Daredevils (15 page)

That was where we sat that afternoon. On the tip of that bullet. September 8, 1974. We walked through those throngs, touched those people, and saw all that we had done to them. We rose to the ramp on a throne, and they roared. We thought of Caesar and Kennedy, of Alexander the Great. We thought of ascension. We believed in the bullet of the moment, the pressure of the instant, the nobility that must live in us, that must, because we saw all it had grown into, what we said, we saw all that what we said had become, and they saw it, too, these people, and they came to worship.

And then we put our foot into the cockpit, and felt the heel of our boot drum on the tinny bottom of the Skycycle.

And we knew.

Boyd

Never in a million years, Boyd thinks, would anyone have guessed Harder could pull this off. An hour ago, even, as he waited at home, one duffel bag packed, praying his mom didn't come home early from the Lincoln Inn, even then, Boyd never imagined they would really leave. Never imagined that Harder—good boy and Eagle Scout, who whispered when he cussed and flinched when you fake-punched him—would dredge up the balls for it.

But here they are. Going, going, gone. They are crossing midnight as they pass slowly through Wendell in the big LeBaron, and Jason sticks to the speed limit as they pass under the sign in the middle of town—
THE HUB OF THE MAGIC VALLEY
—past hotel, grocery store, bar, grain elevator, and onto I-84.

Jason drives, Loretta rides shotgun, Boyd's in back. Honestly,
Boyd doesn't see what the big deal is. Skinny brown-haired chick. Bet she can bake like a grandma already. He's thrilled to be going, but baffled at Harder, his oldest friend and still a mystery: baffled that he's done this and why. Running away from his rich life. Jason took this car from his parents, though it was sort of his car, he drove it all the time, the 1970 Chrysler Imperial LeBaron. Pea green with a black top, it slides over the road on soft shocks and pulls hard around corners. A land ship. The stitched seats are wide and deep, and the speedometer spreads across the dashboard, needle moored at the top so it swings upside down through the miles per hour. The all-or-nothing heater blasts noisily, and the new eight-track player hangs under the dash. They clear Wendell with a silence building in the cab, a tension inside of that silence because none of them knows how to be together. Jason begins to speed up as he approaches I-84, engine straining, and the upside-down needle ticks past fifty, past sixty, and the LeBaron settles into its speed now, they enter the freeway, and it feels to Boyd as if they have left the earth and are flying.

Loretta says, “Who wants pie?”

Runaways,
Boyd thinks. That's what they'll call us. How soon? Will his mother discover he's gone before morning? Will the radio put out bulletins? Will the newspaper run their photos?
Runaways
. It's hard to see through this toward any kind of ending, but for now, he has become something he was not before, and it will always be cool.

“Shit yeah, I want pie,” he says.

Jason is quiet at the wheel. He drives and drives. Boyd thinks,
Don't pussy out on us, Harder
. Loretta leans forward and withdraws a foil-covered pie from the bag between her feet, and fusses
with it on her lap for a second, and then hands back a piece of pie with a bloody mass spilling out the sides.

“Rhubarb,” she says, smiling at him crookedly, squintingly, mischievous.

“Ugh. Okay.”

“Don't do me any favors,” she says, turning back to the pie. “Jason?”

Boyd says, “Rhubarb's one of those things—like, who do you think first decided to put that in a pie? It's like smoking. Who did that first? And then, after doing it just once, why'd they keep doing it? I mean, I understand what happens if you smoke fifty times and get used to it or something, and then you like it or can't stop or something? But that first guy who smoked? Why'd he keep smoking?”

“I'll have some pie, thanks,” Jason says.

“And that first guy who made rhubarb pie? Why'd he keep making it?” Boyd says.

The pie feels heavy in Boyd's hand, like a dead thing. Loretta hands a wedge on a napkin to Jason, a wet bud of tongue peeking from the corner of her mouth.

“Ruth's rhubarb pie,” she says triumphantly. “She's going to be so pissed.”

Jason takes a bite and groans. Loretta reaches across and wipes a gelatinous smear from his chin, as if he were a toddler. Boyd takes a bite himself, and his mouth contracts: it is as sour as a lemon.

“Holy shit,” he mumbles, as he rolls down the window. He spits the mouthful into the rushing winter air, and a gelatinous mess schlumps along the side of the car. “Is that pie a joke?”

Loretta doesn't answer. She holds a third piece of pie in her hands and looks at it, lost in thought. Then she says, dreamily, “That's how she makes it.”

She rolls down the window and gives the pie an underhand toss into the icy night. Brisk air rushes in, and Boyd throws his out, too. Jason hands his piece to Loretta, and she tosses it out as well, then picks up the pie tin from the LeBaron's floor and holds it in both hands, like she's gripping a steering wheel. She turns sideways and sticks the pie out the window with both hands, preparing to lob it into the night.

“Do it,” Boyd says. “Yes.”

She waits, waits, and an exit sign emerges on the road ahead:
TWIN FALLS 1
. She lobs the pie gently into the air—an expert move, Boyd thinks, the move of someone who understands the physics of throwing something at a road sign from a moving vehicle. It clangs thinly, leaving a Doppler wobble in their wake. Boyd whoops like a cowboy, and Loretta grins thinly as she settles back in. And what is Jason doing up there, so quiet? Is he regretting this? Being scared?

He better not fuck this up.

 • • • 

They turn off at Twin, drive across the bridge. Thin patches of cloud stretch across the stars. It is not much past one, but even the lights ahead can't erase the feeling of an emptied world. Boyd waits for Jason to say something about Evel Knievel, about the ramp over there on the canyon rim, silhouetted, but he miraculously doesn't. Loretta turns the radio knob, staticky AM blaring and fading, and stops on a preacher, calling to them from out of the darkness in a gentle Southern baritone.

“‘I looked when He opened the sixth seal, and behold, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became like blood.'”

Boyd groans and says, “Change it!”

“‘And the kings of the earth, the great men, the rich men, the commanders, the mighty men, every slave and every free man, hid themselves in the caves and in the rocks of the mountains, and said to the mountains and rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of Him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb! For the great day of His wrath has come, and who is able to stand?”'”

“I am!” Boyd says, and Loretta turns off the radio. Jason sticks in Kiss's
Hotter Than Hell,
and Loretta smiles at him while she lowers the volume and unfolds a map. “Go through to Highway 93,” she tells Jason. She's the one who charted their course: down through Nevada to Short Creek, where she has some things to pick up. Then they'll figure out what's next. Jason says Ohio, to see Evel Knievel's next jump; Loretta says the ocean, because she's never seen the ocean; and Boyd says Pine Ridge; but none of them seems convinced that there really is any next.

“God-
damn,
” Boyd says. “We are actually doing it. We're on the road. We're free. Totally, totally free, you guys. Check it out. Feel it. Pay attention. This is what it feels like. Feel it. It feels good, right? It feels great.”

Loretta yawns. Jason says, “Should we stop somewhere?”

She says, “Elko? I was thinking Elko.”

“Hell, no,” Boyd says. “We've got to go, go, go.”

“I might just close my eyes for a second,” Loretta says.

“Go, go, go, go, go,” Boyd says, and pounds the back of the seat with his hands.

They pass through Twin Falls, come out on a highway where the night becomes a velvet crush weakening the headlights as they plumb south toward Nevada. They pass a deer once before they even know it, just standing on the side of the road, eyes red in the flash of the LeBaron's lights.

 • • • 

Loretta sits up, rubs her eyes, and says, “Let's play a game.”

“Like Monopoly?” Boyd says.

“Like, we each say one thing about ourselves. Take turns and go around. One thing at a time. It'll help us get to know each other. Just one quick thing. About whatever you want. I'll go first. I'm married to Dean. Get that right out of the way. We got married last year. My folks set it up. I didn't want to.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Boyd says, pretending to be amazed, but also genuinely amazed. “What? Like,
what
?”

“Knock it off,” she says, smiling back at him. “It's not a legal marriage. Enough about it. Now you, Jason.”

“Can't we talk about this some more?” Jason says.

She slugs him on the shoulder.

“Go.”

“I'm two merit badges from Eagle Scout. Probably not going to make it.”

“Boyd?” Loretta asks.

“I,” he says, “am a supersonic jet pilot. I am a master contortionist and a student of the dark arts. I know the secrets of the Bermuda Triangle. I've seen
Jaws
four times.”

“
One
thing,” Loretta says, amused. “Okay, now me. I like country music.”

Jason says, “I like rock music.”

Boyd says, “I like Zeppelin, Foghat, Bad Company, Cream, Kiss, Pink Floyd, the Rolling St—”

“One thing.”

“Oh.
One
thing.”

“Okay,” she says. “I was born in Sedona, Arizona.”

“I was born in Gooding, Idaho,” Jason says.

“I was born in Emmett, Idaho,” Boyd says.

“I can't stand church.”

“Me, neither.”

“What's church?”

“Okay, then: I don't even believe in God,” she says. “I think.”

Boyd finds this incredibly sexy. He says, “I'm half Indian. Which just about every kid around here claims but with me it's true. You can tell by looking. This nose? This nose is a Nez Percé nose. Or maybe Shoshone. Don't know my dad. He's Native, but Mom doesn't even know what tribe. It's like she made it with some guy from Europe, but didn't bother to find out if he was from France or Italy. His name is Francis Daubert. Frank.”

“One, Boyd.” Loretta turned to him, smiling.

“Oh. Forgot.”

“I want to live in Texas,” she says.

“Why Texas?” Jason asks.

“No questions. Or maybe Montana.”

“Okay. I've gone to church every Sunday, more or less, my whole life,” Jason says.

“I want to live anywhere but Gooding. I hate it there.
Hate
it there. Dumbshit capital of America. Can't wait to get out—oh, wait, I don't have to wait to get out. I am out. Hooray.”

The stories add up, sort of. Jason talks
Lord of the Rings
and steadfast Samwise Gamgee. Raising calves for the livestock sale. Going to see Evel Knievel, of course. Boyd tells of picking up his mom one time when she passed out at the Mirage. Loretta talks about an argument with Ruth over her refusal to learn how to knit and sew—how Ruth began leaving knitting needles and hanks of yarn in her bedroom. She says she would rather go to jail than live in that family. “Though I love those kids,” she says.

The game ends. Loretta and Boyd argue about the bunny bash. Loretta hated it—the blood, the violence, the brutality, the sport of it—and Boyd defends it, says they're just rodents and need to be killed, and it's no better to leave out poison and sneak away than it is to stand there and take care of it with your own hands.

“It
is
different,” Loretta insists. “If you poison them, you're not doing it because you
enjoy
it. There's something wrong with enjoying that much death and blood. It's creepy.”

She turns in her seat and points a mock-accusatory finger at Boyd.

“You're creepy.”

Boyd cannot help but notice. Saying it seems to make her very happy.

Jason

It has all gone wrong so quickly. How long have they been on the road? Two hours? Jason's watch says it's nearly two
A.M
., and ahead is the moon glow of a casino, an island in a parking lot of nacreous light, and Loretta has announced that she would like to drive.

Jason is slow to answer, and she says, “Please?
Please,
Jason?” and Boyd says, “Jesus, Harder.” Jason's whole idea of this is vanishing. Has been ever since the bunny bash, really. She's the one who said she wanted to go first. Later, she was the one who reached out to him—coming to him in the early morning, as he fed the calves, to plan their escape. She was the one who set their route to Short Creek, because she needed to get something she has not mentioned, and she was the one who said they should go through Nevada at night, because Nevada at night is like a wasteland and Utah is full of cops. What does it mean, he thinks, that Loretta knows what Nevada is like at night and how many cops there are in Utah?

She is the one flirting with Boyd. She is the one who has not looked at him with any kind of special look, any sign whatsoever. She is the one who said,
Let's go to Elko on the way,
and when Jason said,
Elko?
she is the one who said,
Come on. It'll be fun.

They are barely into Nevada now, in Jackpot. Jason pulls the LeBaron into the far reaches of the parking lot. The sign reads
CACTUS PETE'S
, a giant neon cactus against the sky.

“Yippee,” Loretta says. She's practically bouncing in her seat. Boyd says, “Don't kill us, Lori,” and Jason thinks:
Lori? Lori?
He says, “Be careful. It's my parents' car,” and whatever it is that's wrong about that seems immediately clear, but Loretta is the one who says, “Are you sure it's still theirs?” and laughs and slaps her palms on the dash.

It's all wrong. All turned around. And, if Jason is honest with himself, it has been ever since she saw him in that Rolling Stones shirt, with that fat, lascivious tongue. Since she said, “I have to get away from here.” Since she figured out how, in the days after that pronouncement, to communicate with him and plan their escape.

It has all been her. He keeps telling himself that he is her rescuer—because that is who he is supposed to be, that is how the story goes—and yet it has always been her.