“I don’t know how many of those little dudes I got — I bet thirty or forty.”
“You probably got twice as many as you think.”
“Kinda fun, really.”
“Good cause, anyway.”
Boyd goes to the cook wagon, and Jason walks to the edge of the yard and looks out to where they just were. A couple of trucks and a few men are finishing the work out there. Smoke from the burned-out fire drifts thinly. Then Loretta is beside him. Something tugs her face downward. She seems tiny inside her dress, and she is looking at him so intently that he pulls away before catching himself.
“My word,” she whispers.
“I know it,” he says.
He is close enough to reach for her. To touch her. They stand side by side, facing the desert. Loretta sniffs. She says, “I have to get away from here.”
The clouds in Jason’s mind clear, a gear springs into place. It would be easy. It is so possible. His grandfather floats out of the space-world of death, his voice in the truck as they rode home that exhilarating Evel Knievel Sabbath, as he told Jason about leaving home at seventeen to enlist in the army: “Had a fire in my britches, just to get somewhere. Anyplace else.”
Seventeen — Jason’s own age.
He isn’t trapped. They aren’t trapped at all.
“Where do you want to go?” he asks.
She looks at the desert without seeming to see it. Ruth calls, “Loretta,” in a voice without music, and the moment scampers away.
• • •
Loretta turns and glides toward the house. Where does she want to go? In her future, she anticipates all manner of experiences and freedoms, wears any kind of fresh clothing, eats candy and beef all day long, drives a pink car, and wears Tussy lipstick. But where is it? What place?
She stops at a picnic table to gather paper plates and cups. Bradshaw walks by, does a little sidestep shuffle for her. Dust muddies the blood on his hands, forearms, shirt, and pants — the filthiest patch covers his groin and thighs. He shoots her a wink.
In her peripheral vision, Loretta can feel the shape of Ruth, watching from somewhere. Bradshaw moves by, but then Jason comes up, gangly and shy, flushing. Go away, she wants to say, because it’s too much, and Ruth is right there, watching, and why is she watching?
Jason picks up a ketchup-smeared plate and says, in a blatantly obvious way that he seems to think is covert, “Where do you want to go?”
Bradshaw’s braying laugh cuts through the noise. Ruth’s face seems locked in place, inside the kitchen window. Loretta moves to another picnic table. Focuses on gathering paper plates. Jason isn’t moving. He’s watching her. He has decided something, and it makes her nervous. GO AWAY. Whatever it was she saw in him during the bunny drive — a stubborn distance, a defiance — now seems merely obtuse. Juvenile. GO AWAY. Ruth comes striding across the lawn, holding a plastic garbage bag. Loretta can feel Jason’s radiant hurt; it must be apparent to everyone. Ruth stops before Loretta, snaps the bag open before her. Loretta dumps in her trash, and Ruth turns to Jason, repeats the motion, and Jason tosses the one plate he’s holding into the bag.
Ruth shakes the bag to settle it. “Okay,” she says, pointedly.
Jason—stop it, stop it now, just go—looks stubbornly at Loretta and says, “See you later.”
Loretta does not answer.
Ruth says, “Tell your mother we’ll have you all over real soon.”
“For rabbit?” Jason says.
Loretta loves and hates that equally.
“They fry up fine,” Ruth says.
• • •
Jason walks home — leaves Boyd and goes. His life has been too empty, and now it is too full. Impossible to absorb. Are they doing something now, he and Loretta? Is this real?
At home, he watches a football game on TV without paying attention. The news comes on, and he watches the KMVT report about the bunny bash. There’s footage of Dean arguing with the reporter, but what they show of the bash is distant and unrecognizable. It looks like a football game, a big scrambling mass. Mom hollers questions from the kitchen.
“Ruth said she’s going to invite us over for dinner,” Jason says.
“Let’s not hold our breath,” she says.
At dinner, Dad doesn’t mention the bash until he’s started on seconds, and he doesn’t bother to look up from his plate.
“Everywhere I went today, people were asking me about that circus,” he says. He jabs his fork in the direction of Dean’s place. “Didn’t take him a couple months to turn the whole place into a joke.”
“Lou,” Mom says. “That was over there.”
“That place is this place,” he says. “We’re all in the same place.”
He chews rapidly, forking in bites as though he were punishing the roast beef. Angry scarlet spackles his hairline. Without looking up, he asks Jason, “What about you? What’d you think of it?”
“It was terrible,” he says. “It was — gross.”
He remembers the rabbit that came through broken, and Ruth, and the stone.
“Told you you wouldn’t like it,” Dad says crisply, dropping his fork on his empty plate with a clang.
Jason burns. His self-righteousness. His useless certainty. It is all one piece. It is all together, what happens here and what happens there. That place is this place is that place.
Where do you want to go?
EVEL KNIEVEL ADDRESSES AN ADORING NATION
The heels of our boots never sounded right in that thing. That should have been a warning. The X-2 Skycycle — red, white, and blue, our name spangled all over the bastard, our own personal rocket ship, and when you stepped in and your boot struck the metal floor it echoed like a piece of tin. Cram your ass in, the thing creaks and groans. This, you think, is the vessel to carry us to glory?
So much time and effort and fuckery precedes the moment. Any moment. Each one is so frail, so pushed along the tracks by everything that came before, everything you promised, everything you feared. We started talking canyon jump before we ever jumped a thing. It was in us, this faith. First it was the Grand Canyon we would jump, and then it became the Snake River, and then time pushed us down those tracks and pushed the canyon jump from a thing said to a thing said often to a pledge and then a promise. Time warped it. Turned it real. The steel and the rivets and the steam engine and the leases and the newspaper boys and the things we said, the things we said fueling it, the things we said and the rocket and the parachute and the marching band and the things we said, the prayer in them, the calling forth of them, the things we said entering the air as sound and sign, gathering atoms and molecules and simple fucking weight, America, gathering power, gathering heft, gathering mass, until they become true things, freestanding and undeniable, made into a vessel to carry us forward, a bullet — a train a bullet a star-spangled rocket ship a whatever the fuck, a universal torque impervious to physics and the boundaries of glory.
That was where we sat that afternoon. On the tip of that bullet. September 8, 1974. We walked through those throngs, touched those people, and saw all that we had done to them. We rose to the ramp on a throne, and they roared. We thought of Caesar and Kennedy, of Alexander the Great. We thought of ascension. We believed in the bullet of the moment, the pressure of the instant, the nobility that must live in us, that must, because we saw all it had grown into, what we said, we saw all that what we said had become, and they saw it, too, these people, and they came to worship.
And then we put our foot into the cockpit, and felt the heel of our boot drum on the tinny bottom of the Skycycle.
And we knew.