Shawn Vestal - Daredevils

“So now we’re talking about it?” Jason says to his mother.

Her pressed lips go white. Her forbearance face. She turns her back to him, stands at the sink, and lets the water run full blast. She hisses, “Your uncle is making a spectacle of himself!”

Jason almost says, You’re the one that has me taking her to seminary . But he doesn’t.

• • •

On the way to pick up Loretta, Jason tries to figure out what to put into the new Sanyo eight-track deck slung under the dashboard. He settles on Sweet. “Fox on the Run.” Perfect, he thinks, and yet within one minute she asks him if they can listen to something else, and tunes in the country station. “Rhinestone Cowboy” is playing, and Jason groans. “I cannot listen to this music.”

She reaches out and turns up the volume, and belts out , “‘There’ll be a load of compromisin’ / On the road to my horizon…’”

“Noooooo,” he cries, snapping off the dial. She laughs, alert and alive for the first time all week. It comes off her like a charge, and Jason reads it as something shared between them. Love’s little seedling.

“I don’t think I can stand one more minute of Brother Kershaw,” he says.

“So let’s not go.”

So simple. So amazing.

“Go where instead?” he asks.

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

He knows just where. “I’ll take you to Twin Falls,” he says. “Show you Evel Knievel’s ramp.”

She shrugs. Says okay. She is the most beautiful human being Jason has ever seen, lit up with her love for him. Right? The greening, luscious seedling of love? Her hair is pulled back, her wet brown eyes glow as they scan the desert. She needs saving, and it has been arranged for him to save her, but how? It must be what she wants, too, though this thought is buried so deep in Jason’s assumptions that he doesn’t actually think it. It is simply what occurs, it is simply what men do: rescue women. Superman, Spider-Man, Batman — rescue women. John Wayne rescues women and so does Clint Eastwood. On TV, the guys on Emergency! and Baretta and Kojak and The Rockford Files all rescue women. It’s their job.

For the half hour it takes to drive to Twin Falls, Jason tells her about Evel Knievel. He describes his jumps, details the bones he has broken and at which stadiums, the numbers of buses and cars he has surmounted, his outfits, his retirements and his coming-out-of-retirements. Jason tells her of his own ramp building and driveway jumps — though he does not mention his posters or Stunt Cycle action figure. When they reach Twin Falls and cross the Perrine Bridge into town, the sun is up but the canyon remains doused in shadow. They pull off at the overlook and Jason points out the ramp, a sloped hill of dirt a quarter mile away on the canyon rim.

Loretta stares. “That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“You drove me out here to show me a pile of dirt?”

“Well. I drove you out here to get out of seminary.”

She giggles. Is this good? He thinks it is, though he is disappointed at her inability to see the grandeur of the ramp. He pulls back onto the highway, heads back toward Gooding. He begins to tell her about the day he came to see the canyon jump with Grandpa. He mentions the lie, and how much he had loved the lie, and how happy he had been to have this secret from his parents, and how fun it had been to actually be there, to see him, to watch all the crazy people, and how even though the jump had failed, disappointing him to the bone, he had actually liked it, too, in some way. When they had pulled Evel Knievel out of that canyon with a crane, and he waved at everybody with that same grim, purposeful look he had before he jumped, it was like he wasn’t even embarrassed.

“It was just, I don’t know, still cool,” he says. “I don’t know why.”

“I do. Maybe. I mean, he tried something amazing.”

“Yes!” Jason says. “That’s right. He tried something amazing.”

Jason tries to give her a significant look. A look of deeper communication. She looks back, possibly puzzled. Jason thinks of Evel Knievel crashing in England, bones crushed to dust, insisting on standing to address the crowd. He thinks, Okay. Go .

He says, “Are you okay living there with Dean and Ruth? I mean, happy and everything?”

“I guess so.”

“You know what people think it is?”

She doesn’t answer. He tries again.

“Is it what people think it is?”

“No,” she says, so quietly Jason can barely hear it. His mind allows itself to believe her, because she wouldn’t lie to him now that they have Evel Knievel between them. She says something he can’t hear.

“What?” he asks.

“What it is, is nobody’s business.”

She stares straight ahead, chin tucked in, refusing to turn. Jason shrinks. Gazes at the highway with his hands on the wheel.

“It’s family business,” she says.

• • •

Jason tells Boyd about it later, finally tells him about all of it.

“Dude,” he says. “What’d you think she was going to say?”

EVEL KNIEVEL ADDRESSES AN ADORING NATION

We just sat there in that truck, tinted windows, cab full of Buddy’s goddamn cigarillo smoke, and waited for that miserable fuck to come out of the concert hall. That “writer.” The one who wrote that book we will not name. We had a bat, one of those new metal softball numbers, and Buddy had his billy club, police-issue ironwood. It was like looking at the ramp from the end of the runway, our insides an electric gelatin, like we were being turned from something dull and dumb into something grand, and we knew that feeling well enough to know that we had to focus on it, feel it, try to seize it though it would not be seized, because we were heading into the air now, into the divine space, and we would only be there for a few seconds, for glimpses and flashes, and then we’d be down again, and maybe the landing would be hard and maybe it would be soft, but it would be a landing nevertheless.

He comes out. Just look at that fucker. Pale denim bell-bottoms, boots like some California faggot, nice and clean with shiny leather and little heels, faggoty boots, and a shirt made out of that fuzzy shit like a towel, and his hair all Farrah Fawcett, and bronze sunglasses, and a little smile on his pudgy face, a tiny confident smirk, and we were relieved to discover that upon seeing him we did not lose any of our desire for the moment, that we were energized, inspired, set upon a righteous path. In his book, he wrote all manner of lies about us — about us, about our mother — and now, here, he would pay. Pay for each individual slander, and then for his larger trespass against us: the taking and perversion of our story, the holy scripture of our life.

He didn’t even run. Just fell down and let us do it. His soft body felt like a sack of wheat under our blows. The bones in his forearms gave way as we struck him with our bat. The Tennessee Thumper. Aluminum as shit.

People have told some lies about this — have called us a coward for taking Buddy to hold him down. We were not afraid of him. We wanted him held down to make it worse when we hit him. So he couldn’t curl up, cover his head, protect himself in any way. This was so much worse. So very much worse, and that was his punishment. We chose it carefully, and were prepared for him to die, America. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord, and we sayeth that, too.

He screamed like a girl, Mr. Book Writer did. Screamed just like you’d think with those faggoty boots and that hair.

• • •

By then, we had grown and grown. We had become so large, so multitudinous, that we sometimes felt as if we were exceeding the boundaries of our physical form.