Elders (23 page)

Elder Passos and Rômulo kept walking, but Elder McLeod stood moored a few yards beyond the sign. He couldn’t even pretend to nonchalance. He had never actually seen a physical house of prostitution—he could hardly believe they really existed—and now here one stood in the broad bright daylight. It had been here the whole time he had been here, less than two miles from the apartment, hiding out in the open. Had it not been for the sign Elder McLeod would have assumed that the brown stucco wall enclosed an abandoned lot. All at once it made sense why his companion preferred to detour around this particular stretch of road. It was impossible to behold even the walls now without thinking of the sinfulness and impossible bravery of some men. McLeod ticked his gaze up the length of the sign like a mariner looking for directions, and a different sky wheeled into view.

His companion was saying something. He said it again. On the third time McLeod recognized his name. “McLeod! Earth to Elder McLeod!”

“What?”

“I thought we were hurrying for Leandro. What are you doing?”

“Nothing,” McLeod said.

Elder Passos checked
his watch as they turned onto Josefina’s street. Quarter past eleven. If they were lucky enough to find Leandro at home, they’d have just enough time for a lesson before lunch. Though “lesson” was too formal a word for what Passos had in mind. He wanted a low-key conversation, a chat, really, which still managed to wind upward toward the spiritual, slowly, almost imperceptibly, like a graceful circular staircase. He planned to end with a scripture, not read aloud—again, too formal—but rather recited from memory, from a place of long and heartfelt conviction.
Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock …
Then Passos would bear his testimony and then, if the moment proved right—if the Spirit indicated—he would invite Leandro himself to say the closing prayer. Maybe they would even kneel around the coffee table, all of them, in a gesture of added humility. And if Josefina invited the elders to stay on for lunch? If she insisted? Elder Passos already knew what he would say: They had another appointment, they were very sorry. It mattered less that this wasn’t the strict truth; what mattered was that they leave the house while the Spirit was still a palpable presence, the air like a warm oceanic buoyancy to surrender to, to float away on.

They arrived at Josefina’s door. Passos went to knock but his companion stopped him.

“Let the honorary missionary try,” McLeod said. He brought Rômulo in between them, within knocking distance of the door.

“We don’t have time,” Passos said, rapping on the metal. The sound reverberated and fell away, and in the wake of it the silence felt accusing. “We’ve got forty minutes if we’re lucky.”

Yet again Passos startled himself by the tone in his voice, not explanatory but defensive. For a moment it seemed like Rômulo stood between them more to head off a confrontation than to accompany a missionary lesson.

They heard the front door scrape open, footsteps in their direction, the tread somewhat heavier than usual. The steps left off just short of the door.

“Who is it?” Leandro called.

Passos had expected Josefina to come to the door, if anyone did, and now in his surprise he let the question hang.

“Who is it?” Leandro asked again.

McLeod moved to answer but Passos warned him off with a sharp wave. He lowered his voice beyond recognition, and said, “Electric company here.”

Elder Passos ignored the curious smile from Rômulo, the outright glare from McLeod. He didn’t care about that; he couldn’t afford to. The door latch clattered and the door swung open.

Leandro stood in the rectangular frame, confused at first, then darkening with recognition. He wore green soccer shorts, a white tank top, and the same thick goatee he’d had the evening after the finals several weeks ago. The muscles in his arms, his entire body, tensed as he looked from his companion to Rômulo to him, and back to his companion.

Passos said, “Leandro.” He raised his hand like a footballer acknowledging
his foul to the referee. “Leandro, listen, we just want to talk to you. We haven’t seen you in a long time, you know? Do you have a few minutes before lunch? Just to talk?”

“Go away,” Leandro said, his voice like gravel, rough and hard and loose. Elder Passos couldn’t tell if the smell of
cachaça
carried on his words or if it came off his body, deep-down pervaded, seeped in over the course of weeks and months and years. The sweet-sour stench of too much alcohol. The body never forgets.

“Leandro,” Passos said, “please—”

“I said go away. We don’t want you here.
She
doesn’t want you here either. She just can’t say it. But I can. Go. Go!” He flung his hand out, pointing, barely missing Rômulo’s face. Rômulo flinched.

“And who are you anyway?” Leandro said to him. “Are you supposed to be the electric man?”

“I’m Rômulo,” he said. “Maurilho and Rose’s son? I met you once in—”

“So there’s three of you now?
Three
of you here for my wife?”

Elder McLeod took a sudden step forward. “Hey! Hey. Don’t you start that.”

Leandro took the same step backward, out of instinct, but he more than made up for it as he moved to within inches of McLeod’s face, straightening, stiffening, nostrils flaring. McLeod held his ground on the stoop, returned the stare. Elder Passos felt suddenly disoriented, unprepared. He tried to interrupt the current that coursed between McLeod and Leandro; he put up both hands like a traffic officer. “Listen, listen, listen.” He said it again. “Leandro? Leandro, please listen!”

The man slid his eyes, slowly, in Passos’s direction. He kept his head straight, kept McLeod in front of him.

“We didn’t want …” Passos said. “We didn’t come here to upset you. We’re your friends, okay? We just wanted to say hello again. We’ve missed you. That’s all we wanted to say. Okay?”

Leandro’s voice came even lower now, a growl. “We don’t want you here. I don’t want you here. Josefina doesn’t want you here.”

And just then Josefina stepped into the front doorway. She stood half in shadow, half in light, but Passos could still make out the beginnings of a stomach under her T-shirt. She called across the courtyard: “Is everything okay, honey?” She paused. “Elders?”

Leandro turned toward his wife as McLeod shouted past him, “Josefina, it’s us. It’s the Elders!” Again the over-intimacy in his companion’s voice—even now Passos heard it—until Leandro turned back around and crowded that much more into McLeod’s face, a stiff finger at his sternum. He pushed McLeod back—hard jabs, short, jabbing steps. “You don’t fucking talk to my wife, Elder Gringo! You don’t even fucking talk—”

Leandro doubled forward and made a sound like a lowing cow, his eyes screwed tight shut. Only then did Passos see his companion’s arm buried elbow-deep in Leandro’s stomach. McLeod reared back and drove his fist home again. The lowing renewed, ran down to a wheeze, then Leandro tipped forward and collapsed onto the stoop.

Josefina shouted, “Elders! What did you do? Get out of here!” She rushed to her husband and braced her hands on his back as he pitched and heaved for breath. “Are you all right, Leandro? Honey?” When she looked up she glowered to see them still backing away. “I said get out of here, Elders! Don’t come back!”

McLeod turned and ran, and Passos and Rômulo followed after.
Two, maybe three minutes later. Passos and Rômulo at the bus stop. Rômulo bent double over his knees, breathing hard. Passos too. He took great drags of air, his lungs burned. For all the walking he and McLeod did every day, Elder Passos lacked the stamina for full-tilt running.

He looked up at the sound of an outbound city bus rumbling onto the main road a few blocks away. The big rasping thing picked up speed only to slow down as it neared them, pushing up a wave of heat and sound. Elder Passos didn’t even try to speak over it. He reached into his pocket for bus fare but Rômulo refused it, pointed instead down the street. “You saw him go that way?”

Passos nodded. Rômulo climbed onto the bus and from the stairwell turned around. He showed a weak, worried smile to Elder Passos. Then he disappeared behind the sun-dark glass of the bus’s closing doors.

Elder Passos found his companion at the corrugated rail by the riverbank, a familiar spot. McLeod sat with his gaze on the river, eyes vacant as a doll’s, the water pulled and corded by the current. Passos sat down beside him, regarding him sidelong, waiting, waiting.

After a long time McLeod said, “What’s there to say?”

“Nothing now,” Passos said. “You made very sure of that, didn’t you?”

Silence.

“
Didn’t
you? You and your diplomacy of the balled-up fist. It’s the American way, isn’t it?”

More silence.

“Here we are trying to publish peace, but I should have known better, huh? Elder? Don’t you think?
Huh?
”

Elder McLeod kept his eyes on the river. For a moment the sounds from the road faded to nothing and only the quick sleek burble of the water floated up to them.

“Peace,” Passos said in English, as much to himself as to McLeod. He laughed. “
Peace
. Listen to the word in your language, Elder.” He repeated it again in a nasal, sawed-off Yankee accent. “Peeeace. Peeeeeeeze. It doesn’t even sound like English, does it? It’s an impostor in your language. Peeeeeze. Peeeeeeeze. Peeeeeeeeeze.” Elder Passos grated the word just inches from McLeod’s ear. “Peeeeeze,” he said again, louder,
“Peeeeeeeeeze,”
like a crazed insect, almost shouting it,
“Peeeeeeeeeeze!”

McLeod swung around and took fistfuls of Passos’s shirtfront. “Stop it!”

“Or what? Or what? You’ll hit me too? Huh?”

Elder McLeod relinquished his grip, turned back to the river. But Passos kept after him, yelling at full voice, full up with righteous anger. “Do you have any idea what you did back there? You just beat up an investigator in front of another investigator—the investigator’s wife! Do you know what that makes us? The both of us? Elder McLeod? I’m talking to you! I’m your senior companion and I am talking to you!”

“He was filth,” McLeod whispered. “You said it yourself.”

“So you clobber him? That’s the only option? You don’t talk about it, or walk away? You have to clobber him and ruin everything we worked for? Josefina, Elder! Did you hear what she said? ‘Get out of here! Don’t come back!’
She
said that, not Leandro. And
because of you.
You
are the one who’s thrown her under the bus. Do you hear me? Do you hear me!”

Elder McLeod didn’t answer, didn’t move. He just stared at the water, staring through it, and after a while Elder Passos started staring through it too. His worst anger gave out on him like a candle flame extinguished in its own melt. They sat there, the two of them, in silence. Twelve o’clock came and went. Twelve thirty. At one o’clock Elder Passos rose from the embankment guard and McLeod got up and followed after him. The elders walked to the nearest
padaría
and bought cheese sandwiches and ate them at a table near the open-air storefront. An afternoon rain came on, turning the sidewalks brown and muddy and the streets slate gray. The speckled line between dry and wet came right up to the threshold of the storefront’s little eating space: rain greased the metal track of the roll-up gate, then inched past it as the drops got thicker and a beaded curtain dropped down from the awning, started spraying the table’s legs. The drops began kicking up a floor-level mist; it coated McLeod’s shoes, Passos noticed. At one point a wind gust blew a scrim of wet all over them. Passos scraped back his chair, shucked his pants. McLeod sat motionless, holding his hard roll in front of him for a long, absent minute. Then he took a soggy bite.

The sky cleared half an hour later. The elders left the
padaría
and walked through downtown with no particular purpose or direction, the streets still wet from the rain, dull mirrors, and the sun in them now, a strange effect. Cars passed by and dragged shallow wakes of whitewater after them, each one like the sound of paper ripping. The sidewalk dust-turned-to-mud formed a thin brown paste on the pavement, forming a collage of footprints in
turn. Elder Passos tried to fit his steps into steps that had gone before him.