever and looked at McLeod. “You getting on?”

“This is the eight, right? I’m waiting for the six. Sorry,” McLeod said.

“All right.”

“But, hey,” he said, “where is everybody?”

“Probably glued to their TVs.”

“No, I mean, where are all the buses?”

“Less people to pick up, less buses.” The driver studied McLeod a moment longer, a bemused little grin dawning up through his features. “The Latin American Championships, right? They started today. How do you say it?” He reached for the word in English: “Soccer?”

McLeod thanked him and stepped back from the curb as the bus pulled away, lifting a shimmering wake of dust. As it dissipated, McLeod caught sight of Elder Passos on the opposite sidewalk. He seemed apparitional, unsolid except for the green cans he carried in either hand. He started across the street.

“For a second I thought you’d got on that bus,” Passos called,
holding up two cans of Guaraná. “Would have been twice the refreshment for me.”

“Where were you?” McLeod said.

Passos gestured at the soda as he drew close to McLeod. “I figured we needed something to cool us down. And I don’t know where anything is yet. So it took a while. You’ll forgive me?”

Elder Passos produced his watted smile, easy and bright, and it softened McLeod. He accepted the can from Passos, cracked the tab—the sound of barbecues, camping trips. The transporting sound of elsewhere. The elders sat on the bus-stop bench and drank in long continuous gulps, as if discovering their thirst as they tried to sate it. After a moment McLeod came up for air, broke the silence. “I’m surprised you found somebody to sell you something. Today’s the start of the Latin American Championships, apparently.”

“Today?” Passos said. “Seriously?” He looked off for a minute, came back. “I guess that’s right, isn’t it? Early January. The mission disorients you.”

“Amen,” McLeod said.

“Amen and amen.” Passos tipped the last of his soda above his open mouth, shaking the can like a handbell, dripping it dry. When McLeod had finished his a minute later, Passos walked the two cans to a trash barrel a few feet from the bus stop. He turned around. “Better?”

Elder McLeod nodded his head, even muttered a quiet sentence about the heat and his impatience—how he was working on it, how he wasn’t usually like he was back there.

“That’s okay,” Passos said. “We’ll just knock the last door, then call it a day. We said five, right? One more?”

McLeod pushed air through his nose again, shaking his head through the disembodied laugh, a genuine sound now, almost admiring.

It was Passos’s door anyway. He led them back to the street they’d been knocking earlier, and in the middle of it he put one hand to his head, another out in front of him like a seer, pretending to channel some power as to where he should knock. It was another gesture, another touch of earth. McLeod gave a grateful laugh.

“You’re not quite the hard case you’re made out to be,” he said.

“And you’re not quite the slacker,” Passos said. “Not
quite
.” He smiled a brief reassurance as he slowed before a faded green door about halfway down the street. He knocked it. Again there was stirring in the courtyard. There were footsteps. Just shy of the property wall a woman’s voice called, “Who is it?”

Passos answered, “We’re missionaries.”

The metal door opened on a dark-haired woman in a sleeveless white blouse, cutoff jean shorts. McLeod noticed the shorts, the legs in them, and quickly looked down. The woman wore rubber sandals gone thin as reeds; she stood on an orange dirt walkway that led to a makeshift orange-brick house behind her, a crude box like all the other boxes on the street. McLeod looked up again, tried to match Passos’s smile. The woman smiled too: a wide, simple face. Faint laugh lines, like parentheses, lifted up and fell back. Yes? she said. Could she help them?

“My name is Elder Passos,” Passos began, “and this is my companion, Elder McLeod. We’re representatives of the Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. You may know us as the Mormons. May I ask your name, ma’am?”

“I’m Josefina,” the woman said. “ ‘Ma’am’ is my grandmother.”

“Ah, yes.” Passos lowered his eyes a moment, raised them again. “Josefina, we’ve come here today with a message about the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. About how families can be together forever. About peace and love and hope. The message takes about twenty minutes. May we share it with you?”

Josefina bent forward a little and peered at the missionaries’ name tags, first Passos’s, then McLeod’s. She tilted her head. “ ‘Elder’? How come both of you are named Elder?”

“ ‘Elder’ is a title,” McLeod came in, putting on his brightest tone, his best accent.

“Are you German?” Josefina asked him.

“American.”

“Really?” She looked from McLeod to Passos. “How old are you two?”

“We’re both twenty,” Passos said. “Would you and your family like to hear our message?”

“And what are they paying you to do this?”

“We pay our own way,” Passos said.

“Really. And where are
you
from?”

“Recife.”

“Is that how you do it then? A Brazilian and an American?”

“Not always.”

Josefina nodded. “I’ve seen you guys around before, the pairs of you—white dress shirts and black pants, in this heat. But I never knew.” She looked back and forth between Passos and McLeod, a
wry, deliberating curl to her lips. “A northeasterner and an American come all the way down here to preach to me, huh?” Her smile broadened, her eyes narrowed. After a long silence Passos said, “Josefina?”

“Okay,” she said.

McLeod perked up. “You want to hear our message?”

“Sure,” Josefina said, “why not? We could use a little gospel around here. My husband especially.” Josefina winked at the elders. McLeod felt a sudden blush rise up in his cheeks. He looked to Passos. The sight of him hesitating on the doorstep. Josefina said, “Oh, did you want to do it now? My husband’s not here right now.”

Elder Passos asked if he would be back soon. Could they come back later that night?

Josefina scrunched up her face as if tasting something sour. Then she shrugged. “Well, Leandro’s on a construction job today, but what that really means is that he and the rest of his crew are holed up in a bar somewhere watching the first round of the Latin Championships. I might not see him until late, to be honest. He does have work, though. I thank God for that.”