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her T-shirt while she was programming our plastic key cards. I offered my handkerchief and she said, “Ick.” Elder Stark set a tract on her counter but she ignored it, and we didn't press her; we collected our keys and left. On a mission of just nine months we couldn't waste time on those who wouldn't have us.
    â€œIt's rough,” Elder Stark had said when we reached our room, “leaving folks alone like that to suffer.”
    â€œTomorrow we'll try harder. We're tired,” I said.
    â€œYou noticed that little cross around her neck?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œThose trinkets discourage me,” he said.
    We'd been seeing crosses everywhere. Also, roadside billboards for the Lord, T-shirts and sweatshirts for the Lord, and stickers on cars and trucks with sayings like, “Believe in Him. He still believes in you.” I wasn't sure how seriously to take these things—some of them seemed to be decorations, or jokes—but my partner regarded them as evidence that we'd arrived too late. These fields had been harvested, harrowed, and replanted so many times that the soil was dead, he feared.
    I rinsed out the spider and purged my sticky mouth of the cayenne and Dr Pepper tastes with three or fours swallow of neutral tepid water that made me miss the water back in Bluff, so hard and sharp, like icy liquid stone. I considered making myself vomit as I stood at the sink and faced the mirror and probed my belly with my fingertips to feel the hard, engorged outlines of my intestines. I'd mistreated them and I vowed to stop. We'd dined responsibly for the first five days, relying on almond slivers to keep from snacking and seeking out dinner spots with salad bars featuring radishes, beets, and turkey cubes, but then two nights ago, desperate for hot showers, we'd pulled into a truck stop west of Billings. I ordered the fish but the waitress wouldn't serve it, explaining that the freezer where it was kept had been contaminated by a busboy who'd urinated on the floor and walls after learning that he'd been fired. To be safe, we ordered sourdough pancakes. The corn syrup and white flour sapped our wills, and we'd been craving garbage ever since.
    I opened my toilet kit and removed the products I'd picked up that morning at a Sheridan drugstore where I'd gone to buy razors and shaving cream while Elder Stark handed out pamphlets in the parking lot. The store's health-and-beauty aisle had overwhelmed me. I'd filled my basket with lotions, creams, and gels that I knew full well I couldn't afford but whose labels made claims I was powerless not to test.
    â€œIt's the golfer,” my partner called in from the bedroom. “I'll be danged. She picked the golfer. Frick.”
    â€œYou can use bad words. It's only me.”
    â€œDamn it, she picked the golfer. Watch with me.”
    â€œI'm getting ready to whiten my teeth,” I said.
    â€œWhat's wrong with your teeth? They're fine.”
    â€œYou've seen the teeth here.”
    Even after seven days in the van, my partner and I were still learning about America. The Church's founders had called the place “Terrestria,” refusing at first to vote in its elections, supply troops for its armies, or recognize its currency, and though they capitulated in 1913 in a bid to escape imprisonment, Bluff had remained a world apart. As schoolkids, as part of a secret curriculum we were forbidden to mention to nonmembers, we'd learned to refer to our incorporation as “the Arrangement” and think of it as temporary, lasting only until that fateful day when Terrestria succumbed to chaos and the Apostles were left to sift through the wreckage and usher in the New Edenic Covenant foretold by Mother Lucy. Elder Stark felt this day might come during our mission and he'd joked that the prospect excited him because it would offer us a chance to loot, starting with the luxury-auto lots. Elder Stark wasn't satisfied with the sluggish camper van that