Daredevils (21 page)

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.

I
t 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 any 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.

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.”