Shawn Vestal - Daredevils

“We owe you men a debt of gratitude,” he says. His face bears a scrim of dust with a black smear above his left eye. He folds his arms and bows his head.

“Our Father in Heaven,” he says, and Jason hears that when Dean prays, he sounds just like Jason’s father, “we come to you today with our hearts full of gratitude for the assistance you have given us in protecting our crops and our land. We thank you, oh Lord, for giving us the strength and will to accomplish this task, unpleasant though it may be…”

He prays on, thanking the Lord for the food provided for breakfast and lunch, and for health and families and the abundance of their lives, and for the Gospel — which makes Jason think about what Dean means by the Gospel, and how that differs from what his parents believe about the Gospel, and from what the Catholics and Methodists and Lutherans believe about the Gospel — and for sending his only begotten Son to redeem all mankind.

Jason looks around. Most of the men are bowing their heads, hands folded. Boyd is looking around, too. Their eyes meet, and Boyd smiles. The sweet spot on his baseball bat is smeared black and matted with spiny hair. Jason feels shock, a padded distance from the moment. He turns his head and finds Loretta staring at the ground, skin paled across the bridge of her nose, beside Ruth, whose eyes are closed.

After the prayer, the men load the carcasses into gunnysacks and pile them onto a flatbed truck. Boyd and Jason walk back toward Dean’s house with most of the others, Boyd giddily exultant and Jason silent. It is sunny and cool, and the bitter smell of burning ditch grass comes across the desert, distinct from the scorched, sweet scent of the sagebrush fire. The shouting from the roadside has mostly died down, and the TV van has left. It is almost lunchtime. A small crowd of subdued bashers gathers in Dean’s yard around the cook wagon, which is serving hot dogs, hamburgers, and chili.

“Them little buggers is fast, I tell ya.”

“Faster’n shit. You can’t try to hit one.”

“No, sir. You just have to hit into the bunch.”

“I don’t know how many of those little dudes I got — I bet thirty or forty.”

“You probably got twice as many as you think.”

“Kinda fun, really.”

“Good cause, anyway.”

Boyd goes to the cook wagon, and Jason walks to the edge of the yard and looks out to where they just were. A couple of trucks and a few men are finishing the work out there. Smoke from the burned-out fire drifts thinly. Then Loretta is beside him. Something tugs her face downward. She seems tiny inside her dress, and she is looking at him so intently that he pulls away before catching himself.

“My word,” she whispers.

“I know it,” he says.

He is close enough to reach for her. To touch her. They stand side by side, facing the desert. Loretta sniffs. She says, “I have to get away from here.”

The clouds in Jason’s mind clear, a gear springs into place. It would be easy. It is so possible. His grandfather floats out of the space-world of death, his voice in the truck as they rode home that exhilarating Evel Knievel Sabbath, as he told Jason about leaving home at seventeen to enlist in the army: “Had a fire in my britches, just to get somewhere. Anyplace else.”

Seventeen — Jason’s own age.

He isn’t trapped. They aren’t trapped at all.

“Where do you want to go?” he asks.

She looks at the desert without seeming to see it. Ruth calls, “Loretta,” in a voice without music, and the moment scampers away.

• • •

Loretta turns and glides toward the house. Where does she want to go? In her future, she anticipates all manner of experiences and freedoms, wears any kind of fresh clothing, eats candy and beef all day long, drives a pink car, and wears Tussy lipstick. But where is it? What place?

She stops at a picnic table to gather paper plates and cups. Bradshaw walks by, does a little sidestep shuffle for her. Dust muddies the blood on his hands, forearms, shirt, and pants — the filthiest patch covers his groin and thighs. He shoots her a wink.

In her peripheral vision, Loretta can feel the shape of Ruth, watching from somewhere. Bradshaw moves by, but then Jason comes up, gangly and shy, flushing. Go away, she wants to say, because it’s too much, and Ruth is right there, watching, and why is she watching?

Jason picks up a ketchup-smeared plate and says, in a blatantly obvious way that he seems to think is covert, “Where do you want to go?”

Bradshaw’s braying laugh cuts through the noise. Ruth’s face seems locked in place, inside the kitchen window. Loretta moves to another picnic table. Focuses on gathering paper plates. Jason isn’t moving. He’s watching her. He has decided something, and it makes her nervous. GO AWAY . Whatever it was she saw in him during the bunny drive — a stubborn distance, a defiance — now seems merely obtuse. Juvenile. GO AWAY . Ruth comes striding across the lawn, holding a plastic garbage bag. Loretta can feel Jason’s radiant hurt; it must be apparent to everyone. Ruth stops before Loretta, snaps the bag open before her. Loretta dumps in her trash, and Ruth turns to Jason, repeats the motion, and Jason tosses the one plate he’s holding into the bag.

Ruth shakes the bag to settle it. “Okay,” she says, pointedly.

Jason— stop it, stop it now, just go —looks stubbornly at Loretta and says, “See you later.”

Loretta does not answer.

Ruth says, “Tell your mother we’ll have you all over real soon.”

“For rabbit?” Jason says.

Loretta loves and hates that equally.

“They fry up fine,” Ruth says.

• • •

Jason walks home — leaves Boyd and goes. His life has been too empty, and now it is too full. Impossible to absorb. Are they doing something now, he and Loretta? Is this real?

At home, he watches a football game on TV without paying attention. The news comes on, and he watches the KMVT report about the bunny bash. There’s footage of Dean arguing with the reporter, but what they show of the bash is distant and unrecognizable. It looks like a football game, a big scrambling mass. Mom hollers questions from the kitchen.

“Ruth said she’s going to invite us over for dinner,” Jason says.

“Let’s not hold our breath,” she says.

At dinner, Dad doesn’t mention the bash until he’s started on seconds, and he doesn’t bother to look up from his plate.

“Everywhere I went today, people were asking me about that circus,” he says. He jabs his fork in the direction of Dean’s place. “Didn’t take him a couple months to turn the whole place into a joke.”

“Lou,” Mom says. “That was over there.”

“That place is this place,” he says. “We’re all in the same place.”

He chews rapidly, forking in bites as though he were punishing the roast beef. Angry scarlet spackles his hairline. Without looking up, he asks Jason, “What about you? What’d you think of it?”

“It was terrible,” he says. “It was — gross.”

He remembers the rabbit that came through broken, and Ruth, and the stone.

“Told you you wouldn’t like it,” Dad says crisply, dropping his fork on his empty plate with a clang.

Jason burns. His self-righteousness. His useless certainty. It is all one piece. It is all together, what happens here and what happens there. That place is this place is that place.

Where do you want to go?

EVEL KNIEVEL ADDRESSES AN ADORING NATION

The heels of our boots never sounded right in that thing. That should have been a warning. The X-2 Skycycle — red, white, and blue, our name spangled all over the bastard, our own personal rocket ship, and when you stepped in and your boot struck the metal floor it echoed like a piece of tin. Cram your ass in, the thing creaks and groans. This, you think, is the vessel to carry us to glory?