by Shawn Vestal
He better not fuck this up.
• • •
They turn off at Twin, drive across the bridge. Thin patches of cloud stretch across the stars. It is not much past one, but even the lights ahead can’t erase the feeling of an emptied world. Boyd waits for Jason to say something about Evel Knievel, about the ramp over there on the canyon rim, silhouetted, but he miraculously doesn’t. Loretta turns the radio knob, staticky AM blaring and fading, and stops on a preacher, calling to them from out of the darkness in a gentle Southern baritone.
“‘I looked when He opened the sixth seal, and behold, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became like blood.’”
Boyd groans and says, “Change it!”
“‘And the kings of the earth, the great men, the rich men, the commanders, the mighty men, every slave and every free man, hid themselves in the caves and in the rocks of the mountains, and said to the mountains and rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of Him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb! For the great day of His wrath has come, and who is able to stand?”’”
“I am!” Boyd says, and Loretta turns off the radio. Jason sticks in Kiss’s Hotter Than Hell, and Loretta smiles at him while she lowers the volume and unfolds a map. “Go through to Highway 93,” she tells Jason. She’s the one who charted their course: down through Nevada to Short Creek, where she has some things to pick up. Then they’ll figure out what’s next. Jason says Ohio, to see Evel Knievel’s next jump; Loretta says the ocean, because she’s never seen the ocean; and Boyd says Pine Ridge; but none of them seems convinced that there really is any next.
“God-damn,” Boyd says. “We are actually doing it. We’re on the road. We’re free. Totally, totally free, you guys. Check it out. Feel it. Pay attention. This is what it feels like. Feel it. It feels good, right? It feels great.”
Loretta yawns. Jason says, “Should we stop somewhere?”
She says, “Elko? I was thinking Elko.”
“Hell, no,” Boyd says. “We’ve got to go, go, go.”
“I might just close my eyes for a second,” Loretta says.
“Go, go, go, go, go,” Boyd says, and pounds the back of the seat with his hands.
They pass through Twin Falls, come out on a highway where the night becomes a velvet crush weakening the headlights as they plumb south toward Nevada. They pass a deer once before they even know it, just standing on the side of the road, eyes red in the flash of the LeBaron’s lights.
• • •
Loretta sits up, rubs her eyes, and says, “Let’s play a game.”
“Like Monopoly?” Boyd says.
“Like, we each say one thing about ourselves. Take turns and go around. One thing at a time. It’ll help us get to know each other. Just one quick thing. About whatever you want. I’ll go first. I’m married to Dean. Get that right out of the way. We got married last year. My folks set it up. I didn’t want to.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Boyd says, pretending to be amazed, but also genuinely amazed. “What? Like, what?”
“Knock it off,” she says, smiling back at him. “It’s not a legal marriage. Enough about it. Now you, Jason.”
“Can’t we talk about this some more?” Jason says.
She slugs him on the shoulder.
“Go.”
“I’m two merit badges from Eagle Scout. Probably not going to make it.”
“Boyd?” Loretta asks.
“I,” he says, “am a supersonic jet pilot. I am a master contortionist and a student of the dark arts. I know the secrets of the Bermuda Triangle. I’ve seen Jaws four times.”
“One thing,” Loretta says, amused. “Okay, now me. I like country music.”
Jason says, “I like rock music.”
Boyd says, “I like Zeppelin, Foghat, Bad Company, Cream, Kiss, Pink Floyd, the Rolling St—”
“One thing.”
“Oh. One thing.”
“Okay,” she says. “I was born in Sedona, Arizona.”
“I was born in Gooding, Idaho,” Jason says.
“I was born in Emmett, Idaho,” Boyd says.
“I can’t stand church.”
“Me, neither.”
“What’s church?”
“Okay, then: I don’t even believe in God,” she says. “I think.”
Boyd finds this incredibly sexy. He says, “I’m half Indian. Which just about every kid around here claims but with me it’s true. You can tell by looking. This nose? This nose is a Nez Percé nose. Or maybe Shoshone. Don’t know my dad. He’s Native, but Mom doesn’t even know what tribe. It’s like she made it with some guy from Europe, but didn’t bother to find out if he was from France or Italy. His name is Francis Daubert. Frank.”
“One, Boyd.” Loretta turned to him, smiling.
“Oh. Forgot.”
“I want to live in Texas,” she says.
“Why Texas?” Jason asks.
“No questions. Or maybe Montana.”
“Okay. I’ve gone to church every Sunday, more or less, my whole life,” Jason says.
“I want to live anywhere but Gooding. I hate it there. Hate it there. Dumbshit capital of America. Can’t wait to get out—oh, wait, I don’t have to wait to get out. I am out. Hooray.”
The stories add up, sort of. Jason talks Lord of the Rings and steadfast Samwise Gamgee. Raising calves for the livestock sale. Going to see Evel Knievel, of course. Boyd tells of picking up his mom one time when she passed out at the Mirage. Loretta talks about an argument with Ruth over her refusal to learn how to knit and sew—how Ruth began leaving knitting needles and hanks of yarn in her bedroom. She says she would rather go to jail than live in that family. “Though I love those kids,” she says.
The game ends. Loretta and Boyd argue about the bunny bash. Loretta hated it—the blood, the violence, the brutality, the sport of it—and Boyd defends it, says they’re just rodents and need to be killed, and it’s no better to leave out poison and sneak away than it is to stand there and take care of it with your own hands.
“It is different,” Loretta insists. “If you poison them, you’re not doing it because you enjoy it. There’s something wrong with enjoying that much death and blood. It’s creepy.”
She turns in her seat and points a mock-accusatory finger at Boyd.
“You’re creepy.”
Boyd cannot help but notice. Saying it seems to make her very happy.
Jason
It has all gone wrong so quickly. How long have they been on the road? Two hours? Jason’s watch says it’s nearly two A.M., and ahead is the moon glow of a casino, an island in a parking lot of nacreous light, and Loretta has announced that she would like to drive.
Jason is slow to answer, and she says, “Please? Please, Jason?” and Boyd says, “Jesus, Harder.” Jason’s whole idea of this is vanishing. Has been ever since the bunny bash, really. She’s the one who said she wanted to go first. Later, she was the one who reached out to him—coming to him in the early morning, as he fed the calves, to plan their escape. She was the one who set their route to Short Creek, because she needed to get something she has not mentioned, and she was the one who said they should go through Nevada at night, because Nevada at night is like a wasteland and Utah is full of cops. What does it mean, he thinks, that Loretta knows what Nevada is like at night and how many cops there are in Utah?
She is the one flirting with Boyd. She is the one who has not looked at him with any kind of special look, any sign whatsoever. She is the one who said, Let’s go to Elko on the way, and when Jason said, Elko? she is the one who said, Come on. It’ll be fun.
They are barely into Nevada now, in Jackpot. Jason pulls the LeBaron into the far reaches of the parking lot. The sign reads CACTUS PETE’S, a giant neon cactus against the sky.
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��Yippee,” Loretta says. She’s practically bouncing in her seat. Boyd says, “Don’t kill us, Lori,” and Jason thinks: Lori? Lori? He says, “Be careful. It’s my parents’ car,” and whatever it is that’s wrong about that seems immediately clear, but Loretta is the one who says, “Are you sure it’s still theirs?” and laughs and slaps her palms on the dash.
It’s all wrong. All turned around. And, if Jason is honest with himself, it has been ever since she saw him in that Rolling Stones shirt, with that fat, lascivious tongue. Since she said, “I have to get away from here.” Since she figured out how, in the days after that pronouncement, to communicate with him and plan their escape.
It has all been her. He keeps telling himself that he is her rescuer—because that is who he is supposed to be, that is how the story goes—and yet it has always been her.
• • •
In the days after the bunny bash, Jason had conspired with every circumstance to find a way to Loretta. Two days later, he had stopped by their place after school, under the pretense of borrowing a fence puller of Grandpa’s. But Uncle Dean was in the yard and he simply got it from the shed. No sign of Loretta. The following day Jason brought it back. Ruth answered the door and told him to put it back in the shed, without inviting him in. Each time, before he arrived he would itch with nerves, wondering what he would do if he saw Loretta, and afterward he felt bereft. He called their house three times that following week, and every time, Ruth answered. “Harders.” Like she was angry at the name. Jason simply hung up.
Meanwhile, just as events called for him to be a man of action, he became a mooning girl. Lying in bed, awaiting sleep, he imagined scenarios in which he and Loretta ran off together, giddy in love. He pictured them at the ocean, kicking at the waves or chasing a kite. He imagined them at a Grand Canyon overlook, arms around each other as they gaped into that humongous hole, or at Niagara Falls, holding hands in the mist. These were places he had seen in magazines or on television. He never imagined them anywhere he’d actually been—never at the new mall in Twin Falls or at a football game at the high school. He concocted fantasies in which he struck back at Dean—punched him, or cracked him across the back with a two-by-four, or held him at gunpoint while he and Loretta backed slowly out of the house. But mostly he just thought of Loretta and him together, living in a city apartment like the Newharts, all sliding glass and evening light. He imagined her coming to him, draping her arms around his shoulders, pressing her nose into his neck. Chaste scenarios, impossible and lifeless. And whenever he faced the fact that he didn’t know her at all, he filled her in with his imagination, and her character became marked by one and only one outstanding quality: a blind, unwavering attraction to him.
He didn’t see her for days. He began to wonder if he had misunderstood what they had said to each other that bloody afternoon. Weren’t they talking about doing something? Something for real? He thought they were. He waited and plotted, and blew everything up in his mind, filled himself with ludicrous notions and expectations. He felt that now, finally, he understood what people talked about, what they sang about—this wrenching, consuming ache. Wasn’t it grand? Every lousy song on the radio was for him. For them. “How sweet it is to be loved by you.” “Lovin’ you is easy ’cause you’re beautiful.” “Love will keep us together.”
Eight days after the bunny bash, Jason arose at five thirty, walked through the stiff silence of the house to the mudroom, stepped into his boots and work coat, and walked out into the ice-metal cold foretelling the winter to come, across the dirt yard to the front room of the barn, where he dipped each of the eight large, hard plastic bottles into the tank and topped them with the red rubber nipples. The whoosh and spray of the barn carried on behind the filthy swinging door with the yellowing window. Dad standing behind it. Jason carried the heavy rack out to the calf pens, and upended them in the wire holders, and stood waiting, watching the little piebald slurp and drool on jittery legs, listening to a truck somewhere across the desert shift whiningly into gear, noticing a hiss and rustle behind the shed. The misted sun tried to rise from the horizon. Jason heard another hiss from the direction of the shed, followed by the staccato bray of a calf. And another hiss.
Then, as he turned toward the sound, his name.
“Jason.”
Peeking out from the side of the shed, Loretta’s face was tensed and red in the cold air, and her hair was tied back, covered by a gray wool hat, thick and hand knit, that made her face seem frail and small—chapped, rose cheeks, nub chin. Nervous eyes wide and gleaming. A ranch coat, denim and wool lined, and no dress. She wore the slightly baggy, square-looking jeans she’d worn to seminary. She smiled, and he tried to smile back. Here they were. Here they were. He looked around, walked over. An arrhythmic spasm crossed Jason’s face, and he wondered what he looked like to her. She seemed to be waiting for something, so Jason said, “What are you doing here?”
“I’ve been trying to talk to you forever,” she said.
“I’ve been trying to talk to you forever.”
“I’ve called. I’ve come over.”
“I’ve called. I’ve come over.”
Her brow pinched, and she frowned a smile, as if she thought Jason was messing with her.
“Okay, never mind.” She took a breath. Her tone was the tone of a schoolteacher laying out the rules. Someone burying fluttery doubts under a plan. “We need to talk. Am I wrong about that? That we need to talk?”
“No, we do.”
“I mean, I thought we had a little something, a little agreement or something, and if we don’t, then fine, but I thought we did.” She didn’t seem nervous, really, just set loose. “You asked me, right? You asked me where I wanted to go, and then I couldn’t talk to you, I couldn’t find you, because everything is so screwed up at my house, and maybe at your house, too. I called, and you never answered. I came over here with preserves, and ran into your mom. I came over Saturday and pretended to return a rake—again, no you. I was starting to think I had imagined the whole thing. And that was terrible, because I got so excited about everything.”
She paused for him to say something, but not for long.
“I didn’t imagine the whole thing, did I?” she asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think so. You mean you’re not sure? You mean—what? You don’t think so?”
“No, you didn’t imagine it.”
She peered at him intensely. None of this—this talk assault, this forward speed—was part of his picture of her.
“Does Dean know you’re here?” he said.
She bugged her eyes.
“Are you insane? Like I’d tell Dean I came over here to plot my getaway?”
A noise burst, like gravel being scuffed, and Jason nearly leaped. She smiled and said, “Easy, bronco.”
This was not right. She was not supposed to be the cool one.
“Okay, so. You remember what we talked about?” she asked. “At the rabbit thing?”
“Yes.”
“You remember what you asked me?”
Was this it? Were they leaving now? He was scared. He had been such a good boy, for so long, and he didn’t know how to be different.
“Where do you want to go?” he said, quoting himself.
“Right.”
“Yes,” he said. “I remember.”
The calves brayed and trotted around their pens. Dad would be expecting him to return with the empties soon.
“I know where I want to go,” she said.
She had it all worked out. She knew everything.
• • •
Loretta is a fast, fast driver. Sometimes she takes her eyes off the road, and the LeBaron drifts, and Jason has to speak up before she notices, and then she laughs.
She is talking about Elko. She says she’ll get them a room and pay with a check she stole from Dean. She�
��ll take care of it. It’s all so wrong. Jason emptied his bank account and brought all his mission money—$71.53—but she doesn’t need even that.
“Dean has checks?” Jason asks, because he knows that Dean distrusts banks.
“For business. For emergencies,” she says happily. “This seems like an emergency.”
Good Lord, she is beautiful.
“Wait,” Boyd says. “Why would they take a check from Dean from you?”
“You can talk just about anybody into anything,” she says. “If you really try.”
Loretta
She said Elko because why not Elko? She said Elko because she wanted to do every free thing, now that she was free. She said Elko because Bradshaw had told her stories about Elko. She said Elko because she wanted to see what the boys—these boys, these eager children—would say to her if she said Elko, and what they said was interesting.
“Isn’t that out of the way?” Jason asked.
Boyd said, “Holy shit, Harder, you are a super fun guy.”
Dawn breaks as they draw near Elko. Down between the mountains they come, winding and flattening toward the neon constellation ahead. Boyd snores gaspingly. For the past couple of hours of deep night, Loretta has felt the exhilaration of those first hours dampen. She is overtaken by gloom, by this moment and its failure to be transcendent. She had come tonight thinking what a nice boy Jason was, what a simple, clean thing, and that he and she were a team, whatever that meant, and she had thought maybe it meant something. Perhaps it would grow, this clean, fresh thing. But soon enough she saw Jason’s irritation with Boyd, saw his confusion and jealousy, and realized he was simply another part, as was Boyd, of the wide world that looked at her and wanted to turn her into something of theirs.
It is past three in the morning when she guides the big sloppy car into the parking lot at the Stockmen’s, the pit of light in the center of town. A bank of windows, a neon bull’s head, and a huge sign in red glowing like the entrance to hell on top of it all: STOCKMEN’S HOTEL.
