9,59 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: ONE
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Mormons meet Evel Knievel in this stunning coming-of-age novel about desire and escape At the heart of this coming-of-age novel set in Arizona and Idaho in the mid-1970s is fifteen-year-old Loretta - a beautiful girl with sharp intelligence and courage beyond her years and experience. Raised by strict Mormon parents, she secretly slips out of her bedroom to meet a so-called gentile boy. When her parents catch her returning one night, she is punished and forced to marry the much older Dean Harder, a devout fundamentalist who already has a wife and children. The Harders relocate to his native Idaho, where Dean's teenage nephew, Jason, falls in love with Loretta. Jason worships Evel Knievel and longs to leave his close-minded community. He and Loretta make a daring break for it. They drive all night, stay in a hotel, and relish their dizzying burst of teenage freedom - including a drunken encounter with (possibly) Evel Knievel himself. But someone Loretta left behind is on their trail... Shawn Vestal was born in 1966 in Gooding, Idaho. His story collection Godforsaken Idaho won the 2014 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and was shortlisted for the Saroyan Prize. A graduate of the Eastern Washington University MFA program, his stories have appeared in Tin House, Ecotone,McSweeney's, Southern Review and other journals; his short memoir A.K.A. Charles Abbott recounts the story of his father, who took the family to Canada in flight from the law. He writes a column for Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington, where he lives with his wife and son.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
Ähnliche
ONE, AN IMPRINT OF PUSHKIN PRESS
‘Relentlessly enjoyable, surprising, inventive, and just plain heartwarming… a bona fide marvel… I couldn’t put it down as I cheered on Loretta until the very last page. A real wonder’
Scott Cheshire, author of High as the Horses’ Bridles
‘A speeding stunt bike of a novel, propulsive and daring. Vestal’s prose feels born of the southern Idaho landscape, as fleet and muscular as the jackrabbits swarming the desert floor… The characters’ desires and aches – for love, for glory, for freedom – strain within their confines and burst off of the page. A lucid, bright gem’
Sharma Shields, author of The Sasquatch Hunter’s Almanac
‘Daring, moving, and tender… Beautiful and at times heartbreaking, this book will knock you out’
Nina McConigley, author of Cowboys and East Indians
For my brothers and sisters
Contents
TWO DESERTS
EVEL KNIEVEL ADDRESSES AN ADORING NATION
When did we first think of jumping a canyon? It seems now that we always thought it. That it was always there for us to think. What do you call that, when the world guides you toward its purpose? We believed, America. We believed we could do anything we tried to do. We believed we could do anything we said we would do. We believed in ourself and the things we were saying. We believed that in saying these things, we were already making them true.
July 6, 1974 SHORT CREEK, ARIZONA
Loretta slides open her bedroom window and waits, listening to the house. She pops out the screen and slowly pulls it inside. The summer night is blue and black, filled with plump, spiny stars and the floral waft of alfalfa and irrigated fields. She swings one leg out, then the other, and sits on the sill. A tiny, muffled creak sounds, and she can’t tell if it comes from the house or the night or inside her jangled mind. She spends every day now thinking about the night, and this moment is always the same—the exhilarating passage from here to there. To the brief, momentary future. To Bradshaw.
She drops to the ground and sets off across the lawn, hunched as if trying to stay below the searching beam of a powerful light. She is wearing her jeans, the one pair her father lets her keep for chores, and her clogs. Her Gentile clothes. The mountains, red by day, stand black and craggy against the rich ink of night. Their home is on the edge out here, on the edge of the Short Creek community just as she and her family are on the edge of it—half outsiders, not yet inside the prophet’s full embrace—but that makes it easier to sneak away without being spotted by the prophet’s men. The God Squad, Bradshaw calls them. If she sees car lights, she crouches in the ditch grass until they pass, but tonight she sees no car. She walks the barrow pit for a quarter mile, grass cool on her bare ankles, to where the dirt lane runs into county road and she sees Bradshaw’s Nova on the wide roadside, pale luster along the fender, signal lights glowing like the hot eyes of a new beast coiled against the earth.
As she comes to the car, the passenger door opens, as if on its own, and the interior light blares, and there he is, Bradshaw, smile cocked on his hard, happy face. She feels it again, the sense that she doesn’t know if she loves him, or even if she likes him, because sometimes she yearns for a glimpse of him and sometimes she feels desperate to get away from him—Bradshaw, sitting there with his wrist draped on the steering wheel like a king—but what is certain is that she cannot resist his gravity. She falls toward him at a speed beyond her control.
“There she is,” he says as she slides in. “Holy hell, Lori, you are a vision.”
He leans over and presses his chapped lips against her mouth. He tastes of beer, yeasty and sour. He pulls away and looks at her searchingly, ghostly eyes somehow alight, head tilted, one curly sideburn grazed by the green dashboard glow.
“Did you miss me, sweet Lori?”
“I missed you.”
“Did you think about me a whole bunch?”
“I thought about you all the time.”
She loves how much he seems to love her. He kisses her again, cupping the back of her head with a hand. She puts her hands on his back, feels the knots of muscle there. Sometimes she thinks he is trying to press his face through hers. To consume her. She wants this, always—this sin—but when it arrives she does not enjoy it, because he loses himself. He spreads a palm on her rib cage, thumb an inch from her breast. Then closer.
They part. He breathes as if he’s been sprinting.
“Did you think any more about it?” he says.
He wants her to leave with him. To take off for good and put The Crick in the rearview mirror. To be together, he says. Together together.
“I did,” she says. “I want to. But I don’t think yet. I don’t think now.”
“Aww, Lori,” he says. “Don’t say that. Don’t you say that to me.”
She wants to go. She wants to fly into her future, but she feels she must be very careful, must be precise and exact, or she will miss it. She is sure that her future is a specific place, a destination she will either reach or miss, and it awaits her out there somewhere away from all that is here. Away from the long cotton dresses. Away from the tedious days in church school, studying the same scriptures they study all day on Sundays. Away from her father’s stern but halfhearted righteousness and her mother’s constant acquiescence. And, mostly, away from the looming reality that no one ever says a word about: she is fifteen, she is eligible, she is a means now for her father to pursue his own righteousness. He cannot take another wife himself, but he can still serve the Principle—the principle of plural marriage. Celestial marriage. They have been welcoming certain brothers for dinners in their home. The men are always bright with questions for Loretta.
Bradshaw wrestles her to the seat for a while, and then they drive and talk. He loves to be listened to. He loves to tell her about the way he has handled something, the way he has put someone in their place. He is talking about his new boss, the turf farmer outside St. George.
“So he keeps handing me the eleven-sixteenths, and I keep asking for the thirteen-sixteenths, and then he does it again,” he says, slapping a hand on the dash. “I say, bud, you got your glasses on?”
His laugh is like a chugging motor. Why does he think she wants to hear this? The strange thing is, she does. She loves listening to him talk, to his strange locutions, his crudeness. So hungry I could eat the ass out of a cow, he’ll say. Shit oh dear. That smarmy bastard. He never utters a righteous word. It wasn’t all that long ago that Loretta thought he was her savior, the one who’d rescue her. She has been heading out into the night since she was thirteen, she and her friend Tonaya, meeting up with the Hurricane boys, the St. George boys, the boys the prophet had exiled. They were the crowd Loretta and Tonaya chased around whenever they could, sneaking out at night, joyriding on dirt roads, drinking beer, building bonfires in the desert, shoplifting at the grocery store, riding in the backseat as the boys bashed mailboxes or keyed cars, coming home before dawn, climbing back in that bedroom window, back into the world where no one watched television, where they prayed constantly, or sat over scripture, or sang hymns, or walked to the neighbors to weed a garden. Out there, into the worldly world, and then back home, to reverence and boredom.
The night she met Bradshaw, she and Tonaya were wedged in the backseat of an old Rambler station wagon owned by one of the boys, parked outside the 7-Eleven in Hurricane looking for someone to buy them something—a six-pack, a bottle of sweet wine. That night, it was Bradshaw. Almost immediately, when he came around the side of the store and handed the bag into the car, he looked into the back and found Loretta’s eyes. He was older than the boys she was hanging around with, but younger than the men in Short Creek, the men whose eyes she felt on Sundays at church, the men who blushed if she returned their gaze. Bradshaw didn’t blush, ever. Everything about him announced that he did not harbor a doubt—his quick, bowlegged walk, eyes of washed-out blue and angular face, and the way he was always doing something handsome and prominent with his jaw, cocking it this way or that. Soon she was meeting him alone, and every time she climbed into his car he looked thrilled and he said, “There she is,” like he was announcing something the world had long awaited.
Now, tonight, Bradshaw turns onto a dirt road and guns it, fishtailing the Nova into the desert. They drive up into a bump of low hills where he will find a reason to stop again. It’s past midnight, almost one, Loretta guesses, and she remembers that tomorrow is Fast Sunday, the first Sunday of the month, and she has forgotten to stash something to eat.
“There’s probably nothing open now, is there?” she asks.
“Open for what?”
“Some food. Anything. Tomorrow’s Fast Sunday.”
“Tomorrow’s what Sunday?”
Does Bradshaw not know what Fast Sunday is? The day of fasting? He’s lived down here all his life.
“Fast Sunday. No eating. I get headaches if I don’t sneak something.”
Bradshaw brays laughter. “A day of no eating. You Mormons. I swear.”
You Mormons. Loretta doesn’t think of herself—of her family, of Short Creek—as Mormon, exactly, although everyone here thinks of themselves as the only true Mormons. In her mind, Mormons were what they were before they came here seven years ago. Mormons were what they were when they lived in Cedar City, went to the church on Main Street, the tan-brick wardhouse on a street with ordinary homes and a grocery store and a gas station. Mormons, she thinks, live in the real world, or at least closer to it. They had a television back then, and a radio in the kitchen. Her mother listened to country music. They dressed like real people, like worldly people—though, she knows, they were farmier and more country than Salt Lake City Mormons, the rich, blond Mormons, the ones you can barely tell are even Mormons at all. Mormons, she thinks, marry one person at a time.
They came here when she turned eight—the age for her baptism. Her father had grown up in Short Creek, on the desert border between Utah and Arizona, among the polygamists and fundamentalists, but he had left as a teenager, a rebellious boy encouraged by the prophet to leave. They had lived in Cedar and Loretta’s parents raised eight children, and he worked fixing cars at the town’s auto dealership. Loretta came late and unexpected, as her father had begun turning back toward the faith he had departed and hardening against the soft ways of the mainstream church. When it came time to baptize Loretta, he found he could not do so. They moved back to The Crick—where his brothers lived, where his parents had died. You cannot exactly join this church, Loretta knows; you cannot simply show up and convert to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but because of his family and his history and his willingness to submit, her father was allowed to return, half-caste. Still, all these years later, they are not yet fully in the United Order—the inner circle of the most righteous, those living in the Principle of plural marriage—and yet are allowed to hope, to strive, probationary.
She remembers the spring night her father told them they were returning. They sat around the small kitchen table, the smell of cut grass pungent through the screen door. A Pyrex dish of hamburger casserole, a meaty stew run through with ribbons of noodle and brownish clumps of tomato, sat before them. Her mother wore an ankle-length dress, nothing like she would usually wear. An exhausted pall shadowed her face, and she did not say one word. Loretta’s father, stout and slow, spoke in the deliberate voice that made him seem dumb; his hands were flat on the table beside his plate, grooved in engine black. He answered all of her questions in a tone that made it clear the decision had been made.
“It is for your eternal soul, Loretta, that we do this,” he said. “Even if you can’t see that.”
Loretta’s mother sat twisting her hands, galaxies of red dots spreading across her face and neck. They were both so old, Loretta knew even then—like grandparents. Her father was always wearily heaving himself up and around, always groaning toward the next task, and her mother moved with slow, weary resignation. And now there she was, dressed like a sister wife, dressed the way you would see the Short Creek women dressed when they came to town. Loretta wanted her mother to say something then, to say anything at all.
Loretta has never felt right here. She hates to braid her hair. She hates to sit quietly while the boys run and shout. She does not want to live in one of these strange, huge families, the men orbited by constellations of wives and children. She imagines her future as something like the ads in magazines she has glimpsed in stores, in the hair salon in St. George, those times her mother has let her go. Modern clothing and fast cars and makeup and shining tall buildings that glow at night and cigarettes and cocktails and every forbidden thing. She loved the lipstick ad with the beautiful girl in black jeans lying on the hood of a pink Mustang and smirking into the camera. The name of the lipstick like a password: Tussy.
Bradshaw’s hand is inside her blouse, crawling over her back. Her mouth is sore, her neck is tired. He puts his hand on the inside of her thigh and squeezes. He takes the skin of her neck in his teeth and bites gently, but not gently enough. “Some night I won’t be able to stop myself,” he says, breath like a furnace. “I can’t be responsible.”
Sometimes he holds her wrists so hard he leaves small bruises. He says he can’t help it, and she believes him because he acts like he can’t help it. She wants to do it, too, although she’s also scared it will create something unstoppable in Bradshaw, and she resents the way he pressures her. Still, she spends her days thinking about coming out into the night with Bradshaw and so she wonders if he is not a savior after all but a demon, since she will keep coming to him even as she wants it less and less.
Finally, they stop. He begins to ask her again about leaving.
“Not yet, baby,” she says. “Not now.” She calls him baby because she wants to calm him, like a baby, and because she knows that this is how people talk to each other out in the world where her future lies.
“Well, holy shit, Lori, what are we waiting for?”
“Money,” she says. “A plan or something.”
“I got your plan right here,” he says, taking her hand and placing it on the stiffening in his jeans.
She yanks it back and says, “I’m serious.”
If they leave now, all she’ll have is him.
Pink light is etching the hilltops when she returns. It is the coolest time of the day, the very early morning, and she yearns for sleep, wondering how she will steal slumber today. She crosses the lumpy, wormholed backyard and comes to her window. The house, the small Boise Cascade rancher in light blue and navy blue, is silent. Stepping between her mother’s paper flower bushes, she uses a finger to open the slider, hoists herself into the bedroom, and takes up the screen and replaces it. When she turns at last she leaps and gasps, startled by the sight of her father sitting on her bed.
“I had not guessed you to be such a rebellious harlot,” he whispers.
Loretta is frozen, her mind a storm.
“Can you say nothing? Can you not invent some lie?”
She is somehow not terrified, though she can’t think what to say or do. Her father stands. He comes toward her slowly, his sore-hipped walk, rage purpling his face. Her mother watches from the doorway. Loretta could outrun them, overpower them, probably, but she does not. He seizes her ponytail and slaps her on the side of the head. A slow-motion slap. It hurts less than she expects. He is large bellied and top-heavy, ready to tip, and it is this that she seizes on as he swings his arm slowly again and again, each strike hurting less than she expects, each blow breaking through whatever is happening now and making a path forward, she thinks, toward her future. He is speaking to her, growling, grunting, but she doesn’t hear him, and soon she can’t feel his blows. The flesh on the side of her face fills and puffs, rising like dough. He is old, he is old, and she is on her way to somewhere else.
The day follows, still and silent. It is unspoken that she will remain in her room. Awaiting what, she does not know. Her father does not go to his brother’s ranch, to care for the livestock they raise for the United Order. They do not go to church. Her father comes to put a lock on her bedroom door, a toolbox in his left hand and the lock in the other. He doesn’t look at her, canting his head away as if from light of punishing brightness. He mutters and fumbles. Her mother comes in with toast and eggs on a tray, red eyed and pale in her housecoat. Loretta wonders if they have forgotten it is Fast Sunday.
She should have gone with Bradshaw. Should she have gone with Bradshaw? Which unknown path should she choose, and how should she choose it? All she knows is that while she waited for an answer, the paths closed down. Bradshaw won’t even know why she will stop showing up.
Her father finishes and leaves. Then she hears him outside her bedroom window, doing something to the slider. Hours pass. Loretta, still clothed in her jeans and work blouse, lies on the bed. Everything has a thickened feel, as if all of life will be reduced now to this: a room, some food, and time. She falls asleep hard, and when she awakens to the clicking of the lock on her door, she is groggy and disoriented. She sits up to see her mother entering.
As she sits on the bed, Loretta notes that she is still in her housecoat, the pilled flannel plaid. Loretta doesn’t speak. She has not said one word to them since climbing back in that window. She wonders if she will ever say another word to them. Her mother’s face looks older than Loretta has ever seen it, collapsing like fruit that’s turned. She speaks tentatively, tearfully.
“Your father has made a decision,” she says.
The words come at Loretta as if through water.
“What you’ve done—” Her mother stops. “He feels—”
She smooths her trembling hands outward along her legs, as though brushing crumbs to the floor.
“We feel that you are in peril. That your soul is in peril.”
Neither she nor her mother has anything to do with this. Neither has any part in it but to obey. Her father has agreed to place her with Brother Harder, with Dean Harder, the man who runs Zion’s Harvest, the food supply, a righteous man, a faithful member of the Order, who is ready to add to his heavenly family.
“Place me?” Loretta asks.
“You know,” her mother says, so quietly that Loretta can barely hear her over the sound of a sprinkler fanning the lawn outside. “You’ve known.”
September 8, 1974 TWIN FALLS, IDAHO
A little mischief is good for the soul,” Grandpa tells Jason, leveling a thick, crooked finger toward the road ahead, as if that were mischief right there, fat and smiling on Highway 10.
He says, “There’s nothing so wrong with this.”
The highway plunges as straight as a pipe through the desert and into the horizon. Inside the old Ford pickup, warm air flaps loudly past the open windows, drowning Grandpa’s low growl.
He says, “Your dad never was much of a listener.” Chuckles. Bits of whirling hay prickle Jason’s ears. It’s Grandpa’s work truck—floor mats worn through, seats split and stained. A mess of empty parts boxes, hand tools, and baling twine is pressed into the cove where the dashboard meets the windshield. He is telling stories, and in the blast of the truck cab, Jason can hear only scraps of them, disconnected pieces.
Grandpa says, “By the time we got there, that Packard was all but sunk in the canal.”
He is telling stories about Jason’s father. The time five-year-old Dad was caught shoplifting butterscotch candies. How wildly he fought with his older brother, Dean, when they were teenagers. How he took the family car without permission once and drove it into the canal.
Jason doesn’t understand this unloading of family lore. It seems significant. Announced. He looks at his grandfather—face and neck scorched with crosshatched sunburn and drooping ears red and thick as ham. He’s saying something but the wind blasts it away. The land skims by, a flat plain broken with lava rock and spotted with sage. Thin sky, rags of cloud. The early coat of autumn shows its bright tans and shorn fields, the first scent of bitter dying in the air.
He says, “I thought your dad was going to bite his ear off.”
On the seat between them, balanced atop a pair of hardened leather work gloves and two V-belts, is Grandpa’s set of scriptures, zipped into a leather case: the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, the Pearl of Great Price.
They are wearing their Sunday suits, but they are not going to church.
They pass through Wendell and onto Interstate 84, bound for Twin Falls. Grandpa pushes the Ford to seventy, seventy-five, and stops trying to shout above the noise. He is handsome, better looking than the rest of the Harder men: tall, neat, sun chapped. Beside him, Jason feels thin and soft. He hates the way he looks, his dense scrub of auburn hair, his freckles, his gangling knobbiness. Grandpa’s dark gray hair is oiled, rows of comb tines as neat as a barley field, and his suit smells of Old Spice and perspiration.
An adrenal flutter passes through Jason, then comes again. They are not going to church, though they have told Jason’s parents they are driving to Rupert so Grandpa can speak to the ward there. It is a plausible lie—Grandpa is a high councillor and he often goes to speak at the Mormon wards around southern Idaho—but Jason is astonished that Grandpa told it.
“This oughta be something,” Grandpa shouts.
Jason nods. He wants to say More than something, but then he doesn’t want to say it anymore. This day wears a skin around it, a membrane that might burst with the wrong word. They are going to watch Evel Knievel jump the Snake River Canyon in a steam-powered rocket.
Grandpa says, “What do you think? He gonna make it?”
“Not sure.”
“Well, Judas Priest. Of course you’re not sure. But what do you think?”
Who could say? Jason sees every jump he can, worshipping at the Panasonic each time Evel Knievel climbs onto a motorcycle and flies into the air. It began when Jason watched the Caesars Palace crash on Wide World of Sports when he was nine: Evel Knievel bouncing off the ramp, body rippling and bike roaring after him like an angry bull. Surely that was a vision of death. But Evel Knievel survived and went out and did it again and again.
This jump today, though—rocket ship, canyon—this is something else.
“What do you think?” Jason shouts.
Grandpa laughs.
“He might just do it. He might. I mean, all’s he’s got to do is sit there and get shot a long way.”
“That’s all an astronaut does, too, but that don’t make it easy.”
This is something Evel Knievel himself has said, in one of the articles Jason razored from the Times-News and taped into his scrapbook.
“Well,” Grandpa says, like he’s not going to fight about something so silly with such a junior opponent. “It’s not exactly the moon launch.”
Jason wants to ask Grandpa about their lie. To pin down why it might be acceptable, given what he and the other elders always say in church: Thou shalt not bear false witness. Jason’s parents had cited another commandment when they initially told him he couldn’t go to the canyon jump: Thou shalt keep the Sabbath holy. He was pissed off for days, until Grandpa approached—in his shoulder-to-shoulder, gazing-at-the-horizon way one morning while Jason was feeding calves—and asked if he’d heard of this fella Knievel.
He could understand Grandpa wanting to see the jump. He used to race motorbikes in the desert and drive to Boise for the stock cars. The lie, though. Why would he do it, and then just wink about it? Jason wonders, though he thinks he’s starting to know: the rules are the rules are the rules, the eternal truths unchanging, but inside the brotherhood of men are passageways and tangents, compartments and exceptions.
They leave the freeway and cut south through the desert. Soon the canyon comes into view, a great gray crack in the land. Crowds swarm on the far rim, and behind them a dome of trees cloisters a ranch house.
The bulge of the launchpad stands at the far end of the crowd, a mound of earth with a metal, spirelike ramp, flanked by TV trucks and a white trailer. Below, the cut basalt walls of the canyon turn back afternoon light at strange angles, silvered here, ashen there. The walls crumble downward into piles of boulder, and then stone, and then earthen slopes of weed and duff at the canyon bottom, split by the heavy, swirling Snake River.
They turn east, away from town, and enter a line of cars inching forward. Soon they hear the sound of a marching band—the harsh tin of the horns, the thump of drums. Grandpa guns the sputtering engine. To the left, in the hundred yards or so between the road and the canyon rim, crowds mill and clump; motorcycle engines whine. Beyond them is the ramp. Already, there is the Skycycle, the steam-powered rocket ship, cocked toward heaven, in red, white, and blue and with EVEL KNIEVEL spelled in golden letters and the numeral 1 on the tail fin.
“Skycycle,” Grandpa scoffs. “Nothing cycle about it.”
They come to the gate, and the man standing there with a bulging belly and hands full of bills gives their suits a second look. Grandpa hands him a fifty, then drives in, bumping across the field.
“Isn’t this ridiculous?” he asks happily as he parks.
Ahead Jason can see tent tops. People have been camping here all week, partying, drinking, fighting, skinny-dipping in the canyon pools, frightening the citizens, and upsetting the chamber of commerce.
Grandpa waves his hand at the scene. “A lot of this is exactly the sort of thing you’ve got to avoid, now that you’re getting older. Drinking and whatnot. Rowdy nonsense. But you can’t hide yourself away. You’ve got to live in this world, and keep it off you somehow. But”—and here he pats the leather block of scriptures absently, with the heel of his fist—“you ought to have a little fun when you get a chance. This ought to be fun, don’t you think?”
“I guess.”
“You guess.”
Jason blushes. He feels bashful before this strange day.
They take off their coats and ties, leave them folded on the seat, and head into the crowd. Grandpa veers toward the ramp in a stiff trot, winding past guys in trucker hats and cowboy boots, long-haired kids throwing Frisbees. The crowd tightens as they draw closer, but Grandpa slips through, making a way, until they are about thirty yards from the ramp. The scene looks like something out of Billy Jack—shirtless men with long hair and beards, blurry tattoos on their forearms; women in cutoffs with wild hair; the smell of cigarettes and marijuana. It’s like nothing Jason has ever seen around here, where men wear their hair short and women wear their skirts long and most people think Richard Nixon got a raw deal. A couple of guys wearing leather vests carry girls on their shoulders, girls in tank tops without bras, and Jason studies the shift and jiggle inside those shirts. Someone calls, “Fuckin’-A!” and Jason feels embarrassed for Grandpa, imagining that he has not experienced such worldliness or that he may feel Jason has not, and Jason worries that his grandfather might regret bringing him here, might change his mind, but then the noise of a helicopter rises, a growing thwuk and drone, and a great cheer bursts forth, and it’s too late to change anything because it’s happening.
The copter tilts and drops toward the open desert on the other side of the satellite truck. TV cameras scan the crowd with their gleaming eyes. The marching band, in two shades of blue, blasts away as the copter settles, a skirt of dust billowing. Then he emerges: Evel Knievel, flanked by two frowning men in mirrored sunglasses and cowboy hats. All attention and energy fly to him, like metal shavings to a magnet. He passes along the outer edge of the crowd, dressed like anyone at the co-op on a Saturday—jeans, snap-button shirt, cowboy boots—but for a cane with a silver knob. He grasps the shaft and holds it up and the silver ball burns in the sun, channeling a pillar of light. The crowd cheers, shouts his name, and Evel Knievel and his entourage enter the trailer. The cheers fade, the band lurches to a stop.
“Well,” Grandpa says. “There he is.”
Jason can’t stand the waiting but he doesn’t want it to end. He feels a ludicrous faith, a sense that his future will be more like this day than anything he has experienced—all the holy Sabbaths, the constant prayer, milking and feeding, thresher and combine. The smell of cow shit rising from everything, all the time, even him, announcing his association with the lowest things. He wants to screw down this moment, keep it in front of him. The clamor, the humid press of bodies, the vault of pale sky, and the humming behind it all, the idling motor, gentle but irrevocable, the thing behind the thing, the thing behind everything, the thing that brings us what we get.
The bikers holler and pump their fists to the Rolling Stones, “Under My Thumb” now leaking from the speakers on the TV truck. The crowd is vulgar and filthy and unspeakably beautiful. In front of them, a man in worn jeans sways to the music. His shoulder-length hair is the color of hay, the hair of Jesus Christ, and he wears a red, white, and blue headband. A cigarette dangles from his lips, goes tight as he drags, dangles again. A brown-haired girl beside him in cutoffs and a threadbare Boise State T-shirt cranes her head. She says, “Is he gonna come out or what?” and the entranced hippie says, “Are you gonna shut the fuck up or what?” and Grandpa shifts back and forth, one foot to the other, irritated.
All this waiting, all this pressure. The Sabbath feel of stalled time. And then the trailer door bangs open, and Evel Knievel hops down, glorious in the white jumpsuit with red and blue bands of stars crossing his chest like bandoliers. White boots. Tall Elvis collar open at the neck, and swooping golden-brown hair. He waves again with the cane, and plunges toward the crowd, which parts before him. The loudspeaker narrates, crackling. He seems to float, though his gait is hitched. He passes just yards from Jason and Grandpa, and they feel the backward swell of bodies. Evel Knievel comes so close Jason can see the lines on his face and his quartzite stare, and his scanning eyes stop on Jason’s. He thrusts the cane skyward, mouths something Jason cannot make out, and the gesture seems meant for him.
Evel Knievel comes closer, and Jason reaches toward him, as those around him are reaching. He waits for him to reach back, to put his hand into the striving mass of worshipping hands and to grab Jason’s one hand.
Which Evel Knievel does.
A quick grasp, one shake. The bones in Evel Knievel’s hand feel like a bundle of green branches. His eyes find Jason’s again—“Thanks for coming, buddy”—and glide away. A shout goes up: “Good luck, Evel,” and he says without turning, “It’s in God’s hands now.”
He strides into the cleared space by the ramp. The helicopter rises, dangling a basket to Evel, his hands out to the crowd as though he is blessing them. He sits in the basket and ascends, rising to the rocket ship on the ramp. Information flies, static, from the speakers. Grandpa squeezes Jason’s shoulder and Jason sees his face is wild, reverent, as he nods toward the Skycycle. Don’t miss abit of it. The rocket reminds Jason of something from The Jetsons but cooler, finned in the rear and sleekly pointed, with the name huge on the sides and colorful ads painted around it: Mack Trucks, Chuckles candy. Evel flashes a thumbs-up from the cockpit. The crew retreats, and the Skycycle sits alone. A hushed pause, and then a revving, a sharp whine rising and rising, pressure building to a flash—the Skycycle bursts up the ramp and off, rotating gracefully, screwing itself into the atmosphere. Jason feels pinned to the earth, and his stomach fills with slither. It is like prayer, like hope, and he’ll make it, of course he will. Jason can see that in the arc of the rocket. It reigns over the earth and all its servants, a brilliant bullet aimed for the heart of the desert sky.
Something pops from the back of the Skycycle. What is it? The chute? A change ripples through the air. A pinprick in the pressure. The rocket slows, slows, and a white parachute drags behind it.
“Oh, my word,” Grandpa says. “For heaven’s sake.”
The rocket noses downward, drifting now toward the bottom of the canyon like a bit of burst cattail above a canal. Jason feels slapped, flattened. People race to the canyon rim, but Grandpa and Jason stay back. An eddy of body odor and cigarette smoke swirls around them. Jason fears he might cry.
Later, they drive in silence for a long time. No stories. The day has reoriented itself earthward, toward the dull and the disappointing. The truck smells like dirt. Gray dust films Jason’s shoes and socks. He stares at the delicate hem of rust lining the heater vents.
As they approach Wendell, Grandpa chuckles.
“That’ll be good for him,” he says. “Starting to believe his own bullshit.”
January 13, 1975 SHORT CREEK, ARIZONA
Ruth brushes Loretta’s hair like she’s haltering a horse, yank, yank, hold. Loretta stiffens against each pull. In the dim, round mirror above the dresser, Loretta watches Ruth’s face, the same determined, resigned look as always. Her dough-kneading face. A weak scent of paint lingers, and from downstairs comes the smell of Ruth’s carob-and-date sheet cakes. Loretta’s eyes drift downward, and then her head drifts downward, and Ruth places one palm firmly over each ear and sets Loretta’s head roughly back in position. She divides Loretta’s hair neatly, an ivory line along the scalp, and begins braiding, her mouth tightened into an insistent little fist.
“I think it’s prettier long,” Loretta says, because she cannot help herself.
Ruth turns a braid tightly against Loretta’s scalp.
“It is a joyous day, Aunt Loretta,” she says, “but a sacred one as well. It is important to remain modest before the Lord.”
Something tries to rise from Loretta’s stomach. Aunt Loretta. This is what the children will call her.
