Mission to America

by Walter Kirn

  A hundred yards farther on, Lance said, “Bipolar. But maybe they don't have that where you come from. We didn't have it down here until five years ago. We barely had adult ADHD. I'm always a pioneer with these new things, at least as far as the greater Snowshoe area. I think they kick off in the San Francisco suburbs, or Cambridge, Massachusetts, around the colleges. You've slept with her?”

  Once I'd caught up, I fibbed to him.

  “Good. Your higher self might have a chance then.” Still, the look Lance gave me was grim and pitying. There might have been envy there, too. Between his eyebrows. It was time that I let him play nature guide again.

  We came out in a sandy clearing atop a ridge whose boulder-strewn, treeless shoulders sloped so far down that the ponds at their base looked like shreds of silver foil. Colorado wasn't Montana. It was steeper. More violence had gone into forming its terrain. And unlike Wyoming, which seemed spent and petrified, this place felt restless, charged. I'd never experienced such crashing sunsets, such surging, erupting dawns. Through my boot soles I thought I could feel a deep-down hum, conducted through the granite and the gravel, that was either the echo of a past earthquake or the buildup to a new one. No wonder people in Colorado kept moving, always running, skiing, climbing, racing. No wonder Lance had adopted his swift, long stride. The planet itself spun faster here, it seemed, and just staying upright required leaning forward.

  Lance shrugged and dipped one shoulder and slid his pack off. He set it on the ground, untied a cord, and folded back its topmost flap, his movements soft, deliberate, and exaggerated. I could tell he was going for his Bible, since Elder Stark behaved identically toward his copy of Discourses—as though it was made of blown glass, and irreplaceable.

  Lance held the book in one hand and read it silently, his body angled toward the thousand-foot drop, which was just a yard or two away. The Effinghams' private mountain loomed miles off, and a couple of times he gazed in its direction, trying, it appeared, to clear his thoughts so as to memorize some verse or phrase. I studied the backs of my hands; I couldn't watch him. Other people's devotions embarrassed me, perhaps because, like other people's kisses, they rarely looked genuine when viewed too closely.

  He snapped the book shut as though he'd settled something, then tucked it up high and tight under one arm. He opened his stance to me and I stepped closer, into a warm updraft near the ridge. It smelled of green grass from the valley and in its currents star-shaped bits of seed fluff swerved and tumbled.

  “I almost pushed someone off here once,” Lance said. “I planned it, I pictured it, and weighed the consequences. I even carried out a little test run. The thing's still down there somewhere—a canvas sack stuffed with a good eighty pounds of rocks and dirt. That's how profoundly effed up I was back then, particularly in regard to women I ‘loved.' What scared me off in the end was how the sack stayed nearly completely intact the whole way down and didn't shred or explode like I expected. It told me that they could identify the body.”

  I wasn't sure how to acknowledge these disclosures, delivered so flatly, with such a level stare. I made a rough sound in my throat, glanced down, glanced sideways. I shifted my weight very slightly to my rear foot but decided it made me seem timid and shifted it back. It came to me that I was being addressed not as Lance's friend or confidant but as a dispassionate student of human depravity—as a fellow theologian, really. First, he'd saturate me with ugly storytelling, and then he'd try to show me proof, in the form of the new, redeemed person standing before me, that AlpenCross's god was great and merciful, the only god truly worthy of my loyalty. Then, no doubt, he'd offer me a membership.

  Fair was fair. I deserved this, I decided. But I resented the setting Lance had chosen. Elder Stark and I approached prospects in their homes, on the street, in cafés, in comfortable surroundings where they were always free to walk away from us. Up here, though, a person would have to fly away.

  At first Lance proceeded as I'd predicted. To the crime of premeditating a murder he added a host of other offenses whose details filled out his earlier chronicle of Snowshoe Springs' decline. He'd peddled a drug known as angel dust, he said, through a regional ring of high-school students, one of whom he'd had a romance with that led to her commitment to a mental hospital. He'd been at fault in a drunken auto accident, which he'd avoided prosecution for because the people he hurt were Mexican peach pickers driving an unlicensed truck without insurance coverage. More recently—just five years ago, he said—he'd enticed three young women to cooperate with a “perverted Web site” he'd created that allowed men from all over the world to direct the girls in various acts, individually and together, that were observable on computer screens. The girls had made thousands of dollars, Lance informed me, and he, their manager, had earned much more. When the prettiest one threatened to expose the scheme after being recognized and contacted by a man who, it turned out, lived just three blocks away from her, Lance panicked. This girl was the person he'd thought of killing.

  “But the worst thing,” he said, “was those felt like happy years to me. I drove a classic Mercedes convertible. I scuba dived in Antigua twice a winter. And—please don't tell Lara, don't ruin her illusions—this ridiculous ‘Little Eff' she set her sights on, the guy with the tiny penis and the big jet, we partied together, in secret, several times, in international waters on his yacht. Models, video cameras, black tar heroin, this weird rich young Arab guy who traded platinum over his sat phone while getting his big toe sucked—those sailing trips were Sodom on the high seas. And I couldn't get enough. I gloried in it.”

  “At breakfast . . .” I said, my first venture into speech for ten or fifteen minutes.

  “I know, I know. I made Lara feel bad for stuff that's far more innocent, but I'm trying to train her to take responsibility. Comparing her sins to mine won't minimize them. I know, though. It's unjust. It's inexcusable. I'm afraid it's a sick old dynamic I slip into and only by grace will it ever be relieved. And believe me, I pray for that daily. Hourly. I'll show you my knees if you want. They're black and blue.”

  Lance was speaking and thinking at a furious clip by then, his neck flushed streaky red, his gestures motorized. If his intention was to demonstrate how undeserving he'd been of spiritual amnesty, he'd already convinced me. He couldn't quit, though. Reliving his degradation had struck some spark in him and it was glowing now like a blown-on coal. And his tales had grown outlandish. Platinum? He'd started to say “gold,” stopped at the vowel, wet his crackly lips, and then reached out for something less common, more specialized. I'd seen it: momentum overrunning fact.

  To help Lance, to bring him around, I said, “Miraculous.”

  He repeated the word, but his thoughts were clearly still shoving him further away, toward some ultimate dark drama that he might or might not have actually lived through but whose telling would let out the pressure inside his skull. Lara, who'd lived with him, must have seen this coming when she excused herself to gather wildflowers.

  “Miraculous that you managed to turn back. A voice? Was it a voice, Lance?”

  “I don't hear voices. That's never been a part of it.”

  “I'm sorry.”

  He glared at me. “People should think before they say things.”

  “What changed you? That's all, Lance. That's all I want to know.”

  “So you are or you aren't prepared to let me finish?”

  This was grinding. This was work. My attention strayed out past the ridge and I envisioned my partner's patient labors with Eff Sr., who longed for the pleasure of eating his own bison and might give some share of his fortune for the privilege. If such payment were offered, maybe we should take it. Maybe our services warranted nothing less.

  Lance removed his Christian Bible from his armpit and pressed it with rigid, crossed hands against his heart. The comfort this seemed to provide him was real and physical; his breathing slowed, his locked-up hips unstiffened. Next might come tears, if his body weren't so dehydrated. My own need f
or water felt dangerously acute.

  “It's home, but I need to move away,” Lance said. “I meet someone who's not from here and I see that. I'm faking it, man. I act saved, but I'm not. I have history here, and it's thick. It's thick and sticky. I go downtown, it's in half the ladies' eyes; I hike up here, it's below me on that ledge there. I came a whole lot closer than I told you.”

  “Thoughts are thoughts and that's all they are, Lance. Thoughts. Read to me from your Bible. Something calming.”

  He seemed to like this idea. He traced a finger down a densely printed concordance page. It was one of those scriptures with gold-edged, crinkly paper, and it rustled as he flipped through it. “Here we go now. This is from John. It's my new bedtime verse.” He coughed into his fist, then looked at me. “One last little thing first. A favor.”

  “Only one.”

  “Now, exactly—I mean this, exactly; I need to see it; this helps me, I can't explain why; it helps unstick things—what did my little lost Betsy let you do to her? The usual, or past that? How far past that? My savior and I have a deal—he lets me ask these things. He knows how deep the hurt goes. Describe her outfit.”

  When I reached the bottom, alone, two hours later, Lara was in her Jeep, with music playing. The way she turned the car key and pushed the gearshift, gently, with minimal motion and no noise, felt like an indirect apology. She knew what she knew, and she knew that I knew now too, and that part of my knowledge was that she might have spared me but hadn't because of her greed for sympathy. When she looked like she might defend herself, or Lance, I raised a stern hand that she was right to flinch from. “He can walk home,” I told her. “Lance needs a long, long walk.” Later, as we drove into the campground, I spotted my partner's bike against the van and asked to be taken back to town and dropped there. I just wasn't ready for his stories. They'd breed with the others I'd heard and hatch new monsters, because there was no such thing as separation here, not once you'd started listening. Never listen.

  For most of the evening and well into the night I sat propped against a pillow on my bunk while Elder Stark paced the van from end to end and recounted his visit to the ranch, which he called by the name of its brand, the Rocking F. From somewhere he'd picked up an insulated mug that held at least a quart of ice and cola and allowed him, by use of an elbowed plastic straw, to prod his sagging metabolism with sugar whenever his presentation slowed or wandered. The cola would darken the straw for a few seconds, followed by a creeping facial tightening that convinced me his body no longer wholly belonged to him but now responded chiefly to outside substances, of which the soft drink was probably just one. In the right front pocket of his suit pants I'd spied a small bulge that rattled when he moved and must have been a bottle full of pills. Twice he broke off his speech to use the bathroom, and both times the bulge had switched pockets when he returned.

  “They take a lot of steam up there,” he said. “I'd never done that before. It's interesting. The heat and the fact that you can't see each other's faces even though you're sitting side by side makes people very honest for some reason. Eff Sr. told me some things he probably shouldn't have—where his money first came from, for example. Foreign animal medical experiments.”

  I squinted at him to show I needed more.

  “Apparently the government has rules about what scientists can do to animals, especially to apes and chimpanzees, when they're testing a new medicine or drug. Eff Sr. built laboratories in El Salvador where those laws didn't have to be obeyed. He flew in the animals straight from Africa, including some species you're not allowed to capture. He told me he had to bribe an actual king for them, I can't remember of which country. The king got angry once about late payments and had his army surround Eff Sr.'s airplane. It couldn't take off for six days and all the apes inside died of dehydration. That's when he finally closed the laboratories and bought his first cable-TV company, in Tulsa. He cried when he told me all this. His voice was cracking. Little Eff said he shouldn't feel bad because his laboratories helped invent a new bladder cancer treatment, but his father said he still dreams about dead primates. He wonders if that's where his stomach problems come from.”

  “The guilt,” I said.

  “The debt to nature. That's why he brought in the wolves. To even things out.”

  “With who?”

  “The universe.”

  “The ‘universe'? That's really how he talks?”

  “Late at night he does. With me, at least. Around his son he's quieter, more practical, but he says that I bring out his philosophical side. He's always had it, he told me, but he hides it. He has some private theories on world history he writes in a notebook stored inside a gun safe. Human beings have nearly died off twice, he thinks, once in the Bronze Age and then again around the year one thousand. Both times ‘the Keepers' nursed us back. Some are scientists, some are businessmen. They're still around, but the common folk resent them. The Keepers protect them anyway.”

  “He dreamed this up all by himself?”

  “He had some help. There's a famous dead lady philosopher he loves. He worked it up from dreams he had after finishing his favorite book by her.”

  “What's the book called? I'd like to have a look at it.”

  “Something like The Keepers Quit. Or Samson Sits Down. He was talking pretty quickly.”

  “So why do the common folk resent them?”

  “Who?”

  “These Andromedan types who rescued Humans on Earth. Human life on Earth.”

  “That's your facetious voice. It's not appreciated.”

  “I want an answer,” I said. “Why don't the commoners like the Keepers?”

  “Because the commoners are proud, I guess. They like to think they can take care of themselves.”

  “It sounds like the Keepers are even prouder.”

  “I guess they deserve to be,” my partner said.

  The tales went on, outlandish and disconcerting, accompanied by the racket from the campground, which had filled up with motor homes over the last few days and developed a lively social life. The license plates were from Texas and California, and most of the tourists were thin-haired older couples who enjoyed grilling hamburgers on the concrete pads set in the grassy strips beside the parking spots. One spot over from ours a bearded fellow who dressed in overalls and sleeveless T-shirts that showed off his densely interlocked tattoos of sea monsters, crucifixes, and thorny roses would uncase a guitar after supper and strum till dark, attracting a circle of listeners in lawn chairs. Though they'd only just met and soon would separate, they drank beer and wine and clapped and swayed and laughed, concluding their parties with hearty, tuneless sing-alongs. A few of the campers breathed through plastic tubes attached to portable oxygen tanks on wheels, and I sensed that almost all of them knew they didn't have much more time on earth. Maybe this accounted for their willingness to pitch in with strangers and form a neighborhood.

  “The important part,” my partner said, “is that I think I gained Eff Sr.'s trust. We studied Discourses every afternoon. It relaxed him, relaxed his colon. He's eating meat again. He told me he got more relief from our four days together than his doctors have given him in seven years.”

  “Does he want to convert?”

  “We have to take it slowly. People want things from men like him. They make appeals. Save the orphans. Save the chamber orchestra. There's a fellow who started a church of the outdoors here—”

  “I hiked with him this morning. Lance,” I said.

  “If he claimed to be friends with Little Eff, he lied. He told you about a boat, I bet. A yacht. Their grand old times together on a yacht.”

  “He said Little Eff stole Lara. They were married.”

  “People don't steal people, Mason. It can't be done.”

  My partner's loyalty repulsed me. He spoke like a paid defender, a hired aide, without any views or opinions of his own. If it had been me who'd heard the monkey story, which stuck in my mind like a food scrap in a molar, rotting a
way in a place I couldn't quite reach, I wouldn't have accepted Eff Sr.'s tears. I would have walked off through the steam and slammed the door on him.

  “This Lance is a pest. A parasite. A barnacle. That's what the Effinghams call his type: the barnacles.”

  “I've been thinking we need to leave this place,” I said. “I've been thinking we'd do awfully well in New York City.”

  “That's not where the central powers are nowadays.”

  “That's exactly where they are, according to my reading back in Bluff.”

  “Those library books are from Missoula garage sales.”

  My partner stopped pacing and sucked his straw. It gurgled. He pried the lid off the mug and opened a window and slung the ice cubes out into the dark. The nightly campground sing-along had started and before the window was closed I heard the words: “If I had a hammer . . .” The passion behind them startled me.

  “According to Little Eff you've met a woman here. The news is you're in love,” my partner said.

  This information surprised me, though it shouldn't have. The tattling elves of Snowshoe never rested. Betsy, however, wasn't one of them. At the end of our first night together she'd clasped my warm, flushed face between her palms and made me promise, eye to eye, to shield what she called her most prized possession: her privacy. She told me something awful had happened once that had turned half the town against her, including her mother, and though she insisted the charges were false and mischievous, she said she was still repairing her good name. My talk with Lance had convinced me that her fears were warranted, whatever their basis in real events. I didn't plan to ask; it didn't matter. On the Thonic level, a couple meets in innocence, and the twists and turns in the paths they walked beforehand are revealed as straight and necessary. Combination transforms—absolutely, if it's allowed to.

  “Little Eff said he spoke to her father,” my partner said. “They do business together occasionally. In Denver.”