Shawn Vestal - Daredevils

“Would the Lord not want to bless me for this? To bless us?” Dean says.

“He would, Dean. Yes. He would want us all to be blessed.”

Jason and his friend Boyd sift strychnine powder into the rolled barley, wearing gloves and paper masks. Like surgeons on TV, Jason thinks. The odors of dust and oil, wood and machine, hang thickly in the shed. Outside it is as hot as August, and the jackrabbits are spreading across the desert like insects. They’ve been out for weeks now, bounding and skimming through the sage, chasing, stopping, and popping one another with their forepaws like boxers, the females fighting off the males, the males insane with lust.

“Mad as hares,” Jason’s mom told him a few weeks earlier as they watched them zipping about the haystack by the dairy barn. “That’s where that comes from.”

Jason said, sarcastically, “That’s where what comes from?” His parents were so ridiculous. He thought he was going to choke on it — his ridiculous parents, and their ridiculous church, and this ridiculous farm, and this ridiculous town.

“Rabbit murder,” Jason says now as he hefts the final sack onto the trailer. “Raise this stupid animal, kill that stupid animal, milk the other stupid animal, poison this stupid animal.”

He hacks a dusty loogie and spits it into the dirt, where it coils and darkens like a worm. He thinks the jacks are kind of cool.

“I love rabbit murder,” Boyd says. He wants to argue about every single thing lately. “I wish I could murder rabbits all the time.”

It is late Saturday afternoon. Jason had hoped to take the LeBaron to Twin Falls, maybe stay and see Jaws, but instead his father gave him this to do. Extra chores every weekend. His punishment for spending his mission money on eight-track tapes and hamburgers at the Oh-So-Good Inn and gas for dragging Main. It’s been more than a month since his mom found the stack of eight-tracks in his closet — Bowie and BTO, Sweet and the Doobie Brothers — and then, one question leading to another, discovering that he had spent most of the money in his passbook account. Money he’d earned raising and selling livestock at the FFA sales at the county fair. He was supposed to be saving for his two-year mission, the mission to convert the heathens that all Mormon boys were assigned to at age nineteen. Jason already knew he was not going on a mission, but his parents didn’t, not yet, and they flipped out when they found out about the money. Now every time he asks if he can go somewhere, his father assigns him a chore instead. Like poisoning jackrabbits.

“Those little fuckers are gonna get it good,” Boyd says, grinning behind his mask.

Jason’s father says they’ll try the poison first, and if it doesn’t work, they’ll move on to other methods — traps, arsenic, hunting parties. “This works best,” his father had said, “but it works better on everything else, too. Dogs. Birds. Pretty soon you’re killing everything just to kill one thing.”

Everyone is trying to keep the jacks out of gardens and crops, and no one is succeeding. Fences. Blood meal in the gardens. Heading out to the desert at night with flashlights and rifles: spotlighting. The rabbits just keep coming.

Boyd swings his heavy black bangs out of his eyes and says, “Bleed to death right out their little rabbity asses.”

“Nice,” Jason says. “Nature boy.”

Boyd is half Shoshone, and he’s gotten political. “I am waking up to my heritage,” he sometimes says, in a mock-serious tone that does not mean he isn’t serious. Every day, it seems, he is incensed about some new cause: the American Indian Movement, My Lai, Pine Ridge, the Watergate trials. Boyd wants to free Leonard Peltier. He rails about The Man, and the conspiracy to move the Negroes out of the inner city. Jason has never heard anything like it. His upbringing has been a warm, constant bath of family, faith, and the GOP. He loves to listen to Boyd, as baffling as it is. It makes him feel like an outlaw.

They hitch the trailer to the tractor. Jason drives out onto the county road, Boyd sitting on the wheel well, and down the quarter mile to Grandpa’s place, the small brick square in the middle of a weedy lawn that peters out at the edges. A truck passes and honks. Jason turns in and follows the dirt road out into the fields. They bump along for fifteen minutes until they reach the southern border of the 2,345 Harder acres, where they begin to trace the outline of the family’s land with poison.

Jason drives slowly while Boyd shakes out a trail of barley, marking the black soil like chalk on a baseball field. The tractor grinds and vibrates, stinking of burning oil. Only winter wheat is planted this early, but Grandpa said if they start now, maybe they can kill enough jacks to scare away the rest before everything starts growing. They stop at sunset and look out over the desert running west. The fat sun touches the serrated horizon, shadows veer toward them, and dark smudges scoot across the desert.

“Here, bunny, bunny, bunny,” Boyd says.

By the time they return to Grandpa’s, empty trailer banging, the night glows with spectral pale dust. Boyd is whistling Zeppelin—“Going to California,” far out of tune — and Jason hears a sound he can’t quite identify. A wheezing or hacking. And then he sees his grandfather on all fours on the lawn.

“Holy shit,” Boyd says, and hops off the wheel well. As Jason kills the tractor motor, he hears his grandfather heaving, choking, and when he turns toward them, Jason is stunned at the fear on Grandpa’s face: taut, white eyed. It roots him to his seat until Boyd barks: “Hey!”

They get Grandpa into his truck, propped between them, and Jason drives. Grandpa’s breathing slows, becomes less frantic.

Boyd says, “You doing okay there, Mr. Harder?”

He nods.

“Can’t,” he whispers, “catch my breath.”

“No kidding,” Boyd says, and Jason says, “Don’t be a smart-ass.”

Grandpa chuckles. Coughs and coughs.

“Sorry,” Boyd says, and he does actually sound sorry for once.

Grandpa whispers, “No, no. Do be a smart-ass.” Chuckles and coughs.

They come to the edge of town. On a small rise to the right is the abandoned tuberculosis hospital, like a decrepit castle. Highway 10 becomes Main Street, and Jason barely slows as they pass the Bowl-A-Rama’s neon sign, the bright island of fluorescence at the Oh-So-Good Inn, the Safeway and the Mormon church, the farm implement dealership and the state school for the deaf and blind. They turn east, drive four blocks, and stop at the small one-story brick hospital. Gooding Memorial.

They help him in and he is taken away, and they are left to sit in the plastic chairs under buzzing tubes of light. Jason feels like there must be many things for him to do or say, but he can’t imagine what the first one should be.

Boyd says, “Don’t call your folks or anything.”

• • •

Jason has never seen his grandfather in a position of submission or need. Everywhere they go, his grandfather is greeted as a leader, a patriarch, a man to be depended on. A lot of people seem to think he’s kinder than he is, but even this contributes to Jason’s sense of his authority. He’d kick a dog in a second, scold someone else’s child. Jason once saw him fire a hired man for taking jars of milk. Everyone knew he took milk. It was expected, even. But one day, Grandpa saw Bart bring an empty jug from his pickup truck, fill it from the tank in the barn, and carry it back out again. Grandpa cleared his throat and scratched angrily at the back of his hand. He walked over to Bart and barked, “What’s my son owe ya?”

Jason felt bad for Bart, but not so bad as to erase his admiration for his grandfather. It was a mean thing to do, but it wasn’t weak. That was a few months before the Evel Knievel jump. Jason had asked his parents for permission to go, and his mom had said no, had said, “Let’s keep the Sabbath holy.” His parents had come to think his interest in “worldly” things — in daredevils and rock music and novels about hobbits and the loose and supposedly willing girls of Wendell — was getting out of control. Infuriated, Jason thought, When I leave, I will engage all manner of wickedness on Sundays. But that’s not what he said. What he said was “Okay.” And then his grandfather had stepped in and shown him what you do when you want to do something. You do it.