Elders

by Ryan McIlvain

  Elder Passos sighed, just slightly, and shook his head, his hands on his hips, arms akimbo. He noticed his companion out of the corner of his eye, head hung and sad-looking too. They had both been hoping against hope.

  “I’m sorry,” Rose said.

  “It’s not your fault,” McLeod said.

  “I know, but I still feel sorry. The two of you will still come tonight, though, right? I’m making feijoada. We won’t be able to eat it all by ourselves.”

  “Of course we’ll come,” Passos said. “We’re grateful to you.”

  They shook hands with Rose and started back across the courtyard. Rose called after them, “Oh, and Elders? Maurilho said he still wants to pick you up downtown tonight, if that’s where you’ll be working? At around seven? I’m supposed to find out exactly where.”

  “Tell him we’ll be knocking Rua Branca,” Passos said. “And tell him thanks.”

  Passos noticed the flash of annoyance in his companion’s eyes. He had made the decision about Rua Branca just now, and he’d done it despite the fact that McLeod had told him about his and his last companion’s fruitless slog up that long, hilly street. But Passos knew nothing about McLeod’s last companion, and he could imagine McLeod dragging his feet to various degrees of success. And he didn’t mind annoying him either.

  On the inbound bus the late sun slanted through the windows, strobing the passengers in light and dark as the bus passed buildings, open lots, more buildings, overpasses, more open lots … A few minutes later Elder Passos caught sight of Rua Branca through the broad flat frame of the bus’s windshield, the bus slowing down for the last stop before the river. Rua Branca meant “White Street,” though most of it lay in shadow now, dark gray against the gilded orange houses and property walls. The street climbed up the sudden steep rise of the far bank, looking to Passos like the seam of a giant basketball.

  The bus came to a stop. Passos stood and moved to the middle door.

  “There’s a closer place to get off,” McLeod said. “On the other side of the bridge.”

  “We’re getting off here,” Passos said, and started down the stairs as the hydraulic doors sighed open.

  In the street Passos turned away from the river and began walking in the opposite direction. A moment later he heard his companion behind him. Not a word of protest, no air through his nose. He must have sensed where they were going.

  “I figure we’ve got time,” Passos said. “It’s not even six yet. Then we’ll do Rua Branca.”

  The elders turned onto Josefina’s street a minute later, both of them slowing their pace. They took the last hundred yards to her door in silence, walking at half speed, lightening their footfalls, as if the house might spook and run away. At the door Elder McLeod lowered his voice to ask Passos what he planned to say if someone did answer.

  Passos hovered his fist a few inches from the metal of the outer door. “I’ll say what the Spirit tells me to, Elder.”

  He knocked and waited. He knocked again. Waited. Nothing at all moved on the street, or on the main street behind them. The sound of the river came up. A few birds. Nothing at all from the house. After another minute Passos felt his companion’s eyes on him. He turned and saw a look of apology on McLeod’s face.

  “Do you think she’s heard us?” McLeod said.

  “Hold on.”

  Passos knocked the door one more time, and hard, a loud series of raps that stung the air like gun reports. He waited again—a full minute, two—until something clacked from inside the courtyard. A door handle. The sound of the front door scraping back across the threshold and onto the poured-cement floor. The elders perked up, held their breaths. They heard a few staccato scrapes on the dirt of the courtyard. Then Josefina’s voice in the air: “Who is it?”

  Passos hesitated a moment.

  McLeod said, “It’s us, Josefina. The elders. We’ve come to apologize. We want to apologize to both of you. Josefina?”

  The silence stretched out like something living, a dense, coiling, spring-loading thing. Passos stared straight at the door, steeled. But after a minute more his companion called out again, “Josefina? Please. Please let us apologize.”

  The steps in the dirt started up again, steadier now. They changed pitch, hitting cement, it sounded like, slapping once, twice, three times. The sound of sandals on the entryway floor. The sound of the front door clattering shut.

  Passos stopped to check his watch again. Eight sixteen. He blew air through his mouth, turned around. Not halfway up the steep Rua Branca and the city below already looked miniature, the web of streets and alleyways radiating out from downtown like tiny tidy spokes, the kinks in the roads ironed out by distance. The rows of orange boxy houses, too, improved from this height, looking more like concerted complexes of houses, like freight cars running parallel to the roads. The whites on the teeming clotheslines shaded blue, and the river, dark brown since the sun had set, kept traces of the afterglow, warm seepages, like gold dust at the bottom of a prospector’s tray. The scene was tranquil, quiet, and utterly at odds with Elder Passos’s mood. Most of the people on Rua Branca weren’t home, or at least didn’t answer their doors; the few who did begged off in short order. It was an ordinary stretch of tracting, in other words, but tonight it was almost unbearable to Passos. The only solid presence in their teaching pool had sunk, and who could take her place on this street? The man who’d closed his door as fast as he’d opened it, saying “No, no, no, no—”? Or the woman who’d frowned at McLeod’s Portuguese, then at his Portuguese? “But I’m Brazilian,” he’d said. The woman held out her palms, shook her head, shut the door. Or the little girl who’d peered through a gap in the gate, conferred with a parent back in the house, then returned to report that no one was home? “But you’re home,” Passos had said.

  None of this should really have rankled Elder Passos, but all of it did—every no-show, every evasion, everything that reminded him of the drawing board they were back to, blank and black as a void. On top of it all, he was hungry: Maurilho was late. More than an hour late. Passos checked his watch again. Eight twenty. He lowered himself down onto his haunches, rested his arms on his knees, rocking at intervals, checking his watch.

  “I’ve never understood how you guys can sit like that,” McLeod said. “Doesn’t that hurt your knees?”

  Passos ignored him. “We’re sure Maurilho didn’t say another time? We’re sure he said seven?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Has he ever stood you up before?”

  McLeod shook his head.

  “Well where is he then? I’m hungry.”

  McLeod stood behind him and a little farther out in the road. He squinted at something in the distance. “Is that his car?”

  A small blue two-door was turning onto the avenue from a side street just above the bridge. The car hitched, then started accelerating up the hill, the whine of the engine mounting. As it got closer, Passos could make out Maurilho’s face through the windshield, brows furrowed. The car skidded to a stop a little too close to them. Passos jumped to his feet, jumped back. His companion too.

  Maurilho cranked down the car window. He glared at McLeod, said, “You see the news tonight, Elder? Huh?” There was violence in his voice.

  McLeod pulled back his head on his neck, turtle-like. He studied the big man as if for clues. Then he turned to Passos, his face an appeal: Maurilho knew the missionary rules as well as anyone. What was he getting at? What were they missing?

  “They’re attacking Baghdad,” Maurilho said, his eyes dead-bolted on McLeod. “Your country, Elder. They’re actually doing it. People are dying as we speak.” Then he said, “Come on, get in the car. Come on!”

  Elder Passos climbed into the backseat; McLeod got in beside him, leaving the front seat open. Maurilho whipped the car around and raced down the hill through downtown and the area beyond, the sights of the city blurring past. He kept up a torrent of facts, indictments, laments. He shot looks at McLeod in the rearview, the wh
ites of his eyes flashing in the glass. Massive air strikes. The entire city on fire. Three hundred thousand troops on the ground. Thousands of refugees already, thousands dead. The oil fields closely guarded, of course. Did McLeod know what the Americans were calling it? Operation Iraqi Liberation. Maurilho slurred the abbreviating letters in English: “O-I-L. Do you recognize that word, Elder McLeod?”

  It kept up all throughout dinner. Maurilho held his fork like a weapon, wielding it, stabbing it in the air at McLeod to accentuate his strongest words about “that warmonger president of yours”: “… bloodthirsty … lying … thieving … maniacal … And this is why people hate America—this murderousness, this complete disregard for life! This is why they’ll blow themselves up, why they’ll fly planes into buildings—just to scare you!”

  McLeod no longer looked to Passos for appeal, though Passos wished he would. He too felt angry about the invasion, but more than that he felt taken aback at the sheer force and duration of Maurilho’s tirade—the eyes boring into McLeod as if it were all his fault, the fork a silver blur. At first Elder Passos had felt Amens welling in him, more surges of satisfaction at the look on McLeod’s face, the jaw muscles doing their furious contractions. Maurilho could outright excoriate America in a way that Elder Passos simply couldn’t, or wouldn’t, for fear of burning bridges with McLeod, or, if they’d been burned already, for fear of spoiling his chances at the assistantship by provoking an explosion in his companionship. But now even Passos felt to wave the white flag. What invisible satisfaction he’d taken in Maurilho’s performance in the first act disappeared under the pilings-on of the second and third. “The United Blood-Spattered States of America! Belligerent from its very inception: one hand on a silver spoon, the other on a gun! A country of the violent, by the violent, for the violent! And I haven’t even mentioned all the CIA killings—in Brazil, all over Latin America, all over the world! And all the coups you’ve incited, all the dictators you’ve installed, the blood money you’ve traded in …” and on and on.

  The other faces at the table, like Passos’s, tipped forward in helpless chastened expressions. They’d hazarded their appeals into the maelstrom—“Okay, let’s change the subject,” “Dad, come on,” “Honey, please”—but to no effect. Elder Passos himself had broken in to say, “You know, this just reminds me how lucky we are to have the gospel as our guide, an authority above any earthly tribunal.”

  “A lot of good it’ll do the Iraqis tonight,” Maurilho had said, and right back on the warpath. He seemed to have narrowed his vision and focus until Rômulo and Rose and Elder Passos all melted away, and only he and McLeod remained—he, leaning forward across the table into his points, and McLeod, leaning back, a spreading smile on his face. Just then McLeod shifted in his seat. He rested his cheek in the cradle of his fingers as if to strike the dreamy listener pose.

  Maurilho paused. “You think this is a joke? You think this is all some damn joke?”

  Rose scraped back her chair in the tiny silence that followed and retrieved from the kitchen counter a molded dolce de leite. None of them had made any progress in their meals, the black beans and rice and pork parts heaped on their plates beside potatoes and carrots—a fancy dinner, a sign of changed fortunes. Rose placed the dessert in the center of the table like a peace offering. “Please. I made it special.”

  Maurilho said, “I just can’t believe …” and he trailed off. He watched as his wife cut into the dense brown mold.

  “You’re not done, are you? Oh no, Professor,” McLeod said. He spoke in a grand voice, an orator’s voice. “Oh Professor, please don’t stop! You mustn’t! What other searing insights have you been hiding from us? All this time with a genius in our midst! What other pearls of wisdom has your eighth-grade education endowed you with? Was it eighth grade, Maurilho? Or did you get as far as ninth? All the more reason for you to continue! Tell us your secrets that we too may have a chance to one day become a janitor. Please, Professor, I beg you. Please go on.”

  Maurilho stiffened in his chair, turning hard, magnetic. He drew all the silence in the room to him, and the wide-eyed stares. Elder Passos, Rômulo, Rose, holding a butter knife just above the flan—all of them turned from McLeod to Maurilho.

  “Well,” the big man said. He chuckled. He placed his hands palms-down on the table, and a smile, every bit as false as McLeod’s, distorted his face. “Well, I can tell you this much, Elder McLeod. The country you come from is evil. Are there any questions?”

  “No, Professor. No questions.” McLeod stood up and walked out of the kitchen and out of the house. Passos stood too—out of reflex.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said.

  “Go on,” Maurilho said. “Go after him. That child.”

  Elder Passos found his companion at the bus stop a few streets beyond the drive-through. The sight of McLeod sitting alone under a cement awning was familiar now, almost comical, a bad punch line that earns its groaning laughs through purposeful repetition. He kept quiet beside McLeod on the bench. On the bus itself, McLeod waited for Passos to sit down, then chose a seat across the aisle from him. At one point the woman sitting to McLeod’s left craned her head to read his name tag.

  “Are you some kind of salesman?” Passos heard her ask.

  “Not tonight.”

  McLeod stood up and moved to the pole nearest the middle door, staring out the darkened window at the night. Elder Passos could study his companion’s face in the reflection, as well as the woman’s across the aisle from him, by pretending to gaze out the window himself: the faces looked ghostly, unreal in the glass, especially the woman’s. She tilted it at McLeod, frowning, transposed over the moving streetlights and walls beyond the bus like a spirit observing its body. The entire day seemed unreal as Passos thought about it: the last-ditch effort at Josefina’s, the tiny blue car growing larger as it sped up the hill, the worst words spoken in the calmest tones, and the thought of a city being bombed, the shocks of light, the huge tearing of afterburners.

  He thought back to a time and a mood not unlike tonight’s: the last days before his departure for the MTC. The news channels were still replaying the footage from New York (those red-orange bursts, and all that smoke) nearly a week and a half after the fact. On the day of Passos’s farewell talk at church one of the wealthier members of the ward had hosted a little party for him: finger foods, quiet conversation, a few gifts. The TV ran in a back room and at one point Passos followed the crowd in to see it. On the screen an American fighter jet idled on the runway of an aircraft carrier, its black turbine suddenly lighting up like the tip of a giant cigarette.

  “They’re saying three thousand died in the attacks,” someone behind Passos said. “How many do you think they’ll kill in return?”

  Yet Passos’s thoughts in those days bore striking resemblance to his thoughts—his real thoughts—tonight. What did it all mean for him? For his chances at America? For a student visa? His attempts at the deep indignation of Maurilho felt dutiful, abstract. The only things he really felt were the things he experienced. The tense silence on the bus. The silence walking home. The silence in the apartment as the elders separated to their corners—McLeod to the bedroom, Passos to the front room.

  Elder Passos read for an hour at his desk, or tried to. The Bible in English, as it happened. He kept a note card and pen close by to jot down vocabulary he meant to look up, and any spiritual thoughts or impressions he might use in his address at the upcoming zone conference. “The noise of the world,” he wrote down. He noticed the Seuss book bunched upright in the corner of McLeod’s desk; it looked awkward there, its spine much taller and thinner than the other volumes’, a lone skyscraper amid one-story flats. The arrangement lacked his companion’s normal symmetry; it called too much attention to itself. Passos wondered if the book hadn’t been placed there for that very purpose—to catch his eye, make him jealous somehow. Had the book been on McLeod’s desk before he gave it to him? Or loaned it to him? Or whatever he’d done? Passos could
n’t remember.

  His eye drifted to the black-and-white picture of McLeod’s family. The mother and sister showing white wide smiles, the rose blush of their cheeks showing as a darker gray. Then the father with an exaggerated, mock-serious look (McLeod had said that his father, for all his patriarchal gravity, loved to kid around). And the dog, serene-faced, fat. All in all, a handsome, friendly-looking family. Passos imagined he could get along with each person in the photograph. He already liked the mother. McLeod had showed him the pictures she’d sent of the spacious, carpeted room in the basement: a bed, a bedside table, a little lamp, a desk, another lamp, a small window high up on the far wall that showed a cross-section of soil and grass and sky, and in the near corner, at the edge of the picture, a white door opening onto a white, tiled floor. “That’d be your bathroom,” McLeod had explained. His companion turned the photograph over to show him his mother’s note—1 bed, 1 bath, 0 occupants, for now … —in graceful, confident cursive. Another photograph of the room bore the inscription on the back: Le Chez Passos?

  Clever, then, and generous. Passos read these qualities into the mother’s face in the picture. Nothing bloodthirsty about her. Maurilho had been wrong to focus his anger on McLeod, make a scapegoat of him. He should have acted better. But then he wasn’t a missionary. He wasn’t an ordained representative of the Lord.

  Passos got up from his desk and walked into the bedroom to see his companion laid out like a body in state. McLeod stretched out fully dressed on his bed, arms at his side, feet together, his eyes on the ceiling. He didn’t acknowledge Elder Passos as he came into the room, or as he sat down on his own bed, or as he said, “Elder.”

  The word startled in its clarity, like struck crystal, a sound made huge in the wake of so much silence. A moment later Passos said, “Elder McLeod.”

  His companion got out of bed and went to his dresser. He gave his back to Passos, loosening his tie with deliberate slowness, undoing his shirt down to the last button.