Dean is up on one elbow, looking down at her. She is flat on her back, arms at her sides, and he smiles at her in a way that she has to admit is tender, loving, genuine seeming, and under these covers the heat rolls off him like a milk cow on a cold day, steaming. He puts his hand between her legs and presses lightly as he leans to kiss her on the mouth. The hairs in his beard prickle her face. He kisses her once, twice, three times, and his erection, the source of all that heat, presses against her leg, and his fingers move inside the slit in her garments, and then slide up and down, up and down, and then he withdraws his hand and reaches for the small tub of petroleum jelly that Ruth had brought her, saying only, “Sometimes this helps,” and now he’s talking about “heavenly comfort” and how this is one of God’s true blessings for the righteous. Loretta tries not to hear, to concentrate only on the body. She is making a task of this. A chore. Dean gently moves her legs apart, widening her, and he slips on top, still in his garment, his penis out of the slit now, she feels it bump and prod, and Dean reaches down, helping it seek, and she feels the bit of slick he has rubbed onto it, and it occurs to her how much larger Dean is than she is, how much taller and wider as a human animal, how much more of a monkey or a goat he is, how his feet hang nearly off the bed and how his chest, with the bony, flaring rib cage, is on her face now, how it is almost as if he were pressing her into silence with his chest, and he moves in, and it doesn’t feel too bad, not as painful as she thought it might, just a tightness, a fullness, and Dean begins to move and gasp and lurch and pant — heaving himself at her like an animal, teeth and hair, skin and bones and hunger, and she doesn’t like it, she doesn’t like it at all. But she is in it, and she knows that when you are in it, whatever it is, there is no point in wishing otherwise, and so she tries to let her mind go somewhere but she can’t make it go anywhere, this is all there is right now, and then it is done, Dean tenses and flexes all over, his face contorts grotesquely, as though it were being smeared around by an invisible hand. It didn’t take anywhere close to an hour.
Afterward, Dean pulls back the sheet and looks down at her, at himself.
Loretta knows what he is doing, and says, “Mine broke when I was riding a horse.”
Later, after Dean is snoring, she goes to the bathroom down the hall and takes the latest folded-up letter from Bradshaw and the bottle she had hidden, the bottle with the solution of vinegar and ammonia that Tonaya had told her about, back when they were sneaking out together, the thing that always works, Tonaya said. Nothing can survive that shit.
It burned her there, hurt her worse than Dean had done, and she tried to wash away the burning and could not. What if there was a baby she had washed away? How soon did it start? Sitting on the toilet, she unfolded the letter.
Lorry honey I cant wait for this part of things to be over, but I do want you to know it is working out good. Real good. Hang in there and we will be set. More than you can imagine. D trusts me more every day. My thoughts are about you. I love you lorry, and you need to just wait for me now, just give me time, and soon it will all be over and we can go wherever you want to.
She tears the letter into tiny pieces and drops them into the toilet between her legs. She wonders exactly what he is doing, but has enough of an idea: taking money from Dean. She hopes he’s being careful, because Dean keeps exact track. He talks to her, on his nights with her up until now, of the Council of Elders and their demands, and of how much they want, and of how much he will give them, and of how large this difference is growing, how he will turn over $2,291.66 for January; $1,891.34 for February; $1,996.12 for March—Not a cent more, little sister, I swear it—because that is half of his earnings, and because he has decided that the Law of Consecration is being abused by the Elders. That is half, little sister. How can you say that is not a generous tithe? And yet she knows the Council of Elders does not deem it so.
She has not said anything to Bradshaw about the gold. Dean talks about it, tells her about it, boasts about the precision of one-ounce golden eagles — the fifty-dollar coins — and their solid, righteous weight. He tells her everything about them, except where they are. She wants to take it from him. She wants him not to have it, and she wants to be the reason.
She flushes the toilet. It wasn’t so horrible. Nothing ever is.
EVEL KNIEVEL ADDRESSES AN ADORING NATION
What you need is a way in. In every circumstance, in every situation: a way in. The way in is like the ramp, like the lever, like the cocked hammer of a pistol. It is the way you turn an ordinary thing into an extraordinary thing.
The way in is always the same. You can spend years misunderstanding this, thinking that you have to find the way in for each new scenario, when it’s always the same: the way in is to act as if you’re already in.
To believe it before it’s true.
It’s like getting laid, America. The best way to do it is to act as if you already know — despite whatever the broad herself may think — that it’s inevitable, that’s it’s happening, that there’s no going back. You know she’s gonna do it before she does. You don’t seduce. You make it clear that it is completely unnecessary to seduce. That the fucking to come is not in question.
So the years roll along, and we perform our amazing feats, our miracles, and pretty soon the Grand Canyon dream is not so crazy. Is not such wild talk. And then there’s a New York promoter getting on board. A Jew bastard naturally. But he’s on board, and he thinks he can make it happen, and he starts looking into it, and he finds out that the government — your government, America — will not allow such a thing because it owns the land on the canyon rims or some shit, and so the New York promoter, the flesh peddler, keeps after it, won’t give up, and he finds another spot: the Snake River Canyon, right outside Twin Falls, Idaho. There’s a farmer there who’ll lease the land for the ramp and for the crowds. There’ll be some permits to get, some locals to persuade, some dicks to suck, but the promoter is good at that, and pretty soon we’re set to go.
The way in was money. He was gonna pay us $25,000 plus some of the gate. He had a plan to show the thing live in movie theaters, sell tickets all across the land. A man jumps a canyon! A mortal defies physics! And yet, that was not the way in. Money was the way in. Money — the notion of it, the idea of it, the magnetic force of it.