Elders

by Ryan McIlvain

  His companion was saying something. He said it again. On the third time McLeod recognized his name. “McLeod! Earth to Elder McLeod!”

  “What?”

  “I thought we were hurrying for Leandro. What are you doing?”

  “Nothing,” McLeod said.

  Elder Passos checked his watch as they turned onto Josefina’s street. Quarter past eleven. If they were lucky enough to find Leandro at home, they’d have just enough time for a lesson before lunch. Though “lesson” was too formal a word for what Passos had in mind. He wanted a low-key conversation, a chat, really, which still managed to wind upward toward the spiritual, slowly, almost imperceptibly, like a graceful circular staircase. He planned to end with a scripture, not read aloud—again, too formal—but rather recited from memory, from a place of long and heartfelt conviction. Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock … Then Passos would bear his testimony and then, if the moment proved right—if the Spirit indicated—he would invite Leandro himself to say the closing prayer. Maybe they would even kneel around the coffee table, all of them, in a gesture of added humility. And if Josefina invited the elders to stay on for lunch? If she insisted? Elder Passos already knew what he would say: They had another appointment, they were very sorry. It mattered less that this wasn’t the strict truth; what mattered was that they leave the house while the Spirit was still a palpable presence, the air like a warm oceanic buoyancy to surrender to, to float away on.

  They arrived at Josefina’s door. Passos went to knock but his companion stopped him.

  “Let the honorary missionary try,” McLeod said. He brought Rômulo in between them, within knocking distance of the door.

  “We don’t have time,” Passos said, rapping on the metal. The sound reverberated and fell away, and in the wake of it the silence felt accusing. “We’ve got forty minutes if we’re lucky.”

  Yet again Passos startled himself by the tone in his voice, not explanatory but defensive. For a moment it seemed like Rômulo stood between them more to head off a confrontation than to accompany a missionary lesson.

  They heard the front door scrape open, footsteps in their direction, the tread somewhat heavier than usual. The steps left off just short of the door.

  “Who is it?” Leandro called.

  Passos had expected Josefina to come to the door, if anyone did, and now in his surprise he let the question hang.

  “Who is it?” Leandro asked again.

  McLeod moved to answer but Passos warned him off with a sharp wave. He lowered his voice beyond recognition, and said, “Electric company here.”

  Elder Passos ignored the curious smile from Rômulo, the outright glare from McLeod. He didn’t care about that; he couldn’t afford to. The door latch clattered and the door swung open.

  Leandro stood in the rectangular frame, confused at first, then darkening with recognition. He wore green soccer shorts, a white tank top, and the same thick goatee he’d had the evening after the finals several weeks ago. The muscles in his arms, his entire body, tensed as he looked from his companion to Rômulo to him, and back to his companion.

  Passos said, “Leandro.” He raised his hand like a footballer acknowledging his foul to the referee. “Leandro, listen, we just want to talk to you. We haven’t seen you in a long time, you know? Do you have a few minutes before lunch? Just to talk?”

  “Go away,” Leandro said, his voice like gravel, rough and hard and loose. Elder Passos couldn’t tell if the smell of cachaça carried on his words or if it came off his body, deep-down pervaded, seeped in over the course of weeks and months and years. The sweet-sour stench of too much alcohol. The body never forgets.

  “Leandro,” Passos said, “please—”

  “I said go away. We don’t want you here. She doesn’t want you here either. She just can’t say it. But I can. Go. Go!” He flung his hand out, pointing, barely missing Rômulo’s face. Rômulo flinched.

  “And who are you anyway?” Leandro said to him. “Are you supposed to be the electric man?”

  “I’m Rômulo,” he said. “Maurilho and Rose’s son? I met you once in—”

  “So there’s three of you now? Three of you here for my wife?”

  Elder McLeod took a sudden step forward. “Hey! Hey. Don’t you start that.”

  Leandro took the same step backward, out of instinct, but he more than made up for it as he moved to within inches of McLeod’s face, straightening, stiffening, nostrils flaring. McLeod held his ground on the stoop, returned the stare. Elder Passos felt suddenly disoriented, unprepared. He tried to interrupt the current that coursed between McLeod and Leandro; he put up both hands like a traffic officer. “Listen, listen, listen.” He said it again. “Leandro? Leandro, please listen!”

  The man slid his eyes, slowly, in Passos’s direction. He kept his head straight, kept McLeod in front of him.

  “We didn’t want …” Passos said. “We didn’t come here to upset you. We’re your friends, okay? We just wanted to say hello again. We’ve missed you. That’s all we wanted to say. Okay?”

  Leandro’s voice came even lower now, a growl. “We don’t want you here. I don’t want you here. Josefina doesn’t want you here.”

  And just then Josefina stepped into the front doorway. She stood half in shadow, half in light, but Passos could still make out the beginnings of a stomach under her T-shirt. She called across the courtyard: “Is everything okay, honey?” She paused. “Elders?”

  Leandro turned toward his wife as McLeod shouted past him, “Josefina, it’s us. It’s the Elders!” Again the over-intimacy in his companion’s voice—even now Passos heard it—until Leandro turned back around and crowded that much more into McLeod’s face, a stiff finger at his sternum. He pushed McLeod back—hard jabs, short, jabbing steps. “You don’t fucking talk to my wife, Elder Gringo! You don’t even fucking talk—”

  Leandro doubled forward and made a sound like a lowing cow, his eyes screwed tight shut. Only then did Passos see his companion’s arm buried elbow-deep in Leandro’s stomach. McLeod reared back and drove his fist home again. The lowing renewed, ran down to a wheeze, then Leandro tipped forward and collapsed onto the stoop.

  Josefina shouted, “Elders! What did you do? Get out of here!” She rushed to her husband and braced her hands on his back as he pitched and heaved for breath. “Are you all right, Leandro? Honey?” When she looked up she glowered to see them still backing away. “I said get out of here, Elders! Don’t come back!”

  McLeod turned and ran, and Passos and Rômulo followed after. Two, maybe three minutes later. Passos and Rômulo at the bus stop. Rômulo bent double over his knees, breathing hard. Passos too. He took great drags of air, his lungs burned. For all the walking he and McLeod did every day, Elder Passos lacked the stamina for full-tilt running.

  He looked up at the sound of an outbound city bus rumbling onto the main road a few blocks away. The big rasping thing picked up speed only to slow down as it neared them, pushing up a wave of heat and sound. Elder Passos didn’t even try to speak over it. He reached into his pocket for bus fare but Rômulo refused it, pointed instead down the street. “You saw him go that way?”

  Passos nodded. Rômulo climbed onto the bus and from the stairwell turned around. He showed a weak, worried smile to Elder Passos. Then he disappeared behind the sun-dark glass of the bus’s closing doors.

  Elder Passos found his companion at the corrugated rail by the riverbank, a familiar spot. McLeod sat with his gaze on the river, eyes vacant as a doll’s, the water pulled and corded by the current. Passos sat down beside him, regarding him sidelong, waiting, waiting.

  After a long time McLeod said, “What’s there to say?”

  “Nothing now,” Passos said. “You made very sure of that, didn’t you?”

  Silence.

  “Didn’t you? You and your diplomacy of the balled-up fist. It’s the American way, isn’t it?”

 
More silence.

  “Here we are trying to publish peace, but I should have known better, huh? Elder? Don’t you think? Huh?”

  Elder McLeod kept his eyes on the river. For a moment the sounds from the road faded to nothing and only the quick sleek burble of the water floated up to them.

  “Peace,” Passos said in English, as much to himself as to McLeod. He laughed. “Peace. Listen to the word in your language, Elder.” He repeated it again in a nasal, sawed-off Yankee accent. “Peeeace. Peeeeeeeze. It doesn’t even sound like English, does it? It’s an impostor in your language. Peeeeeze. Peeeeeeeze. Peeeeeeeeeze.” Elder Passos grated the word just inches from McLeod’s ear. “Peeeeeze,” he said again, louder, “Peeeeeeeeeze,” like a crazed insect, almost shouting it, “Peeeeeeeeeeze!”

  McLeod swung around and took fistfuls of Passos’s shirtfront. “Stop it!”

  “Or what? Or what? You’ll hit me too? Huh?”

  Elder McLeod relinquished his grip, turned back to the river. But Passos kept after him, yelling at full voice, full up with righteous anger. “Do you have any idea what you did back there? You just beat up an investigator in front of another investigator—the investigator’s wife! Do you know what that makes us? The both of us? Elder McLeod? I’m talking to you! I’m your senior companion and I am talking to you!”

  “He was filth,” McLeod whispered. “You said it yourself.”

  “So you clobber him? That’s the only option? You don’t talk about it, or walk away? You have to clobber him and ruin everything we worked for? Josefina, Elder! Did you hear what she said? ‘Get out of here! Don’t come back!’ She said that, not Leandro. And because of you. You are the one who’s thrown her under the bus. Do you hear me? Do you hear me!”

  Elder McLeod didn’t answer, didn’t move. He just stared at the water, staring through it, and after a while Elder Passos started staring through it too. His worst anger gave out on him like a candle flame extinguished in its own melt. They sat there, the two of them, in silence. Twelve o’clock came and went. Twelve thirty. At one o’clock Elder Passos rose from the embankment guard and McLeod got up and followed after him. The elders walked to the nearest padaría and bought cheese sandwiches and ate them at a table near the open-air storefront. An afternoon rain came on, turning the sidewalks brown and muddy and the streets slate gray. The speckled line between dry and wet came right up to the threshold of the storefront’s little eating space: rain greased the metal track of the roll-up gate, then inched past it as the drops got thicker and a beaded curtain dropped down from the awning, started spraying the table’s legs. The drops began kicking up a floor-level mist; it coated McLeod’s shoes, Passos noticed. At one point a wind gust blew a scrim of wet all over them. Passos scraped back his chair, shucked his pants. McLeod sat motionless, holding his hard roll in front of him for a long, absent minute. Then he took a soggy bite.

  The sky cleared half an hour later. The elders left the padaría and walked through downtown with no particular purpose or direction, the streets still wet from the rain, dull mirrors, and the sun in them now, a strange effect. Cars passed by and dragged shallow wakes of whitewater after them, each one like the sound of paper ripping. The sidewalk dust-turned-to-mud formed a thin brown paste on the pavement, forming a collage of footprints in turn. Elder Passos tried to fit his steps into steps that had gone before him.

  Finally McLeod spoke. “I want that Dr. Seuss book back that I gave you. It was a gift from my mother. I’m taking it back when we get home.”

  Passos laughed, said, “Fine by me,” like he didn’t care at all.

  “Good,” McLeod said, “and we’ll cut out the English practice too, all right?”

  “Fine by me,” Passos said.

  “And maybe I’ll just write my parents and tell them you changed your mind about wanting to stay with them? You wouldn’t like being around all those violent Americans.”

  “You can do whatever you want—” Passos felt a catch in his throat, then a surge of private anger. He didn’t want to feel venal, dependent. Not on McLeod. Not today. “It turns out I don’t need your charity anyway. You or your family’s.”

  “It’s not charity,” McLeod said, “and whatever it is, it’s not mine. It’s mostly my mother’s offer, but then again she is my mother. She values my opinion. Maybe I was wrong about you. Maybe I’ll tell her that. I thought you wanted to go to America, but I guess I was wrong. It sounds like you’d really hate it there.”

  “Well,” Passos said. He only hung back for a second. “Well, Elder McLeod, maybe you’re right. With you around the house—yeah, you’re probably right.”

  “Oh I wouldn’t be around,” McLeod said. “Is that what you thought? I’ll be long gone by then. Away at college, and a good one too, and with my own room, I’ll make sure of it. And reading great books, lots of them, and not burning a single one—books that don’t begin every sentence with ‘And it came to pass’ or ‘Verily, verily, I say unto you.’ And all the rest of this? Brazil? The mission? You? You’ll all be a memory, a little speck on the horizon.”

  Passos made the same laugh as before, a little snort. He watched the sun pass out of the puddles in the street into another drift of clouds.

  That night at the apartment Elder Passos dropped the Dr. Seuss book on McLeod’s desk as he read there. The book made a loud, sharp smack against the wood.

  “I’ve got most of it memorized anyway,” Passos said.

  “Oh you do?” McLeod said. “Is that so? Because I do too. What’s your favorite part? Recite it for me, Elder? Please?”

  Elder Passos turned back for the bedroom without a word. “ ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness,’ ” his companion called after him. “You and your false witness, huh? But don’t worry, Elder Passos. ‘Don’t worry, don’t stew. Just go right along, you’ll start happening too. Oh! The places you’ll go …’ ”

  The next morning Elder Passos found on his desk the blue hardcover grammar book, Vocabulário e gramática avançada. A handwritten note bookmarked the first page: You can have your gift back too. Only fair. I’ve got most of it memorized anyway.

  Passos had barely finished reading the note before he crumpled it and started, with the book in hand, for the kitchen trash.

  At church that day the elders waited through sacrament meeting, Sunday school, a joint Priesthood-Relief Society meeting, waited through the full three hours of church, hoping against hope that Josefina might just be late. After church they met Rose and Maurilho in the hallway. Rômulo stood behind his parents. He nodded at Passos and McLeod, a little sheepish, then studied the floor.

  “Josefina wasn’t here today?” Rose said. She brought the corners of her mouth up in a wincing half smile, a comforting, sympathetic look meant for the both of them. But Passos turned to his companion and cocked his head, determined that the sympathy, and the blame, should belong to McLeod alone.

  “No, I guess she didn’t come,” McLeod said. “We had a problem yesterday with—well, I had a problem with—”

  “Rômulo told us,” Maurilho said. “But listen, we had an idea. What do you say to this? You let things cool for another few days, then you come over to our place on, say, Thursday for a big dinner, and we invite Leandro and Josefina to join us. What do you think?”

  Elder Passos turned back to McLeod, his same head-cock as before, his faux-solicitous stare. He watched with satisfaction as his companion’s face flushed, his jaws gripping, ungripping.

  Rose spoke up to fill the silence. “Also, I was thinking I could go over there and personally invite them. At least Josefina. Since it’s at our house, you know? If you thought that would be helpful, of course.”

  McLeod turned to face him now. “Well, companion? Senior companion?”

  “No, no,” Passos said, “you decide. I’m delegating this to your discretion.”

  “Fine,” he said to Rose. “Let’s try it. It can’t hurt to try, right?”

  “I could even pick them up,” Maurilho said. “And you g
uys too if you wanted. I’ll be downtown already. I’ve got day shifts this week. And I finally got the car fixed, did I tell you?” He addressed McLeod more than Passos, as usual, rubbing his thumb back and forth against his index and middle fingers. “I’m flush now, did you hear?”

  McLeod smiled a little. “How is the new job?”

  “Ah, you know, mop here, sweep there. It’s a job. A stopgap, really.”

  “It’s a blessing from God,” Rose said.

  “So we’re on for Thursday?” Maurilho said. “I get off at seven. I could pick people up a little after that. Sound good?”

  McLeod looked over at Passos again. Passos held to his mask of false cheeriness.

  “Okay,” McLeod said. “That sounds good.”

  “Great,” Maurilho said, and he clapped a hand on Elder McLeod’s shoulder, leading him down the hallway ahead of Passos. “Let’s just hope that the world doesn’t end before Thursday, what with that loon you’ve got in the White House …” and so on into a gentle diatribe that Passos didn’t join in on and that McLeod, for a change, didn’t seem to mind.

  On Thursday afternoon the elders detoured around the drive-through en route to Rose’s house. They talked to her outside on the front stoop since Maurilho was already at work and Rômulo was still at school. They asked how the personal invitation had gone. Rose dropped her head, said no one had answered. Three times she went to the house, and every time the same.

  “Did you say who it was?” Passos asked her.

  “Yes,” Rose said. “Every time.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I’d knock on the door and call out ‘Hello, Josefina? It’s Rose.’ I’d try that two or three times, and I’d wait a long time between each try.”