Daredevils by Shawn Vestal

Author:Shawn Vestal
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-03-10T12:14:26+00:00

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.

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