Elders (21 page)

FILHOS DA PUTA!

IMPERIALISTAS!

VIVA A REVOLUÇÃO!

The rich hardly ever answered their doors, championships or no championships, now or ever, and this neighborhood looked to Elder Passos like no exception. Then his turn came to knock a Spanish-style house, two stories, its tight-tiled roof like a scaly
hide. A man in a crisp blue button-down opened the door and invited them in. The elders followed him up the courtyard’s walkway, elaborate plants lining the sides, a red convertible shining in the open garage. The man led them into the house and invited them to sit at a large, lacquered table. Dark-haired, olive-skinned, he spoke Portuguese with an accent—not unlike McLeod’s, Passos thought. An American accent. Had he moved here from there? Or returned from years abroad?

“Please be comfortable,” the man said, leaving the room and returning with two glasses of filtered water. Passos noticed under the man’s arm a thin spiral-bound book. The man placed it on the table:
How to Evangelize the Mormons
.

McLeod scoffed—that rush of air through his nose—and for once Passos matched it. They did it in synch. They took drinks of their water and rose to their feet. Passos cited an appointment they’d just remembered, they were sorry.

Out in the street McLeod said, “You think he was a pastor?”

“I’m sure of it,” Passos said.

“I hate that crap.”

“Yeah.”

“And that book of his—right on the table in front of us? Talk about brazen, huh?”

“Brazen was that shiny convertible in the garage. Courtesy of tithe money, I’ll bet.”

“ ‘Lay not up treasures …’ ” McLeod said.

“Tell that to your countrymen,” Passos said.

“What? What does that even mean? Where is this coming from?”

Passos kept quiet, kept walking. He slowed down to stop at the next door but his companion kept on, as he had some two months earlier, one of the first afternoons of the elders’ companionship. As Passos watched McLeod march down the street, straight-backed, proud, he too remembered. His long search to find the open
padaría
. The Guaraná, one of the few things McLeod kept in the fridge. Their first argument, their first amends. He watched McLeod reach the corner of the street now and disappear around it, not looking back. Elder Passos didn’t call after him, though he did feel a brief tug of guilt in his chest. Also the feeling of a strategic error, a potentially costly moment of excess. He thought of Dos Santos, and in that instant he decided—yes, exactly as Dos Santos would do.

Passos hurried to the corner and got out to the main street just in time to see McLeod boarding a bus in the near distance. The buses were running regularly today, which made for one difference from the last time. But let that be the only difference. Passos caught the next outbound bus and stopped at the market en route to home.

He found his companion at his desk in the front room, with the blue grammar book lying open. Passos stood inside the doorway, panting. He held a case of Guaraná like a dumbbell in his right hand.

“A whole case, huh?” McLeod said. “Is Guaraná your standard peace offering?”

Elder Passos held still for the length of his companion’s deliberating stare.

“I’ve already got a case,” McLeod said.

Passos crossed the room and placed the soda on his own desk. He removed two cans, held one out for McLeod. “You can never have too much, right?”

After a pause McLeod took the can and hefted it. “It’s lukewarm.”

“Are you worried thou will spew it out of thy mouth?” Passos said, smiling.

McLeod gave a little smile of his own. He went to the kitchen and came back with two cans from the refrigerator, icy to the touch, already beading. Passos sat down across from his companion as they drank—gulped, in McLeod’s case. He finished in half the time as Elder Passos, tipping back his head and emptying the dregs in a quick practiced shaking motion, the can like a vibrato instrument. Then he brought the can down on the desk with a loud percussive violent
smack
that made Passos jump and McLeod smile, for another moment anyway. His companion’s face settled into a look of expectation. Finally he said, “Well? Are you going to actually apologize? Are you going to at least explain yourself?”

Passos continued to sip his Guaraná. “Explain what?”

“Why you’ve been such a jerk lately. Why you’ve been after me with all this anti-American crap. I thought you were on my side.”

“It’s not about sides, Elder McLeod.”

“What’s it about then? Where did that line about the pastor even come from?”

“I shouldn’t have said that. I am sorry about that. It’s just … Well, I’ve been a little frustrated lately, and maybe that had something to do with it. I’ve been frustrated with the way you’ve handled things with Josefina and Leandro. It seems like all you do is play the pessimist, all you do is criticize.”

“What’s there to be optimistic about, Elder? You threw Josefina under the bus with the president. Now we’re waiting for Leandro, which means we’re waiting for a miracle.”

Elder Passos took a long, a very long, draft of his Guaraná. It had never been clearer to him why McLeod—despite his intelligence and experience, despite his diligence, for the most part—remained a junior so late into his mission. He actually believed that a heroic stand against the president’s new rules could have made a difference, could have turned aside directives that the president had received from his superiors, who had received them from their superiors, and so on, all the way up to the General Authorities, all the way up to the Prophet himself. McLeod believed that a pair of foot soldiers could deflect the sheer tonnage of that institutional momentum. He knew nothing about leadership, nothing about organizations. He knew nothing of consequence about the church he put on the airs of an expert about. Elder Passos wanted to say this—he suddenly
ached
to say it—but he didn’t. He thought of Dos Santos. Convivial Dos Santos. Conciliatory.
Cunning
. Beloved on the mission, then off to America, taking it for all it’s worth, but no more.

Passos took a finishing gulp of his soda, then smacked the can down on the desk in imitation of McLeod. “You say we’re waiting for a miracle with Leandro?” he said. “Well, we’re not. We’re
planning
for one.”

Elder Passos took his weekly planner from his breast pocket and flattened it out on McLeod’s desk.

Plan or no plan
, apology or no apology, Elder McLeod felt shaky. He didn’t know how to set his feet anymore. He was uncertain around Passos, unsteady, and often angry, an anger that swelled his other anxieties, an unsteadiness that unsteadied everything.

In the last few weeks he had regressed into ogling, a little more hesitant than before, and more furtive, but somehow that only made it feel worse. McLeod still made a conscious effort, despite his lapses, to avoid all but Josefina’s pupils, but he had largely ceased such efforts with the newsstands downtown, the racy billboards, the pornographic call cards in phone booths. All the blurs resolving into images now. Or the women from Passos’s magazine bubbling up like molten to the troubled surface of his mind. He had even started masturbating again: three times in the shower, twice into nests of toilet paper, always turned away from the Jesus pictures on the mirror, but still. Five times in two weeks—it worried McLeod. It made him feel dirty, atavistic. It made him feel out of control.

That night Elder McLeod got up to urinate, or so he told himself as he crept out of the darkened bedroom. He closed the door behind him, kept the light off in the bathroom as he sat on the toilet and quietly peed against the side of the bowl. When he finished, he sat in the dark, brooding, his undergarments pooled around his ankles. He began to work at himself with a sort of carelessness,
as if conscious intention were the only path to sin. He didn’t even know if he believed in sin. He moved faster. He thought vaguely of the insults he had suffered in the last weeks, the insults that God had
allowed
him to suffer, and underneath it all the images marshaled themselves—billboards, call cards, Passos’s magazine—a ghostly mix of bodies, a ménage, spinning faster and faster as he neared his climax, and suddenly, and he was already going now, it had already happened: Josefina.

But it couldn’t have been. McLeod refused to believe it. Josefina was the last person he would have admitted into such lurid imaginings. He wanted no persons at all, only bodies. He looked down at the wilted dark penis in his hand, the white bloom of toilet paper, and he shuddered.

The next morning, a P-Day, Elder McLeod leaned on Passos to accompany him to Sweeney’s (“I thought we agreed you’d go there less,” Passos said), then he leaned on Sweeney (“Where’ve you been?” Sweeney said) to accompany him to the mission president’s office in Belo Horizonte. On the bus ride up, and then over lunch, McLeod outlined the basic problems for his friend. A capricious companion. A stranded investigator. All the anti-American garbage. And a feeling of waste, still, and doubt, still.

“I mean …” McLeod said. “Do you know what I mean?” He looked up from his buffet plate to see Sweeney bearing down on a forkful of rice and beans.

Sweeney paused, ticked his eyes up. “You mean how you think too much? Yeah, I know.”

“Don’t you ever doubt? When things go wrong for you and you
look to those bedrock truths, don’t you ever wonder where they are, or even
what
they are? Don’t you ever listen to yourself teaching or street contacting and think, What in the
hell
am I saying?”

Sweeney put down his fork. “Why would I want to think that, McLeod? I’ve had a happy life so far, and I’ve got a beautiful girl waiting for me at home. We’re going to get married in the temple, we’ll have kids, and we’ll give them happy lives too. Why would I want to jeopardize all that? Why would I want to mess that up? The gospel
works
, McLeod. That’s what matters. And that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

“That’s
not
what you told me,” McLeod said. “That night with you and Kimball, the night of our Slump Day party? Do you remember what you said? You said if I wasn’t going to at least try to believe it then why the hell stay out here? Why even finish the mission?
That’s
what you said.”

Sweeney sighed, went back to his food. “I don’t know if I have the energy for this anymore.”

“The gospel might work,” McLeod said, “or it might work for
you
, but that’s not the same as it being true. That’s not the same as actually believing it. Because for me, as far as I’m concerned, if I don’t believe it, it doesn’t work. I can’t just act my way through it anymore, recite the lines. If I could do that, who knows, maybe I would. Maybe I wouldn’t have all these problems. I wouldn’t be on my way to the mission president to confess, you know, the capital-P problem …”

Sweeney looked up from his plate again, eyes brightening.

“And don’t you smile at me like that,” McLeod said, but he smiled himself. “Look at you
—now
you’re interested. You are certifiable, you know that?”

“The capital-P problem?” Sweeney said. “You mean—” He started into the hand motion.

McLeod cut him short. “Yes,” he said. “The very one.”

“Yeah?” Sweeney’s smirk grew wider, but he tilted his head. “You’re not stashing girlie mags or anything, are you?”

“No.”

“Well, okay, then. What’s the big deal? Are you really going to town or something?”

“It’s complicated.”

“It’s complicated?”

McLeod nodded, held Sweeney’s gaze for several poker-faced seconds. He wouldn’t give anything about Josefina. He couldn’t. After a minute more Sweeney shrugged, and returned to his buffet plate.