Elders

by Ryan McIlvain

  “Elder McLeod!” Passos said.

  The reply drifted back to him like a wisp of incense, lazy and thin. “Yeah, companion?” At length McLeod turned around. “My companion, right? My succorer? Have you got something to add, companion? Something Maurilho might have missed in his lecture? You’re a bit of a lecturer yourself, you know.”

  “I am sorry Maurilho got so out of hand, but—”

  “But what? But not enough to say anything? You were supposed to be on my side.”

  “It’s not about sides, McLeod.”

  “It is, Passos—” McLeod’s voice wavered, cracked. “You’re supposed to be on my side. You’re supposed to stick up for me.”

  “Elder,” Passos said. “It’s not about you. And the fact is …” He paused. “Listen, I’m sorry. I should have said something. I tried to—I tried—but I should have tried harder. Okay? I’m sorry, Elder.”

  McLeod’s face was still hard and withholding.

  “But the fact is,” Passos continued, “that Maurilho is not a missionary—you are. You represent the Lord and His church, and you’re going to have to apologize to Maurilho for what you said to him.”

  Elder McLeod shook his head at this, wagging it, snorting. He let the head hang down, let it swing side to side as if he no longer controlled it, a mere pendulum. After a moment he lifted his face and showed the same amused smile he had shown to Maurilho. “All you lecturers. All you foreign-relations experts. One on every corner, right? Right next to the glue sniffers. Right next to the drive-through customers. Or no, no—they’re experts themselves! I just wish I knew as much about your country as you all know about mine. Even the janitors, huh? Especially the janitors. Even the filthy shirtless little kids. And of course the drunks. We can’t forget about the drunks. And what about all the favela dwellers? The people living in places even the cops won’t go near? They must know too. The falling-down shack builders, the thieves, the drug traffickers. Even the dead dogs rotting in the streets must know. So many lecturers. I should feel grateful, I guess. I do feel grateful. And for you too, Elder. How did I get so lucky to get you for a companion? How can I ever thank you?”

  Elder Passos felt a smile on his own face now, an irresistible impulse, it seemed. He had meant to rebuke, then show an increase in love, as the scripture counseled, but now, and instead, Elder Passos heard the unmistakable voice of his former companion.

  “Did you know Elder Jones?” Passos said.

  “I knew of him,” McLeod said. “Sure.”

  “May I tell you a story about Elder Jones?”

  “Sure.”

  “He was my first American companion, as I think I’ve told you. Very obedient. Very curious. For example, one day he asked me if Brazil had a Fourth of July. Just like that. ‘Do you guys have a Fourth of July here?’ ‘A Fourth of July?’ ‘Yeah. Do you?’ I said I wasn’t sure I knew what he meant. He said, ‘You know, a Fourth of July!’ So I told him, yes, we did have a fourth day in our month of July. Was that what he meant? He said, ‘You know what I mean! A Fourth of July!’ But he couldn’t explain it. He just kept saying, ‘Fourth of July! Fourth of July!’ I think he might have been the most ignorant person I’ve ever known. And you remind me of him, Elder McLeod. You really do.”

  “Oh,” McLeod said, more a sound than a word. He lifted his hands up in the air like a faith healer, and said in English, in a singsong, “Are you ready, then? My last words to you, Elder.” He hesitated, mouth ajar. “Fuck you. Fuck. You. All right?”

  Elder McLeod turned around and continued undressing. A minute later Passos moved to his own dresser. He undid his tie, his shirt; he removed his socks. He changed out of his dress pants into a pair of mesh shorts.

  “All right,” Passos whispered.

  That night McLeod went into the bathroom and masturbated out of anger—anger more than lust. Succor me, Lord, for I am compassed about by assholes. But the Lord didn’t answer. Of course he didn’t. After twenty-one months he had gone away for good, dissolving through McLeod’s grasping fingers like sand, or the hope of sand, and leaving him Passos instead. And Maurilho. And Leandro. The big-bellied men in the dark houses. The idiots shouting from their cars. And now Josefina too, and the hardness of her silence, the finality. What more did he need?

  He conjured the images from the newsstands, the call cards, the racy billboards, the spectral train of bodies. He accessed the silo of stored stolen glances—women in the streets, women on buses, women who bared their breasts for infants, and secretly, he imagined, for him—and now, on the topmost layer, the image of women in the nearby drive-through. Those noises, Rômulo had said.

  Afterward he tore down the Jesus pictures from the mirror. He crumbled them into balls and flushed them down the toilet one by one.

  The next morning Elder McLeod canceled his alarm and slept in. He missed breakfast, personal study, companionship study. At a little past nine o’clock he finally got up. He showered, dressed in the bedroom. Then he went into the entryway/living room and sat in his blue chair, taking his shoes out from under it and lacing them in silence. Elder Passos sat at his desk in full dress. From the slope of his shoulders he appeared to be reading. A minute later he stood up from the desk, letting the soft leather cover of his scriptures slap shut. He came over and knelt with his arms on the chair beside McLeod, waiting, his head bowed. McLeod went to the door and opened it. Passos looked up at him, a long blankness on his face, then he stood up too and led them out into the street.

  For the rest of the day the elders looked everywhere but at each other. They spoke to door contacts, street contacts, bus drivers, but never to each other. That was Friday. On Saturday McLeod started dropping from his door introductions even the mention of his companion’s name. No longer “Hi, I’m Elder McLeod, and this is my companion Elder Passos, and we’re representatives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” but rather “Hi, I’m Elder McLeod, and we’re representatives …” and so on. Elder Passos took to using the same technique on his turns. They became invisible to each other, closed off by degrees, each on either side of a chasm that widened, deepened by the day. Saturday. Sunday. Monday. Tuesday.

  On Wednesday, McLeod and Passos boarded a crosstown bus bound for Sweeney’s apartment—McLeod in street clothes, Passos in uniform. McLeod and his friends had agreed to meet up for a P-Day powwow, something they hadn’t done in two months, more. It would be a chance to relax, to let down their guards, and a chance for McLeod to escape nearly a week’s worth of silence. He felt weak and dull, trapped in his own head. When he’d called Sweeney last night en route to home, he’d simply said, loud enough for Passos to hear, “I need to hang out tomorrow, Sweeney. Tell Kimball.”

  And Passos had gone along with it. He didn’t have to. He could have refused. He could have planted himself in the apartment this morning, effectively stranding McLeod at home, since for a missionary to cross an entire city alone, leaving his area in the process, he needed a store of insubordination and bravery that Elder McLeod couldn’t quite muster, even now. To sleep in was one thing; to skip personal and companionship study, companionship prayer, was one thing. Even to stalk away companionless, in anger, was one thing. But to be truly alone was another. Twenty-one months of conjoined living and moving had instilled in McLeod, as it did sooner or later in all missionaries, a distinct separation anxiety from his missionary companion, no matter who or how awful he happened to be. Elder Passos must have known this, but he hadn’t exploited it, hadn’t dared McLeod to overcome it and commit an actionable offense. He had followed him out to the bus stop instead, taken a seat across the aisle from him, taken out his scriptures to read.

  Which meant that Passos too must have been eager for a reprieve, desperate even, for a break from the silence. He too must have pined to talk to someone, even if that someone happened to be Sweeney’s junior companion or Kimball’s. Jokesters, Passos called them. Unserious, unimpressive, immature. But at least they came from a non-evil country, right? Passos
could commiserate with Nunes and Batista about the boorish Americans and their imperialist, blood-spattered ways. He could reprise all the slanders from Maurilho’s diatribe that Passos had endorsed with his willful silence. More than once since that night at Maurilho’s McLeod had started letters to his mother—“I was wrong about Passos,” he wrote in one draft, “and I don’t think you should help him”—but each time he gave up. I don’t think you should help him. It sounded so blunt, so sudden, so unlike the voice of charity and calm that he had cultivated for his family in his previous letters. How could he act out of spite for Passos without betraying the fact of his spite? He decided to let things be.

  McLeod could see the finish line anyway. He was in the homestretch. Just yesterday he’d received a letter from the mission office asking him to “please indicate which release date you prefer—May 14, or a transfer later on June 25.” Which did he prefer? McLeod had laughed out loud, a joyful, giddy laugh. Less than two months to go, then. A transfer and a half. Which meant less than two weeks to go with Passos, since McLeod would demand a new companion in the upcoming transfers. He’d make the appeal directly to the president in the personal interview after next week’s zone conference.

  Elder McLeod snuck a furtive glance across the bus aisle—his ogling glance, returned to its old form—and in an instant his bilious revulsion to Passos surged up again. Look at him. The sad, frescoed face, more yellow than brown. The eyebrows diving in concentration, an open book of scripture on his lap, the rigid posture. Everything about him suggested self-seriousness, soberness, righteousness, so-called. Is this what everyone wanted McLeod to become? Is this the life his father envisioned for him?

  One night in the spring of his senior year, a few months before his nineteenth birthday, McLeod walked into the living room and saw his father rapt in the blue-white light of an old home movie. “Your mother found a place that converts these to DVD,” he said, and motioned for his son to take a seat beside him on the couch. On the screen, two white-shirted teenagers, one of them a younger version of his father—the same lank parted hair, the same hair style even, unchanged across thirty-five years—stood in an open field below the Eiffel Tower. Then, as if at a director’s prompt, the young men started running around in circles, crossing and recrossing each other’s paths. They moved in jerky, stop-time strides, and the film was grainy, swarming with dust motes, but McLeod could still make out his father’s face, and his big, carefree smile.

  “That was a Preparation Day, you understand,” McLeod’s father said. “We weren’t usually like that.” He laughed through his nose. “But look at us. We must have thought we were making a Beatles movie. One of our friends from the ward had a camcorder—they were very expensive in those days—and he gave us this as a present. That’s Elder Nielsen there beside me, doing the handstand now—oh my. Well …” He clicked off the TV and turned on a lamp beside the couch. “I’ll finish watching that some other time. I don’t want you to get the wrong impression about the mission. It’s hard work, you know. It’s not all sightseeing and games. It’s hardly ever like that.”

  “I know,” McLeod said. “I know that.”

  “Where are you in your reading now?”

  “First Corinthians thirteen.”

  “Well, tell me about it.”

  “ ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.’ ”

  “You memorized that?” his father said.

  McLeod felt sudden tears rimming his eyes. “I’m going to try it, Dad. The experiment. I’m going to go on a mission.”

  His father put his arm around his shoulder and pulled him into a sideways embrace. “I knew you would, Seth. I knew you would.”

  The bus let the elders off into a new-sprung rain, the sky above them quickly closing, darkening, the undersides of the clouds stained the color of eggplant. McLeod and Passos walked at pace. Sweeney’s building—a narrow three-story walk-up that put McLeod in mind of a vertical desk organizer, one apartment on top of the other on top of the other—loomed up ahead as the rain thickened. They took the last several hundred yards at a run, took the stairs that wrapped around the building two at a time. Sweeney’s companion, Elder Nunes, answered the door in proselytizing clothes. He had his poncho on already, a large umbrella at his side. He glanced up and down the dripping pair of them and laughed. He handed an umbrella to Passos, stepped out into the awninged hallway to join him. Passos tilted his head at Nunes, then up at the emptying sky. “Trust me,” Nunes said. Then to McLeod: “Well?” He swept his arm toward the open front door.

  Elder McLeod entered the apartment and gave a nod to Elder Batista, Kimball’s junior, who crouched in the dim gray light of the entryway, fitting on a pair of rubber overshoes.

  “Where is everybody?” McLeod asked Batista.

  “Hiding, man.”

  “Huh?”

  Batista worked a corner of the overshoe around his back heel, but the rubber snapped back. “Come on,” he muttered. Elder McLeod looked around the apartment. All the doors were shut, all the windows closed, except one, in the kitchen—a small frame on a big hardening sky. The window light gave onto the long countertop that separated the kitchen from the entryway/living room; it imparted a shine to that surface that cast the other surfaces in the apartment in dark relief: the small wooden dining table, its dropdown flaps like giant ears, the desks, the taped-up pictures on the walls, and the stacks of teaching pamphlets and Books of Mormon teetering in the shadowed corners.

  McLeod heard whispered voices conferring outside in the hallway. He turned around just as Nunes leaned his head back in the door. “Batista, you coming or what?” He looked up at McLeod. “Oh, and hey, tonight we want you guys to come pick us up at Passos’s apartment, okay? Well, your apartment too.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?” McLeod said. He laughed a little. “Yeah, okay.”

  When Batista finally got out the door and shut it behind him, the apartment was that much darker. McLeod searched for the light switch on the wall. The naked bulb (why were the bulbs always naked?) filled up the room with a harsh thin light that reminded him of old black-and-white police dramas, the bad guys lurking in boiler rooms or languishing in holding cells while detectives leaned into their questions. The bulb should be hanging, though, swinging, making me feel like I’m in the underdecks of a ship. McLeod noticed on the wall one taped-up sheet of paper in particular: a map of Sweeney’s area, taking in a slice of west Carinha, and all of the smaller, neighboring city of Borém. Had the map been there the last time he visited? McLeod didn’t think so. He would have noticed it. Was it Nunes’s idea, then? Or Sweeney’s? Some symbolic stand against the usual slacking off that marked the waning days of a missionary’s service? Elder McLeod felt a pinch of comparative shame at the thought. He called out in English, “Hello? Where is everybody? Sweeney? Kimball?”

  The only answer came from the rain sounds through the open kitchen window. McLeod walked toward it, saw a checkerboard of orange-tile roofs and sooted white satellite dishes, brown alleyways, gray side streets—all of it tipping up at him, pushing half of the sky out of the frame. The water buzzed in the puddles in the street below, and for a moment McLeod couldn’t be sure if he’d heard the toilet flushing from the bathroom or some sudden rush from outside. Then Elder Kimball emerged from one of the closed doors off the entryway/living room, looking pale and pained, seasick, and barely altering his drained expression at the sight of McLeod standing behind the kitchen counter. “Oh, hey,” Kimball said weakly. “Wait. I thought you’d sworn off P-Day clothes—even on P-Days.”

  “Times have changed,” McLeod said. “What’s with you?”

  “Green bananas.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s all I can figure. Ate them at lunch yesterday. Those things hold a grudge, man, let me tell you.” He put a hand in his dense helmet of P-Day hair, frowning, looking like he’d forgotten something. “Remind me where you’ve been
for the last two months?”

  “Yeah, I know. It’s a crappy situation. I’m just glad to be away from it for a day.”

  “You mean Passos?”

  “There are words for him, but none of them Bible.”

  “I thought you said he wasn’t as bad as the hype.”

  “He’s worse,” McLeod said, and a silence filled the room. He changed the subject, remembering. Had Sweeney gotten the letter from the mission office? About their group?

  “May fourteenth,” Kimball said, a sly spreading smile. “Less than two months until I get to play with my Blondie.”

  “You and Sweeney both, right?”

  Kimball’s smile went lopsided. He shook his head in stiff quick jerks.

  “What’s up?” McLeod said, suddenly hushed.

  Elder Kimball spoke even quieter. “Sweeney got a Dear John from the girlfriend. Not even a Dear John letter, actually. She sent a wedding announcement, her and some dude named Corey—who marries a Corey?—and there was this little Dear John note inside the envelope.”

  “I thought they were practically engaged.”

  “Who knows, man. The note said she’d tried to tell him sooner. That old story. It looks like a BYU romance to me. Three weeks and they’re soul mates, you know? Agreed to marry in the preexistence, all that. My brother said you see it all the time there.”

  “Wait. He showed you the note?”

  “Well, he just sort of dropped it on the floor. He tore it up, actually, then he dropped the pieces on the floor. I was with him when he opened it this morning. Here.” Kimball motioned for McLeod to follow him, on tiptoe, to the little trash bin at the far edge of the kitchen. It stood mere feet from Sweeney’s bedroom door. Kimball picked the several pieces of the announcement and the note out of the trash and assembled them on the kitchen counter. Elder McLeod inspected the announcement first: a black-and-white photograph of a square-jawed letterman type holding the pale pretty girl in his arms, her ringed hand on display against his chest. And on a separate piece of card stock, the following: