Shawn Vestal - Daredevils

“Well, Judas Priest,” Dean says.

He twists the key, presses the clutch, and tries again. This time the baler lurches forward, coughs, and dies. Jason feels testy, impatient; they are so close to done. Dean stamps his foot and mutters.

He tries again. It chugs and dies.

“You know…” Jason says.

Dean points toward Jason sideways, without looking up, like a prophet banishing a demon. “Do not!” he spits.

Dad and Boyd watch from the ground, shading their eyes. Dad calls, “Maybe you ought to let Jason show you.”

“Louis!” Dean shouts, and Jason hears the tone of an older brother. “I do not need instructions from a boy in how to operate a simple piece of machinery. I think if you maintained your equipment properly, we wouldn’t be having this problem. This clutch is slipping all over the place.”

Jason looks out and catches Boyd’s eye. He smiles.

“That is a bear of a clutch, Mr. Harder,” Boyd says.

Dean stares at Boyd, breathing slowly and deeply. Then he reaches for the key again and turns it, slowly lifting his foot from the clutch. This time, he fails to give it enough gas, and it sputters out weakly.

Dean spins in the seat and climbs down and stalks off across the field toward Grandpa’s.

Dad calls after him, “Dean! Heaven’s sake,” but Dean keeps marching into the sun until he’s a shadow again, and they go back to work.

• • •

They finish haying, and Jason takes the minibike out to the barley fields to move the irrigation pipes. Finished haying forever, he thinks, and soon, once this barley is cut, he’ll be through with that forever, too — through moving pipe, through choking on hay dust, through picking rock, through milking cows, through . He is thinking about buying an eight-track player for the LeBaron, like the one he saw in Roy’s Nova. It hung under the dash, a squat mechanical face with silver knobs for eyes and an inch of plastic case sticking out like a tongue. “New Zappa,” Roy had said, turning it up. Jason had no idea what he meant by that. Was it a code? A language? The music was strange and plinky, moving in uneven time. Roy tapped the steering wheel, and sang along, horrendously: “‘Watch out where the huskies go, and don’t you eat that yellow snow.’”

Jason wrings the gas, pushes the bike to top speed — thirty-three miles an hour. It is nearly sundown, a burning indigo along the black edge of the horizon. When he asked Roy how much the eight-track player cost, Roy answered, “Think your old man will let you have one?” Jason shrugged, and Roy said, “Sixty bucks or so.” Sprinklers on hand lines go chk-chk-chk in the barley, beside the parched, stubbled hay fields. Jason’s got sixty bucks. There’s still $134 in his savings account. He could put the player in the LeBaron and his parents probably wouldn’t even notice.

He rides through a cloud of cooled air, comes over the rise, and approaches Grandpa’s house, and standing in the yard is a girl or young woman, her back to Jason, a smooth drape of long brown hair squared upon the white of her blouse and her ankle-length dress. He has no idea who she is. She is pinning a shirt by the shoulders to the laundry line, one of Dean’s white shirts, and Jason wonders if all these people do is hang laundry, and then he is past her. A worm of nervous excitement moves through his guts, though there can be no good reason. What could he see? Nothing. Hair, a dress, the back of a head. A bending motion, like nodding barley. Nothing. And yet he feels it — girl nervousness, the anxiety of the suitor.

They eat a late dinner. Dad glumly answers Mom’s peppy questions, about the harvest, the yield, the jackrabbits. He nods as she tells him all about her plans for Jason, now that his senior year is beginning — scholarships and grants, college opportunities. She has somehow gotten it into her head that he will study agriculture, become the educated farmer, though he has lately thought he will study architecture, for no reason other than the impressive sound of it. She considers how he will work his mission around his college. Mom finally stops talking, and Dad sighs, staring at the lump of cheesy hamburger casserole on his plate. It is odd that he has not gulped it down and spooned up more. The plain, heavy silence infects Jason with an unfocused urge. He will definitely buy an eight-track player for the LeBaron. And maybe that New Zappa, too. Who cares if they catch him?

“I guess Dean and Ruth have gotten set up over there,” Dad says at last.

“For good?” Jason asks.

Dad shrugs. “For now.”

Mom puts her hand on his forearm.

“We’ll make the best of it,” she says.

“That’s right,” he says, but he sounds exhausted.

Mom smiles forcefully at Dad — her way of drawing him out of his gloom, of insisting happily that he not disappear into his own mind. He avoids her eyes. He coughs once, hard, to clear his throat, and says, “They’ve got a young girl over there with them. Ruth’s niece, Dean said.”

Mom stops chewing. And blinking. She stares at Dad, and he looks back, and they seem to forget Jason. It would not be too much to say they look terrified. Soon everyone they know will know this, too. Everyone in church. Everyone in town. Everyone.

Mom says, “No, Lou.”

Very carefully and very slowly, he says, “Dean says she’s Ruth’s niece, and she has nowhere else to go.”

Nobody speaks for several seconds.

“And I don’t know any different,” he says, looking stubbornly at the center of the table.

Jason feels like he might throw up. Like just vomiting, there on the table, among the three of them and this new development, might be what’s called for.

“You don’t?” he says. “Really?”

Dad exhales sharply, the sound like a sack of grain dropped on its end, and says nothing more.

Dean says they have to, so they have to. And so, when the time comes, when the old clock in this musty house makes a single weak reverberating bong, Loretta swings her legs off the bed and stands, brushes her hands down the front of her dress, and takes a deep breath through her nose. She does not know those people, she reminds herself. Doesn’t know them and shouldn’t care about them. And yet she is flushed with self-consciousness, a constant rose of warmth wrapping her neck and ears and temples now that she is out here, in the world.

She goes downstairs. Ruth herds the kids. They are dressed as if for church, though they will not be attending services here, Dean has informed them. They will be having their own services, led by Dean. He reminds them all, often, how vigilant they must be against the dangers and temptations of the world, where Satan rules. Despite herself, Loretta expected to find demons everywhere; so far, she’s been disappointed by how much this place is like home: the desert here is not as pretty, more like a weed patch with dying grasses and tick-filled sagebrush, but in most ways what she has seen of Gooding and the countryside has been a lot like Short Creek. Farms and fences, barking dogs. Horse trailers on blocks beside mobile homes, spread over with rust. Pole sheds with small weedy junkyards out back. A kind of galaxy circling the town — the farther away you get from the center, the farther apart the houses are, until you get out to Harder land, out to the biggest farms and ranches, and beyond them, all the human structures start coming together again, as Gooding turns into Wendell, the next town over.

The differences, though. There are no other people like them here. No groups of five, eight, eleven children walking along the roadside. No women in long chaste dresses and long braided hair. No young boys in wool pants and long-sleeved shirts.