Boyd says, “What happened to the you from yesterday?”
“Right here.”
“The you from last night?”
Loretta is visited by a pang of conscience regarding her sexual sin — for doing that with someone she had just met, like some whore. Her father had talked about her purity constantly. She remembers him counseling her, giving her bedtime chats, reading her verses about her virtue, the talk of righteousness flooding her mind with thoughts of sin. “The Lord delights in the chastity of His children.” Does she still believe that, though she thinks she does not? Is she wrong that she can simply decide what she believes?
“Same me,” she says.
• • •
Jason sits in the room at the Stockmen’s with the note. Seventy-five hours pass. One hundred forty-three hours pass. Five thousand three hundred fifty-four hours pass. He will live in this dim room forever. A numb, gentle throb in his cranium. He remembers the LeBaron. His father’s car. The keys are no longer on the countertop by the TV. He looks around, digs through pockets. Goes downstairs and out into the parking lot, where there is no longer a pea-green 197 °Chrysler Imperial LeBaron. The sky blazes, summer blue and winter cold.
He will live here. At the Stockmen’s. Maid service. Buffets. Perfect.
He has fifty-two dollars and fifty-two cents. He goes inside and pays for another night. Eleven dollars. There is a mirror behind the counter and he assesses himself: gawky and tall, monster ears, hair starting to frizz out of its bun, a bright rash of freckled self-consciousness on his cheeks. He hates the way he looks. It is all there, every time he examines himself for the signs. The failure is all right there.
He sits on the lobby couch, a burnt-red leather with a fake rustic wood frame. He wants to lie down. Someday, this will be a story. Maybe it will develop a moral. His mom could figure that out. He wonders if he will ever tell her this story and listen as she makes it a lesson. He wonders if he will ever tell his father and listen as he identifies the mistakes Jason made, looking backward for the blame.
He can afford three more days here.
He thinks of his grandfather. Crusty old Grandpa. How did such a tough guy create the family line that leads to Jason? When he was Jason’s age he left home and went to kill people in another country. But Jason — a little pain makes him cry. When Boyd shot him in the arm with a BB gun last summer, burying the BB in a gray lump under his skin, they’d gone to Grandpa for help. Jason’s lower lip trembled, and when Grandpa saw it he turned away, embarrassed. “Don’t start bawling,” he said as he squeezed out the BB like a pimple.
Jason opens his eyes to bright sunlight. Lying on the couch in the lobby, head on a big leather pillow. The high afternoon sun slants in, pushing a boundary of sunlight across the ornate maroon and gold carpet. A loud ringing bursts from the casino. Somebody’s luck has gone right.
Good luck. This will be the place to wait for it.
He walks outside. For some reason, his head doesn’t hurt, though the hangover slows him down. Bile burns the back of his throat. The cold tightens his face. Feels good. His clothing is huge, heavy. He has been physically shrunken. What a preposterous person he is, to shrink like this. He thinks of heaven, of the idea that our lives will be played out for all to see. In heaven, on the movie screen, will everyone see this? His shrinking? He used to live in terror that everyone in heaven — his family and friends, the angels and the heavenly host, God himself — would be forced to watch him masturbate seven thousand times. And now, though he is done with God, bored with God, the idea of that heavenly scrutiny reenters his mind with the force of pure belief.
Everyone in heaven who watches his movie will be stronger than him. Everyone he knows is stronger. Boyd and Loretta are stronger. Evel Knievel is stronger. That guy from last night, whoever he was. Stronger. Mom and Dad. Every kid at school, every dull old farmer at church and his wife — stronger. Uncle Dean, that crazy fuck: way stronger.
Jason decides to pray.
“Our Father in Heaven,” he whispers, standing on the bright concrete outside the Stockmen’s, folding his arms and bowing his head.
His eyes burn and fill. Naturally, he thinks.
He stops. Opens his eyes. Unfolds his arms. What could he even ask for? Make me happy, please. Give me what I want.
He eats alone in the Stockmen’s. Cheeseburger deluxe and fries—$1.95. He remembers when the idea of eating hamburgers every day was thrilling, but this tastes like feed. Like fodder. Goes to his room. Takes off his shoes. Turns on the TV. Baretta rerun, in the middle of the afternoon. Strange. Lies on the bed, head propped on two pillows, and watches the screen between his feet. Baretta talks to his cockatoo. The loosened toes of Jason’s white socks are pooched up, like tiny elf hats. He thinks of the elves in The Lord of the Rings, fleet and deadly with bow, light and magical, and he thinks of Samwise Gamgee, the loyal friend, and he thinks maybe he ought to get that book out and vanish into Middle Earth. Remembers that the book is in the box in the trunk of the LeBaron. With his Evel Knievel scrapbook and his box of eight-tracks.
Someone bangs on the door and calls, “Jason?”
Is that Boyd? Sounds like Boyd. It’s Boyd and Loretta. A massive flood pours out of Jason, tumbles him off the bed, carries him to the door. “Catch you later” meant later today. It meant now. They are back, it is them at the door. Of course they didn’t leave him. They wouldn’t do that.
Another knock, rapid, impatient.
Jason pulls open the door. A man he knows but can’t place stands in the hall, one thumb in a belt loop and a cocky grin filling his face like stones in a bag. Who is he? Why is he so familiar? He wears a hat that reads “Sandy Excavation.”
“Hey, bud,” the man says, peering past Jason into the room. “Where’s Lori?”
• • •
By the time they reach Hurricane, Boyd is asleep. The dusk, the wintry landscape of red hills, pine, and scarves of snow, the familiar pattern of lights, and then the town itself as they draw into it — every mile nearer to home, nearer to Short Creek — feeds Loretta’s anxiety as it becomes more familiar. Hurricane is where they came for supplies. It’s where she came with Tonaya when they were chasing around after the party boys. She pilots the LeBaron carefully down Main Street, twenty-three miles per hour. She passes the bright Texaco station where she met Bradshaw. She passes the Safeway, where she spots a Chevrolet van that she realizes is probably the one that Brother Gardner and his two wives and eight children pilot around town.
They’re out of Hurricane and back on the highway. Almost there now. She will be driving past her home inside of an hour, past the home where she grew up and to the home where she moved in with Dean and Ruth. Her mother will be sitting somewhere, mending or a book in her lap, and her father will be in the lighted garage, space heater at his feet, planing or sanding a piece of wood. She barely knows her parents. She barely understands them as people. She thinks of the things that Jason and Boyd said about their parents on the way down here — for them, their parents are individuals, with characteristics. Boyd’s mom is funny and irresponsible and permissive and, occasionally, unexpectedly cruel — she’d had his dog put down after it shit on the carpet. Jason’s dad is serious and punctual, dour and dull; he turns everything into a lesson about some form of looming danger, whether it is moral disaster or pinkeye in the herd. His mother is, somehow, he had said, exactly the same, except that where his father sees doom, she sees joy; where he is grim about the dangers of life, she is optimistic. She remembers thinking how wonderful they sounded.