Daredevils (25 page)

 • • • 

They are talking secrets and plans, Loretta and Baker are, and Jason feels yet another hot spear of jealousy. How wrong he has been, about everything.

Loretta says, “Yeah. Yes, Brad,” her voice a vibrato of fear. Brad again. What does it mean that she's calling him that? Baker says, “Yeah?” like he's genuinely, deeply curious. He steps to Boyd and kicks him in the ribs so hard Boyd lifts up and falls onto his side. He moans and says, “Goddammit,” and Baker adjusts his angle and kicks him again, and says, “No more from you, you red fucking nigger.” Boyd retches, a wet, beery mess pooling on the shag. “A kick for every single fucking word,” Baker says, and Boyd coughs and whispers, “Okay,” and Baker kicks him again. Boyd begins to quietly cry.

 • • • 

Bradshaw resumes pacing, pounding his heels. At last he says to Lori, “So where is it?” and she doesn't know why she does this but she says, “I've got it. I was getting ready to call and tell you.” She is trying to get his eyes, to share a look, to go to that place where he will do what she wants him to do.

“I got it for us,” she says.

“That is so great,” he says.

He yawns, hugely. He will not join her in that look.

 • • • 

What in the fuck are they talking about? Jason wants Loretta to look at him, but she does not. Her eyes follow Baker, and she is terrified, and she does not give Jason a glance.

“I don't know,” Baker says. He comes over, pulls Loretta to her feet by an arm. “I'm sorely disappointed, Lori, but maybe you can make it up to me.”

Now she looks at Jason, and then Boyd, and her face crumbles. Her look makes Jason feel like one of her captors.

“Upstairs,” Baker says.

 • • • 

She heads toward the stairs. She's in her socks. She wishes she could grab her shoes. They are right there, in the doorway. But she goes up. Behind her, Bradshaw pauses. He says, “I don't really care what you shitheels do,” and Loretta speeds up a tiny bit, and Bradshaw's still behind her, at the base of the stairs, saying to the boys, “Maybe you ought to just walk on out of here,” and now she's at the top of the stairs, and now she's in the hallway, and now she's sprinting toward her room.

 • • • 

Jason thinks:
Just leave?

“Lori and I are going to take it from here,” Baker says, smiling, and then, as if he cannot help himself, adds, “If you know what I mean,” and he winks and clicks his tongue, like he's spurring a horse into motion, and starts up the steps.

 • • • 

She shuts and locks the door, and runs to the window, but it won't slide open. The thick wooden dowel that Dean had put there blocks it. The doorknob rattles furiously. “Lori?” Bradshaw calls. She takes up the stool from the dresser.

 • • • 

Jason and Boyd do not move. Jason says, “Come on. It's two against one.”

Boyd snorts. “That's right, big shot. Two of us, one of him.” Upstairs, Baker is howling her name and banging banging banging, and then there is a sharp, brittle shatter.

 • • • 

Loretta sets the stool back down before the window and steps up on it. Thick, icy air seeps into the room. Bradshaw is pounding, pounding, now kicking the door. She can hear it splinter. She steps onto the windowsill, feels the glass sink hotly into her foot as she ducks through the window and pushes off into the sky.

She feels it in her left ankle when she lands. An explosion. A demolition. She rolls away from it, breath punched out of her. One foot bloody, one broken. The LeBaron sits fifteen yards away. The keys are in her hand. She stands and begins to hop.

 • • • 

Something whooshes onto the front lawn outside. Baker howls, “God-
damn
it!” and now come his thundering boot heels down the stairs. Jason says to Boyd, “Come
on
.”

Jason rises. Baker is racing toward the front door, and Jason,
without thinking, without making a decision, cuts toward him, Baker glancing in his direction in irritated surprise, and Jason hurls himself toward Baker's legs, and wraps them up as Baker bowls him over.

 • • • 

Loretta hops and hops on her cut foot. She waits for the door to burst open behind her. In her broken ankle, she can feel the pieces of bone shift with each hop. It screams with a pain that is almost a comfort, a hot distraction, a welcome elsewhere. She makes it to the LeBaron and puts her hand on it, hops, hops, reaches for the door.

 • • • 

Jason holds Baker's struggling thighs, his right hand gripping his left wrist, while Baker rains down blows on his back. “You're dead, you little fucker,” Baker spits, and he grabs Jason's ear and turns it hard again, sending a bright flame of pain along Jason's scalp along with the certainty that what he says is true, that Jason really is now going to be dead, and soon. “You are super fucking dead.” Outside, the LeBaron chugs into life. The engine noise rises, and then it begins to diminish, and Jason feels that he will lose control of Baker's legs at any moment. His knees, loosening, are knocking Jason in the chest, and soon he will be fucked, truly fucked. Baker starts to heave his knees powerfully, and one cracks Jason in the mouth, and the iron taste of blood arrives, and Jason thinks that Baker will get loose now, and he'll be in his car in seconds, following, and Loretta will never get away. Then he feels a heavy thump. Boyd. Boyd has a knee on Baker's back and one on his neck, mashing Baker's face into the carpet. Baker stops flailing and Jason gets a better grip around his thighs, face pressed against his hip. Baker
says, “Guys,” into the carpet, smush-mouthed, and then again, “Guys,” and the LeBaron is already distant, already who knows where, and Baker screams like an animal into the carpet. They sit there like that, the three of them locked together, until all Jason knows for sure is that they can no longer hear the LeBaron anywhere. It's all the way gone.

 • • • 

She can do this with one foot. It is just a matter of deciding to do it. Like Ruth would do. She presses the gas pedal to the floor with her blood-damp sock, ignoring the pain. Gravel growls under the tires. Dust fills the cab. She breathes and breathes and breathes. Loretta reaches the paved county road, and turns onto it. She can't stop shivering, though she isn't registering the cold. The LeBaron's heater is blasting and she knows it will soon be too warm in here. She passes through Short Creek at just above the speed limit—the huge brick church, the walls of the prophet's compound, the small post office and store, the United Order warehouse. She thinks about the kids. She wishes she could see Benjamin one more time. Read
The Poky Little Puppy
. When she reaches the outskirts she presses the accelerator and the car surges loosely. Her ankle howls. It rests at an impossible angle, swollen tight. The pierced sticky bottom of her pedal foot burns and throbs. The first pink signs of day are lining those dusky orange walls of stone that rise from the desert. The rear end fishtails and stabilizes, and she holds down the pedal. Her left ankle is a bag of bones, and sometime—out far away, in the time that comes after this time—she knows she will need to do something about it, but for now she tells herself just this: She can do this with one foot. It's an automatic, this old boat. She can drive it forever with just one foot.

 • • • 

Jason thinks the end might come any minute. Once Baker is free, he will kill them. With his own two hands. He told them he would, and Jason believes him. Carpet fibers tickle his face. He can feel his arms and hands weakening, but Boyd has Baker perfectly pinned, facedown, one knee on the back of his neck and one in the middle of his back. Jason lies on his side, arms wrapped around Baker's thighs and face against his hip. Jason and Boyd don't talk until not talking seems like the way to do it. They lie there for what feels like hours, the scent of mud and old oatmeal and dirty socks and homemade bread radiating. Baker's anger dies second by second, then surges, fades, surges. Jason stares at the bundle of electrical wires hanging from the ceiling. His shoulders rage. He feels far away from himself.

Baker says, “Guys. Come on. It's over. Just let me up. Seriously now. Come on.” Then he tries thrashing violently. Boyd tips and catches himself on his hands, but keeps his weight on Baker's neck, and Baker stops. “All right,” he says. “Enough. I give. Just let me up.” Nobody answers him. “I can't breathe,” he says.

Boyd says, “You can breathe.”

Baker says, “I can't breathe very well.” Jason thinks that any moment now he will lose his grip. Baker says, “Just let me up and we'll all go our separate ways.”

Jason says, “Boyd?”

“No way,” Boyd says. “My ribs are in pieces.”

“Then what?”

“I don't know,” he says. Dead voiced.

“Guys,” Baker says to the carpet. “Guys.”

Then he laughs, a long manic outburst that fades to silence.
Jason wonders where Loretta is now, and can't block the wish to be with her. Boyd makes wincy noises. Jason looks up from his half-obscured angle at his friend, his oldest and only friend, and sees Boyd staring vacantly. They have each lost the same thing: not Loretta, but an idea of her. A faith.

“Seriously, guys,” Baker says.

It is almost six
A.M
.

“Boyd,” Jason says.

“I know.”

“There's two of us.”

“Yeah.”

“Guys, I mean it, let me up and let's just call it over.”

“Shut up, fucko,” Boyd says.

A long silence follows.

Baker begins to take deep, regular breaths.

“Right,” Boyd says. “Sure, man.”

Baker's body loses its tension. The muscles in his legs slacken.

“I don't know,” Jason whispers. “It feels real.”

One of Baker's feet kicks weakly, lifts and drops on its toe, involuntary. He snorts, begins to wheeze.

“I think it's real,” Jason says.

“No way.”

Baker snores noisily into the carpet. Jason loosens his grip. Nothing. He slides his arms free—fiery with pins and needles—and Baker snorts wetly, pauses, resumes snoring. If he's faking, Jason thinks, he's doing a good job of it. Then he thinks:
How hard would it be to fool me?
He rolls away and stands slowly. When he sees Boyd's face, he grows worried—he is ashen, stunned, and Jason knows from his Boy Scout first-aid training that Boyd is in shock. Boyd looks like he is about to tip over, breath shallow and
eyes drooping. Jason reaches out and takes his elbow and helps him stand, watching Baker and knowing that they are committed now, they'll never get hold of him in that way again, and as Boyd's knees come off his neck, Baker lifts and turns his head and lays it down again and sleeps, astonishingly, sleeps.

“No way,” Boyd says.

They walk out. No keys in the Nova, and they're not going back to root around in Baker's pockets and risk waking him. Boyd's coat is in the LeBaron, so they take turns wearing Jason's as they walk into town, looking back nervously all the way. Boyd limps from the pain in his ribs. They barely speak, and Jason wonders: How do you start? What do you say first?

“What do we do now?” he asks.

Boyd shrugs. “Go until we get someplace.”

It is warmer than it's been in days. Trucks pass, drivers stare. Every house is huge, stamped from the same mold. There are no stores. No stop signs. No normal town things. They walk past a huge walled compound; the gabled roofs of two enormous homes, larger than Dean's, loom above. The desert spreads, flat and dusty red, toward the jutting mountains that seem to shelter the place. Curtains part as they pass; a woman in her yard, in a long dress, ankle to wrist, turns away from them watchfully.

“This place is the weirdest,” Boyd says.

Why does Jason not think Baker is coming? He simply doesn't. They reach a small country store. Two rusting gas pumps out front and a Greyhound bus sign in the window. They go in without speaking. Jason has enough money for two tickets home and four packages of Ho Hos. After he pays, he looks at the change in his palm: $2.13. His mission money.

They stand outside by the ice machine and the dented garbage
can in the radiant morning sun and eat like they're starving, until Boyd begins to laugh. A wet glob of Ho Ho flies out. He stops, gains control, and then begins again, shaking uncontrollably, eyes pinched shut, and then watering over. Jason just watches him, waiting, chewing. He is visited by a powerful urge to be home. To be a child. Boyd stops, takes a breath, wipes his eyes, and says, “He fell asleep,” and starts all over again, the force of it smearing his face around, bending him over. Jason finally has no choice. It is beyond him, it always has been beyond him. He joins in.

 • • • 

Loretta turns north on Highway 59, heading toward Cedar. Spokes of light radiate from the low morning sun, and she thinks she will turn toward it, drive through the red rock canyons, through Zion and Bryce Canyon, and head to Colorado. Or maybe north to Wyoming. Or maybe southeast to New Mexico. An understanding dawns: Her future is not pictures of other places and other things and other people. It is not pictures of anything, and it is not one place. It is the absence of pictures, a void, and this fills her with elation. She wants to bow down before the absence. She wants to worship it.

She is wearing everything she has: the jeans she wore to seminary with Jason, a Led Zeppelin T-shirt of Boyd's, a pair of cotton socks, one of which is torn and bloody, and three one-dollar bills, folded in her front pocket. The gold and the checks and her clothes and money and everything else are behind her. The LeBaron's heater hums waves of hot air, and the inside of the car feels spacious and welcoming, a kind of home. The adrenaline of the past hours has fled, and a warm, happy weariness settles. She will need to sleep somewhere, and she has nowhere to sleep. She will need to
do something about her ankle, and she has no way to pay a doctor. She needs shoes. She needs food. She needs gas. She has no idea how she will get any of it.