Shawn Vestal - Daredevils

We felt somehow angry at the English.

We felt that the English were not appreciative enough of all we had done for them. Everything America has given them. The rotten-toothed, ratty little fuckers.

“You should just say thank you whenever you see an American,” we told our limey publicist, Harry O, while he took our picture loading that pretty Smith & Wesson.38, surrounded by cash on the bed at the Tower Hotel. “You should just say thank you for keeping us from being fucking Germany.”

“Are you ’avin’ a go?” he asked us. ’ Avin’ a go.

“Learn your history,” we said.

For fun, we pointed that beaut right at him. Right into the lens.

“You,” he said, “don’t know your history from your arse.”

You will never understand, America, how difficult it was for us not to pull the trigger that afternoon, how heroic the challenge to our being, our honor, our noble whatever the fuck. But we let it go, we let him go, we let him live. That photo ran in every newspaper over there for weeks.

• • •

So, yes, this is after the fuckup at the canyon, the screwing those “engineers” gave us. They worked on that Skycycle for two years, tightened every bolt, honed every spark plug, did all the math, and then fucked up the parachute bay? The parachute bay?

It’s embarrassing, is what it is. We put our good name out there. Put our life up, is all, put it up for sacrifice, for the entertainment of the people. We climbed into that thing, ready to sacrifice all, like a modern gladiator, like Jesus Christ, and those dumb fucks with the wrenches, drinking and eating steak all over southern Idaho on our dime and our name and our grace, screw it up, and no one knows who they are, no one writes newspaper articles about what a sham it all was, a fake, no one spins a million lies in the Los Angeles Times or Rolling Stone about them.

There was only one thing to do. Go bigger.

It was not as hard as you might think.

• • •

At Wembley, every moment of the crash announces itself. Every altered atom in our body, each as it altered, a cracking network of breakage running through us, and every instant palpable.

We land on our right shoulder, pulverizing the humerus and clavicle and driving one large crack through the scapula and two vertebrae, and then all the way down the right side of us by degree, crushing and chipping and fracturing, ribs, sternum, pelvis, femur, tibia, fibula, rolling over onto our back and sliding, sliding across the ramp and then the earth, chipping the spinous process here, the transverse process there, finely cracking the facet joints and the vertebral body but somehow not breaching the spinal canal, America, the magic of the thing, our majesty and life, protected. We roll, grinding across the asphalt covered with turf that buckles and bundles under us, and the breakage spreads to the other side of us, and the bike, that heavy fucker, the Harley XR750, lands on us, breaking our legs in seven places, our old friends fibula, tibia, femur, and when we grind to a stop, we feel like a receptacle of glittering, broken glass, like a deerskin bag full of coins.

At first, the massive pain remains silent. Somewhere out there are ninety thousand people, making noise or making no noise, and then the face of the TV handsome looms in over us, and he thinks we are dead, that’s clear, and whatever else has happened here: Fuck that. Fuck him and his thinking we are dead, because we are not dead .

We make him hold us up, the TV handsome, we make him hold us up before that massive crowd, and we press it all over him, the breakage, the blood in our breath, the blood tasting of iron and Wild Turkey, and when we stand before that crowd, they fall silent, all ninety thousand of them like congregants in a cathedral, and we speak.

• • •

Strange. We can, even now, recall the exact progression of injury from that crash. The tracery of breakage. The order of disassembly. We can recall standing there, being held there, by the TV handsome and someone else, and we can recall the way the sun was dipping down below the top of the stadium, making a series of expanding and contracting orbs of yellow and red against our spotty vision.

But we cannot remember, nor can we believe, what we said that day.

• • •

When we came to in the hospital, there were Linda and the kids. We wondered whether they’d been to the Tower yet, whether they’d seen the room. We wondered what evidence there might have been left in that room. We could not recall the final state of things, just the parade of the days before: the English “birds” as quick as the American ones, the Wild Turkey bottles, the golf clubs on the balcony, the new red Lamborghini parked out front. All that before, then the jump, and now this: family, fatherhood.

Life is stupid, America. But not at all bad.

• • •

This is what they say we said:

“Ladies and gentlemen of this wonderful country. I have to tell you that you are the last people in the world who will see me jump. Because I will never, ever, ever jump again. I’m through.”

On the first morning of his senior year, Jason pulls up to his grandfather’s house in the LeBaron, crackling slowly on the gravel, and honks. It is 6:45 A.M., cool and lilac-gray. Jason’s stomach pulses, a nervous fist clenching in time with his clash of emotions. All night he planned what to say to Loretta. He will ask her a brash, direct question, a question one of the jocks at school, the popular thugs, would ask. Because he has no idea how to talk to girls, and the popular thugs clearly do, and what the popular thugs do is flirt aggressively. Take liberties. Poke, poke, poke. He will ask her a question as if she were just an ordinary teenager: “Aren’t you pissed that Dean’s making you go to seminary?”

Gauge her response. Get a read.

He spent last night poring over his Evel Knievel scrapbook, the cutout quotes from newspapers and magazines, trolling for bravado and inspiration. “You come to a point in your life when you really don’t care what people think about you, you just care what you think about yourself.” “If you fall during your life, it doesn’t matter. You’re never a failure as long as you try to get up.” He built a reservoir of confidence that has leaked away. Loretta needs saving, saving from Dean and all of it, and he feels that it has been arranged for him to save her.

If he could just be the right guy.

As soon as he sees her coming out of the side door, though — dressed like a normal girl, more or less, in jeans and a long-sleeved blouse, hair pulled into a ponytail, features fine and smooth and tensed and lovely — Jason begins cursing himself, knowing that he is not the right guy.

She climbs in. Says hello very, very quietly. Looks off across the desert, showing him the pale pillar of her neck. He backs out of the driveway.

“Excited for your first day of seminary?” he warbles lamely.

“I don’t know,” she says, not turning from the window.

She is less perfectly beautiful this morning. A little drawn and sleepy eyed. Jason notices a strange sloping bulge on the bridge of her delicate nose. Which is fine with him. She is a lot better looking than he is, and anything that closes the gap will be helpful.

They ride without speaking for seven minutes. It is much harder than he guessed it would be, sitting alone with her and trying to think of things to say. Then, as the abandoned TB hospital on the edge of town comes into sight, she releases a deep breath — a lush, weary sound — and says, “I hope it’s not too weird.”

“It won’t be,” Jason says.