Daredevils (2 page)

“I had not guessed you to be such a rebellious harlot,” he whispers.

Loretta is frozen, her mind a storm.

“Can you say nothing? Can you not invent some lie?”

She is somehow not terrified, though she can't think what to say or do. Her father stands. He comes toward her slowly, his sore-hipped walk, rage purpling his face. Her mother watches from the doorway. Loretta could outrun them, overpower them, probably, but she does not. He seizes her ponytail and slaps her on the side of the head. A slow-motion slap. It hurts less than she expects. He is large bellied and top-heavy, ready to tip, and it is this that she seizes on as he swings his arm slowly again and again, each strike hurting less than she expects, each blow breaking through whatever is
happening now and making a path forward, she thinks, toward her future. He is speaking to her, growling, grunting, but she doesn't hear him, and soon she can't feel his blows. The flesh on the side of her face fills and puffs, rising like dough. He is old, he is old, and she is on her way to somewhere else.

The day follows, still and silent. It is unspoken that she will remain in her room. Awaiting what, she does not know. Her father does not go to his brother's ranch, to care for the livestock they raise for the United Order. They do not go to church. Her father comes to put a lock on her bedroom door, a toolbox in his left hand and the lock in the other. He doesn't look at her, canting his head away as if from light of punishing brightness. He mutters and fumbles. Her mother comes in with toast and eggs on a tray, red eyed and pale in her housecoat. Loretta wonders if they have forgotten it is Fast Sunday.

She should have gone with Bradshaw. Should she have gone with Bradshaw? Which unknown path should she choose, and how should she choose it? All she knows is that while she waited for an answer, the paths closed down. Bradshaw won't even know why she will stop showing up.

Her father finishes and leaves. Then she hears him outside her bedroom window, doing something to the slider. Hours pass. Loretta, still clothed in her jeans and work blouse, lies on the bed. Everything has a thickened feel, as if all of life will be reduced now to this: a room, some food, and time. She falls asleep hard, and when she awakens to the clicking of the lock on her door, she is groggy and disoriented. She sits up to see her mother entering.

As she sits on the bed, Loretta notes that she is still in her housecoat, the pilled flannel plaid. Loretta doesn't speak. She has not said one word to them since climbing back in that window. She
wonders if she will ever say another word to them. Her mother's face looks older than Loretta has ever seen it, collapsing like fruit that's turned. She speaks tentatively, tearfully.

“Your father has made a decision,” she says.

The words come at Loretta as if through water.

“What you've done—” Her mother stops. “He feels—”

She smooths her trembling hands outward along her legs, as though brushing crumbs to the floor.

“We feel that you are in peril. That your soul is in peril.”

Neither she nor her mother has anything to do with this. Neither has any part in it but to obey. Her father has agreed to place her with Brother Harder, with Dean Harder, the man who runs Zion's Harvest, the food supply, a righteous man, a faithful member of the Order, who is ready to add to his heavenly family.

“Place me?” Loretta asks.

“You know,” her mother says, so quietly that Loretta can barely hear her over the sound of a sprinkler fanning the lawn outside. “You've
known.”

A
little mischief is good for the soul,” Grandpa tells Jason, leveling a thick, crooked finger toward the road ahead, as if that were mischief right there, fat and smiling on Highway 10.

He says, “There's nothing so wrong with this.”

The highway plunges as straight as a pipe through the desert and into the horizon. Inside the old Ford pickup, warm air flaps loudly past the open windows, drowning Grandpa's low growl.

He says, “Your dad never was much of a listener.” Chuckles. Bits of whirling hay prickle Jason's ears. It's Grandpa's work truck—floor mats worn through, seats split and stained. A mess of empty parts boxes, hand tools, and baling twine is pressed into the cove where the dashboard meets the windshield. He is telling stories, and in the blast of the truck cab, Jason can hear only scraps of them, disconnected pieces.

Grandpa says, “By the time we got there, that Packard was all but sunk in the canal.”

He is telling stories about Jason's father. The time five-year-old Dad was caught shoplifting butterscotch candies. How wildly he fought with his older brother, Dean, when they were teenagers. How he took the family car without permission once and drove it into the canal.

Jason doesn't understand this unloading of family lore. It seems significant. Announced. He looks at his grandfather—face and neck scorched with crosshatched sunburn and drooping ears red and thick as ham. He's saying something but the wind blasts it away. The land skims by, a flat plain broken with lava rock and spotted with sage. Thin sky, rags of cloud. The early coat of autumn shows its bright tans and shorn fields, the first scent of bitter dying in the air.

He says, “I thought your dad was going to bite his ear off.”

On the seat between them, balanced atop a pair of hardened leather work gloves and two V-belts, is Grandpa's set of scriptures, zipped into a leather case: the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, the Pearl of Great Price.

They are wearing their Sunday suits, but they are not going to church.

They pass through Wendell and onto Interstate 84, bound for Twin Falls. Grandpa pushes the Ford to seventy, seventy-five, and stops trying to shout above the noise. He is handsome, better looking than the rest of the Harder men: tall, neat, sun chapped. Beside him, Jason feels thin and soft. He hates the way he looks, his dense scrub of auburn hair, his freckles, his gangling knobbiness. Grandpa's dark gray hair is oiled, rows of comb tines as neat as a barley field, and his suit smells of Old Spice and perspiration.

An adrenal flutter passes through Jason, then comes again.
They are not going to church, though they have told Jason's parents they are driving to Rupert so Grandpa can speak to the ward there. It is a plausible lie—Grandpa is a high councillor and he often goes to speak at the Mormon wards around southern Idaho—but Jason is astonished that Grandpa told it.

“This oughta be something,” Grandpa shouts.

Jason nods. He wants to say
More than something,
but then he doesn't want to say it anymore. This day wears a skin around it, a membrane that might burst with the wrong word. They are going to watch Evel Knievel jump the Snake River Canyon in a steam-powered rocket.

Grandpa says, “What do you think? He gonna make it?”

“Not sure.”

“Well, Judas Priest. Of course you're not sure. But what do you
think
?”

Who could say? Jason sees every jump he can, worshipping at the Panasonic each time Evel Knievel climbs onto a motorcycle and flies into the air. It began when Jason watched the Caesars Palace crash on
Wide World of Sports
when he was nine: Evel Knievel bouncing off the ramp, body rippling and bike roaring after him like an angry bull. Surely that was a vision of death. But Evel Knievel survived and went out and did it again and again.

This jump today, though—rocket ship, canyon—this is something else.

“What do
you
think?” Jason shouts.

Grandpa laughs.

“He might just do it. He might. I mean, all's he's got to do is sit there and get shot a long way.”

“That's all an astronaut does, too, but that don't make it easy.”

This is something Evel Knievel himself has said, in one of the articles Jason razored from the
Times-News
and taped into his scrapbook.

“Well,” Grandpa says, like he's not going to fight about something so silly with such a junior opponent. “It's not exactly the moon launch.”

Jason wants to ask Grandpa about their lie. To pin down why it might be acceptable, given what he and the other elders always say in church: Thou shalt not bear false witness. Jason's parents had cited another commandment when they initially told him he couldn't go to the canyon jump: Thou shalt keep the Sabbath holy. He was pissed off for days, until Grandpa approached—in his shoulder-to-shoulder, gazing-at-the-horizon way one morning while Jason was feeding calves—and asked if he'd heard of this fella Knievel.

He could understand Grandpa wanting to see the jump. He used to race motorbikes in the desert and drive to Boise for the stock cars. The lie, though. Why would he do it, and then just wink about it? Jason wonders, though he thinks he's starting to know: the rules are the rules are the rules, the eternal truths unchanging, but inside the brotherhood of men are passageways and tangents, compartments and exceptions.

 • • • 

They leave the freeway and cut south through the desert. Soon the canyon comes into view, a great gray crack in the land. Crowds swarm on the far rim, and behind them a dome of trees cloisters a ranch house.

The bulge of the launchpad stands at the far end of the crowd, a mound of earth with a metal, spirelike ramp, flanked by TV trucks
and a white trailer. Below, the cut basalt walls of the canyon turn back afternoon light at strange angles, silvered here, ashen there. The walls crumble downward into piles of boulder, and then stone, and then earthen slopes of weed and duff at the canyon bottom, split by the heavy, swirling Snake River.

They turn east, away from town, and enter a line of cars inching forward. Soon they hear the sound of a marching band—the harsh tin of the horns, the thump of drums. Grandpa guns the sputtering engine. To the left, in the hundred yards or so between the road and the canyon rim, crowds mill and clump; motorcycle engines whine. Beyond them is the ramp. Already, there is the Skycycle, the steam-powered rocket ship, cocked toward heaven, in red, white, and blue and with
EVEL KNIEVEL
spelled in golden letters and the numeral
1
on the tail fin.

“Skycycle,” Grandpa scoffs. “Nothing cycle about it.”

They come to the gate, and the man standing there with a bulging belly and hands full of bills gives their suits a second look. Grandpa hands him a fifty, then drives in, bumping across the field.

“Isn't this ridiculous?” he asks happily as he parks.

Ahead Jason can see tent tops. People have been camping here all week, partying, drinking, fighting, skinny-dipping in the canyon pools, frightening the citizens, and upsetting the chamber of commerce.

Grandpa waves his hand at the scene. “A lot of this is exactly the sort of thing you've got to avoid, now that you're getting older. Drinking and whatnot. Rowdy nonsense. But you can't hide yourself away. You've got to live in this world, and keep it off you somehow. But”—and here he pats the leather block of scriptures absently, with the heel of his fist—“you ought to have a little fun when you get a chance. This ought to be fun, don't you think?”

“I guess.”

“You guess.”

Jason blushes. He feels bashful before this strange day.

They take off their coats and ties, leave them folded on the seat, and head into the crowd. Grandpa veers toward the ramp in a stiff trot, winding past guys in trucker hats and cowboy boots, long-haired kids throwing Frisbees. The crowd tightens as they draw closer, but Grandpa slips through, making a way, until they are about thirty yards from the ramp. The scene looks like something out of
Billy Jack
—shirtless men with long hair and beards, blurry tattoos on their forearms; women in cutoffs with wild hair; the smell of cigarettes and marijuana. It's like nothing Jason has ever seen around here, where men wear their hair short and women wear their skirts long and most people think Richard Nixon got a raw deal. A couple of guys wearing leather vests carry girls on their shoulders, girls in tank tops without bras, and Jason studies the shift and jiggle inside those shirts. Someone calls, “Fuckin'-A!” and Jason feels embarrassed for Grandpa, imagining that he has not experienced such worldliness or that he may feel Jason has not, and Jason worries that his grandfather might regret bringing him here, might change his mind, but then the noise of a helicopter rises, a growing
thwuk
and drone, and a great cheer bursts forth, and it's too late to change anything because it's happening.

The copter tilts and drops toward the open desert on the other side of the satellite truck. TV cameras scan the crowd with their gleaming eyes. The marching band, in two shades of blue, blasts away as the copter settles, a skirt of dust billowing. Then he emerges: Evel Knievel, flanked by two frowning men in mirrored sunglasses and cowboy hats. All attention and energy fly to him, like metal shavings to a magnet. He passes along the outer edge of
the crowd, dressed like anyone at the co-op on a Saturday—jeans, snap-button shirt, cowboy boots—but for a cane with a silver knob. He grasps the shaft and holds it up and the silver ball burns in the sun, channeling a pillar of light. The crowd cheers, shouts his name, and Evel Knievel and his entourage enter the trailer. The cheers fade, the band lurches to a stop.

“Well,” Grandpa says. “There he is.”

 • • • 

Jason can't stand the waiting but he doesn't want it to end. He feels a ludicrous faith, a sense that his future will be more like this day than anything he has experienced—all the holy Sabbaths, the constant prayer, milking and feeding, thresher and combine. The smell of cow shit rising from everything, all the time, even him, announcing his association with the lowest things. He wants to screw down this moment, keep it in front of him. The clamor, the humid press of bodies, the vault of pale sky, and the humming behind it all, the idling motor, gentle but irrevocable, the thing behind the thing, the thing behind everything, the thing that brings us what we get.

 • • • 

The bikers holler and pump their fists to the Rolling Stones, “Under My Thumb” now leaking from the speakers on the TV truck. The crowd is vulgar and filthy and unspeakably beautiful. In front of them, a man in worn jeans sways to the music. His shoulder-length hair is the color of hay, the hair of Jesus Christ, and he wears a red, white, and blue headband. A cigarette dangles from his lips, goes tight as he drags, dangles again. A brown-haired girl beside him in cutoffs and a threadbare Boise State T-shirt cranes her head. She says, “Is he gonna come out or what?” and the entranced hippie
says, “Are you gonna shut the fuck up or what?” and Grandpa shifts back and forth, one foot to the other, irritated.

All this waiting, all this pressure. The Sabbath feel of stalled time. And then the trailer door bangs open, and Evel Knievel hops down, glorious in the white jumpsuit with red and blue bands of stars crossing his chest like bandoliers. White boots. Tall Elvis collar open at the neck, and swooping golden-brown hair. He waves again with the cane, and plunges toward the crowd, which parts before him. The loudspeaker narrates, crackling. He seems to float, though his gait is hitched. He passes just yards from Jason and Grandpa, and they feel the backward swell of bodies. Evel Knievel comes so close Jason can see the lines on his face and his quartzite stare, and his scanning eyes stop on Jason's. He thrusts the cane skyward, mouths something Jason cannot make out, and the gesture seems meant for him.

Evel Knievel comes closer, and Jason reaches toward him, as those around him are reaching. He waits for him to reach back, to put his hand into the striving mass of worshipping hands and to grab Jason's one hand.

Which Evel Knievel does.

A quick grasp, one shake. The bones in Evel Knievel's hand feel like a bundle of green branches. His eyes find Jason's again—“Thanks for coming, buddy”—and glide away. A shout goes up: “Good luck, Evel,” and he says without turning, “It's in God's hands now.”

He strides into the cleared space by the ramp. The helicopter rises, dangling a basket to Evel, his hands out to the crowd as though he is blessing them. He sits in the basket and ascends, rising to the rocket ship on the ramp. Information flies, static, from the speakers. Grandpa squeezes Jason's shoulder and Jason sees his face is wild, reverent, as he nods toward the Skycycle.
Don't miss a
bit of it
. The rocket reminds Jason of something from
The Jetsons
but cooler, finned in the rear and sleekly pointed, with the name huge on the sides and colorful ads painted around it: Mack Trucks, Chuckles candy. Evel flashes a thumbs-up from the cockpit. The crew retreats, and the Skycycle sits alone. A hushed pause, and then a revving, a sharp whine rising and rising, pressure building to a flash—the Skycycle bursts up the ramp and off, rotating gracefully, screwing itself into the atmosphere. Jason feels pinned to the earth, and his stomach fills with slither. It is like prayer, like hope, and he'll make it, of course he will. Jason can see that in the arc of the rocket. It reigns over the earth and all its servants, a brilliant bullet aimed for the heart of the desert sky.

 • • • 

Something pops from the back of the Skycycle. What is it? The chute? A change ripples through the air. A pinprick in the pressure. The rocket slows, slows, and a white parachute drags behind it.