It was hard. It was humbling and hard, America, and don’t you forget it. We swallowed that down, and we swallowed everything else in those days. The toy people pulled their deals, and that was the hardest, because we were rolling in the toy money then — the wind-up racer, the action figures, the bicycles with the Evel Knievel nameplates, the Evel Knievel cane. On and on and on, little idols of the god in every house, and every one of them sending us the purest American love there is: the dollar. But now we were losing that love. Our agent told us to lie low for a while, let it blow over, but no: we called a press conference and apologized to the judge — wink! — for turning his courtroom into a joke, if that’s what he thought we had done, and pledged to take it more seriously from then on.
Winked at the press boys, and they howled. Like broads, the newspaper boys. Give ’em a wink and a story and they’ll drop right to the floor.
Got home after all this and what did we find? On the gate — that marvelous fucking gate, the scrollwork, that beautiful Butte artistry — was a little handwritten sign: SEE THE SON OF EVIL KNIEVEL JUMP. TWENTY-FIVE CENTS.
Eleven years old, he was. Little fucker. Couldn’t even spell the old man’s name right.
DRIVE
October 4, 1975 GOODING, IDAHO
Loretta is awake, lying on the makeshift pallet behind the blankets tacked up in the basement, light filtering through the shelved jars of peaches and tomatoes, when Ruth taps down the stairs and calls, “Good morning, Sister.” She waits for Loretta to answer before going back upstairs. Loretta sits up. Her insides coil and uncoil. She has been awake for hours.
She brushes her teeth at the deep washbasin and washes her face and hands with the blackened bar of industrial soap, and puts on her dress. She can’t stop thinking about Bradshaw up there, at the table already, probably, grinning and grinning. Here. Here to help with the rabbit drive. Here to help set up Zion’s Harvest in its new home. Here in the constantly watching world. He will sit there, the truth of him and her showing in her face.
She comes into the kitchen, and there he is, cheeks stuffed, eyes upon her. The sight of him fills her with sick thrill. Outside, framed in the window above the sink, Dean argues loudly with a man standing in front of a TV news van — KMVT-11, “Your Local News Leader.” Other pickups and vans have parked in the driveway as well, and groups of men are moving around out there. Strangers. Dean has said this will be a way of establishing themselves in the community. A way of distinguishing himself from his brother.
“Like a welcome-home party,” he said.
• • •
Jason clomps across the yard in his rubber boots, and goes into the tank room of the milking barn. Behind a swinging door, he sees his dad at work between the chutes, aiming the sharp, hissing stream of a hose at a shit-splattered udder. The suck and gasp of the machinery obliterates all other sound, and milky air fills his sinuses. At the sink, behind the gleaming silver tank, he fills the bottles, attaches the large red nipples, and loads the wire carrier. Heading for the calf pen, dull with weariness, he looks at the edges of his boots, crusted with bits of grassy manure and half-digested bits of hay, and thinks of the day when he will sleep as late as he wants to and wake to sweet-smelling air.
It sucks, the milking, but it sucks less than seminary. Today is Saturday, but Jason has returned to morning chores full-time ever since the day he and Loretta skipped seminary. That night, Ruth called his mom and said they didn’t think Loretta would be going anymore, because the other kids made her feel out of place. “I’ll bet they did,” Jason’s mom said drily when relating the conversation over dinner, and no one else commented. Jason finds it infuriating that no one else seems to think about Loretta. About what they need to do for her. All his mom and dad can consider is their embarrassment.
So he’d stopped going to seminary. A minor insurrection, but one that his parents fought every day, in indirect ways. He could feel them eyeing him, wary, trying to get a read on the best way to overcome this and set him back on the path. When he had first told his parents he wouldn’t go to seminary anymore, his father had stopped and blinked, as if he hadn’t understood the words, and then he said, “That’s ridiculous.”
Still, now, day after day, even this morning as he upends the bottles in the wire holders, watching the calves slurp hungrily at the thick red nipples, Jason clings to this: Still think it’s ridiculous, Dad? Over there, Dean is getting ready to have his bunny bash. The rabbit drive. Talk about ridiculous. Talk about ridicule. It’s been in all the papers, on the TV news. The Humane Society has raised hell about it. Ridiculous.
Jason is retrieving the empty bottles when his father comes crunching up in his canvas jacket and red-and-black Scotch cap. He is unshaven, and the gray on his hollow cheeks makes him look weak. Sick, even. Something in him has crumbled lately, and Jason holds this against him.
“Need to replace those nipples yet?” Dad asks.
“Nope.”
“You keeping that white-faced bully out of the others’ milk?”
“Yep.”
Jason can feel his father struggling for a way in, and he is glad not to help. From the far back of the milking barn, across the pasture and the patch of rocky desert, he sees trucks and motorcycles gathering in the driveway of Grandpa’s house. Dean’s house. The yard light is on, and Dean and a few other men are unloading rolls of orange temporary fencing from the back of a half-ton truck. A few hundred yards down the road, on the other side of the house, two VW vans sit along the shoulder, and people mill about in the barrow pit. Jason knows from the morning paper that some bunny huggers from Sun Valley have planned a protest.
Jason says, “You going over?”
“Naw. I’ll pass.”
“I’m going.”
Dad nods. Takes off his hat and scratches furiously at his scalp. “There’s no way this can do anybody any good.”
Jason starts gathering the rest of the empties.
“You can come to think that doing what you want to do and ignoring everybody else is the right thing to do,” his dad says. “The honorable thing. Because everybody else is dumb or dishonest or mistaken or something. That’s what your uncle thinks — that everyone is just wrong about everything, and the only thing to do is ignore them. Maybe it is, sometimes. But usually the honorable thing to do is think about others. To consider others, and the way your actions might affect them.”
“Affect us, you mean.”
“I mean everybody. Us, too, but everybody. People all over the country are going to know about this. And when those reporters start writing about it, they might get more interested in your uncle and what’s going on over there. And then…”
“Then what?”
“Then the story gets all that much better.” He coughs. “Worse.”
The sun is all the way up now, air warming. They both know that whatever is happening with the story at Dean’s is already happening. It’s burning like a fire. Since Dean taped up Ruth’s handwritten signs on flag stationery at the co-op — JACKRABBIT DRIVE! YOU BRING A CLUB, WE’LL SUPPLY THE FOOD! — it has energized the town. Crop prices are lousy, the football team is losing, and people have fixed upon the bash. Kids talk about it at school. Some of the popular thugs are for it. Some object on the grounds that it is redneck and uncool. Certain farmers — the angry ones, the political ones — wrote letters to the editor of the Gooding County Leader, anticipating the criticism that would follow the event. “If New Yorkers don’t want us to harvest these pests, maybe they’d like to take them home to Central Park.”