Daredevils (13 page)

O
ver breakfast, Jason's mother questions him about Loretta. What has she said about living with Dean? Has she mentioned whether they're planning to stay? Or what they're up to over there? Will they be going back to Short Creek anytime soon?

The interrogation follows four days of silence from his parents about Dean and Grandpa's place. The one time Jason tried to ask about it, his father brusquely replied, “I don't know what they're up to over there, son,” and when Jason had started to say something more, his dad interrupted angrily, “What did I just say, Jason?”

“So now we're talking about it?” Jason says to his mother.

Her pressed lips go white. Her forbearance face. She turns her back to him, stands at the sink, and lets the water run full blast. She hisses, “Your uncle is making a
spectacle
of himself!”

Jason almost says,
You're the one that has me taking her to seminary
. But he doesn't.

 • • • 

On the way to pick up Loretta, Jason tries to figure out what to put into the new Sanyo eight-track deck slung under the dashboard. He settles on Sweet. “Fox on the Run.” Perfect, he thinks, and yet within one minute she asks him if they can listen to something else, and tunes in the country station. “Rhinestone Cowboy” is playing, and Jason groans. “I cannot listen to this music.”

She reaches out and turns up the volume, and belts out
, “‘There'll be a load of compromisin' / On the road to my horizon . . .'”

“Noooooo,” he cries, snapping off the dial. She laughs, alert and alive for the first time all week. It comes off her like a charge, and Jason reads it as something shared between them. Love's little seedling.

“I don't think I can stand one more minute of Brother Kershaw,” he says.

“So let's not go.”

So simple. So amazing.

“Go where instead?” he asks.

“I don't know. You tell me.”

He knows just where. “I'll take you to Twin Falls,” he says. “Show you Evel Knievel's ramp.”

She shrugs. Says okay. She is the most beautiful human being Jason has ever seen, lit up with her love for him. Right? The greening, luscious seedling of love? Her hair is pulled back, her wet brown eyes glow as they scan the desert. She needs saving, and it has been arranged for him to save her, but how? It must be what she wants, too, though this thought is buried so deep in Jason's assumptions that he doesn't actually think it. It is simply what occurs, it is simply what men do: rescue women. Superman, Spider-Man,
Batman—rescue women. John Wayne rescues women and so does Clint Eastwood. On TV, the guys on
Emergency!
and
Baretta
and
Kojak
and
The Rockford Files
all rescue women. It's their job.

For the half hour it takes to drive to Twin Falls, Jason tells her about Evel Knievel. He describes his jumps, details the bones he has broken and at which stadiums, the numbers of buses and cars he has surmounted, his outfits, his retirements and his coming-out-of-retirements. Jason tells her of his own ramp building and driveway jumps—though he does not mention his posters or Stunt Cycle action figure. When they reach Twin Falls and cross the Perrine Bridge into town, the sun is up but the canyon remains doused in shadow. They pull off at the overlook and Jason points out the ramp, a sloped hill of dirt a quarter mile away on the canyon rim.

Loretta stares. “That's it?”

“That's it.”

“You drove me out here to show me a pile of dirt?”

“Well. I drove you out here to get out of seminary.”

She giggles. Is this good? He thinks it is, though he is disappointed at her inability to see the grandeur of the ramp. He pulls back onto the highway, heads back toward Gooding. He begins to tell her about the day he came to see the canyon jump with Grandpa. He mentions the lie, and how much he had loved the lie, and how happy he had been to have this secret from his parents, and how fun it had been to actually be there, to see him, to watch all the crazy people, and how even though the jump had failed, disappointing him to the bone, he had actually liked it, too, in some way. When they had pulled Evel Knievel out of that canyon with a crane, and he waved at everybody with that same grim, purposeful look he had before he jumped, it was like he wasn't even embarrassed.

“It was just, I don't know, still cool,” he says. “I don't know why.”

“I do. Maybe. I mean, he tried something amazing.”

“Yes!” Jason says. “That's right. He tried something amazing.”

Jason tries to give her a significant look. A look of deeper communication. She looks back, possibly puzzled. Jason thinks of Evel Knievel crashing in England, bones crushed to dust, insisting on standing to address the crowd. He thinks,
Okay. Go
.

He says, “Are you okay living there with Dean and Ruth? I mean, happy and everything?”

“I guess so.”

“You know what people think it is?”

She doesn't answer. He tries again.

“Is it what people think it is?”

“No,” she says, so quietly Jason can barely hear it. His mind allows itself to believe her, because she wouldn't lie to him now that they have Evel Knievel between them. She says something he can't hear.

“What?” he asks.

“What it is, is nobody's business.”

She stares straight ahead, chin tucked in, refusing to turn. Jason shrinks. Gazes at the highway with his hands on the wheel.

“It's family business,” she says.

 • • • 

Jason tells Boyd about it later, finally tells him about all of it.

“Dude,” he says. “What'd you think she was going to say?”

 

EVEL KNIEVEL ADDRESSES AN ADORING NATION

We just sat there in that truck, tinted windows, cab full of Buddy's goddamn cigarillo smoke, and waited for that miserable fuck to come out of the concert hall. That “writer.” The one who wrote that book we will not name. We had a bat, one of those new metal softball numbers, and Buddy had his billy club, police-issue ironwood. It was like looking at the ramp from the end of the runway, our insides an electric gelatin, like we were being turned from something dull and dumb into something grand, and we knew that feeling well enough to know that we had to focus on it, feel it, try to seize it though it would not be seized, because we were heading into the air now, into the divine space, and we would only be there for a few seconds, for glimpses and flashes, and then we'd be down again, and maybe the landing would be hard and maybe it would be soft, but it would be a landing nevertheless.

He comes out. Just look at that fucker. Pale denim bell-bottoms, boots like some California faggot, nice and clean with shiny leather and little heels, faggoty boots, and a shirt made out of that fuzzy shit like a towel, and his hair all Farrah Fawcett, and bronze sunglasses, and a little smile on his pudgy face, a tiny confident smirk,
and we were relieved to discover that upon seeing him we did not lose any of our desire for the moment, that we were energized, inspired, set upon a righteous path. In his book, he wrote all manner of lies about us—about us, about our mother—and now, here, he would pay. Pay for each individual slander, and then for his larger trespass against us: the taking and perversion of our story, the holy scripture of our life.

He didn't even run. Just fell down and let us do it. His soft body felt like a sack of wheat under our blows. The bones in his forearms gave way as we struck him with our bat. The Tennessee Thumper. Aluminum as shit.

People have told some lies about this—have called us a coward for taking Buddy to hold him down. We were not afraid of him. We wanted him held down to make it worse when we hit him. So he couldn't curl up, cover his head, protect himself in any way. This was so much worse. So very much worse, and that was his punishment. We chose it carefully, and were prepared for him to die, America. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord, and we sayeth that, too.

He screamed like a girl, Mr. Book Writer did. Screamed just like you'd think with those faggoty boots and that hair.

 • • • 

By then, we had grown and grown. We had become so large, so multitudinous, that we sometimes felt as if we were exceeding the boundaries of our physical form.

They made a movie. All they had to call it was
Evel Knievel
. It sold itself. George Hamilton made the thing. Wrote it and starred in it. When he came to ask us for permission, came to our hotel
room in the Sands to ask us to sign the deal and take the check, we made him read the script, start to finish. At first he wouldn't do it, but we took out that shiny new Luger and pointed it at him and said, “Read it, motherfucker,” and he read it, and he trembled, and we signed.

It was a mistake. We make them, occasionally. On film, George Hamilton looked soft and weak, and somehow he made the scripture sound like shit:

“Ladies and gentlemen, you have no idea how good it makes me feel to be here today. It is truly an honor to risk my life for you. An honor. Before I jump this motorcycle over these nineteen cars—and I want you to know there's not a Volkswagen or a Datsun in the row—before I sail cleanly over that last truck, I want to tell you that last night a kid came up to me and he said, ‘Mr. Knievel, are you crazy? That jump you're going to make is impossible, but I already have my tickets because I want to see you splatter.' That's right, that's what he said. And I told that boy last night that nothing is impossible.”

As if we could be imitated. As if you could pretend to be us.

 • • • 

We spent our time in jail for the beating and we smiled our way through it. We called in limousines to take us to our work-release jobs—to the shit-shoveling, broom-holding, tray-filling labor they tried to punish us with—and so we called our people and had them line up sixteen limousines outside the Los Angeles County jail, and all these guys got a ride, showed up for the shit shovel in a limousine, thanks to yours truly, and they did not forget it, these guys, they worshipped us, just like everyone else. And when the
jailers complained, and the judge hauled us in, and told us he had half a mind to restore our full sentence—first-degree assault, he called it, a two-year hitch—we simply smiled and apologized and told him, “Why, Your Honor, I merely wanted to return to these men some of the dignity they may have lost within the walls of incarceration, not to make light of the punishment, Your Honor, but to return to these men some sense of their own natural grandeur, their own native royalty, so they might see themselves as something other than low, something more than criminal, and return to society with the hopes and dreams that might make them all better men,” but still, they said no more limousines, no more press conferences at the jail's back door, and we said, Okay, sure, thank you, Your Honor.

It was hard. It was humbling and hard, America, and don't you forget it. We swallowed that down, and we swallowed everything else in those days. The toy people pulled their deals, and that was the hardest, because we were rolling in the toy money then—the wind-up racer, the action figures, the bicycles with the Evel Knievel nameplates, the Evel Knievel cane. On and on and on, little idols of the god in every house, and every one of them sending us the purest American love there is: the dollar. But now we were losing that love. Our agent told us to lie low for a while, let it blow over, but no: we called a press conference and apologized to the judge—wink!—for turning his courtroom into a joke, if that's what he thought we had done, and pledged to take it more seriously from then on.

Winked at the press boys, and they howled. Like broads, the newspaper boys. Give 'em a wink and a story and they'll drop right to the floor.

Got home after all this and what did we find? On the gate—
that marvelous fucking gate, the scrollwork, that beautiful Butte artistry—was a little handwritten sign:
SEE THE SON OF EVIL KNIEVEL JUMP. TWENTY-FIVE CENTS
.

Eleven years old, he was. Little fucker. Couldn't even spell the old man's name
right.

L
oretta is awake, lying on the makeshift pallet behind the blankets tacked up in the basement, light filtering through the shelved jars of peaches and tomatoes, when Ruth taps down the stairs and calls, “Good morning, Sister.” She waits for Loretta to answer before going back upstairs. Loretta sits up. Her insides coil and uncoil. She has been awake for hours.

She brushes her teeth at the deep washbasin and washes her face and hands with the blackened bar of industrial soap, and puts on her dress. She can't stop thinking about Bradshaw up there, at the table already, probably, grinning and grinning.
Here
. Here to help with the rabbit drive. Here to help set up Zion's Harvest in its new home. Here in the constantly watching world. He will sit there, the truth of him and her showing in her face.

She comes into the kitchen, and there he is, cheeks stuffed, eyes upon her. The sight of him fills her with sick thrill. Outside, framed in the window above the sink, Dean argues loudly with a man
standing in front of a TV news van—KMVT-11, “Your Local News Leader.” Other pickups and vans have parked in the driveway as well, and groups of men are moving around out there. Strangers. Dean has said this will be a way of establishing themselves in the community. A way of distinguishing himself from his brother.

“Like a welcome-home party,” he said.

 • • • 

Jason clomps across the yard in his rubber boots, and goes into the tank room of the milking barn. Behind a swinging door, he sees his dad at work between the chutes, aiming the sharp, hissing stream of a hose at a shit-splattered udder. The suck and gasp of the machinery obliterates all other sound, and milky air fills his sinuses. At the sink, behind the gleaming silver tank, he fills the bottles, attaches the large red nipples, and loads the wire carrier. Heading for the calf pen, dull with weariness, he looks at the edges of his boots, crusted with bits of grassy manure and half-digested bits of hay, and thinks of the day when he will sleep as late as he wants to and wake to sweet-smelling air.

It sucks, the milking, but it sucks less than seminary. Today is Saturday, but Jason has returned to morning chores full-time ever since the day he and Loretta skipped seminary. That night, Ruth called his mom and said they didn't think Loretta would be going anymore, because the other kids made her feel out of place. “I'll bet they did,” Jason's mom said drily when relating the conversation over dinner, and no one else commented. Jason finds it infuriating that no one else seems to think about Loretta. About what they need to do for her. All his mom and dad can consider is their embarrassment.

So he'd stopped going to seminary. A minor insurrection, but one that his parents fought every day, in indirect ways. He could feel them eyeing him, wary, trying to get a read on the best way to overcome this and set him back on the path. When he had first told his parents he wouldn't go to seminary anymore, his father had stopped and blinked, as if he hadn't understood the words, and then he said, “That's ridiculous.”

Still, now, day after day, even this morning as he upends the bottles in the wire holders, watching the calves slurp hungrily at the thick red nipples, Jason clings to this:
Still think it's ridiculous, Dad?
Over there, Dean is getting ready to have his bunny bash. The rabbit drive. Talk about ridiculous. Talk about ridicule. It's been in all the papers, on the TV news. The Humane Society has raised hell about it. Ridiculous
.

Jason is retrieving the empty bottles when his father comes crunching up in his canvas jacket and red-and-black Scotch cap. He is unshaven, and the gray on his hollow cheeks makes him look weak. Sick, even. Something in him has crumbled lately, and Jason holds this against him.

“Need to replace those nipples yet?” Dad asks.

“Nope.”

“You keeping that white-faced bully out of the others' milk?”

“Yep.”

Jason can feel his father struggling for a way in, and he is glad not to help. From the far back of the milking barn, across the pasture and the patch of rocky desert, he sees trucks and motorcycles gathering in the driveway of Grandpa's house. Dean's house. The yard light is on, and Dean and a few other men are unloading rolls of orange temporary fencing from the back of a half-ton truck. A few hundred yards down the road, on the other side of the house,
two VW vans sit along the shoulder, and people mill about in the barrow pit. Jason knows from the morning paper that some bunny huggers from Sun Valley have planned a protest.

Jason says, “You going over?”

“Naw. I'll pass.”

“I'm going.”

Dad nods. Takes off his hat and scratches furiously at his scalp. “There's no way this can do anybody any good.”

Jason starts gathering the rest of the empties.

“You can come to think that doing what you want to do and ignoring everybody else is the right thing to do,” his dad says. “The honorable thing. Because everybody else is dumb or dishonest or mistaken or something. That's what your uncle thinks—that everyone is just wrong about everything, and the only thing to do is ignore them. Maybe it is, sometimes. But usually the honorable thing to do is think about others. To consider others, and the way your actions might affect them.”

“Affect us, you mean.”

“I mean everybody. Us, too, but everybody. People all over the country are going to know about this. And when those reporters start writing about it, they might get more interested in your uncle and what's going on over there. And then . . .”

“Then what?”

“Then the story gets all that much better.” He coughs. “Worse.”

The sun is all the way up now, air warming. They both know that whatever is happening with the story at Dean's is already happening. It's burning like a fire. Since Dean taped up Ruth's handwritten signs on flag stationery at the co-op—
JACKRABBIT DRIVE! YOU BRING A CLUB, WE'LL SUPPLY THE FOOD!
—it has energized the town. Crop prices are lousy, the football team is losing, and people
have fixed upon the bash. Kids talk about it at school. Some of the popular thugs are for it. Some object on the grounds that it is redneck and uncool. Certain farmers—the angry ones, the political ones—wrote letters to the editor of the
Gooding County Leader,
anticipating the criticism that would follow the event. “If New Yorkers don't want us to harvest these pests, maybe they'd like to take them home to Central Park.”

“
And,
” Dad says, “this thing—it's not just that it looks barbaric. It is barbaric. Just awful. You hate to see anyone enjoy something so bloody.”

He puts his hand on Jason's shoulder and squeezes.

“Probably the least effective way to get rid of jackrabbits is to stand in the desert with a club and try to beat them all to death,” he says. “It's just dumb.”

Jason ignores him and walks back toward the barn. He doesn't want to bash any bunnies himself. But he's absolutely going.

 • • • 

Loretta and Samuel set up the Zion's Harvest table, while Dean and Bradshaw load fencing into a pickup. She has to remember to call him Baker. Zion's Harvest is a big part of this day. “Two birds with one stone,” Dean said. It was Ruth's idea; if they're moving up here, they'll need the business to grow fast, she reasoned; the rabbit drive is the best marketing opportunity they'll have. She has a mind for that, Ruth does—for imagining what others need and how you might speak to it. Loretta and Samuel tape the butcher-paper sign to the front of the table, sitting at an angle to the driveway so everyone who drives or walks in will see it:
ZION'S HARVEST BULK FOODS
.

Ruth is alert to something in the air. Something with Bradshaw.
Loretta felt it at breakfast—attention flowing from Bradshaw toward her, and Ruth's awareness of it. Loretta feels them both watching her this morning. And she feels self-conscious about the drive, about the people who will be here, about the watching that will come with that. The noticing.

“Bring out some of them buckets,” she says to Samuel.

He's moody, hanging his head because he's not with the men.

“Go on,” she says. “And bring some flyers, too.”

At breakfast, Bradshaw had been scooping up huge mouthfuls of scrambled eggs. She noticed a dullness in her response to him that she'd never felt before. After months of Ruth's horsey breakfasts, Loretta found herself more attracted to the steaming plate of eggs than to Bradshaw, sitting there sock footed and sleepy eyed. Loretta had looked eagerly to Ruth and asked, “Eggs?” Ruth approached with a bowl of oatmeal and dropped it in front of her. “Mush,” she said.

People drift into the driveway, clumping in groups and talking, cups steaming. Dean's hired the auctioneer's food truck to serve hot drinks and lunches. Everyone carries a baseball bat, or a length of pipe, or a two-by-four.

Bradshaw comes to the Zion's Harvest table.

“Hidy, there, Lori,” he says, pretending to look at the clipboard where customers can sign up for the newsletter. “Holy Christ, I'm about to leap over this table.”

Loretta can see Ruth in the corner of her eye, pausing at the laundry line.

“Keep your powder dry,” she says. She pays meticulous attention to the sign, to making sure it is straight along the table.

“My powder,” Bradshaw says, “is about to blow.”

He adjusts his cap. Rubs his face. Takes a deep breath. Exhales.
His face is strained and splotchy, and even across the table she can smell him—armpit and work clothes and a hint of the chasings of the night.

“I hope you're ready, girl,” he says. “Because I am ready.”

He is not a demon or an angel or anything of the sort. She sees what he is, because he is surrounded by others just like him—bandy-legged men in fringe-heeled Wranglers and curl-toed boots, caps with their bills tight, some with chew-can rings in the back pocket, spitting, scuffing their heels, boring and dumb. He waits for her to respond to him, and something mean seeps into his look when she doesn't.

“You
are
ready,” he says. “You are.”

 • • • 

Boyd shows up with his mom's aluminum softball bat, the Tennessee Thumper, tapping it in the palm of his hand as Jason opens the door. He bounces on the balls of his feet like a prizefighter, the frayed bells of his jeans splashing softly around his ankles.

“Time to get some bunnies!” he says, as Jason emerges and they start walking over.

“I'm not getting any bunnies,” Jason says. “I'm a complete spectator.”

“You are such a pussy,” Boyd says happily. “You need to kill something.”

“That's stupid.”

“Such a pussy.”

Boyd is as happy as Jason has seen him in weeks. He's been bitchy and bleak since his mother refused to let him drive off to South Dakota for the American Indian Movement protest. Jason hadn't understood it—hadn't understood, even remotely, Boyd's
expectation that his mother would let him go—but Boyd took it as a grievous offense. “This fucking place,” Boyd said, disgusted. “This fucking town. This fucking school. This fucking point and time in the history of the fucking world.”

He and Boyd trudge through the days like prison inmates in a chow line. Jason picks him up for school every morning, they bitch and listen to
Houses of the Holy,
go to classes and meet again at lunch to bitch some more, return to afternoon classes, and meet again after school to bitch some more. Teachers, parents, cops, laws, principals, bishops, uncles, aunts, cousins, girls, cars, store clerks, waitresses, television stars, the bicentennial. Dean and Loretta. This could not be their lives. They could not breathe. Boyd kept saying he was going to the AIM protests anyway. There or somewhere.

“Just go,” Boyd said. “One of these nights, just—gone. And not for two nights, either.”

As they approach Dean's, Boyd begins swinging his bat before him like a sword.

“Feel my wrath, bunnies!” he calls. “I am the avenging angel! Re-
pent
your evil ways!”

They walk down the county road. Ahead, Jason sees trucks and cars parked in a line that spills out from the driveway. The animal rights protesters are clustered in the barrow pit across the road. Farther ahead sits a TV van from Twin Falls, and between them stands a stocky, thick-haired man with a microphone interviewing a woman in a patchwork dress and loose, long hair. Jason feels the creep of embarrassment—the prickling crawl up the back of his neck, the flush, the sense that an appraising look is aimed from every direction.

He looks for Loretta but doesn't see her. The food truck is set up
behind the house, beside a picnic table laid with plates of doughnuts and a thermos of hot chocolate. There's a table with a sign advertising bulk foods, and Samuel—Dean's oldest—stands behind it, speaking to no one. It is warming up, frost melting off the windows and the metal fencing. You could almost take off your jacket. Men clump in knots of three and four, holding baseball bats, two-by-fours, and nine irons. Out in the desert behind the house—far back, on the other side of the barley field—a group of men stretches out lines of orange temporary fencing, making a chute. Once a fire is set on the far side of the bunchgrass stands, the men on motorcycles will drive the jacks toward the chute, and the chute will lead the jacks into the circle of men and boys. Afterward, supposedly, the jack meat will go to jails and groups that feed the poor.

Boyd spots a man he knows from his mom's softball team and they banter about who will kill more rabbits. The man holds a small wooden club, a fish-killing club, and he demonstrates how quickly he'll strike.

“That big ol' bat's gonna wear you out, boy,” he says, air-whacking rabbits at a furious pace. “Look at me go. You'll never keep up.”