Uncle Louis smiles and looks around, waiting for people to settle. He and Dean avoid each other’s eyes, touch the silverware, scratch at their jaws, watch their folded hands in their laps. Louis glances past Jason, but his gaze snags on the T-shirt. That mouth. That tongue. He doubles back and stares.
“Son,” he says quietly. “Go put on something appropriate.”
Jason moves his head twice as if preparing to speak, tucking it back both times, and looking into his lap. Aunt Becky reaches with a plate of rolls over his shoulder, sets it with a thump on the table, and pats Jason on the shoulder.
“Let’s go,” she says.
He ducks, mopey, pushes back, and clunks out of the room.
Loretta wants to go with him. To see what his room is like. To see the kinds of clothing he might choose among, the sorts of blankets on his beds, whether he hangs anything on the walls. What does it look like, his worldly life?
Ruth and Aunt Becky talk. Dean and Uncle Louis stare at their food, watching it move from plate to mouth. Jason has put on another T-shirt. On it, a ghostly figure holds a lantern over words and symbols Loretta does not understand: Led Zeppelin. At one point, Jason asks her whether she knows that Evel Knievel is jumping thirteen buses today in London, at Wembley Stadium, his first jump since the Snake River.
Loretta smiles and says, “Who is Evel Knievel?”
Jason gazes at her dumbly. Dean watches him. Ruth watches him. He wears his infatuation like a star-spangled cape.
“It’s on the Wide World of Sports later,” he says.
Dean shakes his head. “We do not watch television.”
The food goes around and around. The children are quiet, sometimes the young ones giggle, stopping at Ruth’s abrupt looks. Dean complains about the jackrabbits. Louis says, “I’m not sure how much more there is to be done about them,” and Dean says, “I am.”
Becky interrupts to ask whether Loretta will be enrolling in high school. Dean, Ruth, and Loretta all stop chewing at once.
“Classes start tomorrow,” Aunt Becky says.
Dean clears his throat, says, “She finished her school already. Tested out. Loretta is one sharp young lady.”
“What about seminary?” Aunt Becky asks.
Seminary. The early-morning church class. Loretta would definitely be going to seminary if she were just a regular Mormon girl, a niece living with family. What about seminary?
Dean and Ruth look at each other. You can sense them gauging, measuring.
Dean clears his throat. “I guess we hadn’t thought of that.”
“She could always ride in with Jason,” Dad says.
Jason alerts like a bird dog. He is so cute, this boy. And he likes her so much.
EVEL KNIEVEL ADDRESSES AN ADORING NATION
Most crashes are blur and smash, a sensory blast that’s far too fast to register. There’s just before, followed by an obliterating sensation, a destruction that somehow does not destroy, and then the adding-up after, the backward tracking, the figuring out, the mending.
But this one, America. Shit. This one made every bit of itself known. We felt it all.
• • •
After the canyon thing, we had no choice. When the world tries to crush you, your only choice is to crush back. So: Wembley Stadium. Thirteen buses. Wide World of Sports. Jolly old England.
Hell must be a whole lot like England. Everything somewhat normal. Somewhat regular. Then you’re talking to someone and they say I saw you on the telly, or You could take the lorry, or Are you ’avin’ a go? whatever it is they say, and it’s just enough to tilt you on your fucking ear, and then it’s just one strange thing after another, driving on the wrong side, kings and queens, everything’s a pudding. We arrived two weeks before the jump, left Linda and the kids at home — the kids, Jesus Christ, you’re not supposed to say this, but the goddamn kids were just killing us then — and we set that town on fire.
We felt somehow angry at the English.
We felt that the English were not appreciative enough of all we had done for them. Everything America has given them. The rotten-toothed, ratty little fuckers.
“You should just say thank you whenever you see an American,” we told our limey publicist, Harry O, while he took our picture loading that pretty Smith & Wesson.38, surrounded by cash on the bed at the Tower Hotel. “You should just say thank you for keeping us from being fucking Germany.”
“Are you ’avin’ a go?” he asked us. ’Avin’ a go.
“Learn your history,” we said.
For fun, we pointed that beaut right at him. Right into the lens.
“You,” he said, “don’t know your history from your arse.”
You will never understand, America, how difficult it was for us not to pull the trigger that afternoon, how heroic the challenge to our being, our honor, our noble whatever the fuck. But we let it go, we let him go, we let him live. That photo ran in every newspaper over there for weeks.
• • •
So, yes, this is after the fuckup at the canyon, the screwing those “engineers” gave us. They worked on that Skycycle for two years, tightened every bolt, honed every spark plug, did all the math, and then fucked up the parachute bay? The parachute bay?
It’s embarrassing, is what it is. We put our good name out there. Put our life up, is all, put it up for sacrifice, for the entertainment of the people. We climbed into that thing, ready to sacrifice all, like a modern gladiator, like Jesus Christ, and those dumb fucks with the wrenches, drinking and eating steak all over southern Idaho on our dime and our name and our grace, screw it up, and no one knows who they are, no one writes newspaper articles about what a sham it all was, a fake, no one spins a million lies in the Los Angeles Times or Rolling Stone about them.
There was only one thing to do. Go bigger.
It was not as hard as you might think.
• • •
At Wembley, every moment of the crash announces itself. Every altered atom in our body, each as it altered, a cracking network of breakage running through us, and every instant palpable.
We land on our right shoulder, pulverizing the humerus and clavicle and driving one large crack through the scapula and two vertebrae, and then all the way down the right side of us by degree, crushing and chipping and fracturing, ribs, sternum, pelvis, femur, tibia, fibula, rolling over onto our back and sliding, sliding across the ramp and then the earth, chipping the spinous process here, the transverse process there, finely cracking the facet joints and the vertebral body but somehow not breaching the spinal canal, America, the magic of the thing, our majesty and life, protected. We roll, grinding across the asphalt covered with turf that buckles and bundles under us, and the breakage spreads to the other side of us, and the bike, that heavy fucker, the Harley XR750, lands on us, breaking our legs in seven places, our old friends fibula, tibia, femur, and when we grind to a stop, we feel like a receptacle of glittering, broken glass, like a deerskin bag full of coins.