“Should I mount a rescue?”
She turns off the water. Steam turns the room into a cloud. She trembles. The very idea that he might come in now.
She says, “I think I’ll make it.”
She dries herself vigorously, like rubbing the skin from a roasted beet. She dresses and comes out into the room, hair scraggly and wet. Boyd sits on one bed and Jason sits on the other, watching The $10,000 Pyramid on TV. It’s the final round. The category is “Things in a Discotheque.” It is almost three in the afternoon, and this is luxurious and transgressive, like the hot water — to have slept this late, well into the productive hours of the day. Loretta wants to dance. She wants to spin around and jump. On TV, a woman is giving clues: “A mirror ball. Dance music.” Loretta wants to dance. Is this her future? Her Tussy future — lipstick and fast cars? On TV, the contestant says, “Things in a disco!” Loretta thinks: A disco! She wants to dance. She wants to curse. She wants to drink. She used to sip at the beers that Bradshaw kept on the floorboard of his Nova while they drove the desert a million years ago. Back when she thought Bradshaw was the way out.
Boyd and Jason smile at her sleepily. Jason’s dense helmet of hair is smudged to one side. She runs into the bathroom for a bar of soap, and returns to scrawl on the mirror: October 19, 1975, HAPPY BIRTHDAY!
“It’s whose birthday?” Jason asks her.
Boyd says, “It’s all of our birthdays.”
He gets it. She finds she simply likes to look at Boyd — she likes the strange color of his skin, brown and rich and with a pale, dry, almost translucent layer over it; she likes his black hair, blacker than any hair she has seen, so black it shines bluely; and she likes his enormous, alert, luminous eyes.
Boyd says, “Happy birthday, Lori!”
He comes at her, smiling wickedly, like Bradshaw might smile at her, handsome and strange, ready to wrap her up, arms out like Christ in the clouds.
Jason
It is a Sunday afternoon, and it feels like it. Deadened. Emptied of possibility. Strange, Jason thinks, that they are here, having done this, and he feels this way. Lori? Hugs? He rises to change the channel, and Loretta says, “Come on, Jason, you, too,” but he doesn’t want to.
Click, click. A nature show. On the soundless TV, a lion chases a rabbit across an African desert. The camera cuts away as it closes its paws in slow motion upon its prey.
Why did he bring Boyd? They go back a long way. They were safety buddies in elementary school. Jason can still picture the black rasp of Boyd’s third-grade buzz cut. The strange smells of his house were familiar and warm to Jason, and he had taken in the oddities and embarrassments of Boyd’s life — his drunken mother, his fatherlessness, his Indian-ness — and shared them. He brought Boyd with them, brought him here, and now Jason feels guilty because he wishes that he hadn’t.
Boyd is in the bathroom. The shower runs. Loretta is sort of dancing around, humming. Some awful country song. “I’m Not Lisa.” She catches him looking and smiles. It’s still there, he thinks, whatever is between them. If he can only figure out how to unlock it.
She flops heavily onto the bed, props her chin in her hands.
“We should do something,” she says.
“Aren’t we driving on?”
“We should have fun. Think of something fun.”
Jason tries very hard to think of something fun. The shower stops.
“We could go drive around town,” he says.
“Yeah,” she says, meaning Naw.
Boyd comes out dressed in yesterday’s clothes — jeans, a three-quarter-sleeve T-shirt with a sepia-toned picture of Foghat.
“What are you kids talking about?” he asks.
Loretta says, “What to do. We could go check out the casino.”
“You want to go to the casino?” he says.
She shrugs. “We could. We could get some beer.” She sits up on the bed. Jason sits on the end of the other bed, three feet from the TV — where a jaguar now pursues a springing antelope — and Boyd stands in the bathroom doorway. Loretta bounces. “You guys wanna get some beer?”
Jason says, “I don’t know,” and Boyd says, “I like you old-fashioned Mormons,” and Loretta is looking back and forth between them, and she says, “You guys need to learn to have fun!”
“We could check out a brothel,” Boyd says.
“Check out?” Loretta says.
“Jason could stake us,” Boyd says.
“What’s that cost?” Jason asks.
Loretta says, “It depends,” and Boyd slaps his thigh.
“I don’t get you,” he says. “How do you become you, living the way you’ve lived?”
“I’m creative,” she says. “I’m smart.”
• • •
And now this, Jason thinks. So much, so fast. The beer tastes sour and wheaty, and it rises instantly to his head, like it was always there waiting for him. The world warms and welcomes. He becomes garrulous. All anxiety slips away, and this becomes a world unto itself: this room, the three of them, the beer Loretta has ordered from the casino bar, because she is the one who knows how to do things.
He tells a story, and Loretta laughs. He mocks Boyd, teases him, and she laughs again. All of them seem half drunk before the first cans of Coors are empty. Tipsy and giggling. Jason sips at the beer and tries not to make faces. He feels himself begin to race. He has tasted beer a time or two before, and hasn’t liked it. That seems to be changing. All of the problems and anxieties of the world — all of the past and all of the future — are somewhere outside the warm, cozy bubble of this room. Boyd belches. Loretta says, “Gross,” but then she chugs what must be half a beer and follows suit. When she laughs, her eyes fill with tears.
Loretta pulls a second beer from the paper bag sitting beside the TV. She tells them stories about sneaking out at night, about the party boys down in Short Creek. “Them kids were wild,” she says, admiringly. She has a farmy accent that Jason hasn’t noticed before. Boyd tells a story about finding his mom passed out in the bathroom with puke in her hair, and Loretta says, “Gross,” and Jason feels a warm flood of gratitude that it is Boyd’s shitty life and not his that she is saying this about. He stands and goes to the windows and looks out on the mountains rising over Elko, over the whitening day.
“Seriously, though, Jason,” Loretta says, flopping onto the bed and spilling beer. “We owe you one. Big time.”
“I don’t owe him one,” Boyd says.
She acts as if she didn’t hear him, just looks at Jason in that stoned way.
“Well, I owe you one,” she says. “I can’t believe we did it.”
She rises and crosses over to him and places a hand, as light as balsa, on his forearm and taps his cheek with a kiss.
Louis
The stout, red-faced deputy at the counter is telling Louis that technically his son is not yet a runaway.
“Hafta wait forty-eight hours before we can do a thing,” he says, a little embarrassed, maybe, but still chewing his gum, and for that alone, Louis wants to climb over the counter.
“Who would you find yourself in trouble with if you acted like an officer of the law before forty-eight hours expired?” Louis says carefully. “Seeing how it’s me, the boy’s father, who’s asking you to do so.”
“Now, Brother Harder,” says the deputy, Sid Moody, who comes to church in Louis’s ward about half the time, “I don’t make—”
“You have a car. You have the keys to that car. You have a radio. You have a gun and a badge and the authority of the law, and you have the knowledge that my minor son has taken my car and run away overnight, with another minor child under the care of her guardians, and all you can manage is to tell me about the rules that allow you to sit here in the office and do nothing? Is that about it, Sidney?”