Daredevils

by Shawn Vestal

  But not like this. Not without her choosing.

  • • •

  The clouds have drifted south, and so the picnic goes ahead as planned, in the field behind the schoolhouse. The long tables are covered with food, with corn and salads and chicken and pies. In the shorn grass beyond is the place for the dancing, squared by four poles strung with lights. Ruth and her mother arrive early to help with the food, and she watches carefully as the families show up, as the children race off to join the other children, and the men and women fall into groups, and she watches for Brother Billy until he arrives with his family. He seems shined up. Combed and brushed. She feels his eyes roving for her. She sees the man from the cornfield arrive. The unfamiliar man. He arrives with the Barlows, and Ruth wonders who he is and where he came from and why he’s here. He, too, seems shined up, combed and brushed, and Ruth wants to stand and watch him.

  People fill their plates and crowd the tables. Ruth carries food and dishes between the schoolhouse and the field. She watches Brother Billy as he goes to the table for food, his eyes roving, and she ducks to the other side of the crowd as he finds a seat with his family. She watches Brother Billy, and she watches the man from the cornfield, that tall handsome man.

  Uncle Elden moves to the front and the crowd hushes. He gazes upon them placidly, and lets the silence linger. Ruth wonders if he is waiting for the Lord to arrive in his mind. He begins to tell the story of the pioneers and their handcarts, of the arduous journey of the Saints, fleeing their persecutors in Nauvoo, Illinois, for a land where they could practice their religion in peace.

  “Driven from their . . . homes,” he says. “Their prophet murdered by a mob. They traveled in fear and in . . . faith, trusting God would lead them.”

  Days and nights on the trail. The fatal winter. Death stalking them all—children, the elderly, the young and strong.

  “Can you imagine . . . the powerful doubt, brothers and sisters?” the prophet asks. “Can you imagine the difficulties of sustaining your faith in a wilderness, surrounded by death, and told . . . to put your trust in the Lord?”

  The Saints persevered, following Brother Brigham until he arrived in the valley of the Great Salt Lake, on this very date in 1847.

  “Still . . . the Gentiles went to war against us, brothers and sisters, to war against this priesthood. They tried to stop us from voting. Burned our homes, destroyed our fields. Until even the . . . church . . . itself . . . turned its back on the sacred principles.

  “Still, they persecuted us. Still, we would not yield.”

  He pauses. Everyone knows what is coming.

  “There was a man,” he says, “named Governor . . . Pyle. The governor of Arizona, who set forth a special effort to persecute this people.”

  The raid of ’53. Five years later, Ruth is thinking of her return home, her mother’s desperate embrace. She recalls the way the children came back to their families, a few one day, a few the next, the community slowly restored. Ruth and her sisters shadowed their mother’s every step for weeks, from garden to kitchen to church and back—and it felt wrong to talk about where they had been and what had happened there, so she didn’t. Everyone else seemed to feel the same. Almost nothing was ever said about the raid except in church, where the brethren spoke of it constantly as a lesson in persecution and salvation.

  “They wanted to carry the children away, to adopt . . . them out and destroy the records, so the children would not know their lineage. This was in the hearts of many men.”

  Ruth sees that the man from the cornfield has closed his eyes.

  “We look back now and rejoice at the deliverance . . . the Lord brought us. But we did not know, at the time, what would happen . . . and what the end would be.”

  He pauses and beams at the crowd, gazing up and down the tables. Brother Billy is taking a fussing infant from his wife’s arms. The man from the cornfield is watching Uncle Elden, rapt. Ruth can sense his passionate response—everyone else, it seems, is so familiar with these words that they land without much effect. As the raid has been turned into a story, it has come to feel less real. But to the man from the cornfield, Ruth thinks, the story is devastating. She says a silent prayer of thanks that she has been chosen to be among the Lord’s servants here in Short Creek.

  “And so now,” the prophet says, smiling and opening his arms, “let’s dance.”

  The crowd erupts in applause. Ruth watches as the man from the cornfield stands. Handsome. Righteous. New and unfamiliar. He looks at her and nods, grandly. She realizes what’s going on inside of her: She does not want to stare at him. She does not want to watch him. She does not want to dance with him or talk to him. She wants to touch him. She wants to touch every part of him.

  • • •

  At the dance, her father approaches with Brother Billy. Ruth considers saying that she is sick. She considers saying she sprained her ankle picking corn. She considers saying she does not know how to dance. That she does not know what dancing even is. Here they come, her father leading the way, Brother Billy as an applicant or supplicant, all of it outside of her control, all of it a dance in itself, the steps already laid out, invented and drawn up by others, by her father and Brother Billy, yes, but also by others long before her who wrote the music and named the steps, all of it beyond her.

  “Good evening, Ruth,” Brother Billy says.

  “Good evening, Brother Adler.”

  “I was hoping I might request the pleasure of the next dance.”

  Over her father’s shoulder, several yards away, stands the tall young man from the cornfield. Ruth thinks he might be looking at her. He looms above the others.

  “Little sister?” her father asks.

  “I’m afraid,” she starts, but no words come, and she clears her throat and starts again. “I’m afraid that I have already promised the next dance to someone else.”

  “Oh?” Brother Billy asks, glancing at her father, who narrows his eyes in puzzlement, and asks, “To whom have you promised the next dance?”

  Ruth points to the tall young man. They turn to look at him, and her father says, “Ah. The new man. The convert.”

  “Brother Harder?” Brother Billy asks, and her father nods.

  Brother Billy tips his head, and says, “Perhaps the next dance, then?”

  “Unfortunately,” Ruth says, “all of my dances have been spoken for tonight. Every one of them.”

  SHORT CREEK

  October 20, 1975

  ELKO, NEVADA

  Loretta wakes, parched, no sense of time. It might be any time. The back of Boyd’s head is six inches away, a wing of shiny black hair. Across the gap between the beds are the two lumps that are Jason and that motorcycle guy. Shades drawn. Light slips through an open slice of curtain. The room is ripe with body smell. A disorienting ache pulses from her head down her body, and acid sears the back of her throat. She feels like she must stay perfectly still. Something cloudy hangs between her and whatever brought her to this moment—something that does not quite blot out memory, but presses it out of the immediate range.

  She gets up and pees. The sound embarrasses her. She sits on the toilet for so long, face propped in her hands, that her legs fall asleep. When she stands and flushes the toilet thunderously, she has to wait for the blood to return to her legs, tingling and prickling, before she can walk. When she does, Evel Knievel is sitting up, scratching the back of his neck, and he says, “Mornin’, darlin’,” and Loretta looks away from him and mutters, “Darlin’.”

  Every decision has been wrong. Last night she had thought he was so cool. So interesting. And then with Boyd. Every decision. Wrong. Every bit of her life must come off of her, must be stripped like worn paint.

  She showers. Stays in the hot water until it cools. When she emerges, Jason is saying something she can’t quite make out and Boyd snorts, says, “Oh, please.” Everyone is awake. Evel K
nievel is stepping into his jeans. Boyd and Jason are both sitting up, bedcovers piled around them. Jason looks as though he has been shot or stabbed. He looks at Loretta and then back to Boyd, who is gazing grumpily into his lap.

  “If you boys are gonna be friends,” Evel Knievel says, standing there holding his shirt in front of him, “you’re going to have to learn to keep the ladies in their place.”

  Jason ignores him. “I’m the one who let you come along in the first place, you fucker,” he whispers. “You came to my birthdays. Grandpa’s funeral. You were my goddamn motherfucking safety buddy.”

  Boyd stares into the sheets.

  Jason sputters, “It’s my car!”

  Boyd nods wearily. “Yeah. I know. Your dad’s car.”

  Loretta wishes for a back door. She sits on the bed with a towel, absently rubbing her hair, and Boyd lifts his eyes at her, smiles shyly. She hates the hope she sees there. She cannot quite remember how she ended up doing what she did but now, in the headachy, sick new day, she imagines her parents knowing about this, she imagines the brothers and sisters back home in the ward, she imagines Dean and even Ruth, and despite whatever she thinks she knows about herself and her future, she feels stamped by sin.

  Evel Knievel finishes snapping up his shirt, and slaps his thighs loudly. “We sure had us a party,” he says.

  Jason turns to him and stares. Evaluates. Jason’s tight curly hair has been slept flat on one side. Confused emotion splotches his face and neck.

  “You don’t seem very scarred up,” he says.

  Evel looks at Boyd and winks.

  “Who are you?” Jason asks.

  “You know who I am, bud,” he says.

  “Your hero,” Loretta says. “Remember?”

  She can’t stand his hurt.

  Evel stops pulling on his boots and squints at Jason. Boyd walks into the bathroom.

  “Why would you even ask me that?” Evel Knievel says.

  The shower comes on.

  “Can I see one of your scars?” Jason asks.

  “You wanna see my driver’s license?” Evel Knievel asks.

  “Okay,” Jason says, and Evel Knievel laughs.

  “Look, bud, I don’t give a shit whether you believe me or not,” he says. “Who needs some breakfast?”

  “I do,” Jason says.

  “Not me,” Loretta says.

  Jason says, “Tell me this. How do you keep from getting scared?”

  “God, this again,” Evel Knievel says. “All right. You just have to force it down.” He stands and stomps his heels into his boots. He drops into a karate stance. “Cram that fear down to the ground, sit on it, kick it, punch it in the face, take it by the neck and squeeze it until it’s dead, and know that you’ll have to do the same thing again the next time and the next. You just kill it and kill it and kill it again. Ride that fucker into the ground.”

  He strikes at it with the ax edges of his hands—kills fear and kills it and kills it.

  “Kill it!” he shouts, then stands straight. “Breakfast!”

  • • •

  Jason walks with him downstairs. The carpet sponges underfoot. Fifty years of cigarettes and fried food haunt the air. Jason feels so many things that he cannot pin them down as anything other than: bad. He wants breakfast very much, and yet he doubts he’ll be able to get any down. Why did he change his mind about this guy? It was something in the morning muss of him. Something in the oily glaze on his face. Not Evel Knievel. Also: the guy in the bed next to him was not the guy who is not Evel Knievel. Not Evel Knievel, and not with Loretta. It was Boyd. He could not add it up, but it added up to him being a fool, fooled maliciously by everyone, by his hero, by his love, and by his best friend, conspiring to bring him to this dull vomit of a day.

  Evel Knievel clicks his tongue happily as they walk down the maroon and gold carpet. When they pass the smoky, ringing bells of the casino entrance, a voice calls: “Hey, man, we’ve been looking for you.”

  Evel Knievel looks around, and then spots his buddies hailing him from a blackjack table. “Guess I gotta go,” he says, offering his hand. Jason shakes it. How should he act?

  “It was nice to meet you,” Jason says.

  Evel Knievel claps Jason on the shoulder.

  “Buddy, that was a hell of a party,” he says. “Do you remember running around the room naked? ’Bout three in the A.M.?”

  “What? No. No.”

  There is no way he did that. There is no way he would do that. There is no way this guy is Evel Knievel.

  “Okay,” Evel Knievel says. “Just asking.”

  “Wait,” Jason says. “Are you shitting me? I didn’t do that.”

  Evel Knievel cackles. He punches Jason on the shoulder.

  “You don’t remember that? Really? Huh. Well, I gotta hit it. You take care.”

  He walks off and joins his buddies, and they laugh and slap backs, and Jason thinks he hears one of the guys calling him Bob or maybe John or maybe he doesn’t hear it right. The others wear jeans and cowboy boots, just like Evel Knievel, and one of them wears a John Deere cap, and they seem like ordinary Idaho-type men, and Jason feels a blush warm his whole body. The men gather around Evel Knievel and he vanishes.

  Jason eats breakfast alone, sheeny eggs and soggy hash browns and wet toast, looking over the Elko Daily Free Press and listening to the ringing of the slots. The food sits like a fist in his stomach, until it becomes clear that it will no longer sit in his stomach at all, and he rushes across the café to the bathrooms—GUYS and GALS—and into a stall, where everything comes up, still warm. Jason can see a pair of auburn polyester pants swaddled around cowboy boots in the next stall, and he flushes and waits for them to disappear. He walks back through the café, pays his check, and assesses the thin leaves of cash in his wallet—his FFA livestock sale money, his mission money—and finds a twenty, a ten, a five, a five, a five, and seven ones.

  In the casino, people hunch over the tables, and thin columns of smoke rise from ashtrays, like a planetary surface pocked with asteroid strikes. Jason walks out the front doors and stands under the huge awning, out of the bright sun. It is clear and cold. He feels like he is six, and he’s gotten lost at the carnival, and what he wants to do is cry.

  He goes back to the room. How will he face them? What will they say? He turns the key in the door and opens it on a dark room. The counters sit empty. Their bags are gone. A piece of paper lies on the television, weighed down by a water glass:

  Catch you later. B & L.

  The world rushes away from Jason in every direction, untouching him. He becomes the last person. The final one.

  • • •

  Boyd sleeps, slumped against the passenger door. Loretta tries not to look at the odometer too frequently. It is already dusky, the sun vanished somewhere she cannot see, either behind the gray stain of clouds or one of the mountain spines that flank them on their journey south. She hasn’t seen a building in what feels like forever. She likes this sensation—everyone behind her but Boyd—and she is untroubled about Jason. He will be fine. He will be taken care of.

  But it is only now—now that she and Boyd have put a couple of hours behind them, now that she has piloted Jason’s big old bucket of wobble long enough to predict its drifts and fades—that she fully turns her mind to the gold. Dean’s gold. The gold she’s gotten, and the gold she’s going for. Sutter Creek gold. It had hung out there, behind the scrim of impossibility, for long enough that she failed to contend with the practical problems it might raise. For example: how do you even turn gold into money?

  And then there is this: She might not even care anymore. She can’t decide if she even wants it anymore, or why she wanted it to begin with. This is her mission but now she feels trapped in it.

  Boyd wakes, moaning.

  “Mornin’,” she says. “Feel any better?”


  “No.”

  “Maybe you need more shut-eye,” she says. “We’ve got a ways to go.”

  Sleep, she thinks. Go away.

  Boyd flips a heater vent up and down with a finger. He turns to her and says, “This is the worst thing I have ever done.”

  “Stop it.”

  “No. The worst.”

  He is pouting. Are they all like this? Every single one of them, just a big hurt baby?

  “Then why’d you do it?”

  “For you.”

  “For me?”

  “To be with you.”

  “And now you’re with me. And now you’re miserable.”

  He flips the vent up and down.

  “Don’t you feel at least a little shitty?” he says.

  “A little shitty, yes. A little.”

  “Then why’d you do it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Not to be with me.”

  “Okay. To be with you.”

  She can hardly say it. What had she felt for this boy? Had she just tricked herself? Because he clearly could not have been the one who tricked her. Not like Bradshaw. Tricky Bradshaw. No, she knows what she was thinking: that here was a chance to do the worst thing—the worst to Dean, the worst to all that she was leaving behind—the worst thing, with this Indian, this Lamanite, this child of sin, for that is what the elders taught, that the brown skin was a punishment for immorality, and in the cloud of drink she was thrilled by the entire idea of giving herself to that. But now he’s here and he’s just another one of them.