Shawn Vestal - Daredevils

“It was nice to meet you,” Jason says.

Evel Knievel claps Jason on the shoulder.

“Buddy, that was a hell of a party,” he says. “Do you remember running around the room naked? ’Bout three in the A.M.?”

“What? No. No .”

There is no way he did that. There is no way he would do that. There is no way this guy is Evel Knievel.

“Okay,” Evel Knievel says. “Just asking.”

“Wait,” Jason says. “Are you shitting me? I didn’t do that.”

Evel Knievel cackles. He punches Jason on the shoulder.

“You don’t remember that? Really? Huh. Well, I gotta hit it. You take care.”

He walks off and joins his buddies, and they laugh and slap backs, and Jason thinks he hears one of the guys calling him Bob or maybe John or maybe he doesn’t hear it right. The others wear jeans and cowboy boots, just like Evel Knievel, and one of them wears a John Deere cap, and they seem like ordinary Idaho-type men, and Jason feels a blush warm his whole body. The men gather around Evel Knievel and he vanishes.

Jason eats breakfast alone, sheeny eggs and soggy hash browns and wet toast, looking over the Elko Daily Free Press and listening to the ringing of the slots. The food sits like a fist in his stomach, until it becomes clear that it will no longer sit in his stomach at all, and he rushes across the café to the bathrooms — GUYS and GALS — and into a stall, where everything comes up, still warm. Jason can see a pair of auburn polyester pants swaddled around cowboy boots in the next stall, and he flushes and waits for them to disappear. He walks back through the café, pays his check, and assesses the thin leaves of cash in his wallet — his FFA livestock sale money, his mission money — and finds a twenty, a ten, a five, a five, a five, and seven ones.

In the casino, people hunch over the tables, and thin columns of smoke rise from ashtrays, like a planetary surface pocked with asteroid strikes. Jason walks out the front doors and stands under the huge awning, out of the bright sun. It is clear and cold. He feels like he is six, and he’s gotten lost at the carnival, and what he wants to do is cry.

He goes back to the room. How will he face them? What will they say? He turns the key in the door and opens it on a dark room. The counters sit empty. Their bags are gone. A piece of paper lies on the television, weighed down by a water glass:

Catch you later. B & L.

The world rushes away from Jason in every direction, untouching him. He becomes the last person. The final one.

• • •

Boyd sleeps, slumped against the passenger door. Loretta tries not to look at the odometer too frequently. It is already dusky, the sun vanished somewhere she cannot see, either behind the gray stain of clouds or one of the mountain spines that flank them on their journey south. She hasn’t seen a building in what feels like forever. She likes this sensation — everyone behind her but Boyd — and she is untroubled about Jason. He will be fine. He will be taken care of.

But it is only now — now that she and Boyd have put a couple of hours behind them, now that she has piloted Jason’s big old bucket of wobble long enough to predict its drifts and fades — that she fully turns her mind to the gold. Dean’s gold. The gold she’s gotten, and the gold she’s going for. Sutter Creek gold. It had hung out there, behind the scrim of impossibility, for long enough that she failed to contend with the practical problems it might raise. For example: how do you even turn gold into money?

And then there is this: She might not even care anymore. She can’t decide if she even wants it anymore, or why she wanted it to begin with. This is her mission but now she feels trapped in it.

Boyd wakes, moaning.

“Mornin’,” she says. “Feel any better?”

“No.”

“Maybe you need more shut-eye,” she says. “We’ve got a ways to go.”

Sleep, she thinks. Go away.

Boyd flips a heater vent up and down with a finger. He turns to her and says, “This is the worst thing I have ever done.”

“Stop it.”

“No. The worst.”

He is pouting. Are they all like this? Every single one of them, just a big hurt baby?

“Then why’d you do it?”

“For you.”

“For me?”

“To be with you.”

“And now you’re with me. And now you’re miserable.”

He flips the vent up and down.

“Don’t you feel at least a little shitty?” he says.

“A little shitty, yes. A little.”

“Then why’d you do it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Not to be with me.”

“Okay. To be with you.”

She can hardly say it. What had she felt for this boy? Had she just tricked herself? Because he clearly could not have been the one who tricked her. Not like Bradshaw. Tricky Bradshaw. No, she knows what she was thinking: that here was a chance to do the worst thing — the worst to Dean, the worst to all that she was leaving behind — the worst thing, with this Indian, this Lamanite, this child of sin, for that is what the elders taught, that the brown skin was a punishment for immorality, and in the cloud of drink she was thrilled by the entire idea of giving herself to that. But now he’s here and he’s just another one of them.

She puts on the headlights. Boyd is looking at her now, moon-faced, eyes black in the shadows of the car, waiting for a declaration of purpose, a statement, she knows, like those she made back in the hotel room before they left— It will be me and you. Isn’t that the way you want it, too? Don’t you want to be alone with me, Boyd? — and now those statements feel like a nest of tethers around her feet, ready to tangle her up any way she tries to move.

“We’ll get to Short Creek. We’ll figure this out,” she says at last.

“He was my best friend. Really my only friend. In the whole world there’s just my mom and him and nothing else. Nobody. Assholes. What kind of a person does that to his friend?”

“Boyd, he’s going to be fine.”

“That’s not exactly what I’m wanting to hear from you right now, Loretta. I wish it was him I was worried about, but it’s not.”

“You’re not a bad person.”

“That’s not it, either.”

A tiny cluster of lights appears, far ahead in the cave of darkness. Ely, Nevada. Halfway.

Boyd says, “What happened to the you from yesterday?”

“Right here.”

“The you from last night?”

Loretta is visited by a pang of conscience regarding her sexual sin — for doing that with someone she had just met, like some whore. Her father had talked about her purity constantly. She remembers him counseling her, giving her bedtime chats, reading her verses about her virtue, the talk of righteousness flooding her mind with thoughts of sin. “The Lord delights in the chastity of His children.” Does she still believe that, though she thinks she does not? Is she wrong that she can simply decide what she believes?

“Same me,” she says.

• • •

Jason sits in the room at the Stockmen’s with the note. Seventy-five hours pass. One hundred forty-three hours pass. Five thousand three hundred fifty-four hours pass. He will live in this dim room forever. A numb, gentle throb in his cranium. He remembers the LeBaron. His father’s car. The keys are no longer on the countertop by the TV. He looks around, digs through pockets. Goes downstairs and out into the parking lot, where there is no longer a pea-green 197 °Chrysler Imperial LeBaron. The sky blazes, summer blue and winter cold.

He will live here. At the Stockmen’s. Maid service. Buffets. Perfect.

He has fifty-two dollars and fifty-two cents. He goes inside and pays for another night. Eleven dollars. There is a mirror behind the counter and he assesses himself: gawky and tall, monster ears, hair starting to frizz out of its bun, a bright rash of freckled self-consciousness on his cheeks. He hates the way he looks. It is all there, every time he examines himself for the signs. The failure is all right there.