EVEL KNIEVEL ADDRESSES AN ADORING NATION
First thing we jumped was pretty much nothing, a little hillock of dirt out there in the flats around Butte, a weedy little lump. We were tooling along on the old man’s Super Hawk, that four-stroke piece of shit with the brittle fork, when something or someone urged our hand toward the bump. We have thought long on this, America, and believe it is not too much to suggest the presence of the divine.
We flew. Fuckin’-A flew.
Figure between 1.8 and 2.3 seconds airborne — call it 2. Two seconds of flying. Two seconds of everything you thought life could not be. So amazing. So exhilarating. Also, so incredibly fucked up: you live and live and live, and it all comes down to a tiny flash, a speeding moment that is gone so fast you can’t believe it. All you can ever do is remember it and want it back. Still, those two seconds, holy shit: the warm blood of our heart expanded and sped through us in a way it never did again, though we chased it ever since, chased and chased it, all over the planet, from that lowly little bump outside Butte to the massive sea of cunt and worship we swam in for so long.
We dumped the bike, of course. We were fifteen. Our parents were sad and old and gone to other places, Grandpa coughing up black shit all day long, smelling like piss and whiskey, and Grandma ignoring everything, just pretending, pretending, pretending, and we loved to take out that bike of Grandpa’s, God, it was beautiful then, though we think of it now as an utter piece of shit. We’d take it and ride it from the house up in the warren of roads below the mine and the toxic tailing pond where geese died every winter, where they flew to their deaths believing in a safe landing, and we’d roar back down, below the mountains and the statue of Jesus Christ blessing the whole Summit Valley and we would head out into the flats and just roar.
That day, we flew for two seconds, and we found our place — the place we will always leave for. That little dent in the atmosphere that is shaped like us. We landed on the front tire, all wrong, and the bike squirreled out and we dumped it, scraped hell out of a shoulder and a hip, and put a big hairy scuff on the tank. Grandpa saw it that night when he came home stinking from the M&M, and he kicked open the door to our room and starting going off, Bobby this and Bobby that. Bobby, Bobby — the name that never named us. When he took hold of our arm we grabbed him back, by the front of the shirt, like some movie hero of olden day, and shoved him into the wall, and saw the news on his face: we were not who he thought we were at all.
February 17, 1975 SHORT CREEK, ARIZONA
Ruth checks the forms while Samuel and Loretta organize the orders, hauling the heavy square buckets from the pallets and stacking them near the garage door, sacks slumped at the bases. It is early — they rise at five, and Ruth returns to Loretta’s door in two minutes if she’s not up — and their breath clouds in the frigid yellow light. It’s a huge garage, big enough for two cars, with a concrete floor and unpainted drywall, and pallets full of wheat, barley, flour, oats, powdered milk.
Samuel heaves a third bucket of brown rice onto a stack, and heads back to the pallet as Loretta comes by with a sack of oats.
Ruth says, “One more milk there.”
Samuel rolls his eyes at Loretta, says, “Another one?” under his breath. Ruth shoots him a stern look.
“It’s for the nursing home in Cedar,” she says. This is new, Loretta thinks, a customer that isn’t a family with twenty kids, but a big client, a business. Another sign, no doubt, of the blessings that have come their way since they began living in the Principle.
“A nursing home?” she asks.
“A nursing home,” Ruth says, then points her hand-whittled inch of pencil at a sack of oats. “That’s supposed to be a twenty, not a ten.”
Out of everything Loretta had expected and feared about this life, she had not foreseen the way Zion’s Harvest Bulk Foods would dominate every day. It sets the clock of the household — preparing deliveries in the morning, organizing inventory in the afternoon, and leaving the strange, midday slack times when Ruth announces Silent Scripture Hour and assigns a book of the Bible or the Book of Mormon, the Pearl of Great Price or the Doctrine and Covenants. The littlest children sit quietly with the Book of Mormon coloring books, but even Elizabeth and Dean Jr. — nine and seven years old — are expected to spend the hour reading scripture, running their index fingers under the tiny text. “And if ye shall say there is no law, ye shall also say there is no sin.” Loretta finds this the worst part of any day, the clearest reminder that no corner of her life is her own.
The new driver will arrive at seven. The last man quit in January, and Dean says he’s too busy to make the deliveries and collect payments himself, but Loretta can’t see how. He leaves in his big truck after breakfast, and returns right at dinner; Ruth says he’s finding customers, glad-handing, building the business, doing everything important that goes unseen. Maybe it’s working. Sales are up. Dean doubled the amount he donated to the United Order in December over November. Everyone needs their “year’s supply,” their backup against disaster or the last days, but everyone’s supply is being constantly eroded by their huge, ravenous families. Nobody can keep up. The business had always prospered, but once Dean got signed up to accept food stamps, Zion’s Harvest boomed.
A few weeks earlier, at dinner, when Dean mentioned that the driver had left, Loretta had volunteered to make the deliveries herself. Ruth frowned at her over the table. The children stopped eating.
“What?” Loretta asked, feeling that she had smacked into another taboo though she wasn’t certain what it was. They were everywhere.
Dean paused, a paste of half-chewed food in his mouth.
“We need you here,” he said at last.
They finish the stacks, Samuel and Loretta teaming up on the last of the sixty-pounders while Ruth scans her list. When she’s satisfied, she tapes an invoice to each tower of food. Inside, the girls make oatmeal, the same bland gruel that opens every bland day, with only honey and powdered milk because Ruth says processed sugar is how Lucifer gives you cancer. She is obsessed with cancer and the things that she believes causes it: sugar, too much meat, sin. Dean is upstairs, praying and studying scripture. He is on the Council of Elders now, as he frequently mentions.
Today there are eight orders: the Jordan Seniors get wheat, rice, oats, powdered milk, brown sugar, the deluxe spice mix; the Johnsons get puffed-rice cereal, powdered milk, dried onion seasoning, and the soup sampler; the Hales get one of everything and two of some, what with Brother Hale’s four wives and thirty-four children; the Millers are trying the meatless bulgur mix; the wardhouse will get the weekly complete batch that Ruth has labeled “Manna”—every item on the inventory. And then there are the smaller orders, the odds and ends.
Later today and tomorrow morning, they’ll prepare the largest order yet: three Mannas for the county jail. A new annual contract. Sometimes Dean thanks the Lord for the contract when he prays.
Loretta, Samuel, and Ruth go in and eat that horse food. In her mind, Loretta flees to her future, where breakfast will be a delicious indulgence, a feast of fruits and jams and sugar, spoonfuls of cancery sweetness. Then they hear car wheels on gravel, the new driver, and they go into the garage and Ruth rolls up the door and Loretta looks outside and stops breathing because there he is, leaning against the truck, foot crossed at the ankle, thumb in his belt loop. That bursting, vicious smile. Those pale eyes. Bradshaw.