by Shawn Vestal
He wakes with a start at the sound of Loretta laughing so hard she cannot catch her breath. “You’re so funny,” she screams.
The bar is empty but for them and the bartender, who watches TV, leaning on an elbow.
Evel says, “You’re a real cute girl.”
Jason musters himself into a sitting position and says, “You can say that again.”
Loretta rolls her eyes and says, “Thank you, Robert.”
Evel says something Jason can’t understand because the words are too low. When he next opens his eyes, Evel is whispering in her ear, and she is squinching up her shoulder like he’s tickling her, and he says, “You grind me up, silly,” or maybe he says, “You’re firing me up, Jilly,” or maybe he is calling her a filly, and Jason doesn’t like that, but it seems as if his eyes are stuck closed.
At some point, Jason says, “Maybe we should take this party up to the room.”
Or maybe he doesn’t say that. Maybe he hears it. Maybe Evel says, “Maybe we should take this party up to your room.” Or it might have been Loretta. “Maybe we should take this party up to our room.”
• • •
Is Boyd angry that they return, loud and drunk, at two A.M., with a bottle and a bucket of ice? Does he wake and, seeing their guest, leap from bed and join in the fun? Does he storm out in a rage? Do they sit around and listen to Evel tell stories about Caesars Palace, Wembley Stadium, Reno, Twin Falls? Do he and Loretta sit together on her bed, while Boyd and Jason sit on theirs? Is that the conversational layout? Do the people in the neighboring room call the front desk to complain about their raucous laughter, their shouts of joy? Does Jason regale Evel Knievel with all the ways that he has worshipped him? Does Boyd tell him stories about their attempts to jump bicycles and minibikes off ramps Jason built with two-by-fours and cinder blocks? Is Jason the butt of the joke in those stories? Do they tell Evel Knievel the story of the bunny bash? And what does he have to say about that? Does he say to Boyd, “Good for you. I hate those little fuckers.” And does that affect Loretta in any way? Does she recoil at his heartlessness? Or does she spark up, move toward it? For isn’t there something attractive in cruelty? Something essential and manly and gorgeous? Does Jason realize this as they talk—does he recognize his lack and regret it? Does he mope about it? Does Evel Knievel pull a small bindle from his shirt pocket and snort from it? Does Loretta do the same? Does Jason say no thanks? And does Evel Knievel sneer? And does Jason finally vomit, or does he make it through?
• • •
Jason comes out of the bathroom feeling lighter, relieved, but still weaving. Loretta and Evel are in hysterics, while Boyd watches them, bemused. Jason thinks: That man is not Evel Knievel. The hair’s wrong. The attitude. At some point, he opens his eyes and finds he is lying on his side, fully dressed, feet itching hotly inside his tennis shoes, and the room lights are still on and he can hear the sound of someone sloshing the ice bucket. Then he is back in the yard at the farm, outside the milking barn in the middle of the night, and his father is yelling at him from inside the barn. “Jason Reed Harder! Have you got all that miffling done?” And he looks down to see that he has a carrier full of bottles for the calves, and the bottles are full of beer, and he has to haul them to the calves and get them to drink, but the calves don’t want to drink, they gum the bottles and leave them slick with mucus, and Jason’s father shouts again, “I better not find that you haven’t finished that miffling!” and so he drinks from the bottles himself, tasting the slick, grassy slime of the calves’ mouths on the nipples, and Evel Knievel, who is sitting in the back of one of the calf pens, says, “Come on, kiddo. You can drink one more.” And Jason is standing in a circle of men in the desert behind Dean’s house, and he is surrounded by bloody, misshapen bunnies, a sticky mound of fur and flesh, and a faceless man wearing a Scotch cap and a denim jacket says, “How are we going to eat all these fucking jackrabbits?” and Jason turns to find Boyd standing there, face and T-shirt bleary with blood, working on a large mouthful of something and holding a jackrabbit with a bite taken out of its side, and he says, “Aren’t you going to get that miffling done?” and Jason wants to cry, he wants to drop to his knees and sleep everything away. He says, “I don’t know how,” and Boyd says, “That figures.” And there is a pounding in Jason’s temples and an ache inside the bone of his skull, burning like a bed of embers, and his mouth is dry, so dry, and he hears a squeaking, a metal bouncing, and Loretta’s voice slithers from the dark, saying, “No,” and then, more softly, “Shhhh,” and Jason thinks she is talking to him, and he prepares to say, “No what?” when he hears a voice, no words, just the deep baritone music of it, and she snickers, and Jason keeps his eyes closed tight now, will not open his eyes now, because he knows it is Loretta and Evel out there together, and a soft, steady squeaking begins, a working of the bedsprings, and then a groan and Loretta says again, “Shhhhh,” a note of delight and alarm, and Jason feels Boyd poke him in the back, once, hard, with his finger, and then there is nothing but the compression of the springs like a metronome, like the ticker Jason’s mother kept on the piano, tick-tick-tick-tick-tick, for an hour, for seven hours, for nine days, for months and months, for the rest of Jason’s life, tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick, and then a freeze, a seizing, and one loud sproing and squeak, and a final “Shhh.”
Jason feels sick in his flesh. The death of something is stinking him up. He peeks through his eyelids. The room is sunk in blackness, but for a band of bright light falling through a slit in the curtains, slicing across two shapes in Loretta’s bed and a ball of cloth on the nightstand a few inches from Jason’s face. He lies on his side, back to Boyd. Tiny sprung fibers glow on the cloth in the light, and Jason realizes it is Loretta’s lavender underwear just as her hand emerges from the darkness to grab it. Evel Knievel begins to snore like a gasping engine, deep, shuddering blasts, followed by long, wheezing inhalations. The way Boyd snores. Or Jason’s grandfather. It carries the precise tone and rhythm of his dead grandfather, rending the peace of the night, the room like a grave.
Dean
Just when you feel abandoned by the Lord, He reminds you of His love.
The bank calls for Dean at around eleven A.M. on Monday. Right as Baker is getting ready to hop in that truck and pull out of the driveway to make the deliveries. What do you call that? Divine intervention?
Dean tells Ruth to stop Baker, and when she gives him a questioning look, he waves her out urgently.
A casino? A stolen check?
Dean feels scooped out. His knees wobble and weaken. He places his hand on the wall before him and imagines sliding to the floor. He’s a fool. Someone is trying to make everything he stands for foolish. To make God himself foolish. Someone. Loretta. He had been so sure of her. So sure that he had turned her toward his path. The Lord’s path.
He says pay the check. It’s okay. He does not want anyone else to know anything.
He cannot control the trembling in his hands, and his stomach growls loudly, wrenches against him. He feels as if he might lose control of his bowels. He has to force himself to stand absolutely still, absolutely clenched against this humiliation, his stomach writhing and twisting and a sudden sharp pain that makes Dean feel like an animal, like a filthy beast that will foul itself. When the tremor passes, and he has not fouled himself, everything coheres into a single desire: that this horrific disarray be repaired.
• • •
He tells Baker only what he needs to know: Elko, the Stockmen’s Hotel, the two kids, the Short Creek address, in case it comes to that.
Telling it, Dean seizes with shame and tension. He feels bare before Baker.
Baker, though, seems to have relaxed. To be unspooling, comfortably.
“You want me to do anything to the kid?” he asks.
“Do anything?”
Baker shrugs and smiles.
Dean very much does want Baker to do something
like that. He very much does want to do something like that himself. He waits before answering. He wants to say the right thing, and he wants to be the right person, and he wants to have what he wants.
“Maybe not,” he says.
EVEL KNIEVEL ADDRESSES AN ADORING NATION
Were we magic, America? Were gods lifting us as we flew, carrying us over those buses, those cars, those imitation Conestoga wagons?
That’s not for us to say. If we ever were magic, we’re not now, now that we’re dead. It’s not what we expected here, nothing like anyone said it would be, but at least it goes on, boring as it is, awful as it is. We live in a plain room and eat in a cafeteria and there is nothing to do here but that—eat and remember, eat and remember.
Death used to be so important to us. Every time we put on that jumpsuit, the red, white, and blue, every time we sat at the bottom of the ramp before a jump, twisting the throttle, feeling the foam seat snug between our legs, insides rattling, breath too quick, remembering the crashes, the black fury of them, the feeling of our spine giving way and the instant knowledge that we’re holding hands with death in a way that none of those people in the grandstands can ever know, not even if they go to war, not even if they’re murdered at gunpoint, the moment so specific to us that it can’t even exist in the imagination of anybody else.
Death was our partner. Our friend. For a while, anyway. Now it’s turned on us, too.
We might have shown up anywhere in the good years. Any little shithole bar. Any Podunk store or restaurant. Anywhere we went became a temple, and we were a god, and the worship was love, the purest sweetest love, and it was as all things were then—the more we were granted, the more we hungered. The more we starved. Until there was nothing that could ever feed us.
You didn’t know us, not really, but, America, we dwelled in every part of you. We lived in Butte and Las Vegas. Spokane and Reno. Boise and Grand Rapids and Tuscaloosa and Elmira. We were everywhere. Sometimes we were in a particular place and couldn’t be in other places where we were needed. Where the country had an ebb in courage or confidence, and needed its daredevil. We did the best we could. Don’t say we didn’t.
Years and years and years passed. Just gone. When we went to Spokane, people would ask about the time we punched a cop in the Davenport Hotel. Down in Reno, some asshole would come up and remind us about the time we were thrown out of the Sands for taking out our dick at the craps table. They sold toys in our image, wrote comic books about us—showed us flying down from the sky to disrupt robberies and capture evildoers. They made us forever twenty-five years old, throbbing with muscle.
By the end, though, it got fucking weird, America. On the Internet, the computer tubes and such, there are fan sites—evelrocks.com, evelsavestheuniverse.com—where people write stories about us. Stories about “us.” Craziest shit. Superhero fantasies. We fly around the world and fire amazing weapons from the air. We hold off nuclear annihilation. We turn back floods and tsunamis, stabilize the earth during quakes, send doomsday bombs spinning into space. And then there are the other stories. The villain tales. In these we are a criminal and worse. We stick up banks and fly through the shadows of the night. We run tables and women in inner cities. We are killed, explosively, spectacularly, by other superheroes—the X-Men, Spider-Man, Captain America.
The craziest shit got crazier. That is just basic American gravity, the primary force of the whole damn country, crazy pulled toward crazier. One of the Web sites had a link called “Evel Erotica.” Seriously. The world is full of more stupid shit than anyone could ever guess, and every bit of it comes from other people. Other people. You spend your whole life trying to do something in relation to them—impress them, get their love and attention—and then it somehow all gets turned into stories, then lies, and then something like this:
Cherry leaned forward and Evel drove into her from behind. “You’re in for the ride of your life,” the handsome daredevil exclaimed, thrusting while he ran the bike up the ramp and off into the air, fucking and flying, until the bike landed with a violent lurch and they crashed and came, breaking their bones, spilling their blood . . .
It is a fucked-up world, America. Even the love is all wrong.
PIONEER DAY
July 24, 1958
SHORT CREEK, ARIZONA
It is Pioneer Day, and almost raining, thick clouds ready to burst during the morning parade and services. Everyone is ready for rain. Dust rises with every step. The wheat and barley wilt. But everyone prays for the storm to hold off, just through tonight, through the dance. Everyone tries to read the sky as a signal from the Lord, and Ruth is doing that, too, Ruth is watching the sky and hoping it will do as she asks, that it will open up and pour down upon them so there will be no dancing. She is hoping this even as she knows it will not happen, that even if it rains there will be dancing, in the wardhouse or in the school, and that she will be there for the dancing, and that Brother Billy will be there for the dancing, and that Brother Billy will be there to dance with her, and that he will know what that means, and she will know what that means, and everyone around them—right down to the children—will know what it means, too.
• • •
In the afternoon, the brothers and sisters pick corn for the dinner. The clouds move off and return but nothing falls. Ruth stays in the rows as long as she can, breathing dust and corn silk, relishing the close, shady tunnels, hoping not to see Brother Billy or her parents. She snaps the ears downward and tucks them into a burlap sack held by her sisters, Alma and Sarah. They are singing a song together, under their breath, the way they do, as though their hushed singing were a secret. “‘Father, I will rev’rent be / And in thy house walk quietly.’” They are always quiet, these two, always together, and usually near Ruth, ever since the days when it was unclear if they would ever return home, the days they spent in the house of the man and woman whose name Ruth cannot remember—though it is more true to say that Ruth will not allow herself to remember the name. They all came back with different experiences. Ruth’s father spent four days in jail. Her mother and aunts had spent the days here with no word about their children. “‘Listen to the words I hear, / For in thy house I feel thee near.’” And the children had all gone to different families, to Gentiles and apostate Mormons in Hurricane and Cedar City and St. George, each to a different home that was not home. Ruth and Sarah and Alma had spent the quiet days in the home of the family in Hurricane with the television and the fancy plates and the gentle whispering. That had been their exile. Ruth knew to feel fortunate, because some children did not return, children who were kept away by the Federal Men, kept in other families, and their parents live on in Short Creek, moving among them like ghosts. “‘May my thoughts more perfect be, / That I may speak more rev’rently.’”
Ruth stuffs two more ears into the bag. “Okay, run these down,” she says, and Alma and Sarah shuffle away down the row.
She steps through cornstalks into a new row and stumbles into someone, and she apologizes, and a man answers in a deep voice and turns to face her. A new person. An unfamiliar person. He is tall and he is young—a young man, the rarest of people around here—and he is handsome, despite a pair of large, flappy ears. Ruth feels as if she has been pleasantly tricked. She would like to stare at him. Study him. The back of her neck flushes.
“Hello, young lady,” he says, arms full of corn, bowing in a manner that might be mischievous, and she says, “Hello, old man.” Ruth steps back through the cornstalks to the row she had come from, and she can hear him chuckling. She stands there, catching her breath as if recovering from a fright, until her sisters come running down the row, laughing.
• • •
Walking home, Ruth’s sisters needle her about Brother Billy. They’re supposed to call him Brother Adler, but he is too familiar from the days when he was younger and would sometimes watch them while they played with his younger sisters. Ruth cannot think of him by an
y other name.
“You’ll need to watch out for his elbows,” Sarah says quietly, and Alma giggles, and adds, “He’ll give you a black eye.” Ruth hisses, “You shut your mouth,” and Sarah gasps in mock astonishment, and Alma says, “I’m telling,” and Ruth says, “You go right ahead,” and the girls giggle harder.
His dancing is but one of the many ways in which Ruth finds Brother Billy unacceptable. The main one she cannot express, or feels she is not supposed to express: he simply does not attract her. He does not draw her, does not please her senses, does not appeal. She does not want to dance with him. She is a precise and excellent dancer, Ruth is, and Brother Billy’s laughing, loose way of dancing is embarrassing—bumping into the others, mixing up his feet, coming in late on calls. And she does not want to do any of the other things a girl might want to do in courtship. She does not want to hold his hand, and she does not—definitely, absolutely—want to do the many unthinkable things she has been thinking about doing. Not with him.
Every time her father speaks to her these days, she dreads the possibility that he will tell her Brother Billy has asked to begin courtship. She tries to imagine her father allowing her to say no. Ruth had been the last to see it, and the sting of feeling foolish is still fresh. Brother Billy came to Sunday dinner three times in May and June, each time without his young wife and their two children. Ruth’s mother had paid extra attention to her dress and her hair those days, and her father had been unusually generous and kind to her in front of Brother Billy, thanking her warmly, calling her sweetheart, smiling lovingly, a charade that was obvious to everyone but Ruth, somehow. After dinner in the kitchen it was Sarah, young Sarah, just eleven years old, who said, “Looks like someone’s courting,” and giggled with the others while Ruth’s face burned. How had she not seen this? Everything about it was obvious, and still, she had not. Ruth is sixteen. Three of the girls she grew up with have married already, two of them as sister wives. The world around her works in just this way—the sideways courtship, the arrangements made offstage—and yet she is offended: she feels omitted from her own life. She believes in the Principle. She does. Believes it is ordained by God, believes she will eventually be joined in a celestial marriage with sister wives and her future husband.
