Mission to America

by Walter Kirn

  “So you're definitely thinking John Deere,” the young man said after I'd sat on seven different models, cranking their wheels and fiddling with their gearshifts. “The fity-one hundred or the fity-two?”

  “It's a four-acre yard with a pretty fair slope,” I said, “and most of it's in the shade, which means wet grass. Under certain conditions it's an outright marsh. Also, my wife works nights and sleeps all day, so the quieter, the better.” These details weren't in the script; I'd made them up. Knowing the scene would end happily for everyone had liberated the artist in me.

  Without explaining why it suited my needs, the salesman recommended the fifty-two and untwisted the wires that attached the price tag to the neck of the choke knob. I started patting my pockets. A problem arose: I'd neglected to hide my wallet. It bulged in my back right pocket, its natural place, where the salesman had likely already noticed it. I shifted to another plan. I brought out the wallet, smiled, opened it, frowned, frowned harder, and said, “No credit card.”

  “You misplaced it?” the salesman said.

  “I think I must have.”

  “Nobody stole it, I hope.”

  “I hope not. Damn.”

  “You want to call the company? You can give them your password, they'll authorize the sale. You really ought to alert them anyway, in case someone's out there charging on your account. Here, use this.” He handed me his phone.

  “I don't know their number.”

  “Call up information. Visa or MasterCard?”

  “I remember now: I left it on top of my dresser. What a dunce.” I held out the phone for the salesman to take back.

  “Just call the company and use your password. The mower's yours.”

  “I'm sorry, I can't right now. I'm already late for something.”

  The salesman's brow pinched.

  “First thing tomorrow.”

  “I won't be here tomorrow.”

  My inability to sustain my story—I finally just said the mower cost too much and that my old one could last another year or two—brought on a bitter lecture from the salesman about the economics of his job. He worked on commission, and this was his peak sales hour, meaning that I'd cost him quite a sum, he said, by taking up thirty-five minutes of his time with no intention of buying anything. If I thought about it, he said, I'd stolen from him. I'd stolen from his wife and child, too. “That's selfish,” he said. “That is so incredibly selfish.”

  “Oh please,” Betsy said to him, stepping in. “Cool off. Come on, Mason.”

  “Look at me,” the salesman said.

  “We have been,” said Betsy. “We're going home.”

  “Don't ever come back here. You picked my pocket, dickwad.”

  I was walking away when he said this. I halted, turned. Betsy released the elbow she'd been tugging at.

  “You're going to regret that you weren't nicer,” I said.

  The salesman held out his hands. “I'm shaking all over.”

  “I'm a person who can tell the future. In five or six days—I see it clearly—your employer will call you back into his office, show you a certain report he just received, and inform you that you no longer have a job here. Unless you apologize to me.”

  I counted silently to five. I'd intended to go to ten, but it was pointless: the salesman kept up his mock shaking, unrepentant. I took Betsy's hand and left him standing there, alone with the fate he'd chosen for himself, and for the next hour, from kitchenware to flooring, I terrorized WorkMart's sales floor, sparing no one. Afterward, in Betsy's car, I signed my report and clipped it to an envelope. “Done,” I said. “They got what they deserved.”

  “You changed in there,” Betsy said.

  “I did my job. You're right: I have to think like an American.”

  “I didn't mean all the time.”

  “That's how it sounded.”

  “I like you sweet, though.”

  “You said you liked me mean.”

  “That was a very different context.”

  I'd forgotten this about women: so many conditions. A man shouldn't take them to heart, and yet he does, because he doesn't want to be alone. The woman fears loneliness, too, but she can't help herself, though she knows her conditions may drive the man away. That's why, secretly, she feels relieved when he resists her now and then.

  “The service at WorkMart is awful, and I said so. That's what mystery shoppers do,” I said.

  “You're playing tough now to show me I don't scare you. Which means I must, or else you wouldn't bother. I think it's cute,” said Betsy. “How cute are you?”

  This wasn't the sort of question a man should answer. I stared out the bug-streaked windshield at the store and pictured it collapsing in a dust cloud that would spread over all of Boulder and block the sun. Someday it would happen; it felt inevitable.

  “If I scare you, it must mean you like me,” Betsy said. “Well, I like you too, so don't worry.”

  “Because I'm cute.”

  “No,” she said. “Because you try so hard.”

  At lunch I rewrote my report to make it kinder, since being employed by WorkMart was its own punishment. We set out for our second stop, a downtown jewelry store, but on our way there my phone rang. It was Lauer. I had to cover one ear so I could hear him. He said he was on a plane above New Mexico and was using his phone in violation of United States government regulations, so he had to speak quietly. When he hung up, I tried my partner's number but couldn't get through. Then I told Betsy we had to turn around.

  “What's wrong? You're crying.”

  “It's just my eyes,” I said.

  “I know it's just your eyes. They're full of tears.”

  My explanation consumed the whole drive back, although there were ten-minute stretches when I said nothing, just rubbed the knees of my corduroys and drifted, sometimes backward into childhood and sometimes forward to a future that I suddenly found hard to picture. I understood that no one lives forever, but there are certain people whose power and presence so thoroughly penetrate your view of things that contemplating their absence feels as strange as imagining never having been born yourself.

  Even before my brain was capable of forming and storing lasting memories, I must have seen her face a hundred times: the small pointed ears like tightly closed tulip blossoms, the fine but dense white hair swept back in waves, the pink upturned nose with the oddly snipped-off tip and the X-shaped wrinkle at the top, the round girlish mouth, and the knobby, prominent chin that looked almost manly when seen in profile. Strangely, her weakest feature was her eyes, which were tiny, close set, and dull in color—not quite green or blue but not gray, either. Though she didn't wear glasses, I wouldn't have been surprised if she needed them—the reason, perhaps, that when she spoke to people, she would always ask them to come closer, until they were near enough to feel her breath, which was teakettle hot and smelled faintly of black licorice from the anise seeds she liked to chew.

  For years, I knew her only from a distance, as the short human figure between the towering floral arrangements at the far end of Celestial Hall. Before her arthritis forced her into her chair and confined her to the front porch of Riverbright, she delivered her talks standing upright, with her arms crossed, as though she suffered from a constant chill. Hearing her speak was like watching a magician draw an endless ribbon of yellow scarves out of his clenched fist—astonishing. She never used notes and rarely paused to think; her long singsong sentences sprang forth fully formed. Until I was tall enough to see her easily above the rows and rows of nodding heads, I liked to listen to her with my eyes closed while resting my head against my father's side between his rib cage and his belt. His organs gurgled and shifted with her words. “The All-in-One does not require our praise any more than the rivers and trees require our praise, nor does the All-in-One demand obedience, offerings, tokens, gifts, or sacrifices. The All-in-One seeks neither flattery nor increase but only the satisfaction of our companionship.”

  I quoted these words fo
r Betsy. “Sweet,” she said. Seeming to sense that I wanted more, she added: “And nice if it were true.”

  When I was nine, in the heart of a cold winter that had kept my family inside the house for months, restless, bickering, and chronically sick as the result of my mother's rash decision to heed the warnings of a Terrestrian radio doctor and have us all injected with flu vaccine, the Seeress appeared at our front door one night while my parents were washing the supper dishes. I was lying on the sofa, trying to make myself vomit into a canning pot set on a towel beside me on the floor. After two days of nausea so acute that even seeing bright colors made me gag, vomiting would come as a relief.

  I felt a draft from the kitchen, then heard her voice, pleasant, composed, and utterly unnerving. I flung off my wool blanket and sat up straight. I napkined my chin clean, but, without a mirror, I couldn't be sure I'd gotten all the saliva left there by my unproductive retching. I felt around with my finger, found a wet spot.

  “Mason?” my mother called. “We have a guest.”

  The Seeress insisted on drinking the tea we served her at the kitchen table, from everyday china. My mother offered her a slice of huckleberry tart, but she declined it, citing a “funny, belchy tummy.” This comment helped put us at our ease. My mother finally let herself sit down, my father stopped scratching his thumbnail on his belt buckle, and my own hands stopped shaking enough to lift a spoon and stir a little honey into my tea. The Seeress apologized for intruding, and then explained the reason for her visit.

  “I was strolling home this morning from my hair appointment and I noticed a purple spot above your house. It was faint, you'll be happy to know, not fully developed, but any purple at all concerns me, naturally. I should have come by immediately—forgive me.”

  My mother set down her full teacup on her saucer. It rattled and spilled. My father touched her arm. She took his hand and squeezed it and looked away. Over the Seeress's shoulder, through the window, I watched a magpie land on a slim tree branch that dipped and rose and dipped under its weight. A second bird landed and the branch stayed down.

  “It was faint, as I said, so there's no reason to fret, dears. We caught it early, with time to spare, I'm sure.” The Seeress eyed us each in turn as she helped herself to a warm-up from the teapot. She picked up the creamer and dribbled in some milk, her hand a fragile-looking claw, but steady. Her gaze had come to rest on me. “Tell me, child. Describe it for me, please.”

  Was it possible the old woman was mistaken? Her sighting made no sense to me—how could a stomachache cause a hovering purple spot? I feared insulting her judgment, though. I began with my first symptom three days earlier: a pang of revulsion brought on by smelling an orange, usually my favorite fruit. The Seeress asked me if the offending whiff had come from the skin or the flesh. “The skin,” I said. This seemed to mean something to her—she pinched her lower lip, tugging it slightly between her thumb and forefinger in a way that exposed her crowded brown bottom teeth. I continued, point by point, mentioning my discomfort with vivid colors as well as a peppery taste behind my tonsils that intensified as sleep approached but vanished in the mornings.

  “Peppery?” said the Seeress. “Not silvery? This is vital, child.”

  I thought about it. “I don't know what silver tastes like.”

  “Like this,” she said. She tilted her head, reached up with her right hand, and unscrewed an earring made from an old coin. She presented it to me balanced on an index finger. “On the back of the tongue, where it's rough. The very back.”

  I turned away for modesty's sake, opened my mouth, and did as I'd been told. I tasted nothing at first, just noted the neutral hard coolness of the coin. After another second, it numbed my tongue. The numbness spread up the insides of my cheeks and through my gums and back to my esophagus, which was still sore and raw from all my coughing and hawking. At my back I could feel the warmth and pressure of everyone's concerned attention, and I wondered for how long the Seeress expected me to hold the earring in place. The test seemed pointless.

  And then the cramps came, a rolling succession of whole-body seizures that caused me to rock backward in my chair and brought my pale, shocked father to his feet. He caught me from behind somehow, but the next contraction pitched me forward so violently that he lost his grip. My forehead sledgehammered the table and caused, I was later told, a stream of liquid to spout from the jostled teapot and splatter the Seeress, ruining the lace collar of a dress that had belonged to Mother Lucy herself once. I missed this disaster, though. All I saw was black.

  The cleanup had begun when I came to. The Seeress and my father stood aside as my mother pushed a white bath towel across the table and what must have been two quarts of greenish sludge threaded with bright red blood sloshed off the edge into a galvanized bucket. Chalky shards of china littered the floor, and my mother, in slippers, was careful not to step on them as she carried the bucket to the bathroom and poured it loudly into the toilet. I heard distinct plops and isolated splashes—the stuff must have been quite chunky. I patted my belly. It was hot through my shirt and noticeably sunken. The nausea was gone, though.

  The Seeress said, “Pancreatic, but caught in time. I'd like you to rest now and sip molasses water, as strong and sweet as you can stand it.” She extended one arm and opened a closed hand: the magic earring. The thing looked wet, besmirched, and her willingness to touch it made me love her. “We thought it was lost—you gulped it down,” she said. “But it came back to us, Mason, and so did you. No more deathly purple at the LaVerles'. All is lovely blue again.”

  Betsy steered with one finger as the Explorer topped the ridge east of Snowshoe and nosed back down into its aspen-covered heart-shaped valley, speckled with the first house lights of early evening and softened by a fine magenta mist that looked like the vapor released by wealth itself. My tale of the time my life was saved had diverted her attention from the road. When a deer tiptoed out of the trees and crossed the center line, missing our hood by only a few yards, she not only didn't brake, she barely looked up.

  “What exactly's wrong with her?” she asked.

  “She said it didn't matter. She called the whole town together on her lawn for a lemonade social and just when it was ending she rang the bell that hangs on the side of her wheelchair and announced that she'll be gone by the next moon. People fainted. Not just women, men. Her nurses had to go around with smelling salts.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Sad,” I said.

  “But picturesque. The bell, especially. I liked the bell.”

  Betsy's tone was shifting in a direction that suggested I'd overwhelmed her with thoughts and scenes only an Apostle could understand. She'd done her best, though. She'd sighed convincing sighs. I lifted a twist of hair from her white neck and let it fall back in a way I hoped felt pleasant. Inside, I grieved. Or so I thought. This would be my first death when it occurred, my first real death, and maybe the pain I felt was anger, panic, or deep self-pity, not grief at all. In Bluff, we didn't inspect and name our feelings the way they did here—they came and went, unclassified—and maybe this limited us somehow. Our books, our parents, and our leaders spoke with a single voice about the unity of every creature in its creator, but I'd begun to suspect the All-in-One existed differently in different zones, and our zone had little in common with the others.

  Soon it would have no presiding spirit, either.

  The camper looked empty when Betsy and I pulled in. I didn't invite her inside—the place was filthy. Ever since being accepted by the Effinghams, Elder Stark had lapsed into a state of haughty dishevelment, entranced by everything about himself, including his own filth. I wondered if he'd heard the news yet and decided he'd probably heard it first, since Lauer and he were in league now, as close as crooks. Had he wept? Had he broken down? I knew he'd say he had, of course, but I doubted I'd believe him.

  Betsy parked. I sealed the dishonest mystery shopper report inside its pre-addressed brown envelope, gave it to her to mail
, and opened my door. A cloud of the delicate black-and-olive mayflies that had been hatching on the river all week swarmed into the car, and Betsy grimaced. She didn't start swatting, though; she restrained herself, even when some of the bugs climbed into her vents. This girl who enjoyed it when others were mean to her—at least in certain situations—didn't practice meanness herself.

  “You'll be okay tonight?”

  “I will,” I said.

  “I had a weird psychic flash a few miles back, but I didn't want to interrupt you. You should know that about me: I'm psychic, Mason.”

  “I expect that in women. It's assumed.”

  “You might not want to hear it, though. Do you or don't you?”

  “I'll tell you afterward.” It was a peevish remark, but I was tired, eager to lie on my bunk, alone, in silence.

  “All right, then,” Betsy said. “This seer lady?”

  “Yes?”

  “I said it wrong. I'm sorry. This Seeress?”

  “Betsy, it's been a long day . . .”

  “She'll be the last.”

  I swung my right leg out the door and onto the ground. “I'll be in the coffee shop at eight or so. And remember to send that report. I need the money.” I spoke curtly, in clipped phrases. We traded feeble waves, I shut the door, and walked toward the van, aware with every step of Betsy's displeasure at my seeming dismissal of her vision. In truth, I'd grown weary of visions generally. Everyone had them, no one ever checked them, and even the few visions that proved true conferred no advantage on those who'd had or heard them. The Seeress was the lone exception. Though other Bluff sensitives were just as gifted, and some, including Elder Stark's own mother, were capable of feats she couldn't match, such as reading words from the dead in gnarled tree bark and finding lost pets by peering into their food bowls, the Seeress possessed a quality that vaulted her above all of them: judiciousness. She kept her beholdings close; she didn't scatter them. She intervened with hunches and predictions only when great outcomes were at stake: the fate of the Church, the survival of a marriage, the death of a child. Her visions mattered.