What You Have Left

by Will Allison

  When the announcer called for the hobby cars to take the track, Dale helped Maddy adjust her chin strap and asked her to be careful, reminding her how lucky she’d been to walk away from last week’s wreck.

  “Jesus H.,” she said. “Is this my first race?”

  Wylie couldn’t help it—he loved when she snapped at Dale—but he knew he was the one she was really mad at. Wouldn’t look at him, wouldn’t talk to him. And now he felt sure she’d do something stupid on the track, just to get back at him. He leaned in and wished her good luck, but she just stared straight ahead and put the car in gear. As she joined the other cars leaving the pit area, she tucked a stray wisp of hair up under her helmet, and Wylie could hardly believe he’d been in her shower just three hours ago with his hands in her hair, her skin against his. Sometimes he wasn’t sure who he was anymore, which life he was living.

  Tag was two cars behind Maddy. As he drove by, he winked at Sheila, who was leaning against the pickup, then grinned and winked at Wylie to show he didn’t mean any harm. Once the track stewards got the cars lined up, Dale headed for the concession stand. Wylie and Sheila climbed into the back of the truck and watched as the drivers slowly circled the dirt oval. Now that they were alone, Sheila had gone silent and sullen.

  “It’s good having company for a change,” Wylie said.

  “Pass me the binoculars?” She kept her eyes on the track as the green flag dropped, the cars bucking forward, gouging the air, swaying like sheet-metal winos on their soft springs. It was the usual hobby division slop, three spinouts and two wrecks before the end of the first lap, but Sheila hardly seemed to notice. She had the binoculars trained on Maddy even when she sipped her beer. Wylie told himself she was just in a mood—she’d had too much to drink on a hot night was all. But he wished she’d say something. She was making him nervous.

  Maddy was, too. She was driving like a fool, weaving pell-mell through traffic, sailing full tilt into the turns. He hoped she’d ease up long enough to think about what she was doing. They weren’t even close to having enough money to build a car yet. If she blew the engine or crashed, they’d be done for the season—unless Dale ponied up for another ride, which didn’t seem likely.

  After eleven laps, only half the field was left. Maddy had worked her way up to third behind Tag, who was chopping her, trying like the rest of the drivers not to let her pass. When she closed in on him, Wylie knew what was coming, he just didn’t know how bad it would be. Maddy got inside Tag going into the second turn and let her front end tap his rear fender. It was enough to send him fishtailing into her path. Sheila jumped up, squeezing Wylie’s arm as Tag glanced off the rail and spun. By some miracle, Maddy avoided plowing into him, and by the time his car came to rest, she was already halfway down the backstretch, dogging the lead car. The infield crowd swelled toward the wreck as the flagman waved a blur of red.

  “She did that on purpose,” Sheila said.

  “No, ma’am. The car must be pushing.”

  But of course Sheila was right. There was nothing wrong with Maddy’s suspension; she could easily have blown past Tag. Instead, Tag’s car was now crumpled against the rail, facing traffic, smoke curling from its hood. Maddy was lucky she didn’t get black-flagged. As she and the other drivers pulled over to let the wrecker pass, Wylie told himself she’d only done it because she was scared and frustrated, but no matter how he looked at it, there was just no excuse. It was a relief when Tag climbed out of the car. He seemed to be in one piece. He pitched his helmet into the dirt and waved off help from the stewards, which got him a cheer from the crowd. While they were busy winching the car onto the wrecker, Wylie took a crescent wrench from his toolbox, rolled it up in an old newspaper, and set it across his lap. Even though it was Tag and Tag was a buddy, there was always hell to pay for a wreck, and he wanted to be ready.

  Sheila shook her head. “Why don’t you let Dale look after her?”

  “I’m looking after myself.”

  She tossed an empty can into the corner of the truck bed and mumbled something under her breath. It sounded like, “I bet you are.”

  Maddy ended up winning, her fifth checkered flag of the season, tops among the hobby drivers. She was taking a victory lap when Dale came back from the concession stand, asking if she was all right, saying he’d heard about the wreck. He was carrying enough hot dogs for everyone.

  “She’s fine,” Wylie said. “She won.”

  Sheila’d seen enough. She handed the binoculars to Dale. By now Maddy was steering back toward the pickup, in no hurry at all, the jockstrap dangling like a pendant from her rearview for all the other drivers to see. When she parked and pulled off her helmet, she was beaming. Winning a race always fixed whatever was wrong in her life. Usually it did the same for Wylie, but not tonight. As soon as she was out of the car, he let her see the wrench. Tag would be along any minute, and Wylie wanted to make sure she understood the position she’d put him in. If there was a fight, it would be his butt on the line, not hers. Tag wouldn’t hit a girl.

  “Don’t give me that look,” Maddy said. “I can’t afford to turn the other cheek out there.”

  “Hold on,” Dale said, setting down the hot dogs. “What happened exactly?”

  Sure enough, Tag was already headed their way, a small crowd streaming out behind him like exhaust smoke. Sheila hopped down from the truck, pushed past Wylie, and intercepted Tag. She threw her arms around him as if he’d just come back from the war. She fussed over the cut on his chin, asking if it hurt, if he was okay. He managed a grin. “Only scratch on me,” he said. Then his grin was gone and he was in Maddy’s face, asking what her problem was. He turned so red you almost couldn’t make out his freckles.

  Maddy didn’t back down. “Now you know how it feels,” she said.

  Wylie was about to step in when Dale beat him to it. He draped a friendly arm across Tag’s shoulder, and it was like watching a horse trainer soothe a nervy colt. It probably didn’t hurt that Dale and Tag had played Legion ball together, or that Tag bought his Sunday clothes at Dale’s store. Dale was telling Tag how sorry he was about the wreck. He was sure it was an accident, he said, and he was sure they could work something out, something fair and square. Wylie kept expecting Maddy to say enough’s enough—she hated Dale acting like he was her father—but tonight she seemed perfectly willing to sit back and let him clean up her mess. There was nothing for Wylie to do except stand there looking useless. Once Tag cooled down, Dale actually convinced him and Maddy to shake hands. “That’s it,” he said. “Good sports. Both of you.” By now the crowd was thinning out, disappointed no punches were thrown. Tag started back for his car, then stopped and gave Wylie a hurt look.

  “And what do you got rolled up in that newspaper, brother?”

  The last time Maddy won a race, three weeks earlier, she and Wylie had celebrated with a plate of vinegar fries, sitting on the hood of her car and joking about the skimpy prize money, how it would maybe buy a fan belt or an air filter for their dream car. Dale and Sheila were still up in the grandstand, and Wylie’d had Maddy all to himself. Tonight, he hardly felt like he had her at all. She was sticking close to Dale. She said she hoped he didn’t really plan on giving Tag any money to fix his car. Dale told her he’d worry about that later; right now all that mattered was that nobody got hurt.

  The fender of Tag’s Ford was bent into his rear tire. A couple of guys were helping him peel it back so he could at least tow the car home. Sheila went over to keep them company, and Wylie decided to lend a hand. So what if it pissed Maddy off? He wanted to smooth things over before work tomorrow morning, and he was hoping that if the other drivers saw there was no bad blood between him and Tag, maybe they’d take it easy on Maddy next week, for his sake if not hers. He was about to fetch his crowbar from the truck when he noticed Kip Allen, the chief steward, talking with Maddy and Dale.

  “You must be kidding,” Maddy said.

  Wylie walked over and asked what was going on, and Kip to
ld him somebody had filed a protest. Maddy wouldn’t get the win—or the winnings—until her car passed inspection.

  “Who put up the teardown money?” Dale said.

  Kip shrugged. “My guess would be Tag.”

  Dale looked disappointed. Tag was still squatting in the mud, but he and his pals had stopped pulling on the fender long enough to watch Kip deliver the news. They didn’t try to hide their amusement.

  Wylie was glad he hadn’t made a fool of himself by going over to help. “Who ever heard of protesting a hobby race?”

  “Not my idea,” Kip said. “You can either break down the car, or you can forfeit. I get to go home sooner if you forfeit.”

  After Kip went back to his scut work, Wylie kicked the Ford’s tire. “Shit. They can keep their fifty bucks.”

  “I am not forfeiting this race,” Maddy said. “Damn it, I told you this would happen.”

  “You told me you wanted to win,” Wylie said.

  “Wait a second.” Dale looked from Maddy to Wylie. “The car’s not legit?”

  After the last race, as the infield crowd was trickling out into the night, Maddy set the toolbox beside her car, popped the hood, and began tearing down the engine. It was almost eleven o’clock. Kip looked on, stifling a yawn. Sheila sat on the hood of the pickup with a beer, her legs dangling between the headlights, which were trained on Maddy’s engine. A small group of onlookers had gathered. They were hobby drivers, mostly, and they’d stuck around to see Maddy get her due.

  Across the track, Dale was smoking a cigarette in the empty grandstand. He wanted no part of this. He’d been peeved that Maddy never told him about the car, but mostly he just couldn’t believe she planned to go through with the inspection. “Let me get this straight,” he’d said. “You’re willingly going to tear down the engine and prove you were cheating?” Maddy told him sometimes a person doesn’t see what’s right under his nose. She reminded him that if the car passed, she got to keep the fifty dollars for winning the race plus the hundred dollars teardown money. And anyway, she said, she had no choice: she had to call Tag’s bluff.

  “Tag’s the one calling your bluff,” Dale said.

  “I’d forfeit, myself,” Wylie said, “but it’s up to the driver.”

  Dale had just walked off, shaking his head. Now he was watching the whole sorry scene from a comfortable distance, and Wylie wished he were, too. Maddy had his stomach in knots. Wrecking Tag had been a jackass thing to do, but at least he understood it. Not this stubbornness, though. She had to know the car would never pass, but she seemed to have talked herself into thinking it might, that she wouldn’t have to forfeit and she wouldn’t get nailed for cheating. That was Maddy: she couldn’t help trying to have it both ways. Five more minutes and she’d have the engine apart, and everyone would know what they’d been up to, and then she’d turn to Dale to bail her out, and that would be the end of Wylie. Even a lugnut like Tag would know what to do if he were in Wylie’s shoes: round up Sheila and hit the road before everything came crashing down.

  But Wylie stayed put. It was one thing not to help tear down the engine, but he couldn’t just leave her. By now she had the carburetor and the intake manifold off. One by one, the grandstand lights winked out until only the infield lights remained, swarms of moths orbiting the high poles. Except for the people who’d stuck around to watch, the place was empty, nothing but mud and trampled grass between Maddy’s car and Tag’s. He was leaning there with a beer. Maddy called over to him: “Getting your money’s worth?”

  “Don’t look at me, sugar,” Tag said. “I didn’t put up no money.”

  A buzz went through the crowd. One guy, the driver who’d come in second place, was laughing and saying he wished he could take credit. His buddy mimicked Maddy in a slurry falsetto—“Getting your money’s worth, Taggy?” Somebody else hollered for her to quit stalling. In the middle of all this, Sheila slid down off the truck. Wylie could barely make her out in the glare of the headlights, but he didn’t need to see her face to know, sure as he was standing there, that she was the one who’d filed the protest. And from the look of it, she had some more business to take care of. She’d grabbed a couple beers and was weaving across the infield toward the gate, toward Dale, who apparently was about to hear the truth about his fiancée. Maddy seemed to have forgotten all about the car. She was biting her lip, following Sheila’s progress as if she were watching a bad crash in slow motion. One of the head bolts slipped from her fingers and clanked down through the engine.

  “Let’s go, let’s go.” Kip tapped his micrometer against his leg, impatient for Maddy to get the cylinder head off so he could measure the bore. “I don’t got all night.”

  Maddy didn’t seem to hear him—she looked dazed— but she knelt in the wet grass anyway and began searching for the bolt in front of the tire, behind the tire, under the bumper. She’d been ignoring Wylie, determined to take apart the engine by herself, but under the circumstances, it was turning out to be more than she could handle. “Help me,” she said.

  Wylie watched Sheila as she crossed the track and disappeared into the shadow of the grandstand. Depending on what she knew, he still had a shot at convincing her there was nothing going on between him and Maddy. If that didn’t work, he could always come clean and beg forgiveness— which was exactly what he could see Maddy doing with Dale. And who could blame her? Why put your faith in a guy like Wylie, a guy so bent on playing it safe that he had to wait for his girlfriend to blow the whistle? Right this second, Sheila was probably taking a seat next to Dale, bumming a smoke, offering him a beer. You know, he’s sleeping with her. He could chase her down and fight for something he knew he didn’t want; if it wasn’t happiness, at least she’d never break his heart. Instead, he stooped beside Maddy and groped around in the darkness under the car. He didn’t find the bolt, but he found her hand.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  1996

  Holly

  An hour or so before Lyle was fired for burning the most famous flag in America, Holly lost the last of their savings playing video poker on a machine likely owned by her father-in-law, Ellis Gandy, founder and president of Gandy Amusement. It was the end of May, and the heat had slammed into Columbia that morning like a wrecking ball. Lyle was at work at the statehouse. The building—subject of the master’s thesis he’d failed to finish—was getting its first major face-lift in almost a century. The state had been too cheap to hire archaeologists to help with the excavation, so the task of unearthing artifacts had fallen to the workers. When Lyle’s crew had discovered a buried trove of liquor bottles and discarded bones, he’d quickly fingered the corrupt Lincoln Republicans, who maintained a barroom right next to the senate chamber during Reconstruction.

  “Apparently,” Lyle told Holly at breakfast, “they were so lazy they just threw their garbage out the window.”

  Holly checked the kitchen clock. It was nearly half past eight. Normally Lyle was long gone by now, but here he was, helping himself to another cup of coffee, telling her how he’d managed to pocket two of the antique liquor bottles before the guys from the state museum had arrived to tag the artifacts and trundle them away. To hear Lyle tell it, this wasn’t really stealing; he was the one who’d found the bottles, and anyway, what good were they packed away in boxes at the museum?

  For all Holly cared, he could have stolen the statehouse itself. Her only concern was being at the video parlor when it opened at nine, but she had to wait until Lyle left or risk him seeing her car parked at Fortunes on his way to work. She glanced out the window. The last traces of fog hung low and spotty over what had once been soybean fields. She considered asking Lyle if he had any cash—for groceries, she’d say. She was almost broke. No more money meant no more poker.

  “We counted the bones,” Lyle was saying. “Pork was their favorite.”

  “Aren’t you going to be late?”

  Lyle put down his coffee. “Don’t you want to hear about what we found?”

  A week earl
ier, Holly had been the one suggesting they might actually have a conversation at breakfast sometime. Most mornings, if Lyle spoke at all, he spoke to the newspaper. He’d always been one to give The State a good talking-to, and once upon a time, this had intrigued Holly—there was something vaguely sexy about a man with political bones to pick—but lately he muttered and swore at the news like it was some kind of personal insult. All it took was a story about the Confederate flag or the state’s failed attempts to rid itself of video poker, and boom, off he’d go.

  “Sorry,” Holly said. “I just thought you’d lost track of the time.”

  “It’s my job,” he said. “Let me worry about it.” The implication being, he at least had a job to worry about. Not that he’d ever come out and say as much, but he’d said enough to turn Holly’s face hot as she stole another glance at the clock.

  That morning, she was supposed to be at the antique mall tending the booth she’d rented the previous summer, selling off the old farm implements and china she’d inherited when she inherited Cal’s farm, but as usual, she stopped off first for a few hands of five-card draw. Fortunes Emporium was a converted cinder-block feed store that had been subdivided into a warren of rooms housing five Pots-O-Gold each. At 8:50 a.m., there was a line out front waiting for the attendant, Billy Pecan, to unlock the door. These were the days when video poker ruled the state. Holly had read somewhere that South Carolina had three times as many places to gamble as Nevada, and whenever she thought of her father-in-law, Ellis Gandy, one of the piedmont’s chief suppliers of poker machines, it left her whipsawed. “Your dad must be making a mint,” she’d said to Lyle more than once. But that’s all she said. She had no business sounding like she wished Lyle were getting rich, too.