Daredevils

by Shawn Vestal

  He says this in a minor key, as though it were a simple, painful truth. Now he has ordered a round of Wild Turkey. The colors in his glass are beautiful, the amber glow and the angles off the cut glass and the ice cubes. Jason is trying his damnedest not to sip too slowly, but it’s burning his throat. Acid is trying to crawl out of his stomach. The room tilts and reels, and Jason closes his eyes and places a hand on the table.

  “He’s a lightweight,” he hears Loretta tell Evel Knievel, who answers, “Nothing wrong with that, kiddo.”

  Jason opens his eyes. Loretta sips and watches Evel Knievel, a flame on her cheeks and neck. Boyd reclines against the seat, drink cupped in his hand. Everything in his skeptical aspect angers Jason.

  “You know, people always think it must be something else to be me, just something else. But what you forget is that most of those people who come to my shows, most of those adoring crowds, only show up to see me die. That’s right”—he holds up a hand to ward off their protests—“they want to see me die. They want to see me crash, break my bones, die. I mean, that’s a great story to tell your friends, right? I was there the night Evel Knievel ran up against the thing he couldn’t do.”

  He empties his glass and raises his hand like a bull rider signaling to open the chute. The bartender starts pouring. Evel leans onto his elbows.

  “Look, kids, I’m tired. I’m sore. Some days I think I might just cash it all in.” Jason wants to say no, you can’t, but he sees Loretta nodding empathetically. “I am only human. Only human. There are things that I cannot do, try as I might. And I might die out there some night. It could happen. It could very well happen.”

  He exhales loudly. He smells like booze and Old Spice, and his hair is redder and less blond than Jason remembers it. All told, he presents a picture that is less superhero than the one in Jason’s mind, but he seems hard, tough, worn. Or at least he had seemed that way before he started talking.

  “And I think if it did happen, if I did die out there someday, trying to push myself too far, trying too hard to satisfy what everybody wants from me, I think it would make most people happy. It would make them feel like they were right all along, never to do anything risky or adventurous. See what happens when you get a little too crazy, honey? See what comes your way when you try to grab life by the balls? Old Evel did it. He grabbed life with both hands and look what it got him. Look where he ended up.”

  “I don’t want to see you die,” Jason says, and Loretta says, “Yeah, I don’t, either,” and Boyd says, “I don’t want anyone to die.” Loretta places her hand on Evel’s for two seconds, pats, and withdraws. The downy hair behind her ear glows, pale against her bright skin.

  Evel stares at his hand where she touched it, and smiles wearily at the center of the table. He wears his self-pity like a star-spangled suit.

  “You kids are nice. You know that? You’re nice kids. Let’s have another one. Should we? Can I get you another one? What’ll you have, darling?”

  Boyd says, “Not me,” and gets up to leave. Evel shrugs and Loretta says, “Okay, then, good night, Boyd,” and again Jason spots it—something between them, something in her attitude toward Boyd—and he doesn’t say anything as Boyd leaves.

  • • •

  Here are some of the things Jason finds surprising about Evel Knievel:

  He is short, and not physically imposing in any way. Jason towers over him.

  His eyes are amazing, totally unforeseen, cool lime slivered with yellow. There seems to be a dying light behind them, a weak glow. When he first sat down, his eyes locked on Jason’s while he gave him a curious half-smile, and that bright, shifting color—Jason took it for intelligence, for kindness, for wisdom, for love.

  He is completely unsatisfied. All he does is complain.

  He is not limping, though he could not have even been out of the hospital for all that long after the Wembley jump—that spectacular crash that Jason had missed while eating dinner with Dean’s family, the afternoon he met Loretta.

  He wears ordinary clothing, much like any man Jason might know in Gooding or Twin Falls or Boise: blue jeans with a leather belt and metal buckle, long-sleeved snap-button shirt over a T-shirt, cowboy boots curled up at the toe from wear.

  He is kind of dumb, but thinks he is brilliant. Also like most every man Jason might know back home.

  His eyes steal immediately toward any hint of womanhood. The fiftysomething with the piled white hair, alone in a veil of smoke at the bar. The two middle-aged women who sat two tables over for about an hour, giggling at his every leer. Cheryl Tiegs on a TV commercial for underarm deodorant, which he watched in its entirety from twenty feet away. And Loretta, of course. Loretta.

  He is older than Jason’s father, and looks it, his skin pebbled like a football.

  He is drunker than anyone Jason has ever seen in person, Dean Martin drunk. He had bumped into a chair as he first walked toward their table, and then corrected too far the other way and had to catch himself, stop, and hold out his hands like he was balancing on a wire.

  None of that matters to Jason. He doesn’t love him any less—and that’s the only word for it, love—because running into him like this floods Jason with energy and hope. This is what life can be. Casual drinks with lifelong heroes. Evel Knievel in Elko, and then who knows? Farrah Fawcett in Boise? Lee Majors in Twin Falls? Life glows with possibility. His life—his and Loretta’s lives. Their life.

  They have done the right thing. Jason has done the right thing: surveyed the ass-end quality of his life—of milking barns and morning feedings and church and school pageants and rabbit massacres and sexlessness and sweat-stained polyester and wood-paneled station wagons and AM radio and cattle futures and three prayers a day, every day, knees aching from submission, and the never-ending boredom of the righteous and the self-righteous, prayers and prayers and cow shit and prayers—and gone out and found another world, and Evel Knievel sits in it, Evel fucking Knievel, a mad handsome demon, he sits in it with a whiskey in hand and talks to Jason, talks to Jason and Loretta, pinning them together in space and time, pinning Loretta and Jason together in space and time, no two other people anywhere, ever, able to share this memory, to own this story.

  Ruth

  The children are in bed, and Dean is on the phone with Loretta’s father down in Short Creek, and Ruth is heartsick with the dishonesty of the day. Aunt Loretta has driven home to Short Creek on some errand. Samuel looked at her knowing she was false, but what could she tell him?

  The girl was not right from the start. Never once right, but Dean was blind. Ruth had prayed and been answered. She felt a certainty about the answer: the girl was not right. Yet when she had told Dean this, all those months ago, he had taken her hands in his quietly, and he thought carefully before he said a word, and so she knew it was done before he spoke, knew he had arranged it in his mind, and that this was her lot now, as it was her lot always, to submit. Even knowing what she knew. It was her lot to submit to the will of one so full of human frailty, and through submission to find her eternal blessing.

  It is the only way to see it. And when she prays about it, when she asks the Lord, in her moments of rebellion, how it is that she is supposed to obey him, why it is that she must turn away whatever wisdom thrives in her own bosom to heed his folly, she receives no answer but one: she must.

  She believes it as fervently as she hates it. She accepts it though everything inside her strains toward her own mind, her own way, and has always done so. But her obedience to Dean is obedience to the Lord, and in obeying, in overcoming her own vain resistance, she is fulfilling her promise.

  The girl has taken the gold—or some of it. The coins, not the Sutter Creek ore. Not the gold that Dean seems to worship, the filthy lucre that she believes has stained his soul. There, too, Ruth has been ignored, as he has ignored her in everything these days, in every step along this misbegotten road that brought them
to this breach: a break with the prophet and brethren in Short Creek, the ambition that had overtaken Dean with the prosperity of Zion’s Harvest and with his marriage to Loretta, his greed in buying the Sutter Creek gold and his pride in it, the lust that he had to have it, to touch it, to look at it, to see it. She hadn’t wanted him to get it at all, had urged him to keep the Law of Consecration, to give all to the brotherhood, until he had stopped asking her about it, and then, when he did it anyway and she urged him to hide it from Loretta, he said he would.

  And then he didn’t.

  Still, she will submit. She will carry her burden. She will care for her own soul and the souls of her children, and she will stand proud before the Lord on the day of judgment. Her Book of Mormon is open on her lap and her eyes are closed, she is deep in meditation—it is not prayer, exactly, what she does in these moments when she must turn inward for strength, when she must look toward her soul to erase the negativity that is creeping toward her, when she feels she must battle Satan and his whispers of pridefulness, of anger, of judgment against Dean and others. She breathes and concentrates on the discomfort of the moment, focuses on whatever the discomfort of the moment may be, and she reminds herself that it is a promise of salvation, that the earthly pain is but a price to pay for an eternal glory if she is righteous, if she is obedient, if she submits.

  Dean hangs up and sits next to her on the couch. She does not open her eyes. It is below freezing outside, and the cold seeps upward from the basement, swirls around their ankles. Everything here feels foreign to her. It is but the second time in her life that she has left Short Creek; the first was the raid of the Federal Men who took her from her home, and it is Satan that she feels now just as it was Satan that she felt then, Satan in the atmosphere, in the air and water. She does not open her eyes, even when he speaks.

  “Mother,” he says.

  “Yes.”

  “Her parents are saddened, Mother. If not altogether surprised.”

  Ruth nods calmly.

  “She has taken the coins?”

  “Yes, Mother.” He endures this.

  “But not the strongbox?”

  “No.”

  It doesn’t square. Why would the girl take the sack—that vain, incautious sack of gold coins—and not the locked metal box right behind it in the drawer?

  She can tell that he is merely enduring her questions. Bearing them, as an obligation he must meet. It is the same for her. She imagines this conversation is part of the price she will pay to live in the celestial kingdom, in the glory of the Lord. She imagines the Lord’s pleasure in her passage of this trial. Ruth does not know, still, what they are doing here in Idaho, whether they have left Short Creek for good, and when she inquires Dean tells her he doesn’t know, he is still praying about it, and never once does he inquire about her opinion or ask her whether she has prayed about it, though she has, and though she has been answered.

  Ruth opens her eyes and says, “Perhaps it is the Lord’s will that she has taken the gold.”

  “I cannot see it so, Mother.”

  “Perhaps the Lord will use these events to remind us.”

  “Remind us of what?”

  Ruth whispers, “That we have lost our hold on the iron rod.”

  “Forgive me, Mother. Perhaps I was blinded. Perhaps I have erred.”

  Ruth knows that Dean does not believe he has erred. She hears his swallowing of grievance, his pride in his humility. His satisfaction with himself, that he is able to so patiently pretend to accept her criticism.

  “Erred in which way, Father?”

  Dean does not speak for a long time. The darkness in the living room has deepened against the weak light from the kitchen, gleaming on the glass bell of the lamps, on the wood-grained arms of the couch, casting thin shadows in the nap of the carpet. He leans forward, elbows on knees, hands folded together, very nearly in the aspect of prayer. He lowers his head, raises it as if to speak, and lowers it again.

  Dean says at last, “Perhaps everything, Mother. Perhaps everything I have ever tried to do,” and this, too, his self-pity, is but another part of her lot in this earthly life.

  The girl has never been right. And Dean’s man has never been right. She opposed that from the start as well, and Dean insisted that Mr. Baker was trustworthy, that he had shown his reliability, and Ruth recognized the truth: that was how the world and its values seeped into your life and corroded it, one harmless step at a time, one innocent inch at a time, one arrogant Gentile at a time, until you could not recognize the damned from the saved.

  She submits, submits. Dean sleeps beside her. She becomes more alert with each passing minute. It comes to her every night, this wakefulness. She thinks that perhaps the Lord’s will is aligning with her own. Perhaps a humbling is what Dean requires. Perhaps those who have left them now will never return, just as she wishes.

  Loretta

  Somewhere deep in the rocking recesses of the night, Loretta tells Evel she wants to call him by his real name. She feels this must be a secret that he shares with few people, a talisman, his Sampson hair.

  “Come on,” she says. “What is it?

  “You don’t know what it is?”

  He seems genuinely surprised.

  “I know it!” Jason says, erupting like a bubble in thick stew. “Robert Craig Knievel!”

  Evel Knievel stares heavily at Jason, as though trying to will him away, and says, “Good for you, kiddo.”

  “I’ve seen every one of your jumps but one,” Jason says, head wobbling, eyes misfocused. “I missed the last one. Wembley. My fuckin’ parents wouldn’t let me watch it. They made me go to a family dinner.” He turns to Loretta suddenly. “Dinner with your family. Hey.”

  She pretends to smile. For Evel. She and Evel smile, patiently, together at Jason.

  “My fuckin’ parents,” Jason says again. “They didn’t want me to watch the Snake River jump.”

  “Uh-huh,” Evel Knievel says.

  “Are you sure you don’t remember me? You said, ‘Thanks for coming, buddy.’”

  “Yeah, no,” Evel says. He grins at Loretta.

  “But my parents! Can you believe that? Can you fuckin’ believe it? Greatest thing ever. Biggest day we ever saw.” He looks at Evel, lets it sink in. “Didn’t want me to go. Didn’t want me to do it.”

  “It’s not exactly my favorite thing to talk about, bud.”

  “Ah, hell,” Jason says. “Man, don’t let that get to you. Everybody makes mistakes.”

  They are all wasted, Loretta knows—she is blissfully drunk, protected from the world, narrowed down to the essences—and yet there is something in Jason’s drunkenness that is distasteful, something loose and undisciplined and helpless, as if he were a marionette with half his strings cut. Evel leers at her. No one has ever looked at her so frankly. Not even Bradshaw.

  Jason burps, and holds himself urgently still, then takes huge, steadying breaths through his nose. Evel sits back, swirls his drink.

  Jason says, “Good Lord, you’re amazing.”

  Evel shifts in his seat, frowns at Loretta.

  “No, seriously, man, you are,” Jason says. “I’ve never met anyone like you.”

  Evel stares hard at him—like, Stop it—then turns toward Loretta, who barks once, a laugh escaping from a herd of laughs within. Evel Knievel smiles at her, and in his smile there seems to be some form of original light, something shining from within. Jason stifles a burp, and looks again like he might be sick, and Evel says, “You okay, buddy? Everything gonna stay inside?” and he smiles at her, a smile of pure light. A sour, sickening smell wafts in. She realizes: this is what her future is like. Not like the magazine ads. Not something static and pretty—but something beautiful and ugly at once. It includes a famous man, a worldly man, just showing up at your table, and it includes the possibility that you might find yourself
cleaning up the vomit of a boy.

  Loretta starts telling Evel the truth about them, sort of, saying they’d gotten tired of their families and run away. She leaves out Dean and all that. At one point, Jason snaps to attention and slurs, “And that’s not the fuckin’ half of it,” but she reaches under the table, grabs a thick inch of skin above his knee, and twists it, hard.

  “Holy crap,” Jason yelps. “Knock that off.”

  Loretta smiles sweetly at Evel.

  “How old are you kids?” he asks her.

  “I’m eighteen,” Loretta says.

  He begins to spout advice. Always be true to yourself. Never let the bastards win. Don’t be afraid to fail. Fail your asses off. That is how you will succeed. Be nice. That is the most important thing—be nice.

  “Couple kids like you,” he says, lowering his head and waving his hand as though he were giving a blessing. “Be good to each other.”

  “Yes,” Jason says.

  “No,” Loretta says. “It’s not that way.”

  Jason looks at her, astonished.

  “Be good to each other,” Jason says, and reaches for her hands, which she pulls into her lap.

  “It’s not like that,” she says to Evel Knievel.

  “It is like that,” Jason says loudly. “Come on. Yes, it is.”

  She ignores him, doesn’t even look his way. Just keeps her eyes on Evel, and shakes her head.

  Jason

  Jason has slumped back on the seat. He sees little burn holes in the fake red leather, little blackened edges. It reminds him of the start of Gunsmoke, when the paper is burning away. He believes he will sleep here. The whiskey has gotten inside his nose, inside his eyes. It is making everything strange. Loretta and Evel are ignoring him, and that makes him wonder if he is even here anymore, or if he is dreaming this, and then he notices the burn holes again, and he thinks about Gunsmoke again, and cowboys, and heroes, and Sunday afternoons.