Nick was waiting in the Corvette when I pulled into the lot at nine thirty. Seeing him down low in the awesome car, I realized I had been doubting all along if he’d show up, and now there was a burst of shivering anxious energy, of myself in charge of the night, as I pulled up to his window.
“If she asks,” he said, “you and me are finishing up that Charger. That okay? She doesn’t want me out racing.”
We could’ve gone 84 to 63 to 6, three right turns into Levi, but instead I took him over the Seven Hills and through the rolling farmland, from Breakneck Hill to White Deer Rock, glancing at his headlights as I held a casual speed so that he might find enough peace in an untroubled drive through the country to reflect upon his intention to leave Mary Ann—the course he’d made inevitable, I thought, when he got the vasectomy.
In Levi I pulled into the parking lot of the Arco ampm, the only place still open in town except for two restaurants, and Nick parked beside me. I told him to wait in the Corvette while I went inside.
Walter Maze was working the counter, as he had every night shift since years before I moved to town. I used to revere him, the keeper of tobacco and Hustler magazines who used to sell some of the Northwest kids beer. Then a few months ago I’d stopped in and brought a six-pack up to the counter. “You got that wrong,” he said, and as if a mask had come off I saw him for what he was, an inbred in his late thirties, still cashiering at ampm, still with his folks, balding, hollow faced, a monster truck on his cap though he drove a ’72 Gremlin—a rust box with a bumper sticker that said I LIKE TO SNATCH A KISS AND VICE-VERSA.
I hadn’t come back since, even for gas.
“Anybody out at Wickersham’s tonight?” I asked as I paid for a pack of Marlboro Lights.
His eyes skimmed the aisles behind me before he opened the register. “Probably,” he said, which was code for yes. If nobody was there, he’d say, “Doubt it.”
* * *
There was a story behind the quarter-mile racing at Wickersham’s. When Sheriff Reynolds was new on the job ten or so years ago, he engaged in the high-speed pursuit of a Ford Galaxy full of teenagers who had been drag racing on the Route 6 flats north of the high school. The chase ended with the Galaxy plowing into another car at ninety miles an hour where Rail Tree Hill intersected 317. Legend had it they had to go in with a cherry picker to get bloody limbs out of the trees. Four dead. His first month as sheriff.
Reynolds knew he wasn’t going to stop the kids from drag racing. At Northwest they learned how to trick out engines, and in the evenings after their farm chores, they went out to the machine shed to work on their own hot rods. Reynolds’s brother-in-law, Al Wickersham, owned a section of farmland that was cut by Peacock Lane, a half-mile stretch of blacktop paved and then abandoned by a developer in the ’70s. Nobody used it except hunters in the fall, who continued after it became a single-lane dirt road at the base of Sawpit Hill. Reynolds put out the word that as long as there was no other racing around town, he wouldn’t send his deputies out to Peacock Lane, though it was understood that Wickersham would keep an eye out and report any trouble. By the time I went through Northwest, Wickersham’s (it was cooler than saying “Peacock Lane”) came up as often in conversation as Arco or the drive-in in Wolcott.
I’d been there a few times in the daylight just to see it. Start and finish lines had been painted in reflective white a quarter mile apart, and kids patched and resurfaced the asphalt as it was needed. It was actually one of the smoothest stretches of road in Levi. They’d even put in a telephone pole with a streetlight hanging over the start line.
When Nick and I arrived that night in the Corvette, having left my car in the Arco parking lot, a bonfire was going on a stony crust of mud behind Wickersham’s alfalfa field. I saw backlit silhouettes tipping bottles that were bigger than beer bottles, and things that weren’t logs were getting thrown in the fire, sending up sparks.
In the dirt turnaround I recognized Tim Heller’s Charger and Mickey Burke’s Monte Carlo. “That’s one of them,” I said to Nick, in answer to his earlier question about which cars to take seriously.
“The Charger,” he said.
“It’s got a four forty Magnum.”
“One four or three twos?”
“Just a four-barrel, I think. The Monte’s got a four fifty-four.”
Nick didn’t seem interested in the Monte, and neither of us bothered to mention the other cars—two smog-era Firebirds and a Nova that was a year newer than mine. Nick slid the shifter up to neutral and slowed. “Just pull up?” he said. I nodded, and as Nick began rolling down his window the smell of bonfire conjured the same jittery dread that had crippled me in high school. Three guys came over and blocked our way as if it were private property, and Nick eased to a stop.
Billy Motts wore canvas suspenders over bare skin like he had on the first day of school, when he dropped on one knee in front of my desk and jabbed a hand at me to arm wrestle. He was missing a finger—that nub of flesh still had some small, clammy movement—and beat me after half a minute or so, though I’d been afraid to try all the way.
Except for a glimpse around town, when I usually turned to avoid the potential embarrassment of waving and not having the wave returned, I hadn’t seen anyone from school in more than a year. “A lot of these guys are dicks,” I said. I don’t know what response I was trying to elicit, perhaps just that he have more awareness of his words and gestures, but his expression didn’t change at all. He was staring at the cars.
When Tim Heller started looking over the front end of the Corvette, I saw that Nick had removed the 427 emblems from the hood.
Nobody introduced themselves. I’d made a fool of myself at Northwest when, still in the mind-set of Milford Academy, I’d walked up to a circle of them trying to kick a hacky sack with steel-toe work boots and said, “Hey, guys, I’m Justin.”
“Big block?” Heller said now.
A long moment passed before Nick said, “I’m not used to having to say.”
Motts laughed. “Fuckin’ A. He got you, Heller.”
“Yeah, but you got Brainiac,” Heller said, and God how I despised that nickname. I thought of how in school, by the myth of familiarity that a nickname implies, I’d fooled myself into believing that these people would someday be my friends.
“He knows what I got,” Heller said to Nick. “You’re one up on me.”
“It’s a big block,” Nick said. “Four twenty-seven.”
“Nitrous?”
Nick shook his head.
“I can smell it,” Motts said. “Giggle gas smells like rock candy.” A guy I didn’t know, standing suddenly beside Motts and holding a bottle of Bacardi, said, “You’re a fucking goon, Motts,” and Motts spat his snuff juice and said, “You laugh like you got rubber bands on your balls.” Motts looked at me, grinning, and with no choice except to take his side I grinned back and dared myself to speak. “You guys having a party back there?”
“Anderson’s old man croaked,” Motts said. “Everybody brought shit to burn.”
“I wouldn’t of burnt a good fishing pole,” the guy with the Bacardi said. “Reel and everything. Like a reel’s gonna burn.”
They set the race at three hundred dollars. Since the Corvette was lighter than the Charger, I would ride with Nick while Heller raced alone. Nick agreed to the condition reluctantly and looked a little irritated when the guys explained the fairness of it, which was all pool-shark strategy. Nick didn’t know it, but his attitude of not giving a damn about making friends was going to make him friends. From his wallet he counted out twenties and fifties. Motts came to his window and as he took the bills he said, “That first red oak after the finish line, start laying on the brakes. You got around a thousand feet before it turns to dirt, and then it’s your fucking funeral.”
A kid who’d been a year or two behind me, sipping a Sam Adams, called over, “You know what that Chevy cross is for?”
I looked at Nick. “I think he means the bowtie.”
“It means you’re getting crucified,” the kid said.
Nick started the car without seeming to acknowledge the comment, but the word “crucified” sent a chill through me. It suggested death, and death is what there was out here. You could smell it rising from the pavement, that vinegary haze of drying rubber, and in the strange chemistry of fire smoke and carbon monoxide. In seconds I would look into the face of death as the too-dark dark of the woods rushing toward us at speeds in the triple digits. It was the dark of pre-civilization, where cars didn’t belong, gnats and mosquitoes exploding in the two puny cones of headlights, and the end of everything in the shimmering tree trunks if Nick didn’t find his brakes in time.
But then, cheating death was the whole appeal. That was why in the cafeteria at school, where conversation topics rarely lasted longer than a few bites of pizza, where you were a sucker if you cared too much about anything, the races at Wickersham’s were timeless talk. Year after year, freshman through senior, it made the most unexcitable guys blush and stutter.
Eavesdropping from another table, I’d heard about the close calls—fishtails at the start, locking brakes at the finish, stupefied raccoons scampering out in between—and was amazed that no one had ever been killed out there. But tonight it seemed a little less by dumb luck than by design that wrecks were minimized. There were two rules pertaining to safety, though of course the rationale was explained as keeping the cars in one piece, which was a more manly concern than not getting hurt. The track had to be kept clean. To this effect there were two push brooms nearby, and when someone mindlessly flicked his cigarette sparking onto one of the lanes, he was slapped across the back of the head and told to get his ass over there and pick it up. The second rule was that if you were there to race, you stayed away from the keg. Sheriff Reynolds had donated a Breathalyzer for this reason, and everyone took a blow on it before money on the race was even discussed.
Motts used the fanned-out bills as a flag, and when he brought it down there was only thrust. Nick jumped forward and eased off, letting Heller up to the front fender with a lazy shift to second, more concerned with the illusion of neck-and-neck than with winning. Most of the race, my door was even with the back quarter-panel of the Charger, and in the last seconds Nick bumped ahead to win.
After we stopped, Heller came running over to us. Instinctively I slid my elbow over and locked my door.
“Goddamn it, that was close!” Heller yelled. “I missed third a little, did you hear it? That was fucking inches.” He started laughing. He might have been hollering that he’d won.
On the drive back to my car, Nick handed me a hundred dollars for thirteen-seconds’ work. “You plugged us in,” he said and glanced at me. “You don’t mind taking their money?”
I couldn’t say no emphatically enough.
“They your friends?”
“Just guys from school.”
Nick shifted gears, and then he did something unlike him, something Bobby might do. He reached over and patted me on my thigh. It wasn’t a hard pat or a soft one, but exactly the right impact to say to hell with all of them. “They’re goofball hicks,” he said, and it was the most insulting thing I’d ever hear him say, making me ashamed of all I’d ever done to try to win their assholing approval. He squeezed my thigh once and took his hand back.
“Was it enough money?” I said.
“It’s plenty.”
We both needed cigarettes, but he didn’t want to smoke in the Corvette, so I directed him to a wide shoulder by a suspension bridge over the Pomperaug. We got out and leaned over the iron railing, looking down at the moonlit water as we smoked. “We could have taken him by a second or two,” Nick said.
“Jesus.”
“It’s an embarrassment for a car like this to be in their company.” When his ash fell, his gaze followed it, but you couldn’t see where it hit the water. We stayed on the bridge longer than I’d expected, Nick lighting a second cigarette and a third. And then out of nowhere he said, “You know what they say is proof we’ll never make a time machine?”
I watched him for a moment. “A time machine? Like H. G. Wells?”
“Figure it out,” he said. “You’re smart. What’s the proof it can’t be done?”
My mind was blank, and then the answer was just there. “Because nobody ever came back from one.”
He nodded. “If they figure out how to do it, we’d see somebody come back. There was a NASA guy in the sixties doing research, but the funding got cut. Just like when the EPA said no more high compression. Could you imagine what kind of horsepower we’d be seeing today? Or if NASA kept going with time travel. What good does it do anybody, we landed on the moon?” Animated now, he leaned over the bridge rail.
“There’s a rock ledge down there,” I said, afraid that in his mania he might jump.
“There’s a way it could happen.” He flicked his cigarette away, and in the same second it hissed in the water he had the pack out of his shirt pocket and was getting another. “It’s going to be about gravity. Figuring out how to make it and concentrate it. A passage of some kind. But the thing everyone gets wrong is, you won’t be able to go back to any different time than what you already lived. And you won’t know you’re reliving it. You just will.”
“I don’t know what that means, Nick.”
“Say they get it so you can go back to an exact year. An exact day. You want to go back to Disney World when you were ten, or the night you lost your cherry. You step into that passage and you’re there again. But you don’t know you went back. You’ll live your life exactly like you did all the way up to when you go into the time machine. You have to, or you get the paradox. You’d maybe kill your grandfather by mistake. And you can never not get into it. It always ends the same way. It has to.”
“What happens to you after you go into it? Where does your body go?”
“It just goes. You disappear. You don’t live after that second you step in. But you live forever. Get it? You keep living that ten or twenty or fifty years over and over. You got cancer? You got six months to live? You got tragedy? Get in. Go back to the best part of your life forever. Isn’t that better than a flag on the fucking moon?”
16.
On my day off I got a roll of quarters and called Miami from a pay phone. I half expected to hear Lieutenant Castillo’s lifeless voice say, “Vice Division,” but it was a woman who routed me to a detective after a five-minute wait. I told him I had information on Eve Moore, and there was a silence. I wondered if they were putting in the trace. “Do you know who that is?” I said.
“Yes.”
“She’s a drug dealer, right?”
“Can I have your name?” he said. I dared myself to wait, and then in a sharper, less friendly voice he said, “Who is this?”
I hung up the phone.
Ironically, the mystery was solved with the help of Don two nights later. Not long after Eve disappeared I had called and asked him to save me his New York Times. It was a random shot, and I’d forgotten all about it until I came home to find ten newspapers on the front stoop under one of Mom’s decorative stones. It was in the “Metro Briefing” section four days after they were supposed to come back for the car.
I read the article aloud the next morning in the locker room. “A man and woman found in an abandoned panel van parked on East 13th Street were identified by police as Dennis Faverau, 44, and Eve Moore, 31. Mr. Faverau had been arrested for burglary and Ms. Moore had been arrested twice on drug-related charges. An autopsy determined that both victims had been shot. Anyone with information about the deaths are asked to call the Crime Stoppers hotline—”
“They wanted to send a message back to Miami,” Bobby said. “Else the bodies never would of been found.”
“Jesus. God,” Ray said and dropped onto the bench where we pulled on our shoes. “I figured, maybe…” He shook his head at the ground. Nick slumped on the wall. Bobby fell into a kind of child’s squat and brushed the concrete floor wit
h three fingers. Ray held his face in his hands.
“They say where she was shot?” Nick said. I shook my head.
“It was pros,” Bobby said. “Head and chest. Had to be.”
“Then maybe she didn’t suffer too much,” Nick said.
“If she told them where the car was, they would’ve been here already,” I said. The way Nick looked at me made me feel insensitive to have thought of that, but it was just that I was twelve hours ahead of them in dealing with the news.
We all felt helpless that day, but Ray took it the worst.
After lunch he kicked over an antifreeze bottle that left a running splatter like green blood on the wall. Then diagnosing a Mustang GT he half-shouted, “Work, you whore.” All the bay doors were open, and in the parking lot the Mustang’s owner flicked his cigarette away and came inside. I intercepted him.
“What’s with that guy?” he said.
“Air compressor’s on the blink,” I said. “Grab yourself some coffee. He’ll come get you soon.”
When I came over, Ray didn’t look up from the Chilton book. The radiator fan was ruffling the pages. “When it won’t set codes, what do you do?” he said. “You go wire by wire on every shitting little sensor. It’s guesswork. Switch this, see what happens, switch that. Bullshit. I’m done. I’ll go sit behind a counter at Carquest.”
“Let me see,” I said.
“You go ahead. Fuck it, I’m getting out when I can still remember real cars. Real motors. Not this dicking around pricking wires.”
“What’s up?” said the owner, behind me all of a sudden.
Ray straightened from the fender. “I want you to see something, now,” he said to the guy. “Take a look over here. You see all these little idiot sensors everywhere?”
“Ray,” I said.
“They can’t take the heat and short out. Here’s what’s making it stall. It’s this thing.” He jiggled a sensor on the side of the fuel injector. “No wait, it’s this thing. Hang on, it’s really this.”
He let go of a harness and swung his hand around, and with a sickening ding of fan blade two of his fingers came off at the knuckle. He held the hand in front of him as if he didn’t understand what it was, the bones emerging white before blood sprayed from them with the pumping of his heart. In my peripheries the shape of one glistening finger lay by his boot, but I couldn’t make myself look at it. He squeezed down over the stumps with his left hand as the fan sprayed his blood back at the car. The last thing I saw after Ray was carried off in the stretcher was Bobby Windexing the bottom of the windshield.
The Spark and the Drive Page 10