Daredevils

by Shawn Vestal

  • • •

  The men line up, hands behind their backs, ready to be handcuffed. The prophet is speaking to the Saints, telling them to put their trust in the Lord. “See what the world calls brave men,” he says to the Federal Men. “You are cowards to come down so upon us.” He stands there in his three-piece suit, neat, trim, hands locked behind his back, the man who speaks to God. Ruth’s father is near him, Ruth’s father is looking at Ruth’s mother, communicating something urgent by eyesight, and then one of the Federal Men comes behind him and begins to move Ruth’s father away, directing him by his locked hands as if guiding a boat with a tiller. His face clenches furiously. Ruth sees him close his eyes, close his whole face against it all, weaker than the thing that is crushing him, weaker than she has ever seen him.

  • • •

  They take all the fathers away. The mothers weep and plead, and the Federal Men hush them, and gently hold them back while they take all the fathers away. Someone is following the Federal Men as they take all the fathers away, shooting photographs with a large camera that hangs heavily around his neck. The man chews gum. Ruth watches him as he aims his camera at Sister Taft, her children huddled around her on the bench outside the school, the man with the camera moving, crouching, training his lens on Sister Taft and her children, flash popping, and as the last of the men is taken away, someone begins to wail sharply, a sound rising above a smaller sound, a lower sound, the sound of children crying all around her, crying quietly beneath the one piercing wail. Ruth’s stomach never stops making the noise now. Something is alive inside her, and her outside feels dead. Her mother comes to her, face tight, and Ruth wonders if she knows, too, that this is the Second Coming, and her mother kneels before Ruth and wraps little Sarah in a hug, and that’s when Ruth notices that the wailing has been coming from her little sister all along.

  • • •

  Then they take the mothers away. The children go into the school. The room is too small for all the children. They pack together. Ruth feels the heat of the children around her, but she does not look at them or talk to them or think about them. She stares at the shirt in front of her, at one fraying thread of a boy’s shirt, and she keeps one hand on the shoulder of Sarah and one on the shoulder of Alma. Someone is smoking, a foul odor. Three of the Federal Men and two women who look like worldly schoolteachers are looking at the children and conferring with a man who is sitting at the teacher’s desk. The man makes some marks, and the woman escorts a few children from the room, and they start again.

  • • •

  Did the fathers and mothers go up into heaven?

  • • •

  They take the children away in twos and threes. The brothers and sisters are crying. Ruth watches silently, and Sarah and Alma watch silently, and Ruth stares at the chalkboard, stares at the leftover sentence on the board, written in cursive: Why does the man run? Brothers argue and sisters argue, but they are taking the children away in twos and threes. Why does the man run? A remnant of a lesson. Ruth thinks there must be an answer. She thinks that if she stays very still, maybe this won’t be happening. When the women and the Federal Men finally get to Ruth’s family, they begin to take her brothers and sisters away.

  • • •

  “All right, then.” One of the women is smiling, smiling at Ruth, and then smiling at Sarah, and then smiling at Alma, and then smiling again at Ruth. Sarah and Alma are trying to hide inside of Ruth. “Why don’t you two come with me for a bit?” Ruth shakes her head, and wraps each arm more tightly around her sisters.

  The Federal Man watches. The man with the camera is back, leaning against the wall. He chews gum. The Federal Man whispers something to him and he smiles.

  Ruth can’t figure this out. Did the fathers and mothers rise up to heaven? Did all of the children stay behind? Why does the man run?

  The woman wears pointy glasses and her hair seems sculpted into a wavy bun. She smells of fancy lotion. “Come on now,” she says, trying to carve the children away from Ruth’s side with her hands, gently, gently, viciously. “It’s okay. You two come with me.”

  Ruth holds tight. She says, “No.” The word is like a lump of food she needs to spit out. The woman doesn’t stop. The Federal Man says, “You’ll be all right, girls,” and Ruth manages to spit out the lump more forcefully: “No!” She wonders if she can hold her sisters tightly enough.

  The woman and the Federal Man stop, but do not retreat. The woman’s hands are still touching Alma and Sarah, still resting on their shoulders, still poised to reach in and carve them away from Ruth.

  “No,” Ruth says, and then she says it again. “No.”

  She stares at them. These people. She prays for the Lord to stop them. To kill them. She asks for that, for the Lord to kill them. She asks that this not be the Second Coming. She says, very quietly, “No, no, no, no, no.”

  • • •

  In the home of the man and the woman whose name she cannot remember, Ruth sits on a sofa with her sisters. They are together, at least. Ruth’s mind keeps softening, drifting. Sarah and Alma sit beside her, legs straight before them, faces wrung white. Ruth wants to tell them to pull inside of themselves—she thinks of a turtle. She wants to tell Sarah and Alma to pull inside of themselves and just stay there. Ignore everything outside the shell. Just stay in there and wait. But the man and the woman whose name she cannot remember are sitting there, one in each chair, the chairs that match the sofa, the chairs and the sofa clean and new and fancy, like everything in the house. Carpet runs to the walls and tucks itself in like a made bed. There is cut glass on the cupboard doors, and teacups inside. The woman whose name Ruth cannot remember is saying something Ruth cannot keep track of, in tones that are sweet and pretty and false. Ruth cannot focus on her words, but now the woman seems to be waiting for something. They are together, at least. If only she could tell them, if only she could find a way to let them know: Pull inside, sisters. Pull inside and wait. The woman is kneeling down in front of the chair that matches the sofa, and Ruth thinks she is going to pray now, and Ruth thinks she should not pray with these people, that praying with these people would be a sin, probably, but then she realizes that the woman wants to give them a hug, then she realizes that one of her sisters is crying again. Which one is crying? Alma is crying. Ruth wants to tell her—Pull inside and wait—but she can’t. The woman is kneeling there, and she is saying something softly, and her arms are open, and she smells like lotion, and Alma is crying, and Ruth wants to tell her but she can’t, so she just says, “Go ahead,” because it doesn’t matter.

  REUNION

  August 23, 1975

  GOODING, IDAHO

  Boyd 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 do
n’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.