Jason and his friend Boyd sift strychnine powder into the rolled barley, wearing gloves and paper masks. Like surgeons on TV, Jason thinks. The odors of dust and oil, wood and machine, hang thickly in the shed. Outside it is as hot as August, and the jackrabbits are spreading across the desert like insects. They’ve been out for weeks now, bounding and skimming through the sage, chasing, stopping, and popping one another with their forepaws like boxers, the females fighting off the males, the males insane with lust.
“Mad as hares,” Jason’s mom told him a few weeks earlier as they watched them zipping about the haystack by the dairy barn. “That’s where that comes from.”
Jason said, sarcastically, “That’s where what comes from?” His parents were so ridiculous. He thought he was going to choke on it—his ridiculous parents, and their ridiculous church, and this ridiculous farm, and this ridiculous town.
“Rabbit murder,” Jason says now as he hefts the final sack onto the trailer. “Raise this stupid animal, kill that stupid animal, milk the other stupid animal, poison this stupid animal.”
He hacks a dusty loogie and spits it into the dirt, where it coils and darkens like a worm. He thinks the jacks are kind of cool.
“I love rabbit murder,” Boyd says. He wants to argue about every single thing lately. “I wish I could murder rabbits all the time.”
It is late Saturday afternoon. Jason had hoped to take the LeBaron to Twin Falls, maybe stay and see Jaws, but instead his father gave him this to do. Extra chores every weekend. His punishment for spending his mission money on eight-track tapes and hamburgers at the Oh-So-Good Inn and gas for dragging Main. It’s been more than a month since his mom found the stack of eight-tracks in his closet—Bowie and BTO, Sweet and the Doobie Brothers—and then, one question leading to another, discovering that he had spent most of the money in his passbook account. Money he’d earned raising and selling livestock at the FFA sales at the county fair. He was supposed to be saving for his two-year mission, the mission to convert the heathens that all Mormon boys were assigned to at age nineteen. Jason already knew he was not going on a mission, but his parents didn’t, not yet, and they flipped out when they found out about the money. Now every time he asks if he can go somewhere, his father assigns him a chore instead. Like poisoning jackrabbits.
“Those little fuckers are gonna get it good,” Boyd says, grinning behind his mask.
Jason’s father says they’ll try the poison first, and if it doesn’t work, they’ll move on to other methods—traps, arsenic, hunting parties. “This works best,” his father had said, “but it works better on everything else, too. Dogs. Birds. Pretty soon you’re killing everything just to kill one thing.”
Everyone is trying to keep the jacks out of gardens and crops, and no one is succeeding. Fences. Blood meal in the gardens. Heading out to the desert at night with flashlights and rifles: spotlighting. The rabbits just keep coming.
Boyd swings his heavy black bangs out of his eyes and says, “Bleed to death right out their little rabbity asses.”
“Nice,” Jason says. “Nature boy.”
Boyd is half Shoshone, and he’s gotten political. “I am waking up to my heritage,” he sometimes says, in a mock-serious tone that does not mean he isn’t serious. Every day, it seems, he is incensed about some new cause: the American Indian Movement, My Lai, Pine Ridge, the Watergate trials. Boyd wants to free Leonard Peltier. He rails about The Man, and the conspiracy to move the Negroes out of the inner city. Jason has never heard anything like it. His upbringing has been a warm, constant bath of family, faith, and the GOP. He loves to listen to Boyd, as baffling as it is. It makes him feel like an outlaw.
They hitch the trailer to the tractor. Jason drives out onto the county road, Boyd sitting on the wheel well, and down the quarter mile to Grandpa’s place, the small brick square in the middle of a weedy lawn that peters out at the edges. A truck passes and honks. Jason turns in and follows the dirt road out into the fields. They bump along for fifteen minutes until they reach the southern border of the 2,345 Harder acres, where they begin to trace the outline of the family’s land with poison.
Jason drives slowly while Boyd shakes out a trail of barley, marking the black soil like chalk on a baseball field. The tractor grinds and vibrates, stinking of burning oil. Only winter wheat is planted this early, but Grandpa said if they start now, maybe they can kill enough jacks to scare away the rest before everything starts growing. They stop at sunset and look out over the desert running west. The fat sun touches the serrated horizon, shadows veer toward them, and dark smudges scoot across the desert.
“Here, bunny, bunny, bunny,” Boyd says.
By the time they return to Grandpa’s, empty trailer banging, the night glows with spectral pale dust. Boyd is whistling Zeppelin—“Going to California,” far out of tune—and Jason hears a sound he can’t quite identify. A wheezing or hacking. And then he sees his grandfather on all fours on the lawn.
“Holy shit,” Boyd says, and hops off the wheel well. As Jason kills the tractor motor, he hears his grandfather heaving, choking, and when he turns toward them, Jason is stunned at the fear on Grandpa’s face: taut, white eyed. It roots him to his seat until Boyd barks: “Hey!”
They get Grandpa into his truck, propped between them, and Jason drives. Grandpa’s breathing slows, becomes less frantic.
Boyd says, “You doing okay there, Mr. Harder?”
He nods.
“Can’t,” he whispers, “catch my breath.”
“No kidding,” Boyd says, and Jason says, “Don’t be a smart-ass.”
Grandpa chuckles. Coughs and coughs.
“Sorry,” Boyd says, and he does actually sound sorry for once.
Grandpa whispers, “No, no. Do be a smart-ass.” Chuckles and coughs.
They come to the edge of town. On a small rise to the right is the abandoned tuberculosis hospital, like a decrepit castle. Highway 10 becomes Main Street, and Jason barely slows as they pass the Bowl-A-Rama’s neon sign, the bright island of fluorescence at the Oh-So-Good Inn, the Safeway and the Mormon church, the farm implement dealership and the state school for the deaf and blind. They turn east, drive four blocks, and stop at the small one-story brick hospital. Gooding Memorial.
They help him in and he is taken away, and they are left to sit in the plastic chairs under buzzing tubes of light. Jason feels like there must be many things for him to do or say, but he can’t imagine what the first one should be.
Boyd says, “Don’t call your folks or anything.”
• • •
Jason has never seen his grandfather in a position of submission or need. Everywhere they go, his grandfather is greeted as a leader, a patriarch, a man to be depended on. A lot of people seem to think he’s kinder than he is, but even this contributes to Jason’s sense of his authority. He’d kick a dog in a second, scold someone else’s child. Jason once saw him fire a hired man for taking jars of milk. Everyone knew he took milk. It was expected, even. But one day, Grandpa saw Bart bring an empty jug from his pickup truck, fill it from the tank in the barn, and carry it back out again. Grandpa cleared his throat and scratched angrily at the back of his hand. He walked over to Bart and barked, “What’s my son owe ya?”
Jason felt bad for Bart, but not so bad as to erase his admiration for his grandfather. It was a mean thing to do, but it wasn’t weak. That was a few months before the Evel Knievel jump. Jason had asked his parents for permission to go, and his mom had said no, had said, “Let’s keep the Sabbath holy.” His parents had come to think his interest in “worldly” things—in daredevils and rock music and novels about hobbits and the loose and supposedly willing girls of Wendell—was getting out of control. Infuriated, Jason thought, When I leave, I will engage all manner of wickedness on Sundays. But that’s not what he said. What he said was “Okay.” And then his grandfather had stepped in and shown him what you do when you want to do something. You do it.
That’s when he started spending his mission money.
As far as Jason knew, Grandpa had never told anyone about the day they went to see Evel Knievel, and he never brought it up again—though if he gave Jason a wink during a family dinner, Jason felt their secret was being invoked. The only person Jason ever told was Boyd, and he regretted it. Before the jump, Boyd had been merely dismissive of Evel Knievel as a showboater and fool. After the canyon jump, he was merciless.
“Twenty-five bucks,” he scoffed. “You should have just burned that money.”
“It wasn’t my money.”
“It’s just so hilarious. I about shit myself.”
“As usual.”
Jason was whispering, standing in the kitchen with the long green phone cord wrapped around his arm. His mom walked in, set a potted plant in the sink, and Jason moved around the half wall into the living room.
“Were you laughing pretty hard?” Boyd asked. “I bet you were laughing your ass off.”
Jason had not been not laughing his ass off. He had felt what happened as a nauseating throb below the sternum. There had been an instant that day when he had come to a conclusion: Evel Knievel would clear the canyon. This faith thrived briefly, and it was as wrong as could be. Because Jason had a lifetime of practice in forcing meaning onto events—attaching morals to stories, locating God’s hand in the smallest events—he decided this had identified something about him, something large and definitive and fundamental. A failure to see correctly.
• • •
Jason’s parents arrive, and they stop at the edge of the waiting area—not even a room, just a space off a hallway, defined by a thin rug and two vinyl-covered couches. His father clears his throat. “So?”
“Not sure,” Jason says. “They’ve got him in there doing something or other. They said someone would be out to let us know what’s happening, but it’s been about an hour.”
His parents stand behind the couch, as though they might not be staying. Jason’s father is tall and lean, but gone slumpy in the middle and always blushing. Jason’s mother is shorter, pretty at a distance and plain up close: something practical and taciturn in her short brown hair and bobbed nose, her splintery hazel eyes.
They sit down, and Jason’s mother peppers him with questions: How had they found him? How bad was his breathing? Did he say anything about what happened? Did the doctors act concerned?
“I’d like to lead us in a prayer,” Jason’s father says.
Jason’s neck crawls with embarrassment, because of Boyd and because they are sitting here where anyone might just come walking up. But he bows his head and folds his arms.
“Our Father in Heaven,” his father begins, in the bass drone that sounds as though each word were being tugged from a posthole. “We come before you this evening to ask that you look after our father and grandfather, to ask you to protect him in his time of need.” Jason cuts a look to Boyd, smirking. “We ask that you will bless him with the strength to fight his infirmities, and we ask that you help us stay strong to provide him the help he may need, our Father who art in heaven, to do for him, at this time in his life, as he has done for so many in his own life. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.”
With every amen lately, Jason feels a small, hollow place where something else used to be. He’s been coming unstuck from the church for months, questioning, doubting, and bored. Three hours of church on Sundays, Family Home Evening on Mondays, youth group on Wednesdays, prayer five million times a day. He has simply taken the measure of that life, of the people in the ward, and decided he doesn’t want it. He wanted to be different, and he wanted other people to know he was different, and by the time he recognized this, he already was different.
He was baptized at age eight. He often thinks of that day—the gleaming font and the scratchy, laundered feel of the baptismal garment, a terry-cloth coverall. The font was a huge tub sunk in the floor in a small room at the wardhouse. Family and friends filled the folding chairs. After a prayer and scripture readings by the bishop, Jason went to the edge of the font, at the top of a set of tiled stairs that sank into the water. Dad waited below, waist deep, hands folded before him and the wrists of the garment dampened darkly. He was solemn, unsmiling, and yet Jason knew it was a joyful moment for him. As Jason stepped down, he had the sensation that people were rising above him—Mom in the front row, tears in her eyes, Aunt Bonnie and Jenna and their families, friends from the ward. Dad read the prayer slowly, then laid Jason back into the cool, chlorinated water. When he emerged, he felt like a sleek animal, a cheetah or a puma, fast and glistening. Stepping out, though, he felt the garment cling heavily, and he slopped back to the changing room, where the day resolved itself in the most ordinary sensations: dress shirt sticking to his humid skin, the damp smell of towels and worn socks, the sight of looped black coils of hair on his father’s chest, the echoing sound of him tapping a comb on the sink.
Mom made hamburger pizza for dinner that night. She and Dad were happier about this than about anything Jason had ever done, it seemed—way happier than the time he brought home straight A’s, or earned the Webelos award in Cub Scouts. Now he was a full member of the church. Accountable in the eternal ledger. That night, as she tucked Jason into bed, Mom talked about eternity, about the never-ending time to come. Though Dad was the patriarch, it was Mom—the convert—who talked to him the most about the faith and righteousness, the one who seemed to take it to heart in day-to-day life.
“From now on, son, your actions have consequences forever,” she said, smoothing his stiff hair with her hand. “We can live together as a family for time and all eternity. Never be apart. But we must be righteous. You must be righteous. You will, won’t you, son?”
Whatever it was that Jason was supposed to feel at this moment, he didn’t. But because it was so clearly the thing to be done, he said, “I’ll be righteous, Mom.”
• • •
The doctor arrives, jocular and smiling in his square metal-framed glasses. He tells them it appears Grandpa has an advanced form of emphysema, and he’ll need to stay at least another night.
“Keep an eye on things,” the doctor says, nodding. “Try to get some pictures of his lungs.”
Emphysema. Though he’d never smoked or worked in an asbestos mine.
“Sometimes it happens,” the doctor says. “Not for any reason we can see.”
Jason’s parents want to stay at the hospital, so he heads to Boyd’s for the night. He loves staying over there. There are no rules. Boyd’s mom is gone most of the time, they make a mess and no one complains, and he doesn’t have to worry about his parents coming in and deciding, mid-episode, that Kojak isn’t “appropriate.”
At Boyd’s, they make two frozen pizzas and watch TV while Boyd’s mom works her shift at the Lincoln Inn. Boyd sits cross-legged on his couch—he calls it Indian style, sarcastically. Where Jason is tall and ungainly, Boyd is thick and earthbound, head like a medicine ball, with a wide, flat nose and thick black hair, black eyes, and a shaggy smile that looked sheepish at first and then defiant. At school, the other kids always call him “Chief” or “Little Bear” or something, and he always responds, “Good one, George,” or, “Hilarious once again, George.” Only Jason knows that “George” is Custer, and that in Boyd’s happiest fantasies he rejoins his Indian brothers and sisters and rides down hard on Gooding High School.
Boyd says, “Well, dude, yes or no?”
Yes or No?—their rhetorical game. God: yes or no? Everything is an argument for or against, from Corinne Jensen’s tightly packed H.A.S.H. jeans to Evel Knievel’s failure to clear the canyon.
“That sucks,” he says. “Don’t do that now.”
Boyd shakes his head. “Now is the perfect time.”
Jason stares into the TV screen. Emergency! The paramedics are trying to revive a firefighter who collapsed in a burning building. They are shocking him, trying to restart his heart.
“I say . . . this one’s a yes,” Boyd says.
Jason stares at him.
“It’s so perfectly bad, man,” Boyd says. “So neat. So precise. So constructed. A godless world would be chaotic. Nonsensical.”
“This is sensical?”
On TV, the firefighter comes coughingly back to life.
“Perversely, perfectly nonsensical. A disease he doesn’t deserve in any way. Dude never smoked, and now this.”
“What a godless world would have,” Jason says, “is no sense of right or wrong. Even if cause and effect were all lined up—right and wrong, that’s the main thing. In a godless world, the evil would triumph, the good would be punished or enslaved or something, or get diseases they don’t deserve. Like Mordor.”
Boyd shakes his head. “You can work those fucking hobbits into anything.”
They watch the final credits in silence, the paramedics frozen in tableaux of bravery, concern, celebration.
“I don’t know,” Boyd says. “God must like to fuck with people. Maybe He finds it funny. Maybe He’s just bored and screwing with us. Think about it: we’re bored. How much more bored must He be?”
A tampon commercial comes on with a bicentennial theme. A gymnast in a spotless leotard vaults beneath waving flags.
“Good God,” Boyd says. “If we were really all that free, would we have to be reminded of it constantly? Do free people go around talking about their freedom all the time? Like, tampons—and freedom. Hamburgers—and freedom. Everything and freedom. Wouldn’t a truly free people not really notice it, because they’re so utterly, amazingly free?”
Boyd’s mom comes home as they watch Saturday Night Live. The screen casts a blue pall, and Boyd’s mother, puffy faced and smoky voiced, begins watching it even as she sets down her purse, bending unsteadily at the waist, her skinny legs straight. Her starchy, flyaway hair, as brown as a rabbit’s, barely covers her scalp, and she curses more than any other woman Jason knows. She flops into the recliner and watches, head drooping. She reeks of something sweet and alcoholic, mixed with cigarette smoke. On TV, Belushi and the others bob around in bee suits. Lines of static run through them, slant the scene momentarily sideways. Her face sinks forward, snaps up. She stands, sways, puts a hand on the recliner arm.
“Oof,” she says. “Boys, I am drunk.”
Boyd laughs, flat, without looking away from the TV. His mother wavers, stares. Jason feels darkly clandestine, graced by the world outside his world.
“Bees,” she says.