Daredevils (4 page)

 

EVEL KNIEVEL ADDRESSES AN ADORING NATION

First thing we jumped was pretty much nothing, a little hillock of dirt out there in the flats around Butte, a weedy little lump. We were tooling along on the old man's Super Hawk, that four-stroke piece of shit with the brittle fork, when something or someone urged our hand toward the bump. We have thought long on this, America, and believe it is not too much to suggest the presence of the divine.

We flew. Fuckin'-A flew.

Figure between 1.8 and 2.3 seconds airborne—call it 2. Two seconds of flying. Two seconds of everything you thought life could not be. So amazing. So exhilarating. Also, so incredibly fucked up: you live and live and live, and it all comes down to a tiny flash, a speeding moment that is gone so fast you can't believe it. All you can ever do is remember it and want it back. Still, those two seconds, holy shit: the warm blood of our heart expanded and sped through us in a way it never did again, though we chased it ever since, chased and chased it, all over the planet, from that lowly little bump outside Butte to the massive sea of cunt and worship we swam in for so long.

We dumped the bike, of course. We were fifteen. Our parents
were sad and old and gone to other places, Grandpa coughing up black shit all day long, smelling like piss and whiskey, and Grandma ignoring everything, just pretending, pretending, pretending, and we loved to take out that bike of Grandpa's, God, it was beautiful then, though we think of it now as an utter piece of shit. We'd take it and ride it from the house up in the warren of roads below the mine and the toxic tailing pond where geese died every winter, where they flew to their deaths believing in a safe landing, and we'd roar back down, below the mountains and the statue of Jesus Christ blessing the whole Summit Valley and we would head out into the flats and just roar.

That day, we flew for two seconds, and we found our place—the place we will always leave for. That little dent in the atmosphere that is shaped like us. We landed on the front tire, all wrong, and the bike squirreled out and we dumped it, scraped hell out of a shoulder and a hip, and put a big hairy scuff on the tank. Grandpa saw it that night when he came home stinking from the M&M, and he kicked open the door to our room and starting going off, Bobby this and Bobby that. Bobby, Bobby—the name that never named us. When he took hold of our arm we grabbed him back, by the front of the shirt, like some movie hero of olden day, and shoved him into the wall, and saw the news on his face: we were not who he thought we were at all.

R
uth checks the forms while Samuel and Loretta organize the orders, hauling the heavy square buckets from the pallets and stacking them near the garage door, sacks slumped at the bases. It is early—they rise at five, and Ruth returns to Loretta's door in two minutes if she's not up—and their breath clouds in the frigid yellow light. It's a huge garage, big enough for two cars, with a concrete floor and unpainted drywall, and pallets full of wheat, barley, flour, oats, powdered milk.

Samuel heaves a third bucket of brown rice onto a stack, and heads back to the pallet as Loretta comes by with a sack of oats.

Ruth says, “One more milk there.”

Samuel rolls his eyes at Loretta, says, “Another one?” under his breath. Ruth shoots him a stern look.

“It's for the nursing home in Cedar,” she says. This is new, Loretta thinks, a customer that isn't a family with twenty kids, but a
big client, a business. Another sign, no doubt, of the blessings that have come their way since they began living in the Principle.

“A nursing home?” she asks.

“A nursing home,” Ruth says, then points her hand-whittled inch of pencil at a sack of oats. “That's supposed to be a twenty, not a ten.”

Out of everything Loretta had expected and feared about this life, she had not foreseen the way Zion's Harvest Bulk Foods would dominate every day. It sets the clock of the household—preparing deliveries in the morning, organizing inventory in the afternoon, and leaving the strange, midday slack times when Ruth announces Silent Scripture Hour and assigns a book of the Bible or the Book of Mormon, the Pearl of Great Price or the Doctrine and Covenants. The littlest children sit quietly with the Book of Mormon coloring books, but even Elizabeth and Dean Jr.—nine and seven years old—are expected to spend the hour reading scripture, running their index fingers under the tiny text. “And if ye shall say there is no law, ye shall also say there is no sin.” Loretta finds this the worst part of any day, the clearest reminder that no corner of her life is her own.

The new driver will arrive at seven. The last man quit in January, and Dean says he's too busy to make the deliveries and collect payments himself, but Loretta can't see how. He leaves in his big truck after breakfast, and returns right at dinner; Ruth says he's finding customers, glad-handing, building the business, doing everything important that goes unseen. Maybe it's working. Sales are up. Dean doubled the amount he donated to the United Order in December over November. Everyone needs their “year's supply,” their backup against disaster or the last days, but everyone's supply is being constantly eroded by their huge, ravenous families.
Nobody can keep up. The business had always prospered, but once Dean got signed up to accept food stamps, Zion's Harvest boomed.

A few weeks earlier, at dinner, when Dean mentioned that the driver had left, Loretta had volunteered to make the deliveries herself. Ruth frowned at her over the table. The children stopped eating.

“What?” Loretta asked, feeling that she had smacked into another taboo though she wasn't certain what it was. They were everywhere.

Dean paused, a paste of half-chewed food in his mouth.

“We need you here,” he said at last.

They finish the stacks, Samuel and Loretta teaming up on the last of the sixty-pounders while Ruth scans her list. When she's satisfied, she tapes an invoice to each tower of food. Inside, the girls make oatmeal, the same bland gruel that opens every bland day, with only honey and powdered milk because Ruth says processed sugar is how Lucifer gives you cancer. She is obsessed with cancer and the things that she believes causes it: sugar, too much meat, sin. Dean is upstairs, praying and studying scripture. He is on the Council of Elders now, as he frequently mentions.

Today there are eight orders: the Jordan Seniors get wheat, rice, oats, powdered milk, brown sugar, the deluxe spice mix; the Johnsons get puffed-rice cereal, powdered milk, dried onion seasoning, and the soup sampler; the Hales get one of everything and two of some, what with Brother Hale's four wives and thirty-four children; the Millers are trying the meatless bulgur mix; the wardhouse will get the weekly complete batch that Ruth has labeled “Manna”—every item on the inventory. And then there are the smaller orders, the odds and ends.

Later today and tomorrow morning, they'll prepare the largest
order yet: three Mannas for the county jail. A new annual contract. Sometimes Dean thanks the Lord for the contract when he prays.

Loretta, Samuel, and Ruth go in and eat that horse food. In her mind, Loretta flees to her future, where breakfast will be a delicious indulgence, a feast of fruits and jams and sugar, spoonfuls of cancery sweetness. Then they hear car wheels on gravel, the new driver, and they go into the garage and Ruth rolls up the door and Loretta looks outside and stops breathing because there he is, leaning against the truck, foot crossed at the ankle, thumb in his belt loop. That bursting, vicious smile. Those pale eyes. Bradshaw.

 • • • 

When Loretta was eleven, her mother gave her a journal for her birthday. That girl wrote, “I love the Lord more than anything, except for Momma and Dad, and maybe it's the same for all three of them, and after that my brothers and sisters, Tommy first.” Tommy, the oldest, who left and never contacts the family anymore. Did she love the Lord that much? Or did she just know to say the words? “When I sing the hims at church I feel the spirit inside me. My favorite is Onward Christian Soljer and Til We Meet Again.” She would hum the hymns to herself throughout the day, that girl would. Now she finds them gloomy.

Sometimes at night, unable to sleep, Loretta goes through her box of things. Everything that is hers—everything that is her—is tiny and fading. It is all she brought from home, apart from clothes and a set of art paper and charcoal pencils, a birthday gift from her father. Only once has she ever tried to draw something: half a cat, so misshapen that she gave up. The last thing she does when she inventories the items in the box—the photographs of her infant self and long-dead dog, the Christmas ornaments, the arrowheads—is
read her diary, and the last entry in the diary, the last of seventeen for reasons she can no longer remember, is her listing of the qualities she wanted in “the man I mary: rigteous, kind, handsome, strong, good singer, hero, all to myself!!!!”

 • • • 

Bradshaw grins, cocks his jaw, says, “Hidy, folks. I'm Rex Baker. Guess I'm your new driver.”

Loretta's legs ripple. Her mind fills with chaotic flutter.
Rex Baker?
Ruth nods, and calls the children to help, and they all come, even Benjamin, toddling underfoot. Ruth looks over the piles of food, doing calculations in her mind. Bradshaw shoots Loretta a wink. She feels as if she will collapse.

Taking down the tailgate on the truck, Bradshaw asks, “What's your-alls' names?”

Ruth says, “Don't worry about that, Mr. Baker.”

“All right, okay, all right.” He holds up his hands like he's under arrest. “Sorry, ma'am. Just trying to be sociable.”

“That's fine.”

“I got family down with the LeBarons, you know. Down Mexico. I'm friendly.”

Ruth nods, rebuffs his attempt at conspiracy, but Loretta knows he won't stop trying. She knows what he's saying is false, at least if what he told her before is true, that he grew up in Cedar City, always near but never part of this world in Short Creek, let alone Ervil LeBaron's followers down in Mexico. They were the guns and Revelation gang, the truest of the true believers, hungry for apocalypse.

“I'm not some outsider,” he says. Loretta has a sudden image of him standing outside a window, a lighted window on the darkest
night, looking in.
Rex
Baker
. She will have to remember to call him Baker.

 • • • 

It is her night. Dean comes in around eight while she pretends to read the Book of Mormon. His feet are bare and white, sleeves rolled to the biceps. She knows he has washed his feet and hands, soaped his forearms, and washed his face and neck. He smiles wearily at her, head bowed, and sinks into the rocking chair. His knees angle outward like elbows, and he takes his jaw in one hand and presses anxiously.

“The new man seems acceptable,” he says in his slow baritone. “Managed the deliveries. Very acceptable.”

“Oh?” she answers, pretending to be drawn back toward a scripture she is not yet finished absorbing. “Good.”

“Yes, he's fine.”

Since the night of their wedding, Dean has not touched her when he visits her room two nights a week. “We are partners now, you and I,” he sometimes says. “Partners in all ways.” He hasn't touched her or made any mention of his promise, or any suggestion about his desire. He has sat in the rocking chair and rubbed his knuckles methodically, moving from knuckle to knuckle, finger to finger, and talked about whatever is on his mind or made simple, vacant observations. Though he asks for her opinions, she says little, provides the kind of agreement he is seeking and hides inside herself. She can tell he is proud of his self-restraint and imagines it will be rewarded.

He stretches his legs and yawns.

“I'm afraid I have stumbled into some hardship with the Elders,” he says. “A kind of a bind.”

He waits. Loretta closes her book, asks, “What is it?”

“They are asking more from me than I feel is proper. They are asking more from me than I believe the Law of Consecration requires.”

The Law of Consecration. Uncle Elden speaks of it constantly from the pulpit, as he does the Law of Chastity, which governs times of sexual relations, and the Law of Sarah, which allows wives the right to refuse sister wives. The Law of Consecration is fundamental to their view that they are different here, better here, more righteous here—everyone shares all of their wealth with the Elders, who divide and return it to families as needed. We are a community of God, Uncle Elden says, and not a community of man's desires.

“They are asking me to turn over everything from Zion's Harvest,” Dean says, a thin note of complaint in his voice. “They are demanding to see my accounts.”

Loretta stumbles in her mind: Isn't that the law of the community? Isn't Dean an elder of the community?

“I am now turning over twice the tithe I was before you and I were joined,” he said. “I am struggling in my soul, little sister, to understand what more I am required to give.”

“Aren't you to give all?”

“They say I am.” He works at a back tooth with his tongue, and then says in a rising, rapid voice, “Is it only avarice that might make me ask why that is? Is there no point at which I have contributed my share, more than my share, far more than my share, even, and might keep the remainder without being accused of a lack of righteousness?”

He stops as though embarrassed to have revealed himself so. Loretta doesn't know what to say. She had not expected this. Dean's expanding prosperity—his marriage to her, the growth of Zion's
Harvest, his selection to the Council of Elders—had seemed, in and of itself, a time of great fortune for him. A windfall of esteem and authority. And yet he seems now, rubbing his temples and breathing deeply through his nose, like a man sunk in trouble and misunderstanding. He has been buying gold, she knows, because he distrusts paper money. He buys only one-ounce golden eagles, and he's particular about this, quoting Old Testament verses about not having “diverse weights” in your bag, about having a “perfect and just weight.” He is not turning the gold over to the brethren. Not tithing it. He's keeping it.

“It seems like,” she says slowly, “there
should
be a reward,” and Dean sits up in his chair.

“It seems so to me as well,” he says. “Very much so. It is not that I do not want to provide to the community, or share the wealth. It is not, I hope, out of mere vanity or love of filthy lucre that I wonder this. I have struggled in my soul, Loretta, and prayed long over this. I do not wish to have anything the Lord does not intend for me to have.”

He leans forward in the rocking chair, plants his elbows on his knees. Narrows his eyes, lowers his voice, and looks at her with an intensity he saves for times of greatest spiritual import—those moments when he believes he is being heeded, at the pulpit or in prayer, and a look of such gravity comes over him, such self-seriousness, such consciousness of demeanor, that it betrays his greatest vulnerability: his sense of himself as a righteous man.

He says, “I believe the Lord wants me to retain some of the fruits of my prosperity for my family.”

Loretta nods. Of course He does. The only question was how Dean would work his mind around it. She thinks of his office, with the locked drawers and file cabinets. She thinks of how he hides
away the keys to the truck and the van and the station wagon, as if they were precious treasure. She thinks of how he doles out money to Loretta or the kids—not Ruth, Ruth is trusted—by going into his office and shutting the door, and returning with cash folded in his hand. She thinks of the thick dowel that had been lodged against the sliding window in her bedroom. Dean had cut the wood to size, and climbed a ladder to her second-story window and put it there, so even on the hottest days she cannot slide it open. She thinks of the gold. A bag of gold like in a fairy tale. She thinks of taking that gold away from him, and keeping it for herself.

“Would the Lord not want to bless me for this? To bless us?” Dean says.

“He would, Dean. Yes. He would want us all to be
blessed.”