“Hear what about them?” she asks.
“I thought I heard your folks had some… health problems. Or passed away?”
“You did?”
“Maybe I’m remembering wrong.”
“They’re still hanging around. I think.”
“Oh. Good.”
She looks over at him. Roseate patches bloom on his cheeks and ears, complementing that auburn scruff of hair. His nerves tremble through the whole car. She imagines they are two ordinary teenagers. Shy and nervous and young. Children. He turns to her, and flushes even more deeply to find her looking at him. To be liked in this way, to be buzzed by such naïve, clean interest, feels pure. She thinks he will be a handsome man, this boy, when he loses his flush and downy cheeks, when he hardens a bit, but she cannot imagine him ever being less than simple and readable, and this morning that feels like the best quality a person could have.
“What?” he asks.
“Nothing,” she says.
He pauses. “I guess I somehow got the idea that your folks had died, and that was why you live with Dean and Ruth.”
Instantly, it’s back — the irritation, the self-consciousness. She tells him the story, the lie, tersely, bites it off. Her father’s business had failed in Cedar City, and her mother’s Crohn’s disease left her in bed most days, and there was just no money in the house.
“Mom and Dad just needed a little relief,” she says. “That’s all that was.”
“Weird,” he says.
“What’s weird about it?”
“Nothing. I mean — nothing.”
He drives, clearly struggling to come up with something to say. Telling the lie about her parents reminded her of the truth about her parents — that they gave her to Dean. Gave her to Dean, and when she stopped speaking to them, in church on Sundays or in passing around Short Creek — they stopped, too. Like they didn’t care about her any more than she cared about them. Which made her care.
Jason finally says, “Ready for another thrilling morning of Brother Kershaw’s moral tales and lessons?”
“I don’t know.”
And then he sort of gulps, or gathers himself, and blurts, “Are you pissed off at Dean for making you go?”
Out the window, she watches the landscape blurring past: lava rock, sagebrush, fence posts, haystacks, fallow, harvested fields. Fat drops of rain strike the windshield like pellets. The question feels more important than it is. The rain begins splattering loudly, a gust rustles the trees clustering a farmhouse, and she says, “Yeah.”
What will he say to that?
“Yeah, I hate it, too. I actually told my parents I wasn’t going to go anymore. Until they dragged you into it.”
She teases him, as Bradshaw might: “What an outlaw.”
That night Dean stands at the back of the yard and looks into the fields while Loretta plays tag with the children, sprinting around the lilac bush that sits beside the laundry line.
“Little sister!” Dean barks urgently. “Run into the office and get my pistol from the bottom drawer of the desk. It’s behind the lockbox.”
A crowd of jackrabbits is dancing in the fields — leaping, turning, flying, it seems like dozens of them, dark smears on the darkening land. Loretta doesn’t move at first; Dean has never asked her to go into his desk, into any of his things. He has always been so secretive about them.
“Hurry, Loretta!”
She runs inside, past Ruth at the sink, and into the small room at the top of the basement stairs where Dean has jammed his desk. She opens the bottom drawer, and there, behind a sheaf of papers in folders, is a canvas bag, top bunched downward, and a metal box, and behind them, at the back of the drawer, is Dean’s revolver.
Loretta reaches into the drawer, grabs the bag, and lifts it. Just an inch or so. It is heavy. Heavier than it looks. Heavy enough to be just one thing. She looks in and sees coins — maybe thirty or forty of the fifty-dollar golden eagles — but not the nuggets. Not the Sutter Creek gold. Hadn’t he told her he was leaving it in Short Creek?
“Loretta!”
Her blood tingles, her mind circles. She carries the pistol and the worn, heavy box of bullets out to Dean. He stands there shooting until dark, reloading four times, while Loretta pretends to watch from behind him, trying all the while to shut down the racing of her body, and she doesn’t realize that Dean is missing every shot, that he doesn’t hit a single creature, until he lets out a strangled bark of frustration and hurls the gun into the blackening desert.
Friday
Over breakfast, Jason’s mother questions him about Loretta. What has she said about living with Dean? Has she mentioned whether they’re planning to stay? Or what they’re up to over there? Will they be going back to Short Creek anytime soon?
The interrogation follows four days of silence from his parents about Dean and Grandpa’s place. The one time Jason tried to ask about it, his father brusquely replied, “I don’t know what they’re up to over there, son,” and when Jason had started to say something more, his dad interrupted angrily, “What did I just say, Jason?”
“So now we’re talking about it?” Jason says to his mother.
Her pressed lips go white. Her forbearance face. She turns her back to him, stands at the sink, and lets the water run full blast. She hisses, “Your uncle is making a spectacle of himself!”
Jason almost says, You’re the one that has me taking her to seminary. But he doesn’t.
• • •
On the way to pick up Loretta, Jason tries to figure out what to put into the new Sanyo eight-track deck slung under the dashboard. He settles on Sweet. “Fox on the Run.” Perfect, he thinks, and yet within one minute she asks him if they can listen to something else, and tunes in the country station. “Rhinestone Cowboy” is playing, and Jason groans. “I cannot listen to this music.”
She reaches out and turns up the volume, and belts out, “‘There’ll be a load of compromisin’ / On the road to my horizon…’”
“Noooooo,” he cries, snapping off the dial. She laughs, alert and alive for the first time all week. It comes off her like a charge, and Jason reads it as something shared between them. Love’s little seedling.
“I don’t think I can stand one more minute of Brother Kershaw,” he says.
“So let’s not go.”
So simple. So amazing.
“Go where instead?” he asks.
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
He knows just where. “I’ll take you to Twin Falls,” he says. “Show you Evel Knievel’s ramp.”
She shrugs. Says okay. She is the most beautiful human being Jason has ever seen, lit up with her love for him. Right? The greening, luscious seedling of love? Her hair is pulled back, her wet brown eyes glow as they scan the desert. She needs saving, and it has been arranged for him to save her, but how? It must be what she wants, too, though this thought is buried so deep in Jason’s assumptions that he doesn’t actually think it. It is simply what occurs, it is simply what men do: rescue women. Superman, Spider-Man, Batman — rescue women. John Wayne rescues women and so does Clint Eastwood. On TV, the guys on Emergency! and Baretta and Kojak and The Rockford Files all rescue women. It’s their job.
For the half hour it takes to drive to Twin Falls, Jason tells her about Evel Knievel. He describes his jumps, details the bones he has broken and at which stadiums, the numbers of buses and cars he has surmounted, his outfits, his retirements and his coming-out-of-retirements. Jason tells her of his own ramp building and driveway jumps — though he does not mention his posters or Stunt Cycle action figure. When they reach Twin Falls and cross the Perrine Bridge into town, the sun is up but the canyon remains doused in shadow. They pull off at the overlook and Jason points out the ramp, a sloped hill of dirt a quarter mile away on the canyon rim.