Coming of Age at the End of Days

by Alice LaPlante

  As quietly as Anna can, she crouches down, goes into a kind of kneeling position beside the tub. Although the water that has splashed out of the tub onto the floor is cool as it soaks through her jeans, the tub is warm to touch. The room is altogether too hot. Anna pulls off her shirt without unbuttoning it. Now she’s just in her bra and jeans. Lars still doesn’t perceive that he isn’t alone.

  Anna tentatively touches the side of Lars’s neck. His eyes fly open and he sits up, giving a tiny, almost imperceptible gasp. When he sees Anna, he looks relieved. Then he shrinks back into the bath self-consciously. Anna touches him again, the same spot, only it’s more of a caress this time. He flinches.

  “What are you doing?” His voice, unprepared, comes out several registers higher than usual. Anna realizes this must be his natural voice.

  Anna doesn’t answer. She keeps her hand moving downward, past Lars’s shoulders, down his hairless chest, to his concave stomach. He tries to stop her, but Anna easily pushes his hands aside. She moves her hand past his stomach to his groin, cradles what she finds there in her hand, little seahorse. Lars starts struggling, pushing Anna away, but she presses him back into the water. Through this, neither of them says a word. Power games. Then Anna lets go and stands up.

  “What are you doing?” he asks again, his voice closer to its usual dark timbre. Then he uses her name, “Anna?” first as a question, then “Anna!” But she is too far gone. She is in control, she is negotiating for some peace of mind, some sense of closure. Lars is small and pitiful. He arouses nothing in Anna but distaste. And she clearly has no power over him; he remains flaccid. Anna takes off her bra, slides out of her jeans and panties.

  Except for Anna’s slight breasts, she could be a boy herself, she’s so thin. Even Lars has more meat than she does. Anna steps carefully into the tub even as Lars tries to get out.

  “Stop fighting this,” Anna says, and to her surprise he does. She maneuvers herself into a position where she is sitting astride his hips, her legs on either side of him. She bends and tries to kiss him, but finds her lips pressed against an unyielding wall, no air to breathe. Anna thinks of Jim Fulson and Ms. Thadeous, their open pliant mouths, and is ashamed. She and Lars, two pale sticks in a pool of tepid water.

  Anna thinks, I can do this. She imagines a God above, manipulating the pitiful humans below. Here, you mate with her, and you with him, let’s see what the result will be.

  Anna’s pubic hair is blonde and curly, and she hasn’t shaved under her arms or legs in more than eighteen months. She is as He made her. Lars is studying her as though she were a specimen. His body still unaroused.

  He is waiting for Anna to make the next move. She senses calculation. He is determining how to turn this to his advantage. Anna waits until the silence is unbearable, then says what she has been thinking for some weeks.

  “I don’t think I like you very much.”

  “You don’t need to,” Lars says. He is contained now, as tight in his body as a crustacean. “Liking is never necessary. You will still feel my power.” Anna thinks perhaps she has misunderstood him, she is drunk. Surely he couldn’t be saying these things. “My ministry will grow. I learned a lot from you, from the months in Sunnyvale. That was necessary, as were the missteps before it.”

  Suddenly anger explodes inside Anna, gets her up and off Lars. She stumbles clumsily out of the tub, dries herself with the too-small rough towel, grabs her clothes and leaves the bathroom, closing the door behind her. She dresses herself fully, then sits on the made bed and waits for Lars to emerge. He takes his time.

  “That was odd,” he says, “but then I smelled the alcohol.”

  “What you smelled was a moment of honesty,” Anna says. She is close to tears. Appalled, not for what happened, but for what didn’t happen. She failed to transfer this burden. Unrequited love. Anna has a rare flash of pity for herself, so cheapened now. Offering what no one wants. She slips under the covers, turns her back to Lars, and pretends to sleep.

  49

  ANNA OPENS HER EYES TO another blinding headache, worse than any she’s ever experienced. Then she remembers the previous night, and is awash in shame. Lars is already up, dressed and packed. She can’t look at him directly although he shows no sign he was impacted by what happened.

  They get into the car. Unsure of the next time they’ll find food or fuel, they double back to Rawlins, tank up, and buy coffee and breakfast sandwiches at McDonald’s. They also stop at a 7-Eleven for some apples, bananas, water, and yogurt. Judging from the map, they have about seven hours of driving, and want to get into Valentine before dark. They are on their way, fed and provisioned, by 8:30 am, with very few words spoken between them.

  “Unless we have to stop for any reason, we’ll hit Valentine by 3:30 or 4:00 at the latest,” says Lars. He has been carefully studying the map. “We can find more gas in Douglas and then again in Chadron.”

  The day is clear. Still chilly, but the freshness of the air feels good. Anna rolls her window down halfway, enjoying the wind on her face as she drives. The clouds lift and the American West so glorified in song and stories finally shows its face. Vast distances, miles and miles without any sign of human inhabitants, muted but splendid colors.

  “A man could be a man out here,” says Lars, and, looking at Anna, laughs. A little self-consciously, but not much.

  “Practicing?”

  “A bit,” he admits. “It’s like a movie set,” he says. The tension between them relaxes. They pass any number of decrepit wooden houses, their roofs and porches sagging, stripped of color by rain and sun, foils for the magnificent scenery. At random intervals, fences subdivide the expanse of earth, but no animals, and few humans, in sight.

  Despite herself, Anna is impressed. “Big sky,” she says.

  “I think that’s Montana, but yes, it most definitely is.”

  They fill the tank in Douglas. While the gas flows into the car, Anna stands outside and peels an orange. Everything at the junction is brand new. A Holiday Inn and a Sleep Inn & Suites so recently constructed that the earth around the parking lot is still raw. No one has attempted landscaping of any kind around the buildings. They just let the prairie run up to their doors. An unsettling mixture of earth and plastic.

  They continue on. Lars dozes off about twenty miles out of Douglas. Almost seventy miles after that, Anna sees something white in the distance, something off the road. As she gets closer, she begins to understand the gigantic scale of the thing, whatever it is. Tall and shaped like an elongated teardrop. Its unnatural white glows against the surrounding flatlands. A radio tower of some kind? It grows as they approach it, rising to an incredible height, five or six times the length of one of the telephone poles that parallel the road.

  Lars wakes as they approach it, still several miles away.

  “What on earth . . . !” he exclaims, sitting straight as he squints into the distance. It grows closer and larger. Lars understands before Anna.

  “It’s a statue,” he says.

  “Not possible,” Anna says. “Not unless it’s a statue six stories high.”

  Yet that’s exactly what it is. Positioned around two hundred yards off the highway, they can soon distinguish a head, small in relation to the rest of the body, forming the top of the teardrop. From the shape of the bottom part of the statue, it appears to be wearing robes of some kind. At least sixty feet tall.

  “Not pants, not a dress, at least not a modern one,” says Lars. “I don’t see any limbs, either.”

  “An angel? Moroni?”

  Lars shakes his head. “No trumpet. Besides, we’re a long way off the Mormon Trail. We left that when we turned off 80.”

  They’re perhaps two miles away when Lars gets it.

  “Mary,” Lars says. “Mother of Jesus.”

  He’s right. Anna can see it now, the same shape, the same hooded head, the clasped hands, the flo
wing robes, just as the life-sized statue in front of St. Lucy’s, on Maude, back in Sunnyvale.

  “Good God,” says Anna.

  “Yes,” says Lars.

  Although a large parking lot that can hold at least three hundred cars has been paved amidst the brush and sage of the countryside, no one is here except Anna and Lars. There isn’t a visitors’ center, not even bathroom facilities. Only a looming giant of a woman, smiling, a beatific smile on her face. Our Lady of Peace is carved on her base. Our Blessed Mother.

  “I guess that out here in the middle of nowhere, people get big ideas,” Lars says.

  “They do in the middle of everywhere, too,” Anna says.

  They get out of the car and walk to the statue. Since no one else is around, Anna leaves the keys in the ignition, Lars’s door half-open.

  “An eyesore,” says Lars.

  Anna is surprised at the vehemence in Lars’s voice. She sees that he is more affronted than she has ever seen him. Even the bullies at school didn’t evoke this reaction.

  “Mary worship is an aberration,” says Lars. “Our biggest challenge for conversion are those that idolize her. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God.”

  Both Anna and Lars are then silent. Anna tilts back her neck and shades her eyes against the sun to see the statue’s face. She has seen few things on earth as benign as Mary’s expression.

  Anna wonders how much of what she’s thinking he can guess. She wants none of what he wants. She is thinking that their goals are not aligned. He’ll find out when they reach Fred Wilson’s ranch. Everyone will find out. She is a hypocrite, an activist directly opposed to Lars’s mission.

  “Look,” she says. “What are those little spots of color on the base?”

  Hundreds of pieces of paper have been taped to the bottom of her smooth stone robe. Some of what’s written on the paper are illegible, washed out from the rain or bleached by the sun. Others are fresher, perhaps a day or two old. Some are carefully laminated, and thus preserved, and easily read. The ground is littered with scraps.

  “I’ve heard you see this in Jerusalem, too,” Anna says. “Against the wall of the Temple Mount. People write their prayers and put them between the stones.”

  “Idolatry,” says Lars, nearly spitting the word. He grabs a handful of the papers, rips them off the stone, crumples them, throwing them to the ground. “Appalling.”

  Anna points to one that has been carefully drawn in crayon, clearly a child’s handiwork, laminated and taped securely with electrical tape. “This person came prepared,” she says. Blessed Mother, pray for me, it reads, the child’s drawing of the statue, elongated and off scale, with the mountains in the distance only coming up to Mary’s elbows.

  “Let’s go,” says Lars abruptly, and begins walking back to the car. Anna doesn’t follow. Instead she sits at the base of the statue, the cool stone against her back. The highway stretches out in either direction as far as she can see. Our Lady of Peace. Anna feels peaceful, almost as if she’s found the safe place Ms. Thadeous was seeking. If the Tribulation is indeed coming, she would like to curl up at the base of this giantess and beg for her protection. Anna would call upon the souls of all the hopeful people who had left her notes and arm herself with their faith against the horrors to come.

  50

  THEY’RE BACK IN THE CAR and on the road for maybe thirty seconds when they hear a sharp crack. The car swerves to the right.

  “Oh no,” says Anna. The car is noticeably listing and with each rotation of the wheels they can hear a resounding thump. She swings the car off the road once more.

  “We don’t have time for all these stops,” says Lars. “Not if we want to get to Valentine before dark.”

  They both get out and walk around to the back of the car. The rear left tire is flat against the gravel.

  “Do you know how to fix a flat?” asks Anna.

  “No. Do you?”

  A slow hour passes before Anna sees a small dot traveling toward them. She hits Lars’s arm. The dot grows bigger, reveals itself to be a blue van. Black letters on the side read Elizabeth O’Malley, DVM. Anna is barely on her feet when the van pulls over in a cloud of dust. A tall stout woman of about fifty-five opens the driver’s door and steps out. She’s dressed in blue jeans and a jean jacket.

  “What do we have here?” she asks, then answers herself. “I see. You need some help?”

  “Yes, please,” Anna says while Lars scrambles to his feet.

  “We can do that,” says the woman. From the back of her van she takes out a canvas bag full of tools. Anna and Lars stand by silently while she expertly jacks up the car, removes the flat tire and puts on the spare from their trunk. “You’re lucky, this is a real tire, not just a temporary,” she says.

  The woman eyes their California plates. She examines them more closely. “Awfully far from home,” she says.

  Anna falters. “Yes.”

  “You traveling alone? No adults?”

  Again, Anna pushes out a “yes.” She feels as though she’s being scolded by one of her teachers.

  “Shouldn’t you be in school?” the woman asks. Standing there with her hands on her hips she actually looks like a disapproving teacher.

  Trying to choose among all the lies they’ve been telling, Anna finds herself stumbling to say something sensible. For the first time, Lars volunteers a version that sounds reasonably coherent. “We’re cousins. We have an aunt who’s very ill,” he says. “We’re meeting our parents at her house. They’re flying in.”

  The veterinarian nods, her face impassive. Anna sees her staring again at the license plate of Ms. Thadeous’s car.

  “Thank you,” Anna says. She takes Lars by the arm, pulls him gently toward the car. But Lars has spotted something. She knows that look now, that puffing up of his shoulders, the look of gravitas that settles over his face. He points to the small gold cross the woman is wearing around her neck.

  “Do you believe?” he asks. Then, getting no response, he says in his deepest, most reassuring voice, “We do.”

  Her face does not soften. “Perhaps.”

  “An odd answer,” says Lars, his voice deepening even further, his eyes focusing on hers, beginning what Anna now thinks of as working his magic.

  “Believing means a lot of things around here. Sometimes crazy things,” the woman says.

  Lars doesn’t miss his opening. “Crazy as in implausible? Or crazy as in obviously not the right way of the Lord?”

  She doesn’t answer, but her eyes are sharper.

  “Where you heading?” she asks.

  “Valentine,” Lars says.

  Anna could swear something in her face changes slightly, and she curses Lars for telling the truth.

  “Know anyone out there?” Lars asks.

  “Valentine’s only about a hundred miles away. That makes us practically neighbors. I know most of the farmers in the area. They have their own vets of course. But every once in a while they need a helping hand. What’s your aunt’s name?”

  Anna and Lars are both silent. Then Lars says “Mrs. Fred Wilson. Do you know her?” Again, that slight shift in her face. Even Lars perceives it this time, Anna sees him pull back.

  “I know of them,” she says, finally. “Not the most neighborly of the ranchers in these parts, I’d say. Fred Wilson has a bit of a reputation with the ladies.” Here she stops as if she’s said too much. “His wife is active in politics. Very religious, both of them. But you’d know that, them being your relatives and all. Sorry to hear that your aunt is ill. I don’t know her.”

  “Thank you,” says Lars, in an agreeable voice, as if she isn’t telling them anything they don’t already know.

  She hesitates for a moment, then says, “Follow me to town. Have a cup of coffee. You’re still three hours from Valen
tine.”

  Anna again sees her looking at the license plate for longer than Anna would have thought necessary.

  “No, we have to get going,” she says. They say their goodbyes to the vet, who gets in her car and drives off, and, Anna is convinced, will immediately pick up her cell phone to report two minors hundreds of miles from home in a car with plates 2MZA584.

  “We need to get out of here,” Anna tells Lars. Once inside the car, they get back on I-20 and after another twenty miles or so reach a major milestone: their destination’s name on a sign. Valentine 150 miles.

  “Almost there,” Anna says, to break the silence. But Lars isn’t talking. His failure with the vet is smarting. They make the final leg of their long journey without saying a word to each other.

  51

  THEY MAKE GOOD TIME—ANNA IS going more than 85 miles an hour on the empty, flat road, and so the sun is still low in the sky by the time they circumvent the unmarked turnoffs and roads around Valentine. They’re forced to retrace their route at least half a dozen times before they locate the gravel road marked Wilson. The sign is hand-painted, the letters faded. The ranch buildings are perhaps three-quarters of a mile away, but the terrain is so flat, they can see them from the turnoff. The scene is not prepossessing. Whatever air of prosperity Wilson had projected at Reverend Michael’s church, little of it has rubbed off on his property. Dry, unfertile-looking fields, beaten down fence posts with much of the wiring between them missing. As Lars and Anna drive closer, one of the buildings turns out to be a house. Not a classic farmhouse, but a rancher reminiscent of Sunnyvale, close to the ground, and, like all the dwellings they’ve seen in the state, not landscaped, but with dirt and scrub running straight up to the walls. A cracked pavement leading to the front stoop. No trees. The hills a long way off.

  God painted this landscape using the same palette of browns and grays He’d used since they entered Wyoming. Three satellite dishes are affixed to the roof of the house, and a telephone wire is attached to the chimney and strung on poles that run alongside the driveway. Substantial, physical infrastructure. What can Anna hope to disrupt about this, to put an end to Fred Wilson’s nefarious scheme?