“Should we go home?” I said.
Eldon didn’t answer me. “All right, then. Let’s have a stock-car race, boys.” He laughed the old uncertain ha, ha. And he slipped on a pair of leather work gloves.
There were three rows of five cars all backed now to the starting line and we were in the middle of the last row. Looking next door, I saw Junior Nighthorse pumping his hot rod into earthquake vibrato. He looked back at me, his mouth closed tightly. All around us there were race-car drivers prepping for damage, gunning blue grey clouds of oil smoke at each other. The sky went dark and the earth from where I sat smelled like the last automotive holocaust.
I shrugged at Junior and mouthed: “Nicky’s a crook!” His rod exploded back at me: Rrraaahhrrrr! It rocked on its wheels like a boat against the current. I couldn’t hear the Valiant at all, and while two men stood on a scaffold near the track and scanned a clipboard and pointed at us, Eldon jumped out his window and kicked our muffler into pieces. “That’s better,” he said, getting back in. Now the Valiant sounded its challenging roar against the distant hills; actually, it made a noise like something alive going down a drain in the Great Basin.
The track itself had been plowed and watered like a cornfield to slow everybody down. It looked more suitable for bullfighting; it wouldn’t be a bad idea, it struck me, to run the cars through the streets of Roosevelt, with a group of drunk and daring pedestrians fleeing before them, occasionally standing to wave a blanket at the headlights of the leader.
A jolt! We turned to see two feet on the trunk and then a face fell upside down into the hole where the windshield had been. “Hey! Rocky, how are you doing?”
We both cocked our heads to make out who was speaking.
“Okay, Russ, ready, ready.”
“You still going for the win?”
“Nothing else. If they get this damn thing started.”
I could see Nick pointing our way.
“Well, watch out!” Russell’s voice was barely audible in the roar. “Watch out for me pal: I’m going to win too!” His smile, an upside-down celebration, spread across his face. We watched him clamber back through the top of his ’59 Chevy which was directly behind, that is, in front, of us.
The stands were full of a thousand multi-colored shirts and from the havoc of our pre-wreckage r.p.m.’s the entire grandstand seemed to be swaying in waves, like gelatin.
So we have it all, as a man raises a green flag; a round dirt world with people finally ready for the climactic rinsing of my name. I saw Bill Nighthorse on the front row. He looked larger than anyone else around, like a judge at this little trial. He raised a hand to Eldon and me and his mouth remained even, a line, as if he knew it all already. He looked like everybody’s father, saying, “We’re lost,” but knowing where the path was all the time. I liked his knowing. Things were drawing to a focus I appreciated. At last there would be multiple witnesses, and I scanned the seats further for another honest face.
Then I looked back through the smoke at the scaffold where a man held the green flag. I grabbed Eldon’s sleeve.
“Junior wants to talk to you.”
Eldon leaned across and hollered, “What?”
Junior turned, looking puzzled.
“What is it?” Eldon roared. Junior still could not hear.
“Go see,” I urged, “But make it quick.”
Eldon climbed out his window and ran around the car.
The flag dropped.
I slid over and gunned it, ignoring Eldon’s screaming. All the cars jumped and sat for half a second digging a little place in the mud, and then we were officially off, backward as a group, bumping softly, fenderly into one another. Eldon ran up and tried to jump on the hood of the Valiant, but too late. He fell to his hands and knees, then stood up and pointed at me hard, stiffly. “Talk to the officials!” I yelled, pointing at the police.
The pack remained just that, a pack, to the first turn, every driver with his arm clutching the seat, steering backward, looking for the first turnabout possibility. I could see Darrel Teeth in front, leading in a winding reverse. Right behind Teeth, Wayne Hardell drove a modified ’54 Ford cleverly labeled number 1 and painted with hood flames. Hardell gripped the wheel in ferocious apathy until he caught sight of me. While I registered in his brain, and blood filled the fragile corpuscles of Hardell’s eyes, I pushed the
D
button, stopped in a skid—and drove forward in a broad U-turn, becoming the first car forward in the race.
For a minute I contemplated staying safely behind everyone, but drivers were catching onto the tactic, and Junior swung his car around. So I sprinted to the outside, sideswiping the yellow DeSoto, taking the driver’s door off. As the door cartwheeled irregularly down the track behind us, I heard the first crowd noises, and I wondered again about finding an honest reliable witness in the whole wreckophilic bunch.
“Back in your seats!” I yelled.
Staying outside, in a minute I was in the lead. I might win this mother. I saw Darrel Teeth with teeth bared at me as I passed. He was sideways, turning his Mercury around, and Russ had aided him considerably by ramming into Teeth’s front fender. Darrel bit his steering wheel, or seemed to, symbolizing his mammoth desire to run over my head.
By now all the cars but one had righted themselves, and we again bunched on the far straightaway. The track was soft and deep with dirt clods, and I tried to send the twin spumes of mud that the tires sawed into the air against the wicked surface of Teeth’s face. I could see him ducking. Everybody in the pack was eating dirt.
Wayne Hardell had customized his Ford a bit by installing something similar to the engine from a Lear Jet. While Teeth rammed me repeatedly in the rear, and the axe handle waved in his face, Hardell passed us on the outside. We all crossed the line for lap one.
Wayne then pulled ahead of me and closed what was becoming a grim sandwich. He looked around and his mouth made the
S
he substituted for a smile. I flipped him the bird. I mean there he was fifteen feet ahead of me; it seemed appropriate. He slowed to about sixty, and Lone Racer Teeth sped up to about seventy and I could feel the Valiant lifting, almost airborne.
They had me trapped. We took the first turn in this stuffy trio, locked like a train with a madman at the throttle. Hardell’s exhaust and mossy breath ran through my car. Experimentally, I let go of the wheel; nothing happened. I put an elbow out the window and an arm on the seat and pushed the cigarette lighter in with my toe. I was not in control. For a moment, I wished I’d brought a lunch. When the lighter popped out, I ducked and lit a cigarette, letting the ashes flee generously back into Darrel Teeth’s narrowed eyes.
In the infield I could see his majesty Nicky watching the races from his throne atop his van. I waved at Lila. Beneath them Eldon, helmet under his arm, was speaking to two police officers and pointing at me. I waved at them too and nodded wildly to agree with whatever he was saying.
I felt another jolt as Teeth touched up his speed a bit, and I reached into the back seat for a copy of the
Tribune
. I let each sheet go individually for a while and watched Darrell dodge them. The funnies stuck over his face, but only for a second.
Then our railroad ensemble was on the backstretch, and the industrious and deserving Russell Case, thumb on nose, passed us all on the outside. I loved it. He was fishtailing in joy, throwing dirt in every window. Behind him, equally earnest, Junior kept pace. As a tribute to my credibility, Junior swerved and delivered me a mild concussion doorwise and was gone. I could have poked him in the eye.
Ahead in the track, I saw Russell and Junior sweep inside of one entrant, a stationwagon over on its smoking side. Hardell rammed it on purpose and tore the top off the wagon, jarring those of us in the dining car. One of the stationwagon’s tires flew up and landed on my hood. I pulled it off.
Three other cars were disabled, and two of the drivers were frantic to get theirs away from the third which was frying in forty-foot flames. They hopped around the track uselessly, dodging the mad traffic which from time to time tried to bump them into the grandstand. Finally, two of the drivers lapsed into a fistfight in the infield. It was heartening to see two men finally pay attention to one another. In a way it reminded me of love; two people for awhile making every move in deep, lost concentration, acting as if every move the other person made mattered. One of the men, his overalls ripped into a Tarzan sarong, looked too much like Le Habre, a relief pitcher for the Escapees. The police moved the two dazed men apart.
I began honking occasionally at Wayne Hardell, who couldn’t quite figure it out. “Move over!” I waved. “Russell’s going for the win!” He ignored me, but I could see Big Nicky gesturing and swiveling in concern toward Russell’s Chevy, number 12, which now had half a lap on us.
From time to time the crowd would exhale in unison, signaling yet another collision or rollover. The track was filling with used auto parts. An axle rolling on its own passed us all in the fourth lap.
But something was not happening that should. An announcer was not broadcasting my innocence for all to hear. This is it, I thought, this is supposed to be where it all comes to a knot tighter than our three-car traveling auto wreck, and I step out in a moment filled with the proper bystanders and surprised looks and point my finger—at Nicky. In that moment I am supposed to be believed, and then a hand larger and more official than my own sweeps down and erases my slate: innocent. The retractions are to spread from local paper to paper, and the airwaves are to be full of my reclaimed newness,
INNOCENT MAN JAILED, CLEARED, REIMBURSED, LUNCH WITH GOVERNOR SCHEDULED.
This was the plan. But don’t so many of our plans grow whiskers in the moonlight, becoming dreams then nightmares that roam the countryside biting innocent people near Detroit?
In fact, something was happening that should not. Wayne Hardell was bookending my front-end, and Darrel Teeth in his daredevil mobile was giving me what is called the hard ride from the rear. I was keeping bad company at sixty-eight miles an hour. In this clogged environment, things were not clearing up. I spat back at Darrel Teeth; it splattered on the trunk.
In the infield now I could see a larger group of police surrounding Eldon. Then Lila and two other police joined the group. Eldon still had his helmet off and appeared to be directing the discussion. Nicky remained on top of his van, but he was waving his finger at Russell Case in number 12, and shouting. One of the policemen nearest Eldon was writing things in a small notebook while he looked our way.
“You’ve had it!” I yelled back at Teeth. “They’re taking names!” He couldn’t hear me.
In lap six, Russell and Junior, in that speeding order, began the mad tailgating and random rear bumping of Darrel Teeth. They were trying to lap us all and put the race on ice. Wayne Hardell swerved our clattering three-car ensemble wildly up and down the banked track to block them. I could feel us accelerate, and pressed the brake. No use: Teeth was pushing too hard.
When we whipped around the last turn, and refocused on the grandstand straightaway, bearing down like the chased, Wayne Gunn blew out in front of us sideways in his camper pickup. The rear door was waving open, and the whole image was that of a cow straddling the tracks in front of a closing locomotive. The Waynes exchanged terminal glances, and for the first time I was glad Hardell was ahead of me.
There wasn’t time to do anything; Wayne Hardell tried to turn up and strike the rear-end of the camper, but it didn’t matter. I ducked and closed my mouth.
WHAM! Hardell’s Ford went halfway through the camper body, spewing pans and silverware out in a bright fan. In the wind and speed, I rode the Valiant up his rising trunk in a flying jack-knife, and catapulted over their collision into the apocalyptic tailspin that would seal all deals.
It was hard keeping track for a while. I heard the metal scream as the axe tore loose and flew off toward other lives. Behind me I heard repeated explosions punctuating half a dozen racing careers, and looking up once, I saw my heels. I was in serious centrifugal motion, sitting on the roof being pummeled by Eldon’s novels, smothered by papers; then on the passenger door, pulling my arm back in the window before the view became all earth. I saw the cop cars in telephoto view. The group of policemen and Eldon. Lila, jumping. Nicky’s van did a closeup, and I slid, upside down on the roof, plowing a generous cut of earth into my lap. On the final turn, like a spinning bottle, the Valiant touched Nicky’s bus once. Glass broke.
I looked out the side window to see Nicky, like a skier in a wayward chairlift, clutch the arms of his deck chair and go over the back of his van: Whhoooaaaa!
“Get out!” I yelled to Eldon who was invisible. I dug around in the dirt and rubble, throwing books and papers. I remembered: He was not in the car. There was a subdued belch and the Valiant was in flames. I skittered out the window and was helped to my feet by a patrolman.
“Eldon!” I screamed, spinning away from the officer: “Eldon!”
“He’s over here, son,” the cop said. There was no skin on my elbows. The temperature had changed somehow. My nostrils were full of earth. “Over here son … over here son.” Son? My hearing was magnified, the volume swinging up and down. The eyes were afloat. I was standing up, I think, on the curved earth.
I found Nicky. He pulsed and waved in my vision like a mirage. He lay inert on his back. The particles of his deck chair were everywhere. “Tell him, Nicky! Tell the officer!” The mound of Nicky did not really move. He was unconscious or dead. “No!” I screamed. “Nicky!” Medical persons began kneeling around him. I slugged his van and cried, “Eldon!” It was more like a cough.
Then the sky was smoke in a vortex, flushing away to a pinpoint, and, above the blue lights on police cars snapping in their little circles, I saw Nighthorse. It was like a photograph. The freeze-action photograph in films where the action stops, and becomes a page in an album and a gigantic hand reaches down from heaven and turns the page. The picture was Night-horse standing in flames above the heads of two policemen, his hands on their shoulders, my name in his voice, his head tangent with all the rafters of the firmament. The iris of smoke clenched to a close before I saw the giant page-turning hand.