Elders (27 page)

Elder McLeod entered the apartment and gave a nod to Elder Batista, Kimball’s junior, who crouched in the dim gray light of the entryway, fitting on a pair of rubber overshoes.

“Where is everybody?” McLeod asked Batista.

“Hiding, man.”

“Huh?”

Batista worked a corner of the overshoe around his back heel, but the rubber snapped back. “Come on,” he muttered. Elder McLeod looked around the apartment. All the doors were shut, all
the windows closed, except one, in the kitchen—a small frame on a big hardening sky. The window light gave onto the long countertop that separated the kitchen from the entryway/living room; it imparted a shine to that surface that cast the other surfaces in the apartment in dark relief: the small wooden dining table, its dropdown flaps like giant ears, the desks, the taped-up pictures on the walls, and the stacks of teaching pamphlets and Books of Mormon teetering in the shadowed corners.

McLeod heard whispered voices conferring outside in the hallway. He turned around just as Nunes leaned his head back in the door. “Batista, you coming or what?” He looked up at McLeod. “Oh, and hey, tonight we want you guys to come pick us up at Passos’s apartment, okay? Well, your apartment too.”

“Who’s ‘we’?” McLeod said. He laughed a little. “Yeah, okay.”

When Batista finally got out the door and shut it behind him, the apartment was that much darker. McLeod searched for the light switch on the wall. The naked bulb (why were the bulbs always naked?) filled up the room with a harsh thin light that reminded him of old black-and-white police dramas, the bad guys lurking in boiler rooms or languishing in holding cells while detectives leaned into their questions. The bulb should be hanging, though, swinging, making me feel like I’m in the underdecks of a ship. McLeod noticed on the wall one taped-up sheet of paper in particular: a map of Sweeney’s area, taking in a slice of west Carinha, and all of the smaller, neighboring city of Borém. Had the map been there the last time he visited? McLeod didn’t think so. He would have noticed it. Was it Nunes’s idea, then? Or Sweeney’s? Some symbolic stand against the usual slacking off that marked
the waning days of a missionary’s service? Elder McLeod felt a pinch of comparative shame at the thought. He called out in English, “Hello? Where is everybody? Sweeney? Kimball?”

The only answer came from the rain sounds through the open kitchen window. McLeod walked toward it, saw a checkerboard of orange-tile roofs and sooted white satellite dishes, brown alleyways, gray side streets—all of it tipping up at him, pushing half of the sky out of the frame. The water buzzed in the puddles in the street below, and for a moment McLeod couldn’t be sure if he’d heard the toilet flushing from the bathroom or some sudden rush from outside. Then Elder Kimball emerged from one of the closed doors off the entryway/living room, looking pale and pained, seasick, and barely altering his drained expression at the sight of McLeod standing behind the kitchen counter. “Oh, hey,” Kimball said weakly. “Wait. I thought you’d sworn off P-Day clothes—even on P-Days.”

“Times have changed,” McLeod said. “What’s with you?”

“Green bananas.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s all I can figure. Ate them at lunch yesterday. Those things hold a grudge, man, let me tell you.” He put a hand in his dense helmet of P-Day hair, frowning, looking like he’d forgotten something. “Remind me where you’ve been for the last two months?”

“Yeah, I know. It’s a crappy situation. I’m just glad to be away from it for a day.”

“You mean Passos?”

“There are words for him, but none of them Bible.”

“I thought you said he wasn’t as bad as the hype.”

“He’s
worse
,” McLeod said, and a silence filled the room. He changed the subject, remembering. Had Sweeney gotten the letter from the mission office? About their group?

“May fourteenth,” Kimball said, a sly spreading smile. “Less than two months until I get to play with my Blondie.”

“You and Sweeney both, right?”

Kimball’s smile went lopsided. He shook his head in stiff quick jerks.

“What’s up?” McLeod said, suddenly hushed.

Elder Kimball spoke even quieter. “Sweeney got a Dear John from the girlfriend. Not even a Dear John letter, actually. She sent a wedding announcement, her and some dude named Corey—who marries a Corey?—and there was this little Dear John
note
inside the envelope.”

“I thought they were practically engaged.”

“Who knows, man. The note said she’d tried to tell him sooner. That old story. It looks like a BYU romance to me. Three weeks and they’re soul mates, you know? Agreed to marry in the preexistence, all that. My brother said you see it all the time there.”

“Wait. He showed you the note?”

“Well, he just sort of dropped it on the floor. He tore it up, actually, then he dropped the pieces on the floor. I was with him when he opened it this morning. Here.” Kimball motioned for McLeod to follow him, on tiptoe, to the little trash bin at the far edge of the kitchen. It stood mere feet from Sweeney’s bedroom door. Kimball picked the several pieces of the announcement and the note out of the trash and assembled them on the kitchen counter. Elder McLeod inspected the announcement first: a black-and-white photograph
of a square-jawed letterman type holding the pale pretty girl in his arms, her ringed hand on display against his chest. And on a separate piece of card stock, the following:

Then the note. It filled half a page with tiny looping words about how sorry she was that she hadn’t told him sooner, how she’d tried but she hadn’t known what to say, how it had happened so fast, though of course the Spirit had confirmed it. “I still don’t know what to say. I guess I just hope you’ll be able to understand someday and I hope you’ll still finish your mission with honor. I know you might not want to hear this right now but I’ll always consider you a friend, Andy. I’m so proud of you.” The next line had been scribbled over. McLeod could just make out “I never …” The note concluded: “Affectionately, Tiffany.”

McLeod looked up from the kitchen counter to the closed bedroom door, then to Kimball. “What’s he doing in there?”

Kimball shrugged his shoulders.

“And he’s been in there since this morning?”

He nodded.

Elder McLeod took eggshell steps across the kitchen, opening cupboards in search of food. He found a box of imitation Cocoa Puffs in one cupboard and took it to the threshold of Sweeney’s bedroom door. He held up crossed fingers to Kimball, then he knocked once and entered.

The room was dark and very still. The blinds shut. The fan turned off. The sound of rain drummed distantly on the roof. The air thick and close with heat. Elder McLeod waited for his eyes to adjust, then he crossed the room, stepping on stiff pieces of paper from the sound of it. Sweeney didn’t move. He lay facedown on his bed, his arms stretched up above him, his legs in strict unnatural parallel. He looked like a victim on the rack.

A narrow shaft of gray light broke through the gap where the metal blinds met, making a halfhearted partition of the room. McLeod sat down to one side of it, on Nunes’s bed. He picked up one of the stiff pieces of paper and examined it in the shaft of light: a torn Polaroid of the lower half of Tiffany’s cross-country stride, the long white legs amputated just above the knees, one of them straight, the other bent. Other shreds showed faces with no bodies, a group of headless girls on horseback, an oak tree split right down the middle. Sweeney stood just off-center in the latter picture, extending three-quarters of his arm to a rude white tear.

“What are you doing?” Sweeney said.

McLeod shook the box of cereal. “I brought you some lunch.”

“McLeod?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, McLeod.”

Sweeney settled his head in the crook of his elbow, let out a quavering sigh. McLeod shook the box again and opened it. He pulled out a handful of dark, vaguely sticky spheres, extending the handful toward Sweeney’s face, holding it out the way you hold out feed to horses. After a time Sweeney rolled over to face him; he propped his head up on his fist. He looked at Elder McLeod’s outstretched hand for a long minute, then reached out and overturned it. The little spheres made hollow reports on the linoleum, rattling as they came to rest. McLeod reached into the box and produced another handful, which Sweeney overturned again. McLeod laughed a little.

“Do it again,” Sweeney said.

McLeod did it again. Sweeney flung McLeod’s hand up, or slapped it up, a loud, echoey uppercut of a slap that sent the imitation Cocoa Puffs flying. McLeod and Sweeney laughed together.

“Just give me the fucking box,” Sweeney said. “And don’t you dare tell me to keep it Bible. Not today.”

Elder McLeod handed over the box of cereal. “Today is an exception.”

“You’re fucking right today is a fucking exception.”

Sweeney plunged half of his arm into the box, then shoved the puffs into his mouth, making loud rapid crunching sounds. He repeated the process half a dozen times, coming up for air every two or three handfuls.

“I figured you were hungry,” McLeod said.

“Did you bring anything to drink?”

“I can get something for you.”

“No,” Sweeney said. “I’ll get it.”

Elder Sweeney let the box fall to the floor, swung up out of the
bed, crushed his way across the room. He opened the door and staggered out into the gray light, his arm shielding his eyes. Elder McLeod followed at a distance. In the kitchen Kimball stood before the tatters of the announcement and the note, studying them. He sipped a glass of chocolate milk. He looked up as Sweeney and McLeod came into the room, tried to cover up what he’d uncovered. Elder Sweeney pushed him aside and stared at the announcement, his mouth open—wider, wider—like he’d just had the wind knocked out of him. Again. His eyes began to fill. Kimball made an apologetic wince at McLeod, then looked down.

Elder McLeod went to the fridge and filled a glass of water and brought it over to Sweeney. He pulled him away from the counter, turned him. He pressed the glass into Sweeney’s hand the way he’d once pressed contact cards on strangers:
Dear sir, dear madam, this can help. We promise
.

Kimball swept the pieces of the announcement and the note into his hand and dropped them in the trash, though not without Sweeney noticing.

“In the trash is where it belongs,” McLeod said. “The best thing you can do is ignore it. And drink your water.”

Elder McLeod stepped back against the wall beside the window, leaning there, and Elder Kimball joined him. The two of them watching Sweeney as if from an observation room. The front of Sweeney’s corkscrew pate matted down, his eyes red and unfocused. The absent sips from his glass of water. “You disappeared again, McLeod,” he said, not looking up. “Where’d you go this time?”

“Stuff with Passos again. But it’s almost over. Next week at zone conference I’m demanding a transfer from the president. Then no
more of the vanishing acts. The last transfer of our missions will be the best one yet.”

“Oh sure, sure, sure …” Sweeney said, trailing off. He laughed. “And I’m sure President Mason will give you exactly what you want, McLeod. Since he loves you so much, right?”

Sweeney laughed again, a loud uninhibited laugh that cut off as if caught in a reversal of wind. He drank down the rest of his water in one long, breathless gulp. Then he held out the glass and let it slip from his hand; it bounced once and shattered on the linoleum. McLeod and Kimball looked at the shimmering mess, then at Sweeney, who was looking beyond it. Sweeney took two quick strides to the drying rack and got out another glass that he also dropped, a neat, almost dainty gesture. He dropped another glass, then another. Elders McLeod and Kimball watched in grim recognition. A porcelain cereal bowl hit the floor and radiated shards. A dinner plate cracked in half on impact. Neither McLeod nor Kimball said anything, and neither moved, but then Sweeney finished the drying rack and went to the cupboard, started raking the dishes from the shelves, a guttural roar building in his throat. A heavy mixing bowl smashed into pieces at Kimball’s feet. He jumped back. “Hey!” Another smashed too close to McLeod. He and Kimball ran for the living room. Sweeney followed after them, flipping the wooden dining table, kicking out the four drop flaps with as many shouts. He swept the desks, toppled the stacks in the corners, kicking books and pamphlets across the room as he tore down the pictures from the walls, the map of the area, the monthly calendar—none of it mattered anymore. Sweeney moved Kimball and McLeod around the room as if by opposing magnetic force. He finally slowed near the front door, pausing there, his breathing
loud and ragged, his eyes wild. Then, as if to avoid taking stock of the futility now littering the room, he sprinted headlong for the bedroom door, just short of which Elder McLeod checked him into the wall. McLeod held on to Sweeney, lowering him down to the floor, saying, “I’m sorry, okay? But come on. Are you okay?”

And Sweeney just gasped and gasped for breath until he caught it on a choking sob.