Shawn Vestal - Daredevils

The woman and the Federal Man stop, but do not retreat. The woman’s hands are still touching Alma and Sarah, still resting on their shoulders, still poised to reach in and carve them away from Ruth.

“No,” Ruth says, and then she says it again. “No.”

She stares at them. These people. She prays for the Lord to stop them. To kill them. She asks for that, for the Lord to kill them. She asks that this not be the Second Coming. She says, very quietly, “No, no, no, no, no.”

• • •

In the home of the man and the woman whose name she cannot remember, Ruth sits on a sofa with her sisters. They are together, at least. Ruth’s mind keeps softening, drifting. Sarah and Alma sit beside her, legs straight before them, faces wrung white. Ruth wants to tell them to pull inside of themselves — she thinks of a turtle. She wants to tell Sarah and Alma to pull inside of themselves and just stay there. Ignore everything outside the shell. Just stay in there and wait. But the man and the woman whose name she cannot remember are sitting there, one in each chair, the chairs that match the sofa, the chairs and the sofa clean and new and fancy, like everything in the house. Carpet runs to the walls and tucks itself in like a made bed. There is cut glass on the cupboard doors, and teacups inside. The woman whose name Ruth cannot remember is saying something Ruth cannot keep track of, in tones that are sweet and pretty and false. Ruth cannot focus on her words, but now the woman seems to be waiting for something. They are together, at least. If only she could tell them, if only she could find a way to let them know: Pull inside, sisters. Pull inside and wait . The woman is kneeling down in front of the chair that matches the sofa, and Ruth thinks she is going to pray now, and Ruth thinks she should not pray with these people, that praying with these people would be a sin, probably, but then she realizes that the woman wants to give them a hug, then she realizes that one of her sisters is crying again. Which one is crying? Alma is crying. Ruth wants to tell her— Pull inside and wait —but she can’t. The woman is kneeling there, and she is saying something softly, and her arms are open, and she smells like lotion, and Alma is crying, and Ruth wants to tell her but she can’t, so she just says, “Go ahead,” because it doesn’t matter.

Boyd wrings the handlebar grip, dipping his shoulder, and the Kawasaki spits and flies toward a rocky ramp of lava. Jason found this spot — the tiny cliff that drops three feet onto a flat piece of desert — and now he watches as Boyd goes over the ledge, front wheel dropping. The whine halts abruptly. Boyd pitches headfirst over the handlebars, and the Kawasaki flips across the desert. For a second Jason thinks Boyd will be badly hurt. Even when Boyd hops up, holding his elbow and grinning madly, even then, Jason knows that he doesn’t really want to do this. He wants to be away, alone.

The Kawasaki lies on its side in the duff grass, back wheel slowly spinning. Three jackrabbits inch up, sniffing, and hop off.

“I know what I did wrong,” Boyd says, breathing heavily. “You gotta go faster and pull back harder.”

It’s not that Jason’s scared. At least he doesn’t think so. He’s jumped other things — lots of them — and he’s usually first to go. But Boyd’s wreck makes him nervous, a little, and that’s enough, on top of this other thing, the fuzzed focus and half exhaustion that’s been swamping him since Grandpa died.

“You look about half retarded right now,” Boyd says. “Mouth all open.”

Jason shrugs, and Boyd goes to get the bike. Boyd won’t give him too much shit if he doesn’t do it, Jason thinks. It’s not the time for that, but as that thought enters Jason’s mind he wonders: What is it the time for, exactly? His mother says it’s time to reflect and remember the importance of family, the eternal verities, the celestial kingdom, et cetera. What is it the time for? Anecdotes and platitudes. Self-comforting nonsense. It’s better this way. He’s out of his pain. He’s with the Lord now. With Grandma. At peace . Everyone has something to say. Everyone has a lesson to impart, an anecdote dragging a moral trailing a tidy little pat on the head. A grand, swamping tide of bullshit. Only Boyd had said the right thing: “Man, dude. That is fucked up.”

Precisely right. Five days ago, Dad found Grandpa in his metal lawn chair, where he’d been spending each desert sunset and the cooling hour after, just sitting and breathing through his oxygen mask. It had been furiously hot, no rain for weeks, every parched inch of land one spark from inferno. Time to start the third cutting of hay. Jackrabbits swarmed, gnawing through barley and haystacks faster than anyone could poison or shoot them.

His father came into Jason’s room that night. Which he never did. Jason was lying on his bed reading The Hobbit, bare feet hanging off the end of the mattress. Bilbo and the dwarves had just entered the forest of Mirkwood. A dark tangle of menace. Dad sat on the bed and stared at the wood-paneled wall, gray cheeks slack. Outside, a wheel line repeated its watery skirch . Above them, trophies from livestock sales and Little League sat on shelves, tiny golden calves and batters, and images of Evel Knievel — in black and white, in color, crashing and landing — papered every wall.

“Your grandpa’s gone,” his father said, and Jason thought for a moment that he meant Grandpa had traveled somewhere, maybe Boise or Salt Lake. “I’m going to need you to be strong for your mother.”

Dad sighed, and dropped his gaze to the floor. Jason waited for the moment to arrive — grief, heartbreak — but it simply did not. He felt tired. A little sad, a little hungry. He thought he spied a tearish gleam at the corner of Dad’s eye and was glad for it. Jason had seen him show emotion only during testimony meeting, when he was displaying his deep and abiding faith for the ward. Jason wanted something to have the power to make him sad.

“Sorry, Dad,” he said.

Dad turned, and his eyes were shiny but dry, the same glinty nuggets he trained on Jason when he screwed around during church or was late feeding calves.

Dad shook his head. “It was time,” he said.

Time . What made it time? What made the time any better than, say, one day later? Or one day earlier? Why not another thirty-seven hours, or forty-two hours, or fifty-six hours and twenty-seven minutes and thirteen seconds? What made it so right that Grandpa didn’t get another year, five years? Ten years? It was time . He felt surrounded by people who would swallow any goddamned thing and smile.

Boyd walks the motorcycle over. Jason won’t do it. Not today. He feels relieved that he can put this off for another time. Out of everyone in the world, only Boyd understands him correctly, and this is how Jason knows that Boyd will not ride him about chickening out.

Boyd stops, his enormous head cocked and a gaze of evaluation trained on Jason.

He says, “Get on the bike, man. You can’t be a pussy your whole life.”

• • •

Here is how, according to the story Jason’s mother told him on every birthday, he became the sole only child out of all the Mormon kids he knew:

Twenty-three hours of labor. A night and day and night of pain and desperation. Prayers and lamentations. A period of thirteen minutes when everyone in the delivery room believed he had died, followed by his birth, breach, with the umbilical cord wrapped snugly around his neck. Blue above and red below. Then, a revival. “A miracle. You’re my miracle boy.” But he was the last of the children, for reasons that were never fully clear — a complication, a risk to his mother’s life. More children would have been unsafe. So he was the only one, and though he was surrounded by families of five, six, seven, eight, all these fertile righteous families, he could believe only that everyone was really just like him: the only one, the miracle of their own lives.