Shawn Vestal - Daredevils

“Holy crap,” Jason yelps. “Knock that off.”

Loretta smiles sweetly at Evel.

“How old are you kids?” he asks her.

“I’m eighteen,” Loretta says.

He begins to spout advice. Always be true to yourself. Never let the bastards win. Don’t be afraid to fail. Fail your asses off. That is how you will succeed. Be nice. That is the most important thing — be nice.

“Couple kids like you,” he says, lowering his head and waving his hand as though he were giving a blessing. “Be good to each other.”

“Yes,” Jason says.

“No,” Loretta says. “It’s not that way.”

Jason looks at her, astonished.

“Be good to each other,” Jason says, and reaches for her hands, which she pulls into her lap.

“It’s not like that,” she says to Evel Knievel.

“It is like that,” Jason says loudly. “Come on. Yes, it is.”

She ignores him, doesn’t even look his way. Just keeps her eyes on Evel, and shakes her head.

Jason

Jason has slumped back on the seat. He sees little burn holes in the fake red leather, little blackened edges. It reminds him of the start of Gunsmoke, when the paper is burning away. He believes he will sleep here. The whiskey has gotten inside his nose, inside his eyes. It is making everything strange. Loretta and Evel are ignoring him, and that makes him wonder if he is even here anymore, or if he is dreaming this, and then he notices the burn holes again, and he thinks about Gunsmoke again, and cowboys, and heroes, and Sunday afternoons.

He wakes with a start at the sound of Loretta laughing so hard she cannot catch her breath. “You’re so funny, ” she screams.

The bar is empty but for them and the bartender, who watches TV, leaning on an elbow.

Evel says, “You’re a real cute girl.”

Jason musters himself into a sitting position and says, “You can say that again.”

Loretta rolls her eyes and says, “Thank you, Robert.”

Evel says something Jason can’t understand because the words are too low. When he next opens his eyes, Evel is whispering in her ear, and she is squinching up her shoulder like he’s tickling her, and he says, “You grind me up, silly,” or maybe he says, “You’re firing me up, Jilly,” or maybe he is calling her a filly, and Jason doesn’t like that, but it seems as if his eyes are stuck closed.

At some point, Jason says, “Maybe we should take this party up to the room.”

Or maybe he doesn’t say that. Maybe he hears it. Maybe Evel says, “Maybe we should take this party up to your room.” Or it might have been Loretta. “Maybe we should take this party up to our room.”

• • •

Is Boyd angry that they return, loud and drunk, at two A.M., with a bottle and a bucket of ice? Does he wake and, seeing their guest, leap from bed and join in the fun? Does he storm out in a rage? Do they sit around and listen to Evel tell stories about Caesars Palace, Wembley Stadium, Reno, Twin Falls? Do he and Loretta sit together on her bed, while Boyd and Jason sit on theirs? Is that the conversational layout? Do the people in the neighboring room call the front desk to complain about their raucous laughter, their shouts of joy? Does Jason regale Evel Knievel with all the ways that he has worshipped him? Does Boyd tell him stories about their attempts to jump bicycles and minibikes off ramps Jason built with two-by-fours and cinder blocks? Is Jason the butt of the joke in those stories? Do they tell Evel Knievel the story of the bunny bash? And what does he have to say about that? Does he say to Boyd, “Good for you. I hate those little fuckers.” And does that affect Loretta in any way? Does she recoil at his heartlessness? Or does she spark up, move toward it? For isn’t there something attractive in cruelty? Something essential and manly and gorgeous? Does Jason realize this as they talk — does he recognize his lack and regret it? Does he mope about it? Does Evel Knievel pull a small bindle from his shirt pocket and snort from it? Does Loretta do the same? Does Jason say no thanks? And does Evel Knievel sneer? And does Jason finally vomit, or does he make it through?

• • •

Jason comes out of the bathroom feeling lighter, relieved, but still weaving. Loretta and Evel are in hysterics, while Boyd watches them, bemused. Jason thinks: That man is not Evel Knievel. The hair’s wrong. The attitude. At some point, he opens his eyes and finds he is lying on his side, fully dressed, feet itching hotly inside his tennis shoes, and the room lights are still on and he can hear the sound of someone sloshing the ice bucket. Then he is back in the yard at the farm, outside the milking barn in the middle of the night, and his father is yelling at him from inside the barn. “Jason Reed Harder! Have you got all that miffling done?” And he looks down to see that he has a carrier full of bottles for the calves, and the bottles are full of beer, and he has to haul them to the calves and get them to drink, but the calves don’t want to drink, they gum the bottles and leave them slick with mucus, and Jason’s father shouts again, “I better not find that you haven’t finished that miffling!” and so he drinks from the bottles himself, tasting the slick, grassy slime of the calves’ mouths on the nipples, and Evel Knievel, who is sitting in the back of one of the calf pens, says, “Come on, kiddo. You can drink one more.” And Jason is standing in a circle of men in the desert behind Dean’s house, and he is surrounded by bloody, misshapen bunnies, a sticky mound of fur and flesh, and a faceless man wearing a Scotch cap and a denim jacket says, “How are we going to eat all these fucking jackrabbits?” and Jason turns to find Boyd standing there, face and T-shirt bleary with blood, working on a large mouthful of something and holding a jackrabbit with a bite taken out of its side, and he says, “Aren’t you going to get that miffling done?” and Jason wants to cry, he wants to drop to his knees and sleep everything away. He says, “I don’t know how,” and Boyd says, “ That figures.” And there is a pounding in Jason’s temples and an ache inside the bone of his skull, burning like a bed of embers, and his mouth is dry, so dry, and he hears a squeaking, a metal bouncing, and Loretta’s voice slithers from the dark, saying, “No,” and then, more softly, “Shhhh,” and Jason thinks she is talking to him, and he prepares to say, “No what?” when he hears a voice, no words, just the deep baritone music of it, and she snickers, and Jason keeps his eyes closed tight now, will not open his eyes now, because he knows it is Loretta and Evel out there together, and a soft, steady squeaking begins, a working of the bedsprings, and then a groan and Loretta says again, “Shhhhh,” a note of delight and alarm, and Jason feels Boyd poke him in the back, once, hard, with his finger, and then there is nothing but the compression of the springs like a metronome, like the ticker Jason’s mother kept on the piano, tick-tick-tick-tick-tick, for an hour, for seven hours, for nine days, for months and months, for the rest of Jason’s life, tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick, and then a freeze, a seizing, and one loud sproing and squeak, and a final “Shhh.”

Jason feels sick in his flesh. The death of something is stinking him up. He peeks through his eyelids. The room is sunk in blackness, but for a band of bright light falling through a slit in the curtains, slicing across two shapes in Loretta’s bed and a ball of cloth on the nightstand a few inches from Jason’s face. He lies on his side, back to Boyd. Tiny sprung fibers glow on the cloth in the light, and Jason realizes it is Loretta’s lavender underwear just as her hand emerges from the darkness to grab it. Evel Knievel begins to snore like a gasping engine, deep, shuddering blasts, followed by long, wheezing inhalations. The way Boyd snores. Or Jason’s grandfather. It carries the precise tone and rhythm of his dead grandfather, rending the peace of the night, the room like a grave.