Elders (34 page)

Passos knew he couldn’t afford to wonder. He started praying, to distract himself as much as anything. It was a sort of reflex, but soon he meant it. Elder Passos’s thoughts rose up into genuine prayer the way the mind slips down into dreaming—in an act of ungovernable grace. His God-led thoughts led from his mother to his brothers, Nana, the mission, all of it, the whole purpose—and then to McLeod. He stopped on McLeod. Something stopped him there. A feeling of warning. What had Passos decided just last night? What had he resolved to do just hours earlier? Give him time. Give him a little more time. It implied a chance, a chance, at least, at explanation. Maybe McLeod had gone for a walk in the moonlight—a serious mistake but not mission-ending, not enough for a dishonorable release. How could Passos be such an unjust judge? If
he
expected a chance from the president, if he expected a chance from BYU, then didn’t he owe one to Elder McLeod? Didn’t he owe him at least the question?
You’re a good boy
, his mother had said,
but
.

The feeling of warning still hovered like a fog in Passos’s mind, though little by little it lifted, breaking altogether when a resolution took its place. Give him a little more time. Give him a chance. Never mind the call to the president. He’d get to the office soon enough. The president had all but promised him the assistantship next transfer.
For now just concentrate on that companion of yours
. He owed him the question at least.

Passos opened his eyes. The glowing yellow band at the foot of
the door glowing softer. The rising warmth in the room. This way, besides, he could still call the president if he needed to—it would be trickier, but he could do it—and he could also satisfy his curiosity, growing more intense by the second. Where had McLeod actually gone? What had he done? Why? And what was he doing now? What was that noise—Passos heard it again—that tiny, insistent tapping and scratching, tapping and scratching, tapping and scratching. It sounded like mice in the walls. It drove Passos to his feet.

Elder McLeod looked up
from his work to the window, still mostly dark. The bare bulb overhead cast overlapping shadows on the ceiling, a sort of flowering out from the center. The bulb, as always, gave off little light, but enough for McLeod’s present purpose. He held Passos’s left shoe in his left hand, sole up, taking a retracted pen tip to the packed-in dirt between the grooves, scraping at the dirt, then trying to tap the remainder free. Scraping, then tapping. Taking action. Elder McLeod thought of President Mason, who had given him the idea, but he thought of his father more. In the car at Logan Airport, not two hours before takeoff. His father’s warm blessing hands on his head. And his assurances.
You wouldn’t be doing this if you weren’t going to do it well. That’s one of the things I most admire about you
.

McLeod thought his father would be proud of him now, seeing him at work on his companion’s shoes. The gospel of doing. Faith as a principle of action. Saint John’s litmus test. The old tropes. If he could will himself to care, he could will himself to obey. If not out of love or belief, then out of fear. Maybe
that
was the whole game.

In any case, Elder McLeod felt a strange excitement as he carried out his good deed, tapping and scratching, tapping and scratching, the rhythmic energy of his hands imparting energy to his heart such that his
feelings
began to align against his thoughts in an almost exact counterpoint. I have set both feet, he felt, on a course that will restore my companionship to good faith, that will provide
the impetus for a strong end to my mission, a triumphal end, and that will trigger God’s grace in my heart, a permanent testimony. McLeod smiled at himself. He pulled back to his thoughts.

At the very least he could say he had tried something, and who knew? He might surprise Passos with the sheer suddenness of the gesture, the unexpectedness, as Passos had surprised him that first day with the Guaraná.
Did you do this?
he would say, and to him, audibly, unmistakably, the sound of a cease-fire. Holding up the shoes, like dull mirrors, and saying,
You did this, Elder McLeod?

And McLeod would nod and say,
I’m sorry, Elder Passos. Not about
—gesturing to the shoes—
not about that, obviously. That I meant. I’m sorry about everything else. You know?

Passos would nod too, or maybe not, but in any case McLeod would cross the entryway/living room to his desk and lever out the Seuss book he’d demanded back. He could hold it out to him:
Here, take it. This is another thing I’m sorry about. It was a gift, and it’s yours
.

Passos would accept the return of the gift, with thanks. Then he would cross the room to
his
desk, digging through the drawer and retrieving the blue grammar book that Passos had given him as a birthday present and that he, McLeod, had returned out of spite, leaving a spiteful note in the pages. He really did regret that. He felt a sea of regrets welling up in him, huge crashing waves. He could tell that to Passos—the shoe-cleaning could occasion it—and maybe he really
could
restore his companionship to good faith.

Maybe. Could. Would. Might
. The very language of his hope spread over McLeod’s thoughts like a sedative, a check to keep his expectations in balance. He had felt this sense of performance before, this sense of personal history-making
in situ
, of doing something
and knowing already how he’d describe it months, even years, afterward. One afternoon in his first area he had spotted a little girl with big hungry eyes. Gaping eyes, McLeod had thought. “Gaping” was just how he would describe them. He bought an ice-cream cone and motioned for the girl to come over and help herself. She moved to the cone and took it from his hand and looked at him flatly and walked away. A few months later he had stayed up half the night composing his homecoming talk; he hadn’t been eight months into his mission at the time. The talk began:
I wasn’t eight months into my mission when I started composing this homecoming talk …
The next morning he read over his too-clever effusions of the night before, and threw the pages away.

And he was doing it again now—on some level he knew that. The way he took breaks from cleaning Passos’s shoes to observe the room, frame it for memory’s sake, for posterity’s. The entryway/living room in a dim yellow light. Shadows clinging to the corners. The air warm, the floor cool underfoot. In a gesture of charity—
It never faileth
, Paul said—he had taken up his companion’s worn and dusty shoes to clean them, including the soles. Of course McLeod hoped something good might come of it. The heart is a hopeful, incorrigible thing.

McLeod finished Passos’s left shoe and took up the right, making a fist of his hand and using it as a shoe horn. He brushed the dirt clods off with his free hand, removing the loose earth preparatory to the thorough treatment: the old toothbrush, the tin of shoe black, the small felt buffing rag retrieved from the recesses of his desk drawer. In the absence of a drop cloth, a loose circle of dirty precipitation had formed on the floor in front of McLeod’s chair. He planned to sweep up before Passos awoke, which he figured
would be in an hour or so, a little under. He didn’t feel rushed, but he wanted to have time to spare. He took out his pen again, tip retracted, and started working at the stubborn tracks of dust that crusted into the grooves along the side of the right shoe, scratching at the dirt, then tapping at it, then scratching at it again, and so on. Elder McLeod had never cleaned his own shoes so thoroughly, much less a companion’s shoes. He went at the cracks and veins of dirt with the avid, improvisational élan of a novice. Much of the dirt would take up residence again, by midday that day, in the very crevices he cleaned. The essence of the gesture lay not in utility but in ceremony, old as forgiveness itself. I am doing this for you, Passos, McLeod thought, not because it is practical but because it is impractical. I am doing this for you because you—

He looked up at the sound of bare feet slapping the linoleum.

Elder Passos, in shorts and garment top, stopped just past the hallway. He looked at McLeod, squinting. He visored his eyes, still squinting. “What are you doing?”

McLeod froze, pen in one hand, shoe in the other, as if he’d been caught in a shameful act. His companion’s words confused him. Their tone confused him: rough, abrading. The first words to him in more than three weeks and they sounded like an accusation. A threat.

Passos’s brows suddenly snapped all the way to the
V
. “Is that a pen? Hey! What are you doing to my shoe?”

McLeod opened his mouth to respond—“Wah …”—but only a wordless noise came out. He watched his companion’s posture change, spring-load, and he tensed himself.

McLeod tried again. “Wait. No.” The words felt leaden, slow on his tongue, as if three weeks of silence and the night’s exhaustion
had combined to atrophy his very ability to speak. The words labored up like a pair of wounded birds in the space between the two elders, the space Passos was suddenly closing as he glowered across the room. McLeod dropped the pen and took up Passos’s shoe instead, cocked it back at his ear. Passos hesitated a beat, then another, and rushed, nose-first, into the airborne shoe. The collision made a sharp, wet
thwock
. The shoe fell to the ground and Passos followed it and McLeod saw dark blood forming up in his companion’s nostrils. Passos looked dazed, blinking rapidly, touching his fingers to the blood, coming to a number of realizations. Elder McLeod crouched in a wrestler’s stance in front of the chair. He felt the other shoe gripped in his hand now, and he came to realizations of his own.

This was not the way it was supposed to go. This was the little girl taking him in flatly, walking away instead of smiling, thanking him. This was the homecoming talk that fell dead on the page, too self-conscious, too
hopeful
. This was God resurrecting long enough to throw Jonah to the whale, then dying again, and consigning him to the dark reeking bowels forever.

This was McLeod’s bloodied companion suddenly lunging for the fallen shoe. This was McLeod rushing forward and kicking it out of his hand. This was McLeod trying to fall astride Passos’s chest only to feel Passos’s knee instead, hard as a beam against his groin. This was the airless howl McLeod made, the feeling of drowning, of pain like the end of the world, the feeling of Passos falling astride
his
chest now, trapping his arms under bony knees, and landing hard, stiff, repetitive punches on his nose, his cheeks, his temples, his eyes.

This was not the way it was supposed to go.

After a time
Passos felt McLeod’s body slacken, felt him go heavy underneath him. His companion stopped bucking, stopped struggling altogether. He lay still and just accepted the sidelong blows, eyes closed, though softly, the soft eyelids of the unconscious or close to it. The eyelids startled Elder Passos, brought him back to himself. He arrested his fist halfway to McLeod’s cheek, sharply rouged already with jags of skin-trapped blood. The entire right side of McLeod’s face looked lurid with darkening spots, like bruises on a pear. The skin broke across his eyebrow and lower lip, leaking red. A thick streak of blood ran down from either nostril.

Passos rocked off his companion’s chest and slid back along the floor several feet from McLeod. The breath had gone out of him suddenly; he hugged his knees. He had never fought like this before, never exchanged more than a few halfhearted blows with his brothers. The adrenaline coursed through his limbs, felt dangerous, like it might overflow the banks of his body.

Passos felt a wetness on his upper lip and tongued the tangy flavor with realization, relief: blood. His own blood. He had nearly forgotten.

“You made me bleed,” he said to McLeod, as if to justify himself, and make sure McLeod could hear him. “McLeod? You hit me first, remember. You made me bleed first.”

After another moment McLeod rolled onto his side, facing away from him. He let out a moan, then a sort of watery laugh. McLeod
got to all fours, dripping blood onto the linoleum underneath him. “I can’t even tell where it’s coming from—my nose or my lip.” He spoke his words as if through a mouthful of food, but when he spat nothing came out except a glistening web of pink. “Fucking …” He laughed again. “ ‘You made me bleed first.’ ”