Mission to America (2 page)

“What is it that they offer?” I said.

“Death.”

I asked him if he was referring to their guns.

“Their guns are the least of it,” Lauer said. “Look at what they dump into their gullets. They eat death. They defecate death. It's all they know. And when they sleep, they dream of death. You'll see. You'll see how it saturates their souls. Just walk into one of their toy stores and count the death dolls.”

I tried to imagine what such things looked like. “Skeleton figures?” I asked.

“They might as well be. Emaciated elongated young women with barely enough flesh to cover their skulls but with breasts the size of a nursing mother of twins. The Sphinx and the Griffin are more convincing creatures.”

He allowed me to sit with these images for a moment before asking me, eye to eye, with an expression that I sensed he'd borrowed from the Phoenix millionaire, if I'd be comfortable doing whatever was necessary to meet potential mates during my mission and persuade one of them to accompany me back home. I wasn't exactly certain what he meant, but I felt I understood his general point: Would I devote my whole body to the task? And, further, was there someone here in Bluff, someone whom I was pledged to or had feelings for, who might prevent me from me going forth wholeheartedly?

“I'll need to talk to her,” I said. He knew who I meant. There weren't that many of us.

“I'm sorry,” said Lauer.

“It might be for the best. I've been wondering if we're poorly matched.”

“Problems?”

“Little strains,” I said.

“That ought to make it easier.” Lauer slanted his head to indicate a photo hanging above his brass-buttoned leather sofa. “The short man in the bow tie I'm standing next to developed a flavorful ice cream that never melts and in fact contains no liquid. Gross sales last year of thirty million dollars. What's astonishing is that the fellow has no thumbs. Born without thumbs. Take a lesson there.”

“Persistence?”

“Forward-leaningness. Focus. Mental drive.” Lauer gazed off through the widest of his tall windows, the one with the stained-glass border of stars and suns. “Once you're out there, Mason, you won't miss her. Maybe at first, but then you'll be absorbed. The place has a pull, you'll discover. It hums. It hops. Death thinking does that to people. It peps them up. To be frank with you, Bluff could use a dose of that.”

“I like it the way it is now.”

“I don't,” said Lauer. “We need to put some muscle on. This faith has turned into an endless ladies' tea that starts with a prayer and closes with a séance and accomplishes precisely nothing except to turn Tuesday into Wednesday and February into March. As long as the flowers bloom, they like to tell us. As long as our friend mister robin sings his songs. They're touched in the head, these women.”

“They're our mothers.”

“So they enjoy reminding us,” said Lauer.

         

My first full experience of physical love, like that of most young men in Bluff, took place at an annual religious festival known as the Sanctified Midsummer Frolic. I was twenty-two that month, a trainee forester battling Asian beetles in the lodgepole pine stands north of town. My partner, chosen by our families, was one year my junior, a girl named Sarah Kimmel, studious, severe, and very thin, whose fingertips smelled of Scotch tape and Magic Marker ink as she reached for my face and neatly shut my eyes.

“You're going to like this, and it's okay to like it, but try not to like it too much,” Sarah said. “You have to contain yourself.”

“I know,” I said.

“Not every time, but this time. Can you?”

“Yes.”

“Because you've done the exercise?”

“I have.”

Sarah looked worried. Accidents happened. I wondered if I should be equally concerned. I'd kissed girls, I'd held them, I'd roamed inside their clothes, and a few times I'd let them touch me under my clothes, but those were sneaky, unauthorized encounters, hampered by fear and circumscribed by conscience, while this one was authorized, open, and encouraged. I might explode. My whole body might fly apart.

My father had tried to prepare me for the Frolic by taking me out on a drive the previous week in his Chevrolet cruiser and speaking frankly for hours, even drawing a couple of sketches in his citation log as we idled at the edge of Martyr's Pond, the site of the 1880 hacking death of a runaway polygamous wife by a posse of vengeful Mormon patriarchs. There had been three other murders in Bluff's history, but none of them so momentous and galvanizing, perhaps because the victims were all men and at least two of them were drunken men. The dead woman's name was Eliza Wofford Bingham, and we honored her with a two-day September holiday that was my least favorite weekend of the year. From dawn on the first day to sundown on the second, all AFA males had to stay inside their houses while the women of Bluff paraded in the streets drinking from flasks of elderberry spirits and—in imitation of Eliza fleeing her killers through the thorny brush—casting off their clothing as they went. The holiday ended here, at Martyr's Pond, with a ceremony I'd never seen but once heard described as “rambunctious naked splashing.”

After hastily going over the mental exercise meant to arrest my pleasure at the last moment, my father recalled the Frolic of thirty years ago, when he'd first enjoyed contact with my mother. He said he'd been tired that evening from staying up late kidding around with his buddies, and he regretted it. He was drowsy and inattentive during the ritual, while my mother, he said, was alert and fresh and avid. He told me that he feared he'd hurt her permanently and compromised their marriage before it started. He advised me to go to bed early beginning that night and to double my daily intake of citrus water.

“You'll be judged by the girl,” he said, “and it will linger. I don't think it's right, and they're warned they shouldn't do it, but most of them—the lively ones—can't help it. What's worse is that what they're judging you against isn't another man but their idea of one.”

“What idea? From where?”

“You'll never know. They don't know, either. Just rest and build your strength.”

I asked him with some reluctance what I should do if Sarah didn't suit me. I didn't consider that I might not suit her.

“There's nothing to be scared of there,” he said. He explained that my pairing with Sarah was not an accident but the result of continuous observation by our most intuitive church leaders. They'd been watching us since our childhoods, he said, and our compatibility was assured, although it might not be evident right away. “With your mother and me it took about six years. In your case, I'd be surprised if it takes two.”

I tried to look cheered by this news but it was hard. Two years was more than seven hundred days.

“You're kinder than I was at your age,” my father said. “You thrive on their approval. You nod. You listen. Love will come quickly, I know it. You're a knight.”

“Sometimes I act that way. I'm not sure,” I said.

“Acting that way is enough for them, I've learned.” My father laughed and seemed eager for me to join him but something in what he'd said felt grim to me. It suggested I'd have to be false for women to like me, or at least for Sarah Kimmel to like me. Women in general were irrelevant now.

“And of course there's your other great virtue,” my father said. “The midwife and I discussed it at your birth. But I've told you that story.”

He had. It made me bashful. How the old woman had measured me with her thumb and marked its tip with a pen to show her friends. I knew he expected me to share his pride in this, and maybe I did, but it didn't feel proper to show it. Not to him, and not to any man. And what Sarah might think didn't matter; I'd thought this through. If she'd dabbled in much love play before the Frolic, she might feel appreciative and pleased, but she wouldn't be able to tell me without revealing embarrassing facts about her youth that AFA females simply never spoke about lest it should ever dawn on AFA men that the Frolic was not worth waiting for. And if Sarah hadn't dallied with other partners (which seemed to me more likely), she wouldn't know that I was any different. I'd know, however, and it might breed resentment to watch my oblivious, complacent mate take for granted what her worldly sisters might dote on and covet and treat me like a king for.

“Can we please just forget that old story?” I asked my father. I loved the man, but not right then. “It hasn't helped me any. It's upsetting. When you tell it to other people, it always comes back to me. I don't think you know that.”

My father looked wounded, pierced. The story was about himself, I saw then, about the potential hidden in his seed that had emerged so grandly in his son. But was it even true? I wondered now. The physical fact it referred to was true enough (I'd peeked around at my buddies while growing up and confirmed that I had a modest advantage, especially in warm weather and in the morning), but the awestruck midwife and her thumb felt like devices invented to mask and soften an outright boast that my father dared not risk. He was a shy man. He rarely polished his badge and he wore a Windbreaker over his uniform even in broiling late July.

He gazed through the windshield at muddy Martyr's Pond. It was miserable being a man in Bluff sometimes. Perhaps it was even worse elsewhere. We hoped so, anyway.

“The Frolic,” my father said. “I wouldn't have named it that.”

“What would you have named it?”

“Hmm . . . I'll think.”

“Not that they let us name things. Or ever will.”

“Don't talk that way, Mason. It's a downhill road.”

“Don't be so somber. Let's hear your name.”

“‘The Clench.'”

Exactly sixty minutes after sundown, Sarah had me lie on my back with my arms beside my trunk and my legs about a foot apart so that she could kneel between my ankles. She was as thin from the front as from the side, an index finger of a woman. She spread her hands and gripped my goose-bumped shins and seemed to be steadying her mind for something that she'd mastered while alone but found more daunting now that I was here. I asked her if she'd intended to leave my socks on.

“It's brisk tonight. I thought you'd want warm toes.”

“It looks wrong,” I said.

“No one's looking at you.”

“You are.”

“But you don't know at what. It's not your socks, young man.”

Surprising. Enlightening. Her quip meant that she did know the difference, but it meant more than that. It meant she didn't care to hide her knowledge and even that she enjoyed it. And felt entitled to.

Like the five or six other young women at that year's ceremony, Sarah had made a small campsite along a stream at the edge of a cut alfalfa field. She'd pitched a loose tent of gray mosquito netting supported at its corners by sharpened willow sticks and spread out a freshly laundered flannel sleeping bag made fragrant with drops of purifying sage oil. On the ground, beside a kerosene lantern, her purse lay open, filled with her supplies: a tube of skin cream, a folded yellow hand towel, and a pocket edition of Mother Lucy's
Discourses
bound in white elk skin, stitched with yellow thread, and marked with a lavender ribbon near the end. I'd never managed to read that far myself, but Sarah was a student of theology, about to complete her fourth year at Coleman College, the Church academy for women. There was no such institution for men. Men in Bluff trained for jobs, for concrete tasks, but women cultivated a higher view that showed them what all our sweat and toil would come to. They spoke of this vista in parables, symbolically, and my hunch was that they withheld important elements out of fear of lowering men's morale.

“Your body needs to form a line,” said Sarah. “North-south, to take advantage of magnetism.” She grasped my heels and tugged my legs out straight, gently shaking them to relax my hips, and then, beginning with the little ones and working methodically inward, she cracked my toes. Afterward, I couldn't feel them. The lantern light through my closed eyelids was mottled pink, its patterns shifting with my heartbeat, and I could smell concentration on Sarah's breath—a burned odor, not unpleasant, like peanuts roasting—as she positioned herself athwart my pelvis.

“All the way flat. No tension. Dead,” she said.

I'd assumed we'd pray first. Maybe later. She gave me all of her weight. She gave it smoothly. I drew a deep breath, then felt Sarah blow it out. That people could breathe for each other was strange new knowledge and I felt suddenly enlarged by it, like the moment I'd learned to stay upright on a bicycle. A needle of hay stubble pierced the sleeping bag and I arched my back to avoid it but couldn't go high enough without disturbing a balance that had developed. I let the stalk scratch me, its sharp dry tip, and then let it cut me when she drove me flat again. I must have made a sound then—Sarah stopped.

“Are you close?” she said. “How close are you?”

My father had said it would jolt me, but not wholly. First would come a sense that a jolt was likely.

“I'm pretty sure we're safe,” I said.

She touched me near where we were connected, in a spot where I'd never been touched as an adult and hadn't wished to be. Now I wished to be. This new wish would endure until I died, I sensed, and might even float free from my gray corpse and drift forever in the Etheric Breeze, a permanent speck of quintessential Mason-ness that couldn't think or remember or speak its name but only wish and wish and wish.

“I'm supposed to be able to feel it. Here,” said Sarah. “A little bump-bump or twitch that tells me when.”

“Did you?”

“Not yet.”

“Let's keep going.”

“If you're confident.”

“I'm confident.”

“Confident or just determined?”

“The longer you jabber and pester me,” I said, “the more confident I get.”

Across the field, by some wonder of acoustics that summer in the mountains brings on sometimes, I could hear the voices of our chaperones—four ancient ladies drinking mint tea from thermoses and plotting their annual trade fair in Missoula. AFAs lived to ninety quite regularly, and not a touchy, arthritic, dependent ninety but an unflappable productive ninety that, among the women, led to supreme achievements in the crafts realm. They sewed and crocheted with the patience of near immortals, complicating and miniaturizing their stitches, detailing and elaborating their patterns. It was as though they were working their way down to some primary depth of tininess and fineness that, if they ever succeeded in touching it, might allow them to reweave the cosmos or, if their fingers slipped, unravel it. They didn't hold on to their handiworks, however; they sold them to strangers from a rented stall at a Missoula's weekend farmers' market. Their pieces commanded handsome prices. Those old crones loved their money, it was plain to see, though why they loved it wasn't clear. They rarely spent it, just packed it into shoe boxes or sewed it into the linings of their coats for their heirs to come across someday.