Daredevils Read Free Page A

scorched with crosshatched sunburn and drooping ears red and thick as ham. He’s saying something but the wind blasts it away. The land skims by, a flat plain broken with lava rock and spotted with sage. Thin sky, rags of cloud. The early coat of autumn shows its bright tans and shorn fields, the first scent of bitter dying in the air.
    He says, “I thought your dad was going to bite his ear off.”
    On the seat between them, balanced atop a pair of hardened leather work gloves and two V-belts, is Grandpa’s set of scriptures, zipped into a leather case: the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, the Pearl of Great Price.
    They are wearing their Sunday suits, but they are not going to church.
    They pass through Wendell and onto Interstate 84, bound for Twin Falls. Grandpa pushes the Ford to seventy, seventy-five, and stops trying to shout above the noise. He is handsome, better looking than the rest of the Harder men: tall, neat, sun chapped. Beside him, Jason feels thin and soft. He hates the way he looks, his dense scrub of auburn hair, his freckles, his gangling knobbiness. Grandpa’s dark gray hair is oiled, rows of comb tines as neat as a barley field, and his suit smells of Old Spice and perspiration.
    An adrenal flutter passes through Jason, then comes again.They are not going to church, though they have told Jason’s parents they are driving to Rupert so Grandpa can speak to the ward there. It is a plausible lie—Grandpa is a high councillor and he often goes to speak at the Mormon wards around southern Idaho—but Jason is astonished that Grandpa told it.
    â€œThis oughta be something,” Grandpa shouts.
    Jason nods. He wants to say
More than something,
but then he doesn’t want to say it anymore. This day wears a skin around it, a membrane that might burst with the wrong word. They are going to watch Evel Knievel jump the Snake River Canyon in a steam-powered rocket.
    Grandpa says, “What do you think? He gonna make it?”
    â€œNot sure.”
    â€œWell, Judas Priest. Of course you’re not sure. But what do you
think
?”
    Who could say? Jason sees every jump he can, worshipping at the Panasonic each time Evel Knievel climbs onto a motorcycle and flies into the air. It began when Jason watched the Caesars Palace crash on
Wide World of Sports
when he was nine: Evel Knievel bouncing off the ramp, body rippling and bike roaring after him like an angry bull. Surely that was a vision of death. But Evel Knievel survived and went out and did it again and again.
    This jump today, though—rocket ship, canyon—this is something else.
    â€œWhat do
you
think?” Jason shouts.
    Grandpa laughs.
    â€œHe might just do it. He might. I mean, all’s he’s got to do is sit there and get shot a long way.”
    â€œThat’s all an astronaut does, too, but that don’t make it easy.”
    This is something Evel Knievel himself has said, in one of the articles Jason razored from the
Times-News
and taped into his scrapbook.
    â€œWell,” Grandpa says, like he’s not going to fight about something so silly with such a junior opponent. “It’s not exactly the moon launch.”
    Jason wants to ask Grandpa about their lie. To pin down why it might be acceptable, given what he and the other elders always say in church: Thou shalt not bear false witness. Jason’s parents had cited another commandment when they initially told him he couldn’t go to the canyon jump: Thou shalt keep the Sabbath holy. He was pissed off for days, until Grandpa approached—in his shoulder-to-shoulder, gazing-at-the-horizon way one morning while Jason was feeding calves—and asked if he’d heard of this fella Knievel.
    He could understand Grandpa wanting to see the jump. He used to race motorbikes in the desert and drive to Boise for the stock cars. The lie, though. Why would he do it, and then just wink about it? Jason wonders,