Mission to America (24 page)

I called him back when he was halfway up, this relentless young man who'd sold a whole religion to someone who needed his delusions solemnized, his twilight deliriums engraved and certified, and who longed to stamp his fine name on something more lasting than stock certificates and Asian factories.

“Have you ever used a gun before today?”

“Where would I have found a gun in Bluff? Maybe I aimed a stick once and said ‘bang.' No. Of course not. They scare me witless.”

“Did you manage to hit the target even once? People must have been laughing at you, too. You must have been as bad as Lance,” I said.

“I had an important advantage,” my partner said. “I am who I am. I knew better than to try.”

A Ford front-end loader,
the inside of its bucket rubbed silvery smooth by the tons of soil and sand it had lifted and dumped over its lifetime, was parked in the driveway in front of the machinery shed. I carried my coffee to the guesthouse porch, alone because my partner was at the airport hefting expensive luggage onto carts, and watched the old ranch hand who operated the loader select a crescent wrench from a dented toolbox and loosen a pair of black hydraulic hoses at their juncture with the pump under the cab. I admired the way the old hand submerged himself in the simple task before him, and it struck me that what I'd been told last night was true: when the sun reemerges to cast it slanting light on the factual and sufficent All There Is and on the needful labors of the new day, the person who seeks to be happier than not must put aside his resentments and regrets and quietly bear witness to these astonishments. Look: the world is intact. It has no holes. The people have no holes. They work, they lift things. If there seem to be holes, the holes are in yourself.

I was here again, suddenly. This was where I stood, neither tilted back nor leaning forward, high on a wooded Terrestrian plateau that sloped up to meadowy foothills where bison grazed, inching along blade of grass by blade of grass, not backward, not forward, not up or down, just moving. And I, because I'd not slept well and wanted to sleep better, and because before going to bed I'd called a woman who'd chosen not to answer, as was her right—but mostly because the sun on my face was warm and my coffee was just the right temperature and sweetness—I resolved to live the way the bison did, bite by bite, while looking at the ground, always occupied, never out of place, indifferent to what was approaching from behind or getting into position up ahead.

         

The black Suburbans came and went all day, dropping the visitors and their heavy bags. I carried a few of these so I knew their weight, though I couldn't imagine what accounted for it. Summer clothing, even several days' worth, might add up to a pound or two, at most, yet some of the suitcases took two hands to lift. I didn't pry, though. I stayed quiet, invisible. Costumed according to various strange ideas about the situations that might arise this far west and this far from the city (I saw people dressed for saloon brawls, stagecoach rides, powwows, cattle drives, gunfights, poker games), the new arrivals spoke mostly to one another and mostly about matters I couldn't fathom. I heard talk about treasury coupons, the Harvard rowing team, a Chicago divorce lawyer nicknamed “the Incisor,” new medications for swollen prostate glands, a store called Bergdorf's, and “the flat tax.” I couldn't tell which of the guests were friends or strangers or relatives by marriage who hadn't met before but had communicated on the phone once. It was clear, though, that almost every one of them harbored some interest in almost every other one and assumed that the others were interested in them.

During one of the drop-offs and unloadings, my partner took me aside to let me know that the fellow whose duffel bag I'd just been handed was a high Terrestrian government minister in charge of “energy.” He also owned, with a partner, the president's son-in-law, a fleet of tanker ships and a professional football team, “the Flood.” The man, whom my partner called Secretary Barry, was here with his daughter, whom my partner pointed to as she was entering one of the large tepees that had been erected without my noticing on the main house's irrigated back lawn. My partner said the girl was “pleasant looking,” but I couldn't confirm this from a distance. Without a smile, he said her name was Chipper. Not to smile at such a stupid name could only be a sign, I felt, of serious intentions toward its bearer. When she pushed back the flap on the tepee and stepped out, my partner waved at her, and then said, “See that?” I had no idea what he meant since I hadn't noticed her wave back.

I went to the guesthouse to wash up before supper, which I'd heard would be served near the tepees, off of chuck wagons. The house had been cleaned, I saw, and on the sofa I spotted a computer and a briefcase and an upside-down white cowboy hat still wrapped in plastic and stuffed with tissue paper. A tall white-haired man with much younger-looking skin appeared on the stairs. His shirt was gingham, girlish, his feet were bare, and he hadn't cinched his belt yet. “May I help you?” he asked.

“They must have moved us out.”

“Perhaps you're residing in the village.” All the guests called the tepees “the village” for some reason. It must have been mentioned on the invitations.

I thanked the man, who didn't thank me back, which hurt because I'd been so cooperative. I felt him watching me as I went out, and I made sure to shut the door firmly to reassure him that I was permanently, safely gone.

In the village a guest who'd put on denim overalls over the type of shirt that needs a tie directed me to an old-fashioned-looking map nailed to a tree trunk with square-headed nails. “Camp Shoshone” it said in rough black letters that reminded me of a poster in the café which read “Wanted: Dead or Alive—Motivated, Personable Baristas.” Both the sign and the map were printed on stained brown paper edged in curly burn marks. One of the triangles representing the tepees was labeled “Lodge of the Two Elders.” I memorized its position and, moments later, was reunited with my books and clothes inside a surprisingly spacious canvas cone outfitted with cots and rugs and lanterns.

Dinner, for once, was not buffalo but chicken. Young men I recognized from the downtown sidewalks, including the bobsledder from the café whose family fortune was built on yellow markers and whom I'd suspected of having eyes for Betsy, were dressed as frontier cooks and armed with cleavers that, when swung down hard from shoulder level, split the roast chickens into equal halves that fell over onto their sides at the same time. The feat brought grins from the diners. Some clapped their hands. One man whooped. He'd been waiting all year to whoop like this, it seemed, and he did it again later on, when it was dark, and everyone was seated in a circle on pine-log benches, waiting for the speech.

I hadn't known a speech was scheduled. I'd been meditating on my cot, staring up through the tepee's little opening while my overfull belly burbled and leaked fumes. I'd kept up with my partner, right on through the pies, cramming down second double servings of everything to smother the hatred that flared up every time I heard that voice or saw that face. My morning serenity had simmered off, turned to steam by too much bulky luggage, too many middle-aged women in leather chaps, and too many loud conversations that grew subdued when I passed by too close or stared too long. Secretary Barry's rudeness finished things. He was the man in the guesthouse, it turned out. My partner met him in the chow line and called me over to be introduced. The man shook my hand but didn't meet my eyes—and not because he remembered me, I sensed, but because he deemed me unworthy of remembering.

When Elder Stark ducked his head inside the tepee and told me Eff Sr. was set to give a welcome speech, I rolled on my side and ignored him. He came and shook me. The speech was important. The speech could not be skipped. The names of the buffalo hunters would be drawn.

“I'm not going to watch the safari. I don't care,” I said. “And who decided to call it a safari? Isn't everything Indian this weekend?”

“It's a mixture,” my partner said. “The speech is starting.”

“How many pages in
Luminaria
did you and Lauer give him for his writings?”

“This month? Four.”

“Shoshone Indians don't have safaris. Apostles don't have Executives Divines. I don't approve of mixtures. I don't like them.”

“They don't need you to like them. Get up off that bed. You'll brood yourself sick.”

“I'm here because of you.
Only
because of you. I could have gone. I could have left you stranded in this place.”

“And I acknowledge that, and I am thankful.”

“Act it.”

“I do. I love you. Be with me. I've done what I've done and I'm doing for the ongoing good of the Apostolic All. Believe it.”

“What?”

“We're getting the better end of this.” He winked at me.

“If that's how you really think, that makes it worse.”

“It makes it what it is. The speech,” he said.

I snarled at him to leave and said I'd be there, thinking the short walk over might vent some gas. I didn't care in front of whom.

With the collar turned up on his favorite sheepskin coat, the one with buttons of gnarled yellow bone, Eff Sr. stood up as straight as he was able, which was straighter than when we'd first met him, but not by much. My partner claimed he'd worked magic with the man, scouring and flushing his innards until they sparkled, and then pumping him full of Revealed Nutritional Science. But clots of tarry residue still circulated. Their particles clouded the corners of his eyes and darkened the backs of his spotted, freckled hands. The last time we'd stood near enough for me to scrutinize his nails, I'd observed the ridges, grooves, and furrows that meant the imbalance had spread to every cell, even the dry, brittle, dead ones farthest out.

He called for attention by swatting an aspen branch against one of the stones banked up to form the fire circle. He didn't seem to fear the column of sparks that every flicker of wind disturbed and scattered, sometimes landing black cinders on his gray head. And the smoke didn't trouble his lungs, that I could see. His breathing was quick and shallow, like a newborn's.

He dropped the stick and thrust his arms straight up the way that winning TV athletes do but also in the manner of a sketch near the end of Little Red Elk's
Thought Streams
depicting his vision of the Thunder Chief, a minor springtime deity who modern Apostles didn't give much thought to but who my great-grandmother sewed into a sock doll that, with dyed pipe cleaners for its upraised arms and flakes of obsidian for eyes, had vigilantly guarded me in my crib.

“Shoshone braves, Shoshone squaws!” Eff Sr.'s arms stretched as high as they could go, pulling his pale wrists out of his coat sleeves. “My gratitude be upon you, and my greeting!”

That's when the whooping man gave his second whoop. Some other guests whistled or howled like wild dogs, but the guests who appeared the least startled and most comfortable—perhaps because they'd attended previous gatherings—slapped their knees, their left knees, with their left hands. In unison, and for what felt like a full minute.

My partner, sitting with Chipper across the circle, knew just what to do, somehow. But Chipper didn't. She used the wrong hand until he pushed it down and grabbed her other hand with his. By the time she'd mastered the rhythm and the motion, though, Eff Sr. had dropped his arms and lowered his eyebrows and was rolling his shoulders and loosening his neck. He let out a long, showy sigh, and then said this:

“Now aren't we all glad to have
that
crap over with!”

I laughed with the others. The joke was a relief. It helped me feel much better about things.

The speech became practical and businesslike, setting out the schedule of events, the times and locations of the meals, and the weather forecast for the weekend. Rain was expected tomorrow, an inconvenience but also, Eff Sr. said—still grinning, thankfully—a sign that the “Directorate of Firmaments” looked favorably on the assembly because the storms would ease a six-year drought.

Eff Sr. called his son out of the crowd then and had him stand at his left shoulder. Little Eff looked embarrassed and abashed. In the V of his open collar I saw a chain similar to the one Lance hung his cross from. Hadley, it seemed, had been right: he'd met the Lord. The man who'd brought them together wasn't here, though; I heard he'd been banned for maiming Eff Sr.'s pickup.

“The details on the safari,” said Eff Sr., “are all laid out in your orientation letters. This is a brand-new rite. It came to me. So: Are you ready for Freddy? Let's draw names. Errol, fetch the skin from Delbert there.”

The new foreman stepped out of the shadows behind the benches and passed Little Eff a grocery-bag-size sack fashioned from a coffee-colored hide so crudely tanned that it still bore tufts of fur. The son held it open for the father; the names were already inside it, apparently. I expected more introductory fuss and bluster, but instead the old man plunged his hand into the sack, picked out a slip of paper, and said crisply: “Rear Admiral Retired Barnaby T. Amundsen!”

The crowd scanned itself until a hand went up. Prepared by the formidable name and title to behold an imposing master of the high seas, I found the sharp-eared, slit-eyed, short admiral, who was also bald and had a paunch, piercingly disappointing.

The second hunter was a husky woman who stood up, bowed, and waved, then made two fists. From about two feet apart, she rammed the fists together like butting rams, provoking a burst of knee claps and a third whoop. The next hunter was Secretary Barry. His prominence at the assembly felt engineered and made me think the drawing might not be honest. The strenuous way Eff Sr. stirred his hand around before he withdrew the fourth name from the sack seemed laughably, transparently fraudulent. I sighed and shook my head and turned my hands up, thinking these gestures might flush out other skeptics. There had to be a few, but they didn't show themselves. Too shy or too scared. It exasperated me. I was twisting around to leave the circle when a voice from across the circle said, “I'm honored, sir.”