Free Daredevils by Shawn Vestal Page A

every situation: a way in. The way in is like the ramp, like the lever, like the cocked hammer of a pistol. It is the way you turn an ordinary thing into an extraordinary thing.
    The way in is always the same. You can spend years misunderstanding this, thinking that you have to find the way in for each new scenario, when it’s always the same: the way in is to act as if you’re already in.
    To believe it before it’s true.
    It’s like getting laid, America. The best way to do it is to act as if you already know—despite whatever the broad herself may think—that it’s inevitable, that’s it’s happening, that there’s no going back. You know she’s gonna do it before she does. You don’t seduce. You make it clear that it is completely unnecessary to seduce. That the fucking to come is not in question.
    So the years roll along, and we perform our amazing feats, our miracles, and pretty soon the Grand Canyon dream is not so crazy. Is not such wild talk. And then there’s a New York promoter getting on board. A Jew bastard naturally. But he’s on board, and hethinks he can make it happen, and he starts looking into it, and he finds out that the government—your government, America—will not allow such a thing because it owns the land on the canyon rims or some shit, and so the New York promoter, the flesh peddler, keeps after it, won’t give up, and he finds another spot: the Snake River Canyon, right outside Twin Falls, Idaho. There’s a farmer there who’ll lease the land for the ramp and for the crowds. There’ll be some permits to get, some locals to persuade, some dicks to suck, but the promoter is good at that, and pretty soon we’re set to go.
    The way in was money. He was gonna pay us $25,000 plus some of the gate. He had a plan to show the thing live in movie theaters, sell tickets all across the land. A man jumps a canyon! A mortal defies physics! And yet, that was not the way in. Money was the way in. Money—the notion of it, the idea of it, the magnetic force of it.
    The promoter understood it and we understood it, and so we gathered in New York City, and he got a big cardboard check with a big fake number on it: $6 million. And he handed it to me, and from that moment on, it became truer than true, $6 million, in all the headlines and stories, and of course America would watch this, of course the country would turn its adoring gaze to us, obviously there was no way this could fail, because now this feat drank from the wells of death and money, and the wells of death and money are magic.

THE FEDERALMEN

July 26, 1953
S HORT C REEK, A RIZONA
    S omething booms in the night. Three times. Explosions, far away. The echoes drift. Is it the Lord? Is it the enemy? Ruth is too warm, and kicks off the blanket. The booms are like dream noise. Like heaven noise, hell noise.
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    â€œGood morning, little birds,” Ruth’s mother whispers. It is as dark as the closet with the door closed. “Come, come, little birds.” Her mother is a shape of darkness inside other darkness, leaning over Ruth’s younger sisters in their bed. And now she is moving toward Ruth, leaning over, a light hand on her shoulder. “Come quickly, Ruth. I need you to get Alma and Sarah dressed and come downstairs.
Quickly
.”
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    Her father’s beard is like a tree. Or a forest. Dense and thick at the roots, it spreads and lightens at the tips, where the light slips in.When his jaw moves and he talks to the Lord, his face is a dense grove of slender autumn trees, rolling along as the earth heaves.
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    The entire family is here. Her father and her mother and her father’s other wives—Aunt Olive and Aunt Desdemona and Aunt Eliza. All thirteen of her brothers and sisters. Her heavenly family. Ruth is eleven, the oldest among her