Boyd says, “You can breathe.”
Baker says, “I can’t breathe very well.” Jason thinks that any moment now he will lose his grip. Baker says, “Just let me up and we’ll all go our separate ways.”
Jason says, “Boyd?”
“No way,” Boyd says. “My ribs are in pieces.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know,” he says. Dead voiced.
“Guys,” Baker says to the carpet. “Guys.”
Then he laughs, a long manic outburst that fades to silence. Jason wonders where Loretta is now, and can’t block the wish to be with her. Boyd makes wincy noises. Jason looks up from his half-obscured angle at his friend, his oldest and only friend, and sees Boyd staring vacantly. They have each lost the same thing: not Loretta, but an idea of her. A faith.
“Seriously, guys,” Baker says.
It is almost six A.M.
“Boyd,” Jason says.
“I know.”
“There’s two of us.”
“Yeah.”
“Guys, I mean it, let me up and let’s just call it over.”
“Shut up, fucko,” Boyd says.
A long silence follows.
Baker begins to take deep, regular breaths.
“Right,” Boyd says. “Sure, man.”
Baker’s body loses its tension. The muscles in his legs slacken.
“I don’t know,” Jason whispers. “It feels real.”
One of Baker’s feet kicks weakly, lifts and drops on its toe, involuntary. He snorts, begins to wheeze.
“I think it’s real,” Jason says.
“No way.”
Baker snores noisily into the carpet. Jason loosens his grip. Nothing. He slides his arms free — fiery with pins and needles — and Baker snorts wetly, pauses, resumes snoring. If he’s faking, Jason thinks, he’s doing a good job of it. Then he thinks: How hard would it be to fool me? He rolls away and stands slowly. When he sees Boyd’s face, he grows worried — he is ashen, stunned, and Jason knows from his Boy Scout first-aid training that Boyd is in shock. Boyd looks like he is about to tip over, breath shallow and eyes drooping. Jason reaches out and takes his elbow and helps him stand, watching Baker and knowing that they are committed now, they’ll never get hold of him in that way again, and as Boyd’s knees come off his neck, Baker lifts and turns his head and lays it down again and sleeps, astonishingly, sleeps.
“No way,” Boyd says.
They walk out. No keys in the Nova, and they’re not going back to root around in Baker’s pockets and risk waking him. Boyd’s coat is in the LeBaron, so they take turns wearing Jason’s as they walk into town, looking back nervously all the way. Boyd limps from the pain in his ribs. They barely speak, and Jason wonders: How do you start? What do you say first?
“What do we do now?” he asks.
Boyd shrugs. “Go until we get someplace.”
It is warmer than it’s been in days. Trucks pass, drivers stare. Every house is huge, stamped from the same mold. There are no stores. No stop signs. No normal town things. They walk past a huge walled compound; the gabled roofs of two enormous homes, larger than Dean’s, loom above. The desert spreads, flat and dusty red, toward the jutting mountains that seem to shelter the place. Curtains part as they pass; a woman in her yard, in a long dress, ankle to wrist, turns away from them watchfully.
“This place is the weirdest,” Boyd says.
Why does Jason not think Baker is coming? He simply doesn’t. They reach a small country store. Two rusting gas pumps out front and a Greyhound bus sign in the window. They go in without speaking. Jason has enough money for two tickets home and four packages of Ho Hos. After he pays, he looks at the change in his palm: $2.13. His mission money.
They stand outside by the ice machine and the dented garbage can in the radiant morning sun and eat like they’re starving, until Boyd begins to laugh. A wet glob of Ho Ho flies out. He stops, gains control, and then begins again, shaking uncontrollably, eyes pinched shut, and then watering over. Jason just watches him, waiting, chewing. He is visited by a powerful urge to be home. To be a child. Boyd stops, takes a breath, wipes his eyes, and says, “He fell asleep,” and starts all over again, the force of it smearing his face around, bending him over. Jason finally has no choice. It is beyond him, it always has been beyond him. He joins in.
• • •
Loretta turns north on Highway 59, heading toward Cedar. Spokes of light radiate from the low morning sun, and she thinks she will turn toward it, drive through the red rock canyons, through Zion and Bryce Canyon, and head to Colorado. Or maybe north to Wyoming. Or maybe southeast to New Mexico. An understanding dawns: Her future is not pictures of other places and other things and other people. It is not pictures of anything, and it is not one place. It is the absence of pictures, a void, and this fills her with elation. She wants to bow down before the absence. She wants to worship it.
She is wearing everything she has: the jeans she wore to seminary with Jason, a Led Zeppelin T-shirt of Boyd’s, a pair of cotton socks, one of which is torn and bloody, and three one-dollar bills, folded in her front pocket. The gold and the checks and her clothes and money and everything else are behind her. The LeBaron’s heater hums waves of hot air, and the inside of the car feels spacious and welcoming, a kind of home. The adrenaline of the past hours has fled, and a warm, happy weariness settles. She will need to sleep somewhere, and she has nowhere to sleep. She will need to do something about her ankle, and she has no way to pay a doctor. She needs shoes. She needs food. She needs gas. She has no idea how she will get any of it.
It is the happiest she has ever been, the best moment of her life, but only so far.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My deepest thanks are due to friends who read early versions of this novel and gave me guidance. Sam Ligon, in particular, read every scrap of this and repeatedly helped me expand the world of the book. Mike Baccam, Stephen Knezovich, and Jess Walter also provided valuable help — as did the brilliant Ed Park, whom I am lucky to have as an editor. I have been so fortunate to call Renée Zuckerbrot my agent, and her editorial insights and patience through the various drafts helped me discover the story hidden there.
I would like to express my gratitude to PEN and the family of Robert W. Bingham, as well as the Washington Artists Trust. Their support made it possible for me to devote time to this novel that I would not have otherwise had.
I relied upon several sources of historical information while writing this novel but also took certain dramatic liberties. (These include changing the date of Evel Knievel’s London bus jump, which actually occurred in May 1975, and retaining the name Short Creek for the fundamentalist community in northern Arizona, even though the community has actually changed its name to Colorado City.)
Leigh Montville’s biography Evel was particularly useful in understanding the history and mythology surrounding Knievel, and the History channel documentary Absolute Evel was valuable as a resource in attempting to reproduce the man’s voice. Several accounts of the Short Creek raids were helpful in describing that day, but it was the Life magazine photographs of the raid that I returned to repeatedly when I wanted to try to imagine my way inside those events.
Among the many others to whom I owe thanks are:
The members of my “church,” fellow squires of the night’s body: Chris, Dan, Jess, Sam, Tony.
The faculty and students of Eastern Washington University’s MFA program, where I learned and where I sometimes teach.
The gang at the Spokesman-Review, where it has been my privilege to work since 1999.