by Shawn Vestal
It was hard. It was humbling and hard, America, and don’t you forget it. We swallowed that down, and we swallowed everything else in those days. The toy people pulled their deals, and that was the hardest, because we were rolling in the toy money then—the wind-up racer, the action figures, the bicycles with the Evel Knievel nameplates, the Evel Knievel cane. On and on and on, little idols of the god in every house, and every one of them sending us the purest American love there is: the dollar. But now we were losing that love. Our agent told us to lie low for a while, let it blow over, but no: we called a press conference and apologized to the judge—wink!—for turning his courtroom into a joke, if that’s what he thought we had done, and pledged to take it more seriously from then on.
Winked at the press boys, and they howled. Like broads, the newspaper boys. Give ’em a wink and a story and they’ll drop right to the floor.
Got home after all this and what did we find? On the gate—that marvelous fucking gate, the scrollwork, that beautiful Butte artistry—was a little handwritten sign: SEE THE SON OF EVIL KNIEVEL JUMP. TWENTY-FIVE CENTS.
Eleven years old, he was. Little fucker. Couldn’t even spell the old man’s name right.
DRIVE
October 4, 1975
GOODING, IDAHO
Loretta is awake, lying on the makeshift pallet behind the blankets tacked up in the basement, light filtering through the shelved jars of peaches and tomatoes, when Ruth taps down the stairs and calls, “Good morning, Sister.” She waits for Loretta to answer before going back upstairs. Loretta sits up. Her insides coil and uncoil. She has been awake for hours.
She brushes her teeth at the deep washbasin and washes her face and hands with the blackened bar of industrial soap, and puts on her dress. She can’t stop thinking about Bradshaw up there, at the table already, probably, grinning and grinning. Here. Here to help with the rabbit drive. Here to help set up Zion’s Harvest in its new home. Here in the constantly watching world. He will sit there, the truth of him and her showing in her face.
She comes into the kitchen, and there he is, cheeks stuffed, eyes upon her. The sight of him fills her with sick thrill. Outside, framed in the window above the sink, Dean argues loudly with a man standing in front of a TV news van—KMVT-11, “Your Local News Leader.” Other pickups and vans have parked in the driveway as well, and groups of men are moving around out there. Strangers. Dean has said this will be a way of establishing themselves in the community. A way of distinguishing himself from his brother.
“Like a welcome-home party,” he said.
• • •
Jason clomps across the yard in his rubber boots, and goes into the tank room of the milking barn. Behind a swinging door, he sees his dad at work between the chutes, aiming the sharp, hissing stream of a hose at a shit-splattered udder. The suck and gasp of the machinery obliterates all other sound, and milky air fills his sinuses. At the sink, behind the gleaming silver tank, he fills the bottles, attaches the large red nipples, and loads the wire carrier. Heading for the calf pen, dull with weariness, he looks at the edges of his boots, crusted with bits of grassy manure and half-digested bits of hay, and thinks of the day when he will sleep as late as he wants to and wake to sweet-smelling air.
It sucks, the milking, but it sucks less than seminary. Today is Saturday, but Jason has returned to morning chores full-time ever since the day he and Loretta skipped seminary. That night, Ruth called his mom and said they didn’t think Loretta would be going anymore, because the other kids made her feel out of place. “I’ll bet they did,” Jason’s mom said drily when relating the conversation over dinner, and no one else commented. Jason finds it infuriating that no one else seems to think about Loretta. About what they need to do for her. All his mom and dad can consider is their embarrassment.
So he’d stopped going to seminary. A minor insurrection, but one that his parents fought every day, in indirect ways. He could feel them eyeing him, wary, trying to get a read on the best way to overcome this and set him back on the path. When he had first told his parents he wouldn’t go to seminary anymore, his father had stopped and blinked, as if he hadn’t understood the words, and then he said, “That’s ridiculous.”
Still, now, day after day, even this morning as he upends the bottles in the wire holders, watching the calves slurp hungrily at the thick red nipples, Jason clings to this: Still think it’s ridiculous, Dad? Over there, Dean is getting ready to have his bunny bash. The rabbit drive. Talk about ridiculous. Talk about ridicule. It’s been in all the papers, on the TV news. The Humane Society has raised hell about it. Ridiculous.
Jason is retrieving the empty bottles when his father comes crunching up in his canvas jacket and red-and-black Scotch cap. He is unshaven, and the gray on his hollow cheeks makes him look weak. Sick, even. Something in him has crumbled lately, and Jason holds this against him.
“Need to replace those nipples yet?” Dad asks.
“Nope.”
“You keeping that white-faced bully out of the others’ milk?”
“Yep.”
Jason can feel his father struggling for a way in, and he is glad not to help. From the far back of the milking barn, across the pasture and the patch of rocky desert, he sees trucks and motorcycles gathering in the driveway of Grandpa’s house. Dean’s house. The yard light is on, and Dean and a few other men are unloading rolls of orange temporary fencing from the back of a half-ton truck. A few hundred yards down the road, on the other side of the house, two VW vans sit along the shoulder, and people mill about in the barrow pit. Jason knows from the morning paper that some bunny huggers from Sun Valley have planned a protest.
Jason says, “You going over?”
“Naw. I’ll pass.”
“I’m going.”
Dad nods. Takes off his hat and scratches furiously at his scalp. “There’s no way this can do anybody any good.”
Jason starts gathering the rest of the empties.
“You can come to think that doing what you want to do and ignoring everybody else is the right thing to do,” his dad says. “The honorable thing. Because everybody else is dumb or dishonest or mistaken or something. That’s what your uncle thinks—that everyone is just wrong about everything, and the only thing to do is ignore them. Maybe it is, sometimes. But usually the honorable thing to do is think about others. To consider others, and the way your actions might affect them.”
“Affect us, you mean.”
“I mean everybody. Us, too, but everybody. People all over the country are going to know about this. And when those reporters start writing about it, they might get more interested in your uncle and what’s going on over there. And then . . .”
“Then what?”
“Then the story gets all that much better.” He coughs. “Worse.”
The sun is all the way up now, air warming. They both know that whatever is happening with the story at Dean’s is already happening. It’s burning like a fire. Since Dean taped up Ruth’s handwritten signs on flag stationery at the co-op—JACKRABBIT DRIVE! YOU BRING A CLUB, WE’LL SUPPLY THE FOOD!—it has energized the town. Crop prices are lousy, the football team is losing, and people have fixed upon the bash. Kids talk about it at school. Some of the popular thugs are for it. Some object on the grounds that it is redneck and uncool. Certain farmers—the angry ones, the political ones—wrote letters to the editor of the Gooding County Leader, anticipating the criticism that would follow the event. “If New Yorkers don’t want us to harvest these pests, maybe they’d like to take them home to Central Park.”
“And,” Dad says, “this thing—it’s not just that it looks barbaric. It is barbaric. Just awful. You hate to see anyone enjoy something so bloody.”
He puts his hand on Jason’s shoulder and squeezes.
“Probably the least effective way to get rid of jackrabbits is to stand in the desert with a club and try to beat them all to death,�
� he says. “It’s just dumb.”
Jason ignores him and walks back toward the barn. He doesn’t want to bash any bunnies himself. But he’s absolutely going.
• • •
Loretta and Samuel set up the Zion’s Harvest table, while Dean and Bradshaw load fencing into a pickup. She has to remember to call him Baker. Zion’s Harvest is a big part of this day. “Two birds with one stone,” Dean said. It was Ruth’s idea; if they’re moving up here, they’ll need the business to grow fast, she reasoned; the rabbit drive is the best marketing opportunity they’ll have. She has a mind for that, Ruth does—for imagining what others need and how you might speak to it. Loretta and Samuel tape the butcher-paper sign to the front of the table, sitting at an angle to the driveway so everyone who drives or walks in will see it: ZION’S HARVEST BULK FOODS.
Ruth is alert to something in the air. Something with Bradshaw. Loretta felt it at breakfast—attention flowing from Bradshaw toward her, and Ruth’s awareness of it. Loretta feels them both watching her this morning. And she feels self-conscious about the drive, about the people who will be here, about the watching that will come with that. The noticing.
“Bring out some of them buckets,” she says to Samuel.
He’s moody, hanging his head because he’s not with the men.
“Go on,” she says. “And bring some flyers, too.”
At breakfast, Bradshaw had been scooping up huge mouthfuls of scrambled eggs. She noticed a dullness in her response to him that she’d never felt before. After months of Ruth’s horsey breakfasts, Loretta found herself more attracted to the steaming plate of eggs than to Bradshaw, sitting there sock footed and sleepy eyed. Loretta had looked eagerly to Ruth and asked, “Eggs?” Ruth approached with a bowl of oatmeal and dropped it in front of her. “Mush,” she said.
People drift into the driveway, clumping in groups and talking, cups steaming. Dean’s hired the auctioneer’s food truck to serve hot drinks and lunches. Everyone carries a baseball bat, or a length of pipe, or a two-by-four.
Bradshaw comes to the Zion’s Harvest table.
“Hidy, there, Lori,” he says, pretending to look at the clipboard where customers can sign up for the newsletter. “Holy Christ, I’m about to leap over this table.”
Loretta can see Ruth in the corner of her eye, pausing at the laundry line.
“Keep your powder dry,” she says. She pays meticulous attention to the sign, to making sure it is straight along the table.
“My powder,” Bradshaw says, “is about to blow.”
He adjusts his cap. Rubs his face. Takes a deep breath. Exhales. His face is strained and splotchy, and even across the table she can smell him—armpit and work clothes and a hint of the chasings of the night.
“I hope you’re ready, girl,” he says. “Because I am ready.”
He is not a demon or an angel or anything of the sort. She sees what he is, because he is surrounded by others just like him—bandy-legged men in fringe-heeled Wranglers and curl-toed boots, caps with their bills tight, some with chew-can rings in the back pocket, spitting, scuffing their heels, boring and dumb. He waits for her to respond to him, and something mean seeps into his look when she doesn’t.
“You are ready,” he says. “You are.”
• • •
Boyd shows up with his mom’s aluminum softball bat, the Tennessee Thumper, tapping it in the palm of his hand as Jason opens the door. He bounces on the balls of his feet like a prizefighter, the frayed bells of his jeans splashing softly around his ankles.
“Time to get some bunnies!” he says, as Jason emerges and they start walking over.
“I’m not getting any bunnies,” Jason says. “I’m a complete spectator.”
“You are such a pussy,” Boyd says happily. “You need to kill something.”
“That’s stupid.”
“Such a pussy.”
Boyd is as happy as Jason has seen him in weeks. He’s been bitchy and bleak since his mother refused to let him drive off to South Dakota for the American Indian Movement protest. Jason hadn’t understood it—hadn’t understood, even remotely, Boyd’s expectation that his mother would let him go—but Boyd took it as a grievous offense. “This fucking place,” Boyd said, disgusted. “This fucking town. This fucking school. This fucking point and time in the history of the fucking world.”
He and Boyd trudge through the days like prison inmates in a chow line. Jason picks him up for school every morning, they bitch and listen to Houses of the Holy, go to classes and meet again at lunch to bitch some more, return to afternoon classes, and meet again after school to bitch some more. Teachers, parents, cops, laws, principals, bishops, uncles, aunts, cousins, girls, cars, store clerks, waitresses, television stars, the bicentennial. Dean and Loretta. This could not be their lives. They could not breathe. Boyd kept saying he was going to the AIM protests anyway. There or somewhere.
“Just go,” Boyd said. “One of these nights, just—gone. And not for two nights, either.”
As they approach Dean’s, Boyd begins swinging his bat before him like a sword.
“Feel my wrath, bunnies!” he calls. “I am the avenging angel! Re-pent your evil ways!”
They walk down the county road. Ahead, Jason sees trucks and cars parked in a line that spills out from the driveway. The animal rights protesters are clustered in the barrow pit across the road. Farther ahead sits a TV van from Twin Falls, and between them stands a stocky, thick-haired man with a microphone interviewing a woman in a patchwork dress and loose, long hair. Jason feels the creep of embarrassment—the prickling crawl up the back of his neck, the flush, the sense that an appraising look is aimed from every direction.
He looks for Loretta but doesn’t see her. The food truck is set up behind the house, beside a picnic table laid with plates of doughnuts and a thermos of hot chocolate. There’s a table with a sign advertising bulk foods, and Samuel—Dean’s oldest—stands behind it, speaking to no one. It is warming up, frost melting off the windows and the metal fencing. You could almost take off your jacket. Men clump in knots of three and four, holding baseball bats, two-by-fours, and nine irons. Out in the desert behind the house—far back, on the other side of the barley field—a group of men stretches out lines of orange temporary fencing, making a chute. Once a fire is set on the far side of the bunchgrass stands, the men on motorcycles will drive the jacks toward the chute, and the chute will lead the jacks into the circle of men and boys. Afterward, supposedly, the jack meat will go to jails and groups that feed the poor.
Boyd spots a man he knows from his mom’s softball team and they banter about who will kill more rabbits. The man holds a small wooden club, a fish-killing club, and he demonstrates how quickly he’ll strike.
“That big ol’ bat’s gonna wear you out, boy,” he says, air-whacking rabbits at a furious pace. “Look at me go. You’ll never keep up.”
“You won’t even knock ’em out with that little thing,” Boyd says, holding the bat before him. “These rabbits are going to know they got hit by me.”
Jason goes for a doughnut. He snags an old-fashioned from the paper plate, and the first bite falls apart like dirt in his mouth. He looks at Grandpa’s house. He’s been inside just twice since he died. Now Jason wants to run in and find it just the way it used to be—same couches and furniture, same drapes, same neat and orderly kitchen with the smell of yesterday’s bread or today’s roast, the big boxy TV in the corner with the doily and the glass figurines on top, the cool dusty smell. He wants to find that vanished place and sleep in it.
Loretta’s head appears in the kitchen window. She gazes impassively for a moment, sees Jason, waves quickly, and ducks out of the window. Jason forces down a mouthful of doughnut. Dean materializes beside him, his stiff back and beard in Jason’s peripheral vision. Dean holds a Styrofoam cup, and nods hello. Jason wonders if Loretta has told him about their conversat
ion—that he asked her about the arrangements here. Dean looks at Jason for an uncomfortable few seconds.
“Need a club?” he asks finally.
“I don’t think so.”
“Just gonna use your fists?”
Dean betrays none of the signs of someone who’s joking. “Maybe you can help the ladies with the food, then,” he says when Jason doesn’t answer. “Where’s your father today?”
“He’s home.”
Dean nods.
“Figures.”
• • •
They set the desert aflame about two hundred yards away, a wavering orange hyphen on the land. Loretta walks out with Ruth, and they stand in a half-circle of watchers, nested behind the half-circle of clubbers. The men and the boys. Standing apart, separated from the line of other watchers, is Jason, hands stuffed in his pockets. She sees that his friend, the chunky, kind-of-handsome Indian guy, has joined the circle of clubbers, around twenty-five of them, who start whooping and hollering when the fire is lit. Bradshaw is the loudest, and he swings his club—the weapon he made himself, hammering nails into a four-by-four. He shakes his hips lewdly and dances, and Loretta knows he’s performing for her. A couple of guys start beating the ground with bats, raising low clouds of dust.
Rabbits emerge on the desert ahead, erratic black shapes cohering into a mass. Three men on motorcycles sweep back and forth, working the flanks of the herd like cowboys in a cattle drive. Untended, the flames reach a thick stand of sage and burst into the air. Dean, standing at the center of the circle, shouts, “Who’s on that fire? Who’s got that fire?” Nobody answers, but it won’t burn far in the damp and cold. The jacks develop a chaotic bristling unity, a dark carpet rolling and tumbling across the desert.