Shawn Vestal - Daredevils

They stand outside by the ice machine and the dented garbage can in the radiant morning sun and eat like they’re starving, until Boyd begins to laugh. A wet glob of Ho Ho flies out. He stops, gains control, and then begins again, shaking uncontrollably, eyes pinched shut, and then watering over. Jason just watches him, waiting, chewing. He is visited by a powerful urge to be home. To be a child. Boyd stops, takes a breath, wipes his eyes, and says, “He fell asleep,” and starts all over again, the force of it smearing his face around, bending him over. Jason finally has no choice. It is beyond him, it always has been beyond him. He joins in.

• • •

Loretta turns north on Highway 59, heading toward Cedar. Spokes of light radiate from the low morning sun, and she thinks she will turn toward it, drive through the red rock canyons, through Zion and Bryce Canyon, and head to Colorado. Or maybe north to Wyoming. Or maybe southeast to New Mexico. An understanding dawns: Her future is not pictures of other places and other things and other people. It is not pictures of anything, and it is not one place. It is the absence of pictures, a void, and this fills her with elation. She wants to bow down before the absence. She wants to worship it.

She is wearing everything she has: the jeans she wore to seminary with Jason, a Led Zeppelin T-shirt of Boyd’s, a pair of cotton socks, one of which is torn and bloody, and three one-dollar bills, folded in her front pocket. The gold and the checks and her clothes and money and everything else are behind her. The LeBaron’s heater hums waves of hot air, and the inside of the car feels spacious and welcoming, a kind of home. The adrenaline of the past hours has fled, and a warm, happy weariness settles. She will need to sleep somewhere, and she has nowhere to sleep. She will need to do something about her ankle, and she has no way to pay a doctor. She needs shoes. She needs food. She needs gas. She has no idea how she will get any of it.

It is the happiest she has ever been, the best moment of her life, but only so far.

My deepest thanks are due to friends who read early versions of this novel and gave me guidance. Sam Ligon, in particular, read every scrap of this and repeatedly helped me expand the world of the book. Mike Baccam, Stephen Knezovich, and Jess Walter also provided valuable help — as did the brilliant Ed Park, whom I am lucky to have as an editor. I have been so fortunate to call Renée Zuckerbrot my agent, and her editorial insights and patience through the various drafts helped me discover the story hidden there.

I would like to express my gratitude to PEN and the family of Robert W. Bingham, as well as the Washington Artists Trust. Their support made it possible for me to devote time to this novel that I would not have otherwise had.

I relied upon several sources of historical information while writing this novel but also took certain dramatic liberties. (These include changing the date of Evel Knievel’s London bus jump, which actually occurred in May 1975, and retaining the name Short Creek for the fundamentalist community in northern Arizona, even though the community has actually changed its name to Colorado City.)

Leigh Montville’s biography Evel was particularly useful in understanding the history and mythology surrounding Knievel, and the History channel documentary Absolute Evel was valuable as a resource in attempting to reproduce the man’s voice. Several accounts of the Short Creek raids were helpful in describing that day, but it was the Life magazine photographs of the raid that I returned to repeatedly when I wanted to try to imagine my way inside those events.

Among the many others to whom I owe thanks are:

The members of my “church,” fellow squires of the night’s body: Chris, Dan, Jess, Sam, Tony.

The faculty and students of Eastern Washington University’s MFA program, where I learned and where I sometimes teach.

The gang at the Spokesman-Review, where it has been my privilege to work since 1999.

The Internet, which makes it so easy to find useful information about everything from the mating patterns of jackrabbits to the dashboard of a 197 °Chrysler LeBaron.

And, most of all, my family: my mother, brothers, and sisters; my wife, Amy, and son, Cole.