Shawn Vestal - Daredevils

Baker’s face opens brightly, delighted. Just as Boyd is noticing there is something amiss, Baker says, “Hello, shitbird,” and takes three rapid strides across the room and slaps Boyd against the side of his head with such force that Boyd stumbles, then sits on the ground. Baker strikes him again, a meaty clout on the ear, and Boyd topples over, covers his head with his hands. From upstairs comes a voice. “Boyd?” Loretta’s voice.

Baker looks toward the stairs and bellows in answer, wordlessly, a joyous animal roar that he seems to draw upward from somewhere deep and black and far below the earth.

Then he’s taking the stairs, two by two.

• • •

Bradshaw? What? Bradshaw? Loretta can’t put together an idea of why Bradshaw is here, but there he is, Bradshaw, barging in the door while she sits there, shoebox in her lap, and he is smiling and moving so forcefully that her body knows to be terrified even before her mind does: it drains and parches and trembles.

Bradshaw knocks the shoebox from her lap.

“Hey, baby. Surprise.”

She shakes her head. He stands over her. His fury fills the room.

“You’re not? You’re not surprised?”

“Brad,” she starts.

He leans down, puts his face so close she feels his nose tickling the hairs of her nose, and bellows: “SHUT UP!” A blast of liquor. He stands and inhales vigorously through his nostrils, and then says, almost dreamily, almost as if he were talking to himself, “Just shut up, Lori. Let that be your plan. Now get your lousy faithless ass downstairs.”

Out the door and down the hall and down the stairs, and there is the next surprise: Jason. He stands in the kitchen, with the aspect of a jackrabbit staying perfectly still to avoid the eye of the hawk. Boyd is curled on the ground, hands to his head.

Bradshaw says, “What a couple of chickenshits.”

• • •

Jason thinks he doesn’t recognize Loretta, though he does. She has lost control of her face. She called him Brad. Why is she calling him Brad, and why is she calling him Brad in that way?

“Thought you two might take off while you had the chance,” Baker says. “I guess you must like me.”

He takes Loretta by the arm and guides her to the love seat and shoves her into it.

“You two come on over and sit here, too,” he says.

When they are arrayed — Loretta in the love seat, Boyd and Jason sitting on the carpet in a kind of triangle — Baker makes a show of looking from Boyd to Loretta, from Loretta to Boyd. He makes a show of trying to think it through, sort it out.

Finally, he looks at Jason, waggles his thumb between Boyd and Loretta, and says, “Told ya, stupid.”

• • •

Bradshaw takes a deep breath. Pulls the flask from his back pocket and tips it up until it’s empty. He tilts his head back and forth, as though carrying on a debate within himself.

Loretta says, “I was getting ready to call you.”

“Yeah?”

He begins to pace. Heavy on the boot heels.

She says, “Yeah,” and he nods and stomps, and says, blearily, “Your plan was that you’d leave without telling me, take off with these jokers, come down and get it, and then call me?”

• • •

They are talking secrets and plans, Loretta and Baker are, and Jason feels yet another hot spear of jealousy. How wrong he has been, about everything.

Loretta says, “Yeah. Yes, Brad,” her voice a vibrato of fear. Brad again. What does it mean that she’s calling him that? Baker says, “Yeah?” like he’s genuinely, deeply curious. He steps to Boyd and kicks him in the ribs so hard Boyd lifts up and falls onto his side. He moans and says, “Goddammit,” and Baker adjusts his angle and kicks him again, and says, “No more from you, you red fucking nigger.” Boyd retches, a wet, beery mess pooling on the shag. “A kick for every single fucking word,” Baker says, and Boyd coughs and whispers, “Okay,” and Baker kicks him again. Boyd begins to quietly cry.

• • •

Bradshaw resumes pacing, pounding his heels. At last he says to Lori, “So where is it?” and she doesn’t know why she does this but she says, “I’ve got it. I was getting ready to call and tell you.” She is trying to get his eyes, to share a look, to go to that place where he will do what she wants him to do.

“I got it for us,” she says.

“That is so great,” he says.

He yawns, hugely. He will not join her in that look.

• • •

What in the fuck are they talking about? Jason wants Loretta to look at him, but she does not. Her eyes follow Baker, and she is terrified, and she does not give Jason a glance.

“I don’t know,” Baker says. He comes over, pulls Loretta to her feet by an arm. “I’m sorely disappointed, Lori, but maybe you can make it up to me.”

Now she looks at Jason, and then Boyd, and her face crumbles. Her look makes Jason feel like one of her captors.

“Upstairs,” Baker says.

• • •

She heads toward the stairs. She’s in her socks. She wishes she could grab her shoes. They are right there, in the doorway. But she goes up. Behind her, Bradshaw pauses. He says, “I don’t really care what you shitheels do,” and Loretta speeds up a tiny bit, and Bradshaw’s still behind her, at the base of the stairs, saying to the boys, “Maybe you ought to just walk on out of here,” and now she’s at the top of the stairs, and now she’s in the hallway, and now she’s sprinting toward her room.

• • •

Jason thinks: Just leave?

“Lori and I are going to take it from here,” Baker says, smiling, and then, as if he cannot help himself, adds, “If you know what I mean,” and he winks and clicks his tongue, like he’s spurring a horse into motion, and starts up the steps.

• • •

She shuts and locks the door, and runs to the window, but it won’t slide open. The thick wooden dowel that Dean had put there blocks it. The doorknob rattles furiously. “Lori?” Bradshaw calls. She takes up the stool from the dresser.

• • •

Jason and Boyd do not move. Jason says, “Come on. It’s two against one.”

Boyd snorts. “That’s right, big shot. Two of us, one of him.” Upstairs, Baker is howling her name and banging banging banging, and then there is a sharp, brittle shatter.

• • •

Loretta sets the stool back down before the window and steps up on it. Thick, icy air seeps into the room. Bradshaw is pounding, pounding, now kicking the door. She can hear it splinter. She steps onto the windowsill, feels the glass sink hotly into her foot as she ducks through the window and pushes off into the sky.

She feels it in her left ankle when she lands. An explosion. A demolition. She rolls away from it, breath punched out of her. One foot bloody, one broken. The LeBaron sits fifteen yards away. The keys are in her hand. She stands and begins to hop.

• • •

Something whooshes onto the front lawn outside. Baker howls, “God- damn it!” and now come his thundering boot heels down the stairs. Jason says to Boyd, “Come on .”

Jason rises. Baker is racing toward the front door, and Jason, without thinking, without making a decision, cuts toward him, Baker glancing in his direction in irritated surprise, and Jason hurls himself toward Baker’s legs, and wraps them up as Baker bowls him over.

• • •

Loretta hops and hops on her cut foot. She waits for the door to burst open behind her. In her broken ankle, she can feel the pieces of bone shift with each hop. It screams with a pain that is almost a comfort, a hot distraction, a welcome elsewhere. She makes it to the LeBaron and puts her hand on it, hops, hops, reaches for the door.

• • •