Daredevils (24 page)

They pass semis in a blind wash of white. Station wagons and pickup trucks. The Nova swishes but stays road bound. Sometimes Baker lets out a little whoop, and sometimes he yawns and then shakes his head violently, as if to drive away his fatigue, but mostly he stays clenched, focused, two hands on the wheel, leading with his chin. The flask stays in his pocket.

An hour south of Salt Lake, the snow stops and the freeway clears. Baker slowly relaxes, sits back, and holds the wheel with one hand, but he still seems agitated. It is past ten.

“So, tell me,” Baker says. “Were you fucking her? Was this other kid fucking her? The Indian? God, let's hope not. Let's hope not for her sake. I mean, she's in a big enough shit storm already without fucking some mongrel dog.”

“Don't say that,” Jason says—and Baker pounds him on the shoulder, fist like stone driving him into the door.

“Don't start giving me advice about what to say.”

Jason rubs and rubs his arm, and the moment he releases it, Baker pounds him again. The new pain vacuums up Jason's breath, leaves him cringing and wincing, close to tears.

“Okay, goddammit?” Baker says.

“Okay.” Jason says.
“Okay.”

“So. Who was fucking her? Somebody was fucking her.”

“No.”

“Kid, you must be the stupidest guy on the face of this earth. Your buddy was fucking her. Is fucking her. I mean, that's the way this works: you ate all your horses, it won't stop snowing, and somebody else is fucking your girl.”

He pounds the steering wheel with the heel of his hand. Fear seeps through Jason. He tries to sort out the message in the story: Who ate the horses? What was the snow?

“Get it?” Baker says. “You're fucked, is what it is.”

They pass a sign that glares in the Nova's headlights:
CEDAR CITY 112
. Jason knows that is where they will leave the freeway and head down, into the desert, to Short Creek.

Baker yawns—the yawn swamps him, against his will, large and powerful—and then shakes his head violently, as if to drive it away. He sniffs. Nods.

“Yeah, I'm afraid Lori was fucking your little redskin. Worse than I even thought. I mean, you live your life, you make your
plans, you try to do the right thing, and what happens? What happens, kid? I'm asking you.”

“I don't know.”

“You do know! You do know because I just told you! What happens,” Baker says, “is you ate all the horses and it won't stop snowing and the girl you love is fucking some dirty Indian nigger and you have to figure out what to do about it.”

He whistles and clicks his tongue.

“Gotta figure out who to eat.”

 • • • 

She feels almost sick going back into that house. A little dulled and confused. An unplugged lamp sits on the floor, cord like a tail, and trapezoids of moonlight, cast through the windows, hang on the bare walls. Ghosts of missing furniture haunt the carpet.

“This place is huge,” Boyd says, flipping on a light. Loretta flips it back off. “Let's not go announcing ourselves,” she says. She sets down her duffel bag. The gold inside—the coins in the canvas sack, rolled tightly inside one of her denim skirts—clangs dully on the linoleum entry. She kicks off her shoes. Force of habit. Ruth's rules. Boyd wanders the carpet in his dirty gray tennis shoes, gazing up at the high ceiling like he's in a cathedral. It's past ten, late for around here, but who knows who might see a light and get interested. She's not sure whether the United Order might stop by. The God Squad. She's not sure it isn't officially Uncle Elden's house or the Order's house. They own everything. But Dean's key worked on the front door, and she's soon to see about the others. She's gripping them so tightly they might be cutting into her palm.

It's time to tell Boyd, probably. She looks at him to begin and sees he is coming her way, his best attempt at a romantic look on
his face, eyebrows raised. It never ends, these men coming at her. She can tell he is nervous, half embarrassed. She misses Bradshaw and his crazy confidence.

“Stop it,” she says, though she smiles to soften it. “I've got something to show you. To tell you.”

They sit on the floor in the darkened, moonlit room. She explains about the coins she has. She explains about the gold that is still, now, she thinks, locked in Dean's office. “Gold!” Boyd says. “Fuckin'-A!” She unwraps and shows him the coins, thick and heavy, gleaming richly, almost amber in the dim light, and she lets him hold them, and he seems awestruck. He keeps saying it, a prayer or a curse: “Gold!” She tells him about the Sutter Creek gold, how important it is to Dean, and how important that is to her.

“I want to take it from him, and I want him to know I took it from him, and I want him to know that I knew how important it was to him when I took it,” she says.

Boyd is looking at her strangely.

“Lori,” he whispers. “Why did he leave that gold down here? In an empty house?”

“What?”

“Why did he leave it here? Why would he?”

It does not dawn on her slowly. She does not have to think it over. It reminds her of a crash she once had on a bicycle; one moment she was moving along one way, and then she abruptly was not, and the blow that struck her felt not like it came from a specific direction but from everywhere at once. Why had she ever thought the gold was here? She couldn't remember.

“Lori?”

She takes the coins and wraps them back up, then goes to the door to Dean's office, the white cube at the back of the room off the
kitchen. The key slides and turns. She puts on the light in the windowless room. It's half emptied, too—some of Dean's books remain, some files, a pair of his Red Wings on the floor beside the chair, one tipped on its side. She goes to the cabinet, to the bottom drawer, and takes the smaller key between her thumb and forefinger. The key slides and turns, and the drawer pulls out, and the drawer is empty.

“Well, shit,” Boyd says.

She sits in the chair heavily.

“Who cares?” Boyd says.

She
cares. This is not his to judge, to care about or not care about. She kicks idly at the metal drawer, and then again, harder. She thinks back: The Sutter Creek gold wasn't with the coins, she knew that. Didn't she know that? And she had looked everywhere through that house up in Idaho, everywhere she could think of, every chance she had. And then—what? Why had she decided it was here? He told her. Hadn't he? The idea seems so ludicrous now. So clearly, obviously ludicrous. She feels stupid. As stupid as Jason. As stupid as Boyd.

“We should get out of here,” she says.

“We've still got the coins, though,” Boyd says.

She doesn't answer.
We
. His big hurt brown eyes. How could she have done what she did with him? She feels a pang of judgment about herself: whore. Boyd flops onto the couch, arms outstretched, exhausted. She goes to the carpeted, banistered staircase and starts up. She will get her things, her shoebox, and they will go, and that will be okay, it will be all right, it will still be great that she has done this, that she has fled Dean and that life.

Boyd shouts, “Maybe we could just live here. Join the brethren.”

We.
She reaches the top of the stairs, pads to the end of the
hallway. Two small framed things remain on the walls, quotations Ruth has embroidered: “David's wives and concubines were given unto him of me . . .”

She goes to her room. The sagging queen under the denim quilt. The dresser and its grimy mirror, where she watched Ruth braid her hair for the wedding. Out the window she sees the occasional farm light, spread thinly toward the spiny desert mountains. Loretta opens the drawers, empty, empty, empty. Then, in the bottom drawer, she finds her shoebox. Her eyes have become hot. She lifts out the box, opens it. Her throat feels thick and her scalp prickles. She sits on the padded stool before the dresser, and looks through the box. Her grandmother's Christmas ornaments. Her diary. “The man I will mary.” Earrings. Arrowheads. A hazy photograph of herself as an infant, her parents huddled around her. She looks up and is startled by her image in the mirror: grief stricken, gunshot. She feels dimmed with a sorrow for all that is bygone and impossible and flown away. For all that has to be the way it is simply because it is over now, it has happened, and is never to be gotten back.

 • • • 

Jason wakes to a shove from Baker. “It's go time,” he says.

The Nova creeps with its lights off, down a dirt road lined in ditch grass. Forms take shape. Ahead is a barny, big-shouldered house. They're in the country somewhere. The stars look tiny and still, as though racing away from the earth.

“You snore like a girl,” Baker says.

“What time is it?”

Baker chuckles.

“You're a funny kid. It's late.”

“Where are we?”

“We're there, buddy. The Crick. We are there.”

They stop in front of the house. It is dark, but for thin light through curtains in the biggest window. Ahead, sharked crookedlyonto the border where the lawn peters out into dirt, sits the LeBaron. Baker leans on the steering wheel and works his chin against a knuckle, staring at the house. Jason can see now that it is cheap, simple—wood siding in dirty cream paint, asphalt shingles. Small, dark, gabled windows. One thick strip of paint has peeled loose and bowed to the ground. A tricycle lies on its side on the grass.

“I don't know what to do here,” Baker says. “What do you think I should do?”

“Maybe we ought to just leave.”

“Good one. Okay.” He pops the steering wheel with both palms. “Let's go see our friends.”

Frosty grass crackles underfoot. The concrete step has a worn mat with the words
WELCOME TO OUR HOME
. Scuff marks cover the bottom of the wooden door. Baker looks around, thinking. He seems unconcerned about Jason and what Jason might do, and Jason wonders why it is so obvious that he will do nothing. Baker takes the doorknob. When it turns, he gives Jason a look of happy surprise and pushes it open. Inside, a linoleum entryway opens onto a carpeted cavern of a living room, half empty, that opens onto a kitchen at the back, where a single light is on. A disassembled living space remains—a love seat and end table that suggest where the rest of the missing furniture used to be. A couple of lumps—duffel bags, piles of clothes, a pair of tennis shoes that he recognizes as Loretta's—sit on the floor. Baker walks in. Yawns. He stares out the kitchen window. The refrigerator hums. Baker
turns and steps back through the kitchen quietly, and as he is doing so a door along the side of the room opens, and Boyd walks out, looking down as he buttons his jeans.

Baker's face opens brightly, delighted. Just as Boyd is noticing there is something amiss, Baker says, “Hello, shitbird,” and takes three rapid strides across the room and slaps Boyd against the side of his head with such force that Boyd stumbles, then sits on the ground. Baker strikes him again, a meaty clout on the ear, and Boyd topples over, covers his head with his hands. From upstairs comes a voice. “Boyd?” Loretta's voice.

Baker looks toward the stairs and bellows in answer, wordlessly, a joyous animal roar that he seems to draw upward from somewhere deep and black and far below the earth.

Then he's taking the stairs, two by two.

 • • • 

Bradshaw? What?
Bradshaw?
Loretta can't put together an idea of why Bradshaw is here, but there he is, Bradshaw, barging in the door while she sits there, shoebox in her lap, and he is smiling and moving so forcefully that her body knows to be terrified even before her mind does: it drains and parches and trembles.

Bradshaw knocks the shoebox from her lap.

“Hey, baby. Surprise.”

She shakes her head. He stands over her. His fury fills the room.

“You're not? You're not surprised?”

“Brad,” she starts.

He leans down, puts his face so close she feels his nose tickling the hairs of her nose, and bellows: “SHUT UP!” A blast of liquor. He stands and inhales vigorously through his nostrils, and then
says, almost dreamily, almost as if he were talking to himself, “Just shut up, Lori. Let that be your plan. Now get your lousy faithless ass downstairs.”

Out the door and down the hall and down the stairs, and there is the next surprise: Jason. He stands in the kitchen, with the aspect of a jackrabbit staying perfectly still to avoid the eye of the hawk. Boyd is curled on the ground, hands to his head.

Bradshaw says, “What a couple of chickenshits.”

 • • • 

Jason thinks he doesn't recognize Loretta, though he does. She has lost control of her face. She called him Brad. Why is she calling him Brad, and why is she calling him Brad in that way?

“Thought you two might take off while you had the chance,” Baker says. “I guess you must like me.”

He takes Loretta by the arm and guides her to the love seat and shoves her into it.

“You two come on over and sit here, too,” he says.

When they are arrayed—Loretta in the love seat, Boyd and Jason sitting on the carpet in a kind of triangle—Baker makes a show of looking from Boyd to Loretta, from Loretta to Boyd. He makes a show of trying to think it through, sort it out.

Finally, he looks at Jason, waggles his thumb between Boyd and Loretta, and says, “Told ya, stupid.”

 • • • 

Bradshaw takes a deep breath. Pulls the flask from his back pocket and tips it up until it's empty. He tilts his head back and forth, as though carrying on a debate within himself.

Loretta says, “I was getting ready to call you.”

“Yeah?”

He begins to pace. Heavy on the boot heels.

She says, “Yeah,” and he nods and stomps, and says, blearily, “Your plan was that you'd leave without telling me, take off with these jokers, come down and get it, and then call me?”