Daredevils (14 page)

“You won't even knock 'em out with that little thing,” Boyd says, holding the bat before him. “These rabbits are going to know they got hit by me.”

Jason goes for a doughnut. He snags an old-fashioned from the paper plate, and the first bite falls apart like dirt in his mouth. He looks at Grandpa's house. He's been inside just twice since he died. Now Jason wants to run in and find it just the way it used to be—same couches and furniture, same drapes, same neat and orderly kitchen with the smell of yesterday's bread or today's roast, the big boxy TV in the corner with the doily and the glass figurines
on top, the cool dusty smell. He wants to find that vanished place and sleep in it.

Loretta's head appears in the kitchen window. She gazes impassively for a moment, sees Jason, waves quickly, and ducks out of the window. Jason forces down a mouthful of doughnut. Dean materializes beside him, his stiff back and beard in Jason's peripheral vision. Dean holds a Styrofoam cup, and nods hello. Jason wonders if Loretta has told him about their conversation—that he asked her about the arrangements here. Dean looks at Jason for an uncomfortable few seconds.

“Need a club?” he asks finally.

“I don't think so.”

“Just gonna use your fists?”

Dean betrays none of the signs of someone who's joking. “Maybe you can help the ladies with the food, then,” he says when Jason doesn't answer. “Where's your father today?”

“He's home.”

Dean nods.

“Figures.”

 • • • 

They set the desert aflame about two hundred yards away, a wavering orange hyphen on the land. Loretta walks out with Ruth, and they stand in a half-circle of watchers, nested behind the half-circle of clubbers. The men and the boys. Standing apart, separated from the line of other watchers, is Jason, hands stuffed in his pockets. She sees that his friend, the chunky, kind-of-handsome Indian guy, has joined the circle of clubbers, around twenty-five of them, who start whooping and hollering when the fire is lit. Bradshaw is the
loudest, and he swings his club—the weapon he made himself, hammering nails into a four-by-four. He shakes his hips lewdly and dances, and Loretta knows he's performing for her. A couple of guys start beating the ground with bats, raising low clouds of dust.

Rabbits emerge on the desert ahead, erratic black shapes cohering into a mass. Three men on motorcycles sweep back and forth, working the flanks of the herd like cowboys in a cattle drive. Untended, the flames reach a thick stand of sage and burst into the air. Dean, standing at the center of the circle, shouts, “Who's on that fire? Who's got that fire?” Nobody answers, but it won't burn far in the damp and cold. The jacks develop a chaotic bristling unity, a dark carpet rolling and tumbling across the desert.

Loretta doesn't want to see this. She looks at Ruth, Ruth with her countenance set firmly, and Ruth turns back, almost softens, almost allows a sense of unease to slip into her demeanor, then shrugs. The jacks race closer, within a hundred yards, then seventy-five, flowing through the sagebrush like a burst river. Loretta sees the Indian kid turn to Jason, act out a maniacal laugh. Jason stands back, apart, she thinks, alone among them all, and that takes a kind of courage. In front of the pack of rabbits are the fastest few, darting this way or that but trapped by the rolling mass behind them. As they near, they bring a drumming, as if from a herd of distant horses, and then the first of them enters the wide-open mouth of the fencing.

“Get ready!” Dean calls, and the men pound the ground with clubs and bats, and it seems to be happening too fast now, rabbits leaping and weaving, rolling over any fellow creature that slows or loses a step, and then the most beautiful sight: rabbits breaking from the pack and soaring, majestic ten-foot spans, twenty-foot
spans, across the moving mass beneath them, and the rabbits now twenty yards away, ten yards, and each leaping creature seems hung in the air, slowing as everything below them gains speed.

“My word,” a voice says, and Loretta registers that it is Ruth, blanched and stunned, and when she turns back the men are bent to it, heaving their weapons downward again and again, filling the air with the sound of wet cracking and thudding blows. A few jacks straggle through, fugitives, panic eyed and zigzagging, though many more fall at the feet of the men. A mist of blood rises. An ammoniac stench. The terror of the doomed creatures imprints itself on Loretta's mind. One rabbit slips through, dragging a leg and shrieking. Almost childlike. A copper taste floods Loretta's mouth as the lone rabbit shrieks and drags itself toward the watchers and away from the bashers, the men pounding down and down, the rabbits before them a fleshy mound, black with damp and dust. Every few seconds a freshet of blood spurts into the air, like a blown sprinkler valve.

Ruth breaks suddenly forward, leans over, and takes up a hunk of lava rock. She raises it in two hands above her head and hurls it downward, and the shrieking stops.

 • • • 

Looking at the circle of men exhausting themselves dumbly, blindly, exhilarated with the sport of it, leading their children into it, hand in bloody hand—looking at their farmer clothing, their overalls and snap-button shirts strained thin in the back, their
hoo-rah
s and
yee-haw
s
,
looking with a disdain that builds with every blow—Jason feels a severance. A finality.

He is not of this. Not of them.

When Ruth smashed the rabbit with the broken leg, turning the creature into a silent mass of thick blood and gleaming organs, Jason went distant in his mind, and somehow it stopped touching him, until it was silent and the pounding was over. Slowly, the men leave the circle. In the pile of carcasses, an occasional jerk shudders through. A frantic scuffling. Just another incomplete maiming. Dean steps to the front of the group, blood sprayed on his shirt in a way that makes Jason think of speckles flying from a roller dipped in too much paint, and adopts the demeanor of the patriarch.

“We owe you men a debt of gratitude,” he says. His face bears a scrim of dust with a black smear above his left eye. He folds his arms and bows his head.

“Our Father in Heaven,” he says, and Jason hears that when Dean prays, he sounds just like Jason's father, “we come to you today with our hearts full of gratitude for the assistance you have given us in protecting our crops and our land. We thank you, oh Lord, for giving us the strength and will to accomplish this task, unpleasant though it may be . . .”

He prays on, thanking the Lord for the food provided for breakfast and lunch, and for health and families and the abundance of their lives, and for the Gospel—which makes Jason think about what Dean means by the Gospel, and how that differs from what his parents believe about the Gospel, and from what the Catholics and Methodists and Lutherans believe about the Gospel—and for sending his only begotten Son to redeem all mankind.

Jason looks around. Most of the men are bowing their heads, hands folded. Boyd is looking around, too. Their eyes meet, and Boyd smiles. The sweet spot on his baseball bat is smeared black and matted with spiny hair. Jason feels shock, a padded distance
from the moment. He turns his head and finds Loretta staring at the ground, skin paled across the bridge of her nose, beside Ruth, whose eyes are closed.

After the prayer, the men load the carcasses into gunnysacks and pile them onto a flatbed truck. Boyd and Jason walk back toward Dean's house with most of the others, Boyd giddily exultant and Jason silent. It is sunny and cool, and the bitter smell of burning ditch grass comes across the desert, distinct from the scorched, sweet scent of the sagebrush fire. The shouting from the roadside has mostly died down, and the TV van has left. It is almost lunchtime. A small crowd of subdued bashers gathers in Dean's yard around the cook wagon, which is serving hot dogs, hamburgers, and chili.

“Them little buggers is fast, I tell ya.”

“Faster'n shit. You can't try to hit one.”

“No, sir. You just have to hit into the bunch.”

“I don't know how many of those little dudes I got—I bet thirty or forty.”

“You probably got twice as many as you think.”

“Kinda fun, really.”

“Good cause, anyway.”

Boyd goes to the cook wagon, and Jason walks to the edge of the yard and looks out to where they just were. A couple of trucks and a few men are finishing the work out there. Smoke from the burned-out fire drifts thinly. Then Loretta is beside him. Something tugs her face downward. She seems tiny inside her dress, and she is looking at him so intently that he pulls away before catching himself.

“My word,” she whispers.

“I know it,” he says.

He is close enough to reach for her. To touch her. They stand
side by side, facing the desert. Loretta sniffs. She says, “I have to get away from here.”

The clouds in Jason's mind clear, a gear springs into place. It would be easy. It is so possible. His grandfather floats out of the space-world of death, his voice in the truck as they rode home that exhilarating Evel Knievel Sabbath, as he told Jason about leaving home at seventeen to enlist in the army: “Had a fire in my britches, just to get somewhere. Anyplace else.”

Seventeen—Jason's own age.

He isn't trapped. They aren't trapped at all.

“Where do you want to go?” he asks.

She looks at the desert without seeming to see it. Ruth calls, “Loretta,” in a voice without music, and the moment scampers away.

 • • • 

Loretta turns and glides toward the house. Where does she want to go? In her future, she anticipates all manner of experiences and freedoms, wears any kind of fresh clothing, eats candy and beef all day long, drives a pink car, and wears Tussy lipstick. But where is it? What place?

She stops at a picnic table to gather paper plates and cups. Bradshaw walks by, does a little sidestep shuffle for her. Dust muddies the blood on his hands, forearms, shirt, and pants—the filthiest patch covers his groin and thighs. He shoots her a wink.

In her peripheral vision, Loretta can feel the shape of Ruth, watching from somewhere. Bradshaw moves by, but then Jason comes up, gangly and shy, flushing.
Go away,
she wants to say, because it's too much, and Ruth is right there, watching, and why is she watching?

Jason picks up a ketchup-smeared plate and says, in a blatantly obvious way that he seems to think is covert, “Where do you want to go?”

Bradshaw's braying laugh cuts through the noise. Ruth's face seems locked in place, inside the kitchen window. Loretta moves to another picnic table. Focuses on gathering paper plates. Jason isn't moving. He's watching her. He has decided something, and it makes her nervous.
GO AWAY
. Whatever it was she saw in him during the bunny drive—a stubborn distance, a defiance—now seems merely obtuse. Juvenile.
GO AWAY
. Ruth comes striding across the lawn, holding a plastic garbage bag. Loretta can feel Jason's radiant hurt; it must be apparent to everyone. Ruth stops before Loretta, snaps the bag open before her. Loretta dumps in her trash, and Ruth turns to Jason, repeats the motion, and Jason tosses the one plate he's holding into the bag.

Ruth shakes the bag to settle it. “Okay,” she says, pointedly.

Jason—
stop it, stop it now, just go
—looks stubbornly at Loretta and says, “See you later.”

Loretta does not answer.

Ruth says, “Tell your mother we'll have you all over real soon.”

“For rabbit?” Jason says.

Loretta loves and hates that equally.

“They fry up fine,” Ruth says.

 • • • 

Jason walks home—leaves Boyd and goes. His life has been too empty, and now it is too full. Impossible to absorb. Are they doing something now, he and Loretta? Is this real?

At home, he watches a football game on TV without paying attention. The news comes on, and he watches the KMVT report
about the bunny bash. There's footage of Dean arguing with the reporter, but what they show of the bash is distant and unrecognizable. It looks like a football game, a big scrambling mass. Mom hollers questions from the kitchen.

“Ruth said she's going to invite us over for dinner,” Jason says.

“Let's not hold our breath,” she says.

At dinner, Dad doesn't mention the bash until he's started on seconds, and he doesn't bother to look up from his plate.

“Everywhere I went today, people were asking me about that circus,” he says. He jabs his fork in the direction of Dean's place. “Didn't take him a couple months to turn the whole place into a joke.”

“Lou,” Mom says. “That was over there.”

“That place is this place,” he says. “We're all in the same place.”

He chews rapidly, forking in bites as though he were punishing the roast beef. Angry scarlet spackles his hairline. Without looking up, he asks Jason, “What about you? What'd you think of it?”

“It was terrible,” he says. “It was—gross.”

He remembers the rabbit that came through broken, and Ruth, and the stone.

“Told you you wouldn't like it,” Dad says crisply, dropping his fork on his empty plate with a clang.

Jason burns. His self-righteousness. His useless certainty. It is all one piece. It is all together, what happens here and what happens there. That place is this place is that place.

Where do you want to
go?

 

EVEL KNIEVEL ADDRESSES AN ADORING NATION

The heels of our boots never sounded right in that thing. That should have been a warning. The X-2 Skycycle—red, white, and blue, our name spangled all over the bastard, our own personal rocket ship, and when you stepped in and your boot struck the metal floor it echoed like a piece of tin. Cram your ass in, the thing creaks and groans. This, you think, is the vessel to carry us to glory?

So much time and effort and fuckery precedes the moment. Any moment. Each one is so frail, so pushed along the tracks by everything that came before, everything you promised, everything you feared. We started talking canyon jump before we ever jumped a thing. It was in us, this faith. First it was the Grand Canyon we would jump, and then it became the Snake River, and then time pushed us down those tracks and pushed the canyon jump from a thing said to a thing said often to a pledge and then a promise. Time warped it. Turned it real. The steel and the rivets and the steam engine and the leases and the newspaper boys and the things we said, the things we said fueling it, the things we said and the rocket and the parachute and the marching band and the things we
said, the prayer in them, the calling forth of them, the things we said entering the air as sound and sign, gathering atoms and molecules and simple fucking weight, America, gathering power, gathering heft, gathering mass, until they become true things, freestanding and undeniable, made into a vessel to carry us forward, a bullet—a train a bullet a star-spangled rocket ship a whatever the fuck, a universal torque impervious to physics and the boundaries of glory.