Emphysema. Though he’d never smoked or worked in an asbestos mine.
“Sometimes it happens,” the doctor says. “Not for any reason we can see.”
Jason’s parents want to stay at the hospital, so he heads to Boyd’s for the night. He loves staying over there. There are no rules. Boyd’s mom is gone most of the time, they make a mess and no one complains, and he doesn’t have to worry about his parents coming in and deciding, mid-episode, that Kojak isn’t “appropriate.”
At Boyd’s, they make two frozen pizzas and watch TV while Boyd’s mom works her shift at the Lincoln Inn. Boyd sits cross-legged on his couch — he calls it Indian style, sarcastically. Where Jason is tall and ungainly, Boyd is thick and earthbound, head like a medicine ball, with a wide, flat nose and thick black hair, black eyes, and a shaggy smile that looked sheepish at first and then defiant. At school, the other kids always call him “Chief” or “Little Bear” or something, and he always responds, “Good one, George,” or, “Hilarious once again, George.” Only Jason knows that “George” is Custer, and that in Boyd’s happiest fantasies he rejoins his Indian brothers and sisters and rides down hard on Gooding High School.
Boyd says, “Well, dude, yes or no?”
Yes or No? — their rhetorical game. God: yes or no? Everything is an argument for or against, from Corinne Jensen’s tightly packed H.A.S.H. jeans to Evel Knievel’s failure to clear the canyon.
“That sucks,” he says. “Don’t do that now.”
Boyd shakes his head. “Now is the perfect time.”
Jason stares into the TV screen. Emergency! The paramedics are trying to revive a firefighter who collapsed in a burning building. They are shocking him, trying to restart his heart.
“I say… this one’s a yes,” Boyd says.
Jason stares at him.
“It’s so perfectly bad, man,” Boyd says. “So neat. So precise. So constructed. A godless world would be chaotic. Nonsensical.”
“This is sensical?”
On TV, the firefighter comes coughingly back to life.
“Perversely, perfectly nonsensical. A disease he doesn’t deserve in any way. Dude never smoked, and now this.”
“What a godless world would have,” Jason says, “is no sense of right or wrong. Even if cause and effect were all lined up — right and wrong, that’s the main thing. In a godless world, the evil would triumph, the good would be punished or enslaved or something, or get diseases they don’t deserve. Like Mordor.”
Boyd shakes his head. “You can work those fucking hobbits into anything.”
They watch the final credits in silence, the paramedics frozen in tableaux of bravery, concern, celebration.
“I don’t know,” Boyd says. “God must like to fuck with people. Maybe He finds it funny. Maybe He’s just bored and screwing with us. Think about it: we’re bored. How much more bored must He be?”
A tampon commercial comes on with a bicentennial theme. A gymnast in a spotless leotard vaults beneath waving flags.
“Good God,” Boyd says. “If we were really all that free, would we have to be reminded of it constantly? Do free people go around talking about their freedom all the time? Like, tampons — and freedom. Hamburgers — and freedom. Everything and freedom. Wouldn’t a truly free people not really notice it, because they’re so utterly, amazingly free?”
Boyd’s mom comes home as they watch Saturday Night Live. The screen casts a blue pall, and Boyd’s mother, puffy faced and smoky voiced, begins watching it even as she sets down her purse, bending unsteadily at the waist, her skinny legs straight. Her starchy, flyaway hair, as brown as a rabbit’s, barely covers her scalp, and she curses more than any other woman Jason knows. She flops into the recliner and watches, head drooping. She reeks of something sweet and alcoholic, mixed with cigarette smoke. On TV, Belushi and the others bob around in bee suits. Lines of static run through them, slant the scene momentarily sideways. Her face sinks forward, snaps up. She stands, sways, puts a hand on the recliner arm.
“Oof,” she says. “Boys, I am drunk.”
Boyd laughs, flat, without looking away from the TV. His mother wavers, stares. Jason feels darkly clandestine, graced by the world outside his world.
“Bees,” she says.
May 21, 1975 SHORT CREEK, ARIZONA
The sheet cake sits on the dining room table. Happy Birthday, Aunt Loretta spelled out in raisins. The cake sits there and sits there and sits there, on the long wooden table with bench seats, as in a monastery or penitentiary. Just sits there in its sheet pan, unadorned, on a red-and-white-checked dish towel. Nobody makes a big deal about birthdays here. Every time Loretta walks past it, she wants to run out the door, find Bradshaw, and go.
In his letters, he keeps telling her to wait. He’s getting some things together. A little money. Hang in there, baby. It’ll happen soon.
He doesn’t even know today is her birthday.
That morning, he picked up the orders, and Loretta slipped a note to him as she passed a sack of rice, and he slipped a note to her as they teamed up to haul a box of sundries to his truck. They do this nearly every day — winks, notes, the furtive brush of a finger. This thing Loretta thought would be impossible has turned out to be simple, just as living this life has turned out to be simple. She remembers wondering how she would hide her true self from them, and then discovering how easy it was, because no one ever asked her anything about herself.
So when Dean comes tonight, it will be the same, only more so. It won’t be her with him, it will be her shadow, and it won’t be too bad, it will just be another thing she can get through by shrinking into herself. She is not squeamish about the body.
You are mine lorry and that is not something that any fake polyg marriage can change, baby, and we are going to be together I promise.
She thought about telling Bradshaw, in her letters, that today is her birthday. He does not know, she is sure. He is not a birthday-remembering person, though he likes an elaborate fuss for his own. He thinks it has already happened; he thinks it’s been happening. I love you so much lorry that it don’t count what he does to you. She has not corrected him, because it feels strangely too personal. Now she wishes she had mentioned it, because maybe he’d have done something by now, and they’d be gone.
Since that first night, Dean has been gentle and kind, patient, never mentioning how much he wants her, never coming near her in that way. And every morning and evening when she sees Bradshaw, his eyes gleam and jump, he scuttles and hustles at every task. His hungry look never leaves her. Every time she glances at Bradshaw he is already looking back, and she knows that if one of these men is a demon, it is him.
My lorry you have my word that we are going to make the old son of a B pay. I wake up ever day just to see you.
• • •
Ruth has made chicken tortilla casserole, with chunks of canned tomatoes that Samuel and Benjamin will sequester on their plates, and that Ruth will insist they eat. The casserole sits in a rectangular baking dish at the center of the table, beside a large bowl of green beans and a stack of wheat bread sliced from the loaf. Ice water in a pitcher and no butter for the bread.
Dean sits at the head of the table, with Ruth to his right and Loretta to his left, and the seven kids lined up from there. Bowing his head, Dean laces his hands and props them before himself on his elbows. They all fold their arms and bow. “Our Father in Heaven,” he begins, and Loretta’s mind wanders. He prays several times a day, loves to hear himself pray. Sometimes he will draw it out, add a theme or rebuke a child. And we pray, dear Lord, that you grant Elizabeth the patience to become more obedient. He finishes, and everyone whispers, “Amen,” and the food begins to move around the table.