Elders Read Online Free Page B

did suggest they drop in and meet Maurilho, their Advocate with the Locals, as McLeod called him, and a good friend. Maurilho’s blue stucco house sat just off the main street, fairly close to the elders’ apartment, and very close, uncomfortablyclose, to the neighborhood brothel, its darkened neon sign— DRIVE-THRU —like an unlit fuse. To even pass the drive-through’s outer walls, even in the middle of the day, set Elder Passos on edge, conjuring up images that reminded him in turn of the images he had hidden in the back of his desk drawer. He resolved to get rid of the magazine once and for all, and very soon.
    Inside Maurilho’s house Passos met the big man himself: completely bald, a smiler, with a belly that slung down from his sternum like a giant kangaroo pouch. He met Rose, too, Maurilho’s wife, a tall and elegant woman, her skin stretched drumhead taut across high cheekbones, her hair tipping just this side of gray. Passos figured Maurilho must have drawn on a store of considerable wit and charm to marry her. He liked them both instantly. And their son, Rômulo, a fourteen-year-old with a buzz cut, a Ronaldo jersey, and a precocious air that reminded Passos of his little brother.
    The elders sat opposite the little family on wooden chairs. Where are you from? How long have you been on the mission? How did you find the church? The usual questions. After Passos had answered each of them in brief—he gave his most basic conversion story, not even mentioning his mother’s death—he followed Maurilho’s eyes to his companion beside him. McLeod sat silent, smiling.
    “What are you grinning at, whitey?” Maurilho said. He ran his palm over the high smooth dome of his head. “We look practically alike by now, don’t we?”
    Rose caught Passos’s eye, said softly, “He’s just teasing him. They’re grand comics, these two.”
    “Ah,” Passos said.
    Elder McLeod mimicked Maurilho, smoothing his hand over his own head, the hair close-cropped and bleached almost invisibly blond by the sun.
Brancão
indeed. It occurred to Passos that McLeod was the palest companion he had had so far, by a wide margin.
    “There are worse people to look like, right?” McLeod answered Maurilho. “How’s your team, by the way? You still thinking of painting a flag on your head?”
    “Later on, maybe. It’s still early stages. Brazil beat Paraguay, four to one, in the first round. A little stroll on the pitch. It’ll get harder, though.”
    “I assume it’s just South America, right? The U.S. isn’t playing?”
    “No, they’re not invited. You guys are too busy stockpiling for war.”
    “Maurilho,” Rose said, a note of warning in her voice.
    “What she said,” McLeod said, and he smiled.
    Maurilho smiled too, after a moment, and the conversation turned to other subjects. When these ran out, Rose got up and motioned for Rômulo to follow her into the kitchen, where they prepared drinks and snack plates for the rest of them. They all ate and drank in an alcove just off the kitchen. McLeod sat beside Maurilho and asked at one point how the job search was going. The big man dropped his head. McLeod chucked him, lightly, on the shoulder. They all clearly liked McLeod, and he them, but Passos felt a hanging back in himself at this intimate rapport, almost too intimate. Or was it? After the events of the last twenty-four hours Passos had reason to doubt his first impressions. Hadn’t the Lord Himself established rapports? Hadn’t He suffered evenlittle children to come to Him? He might have dandled them on his knee, done magic tricks for them. Elder Passos knew he could sometimes confuse mere soberness with righteousness, and he wanted to check that in himself—that and so much else. He decided to keep an open mind about McLeod’s—what to call it even? His openness? His familiarity? It was clear to him, in any case, that Maurilho and his family reciprocated McLeod’s warm feelings, and that they’d missed the