Daredevils

by Shawn Vestal

  “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.”

  August 26, 1975

  SHORT CREEK, ARIZONA

  Loretta 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.

  September 1, 1975

  GOODING, IDAHO

  Jason’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?”