by Shawn Vestal
Jason’s parents still like Nixon. A couple of popular thugs walk past in their letterman’s jackets, red felt with black leather sleeves. One of them says, “What are you staring at, Tonto?”
Boyd says, “Nothing, George,” and flips them off.
Then he says, “I need to go. I need to get out of here. At least practice getting out of here.”
“Maybe I could go with you.”
Boyd laughs. “That would be hilarious. Boy Scout gone wrong. Break your parents’ hearts.”
“Screw off.”
“Plus,” Boyd says. “The thing about South Dakota. I think I might find my dad there.”
“What makes you think that?”
Boyd shrugs.
“Karma. Kismet. Whatever it is. Indian intuition.” He chews, watching his plate. “Day’s gonna come when we get back what’s ours. I find my dad, and we start working in tandem on this—whoa. You Europeans aren’t going to know what hit you.”
“Come on. You’re about as much an Indian as I am.”
Boyd stops. He stares at the table, bugs his eyes in frustration.
“You know, dumbass,” he says. “Everybody thinks the problem, the race thing, is the guy who hollers some shitty thing, calls you an Injun, burns a cross, whatever.”
“That guy’s not the problem?”
“That guy is a problem. But the problem is guys like you. The problem is guys who want to tell you there’s no problem. Guys who want to tell you to just calm down.”
“Calm down.”
Boyd is the only Indian Jason knows, and though there are a couple of Mexican kids in school, he really knows only white people, and he cannot imagine why Boyd doesn’t simply let all this go. Jason would say all people are created equal and that by writing a three-page paper on To Kill a Mockingbird, he has done his part.
“The problem,” Boyd says, “is dumbasses like you.”
And then he lets it drop. He turns his irritation to his mother, who he is convinced is not telling him the truth about his father.
All Boyd knows about his father is that he is an Indian. Years earlier, his mom told him his dad was Shoshone, but once he really started asking questions, she said maybe he had just been from Shoshone, the town and not the tribe. All she knew, he’d been living around Boise about seventeen years earlier, a real charmer, tall with white, white teeth and scarred-up hands. “She says last she heard he was working ranches and rodeos in Montana and Wyoming, but that was ten years ago. He could be anywhere, she says. Even dead—she wouldn’t be surprised.”
“You probably ought to just let it go.”
“Easy for you to say. You’ve got a father.”
“You can have him. He’s all yours.”
“Easy for you to say.”
Thursday
In the car again, on the way back to church, Jason says, “I was sure sorry to hear about your parents.”
Loretta is confused: heard what about them? She thinks it through—what the story is, who’s been told what.
“Hear what about them?” she asks.
“I thought I heard your folks had some . . . health problems. Or passed away?”
“You did?”
“Maybe I’m remembering wrong.”
“They’re still hanging around. I think.”
“Oh. Good.”
She looks over at him. Roseate patches bloom on his cheeks and ears, complementing that auburn scruff of hair. His nerves tremble through the whole car. She imagines they are two ordinary teenagers. Shy and nervous and young. Children. He turns to her, and flushes even more deeply to find her looking at him. To be liked in this way, to be buzzed by such naïve, clean interest, feels pure. She thinks he will be a handsome man, this boy, when he loses his flush and downy cheeks, when he hardens a bit, but she cannot imagine him ever being less than simple and readable, and this morning that feels like the best quality a person could have.
“What?” he asks.
“Nothing,” she says.
He pauses. “I guess I somehow got the idea that your folks had died, and that was why you live with Dean and Ruth.”
Instantly, it’s back—the irritation, the self-consciousness. She tells him the story, the lie, tersely, bites it off. Her father’s business had failed in Cedar City, and her mother’s Crohn’s disease left her in bed most days, and there was just no money in the house.
“Mom and Dad just needed a little relief,” she says. “That’s all that was.”
“Weird,” he says.
“What’s weird about it?”
“Nothing. I mean—nothing.”
He drives, clearly struggling to come up with something to say. Telling the lie about her parents reminded her of the truth about her parents—that they gave her to Dean. Gave her to Dean, and when she stopped speaking to them, in church on Sundays or in passing around Short Creek—they stopped, too. Like they didn’t care about her any more than she cared about them. Which made her care.
Jason finally says, “Ready for another thrilling morning of Brother Kershaw’s moral tales and lessons?”
“I don’t know.”
And then he sort of gulps, or gathers himself, and blurts, “Are you pissed off at Dean for making you go?”
Out the window, she watches the landscape blurring past: lava rock, sagebrush, fence posts, haystacks, fallow, harvested fields. Fat drops of rain strike the windshield like pellets. The question feels more important than it is. The rain begins splattering loudly, a gust rustles the trees clustering a farmhouse, and she says, “Yeah.”
What will he say to that?
“Yeah, I hate it, too. I actually told my parents I wasn’t going to go anymore. Until they dragged you into it.”
She teases him, as Bradshaw might: “What an outlaw.”
That night Dean stands at the back of the yard and looks into the fields while Loretta plays tag with the children, sprinting around the lilac bush that sits beside the laundry line.
“Little sister!” Dean barks urgently. “Run into the office and get my pistol from the bottom drawer of the desk. It’s behind the lockbox.”
A crowd of jackrabbits is dancing in the fields—leaping, turning, flying, it seems like dozens of them, dark smears on the darkening land. Loretta doesn’t move at first; Dean has never asked her to go into his desk, into any of his things. He has always been so secretive about them.
“Hurry, Loretta!”
She runs inside, past Ruth at the sink, and into the small room at the top of the basement stairs where Dean has jammed his desk. She opens the bottom drawer, and there, behind a sheaf of papers in folders, is a canvas bag, top bunched downward, and a metal box, and behind them, at the back of the drawer, is Dean’s revolver.
Loretta reaches into the drawer, grabs the bag, and lifts it. Just an inch or so. It is heavy. Heavier than it looks. Heavy enough to be just one thing. She looks in and sees coins—maybe thirty or forty of the fifty-dollar golden eagles—but not the nuggets. Not the Sutter Creek gold. Hadn’t he told her he was leaving it in Short Creek?
“Loretta!”
Her blood tingles, her mind circles. She carries the pistol and the worn, heavy box of bullets out to Dean. He stands there shooting until dark, reloading four times, while Loretta pretends to watch from behind him, trying all the while to shut down the racing of her body, and she doesn’t realize that Dean is missing every shot, that he doesn’t hit a single creature, until he lets out a strangled bark of frustration and hurls the gun into the blackening desert.
Friday
Over breakfast, Jason’s mother questions him about Loretta. What has she said about living with Dean? Has she mentioned whether they’re planning to stay? Or what they’re up to over there? Will they be going back to Short Creek anytime soon?
The interrogation follows four days of silence from hi
s parents about Dean and Grandpa’s place. The one time Jason tried to ask about it, his father brusquely replied, “I don’t know what they’re up to over there, son,” and when Jason had started to say something more, his dad interrupted angrily, “What did I just say, Jason?”
“So now we’re talking about it?” Jason says to his mother.
Her pressed lips go white. Her forbearance face. She turns her back to him, stands at the sink, and lets the water run full blast. She hisses, “Your uncle is making a spectacle of himself!”
Jason almost says, You’re the one that has me taking her to seminary. But he doesn’t.
• • •
On the way to pick up Loretta, Jason tries to figure out what to put into the new Sanyo eight-track deck slung under the dashboard. He settles on Sweet. “Fox on the Run.” Perfect, he thinks, and yet within one minute she asks him if they can listen to something else, and tunes in the country station. “Rhinestone Cowboy” is playing, and Jason groans. “I cannot listen to this music.”
She reaches out and turns up the volume, and belts out, “‘There’ll be a load of compromisin’ / On the road to my horizon . . .’”
“Noooooo,” he cries, snapping off the dial. She laughs, alert and alive for the first time all week. It comes off her like a charge, and Jason reads it as something shared between them. Love’s little seedling.
“I don’t think I can stand one more minute of Brother Kershaw,” he says.
“So let’s not go.”
So simple. So amazing.
“Go where instead?” he asks.
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
He knows just where. “I’ll take you to Twin Falls,” he says. “Show you Evel Knievel’s ramp.”
She shrugs. Says okay. She is the most beautiful human being Jason has ever seen, lit up with her love for him. Right? The greening, luscious seedling of love? Her hair is pulled back, her wet brown eyes glow as they scan the desert. She needs saving, and it has been arranged for him to save her, but how? It must be what she wants, too, though this thought is buried so deep in Jason’s assumptions that he doesn’t actually think it. It is simply what occurs, it is simply what men do: rescue women. Superman, Spider-Man, Batman—rescue women. John Wayne rescues women and so does Clint Eastwood. On TV, the guys on Emergency! and Baretta and Kojak and The Rockford Files all rescue women. It’s their job.
For the half hour it takes to drive to Twin Falls, Jason tells her about Evel Knievel. He describes his jumps, details the bones he has broken and at which stadiums, the numbers of buses and cars he has surmounted, his outfits, his retirements and his coming-out-of-retirements. Jason tells her of his own ramp building and driveway jumps—though he does not mention his posters or Stunt Cycle action figure. When they reach Twin Falls and cross the Perrine Bridge into town, the sun is up but the canyon remains doused in shadow. They pull off at the overlook and Jason points out the ramp, a sloped hill of dirt a quarter mile away on the canyon rim.
Loretta stares. “That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“You drove me out here to show me a pile of dirt?”
“Well. I drove you out here to get out of seminary.”
She giggles. Is this good? He thinks it is, though he is disappointed at her inability to see the grandeur of the ramp. He pulls back onto the highway, heads back toward Gooding. He begins to tell her about the day he came to see the canyon jump with Grandpa. He mentions the lie, and how much he had loved the lie, and how happy he had been to have this secret from his parents, and how fun it had been to actually be there, to see him, to watch all the crazy people, and how even though the jump had failed, disappointing him to the bone, he had actually liked it, too, in some way. When they had pulled Evel Knievel out of that canyon with a crane, and he waved at everybody with that same grim, purposeful look he had before he jumped, it was like he wasn’t even embarrassed.
“It was just, I don’t know, still cool,” he says. “I don’t know why.”
“I do. Maybe. I mean, he tried something amazing.”
“Yes!” Jason says. “That’s right. He tried something amazing.”
Jason tries to give her a significant look. A look of deeper communication. She looks back, possibly puzzled. Jason thinks of Evel Knievel crashing in England, bones crushed to dust, insisting on standing to address the crowd. He thinks, Okay. Go.
He says, “Are you okay living there with Dean and Ruth? I mean, happy and everything?”
“I guess so.”
“You know what people think it is?”
She doesn’t answer. He tries again.
“Is it what people think it is?”
“No,” she says, so quietly Jason can barely hear it. His mind allows itself to believe her, because she wouldn’t lie to him now that they have Evel Knievel between them. She says something he can’t hear.
“What?” he asks.
“What it is, is nobody’s business.”
She stares straight ahead, chin tucked in, refusing to turn. Jason shrinks. Gazes at the highway with his hands on the wheel.
“It’s family business,” she says.
• • •
Jason tells Boyd about it later, finally tells him about all of it.
“Dude,” he says. “What’d you think she was going to say?”
EVEL KNIEVEL ADDRESSES AN ADORING NATION
We just sat there in that truck, tinted windows, cab full of Buddy’s goddamn cigarillo smoke, and waited for that miserable fuck to come out of the concert hall. That “writer.” The one who wrote that book we will not name. We had a bat, one of those new metal softball numbers, and Buddy had his billy club, police-issue ironwood. It was like looking at the ramp from the end of the runway, our insides an electric gelatin, like we were being turned from something dull and dumb into something grand, and we knew that feeling well enough to know that we had to focus on it, feel it, try to seize it though it would not be seized, because we were heading into the air now, into the divine space, and we would only be there for a few seconds, for glimpses and flashes, and then we’d be down again, and maybe the landing would be hard and maybe it would be soft, but it would be a landing nevertheless.
He comes out. Just look at that fucker. Pale denim bell-bottoms, boots like some California faggot, nice and clean with shiny leather and little heels, faggoty boots, and a shirt made out of that fuzzy shit like a towel, and his hair all Farrah Fawcett, and bronze sunglasses, and a little smile on his pudgy face, a tiny confident smirk, and we were relieved to discover that upon seeing him we did not lose any of our desire for the moment, that we were energized, inspired, set upon a righteous path. In his book, he wrote all manner of lies about us—about us, about our mother—and now, here, he would pay. Pay for each individual slander, and then for his larger trespass against us: the taking and perversion of our story, the holy scripture of our life.
He didn’t even run. Just fell down and let us do it. His soft body felt like a sack of wheat under our blows. The bones in his forearms gave way as we struck him with our bat. The Tennessee Thumper. Aluminum as shit.
People have told some lies about this—have called us a coward for taking Buddy to hold him down. We were not afraid of him. We wanted him held down to make it worse when we hit him. So he couldn’t curl up, cover his head, protect himself in any way. This was so much worse. So very much worse, and that was his punishment. We chose it carefully, and were prepared for him to die, America. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord, and we sayeth that, too.
He screamed like a girl, Mr. Book Writer did. Screamed just like you’d think with those faggoty boots and that hair.
• • •
By then, we had grown and grown. We had become so large, so multitudinous, that we sometimes felt as if we were exceeding the boundaries of our physical form.
They made a movie. All they had
to call it was Evel Knievel. It sold itself. George Hamilton made the thing. Wrote it and starred in it. When he came to ask us for permission, came to our hotel room in the Sands to ask us to sign the deal and take the check, we made him read the script, start to finish. At first he wouldn’t do it, but we took out that shiny new Luger and pointed it at him and said, “Read it, motherfucker,” and he read it, and he trembled, and we signed.
It was a mistake. We make them, occasionally. On film, George Hamilton looked soft and weak, and somehow he made the scripture sound like shit:
“Ladies and gentlemen, you have no idea how good it makes me feel to be here today. It is truly an honor to risk my life for you. An honor. Before I jump this motorcycle over these nineteen cars—and I want you to know there’s not a Volkswagen or a Datsun in the row—before I sail cleanly over that last truck, I want to tell you that last night a kid came up to me and he said, ‘Mr. Knievel, are you crazy? That jump you’re going to make is impossible, but I already have my tickets because I want to see you splatter.’ That’s right, that’s what he said. And I told that boy last night that nothing is impossible.”
As if we could be imitated. As if you could pretend to be us.
• • •
We spent our time in jail for the beating and we smiled our way through it. We called in limousines to take us to our work-release jobs—to the shit-shoveling, broom-holding, tray-filling labor they tried to punish us with—and so we called our people and had them line up sixteen limousines outside the Los Angeles County jail, and all these guys got a ride, showed up for the shit shovel in a limousine, thanks to yours truly, and they did not forget it, these guys, they worshipped us, just like everyone else. And when the jailers complained, and the judge hauled us in, and told us he had half a mind to restore our full sentence—first-degree assault, he called it, a two-year hitch—we simply smiled and apologized and told him, “Why, Your Honor, I merely wanted to return to these men some of the dignity they may have lost within the walls of incarceration, not to make light of the punishment, Your Honor, but to return to these men some sense of their own natural grandeur, their own native royalty, so they might see themselves as something other than low, something more than criminal, and return to society with the hopes and dreams that might make them all better men,” but still, they said no more limousines, no more press conferences at the jail’s back door, and we said, Okay, sure, thank you, Your Honor.
