While I battle the beast of MySpace, here's some more nonfiction for my adoring fans. This one makes reference to the characters in The Second Funniest Story From My Mission.

Parts

Wayne backfilled his life with little bits of information, always couched in the form of stories. For a missionary, he'd lived a colorful life. "Did I ever tell you about the time I was in a high-speed chase with the cops?" "Did I ever tell you about the time my girlfriend and I made porn and my friends got ahold of it?"

There was only one story he told tersely, with no trace of embellishment. "My brother died when I was four. He was four-wheeling and it flipped over." There was never more than that detail--a seven-year-old brother, riding a four-wheeler who died under it.

It's the thing about funny stories. You tell enough of the story, and there are messy pieces--bits that don't fit, cutting room floor relics. It's all in what you leave out.

* * *

Merle--our nigga--had a wife named Jackie, a tiny little Cherokee woman with crooked teeth. When we went back to see him, Jackie welcomed us in. "Merle's not here, but I've talked to Mormon missionaries before. I like you guys."

"Can we give you a Book of Mormon, too?" we asked.

"I can't read," she said, in the same tone most people might say they couldn't skateboard. "Merle tries to teach me, but I get frustrated with it."

"Do you want to try reading now? We can help you."

She looked at the book and back at us. "Not right now," she said. "I get too frustrated."

When we left, with an appointment to come back, she smiled her big crooked smile. "I sure am glad Merle got saved in prison," she said. "I've always wanted to be Mormon, ever since I was a little girl."

We went back to Merle and Jackie's accompanied by a recently baptized couple named the Dorians. The Dorians were overwhelmingly friendly and homely. They were both pear-shaped and balding with large eyes and large smiles. I loved them--loved their innocence, their joy, their certainty. I wished I had it.

Merle and Jackie's house was dark and sweaty. "We didn't pay the power bill," Jackie said, "so we've got to sit in the dark. And of course the swamp cooler's out, too." We lit candles in the hot dark and read to them out of the Book of Mormon.

In the presence of the Dorians, or perhaps just for his wife's sake, Merle left the N-word out of the conversation. He just mentioned, "I done a lot of things I regretted before I was saved. I done drugs, I hurt people."

We passed the Book of Mormon around and each read into the quiet, hot dark, except Jackie. At the end of the night there was a feeling in the room that Merle expressed by saying, "I could just jump up and shout! I never knew what people was talking about till now!"
We asked Merle and Jackie, "Will you be baptized?" and they, through faces lit by pure joy, said, "Yes."

On the way home, we laughed with the Dorians about the reaction Merle and Jackie might get in church. "Where will they fit in?" I asked Brother Dorian. He replied, "What will happen the first time Merle gives a talk?"

Elder Pierce and I, laying on our beds across from each other, asked "Can Merle get baptized? Can you get baptized if you've killed people?"

"I don't know. I guess we'll figure it out soon enough."

The next time we went there, the house was empty. "They took off," their landlady yelled from her porch. "Don't know where they went."

Brother Dorian approached me in church a few times, his hands crossed on the bulge of his stomach. "Have we heard anything about Merle and Jackie?" I shook my head. At one point I said, "People we teach have a tendency to vanish."

I could see a little bit of his certainty fail.

What kind of an ending would that make? It's much better to leave it at the moment when Merle put his stained, scarred arms around us and said, "Y'all's my niggas now." The story is quick, clean, young. Add the rest and it gets older.