Daredevils (19 page)

Loretta says, “Don't worry about money.”

One of the guys from the other table gets up and begins walking across the bar, toward the bathroom past where the three of them sit. Loretta sees something happen to Jason—something freezes his attention. His head pivots, following the man.

“Holy shit,” Jason says.

Loretta turns to the man now. He's a hitch-gaited walker, a bit bowlegged like Bradshaw, with a thieving look. Jason says it again, whispers to himself, as if he were praying.
“Holy shit.”

“What?” Loretta says, and Jason says, “I don't think I can believe this,” and she says again, “What, Jason?” and he says, “Watch this guy when he comes out of the john,” and she says, “What about him?” and he says, “Just watch,” and he takes a trembling sip of beer and nods toward the man now returning from the restroom and says, “See?” and she says, “What?” and Boyd says, “What, already?” and Jason says, “Stop saying that,” and then the man notices them, notices them noticing him, and he stops, smiles a head-cocked smile, the smile of an explorer spying a new path through the jungle, and the man says, “What?” and Jason asks, “Are you who I think you are?” and the man says, “That depends, buddy. Who do you think I am?”

Jason

“Grab life, I guess is what I'm saying,” Evel Knievel is telling them. “You kids need to take life by the balls, if you'll pardon my French, just grab it by the sack and give it a big squeeze. 'Cause that's what it's all about—just how much of life you can hold on to. Jobs, families, reputations—fuck all that. What it comes down to, at the end of the day when the horses are back in the barn, is just
taking
things,
taking
life,
taking
what-have-you, whatever, and just holding it. Just . . .
seizing
it.”

He is holding both hands before him and squeezing his fists like he's draining lemons, and the look on his face tightens in conjunction with his hands. He has joined them here at their table, a round of golden beers arrayed before them. Boyd acts half amused, and Loretta seems intrigued, but Jason is awestruck, and full of the sense that this is life as it is supposed to be, right here, this exact moment, and that he must pay strict attention.

“You know?” Evel says. “You know what I'm saying? Of course, you don't. How could you? I'm not saying I did it all right or anything, not saying I'm some kind of hero, but I did try to
grab
life
. I
do
try to grab it. You gotta say that for me, whatever else kind of slander and bullshit you want to peddle, at least give me that. Huh?”

He has been sitting at their table in the Stockmen's lounge for
ten minutes or so, and he hasn't stopped talking. He's left his table of buddies across the bar, and seems to be settling in.

“That's just what we're trying to do, Mr. Knievel,” Jason says. “We're trying to grab life, just like you say.”

“What did I say about Mr. Knievel?”

Evel Knievel's words are thick, stuck to his tongue. When he isn't speaking, he breathes heavily through his mouth.

“Evel,” Jason says. “Sorry.”

“I mean, look around you. Look at people.”

There are not many other people in the bar to look at, but for a couple of small groups and the bartender watching an episode of
Emergency!
on TV. Sirens sound; someone is being saved.

“All around you. Just look at them,” he says, leaning forward and hissing in a hostile whisper. “It is flat pathetic. People living puny lives, never trying for anything real. Anything authentic. Anything that might give 'em a little goose, a little pucker in the hoo-ha. Let me tell you—when I land that bike, it's real. When I'm up there in the air, and the sound of all those people just vanishes—just disappears—that's real as a motherfucker.” He looks at Loretta. “Pardon my French, hon. When I land and break those bones, you can bet your ass that's real. I'm not perfect. I'm not saying I'm perfect. Who's perfect? Nobody's perfect. I'm not some kind of, whaddya call, example and whatnot. I'm not saying you should be like me, necessarily. Not everyone's cut out for this.”

He says this in a minor key, as though it were a simple, painful truth. Now he has ordered a round of Wild Turkey. The colors in his glass are beautiful, the amber glow and the angles off the cut glass and the ice cubes. Jason is trying his damnedest not to sip too slowly, but it's burning his throat. Acid is trying to crawl out of his
stomach. The room tilts and reels, and Jason closes his eyes and places a hand on the table.

“He's a lightweight,” he hears Loretta tell Evel Knievel, who answers, “Nothing wrong with that, kiddo.”

Jason opens his eyes. Loretta sips and watches Evel Knievel, a flame on her cheeks and neck. Boyd reclines against the seat, drink cupped in his hand. Everything in his skeptical aspect angers Jason.

“You know, people always think it must be something else to be me, just something else. But what you forget is that most of those people who come to my shows, most of those
adoring
crowds,
only show up to see me die. That's right”—he holds up a hand to ward off their protests—“they want to see me die. They want to see me crash, break my bones, die. I mean, that's a great story to tell your friends, right? I was there the night Evel Knievel ran up against the thing he couldn't do.”

He empties his glass and raises his hand like a bull rider signaling to open the chute. The bartender starts pouring. Evel leans onto his elbows.

“Look, kids, I'm tired. I'm sore. Some days I think I might just cash it all in.” Jason wants to say no, you can't, but he sees Loretta nodding empathetically. “I am only human. Only human. There are things that I cannot do, try as I might. And I might die out there some night. It could happen. It could very well happen.”

He exhales loudly. He smells like booze and Old Spice, and his hair is redder and less blond than Jason remembers it. All told, he presents a picture that is less superhero than the one in Jason's mind, but he seems hard, tough, worn. Or at least he had seemed that way before he started talking.

“And I think if it did happen, if I did die out there someday,
trying to push myself too far, trying too hard to satisfy what everybody wants from me, I think it would make most people happy. It would make them feel like they were right all along, never to do anything risky or adventurous. See what happens when you get a little too crazy, honey? See what comes your way when you try to grab life by the balls? Old Evel did it. He grabbed life with both hands and look what it got him. Look where he ended up.”

“I don't want to see you die,” Jason says, and Loretta says, “Yeah, I don't, either,” and Boyd says, “I don't want anyone to die.” Loretta places her hand on Evel's for two seconds, pats, and withdraws. The downy hair behind her ear glows, pale against her bright skin.

Evel stares at his hand where she touched it, and smiles wearily at the center of the table. He wears his self-pity like a star-spangled suit.

“You kids are nice. You know that? You're nice kids. Let's have another one. Should we? Can I get you another one? What'll you have, darling?”

Boyd says, “Not me,” and gets up to leave. Evel shrugs and Loretta says, “Okay, then, good night, Boyd,” and again Jason spots it—something between them, something in her attitude toward Boyd—and he doesn't say anything as Boyd leaves.

 • • • 

Here are some of the things Jason finds surprising about Evel Knievel:

He is short, and not physically imposing in any way. Jason towers over him.

His eyes are amazing, totally unforeseen, cool lime slivered with yellow. There seems to be a dying light behind them, a weak glow.
When he first sat down, his eyes locked on Jason's while he gave him a curious half-smile, and that bright, shifting color—Jason took it for intelligence, for kindness, for wisdom, for love.

He is completely unsatisfied. All he does is complain.

He is not limping, though he could not have even been out of the hospital for all that long after the Wembley jump—that spectacular crash that Jason had missed while eating dinner with Dean's family, the afternoon he met Loretta.

He wears ordinary clothing, much like any man Jason might know in Gooding or Twin Falls or Boise: blue jeans with a leather belt and metal buckle, long-sleeved snap-button shirt over a T-shirt, cowboy boots curled up at the toe from wear.

He is kind of dumb, but thinks he is brilliant. Also like most every man Jason might know back home.

His eyes steal immediately toward any hint of womanhood. The fiftysomething with the piled white hair, alone in a veil of smoke at the bar. The two middle-aged women who sat two tables over for about an hour, giggling at his every leer. Cheryl Tiegs on a TV commercial for underarm deodorant, which he watched in its entirety from twenty feet away. And Loretta, of course. Loretta.

He is older than Jason's father, and looks it, his skin pebbled like a football.

He is drunker than anyone Jason has ever seen in person, Dean Martin drunk. He had bumped into a chair as he first walked toward their table, and then corrected too far the other way and had to catch himself, stop, and hold out his hands like he was balancing on a wire.

None of that matters to Jason. He doesn't love him any less—and that's the only word for it, love—because running into him like this floods Jason with energy and hope. This is what life can
be. Casual drinks with lifelong heroes. Evel Knievel in Elko, and then who knows? Farrah Fawcett in Boise? Lee Majors in Twin Falls? Life glows with possibility. His life—his and Loretta's lives. Their life.

They have done the right thing. Jason has done the right thing: surveyed the ass-end quality of his life—of milking barns and morning feedings and church and school pageants and rabbit massacres and sexlessness and sweat-stained polyester and wood-paneled station wagons and AM radio and cattle futures and three prayers a day, every day, knees aching from submission, and the never-ending boredom of the righteous and the self-righteous, prayers and prayers and cow shit and prayers—and gone out and found another world, and Evel Knievel sits in it, Evel fucking Knievel, a mad handsome demon, he sits in it with a whiskey in hand and talks to Jason, talks to Jason and Loretta, pinning them together in space and time, pinning Loretta and Jason together in space and time, no two other people anywhere, ever, able to share this memory, to own this story.

Ruth

The children are in bed, and Dean is on the phone with Loretta's father down in Short Creek, and Ruth is heartsick with the dishonesty of the day.
Aunt Loretta has driven home to Short Creek on some errand.
Samuel looked at her knowing she was false, but what could she tell him?

The girl was not right from the start. Never once right, but Dean was blind. Ruth had prayed and been answered. She felt a certainty about the answer: the girl was not right. Yet when she had told Dean this, all those months ago, he had taken her hands in his quietly, and he thought carefully before he said a word, and so she knew it was done before he spoke, knew he had arranged it in his mind, and that this was her lot now, as it was her lot always, to submit. Even knowing what she knew. It was her lot to submit to the will of one so full of human frailty, and through submission to find her eternal blessing.

It is the only way to see it. And when she prays about it, when she asks the Lord, in her moments of rebellion, how it is that
she
is supposed to obey
him,
why it is that she must turn away whatever wisdom thrives in her own bosom to heed his folly, she receives no answer but one: she must.

She believes it as fervently as she hates it. She accepts it though everything inside her strains toward her own mind, her own way,
and has always done so. But her obedience to Dean is obedience to the Lord, and in obeying, in overcoming her own vain resistance, she is fulfilling her promise.

The girl has taken the gold—or some of it. The coins, not the Sutter Creek ore. Not the gold that Dean seems to worship, the filthy lucre that she believes has stained his soul. There, too, Ruth has been ignored, as he has ignored her in everything these days, in every step along this misbegotten road that brought them to this breach: a break with the prophet and brethren in Short Creek, the ambition that had overtaken Dean with the prosperity of Zion's Harvest and with his marriage to Loretta, his greed in buying the Sutter Creek gold and his pride in it, the lust that he had to have it, to touch it, to look at it, to see it. She hadn't wanted him to get it at all, had urged him to keep the Law of Consecration, to give all to the brotherhood, until he had stopped asking her about it, and then, when he did it anyway and she urged him to hide it from Loretta, he said he would.

And then he didn't.

Still, she will submit. She will carry her burden. She will care for her own soul and the souls of her children, and she will stand proud before the Lord on the day of judgment. Her Book of Mormon is open on her lap and her eyes are closed, she is deep in meditation—it is not prayer, exactly, what she does in these moments when she must turn inward for strength, when she must look toward her soul to erase the negativity that is creeping toward her, when she feels she must battle Satan and his whispers of pridefulness, of anger, of judgment against Dean and others. She breathes and concentrates on the discomfort of the moment, focuses on whatever the discomfort of the moment may be, and she reminds herself that it is a
promise of salvation, that the earthly pain is but a price to pay for an eternal glory if she is righteous, if she is obedient, if she submits.

Dean hangs up and sits next to her on the couch. She does not open her eyes. It is below freezing outside, and the cold seeps upward from the basement, swirls around their ankles. Everything here feels foreign to her. It is but the second time in her life that she has left Short Creek; the first was the raid of the Federal Men who took her from her home, and it is Satan that she feels now just as it was Satan that she felt then, Satan in the atmosphere, in the air and water. She does not open her eyes, even when he speaks.