Daredevils
Page 5
Jason felt bad for Bart, but not so bad as to erase his admiration for his grandfather. It was a mean thing to do, but it wasn’t weak. That was a few months before the Evel Knievel jump. Jason had asked his parents for permission to go, and his mom had said no, had said, “Let’s keep the Sabbath holy.” His parents had come to think his interest in “worldly” things—in daredevils and rock music and novels about hobbits and the loose and supposedly willing girls of Wendell—was getting out of control. Infuriated, Jason thought, When I leave, I will engage all manner of wickedness on Sundays. But that’s not what he said. What he said was “Okay.” And then his grandfather had stepped in and shown him what you do when you want to do something. You do it.
That’s when he started spending his mission money.
As far as Jason knew, Grandpa had never told anyone about the day they went to see Evel Knievel, and he never brought it up again—though if he gave Jason a wink during a family dinner, Jason felt their secret was being invoked. The only person Jason ever told was Boyd, and he regretted it. Before the jump, Boyd had been merely dismissive of Evel Knievel as a showboater and fool. After the canyon jump, he was merciless.
“Twenty-five bucks,” he scoffed. “You should have just burned that money.”
“It wasn’t my money.”
“It’s just so hilarious. I about shit myself.”
“As usual.”
Jason was whispering, standing in the kitchen with the long green phone cord wrapped around his arm. His mom walked in, set a potted plant in the sink, and Jason moved around the half wall into the living room.
“Were you laughing pretty hard?” Boyd asked. “I bet you were laughing your ass off.”
Jason had not been not laughing his ass off. He had felt what happened as a nauseating throb below the sternum. There had been an instant that day when he had come to a conclusion: Evel Knievel would clear the canyon. This faith thrived briefly, and it was as wrong as could be. Because Jason had a lifetime of practice in forcing meaning onto events—attaching morals to stories, locating God’s hand in the smallest events—he decided this had identified something about him, something large and definitive and fundamental. A failure to see correctly.
• • •
Jason’s parents arrive, and they stop at the edge of the waiting area—not even a room, just a space off a hallway, defined by a thin rug and two vinyl-covered couches. His father clears his throat. “So?”
“Not sure,” Jason says. “They’ve got him in there doing something or other. They said someone would be out to let us know what’s happening, but it’s been about an hour.”
His parents stand behind the couch, as though they might not be staying. Jason’s father is tall and lean, but gone slumpy in the middle and always blushing. Jason’s mother is shorter, pretty at a distance and plain up close: something practical and taciturn in her short brown hair and bobbed nose, her splintery hazel eyes.
They sit down, and Jason’s mother peppers him with questions: How had they found him? How bad was his breathing? Did he say anything about what happened? Did the doctors act concerned?
“I’d like to lead us in a prayer,” Jason’s father says.
Jason’s neck crawls with embarrassment, because of Boyd and because they are sitting here where anyone might just come walking up. But he bows his head and folds his arms.
“Our Father in Heaven,” his father begins, in the bass drone that sounds as though each word were being tugged from a posthole. “We come before you this evening to ask that you look after our father and grandfather, to ask you to protect him in his time of need.” Jason cuts a look to Boyd, smirking. “We ask that you will bless him with the strength to fight his infirmities, and we ask that you help us stay strong to provide him the help he may need, our Father who art in heaven, to do for him, at this time in his life, as he has done for so many in his own life. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.”
With every amen lately, Jason feels a small, hollow place where something else used to be. He’s been coming unstuck from the church for months, questioning, doubting, and bored. Three hours of church on Sundays, Family Home Evening on Mondays, youth group on Wednesdays, prayer five million times a day. He has simply taken the measure of that life, of the people in the ward, and decided he doesn’t want it. He wanted to be different, and he wanted other people to know he was different, and by the time he recognized this, he already was different.
He was baptized at age eight. He often thinks of that day—the gleaming font and the scratchy, laundered feel of the baptismal garment, a terry-cloth coverall. The font was a huge tub sunk in the floor in a small room at the wardhouse. Family and friends filled the folding chairs. After a prayer and scripture readings by the bishop, Jason went to the edge of the font, at the top of a set of tiled stairs that sank into the water. Dad waited below, waist deep, hands folded before him and the wrists of the garment dampened darkly. He was solemn, unsmiling, and yet Jason knew it was a joyful moment for him. As Jason stepped down, he had the sensation that people were rising above him—Mom in the front row, tears in her eyes, Aunt Bonnie and Jenna and their families, friends from the ward. Dad read the prayer slowly, then laid Jason back into the cool, chlorinated water. When he emerged, he felt like a sleek animal, a cheetah or a puma, fast and glistening. Stepping out, though, he felt the garment cling heavily, and he slopped back to the changing room, where the day resolved itself in the most ordinary sensations: dress shirt sticking to his humid skin, the damp smell of towels and worn socks, the sight of looped black coils of hair on his father’s chest, the echoing sound of him tapping a comb on the sink.
Mom made hamburger pizza for dinner that night. She and Dad were happier about this than about anything Jason had ever done, it seemed—way happier than the time he brought home straight A’s, or earned the Webelos award in Cub Scouts. Now he was a full member of the church. Accountable in the eternal ledger. That night, as she tucked Jason into bed, Mom talked about eternity, about the never-ending time to come. Though Dad was the patriarch, it was Mom—the convert—who talked to him the most about the faith and righteousness, the one who seemed to take it to heart in day-to-day life.
“From now on, son, your actions have consequences forever,” she said, smoothing his stiff hair with her hand. “We can live together as a family for time and all eternity. Never be apart. But we must be righteous. You must be righteous. You will, won’t you, son?”
Whatever it was that Jason was supposed to feel at this moment, he didn’t. But because it was so clearly the thing to be done, he said, “I’ll be righteous, Mom.”
• • •
The doctor arrives, jocular and smiling in his square metal-framed glasses. He tells them it appears Grandpa has an advanced form of emphysema, and he’ll need to stay at least another night.
“Keep an eye on things,” the doctor says, nodding. “Try to get some pictures of his lungs.”
Emphysema. Though he’d never smoked or worked in an asbestos mine.
“Sometimes it happens,” the doctor says. “Not for any reason we can see.”
Jason’s parents want to stay at the hospital, so he heads to Boyd’s for the night. He loves staying over there. There are no rules. Boyd’s mom is gone most of the time, they make a mess and no one complains, and he doesn’t have to worry about his parents coming in and deciding, mid-episode, that Kojak isn’t “appropriate.”
At Boyd’s, they make two frozen pizzas and watch TV while Boyd’s mom works her shift at the Lincoln Inn. Boyd sits cross-legged on his couch—he calls it Indian style, sarcastically. Where Jason is tall and ungainly, Boyd is thick and earthbound, head like a medicine ball, with a wide, flat nose and thick black hair, black eyes, and a shaggy smile that looked sheepish at first and then defiant. At school, the other kids always call him “Chief” or “Little Bear” or something, and he always responds, “Good one, George,” or, “H
ilarious once again, George.” Only Jason knows that “George” is Custer, and that in Boyd’s happiest fantasies he rejoins his Indian brothers and sisters and rides down hard on Gooding High School.
Boyd says, “Well, dude, yes or no?”
Yes or No?—their rhetorical game. God: yes or no? Everything is an argument for or against, from Corinne Jensen’s tightly packed H.A.S.H. jeans to Evel Knievel’s failure to clear the canyon.
“That sucks,” he says. “Don’t do that now.”
Boyd shakes his head. “Now is the perfect time.”
Jason stares into the TV screen. Emergency! The paramedics are trying to revive a firefighter who collapsed in a burning building. They are shocking him, trying to restart his heart.
“I say . . . this one’s a yes,” Boyd says.
Jason stares at him.
“It’s so perfectly bad, man,” Boyd says. “So neat. So precise. So constructed. A godless world would be chaotic. Nonsensical.”
“This is sensical?”
On TV, the firefighter comes coughingly back to life.
“Perversely, perfectly nonsensical. A disease he doesn’t deserve in any way. Dude never smoked, and now this.”
“What a godless world would have,” Jason says, “is no sense of right or wrong. Even if cause and effect were all lined up—right and wrong, that’s the main thing. In a godless world, the evil would triumph, the good would be punished or enslaved or something, or get diseases they don’t deserve. Like Mordor.”
Boyd shakes his head. “You can work those fucking hobbits into anything.”
They watch the final credits in silence, the paramedics frozen in tableaux of bravery, concern, celebration.
“I don’t know,” Boyd says. “God must like to fuck with people. Maybe He finds it funny. Maybe He’s just bored and screwing with us. Think about it: we’re bored. How much more bored must He be?”
A tampon commercial comes on with a bicentennial theme. A gymnast in a spotless leotard vaults beneath waving flags.
“Good God,” Boyd says. “If we were really all that free, would we have to be reminded of it constantly? Do free people go around talking about their freedom all the time? Like, tampons—and freedom. Hamburgers—and freedom. Everything and freedom. Wouldn’t a truly free people not really notice it, because they’re so utterly, amazingly free?”
Boyd’s mom comes home as they watch Saturday Night Live. The screen casts a blue pall, and Boyd’s mother, puffy faced and smoky voiced, begins watching it even as she sets down her purse, bending unsteadily at the waist, her skinny legs straight. Her starchy, flyaway hair, as brown as a rabbit’s, barely covers her scalp, and she curses more than any other woman Jason knows. She flops into the recliner and watches, head drooping. She reeks of something sweet and alcoholic, mixed with cigarette smoke. On TV, Belushi and the others bob around in bee suits. Lines of static run through them, slant the scene momentarily sideways. Her face sinks forward, snaps up. She stands, sways, puts a hand on the recliner arm.
“Oof,” she says. “Boys, I am drunk.”
Boyd laughs, flat, without looking away from the TV. His mother wavers, stares. Jason feels darkly clandestine, graced by the world outside his world.
“Bees,” she says.
May 21, 1975
SHORT CREEK, ARIZONA
The sheet cake sits on the dining room table. Happy Birthday, Aunt Loretta spelled out in raisins. The cake sits there and sits there and sits there, on the long wooden table with bench seats, as in a monastery or penitentiary. Just sits there in its sheet pan, unadorned, on a red-and-white-checked dish towel. Nobody makes a big deal about birthdays here. Every time Loretta walks past it, she wants to run out the door, find Bradshaw, and go.
In his letters, he keeps telling her to wait. He’s getting some things together. A little money. Hang in there, baby. It’ll happen soon.
He doesn’t even know today is her birthday.
That morning, he picked up the orders, and Loretta slipped a note to him as she passed a sack of rice, and he slipped a note to her as they teamed up to haul a box of sundries to his truck. They do this nearly every day—winks, notes, the furtive brush of a finger. This thing Loretta thought would be impossible has turned out to be simple, just as living this life has turned out to be simple. She remembers wondering how she would hide her true self from them, and then discovering how easy it was, because no one ever asked her anything about herself.
So when Dean comes tonight, it will be the same, only more so. It won’t be her with him, it will be her shadow, and it won’t be too bad, it will just be another thing she can get through by shrinking into herself. She is not squeamish about the body.
You are mine lorry and that is not something that any fake polyg marriage can change, baby, and we are going to be together I promise.
She thought about telling Bradshaw, in her letters, that today is her birthday. He does not know, she is sure. He is not a birthday-remembering person, though he likes an elaborate fuss for his own. He thinks it has already happened; he thinks it’s been happening. I love you so much lorry that it don’t count what he does to you. She has not corrected him, because it feels strangely too personal. Now she wishes she had mentioned it, because maybe he’d have done something by now, and they’d be gone.
Since that first night, Dean has been gentle and kind, patient, never mentioning how much he wants her, never coming near her in that way. And every morning and evening when she sees Bradshaw, his eyes gleam and jump, he scuttles and hustles at every task. His hungry look never leaves her. Every time she glances at Bradshaw he is already looking back, and she knows that if one of these men is a demon, it is him.
My lorry you have my word that we are going to make the old son of a B pay. I wake up ever day just to see you.
• • •
Ruth has made chicken tortilla casserole, with chunks of canned tomatoes that Samuel and Benjamin will sequester on their plates, and that Ruth will insist they eat. The casserole sits in a rectangular baking dish at the center of the table, beside a large bowl of green beans and a stack of wheat bread sliced from the loaf. Ice water in a pitcher and no butter for the bread.
Dean sits at the head of the table, with Ruth to his right and Loretta to his left, and the seven kids lined up from there. Bowing his head, Dean laces his hands and props them before himself on his elbows. They all fold their arms and bow. “Our Father in Heaven,” he begins, and Loretta’s mind wanders. He prays several times a day, loves to hear himself pray. Sometimes he will draw it out, add a theme or rebuke a child. And we pray, dear Lord, that you grant Elizabeth the patience to become more obedient. He finishes, and everyone whispers, “Amen,” and the food begins to move around the table.
“I would like everyone to think of one thing to share with the family about Aunt Loretta tonight,” Ruth says. “One thing that you feel she has brought to our family. One thing about her that you love.”
Samuel mumbles into his plate, “She’s nice,” and Ruth nods vigorously. “She is very nice, Samuel,” she says. Elizabeth says, “She loves the Lord?” and Ruth agrees again, though she looks at Loretta as she nods. Benjamin says, loudly, “She weads to me!” and everyone laughs. Loretta, too. When it falls silent, Dean clears his throat and says, “I believe Loretta has brought a sweetness of spirit into our home,” and Ruth nods in agreement with this as well, mouth pursed.
Loretta has never adjusted to the silence of these children, their obedience, though she has seen the cause of it when they disobey Ruth. She whips them mercilessly with her large wooden spoon or pinches them in strategic ways. If Loretta had considered Ruth a hard woman, humorless, before the wedding, she has come to realize how little she really knew. Ruth is harder than humorless—believing life is meant to be a trial, and her task is to drive these children into heaven, to teach them to ignore pleasure in pursuit of salvation.
Out comes the sad, flat cake, with the birthday message in raisins and a single candle burning. The children sing “Happy Birthday.” She had wondered whether they would, or whether Ruth would consider it a worldly extravagance. Janeen, the six-year-old, sings loudest, and she smiles widely at Loretta when the song is over, a big gap in her nubby-toothed smile. Loretta blushes, wanting to check the feeling rising up inside her, because it is love.
If anything, hearing Ruth’s ideas about disciplining children has made Loretta want to coddle them more. She looks upon the children with intense tenderness; she feels their slights and injuries more powerfully than they do. She can’t bring herself to trim little Ben’s fingernails, because she once accidentally cut him to the quick and he cried and whimpered, warm and tight in her arms, for half an hour. She relishes doing the girls’ hair, and seeing them smile when she tells them they look pretty. She teases Samuel, who blushes hotly, and at night, when she tries to imagine her future, when she thinks about what Bradshaw must be doing with all that money of Dean’s that he is handling, when she remembers how much she hated Dean and realizes how that hate has slid into something like accommodation, how she has found a place inside herself for all of this, she becomes fearful at the idea of never seeing these children again, fearful that they may love her, too, and that it will hurt them when she leaves.