Shawn Vestal - Daredevils

The day follows, still and silent. It is unspoken that she will remain in her room. Awaiting what, she does not know. Her father does not go to his brother’s ranch, to care for the livestock they raise for the United Order. They do not go to church. Her father comes to put a lock on her bedroom door, a toolbox in his left hand and the lock in the other. He doesn’t look at her, canting his head away as if from light of punishing brightness. He mutters and fumbles. Her mother comes in with toast and eggs on a tray, red eyed and pale in her housecoat. Loretta wonders if they have forgotten it is Fast Sunday.

She should have gone with Bradshaw. Should she have gone with Bradshaw? Which unknown path should she choose, and how should she choose it? All she knows is that while she waited for an answer, the paths closed down. Bradshaw won’t even know why she will stop showing up.

Her father finishes and leaves. Then she hears him outside her bedroom window, doing something to the slider. Hours pass. Loretta, still clothed in her jeans and work blouse, lies on the bed. Everything has a thickened feel, as if all of life will be reduced now to this: a room, some food, and time. She falls asleep hard, and when she awakens to the clicking of the lock on her door, she is groggy and disoriented. She sits up to see her mother entering.

As she sits on the bed, Loretta notes that she is still in her housecoat, the pilled flannel plaid. Loretta doesn’t speak. She has not said one word to them since climbing back in that window. She wonders if she will ever say another word to them. Her mother’s face looks older than Loretta has ever seen it, collapsing like fruit that’s turned. She speaks tentatively, tearfully.

“Your father has made a decision,” she says.

The words come at Loretta as if through water.

“What you’ve done—” Her mother stops. “He feels—”

She smooths her trembling hands outward along her legs, as though brushing crumbs to the floor.

“We feel that you are in peril. That your soul is in peril.”

Neither she nor her mother has anything to do with this. Neither has any part in it but to obey. Her father has agreed to place her with Brother Harder, with Dean Harder, the man who runs Zion’s Harvest, the food supply, a righteous man, a faithful member of the Order, who is ready to add to his heavenly family.

“Place me?” Loretta asks.

“You know,” her mother says, so quietly that Loretta can barely hear her over the sound of a sprinkler fanning the lawn outside. “You’ve known.”

A little mischief is good for the soul,” Grandpa tells Jason, leveling a thick, crooked finger toward the road ahead, as if that were mischief right there, fat and smiling on Highway 10.

He says, “There’s nothing so wrong with this.”

The highway plunges as straight as a pipe through the desert and into the horizon. Inside the old Ford pickup, warm air flaps loudly past the open windows, drowning Grandpa’s low growl.

He says, “Your dad never was much of a listener.” Chuckles. Bits of whirling hay prickle Jason’s ears. It’s Grandpa’s work truck — floor mats worn through, seats split and stained. A mess of empty parts boxes, hand tools, and baling twine is pressed into the cove where the dashboard meets the windshield. He is telling stories, and in the blast of the truck cab, Jason can hear only scraps of them, disconnected pieces.

Grandpa says, “By the time we got there, that Packard was all but sunk in the canal.”

He is telling stories about Jason’s father. The time five-year-old Dad was caught shoplifting butterscotch candies. How wildly he fought with his older brother, Dean, when they were teenagers. How he took the family car without permission once and drove it into the canal.

Jason doesn’t understand this unloading of family lore. It seems significant. Announced. He looks at his grandfather — face and neck scorched with crosshatched sunburn and drooping ears red and thick as ham. He’s saying something but the wind blasts it away. The land skims by, a flat plain broken with lava rock and spotted with sage. Thin sky, rags of cloud. The early coat of autumn shows its bright tans and shorn fields, the first scent of bitter dying in the air.

He says, “I thought your dad was going to bite his ear off.”

On the seat between them, balanced atop a pair of hardened leather work gloves and two V-belts, is Grandpa’s set of scriptures, zipped into a leather case: the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, the Pearl of Great Price.

They are wearing their Sunday suits, but they are not going to church.

They pass through Wendell and onto Interstate 84, bound for Twin Falls. Grandpa pushes the Ford to seventy, seventy-five, and stops trying to shout above the noise. He is handsome, better looking than the rest of the Harder men: tall, neat, sun chapped. Beside him, Jason feels thin and soft. He hates the way he looks, his dense scrub of auburn hair, his freckles, his gangling knobbiness. Grandpa’s dark gray hair is oiled, rows of comb tines as neat as a barley field, and his suit smells of Old Spice and perspiration.

An adrenal flutter passes through Jason, then comes again. They are not going to church, though they have told Jason’s parents they are driving to Rupert so Grandpa can speak to the ward there. It is a plausible lie — Grandpa is a high councillor and he often goes to speak at the Mormon wards around southern Idaho — but Jason is astonished that Grandpa told it.

“This oughta be something,” Grandpa shouts.

Jason nods. He wants to say More than something, but then he doesn’t want to say it anymore. This day wears a skin around it, a membrane that might burst with the wrong word. They are going to watch Evel Knievel jump the Snake River Canyon in a steam-powered rocket.

Grandpa says, “What do you think? He gonna make it?”

“Not sure.”

“Well, Judas Priest. Of course you’re not sure. But what do you think ?”

Who could say? Jason sees every jump he can, worshipping at the Panasonic each time Evel Knievel climbs onto a motorcycle and flies into the air. It began when Jason watched the Caesars Palace crash on Wide World of Sports when he was nine: Evel Knievel bouncing off the ramp, body rippling and bike roaring after him like an angry bull. Surely that was a vision of death. But Evel Knievel survived and went out and did it again and again.

This jump today, though — rocket ship, canyon — this is something else.

“What do you think?” Jason shouts.

Grandpa laughs.

“He might just do it. He might. I mean, all’s he’s got to do is sit there and get shot a long way.”

“That’s all an astronaut does, too, but that don’t make it easy.”

This is something Evel Knievel himself has said, in one of the articles Jason razored from the Times-News and taped into his scrapbook.

“Well,” Grandpa says, like he’s not going to fight about something so silly with such a junior opponent. “It’s not exactly the moon launch.”

Jason wants to ask Grandpa about their lie. To pin down why it might be acceptable, given what he and the other elders always say in church: Thou shalt not bear false witness. Jason’s parents had cited another commandment when they initially told him he couldn’t go to the canyon jump: Thou shalt keep the Sabbath holy. He was pissed off for days, until Grandpa approached — in his shoulder-to-shoulder, gazing-at-the-horizon way one morning while Jason was feeding calves — and asked if he’d heard of this fella Knievel.

He could understand Grandpa wanting to see the jump. He used to race motorbikes in the desert and drive to Boise for the stock cars. The lie, though. Why would he do it, and then just wink about it? Jason wonders, though he thinks he’s starting to know: the rules are the rules are the rules, the eternal truths unchanging, but inside the brotherhood of men are passageways and tangents, compartments and exceptions.