Free Mission to America by Walter Kirn

of chocolate sauce and pineapple. During our training course I'd heard it said that after his father left he developed a temper and was sent for a summer to El Dorado Farm, the Church's disciplinary youth retreat, where troublesome boys built fences, tore them down, and put them back up in the same place. The boys were allowed no red meat there, just fish and chicken, and supposedly they drank ice water all day to neutralize what Church healers called their “heat points.” We all had our heat points, even normal children. Mine, a healer once told me, were in my groin.
    â€œYou tell us first. What are
you
?” I asked the girls.
    â€œWe're Wiccans. We worship nature,” one said.
    â€œHow?”
    â€œWe run around nude in the woods,” the same girl said. “Nude and completely shaved.”
    Her girlfriends cackled. The top girl looked angry and shushed them by pointing her spoon-fork. At the table behind theirs an old brown woman looked up from the job application she was working on. From the moment I'd noticed what she was doing, and how earnest and strenuous she seemed, I'd been feeling anxious on her behalf.
    â€œBethany's still a novice,” the top girl said. “She hasn't learned respect yet. Excuse her language.”
    â€œIt's her imagery, not her language,” my partner said.
    The top girl ate a cheesy finger. She fascinated me. I couldn't stop staring at her lipsticked mouth—at the perfect alignment between its wet red corners and the corners of her pumpkin-seed-shaped eyes, brownly outlined in pencil and bluely shadowed. Apostle girls used makeup, too, but without any flair or conviction, to mask their flaws. This girl, though, was a master of lavish effects beyond those required for basic facial smoothness. She belonged in a tent in a land across the sea, an amusement for warlords gathered around a fire. Looking at her I sensed for the first time that my return to Bluff was not assured, or at least not my happy, safe return.
    â€œAnd don't try to tell us that Wicca is Satanism,” said a girl who hadn't spoken yet. “We get that from our pastor and it's BS. Anything that empowers women, he hates. He knows that the planet's alive and that it's female and he knows that Jehovah is just some masculine fear god the Jews stole from the Persians to keep their wives in line. Read archaeology. Read history.”
    â€œWe don't have any dispute with that,” I told her. In fact, Mother Lucy had made quite similar points back in the early 1880s. The difference was that the Wiccans of the Sweety-Freeze were stern and resentful, while the first female Apostles were glad and buoyant. Could we correct these prickly girls? It felt to me unlikely. They were just children, children who wore paint, spraying big foggy ideas in people's faces to make the people wince and hold their noses. They weren't whatever that thing was they'd just called themselves. They were bouncy, flip-tailed little skunks.
    I rose from the table and threw away my sundae cup, aware that my partner intended to stay and scrimmage. I'd tract a few dozen windshields in the parking lot, which also served a drugstore and a supermarket. We'd worked out a system for using our shrinking tract supply to what we hoped was good advantage. This system worked off the appearance of the vehicles. Dented ones and damaged ones, if the damage appeared recent and the car looked costly and new, were the ones we tracted first. Our reasoning was that their owners were shaken people who'd thought that handsome purchases would spare them the reversals and disappointments that people here seemed so paralyzed about. We wanted to hit them while they were still bewildered. Next were very old miniature dusty cars with lots of belongings crammed in their backseats and, ideally, lots of stuck-on decals whose messages and sayings didn't quite harmonize. The best example we'd found so far was a tiny Chevrolet that we knew wasn't