Jason walks into school alone. He goes to first-period biology and doesn’t talk to anyone. He goes to second-period trig, where his only words are an awkward and ignored hello to Corinne Jensen, the former girl of his dreams. He goes to third and fourth periods and doesn’t talk to anyone.
He imagines the cloud of knowledge from seminary following him, spreading into every corner of the school. At lunch, Boyd asks him how things are going with the pioneers.
“Hunky-dory,” Jason says.
“They say there’s a new girl.”
“A new girl?” Jason returns this with a hard, sarcastic spin. “What does that mean?”
“Hey, this is me,” Boyd says. “You know what it means. And you know what everyone is saying it means.”
“She’s my aunt’s niece,” Jason says.
Boyd gazes at him. Jason studies the tater tot casserole on his lunch tray: it is a creamy prehistoric ocean, mushroomy and thick, with tawny islands of potato for the swimmers, the strivers, to cling to while they rest and regain their strength. Jason imagines he is on one of those islands, and Loretta is on another one. And everybody else — family, school, church, town, state, nation, world — is the gray, gloopy sea.
Boyd says, “Dude,” and shakes his head.
“It’s weird,” Jason says. “I think she doesn’t belong with them.”
“People from the twentieth century don’t belong with them.”
Tuesday
Loretta feels lit from within. Neon. Like no one can stop looking at her, aglow in the dark, like she is made of fine glass tubes, easily shattered. Since she walked into that church, every moment since, even at home in her bed, she feels watched and judged and known.
She hates it more than she hates Ruth’s bulgur meat loaf. She hates it more than she hates sleeping with Dean. She hates it because it has tainted the best thing in her life — her future, the magical time that is supposed to arrive when she enters the outside world, the world of pink Mustangs and matching Tussy lipstick — by announcing the truth about the way she will be in that outside world.
Ruth says she can’t quit. Not yet. They have not figured out their relationship to this community. If Bradshaw were up here, Loretta would leave with him, go anywhere, sleep under bridges, under sagebrush, eat jackrabbits, eat grass, eat dirt, eat bugs. She is brave enough, if only she had someone to share it with, she knows she could be brave enough. But Bradshaw is in Short Creek, running the business, while Dean scouts for customers up here.
Jason picks her up in the morning, all corny and nervous. He reminds her of the children — alternately endearing and aggravating.
“Hello again,” he says.
“Good morning.”
She does not like how much he likes this. Three minutes expire. On the glove box is a word in script: LeBaron. She thinks of Ervil LeBaron, the polygamist leader down in Mexico with thirteen wives who broke with the Short Creek brethren. Mr. Blood Atonement — the guy had his own brother killed. Dean once told her, Ervil’s methods are extreme, but his beliefs are sound.
She yawns. She could go right back to sleep. In her future, Loretta will never rise before the sun and grog through the gray hours. She will not do chores or make biscuits. She will not live so close to cattle that it is all she can smell, all the time, the shit of cattle.
Jason says, “How’d you like your first day of seminary?”
“Another joy sent by the Lord,” she says. Caught by surprise, he snorts moistly, then looks away, ears scarlet. She feels one ounce better.
At seminary, she sits in the back corner. She averts her gaze from the eyes of others — on the floor, over their shoulders, at their feet — and no one speaks to her, not even Brother Kershaw, and she can tell by the insistence with which they try to show her they aren’t noticing her that it’s all they are doing, noticing her.
She thought that among the Mormons here there would be some bit of kinship. Some similarity. But these kids are utterly worldly. The girls wear jeans high on their hips, snugged up their cloven rears, and their hair parts into cascading waves. They all wear makeup, and even the homely girls dress like whores. And the boys are like monkeys, in their bell-bottoms and T-shirts, all except for the three who are farm boys, in Wranglers and boots and purple FFA jackets, the closest thing to Short Creek style she has seen here. These three boys are clearly the lowest caste. Jason and a few of the others are somewhere above them, and the top caste consists of the two largest monkeys, the two with the biggest bodies, the square-jawed, acne-scarred football player boys. Ben and Jed cut looks at her constantly, and elbow each other, and show their interest more plainly than the rest.
• • •
It is Dean’s night. She finds it more unbearable than usual. He smells like a sour washcloth, and the mole on his neck is grotesque and wrinkled, and his face is contorted into a twisted grimace that lacks all self-consciousness, all reserve, and she knows she will never be able to be someone who has not experienced this. He is marking her.
Afterward, she says, “I was wondering, since we’re not going to church here, if it makes sense for me to be going to seminary. I mean, will it make sense to them?”
Dean seems stumped. He lies on his back in his garments. The prickly black hair that covers his body presses against the sheer white material in swirls and eddies. He rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands, starts to speak, rubs them again.
“Huh,” he says. “Well, little sister, you may be right there. You may be.”
He falls silent. He drums his fingers on his chest, gazes at the ceiling. Something washes over him afterward, some lassitude. Loretta wonders whether he’ll come at her again. He’s frustrated that she isn’t yet pregnant, because he believes himself so fertile. His fertility is an expression of his righteousness. She has kept her methods a secret, and yet she understands that it is starting to be taken in the household as a failure, a failure of righteousness and belief and commitment, a failure for which blame will be located and assigned.
“Maybe I should stop going,” she says, grazing his beard with her fingertips.
“Maybe,” he says. “We’ll see.”
Wednesday
Waiting in the LeBaron for Loretta, Jason spots a jackrabbit perched on a rock at the back of the yard, spindly ears high. His duff color blends with the morning twilight. He’s barely visible, and he doesn’t move as Loretta scuttles out and slides in.
“Look at that guy,” he says. “Just watching us. He’s not even scared.”
“Dean says we’ve got to do something drastic.”
“We were using carrots before.”
“What — feeding them?”
“Yeah. You cut them up, soak them in strychnine, and then lay out a line of them along the edge of the field. You’ve got to start with some nonpoison ones first. Works pretty good. We were hauling eight or ten a day out of there for a while.”
She doesn’t answer.
He says, “We tried some other poisons, too. In barley.”
“Dean says you can’t shoot ’em or poison ’em fast enough.”
They’re actually talking. Okay, Jason, he thinks. Keep it going.
He says, “Yeah, that’s what my grandpa said, too.”
“He wants to have a drive.”
A drive. A bunny bash. Herd the rabbits into a circle of men, who club them to death. Regular people had stopped doing them. The New York Times had written up the last one, over in Mud Flats, and run a photo of a bloody-shirted father-and-son bashing team. It became a big deal, and everyone got defensive. The gas stations sold bumper stickers with a cartoon image of a hippie hugging a bunny, set inside a gun sight. The local papers ran editorials about big-city animal lovers, and the letters were full of righteous indignation about liberals, hippies, environmentalists, the media. Jason had never seen a drive, and he didn’t care about jackrabbits. Sometimes he and Boyd would take.22s out and try to shoot them in the desert, though the rabbits mostly bounded away untouched. But if there is anything he doesn’t want right now, it’s more weird attention at the farm.