Daredevils (8 page)

B
oyd wrings the handlebar grip, dipping his shoulder, and the Kawasaki spits and flies toward a rocky ramp of lava. Jason found this spot—the tiny cliff that drops three feet onto a flat piece of desert—and now he watches as Boyd goes over the ledge, front wheel dropping. The whine halts abruptly. Boyd pitches headfirst over the handlebars, and the Kawasaki flips across the desert. For a second Jason thinks Boyd will be badly hurt. Even when Boyd hops up, holding his elbow and grinning madly, even then, Jason knows that he doesn't really want to do this. He wants to be away, alone.

The Kawasaki lies on its side in the duff grass, back wheel slowly spinning. Three jackrabbits inch up, sniffing, and hop off.

“I know what I did wrong,” Boyd says, breathing heavily. “You gotta go faster and pull back harder.”

It's not that Jason's scared. At least he doesn't think so. He's jumped other things—lots of them—and he's usually first to go.
But Boyd's wreck makes him nervous, a little, and that's enough, on top of this other thing, the fuzzed focus and half exhaustion that's been swamping him since Grandpa died.

“You look about half retarded right now,” Boyd says. “Mouth all open.”

Jason shrugs, and Boyd goes to get the bike. Boyd won't give him too much shit if he doesn't do it, Jason thinks. It's not the time for that, but as that thought enters Jason's mind he wonders: What is it the time for, exactly? His mother says it's time to reflect and remember the importance of family, the eternal verities, the celestial kingdom, et cetera. What is it the time for? Anecdotes and platitudes. Self-comforting nonsense.
It's better this way. He's out of his pain. He's with the Lord now. With Grandma. At peace
. Everyone has something to say. Everyone has a lesson to impart, an anecdote dragging a moral trailing a tidy little pat on the head. A grand, swamping tide of bullshit. Only Boyd had said the right thing: “Man, dude. That is fucked up.”

Precisely right. Five days ago, Dad found Grandpa in his metal lawn chair, where he'd been spending each desert sunset and the cooling hour after, just sitting and breathing through his oxygen mask. It had been furiously hot, no rain for weeks, every parched inch of land one spark from inferno. Time to start the third cutting of hay. Jackrabbits swarmed, gnawing through barley and haystacks faster than anyone could poison or shoot them.

His father came into Jason's room that night. Which he never did. Jason was lying on his bed reading
The Hobbit,
bare feet hanging off the end of the mattress. Bilbo and the dwarves had just entered the forest of Mirkwood. A dark tangle of menace. Dad sat on the bed and stared at the wood-paneled wall, gray cheeks slack.
Outside, a wheel line repeated its watery
skirch
. Above them, trophies from livestock sales and Little League sat on shelves, tiny golden calves and batters, and images of Evel Knievel—in black and white, in color, crashing and landing—papered every wall.

“Your grandpa's gone,” his father said, and Jason thought for a moment that he meant Grandpa had traveled somewhere, maybe Boise or Salt Lake. “I'm going to need you to be strong for your mother.”

Dad sighed, and dropped his gaze to the floor. Jason waited for the moment to arrive—grief, heartbreak—but it simply did not. He felt tired. A little sad, a little hungry. He thought he spied a tearish gleam at the corner of Dad's eye and was glad for it. Jason had seen him show emotion only during testimony meeting, when he was displaying his deep and abiding faith for the ward. Jason wanted something to have the power to make him sad.

“Sorry, Dad,” he said.

Dad turned, and his eyes were shiny but dry, the same glinty nuggets he trained on Jason when he screwed around during church or was late feeding calves.

Dad shook his head. “It was time,” he said.

Time
. What made it time? What made the time any better than, say, one day later? Or one day earlier? Why not another thirty-seven hours, or forty-two hours, or fifty-six hours and twenty-seven minutes and thirteen seconds? What made it so right that Grandpa didn't get another year, five years? Ten years?
It was time
. He felt surrounded by people who would swallow any goddamned thing and smile.

Boyd walks the motorcycle over. Jason won't do it. Not today. He feels relieved that he can put this off for another time. Out of
everyone in the world, only Boyd understands him correctly, and this is how Jason knows that Boyd will not ride him about chickening out.

Boyd stops, his enormous head cocked and a gaze of evaluation trained on Jason.

He says, “Get on the bike, man. You can't be a pussy your whole life.”

 • • • 

Here is how, according to the story Jason's mother told him on every birthday, he became the sole only child out of all the Mormon kids he knew:

Twenty-three hours of labor. A night and day and night of pain and desperation. Prayers and lamentations. A period of thirteen minutes when everyone in the delivery room believed he had died, followed by his birth, breach, with the umbilical cord wrapped snugly around his neck. Blue above and red below. Then, a revival. “A miracle. You're my miracle boy.” But he was the last of the children, for reasons that were never fully clear—a complication, a risk to his mother's life. More children would have been unsafe. So he was the only one, and though he was surrounded by families of five, six, seven, eight, all these fertile righteous families, he could believe only that everyone was really just like him: the only one, the miracle of their own lives.

 • • • 

Jason lands the first jump, crashes the second. It is afternoon when he arrives home, elbow bleeding and shoulder aching, to find Aunt Bonnie and Uncle Ben have arrived from Pocatello, with their six kids in the converted airport van. Jason parks the bike in the shed
and pokes around in the dusty heat, avoiding going in. The gloomy swelter of the shed forces itself on him, sends stinging trickles of sweat into his scrapes and cuts.

He comes out as a rusty gold Nova tears into the drive. Uncle Roy. Here from Boise. A Jack Mormon, never married, suspected of illicit pleasures like coffee and beer. Jason's favorite.

“Hey, kid,” Roy hollers, elbow out the window as the car engine rattles and ticks into silence. “Staying out of trouble?”

“Not really.”

“Cool, man.”

He clambers out, slams the door, puts his hands on his hips, and surveys the place. Soft body on a big frame. His belly strains against a thinning terry-cloth shirt and his fraying bell-bottom jeans nearly cover his feet. Face thick and happy, with curly sideburns and an unruly nest of hair and a grin that makes you feel he knows where all the good times are hidden.

He comes over, rubs a hand in Jason's hair and hugs him hard, slaps his back, and holds him with one arm around the shoulder, tightly.

“Sucks about the old man,” Roy says.

“Really sucks,” Jason says.

“Just goddamn lousy,” Roy says. Jason's eyes sting and tighten. Roy adds, “This next part's gonna be worse yet. Watching all the boo-hoo.”

Roy pats his shoulder, releases him.

“Dean here?”

Dean. Uncle Dean. Supposedly, Jason met his uncle Dean once, when he was two or three, but all he knows is that Dean and his family live down in Arizona or Utah, with their million kids and strange ways. Old-school Mormons, fundamentalists. Just how old
school he couldn't have said, but Dean lives down where the polygamists live. One of the places. They're up in British Columbia and down in Arizona and Mexico and even, a few of them, in Hagerman, just a few miles away in the Snake River Canyon. Little pockets of polygamists. They're an embarrassment to good, normal Mormons, and Jason's parents have made their own nervousness about Dean clear in their cautious avoidance of the subject. He is the signal omission from all their talk of family, family, family. The sacred family.

“I guess not,” Jason says.

“You'd know it if he was.”

“What? Why?”

Roy scrunches his features, as if he can't quite calculate the answer. “He'll be here soon enough. I don't want to spoil the surprise.” He pats Jason aggressively on the shoulder. “Okay. Let's go greet the fam damily.”

They go in. Hugs, kisses. Jason's cousins are mostly younger. While they're all saying shy hellos, Aunt Jenna and her five kids arrive in their station wagon from Salt Lake City. She has left her husband, Verl, behind. He'll come up in time for the funeral tomorrow. The house is suddenly so full you can't put a foot down. Cousins crowd into Jason's room, toss down sleeping bags. Jason's mother has put box fans in the windows, shoving waves of dank air, and laid out a buffet of cold cuts and salads on the kitchen counter, the start of the continuous meal that marks all family gatherings—the steady, informal eating, broken only by the moments of formalized eating. People stand around the counter, picking at the food, eating off trays, leaving the paper plates mostly untouched.

Suitcases and pillows pile up everywhere. Jason and his father
set up cots in the living room and office. The day is blazing, near a hundred, and it's not cooling as the bright evening approaches. Conversations streak into a blur.

“Robbie says you had to hold out that heifer again.”

“Is that sour cream in this?”

“I don't believe those boys could make a tackle to save their life.”

“Yeah, she takes sick more than the rest.”

“Just a little plain yogurt.”

“Yep. Pinkeye.”

“So she takes off her clothes and runs into the ocean.”

“Glenns Ferry is gonna take 'em apart.”

“Mom! Mooooom!”

“And while she's out there skinny-dipping, something starts to yank her under the water.”

“You got Pong?”

“Roy! What are you telling those kids?”

“Mom!”

“Pong and four other ones. I got it for Christmas.”

“It's just a movie, Becky.”

“Sometimes one just is that way.”

“You see old Ford's speech the other night?”

“Heavens. I wish we had someone better.”

“Better than awful?”

A knocking rattles the screen door. Someone yells, “Come in,” and an entire family clad in denim enters. Three boys in dark dungarees, light denim shirts, and suspenders. Four girls in prairie dresses of pale plain blue. Mother and father the same, like the largest in a set of nesting dolls. The chirping of grasshoppers is suddenly audible. The man holds his hat, squints into the room, as if he has just arrived from 1875 and is waiting for his eyes to adjust.
His beard makes a neat berm along his jaw, and his bony Adam's apple gives him the cast of an Ichabod or an Abe.

“I gather we missed the announcement,” he says to the room.

He has the unmistakable Harder lank and pall.

Dad reddens and comes to the door, says, “My word, Dean, how would we ever know how to reach you?”

It is past eight
P.M
. Through the screen door, behind the Ingalls Wilders, the sky darkens from pink to purple and orange. Dad and Dean stand at cross angles. Dad nods vacantly at nothing, and Dean's family clusters as if for warmth. Dean's wife looks cornered, as Mom blitzes in with the aunts.

“Heaven's sake, you must all be starving,” she says. “Come get something to eat.”

Dean frowningly hugs his sisters and Jason's mom, but his wife gives them grim smiles to convey that she will not be hugging anyone. Dean says, “Thank you, but I think we'll just go over to the house and get settled.”

The house. Grandpa's house. Dad stops nodding, and Mom starts, very slowly. From the far edge of the room, Roy calls, “Don't go pocketing the silverware,” and Dad says, “Roy,” but Dean's expression doesn't change. He just says, as he herds his kids out, “Hullo, little brother.”

L
oretta wakes into baffling stillness. Somewhere outside a car accelerates. Bird trill flutters through the window. Has she ever heard a bird before, inside this house? The family squelches all incoming signals, and now that the clamor has departed, the silence is delicate and pure and enormous. A dog barks, a hundred miles away.

She stays in bed, though the sun is up. No one knocks. No one calls her to breakfast or asks her to help with the children or points to a bucket with a floating sponge or kisses her on the top of the head or asks her to get more honey from the pantry. No one tugs at her skirt or tap-tap-taps her on the arm, as Ruth has ordered the children to do when they want a grown-up's attention, and no one cries when they fall down after jumping off the shed roof or gets their pants caught on the barbed-wire fence or are told, sternly, that they cannot keep the stray cat they lured home only to have
Ruth chase it away, whipping stones at it in short, expert strokes. It will not be her night tonight. She will not have to do that, though she ordinarily would, would prepare for it all day, reminding herself it's just a gesture of the body. She will not have to hear Dean's questions about whether she has noticed any queasiness in the mornings.

All of that doesn't happen, and something else. She does not leave. She does not plan to leave. She could not dream of a better chance. She could not dream of a door more open. But she is not going, and she knows she is not going.

Before now, the idea that Dean had parents of his own, that he grew up with brothers and sisters, had not entered Loretta's mind. Then he received a phone call from a friend in the Reorganized LDS Church in Hagerman, Idaho, who'd seen an obituary for Dean's father in the
Times-News
. Dean's name had not been included among the survivors. The friend thought perhaps his family had failed to notify him.

“It is just the kind of betrayal I would have expected from Louis,” Dean said that night, after the children were asleep, as he and Ruth and Loretta discussed what would happen now. Dean would have something coming up there, surely. Land, money. He would have an inheritance to claim.

“Even if I have to force it,” he said.

“It's only what's right, Father,” Ruth said. “You can never be wrong when you stand up for what's right.”

Dean smiled at her. She did this for him, Loretta saw: confirmed him in his positions. Dean sometimes came to Loretta for the same thing, asking her without directly asking her to support him in his interpretations of scripture, in his decisions about disciplining the children, in the products he would add or remove from the Zion's
Harvest inventory, in his recent battles with the Council of Elders. He was not seeking permission or anything like it; Dean knew what he thought was right. And yet there was something in him that needed support and confirmation.

Dean drank hot Postum with dehydrated milk. Ruth nibbled raisins one at a time, aggressively. She did most of the talking, but Dean gave the final word. Every so often, Dean would look at Loretta, as though remembering to include her. Loretta was hungry, but not hungry enough to eat whatever was available here; before, back with her parents, there had always been a bounty of junk food, sugar cereal and potato chips and store cookies, and now Loretta sometimes feels as if she were starving. When the children complain of hunger, Ruth suggests to them that they chew on kernels of raw wheat, and they do, chewing and chewing until it forms a gum, but Loretta wants nothing to do with Ruth's food, with raw wheat and carob and one-at-a-time raisins.

“Maybe this can be your way,” Ruth said. “Maybe the Lord is bringing you an opportunity to overcome your obstacles. With the council and such.”

Dean had left the Council of Elders. There had been talk of disfellowship. Excommunication.

Ruth said, “How about this, Father? You and me and the children go to Idaho for the funeral, and Aunt Loretta stays behind here. Minds the house. Takes orders. We can see what the situation is like there. Consider. There's no need for us to introduce anything just yet that requires extra explanation.”

Dean and Ruth cast cool, appraising looks at Loretta, and Loretta felt as if she were more their child than their spouse. They were wondering, she could see, whether they could trust her.

“You make good sense, Mother,” Dean said at last. “As usual.”

 • • • 

It is not quite seven thirty. Loretta remembers a time she would have considered this early. She can't remember the last time she just wallowed around in bed. Every day, she drags herself out, against her will and ahead of the sun.

Why is she not going?

She can make each of the competing arguments to herself: Go now. Go alone. Go with Bradshaw. Wait and plot and gather “provisions,” as Bradshaw calls it in his letters, and leave with Bradshaw. Or without him. Or. Or. Or. Her mind circles the options constantly, but now she realizes that she isn't waiting for one of those options to clarify—she's waiting for something else. Another choice. Another way. But all that thinking has nothing to do with why she's not leaving. She simply feels it. She is not going.

She does not relish this life in any sense. She despises it, feels it like a web holding her in place. But she knows it. It is all she knows. And what she tells herself she wants—freedom, a worldly life, music, magazine life, slacks, and makeup—of that world, she knows absolutely nothing. She thinks of the Tussy ad. “Win a Mustang to Match Your Lipstick!” The brazen girl on the hood of the pink, pink car, so colorful and bold and distant. An eternity away from here.

She will not think of herself as afraid.

Seven forty-five. Bradshaw arrives each morning at eight. He knows nothing of what's gone on here. Dean trusts him. There is an idea in the air—a hint, an undecided notion—that they could all just leave here, escape the problems with the brotherhood, and that Bradshaw could help run the business here while they are
away. When Bradshaw understands what is happening, he will want to go. He will want to go, go, go.

 • • • 

Dean told Loretta his story with a neatness she distrusted—a mosaic of cause and effect dragged into the service of the ideas Dean wanted to convey about himself. That he had been raised in a misshapen faith, in a perverted version of the truth, and that he had found his way to the light.

He grew up in the mainstream church in southern Idaho, the oldest of five. His father held leadership roles in the local ward—a bishop or a member of the bishopric, a high councillor, the stake president—and the family was stalwart, at the wardhouse on Sundays and at the farmers co-op on Mondays and at the livestock auctions on Fridays at the fairgrounds. Though the church and its demands were great, Dean found himself at a young age wanting more rigor. More fire. In prayer, during the sacrament, while reading scripture, he would feel liquefied in the forge of the Lord, and when he emerged, he would see that his fellows were the same earthen lumps. They had not entered the fire. When he accompanied his father to the auctions or the cafés, and he watched him laugh and glad-hand with the worldly men, the farmers telling crude jokes or smoking cigarettes, he resented his father for not turning his back on these men and their ways.

He came to know some of the Reorganized LDS members down in Hagerman. The RLDS was a small sect that had broken away from the mainstream church more than a hundred years ago. Little pockets of the church stayed true, tiny congregations here and there around the country. There was something clandestine about them
that fed Dean's desires. They were polygamists, and as Dean studied the origins of the faith, he began to see that the principle of plural marriage kept returning—godly men building lineages of righteousness. As he read the writings of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, as he read the Old Testament with new eyes, he began to understand that there was a wide range of Mormon believers out there, a variety of little shoots and branches off the main body of the faith, and that one of these might contain the truth that the mainstream church had forsaken, and that the Principle stood at the center of this truth.

He was twenty-three, working the farm with his father while Louis served his mission, when federal agents raided the Saints in Short Creek. The officers tore children from the arms of their mothers and held righteous men at gunpoint, wicked and prideful, while the newspaper whores took photographs.
A clarion to awaken the righteous,
Dean had whispered to Loretta, telling her this story late into the night.
Your aunt Ruth was one of those children.

His devotion grew until the Hagerman congregation could not contain it. Five years later, at the end of the harvest, he traveled to Short Creek. He returned home just once after that, a month later, when he held counsel with his father and his brother, poring over scripture and urging them to reject the mainstream church and join the brethren in Short Creek. When they told him they would not, he knew they were filled not simply with wickedness but with the most dangerous belief on earth—that their wickedness was righteousness.

 • • • 

She waits for the sound of Bradshaw's truck in the drive. She is in her nightdress, the thick cotton over the temple garments—
the silky two-piece underwear with the markings at the nipples and the belly, the garments she was given upon her marriage and which she is to wear at all times. It occurs to her that she could take them off.

She answers when the knock comes, and when she sees him again, like this, unguarded and not pretending, he is too much. Hungry grin, twittery eyes of ice, almost turquoise. One hand high on the doorjamb, one on his hip, one foot forward and one back, his Wranglers long at the boot heel and the arms of his pearl-button shirt cut short and fraying, and his hat, bill curled tightly and worn through at the front edge, bearing the words “Sandy Excavation” in lariat script.

“Darlin',” he says. “Sweet Lori,” he says, and he is upon her.

He kisses her face off. He kisses her like he's trying to eat something. Her lips go raw, her jaw aches. He puts his hands everywhere. She likes it but she doesn't. It feels half like he's trying to hurt her. She holds his back, recalls how tightened with muscle it is, compared to Dean's thick, spongy flesh. She starts to push him away, and says, “Stop, stop, slow down,” and it takes her a long time to wake him from the fever, and when he finally does he looks at her in pain and disbelief, groans and rolls to the corner of the couch, and wails. “Lori,” he says, begging. “Lori.”

Whether she wants it or not seems like the wrong question. Bradshaw is handsomer than Dean, funnier, younger, better in every way, and she would rather do this with him than with Dean. But it is not a choice between Bradshaw and Dean. It is a choice between now or later. Between Bradshaw or Dean or something else entirely. She could do it. Easily. She could do almost anything now. You hide inside yourself, and whatever happens out there still happens, but you're less there, you're enough not there that you
can keep talking to yourself, telling yourself whatever you've decided to tell yourself, until it's done.

She says, “Not like this, baby. I want it to be right. To be us, somewhere else, living our own life. Not here. Not in Dean's house.”

Bradshaw groans and holds his head in his hands as though he has been struck in the face. Loretta could not care less about the moment or the place. But she understands that this is a thing he would expect her to care about.

She could just give in. That would make Bradshaw happy. It might even make her happy. But none of that matters—not her desire, not his desire, not this man or that man, not being married or being free, not whether she wants to or not.

It is only about the choosing. Nothing else. The choosing, and that it be hers.

 • • • 

Later, when he's got his smile back, he tells her, “Well, hon, I'm sorry but there ain't any money.”

Dean called in everything before he left town, got all the accounts in order. He had been settling up with Bradshaw once a week, and taking Bradshaw's word about a couple of “late payments,” and generally had allowed Bradshaw to create pockets of uncertainty in the cash flow. But that was over now, and Bradshaw had to give over all the money he had squirreled away off the top of the payments to Zion's Harvest.

“Didn't have no choice. But this thing of Dean's is exploding. Sales off the freaking charts. When things settle down again, it'll be nothing to skim off . . . I don't know. . . .” He acts like he's calculating in his head. “A lot, baby. A shitload.”

A love of money is the root of all evil. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Your gold and your silver have rusted, and their rust will be a witness against you
. Loretta has heard these words all her life, and she has always wondered: How could you not love money? Is it even possible?

He's not even trying to talk her into it now. He wants to wait for the money,
too.

 

EVEL KNIEVEL ADDRESSES AN ADORING NATION

The taverns. Oh, the taverns. The Muddy Bumper in Reno. The Silver Pony in Baker. The Mint in every Podunk Montana town. The little-town bars. The dusty afternoon light, thrust through the bar dark in thick planks. The freak-show glow of the egg jar, pickling in amber, and the sharp bite of a seventh cigarette. The Rockin R in Bozeman. John's Alley in Moscow. The Dry Dock in Moses Lake. The little-town taverns, unannounced. Walk in, await an audience, watch the night grow. Buy rounds, unscrew the top of the cane, drain the Wild Turkey. Wink at the best-looking gal first chance you get. The Sports Page in Pocatello. The Bawdy Dog in Orem. The Baby Bar in Spokane. The Stockmen's in Elko. People pressed around us so tight we felt their heat, their life, pouring into us. We walk in, and wait for the eyes to turn, for the looks to begin, for the approach and the surprise—their thrill when we sit with them, share ourselves, their glorying in us—and the delivery of the best kind of love, the only kind of love: wild, momentary, complete.