Mission to America (26 page)

A boot in the neck to a creature of that magnitude—and to one whose reaction to his brother's slaughter had been to go on calmly chewing its cud after nudging the vast carcass with its nose and confirming that, yes, my companion's dead—shouldn't have been much of an annoyance. Then again, I'm not a buffalo. Perhaps the tiny, glancing blow brought back memories of larger insults that its species had absorbed over the centuries. Being stampeded over cliffs, for instance, or being cut down by the hundreds and the thousands by rifles aimed from the windows of tourist trains. I've done some reading since that day, and bison, I've learned, have certain grounds for anger.

The creature's advantage that wet chaotic morning was its ancient, inherited knack for manuevering on saturated soil. My pill-addled, Egg McMuffin–swollen partner possessed no such agility. Hobbling him further was his visible terror—aggravated, undoubtedly, by the old man's unceasing croaky hollering—of fumbling the rifle a second time. The relic might have been a nursing infant, he clutched it that close once he'd wiped it clean of muck and proudly brandished it to show Eff Sr. how thoroughly he'd restored its fine appearance. I was shouting by then and trying to stretch a hand out, but the old man's invective smothered my words and Secretary Barry blocked my way.

My partner heard the pounding hooves and whirled, but his first and overwhelming thought, it seemed, was to shield not himself but Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, a dead potentate whose minister of taxation, I would learn, once sent an ugly missive to Mother Lucy demanding that she stop printing Virtue Coupons. Elder Stark wrapped his broad cushioned torso around the Sharps, slipped, stood up, skidded, recovered, and was gored. I saw the horns slice in and pull back out, and then I saw one of them—the one that stuck and allowed the furious bull to fling my partner right up onto the platform at our feet—impale his right shoulder and prick out through his back. And then he was tossed. And then he fell. And bounced.

But the gun never left his grasp. He hugged it tight. He hugged it tight and he never, ever let go.

We made it back to Bluff,
with help. That's what I hope to write about someday, assuming anyone's still interested in what became of the Apostles: the way strange hands emerged to shepherd us home across the barbed-wire deserts of Wyoming. Our mission reversed itself along those highways, and the Terrestrians, whom I despised by then and blamed for the sad cargo strapped down in back, wrapped up in plastic inside a plywood box with a block of dry ice and a sachet of sage leaves, came forth in a bright new garb, as gentle seraphim.

There was the lady tow-truck driver from Riverton who worked on our van on the shoulder of the road, replacing a shredded fan belt at two a.m. by the shaky light of a sizzling orange flare. When she noticed that Betsy, who'd had no time to pack, was shivering in her thin T-shirt and nylon hiking shorts, she draped her black Windbreaker around her shoulders and wouldn't let us return it to her afterward, even though a patch sewn on the back identified it as a souvenir from the Las Vegas Hard Rock Cafe. She presented a bill for just twenty-seven dollars, giving me a discount for an auto club that I didn't belong to, but she tore it up when she saw me spread my wallet and bring out two limp, wrinkled twenties. “It's on Lou Anne,” she said, adding that in a pocket of her jacket we'd find a king-size Pearson Salted Nut Roll that we were to split and eat immediately.

The next crisis came two hours later on the outskirts of Thermopolis. I'd stepped hard on the brakes to avoid a waddling marmot and one of the elastic cords that lashed the casket to a bunk frame snapped. To stop the box from skidding and bouncing around, Betsy sat on it with one leg on either side, but the wood was flimsy and cracked under her weight. I bellowed at her when I heard the sound, and I shouted again when she stood up off the box and I glanced in my rearview mirror just in time to see the box slide and bump the bathroom door.

We were both in tears when the quarreling subsided, though for different reasons, probably. Betsy asked me to drop her off in the next town. It seemed she'd forgotten that I'd saved her life. The evening before, as I was leaving Snowshoe, I'd driven to her mother's to say goodbye to her and been told that Lance had just then picked her up for a moonlight hike into the mountains. I sped to the trailhead, imagining the canvas bag lying among the boulders beneath the cliff. Banished from the Rocking F, the fellow was desperate now, I feared. I caught them as they were slinging on their packs. On Lance's belt was a scabbarded hunting knife and his face was broken out in purple blemishes that spoke of malnutrition and sleeplessness. I didn't argue with him, I just took her, sternly, in the manner she'd always favored, and only after we'd crossed into Wyoming did I explain the peril she'd been in. She shrugged and looked away. She knew, apparently. “Naked pictures go on and on,” she said. “They're like the light from dying stars.” She curled up on her seat and dozed, but restlessly, as though being pestered by biting flies. She'd told me the casket didn't bother her, though she didn't like the vapors from the dry ice, so I gathered that she was dreaming of her own murder. It was there if she wanted it, waiting, all prepared. What a peculiar feeling that must have been.

“There's a gas station, Mason. I mean it: let me go.” Betsy sat on a bunk with one foot wedged under the box. “I'll call a friend to come get me.”

“You can't go back there.”

“I want my momma,” she said. “I miss my momma.”

I pulled over, too fatigued to bicker. Betsy sulked inside the little convenience store while I fueled up the van. At the adjacent pump a teenage boy was funneling motor oil into the crankcase of a jacked-up Ford pickup with spoked chrome wheels. “She's hot. She's a fox,” he said, nodding toward the store. His hair had been knotted into greasy braids that lay parallel and distinct on his white scalp.

“She wants me to leave her here,” I told him. Utter exhaustion bred utter candor. “We're transporting a body. It's gloomy. We've been fighting. At first she was fine, but now she's getting skittish.” I clicked off the pump when the numbers on its display matched the amount of money I had left minus three or four dollars in dimes and quarters.

“Lay two of these guys on her,” said the teenager. In his palm were three yellow pills with V-shaped cutouts. “Crush them up in some yogurt, if you have to. They don't have much of a taste. They're mostly sugar.”

I did as he suggested, and it worked. Never dismiss unbidden late-night aid from people you might avoid if it were daytime. Someday, when I'm more settled, I'll fill a notebook with all the odd new latter-day commandments.

Dawn broke in the gas fields north of Worland, where cows and horses wandered among the rigs and the smell through the rolled-down windows of the van was just noxious enough that I couldn't stop inhaling it, helplessly savoring its chemical tang. The fumes made my brain shimmer with dreams and memories as tranquilized Betsy slumbered on the bunk, her right arm flopped out and resting on the box, which we'd resecured with twisted bedsheets. At one point, I heard a grumbly low voice that I associated with the Hobo. “He released me,” it said. “I'm yours now. I'll stay close.” A scene from our mission's second day took shape then: Elder Stark at a rest-stop picnic table, enjoying the last of the lunch his mother had packed for him: parsnip sticks, rosehip tea, and cold-smoked trout mixed up with barley and beet greens in a salad. It was the last wholesome food I'd seen him eat, his eyes so clear then, his nails so smooth and pink.

In Powell I left Betsy snoring in the van and roamed the aisles of a supermarket looking for a solid, sustaining snack to spend my last dollar and seventy-eight cents on. Lauer telephoned while I was shopping. He'd been calling every few hours for two days, first with instructions on caring for the body—no funeral-parlor preservatives, no tampering, just keep it cold and drive straight through to Bluff—and then with messages from Mrs. Stark, who'd broken down, he said, and resigned from office as the Seeress-in-Waiting. Her replacement hadn't been named but I suspected Lauer intended to seize the throne himself—that, or dissolve its duties and prerogatives into the post of Executive Divine.

“Status report. How far are you?” he said. “Mrs. Stark had a nightmare you'd crashed into a tree.”

“That family overestimates its powers.” When I got back I planned to wallop Lauer. Not with my fists—with an object. A length of pipe, perhaps. To bleed all that deadly gray language from his head.

“How are you and Sarah doing?” Never before had I asked the question plainly.

“In process. We're in process.”

I hung up on him.

I left the store with a packet of smoked almonds that the phone call had distracted me from paying for. An elderly guard tapped my shoulder in the parking lot. I'd noticed this at WorkMart, too, this practice of hiring the feeble and the old to wrangle with thieves over pilfered merchandise. The guard lacked a healthy larynx, apparently, and communicated by pressing a kind of buzzer against the skin of his throat. His tremulous syllables baffled me, and I didn't understand what he was getting at until he pulled the almonds from my shirt pocket. I apologized and gave him seven quarters.

“Truck from Powell food bank loading up in back,” he said. I'd gotten used to his stilted electric voice by then. “Free day-old layer cake not picked up by customer. Mocha butter-cream icing. Shame to waste.”

“I'm not from around here,” I said. “I'm not from Powell.”

“Any hungry person with a need. Also many fine items from our dairy case.”

A procession of angels stretching to Montana, bearing us aloft on shining wings and feeding us on baked sweets and cold skim milk. When Betsy woke up near Billings and saw the cake sitting on the bunk across from hers, its sugar roses and frosting bride and groom still crisply outlined and intact, I think she changed her mind about our journey. We parked in a field along the Yellowstone River and prepared our feast. She unfolded two tracts on Perfection to use as plates and cut two generous slices of yellow cake, one with a flower, the other with a bow. We ate them with our fingers, off the casket lid, showering it in crumbs and hunks of icing that Betsy brushed into her hand when we were done and held out for me to lick.

         

This time the bird, a falcon, flew immediately. He'd done the job before. He knew the ceremony. So did the rest of us, everyone in Bluff. Only the ailing Seeress was absent. During the service I started counting heads to find out exactly how many of us remained, but I stopped at two hundred and twenty when I realized that the tally would come out much lower than I'd hoped. Once, these were all the people in the world for me, or at least all the people who mattered, who figured in, and they might as well have numbered in the millions, but now I could see that all of them together would fit in the lawn-care department of one WorkMart.

At the reception inside Celestial Hall I knelt before a seated Mrs. Stark and told her noble lies about our mission. I told her that her son had found love. A girl named Chipper. And it might have been true; she'd collapsed after the goring and followed my partner's body to the hospital in a second ambulance. I rode behind her in one of the Suburbans, squeezed in between her father and Eff Sr., who addressed me only once along the way, promising “timely, appropriate compensation to all affected parties.” As they stripped off my partner's shirt in the emergency room and assailed him with their machines and instruments as though he were a broken television that could be shocked and soldered back to life, Secretary Barry grabbed a nurse and demanded the top doctor for his daughter, who'd revived and was sitting upright on her stretcher biting a thumbnail and swinging her dangling ankles. The nurse, my hero, wrested herself away from him and commanded a strapping young male orderly to usher him outside into the hallway. He reacted by going for his wallet and flourishing some plastic-coated credential, but there was death in the room and lots of blood, and the wondrous card had no potency for once.

Mrs. Stark interrupted my tales by looking past me and summoning Lauer with a bent, raised finger. Sarah strode over with him, arm in arm. She'd grown elegant during my absence, ambassadorial, her hair no longer in bangs but cleanly parted, her shoes an inch higher than any she'd owned before. It may have been the Saab. She drove one now—silver, with a black cloth top that would be unusable by late August, or even before then, if our frosts came early. I couldn't tell if she was happy.

“Mason,” she said. She presented her left cheek and tapped it where she wanted me to kiss it. My lips came away feeling drier than they had.

“Where's your charming new lady friend?” she asked. “I chatted with her this morning at the co-op. She was trying to buy sandals with Virtue Coupons. Apparently they were yours. Hilarious.”

“I gave them to her before I knew,” I said. Before I knew Lauer had declared them valueless. And before I'd seen Celestial Hall's new entranceway—the Effingham Portal, a plaque informed me—all sided in redwood, with a redwood door. “Betsy's cooking supper at my parents' house. She felt it
would show more respect if she bowed out of this. She's not an Apostle.”

“Persuade her,” Sarah said.

“I'd rather not.”

Lauer, who'd been kneeling where I'd knelt, rose, and Mrs. Stark received another mourner. His name was Harmon Kluge, a talc miner. He'd arrived at the service in a car with Edward, who was standing beside the punch bowl across the hall admiring a little girl's embroidered dress. He'd welcomed me back in my parents' kitchen yesterday, already three or four pounds heavier, the backs of his hands and wrists scrubbed free of doodles. We'd talked for a while—about this Harmon, mostly; Edward was curious about the woman who'd crept out of town the night before their wedding after spreading a rumor that Harmon wore satin slips to bed—and when he left to trim the grass and shrubbery around my partner's burial plot, I knew he'd stay in Bluff for good. Most of all, he told me, he loved the views up here, because they only went in one direction. “We're part of no one else's panorama, but everyone else is part of ours. Ideal. It's what I've been looking for since age thirteen or so.”

Lauer slanted his body to indicate to Sarah that he wished to speak to me in confidence. She waved like a princess, with the top half of one hand, and then vanished in the efficient manner of Hadley, withdrawing her essence first, and then her body. For a female Apostle, this was a new trick; usually it was the man who gave the woman room. But Bluff had changed. What was Lauer's term? “Evolved.”

“I'm here to convey a message from the Seeress.”

“She still lets you speak to her?”

Lauer snapped his fingers. “Enough. No more.”

“That works with dogs, not people. Though Sarah might be the exception. You've trained her well.”

The face of our new Executive Divine went rigid and royal but reddened at its edges. He dreamed of beheadings, this man, of bloody edicts. He longed for troops, for sashes, swords, and medals, for proclamations stamped with his wax seal and purple silk robes with lions on their breasts. We'd fled from him more than a century ago, across the prairies and on up into the woods, but we hadn't built fortifications, and we should have. They might have delayed him and forced him to lay siege while our queen devised other hazards to thwart the onslaught. But he was here now, and there was no defense. He'd marched through the garden that should have been a wall and planted his boots on our holy innermost center. The heat he gave off, the musk.