• • •
Loretta sits up, rubs her eyes, and says, “Let’s play a game.”
“Like Monopoly?” Boyd says.
“Like, we each say one thing about ourselves. Take turns and go around. One thing at a time. It’ll help us get to know each other. Just one quick thing. About whatever you want. I’ll go first. I’m married to Dean. Get that right out of the way. We got married last year. My folks set it up. I didn’t want to.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Boyd says, pretending to be amazed, but also genuinely amazed. “What? Like, what?”
“Knock it off,” she says, smiling back at him. “It’s not a legal marriage. Enough about it. Now you, Jason.”
“Can’t we talk about this some more?” Jason says.
She slugs him on the shoulder.
“Go.”
“I’m two merit badges from Eagle Scout. Probably not going to make it.”
“Boyd?” Loretta asks.
“I,” he says, “am a supersonic jet pilot. I am a master contortionist and a student of the dark arts. I know the secrets of the Bermuda Triangle. I’ve seen Jaws four times.”
“One thing,” Loretta says, amused. “Okay, now me. I like country music.”
Jason says, “I like rock music.”
Boyd says, “I like Zeppelin, Foghat, Bad Company, Cream, Kiss, Pink Floyd, the Rolling St—”
“One thing.”
“Oh. One thing.”
“Okay,” she says. “I was born in Sedona, Arizona.”
“I was born in Gooding, Idaho,” Jason says.
“I was born in Emmett, Idaho,” Boyd says.
“I can’t stand church.”
“Me, neither.”
“What’s church?”
“Okay, then: I don’t even believe in God,” she says. “I think.”
Boyd finds this incredibly sexy. He says, “I’m half Indian. Which just about every kid around here claims but with me it’s true. You can tell by looking. This nose? This nose is a Nez Percé nose. Or maybe Shoshone. Don’t know my dad. He’s Native, but Mom doesn’t even know what tribe. It’s like she made it with some guy from Europe, but didn’t bother to find out if he was from France or Italy. His name is Francis Daubert. Frank.”
“One, Boyd.” Loretta turned to him, smiling.
“Oh. Forgot.”
“I want to live in Texas,” she says.
“Why Texas?” Jason asks.
“No questions. Or maybe Montana.”
“Okay. I’ve gone to church every Sunday, more or less, my whole life,” Jason says.
“I want to live anywhere but Gooding. I hate it there. Hate it there. Dumbshit capital of America. Can’t wait to get out — oh, wait, I don’t have to wait to get out. I am out. Hooray.”
The stories add up, sort of. Jason talks Lord of the Rings and steadfast Samwise Gamgee. Raising calves for the livestock sale. Going to see Evel Knievel, of course. Boyd tells of picking up his mom one time when she passed out at the Mirage. Loretta talks about an argument with Ruth over her refusal to learn how to knit and sew — how Ruth began leaving knitting needles and hanks of yarn in her bedroom. She says she would rather go to jail than live in that family. “Though I love those kids,” she says.
The game ends. Loretta and Boyd argue about the bunny bash. Loretta hated it — the blood, the violence, the brutality, the sport of it — and Boyd defends it, says they’re just rodents and need to be killed, and it’s no better to leave out poison and sneak away than it is to stand there and take care of it with your own hands.
“It is different,” Loretta insists. “If you poison them, you’re not doing it because you enjoy it. There’s something wrong with enjoying that much death and blood. It’s creepy.”
She turns in her seat and points a mock-accusatory finger at Boyd.
“You’re creepy.”
Boyd cannot help but notice. Saying it seems to make her very happy.
Jason
It has all gone wrong so quickly. How long have they been on the road? Two hours? Jason’s watch says it’s nearly two A.M., and ahead is the moon glow of a casino, an island in a parking lot of nacreous light, and Loretta has announced that she would like to drive.
Jason is slow to answer, and she says, “Please? Please, Jason?” and Boyd says, “Jesus, Harder.” Jason’s whole idea of this is vanishing. Has been ever since the bunny bash, really. She’s the one who said she wanted to go first. Later, she was the one who reached out to him — coming to him in the early morning, as he fed the calves, to plan their escape. She was the one who set their route to Short Creek, because she needed to get something she has not mentioned, and she was the one who said they should go through Nevada at night, because Nevada at night is like a wasteland and Utah is full of cops. What does it mean, he thinks, that Loretta knows what Nevada is like at night and how many cops there are in Utah?
She is the one flirting with Boyd. She is the one who has not looked at him with any kind of special look, any sign whatsoever. She is the one who said, Let’s go to Elko on the way, and when Jason said, Elko? she is the one who said, Come on. It’ll be fun.
They are barely into Nevada now, in Jackpot. Jason pulls the LeBaron into the far reaches of the parking lot. The sign reads CACTUS PETE’S, a giant neon cactus against the sky.
“Yippee,” Loretta says. She’s practically bouncing in her seat. Boyd says, “Don’t kill us, Lori,” and Jason thinks: Lori? Lori? He says, “Be careful. It’s my parents’ car,” and whatever it is that’s wrong about that seems immediately clear, but Loretta is the one who says, “Are you sure it’s still theirs?” and laughs and slaps her palms on the dash.
It’s all wrong. All turned around. And, if Jason is honest with himself, it has been ever since she saw him in that Rolling Stones shirt, with that fat, lascivious tongue. Since she said, “I have to get away from here.” Since she figured out how, in the days after that pronouncement, to communicate with him and plan their escape.
It has all been her. He keeps telling himself that he is her rescuer — because that is who he is supposed to be, that is how the story goes — and yet it has always been her.
• • •
In the days after the bunny bash, Jason had conspired with every circumstance to find a way to Loretta. Two days later, he had stopped by their place after school, under the pretense of borrowing a fence puller of Grandpa’s. But Uncle Dean was in the yard and he simply got it from the shed. No sign of Loretta. The following day Jason brought it back. Ruth answered the door and told him to put it back in the shed, without inviting him in. Each time, before he arrived he would itch with nerves, wondering what he would do if he saw Loretta, and afterward he felt bereft. He called their house three times that following week, and every time, Ruth answered. “Harders.” Like she was angry at the name. Jason simply hung up.
Meanwhile, just as events called for him to be a man of action, he became a mooning girl. Lying in bed, awaiting sleep, he imagined scenarios in which he and Loretta ran off together, giddy in love. He pictured them at the ocean, kicking at the waves or chasing a kite. He imagined them at a Grand Canyon overlook, arms around each other as they gaped into that humongous hole, or at Niagara Falls, holding hands in the mist. These were places he had seen in magazines or on television. He never imagined them anywhere he’d actually been — never at the new mall in Twin Falls or at a football game at the high school. He concocted fantasies in which he struck back at Dean — punched him, or cracked him across the back with a two-by-four, or held him at gunpoint while he and Loretta backed slowly out of the house. But mostly he just thought of Loretta and him together, living in a city apartment like the Newharts, all sliding glass and evening light. He imagined her coming to him, draping her arms around his shoulders, pressing her nose into his neck. Chaste scenarios, impossible and lifeless. And whenever he faced the fact that he didn’t know her at all, he filled her in with his imagination, and her character became marked by one and only one outstanding quality: a blind, unwavering attraction to him.