“Great,” he says, sarcastically. “That’ll be super cool.”
“I don’t know,” she says. “They’re just a bunch of stupid rodents. Gotta get rid of ’em somehow. Dean says they ate up about half the crops.”
A revelation sprints across Jason’s mind, illuminated by her defensiveness: She would be having sex with Dean, of course. She would be — What? Every other night? On some kind of schedule? — welcoming Dean into her room. His creepy uncle would climb on and get to it, grunting and farting, probably, and covered with moles and bristly hairs. Holy goddamn shit. Jason thinks he will puke. She would hate Dean, of course. She must. Jason could think of her only that way. But even so, she would find herself aligned with him against others.
Loretta reaches over and turns on the radio. Jason notices her knuckles are large and red for such trim, tapered fingers. Like she pops them too much. He welcomes every unflattering detail. The radio is set at his dad’s AM country station, KART. They listen to that awful music—“Grandma’s Feather Bed,” “Rhinestone Cowboy,” the hideous sound track to his life — all the way to town, while she hums along.
• • •
At lunch, Jason doesn’t say anything to Boyd about Loretta, and Boyd doesn’t ask. Boyd says he’s thinking about seeing if his mom would let him borrow her car to drive to South Dakota for a demonstration in support of Jonathan Raincounter.
“Dude’s getting hosed,” Boyd says.
“Who’s he again?”
“Man, you have got to pay some goddamn attention.”
Boyd reminds him: Jonathan Raincounter was an Oglala Sioux, unjustly imprisoned for shooting two FBI agents. Most people Jason knows take a different view of the case than Boyd; most people he knows see the case — Indians shooting FBI agents! — as one more sign that they have entered the last days, that the sinful world is tinder dry and ready to burn with apocalyptic fire, that the approach to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ is nigh, and that the righteous will soon be heaved upward by the Lord, for that reason and many others, including the following:
Nudity and sex talk in movies
Filthy rock and roll
Women’s lib
The Equal Rights Amendment
Tight blue jeans
Rampant sexual perversion and immorality
Unshaven men with long hair
Roe v. Wade
The fall of Saigon
Jackrabbits eating farmers out of house and home
Queers and hippies marching in the streets of the cities
Liberals attacking the family
The end of the gold standard
Drugs
Oil shock
Creeping federalism
Communists
It is the entire context for Jason’s people. Their atmosphere. They are the Lord’s chosen, saved for the last days, when wickedness will overrun the planet until Christ returns and cleanses the earth for a millennium — a thousand years of fire — followed by the three-tiered afterlife, in descending order of glory. It is coming, it is nearer every day, it is all around them.
What Jason always wonders is: If we’re living in the last days, why are we living like this? School, work, church, chores, bills, striving, arguments, chastity, oil changes, milking cows, cutting hay? He wants to live like time is running out. Like the hippies at the Snake River Canyon. Like Evel Knievel. Like driving to South Dakota to raise forbidden hell. Like falling in love with his uncle’s second wife. Like precious time is really, actually running out instead of plodding along forever.
“What do you think you can you do about it?” Jason asks.
“Not a thing.”
“Then why go?”
“Fun. Adventure. Freedom. Just to be on the right side of things for once.” He waves his fork around, a gesture that encompasses not just the cafeteria, with its folding tables in the space between the auditorium seating and the stage, but their entire universe. “This place. The fucking Indian jokes. The retarded politics. I mean, people here still like Nixon, man.”
Jason’s parents still like Nixon. A couple of popular thugs walk past in their letterman’s jackets, red felt with black leather sleeves. One of them says, “What are you staring at, Tonto?”
Boyd says, “Nothing, George,” and flips them off.
Then he says, “I need to go. I need to get out of here. At least practice getting out of here.”
“Maybe I could go with you.”
Boyd laughs. “That would be hilarious. Boy Scout gone wrong. Break your parents’ hearts.”
“Screw off.”
“Plus,” Boyd says. “The thing about South Dakota. I think I might find my dad there.”
“What makes you think that?”
Boyd shrugs.
“Karma. Kismet. Whatever it is. Indian intuition.” He chews, watching his plate. “Day’s gonna come when we get back what’s ours. I find my dad, and we start working in tandem on this — whoa. You Europeans aren’t going to know what hit you.”
“Come on. You’re about as much an Indian as I am.”
Boyd stops. He stares at the table, bugs his eyes in frustration.
“You know, dumbass,” he says. “Everybody thinks the problem, the race thing, is the guy who hollers some shitty thing, calls you an Injun, burns a cross, whatever.”
“That guy’s not the problem?”
“That guy is a problem. But the problem is guys like you. The problem is guys who want to tell you there’s no problem. Guys who want to tell you to just calm down.”
“Calm down.”
Boyd is the only Indian Jason knows, and though there are a couple of Mexican kids in school, he really knows only white people, and he cannot imagine why Boyd doesn’t simply let all this go. Jason would say all people are created equal and that by writing a three-page paper on To Kill a Mockingbird, he has done his part.
“The problem,” Boyd says, “is dumbasses like you.”
And then he lets it drop. He turns his irritation to his mother, who he is convinced is not telling him the truth about his father.
All Boyd knows about his father is that he is an Indian. Years earlier, his mom told him his dad was Shoshone, but once he really started asking questions, she said maybe he had just been from Shoshone, the town and not the tribe. All she knew, he’d been living around Boise about seventeen years earlier, a real charmer, tall with white, white teeth and scarred-up hands. “She says last she heard he was working ranches and rodeos in Montana and Wyoming, but that was ten years ago. He could be anywhere, she says. Even dead — she wouldn’t be surprised.”
“You probably ought to just let it go.”
“Easy for you to say. You’ve got a father.”
“You can have him. He’s all yours.”
“Easy for you to say.”
Thursday
In the car again, on the way back to church, Jason says, “I was sure sorry to hear about your parents.”
Loretta is confused: heard what about them? She thinks it through — what the story is, who’s been told what.