Daredevils (6 page)

Whatever it was that Jason was supposed to feel at this moment, he didn't. But because it was so clearly the thing to be done, he said, “I'll be righteous, Mom.”

 • • • 

The doctor arrives, jocular and smiling in his square metal-framed glasses. He tells them it appears Grandpa has an advanced form of emphysema, and he'll need to stay at least another night.

“Keep an eye on things,” the doctor says, nodding. “Try to get some pictures of his lungs.”

Emphysema. Though he'd never smoked or worked in an asbestos mine.

“Sometimes it happens,” the doctor says. “Not for any reason we can see.”

Jason's parents want to stay at the hospital, so he heads to Boyd's for the night. He loves staying over there. There are no rules. Boyd's mom is gone most of the time, they make a mess and no one complains, and he doesn't have to worry about his parents coming in and deciding, mid-episode, that
Kojak
isn't “appropriate.”

At Boyd's, they make two frozen pizzas and watch TV while Boyd's mom works her shift at the Lincoln Inn. Boyd sits cross-legged on his couch—he calls it Indian style, sarcastically. Where Jason is tall and ungainly, Boyd is thick and earthbound, head like a medicine ball, with a wide, flat nose and thick black hair, black eyes, and a shaggy smile that looked sheepish at first and then defiant. At school, the other kids always call him “Chief” or “Little Bear” or something, and he always responds, “Good one, George,” or, “Hilarious once again, George.” Only Jason knows that “George” is Custer, and that in Boyd's happiest fantasies he rejoins his Indian brothers and sisters and rides down hard on Gooding High School.

Boyd says, “Well, dude, yes or no?”

Yes or No?—their rhetorical game. God: yes or no? Everything is an argument for or against, from Corinne Jensen's tightly packed H.A.S.H. jeans to Evel Knievel's failure to clear the canyon.

“That sucks,” he says. “Don't do that now.”

Boyd shakes his head. “Now is the perfect time.”

Jason stares into the TV screen.
Emergency!
The paramedics are trying to revive a firefighter who collapsed in a burning building. They are shocking him, trying to restart his heart.

“I say . . . this one's a yes,” Boyd says.

Jason stares at him.

“It's so perfectly bad, man,” Boyd says. “So neat. So precise. So
constructed
. A godless world would be chaotic. Nonsensical.”

“This is sensical?”

On TV, the firefighter comes coughingly back to life.

“Perversely, perfectly nonsensical. A disease he doesn't deserve in any way. Dude never smoked, and now this.”

“What a godless world would have,” Jason says, “is no sense of right or wrong. Even if cause and effect were all lined up—right and wrong, that's the main thing. In a godless world, the evil would triumph, the good would be punished or enslaved or something, or get diseases they don't deserve. Like Mordor.”

Boyd shakes his head. “You can work those fucking hobbits into
anything
.”

They watch the final credits in silence, the paramedics frozen in tableaux of bravery, concern, celebration.

“I don't know,” Boyd says. “God must like to fuck with people. Maybe He finds it funny. Maybe He's just bored and screwing with us. Think about it:
we're
bored. How much more bored must He be?”

A tampon commercial comes on with a bicentennial theme. A gymnast in a spotless leotard vaults beneath waving flags.

“Good God,” Boyd says. “If we were really all that free, would we have to be reminded of it constantly? Do free people go around talking about their freedom all the time? Like, tampons—and freedom. Hamburgers—and freedom. Everything and freedom. Wouldn't a truly free people not really notice it, because they're so utterly, amazingly free?”

Boyd's mom comes home as they watch
Saturday Night Live
.
The screen casts a blue pall, and Boyd's mother, puffy faced and smoky voiced, begins watching it even as she sets down her purse, bending unsteadily at the waist, her skinny legs straight. Her starchy, flyaway hair, as brown as a rabbit's, barely covers her scalp, and she curses more than any other woman Jason knows. She flops into the recliner and watches, head drooping. She reeks of something sweet and alcoholic, mixed with cigarette smoke. On TV, Belushi and the others bob around in bee suits. Lines of static run through them, slant the scene momentarily sideways. Her face sinks forward, snaps up. She stands, sways, puts a hand on the recliner arm.

“Oof,” she says. “Boys, I am
drunk
.”

Boyd laughs, flat, without looking away from the TV. His mother wavers, stares. Jason feels darkly clandestine, graced by the world outside his world.

“Bees,” she says.

T
he sheet cake sits on the dining room table.
Happy Birthday, Aunt Loretta
spelled out in raisins. The cake sits there and sits there and sits there, on the long wooden table with bench seats, as in a monastery or penitentiary. Just sits there in its sheet pan, unadorned, on a red-and-white-checked dish towel. Nobody makes a big deal about birthdays here. Every time Loretta walks past it, she wants to run out the door, find Bradshaw, and go.

In his letters, he keeps telling her to wait. He's getting some things together. A little money. Hang in there, baby. It'll happen soon.

He doesn't even know today is her birthday.

That morning, he picked up the orders, and Loretta slipped a note to him as she passed a sack of rice, and he slipped a note to her as they teamed up to haul a box of sundries to his truck. They do this nearly every day—winks, notes, the furtive brush of a finger.
This thing Loretta thought would be impossible has turned out to be simple, just as living this life has turned out to be simple. She remembers wondering how she would hide her true self from them, and then discovering how easy it was, because no one ever asked her anything about herself.

So when Dean comes tonight, it will be the same, only more so. It won't be her with him, it will be her shadow, and it won't be too bad, it will just be another thing she can get through by shrinking into herself. She is not squeamish about the body.

You are mine lorry and that is not something that any fake polyg marriage can change, baby, and we are going to be together I promise.

She thought about telling Bradshaw, in her letters, that today is her birthday. He does not know, she is sure. He is not a birthday-remembering person, though he likes an elaborate fuss for his own. He thinks it has already happened; he thinks it's been happening.
I love you so much lorry that it don't count what he does to you
. She has not corrected him, because it feels strangely too personal. Now she wishes she had mentioned it, because maybe he'd have done something by now, and they'd be gone.

Since that first night, Dean has been gentle and kind, patient, never mentioning how much he wants her, never coming near her in that way. And every morning and evening when she sees Bradshaw, his eyes gleam and jump, he scuttles and hustles at every task. His hungry look never leaves her. Every time she glances at Bradshaw he is already looking back, and she knows that if one of these men is a demon, it is him.

My lorry you have my word that we are going to make the old son of a B pay. I wake up ever day just to see you.

 • • • 

Ruth has made chicken tortilla casserole, with chunks of canned tomatoes that Samuel and Benjamin will sequester on their plates, and that Ruth will insist they eat. The casserole sits in a rectangular baking dish at the center of the table, beside a large bowl of green beans and a stack of wheat bread sliced from the loaf. Ice water in a pitcher and no butter for the bread.

Dean sits at the head of the table, with Ruth to his right and Loretta to his left, and the seven kids lined up from there. Bowing his head, Dean laces his hands and props them before himself on his elbows. They all fold their arms and bow. “Our Father in Heaven,” he begins, and Loretta's mind wanders. He prays several times a day, loves to hear himself pray. Sometimes he will draw it out, add a theme or rebuke a child
. And we pray, dear Lord, that you grant Elizabeth the patience to become more obedient
. He finishes, and everyone whispers, “Amen,” and the food begins to move around the table.

“I would like everyone to think of one thing to share with the family about Aunt Loretta tonight,” Ruth says. “One thing that you feel she has brought to our family. One thing about her that you love.”

Samuel mumbles into his plate, “She's nice,” and Ruth nods vigorously. “She is very nice, Samuel,” she says. Elizabeth says, “She loves the Lord?” and Ruth agrees again, though she looks at Loretta as she nods. Benjamin says, loudly, “She weads to me!” and everyone laughs. Loretta, too. When it falls silent, Dean clears his throat and says, “I believe Loretta has brought a sweetness of spirit into our home,” and Ruth nods in agreement with this as well, mouth pursed.

Loretta has never adjusted to the silence of these children, their obedience, though she has seen the cause of it when they disobey Ruth. She whips them mercilessly with her large wooden spoon or pinches them in strategic ways. If Loretta had considered Ruth a hard woman, humorless, before the wedding, she has come to realize how little she really knew. Ruth is harder than humorless—believing life is meant to be a trial, and her task is to drive these children into heaven, to teach them to ignore pleasure in pursuit of salvation.

She has told Loretta as much.
You must shut down that part of yourself that would coddle a child in weakness. When you encourage worldly softness, you are putting their souls in peril. It is the hardest part of a godly love, to be stern with your children.
Ruth often refers to Loretta's future children.
Your children
. They exist already, these children, and their souls await their chance to come to earth. It is her job to bring them here. Ruth believes this and Dean believes this and Loretta's parents believe this and virtually everyone Loretta knows believes this. Loretta believes this. She tells herself she does not, but when she imagines her childless future—her glamorous days and nights of freedom—she imagines particular souls who will suffer for this, who will remain stranded, and she feels bad for them, a little, but also hoisted and enlarged—seeing herself the way Dean must see himself, as someone toward whom other wills must bend.

Out comes the sad, flat cake, with the birthday message in raisins and a single candle burning. The children sing “Happy Birthday.” She had wondered whether they would, or whether Ruth would consider it a worldly extravagance. Janeen, the six-year-old, sings loudest, and she smiles widely at Loretta when the song is
over, a big gap in her nubby-toothed smile. Loretta blushes, wanting to check the feeling rising up inside her, because it is love.

If anything, hearing Ruth's ideas about disciplining children has made Loretta want to coddle them more. She looks upon the children with intense tenderness; she feels their slights and injuries more powerfully than they do. She can't bring herself to trim little Ben's fingernails, because she once accidentally cut him to the quick and he cried and whimpered, warm and tight in her arms, for half an hour. She relishes doing the girls' hair, and seeing them smile when she tells them they look pretty. She teases Samuel, who blushes hotly, and at night, when she tries to imagine her future, when she thinks about what Bradshaw must be doing with all that money of Dean's that he is handling, when she remembers how much she hated Dean and realizes how that hate has slid into something like accommodation, how she has found a place inside herself for all of this, she becomes fearful at the idea of never seeing these children again, fearful that they may love her, too, and that it will hurt them when she leaves.

They eat the cake. It tastes terrible, odd and eggy.

“Sarah!” Ruth barks, for the youngest girl has laughed with a full mouth of cake, sending a small, wet hunk onto the front of her dress. The girl quickly and quietly tries to wipe it off before Ruth rises and comes and takes the napkin roughly from her hand, dips it in her water glass, and begins to dab at the stain.

Dean wipes his mouth, pets his beard, and leans back with a satisfied aspect. “Thank you, Mother,” he says to Ruth, and scoots back his chair and rises. Suddenly it is there again in Loretta's mind: tonight. What must happen. She has prepared herself. Talked to herself. How bad can it be? How long can it take? She imagines
it might take an hour, and that an hour is not so much. How many other hours has she endured? Yet she is weak with dread.

Ruth, Loretta, and the girls clean up. Dean and the boys work in the garage on tomorrow's deliveries. Soon it's bedtime, and she begins shepherding—it's bath night for Janeen and Sarah, and the older girls need help putting up their hair. Ruth moves constantly through the enormous house, from the kitchen where she rinses a glass to the living room where she straightens the children's scripture books on a shelf to the garage door where she asks Dean a question, up the long staircase and down the carpeted hall past the bedrooms to the bathroom at the end, where she scolds Sarah for taking too long in the bath.

Loretta goes to the boys' bedroom. Her favorite part of the day. Benjamin waits for her, his hair buzzed close to the scalp, his big, light-filled eyes, and his entire face—that ripe, chubby face—alert with anticipation. She sits on the lower bunk with her feet up and leans against the headrest and he settles into her lap in the plain white pajamas Ruth has sewn for him. He loves
The Poky Little Puppy
. It's one of the few books Ruth tolerates, because the puppy is punished. Benjamin snuggles into the crook of Loretta's arm, and she reads. About halfway into the story he lays his head against her chest. His chubby hand curls into a loose fist, resting on her belly. She can smell his hair and his skin, a familiar scent—grass, sweat, play, boy, and something more, something family. She finishes the book. The wayward puppy gets what he has coming—no dessert. She thinks Ben has fallen asleep, but he lifts his head and says, “Again,” and she starts over. The puppy digs and disobeys. Ben adjusts, shifts against her. Loretta presses her cheek against his head. What a warm, fragile being. Bone and flesh. Belly and brain. With only these people, this family, to care for him.

 • • • 

She lies under the covers in her garments, afghan to her chin, and watches Dean unloop a suspender from one shoulder, then the other, and step carefully out of his black wool pants, not letting them drop to the floor. He removes his shirt and drapes it over the foot of the bed. His blush runs from the side of his face, brightening the shiny half-moon scar on his earlobe, and streaks down his neck and onto his chest, burrowing into the V-neck of his gauzy garments, the blessed garments that protect him from evil. His breathing is shallow and rapid. He is already erect, a dark bulb pressing outward against the thin cloth of the garment. He drops his hands in front of it as he walks to the side of the bed, and says, “I apologize if this seems vulgar,” and slides under the covers, sits up on his elbow, and puts on his serious face, his church-speaking face. “And I am sorry, little sister, for the way I behaved with you on our first night. I feel as though a demon has overtaken me when it comes to you, beautiful Loretta, and it is in this battle, this torture of the flesh, that I have found some spiritual solace these past months, that I have found myself tested, and imagined that I had battled this flesh in earnest, and, like all such battle, had gained something in my soul from it. Except for that first night.”

“It's all right,” Loretta whispers. She had hoped he might be wordless and fast. That she might dream her way through it. But seeing him at the foot of her bed, his erection tenting, had surprised her: she was intrigued. Not aroused, not that—but curious about that pronging, and about the way it might be like or unlike Bradshaw's pronging, which she has felt only through his jeans, though he has pressed her for more. When she imagines her future and wonders how she will get there, she realizes that it may involve
Bradshaw and his penis, and she wonders if there will be others, and how she will feel about those others, if they might be pathways to other things or simply ends in themselves, and so she is curious now in the way she might be curious about the first time she saw anything. And part of her has always felt that all of this—romance, passion, love, sex, men, and women—was overwrought, overdone, oversold, whether in the worldly world or in the church world, both places treating it like some magic thing when it was just a body thing, an animal thing. She wants Dean to get started now and stop talking about God and temptation and the flesh, but he is doing it again, talking about the flesh, and Loretta wonders how he could think it makes any difference if they do it today or if they did it last week or if they do it tomorrow. How could it matter?

Dean is up on one elbow, looking down at her. She is flat on her back, arms at her sides, and he smiles at her in a way that she has to admit is tender, loving, genuine seeming, and under these covers the heat rolls off him like a milk cow on a cold day, steaming. He puts his hand between her legs and presses lightly as he leans to kiss her on the mouth. The hairs in his beard prickle her face. He kisses her once, twice, three times, and his erection, the source of all that heat, presses against her leg, and his fingers move inside the slit in her garments, and then slide up and down, up and down, and then he withdraws his hand and reaches for the small tub of petroleum jelly that Ruth had brought her, saying only, “Sometimes this helps,” and now he's talking about “heavenly comfort” and how this is one of God's true blessings for the righteous. Loretta tries not to hear, to concentrate only on the body. She is making a task of this. A chore. Dean gently moves her legs apart, widening her, and he slips on top, still in his garment, his penis out of the slit now,
she feels it bump and prod, and Dean reaches down, helping it seek, and she feels the bit of slick he has rubbed onto it, and it occurs to her how much larger Dean is than she is, how much taller and wider as a human animal, how much more of a monkey or a goat he is, how his feet hang nearly off the bed and how his chest, with the bony, flaring rib cage, is on her face now, how it is almost as if he were pressing her into silence with his chest, and he moves in, and it doesn't feel too bad, not as painful as she thought it might, just a tightness, a fullness, and Dean begins to move and gasp and lurch and pant—heaving himself at her like an animal, teeth and hair, skin and bones and hunger, and she doesn't like it, she doesn't like it at all. But she is in it, and she knows that when you are in it, whatever it is, there is no point in wishing otherwise, and so she tries to let her mind go somewhere but she can't make it go anywhere, this is all there is right now, and then it is done, Dean tenses and flexes all over, his face contorts grotesquely, as though it were being smeared around by an invisible hand. It didn't take anywhere close to an hour.