Henry showed up before long. The old guy—or rather, the “experienced” mechanic—shook hands with Teller and Earl and said, “That’s a fine automobile. Who got it all fixed up like that?”
“I did,” Teller said. “I’ve been working on it for years.”
“No doubt.” Henry was a diminutive man, and bent. Earl couldn’t imagine that he could look into the engine of the Olds without standing on a good-sized box, but his voice was strong, and his eyes sharp, as though the actual Henry was lurking inside, peeking out. “I gotta warn you, I can have a look at what’s goin’ on with yer engine, but if you need parts, it might take a long time to get anythin’. There’s wrecking yards around, but you never know—”
“Actually, I need to talk to you about that,” Teller said. “We don’t need any parts.”
“Well, you know the car better’n anybody. Why din’t you jist work on it yerself?”
“That’s what I need to talk to you about. Let’s just step into the waiting room and see if I can explain why I requested that you come over.” Teller held the door to the waiting room open for Henry, and then for Earl, and they all walked in and sat down. Henry and Earl sat at opposite ends of a long, plastic-covered couch, and Teller dragged a chair over in front of them. “Okay, Henry, I need to ask you a question,” Teller said. “What do you still want to do with your life?”
“Look, if you’re sellin’ vitamins or somethin’ like that, I’m outta here. But I do expect to get paid. I was told you’d pay me a lot more than I usually get for something like this.”
Teller pulled his wallet from his back pocket. He pulled a bunch of twenties out and counted them. “There’s four hundred dollars. Is that fair?”
“Shore,” Henry said. He took the money from Teller’s extended hand, but he counted it before he tucked it into his shirt pocket.
“I have nothing to sell. But here’s what you need to understand. My friend here—we’ll call him Earl for now, although that may or may not be his real name—me and him were living in what they call an ‘assisted living center.’ We got to be friends. But then they told Earl he was getting to be forgetful, and the director of the place wanted to lock him up. So the two of us decided to get out of there and take a trip. This might be our last adventure. We just want to enjoy ourselves while we still can. Do you understand that?”
“Shore I do.”
“See, that’s why I asked you what you still wanted to do with your life. We wanted to take a road trip, you know, see the country. The only trouble is, Earl’s daughter didn’t want him to go, and she complained to the police that I was running off with him. Ever since, the police keep chasing after us. So a policeman in this town spotted us and was about to take us in, so we ducked into this dealership and shut the door. And that was that. We lost him.”
Henry began to laugh in a kind of cackle. “That was pritty smart,” he said. “But how’re you gonna get outta here without gittin’ spotted all over again?”
“Okay. That’s just the point. I don’t want to leave in the daylight, so I asked for you to come over, mainly just as a way of stalling for a time.”
“You mean you’re payin’ me four hundred bucks to sit here until the sun goes down?”
“Well, yes. But I’m wondering if you ever paint cars or if you know someone in town who does. We need to change the look of my Olds so we don’t get stopped again.”
“I do know a guy who has a little paint shop. But when would you want to paint it?”
“Tonight.”
“I don’t know about that. Ed’s younger than me, but he ain’t no kid either. He might not want to stay up late doin’ somethin’ like that. And I’m not sure what paint he would have at the shop. He might not be able to order in what you want until tomorrow.”
“What if you told him that I pay really well for the work I have done?”
“I’m sure the first thing he’d say is, ‘What kinda guys am I dealin’ with?’ And I gotta admit, you two look a little off, with your hair rinsed so dark.”
“That’s not rinse, Henry. We paid good money to get our hair dyed professionally. Mine is auburn with highlights.” Teller glanced up, as though he could somehow see the top of his own head.
Henry was laughing again, cackling. “If you say so. But Ed’s kind of a down-to-earth guy. He might take one look at you and back out of the whole deal.”
“Not if I offer him more money than he usually gets. A lot more.”
That brought on another choppy little laugh. “How much more?”
“You tell me what it’s going to take, and I’ll pay it. In cash.” Earl was getting nervous, and he must have shown it because Teller looked at him and said, “This is all on me, Earl. I’m not asking you to pay a cent.” Then he looked back at Henry. “So call Ed. See what you can work out, but tell him we can’t drive to his shop until the sun goes down.”
“Ahright. But I don’t have one of those sail phones everybody talks about. And I don’t know Ed’s number right off.”
“We can use the boy’s office, look up his number, and make the call from there.”
“Okay. I can’t promise he’ll do it, but I’ll call ’im.”
It was 7:30 by the time Teller drove the car into Ed’s paint shop.
It was called Ed’s Paint Shop.
Ed was a man nearing seventy, Earl thought, and one with a bad cough. “I been around this paint too long” was almost the first thing he said to Earl and Teller. “It’s going to kill me sure as God made little green apples.” He did seem to take note of their hair, but he didn’t say anything about it, though he did ask for his money up front. Teller had agreed to $3,500—$3,000 for Ed and $500 for Henry—and had also agreed that black was now the color of his true-loved car. It was a sad concession, but Teller was committed to it.
“I don’t have no waiting room,” Ed said, “but my shop is hooked onto my house, and you can go in there and watch some TV or something. Or maybe sleep a little. We’re going to be pretty late getting this job finished. I ain’t got no wife. She divorced me twenty years ago. So you won’t bother nobody if you sit in there.”
So Teller and Earl went inside the house, which was surprisingly neat, and for a little while the two did watch TV, but both were asleep before an hour had gone by, and except for waking and squirming to get comfortable in the recliner that he was sitting in, Earl stayed asleep until Ed came in and said, “She’s painted, but it wouldn’t be good to drive her out just yet. If you want to sleep where you are, that’ll save you looking for a place to stay overnight.”
“That’ll be fine with us,” Teller said, “but I have one more request. Do you have any old license plates around your shop—maybe Michigan plates?”
“Shore. But they’s out of date. It’s illegal to drive around with something like that.”
“Well, it’ll have to do for now. And I’ll pay you another hundred bucks it you’ll put ’em on for me.”
“Naw. That’s ahright. You’ve paid me enough. Just go to sleep, and I’ll take care of the plates.”
So that’s what they did. Teller woke Earl before sunrise, and they drove carefully out of town. Once they seemed to be in the clear, Teller asked, “What’s the name of that place where you wanted to stop?”
“You mean Kirtland, Ohio? We don’t have to go there if you’re not interested. But I’d like to see the temple my church built there back in the early days.”
“Hey, that’s fine with me. We gotta start having some fun again. I don’t think we’ll get stopped anymore.”
Earl hoped that was right.
The day passed by without any problems, and they reached Cleveland early in the afternoon. As it turned out, Kirtland was a little tricky to find, or at least it was with Earl doing the navigating. Eventually, though, they saw road signs that directed them to “Historic Kirtland.” They found the place with the Whitney store and the old sawmill and then learned that the temple was not far from there. Earl was thrilled to see it sitting at the crest of the hill, looking exactly as he had seen it in pictures.
When he and Teller walked into the visitors’ center, they soon learned that the temple wasn’t owned and operated by “the Church,” as Earl called it when he asked, but by “The Community of Christ,” and rather hesitantly, a nice man said, “You’ve probably heard us called the ‘Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints,’ but we aren’t called that anymore.”
It was Teller who asked why not, and Earl didn’t exactly understand the explanation, but once the tour began, he was fascinated to see the inside and realize that it looked nothing like the temples he had known in Utah. It was a small building, and the main floor looked like a chapel, with a railed-off section in both front and back. There were elevated seats at three levels, each its own little booth with letters printed on the doors. It was all quite surprising, but the tour guide explained the meaning of the letters that designated priesthood offices. When Earl asked him about the endowment, the man explained that endowment ceremonies—at least the one Earl had experienced in the “Utah church”—came later, in Nauvoo. At the end of the tour, Earl thanked the guide and shook hands with him. The man had been respectful and patient with Earl’s questions.
Earl wanted to take some pictures of the temple, so he backed far enough away from the building to take a photo that included the single spire on top—with no angel Moroni. Teller walked back with Earl and stood next to him. He asked, “So in this church—the Community thing—don’t they believe in marrying people forever, the way Mormons do?”
“I don’t know,” Earl said. “I didn’t think to ask him.”
“I don’t think many churches believe in that,” Teller said. He stood for a time, waited for Earl to take more pictures. But then he said, “You told me that you would be with Muriel in the next life, but what about your children? Are they part of the deal?”
“They sure are. I’m sealed to them too.”
“What about the one who doesn’t go to church much anymore, or the one who’s had drug problems, do you get to have them with you too?”
“I trust that I will. From what some of our leaders have said, even children who go far away from the Church can eventually be with their family—if the parents always keep their covenants. The ones who got off the path would have to repent in the next world if they don’t do it here, but they would be allowed to do that.”
“Wait a minute,” Teller said, and Earl turned and looked at him. “Are you saying that a guy could be pretty bad in this life and still repent after he dies?”
“Uh . . . yes. But we enter the next life as the same person we are when we die, so a sinful person couldn’t just say he’d changed. He’d really have to make the effort. If he was serious, though, he could make the progress he didn’t make in this life. It’s all because of Jesus Christ. He opened that door.”
“Okay, here’s another question. What if I joined your church, and I repented of a whole lot of things I’ve done in my life and—”
“It’s the other way around. You repent, and then you’re baptized.”
“Okay, so if I did that, could I find someone who wanted to marry an old man and be married to her forever?”
“Sure. You have to wait a year after you’re baptized, and she would have to be baptized too. But sure, you could do that.” He smiled. “Do you have someone in mind?”
Teller laughed. “I’m just talking theory,” he said. “Just to understand what you believe. If I had to repent first, that might take me a couple hundred years. I’ve racked up a whole lot of failing grades on my transcripts.”
“I kind of doubt that, Teller. You’re a good man. That’s the important thing: not what you’ve done exactly, but the person you are. Repentance doesn’t have to take a lot of time if your heart changes.”
“What about my stories? Would I have to give them up?”
“That depends. Are they lies or not?”
Teller was smiling. He cocked his head to one side and then the other, clearly considering his answer. “Well . . . like I said before, each one is based on a true story, and somewhere along the way, they’ve become the stories I tell. Sometimes I’m not sure what actually happened in the first place.”
“What about some of the things you’ve told the police? I know for a fact that you’ve told those guys things that aren’t true. You said I was a basketball coach and we had to get to a wedding—and all that. There was no truth to base that one on.”
“I told you, some things only symbolize the truth.”
“Yeah, well, I never did quite figure out what you meant by that.”
Teller was smiling just a little, his blue eyes showing his pleasure. “Are you saying I could go to hell for something like that? I had a higher purpose in mind, that’s all.”
“Yeah. Keeping us out of jail.”
“Exactly. That’s a very high purpose. What are you saying—that I should have told the truth and gotten us locked up?”
That was not as easy a question as Earl wanted it to be, but after considering for a few seconds, he said, “If you’d told the truth, maybe a judge would’ve straightened the whole thing out, maybe have gotten in touch with my daughter or something. I just think it’s better not to deceive people.”
Teller looked at Earl as though he were staring down that moose again, and then he asked, “So why didn’t you speak up and correct what I said?”
“Well . . . I should have said something. I can’t get self-righteous on you and claim you’re the only one who’s done anything wrong.”
“But I think we should cut ourselves some slack. This trip has been good for us, and my little dishonesties are only to fight back against all the folks who want to run our lives for us. Maybe your daughter thinks I’m a bad guy, but she’s accused me without any evidence. That’s wrong too. After all, I’m the guy who cut your toenails for you.” He burst into a huge laugh.
But Earl didn’t laugh. He looked down at the ground, not into Teller’s eyes, and said, “I’ll tell you something, and this is hard to admit. Last night, when I was trying to sleep in that chair, I realized that I hadn’t said my prayers. So I said them silently, and I started to tell the Lord I was sorry that I hadn’t been as truthful as I ought to be. But the words sort of got caught in my throat—or in my head, I guess. I just couldn’t get myself to say that I felt bad about some of the stories we’ve told the police. I probably should feel bad about it, but I didn’t want to lie to God and say I was sorry when I wasn’t.”
“Well, maybe so. But I’m the one who’s stretched the truth. I’m probably in bigger trouble with God than you are.”
“No. We’re in this together. And let me say again, you are a good man.”
“I guess it’s time I tell you something,” Teller said.
“What’s that?”
“I was baptized.”
“What?”
“I wasn’t going to tell you because of, you know, the way I’ve lived my life. But my mother was a Mormon, and she had me baptized when I was a kid in Salt Lake. I hung around the Church for a while, even in Hawaii and Tacoma, but I just never took it seriously. Now, though, I wonder where I stand with God. I don’t know whether I can make up for some of the things I’ve done.” He finally looked Earl in the eye. “But there’s one thing I’ve figured out. I’d like, if I can, to get to be more like you.”