The Highway Kind

by Patrick Millikin

  Pop began to put a shot of whiskey next to his beer in the evenings. It took hold of him and he leaned on it. He turned into someone else virtually overnight. He knew what was happening to him, but he wouldn’t or couldn’t stop.

  The house became a place I dreaded to enter. I moved out of my old bedroom to a smaller room in the basement. Pop had parked and tarped the ’Cuda in our driveway, so even the exterior of our home was a cold reminder of Ted’s demise.

  In the year that followed my brother’s death, my father quit his job at the Esso station, and I took his place as a certified mechanic in the garage. There were other changes. I unloaded my Dart and bought a clean-line ’71 Fury GT with a 440 under the hood. I filled out, and between that and the pressure and responsibility of living with my father, my face aged and grew hard.

  I’d talked to one of Walter’s ex–running buddies and learned that Walter had moved to an apartment building over in the neighboring county. He worked in a body shop and was still driving the AMX. Once again, my fantasies turned to violence.

  One night I came home to find my father passed out on the floor. His head was cut from where he’d hit it on the edge of the coffee table. He was snoring. I shook him and helped him up. He glanced around the living room as if he’d woken up in a strange place. His eyes were jittery when he finally looked my way.

  “It’s me, Pop. Rick.”

  “You,” he said. “You. Why did this happen to Ted and not you?”

  My heart sank. But he needed my help.

  “Dad, you’re sick.”

  “What?”

  “I’m going to help you,” I said. “I’m going to fix it.”

  My father stared at me and shook his head. He knew me well.

  I drove over to the local pub. I needed a beer. The fact is, I’d been drinking heavily for some time too.

  After a few I settled up and drove over the county line. It wasn’t but five miles from our neighborhood. The area had been largely white and blue collar up until the late sixties, but minorities had moved in, and in less than ten years the whites had bolted and left it to the blacks and the Spanish.

  I parked in the lot of the Gardens building, which, despite its name, was neither a low-rise structure nor one surrounded by greenery. It was an eight-story concrete box with balconies holding bicycles and rusty chairs and tables. Walter’s AMX was not in the lot. I decided to wait.

  He pulled up late that night, locked his car, and walked to the glass-doored entrance of the building. He was heavier and his hair was long and looked unwashed. He walked unsteadily, with a slight sway. It didn’t occur to me then that he had been broken by Ted’s death too.

  I got out of my car, trailed him to the entrance, and looked inside the lobby. Walter pushed on a door near a single elevator and stepped inside. I followed.

  The lobby had no desk or security. The door Walter had entered led to the stairwell. A sign on the elevator said that it was temporarily out of service due to repairs. On the mailbox slots on the opposite wall I saw the name Mahoney. Walter lived on the fourth floor.

  I drove home, checked on Pop, and went to bed. I couldn’t sleep. I was thinking of my father and how I could help him find some kind of peace.

  For the next three nights I sat outside the Gardens and watched Walter Mahoney come home from whatever watering hole he frequented. The pattern was the same. He’d return intoxicated after our county’s last call, park and lock the AMX, and stagger-walk into his building, where he’d take the stairs to the fourth floor.

  On the third night I gave him a ten-minute lead, then followed his route. The stairwell, at that hour, was deserted. Its steps were concrete. There were blind corners on each landing where a man could hide and wait. If I could surprise Walter, come up behind him and move fast, I’d throw him down the stairs. Maybe that would break his neck. If it didn’t, he’d still be too hurt to retaliate. I could crush his skull with a heavy-duty wrench or a ballpeen hammer. That would finish him.

  The elevator wouldn’t be under repair for much longer. If I was going to do it, I had to do it the following night.

  My father came by the gas station the next morning. I was in the bay, gunning the lug nuts off an Olds 88 that was up on the lift, when he walked in.

  “Rick,” he said. “Can I speak to you a minute?”

  “Sure.” I wiped my hands off on a shop rag and went to him.

  “I’m sorry about the other night,” my father said. “What I said to you. I was disoriented. I didn’t mean it. I don’t know what I’d do if something happened to you.”

  “It’s okay, Pop.”

  “I haven’t been the best father to you, I know.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “There’s something else.”

  “What?”

  “You can’t fix this, Rick. You can’t.” He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed it. “I know what you’re capable of. And I want you to forget it. I want you to stop. Walter Mahoney’s parents love him too. I don’t want them to go through what I’m going through now. Do you understand me, Rick?”

  “Dad.”

  “Do you?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Okay.” My father nodded at the 88. “What are you doing to that Oldsmobile?”

  “Pads and rotors.”

  “Better get to it, then. I’ll see you tonight.”

  I hadn’t thought about Mr. and Mrs. Mahoney. I hadn’t thought any of it through, not really. I was still a kid.

  Pop was right about one thing. I couldn’t fix him.

  One day I came home from work and Ted’s Barracuda was no longer in the driveway. My father had gotten rid of it. When I walked into the house, he was dead drunk in his recliner. A cigarette was still in his fingers, burned down to the filter.

  My father passed in 1979, and I sold the house shortly thereafter.

  You wake up one day, and you’re old.

  Recently, I went back to the old neighborhood and drove its streets. Today, many of the homes are owned by Hispanics, Ethiopians, Arabs, Indians, and Pakis. The new immigrants. Same kinds of folks I grew up with, only with darker skin. It’s a cycle.

  The parents of the Mahoney brothers are gone now, the home long since sold. Back in the ’80s, Jason Mahoney, fried on PCP, dropped his Harley on the highway and got run over by an eighteen-wheeler. Near his mangled corpse, on the median strip, was a spiked Prussian Army helmet that he wore when he rode his bike. Jason was stupid till the end.

  Mike Mahoney, the quiet brother, moved to the country, where he raised a family and worked as an electrician. I looked him up on Facebook. In his photos, he’s smiling, surrounded by his wife, grown children, and dogs. He did all right.

  My own journey has not been predictable, but then, whose is? I worked as a mechanic in my twenties, got married and divorced, struggled with substance abuse, and kicked it. Met a woman in rehab who has been my wife for almost thirty years. Had a son. Somewhere in there I noticed that the guys who were selling water pumps and mufflers to me were driving Cadillacs and Lincolns, so I opened up an auto-parts store, then three more, and within a decade I was bought out by a chain that came to town. By most standards, I’m a wealthy man.

  These days, I can afford to buy any car I want, but nothing floats my boat. The rice burners all look alike, and the modern American muscle cars are weak imitations of the more striking originals. I drive a Dodge pickup truck. My father, a Mopar man, would approve.

  Jane and I had always wanted to see New Orleans, and about six months ago we went down to check it out. We were staying at the Hampton Inn on the edge of the warehouse district. One afternoon I wandered by the convention center while my wife was shopping up on Magazine Street. There’s a huge warehouse nearby where they store the Mardi Gras floats, and there they were having one of those classic-car auctions you see on TV. I walked in.

  They were bringing the cars out one by one, with fanfare, before the bidding started. The way they played it up, with music and sho
wgirls and all that, it was like the lions and Christians were coming out into the Colosseum in ancient Rome. I watched it for a while standing next to a guy about my age, said his name was Dan. He was still beside me when they rolled out a ’70 ’Cuda: black body, black interior, black vinyl roof. Triple black. The announcer said it was a 383.

  “The four-forty can go for close to a mill,” said Dan. “This one here might fetch a couple hundred grand, at least, if it’s straight.”

  “It’s a beauty,” I said.

  “I always thought the Barracuda from that era had four headlights. This one’s got only two.”

  “This is a ’70,” I said. “Plymouth only put the four headlights on the ’71s.”

  “You know your cars.”

  “I used to,” I said.

  I thought about getting closer to see if the car was Ted’s. Surely there was a chain of title. For a hot second, I considered bidding on it and, if I got it, giving the ’Cuda to my son. But that moment passed.

  My son doesn’t own a car. No interest. He didn’t even get his license until he was in his early twenties. He rides a bicycle and uses Uber. I don’t understand a young man who doesn’t want the freedom and thrill of having his own vehicle, but there are many things about him that I don’t understand.

  You get to an age, you feel like you don’t belong here anymore. But I’m not here. The young man I’ve described to you is gone. I’m not the same person I was so many years ago. Not even close.

  Take Walter Mahoney. It scares me now to think that I came so very close to murdering him. If I could talk to Walter again, I’d tell him that it’s okay. He was a confused kid, just like me. He was reckless, just like me. He got in a wrestling match with Ted, and he hurt him, but he didn’t make Ted sick. I’d tell him that, with the death of his brother Jason, we had something in common now. If I were to spend some time with Walter again, we might even become friends. But that will never happen. Walter ended up homeless and alcoholic. He’s been gone many years. His body was found one January morning, frozen on the street.

  My mom and Ted both died of cancer. It runs in my family, so odds are I’m next. When it happens, I’ll join Pop, and my mother, and Ted. Walter too. Not in heaven or anything like that. I don’t believe in fairy tales.

  I’m saying, when I go, we’ll all be in the same place: buried in the Catholic cemetery by our church in the neighborhood where I came up, a long time ago. When cars were loud, fast, and beautiful, and we raced them in the night.

  FOGMEISTER

  by Diana Gabaldon

  HE WAS MY friend. It was my car.

  I had to know.

  January 28, 1938, was a cold day. Cold, clear, and dry. Ironic, really—two drivers famous for their skill in bad weather, and that day the Autobahn was dry as a bone, the air clear as a bell. The German Nazi Motorsports Guild arranged to close part of the Autobahn for the speed-record trials; the officials from Mercedes-Benz and the Auto Union each chose a straight kilometer—the ground for their duel—and marked them off. If you stood at the Auto Union starting line, you could see the bridge in the distance.

  Rudolf Caracciola was driving for Mercedes. They called him Der Regenmeister, the Rain Master. Great on wet pavement, complete control.

  Bernd Rosemeyer could drive in any weather conditions, but to see him come hurtling alone out of a bank of fog, the distant whine of the invisible pack behind him, was a sight to lift the hairs on your neck.

  The day before, it had been raining and hazy, but not on the twenty-eighth. A perfect day for this clash of German titans. The Auto Union—and the 1937 Rekordwagen based on my Type C Grand Prix car—had come out of the Recordwoche in October covered in glory and bursting with pride. Bernie set fifteen world and international records that week. Mercedes wanted some of them back.

  The Stromlinienwagen, we called it—the Streamliner. I designed it, a new, beautiful, flowing shape for the Grand Prix. It passed out of my hands when my contract with Auto Union expired at the end of 1937, but I created it. It was my car.

  Stromlinienwagen 6.5 L

  Design Note 14.32 [Dr. Porsche]

  Engine capacity to be enlarged to 6.5 liters through a 78 mm bore (75 mm in original 6.1 engine). New pistons, liners, and heads to be machined.*

  * See Workshop Specifications Number 633–639 and Materials List Number 55A, 55B, 55C, and 62A.

  Each company chose its own stretch of road. These were record-speed runs, not a race. The Auto Union’s first run was southbound, a straight shot through woodland and under a bridge. The speed recorded was very respectable, but not greater than Bernie’s record in the six-liter Streamliner in October. Run two, northbound, took place twenty minutes later. Again, good speed—perhaps a record, but very, very close to Caracciola’s time. Someone in the press reported that Auto Union officials were dubious about another run but that Rosemeyer was willing to try again.

  Three times was one too many. I bought every paper available, but most articles reporting the accident talked only about the death of a hero of the Reich and not about how—or why—that death had happened. The Frankfurter Zeitung, the local daily, had a few details. There was no doubt, the journalist wrote, that a wind gust triggered the “wide-open” skid to the left. “After having hit a picket in the grass median, the car went on again, back on the concrete track, as one can see from the black marks.”

  I flipped through the other accounts—no one else mentioned a picket in the grass. The Kurhessische Landeszeitung had a quote from a first-aid man who had come to the site of the wreck. The journalist described this gentleman as “quite shocked”—and no wonder, I thought—but he gave it as his opinion that there were two gusts of wind. The first, he said, had forced the car onto the grass median; the second had triggered the deadly skid to the right, after the car was already back on the concrete.

  This was nonsense; wind blowing strongly in opposite directions at virtually the same moment for the entire run, which must have taken less than ten seconds? “Do these people even read what they write?” I muttered to myself.

  Neueste Zeitung...this was more interesting. Whoever had written the article—there was no name—talked about the airflow, the drag. He got everything else wrong—the direction of the run, which wheels were which in the wreck—but he was right when he said that the longitudinal stability is worsened by an increase in front drag. That means that any side force—as from, for instance, a gust of wind—has a stronger impact at higher speed. Wind that wouldn’t even be felt in a passenger car could—maybe—push a racing car right off the track.

  “On this event,” the author had written, “not even a master like Rosemeyer managed to win over the forces of nature.”

  I folded up the newspapers into tidy squares and stuffed them into the kindling basket by the stove. It was a cold day today too, and the stove in my sitting room was glowing hot.

  Bernie had lost, all right—but was it the forces of nature, some failure of his own famous skill...or some defect in the car?

  What had they done to my car!?

  Stromlinienwagen 6.5 L

  Design Note 67.33A Retention and Placement of Water Radiator

  Even though the water radiator has no function, having been supplanted by ice cooling, the radiator itself must be retained at the front of the car in order to balance the weight of the ice tank. (See also Design Notes 80x–93x, on fairings required by altered center of gravity.)

  I was still thinking about it in the morning.

  There were only two eyewitnesses, according to the reports, both of them officials of the timekeeping team. These men were at the end of the measured course and thus closest to the accident.

  Only two eyewitnesses? I doubted that very much. A record run was not a race, so there wouldn’t have been a crowd, but surely there would have been a good number of people present. The car’s crew, naturally—although they wouldn’t have been at the end of the course, they would have seen something. A crew chief and the eight mechanics o
f a race crew, certainly. Maybe a backup driver. Officials from Auto Union, definitely. Which men would those have been? I wondered. Again—probably not located near the actual crash, but every eye would have been fixed on that car for every second of the run.

  I’d read the two “official” eyewitness accounts in the newspapers: Otto Geyer and Carlo Weidmann. I’d talked to many newspaper journalists on many occasions. I had yet to read a single interview of myself without errors, and certainly never one that included everything I’d said. I didn’t know Geyer, but I’d met Weidmann a few times. I pulled out my watch; nearly 3:00 p.m. Perhaps Carlo Weidmann would like to have a cup of coffee. Perhaps mit schnapps—it was a cold day, after all.

  Design Note 55.12 Fairings

  Fairings to be adjusted so that junction with side-paneling is minimal, ideally less than 2 mm. Fairings to be tapered, with a thickness of five cm at the apex of each fairing, tapering outward to 8 cm at point of attachment. Attachment: bolts at intervals of 15 cm.

  See Workshop Order 143/7 for bolt sizing.

  “Oh my God.” Weidmann took a large swallow of his drink—he’d chosen calvados to accompany his coffee—and coughed hard. “Oh God. You know how it is when there’s a bad wreck, you know it occurs so fast, you can’t have seen anything, really, and at the same time it seems to move so slowly, like it’s—it’s happening like an ordinary thing, just in its own time, but it’s you that’s frozen, so slow that you can’t do anything?”

  I did know, and nodded. The heat of the coffee was making my nose run; I dabbed it with my napkin.

  “The car did skid, though? You saw it?”

  “Oh yes.” He’d flushed from the coughing but now went a little pale. “Yes, definitely. It was just before the Morfelden clearing—before the bridge, you know? That bridge...He moved to the right, there, I’m sure of it—maybe because of the wind that was coming from the right—but the car’s left wheels, they went off the concrete, into the grass of the median.” He glanced at me. “We’re sure of that; the wheel marks were plain in the grass, when we looked...afterward.”