Mission to America

by Walter Kirn

  “Healthy,” said Lara. She didn't believe him either.

  Because it wasn't raining or all that hot, the party tent served no particular purpose other than marking the location of the food and drinks. Of the forty or fifty guests who'd come before us, most were standing in the open air, perhaps to avoid the smoke and fumes from a stupendous iron barbecue pit whose dual rotisseries turned boulders of flesh too large to have been obtained from regular cattle. I noticed a lot of cowboy hats, but only two men who actually looked like cowboys. Both had the outlines of snuff cans on their back pockets and both were talking to pairs of older women. The men's faces looked tired, and I assumed they worked here. None of the other faces looked even slightly tired. Not even in Bluff, at the Service of New Spring Morn, had I ever seen such a brisk-eyed, wakeful crowd.

  Lara led us under the tent and dug up two freezing bottles of orange pop from a cooler packed with snowy shaved ice. For herself, she ordered something from the bar, violating her own rule. The bartender was a kid of maybe twenty in a starched white shirt, an agate bolo tie, and a black leather vest too short for his long torso. All the helpers that day were dressed like him. He poured, stirred, added a lemon wedge, presented. Lara tasted, then handed back the glass. She made the flustered kid start over. When I realized she was a baptized Apostle now, the first Terrestrian so privileged, I found myself doubting the wisdom of our mission. Maybe it was better to die off than to dilute our standards for membership.

  Lara winked at us and strode away, headed in the direction of the house—a long, low structure of timber and adobe designed to follow the contours of its site. I took the wink to mean Lara would be back soon. Elder Stark and I loitered with nothing much to say, gazing past each other at other guests who, when they noticed us looking at them, smiled or tipped their heads as if they knew us, then calmly turned back to their conversation partners and forgot about us for all eternity.

  “Over to your right there, by the hitching post. I think she's an Effingham,” my partner said. “Paula, the daughter. A Cleveland baby doctor.”

  The stout, mannish, middle-aged lady my partner was talking about changed my ideas of what heiresses look like. They were dumb ideas anyway, backed by no experience, and I couldn't imagine where they'd come from—perhaps from the same realm as the face of Cher. The woman had on no jewelry, she wore her hair short, and she stood in her putty-brown shoes as if cemented to them, with none of the swaying supple lightness of the other female guests. Her hand gestures were precise and technical, the movements of her mouth were quick and beaverish, and she seemed to be saying something quite serious to the attentive young couple in front of her.

  “Excuse me,” my partner said.

  “Don't just barge in there. She might be giving medical advice.”

  “We've already wasted twenty minutes here. Lara was supposed to go find Little Eff and bring him down and introduce us all. They're probably quarreling.”

  “Please don't call him that.”

  “It's his nickname. Little Eff.”

  “I just don't like it for some reason. Especially not from your mouth.”

  “You should leave.”

  “I'm waiting for the meat. I'm hoping it's buffalo.”

  “Go back to Bluff. You're a pebble in my shoe. Tell Lauer you want your pretty Sarah back, take out a loan from the co-op for a house, apply for a job at the talc mine, save your Virtue Coupons, and go down with the rest of them. You hurt my feet.”

  “I met a neat young woman last night. She told me she'd call.” A disturbing thought perked up then. “Why would I have to ask Lauer for Sarah back?”

  “Because you just might have to. Protocol. Because he's a power there now. The Church is changing. They're lovely, gentle, wise old ladies, but as a leadership team they're faltering.”

  “You looked away from me when I asked my question.”

  “Because I'm impatient. I need to meet an Effingham.”

  I let his dark bulk brush past me and finished my pop. The moment I did, a uniformed girl appeared and asked if she could take my empty bottle. Around me was a deserted ten-foot circle of absolute social uninterest. I needed new shoes. I also needed to speak with Lauer—that, or never to speak with him again. I'd always assumed he met women on his speaking tours, sleek young Terrestrian corporate executives who shared his Human on Earth concerns and led the same hotel-banquet life that he did, and that he'd return someday engaged to one of them. His cologne made me think this; its spices evoked damp bedsheets. Why Sarah, then? Perhaps to please his mother, but Madeline Lauer had been dead ten years, approved for a Mercy Passing by the Seeress when prayer and diet failed to shrink her tumors.

  Sarah held nothing for Lauer, nor Lauer for her—except for the money to buy her a Saab, perhaps. But what if I was wrong? “What should be, is.” As my grandmother explained it to our family the winter she lost three fingertips to frostbite when the furnace in her little house broke and she fell and cracked a hip while trying to light it, “Accepting life's imperfections is not the secret. The secret, dears, is to understand life has none. How could it? We've nothing to compare it to. We can dream something up, of course—some pretty maybe life where fingers are very hard and indestructible—but that's pure mischief, darlings. Fingers freeze. It's one of the things they like to do sometimes.”

  I found myself beside the barbecue pit, admiring the stately rotation of the bison quarters. I wasn't alone. A man in his early or middle sixties, strangely stiff in the waist as though he wore a girdle, and standing with his chest and shoulders bent forward like someone wading upstream in a fast river, had stationed himself at the backs of two male cooks who were basting the meat with liquid from foil pans and banking and spreading the coals with metal pokers. The old man's face was fiercely supervisory and it registered every action of the cooks with a flutter of tiny muscles or a quick wince. He spoke no orders, though. He managed through simple presence. The cooks seemed to move their basters and wield their pokers in response to intuitions about his wishes, and occasionally one would stop short and change direction like a hunting dog who's heard a whistle.

  “Whether the ultimate taste is worth the wait depends on the animal,” the man announced. He was talking to me, though he hadn't turned his head. “The one we've got here was a plodding big old guy. He liked to find a cool spot and snooze all day. Either his age will make him dry and chewy, or his incredible sloth will make him tender.”

  “I suppose we'll have to see,” I said.

  “You'll have to see. I can't eat it anymore.” In his voice was a braided thread of irritation and something like despair. “I could mush it up in a blender and take a spoonful, but even then I'd bloat up like a hog.”

  I'd guessed the old man's identity by then, and it puzzled me that the host of such a party and the owner of such a colossal property would find himself alone with someone like me. We watched the roasts turn and waved away the smoke and our solitude there seemed to gradually draw us closer and ease us toward further intimate disclosures. I glanced behind me to check on Elder Stark, but both he and the Effingham daughter had been absorbed by the growing crowd. Once again, some of the guests smiled back at me, but with a subtle new wary curiosity. My friendly proximity to Errol Sr. clearly had made me an object of speculation.

  “Does all meat affect you that way, or only buffalo?” This was a personal question, but he'd started it.

  “Solid food in general,” Eff Sr. said. “My gut is in bloody revolt against its master. It's no way to die, I can tell you that much. Why are you here? Who invited you?”

  His bluntness shook me, but a look at his eyes suggested that what he wanted was simple information, not to frighten me. My grandmother's second husband was the same way. He'd run the talc operation for decades, overseeing tons of machinery and scores of men, and he lived for honest answers to straight questions. People got just one chance to offer them fully.

  “We're traveling missionaries from Montana who met your son's frien
d Lara Shirer recently and are helping adjust her higher and lower minds. She felt for some reason that we should meet your family. When I say ‘we,' I mean I have a partner. His name is Elder Elias Stark. Our church is the Aboriginal Fulfilled Apostles and we preach that the worthiness of soul and body is intrinsic and innate. We approve of many, many things.”

  “Unusually comprehensive. That's appreciated.” Eff Sr. held out his right hand and when it gripped me I detected a willed attempt at firmness undermined by a basic cellular frailty whose nature and causes a trained Church Healer, or perhaps the Hobo, might have been able to diagnose right there.

  “Enjoy my place today. Have lots to drink. It's time for my baby food,” Eff Sr. said. “My job here is finished. This buffalo is done.”

  I waited until he'd gone off a couple of yards before I said thank you and goodbye. Without turning, he slowed his steps and waved me nearer. When I caught up, he clasped one of my forearms and gave me a good portion of his weight, the portion he couldn't carry by himself. I didn't make him ask me; I walked him home.

  The gathering at the tent, I soon found out, wasn't the true party, the party that mattered, but a luxurious diversion staged to keep Snowshoe's prominent residents occupied while the real party happened inside the house. This party was smaller and more informal, its food just a platter of crackers and smelly cheese and a bowl of fruit salad that was mostly watermelon, and its drinks cans of Coke and beer from the refrigerator, but the fact that the Effinghams themselves were there made it more prestigious, I'd discover.

  Not that any of them were having much fun. Paula, the daughter, who'd come up from the tent after fulfilling her obligations as ambassador to the general public, sat on a stool at a long butcher-block counter and placed cell phone calls to her hospital in Ohio. (She preferred to be addressed as Dr. Vance, I learned.) Her husband, Connor, who had the white teeth I sought but probably would have wrestled me for my hair, since his was just a dusting of thin gray fuzz adhering to a badly sunburned scalp, was amusing himself at the table with a red pencil and a book of word games. Errol—Little Eff—came in and out through a set of glass doors that led to a back garden where four or five guests whom I hadn't been introduced to yet were talking quietly under a big umbrella. The only point of his visits indoors, so far as I could see, was to ask an immobile, armchair-bound Eff Sr. again and again if he needed anything—a glass of water, another pill, his Wall Street Journal, a dish of applesauce. The father acted annoyed by his son's doting, but I sensed that he also expected nothing less from him.

  My part in this scene was to wander around the room—an immense combination kitchen–dining room–living room from whose exposed and lowered wood ceiling beams hung a museum's worth of copper kettles, birch canoe paddles, tin mining lanterns, iron coyote traps, and bamboo fishing poles—and ask whomever I happened to be closest to where this strange thing had come from or what that thing did. Now and then son-in-law Connor would call for help with one of his word puzzles, and we'd all pitch in, but the rest of the time I felt bored, confined, and stunned.

  Until Lara and Elder Stark appeared. Her head poked through the door first and when she saw me there, at home with the president-electing Effinghams, holding a cola from their private refrigerator, and, at that particular moment, being congratulated by Eff Sr. for helping to solve a word problem that Connor had been struggling with, her face seized up with anguish and hostility. The look didn't last, though. Errol had just come in again, and when Lara spotted him she turned all twinkly.

  “Hi, everybody. Hi there, Mr. Eff,” she said. Then, to Errol: “Hi, where've you been hiding?” I gathered that she hadn't found him earlier.

  “Nowhere. Here and there. Come in,” he said. He seemed startled and a little depressed.

  “I have a friend,” she said. She opened the door the whole way. My partner bowed. Not a deep bow, but a bow. There were stains on his shirt that I assumed were bison grease.

  “Who is that young man?” Eff Sr. demanded. He knew who it was because I'd pointed him out to him, so maybe the idea was to teach Lara a lesson about popping in without knocking properly.

  A silence took hold. Poor Lara looked terrified. She started to back away. I was thinking about how to save things when my partner said, solemnly, deliberately, and—as events would show—not unpersuasively:

  “Someone who can help, sir. Elder Stark. I've come from Montana to help you eat again.”

  A few mornings later Betsy met me at the van. I'd suggested a rendezvous at the coffee shop, but there was somebody who worked there whom she was trying to avoid. She didn't give any details, but I suspected she meant the son of the yellow-marker tycoon. He was the only employee near her age and he had, I'd heard, quite a history with the girls in town, who were said to admire his bobsledding ambitions. I'd learned that “Olympic hopefuls” were common in Snowshoe, and that the community had more “medalists” than any place of its size in the whole country. Indeed, Elder Stark had done some checking around after Betsy finally phoned me and discovered that she was a former snowboarder who'd quit the sport at twenty-one when her best friend was chosen for the Olympic team and Betsy wasn't. I didn't plan to ask her if this was true because I didn't want to make her feel bad.

  She showed up at our campsite in a silver Ford Explorer waxed to the luster of a Christmas ornament. My partner was just leaving on his bike, bound for one of the mysterious appointments that had been occupying his afternoons since the party at the Effingham ranch. We hadn't spoken much since then. He wore his Hobo aura around the clock, studied Discourses late into the evenings, and spent hours on the phone with Lauer, who was lecturing in Japan that week. It was hard to imagine what could justify such costly international hookups. When I'd asked him if we were paying the bills, he'd answered curtly, “The funds exist.” His schemes had dissolved our partnership. When Betsy's Explorer appeared, he biked right past it, incurious and fixated. I hated him.

  “I'm sorry I'm late,” she said, though she wasn't late. She'd said that she'd come at ten and it was ten, at least according to my watch. Hers, I saw, was running ahead of mine by a minute or two, but a minute or two wasn't late. Except for her, I'd learn.

  “That's where you've been living?” she asked. “I'm sorry.”

  “Don't be. Don't always be sorry for everything.”

  “I am, though. That's just how I am. I want to see this.”

  I'd prepared for her visit by consolidating our boxes of books and our bales of tracts and pamphlets into a big solid cube at the far rear. The van looked as neat and spacious as it ever had, but there was no hiding the odor of Elder Stark's cheeseburger-and-burrito-related night sweats. They clung inexpungibly to the layer of carpet—a low-pile, faintly textured orange material—that started midway up the walls and covered the ceiling. The van had come off a lot outside Missoula, and the salesman had told Lauer little about its history other than that its last owners had been arrested for something and forfeited the title to the police.

  “I think sometimes I'd like to live like this. The gypsy life,” Betsy said. “But maybe not.” She leaned down over my bunk and fluffed my pillow, then tightened the sheet and smoothed it with both hands. There were rings on both ring fingers that I hadn't noticed before: thin white-metal diamond-encrusted bands. “It is what it is in here. It makes me sad, though.”

  “We do just fine.”

  “Not sad for you. For people.” She opened one palm and held it on her cheek and lowered her eyes to the toes of her suede boots. “Ugly things actually hurt me. It's a problem. Sometimes an old car will go by, let's say a station wagon, with the kids crowded into the back and half the windows blocked by all the family's clothes and junk, their moth-eaten blankets, their crappy pots and pans, and the mom and the dad aren't talking to each other, and maybe one of them's smoking, and I just think: I'd rather be dead.”

  “Than have to live that way?”

  “Than even to have to see it.”

  I let Betsy stew in h
er mood for a few seconds before I said, “You don't know—they might be happy in there.”

  “That's even worse. That hurts me even more.”

  Eventually Betsy raised her eyes, inhaled, exhaled, then forced herself to smile. It took a moment for the smile to stick. “You have to replace those poly sheets you're using with one hundred percent cotton. Promise me.”

  “We're short on money nowadays.”

  “I thought Dale hired you to mystery shop?”

  “He was supposed to call me with instructions.”

  “Dale's an airhead. He fried his brain on meth. I'll call him at his office. I'll handle it.”

  I thought Betsy meant tomorrow or the next day, but she was already unfolding her little white phone, the exact size and shape of a well-worn bar of soap. The whole conversation took about two minutes. Its results were conclusive: Boulder, Thursday morning, Betsy would drive me, dress like “someone normal.”

  “I think I need to get out of here now,” she said.

  Outside, as we leaned against her car and talked about how we might spend the afternoon—Betsy suggested a short hike and a trip to a mall to buy me some new shoes—she became distracted by our tires, which she said weren't black enough. I didn't know quite how to take this comment, so I did as I often did: I apologized. She told me it wasn't my fault; most people ignored the color of their tires.

  “It's me,” she said. “I'm a freak. Things bother me.” She walked to the back of her Ford and opened the tailgate, brought out a spray can of something and a rag, squatted down next to the van, and set to work. Her squat pulled away the waistband of her jeans from her lower back, disclosing a dark heart-shaped notch I couldn't help staring at.

  She wouldn't let me assist her, so I asked questions. “How old are you?” I had to get this settled.