Now, tonight, Bradshaw turns onto a dirt road and guns it, fishtailing the Nova into the desert. They drive up into a bump of low hills where he will find a reason to stop again. It’s past midnight, almost one, Loretta guesses, and she remembers that tomorrow is Fast Sunday, the first Sunday of the month, and she has forgotten to stash something to eat.
“There’s probably nothing open now, is there?” she asks.
“Open for what?”
“Some food. Anything. Tomorrow’s Fast Sunday.”
“Tomorrow’s what Sunday?”
Does Bradshaw not know what Fast Sunday is? The day of fasting? He’s lived down here all his life.
“Fast Sunday. No eating. I get headaches if I don’t sneak something.”
Bradshaw brays laughter. “A day of no eating. You Mormons. I swear.”
• • •
You Mormons. Loretta doesn’t think of herself — of her family, of Short Creek — as Mormon, exactly, although everyone here thinks of themselves as the only true Mormons. In her mind, Mormons were what they were before they came here seven years ago. Mormons were what they were when they lived in Cedar City, went to the church on Main Street, the tan-brick wardhouse on a street with ordinary homes and a grocery store and a gas station. Mormons, she thinks, live in the real world, or at least closer to it. They had a television back then, and a radio in the kitchen. Her mother listened to country music. They dressed like real people, like worldly people — though, she knows, they were farmier and more country than Salt Lake City Mormons, the rich, blond Mormons, the ones you can barely tell are even Mormons at all. Mormons, she thinks, marry one person at a time.
They came here when she turned eight — the age for her baptism. Her father had grown up in Short Creek, on the desert border between Utah and Arizona, among the polygamists and fundamentalists, but he had left as a teenager, a rebellious boy encouraged by the prophet to leave. They had lived in Cedar and Loretta’s parents raised eight children, and he worked fixing cars at the town’s auto dealership. Loretta came late and unexpected, as her father had begun turning back toward the faith he had departed and hardening against the soft ways of the mainstream church. When it came time to baptize Loretta, he found he could not do so. They moved back to The Crick — where his brothers lived, where his parents had died. You cannot exactly join this church, Loretta knows; you cannot simply show up and convert to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but because of his family and his history and his willingness to submit, her father was allowed to return, half-caste. Still, all these years later, they are not yet fully in the United Order — the inner circle of the most righteous, those living in the Principle of plural marriage — and yet are allowed to hope, to strive, probationary.
She remembers the spring night her father told them they were returning. They sat around the small kitchen table, the smell of cut grass pungent through the screen door. A Pyrex dish of hamburger casserole, a meaty stew run through with ribbons of noodle and brownish clumps of tomato, sat before them. Her mother wore an ankle-length dress, nothing like she would usually wear. An exhausted pall shadowed her face, and she did not say one word. Loretta’s father, stout and slow, spoke in the deliberate voice that made him seem dumb; his hands were flat on the table beside his plate, grooved in engine black. He answered all of her questions in a tone that made it clear the decision had been made.
“It is for your eternal soul, Loretta, that we do this,” he said. “Even if you can’t see that.”
Loretta’s mother sat twisting her hands, galaxies of red dots spreading across her face and neck. They were both so old, Loretta knew even then — like grandparents. Her father was always wearily heaving himself up and around, always groaning toward the next task, and her mother moved with slow, weary resignation. And now there she was, dressed like a sister wife, dressed the way you would see the Short Creek women dressed when they came to town. Loretta wanted her mother to say something then, to say anything at all.
Loretta has never felt right here. She hates to braid her hair. She hates to sit quietly while the boys run and shout. She does not want to live in one of these strange, huge families, the men orbited by constellations of wives and children. She imagines her future as something like the ads in magazines she has glimpsed in stores, in the hair salon in St. George, those times her mother has let her go. Modern clothing and fast cars and makeup and shining tall buildings that glow at night and cigarettes and cocktails and every forbidden thing. She loved the lipstick ad with the beautiful girl in black jeans lying on the hood of a pink Mustang and smirking into the camera. The name of the lipstick like a password: Tussy.
• • •
Bradshaw’s hand is inside her blouse, crawling over her back. Her mouth is sore, her neck is tired. He puts his hand on the inside of her thigh and squeezes. He takes the skin of her neck in his teeth and bites gently, but not gently enough. “Some night I won’t be able to stop myself,” he says, breath like a furnace. “I can’t be responsible.”
Sometimes he holds her wrists so hard he leaves small bruises. He says he can’t help it, and she believes him because he acts like he can’t help it. She wants to do it, too, although she’s also scared it will create something unstoppable in Bradshaw, and she resents the way he pressures her. Still, she spends her days thinking about coming out into the night with Bradshaw and so she wonders if he is not a savior after all but a demon, since she will keep coming to him even as she wants it less and less.
Finally, they stop. He begins to ask her again about leaving.
“Not yet, baby,” she says. “Not now.” She calls him baby because she wants to calm him, like a baby, and because she knows that this is how people talk to each other out in the world where her future lies.
“Well, holy shit, Lori, what are we waiting for?”
“Money,” she says. “A plan or something.”
“I got your plan right here,” he says, taking her hand and placing it on the stiffening in his jeans.
She yanks it back and says, “I’m serious.”
If they leave now, all she’ll have is him.
• • •
Pink light is etching the hilltops when she returns. It is the coolest time of the day, the very early morning, and she yearns for sleep, wondering how she will steal slumber today. She crosses the lumpy, wormholed backyard and comes to her window. The house, the small Boise Cascade rancher in light blue and navy blue, is silent. Stepping between her mother’s paper flower bushes, she uses a finger to open the slider, hoists herself into the bedroom, and takes up the screen and replaces it. When she turns at last she leaps and gasps, startled by the sight of her father sitting on her bed.
“I had not guessed you to be such a rebellious harlot,” he whispers.
Loretta is frozen, her mind a storm.
“Can you say nothing? Can you not invent some lie?”
She is somehow not terrified, though she can’t think what to say or do. Her father stands. He comes toward her slowly, his sore-hipped walk, rage purpling his face. Her mother watches from the doorway. Loretta could outrun them, overpower them, probably, but she does not. He seizes her ponytail and slaps her on the side of the head. A slow-motion slap. It hurts less than she expects. He is large bellied and top-heavy, ready to tip, and it is this that she seizes on as he swings his arm slowly again and again, each strike hurting less than she expects, each blow breaking through whatever is happening now and making a path forward, she thinks, toward her future. He is speaking to her, growling, grunting, but she doesn’t hear him, and soon she can’t feel his blows. The flesh on the side of her face fills and puffs, rising like dough. He is old, he is old, and she is on her way to somewhere else.