by Walter Kirn
Elder Stark kept swallowing and fidgeting until he got frustrated and sat back up and patted around on his bed for the TV device. Once he'd found it, just before he used it, he said, because he knew I wasn't sleeping yet, which friends together in a little room can always sense about each other, “Now I'm thinking she's not contagious after all. I'm thinking that nudge was my greedy inner brain giving me an excuse to laze around and watch more shows and not feel low about it. If you still think she needs us, let's go find her. We'll give her the Quiz. She can tell us how her life's been. Unless she's catnapping, maybe, and needs her rest to shake her little bug. I'm of two minds still. This one's up to you.”
He reached out with the device and lit the screen. A trim hairy young doctor with a face mask and splashes of dark blood on his green smock was leaning down to kiss the forehead of a beautiful woman who looked dead lying on a cart or table in nothing but her frail black underthings while a scampering puppy or white rabbit or cat (it finally turned out) was throwing the nurses behind them all into a chasing-and-stumbling mad ruckus that an audience we couldn't see was laughing and hooting about to beat the dickens.
I'd never seen such business and it took ages, close to a whole hour, probably, before my partner and I had learned enough—about the people and the corpse and the reasons the cat, which turned out to be rabid, was loose inside an important Chicago hospital—to feel satisfied we understood it all (including why it's permissible to laugh at people crashing down and skidding sideways when right in the middle of things is a dead young lady) and could offer our full attention to the next show, which also had a part about a cat.
We'd been taught that to sleep during daylight showed ingratitude, so we woke the next morning at the minute specified in the latitude-adjusted sunrise table printed in our little instruction pamphlet. The air in the room was a fog of nighttime body smells veined with whiffs of undigested chicken. I had crust in the corners of my eyes and mouth and flyaway hair that wouldn't stay put in back until I puddinged it up with Vaseline and mashed it and smoothed it against my lumpy skull.
Elder Stark got down on the carpet, planted his hands, and tortured himself through thirty shallow push-ups, followed by a single sit-up that he quit on partway through. I could tell he was nervous about his weight, but I hadn't looked hard enough at him in Bluff to figure out if he'd added any yet. It would come, though, I knew that much. At four a.m. he'd snuck out of the room and returned with a box of chocolate-covered raisins from the sidewalk candy machine. He ate them while sitting upright with his legs crossed, facing the busy but soundless television. Later on, when I woke again and looked across at him, his right hand was wearing the yellow candy box like a square cardboard mitten and he was snoring hard, with dabs of chocolate all over his big round chin.
Instead of breakfasting on barley cereal as recommended in the booklet we drove into Buffalo to a filthy diner so Elder Stark could get a caramel roll. Along the highway we saw four billboards preaching against abortion. They embarrassed me. Women in Bluff kept their pregnancies to themselves until they'd organized their situations. If they felt like they'd better wait to have a child, they were obliged to seek counsel from the Seeress, who had it in her power to dispense certain potent secret preparations whose ingredients hadn't touched men's hands.
A state trooper was using the men's room when we walked in. My partner greeted him too heartily, in the manner of people who fear policemen. Whenever we passed a cruiser on the road, he waved and smiled as though trying to look innocent, attracting long stern gazes from busy lawmen who might have ignored us if we'd ignored them first.
The trooper, who had no reason to say a word to us before my partner grinned his huge “Hello,” asked us where we were headed. My partner said, “South. South, then east. We're zigzagging at first. Later, we'll straighten out, once things get clearer.” This seemed to raise doubts in the trooper but not specific ones, so instead of questioning us more he made a hard show of looking us up and down as though he were memorizing our appearances. I knew which features he'd write down in my box, besides my dusty-looking grayish teeth: a slick white scar at the corner of my right eye where my mother removed a mole once with a nail file, and a blackish left thumbtip damaged by a snakebite I'd gotten while haying on the co-op feed farm. Elder Stark's box would include his ears, near to double the size of normal ears and with several extra inner folds that made me wonder how the sound got through and if so, how it changed along the route. This was a serious, real thought of mine, especially a little later on, when it became evident to me from his actions that my partner was taking different meanings from words we'd heard at the same time.
At the counter we sat down next to an old man who was rubbing the edge of a coin across a card and hissing when he kept failing to win a prize. Though it was summer, the man had on a coat that looked like it was pretty expensive once, before the person it fit correctly gave it away to some helping agency or threw it down beside the road. Elder Stark, who knew about prize cards from somewhere, shook his head at the fellow and said to him, “This is my final theory on these things: every single one of them is blank. Nobody wins, not a drop of turtle spit.” This seemed to anger the man and he moved down a stool, reaching back to drag his breakfast after him. Later, when we were standing up to pay, the man said to my partner, “This is mine: Christ won't come down until you nuts stop begging him. Damn it, I think he's afraid of all you goons.”
“As a matter of fact,” Elder Stark said, “we agree there. We don't care if he comes. There's enough down here already. Furthermore, we're not ‘down.' From anything. We're ‘next to,' we're horizontal. It's all spread out.” He set his black briefcase on the counter and sprung the brass latches so they thumped the lid. Inside was a pocket edition of Discourses worth, we'd been told, five dollars and fifty cents, but free to anyone whom we deemed promising. We'd given out an average of two a day, with our mobile phone numbers written inside the covers, but we'd yet to receive a call from anyone. If we did get a call, we'd asked each other, how far were we willing to backtrack to meet the caller? Another unsettleable debate. The side I ended up on was: “It depends—but if it's more than fifty miles, let's press them hard to make certain they're sincere and tell them that they have to wait right where they are, no quick errands, no running to the store.” My partner's side was: “Any distance necessary.” If he hadn't taken his side first—the obvious and noble side—I wouldn't have thought up my picky, petty one. What nicked my hindparts about the whole dispute, though, was that I knew my partner, of the two of us, was the one least likely to go ten miles, especially not around a mealtime or if we had a fun station on the radio that might get scratchy or die out.
Elder Stark set the book on the counter like coyote bait, just beyond the old man's reach. The man eyed its cover but made no moves. I couldn't blame him—the cover put people off. Its title was done in a wavy silver script like something from an invitation to a fancy wedding of lady ghosts. The picture was a misty lavender planet with Saturnish rings and a Jupiterish eye—which was so close to a human-being eye that when I was bored in the van one afternoon I drew long lashes on my copy—and then a stretched-out slender tear. Lauer had promised us a new edition with a comet shower, no Cyclops planet, better letters, omegas in the corners, and a white satin placemark ribbon in the spine that the Seeress had rejected as too expensive but Lauer had sneaked around and found the money for (from a rich man who'd liked his stage show, probably). The books were on their way from China by ship, he said, but the ship must have had other stops. That nicked my hindparts, too.
“That's yours to keep,” Elder Stark said. “Skim it. Browse it. Discourse Nineteen: The Ten Perennial Follies is where I'd start if I were you. It'll help you stop wasting money on sweepstakes cards. Or close your eyes and flip it open anywhere. That'll be your message. That's what we do. I'll show you. I'll get my message.”
“That's pagan,” the man said. “That's pagan divination. It's not one bit Christ Jesus.
You're a hypocrite.”
“I'd have to be Christian to be that. Should we try this?” My partner shut his eyes. He clenched them, really, bearing down for added believability. “The problem for me is I know this book stone-cold, every page, so when I flip it now—that way, don't grasp it, hit it—I can't be random. I try to, and I'm sure it looks that way, but once the inner mind has grown familiar—”
“I get it, kid.”
“Read it now. Not out loud. Then let me guess it.”
“Which part?”
“The message verse is always halfway down, precisely halfway, left page, the inside column. Tap my arm here when you're done.”
“I'm done right now. It's short.”
My partner pointed to his eyes to show again how terribly shut they were. The man and I stood waiting. The corner of his lip kinked up when he caught me looking at him. It seemed like he couldn't help it, habitual, a snarl from his moon-ruled wild-animal side. That's where his troubles came from, too, I sensed, as well as his sore-looking black-nailed stubbed-off fingertips.
I knew all about the fellow, suddenly. He'd lived with nice things and around nice people, but then—and it wasn't his fault, I had a hunch; it might have just been the food that he was eating—he'd turned into a boar. A sudden big-money prize might snap him back, though. That was exactly his thinking. I knew this man.
“I'm seeing two interesting competing verses. They're both pretty bold against the white. I have to choose, and I'm trying, but boy oh boy . . .”
Elder Stark's hands were on his head by then, up on the crown, the fingers arched and stiff and the two sets of knuckles facing toward each other so the hands looked like crabs about to fight. He relaxed them a bit and began to scratch his scalp, just lightly at first, but then scrubbing, digging in, down to the temples and back up to the crown, a full-strength attack on a deep serious itch—or maybe an attempt to raise an itch and make it worse until he reached his torture point. Everyone has one, and everyone's is different. The people who need to bleed before they reach it, and the people who still can't get there even then were the people I hoped I'd travel any distance for. It was just a hope, though; I hadn't done it yet.
My partner finally quit scratching about the time the waitress, who seemed so intent on proving that customers who'd finished eating and were using her diner as an arena for feats of mentalism didn't bother or distract her because she had so many pressing tasks, started to look bothered.
“‘As to what the crones assure the maidens,'” he said in his airy, swept-high quotation voice, “‘about how beauty fades, and must, and dry old Time unpinks the dewy cheek, the Discourser spoke thusly to Scribe Lucy: This too is a fib of False Esteeming Thought. Beheld all isolate, alone, and free of prejudicial overlay, the fair are fair forever absolute. Upon which the Discourser darkly reinfolded, undimensioned, and withdrew, resuming beetle form upon a petal.'”
“Wrong. So far off, it's ridiculous,” the man said. He was a foul old hog on purpose now. He shouldn't have let the verse go on unfurling.
“Just read it out then.” My partner seemed sick of the whole enchanted mood he'd tried to sparkle us into. He probably thought we were unappreciative.
“‘The cheerful fall is the highest sort of flight.'” The man closed the book. “So that's my stupid message, huh?”
“No,” my partner said. “It's mine.”
After we'd paid and gathered our literature and Elder Stark had shut and latched his briefcase, the scratch-card fellow seemed to mellow toward us.
“You're two good-looking boys,” he said. “You should be out there chasing foxes.”
“We plan on it,” my partner said.
“So put on some jeans. Get with it. Buy some crank. The girls in these counties are crankheads. They're little freaks. The trick in Wyoming is show the chicks a party.”
My partner laughed politely. I did, too.
“I've got the good stuff, the waxy, chunky stuff. A gram is fifty bucks. One gram's a lot. That is if it's the waxy, chunky good stuff.”
“Thank you. No,” I said. “But thank you, sir.” I looked at my partner for backup but he gave me none. “Let's go. I'm going,” I told him. I surveyed the place, table by table, stool by stool. No state trooper anywhere.
“I'll be right behind you,” Elder Stark said. He patted his gut through his white shirt. “Those chicken wings. About to fly the coop.”
I stood by the door and studied a newspaper through the scratched glass window of a paper box. The government had lowered a certain tax and raised another. I wasn't interested. I read the top half of a second story about a California kidnapping involving a male kindergarten teacher and the daughter of a cinema director. The little girl's picture looked like all the other ones I'd been seeing on posters and signs since leaving Bluff, and it made me want to go home immediately, before I spotted one of the lost children and was drawn into a complicated court case. The longer I spent here, the likelier it was that some act of heroism would be required of me, whose consequences might keep me forever. I'd changed my views about any distance necessary.
Elder Stark emerged from the diner and said, “Don't worry.” He could see my concern and I could see his lack of any.
“You better not have.”
“It was too much money. I just wanted to hear what the stuff supposedly does. Better energy and spoils your appetite.”
“You can get both of those with poplar bark tea.”
“For a considerably smaller outlay.”
When Elder Stark sat down to drive, a grumble of trapped gas escaped followed by a long thin whistle of after-pressure. For Apostles, such noises weren't comical but ominous. I sympathized with his desire to foil his hunger with any chemical agent that came to hand. I pretended to concentrate on reading the atlas, turned the radio up loud, and allowed him to vent his fumes with dignity, eking out blessed relief in spurts that raised him from his seat an inch or so. We were brothers now, and I felt for him.
Central Wyoming was like hell without the flames, an underworld thrust up onto the surface. Treeless gray gravel-pit mountains, dry silt riverbeds, dump trucks heaped with mine tailings and slag, lethargically pumping gas rigs, crumbling buttes, and expanses of dead, abrasive-looking grass crisscrossed by sagging barbed wire with tufts of hair in it. There was no color anywhere but in the sky, and a lot of the time no color in the sky, just a uniform high layer of linty clouds that bled all the happy light out of the sun. A lot of Montana was plain and arid, too, but Wyoming was punishment for having eyes. Even the roadkill was uglier. In Montana the deer on the shoulders of the roads lay there intact and peaceful, with long curved backs, but here their bodies were blown apart in chunks.
“I'm reading through Lauer's Well-being Quiz again. It's impossible not to fail it,” I told my partner.
“I believe that's very much on purpose. Reach behind you, would you? There's a bag. Never mind. I'm reaching it. You want some?”
I soured my face. I'd had my fill of the caterpillar-shaped orange crunchy things. I read out loud to my partner from the Quiz. “‘Are you ever aware of your own heartbeat?' Is that saying people shouldn't be aware?”
“I'm not. Not in the busy daytime hours.”
“The Quiz says ‘Are you ever?' Ever includes the night.”
“That one would have to go against me then.”
“‘In a dining establishment, when informed that only one portion of a certain menu item remains available for consumption, have you ever ordered that scarce item despite your keen prior interest in another item?'”
“I love how Lauer writes things. He lays it out for people, end to end.”
“I can check ‘No,' but I hardly ate out before. Just twice in Missoula when I needed X-rays and once in Spokane at a hotel.”
“The hotel underneath the two raised highways? Right underneath where they crisscross?”
“It could have been. I was only eight,” I said. “I went with my father for his police convention.�
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“It had to be that one. Apostles get a deal there.”
My partner's eyes sharpened because a prairie dog that was still twenty seconds or so ahead of us was up on its back legs and all alert, the way they get when they're about to sprint. They see everything but your gigantic looming car, it seems, and yet, when you really think about it afterward, you realize they must have seen you awfully clearly, because they timed their destruction so precisely. Once you've barreled over enough of them, not only do you not bother to slow down (their hot compact wizardly brains just recalculate, they wait a touch longer, and things come out the same), but you understand in a fresh, convincing way why science—microscope and number science, not AFA Etheric Science—will utterly fail and fail and fail.
My partner said, at the same instant it failed again, “That second question goes against me, too. I did that in Billings the other day. Remember? That chili con carne the place was so damned famous for? I was about to try salmon done in butter.”
“Here's one I'm thinking you'll have a better chance with. ‘When courting members of—'”
“That's fine. Let's stop. Go on and work out your own score, if you want. I know mine.”
“You took the Quiz already?”
