Elders

by Ryan McIlvain

  Head-hanging had become McLeod’s default posture. He hardly looked up from the floor during the entire visit at Josefina’s, his face dull, eyes vacant. He looked lobotomized. Worse yet was the way Josefina herself mirrored McLeod’s body language. She sat on the love seat, her back hunched, hands crossed in front of her knees, her gaze angled down at the bowl of pebbles on the coffee table, the untouched plate of biscoitos. Passos talked and talked but he couldn’t get through to her. Only when Rose opened her mouth to speak did Josefina even shift her position on the love seat. Rose hesitated.

  “Please,” Passos said. “Please.”

  “Well, I just wanted to say,” she began, “and I’d meant to tell you this at the beginning, Josefina. I’m sorry Maurilho couldn’t be here with us tonight, but he finally got a job, a janitorial position at the town hall, and he has to work nights now, even Sunday nights. I know he’s a little embarrassed about it all. He’s not a prideful man, my husband, but he’s smart enough to run that town hall, and now he’s pushing a broom there. The Lord humbles us sometimes, to make us teachable. He has to break our hearts before he can rebuild them better.”

  By now Josefina had looked up at her friend, her eyes sharpening slightly, and her posture too. When Rose finished, she nodded at Passos. He was searching for a particular verse in the Doctrine and Covenants to build on Rose’s point, to add to the Spirit suddenly warming the room. Was it section 131? The word of the Lord to the Prophet Joseph Smith: how his afflictions would be but for a small moment, and if he endured them well, the Lord would exalt him on high. It was section 121, he remembered.

  Passos turned to the section, but before he could locate the verse Elder McLeod opened his mouth for the first time all visit.

  “Where’s Leandro?” he said.

  Passos looked up, startled to hear his companion’s voice, and saw him staring intensely into Josefina’s eyes.

  “I don’t know,” Josefina admitted.

  “When was the last time you saw him? Did he know we were coming here tonight?”

  “I told him you were coming. I told him last night, but—”

  “Was he sober?” McLeod said.

  The visit ended a few minutes later. On the bus ride home McLeod and Rose exchanged a few polite words. Passos kept totally silent.

  President Mason had been right about McLeod all along. The president was more clear-eyed about his companion, more blunt and honest. A difficult missionary. Arrogant. Stubborn. He needs a leader more than a friend, Elder Passos. The president had told him this in the bishop’s office the other day, and not for the first time, after McLeod had stomped out of the room trailing his yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah like a little boy dragging his baby blanket. His junior companion was acting worse than junior now, worse than juvenile. For he threw loud tantrums at the realities he disliked, then walked around with his nose in the air as if convinced of his own purity, untainted by compromise, by facts. McLeod suddenly embodied for Elder Passos some of America’s worst tendencies. He suddenly reminded him of Elder Jones: boorish yet haughty, naïve yet cynical, self-righteous despite such obvious cruelty.

  These thoughts of Passos’s coincided, and not coincidentally, with the news of America’s buildup to war. Neither Passos nor McLeod had violated the missionary rules against reading newspapers or magazines, watching TV, listening to the radio. The talk of war with Iraq simply pervaded the air around them, like humidity before a thunderstorm. Already a unanimous vote in America’s Congress. Troop movements in Kuwait. Refugees at the border. Signs of the times, Elder Passos thought.

  On Thursday afternoon the elders knocked a door and an oldish woman answered it. Tracting had improved with the end of the championships, but the harvests still came in meager, and opened doors still rather surprised the missionaries. Elders Passos and McLeod straightened up as the woman tucked long strands of gray behind her ear, smiling slightly, straddling the threshold of the door. Yes? Could she help them? Passos gave the more extended introduction in which he anticipated common questions—“Elder” was a title; they came from Recife and Boston, respectively—then he asked the woman if they could come inside to share their message.

  The woman hesitated.

  “It won’t take long at all,” Passos added.

  She opened the door a little wider, stepping aside to make room for the missionaries to enter her dirt courtyard.

  “Oh, actually,” Passos said. “Are you alone, ma’am? Is your husband or anyone else home with you?”

  McLeod snorted, muttered under his breath, in English, “She’s like sixty, dude.”

  “Shut up,” Passos said. He too spoke in English. He turned to the woman. “I sometimes have to translate for him. Excuse us.”

  The woman nodded. “My son is here.”

  Inside the darkened living room the elders sat opposite the woman on a pair of chairs brought in from the kitchen. She called out to her son more than once as the three of them made small talk, waiting. After a minute more the woman shrugged and told the elders they might as well begin. Elder Passos hesitated a moment—did the rule require that the third party actually be in the room?—and in that space McLeod started into the first lesson, reciting memorized lines on God as a loving Heavenly Father who calls prophets, and so on. Passos took up the next two sections, providing his own variations on the themes of God’s Son and His atoning sacrifice and the original church He established on the earth. The missionaries were halfway through the next section on that church’s eventual apostasy—“saving truths were lost or corrupted,” McLeod was reciting—when a big shirtless man stepped into the room, immense brown belly first. The man stood generously proportioned throughout, but especially at his middle, so bowed out and smooth as to look ceramic. No sooner had he dropped down beside his mother on the couch than he leveled a stare at Elder McLeod. “Are you American?”

  McLeod gave a slow nod.

  “How about that fucking president of yours?”

  In the instant Passos felt McLeod straighten beside him, bristle. He spoke quickly. “Sir?” he said. “Sir.” He explained about the gospel message they were sharing with his mother. They’d been talking about the attributes of God. Would he like to tell them how he imagined God?

  “God is good,” the man said. His eyes returned to McLeod. “And God ain’t greedy either. He don’t want to bomb poor little countries just to get their fucking oil. He don’t want—”

  Passos cleared his throat loudly. He stood up and shook the woman’s hand, then the man’s. He thanked them for their time and at the doorway exchanged a few last pleasantries, a few God bless yous. McLeod kept notably quiet. He waited until they rounded a corner away from the house before he said, sounding confident of Passos’s accord, “Talk about an ignoramus, huh? Anyway, thanks for sticking up for me back there. I appreciate it.”

  Passos answered in English: “I did not say I disagree with him.”

  A week more passed like that, two weeks. The elders visited Josefina several times, with Rose or Rômulo in tow. Most of the visits devolved into planning sessions, strategic brainstorms. How to get Leandro interested? How to get him to show up at all? What about a casual meeting one night, just a chance to relax and talk? What about a dinner at Rose and Maurilho’s? They needed to reestablish their friendship with Leandro, needed to properly apologize for their run-in after the championships. Or what if they dropped by unannounced? A surprise visit?

  Most of the suggestions came from Passos, some from Rose, some from Josefina herself. McLeod did little except to naysay, as Passos saw it. His companion took up each suggestion like a pawnshop jewel appraiser, holding it to the light and finding something to disparage: too transparent, too murky, too sneaky, and weren’t they supposed to be missionaries first, friends second? Wasn’t that another of the things they’d talked about?

  Things between Passos and McLeod hadn’t healed in the last weeks so much as scabbed over—they’d resigned themselves to each other’s formalities—though on some nig
hts Elder Passos’s frustrations still rose to a boil, causing him to compose in his head long lists of McLeod’s faults: pride, negativity, hypercriticism, petulance, arrogance, self-absorption … He even began to take private pleasure in the carfuls of men shouting out at them “Bin Laden, Bin Laden!” or “Imperialists!” or “Warmongers!” Passos knew that many of these drive-by critics probably lumped him in with the whitey at his side, but he considered this a bearable price to pay for the sight of McLeod’s jaw gripping, the flaring in his eyes. Of course Elder Passos did not hate his companion. Nor did he feel apathetic toward him. His feelings now lived in a shifting middle space, a place that could accommodate affection and hope—that the offer of a stay in McLeod’s basement still stood, for example—but that could also make room for scorn, spite, bitterness, resentment, hopes of comeuppance.

  On another day, toward the end of February, the missionaries tracted a rich neighborhood. To give them a chance, Passos thought, though he knew from long experience not to expect much from the worldly and vaunted. In the richer neighborhoods electric fences topped the property walls instead of broken bottles. On some of the walls, on the white glaring stucco, local vandals spray-painted looping insignia. Others left messages of protest:

  FILHOS DA PUTA!

  IMPERIALISTAS!

  VIVA A REVOLUÇÃO!

  The rich hardly ever answered their doors, championships or no championships, now or ever, and this neighborhood looked to Elder Passos like no exception. Then his turn came to knock a Spanish-style house, two stories, its tight-tiled roof like a scaly hide. A man in a crisp blue button-down opened the door and invited them in. The elders followed him up the courtyard’s walkway, elaborate plants lining the sides, a red convertible shining in the open garage. The man led them into the house and invited them to sit at a large, lacquered table. Dark-haired, olive-skinned, he spoke Portuguese with an accent—not unlike McLeod’s, Passos thought. An American accent. Had he moved here from there? Or returned from years abroad?

  “Please be comfortable,” the man said, leaving the room and returning with two glasses of filtered water. Passos noticed under the man’s arm a thin spiral-bound book. The man placed it on the table: How to Evangelize the Mormons.

  McLeod scoffed—that rush of air through his nose—and for once Passos matched it. They did it in synch. They took drinks of their water and rose to their feet. Passos cited an appointment they’d just remembered, they were sorry.

  Out in the street McLeod said, “You think he was a pastor?”

  “I’m sure of it,” Passos said.

  “I hate that crap.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And that book of his—right on the table in front of us? Talk about brazen, huh?”

  “Brazen was that shiny convertible in the garage. Courtesy of tithe money, I’ll bet.”

  “ ‘Lay not up treasures …’ ” McLeod said.

  “Tell that to your countrymen,” Passos said.

  “What? What does that even mean? Where is this coming from?”

  Passos kept quiet, kept walking. He slowed down to stop at the next door but his companion kept on, as he had some two months earlier, one of the first afternoons of the elders’ companionship. As Passos watched McLeod march down the street, straight-backed, proud, he too remembered. His long search to find the open padaría. The Guaraná, one of the few things McLeod kept in the fridge. Their first argument, their first amends. He watched McLeod reach the corner of the street now and disappear around it, not looking back. Elder Passos didn’t call after him, though he did feel a brief tug of guilt in his chest. Also the feeling of a strategic error, a potentially costly moment of excess. He thought of Dos Santos, and in that instant he decided—yes, exactly as Dos Santos would do.

  Passos hurried to the corner and got out to the main street just in time to see McLeod boarding a bus in the near distance. The buses were running regularly today, which made for one difference from the last time. But let that be the only difference. Passos caught the next outbound bus and stopped at the market en route to home.

  He found his companion at his desk in the front room, with the blue grammar book lying open. Passos stood inside the doorway, panting. He held a case of Guaraná like a dumbbell in his right hand.

  “A whole case, huh?” McLeod said. “Is Guaraná your standard peace offering?”

  Elder Passos held still for the length of his companion’s deliberating stare.

  “I’ve already got a case,” McLeod said.

  Passos crossed the room and placed the soda on his own desk. He removed two cans, held one out for McLeod. “You can never have too much, right?”

  After a pause McLeod took the can and hefted it. “It’s lukewarm.”

  “Are you worried thou will spew it out of thy mouth?” Passos said, smiling.

  McLeod gave a little smile of his own. He went to the kitchen and came back with two cans from the refrigerator, icy to the touch, already beading. Passos sat down across from his companion as they drank—gulped, in McLeod’s case. He finished in half the time as Elder Passos, tipping back his head and emptying the dregs in a quick practiced shaking motion, the can like a vibrato instrument. Then he brought the can down on the desk with a loud percussive violent smack that made Passos jump and McLeod smile, for another moment anyway. His companion’s face settled into a look of expectation. Finally he said, “Well? Are you going to actually apologize? Are you going to at least explain yourself?”

  Passos continued to sip his Guaraná. “Explain what?”

  “Why you’ve been such a jerk lately. Why you’ve been after me with all this anti-American crap. I thought you were on my side.”

  “It’s not about sides, Elder McLeod.”

  “What’s it about then? Where did that line about the pastor even come from?”

  “I shouldn’t have said that. I am sorry about that. It’s just … Well, I’ve been a little frustrated lately, and maybe that had something to do with it. I’ve been frustrated with the way you’ve handled things with Josefina and Leandro. It seems like all you do is play the pessimist, all you do is criticize.”

  “What’s there to be optimistic about, Elder? You threw Josefina under the bus with the president. Now we’re waiting for Leandro, which means we’re waiting for a miracle.”

  Elder Passos took a long, a very long, draft of his Guaraná. It had never been clearer to him why McLeod—despite his intelligence and experience, despite his diligence, for the most part—remained a junior so late into his mission. He actually believed that a heroic stand against the president’s new rules could have made a difference, could have turned aside directives that the president had received from his superiors, who had received them from their superiors, and so on, all the way up to the General Authorities, all the way up to the Prophet himself. McLeod believed that a pair of foot soldiers could deflect the sheer tonnage of that institutional momentum. He knew nothing about leadership, nothing about organizations. He knew nothing of consequence about the church he put on the airs of an expert about. Elder Passos wanted to say this—he suddenly ached to say it—but he didn’t. He thought of Dos Santos. Convivial Dos Santos. Conciliatory. Cunning. Beloved on the mission, then off to America, taking it for all it’s worth, but no more.

  Passos took a finishing gulp of his soda, then smacked the can down on the desk in imitation of McLeod. “You say we’re waiting for a miracle with Leandro?” he said. “Well, we’re not. We’re planning for one.”

  Elder Passos took his weekly planner from his breast pocket and flattened it out on McLeod’s desk.

  Plan or no plan, apology or no apology, Elder McLeod felt shaky. He didn’t know how to set his feet anymore. He was uncertain around Passos, unsteady, and often angry, an anger that swelled his other anxieties, an unsteadiness that unsteadied everything.

  In the last few weeks he had regressed into ogling, a little more hesitant than before, and more furtive, but somehow that only made it feel worse. McLeod still mad
e a conscious effort, despite his lapses, to avoid all but Josefina’s pupils, but he had largely ceased such efforts with the newsstands downtown, the racy billboards, the pornographic call cards in phone booths. All the blurs resolving into images now. Or the women from Passos’s magazine bubbling up like molten to the troubled surface of his mind. He had even started masturbating again: three times in the shower, twice into nests of toilet paper, always turned away from the Jesus pictures on the mirror, but still. Five times in two weeks—it worried McLeod. It made him feel dirty, atavistic. It made him feel out of control.

  That night Elder McLeod got up to urinate, or so he told himself as he crept out of the darkened bedroom. He closed the door behind him, kept the light off in the bathroom as he sat on the toilet and quietly peed against the side of the bowl. When he finished, he sat in the dark, brooding, his undergarments pooled around his ankles. He began to work at himself with a sort of carelessness, as if conscious intention were the only path to sin. He didn’t even know if he believed in sin. He moved faster. He thought vaguely of the insults he had suffered in the last weeks, the insults that God had allowed him to suffer, and underneath it all the images marshaled themselves—billboards, call cards, Passos’s magazine—a ghostly mix of bodies, a ménage, spinning faster and faster as he neared his climax, and suddenly, and he was already going now, it had already happened: Josefina.

  But it couldn’t have been. McLeod refused to believe it. Josefina was the last person he would have admitted into such lurid imaginings. He wanted no persons at all, only bodies. He looked down at the wilted dark penis in his hand, the white bloom of toilet paper, and he shuddered.