At first, the massive pain remains silent. Somewhere out there are ninety thousand people, making noise or making no noise, and then the face of the TV handsome looms in over us, and he thinks we are dead, that’s clear, and whatever else has happened here: Fuck that. Fuck him and his thinking we are dead, because we are not dead.
We make him hold us up, the TV handsome, we make him hold us up before that massive crowd, and we press it all over him, the breakage, the blood in our breath, the blood tasting of iron and Wild Turkey, and when we stand before that crowd, they fall silent, all ninety thousand of them like congregants in a cathedral, and we speak.
• • •
Strange. We can, even now, recall the exact progression of injury from that crash. The tracery of breakage. The order of disassembly. We can recall standing there, being held there, by the TV handsome and someone else, and we can recall the way the sun was dipping down below the top of the stadium, making a series of expanding and contracting orbs of yellow and red against our spotty vision.
But we cannot remember, nor can we believe, what we said that day.
• • •
When we came to in the hospital, there were Linda and the kids. We wondered whether they’d been to the Tower yet, whether they’d seen the room. We wondered what evidence there might have been left in that room. We could not recall the final state of things, just the parade of the days before: the English “birds” as quick as the American ones, the Wild Turkey bottles, the golf clubs on the balcony, the new red Lamborghini parked out front. All that before, then the jump, and now this: family, fatherhood.
Life is stupid, America. But not at all bad.
• • •
This is what they say we said:
“Ladies and gentlemen of this wonderful country. I have to tell you that you are the last people in the world who will see me jump. Because I will never, ever, ever jump again. I’m through.”
SEMINARY, September 8–12, 1975
Monday
On the first morning of his senior year, Jason pulls up to his grandfather’s house in the LeBaron, crackling slowly on the gravel, and honks. It is 6:45 A.M., cool and lilac-gray. Jason’s stomach pulses, a nervous fist clenching in time with his clash of emotions. All night he planned what to say to Loretta. He will ask her a brash, direct question, a question one of the jocks at school, the popular thugs, would ask. Because he has no idea how to talk to girls, and the popular thugs clearly do, and what the popular thugs do is flirt aggressively. Take liberties. Poke, poke, poke. He will ask her a question as if she were just an ordinary teenager: “Aren’t you pissed that Dean’s making you go to seminary?”
Gauge her response. Get a read.
He spent last night poring over his Evel Knievel scrapbook, the cutout quotes from newspapers and magazines, trolling for bravado and inspiration. “You come to a point in your life when you really don’t care what people think about you, you just care what you think about yourself.” “If you fall during your life, it doesn’t matter. You’re never a failure as long as you try to get up.” He built a reservoir of confidence that has leaked away. Loretta needs saving, saving from Dean and all of it, and he feels that it has been arranged for him to save her.
If he could just be the right guy.
As soon as he sees her coming out of the side door, though — dressed like a normal girl, more or less, in jeans and a long-sleeved blouse, hair pulled into a ponytail, features fine and smooth and tensed and lovely — Jason begins cursing himself, knowing that he is not the right guy.
She climbs in. Says hello very, very quietly. Looks off across the desert, showing him the pale pillar of her neck. He backs out of the driveway.
“Excited for your first day of seminary?” he warbles lamely.
“I don’t know,” she says, not turning from the window.
She is less perfectly beautiful this morning. A little drawn and sleepy eyed. Jason notices a strange sloping bulge on the bridge of her delicate nose. Which is fine with him. She is a lot better looking than he is, and anything that closes the gap will be helpful.
They ride without speaking for seven minutes. It is much harder than he guessed it would be, sitting alone with her and trying to think of things to say. Then, as the abandoned TB hospital on the edge of town comes into sight, she releases a deep breath — a lush, weary sound — and says, “I hope it’s not too weird.”
“It won’t be,” Jason says.
He is so wrong. It is too, too weird. They arrive at the church as sunrise blares through the tops of the trees, burnishing rooftops, power lines, and steeples. They park and walk in behind two freshman boys and a girl. The freshmen don’t say a thing, don’t look at them. Jason and Loretta follow them in and down the hallway of cool tile into the seminary classroom. Three rows of folding chairs face a blackboard and a little mini-pulpit on a table. Brother Kershaw stands there, reading from a workbook and chewing a pencil, belly straining outward above skinny legs. On the blackboard, three words are whitely chalked: Remorse, Repentance, Restitution.
“Brother Harder,” Kershaw says. “Good to see you looking bright eyed and bushy tailed.”
And then he looks to Loretta and his jovial energy lurches to a stop. Jason flushes anew, introduces Loretta as Ruth’s niece, who is visiting for a while or maybe longer, and sees the blood is hot in her face, too. Loretta takes the seat in the far back corner by herself, and Jason sits in front of her, not next to anyone, and they each avoid the eyes of the others. There are fifteen other kids there; half the seats are full. A cloud of assumptions fills the room. Loretta sits quietly, filling a notebook page with an expanding spore of tiny squares. Kershaw calls on her just once, after reading a passage from the Pearl of Great Price:
“‘Wherefore teach it unto your children, that all men, everywhere, must repent, or they can in nowise inherit the kingdom of God, for no unclean thing can dwell there, or dwell in his presence.’ Why must all men repent?” Kershaw asks. “Loretta?”
She says, in a hushed, glorious voice, “I don’t know.”
Afterward, she takes the LeBaron back home. Jason catches a ride to school with Ben Jenkins and Jed Story. The two talk football. Ben’s a fullback and linebacker, and Jed plays wide receiver, and they look like variations on a theme: wide-legged jeans, short-sleeved terry-cloth shirts, helmety haircuts parted down the middle and feathered. They tune in the rock station from Twin Falls, Z103 FM, blasting “Ballroom Blitz.”
Jason is happy to be left out of their conversation. But as they pull into the high school parking lot, Ben says, “Hey, Harder,” with the sneer that lets him know he’s in for it.
“What?”
“Your cousin’s hot.”
Jed snorts.
“She’s not my cousin.”
“What is she?”
“My aunt’s niece.”
Jed says, “I think that makes her your cousin.”
“You can’t fuck her, anyway,” Ben says.
Jed cackles. A brush fire breaks out in Jason’s upper intestine. A knife blade pierces his side. Jed slaps his open palm on the dashboard. “You’d make a retarded baby.”
“One of us could fuck her, though,” Ben says, waggling his thumb between himself and Jed. “Maybe you could set that up.”
A vial of acid bursts in Jason’s stomach. Ben and Jed laugh and laugh, gasping and clutching themselves in glee.
“Knock it off,” Jason says, puny.
“Fine,” Ben says. “Make a retarded baby.”