Elders

by Ryan McIlvain

  Leandro lifted his gaze without lifting his head. He took in Passos for a brief second, then McLeod for a longer one, his eyes false-sad like a basset hound’s. He nodded.

  The next day was Wednesday. Another P-Day. McLeod and Passos cleaned the apartment, did laundry, shopped for what groceries they could afford, and did all of it largely in silence. In the late morning the mail came. A letter from McLeod’s mother. They’d finished redoing the basement, she said. Were certainly open to the idea of renting it out—either that or turning it into a guest room. Dad was well. Karen too. Already dating seriously at BYU. Something in the water there. Was he eating well? And so on.

  McLeod went into the entryway/living room; its corners were in shadow, darkness at midday. The clouds through the window looked low and leaden, almost purplish at patches. Passos sat at his desk. He leaned over a sheet of paper, frowning with concentration. He hadn’t received any letters that day.

  “Who are you writing?” McLeod asked him.

  “Brother,” Passos said.

  “Oh. Cool.”

  McLeod sat down at his desk and composed a brief letter to his family. Things were good. They were still teaching Josefina and Leandro. Leandro was coming along a little slower than Josefina, but then again Josefina was really coming along. And so on. McLeod thought about bearing some kind of testimony to close the letter, mostly for his father’s sake, but he couldn’t muster the energy. He still felt drained from last night. He put the finished letter in an envelope, addressed it, took out a stamp from his desk drawer. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Passos still writing, his concentration unbroken. McLeod tidied the mugful of pens on his desk—highlighters, scripture markers, all recent additions. He pushed flush the spines of the Missionary Classics Paperback Library that he had pulled from the recesses of his suitcase. McLeod took out Jesus the Christ, which he’d started rereading. He made it through several pages about Christ’s pre-mortal calling.

  “Who are you writing now?” he asked Passos.

  “Other brother.”

  “Oh.”

  He wandered into the bedroom, organized his closet. He had promised Sweeney he’d make it to his apartment today for a little powwow, as in their MTC days. Kimball would be there too, at noon, and Sweeney’s and Kimball’s companions, friends by now, would probably head out to do whatever it was they did. They could take Passos along too; he might enjoy himself.

  A few minutes later Elder McLeod leaned his head out of the bedroom and asked his companion, still bowed over his writing, if he thought he’d be much longer. Passos said, “Might be.” McLeod explained the situation. Did he think maybe he could finish the letters tonight?

  Passos put down his pen—an audible clack on the wooden desk—and craned his neck to see the sky through the window. “It’s going to open up out there,” he said, and returned to his writing.

  “It might not. We’ll take umbrellas.” McLeod repeated the word in English: “Umbrellas.”

  Passos stopped writing. His shoulders softened a bit. “We’ll take the umbrellas,” he said quietly, practicing.

  The elders arrived at Sweeney’s apartment, unrained-on, at a quarter to one, just as Sweeney’s and Kimball’s greenies, Nunes and Batista, made ready to leave. In shorts and T-shirts, they stuffed their shoulder bags with water, a stack of small orange cones, a soccer ball, and their ponchos, though Nunes said he doubted the sky would make good on its threat. He asked Passos if he wanted to come along. Passos begged off on account of letters he needed to write. Elder Nunes set Passos up at his desk and mumbled something in Portuguese, a quick burst of slang that McLeod didn’t catch.

  Passos chuckled. “I’ll be fine.”

  Nunes nodded at McLeod and at the bedroom door in turn. “They’re in there.”

  “Thanks,” McLeod said.

  He left his companion in the living room and let himself into the bedroom. Elders Kimball and Sweeney sat on opposite beds in jeans and T-shirts, Sweeney leaning forward in the position of holding forth, Kimball slumped back against the wall, hands joined behind his neck, elbows crooked out, smiling.

  “Ask McLeod,” Kimball said in English, pointing his chin at him. “He’ll tell you the very same.”

  Sweeney turned to him with urgency in his face and said, “McLeod, back me up here—” He stopped short, cocking his head.

  Elder McLeod pinched his dress shirt and let it go; he palmed his tie. “You’re wondering about the proselytizing clothes? Is that it? I’m a rule abider now. Like you guys wanted.”

  “It’s P-Day,” Sweeney said.

  “I had to travel to get here.”

  Sweeney’s face was still a question mark.

  “I can show it to you in the Missionary Handbook,” McLeod said, reaching for the thin white booklet he’d taken to carrying in his breast pocket again.

  “Whatever, whatever,” Sweeney said. “Sit.”

  Kimball smacked the bed beside him and McLeod plopped down, noticing Kimball’s T-shirt. It looked silk-screened, with a quote on the front of it attributed to Nietzsche (“God is dead”) and below it another quote attributed to God (“Nietzsche is dead”) and below that, inexplicably, a guitar in silhouette. Elder McLeod never quite got used to seeing his friends, or any fellow missionaries, in street clothes. Neither did he get used to the ungelled undifferentiated mass of brown hair, like one of those Russian fur hats, that Kimball wore on P-Days.

  “The question is simple,” Sweeney said. He held his hands out in the air as if to bracket McLeod’s attention. “Does the church keep tabs on your sex life after you’re married? To wit: Can you go down on your wife?”

  “The church stays out of the bedroom,” McLeod said.

  “That’s exactly what I said! Is that not exactly what I said, Kimball, you prude?”

  “I’m not the prude. They’re not my rules. I’m just saying. My brother’s bishop told him when he got married—and this was BYU, mind you, this was officialdom—he told him oral sex was a no-no. Both the his and her variety. Off-limits.”

  “Your brother’s bishop didn’t know shit,” Sweeney said.

  “Whoa, hey now!” Kimball said, laughing. “Keep it Bible, dude. You know the rules.”

  “And keep it down too,” McLeod said. “If you’re going to be insane, Sweeney …” He spread his hands, palms down. “Right? My companion’s out there.”

  “He didn’t go out with his countrymen?” Kimball said.

  “Your brother’s bishop didn’t know shit!” Sweeney said, rising to his feet.

  “Bible, Bible!”

  “Well I’m sorry, but I get worked up over this! If you think for one second—”

  “Guys, seriously,” McLeod said. “My companion.”

  And as if on cue, Passos opened the door. He leaned his head into the room, saying in Portuguese, “Could you guys please keep it down a little?”

  “I was almost finished,” Sweeney said, still in English.

  “He can hear you,” McLeod said. “I mean he understands English.”

  “I don’t care who hears me! I’ll tell it on the mountain! If you think for one second that Tiff and I aren’t going to get a little alternative? You know, a little of this—” Sweeney put his hand on an invisible head in front of his crotch. “A little of this—” He adjusted his hands to an invisible pair of hips and pumped. “If you think we’re not going to do that and more, you’re crazy!” He turned to Passos. “You hear that, Your Highness? I’ve been a good little boy for twenty-one very long years and now the Man’s going to tell me what I can and can’t do in my conjugal bed? It’s bullshit! You hear that, Your Highness? To hell with the Man! I’m five months to homecoming, which means I’m six months to the wedding, which means I’m six months and a few hours from me and my wife, my female companion, doing this, this, this, this! You think about that when you’re still on the mission, Passos, when you’re kneeling down for companionship prayer, all right? You think about that.”

  Elder Sweeney dro
pped back down onto his bed, mock panting. After a silence he said, “I yield the floor.”

  Kimball still chuckled. “Keep it Bible, man. That’s all I’m saying.”

  McLeod shook his head, hand to face, a gesture he calculated for Sweeney and Kimball, but also for Passos, who stood several feet inside the door now. McLeod felt painfully conscious of his senior companion; he peeked at him through his fingers: the long thin face an utter blank, a floating mirror on top of the tall dresser of his body. Passos held his non-look for an agonizing minute more, then he smiled. There, then gone. A darting minnow. Elder McLeod wasn’t sure he’d even seen it right until Passos showed another smile, a longer one—an effort at one, anyway—a tight if ingratiating upturn at the corners of his mouth and eyes. He crossed the room and gestured to the spot beside Sweeney. Sweeney squinted a bit, nodded.

  Passos sat, laid a friendly hand on Sweeney’s knee. Sweeney frowned at the hand; Passos retracted it.

  “You know,” Passos said in English, “I don’t think I will think about that. But can I ask?”

  A curious smile spread across Elder Sweeney’s face. “Shoot.”

  “ ‘Shoot’?”

  “Ask your question,” Sweeney said.

  “What does it mean to say ‘keep it Bible’?”

  “Oh,” Sweeney said, and he laughed a little. “That. I guess it means we don’t use any bad words unless they’re in the Bible. Or something like that.” He laughed again. “It sounds pretty stupid when you explain it.”

  Elder McLeod watched his companion out of the corner of his eye, feeling something at the edge of amazement. The conversation moved on to other topics, safer topics. Though maybe even that was unfair—safer topics. Maybe he’d been inventing Passos all along, or allowing others to invent him for him. For now we see through a glass, darkly … The line flashed in McLeod’s mind, shot through it like a tracer, and on its heels came the thought of his father. Paul’s words were some of McLeod’s favorite in all of scripture, but they were still only words to him. He needed to convert them into actions.

  They traveled home that evening under big heavy clouds edged in gold, burnished by the sun sunk beneath them. It hadn’t rained a drop the entire day, and it didn’t start until McLeod and Passos had descended from the bus and turned onto their street, the late sunlight breaking along the bottle shards on property walls in multicolored beams. The low sun makes the color … Then the first small drops hit the pavement, growing larger by the second, pinging the broken bottles, the antennae on top of houses, making a bright ephemeral aural ring that then receded under the thousand drumming fingers of the rain. Passos yelped, and McLeod too, like coon hunters, and instead of opening their umbrellas they took off running, downing the street at a sprint, laughing the whole way.

  They burst through the outer door and yanked from the clothesline the first of their soaked shirts pants socks garments until Passos shouted, “Leave them—who cares?” and they ran inside.

  Later that night. Each elder at his desk. The rain still coming unabated, loud as an automatic car wash on the roof. Louder through the windows, still open. The rain pounding in a coat of water in the courtyard. The elders had to raise their voices almost to a shout to be heard.

  “You were right about it opening up,” McLeod said.

  “Well, we were both right,” Passos said. “It held out. Sort of.”

  “Yeah, seriously.”

  “What?”

  “Seriously!”

  “One more time?”

  Elder McLeod stood up and closed the metal blinds. The sound of the rain dropped, though not by much. He looked down at the materials spread out on Passos’s desk. “Who are you writing now?”

  “My grandmother.”

  “You are diligent.”

  “That’s my name. His Royal Highness, Diligent Passos.”

  “Don’t listen to Sweeney. He doesn’t know you. Besides, he already likes you by the transitive property of friendship. A is friends with B, B is friends with C, therefore A is also friends with C.”

  Passos smiled, put pen to paper again, then stopped. “You’re different from Sweeney, though, aren’t you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He makes dirty jokes, you blush. He doesn’t blush.”

  “I blushed?”

  “You looked like a tomato. Like right now, actually. You can’t hide it, whitey. None of you can.”

  “Careful now. Only Maurilho calls me whitey, and he says it with love.”

  “So do I. Of course.”

  “Well good,” McLeod said, “because if you don’t like whiteys you shouldn’t be planning on BYU.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The place is crawling with them. You should see the pictures my sister sends. I bet they’d make an exception for you, though.”

  “Who said I’m planning on BYU?”

  “Your BYU catalog. Your TOEFL book there.”

  “I’m practicing my English. Like the president said.”

  “And all your questions about the States. All the stories about your missionary friend who goes to BYU.”

  “I’m not planning to go to the States, Elder McLeod.”

  “No?”

  “Who said I was?”

  “Well, okay. Never mind then.”

  “What?”

  “Well, I mean, you’re not interested, obviously, but I was going to say that my mom’s just refinished our basement and is thinking about renting it out in the future. Say in seven months or so? I thought I might ask if she’d have room for a diligent Brazilian getting ready for the TOEFL. But never mind. You don’t want to visit the States after all.”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “No?”

  “All I said was I wasn’t planning on it. I wasn’t.”

  “Ah.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What? What are you smiling at?”

  “Nothing.”

  Then January disappeared into February, and the people of Carinha disappeared into their houses completely—this even as temporary aluminum grandstands went up in the center of town, even as yellow-and-green banners and flags started filling the spaces above intersections like a second atmosphere. Elder Passos liked to picture the streets refilling after the final next week in an explosive epic hurry, Brazil having won—again!—the Latin crown. The roil of jerseys, the booming fireworks, the car horns combining like the sound of a million bagpipes … The mere thought of it could quicken Passos’s blood, make a sea-rushing sound in his ears. But after a few minutes the sound usually faded and the stark eerie quiet of late-stage-championships Brazil reasserted itself. The wind moving in the trees and the tick of each leaf. The clop, clop, clop of their own footsteps floating up behind them like the ghosts of footsteps.

  On Monday morning the elders walked all the way from their apartment to the main square downtown and inspected the grandstands. The banked silver rows gleaming powerfully in the sun put Passos in mind of abandoned ancient monoliths. No bodies around, just the seats to sit them in. It was as if all the townspeople had been abducted in the middle of Carnival.

  “Maybe everybody’s too busy preparing for my birthday,” McLeod said.

  “I’m sure that’s it,” Passos said. “Celebrate the Ugly American during the last week of Latin Championships.”

  McLeod’s eyes flared. “So now I’m ugly?”

  “It’s the title of a book,” Passos said. “I was just kidding.”

  “So was I,” McLeod said, smiling. “I’ve read it too. It wasn’t bad.”

  Mondays, lately, had been the hardest days for Passos. He dreaded going back to the barren streets and lifeless doors after the relative reprieve of Sunday, which in a sense had become more rejuvenating than P-Day, especially when McLeod got it into his head to cross the city for a “powwow,” as he called it, with his friends. Last Wednesday Passos had managed to persuade McLeod to cancel his planned visit to Sweeney’s. It wo
uld have taken up most of their day off, and besides, neither he nor McLeod could afford the uncleanness that Sweeney and Kimball represented. They needed to be pure vessels, meet for the Work, meet for their principal task of guiding Leandro to baptism.

  Really, it was their only task. Traditional contacting had become a fool’s errand: nobody, nobody answered their doors during the day, and only Josefina and Leandro did at night. For most of the sunlit hours, then, the elders wandered the streets like vagabonds, calling out novel church signs to pass the time. On the way out of the main square, Elder Passos called a little storefront Baptist church set back in an orange-brick alleyway: “ ‘The Great God Church.’ I’m up six to five.”

  “I called that church the other day,” McLeod said.

  “Good for you, whitey. I called it today.”

  “You can’t do that. That’s against the rules.”

  “I’m your senior companion, Elder. I am the rules.”

  “Kidding again, I hope. Elder.”

  Passos heard something small but hard-edged in his junior companion’s voice. For a second it unnerved him.

  “Fine.” Passos jutted his chin at another church sign up ahead. “ ‘God’s Rainbow.’ That one’s new. I’m up six to five again.”

  At last it was lunchtime, and time for the church-names game, as the elders called it, to suspend for an hour, maybe more. Passos hoped for more, anyway. The elders boarded a bus en route to Maurilho’s, where their weekly lunch appointment never fell through. At times the family needed to keep to the allotted hour—Maurilho off to a job interview, or Rômulo back to class—but today Elder Passos felt luck at his back. They’d chanced into an outbound bus during a time of championships-induced bus drought. If that could happen, why not a two-hour lunch?