Daredevils (12 page)

L
oretta feels lit from within. Neon. Like no one can stop looking at her, aglow in the dark, like she is made of fine glass tubes, easily shattered. Since she walked into that church, every moment since, even at home in her bed, she feels watched and judged and known.

She hates it more than she hates Ruth's bulgur meat loaf. She hates it more than she hates sleeping with Dean. She hates it because it has tainted the best thing in her life—her future, the magical time that is supposed to arrive when she enters the outside world, the world of pink Mustangs and matching Tussy lipstick—by announcing the truth about the way she will be in that outside world.

Ruth says she can't quit. Not yet. They have not figured out their relationship to this community. If Bradshaw were up here, Loretta would leave with him, go anywhere, sleep under bridges, under sagebrush, eat jackrabbits, eat grass, eat dirt, eat bugs. She is brave
enough, if only she had someone to share it with, she knows she could be brave enough. But Bradshaw is in Short Creek, running the business, while Dean scouts for customers up here.

Jason picks her up in the morning, all corny and nervous. He reminds her of the children—alternately endearing and aggravating.

“Hello again,” he says.

“Good morning.”

She does not like how much he likes this. Three minutes expire. On the glove box is a word in script:
LeBaron.
She thinks of Ervil LeBaron, the polygamist leader down in Mexico with thirteen wives who broke with the Short Creek brethren. Mr. Blood Atonement—the guy had his own brother killed. Dean once told her,
Ervil's methods are extreme, but his beliefs are sound
.

She yawns. She could go right back to sleep. In her future, Loretta will never rise before the sun and grog through the gray hours. She will not do chores or make biscuits. She will not live so close to cattle that it is all she can smell, all the time, the shit of cattle.

Jason says, “How'd you like your first day of seminary?”

“Another joy sent by the Lord,” she says. Caught by surprise, he snorts moistly, then looks away, ears scarlet. She feels one ounce better.

At seminary, she sits in the back corner. She averts her gaze from the eyes of others—on the floor, over their shoulders, at their feet—and no one speaks to her, not even Brother Kershaw, and she can tell by the insistence with which they try to show her they aren't noticing her that it's all they are doing, noticing her.

She thought that among the Mormons here there would be some bit of kinship. Some similarity. But these kids are utterly worldly. The girls wear jeans high on their hips, snugged up their cloven
rears, and their hair parts into cascading waves. They all wear makeup, and even the homely girls dress like whores. And the boys are like monkeys, in their bell-bottoms and T-shirts, all except for the three who are farm boys, in Wranglers and boots and purple FFA jackets, the closest thing to Short Creek style she has seen here. These three boys are clearly the lowest caste. Jason and a few of the others are somewhere above them, and the top caste consists of the two largest monkeys, the two with the biggest bodies, the square-jawed, acne-scarred football player boys. Ben and Jed cut looks at her constantly, and elbow each other, and show their interest more plainly than the rest.

 • • • 

It is Dean's night. She finds it more unbearable than usual. He smells like a sour washcloth, and the mole on his neck is grotesque and wrinkled, and his face is contorted into a twisted grimace that lacks all self-consciousness, all reserve, and she knows she will never be able to be someone who has not experienced this. He is marking her.

Afterward, she says, “I was wondering, since we're not going to church here, if it makes sense for me to be going to seminary. I mean, will it make sense to
them
?”

Dean seems stumped. He lies on his back in his garments. The prickly black hair that covers his body presses against the sheer white material in swirls and eddies. He rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands, starts to speak, rubs them again.

“Huh,” he says. “Well, little sister, you may be right there. You may be.”

He falls silent. He drums his fingers on his chest, gazes at the ceiling. Something washes over him afterward, some lassitude.
Loretta wonders whether he'll come at her again. He's frustrated that she isn't yet pregnant, because he believes himself so fertile. His fertility is an expression of his righteousness. She has kept her methods a secret, and yet she understands that it is starting to be taken in the household as a failure, a failure of righteousness and belief and commitment, a failure for which blame will be located and assigned.

“Maybe I should stop going,” she says, grazing his beard with her fingertips.

“Maybe,” he says. “We'll see.”

W
aiting in the LeBaron for Loretta, Jason spots a jackrabbit perched on a rock at the back of the yard, spindly ears high. His duff color blends with the morning twilight. He's barely visible, and he doesn't move as Loretta scuttles out and slides in.

“Look at that guy,” he says. “Just watching us. He's not even scared.”

“Dean says we've got to do something drastic.”

“We were using carrots before.”

“What—feeding them?”

“Yeah. You cut them up, soak them in strychnine, and then lay out a line of them along the edge of the field. You've got to start with some nonpoison ones first. Works pretty good. We were hauling eight or ten a day out of there for a while.”

She doesn't answer.

He says, “We tried some other poisons, too. In barley.”

“Dean says you can't shoot 'em or poison 'em fast enough.”

They're actually talking.
Okay, Jason,
he thinks.
Keep it going
.

He says, “Yeah, that's what my grandpa said, too.”

“He wants to have a drive.”

A drive. A bunny bash. Herd the rabbits into a circle of men, who club them to death. Regular people had stopped doing them. The
New York Times
had written up the last one, over in Mud Flats, and run a photo of a bloody-shirted father-and-son bashing team. It became a big deal, and everyone got defensive. The gas stations sold bumper stickers with a cartoon image of a hippie hugging a bunny, set inside a gun sight. The local papers ran editorials about big-city animal lovers, and the letters were full of righteous indignation about liberals, hippies, environmentalists, the media. Jason had never seen a drive, and he didn't care about jackrabbits. Sometimes he and Boyd would take .22s out and try to shoot them in the desert, though the rabbits mostly bounded away untouched. But if there is anything he doesn't want right now, it's more weird attention at the farm.

“Great,” he says, sarcastically. “That'll be super cool.”

“I don't know,” she says. “They're just a bunch of stupid rodents. Gotta get rid of 'em somehow. Dean says they ate up about half the crops.”

A revelation sprints across Jason's mind, illuminated by her defensiveness: She would be having sex with Dean, of course. She would be—What? Every other night? On some kind of schedule?—welcoming Dean into her room. His creepy uncle would climb on and get to it, grunting and farting, probably, and covered with moles and bristly hairs.
Holy goddamn shit
. Jason thinks he will puke. She would hate Dean, of course. She must. Jason could think of her only that way. But even so, she would find herself aligned with him against others.

Loretta reaches over and turns on the radio. Jason notices her knuckles are large and red for such trim, tapered fingers. Like she pops them too much. He welcomes every unflattering detail. The radio is set at his dad's AM country station, KART. They listen to that awful music—“Grandma's Feather Bed,” “Rhinestone Cowboy
,
” the hideous sound track to his life—all the way to town, while she hums along.

 • • • 

At lunch, Jason doesn't say anything to Boyd about Loretta, and Boyd doesn't ask. Boyd says he's thinking about seeing if his mom would let him borrow her car to drive to South Dakota for a demonstration in support of Jonathan Raincounter.

“Dude's getting hosed,” Boyd says.

“Who's he again?”

“Man, you have got to pay some goddamn attention.”

Boyd reminds him: Jonathan Raincounter was an Oglala Sioux, unjustly imprisoned for shooting two FBI agents. Most people Jason knows take a different view of the case than Boyd; most people he knows see the case—Indians shooting FBI agents!—as one more sign that they have entered the last days, that the sinful world is tinder dry and ready to burn with apocalyptic fire, that the approach to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ is nigh, and that the righteous will soon be heaved upward by the Lord, for that reason and many others, including the following:

Nudity and sex talk in movies

Filthy rock and roll

Women's lib

The Equal Rights Amendment

Tight blue jeans

Rampant sexual perversion and immorality

Unshaven men with long hair

Roe v. Wade

The fall of Saigon

Jackrabbits eating farmers out of house and home

Queers and hippies marching in the streets of the cities

Liberals attacking the family

The end of the gold standard

Drugs

Oil shock

Creeping federalism

Communists

It is the entire context for Jason's people. Their atmosphere. They are the Lord's chosen, saved for the last days, when wickedness will overrun the planet until Christ returns and cleanses the earth for a millennium—a thousand years of fire—followed by the three-tiered afterlife, in descending order of glory. It is coming, it is nearer every day, it is all around them.

What Jason always wonders is: If we're living in the last days, why are we living like this? School, work, church, chores, bills, striving, arguments, chastity, oil changes, milking cows, cutting hay? He wants to live like time is running out. Like the hippies at the Snake River Canyon. Like Evel Knievel. Like driving to South Dakota to raise forbidden hell. Like falling in love with his uncle's second wife. Like precious time is really, actually running out instead of plodding along forever.

“What do you think you can you do about it?” Jason asks.

“Not a thing.”

“Then why go?”

“Fun. Adventure. Freedom. Just to be on the right side of things for once.” He waves his fork around, a gesture that encompasses not just the cafeteria, with its folding tables in the space between the auditorium seating and the stage, but their entire universe. “This
place
. The fucking Indian jokes. The retarded politics. I mean, people here still like Nixon, man.”

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.”

I
n 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.