by Shawn Vestal
“Okay, then,” Dean says, and Ruth opens the front door and the children exit in single file, through the screen door and onto the front step, the red paint walked off in the middle, and onto the path worn into the lawn. Then Loretta goes, then Dean, then Ruth, and the children wait for Dean to take the lead. They walk out onto the gravel shoulder of the narrow county road and begin walking the quarter mile toward Uncle Lou and Aunt Becky’s. The heat of the past month is cooling, but still Loretta feels too warm in her long dress and wool stockings, a hint of dampness already inside her lace-up shoes, at the tight neck of her dress. They begin walking up the small rise that separates the two homes, the harvested hay fields to their left, and the cow-filled pasture on their right, and a pickup roars over the top, a dirt-caked Ford F-150 with a cracked windshield. The plump, red-faced man inside turns to watch them as he passes, looking mystified and pleased, here on this ordinary road that he must drive all the time without the magic of any surprise.
When Dean came to The Crick to get her and their belongings, to fill the horse trailer with the boxes that Bradshaw helped them load, bantering with Dean, making him laugh and shake his head, when he came for her and had her by his side as he prowled through the house, choosing what would be needed and what could be left behind for now, he had taken her into his office while he compiled certain papers and locked others into his steel filing cabinet. He had opened the bottom drawer of the cabinet and removed a strongbox that he opened with another small key, and then had shown it to her with wide eyes, with shared amazement: a pile of gold coins, shined carefully, an incoherent pile of one-ounce golden eagles, thousands of dollars’ worth of gold. He had removed eight coins, and relocked the box, and placed it back in the cabinet.
“You’re leaving that here?” Loretta had asked.
“For now,” Dean said. “For now.”
He looked at her gravely, lips pressed and brown eyes brightened. She could sense in him an assessing mood, an evaluative moment—the kind of seriousness that might come over him in prayer or spiritual leadership, his sense of himself expanding even as he adopted a veil of humility.
“What?” she asked.
“If I show you something,” he said, “you must promise me to hold it as a sacred secret.”
“I promise, Dean.”
He withdrew a leather pouch tied with a cord, sagging as if it held a misshapen grapefruit, and held it toward her, fist tight around the top, his chapped red knuckles as big as walnuts and one black crack running across his thumbnail.
“Take it,” he said. “Feel it.”
She reached out, and he said, “Use both hands,” and he set the pouch in her cupped palms, and said, “Don’t drop it, little sister,” smiling, thrilled, looking as he did sometimes in bed, beforehand, ready to climb on, his brown eyes backlit with intensity. She felt the contents of the bag settle and shift as he gave it to her, and it nearly forced her hands to the floor, so great was the distance between its weight and her expectation of its weight.
“What is it?”
“It is gold, little sister.”
He was whispering, inches from her face. She had never felt so intimately connected with him. She set the pouch on the floor and opened the top.
He whispered, “It is gold from the California gold rush. Some of the first ever discovered—by Saints. By Saints, little sister.”
She opened the top of the pouch tremblingly. Inside, the lumps were dark and brownish, but for a few tiny gleaming curves, where the lumps of ore caught the light.
“Discovered by Saints, Loretta, though you will never hear it spoken of by the Gentiles. They say a man named John Sutter discovered the gold, in a place called Coloma in California. They named it Sutter’s Mill. You can read all about him in the histories. In the schoolbooks of the Gentiles, his story is well told.”
Loretta reached in and took up a single nugget. It felt almost soft between her finger and thumb, as if she might mash it.
“But you will never hear the Gentiles talk of the Saints in Sutter’s Mill, and how the Saints settled California, how the Saints discovered the gold. You will never hear the Gentiles tell the truth about that, little sister, because what if they did? What if they had to accept the righteous history of the nation? That it was the Saints—the ones everyone repudiated, the ones everyone scorned and scorns still, the Saints, abandoned by their own church, ostracized by all—it was the Saints leading from the very first, Loretta. Setting the example.”
Loretta had stopped noticing anything but the small lump of gold. Gold. She hadn’t conceived of it like this before—as a substance of the earth, a rock. Dean reached out and took it from her, and placed it back in the pouch as he continued talking about it, telling her it was sacred gold, Mormon gold, and that this particular gold had been held in the hands of the true Saints for more than a hundred years. Saints had left Utah and gone to California, and gold had come back to Salt Lake and bolstered the new Zion under Brigham Young.
“And where did you get it?” Loretta asked.
Dean merely shook his head. Never mind. He tightened the pouch and placed it back in the bottom cabinet drawer and locked it.
They left the room and he locked his office door behind them. He explained that they were entering a world full of dangers, of persecution, of enemies. He told her for the ten-millionth time about the Short Creek raid, the agents pouring into the homes of the righteous, driving out mothers and children, locking up their fathers.
“That was not so long ago, little sister,” he says. “Your aunt Ruth was among those children. That is still the world that we live in.”
Those two days had been awful—Dean climbing onto her every half hour, it seemed, until she was so sore she asked him to stop, until she feared that nothing could stop her from getting pregnant now, not with this flood of his seed, and when she used the solution it burned so badly she bit her thumb and cried.
But she took careful note of the ring of keys that Dean carried. Careful mental note of which keys, among the thick ball of them, opened four locks: front door, office door, cabinet, strongbox.
• • •
They arrive at the house in single file, crossing the dirt driveway and aiming straight for the side door. Both of these houses, this one and Dean’s father’s home, are squat, square brick affairs, with front doors and side doors facing their dirt drives, each door fronted by a cube of concrete. Uncle Louis’s place has a shed out back, and a cinder-block milking barn across the driveway, and cow pasture all around. Behind the barn are haystacks and a low row of calf pens. Loretta finds the smell—fresh manure and cut hay—comfortingly familiar.
Dean raps on the screen door, and Aunt Becky sings, “Come in, come in,” and in they come, clustering on the bright yellow linoleum, not leaving Loretta enough room to let the door shut behind her, and so she stands there, framed, as Aunt Becky dries her hands on a towel and fusses, never stops looking about, offering a hand, patting, smiling, moving, nervous. At the counter stands a tall, knobby boy with a rubbed brush of reddish hair, leaning with half a buttered roll in his hand. When Loretta glances at him he looks away quickly. She feels him tracking her in his peripheral vision, shooting quick visual sorties her way, and his appraisal lights up her nerves. She is familiar with this kind of attention, but usually not from boys. The boys in Short Creek tend to leave, or be kicked out, by the time they’re in their middle teens. Loretta feels both younger and a thousand years older than this worldly kid in blue jeans and T-shirt, though she knows that he is older, that he is Jason, that he is seventeen, that he is technically her nephew if you drew it up on the family tree—but that he considers her unrelated. Or not very related, anyway.
The children crowd farther in and she lets the screen door close behind her. On the boy’s T-shirt is an image of a large red tongue hanging from a set of bright red lips, a lush sexual image, and under it the words “Hot Rocks.�
�� She feels herself blush behind the ears.
The boy says, “Welcome to Idaho,” says it directly to her, but it is Dean who answers, “Don’t forget I grew up here.”
• • •
Uncle Louis sits at the head of the table, offers Dean the seat at his right hand. Aunt Becky’s seat stays open at his left, while she and Ruth shuttle the dishes to the table: roast chickens, mashed potatoes, green beans, hot rolls, jugs of milk. Loretta sits among the children, across the long table from Jason, the two of them volleying looks. He seems to be watching her even when he is not watching her. He is not handsome, particularly—gangly, hips wider than shoulders, a scruff of curly reddish hair cut close, with those big Harder ears and small Harder eyes hidden behind his bulb of a freckled nose. But she finds him awkwardly beautiful, like a calf or colt. He acts like a shy boy, and she finds herself feeling like a shy girl, and it shocks her—it assaults her how simple and nice it is, how childlike, how innocent to be shy and embarrassed and nervous, and how normal that is, how utterly typical it is everywhere and for everyone except her.
Uncle Louis smiles and looks around, waiting for people to settle. He and Dean avoid each other’s eyes, touch the silverware, scratch at their jaws, watch their folded hands in their laps. Louis glances past Jason, but his gaze snags on the T-shirt. That mouth. That tongue. He doubles back and stares.
“Son,” he says quietly. “Go put on something appropriate.”
Jason moves his head twice as if preparing to speak, tucking it back both times, and looking into his lap. Aunt Becky reaches with a plate of rolls over his shoulder, sets it with a thump on the table, and pats Jason on the shoulder.
“Let’s go,” she says.
He ducks, mopey, pushes back, and clunks out of the room.
Loretta wants to go with him. To see what his room is like. To see the kinds of clothing he might choose among, the sorts of blankets on his beds, whether he hangs anything on the walls. What does it look like, his worldly life?
Ruth and Aunt Becky talk. Dean and Uncle Louis stare at their food, watching it move from plate to mouth. Jason has put on another T-shirt. On it, a ghostly figure holds a lantern over words and symbols Loretta does not understand: Led Zeppelin. At one point, Jason asks her whether she knows that Evel Knievel is jumping thirteen buses today in London, at Wembley Stadium, his first jump since the Snake River.
Loretta smiles and says, “Who is Evel Knievel?”
Jason gazes at her dumbly. Dean watches him. Ruth watches him. He wears his infatuation like a star-spangled cape.
“It’s on the Wide World of Sports later,” he says.
Dean shakes his head. “We do not watch television.”
The food goes around and around. The children are quiet, sometimes the young ones giggle, stopping at Ruth’s abrupt looks. Dean complains about the jackrabbits. Louis says, “I’m not sure how much more there is to be done about them,” and Dean says, “I am.”
Becky interrupts to ask whether Loretta will be enrolling in high school. Dean, Ruth, and Loretta all stop chewing at once.
“Classes start tomorrow,” Aunt Becky says.
Dean clears his throat, says, “She finished her school already. Tested out. Loretta is one sharp young lady.”
“What about seminary?” Aunt Becky asks.
Seminary. The early-morning church class. Loretta would definitely be going to seminary if she were just a regular Mormon girl, a niece living with family. What about seminary?
Dean and Ruth look at each other. You can sense them gauging, measuring.
Dean clears his throat. “I guess we hadn’t thought of that.”
“She could always ride in with Jason,” Dad says.
Jason alerts like a bird dog. He is so cute, this boy. And he likes her so much.
EVEL KNIEVEL ADDRESSES AN ADORING NATION
Most crashes are blur and smash, a sensory blast that’s far too fast to register. There’s just before, followed by an obliterating sensation, a destruction that somehow does not destroy, and then the adding-up after, the backward tracking, the figuring out, the mending.
But this one, America. Shit. This one made every bit of itself known. We felt it all.
• • •
After the canyon thing, we had no choice. When the world tries to crush you, your only choice is to crush back. So: Wembley Stadium. Thirteen buses. Wide World of Sports. Jolly old England.
Hell must be a whole lot like England. Everything somewhat normal. Somewhat regular. Then you’re talking to someone and they say I saw you on the telly, or You could take the lorry, or Are you ’avin’ a go? whatever it is they say, and it’s just enough to tilt you on your fucking ear, and then it’s just one strange thing after another, driving on the wrong side, kings and queens, everything’s a pudding. We arrived two weeks before the jump, left Linda and the kids at home—the kids, Jesus Christ, you’re not supposed to say this, but the goddamn kids were just killing us then—and we set that town on fire.
We felt somehow angry at the English.
We felt that the English were not appreciative enough of all we had done for them. Everything America has given them. The rotten-toothed, ratty little fuckers.
“You should just say thank you whenever you see an American,” we told our limey publicist, Harry O, while he took our picture loading that pretty Smith & Wesson .38, surrounded by cash on the bed at the Tower Hotel. “You should just say thank you for keeping us from being fucking Germany.”
“Are you ’avin’ a go?” he asked us. ’Avin’ a go.
“Learn your history,” we said.
For fun, we pointed that beaut right at him. Right into the lens.
“You,” he said, “don’t know your history from your arse.”
You will never understand, America, how difficult it was for us not to pull the trigger that afternoon, how heroic the challenge to our being, our honor, our noble whatever the fuck. But we let it go, we let him go, we let him live. That photo ran in every newspaper over there for weeks.
• • •
So, yes, this is after the fuckup at the canyon, the screwing those “engineers” gave us. They worked on that Skycycle for two years, tightened every bolt, honed every spark plug, did all the math, and then fucked up the parachute bay? The parachute bay?
It’s embarrassing, is what it is. We put our good name out there. Put our life up, is all, put it up for sacrifice, for the entertainment of the people. We climbed into that thing, ready to sacrifice all, like a modern gladiator, like Jesus Christ, and those dumb fucks with the wrenches, drinking and eating steak all over southern Idaho on our dime and our name and our grace, screw it up, and no one knows who they are, no one writes newspaper articles about what a sham it all was, a fake, no one spins a million lies in the Los Angeles Times or Rolling Stone about them.
There was only one thing to do. Go bigger.
It was not as hard as you might think.
• • •
At Wembley, every moment of the crash announces itself. Every altered atom in our body, each as it altered, a cracking network of breakage running through us, and every instant palpable.
We land on our right shoulder, pulverizing the humerus and clavicle and driving one large crack through the scapula and two vertebrae, and then all the way down the right side of us by degree, crushing and chipping and fracturing, ribs, sternum, pelvis, femur, tibia, fibula, rolling over onto our back and sliding, sliding across the ramp and then the earth, chipping the spinous process here, the transverse process there, finely cracking the facet joints and the vertebral body but somehow not breaching the spinal canal, America, the magic of the thing, our majesty and life, protected. We roll, grinding across the asphalt covered with turf that buckles and bundles under us, and the breakage spreads to the other side of us, and the bike, that heavy fucker, the Harley XR750, lands on us, breaking our l
egs in seven places, our old friends fibula, tibia, femur, and when we grind to a stop, we feel like a receptacle of glittering, broken glass, like a deerskin bag full of coins.
At first, the massive pain remains silent. Somewhere out there are ninety thousand people, making noise or making no noise, and then the face of the TV handsome looms in over us, and he thinks we are dead, that’s clear, and whatever else has happened here: Fuck that. Fuck him and his thinking we are dead, because we are not dead.
We make him hold us up, the TV handsome, we make him hold us up before that massive crowd, and we press it all over him, the breakage, the blood in our breath, the blood tasting of iron and Wild Turkey, and when we stand before that crowd, they fall silent, all ninety thousand of them like congregants in a cathedral, and we speak.
• • •
Strange. We can, even now, recall the exact progression of injury from that crash. The tracery of breakage. The order of disassembly. We can recall standing there, being held there, by the TV handsome and someone else, and we can recall the way the sun was dipping down below the top of the stadium, making a series of expanding and contracting orbs of yellow and red against our spotty vision.
But we cannot remember, nor can we believe, what we said that day.
• • •
When we came to in the hospital, there were Linda and the kids. We wondered whether they’d been to the Tower yet, whether they’d seen the room. We wondered what evidence there might have been left in that room. We could not recall the final state of things, just the parade of the days before: the English “birds” as quick as the American ones, the Wild Turkey bottles, the golf clubs on the balcony, the new red Lamborghini parked out front. All that before, then the jump, and now this: family, fatherhood.
Life is stupid, America. But not at all bad.
• • •
This is what they say we said:
“Ladies and gentlemen of this wonderful country. I have to tell you that you are the last people in the world who will see me jump. Because I will never, ever, ever jump again. I’m through.”
