Daredevils (11 page)

Uncle Louis smiles and looks around, waiting for people to settle. He and Dean avoid each other's eyes, touch the silverware, scratch at their jaws, watch their folded hands in their laps. Louis glances past Jason, but his gaze snags on the T-shirt. That mouth. That tongue. He doubles back and stares.

“Son,” he says quietly. “Go put on something appropriate.”

Jason moves his head twice as if preparing to speak, tucking it back both times, and looking into his lap. Aunt Becky reaches with a plate of rolls over his shoulder, sets it with a thump on the table, and pats Jason on the shoulder.

“Let's go,” she says.

He ducks, mopey, pushes back, and clunks out of the room.

Loretta wants to go with him. To see what his room is like. To see the kinds of clothing he might choose among, the sorts of blankets on his beds, whether he hangs anything on the walls. What does it look like, his worldly life?

Ruth and Aunt Becky talk. Dean and Uncle Louis stare at their food, watching it move from plate to mouth. Jason has put on another T-shirt. On it, a ghostly figure holds a lantern over words and symbols Loretta does not understand: Led Zeppelin. At one point, Jason asks her whether she knows that Evel Knievel is jumping thirteen buses today in London, at Wembley Stadium, his first jump since the Snake River.

Loretta smiles and says, “Who is Evel Knievel?”

Jason gazes at her dumbly. Dean watches him. Ruth watches him. He wears his infatuation like a star-spangled cape.

“It's on the
Wide World of Sports
later,” he says.

Dean shakes his head. “We do not watch television.”

The food goes around and around. The children are quiet, sometimes the young ones giggle, stopping at Ruth's abrupt looks. Dean complains about the jackrabbits. Louis says, “I'm not sure how much more there is to be done about them,” and Dean says, “I am.”

Becky interrupts to ask whether Loretta will be enrolling in high school. Dean, Ruth, and Loretta all stop chewing at once.

“Classes start tomorrow,” Aunt Becky says.

Dean clears his throat, says, “She finished her school already. Tested out. Loretta is one sharp young lady.”

“What about seminary?” Aunt Becky asks.

Seminary. The early-morning church class. Loretta would definitely be going to seminary if she were just a regular Mormon girl, a niece living with family. What about seminary?

Dean and Ruth look at each other. You can sense them gauging, measuring.

Dean clears his throat. “I guess we hadn't thought of that.”

“She could always ride in with Jason,” Dad says.

Jason alerts like a bird dog. He is so cute, this boy. And he likes her so
much.

 

EVEL KNIEVEL ADDRESSES AN ADORING NATION

Most crashes are blur and smash, a sensory blast that's far too fast to register. There's just before, followed by an obliterating sensation, a destruction that somehow does not destroy, and then the adding-up after, the backward tracking, the figuring out, the mending.

But this one, America.
Shit
. This one made every bit of itself known. We felt it all.

 • • • 

After the canyon thing, we had no choice. When the world tries to crush you, your only choice is to crush back. So: Wembley Stadium. Thirteen buses.
Wide World of Sports
. Jolly old England.

Hell must be a whole lot like England. Everything somewhat normal. Somewhat regular. Then you're talking to someone and they say
I saw you on the telly,
or
You could take the lorry,
or
Are you 'avin' a go?
whatever it is they say, and it's just enough to tilt you on your fucking ear, and then it's just one strange thing after another, driving on the wrong side, kings and queens, everything's a pudding. We arrived two weeks before the jump, left Linda and the kids at home—the kids, Jesus Christ, you're not supposed to
say this, but the goddamn kids were just killing us then—and we set that town on fire.

We felt somehow angry at the English.

We felt that the English were not appreciative enough of all we had done for them. Everything America has given them. The rotten-toothed, ratty little fuckers.

“You should just say thank you whenever you see an American,” we told our limey publicist, Harry O, while he took our picture loading that pretty Smith & Wesson .38, surrounded by cash on the bed at the Tower Hotel. “You should just say thank you for keeping us from being fucking Germany.”

“Are you 'avin' a go?” he asked us. '
Avin' a go.

“Learn your history,” we said.

For fun, we pointed that beaut right at him. Right into the lens.

“You,” he said, “don't know your history from your arse.”

You will never understand, America, how difficult it was for us not to pull the trigger that afternoon, how heroic the challenge to our being, our honor, our noble whatever the fuck. But we let it go, we let him go, we let him live. That photo ran in every newspaper over there for weeks.

 • • • 

So, yes, this is after the fuckup at the canyon, the screwing those “engineers” gave us. They worked on that Skycycle for two years, tightened every bolt, honed every spark plug, did all the math, and then fucked up the parachute bay? The parachute bay?

It's embarrassing, is what it is. We put our good name out there. Put our life up, is all, put it up for sacrifice, for the entertainment of the people. We climbed into that thing, ready to sacrifice all, like
a modern gladiator, like Jesus Christ, and those dumb fucks with the wrenches, drinking and eating steak all over southern Idaho on our dime and our name and our grace, screw it up, and no one knows who they are, no one writes newspaper articles about what a sham it all was, a fake, no one spins a million lies in the
Los Angeles Times
or
Rolling Stone
about them.

There was only one thing to do. Go bigger.

It was not as hard as you might think.

 • • • 

At Wembley, every moment of the crash announces itself. Every altered atom in our body, each as it altered, a cracking network of breakage running through us, and every instant palpable.

We land on our right shoulder, pulverizing the humerus and clavicle and driving one large crack through the scapula and two vertebrae, and then all the way down the right side of us by degree, crushing and chipping and fracturing, ribs, sternum, pelvis, femur, tibia, fibula, rolling over onto our back and sliding, sliding across the ramp and then the earth, chipping the spinous process here, the transverse process there, finely cracking the facet joints and the vertebral body but somehow not breaching the spinal canal, America, the magic of the thing, our majesty and life, protected. We roll, grinding across the asphalt covered with turf that buckles and bundles under us, and the breakage spreads to the other side of us, and the bike, that heavy fucker, the Harley XR750, lands on us, breaking our legs in seven places, our old friends fibula, tibia, femur, and when we grind to a stop, we feel like a receptacle of glittering, broken glass, like a deerskin bag full of coins.

At first, the massive pain remains silent. Somewhere out there
are ninety thousand people, making noise or making no noise, and then the face of the TV handsome looms in over us, and he thinks we are dead, that's clear, and whatever else has happened here: Fuck that. Fuck him and his thinking we are dead,
because we are not dead
.

We make him hold us up, the TV handsome, we make him hold us up before that massive crowd, and we press it all over him, the breakage, the blood in our breath, the blood tasting of iron and Wild Turkey, and when we stand before that crowd, they fall silent, all ninety thousand of them like congregants in a cathedral, and we speak.

 • • • 

Strange. We can, even now, recall the exact progression of injury from that crash. The tracery of breakage. The order of disassembly. We can recall standing there, being held there, by the TV handsome and someone else, and we can recall the way the sun was dipping down below the top of the stadium, making a series of expanding and contracting orbs of yellow and red against our spotty vision.

But we cannot remember, nor can we believe, what we said that day.

 • • • 

When we came to in the hospital, there were Linda and the kids. We wondered whether they'd been to the Tower yet, whether they'd seen the room. We wondered what evidence there might have been left in that room. We could not recall the final state of things, just the parade of the days before: the English “birds” as quick as the American ones, the Wild Turkey bottles, the golf clubs
on the balcony, the new red Lamborghini parked out front. All that before, then the jump, and now this: family, fatherhood.

Life is stupid, America. But not at all bad.

 • • • 

This is what they say we said:

“Ladies and gentlemen of this wonderful country. I have to tell you that you are the last people in the world who will see me jump. Because I will never, ever, ever jump again. I'm
through.”

O
n the first morning of his senior year, Jason pulls up to his grandfather's house in the LeBaron, crackling slowly on the gravel, and honks. It is 6:45
A.M
., cool and lilac-gray. Jason's stomach pulses, a nervous fist clenching in time with his clash of emotions. All night he planned what to say to Loretta. He will ask her a brash, direct question, a question one of the jocks at school, the popular thugs, would ask. Because he has no idea how to talk to girls, and the popular thugs clearly do, and what the popular thugs do is flirt aggressively. Take liberties. Poke, poke, poke. He will ask her a question as if she were just an ordinary teenager: “Aren't you pissed that Dean's making you go to seminary?”

Gauge her response. Get a read.

He spent last night poring over his Evel Knievel scrapbook, the cutout quotes from newspapers and magazines, trolling for bravado and inspiration. “You come to a point in your life when you really don't care what people think about you, you just care what
you think about yourself.” “If you fall during your life, it doesn't matter. You're never a failure as long as you try to get up.” He built a reservoir of confidence that has leaked away. Loretta needs saving, saving from Dean and all of it, and he feels that it has been arranged for him to save her.

If he could just be the right guy.

As soon as he sees her coming out of the side door, though—dressed like a normal girl, more or less, in jeans and a long-sleeved blouse, hair pulled into a ponytail, features fine and smooth and tensed and lovely—Jason begins cursing himself, knowing that he is not the right guy.

She climbs in. Says hello very, very quietly. Looks off across the desert, showing him the pale pillar of her neck. He backs out of the driveway.

“Excited for your first day of seminary?” he warbles lamely.

“I don't know,” she says, not turning from the window.

She is less perfectly beautiful this morning. A little drawn and sleepy eyed. Jason notices a strange sloping bulge on the bridge of her delicate nose. Which is fine with him. She is a lot better looking than he is, and anything that closes the gap will be helpful.

They ride without speaking for seven minutes. It is much harder than he guessed it would be, sitting alone with her and trying to think of things to say. Then, as the abandoned TB hospital on the edge of town comes into sight, she releases a deep breath—a lush, weary sound—and says, “I hope it's not too weird.”

“It won't be,” Jason says.

He is so wrong. It is too, too weird. They arrive at the church as sunrise blares through the tops of the trees, burnishing rooftops, power lines, and steeples. They park and walk in behind two freshman boys and a girl. The freshmen don't say a thing, don't look at
them. Jason and Loretta follow them in and down the hallway of cool tile into the seminary classroom. Three rows of folding chairs face a blackboard and a little mini-pulpit on a table. Brother Kershaw stands there, reading from a workbook and chewing a pencil, belly straining outward above skinny legs. On the blackboard, three words are whitely chalked:
Remorse,
Repentance, Restitution.

“Brother Harder,” Kershaw says. “Good to see you looking bright eyed and bushy tailed.”

And then he looks to Loretta and his jovial energy lurches to a stop. Jason flushes anew, introduces Loretta as Ruth's niece, who is visiting for a while or maybe longer, and sees the blood is hot in her face, too. Loretta takes the seat in the far back corner by herself, and Jason sits in front of her, not next to anyone, and they each avoid the eyes of the others. There are fifteen other kids there; half the seats are full. A cloud of assumptions fills the room. Loretta sits quietly, filling a notebook page with an expanding spore of tiny squares. Kershaw calls on her just once, after reading a passage from the Pearl of Great Price:

“‘Wherefore teach it unto your children, that all men, everywhere, must repent, or they can in nowise inherit the kingdom of God, for no unclean thing can dwell there, or dwell in his presence.' Why must all men repent?” Kershaw asks. “Loretta?”

She says, in a hushed, glorious voice, “I don't know.”

Afterward, she takes the LeBaron back home. Jason catches a ride to school with Ben Jenkins and Jed Story. The two talk football. Ben's a fullback and linebacker, and Jed plays wide receiver, and they look like variations on a theme: wide-legged jeans, short-sleeved terry-cloth shirts, helmety haircuts parted down the middle and feathered. They tune in the rock station from Twin Falls, Z103 FM, blasting “Ballroom Blitz.”

Jason is happy to be left out of their conversation. But as they pull into the high school parking lot, Ben says, “Hey, Harder,” with the sneer that lets him know he's in for it.

“What?”

“Your cousin's hot.”

Jed snorts.

“She's not my cousin.”

“What is she?”

“My aunt's niece.”

Jed says, “I think that makes her your cousin.”

“You can't fuck her, anyway,” Ben says.

Jed cackles. A brush fire breaks out in Jason's upper intestine. A knife blade pierces his side. Jed slaps his open palm on the dashboard. “You'd make a retarded baby.”

“One of
us
could fuck her, though,” Ben says, waggling his thumb between himself and Jed. “Maybe you could set that up.”

A vial of acid bursts in Jason's stomach. Ben and Jed laugh and laugh, gasping and clutching themselves in glee.

“Knock it off,” Jason says, puny.

“Fine,” Ben says. “Make a retarded baby.”

Jason walks into school alone. He goes to first-period biology and doesn't talk to anyone. He goes to second-period trig, where his only words are an awkward and ignored hello to Corinne Jensen, the former girl of his dreams. He goes to third and fourth periods and doesn't talk to anyone.

He imagines the cloud of knowledge from seminary following him, spreading into every corner of the school. At lunch, Boyd asks him how things are going with the pioneers.

“Hunky-dory,” Jason says.

“They say there's a new girl.”

“A new girl?” Jason returns this with a hard, sarcastic spin. “What does that mean?”

“Hey, this is me,” Boyd says. “You know what it means. And you know what everyone is saying it means.”

“She's my aunt's niece,” Jason says.

Boyd gazes at him. Jason studies the tater tot casserole on his lunch tray: it is a creamy prehistoric ocean, mushroomy and thick, with tawny islands of potato for the swimmers, the strivers, to cling to while they rest and regain their strength. Jason imagines he is on one of those islands, and Loretta is on another one. And everybody else—family, school, church, town, state, nation, world—is the gray, gloopy sea.

Boyd says, “Dude,” and shakes his head.

“It's weird,” Jason says. “I think she doesn't belong with them.”

“People from the twentieth century don't belong with
them.”