The Flamethrowers: A Novel

by Rachel Kushner

  He said he might need to go take another shower, a cold one, and somehow the comment was sweet instead of distasteful.

  Later, what I remembered most was the way he’d said my name. He said it like he believed he knew me.

  On occasion I let my thoughts fall into that airy space between me and whatever Stretch’s idea of me was. He would understand what I came from, even if we couldn’t talk about movies or art. “Were you in Vietnam?” I’d ask, assuming some terrible story would come tumbling out, me there to offer comfort, the two of us in the cab of an old white pickup, the desert sun orange and giant over the flat edge of a Nevada horizon. “Me?” he’d say. “Nah.”

  * * *

  On the short drive from town out to the salt flats, the high desert gleamed under the morning sun. White, sand, rose, and mauve—those were the colors here, sand edging to green in places, with sporadic bursts of powdery yellow, weedy sunflowers blooming three-on-the-tree.

  The little gambling town’s last business was a compound of trailers orphaned on a bluff. LIQUOR AND DANCING AND NUDE WOMEN. I thought again of Pat Nixon, of underthings in a Pat Nixon palette. Faded peach, or lemon-bright chiffon. As a teenager in Reno, when I heard the words Mustang Ranch I pictured a spacious lodge with gold-veined mirrors and round beds, velvet-upholstered throw pillows shaped like logs. The actual Mustang Ranch was just a scattering of cruddy outbuildings, gloomy women with drug habits inside. Even after I understood what it was, it seemed natural enough to hear Mustang Ranch and imagine country luxury, sunken living rooms with wet bars, maybe someone putting on Wanda Jackson, “Tears at the Grand Ole Opry.” But they were listening to Top Forty in those places, or to the sound of the generator.

  Beyond the access road off the interstate, a lake of white baked and shimmered, flaring back up at the sun like a knife blade turned flat. Pure white stretching so far into the distance that its horizon revealed a faint curve of the Earth. I heard the sonic rip of a military jet, like a giant trowel being dragged through wet concrete, but saw only blue above, a raw and saturated blue that seemed cut from an inner wedge of sky. The jet had left no contrail, just an enveloping sound that came from no single direction. Another jet scraped the basin, high and invisible. I must have heard them in the night. There was a base nearby, Area G on my map, a gray parenthesis. I thought about satellites, Soviet ones, whose features I borrowed from the vintage globe-shaped helmet of a deep-sea diver, a blinking round orb scratching its groove in the sky like a turntable stylus. Everything in Area G put away, retractable roofs closed, missiles rolled out of sight for the scheduled appearance of the probe, the military changing theater sets for the next act.

  I wondered why the military didn’t claim the salt flats for themselves, for their own tests. I don’t know what kind of tests, but something involving heat, speed, thrust, the shriek of engines. American legend Flip Farmer had shot across these flats and hit five hundred miles an hour, driving a three-wheeled, forty-four-foot aluminum canister equipped with a jet engine from a navy Phantom. Why Flip, an ordinary citizen, and not the military? You’d think they would have wanted this place, a site of unchecked and almost repercussionless speed. But the military didn’t want an enormous salt desert. They gave it, more or less, to Flip Farmer, world land speed record holder.

  Growing up, I loved Flip Farmer like some girls loved ponies or ice skating or Paul McCartney. I had a poster above my bed of Flip and his winning car, the Victory of Samothrace. Flip with his breakfast cereal smile, in his zip-up land speed suit, made of a silvery-blue ripstop cloth that refracted to lavender at angles and folds, and lace-up racing boots that were the color of vanilla ice cream. He had a helmet under his arm, silver, with “Farmer” in fancy purple script. I’d found that image again recently, in preparation for my own run on the salt flats, in a book about his life I’d picked up at the Strand. The Victory of Samothrace was just behind him on the salt. It was painted the same lavender as the refracting undertone of Flip’s flameproof suit, hand-rubbed color lacquered to a fine gleam, silver accents on the intake ducts and tail wing. Pure weight and energy, but weightless, too, with its enormous tailfin, a hook for scraping the sky.

  When I was twelve, Flip came through Reno and gave out autographs at a casino. I didn’t have a glossy photo for him to sign, so I had him sign my hand. For weeks I took a shower with a plastic bag over that hand, rubber-banded at the wrist. It wasn’t quite a romantic infatuation. There are levels of readiness. Young girls don’t entertain the idea of sex, their body and another’s together. That comes later, but there isn’t nothing before it. There’s an innocent displacement, a dreaming, and idols are perfect for a little girl’s dreaming. They aren’t real. They aren’t the gas station attendant trying to lure you into the back of the service station, a paperboy trying to lure you into a toolshed, a friend’s father trying to lure you into his car. They don’t lure. They beckon, but like desert mirages. Flip Farmer was safely unreachable. He was something special. I chose him from among all the men in the world, and he signed the back of my hand and smiled with very white, straight teeth. He gave us each that same smile, the children and adults who lined up at Harrah’s. We weren’t individuals but a surface he moved over, smiling and remote. The thing was, if he had returned my gaze, I probably would have washed his autograph from my hand.

  The year he came through Reno, Flip had barely escaped death as he’d made his land speed record on the salt. Just after he hit 522 miles per hour, his rear chute prematurely released. It blew out the back of the Victory and snapped off, sending the car veering to and fro between mile markers. He recovered, but with no chute, he had no way to slow down. He was still going five hundred miles an hour. He knew that if he even so much as tapped the brakes they would melt and burn out, and then he’d have no brakes. They were designed for speeds of less than 150 miles an hour. He would have to let the car slow itself, but it wasn’t slowing. He realized, as he flew across the salt, almost friction-lessly, that it was all going to be over anyhow. Whether he used the brakes or not, it was all about to end. So he used them. He tapped ever so slightly on the pedal with his left driving shoe. It sank to the floor. The car sailed onward, its speed unchecked. He pumped the brake, and nothing. Just the thunk of the pedal hitting the floor, the flat world running liquid beyond the clear plastic bubble-canopy.

  He flew past mile zero, the end of the official racecourse. His crew and several teams of newsmen looked on. He was going four hundred miles an hour. The surface, here, was ungraded. The engine was off, and all he heard was the knocking and slamming of the Victory’s suspension as it thudded over the rough salt. He had time to think, as he sat in the cockpit, soon to be tomb, time to notice how small and familiar a space it was. How intimate and calm. The car was filled with a white smoke. As he waited for death, having given up pumping his nonbrakes, it occurred to him that the smoke was salt, aspirated to an airborne powder, having been ground by the wheels and forced up through the axles into the cramped cockpit of the car.

  Through a mist of white, softening his view out the canopy, a row of electricity poles reared up. He tried to steer between them but ended up mowing down several. Then he was riding straight into the shallow salt lake, water spraying high on both sides of the Victory. The car finally began to slow—to three hundred, to two hundred. But then he was shot up a ten-foot-high salt dike, which had been built when a drainage ditch was dug across the southern edge of the flats. The world went vertical. A quadrangle of plain, cloudless sky. A forced contemplation of the heavens, crisp and angelic blue, a classic prelude to death. If there had been just one puffy trawler, a little tugboat of a cloud, even so much as a cotton ball of vapor against the blue, he would have hoped. There was only blue. He was headed for the drainage ditch on the other side of the dike. It was filled with rainwater. The Victory slammed into it. As it sank, nose first, Flip desperately popped the canopy. There was no way he’d get the canopy open once the car was underwater. He tore off his oxygen mask and tried to u
nfold himself from the driver’s seat. He was caught. He could not get himself out from behind the steering wheel. The car was sinking. His fireproof suit was snagged on the afterburner levers. The Victory was deep underwater, and he was still trying to unhook the fabric of his suit-sleeve from the levers. Just as his brain was losing its last bit of oxygen he untangled himself and swam toward the wavering brightness above him, where sun penetrated the water. He emerged in a slick of hydrazine fuel that was collecting on the surface. Emergency workers came running. They dragged him to safety just before the hydrazine ignited, sending a boom, and then a far bigger boom, followed by a violent bubbling, as the Victory of Samothrace exploded underwater like fuel rods in a reactor pool.

  The next year, Flip built another car, Samothrace II, with a bigger jet engine and beefy rear disc brakes, at his shop in the Watts area of Los Angeles. It was 1965. The riots came and his warehouse caught fire, or maybe it was torched. The Victory of Samothrace II was badly damaged. He couldn’t rebuild in time for the season at the salt flats, which only lasts from August to September or October, before the rains come and turn the ancient lake bed into a huge shallow bowl. That year the rains came early, and the Samothrace was not yet ready. I read about all this in his autobiography, Winning. Riots and rain were presented in the book as misfortunes of the same order: one and then another. Riots in Watts, rain at the flats. Smiling, suburban Flip talking about how he and the crew had entertained themselves with an improvised version of miniature golf, barricaded inside their workshop as marauders flung homemade bombs. “Golly,” Flip or his ghost author wrote, “what a year of random bad luck.”

  Flip recaptured the world record the season after the Watts riots and kept it until last year, 1975, when an Italian stole it away in a rocket-fueled vehicle and Flip officially retired. Now he does television commercials for after-market shocks. The Italian, Didi Bombonato, is sponsored by Valera Tires, which is where the lines begin to cross. Didi Bombonato would be at the Bonneville Salt Flats to set a record. Sandro is Sandro Valera, of Valera Tires and Moto Valera motorcycles.

  * * *

  At the flats, the sun conspired with the salt to make a gas of brightness and heat pouring in from all directions, its reflected rays bouncing up from the hammered-white ground and burning the backs of my thighs right through my leathers.

  I parked and walked along the open pits. People were wheeling race cars and motorcycles from flatbed trailers and up onto workbenches, unlooping cable to plug into power generators, transferring gasoline from larger canisters to plastic jugs with funnel dispensers. Pink gasoline and synthetic red engine oil soaked into the salt like butcher shop residue. The salt itself, up close, was the color of unbleached sugar, but the sunlight used it as if it were the brightest white. It was only when a cloud momentarily shifted over the sun and recast the earth in a different mood, cool and appealingly somber, that the salt revealed its true self as a light shade of beige. When the cloud moved away, everything blanched to the white sheen of molybdenum grease.

  I heard the silky glide of toolbox drawers, the tink of wrenches dropped on the hard salt. Tanned little boys darted past me on bicycles, wearing mesh baseball caps propped high on their heads, in mimicry of the fathers and uncles who crowded around workbenches, bent over vehicles, their belts buckled off center to avoid scratching the paint. Beyond the workbenches, large women fanned themselves and guarded the Igloo coolers. Each pit site had one of these women, seated in a frail aluminum lawn chair, her weight distending the woven plaid seat, legs splayed, monstrous calves like big, blank faces. Opening and shutting the Igloo cooler to retrieve or simply monitor the soft drinks and sandwiches, as their husbands opened and shut the red metal drawers of stacked and rolling toolboxes. The women seemed deeply bored but proudly so, as veterans of this event.

  Cars were being rolled from the test area, salt piled in a ring around the tread of each tire like unmelting snow. I filled out my registration form and waited to have the bike inspected. The Valera motorcade arrived, a convoy of trucks, trailers, and air-conditioned buses with tinted windows and industrial-grade generators. They parked in their own separate area of the salt. It was roped and off-limits. I turned in my form. I had a couple of hours before they would run my class. I walked over to the start line. The men who clocked the start were like the men I’d seen in the Mexican restaurant the night before, big mustaches, wearing sunglasses and ear protection headphones, walkie-talkies strapped to their chests, over their officials’ jackets.

  For land speed records, each driver has the course to himself. You race by yourself, but your time is relative to whatever class you race in—in my case, unmodified 650 cc twins. No one else shares the course, so vehicles run endlessly throughout the day, a coming and going in the bright white heat, each calamity or success on the scale of individuals. There were two long lines, short course and long course. In the lines were every kind of car and bike, dragster cycles with eight-cylinder motors, streamliners like warheads put on wheels, the drivers coffined flat on their backs in tiny horizontal compartments, inches above the salt, and the elegant lakesters in polished aluminum, rounded and smooth like worn bars of soap, their fender skirts almost grazing the road. There were old-fashioned roadsters with gleaming new paint, roll bars, and big stenciled numbers on the doors. Vintage American muscle cars. A pink-and-yellow 1953 Chrysler Town & Country, a Technicolor mirage bouncing along on shot springs.

  After my one year in New York I had practically forgotten there was a world of elsewheres, people who lived outside the city and recreated in their own style. There were a lot of family-based teams, and in a few cases, the mother was the driver. Not many, but I was not the only female, though I may have been the only woman on a motorcycle. There was the joke of the bump-start vehicle, which gave the racers a boost from the start line. Anything on wheels and that ran could work: A school bus. A just-married jalopy, trailing cans. An ice cream truck. The more elaborate and professional the race car, the more ridiculous and lavishly impractical its bump-start vehicle seemed to be. Although I was wrong about the ice cream truck. It pulled up and opened for business, pencil-necked boys lining up at the window. An ambulance came, and I wondered what happened, and how serious the injury was. But the ambulance was a bump vehicle, pushing a lakester off the start line, the ambulance driver wearing a white medic’s shirt and costume bandages soaked in fake blood.

  Every few minutes an engine screamed as a vehicle flew off the line, spewing a rooster tail of salt from under each rear tire. A few seconds into its run the vehicle began to float, its lower half warbled. Then the whole thing went liquid and blurry and was lost to the horizon.

  One after another I watched the scream, the careen, the rooster tail, the float, and then the shimmer and wink off the edge of horizon, gone.

  Careen, rooster tail, float, gone.

  Careen, float, gone.

  There were lots of us watching. Drivers, kids, wives, technicians. All we had, to track the action, after the vehicle twinkled and melted into nothing, was a crackle on the timing officials’ two-way radios. I felt myself bracing for bad news after the crackle. Anticipation was structured into the logic of the place. We weren’t waiting to hear the run was routine, that it was solid, that there were no problems. Standing behind the start line, there was nothing to see as a car entered the measured mile. We weren’t there to see. We were waiting on news of some kind of event, one that could pierce this blank and impassive and giant place. What else could do that but a stupendous wipeout? We were waiting on death.

  * * *

  My final project in art school was a film about Flip Farmer. I’d contacted him at his shop in Las Vegas to request an interview, but he wouldn’t agree to it unless I paid him five thousand dollars. He seemed to make no distinction between an impoverished art student and Look magazine. I took a risk and knocked on his door. He lived on the bluffs above the strip. A curtain was pulled aside and quickly shut. No one was going to answer. I had a super-8 camera
that I panned around the premises, past a tire swing, unmoving in the breezeless day, broken toys, lawn chairs that someone was stripping of upholstery and bending into scrap aluminum. Several project cars up on blocks—shade tree work, as Scott and Andy called it. “Hey, you can’t film here! Hey!” It was a woman’s voice, from beyond a window screen. I figured I’d better go.

  A friend of mine from school named Chris Kelly had tried to make a documentary about the singer Nina Simone, a similar scenario of knocking on her door. He had tracked her down to the South of France. Nina Simone opened her front door in a bathrobe, saw that the visitor was holding a camera, lifted a gun from the pocket of her robe and shot at him. She wasn’t a good shot. Chris Kelly, who had turned and run, was only hit once, a graze to the shoulder, as he tore through the high, wet grass beyond her farmhouse. He got no footage of Nina Simone but I somehow saw this robe from which she had produced her gun. Flowy and feminine, pink and yellow flowers with greenish flourishes, semi-abstract leaves. Nina Simone’s brown legs. Her flat, calloused feet in a pair of those unisex leather slippers that Europeans like Sandro wore around the house. She shot Chris Kelly, after which he became a legend at UNR. Or at least he was a legend to me. Being fired at with a gun made an impression; it elevated what he did from a student project to actual art. It was somehow better than if he’d filmed her in a typical documentary style. Chris Kelly moved to New York City a year later and became doubly a legend to me, the guy shot by the singer and also the one who moved to New York.

  After I’d left Flip Farmer’s place on the bluffs I drove along the Las Vegas Strip at dusk, the camera filming my own departure, casino neon flashing beyond the windshield of the car I’d borrowed for the trip. Stoplight. Man in a white cowboy hat, crossing. Signs stacked up against high mountains. Chapel, Gulf, Texaco, motel, family units, weekly, pawn, refrigerator, fun. A slow proceeding through town and out. No Flip. A Flipless film about Flip. It wasn’t bad, and when I first got to New York, I mostly made short movies that were like the tracked retreat from Flip’s. They were wanderings, through Chinatown at night, or into abandoned buildings on the Lower East Side. I didn’t know what I was looking for. I filmed and then looked at the footage to see what was there.