Mission to America

by Walter Kirn

  Tilted heads swiveled, tracking the hawk's wide spirals. Elder Stark cleared his throat for attention and tossed his feather. I tossed mine and a flurry of them followed, many settling on or near the casket but quite a few of them catching a sideways breeze that fluttered them over the hole toward other mourners, who seemed confused about whether to retrieve them and try again to land them in the right spot. People here were too concerned with marksmanship. Feathers will drift. They aren't missiles. They aren't spears. Lance, whose feather had blown right back to him, picked it up off the ground and cocked his arm and threw it like a dart. It struck like a dart, in the center of the casket lid, and he smiled with his eyes as though he'd truly accomplished something.

  Black Suburbans bore us to the Effinghams', where a new cook had covered several picnic tables with platters of thinly sliced rare bison meat (diseased, perhaps, but still fit for guests, apparently) and wedges of various cheeses whose blended stench killed my interest in all the other delicacies. My partner, of course, devoured everything, coating his plump fingers with crumbs and grease that he smeared on his sleeves before shaking hands with people. His funeral performance had won him many admirers—not only for his talk on Preexistence, which hinted that Lara's death fulfilled a plan she'd decided upon before embodiment, but also because they seemed to credit him personally for the astonishing antics of the hawk, which found another hawk behind a cloud somewhere and joined it for a synchronized ballet that climaxed with a high-speed double plunge.

  I watched as Elder Stark consoled and hugged Lara's slim young cousin, Marguerite, whose leaf-and-vine patterned fluttery green dress was just the dress I would have worn myself that day if I'd been female and unmarried. He'd told me, when he found out about Betsy, that though his interest in securing a bride might not show in his actions or conversation, it emerged almost nightly in his dreams. Indeed, the Hobo had taken his right hand one day and guided it through a sketch of the girl's face, he said. I asked to view it, as a test. If a real girl appeared on his arm who matched the drawing, I'd concede that the homely tramp existed after all and wasn't just a device my partner used to make himself look prophetic after the fact. “I'm sorry,” he said when I asked. “I had to burn it. I couldn't afford to have it stolen.” I asked him who'd want to steal it and he said, “Entities.”

  I kept my distance from the other mourners, especially my partner and the Effinghams, who, in the wake of Edward's liberation, only tolerated my presence, I sensed, because other matters absorbed them: this afternoon's burial, tomorrow's slaughter, and Sunday's pack trip for the luminaries. My partner had been invited to go along to help feed and water the mules and llamas, and he told me the celebrated Ronald Howard would also participate in the expedition. “What about Cher?” I joked. She represented a type for me—I wasn't referring to the woman herself. But my partner was when he said: “She pled exhaustion. People had their hopes up. It's a shame.”

  The mourner I least wanted to spend time with had been slipping me periodic private glances, as though signaling me to wait in place until he satisfied other obligations. Since wiggling in beside him in the church pew, Lance had attached himself to Little Eff, continuously touching and stroking him. He behaved like a coach with a defeated athlete. Once in a while they'd slip off as a pair and Lance, drawn up square and in his fringed buckskin, his mighty crucifix knocking against his chest, would direct what appeared to be lofty words of solace and manly injunctions to be brave at Little Eff's shrunken, downturned face. The picture was one that early in my mission—before the stickiness with the Casper Wiccans, and maybe only for those first few hours when I-90 still felt like a road to princely feats—I'd imagined myself appearing in, my bearing and demeanor much like Lance's, sympathetic yet commanding. But genuinely so, I liked to think. Lance thought the same thing of himself, perhaps, and he probably still would after he finally killed someone.

  Hadley neared, four or five steps behind her perfume. She had a pink drink with a cherry, which no one else had. She must have treated herself at the main house while changing out of her solemn slate-gray suit into the silvery T-shirt and denim skirt that announced the end of her long workday grieving for someone whom, she'd told me earlier, she'd met only once, under terribly awkward circumstances. “There's a reason that bedrooms have doors on them,” she'd said. “I tried to explain it to her. Then she bit my tit.”

  When her body caught up with its perfume, Hadley gave me her drink to hold while she bent down and tightened one of the three black leather straps that fastened her left sandal to her left foot by wrapping around and around the ankle and calf, forming Xs where it crossed the other straps. The whole business looked cruelly complicated and painful, which might have been why it grabbed the eye and held it.

  With her drink back, she said, “Where's your honey? You didn't bring her?”

  “It was a funeral, not a birthday party. Anyway, we're apart now.”

  “Was it Aspen? He does that with new women. He pees on trees. He picked it up from his wolves, I think.”

  “Not Aspen.”

  “Errol briefed me about her. She used to dance, he told me. Contemporary American exotic.”

  “Only on computers.”

  “That's where it's at now. May I vouchsafe some good pragmatic advice?” The words this woman used. It was as though she was being paid to test them. “Pretty twentyish women need money, too. Sometimes they earn it in expensive ways. Then they get older and wiser. Or uglier. Put it out of your mind. Make room for other things. Have a peek at her medical records, if possible, and then, if there's nothing alarming, forget about it.”

  “None of that was my concern,” I said. Just then, I couldn't remember my concern. I missed my Betsy. I missed her cleanliness. I missed the way she sterilized the tweezers by holding them over a lighted wooden match before she extracted pimples from my face. She made a procedure of every little task. After she bathed, she'd rinse her bar of soap and dry it with a washcloth, then rinse the washcloth. Why had I wanted to spare her? From what, exactly? She'd made her own life hard enough. Still, it seemed best to leave things where they stood. A new tire will go ten thousand miles without a leak, but patch it once and it starts to pick up nails.

  Hadley tipped back her empty glass and let the cherry roll down onto her tongue. When she opened her mouth to speak, the cherry was gone, although I hadn't seen her chew it. “Who's John the Baptist? Or is it Davy Crockett?”

  I offered a charitable summary of Lance. I left out his canvas-sack experiment. I left out plenty. The few things I left in, I trimmed and tidied the way my mother salvaged burned slices of toast.

  “Poor Errol's ripe for the picking,” Hadley said. “He blames himself for the psycho's overdose. By tomorrow, you watch, he'll be a Holy Roller and I'll be flying home commercial, economy class, eating bagel chips for lunch. Oh well, it happens. They all come back eventually. The King of Kings gets his turn, then I get mine. We've learned to share.”

  Hadley seemed to be waiting for someone to take her glass and looked deeply let down that it hadn't already happened. So I took it. She smiled. Her brow uncrinkled. Never having to hold an empty glass was part of the bargain she'd struck with life, I speculated; one that helped make the deal's other conditions more bearable.

  “What's your buddy the scheming suck-up's name again? Eff Sr.'s new guru slash gastroenterologist?”

  “Elder Stark?”

  “Look at the dunce.” She aimed her nose. “He's practically being visually cannibalized by a buxom olive-skinned size two who's never, that I can see, had any work done, except perhaps for a laser around her eyes and maybe a peel or two—just maintenance—but all he can do is stare daggers at Daniel Boone hypnotizing poor Errol with that big cross thing. I detect covetous territoriality. Territorialism?”

  I wasn't sure about the word, but Hadley appeared to be right about my partner. In Celestial Hall a dozen pillars were distributed around the seating area, blocking the view of the stage for many cong
regants and forcing them to lean way out of their chairs. So fixated did Elder Stark appear on our new benefactor's son's looming Christianization that he was treating Lara's cousin like one of those pillars. But unlike the pillars, the girl was mobile. Whenever he tried to peer past her, she shifted her stance so as to keep herself centered in his vision. If she knew what she was doing, she had no pride. If the dance was a reflex, instinctive, she'd fallen in love. Either way, she needed help, I felt.

  “Excuse me,” I said to Hadley.

  “I'd rather not. I was thinking we could trade back rubs in the guesthouse. Yours seems stiff, and I know mine is. Too much churchy correctness makes me spasm.”

  My best reason for declining this proposition—if I really wished to, because it did present interesting opportunities, from taking revenge on Little Eff for Aspen to honing my crude romantic skills under the tutelage of a trained expert whose lathed and polished appearance I was used to now—vanished the very next moment when Elder Stark patted Lara's cousin on the cheek and hurried away to defend his vulnerable flock. I expected Lance to rebuff him, but instead he walked off toward the food, cleverly leaving Little Eff alone with someone too insulted and agitated to raise his spirits or regain his loyalty. He'd lose this particular contest, I predicted, and the prospect buoyed me. I wanted him back, and he needed to return to me. I knew him. No one else did. Maybe we could drive off toward Omaha, whose enchanting name excited in me a mysterious optimism, or maybe just straight north and home. We could throw our white shirts in the laundry, or in the garbage, and formally declare defeat to Lauer, whose own trips through Terrestria should have taught him that people here often felt that they'd been saved already—three or four times over, some of them, and by too many methods to keep track of—and the few who had no faith but wanted one were either so rich or confused or beaten down that enlightening them meant going crazy yourself.

  Maybe Lara's cousin would come with us. He could impregnate her on the drive up and if Bluff disappointed her, she'd be stuck. By the time she gave birth, if she still wanted to leave, Elder Stark could adopt the baby and let her go.

  “Okay, no back rubs. Oral copulation. That's all I can provide this time of month. If you're rugged enough to reciprocate, I'll let you. Whatever, though. We can eat Ding Dongs and play the Price Is Right. Which I bet you're really, really bad at. Which might precipitate riotous hilarity.”

  “Do you read the dictionary before bed?”

  Hadley's face puckered up as though I'd pulled its drawstring. A scar I'd not noticed before near her left temple purpled slightly and became conspicuous.

  “I try to make jokes and I'm not the type who should,” I said.

  “It's fine. It was funny. A wee bit obvious. ‘Thesaurus' would have brought it up a notch.”

  “That's why I'm not the type. I'm obvious. If you're joking about a person, be original. Make that extra effort. They'll feel special.”

  “You asked me a question. About my verbiage.”

  “Mmm.”

  “Would you stop acting like you need to go somewhere long enough to listen to the answer? You do that a lot, you know. It's rude.”

  I looked over at Lara's cousin, so alone, and then at my partner, failing with Little Eff and probably feeling the deck begin to list as the great treasure ship scraped against a reef. There was always somewhere else to go and someone there in need of more assistance than the person standing in front of you. Universal helpfulness wasn't possible. Even the fireman rescuing a child was turning his back on some famine that was killing thousands.

  “I'm here,” I said. “You have my full attention.”

  Hadley paused to line up her thoughts. “My father, a disabled Bemidji iron miner, he followed me when I ran off to join the circus. He'd never been to New York. He packed a tent. No kidding, he thought you could camp in Central Park. He told me he wanted a farewell dinner, and make it a fancy place, maybe we'll spot DiMaggio. I picked ‘21.' I asked a cop. Dad loved it. Thirty dollars for a burger. He was a socialist—that just made his day. He said he couldn't wait to tell his union pals.”

  I turned then because I thought I heard a shot. “I'm listening. A thirty-dollar hamburger.”

  “I've made you all weird and self-conscious now,” said Hadley. “Well anyway, we got drunk. We had a ball. We met a guy at the bar who said he knew a guy whose stepfather sold DiMaggio his Cadillacs. Afterward, on the street, Dad hailed a cab for me, and as I was climbing in, he started crying. I could see he wanted to tell me something. ‘Read,' he finally said. ‘Read everything. I've read one book in my life: a children's Bible. That's why I smashed my pelvis in an ore pit.' He reached in his raincoat and handed me a card then. ‘These books will come once a month,' he said, ‘forever. They're already paid for. I sent them three months' pension.'”

  The next noise was definitely a gunshot. A practice round, or had the hunt begun? I searched the crowd for Eff Sr. but didn't spot him. It had to be a practice round. No one commenced to massacre their livestock an hour after a burial.

  “The Library of the Ages, it was called. Flimsy, shoddy editions with fake gold leaf and leather so thin you could tear it with your pinkie nail. I called the company's office for a refund. I'm not even going to tell you how much Dad gave them. No luck, though. Soon, the first book came: the Iliad. And then the Odyssey and Plutarch's Parallel Lives and . . . I couldn't keep up. I sold the books to get a better head shot. I was in penury, flunking my auditions, hostessing at a men's club that stole the girls' tips. Dad telephoned me one day, we talked for a while, I lied about my work, and just before we hung up, he said: ‘Your language, darling. It hasn't changed. Those books are too hard for young ladies, I should have known. I'll have them sent here to Bemidji.' And he did. When he died eight years later—a massive stroke, no pain, the way it should be—I flew to Minnesota to sell his house, and—”

  Five booms in a row, an entire magazine. Little Eff and my partner had vanished also. I checked for Lance at the buffet, where people were still heaping paper plates with bison meat and spooning creamed horseradish on top, but it seemed that he'd joined the other target shooters. Capturing the Effinghams for AlpenCross would mean showing zest for all their games.

  “—there they were stacked up in the garage, all seventy, still in their wrappers, immaculate. The hypocrite—he hadn't read them, either. Later on, after I shipped them to New York, I noticed a Hallmark card taped to Montaigne's Essays. ‘My dear daughter,' it said . . . I should shut up. I'm boring you.”

  “I'm listening. I am. The shots,” I said.

  “Only talk to make the man feel good or to keep the conversation moving. I violated my first commandment.”

  The scalpels and chemicals and beams of light that had sculpted Hadley out of Gretel must have damaged the tear ducts in her right eye. It stayed dry while the other puddled up, the liquid collecting in a bulging dome that soaked the left side of her face when it erupted. I noticed again what I'd often noticed before: human teardrops aren't really drops at all. They're not that separate. We should call them “tearspills.”

  It was time to buy a second handkerchief. Hadley blotted her cheeks off, blew her nose, inspected the cloth, and folded it up tight. “Wash that in bleach unless you want an outbreak.”

  I'd thought things over as she cried and concluded that, if you're at liberty to do so, it's probably wisest to eat the meal in front of you. Who was to say you'd ever get a better meal, or another one at all.

  “I want to play—what was it called?—the Price Is Right.”

  “I should get back and total up my invoice. They always stiff you once they've seen the light. Maybe I'll take a hot bath and read some Plato and see if the airline can whisk me out of here before the great white hunters start arriving. One or two of them know me, it might get messy.”

  She rose on her toes in her binding, strappy sandals and daintily kissed me between the eyebrows like a mother sending a child off to school. I'd misjudged her. Hadley was unselfish
underneath, but she understood that her eagerness to please might leave her with nothing unless she reined it in and put it on a proper business footing.

  “I'd like you to finish your story. This doesn't feel right.”

  “I so agree,” she said, “but there you have it: the phenomenological crux of social mobility. We come in midway with people; we leave midway. We don't always get to hear the end of things.”

  She walked away with the assured light steps of someone who'd made a profession of departures. I waited until the wind had scattered her perfume before heading off to locate Elder Stark. All the smart people were leaving, I planned to tell him, and we should go, too, if we wished to be among them.

  In a freshly cut alfalfa field about half a mile from the house I found the rifle range but not the riflemen. I poked a finger through a shredded target tacked to a stack of mildewed straw bales approximately as tall and wide across as a grazing buffalo. Spent brass cartridges glinted in the stubble and I stuffed a couple in my pocket because the boy inside me still believed that all shiny objects were valuable.

  The sportsmen had trampled a path between the bales and the spot they'd chosen as their firing line was no more than thirty yards away. Because buffalo didn't run from people (unless someone hollered or pitched a sizable rock at them, they barely hoisted their heads) I doubted that shots of even half that distance would be required in the safari. Unlike almost everyone else in Bluff, I knew some things about ballistics, since my father the deputy was the only resident other than the Varmint Warden—who dispatched rabid skunks and cat-killing coyotes with an open-sighted .223—who was permitted to carry firearms. When fired from close range, the smoky slow-speed ordnance issuing from Eff Sr.'s high-caliber blunderbusses would gouge broad channels through the hides and flesh, ruining a certain amount of meat but enabling efficient one-shot kills—assuming the hunter wasn't drunk or handling a rifle for the first time. I didn't plan to watch, though. Nor did I expect I'd be invited to.