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would like to hear you say it.”
    She tries three times to get the word out, that word,
yes,
and when she does everything collapses. Tears scald her face and she gasps and coughs. He strokes her head, hair damp at the roots. She hates to cry.
    â€œShh, little sister,” he says. “It’s all right.”
    He leaves, and she lies there shaking, curled on her side on the unfamiliar bed, on the quilt Ruth made from patches of old denim dotted with tiny rabbit ears of white yarn, and she lies there a long time, an eternity, staring at the wall, thinking,
Bradshaw was right, Bradshaw was right,
until she gathers herself, becomes herself again, and makes herself a promise that she will do more than simply getaway.
    Â 
    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 parentswere 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
S HORT C REEK, A RIZONA
    R uth 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