Read Daredevils Online

Authors: Shawn Vestal

Daredevils (18 page)

BOOK: Daredevils
2.01Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

“Yeah,” she says, meaning
Naw
.

Boyd comes out dressed in yesterday's clothes—jeans, a three-quarter-sleeve T-shirt with a sepia-toned picture of Foghat.

“What are you kids talking about?” he asks.

Loretta says, “What to do. We could go check out the casino.”


You
want to go to the casino?” he says.

She shrugs. “We could. We could get some beer.” She sits up on the bed. Jason sits on the end of the other bed, three feet from the TV—where a jaguar now pursues a springing antelope—and Boyd stands in the bathroom doorway. Loretta bounces. “You guys wanna get some beer?”

Jason says, “I don't know,” and Boyd says, “I like you old-fashioned Mormons,” and Loretta is looking back and forth between them, and she says, “You guys need to learn to have fun!”

“We could check out a brothel,” Boyd says.

“Check out?” Loretta says.

“Jason could stake us,” Boyd says.

“What's that cost?” Jason asks.

Loretta says, “It depends,” and Boyd slaps his thigh.

“I don't get you,” he says. “How do you become you, living the way you've lived?”

“I'm creative,” she says. “I'm smart.”

 • • • 

And now this, Jason thinks. So much, so fast. The beer tastes sour and wheaty, and it rises instantly to his head, like it was always there waiting for him. The world warms and welcomes. He becomes garrulous. All anxiety slips away, and this becomes a world unto itself: this room, the three of them, the beer Loretta has ordered from the casino bar, because she is the one who knows how to do things.

He tells a story, and Loretta laughs. He mocks Boyd, teases him, and she laughs again. All of them seem half drunk before the first cans of Coors are empty. Tipsy and giggling. Jason sips at the beer and tries not to make faces. He feels himself begin to race. He has tasted beer a time or two before, and hasn't liked it. That seems to be changing. All of the problems and anxieties of the world—all of the past and all of the future—are somewhere outside the warm, cozy bubble of this room. Boyd belches. Loretta says, “Gross,” but then she chugs what must be half a beer and follows suit. When she laughs, her eyes fill with tears.

Loretta pulls a second beer from the paper bag sitting beside the TV. She tells them stories about sneaking out at night, about the party boys down in Short Creek. “Them kids were wild,” she says, admiringly. She has a farmy accent that Jason hasn't noticed before. Boyd tells a story about finding his mom passed out in the bathroom with puke in her hair, and Loretta says, “Gross,” and Jason feels a warm flood of gratitude that it is Boyd's shitty life and not his that she is saying this about. He stands and goes to the windows and looks out on the mountains rising over Elko, over the whitening day.

“Seriously, though, Jason,” Loretta says, flopping onto the bed and spilling beer. “We owe you one. Big time.”

“I don't owe him one,” Boyd says.

She acts as if she didn't hear him, just looks at Jason in that stoned way.

“Well, I owe you one,” she says. “I can't believe we did it.”

She rises and crosses over to him and places a hand, as light as balsa, on his forearm and taps his cheek with a kiss.

Louis

The stout, red-faced deputy at the counter is telling Louis that technically his son is not yet a runaway.

“Hafta wait forty-eight hours before we can do a thing,” he says, a little embarrassed, maybe, but still chewing his gum, and for that alone, Louis wants to climb over the counter.

“Who would you find yourself in trouble with if you acted like an officer of the law before forty-eight hours expired?” Louis says carefully. “Seeing how it's me, the boy's father, who's asking you to do so.”

“Now, Brother Harder,” says the deputy, Sid Moody, who comes to church in Louis's ward about half the time, “I don't make—”

“You have a car. You have the keys to that car. You have a radio. You have a gun and a badge and the authority of the law, and you have the knowledge that my minor son has taken my car and run away overnight, with another minor child under the care of her guardians, and all you can manage is to tell me about the rules that allow you to sit here in the office and do nothing? Is that about it, Sidney?”

The clock makes the V of 1:50. Louis should have been here hours ago. But first there was the matter with Dean—Dean arguing, and then insisting, that he not bring in the police, and then Becky recoiling when he told her he had agreed to that and
shaming him into coming here at last. And now that he's here, he's being told he is
too
early
. He is recalling now what it had been like to be a brawling youngster—he and Dean swinging it out on the front lawn as kids, he and any number of other boys, his friends, even, back in those days of high school and youth, the days of drag racing the dirt roads around Gooding, the days before he settled down, as he always knew he would—recalling what it had been like in the moments before a fight, the pressure about to burst.

“I know this is hard, Louis,” Moody says, watching one of his hands idly scratching the back of the other.

“How would you know that, Sidney? By what possible means would you know this is hard?”

Louis senses that he has recomposed himself.

“Maybe you ought to speak to the sheriff.”

“Maybe I should, Sidney. Maybe I damn well should.”

Apparently, his voice has risen. The sheriff comes out from the warren of fluorescent-lit linoleum hallways, holding up both hands and smiling amicably, a peacemaker.

 • • • 

Louis has been immersed in other people's problems for so long that he's almost forgotten what the hot pain of crisis feels like firsthand. He had served as the ward's bishop for almost five years, and most recently has been the head of the young men's program. People approach him constantly for advice and solace.
My husband is spending all of our money gambling. I am struggling with sexually impure thoughts. My boss is asking me to work on Sundays. My wife won't tell me where she's been going on Saturday afternoons. My son is stealing money from his grandmother.

What do these people want? He would simply tell them what he
thought they should do—
leave your husband, forgive your husband, report your son to the police—
but that was never what they wanted. People almost always know what they should do. What they come for is comfort. To have the difficult thing done for them. They want to be confirmed as the kind of person they think themselves to be, while doing something that person would not do. Or to extract themselves from the situation that proves they are not the kind of person they think themselves to be. To retract, to undo, to redo. Years and years of listening to people has hardened this sense in Louis—this notion that people come to him for love and repair only, never for advice about what to do—and has also hardened his sense that he can do neither, that he cannot fix them and he cannot love them, not really love them, not enough to fix them.

And so he has become distant from them, one by one, with their heartbreaks and hypocrisies, wanting to be relieved of the things that are rightfully theirs. He has become just as distant as Sid Moody, the deputy, and because he understands Moody's detachment, he understands how Moody is calculating his own—Louis's—pain and need and impossibility, and he understands that Moody had put him at a distance before they even began.

 • • • 

He and Becky drive the roads around Gooding. He tells her it's because the kids might be out there somewhere, crashed and hurt, or worse, but he doesn't think the kids are out there. He just wants to move. To avoid sitting. Becky has entered a stunned silence at last, but she bombarded him with questions, with expectations, when he returned from the sheriff's office. The sheriff had agreed to put out a dispatch to other law enforcement agencies, and to put in a few calls to sheriffs in neighboring counties.

“And what else?” Becky asked.

“What else what?”

“Is that it?”

“I don't think there's anything else to do.”

He can hear the rage in the watery notes of her voice. It is a sticking point between them—his passivity—and she is feasting on this, filling herself with all that he is not, though they will speak of it, as ever, in the measured tones of people in control.

“There has to be more, Louis. There has to be.”

So they are driving. They drive east on Old Shoshone Road, and south on Pole Line, and back west on Highway 26, and then south on 46, and then he begins simply cruising every country block, through the fields and farms. She asks him again where he thinks Jason has gone, and he tells her again that he doesn't know. No ideas? No, he says. Does she have any? She does not.

They return when it's time for milking. There, inside the noise of the barn, the wet suck of the machines and the milky, cow-shitty odor, Louis feels a measure of relief, and stops thinking for the moment, tries his very best to vanish inside the things that make this day like any other day.

Loretta

All things begin to seem possible. Loretta says, “Who wants to gamble?” and Jason, who seems to be stumbling and slurring even while sitting silently, burps and grins, and Boyd says, “How are we supposed to get away with that?” and Loretta rolls her eyes. “Jeez. I thought I was the sheltered one,” she says, thinking maybe they could just live here, like this, the three of them. Or just two of them—she and Boyd. Every worldly thing is here. Every sinful thing.

They go to the casino, and she is right, no one bothers them. She gets tokens for the slots at the window—shows them her room key, and they ask no questions. The casino is mostly deserted; the ringing of slots and the thick haze of cigarette smoke fill the room. Now and then the reek of liquor wafts by, and Loretta breathes it in. She sits at a slot machine, and Jason and Boyd flank her. At one point, Boyd reaches across and says, “Let me try,” and pulls the lever, and she smells him, soap and beer and something sweetly foreign, and she looks at his skin and finds that she wants to look at it closely, wants to examine his dark skin—she has never been so close to it, never touched it, and now she finds it exotic and interesting, the way it pales at the elbow and finger joints and worn places, the way it lightens on his palms, and she thinks about what this skin is, in the world that she has left behind, she thinks about
the fact that the skin is the punishment of God, in the world she has left behind, and it makes her want to touch that skin and smell that skin. It makes her want to know what that skin means—that difference. She wonders about demons and men; she wonders why she believes in demons, beings beyond the world of people. She cannot understand why she believes in this, when so much of everything else from that world she has left behind she has simply left behind. What if Boyd were a demon? What if that was what his dark skin meant? And what if she wanted it anyway?

The waitress roaming the casino asks them if they want drinks, and Loretta answers for all of them: “Three beers and three shots,” and the waitress jots and leaves. Loretta pulls the handle—cherry, banana, cherry—and the waitress returns. Loretta shows the boys how to throw back the shots, though she has never done it. How does she know how to do it? Her future is teaching her how.

Jason seems the drunkest, but they're all drunk. It's almost six. From the speakers comes rowdy music.
“I . . . wanna rock and roll all night and party e-ve-ry day
.

Loretta keeps pulling the slot handle, and keeps losing. Behind her, Boyd and Jason bicker.

Jason says, “I'd be happy to buy you a bus ticket home,” and Boyd says, “I bet you would.”

Loretta moves to a roulette table, asks the man in the white shirt and black vest what to do and he explains it to her, but she doesn't understand. She puts chips on thirteen. She thinks that everything is reversed now, opposite, so thirteen is her lucky number, but she doesn't win. The man in the black vest gathers in the money. Boyd says, “This is fucked up.” The roulette wheel spins and flashes, the ball bounces and lands in a black chute, and the man in the vest sweeps Loretta's chips toward himself across the felt table. Boyd
leaves and returns. Loretta hears him telling Jason, “I hurled like a motherfucker in there. All over the seat.”

A different song comes on. Slower. Sadder.
“And it's one more beer / and I don't hear you anymore . . .”

Loretta puts chips on black thirteen. Boyd says to Jason, “What are we doing, exactly? I mean, what are
you
doing?”

Loretta loses. The chips slide away. Jason says something she can't hear.

“What I mean,” Boyd says, belching, “is, I can see why she would want to leave. And I can see why I would want to leave. But I can't see why you would want to leave.”

“Well.”

The singer sings, “
And someone saved my life tonight sugar bear . . .”

Boyd says, “I mean, you had it pretty good.”

Something wordless is happening between the two of them behind her back. Loretta wins, and cheers, and Boyd says, “Dude, I used to think you were smart.”

They go to eat in the bar. Loretta shows the key, and everything is fine, everything is good, they order drinks and cheeseburgers deluxe. On the wall are photos of cattle drives and cowboys. Longhorns everywhere. Knotty-wood paneling and red vinyl seats. Red glass candleholders glow on each table, little bowls of fire. A bartender in an ornate Western shirt and bolo tie, hair wet and tight against his head. There are just the three of them and one other group of customers—four men. Every so often, one of the men lets out a whoop, or a cloudburst of laughter erupts.

Jason says, “We probably should be careful with money.”

BOOK: Daredevils
2.01Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Blood Lines by Eileen Wilks
Toxic Treacle by Echo Freer
Home in Carolina by Sherryl Woods
Pixilated by Jane Atchley
Pirate's Promise by Clyde Robert Bulla
ALIEN INVASION by Hallett, Peter
Levijatan by Boris Akunin
CursedLaird by Tara Nina
In the Jungle by J.C. Greenburg