Mission to America (9 page)

I went to find the Emmy. I passed a number of rooms that looked unused and seemed to have been furnished by different owners, or by one owner of shifting minds. There was a library with rust-red wallpaper, deep leather armchairs, and glassed-in bookshelves where I could imagine an educated widow lady writing a book about the London kings. The next room was cruder, with waxed plank floors. It held a spindly twin bed, an enameled tin bedpan in a wooden stand, and a church pew that ran the length of one whole wall and had nothing on it but a lone rag doll, its red-haired head collapsed onto its lap. The last room was another bathroom, perfectly clean and empty, no bath mat even, just a spotless stretch of purplish-black tile and a black tub and sink that looked like they belonged in an undersea future brain-experiment laboratory.

And then I saw it, lit by its own ceiling light: a golden angel with conical, pert breasts arching its back and holding aloft a globe. I picked it up. Was it insured? It felt insured. Its heft suggested high-quality materials, yet it still seemed cheap to me; a very elegant horseshoes trophy.

Elder Stark came down the stairs alone, no longer wearing his hooded Hobo face. His brow was open and hopeful, rinsed of worry. I set the Emmy back on its display stand and wondered if Lara's sorrows, whatever they were, had begun with its acquisition. I felt they had.

“She needs a go-between,” my partner said. “She's in love, and she's been mistreated. I can fix it. The man gets back to town a couple of days from now and I'm going to talk to him. By the way, she's baptized. I baptized her.”

“Where?” Our baptisms weren't complicated or lengthy but they did require fresh clean air, not cooped-up indoor air.

“Her bathroom up there leads out to a small porch.”

Three bathrooms in one house. I didn't approve.

“What color porcelain did she use in that one?”

My partner regarded the Emmy and ignored me. I could see tall ideas standing up behind his eyes. “This fellow of hers is a power. An Effingham. They own a lot of the Arkansas TV and over into Texas and maybe other states. Their ranch south of town has sixteen thousand acres and four hundred buffalo. They're people worth our knowing.”

“Lauer is going to perish from a fever.”

My partner's grin was so wide that it showed the inside of his throat.

“Lara still hasn't eaten,” I reminded him.

“She told me to look in her refrigerator for a canned vanilla health drink. It's everything good in a pizza but in a can, she said. We can try them, too, she said. She bought a whole crate.”

“It's like cold vanilla pizza?”

“No, I'm sure it's not, but I don't know. Why can't you just learn to try things for yourself instead of always making me go first and then explain them to you? I'm tired of it.”

“That's just the foot we got off on.”

“I'd like to switch feet.”

“Fine. I'll be the tester. I don't mind. Go get us two cans. I'll describe the taste for you.”

But when he came back with the drinks he'd almost finished his. Its sweet creamy whiteness was slicked all over his chin.

The campground
Lara recommended
charged twenty dollars per day to let us park and connect our toilet to its sewer. I suspected the pipes ran directly to the river—all drought-exposed sandbars and shallow weedy sloughs—which was visible out the window above my bunk and gave off a stagnant smell of rotting lawn clippings. The deer that I saw come to drink there seemed stiff and slow, with none of the flickering nervousness of healthy deer, and on the evening of our second day there I asked the attendant if we could take a new spot, away from the water, closer to the hills. I immediately felt better, with clearer sinuses and a sense that my food was on the move again.

While we waited for Lara's boyfriend to return (he was off playing golf, we'd learned, in a Florida tournament hosted by a baseball player whose name I thought I recognized from the card game but found out from Lara wasn't who I thought he was, and was actually much more famous as a kidnapper who'd stayed out of jail through crafty lawyering) we made ourselves fixtures in Snowshoe Springs by renting bicycles from the campground office and riding back and forth along the length of the outlying commercial area and circling the fancy business district, which was mostly made up of art galleries, antique malls, coffee shops, and mountaineering stores where young men our age, who didn't appear to work, could be seen through the windows trying on boots and packs. Elder Stark seemed jealous of these fellows, particularly after he found out from Lara that Errol Effingham, her troublesome beau, climbed peaks in New Zealand when he wasn't golfing.

As we rode through the streets in the morning, we waved at people, especially the younger women, and once in a while one of them smiled back at us. Most of the women struck us as remote, though. Their faces were hard and windburned. They carried water bottles. Their calves showed carpentered edges as they walked and their throat muscles shifted sharply when they spoke, as if separately manufacturing each word. It was hard to imagine them pregnant, though many were. The fetuses rode up high in firm round capsules that gave the impression of being detachable from their mothers' bodies, like the seats that unhooked from the mighty eight-wheeled strollers they stuck the kids into after they were born so that they could be carried into restaurants and stowed beneath the tables.

“If the guy doesn't come back this Friday like she said, I'm ready to head off east,” I told my partner as we cruised past the entrance to Snowshoe Alps, the main local ski resort, whose major buildings appeared to have been shipped over from Hansel-and-Gretel land. My frustration with Snowshoe Springs was real—its residents seemed unapproachable, cut off from us by their money and sporting interests—but the statement was also a test of Elder Stark's attachment to Lara, or his hopes for one. His motives in helping her make up with Effingham struck me as muddled and misleadingly declared. Which person he most wished to woo was also obscure.

“He's got an ailing father on the ranch. He'll be back on time. He has to be. The father's the one with the money, the way I hear it, and he's awfully demanding. The son's afraid of him.”

“I'm only saying that if he gets held up—”

“What's your hurry?”

I couldn't say, exactly. Spending time in Snowshoe Springs felt to me like staying in a lodging whose rates I knew I couldn't afford. Somewhere a terrible bill was being prepared, and soon we would either have to run and duck it or take unpaid jobs ironing linens in the basement.

We bicycled to our favorite café and sat side by side on a denim-upholstered couch whose spongy, underfilled cushions made me feel trapped and forced me to lean farther forward than felt dignified to reach my breakfast on the small low table. I picked up the crescent-shaped chocolate-covered biscuit that I'd chosen from the bakery case and set it in my peppermint tea to soak. I'd expected the thing to be softer than it was, and the first dry, splintering bite had rattled me. I wished I'd had the money for a muffin stuffed with ham and egg and cheese, but the campground fees had pushed us past our limit on the credit card Lauer had provided. Until he paid it off next month for us, we'd have to live on cash.

“Those guys we saw buying ropes and cleated shoes today? I'd like to learn to do that,” Elder Stark said. “Crawl up cliffs.”

“We need to be earning. We're going broke,” I said.

“Everything's right in place. We're fine,” he said. Now that he'd become an open coffee drinker, Elder Stark was euphoric in the mornings. Hard truths about numbers couldn't cool him down. He sizzled until noon.

“My mother called last night,” he said. “She gave me my weekly reading while you were sleeping. Sometimes I wonder if she's fooling me. It's always the same: It's cloudy, but it will clear. Trust a stranger. Beware a friend. This time, though, she was specific. She had good news.”

I bit into my biscuit, eager to hear it. Pamela Stark was a golden figure in Bluff, known for her clockwork uphill morning strolls, her unmatched raisin buns, and the detailed files she kept on the dreams of leading Apostles, including the ladies of the First Council. She'd performed this role since age nineteen, when she'd correctly interpreted the nightmares of a bed-wetting seven-year-old boy to mean that a long drought was on its way and AFA farmers should rotate out of grains and into a mixture of hardy native grasses.

“She told me we're going to dine with men of fortune and win for the Church the great bounty of influence promised in the Eighty-third Decree. And it's going to be soon,” Elder Stark said. “Not long at all.”

“Anything about meeting wives?”

“Not this time.”

“Your tarot cards in Casper. I never asked you.”

“Unreliable,” he said. He rose with his coffee cup. He loved free refills.

“Just for fun,” I said.

“A sorrowful romance with a fair-haired goddess followed by ages of thoughtful wandering among a race of industrious sad elves. A Wiccan prank, I think.”

“They zworked you.”

“That man by the counter runs the natural foods store. He might let us post some literature on his board.”

Elder Stark crossed the shop and turned the man to face him by touching his elbow, which seemed to startle him. Because of the man's shaved head, his lack of body hair, and his muscle-molding shorts and vest, which were the eye-frying orange of certain traffic signs, it was hard to judge his age. He looked like a being who'd voyaged back through time from a world that had overcome illness, pain, and conflict. As he listened to Elder Stark the only activity was in his eyelids. They'd flutter slightly, as if about to blink, and then retract so completely that his round eyes appeared to lose all depth and warmth. I'd seen quite a few of his type in Snowshoe Springs.

Elder Stark shook the store owner's hand and watched him leave, then went to the counter and topped up his mug by pumping at the lid of a steel thermos. He drank his coffee black, five cups per morning, which I guessed was the reason why he rarely slept these days and didn't appear to miss it or to suffer much. I envied his vigor and half wanted to join him, but it seemed important for one of us to maintain normal contact with the night realm, which
Discourses
taught was the lower mind's repair shop.

My partner sat back down next to me and said, “I think we've found an ally there. I think we've found a nodal leverage point.” This was Lauer language. They'd been talking. Often.

“His store runs a popular evening lecture series. I volunteered to talk on Deep Digestion. He didn't say yes yet, but I think he will. He invited us to tonight's lecture for a taste of things.”

“You act like we're going to be here permanently. We're supposed to go east. New York City. Washington.”

“All the important easterners live here now. This food-store fellow's from Philadelphia. He moved here for the trout fishing, he said. The kid who serves the baked goods, he's from Boston. He's training for the Olympic bobsled team. His father makes all those yellow markers you see, for underlining books and documents.”

“All of them?”

“That's what he indicated, at least.” My partner gazed into the bottom of his mug. “I'm finally learning to talk to people,” he said. “I never knew how shy I was before. The coffee helps, I think. That powder helped, too, but I had to pour it out. It made my scalp prickle.”

“I'm proud. I'm glad. The problem is we still need money.”

“This Lara has something a lot more valuable. Names and addresses,” he said. “You'd be surprised.”

“By what?”

“The sort of people that woman knows. There's a congressman in there. A U.S. congressman. He has a little horse farm up the hill here. And this Effingham bunch, they're the center of everything. They throw parties all summer long that people fly in for. The old man's a charmer, even though he's sick. He puts up tents. He hires national acts. That singer Cher you're always mooning on about?”

“I only mentioned her one time.”

“She sang at his birthday party last September. I told Lauer and Lauer said, ‘Stay put. Don't move. You're right where you need to be.' I'm with him there. A truss in the roof of Celestial Hall collapsed, and then it rained, and now a cave-in's coming. Things are tough. Yet you won't drink a tiny cup of coffee to loosen your tongue and get out there and get cracking.”

I considered his words. I pictured the portrait of Swift Aunt Patricia dripping with rain in the lobby of the hall. I even imagined Sarah and her new man, whoever he was (I'd vowed not to inquire; I preferred that my bad dreams be vague), offering their first child for baptism in a temporary metal barn built to replace the grand structure of our childhoods.

“I apologize,” Elder Stark said.

“I deserved it.”

On our way out I spent almost three dollars on a drink that the counter kid claimed had such a kick that I wouldn't feel drowsy again until next week: a triple Americano. And though it was bitter and as thick as gravy and probably spelled a permanent end to normal, comfortable, wholesome eliminations, I resolved to be strong and to drink one every day.

         

About an hour before we were due to leave for the lecture at the natural foods store, Elder Stark took a call from Lara in the van. We'd been trying to clean it all afternoon, lying prone in the narrow central aisle flicking wet rags at spiderwebs and dustballs hanging just out of reach in the cracks beneath our bunks; kneeling between the front seats and using toothbrushes to scrub off the spilled chocolate-milk scum in the grooved floor mats; sitting bent over on the lidless toilet in the chimney-width bathroom spritzing 409 onto the urine-splattered and mud-scabbed tiles. We were tired and cranky by the time the phone rang, and the odors that we'd created and released by wetting the van's surfaces with various cleansers were as bothersome as the odors we'd removed.

Elder Stark held the phone to his ear and chewed his lip and did nothing but listen for a while, which led me to fear that a new crisis had erupted. A few minutes later, he broke into a grin, though, and he finished up the call outside, pacing in brisk circles around the campsite and—after putting the phone back in his shirt pocket—picking up a stone and rearing back and throwing it, out of sheer high spirits, it seemed, off toward the river a hundred feet away. He thrust one arm in the air when it splashed down, then turned to face the open sliding door and told me a wonder had occurred.

“I thought we had big trouble when she first called,” he said. “She was flat on her sofa drinking wine and crying, talking a lot of gruesome, morbid nonsense about how peaceful it feels, supposedly, when a person dies by drowning, but then—she had a TV set in the room—some old movie came on that she'd played a little role in and she couldn't believe what a fine performance she'd given and how nice her hair looked. It perked her right back up. The next thing I know she's telling me she's hungry and could I quick get some Chinese food and come over there and maybe we'll read some doctrine afterward.”

I biked to town alone. Inside the shop I found twenty or thirty people chatting in groups and milling through the aisles while an employee set up folding chairs in front of a wooden lectern with a microphone. The talk that night was on balancing the liver, a leading theme of Edenic Nutritional Science. Before it started, I read the announcements on the bulletin board. About half of them advertised places to get massages and quoted what were, to me, ridiculous rates, especially for a service that should be free. My grandmother had massaged me as a boy, paying special attention to the area where my skull met my neck, which in AFA anatomies was called the Royal Junction and was said to govern the flow of intuition back and forth between the brain and the body. I missed those sweet treatments. I missed the pinpoint grinding of those sharp old knuckles against my knots.

I missed a lot of things, but less often lately, and sometimes I feared that the people behind the memories ceased to exist when I didn't think of them. This nervous suspicion worked on me. To ensure Bluff's survival meant plunging into Terrestria, at least according to Lauer and my partner, but if I plunged in too deeply, home might vanish and I'd be stranded here. I could call my parents, I supposed, but they disliked telephones. A phone tied up your hands so you couldn't do more constructive things.