Shawn Vestal - Daredevils

Good Lord, she is beautiful.

“Wait,” Boyd says. “Why would they take a check from Dean from you?”

“You can talk just about anybody into anything,” she says. “If you really try.”

Loretta

She said Elko because why not Elko? She said Elko because she wanted to do every free thing, now that she was free. She said Elko because Bradshaw had told her stories about Elko. She said Elko because she wanted to see what the boys — these boys, these eager children — would say to her if she said Elko, and what they said was interesting.

“Isn’t that out of the way?” Jason asked.

Boyd said, “Holy shit, Harder, you are a super fun guy.”

Dawn breaks as they draw near Elko. Down between the mountains they come, winding and flattening toward the neon constellation ahead. Boyd snores gaspingly. For the past couple of hours of deep night, Loretta has felt the exhilaration of those first hours dampen. She is overtaken by gloom, by this moment and its failure to be transcendent. She had come tonight thinking what a nice boy Jason was, what a simple, clean thing, and that he and she were a team, whatever that meant, and she had thought maybe it meant something. Perhaps it would grow, this clean, fresh thing. But soon enough she saw Jason’s irritation with Boyd, saw his confusion and jealousy, and realized he was simply another part, as was Boyd, of the wide world that looked at her and wanted to turn her into something of theirs.

It is past three in the morning when she guides the big sloppy car into the parking lot at the Stockmen’s, the pit of light in the center of town. A bank of windows, a neon bull’s head, and a huge sign in red glowing like the entrance to hell on top of it all: STOCKMEN’S HOTEL.

Jason says, “I don’t know,” and Loretta wants to hit him.

She parks the car and says, “Wait here,” and sets off. As she walks across the parking lot she feels it again — the lift, the joy, the hum — and she enters the front doors, smells cigarette smoke, and hears the tinny bells, the trilling of adrenaline that sings to her from the worldly world.

Inside, the Stockmen’s opens cavernously. Footpaths are worn in the center of the brocade carpet, and the decor suggests a fake barn — all lassos and riverine wood grain. It is lit up like midday, but nearly deserted. The long check-in desk has five stations, though only one person sits there now, a young man with a bolo tie and boils along the temples who glances at Loretta as though she has startled him.

The hum is at full speed when she approaches the desk. She stops, acts confused and embarrassed, and says, as though she doesn’t know where to begin, “I’m in kind of a jam here, and I wonder if you can help me.”

She explains herself, and shows him a blank check.

“I don’t know,” the night clerk says slowly.

He is holding the check between his thumb and forefinger, as if it might be tainted. He looks at the name and information — Dean Harder, d/b/a Zion’s Harvest — and then at Loretta, and then back.

“I swear,” she says. “He’s my father, and he gave me these. For emergencies. It’s completely good, I promise.”

The boy exhales loudly and screws up his face.

“I don’t know,” he says.

She doesn’t have a driver’s license or an ID. She’s got nothing to prove anything. She looks at him beseechingly, and says, “Please?”

“I’ll have to ask my manager,” he says. He leaves and returns with a tall, thin woman, who is made taller by the hair swooped upon her head like an ice cream cone. She has wrinkled skin and golden hair that strikes Loretta as unnatural, almost orange, and she smells strongly of perfume, and she is smoking a long, thin cigarette. She puts her big brown eyes on Loretta and sucks hard on the cigarette, and the wrinkles on her face centralize.

“We might have to give the bank a call Monday,” she says — she pronounces it “Mondee.” Loretta feels certain she will not do this, and says, “Of course. Sure,” and the manager shrugs and says, “Okay,” and hands the check back to the boy and leaves without another word.

And then Loretta — flying again, just flying — asks, “Can I make it for a little over?”

Walking back to the car, she spots the first pale hint of morning along the horizon rim to the east. A mere lightening of the dark. It is approaching four A.M. Back home, she thinks, no one is even awake yet. No one even knows they’re gone.

Becky

She wakes with Lou, as she does every morning, and as Lou leaves to begin milking, she slides to her knees at the side of the bed and prays. She thanks the Lord for this day, this life, for her husband and son, Louis and Jason, their farm here in Gooding, their faith, their friends, their family, even the newly arrived woes and strife of family. She prays and prays, not thinking words — not the way Lou prays, in carefully selected, familiar phrases — so much as images and sensations. She finds herself filled, as always, with a warmth, a reaction in her body that she can only believe is the arrival of a presence, prickling her nerve ends, adding substance to her flesh, joining her. It is the sensory manifestation of the Lord, the weight of Him in the body, and it fills her with the knowledge of God, the knowledge that brought her into this church. It was not belief or faith, she thought. It was physics. Force and mass. It was knowledge . And so she is strong in the face of everyone she left behind — her faithless family in Wyoming, her Catholic friends from college — because she knows that they can’t help what they don’t know.

She had come to Gooding to teach school and met Lou through a fellow teacher, and her conversion was quick: she felt the weight of the Lord the second time she attended sacrament meeting. She knows her family can’t help but tell the tales they have been told, repeat the heresies and bigotries against Mormons, and though they long ago stopped trying to get her to change, she knows it is always there, their sense of having lost her to this thing they call a cult. Now, though, something new has flamed inside her since the arrival of Dean and Ruth and their children and that girl, and she must pray against it, must pray to drive from her body the fear that they prove the doubters right, they illustrate the worst of what the ignorant already believe. Polygamy, her friends and family always said to her. The Mormons are polygamists . And she had insisted they were not. But here the polygamists were. In her own family. She prays against Dean and Ruth, prays not just that they will leave but that they will never have been, that they and what they are will be undone.

It is dark. Five A.M. She puts on her slippers and robe, and descends the stairs. Turns on the kitchen lights, and one bulb in the overhead fixture fritzes out. She changes it standing on a kitchen chair, and washes the dust and bugs out of the frosted glass bowl of the fixture at the sink. Outside, in the paling dark, the lights of the milking barn look supple and thick. The milking machine hums. Cows low. Becky starts a pan of sausage links, and beats together eggs and milk and cinnamon, and slices the last half of a loaf of wheat bread. She pours a splash of apple juice into the pan with the sausage links and covers it, and then goes to wake up Jason. He will grumble and growl, she knows, complain, ask to sleep in, whine that it’s a Sunday, it’s a weekend, just a little longer, just a little longer, and Becky prepares to resist him, because she loves him so, this boy, because she wants him to be happy in every small moment, and it has been her lifelong challenge to fight the desire to satisfy him, to soften him with pleasures. There is nothing that feels more vital to Becky than rising early, earlier than the flesh wishes, to thrust herself into life, and she must teach Jason this, she must force him, over and over, to wake and to go forth, to train the sloth out of him, the way she trained it out of herself, morning after morning.