Mission to America (23 page)

“I'm here,” I said. “You have my full attention.”

Hadley paused to line up her thoughts. “My father, a disabled Bemidji iron miner, he followed me when I ran off to join the circus. He'd never been to New York. He packed a tent. No kidding, he thought you could camp in Central Park. He told me he wanted a farewell dinner, and make it a fancy place, maybe we'll spot DiMaggio. I picked ‘21.' I asked a cop. Dad loved it. Thirty dollars for a burger. He was a socialist—that just made his day. He said he couldn't wait to tell his union pals.”

I turned then because I thought I heard a shot. “I'm listening. A thirty-dollar hamburger.”

“I've made you all weird and self-conscious now,” said Hadley. “Well anyway, we got drunk. We had a ball. We met a guy at the bar who said he knew a guy whose stepfather sold DiMaggio his Cadillacs. Afterward, on the street, Dad hailed a cab for me, and as I was climbing in, he started crying. I could see he wanted to tell me something. ‘Read,' he finally said. ‘Read everything. I've read one book in my life: a children's Bible. That's why I smashed my pelvis in an ore pit.' He reached in his raincoat and handed me a card then. ‘These books will come once a month,' he said, ‘forever. They're already paid for. I sent them three months' pension.'”

The next noise was definitely a gunshot. A practice round, or had the hunt begun? I searched the crowd for Eff Sr. but didn't spot him. It had to be a practice round. No one commenced to massacre their livestock an hour after a burial.

“The Library of the Ages, it was called. Flimsy, shoddy editions with fake gold leaf and leather so thin you could tear it with your pinkie nail. I called the company's office for a refund. I'm not even going to tell you how much Dad gave them. No luck, though. Soon, the first book came: the
Iliad
. And then the
Odyssey
and Plutarch's
Parallel Lives
and . . . I couldn't keep up. I sold the books to get a better head shot. I was in penury, flunking my auditions, hostessing at a men's club that stole the girls' tips. Dad telephoned me one day, we talked for a while, I lied about my work, and just before we hung up, he said: ‘Your language, darling. It hasn't changed. Those books are too hard for young ladies, I should have known. I'll have them sent here to Bemidji.' And he did. When he died eight years later—a massive stroke, no pain, the way it should be—I flew to Minnesota to sell his house, and—”

Five booms in a row, an entire magazine. Little Eff and my partner had vanished also. I checked for Lance at the buffet, where people were still heaping paper plates with bison meat and spooning creamed horseradish on top, but it seemed that he'd joined the other target shooters. Capturing the Effinghams for AlpenCross would mean showing zest for all their games.

“—there they were stacked up in the garage, all seventy, still in their wrappers, immaculate. The hypocrite—he hadn't read them, either. Later on, after I shipped them to New York, I noticed a Hallmark card taped to Montaigne's
Essays
. ‘My dear daughter,' it said . . . I should shut up. I'm boring you.”

“I'm listening. I am. The shots,” I said.

“Only talk to make the man feel good or to keep the conversation moving. I violated my first commandment.”

The scalpels and chemicals and beams of light that had sculpted Hadley out of Gretel must have damaged the tear ducts in her right eye. It stayed dry while the other puddled up, the liquid collecting in a bulging dome that soaked the left side of her face when it erupted. I noticed again what I'd often noticed before: human teardrops aren't really drops at all. They're not that separate. We should call them “tearspills.”

It was time to buy a second handkerchief. Hadley blotted her cheeks off, blew her nose, inspected the cloth, and folded it up tight. “Wash that in bleach unless you want an outbreak.”

I'd thought things over as she cried and concluded that, if you're at liberty to do so, it's probably wisest to eat the meal in front of you. Who was to say you'd ever get a better meal, or another one at all.

“I want to play—what was it called?—the Price Is Right.”

“I should get back and total up my invoice. They always stiff you once they've seen the light. Maybe I'll take a hot bath and read some Plato and see if the airline can whisk me out of here before the great white hunters start arriving. One or two of them know me, it might get messy.”

She rose on her toes in her binding, strappy sandals and daintily kissed me between the eyebrows like a mother sending a child off to school. I'd misjudged her. Hadley was unselfish underneath, but she understood that her eagerness to please might leave her with nothing unless she reined it in and put it on a proper business footing.

“I'd like you to finish your story. This doesn't feel right.”

“I so agree,” she said, “but there you have it: the phenomenological crux of social mobility. We come in midway with people; we leave midway. We don't always get to hear the end of things.”

She walked away with the assured light steps of someone who'd made a profession of departures. I waited until the wind had scattered her perfume before heading off to locate Elder Stark. All the smart people were leaving, I planned to tell him, and we should go, too, if we wished to be among them.

         

In a freshly cut alfalfa field about half a mile from the house I found the rifle range but not the riflemen. I poked a finger through a shredded target tacked to a stack of mildewed straw bales approximately as tall and wide across as a grazing buffalo. Spent brass cartridges glinted in the stubble and I stuffed a couple in my pocket because the boy inside me still believed that all shiny objects were valuable.

The sportsmen had trampled a path between the bales and the spot they'd chosen as their firing line was no more than thirty yards away. Because buffalo didn't run from people (unless someone hollered or pitched a sizable rock at them, they barely hoisted their heads) I doubted that shots of even half that distance would be required in the safari. Unlike almost everyone else in Bluff, I knew some things about ballistics, since my father the deputy was the only resident other than the Varmint Warden—who dispatched rabid skunks and cat-killing coyotes with an open-sighted .223—who was permitted to carry firearms. When fired from close range, the smoky slow-speed ordnance issuing from Eff Sr.'s high-caliber blunderbusses would gouge broad channels through the hides and flesh, ruining a certain amount of meat but enabling efficient one-shot kills—assuming the hunter wasn't drunk or handling a rifle for the first time. I didn't plan to watch, though. Nor did I expect I'd be invited to.

My hope was that soon we'd be on the road to Omaha, but I knew it was a fantasy. My partner's emerging rivalry with Lance might keep him here for six months, a year. Even if guards escorted him from the ranch, he'd creep back through the National Forest at night, camp by the fence line nearest to the house, and monitor his quarry through binoculars, watching for indications of a fresh blockage in the old man's large intestines and scanning for any signs of cooling in Little Eff's ardor for AlpenCross. My partner's condition was as bad as Lara's, and hers had proven fatal. Unless it was in the talons of a hawk, he'd never leave the castle on his own.

I decided I'd have to take him away by force.

I found him at the table in our kitchen gobbling corn chips, swilling Dr Pepper, and reading a heavily underlined and starred copy of a book called
From Sea to Shining Sea
. A yellow notepad lay open at his elbow, but he closed it as soon as I came in. He also had his phone, which should have been locked inside the guardhouse. The phone was flipped open and its screen was lit, meaning he'd either just used it or was about to.

“The pack-trip guests start arriving at six a.m. I said we'd drive out to the airport and pick them up. They'll want help with their bags. We need to earn our keep here.”

“They let you have your phone.”

“I'm consulting with Lauer. He's been to see my mother. We're interested in what she thinks of this.” He patted the cover of
From Sea to Shining Sea
. “As the new Executive Divine, Lauer's in charge of the Doctrinal Review. He's convinced her that new revelations are at hand. The truth is not a stone tablet. It shifts. It moves.”

The blood surged through my head so rapidly and under such pressure that I heard the arteries squeak—an actual sound that struck me as a warning to lie down immediately or suffer a seizure. “What,” I asked, “is an ‘Executive Divine'?”

My partner folded his arms and scraped his chair back, perhaps to prepare himself for the assault he knew was inevitable if things went on this way. I'd already plotted the first two blows: a bony backhand clubbing of his right ear by my tensed right forearm followed by a tremendous head-on kick like the ones used by TV policeman to break down doors. I prayed for the strength to drag him to the van then, and the skill to resuscitate him afterward.

“The hierarchy,” he said, “has been reorganized.”

“That was sudden.”

“In fact, it's not,” he said. “Lauer's been planning it for a year or two. The goal is a more dynamic leadership, not so reactive, not so . . . calcified. The government of Great Britain would be the model here. There's a titular royal head, the king, the queen, but the locus of real-world, practical decision making—”

“These words of Lauer's, they sicken me,” I said. “Especially when I hear them out of you. They coat my whole mouth with a rotten-banana taste.”

He spread his knees, consolidating his defenses, and I responded by widening my own stance. Then a subtler strategy revealed itself. Soften, draw back. Perform a false retreat. Try not to wince at the gruesome terminology. Let him sing of the new dispensation unmolested. Then, when his breathing evened, smash his head in.

“So we'll still have a Seeress?”

“Of course we will. That's our tradition. We embrace tradition. We also embrace, as of now, the principle of ‘Guided Institutional Evolution.'”

“Is that from that?” I nodded at the book that he'd been scribbling in.

“It's Lauer's phrase. This is just a volume on history that Eff Sr. said I should read to get my facts straight. About the wars and leaders and all that. The right names and dates and so on.”

“You went to school,” I said.

“We only got one side of things in school.” He covered the book with one of his broad hands as though to remove it from the discussion. “Eff Sr. forgives you, by the way. He gave up on that Edward months ago. Truthfully, you did the man a favor there. I talked to him when we were shooting. He said the memoir was distracting him from more important problems, like his son. Little Eff is unsound. He's an unsound human being. He falls for things. He falls for anything. Then his father has to pick him up.”

“Little Eff's with the Prince of Flocks now, isn't he?”

“This Lance—are you two friends? Lance said you were.”

I shook my head as severely as people can shake them.

My partner scooped up corn chips from the bowl and crushed them past his lips, reducing them to a yellow mealy mash that I received several revolting glimpses of as he labored to make it swallowable by gulping up extra saliva from his throat. “He dresses funny,” he said at last. “He also can't shoot worth a darn. He's laughable. The first time he aimed, he snugged the rifle stock—Eff Sr. and I just shook our heads, appalled—against the wrong shoulder, but also the wrong cheek! And then, once we'd straightened him out, he bumped the trigger before he had his barrel pointing level and blew a mirror off Eff Sr.'s truck!”

My partner's joy dislocated his features, stretching them and pushing them apart as his skull tried to burst through his face in sheer exuberance. He dipped his head to meet the straw sticking up from his Dr Pepper can and merrily, gurglingly sucked, crossing his eyes to watch the rising liquid. Here was my opportunity to avenge myself for the pummeling of the other day and then, once I'd whipped him, drag him to the van. I couldn't bear to touch him now, forever. That body, so glutted with grease and arrogance. That mind deceived by
From Sea to Shining Sea
.

Dropping my plan to take him by surprise meant I could speak again in my real voice. The words I chose weren't usual for me, but I knew they were mine because of where they came from. They howled up into the tunnel of my throat from some fundamental abdominal black pit that had been sealed off from me before but had been opened now, I understood, because there was real evil to be named.

“Vile decayed betrayer and despoiler. Defiled loathsome hog.”

And then the pit closed over and I said this: “Lauer's worse, but he was born worse. Lauer was hatched in a brain aquarium. You're from Bluff, Elias. Remember Bluff? Elias and Mason. We used to be the same.”

My partner laughed and I saw his horrid tongue, coated with golden curds of corn-chip paste. “No two are alike. Especially not us two.”

“We're of the same body. Two different feet. Remember? I'm not going to forget that. Ever, Elias.”

“Remember, forget, I don't care what you do.”

Keeping an eye on me in case I lunged, he slipped his notepad inside the history book, tucked the bundle in one of his foul armpits, rose from his chair, gave another ugly laugh, and carried the bowl of corn-chip fragments over to the counter where the bag was. He shook out what was left inside the bag, which appeared to be less than he'd expected, judging by how vengefully he crumpled it. He crossed toward the stairs, picking chips out of the bowl and bowing his head to eat them from his hand because if he moved that arm the book might fall.

“Put the bowl in your other hand,” I said.

“You see?” he said, turning as he made the switch. “Still brothers. We can't help it. Still a pair. Be as angry as you'd like tonight—in the morning you'll wake up and you'll remember that Could Have Been and Should Be aren't What Is. And then we'll drink our coffee. And we'll enjoy it.”