Loretta’s head appears in the kitchen window. She gazes impassively for a moment, sees Jason, waves quickly, and ducks out of the window. Jason forces down a mouthful of doughnut. Dean materializes beside him, his stiff back and beard in Jason’s peripheral vision. Dean holds a Styrofoam cup, and nods hello. Jason wonders if Loretta has told him about their conversation — that he asked her about the arrangements here. Dean looks at Jason for an uncomfortable few seconds.
“Need a club?” he asks finally.
“I don’t think so.”
“Just gonna use your fists?”
Dean betrays none of the signs of someone who’s joking. “Maybe you can help the ladies with the food, then,” he says when Jason doesn’t answer. “Where’s your father today?”
“He’s home.”
Dean nods.
“Figures.”
• • •
They set the desert aflame about two hundred yards away, a wavering orange hyphen on the land. Loretta walks out with Ruth, and they stand in a half-circle of watchers, nested behind the half-circle of clubbers. The men and the boys. Standing apart, separated from the line of other watchers, is Jason, hands stuffed in his pockets. She sees that his friend, the chunky, kind-of-handsome Indian guy, has joined the circle of clubbers, around twenty-five of them, who start whooping and hollering when the fire is lit. Bradshaw is the loudest, and he swings his club — the weapon he made himself, hammering nails into a four-by-four. He shakes his hips lewdly and dances, and Loretta knows he’s performing for her. A couple of guys start beating the ground with bats, raising low clouds of dust.
Rabbits emerge on the desert ahead, erratic black shapes cohering into a mass. Three men on motorcycles sweep back and forth, working the flanks of the herd like cowboys in a cattle drive. Untended, the flames reach a thick stand of sage and burst into the air. Dean, standing at the center of the circle, shouts, “Who’s on that fire? Who’s got that fire?” Nobody answers, but it won’t burn far in the damp and cold. The jacks develop a chaotic bristling unity, a dark carpet rolling and tumbling across the desert.
Loretta doesn’t want to see this. She looks at Ruth, Ruth with her countenance set firmly, and Ruth turns back, almost softens, almost allows a sense of unease to slip into her demeanor, then shrugs. The jacks race closer, within a hundred yards, then seventy-five, flowing through the sagebrush like a burst river. Loretta sees the Indian kid turn to Jason, act out a maniacal laugh. Jason stands back, apart, she thinks, alone among them all, and that takes a kind of courage. In front of the pack of rabbits are the fastest few, darting this way or that but trapped by the rolling mass behind them. As they near, they bring a drumming, as if from a herd of distant horses, and then the first of them enters the wide-open mouth of the fencing.
“Get ready!” Dean calls, and the men pound the ground with clubs and bats, and it seems to be happening too fast now, rabbits leaping and weaving, rolling over any fellow creature that slows or loses a step, and then the most beautiful sight: rabbits breaking from the pack and soaring, majestic ten-foot spans, twenty-foot spans, across the moving mass beneath them, and the rabbits now twenty yards away, ten yards, and each leaping creature seems hung in the air, slowing as everything below them gains speed.
“My word,” a voice says, and Loretta registers that it is Ruth, blanched and stunned, and when she turns back the men are bent to it, heaving their weapons downward again and again, filling the air with the sound of wet cracking and thudding blows. A few jacks straggle through, fugitives, panic eyed and zigzagging, though many more fall at the feet of the men. A mist of blood rises. An ammoniac stench. The terror of the doomed creatures imprints itself on Loretta’s mind. One rabbit slips through, dragging a leg and shrieking. Almost childlike. A copper taste floods Loretta’s mouth as the lone rabbit shrieks and drags itself toward the watchers and away from the bashers, the men pounding down and down, the rabbits before them a fleshy mound, black with damp and dust. Every few seconds a freshet of blood spurts into the air, like a blown sprinkler valve.
Ruth breaks suddenly forward, leans over, and takes up a hunk of lava rock. She raises it in two hands above her head and hurls it downward, and the shrieking stops.
• • •
Looking at the circle of men exhausting themselves dumbly, blindly, exhilarated with the sport of it, leading their children into it, hand in bloody hand — looking at their farmer clothing, their overalls and snap-button shirts strained thin in the back, their hoo-rahs and yee-haws, looking with a disdain that builds with every blow — Jason feels a severance. A finality.
He is not of this. Not of them.
When Ruth smashed the rabbit with the broken leg, turning the creature into a silent mass of thick blood and gleaming organs, Jason went distant in his mind, and somehow it stopped touching him, until it was silent and the pounding was over. Slowly, the men leave the circle. In the pile of carcasses, an occasional jerk shudders through. A frantic scuffling. Just another incomplete maiming. Dean steps to the front of the group, blood sprayed on his shirt in a way that makes Jason think of speckles flying from a roller dipped in too much paint, and adopts the demeanor of the patriarch.
“We owe you men a debt of gratitude,” he says. His face bears a scrim of dust with a black smear above his left eye. He folds his arms and bows his head.
“Our Father in Heaven,” he says, and Jason hears that when Dean prays, he sounds just like Jason’s father, “we come to you today with our hearts full of gratitude for the assistance you have given us in protecting our crops and our land. We thank you, oh Lord, for giving us the strength and will to accomplish this task, unpleasant though it may be…”
He prays on, thanking the Lord for the food provided for breakfast and lunch, and for health and families and the abundance of their lives, and for the Gospel — which makes Jason think about what Dean means by the Gospel, and how that differs from what his parents believe about the Gospel, and from what the Catholics and Methodists and Lutherans believe about the Gospel — and for sending his only begotten Son to redeem all mankind.
Jason looks around. Most of the men are bowing their heads, hands folded. Boyd is looking around, too. Their eyes meet, and Boyd smiles. The sweet spot on his baseball bat is smeared black and matted with spiny hair. Jason feels shock, a padded distance from the moment. He turns his head and finds Loretta staring at the ground, skin paled across the bridge of her nose, beside Ruth, whose eyes are closed.
After the prayer, the men load the carcasses into gunnysacks and pile them onto a flatbed truck. Boyd and Jason walk back toward Dean’s house with most of the others, Boyd giddily exultant and Jason silent. It is sunny and cool, and the bitter smell of burning ditch grass comes across the desert, distinct from the scorched, sweet scent of the sagebrush fire. The shouting from the roadside has mostly died down, and the TV van has left. It is almost lunchtime. A small crowd of subdued bashers gathers in Dean’s yard around the cook wagon, which is serving hot dogs, hamburgers, and chili.
“Them little buggers is fast, I tell ya.”
“Faster’n shit. You can’t try to hit one.”
“No, sir. You just have to hit into the bunch.”