Daredevils (17 page)

It is dark. Five
A.M.
She puts on her slippers and robe, and descends the stairs. Turns on the kitchen lights, and one bulb in the overhead fixture fritzes out. She changes it standing on a kitchen chair, and washes the dust and bugs out of the frosted glass bowl of the fixture at the sink. Outside, in the paling dark, the lights of the milking barn look supple and thick. The milking machine hums. Cows low. Becky starts a pan of sausage links, and beats together eggs and milk and cinnamon, and slices the last half of a loaf of wheat bread. She pours a splash of apple juice into the pan with the sausage links and covers it, and then goes to wake up Jason. He will grumble and growl, she knows, complain, ask to sleep in, whine that it's a Sunday, it's a weekend, just a little longer, just a little longer, and Becky prepares to resist him, because she loves him so, this boy, because she wants him to be happy in every small moment, and it has been her lifelong challenge to fight the desire to satisfy him, to soften him with pleasures. There is nothing that feels more vital to Becky than rising early, earlier than the flesh
wishes, to thrust herself into life, and she must teach Jason this, she must force him, over and over, to wake and to go forth, to train the sloth out of him, the way she trained it out of herself, morning after morning.

When she knocks, there is no answer. She knocks again, and again there is no answer—no grumbling, no moaning. She cracks open the door and peeks in, and then she simply stares at the empty bed, the empty room, without understanding, at first, what isn't there.

Bradshaw

Bradshaw wakes on the cot in the basement, surrounded by the walls of jarred preserves aligned on new wood shelves, some bright with color, peach yellow, beet red, and others gone gray and furred with dusk. Right where Lori was sleeping, until he showed up. It is winter cold down there, concrete and exposed pipe and invisible shuffling in the corners, and each new morning briefly confuses Bradshaw, who must absorb and remember.

Upstairs, he hears footsteps in the kitchen. Ruth's making her horse food. They will go now any day, he and Lori. He is ready. He tells Lori they don't need a thing. He tells her he was wrong, down in The Crick, when he said to wait for money, just as he was wrong to let her tell him no. He mutters and whispers to her whenever he gets a chance, and he knows it now, without a doubt, that Ruth has seen. Loretta says wait, wait, soon now, soon. She knows something, she wants something, but they can never talk much.

He was wrong when he said they should wait for money. Everything had already changed, the landscape shifted, by the time he told her that, but he didn't realize it until their moment had passed. How had it changed? What had she said? No.
No
. He had never allowed a girl to tell him no. Never. And there had been plenty of them, starting back in Vegas. High school. His dad off on oil rigs
for weeks at a time, his mom who knows where, the house his own. And there were plenty of them in Cedar City later, girls who would do what he wanted them to. Like it or not. The Mormon girls—half were as fast as hell, and the others would keep their mouths shut. At a certain point, limbs and mouths entangled, no was not something Bradshaw was willing to accept.

But with Loretta, he had. She was
that kind
of Mormon. A whole new territory. He took no for an answer, knowing that yes was up ahead somewhere. What do you call that, if not love? Surely she knows that, Lori does. Surely she knows what he has done for her, what part of himself he has given up, and what she owes him because of it.

Footsteps on the top three stairs, and Ruth's voice.

“Mr. Baker? Good morning.”

Steps retreating. Upstairs, the sounds of the house: chairs dragging, forks on plates. And then heavier steps and a deeper voice: Dean.

Bradshaw pulls on his jeans and chamois work shirt, and steps into his boots. Sitting on the cot, he ties the boots and considers one of the surprises of this journey: He likes Dean. Kind of admires him. Enjoys the fact that Dean seems to trust and admire him in turn, seems to feel that Bradshaw is becoming a loyal lieutenant in Zion's Harvest, and maybe in his wider battles—his battles with the brethren down in Short Creek, his constant inner battle with the worldly world. It's not that Bradshaw won't do what he's come here to do. But sometimes he imagines having a life like Dean's, and the idea draws him in: all those people orbiting you, women and children and women, all yours, all turning toward your light as if you were the sun itself.

 • • • 

Breakfast is mush. That's what Ruth calls it, the oatmeal cooked to spongy softness: mush. Raisins and honey for sweetness. Some whole wheat toast with her homemade jam and no butter. Eating these meals makes Bradshaw desperate for a diner, a cafeteria somewhere with coffee and greasy eggs and glistening hash browns, big bowls of sugar, a drift of cigarette smoke. The only consolation is Lori, every morning, ducking her head toward the food, hiding those eyes. Love, he thinks every morning, love, love. He was not one who accepted love—not like that, not the way they say, the giving over, the loss of control—it was not something he sought or even believed in, necessarily, until Lori seeped into his mind.

Only she is not at the table today. The kids are crowded around, slurping and banging. Dean looms above everyone else, knees wide and head bowed, and he spoons mush into his mouth steadily and purposefully, as though he were hammering a nail.

He looks up when Bradshaw enters and says, “Morning,” and turns back to the mush. Samuel—a zitty little shit who Bradshaw can tell will grow into meanness—looks to Bradshaw and nods, but no one else says a word or turns his way. Bradshaw wants more talk than this house provides. He says, “And a fine morning it is, with this lovely spread for breakfast. Thank you, Sister Ruth.”

She says, “You're welcome,” as she puts a bowl before him. He considers asking where Loretta is, and decides against it.

After several minutes of silent eating, Dean says to Ruth, “Perhaps she needs a little nudging,” and Ruth wipes her hands on a towel and leaves. Bradshaw hears her going up, and then down the small hall, to where he knows Loretta's room is—the one she moved into when he arrived, displacing the kids into sleeping bags
in the living room—and he hears, faintly, a knock and a murmur, another knock and another murmur, and then Ruth's returning steps, down the hall, down the stairs, into the kitchen. She leans over Dean's shoulder, whispers in his ear, and they leave together, and Bradshaw knows something has gone rotten. When he learns that Loretta is not in that room and that no one knows where she has gone, he thinks back on how he knew it—how he felt it—when Dean and Ruth left the kitchen together, how the knowledge came to him like a wrenching of the guts, because that, too, was love.

 • • • 

No one is talking to him. No one is looking at him. Dean and Ruth whisper loudly, the anger audible but not the words. The kids are hustled away to the living room, and Ruth tells Samuel, “I need you all in there and I need you quiet,” and then she turns to Bradshaw, still sitting there before his mush. Ruth seems unsure what to say as she looks at him, face livid, and after forever she simply holds up a hand, as if to say,
Stay right there.

Dean stomps upstairs and down, whispers with Ruth, and stomps back up. Soon come four loud pounding sounds, accompanied by some splintering. Bradshaw stands, and Ruth checks him with a glance.

“Can I help with anything?” he asks.

Ruth shakes her head tightly. “Thank you, no. Thank you.”

“I'll go out, then.”

He pulls on his wool-lined denim jacket, and steps out the back door, letting the screen door slam. He just knows. Not everything. Not the how and why. But he knows, and there is a rot in his chest. His mind moves like a hummingbird, too fast, and he feels strangely
exposed—fooled and foolish—and trudges through the fallow hayfield, through frozen clod and chaff.

When he goes back in, Ruth is speaking on the telephone while Dean is seated at the kitchen table, looking calm, meditative. A rush of affection floods Bradshaw; here is how a man holds himself. Here is a right man. Ruth cuts her eyes at Bradshaw, phone tucked against the side of her head, and then turns her back and lowers her voice.

She hangs up and says to Dean, “Jason, too,” and confusion ripples the stillness of Dean's calm face, and he asks, “What?” and then everything in Dean's visage—forehead, eyes, beard—contracts around the center of his face, and he says, “What?” again, louder, and Ruth doesn't answer.

 • • • 

He's going after her. It's the only thing he knows. He walks out and stops in the yard. Considers Dean's pickup, white with a scurf of dirt splattered upward from below. The tempest in his mind clears and he hears his own voice:
What in the fuck is wrong with me?
How had she done this to him, and what should he do about it?

He walks to his Nova. Gets in and sits, squeezing the steering wheel. Some of his things are still in the basement, but nothing important. They've gotten ahead of him, Lori and this little shit, and he needs to hurry.

A cloudy pressure in his head makes it hard for him to feel he is thinking correctly. This has never been his thing. Foresight, strategy.
He had let her tell him no
. He squeezes the steering wheel and locks his jaw and howls. Then he gets out. Slams the door. Says, jaw clamped, “Fuckity fuckity
fuck
.” If he leaves here now, he will have no idea where to go.

Loretta

The hot water stays hot. It flows over her head, through her hair, sliding over her body in streams and tendrils, and it stays hot, clogging the air with steam.
This is how life will be now,
she thinks. No one monitoring the minutes of her showers, and the water always hot. No more Ruth lecturing them on toilet paper usage, giving screeds on the Lucifer's sugar. No more Dean at dinner, scolding about showers, instructing them all to wet themselves, turn off the water to soap up, and then rinse briefly—saying there was no reason a shower should take any longer than two minutes, and that it was wasteful and selfish to stand there and warm up.

Now the drowsy, narcotic comfort of the water gives her the next idea.

A knock on the door.

“Did you drown?”

Boyd. That interesting boy.

“I might've,” she shouts.

“Should I mount a rescue?”

She turns off the water. Steam turns the room into a cloud. She trembles. The very idea that he might come in now.

She says, “I think I'll make it.”

She dries herself vigorously, like rubbing the skin from a roasted
beet. She dresses and comes out into the room, hair scraggly and wet. Boyd sits on one bed and Jason sits on the other, watching
The $10,000 Pyramid
on TV. It's the final round. The category is “Things in a Discotheque.” It is almost three in the afternoon, and this is luxurious and transgressive, like the hot water—to have slept this late, well into the productive hours of the day. Loretta wants to dance. She wants to spin around and jump. On TV, a woman is giving clues: “A mirror ball. Dance music.” Loretta wants to dance. Is this her future? Her Tussy future—lipstick and fast cars? On TV, the contestant says, “Things in a disco!” Loretta thinks:
A disco!
She wants to dance. She wants to curse. She wants to
drink
. She used to sip at the beers that Bradshaw kept on the floorboard of his Nova while they drove the desert a million years ago. Back when she thought Bradshaw was the way out.

Boyd and Jason smile at her sleepily. Jason's dense helmet of hair is smudged to one side. She runs into the bathroom for a bar of soap, and returns to scrawl on the mirror:
October 19, 1975, HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

“It's whose birthday?” Jason asks her.

Boyd says, “It's all of our birthdays.”

He gets it. She finds she simply likes to look at Boyd—she likes the strange color of his skin, brown and rich and with a pale, dry, almost translucent layer over it; she likes his black hair, blacker than any hair she has seen, so black it shines bluely; and she likes his enormous, alert, luminous eyes.

Boyd says, “Happy birthday, Lori!”

He comes at her, smiling wickedly, like Bradshaw might smile at her, handsome and strange, ready to wrap her up, arms out like Christ in the clouds.

Jason

It is a Sunday afternoon, and it feels like it. Deadened. Emptied of possibility. Strange, Jason thinks, that they are here, having done this, and he feels this way.
Lori? Hugs?
He rises to change the channel, and Loretta says, “Come on, Jason, you, too,” but he doesn't want to.

Click, click.
A nature show. On the soundless TV, a lion chases a rabbit across an African desert. The camera cuts away as it closes its paws in slow motion upon its prey.

Why did he bring Boyd? They go back a long way. They were safety buddies in elementary school. Jason can still picture the black rasp of Boyd's third-grade buzz cut. The strange smells of his house were familiar and warm to Jason, and he had taken in the oddities and embarrassments of Boyd's life—his drunken mother, his fatherlessness, his Indian-ness—and shared them. He brought Boyd with them, brought him here, and now Jason feels guilty because he wishes that he hadn't.

Boyd is in the bathroom. The shower runs. Loretta is sort of dancing around, humming. Some awful country song. “I'm Not Lisa.” She catches him looking and smiles. It's still there, he thinks, whatever is between them. If he can only figure out how to unlock it.

She flops heavily onto the bed, props her chin in her hands.

“We should do something,” she says.

“Aren't we driving on?”

“We should have fun. Think of something fun.”

Jason tries very hard to think of something fun. The shower stops.

“We could go drive around town,” he says.