Shawn Vestal - Daredevils

Jason holds Baker’s struggling thighs, his right hand gripping his left wrist, while Baker rains down blows on his back. “You’re dead, you little fucker,” Baker spits, and he grabs Jason’s ear and turns it hard again, sending a bright flame of pain along Jason’s scalp along with the certainty that what he says is true, that Jason really is now going to be dead, and soon. “You are super fucking dead.” Outside, the LeBaron chugs into life. The engine noise rises, and then it begins to diminish, and Jason feels that he will lose control of Baker’s legs at any moment. His knees, loosening, are knocking Jason in the chest, and soon he will be fucked, truly fucked. Baker starts to heave his knees powerfully, and one cracks Jason in the mouth, and the iron taste of blood arrives, and Jason thinks that Baker will get loose now, and he’ll be in his car in seconds, following, and Loretta will never get away. Then he feels a heavy thump. Boyd. Boyd has a knee on Baker’s back and one on his neck, mashing Baker’s face into the carpet. Baker stops flailing and Jason gets a better grip around his thighs, face pressed against his hip. Baker says, “Guys,” into the carpet, smush-mouthed, and then again, “Guys,” and the LeBaron is already distant, already who knows where, and Baker screams like an animal into the carpet. They sit there like that, the three of them locked together, until all Jason knows for sure is that they can no longer hear the LeBaron anywhere. It’s all the way gone.

• • •

She can do this with one foot. It is just a matter of deciding to do it. Like Ruth would do. She presses the gas pedal to the floor with her blood-damp sock, ignoring the pain. Gravel growls under the tires. Dust fills the cab. She breathes and breathes and breathes. Loretta reaches the paved county road, and turns onto it. She can’t stop shivering, though she isn’t registering the cold. The LeBaron’s heater is blasting and she knows it will soon be too warm in here. She passes through Short Creek at just above the speed limit — the huge brick church, the walls of the prophet’s compound, the small post office and store, the United Order warehouse. She thinks about the kids. She wishes she could see Benjamin one more time. Read The Poky Little Puppy . When she reaches the outskirts she presses the accelerator and the car surges loosely. Her ankle howls. It rests at an impossible angle, swollen tight. The pierced sticky bottom of her pedal foot burns and throbs. The first pink signs of day are lining those dusky orange walls of stone that rise from the desert. The rear end fishtails and stabilizes, and she holds down the pedal. Her left ankle is a bag of bones, and sometime — out far away, in the time that comes after this time — she knows she will need to do something about it, but for now she tells herself just this: She can do this with one foot. It’s an automatic, this old boat. She can drive it forever with just one foot.

• • •

Jason thinks the end might come any minute. Once Baker is free, he will kill them. With his own two hands. He told them he would, and Jason believes him. Carpet fibers tickle his face. He can feel his arms and hands weakening, but Boyd has Baker perfectly pinned, facedown, one knee on the back of his neck and one in the middle of his back. Jason lies on his side, arms wrapped around Baker’s thighs and face against his hip. Jason and Boyd don’t talk until not talking seems like the way to do it. They lie there for what feels like hours, the scent of mud and old oatmeal and dirty socks and homemade bread radiating. Baker’s anger dies second by second, then surges, fades, surges. Jason stares at the bundle of electrical wires hanging from the ceiling. His shoulders rage. He feels far away from himself.

Baker says, “Guys. Come on. It’s over. Just let me up. Seriously now. Come on.” Then he tries thrashing violently. Boyd tips and catches himself on his hands, but keeps his weight on Baker’s neck, and Baker stops. “All right,” he says. “Enough. I give. Just let me up.” Nobody answers him. “I can’t breathe,” he says.

Boyd says, “You can breathe.”

Baker says, “I can’t breathe very well.” Jason thinks that any moment now he will lose his grip. Baker says, “Just let me up and we’ll all go our separate ways.”

Jason says, “Boyd?”

“No way,” Boyd says. “My ribs are in pieces.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know,” he says. Dead voiced.

“Guys,” Baker says to the carpet. “Guys.”

Then he laughs, a long manic outburst that fades to silence. Jason wonders where Loretta is now, and can’t block the wish to be with her. Boyd makes wincy noises. Jason looks up from his half-obscured angle at his friend, his oldest and only friend, and sees Boyd staring vacantly. They have each lost the same thing: not Loretta, but an idea of her. A faith.

“Seriously, guys,” Baker says.

It is almost six A.M.

“Boyd,” Jason says.

“I know.”

“There’s two of us.”

“Yeah.”

“Guys, I mean it, let me up and let’s just call it over.”

“Shut up, fucko,” Boyd says.

A long silence follows.

Baker begins to take deep, regular breaths.

“Right,” Boyd says. “Sure, man.”

Baker’s body loses its tension. The muscles in his legs slacken.

“I don’t know,” Jason whispers. “It feels real.”

One of Baker’s feet kicks weakly, lifts and drops on its toe, involuntary. He snorts, begins to wheeze.

“I think it’s real,” Jason says.

“No way.”

Baker snores noisily into the carpet. Jason loosens his grip. Nothing. He slides his arms free — fiery with pins and needles — and Baker snorts wetly, pauses, resumes snoring. If he’s faking, Jason thinks, he’s doing a good job of it. Then he thinks: How hard would it be to fool me? He rolls away and stands slowly. When he sees Boyd’s face, he grows worried — he is ashen, stunned, and Jason knows from his Boy Scout first-aid training that Boyd is in shock. Boyd looks like he is about to tip over, breath shallow and eyes drooping. Jason reaches out and takes his elbow and helps him stand, watching Baker and knowing that they are committed now, they’ll never get hold of him in that way again, and as Boyd’s knees come off his neck, Baker lifts and turns his head and lays it down again and sleeps, astonishingly, sleeps.

“No way,” Boyd says.

They walk out. No keys in the Nova, and they’re not going back to root around in Baker’s pockets and risk waking him. Boyd’s coat is in the LeBaron, so they take turns wearing Jason’s as they walk into town, looking back nervously all the way. Boyd limps from the pain in his ribs. They barely speak, and Jason wonders: How do you start? What do you say first?

“What do we do now?” he asks.

Boyd shrugs. “Go until we get someplace.”

It is warmer than it’s been in days. Trucks pass, drivers stare. Every house is huge, stamped from the same mold. There are no stores. No stop signs. No normal town things. They walk past a huge walled compound; the gabled roofs of two enormous homes, larger than Dean’s, loom above. The desert spreads, flat and dusty red, toward the jutting mountains that seem to shelter the place. Curtains part as they pass; a woman in her yard, in a long dress, ankle to wrist, turns away from them watchfully.

“This place is the weirdest,” Boyd says.

Why does Jason not think Baker is coming? He simply doesn’t. They reach a small country store. Two rusting gas pumps out front and a Greyhound bus sign in the window. They go in without speaking. Jason has enough money for two tickets home and four packages of Ho Hos. After he pays, he looks at the change in his palm: $2.13. His mission money.