by Walter Kirn
I told Dale that time was just time, that time was free. He seemed to think I was joking and started to laugh, but he ran short of breath. He closed his eyes and wheezed. The whole time we'd been talking, I'd sensed he might be ill, maybe even seriously ill. His reddish hair didn't match his olive complexion and it fluffed out from under his Colorado Rockies cap with a curious density and luster that made me think the cap and hair were one—a complicated cosmetic headpiece. Also, his hands shook. He kept them on his hips but every once in a while one slipped off and hung in the air for a moment, trembling. To bring the hand back to his hip he had to look at it.
“I think we may have a friend in common,” he said. “Lara Shirer. She mentioned she'd been baptized by some young man who'd just showed up in Snowshoe, and by her description of him I'm guessing that's you. I hope for her sake it takes. I truly do. I hope she finds what I found.”
“What was that?” I knew now that Lauer had misled us with his talk of the rampant godlessness out here. The problem, if anything, was rampant godliness.
“Two years ago,” Dale said, “I contracted hepatitis, probably from sharing dirty needles. I'm only grateful it wasn't something worse. I was a human ruin, a toss-away. But then, on September eighteenth, at ten a.m., I lifted up my frailties before the Throne and was healed in an instant and filled with a new strength.” He lifted his right arm and made a muscle that I pretended to be impressed by although I couldn't see it through his shirt.
“Back to Lara,” I said.
“She runs with a fast crowd. I don't know how she keeps up.”
“She doesn't,” I said. “How well do you know her?”
“I know Errol some. I know Errol Sr. better. He got in touch with me about a year ago, after his diagnosis. He'd heard somewhere about my activities with AlpenCross and how it healed my hepatitis. We talked a few times, but he's a wary old snake—he thought we'd take all his money, probably—and nothing much came of it. Party invitations. A chance to hear Cher from ten feet away. Big whoop.”
Someone tapped a hard object on the microphone and the people who were still standing moved toward their chairs while the people who already had chairs crossed their arms and settled in for the lecture. Dale shook my hand. His fingers and palm were cold and dry yet slippery, as though coated in the blue chalk that's used on pool sticks. Whomever he'd prayed to back when to save his health hadn't quite delivered, evidently, and I guessed that he knew this but felt the blame was his.
“You might want to try milk thistle tea,” I said. “Three or four cups a day. Not hot. Room temperature.”
“How long are you going to be in town?”
“Not sure yet.”
“We've got a cool group here in Snowshoe that loves the Truth and also loves to get up in the mountains and hike and run around and climb and stuff. A few of us are here tonight, in fact. You're welcome to come hang out. You might enjoy it.”
“We'll see,” I said. “I had a little question.”
“Fire away, man.”
“It's Mason.”
“Mason. Cool.”
“These mystery shoppers. How much do they get paid?”
“For doing practically nothing, way too much. You're looking for part-time work?”
“Everyone please take their seats now,” said a voice.
“I'll check my roster once I'm back in Denver. I'll see what I can do for you,” said Dale. “If you'd like to, come join us for dinner after this.”
The liver lecture, as I'd expected, confirmed my suggestion about thistle tea. I barely listened. I watched the audience, ranking the women according to a system that I'd been working out since age sixteen or so. I noted the looseness or tightness of their hairstyles, which I'd found to be an indicator of a woman's overall disposition. Tight-haired women tended, from what I'd seen, to be more patient, more yielding, and better listeners. They let a man express himself and seemed to gain feelings of security from a firm and confident approach. Loose-haired women, though, shrank away from forcefulness. They came off as warm and spontaneous at first, but in the end they lacked the inner discipline, the stable structures of instinct and belief, that would allow a man to seize and hold them. Sarah had worn her hair loose. I wanted her opposite.
From the tight-haired women in the audience, the users of clips, barrettes, and rubber bands, I picked out two who looked around my age and monitored their behavior during the talk. The taller and darker of the pair dwelt mostly in her spinal column. When the lecturer grew animated or made a stimulating point, she raised her shoulders to separate her vertebrae. When his words were dull, she hunched, bore down, driving her energy toward her pelvic cradle. According to the Book of Osteograms, Mother Lucy's posthumously published treatise on the spiritual aspects of physiognomy, this woman was a Verticalist/Expanded and leaned toward stubbornness and practicality. In romantic terms, she matched best with men of the Radialist/Balanced family, whose well-developed shoulders and stout hips marked them as cheerful, rational, and steadfast.
This meant she wasn't the woman for me. My grandmother, a devoted student of osteograms (they'd helped her pair her daughter with my father) had classified me when I was just an infant as a Localist/Unpatterned, meaning that my Animating Essence roamed around freely through my skeleton and predisposed me to indecision, compassion, dependency, and disorganization. I wasn't told any of this until age twelve, but I sensed it well before then in my parents' insistence on order and routine in my smallest everyday acts, from the way I was directed to lay my head in the very center of my pillow to the way I was taught to drink a glass of water in six equal swallows spaced five seconds apart.
The other girl I was eyeing, petite but womanly, her hair clamped in place by a mousetrap-size black clip studded with rhinestones, was difficult to analyze. She was sitting one row ahead of me, at the end, wearing tall lace-up boots of lightly scuffed brown leather, tight dark blue jeans tucked into the boots, and a fitted tweed jacket with nothing under it but a shiny lace-fringed off-white slip that showed the deep, freckled crevice between her breasts. The small of her back curved so far inward that I wondered if she was doing some sort of exercise, and her legs made up close to two-thirds of her height. Her essence appeared to be centered in her hindparts.
After the talk, she went forward and thanked the speaker, who continued to look at her when she turned away, and then joined a group that included my new friend, Dale. I got his attention by picking up a pamphlet from a table beside the lectern and looking bored and forlorn while I read through it. I hoped he'd wave me over there but instead he came to me.
“Still interested in a little bite?”
I was. The restaurant was several blocks away. I walked my bike a step behind the others: the girl, whose name I hadn't gotten yet—a broad-faced, fortyish woman in black tights that emphasized the bulges in her thick legs—and an older fellow with a gray ponytail that had been brushed and conditioned to a high sheen. He stopped at a bank machine on the way there and collected a formidable stack of twenties that he casually stuffed in his back pocket as though he made such a withdrawal every night. My impression, formed on no clear basis, was that he hadn't earned the money honestly.
Dale said to all of us, “Dinner's on Lance, it looks like. Everybody order the prime rib.” Lance shook his head in a humorous disgusted way and cracked, “It's expensive hanging out with slackers.” He winked at me, trying to put me at ease, it seemed, and then turned and inserted himself between the females, throwing his ropy brown arms around their shoulders and tangling his fingers in their hair. The older woman leaned into the hug, but the girl broke away from him and walked on ahead. “I guess Pretty Betsy's on the rag,” Lance said. Dale disappointed me by laughing with him.
We came to an intersection with traffic. Betsy hurried across it against the light, while the rest of us waited, bunched up on the curb. Dale said, “Lance was our AlpenCross team leader. He taught us to scale sheer cliffs with our bare hands.” He made rigid claws of his f
ingers and scratched the air. “He said it would build our self-esteem—the liar. We love him anyway. He kicked our butts.”
“The Father kicked their butts,” Lance said. “Not me. The Father kicks our butts because he loves us. He wants us to grow, to test ourselves. And you are?”
“Mason LaVerle.”
“That's a funky old-fashioned name. And you look like a funky old-fashioned guy. You're an old friend of Dale's?”
“We just met tonight,” Dale said. “He's down here from Montana.”
“Which part?” Lance asked.
“The part of Montana that time forgot,” Dale said. “The part where they make their own shirts with needles and thread. I don't think he's ever even drunk a Coke. I'm thinking he might make an interesting mystery shopper.”
Lance looked me over, my slacks, my awful shoes. I'd left my tie and my name badge in the van.
“At least not a Diet Cherry Coke,” Dale said.
He had this wrong, but correcting him felt pointless. He'd settled on an identity for me that I'd only have to live with for an hour or two and which would probably earn me a free meal. I hadn't eaten since the coffee shop that morning and was starting to feel light-headed and adrift. I could reclaim my pride after the meal, but for now it seemed easier to go along with people. Plus, I might want that job with Dale. I'd never heard of work so easy.
Betsy was sitting in the middle segment of a leather-upholstered C-shaped booth. She was reading a one-page laminated menu whose back reflected a candle flame coming from a reddish glass globe. Lance and the woman, whose name I'd learned was Tania, took up positions on either side of her, leaving Dale and me perched out on the ends. A waitress set down a napkin-lined basket of dinner rolls, but no one took one. I waited and waited. The rolls smelled more homemade than real homemade rolls and soaked the insides of my cheeks with warm saliva.
“What are people's feelings about wine?” Lance asked.
The discussion went on forever. Real conflicts arose. Tania and Lance started out on opposite sides (red versus white) but managed, by stages, to reach a compromise that they then presented to Dale and Betsy, who couldn't agree on whether to accept it and ended up offering separate counterproposals (different versions of a certain type of red) that complicated the issue more than ever. Our waitress walked up in the middle of the discussion but stepped away when she saw how strained it was. I could tell she despised us, not as individuals but as a category. I wished I could tell her that I didn't belong to it.
A wine choice was made that left everyone looking grumpy. I decided that Lance and Tania were a couple—or perhaps that they recently had been, or were trying to be—but that they were also both more interested in Betsy than in each other. For some reason, her attention was the prize, and though they spoke across her, to each other, debating various appetizer ideas, their eyes kept returning to her pretty profile, whose only flaw was a slightly foreshortened nose with a small tab of scar tissue beside one nostril. She said nothing to either of them, just read her menu, running an index finger across the items while looking, to me, a bit bored by her own power. She hadn't asked me what my name was yet, or even given me a visible glance, but I wasn't sure it was a slight. I was the only mystery at the table, the only person she hadn't yet charmed and mastered, and maybe she was saving me for later. That, or she was just tired of being adored.
I tested my theory by ignoring her and questioning Dale about his faith. The more he explained it, the less sense it made. He believed in the Bible but only in the one Bible, as though God had retired a couple of thousand years ago having said everything he wished to say. He believed that the murder of the Prince of Flocks won the world forgiveness but that people still had to ask for it as well—they still had to speak the magic words, like children. He believed that we went to heaven but came from nowhere and that our physical bodies were glorious but also needed to be overcome, preferably by exhausting them in the mountains.
“And all of this inspires you?” I said.
“Deeply.”
“You left out the spirits all around us. You left out animals, old folks, little kids.”
“Except for the spirits, those things all have a place, I guess.”
“And you think of yourself as a sinner first and last?”
“A sinner whose cries for help have gained him mercy.”
“What if I told you that you can save your breath?”
I was arguing with half my brain; the other half was tracking Betsy, whose thought rays I could feel angling my way even though Lance and Tania had pinned her down with what sounded like an aggressive invitation to attend a new round of AlpenCross events, which I got the feeling people had to pay for. I heard Lance use the word “accreditation” and mention something called “level four self-mentoring,” then talk about certain “surreal glacial cirques” with “natural prayer sites that will knock your panties off.” This last expression cemented my view of him as a nasty specimen covered in a tarry spirit-essence similar to what grasshoppers excrete. My partner, in his discerning Hobo mode, would have spotted this substance the moment he first met Lance.
My show of indifference to Betsy was reaching its limits. It annoyed me that she'd let Lance slide in so close to her and speak to her so exclusively. I was about to excuse myself and leave when she set down her wineglass, abruptly cut Lance short, and launched, without any preface, into a story about being harassed that morning by a crew of menacing highway flagmen east of town. She'd found herself in a string of cars, she said, that had been waiting for ages to follow a pilot car over a pass with just one open lane. The flagmen waved the cars ahead, but just as she was passing them a shirtless young hard hat stepped out and slapped her hood, then stepped around to her window once she'd stopped and said into his radio, “Got her, boss. You're right, she's even cuter closer up.”
This story, at first addressed to Lance and Tania, was opened to the whole table as Betsy went on, as though in response to some invitation from Dale and me, who were, in fact, still talking theology. I indulged this masked play for attention only briefly, so Betsy would notice when I resumed ignoring her. Then I started cutting up my steak. I dipped the rare chunks in the blood pooled on my plate, trying to look like a rugged character. Betsy's description of the randy flagmen—some of whom, or so she claimed, had trained binoculars on her from down the highway and, when they saw her spot them, had pounded their chests—convinced me that she had a weakness for beastliness, even though she pretended it repulsed her.
Still acting for her benefit, I tossed back the wine that I'd so far barely sipped at, then attacked the taboo rolls, tearing open their steaming yeasty hearts and wiping up more of the steak blood with the pieces. I swiped my chin dry with my linen napkin, then crushed it up and dropped it onto my plate instead of into my lap. Then, for the first time that night, I looked at Betsy.
“Good story. Excuse me.” My voice was hard and rude.
“You're leaving? Just like that? No name?” she said. It seemed I'd done well.
“Don't worry. I'm coming back.”
In the men's room, trying to wash my hands under a motion-activated faucet that only gave water in skimpy three-second bursts, I permitted myself a memory of home—a good one, the very best of all, of Sarah and me reclining in the dark hayfield, the chaperones off chatting at the picnic tables, the other young voices sifting through the grass, and stretched above it all our peculiar heaven, swarming with secret benevolent entities—and I told myself that for other, future Apostles to ever have a chance at such experiences I had to push ahead with what I'd started tonight. Even if Betsy was just the first of many and not the eventual mother of new Apostles whose blood would sustain us for generations afterward, she represented a start in the great search.
She'd ordered dessert, a slice of layered ice-cream cake, and was splitting it three ways with Lance and Tania when I sat back down in the booth and squared my shoulders. I watched their three forks cross, vying for the gooey parts.
She was acting as if she'd forgotten all about me, as if sugar and chocolate were all she needed now.
“You're the three little pigs,” I said. Not nice, but true.
The women stopped eating but Lance cut a new forkful, gobbled it up, and then sucked the dripping tines. Tania patted her stomach and said, “I need to watch it,” while Betsy just glared at me, her plucked eyebrows arched, her nostrils flared, her tiny scar stretched taut. The most beautiful faces have some ugly in them.
“I've been meaning to ask you something all night,” she said. “Why the Iowa sofa-salesman outfit?”
“My great-grandfather was an Iowan. Good guess.”
“But was he in the sofa trade?” she said.
“You mean my shoes. No one likes them. And I don't care.”
“Actually, I mean the whole ensemble. Mostly the short-sleeved dress shirt. My uncle wore those.”
“Because he sold sofas in Iowa?”
“In fact, he sold mattresses in Massachusetts.”
“That job has a ring to it.”
“What's your job, anyway?”
The banter had come automatically so far, from a part of myself that I hadn't known was there and that life in Bluff had never made me use, but now nothing came. Nothing clever. I'd run dry. Elder Stark and I needed to start seeing some movies.
“I believe that the main job of people like Mason,” said Lance, a pellet of ice-cream cake clinging to his chin, “is walking the streets spreading Pagan heresies and cadging free meals from vital young Christians like us.”
Dale, Lance's craven disciple, softly chuckled.
My anger at them revived my snap. “Men who turn their faith into a business owe all of us a steak dinner now and then.”
A fat grin from Tania, a choked-back snort from Dale, and from Betsy a slanted, cool, appraising look that I met with a calm, unapologetic stare. The candle flame between us seemed to dim as the energies behind our faces maneuvered on another plane. The Seeress, in a tape-recorded talk entitled “Love Me or Love Me Not” that my mother liked to listen to whenever she was fighting with my father, taught that relations between men and women unfold on two levels, the Thonic and the Matic. For Betsy and me that unfolding had begun. On the higher, accelerated Thonic level, our souls were rehearsing a roster of possible outcomes—a casual friendship, a troubled but passionate marriage, a happy marriage, a cordial but final goodbye—while down on the lower, trailing Matic level our nerves were responding to the flow of dramas with twinges and twitches of sadness, hope, apprehension, pleasure, and the like. Whatever was going to happen to the two of us was happening already, experimentally, but so were all the things that wouldn't happen, and the trick was to feel each one as it swept by and not to fight the feelings or try to hold them. We had no influence. Fate deals only with fate. But because we'd already lived through what would come for us, if only obscurely, we'd accept it when it did.
