Daredevils (16 page)

 • • • 

In the days after the bunny bash, Jason had conspired with every circumstance to find a way to Loretta. Two days later, he had stopped by their place after school, under the pretense of borrowing a fence puller of Grandpa's. But Uncle Dean was in the yard and he simply got it from the shed. No sign of Loretta. The following day Jason brought it back. Ruth answered the door and told him to put it back in the shed, without inviting him in. Each time, before he arrived he would itch with nerves, wondering what he would do if he saw Loretta, and afterward he felt bereft. He called their house three times that following week, and every time, Ruth answered. “Harders.” Like she was angry at the name. Jason simply hung up.

Meanwhile, just as events called for him to be a man of action, he became a mooning girl. Lying in bed, awaiting sleep, he
imagined scenarios in which he and Loretta ran off together, giddy in love. He pictured them at the ocean, kicking at the waves or chasing a kite. He imagined them at a Grand Canyon overlook, arms around each other as they gaped into that humongous hole, or at Niagara Falls, holding hands in the mist. These were places he had seen in magazines or on television. He never imagined them anywhere he'd actually been—never at the new mall in Twin Falls or at a football game at the high school. He concocted fantasies in which he struck back at Dean—punched him, or cracked him across the back with a two-by-four, or held him at gunpoint while he and Loretta backed slowly out of the house. But mostly he just thought of Loretta and him together, living in a city apartment like the Newharts, all sliding glass and evening light. He imagined her coming to him, draping her arms around his shoulders, pressing her nose into his neck. Chaste scenarios, impossible and lifeless. And whenever he faced the fact that he didn't know her at all, he filled her in with his imagination, and her character became marked by one and only one outstanding quality: a blind, unwavering attraction to him.

He didn't see her for days. He began to wonder if he had misunderstood what they had said to each other that bloody afternoon. Weren't they talking about doing something? Something for real? He thought they were. He waited and plotted, and blew everything up in his mind, filled himself with ludicrous notions and expectations. He felt that now, finally, he understood what people talked about, what they sang about—this wrenching, consuming ache. Wasn't it grand? Every lousy song on the radio was for him. For them.
“How sweet it is to be loved by you.” “Lovin' you is easy 'cause you're beautiful.” “Love will keep us together.”

Eight days after the bunny bash, Jason arose at five thirty,
walked through the stiff silence of the house to the mudroom, stepped into his boots and work coat, and walked out into the ice-metal cold foretelling the winter to come, across the dirt yard to the front room of the barn, where he dipped each of the eight large, hard plastic bottles into the tank and topped them with the red rubber nipples. The whoosh and spray of the barn carried on behind the filthy swinging door with the yellowing window. Dad standing behind it. Jason carried the heavy rack out to the calf pens, and upended them in the wire holders, and stood waiting, watching the little piebald slurp and drool on jittery legs, listening to a truck somewhere across the desert shift whiningly into gear, noticing a hiss and rustle behind the shed. The misted sun tried to rise from the horizon. Jason heard another hiss from the direction of the shed, followed by the staccato bray of a calf. And another hiss.

Then, as he turned toward the sound, his name.

“Jason.”

Peeking out from the side of the shed, Loretta's face was tensed and red in the cold air, and her hair was tied back, covered by a gray wool hat, thick and hand knit, that made her face seem frail and small—chapped, rose cheeks, nub chin. Nervous eyes wide and gleaming. A ranch coat, denim and wool lined, and no dress. She wore the slightly baggy, square-looking jeans she'd worn to seminary. She smiled, and he tried to smile back. Here they were. Here they were. He looked around, walked over. An arrhythmic spasm crossed Jason's face, and he wondered what he looked like to her. She seemed to be waiting for something, so Jason said, “What are you doing here?”

“I've been trying to talk to you forever,” she said.

“I've been trying to talk to
you
forever.”

“I've called. I've come over.”

“
I've
called.
I've
come over.”

Her brow pinched, and she frowned a smile, as if she thought Jason was messing with her.

“Okay, never mind.” She took a breath. Her tone was the tone of a schoolteacher laying out the rules. Someone burying fluttery doubts under a plan. “We need to talk. Am I wrong about that? That we need to talk?”

“No, we do.”

“I mean, I thought we had a little something, a little agreement or something, and if we don't, then fine, but I thought we did.” She didn't seem nervous, really, just set loose. “You asked me, right? You asked me where I wanted to go, and then I couldn't talk to you, I couldn't find you, because everything is so screwed up at my house, and maybe at your house, too. I called, and you never answered. I came over here with preserves, and ran into your mom. I came over Saturday and pretended to return a rake—again, no you. I was starting to think I had imagined the whole thing. And that was terrible, because I got so excited about everything.”

She paused for him to say something, but not for long.

“I didn't imagine the whole thing, did I?” she asked.

“I don't think so.”

“You don't think so. You mean you're not sure? You mean—what? You don't think so?”

“No, you didn't imagine it.”

She peered at him intensely. None of this—this talk assault, this forward speed—was part of his picture of her.

“Does Dean know you're here?” he said.

She bugged her eyes.

“Are you insane? Like I'd tell Dean I came over here to plot my getaway?”

A noise burst, like gravel being scuffed, and Jason nearly leaped. She smiled and said, “Easy, bronco.”

This was not right. She was not supposed to be the cool one.

“Okay, so. You remember what we talked about?” she asked. “At the rabbit thing?”

“Yes.”

“You remember what you asked me?”

Was this it? Were they leaving now? He was scared. He had been such a good boy, for so long, and he didn't know how to be different.

“Where do you want to go?” he said, quoting himself.

“Right.”

“Yes,” he said. “I remember.”

The calves brayed and trotted around their pens. Dad would be expecting him to return with the empties soon.

“I know where I want to go,” she said.

She had it all worked out. She knew everything.

 • • • 

Loretta is a fast, fast driver. Sometimes she takes her eyes off the road, and the LeBaron drifts, and Jason has to speak up before she notices, and then she laughs.

She is talking about Elko. She says she'll get them a room and pay with a check she stole from Dean. She'll take care of it. It's all so wrong. Jason emptied his bank account and brought all his mission money—$71.53—but she doesn't need even that.

“Dean has checks?” Jason asks, because he knows that Dean distrusts banks.

“For business. For emergencies,” she says happily. “This seems like an emergency.”

Good Lord, she is beautiful.

“Wait,” Boyd says. “Why would they take a check from Dean from you?”

“You can talk just about anybody into anything,” she says. “If you really try.”

Loretta

She said Elko because why not Elko? She said Elko because she wanted to do every free thing, now that she was free. She said Elko because Bradshaw had told her stories about Elko. She said Elko because she wanted to see what the boys—these boys, these eager children—would say to her if she said Elko, and what they said was interesting.

“Isn't that out of the way?” Jason asked.

Boyd said, “Holy shit, Harder, you are a super fun guy.”

Dawn breaks as they draw near Elko. Down between the mountains they come, winding and flattening toward the neon constellation ahead. Boyd snores gaspingly. For the past couple of hours of deep night, Loretta has felt the exhilaration of those first hours dampen. She is overtaken by gloom, by this moment and its failure to be transcendent. She had come tonight thinking what a nice boy Jason was, what a simple, clean thing, and that he and she were a team, whatever that meant, and she had thought maybe it meant something. Perhaps it would grow, this clean, fresh thing. But soon enough she saw Jason's irritation with Boyd, saw his confusion and jealousy, and realized he was simply another part, as was Boyd, of the wide world that looked at her and wanted to turn her into something of theirs.

It is past three in the morning when she guides the big sloppy car
into the parking lot at the Stockmen's, the pit of light in the center of town. A bank of windows, a neon bull's head, and a huge sign in red glowing like the entrance to hell on top of it all:
STOCKMEN'S HOTEL
.

Jason says, “I don't know,” and Loretta wants to hit him.

She parks the car and says, “Wait here,” and sets off. As she walks across the parking lot she feels it again—the lift, the joy, the hum—and she enters the front doors, smells cigarette smoke, and hears the tinny bells, the trilling of adrenaline that sings to her from the worldly world.

Inside, the Stockmen's opens cavernously. Footpaths are worn in the center of the brocade carpet, and the decor suggests a fake barn—all lassos and riverine wood grain. It is lit up like midday, but nearly deserted. The long check-in desk has five stations, though only one person sits there now, a young man with a bolo tie and boils along the temples who glances at Loretta as though she has startled him.

The hum is at full speed when she approaches the desk. She stops, acts confused and embarrassed, and says, as though she doesn't know where to begin, “I'm in kind of a jam here, and I wonder if you can help me.”

She explains herself, and shows him a blank check.

“I don't know,” the night clerk says slowly.

He is holding the check between his thumb and forefinger, as if it might be tainted. He looks at the name and information—Dean Harder, d/b/a Zion's Harvest—and then at Loretta, and then back.

“I swear,” she says. “He's my father, and he gave me these. For emergencies. It's completely good, I promise.”

The boy exhales loudly and screws up his face.

“I don't know,” he says.

She doesn't have a driver's license or an ID. She's got nothing to prove anything. She looks at him beseechingly, and says, “Please?”

“I'll have to ask my manager,” he says. He leaves and returns with a tall, thin woman, who is made taller by the hair swooped upon her head like an ice cream cone. She has wrinkled skin and golden hair that strikes Loretta as unnatural, almost orange, and she smells strongly of perfume, and she is smoking a long, thin cigarette. She puts her big brown eyes on Loretta and sucks hard on the cigarette, and the wrinkles on her face centralize.

“We might have to give the bank a call Monday,” she says—she pronounces it “Mondee.” Loretta feels certain she will not do this, and says, “Of course. Sure,” and the manager shrugs and says, “Okay,” and hands the check back to the boy and leaves without another word.

And then Loretta—flying again, just flying—asks, “Can I make it for a little over?”

Walking back to the car, she spots the first pale hint of morning along the horizon rim to the east. A mere lightening of the dark. It is approaching four
A.M.
Back home, she thinks, no one is even awake yet. No one even knows they're gone.

Becky

She wakes with Lou, as she does every morning, and as Lou leaves to begin milking, she slides to her knees at the side of the bed and prays. She thanks the Lord for this day, this life, for her husband and son, Louis and Jason, their farm here in Gooding, their faith, their friends, their family, even the newly arrived woes and strife of family. She prays and prays, not thinking words—not the way Lou prays, in carefully selected, familiar phrases—so much as images and sensations. She finds herself filled, as always, with a warmth, a reaction in her body that she can only believe is the arrival of a presence, prickling her nerve ends, adding substance to her flesh, joining her. It is the sensory manifestation of the Lord, the weight of Him in the body, and it fills her with the knowledge of God, the knowledge that brought her into this church. It was not belief or faith, she thought. It was physics. Force and mass. It was
knowledge
. And so she is strong in the face of everyone she left behind—her faithless family in Wyoming, her Catholic friends from college—because she knows that they can't help what they don't know.

She had come to Gooding to teach school and met Lou through a fellow teacher, and her conversion was quick: she felt the weight of the Lord the second time she attended sacrament meeting. She knows her family can't help but tell the tales they have been told,
repeat the heresies and bigotries against Mormons, and though they long ago stopped trying to get her to change, she knows it is always there, their sense of having lost her to this thing they call a cult. Now, though, something new has flamed inside her since the arrival of Dean and Ruth and their children and that girl, and she must pray against it, must pray to drive from her body the fear that they prove the doubters right, they illustrate the worst of what the ignorant already believe.
Polygamy,
her friends and family always said to her.
The Mormons are polygamists
. And she had insisted they were not. But here the polygamists were. In her own family. She prays against Dean and Ruth, prays not just that they will leave but that they will never have been, that they and what they are will be undone.