“And,” Dad says, “this thing — it’s not just that it looks barbaric. It is barbaric. Just awful. You hate to see anyone enjoy something so bloody.”
He puts his hand on Jason’s shoulder and squeezes.
“Probably the least effective way to get rid of jackrabbits is to stand in the desert with a club and try to beat them all to death,” he says. “It’s just dumb.”
Jason ignores him and walks back toward the barn. He doesn’t want to bash any bunnies himself. But he’s absolutely going.
• • •
Loretta and Samuel set up the Zion’s Harvest table, while Dean and Bradshaw load fencing into a pickup. She has to remember to call him Baker. Zion’s Harvest is a big part of this day. “Two birds with one stone,” Dean said. It was Ruth’s idea; if they’re moving up here, they’ll need the business to grow fast, she reasoned; the rabbit drive is the best marketing opportunity they’ll have. She has a mind for that, Ruth does — for imagining what others need and how you might speak to it. Loretta and Samuel tape the butcher-paper sign to the front of the table, sitting at an angle to the driveway so everyone who drives or walks in will see it: ZION’S HARVEST BULK FOODS.
Ruth is alert to something in the air. Something with Bradshaw. Loretta felt it at breakfast — attention flowing from Bradshaw toward her, and Ruth’s awareness of it. Loretta feels them both watching her this morning. And she feels self-conscious about the drive, about the people who will be here, about the watching that will come with that. The noticing.
“Bring out some of them buckets,” she says to Samuel.
He’s moody, hanging his head because he’s not with the men.
“Go on,” she says. “And bring some flyers, too.”
At breakfast, Bradshaw had been scooping up huge mouthfuls of scrambled eggs. She noticed a dullness in her response to him that she’d never felt before. After months of Ruth’s horsey breakfasts, Loretta found herself more attracted to the steaming plate of eggs than to Bradshaw, sitting there sock footed and sleepy eyed. Loretta had looked eagerly to Ruth and asked, “Eggs?” Ruth approached with a bowl of oatmeal and dropped it in front of her. “Mush,” she said.
People drift into the driveway, clumping in groups and talking, cups steaming. Dean’s hired the auctioneer’s food truck to serve hot drinks and lunches. Everyone carries a baseball bat, or a length of pipe, or a two-by-four.
Bradshaw comes to the Zion’s Harvest table.
“Hidy, there, Lori,” he says, pretending to look at the clipboard where customers can sign up for the newsletter. “Holy Christ, I’m about to leap over this table.”
Loretta can see Ruth in the corner of her eye, pausing at the laundry line.
“Keep your powder dry,” she says. She pays meticulous attention to the sign, to making sure it is straight along the table.
“My powder,” Bradshaw says, “is about to blow.”
He adjusts his cap. Rubs his face. Takes a deep breath. Exhales. His face is strained and splotchy, and even across the table she can smell him — armpit and work clothes and a hint of the chasings of the night.
“I hope you’re ready, girl,” he says. “Because I am ready.”
He is not a demon or an angel or anything of the sort. She sees what he is, because he is surrounded by others just like him — bandy-legged men in fringe-heeled Wranglers and curl-toed boots, caps with their bills tight, some with chew-can rings in the back pocket, spitting, scuffing their heels, boring and dumb. He waits for her to respond to him, and something mean seeps into his look when she doesn’t.
“You are ready,” he says. “You are.”
• • •
Boyd shows up with his mom’s aluminum softball bat, the Tennessee Thumper, tapping it in the palm of his hand as Jason opens the door. He bounces on the balls of his feet like a prizefighter, the frayed bells of his jeans splashing softly around his ankles.
“Time to get some bunnies!” he says, as Jason emerges and they start walking over.
“I’m not getting any bunnies,” Jason says. “I’m a complete spectator.”
“You are such a pussy,” Boyd says happily. “You need to kill something.”
“That’s stupid.”
“Such a pussy.”
Boyd is as happy as Jason has seen him in weeks. He’s been bitchy and bleak since his mother refused to let him drive off to South Dakota for the American Indian Movement protest. Jason hadn’t understood it — hadn’t understood, even remotely, Boyd’s expectation that his mother would let him go — but Boyd took it as a grievous offense. “This fucking place,” Boyd said, disgusted. “This fucking town. This fucking school. This fucking point and time in the history of the fucking world.”
He and Boyd trudge through the days like prison inmates in a chow line. Jason picks him up for school every morning, they bitch and listen to Houses of the Holy, go to classes and meet again at lunch to bitch some more, return to afternoon classes, and meet again after school to bitch some more. Teachers, parents, cops, laws, principals, bishops, uncles, aunts, cousins, girls, cars, store clerks, waitresses, television stars, the bicentennial. Dean and Loretta. This could not be their lives. They could not breathe. Boyd kept saying he was going to the AIM protests anyway. There or somewhere.
“Just go,” Boyd said. “One of these nights, just — gone. And not for two nights, either.”
As they approach Dean’s, Boyd begins swinging his bat before him like a sword.
“Feel my wrath, bunnies!” he calls. “I am the avenging angel! Re-pent your evil ways!”
They walk down the county road. Ahead, Jason sees trucks and cars parked in a line that spills out from the driveway. The animal rights protesters are clustered in the barrow pit across the road. Farther ahead sits a TV van from Twin Falls, and between them stands a stocky, thick-haired man with a microphone interviewing a woman in a patchwork dress and loose, long hair. Jason feels the creep of embarrassment — the prickling crawl up the back of his neck, the flush, the sense that an appraising look is aimed from every direction.
He looks for Loretta but doesn’t see her. The food truck is set up behind the house, beside a picnic table laid with plates of doughnuts and a thermos of hot chocolate. There’s a table with a sign advertising bulk foods, and Samuel — Dean’s oldest — stands behind it, speaking to no one. It is warming up, frost melting off the windows and the metal fencing. You could almost take off your jacket. Men clump in knots of three and four, holding baseball bats, two-by-fours, and nine irons. Out in the desert behind the house — far back, on the other side of the barley field — a group of men stretches out lines of orange temporary fencing, making a chute. Once a fire is set on the far side of the bunchgrass stands, the men on motorcycles will drive the jacks toward the chute, and the chute will lead the jacks into the circle of men and boys. Afterward, supposedly, the jack meat will go to jails and groups that feed the poor.
Boyd spots a man he knows from his mom’s softball team and they banter about who will kill more rabbits. The man holds a small wooden club, a fish-killing club, and he demonstrates how quickly he’ll strike.
“That big ol’ bat’s gonna wear you out, boy,” he says, air-whacking rabbits at a furious pace. “Look at me go. You’ll never keep up.”
“You won’t even knock ’em out with that little thing,” Boyd says, holding the bat before him. “These rabbits are going to know they got hit by me.”
Jason goes for a doughnut. He snags an old-fashioned from the paper plate, and the first bite falls apart like dirt in his mouth. He looks at Grandpa’s house. He’s been inside just twice since he died. Now Jason wants to run in and find it just the way it used to be — same couches and furniture, same drapes, same neat and orderly kitchen with the smell of yesterday’s bread or today’s roast, the big boxy TV in the corner with the doily and the glass figurines on top, the cool dusty smell. He wants to find that vanished place and sleep in it.