Shawn Vestal - Daredevils

He is so wrong. It is too, too weird. They arrive at the church as sunrise blares through the tops of the trees, burnishing rooftops, power lines, and steeples. They park and walk in behind two freshman boys and a girl. The freshmen don’t say a thing, don’t look at them. Jason and Loretta follow them in and down the hallway of cool tile into the seminary classroom. Three rows of folding chairs face a blackboard and a little mini-pulpit on a table. Brother Kershaw stands there, reading from a workbook and chewing a pencil, belly straining outward above skinny legs. On the blackboard, three words are whitely chalked: Remorse, Repentance, Restitution.

“Brother Harder,” Kershaw says. “Good to see you looking bright eyed and bushy tailed.”

And then he looks to Loretta and his jovial energy lurches to a stop. Jason flushes anew, introduces Loretta as Ruth’s niece, who is visiting for a while or maybe longer, and sees the blood is hot in her face, too. Loretta takes the seat in the far back corner by herself, and Jason sits in front of her, not next to anyone, and they each avoid the eyes of the others. There are fifteen other kids there; half the seats are full. A cloud of assumptions fills the room. Loretta sits quietly, filling a notebook page with an expanding spore of tiny squares. Kershaw calls on her just once, after reading a passage from the Pearl of Great Price:

“‘Wherefore teach it unto your children, that all men, everywhere, must repent, or they can in nowise inherit the kingdom of God, for no unclean thing can dwell there, or dwell in his presence.’ Why must all men repent?” Kershaw asks. “Loretta?”

She says, in a hushed, glorious voice, “I don’t know.”

Afterward, she takes the LeBaron back home. Jason catches a ride to school with Ben Jenkins and Jed Story. The two talk football. Ben’s a fullback and linebacker, and Jed plays wide receiver, and they look like variations on a theme: wide-legged jeans, short-sleeved terry-cloth shirts, helmety haircuts parted down the middle and feathered. They tune in the rock station from Twin Falls, Z103 FM, blasting “Ballroom Blitz.”

Jason is happy to be left out of their conversation. But as they pull into the high school parking lot, Ben says, “Hey, Harder,” with the sneer that lets him know he’s in for it.

“What?”

“Your cousin’s hot.”

Jed snorts.

“She’s not my cousin.”

“What is she?”

“My aunt’s niece.”

Jed says, “I think that makes her your cousin.”

“You can’t fuck her, anyway,” Ben says.

Jed cackles. A brush fire breaks out in Jason’s upper intestine. A knife blade pierces his side. Jed slaps his open palm on the dashboard. “You’d make a retarded baby.”

“One of us could fuck her, though,” Ben says, waggling his thumb between himself and Jed. “Maybe you could set that up.”

A vial of acid bursts in Jason’s stomach. Ben and Jed laugh and laugh, gasping and clutching themselves in glee.

“Knock it off,” Jason says, puny.

“Fine,” Ben says. “Make a retarded baby.”

Jason walks into school alone. He goes to first-period biology and doesn’t talk to anyone. He goes to second-period trig, where his only words are an awkward and ignored hello to Corinne Jensen, the former girl of his dreams. He goes to third and fourth periods and doesn’t talk to anyone.

He imagines the cloud of knowledge from seminary following him, spreading into every corner of the school. At lunch, Boyd asks him how things are going with the pioneers.

“Hunky-dory,” Jason says.

“They say there’s a new girl.”

“A new girl?” Jason returns this with a hard, sarcastic spin. “What does that mean?”

“Hey, this is me,” Boyd says. “You know what it means. And you know what everyone is saying it means.”

“She’s my aunt’s niece,” Jason says.

Boyd gazes at him. Jason studies the tater tot casserole on his lunch tray: it is a creamy prehistoric ocean, mushroomy and thick, with tawny islands of potato for the swimmers, the strivers, to cling to while they rest and regain their strength. Jason imagines he is on one of those islands, and Loretta is on another one. And everybody else — family, school, church, town, state, nation, world — is the gray, gloopy sea.

Boyd says, “Dude,” and shakes his head.

“It’s weird,” Jason says. “I think she doesn’t belong with them.”

“People from the twentieth century don’t belong with them.”

Loretta feels lit from within. Neon. Like no one can stop looking at her, aglow in the dark, like she is made of fine glass tubes, easily shattered. Since she walked into that church, every moment since, even at home in her bed, she feels watched and judged and known.

She hates it more than she hates Ruth’s bulgur meat loaf. She hates it more than she hates sleeping with Dean. She hates it because it has tainted the best thing in her life — her future, the magical time that is supposed to arrive when she enters the outside world, the world of pink Mustangs and matching Tussy lipstick — by announcing the truth about the way she will be in that outside world.

Ruth says she can’t quit. Not yet. They have not figured out their relationship to this community. If Bradshaw were up here, Loretta would leave with him, go anywhere, sleep under bridges, under sagebrush, eat jackrabbits, eat grass, eat dirt, eat bugs. She is brave enough, if only she had someone to share it with, she knows she could be brave enough. But Bradshaw is in Short Creek, running the business, while Dean scouts for customers up here.

Jason picks her up in the morning, all corny and nervous. He reminds her of the children — alternately endearing and aggravating.

“Hello again,” he says.

“Good morning.”

She does not like how much he likes this. Three minutes expire. On the glove box is a word in script: LeBaron. She thinks of Ervil LeBaron, the polygamist leader down in Mexico with thirteen wives who broke with the Short Creek brethren. Mr. Blood Atonement — the guy had his own brother killed. Dean once told her, Ervil’s methods are extreme, but his beliefs are sound .

She yawns. She could go right back to sleep. In her future, Loretta will never rise before the sun and grog through the gray hours. She will not do chores or make biscuits. She will not live so close to cattle that it is all she can smell, all the time, the shit of cattle.

Jason says, “How’d you like your first day of seminary?”

“Another joy sent by the Lord,” she says. Caught by surprise, he snorts moistly, then looks away, ears scarlet. She feels one ounce better.

At seminary, she sits in the back corner. She averts her gaze from the eyes of others — on the floor, over their shoulders, at their feet — and no one speaks to her, not even Brother Kershaw, and she can tell by the insistence with which they try to show her they aren’t noticing her that it’s all they are doing, noticing her.

She thought that among the Mormons here there would be some bit of kinship. Some similarity. But these kids are utterly worldly. The girls wear jeans high on their hips, snugged up their cloven rears, and their hair parts into cascading waves. They all wear makeup, and even the homely girls dress like whores. And the boys are like monkeys, in their bell-bottoms and T-shirts, all except for the three who are farm boys, in Wranglers and boots and purple FFA jackets, the closest thing to Short Creek style she has seen here. These three boys are clearly the lowest caste. Jason and a few of the others are somewhere above them, and the top caste consists of the two largest monkeys, the two with the biggest bodies, the square-jawed, acne-scarred football player boys. Ben and Jed cut looks at her constantly, and elbow each other, and show their interest more plainly than the rest.