Daredevils (9 page)

J
ason's dad sits in the high cab of the tractor, pulling the baler as it spins the cut hay into its mouth and spits out a trail of tightly twined rectangles. Jason and Boyd swap between bucking bales onto the flatbed and driving the truck. They should finish by nightfall. Finish for the day, finish for the season, finish forever. That's what Jason is thinking, that this will be his last day of this, ever, and that now that school is starting, his senior year, everything will be the last of its kind, the final one. Next year, he'll be eighteen, a high school graduate, and gone. The thought gets him through it all: the throb in his temples, his pasty mouth, the ache in his shoulders.

The day is spangled, wincingly bright—white-gold fields, a haze of dust. They have been haying behind Grandpa's place, by the falling-down gray shack and the old tractor grown through with weeds. They stop for lunch. Jason and Boyd eat in the truck cab,
drenched in sweat and daubed with hay dust, while Dad clears weeds from the teeth of the baler.

They eat quietly until, across the field, they see Dean emerge from the back door of the house and lope to the shed. Everyone else left not long after the funeral, but Dean and his family stayed, without explanation. Now a pickup truck and a horse trailer packed with boxes are parked in the drive.

“Are they moving here?” Boyd asks.

“I don't know.”

“They look like they're in some pioneer movie.”

Jason feels an odd impulse to defend them. The ugly tether of family.

“What are they, like, square dancers?” Boyd asks.

“Probably.”

“Do they spin wool into thread? Can they churn butter?”

“I'm sure they can churn amazing butter.”

Jason's parents have been deeply uninformative about the situation. His father has been particularly terse and dismissive, pretending he's surprised anyone might be interested in what Dean is doing. Across the field, Dean emerges from the shed and strides to the horse trailer. Ruth comes out from the back door, and begins pulling down what seems like one hundred pairs of overalls from the clothesline, two kids romping at her feet like puppies.

“Spectacular butter,” Jason says. “You'd want to rub yourself all over with this butter.”

It is so hot it no longer feels hot. Jason's mouth is furred, no matter how much warm water he chugs from the thermos. He sinks drowsily into the soft, springy seats, closes his eyes, wonders how quickly they will make it through the final windrows. Four more hours? Five?

Done forever.

Boyd spits out the window. “I don't get why you don't know if they're moving here,” he says. “What's the big secret?”

Boyd can't understand Jason's family, Jason knows, because they almost never tell one another anything, while he and his mother tell each other every embarrassing thing. Jason doesn't know what to say about Dean. He can feel already how having them here is going to reflect on him, on his family—how it will create a new zone of caution between him and others.

“They're just old-fashioned,” he says. “They live down there on the Utah-Arizona line. It's like they're half Amish.”

“Down there with the polygamists?”

“I'm not sure.”

Dad comes to the truck, boots crunching the shorn hay stalks. He takes off his hat and squints at them, sweat sheened, the tips of his nose and ears a deep red.

“All right, boys, let's get back to it,” he says.

“Hey, Mr. Harder,” Boyd says. “Is your brother moving here or what?”

Dad pulls on his gloves, gets them snug.

“We're still figuring that out,” he says.

 • • • 

Grandpa has been dead for two weeks now, the funeral come and gone, and everything still feels tilted on its side. For as long as Jason can remember, this has been the order of things: him, his parents, and Grandpa down the road. His grandmother died when Jason was four, and he doesn't remember her at all. The current arrangement—the family, as he understood it to exist—had taken on a feeling of permanence.

And then there is the pressing strangeness of Dean and Ruth and their kids. Dean calls Ruth “Mother” in a stern voice, they dress like pioneers, and an air of self-imposed privation hangs around them. None of them says much, always waiting for Dean to talk. They don't watch television or go to movies or dances, and they eat weird food. For one of the family dinners before everyone left, Ruth made meat-free hamburgers out of bulgur. Everyone picked at them unhappily while Ruth talked about the benefits of eating less meat and sugar. It was the quietest meal of the week, as people nibbled the crumbly patties and held their tongues.

Afterward, Roy had driven Jason into town for cheeseburgers, tater tots, and suicides at the Oh-So, where they laughed themselves to tears over Ruth's food.

“
Ho-ly shit
. Those poor kids,” Roy had said, sinking a tot into a tub of pink fry sauce. “Someone ought to set them free. Nobody should be forced to eat like that.”

“Why do they?”

“Why do they do anything? Don't ask me.” He seemed happily unconcerned. “I used to tell my friends that Dean had crooked calf disease. You know what that is? When their feet are turned under and twisted all around? Nothing you can do for 'em. It's just unfixable. Dean's like that—just
deformed
. From the ground up. His feet are all fucked up.”

Jason is tempted to say he hates them, but why would he hate them? He feels a stinging blade of hatred in the side, like a stitch in the abdomen from running—a resentment that they magnify everything he dislikes about his family and church and town, the limited horizons, the boring reverence, the feeling that the people who were considered wise were in fact stupid. And the truth of it,
the real thing: the fear that they are him. That he is them. These freaks.

In the days before the funeral, Dad, Dean, and Roy spent a lot of time huddled together, speaking in low voices, pointing, and shaking their heads. Sometimes Bonnie and Jenna would join in. They were sorting through the inheritance—Grandpa had left each of the five siblings a share of the land. Dad already had 250 acres and the dairy, which he'd bought years earlier. The brothers were going to buy out the sisters, but some unknown tension remained unresolved.

The night before the funeral, Jason walked into the kitchen to find the brothers around the table. Mom stood at the sink, her back to them. She seemed smaller than usual in the waning glow from the overhead light. They all tower over her, the Harder men—even Jason is a head taller—but she never seems short, exactly; she has a way of bringing your eyes down to her, a directness that could make a high priest squirm. She was washing jars in steaming water; the women were going to can green beans and tomatoes the next day.

Dad was saying, “But I
bought
it, Dean. How's that supposed to count against me here?” Dean stared at a point between his long, thickly knuckled hands, splayed on the table before him. The skin around his eyes had tightened whitely. Roy winked at Jason.

Jason opened the fridge and scouted, waiting for them to resume talking. He grabbed a Tupperware bowl, opened it, and looked at a lump of leftover ground beef. The hamburger looked like volcanic rock, a solid created from a liquid's lack of geometric logic. At his back, a fingernail ticked on the laminate tabletop. He imagined a tiny mountain climber rappelling down Hamburger Mountain
into a greasy white crevasse. Dad said, “Jason, you're letting out all the cold air.”

“It's not like there's only so much cold air,” Jason said. “Like there's only a certain amount of cold, and you've got to keep it trapped in there, like bees.”

He could be so stupid. Jason thought he was going to choke on it.

Roy laughed. “He's making a certain kind of sense, Louis.”

“Thank you, son,” Dad said, ignoring Roy. “Now clear out of here and let us talk.”

“Talk. Please.”

Mom turned, holding a gleaming, soapy jar. “I don't know where all this mouth is coming from,” she said. “But that's enough.”

Jason closed the fridge door and sauntered out, steaming. He couldn't believe they were fighting over this place. Who would ever want to be here?

 • • • 

They move into the last field, the fifty acres between Grandpa's house and Shoestring Road. Some of these final windrows are barely even there. This is where the jacks had hit a few weeks earlier, gnawing half the hay into bare patches and paths swirling through the field like the scribbling of a giant.

Dad stops the combine and climbs out. Shakes his head. A sudden rustling at the edge of the field startles Jason. A single jackrabbit springs into the air, long ears back, bounding into the desert in ten-foot leaps. Boyd points an imaginary gun and says, “Boom.”

Later that afternoon, when they're halfway through the field, the end in sight, Dean comes striding through the stubble, raising a low cloud. Jason sits in the sweltering, oil-rank cab of the combine, engine roaring in an obliterating drone. Dad follows in the truck,
while Boyd bucks bales onto the flatbed. Everyone stops and watches Dean. He doesn't wave, and they don't, either, and when he reaches them, a few strained, silent seconds pass.

Finally, Dean says something, and Dad shrugs and gestures toward the rumbling cab, or toward Jason. He's come to help, it seems, though they are all but done. Jason turns off the engine, and Dad calls, “Whyn't you let your uncle Dean up there for a minute?”

Dean climbs in and nods, says, “Jason.” His denim shirt is buttoned to the neck, darkened with sweat at the collar, and he wears a green John Deere cap with a stiff bill. He smells sour and fundamental, like homemade soap and tent canvas. He looks around, at the pedals and the gearshift and back at the pedals. The sun illuminates the calcified grime on the cab windows. He turns the key and the engine bursts into life.

“Gotta watch that clutch,” Jason shouts.

“I don't require any instruction from you.”

Dean might be teasing. He presses the clutch, forces the gearshift into first, and eases his foot down on the gas. The gearshift begins to grind and vibrate and his foot slips off. The engine chugs and dies.

“Well, Judas Priest,” Dean says.

He twists the key, presses the clutch, and tries again. This time the baler lurches forward, coughs, and dies. Jason feels testy, impatient; they are so close to done. Dean stamps his foot and mutters.

He tries again. It chugs and dies.

“You know . . .” Jason says.

Dean points toward Jason sideways, without looking up, like a prophet banishing a demon. “Do not!” he spits.

Dad and Boyd watch from the ground, shading their eyes. Dad calls, “Maybe you ought to let Jason show you.”

“Louis!” Dean shouts, and Jason hears the tone of an older brother. “I do not need instructions from a boy in how to operate a simple piece of machinery. I think if you maintained your equipment properly, we wouldn't be having this problem. This clutch is slipping all over the place.”

Jason looks out and catches Boyd's eye. He smiles.

“That
is
a bear of a clutch, Mr. Harder,” Boyd says.

Dean stares at Boyd, breathing slowly and deeply. Then he reaches for the key again and turns it, slowly lifting his foot from the clutch. This time, he fails to give it enough gas, and it sputters out weakly.

Dean spins in the seat and climbs down and stalks off across the field toward Grandpa's.

Dad calls after him, “Dean! Heaven's sake,” but Dean keeps marching into the sun until he's a shadow again, and they go back to work.

 • • • 

They finish haying, and Jason takes the minibike out to the barley fields to move the irrigation pipes. Finished haying forever, he thinks, and soon, once this barley is cut, he'll be through with that forever, too—through moving pipe, through choking on hay dust, through picking rock, through milking cows,
through
. He is thinking about buying an eight-track player for the LeBaron, like the one he saw in Roy's Nova. It hung under the dash, a squat mechanical face with silver knobs for eyes and an inch of plastic case sticking out like a tongue. “New Zappa,” Roy had said, turning it up. Jason had no idea what he meant by that. Was it a code? A language? The music was strange and plinky, moving in uneven time. Roy
tapped the steering wheel, and sang along, horrendously:
“‘Watch out where the huskies go, and don't you eat that yellow snow.'”

Jason wrings the gas, pushes the bike to top speed—thirty-three miles an hour. It is nearly sundown, a burning indigo along the black edge of the horizon. When he asked Roy how much the eight-track player cost, Roy answered, “Think your old man will let you have one?” Jason shrugged, and Roy said, “Sixty bucks or so.” Sprinklers on hand lines go
chk-chk-chk
in the barley, beside the parched, stubbled hay fields. Jason's got sixty bucks. There's still $134 in his savings account. He could put the player in the LeBaron and his parents probably wouldn't even notice.

He rides through a cloud of cooled air, comes over the rise, and approaches Grandpa's house, and standing in the yard is a girl or young woman, her back to Jason, a smooth drape of long brown hair squared upon the white of her blouse and her ankle-length dress. He has no idea who she is. She is pinning a shirt by the shoulders to the laundry line, one of Dean's white shirts, and Jason wonders if all these people do is hang laundry, and then he is past her. A worm of nervous excitement moves through his guts, though there can be no good reason. What could he see? Nothing. Hair, a dress, the back of a head. A bending motion, like nodding barley. Nothing. And yet he feels it—girl nervousness, the anxiety of the suitor.