The Highway Kind

by Patrick Millikin

  She bent over the pram to check that the child was covered, then came over to the fence where I was.

  “Ferdinand. Do you want to come inside?” she asked. “You can walk round and I’ll meet you at the gate—or perhaps it’s better to go back to the house?”

  “No, no,” I said. “Here will be fine, if you’re not too cold?” No possibility of being overheard here.

  She shook her head with a sort of indifference.

  I grasped the iron railings with both hands—I’d thought to wear gloves, fortunately—and told her, as briefly as I could, what I’d found out and what Hasse had told me.

  She listened, head bent so I could see only her mouth and chin under the curve of the hat she wore. The lips pressed tight at some points, relaxed at others, but the chin stayed strong. When I stopped speaking, she didn’t move. I waited for what seemed a long time, my hands growing colder.

  “Elly,” I said at last, quietly. “You don’t need to decide now. What to do, I mean—if...if you want to do anything,” I added quickly. “Just...know I will stand by you.”

  She did look up at that and met my eyes directly. They were red-rimmed and tired, but not weeping, and the strong features of her face were carved deep with sorrow. But that chin was still strong.

  “Ferdie,” she said softly and reached out to touch my gloved hand, very briefly. “Thank you. You are our friend, our good friend, and I’m grateful to you. Some people say it’s better not to know too much, but I’ve never thought so.”

  She paused, but I could tell she wasn’t through, and I waited. On the far side of the park, I heard the throb of a twelve-cylinder motor; the big car that had stopped at her house was pulling away.

  “You had a visitor,” I said, nodding toward the fading sound. “Someone brought you a fancy basket.”

  That made her lips compress again and for the first time, a small light came into her eyes—not a pleasant light, though. She made a little snorting sound and tossed her head.

  “Them,” she said. “He’s not been dead a month, and the courtship begins. There are half a dozen at least, and more to come, I’m sure.”

  That shocked me for a moment. I hadn’t thought of it. But of course, a young widow, and a famous one, a person valuable for her fame...I was sufficiently taken aback by the situation that I missed what she said next.

  “Bitte?” I said, and she looked at me sharp, like a governess.

  “I said I won’t do anything,” she repeated. She saw my face, and her expression relaxed. “I’m grateful to know, Ferdinand—and so grateful for your friendship. But...” She stopped for a moment and looked at me with great penetration, as though she could see through me to the row of town houses behind me. She turned round to the pram and bent, fumbled among the blankets, came out with a handbag. This she opened and took out a piece of paper, which she handed to me through the bars.

  It was an envelope, folded in half. I spread it out; it was addressed to Bernd Rosemeyer et Ux—et uxor; that meant “and wife”—and the address in the upper corner was of the Chase Morgan Bank, New York City. The envelope was empty, and I looked up at her, bewildered.

  She took a deep breath and let it out in a white wisp.

  “We went to America last year, Bernie and I.”

  “Yes?”

  “We opened a bank account in New York while we were there.” She nodded at the envelope and waited for me to grasp the implication, which took only a moment.

  “Oh,” I said, realization hitting me like a blow in the stomach. They’d meant—maybe—to emigrate. To move to America. Leave Germany.

  “Oh,” she echoed with a mild irony. “Yes.” She nodded again at the empty envelope. “The bank sends us a statement of the account each month. That one arrived a few days ago. I didn’t feel up to doing anything about it, so I left it on the little desk in my bedroom. Yesterday, I found some energy at last, and began to tidy things up a little. That was still on the desk—but it was open, and empty.”

  I took hold of the iron railing with my free hand and felt the cold spread through my body.

  “Your bedroom,” I said. “Your maid...”

  “No. I don’t let her go in there. And—” She took the envelope from me and, with one brisk movement, tucked it back in her bag. “Why would she take such a thing?”

  Who would? Someone who recognized that that paper was a statement of intent as well as money and had taken it as evidence.

  “One of your—your suitors?” I managed.

  “Perhaps. Maybe one of their minders; the suitors”—her mouth twisted at the word—“the ones who belong to the party always bring at least one, maybe two or three men with them. Like a knight in the old times, coming with squires to show how important he is.”

  She’d meant that as a wry joke, and I smiled a little in response. It was true; all the high-ranking Nazis trailed retinues in their wake.

  “Don’t worry about me, Ferdinand.” She leaned forward, her eyes intense, and wrapped her own bare hand around my gloved one where it grasped the fence. “They won’t harm me, and they can’t force me to marry. But I have family here...” Her other hand rose, gesturing to the world outside the palisades. “My parents, my brother, my grandmother...and of course...” She glanced over her shoulder at the pram and its snug bundle. The child—quite invisible—wore a woolly knit cap with an enormous red bobble on it that trembled in the slight wind.

  “If I left—” Another deep breath. “Well. There’s nothing to leave for, is there? Not without Bernie.” She closed her eyes briefly, then opened them.

  “But if I were to go to the newspapers, if you and I were to tell what you’ve found out—it might damage Eberan and the others...God damn their souls!” she burst out. She stood with her fists clenched, trembling. I said nothing, and after a moment, she got hold of herself again.

  “It might,” she said, her words clipped off like bits of wire. “But it might damage me and my family a lot more. The newspapers accusing me of betraying Germany, planning to leave, making up stories. Auto Union has a relationship with the Reich; they wouldn’t suffer me to slander them. Or you.”

  There was a long silent moment between us. I coughed and bowed my head.

  “You’re right,” I said quietly. “If you should change your mind, though...”

  “I won’t,” she said, and she reached for the handle of the pram. “Bernie never looked back—I won’t either.”

  She put both hands on the handle and pulled the pram to turn it, to head to her house. She looked at me then, one last time, her eyes now dark in the shadow of her hat.

  “But that doesn’t mean I will ever forget. I won’t do that either, Ferdie. Good-bye.”

  I stayed there for some time, long after she had disappeared; I heard the clang of the gate on the other side of the park.

  I knew enough.

  It was my car. And Bernie was my friend.

  Author’s Note: This story is really a piece of historical narrative rather than historical fiction. The events are factual, taken from primary sources of the time and from analyses published after the accident. The technical details are taken mostly from Aldo Zano’s thorough analysis of the record attempt and the Stromlinienwagen’s engineering details. Most of the people mentioned are real people, and their backgrounds, positions, and relationships are drawn from biographical accounts. Only the inquiries undertaken by Dr. Porsche and Elly Beinhorn are fictional. I am deeply indebted to Doug Watkins, both for the original suggestion for the story and for the research material that gave it its bones.

  WHIPPERWILL AND BACK

  By Patterson Hood

  CHARLIE ALWAYS DROVE way too fast. The car was overpowered and rusted, and the road twisted and wound through red-clay foothills and pine thickets. Lester was slouched down in the passenger seat, rolling a joint with one hand while exclaiming and gesturing wildly with the other. They both had Milwaukee’s Best cans between their legs as the car tried to hang on to every curve. There wa
s a cooler with a bunch more Milwaukee’s Best cans on some ice just behind the driver’s seat and every so often Lester and Charlie would throw their empties out the window, Charlie would say, “Lester, grab another Beast,” and Lester would grab two more, open them, and light another joint. It could have been just any Thursday night, or any other night, for that matter. With one difference.

  “I ain’t heard Dale lately. Think we ought to check on him?”

  Lester’s question didn’t seem to register with Charlie at first and he just kept on driving. Perhaps he didn’t hear him, as Thin Lizzy’s Live and Dangerous was blasting really loud from the Craig PowerPlay eight-track, that part where “Cowboy Song” runs straight into “The Boys Are Back in Town,” which normally Lester would know better than to interrupt. It had been a couple of hours since they had left the Zippy Mart and initially everything had gone fairly smooth. They were friendly with Dale. Not best buds or nothing, but he always had good dope and would let them shoplift if no one else was in the store and only occasionally asked for a kickback. He was stuck way out of town and he didn’t really know anybody out there and it got lonely and spooky whenever he had to pull that seven-to-three shift, so he was generally glad to see Lester and Charlie come in, even if it was just to steal something. Dale would call the cops thirty or so minutes later and say some “colored kid” had driven off with some gas, might have shoplifted too. Then he’d describe a customer from earlier in the evening. This was before they installed cameras everywhere, back when you could get away with stuff like that.

  The Chevy Chevelle SS was nearly ten years old and was pretty much ragged out. It had originally been a dark metallic green but now had oxidized to a color somewhere between piss and rust. It burned oil and leaked some too, needed new tires, and Charlie had to pump the brakes a little before every stop sign. The stereo was the only thing fully working on it and it had seen better days. Charlie had only a few tapes, but they all were what the ad on TV referred to as Freedom Rock and he usually ended up playing Thin Lizzy anyway so it didn’t matter.

  Charlie was small-framed but strong with muscular arms and close-cropped dark curly hair. He had a chipped front tooth and the blackest of eyes but he always looked like he was smiling or about to.

  Lester was slightly taller and much skinnier than Charlie. He had greasy hair, fair skin, and peach fuzz on his upper lip like a boy five years younger. His ragged jeans were slightly too big for his thin frame, and his Willie Nelson T-shirt was faded. He was more or less a permanent part of Charlie’s passenger seat, staring out the windshield and as agreeable as a dog. Charlie could always count on Lester for a yes vote to whatever he suggested, and Lester could always count on Charlie to drive and have a cooler full of beer and some weed. Maybe even a little blow. What the hell else was there to do?

  Charlie had bought his Chevelle secondhand from the mama of its original owner, Jimmy Ray, who had died in the passenger seat of a buddy’s Camaro in a crash a few years earlier. Jimmy Ray’s mama liked Charlie since he’d helped put out her aunt’s kitchen fire, and she couldn’t stand looking at that car anymore. She practically gave it to him just to get it out of the driveway. It was still in pretty good shape when Charlie got it, but being a Chevy, its door handles kept coming off and the roof liner kept falling down and the suspension had become mushy and the steering loose. But it always started when he turned the square key. It would flat-out shit and git, as they say, and that big 396 had the greatest low-rumble sound in the world. It guzzled gas, which by 1979 had become a little expensive after the oil embargo, and the fuel gauge didn’t work anymore so Charlie had to keep it topped off, but he loved that car more than anything in the world and always talked about what a classic it would someday be and how he was going to one day get the cash to fix it up to showroom condition and keep it that way. Besides, Charlie could get rubber from twenty miles an hour, and once he’d gotten it up to a hundred and twenty-five going across the Natchez Trace Bridge. He named it Jimmy Ray after its late original owner and he and Lester liked nothing better than hauling ass down some backcountry roads with the windows down and the stereo blasting and the wet summer air blowing through their hair.

  “Think we should check on Dale?” Lester asked again.

  They pulled over to the side of the Gunwaleford Road and Charlie handed Lester the oval key and he got out and opened up the trunk. Dale was lying in there amid the spare tire and some clutter. He was tied up with a hankie loosened at his mouth like a gag that no one had bothered to tighten. His eyes were rolled back in his head and he appeared to be dead.

  “Oh shit, Charlie,” Lester just kept saying over and over.

  Charlie got out and stood next to Lester, staring into the trunk but not saying a thing as Lester started stammering the way he always did when he got excited or scared.

  After a while Charlie closed the trunk and got back in. Lester was still standing outside carrying on about Dale’s not breathing until finally Charlie yelled for him to get the fuck back in the car. Once Lester got in, Charlie pulled out slowly and carefully began driving toward Whipperwill.

  Charlie had been driving drunk for over a decade without getting so much as a scratch on the car’s paint job. He had a survival instinct that made him drive more carefully the drunker he became. An innate ability to always land on his feet in whatever situation. As a kid he had started literally playing with fire and at one point nearly burned down his junior high school, but even then he was able to squeak out without actually getting caught. Then, a few years later, he figured out how to turn his pyromania into an asset, becoming the youngest guy at the Tuscumbia Volunteer Fire Department and exhibiting a fearlessness that made him a hero and earned him a grudging respect from everyone on the civil-service boards of the two-county area.

  Once, when he was in his early twenties, Charlie got them to lower him down from a fire ladder on a rope into the middle of the inferno that totally destroyed a local car dealership, Chris Blake Pontiac. Just Charlie and the fire hose amid the smoke, heat, and chaos. He fought his way from the middle of hell to the sidewalk outside. The building collapsed anyway, only moments later, in fact, but Charlie’s reputation was made as a fearless motherfucker who could be counted on to do whatever crazy shit that was asked and not expect anything in return but maybe a blind eye turned from the way he’d chosen to live his life. He usually didn’t hurt anybody, or at least not in a way that would call for paperwork and questions being asked, so Charlie was all right.

  Charlie was able to parlay his good graces with the local law enforcement into a sweet job running errands, mostly carrying beer and money, for the various bootleggers that were so prominent in the area. The Tennessee Valley was all dry back in those days. To buy legal beer you had to drive up to the Tennessee state line, and to get liquor you had to drive an hour each way to Savannah, Tennessee, or Minor Hill. This opened the doors for a slew of bootleggers to sell beer and liquor, at a greatly inflated price, to the general populace. Enough palms were greased with enough cash for the cops to not ask questions and as long as nothing happened that brought undo attention to the situation or required extra paperwork for the cops, no one was arrested, much less prosecuted or convicted.

  Lester never finished school or got around to taking his GED but he could roll a perfect joint with one hand and never questioned Charlie’s authority over him. If Charlie was crazy, Lester was a little bit crazier. Charlie’s impulses seemed to form a straight line between where he was and where he wanted to be whereas Lester’s seemed to be based on whatever whim he thought of at any given time, sometimes likely to be inspired by something he saw in a movie or on TV. It was Charlie who first suggested robbing the Zippy Mart where Dale worked. Lester didn’t have a job or any money of his own and Charlie thought it’d be nice for Lester to pull a little more weight for once. It was Lester who thought it would be a better idea if they tied Dale up and put him in the trunk. They would take him out to Whipperwill and leave him there with enough of th
e take in his pocket that he wouldn’t feel compelled to turn them in.

  When they pulled up to the store, only Dale’s car was in the parking lot. They could see him standing behind the counter, leaning on the cigarette rack and watching something on the TV. Lester began filling up Jimmy Ray’s tank and Charlie went inside. By the time Lester went in, Charlie was holding a bag full of money. He and Dale were both laughing about something. There was way more money than expected in the register since the day-shift lady had had a doctor’s appointment and had to leave early without doing the deposit. Dale had already been there since midafternoon and was bored and itchy so he was kinda glad to see them.

  It was surprisingly easy for Charlie to talk Dale into letting them tie him up and put him in the trunk. Charlie promised to cut him in on the take and said they’d make it look convincing. Boys like Dale and Lester looked up to guys like Charlie.

  They took the money, some smokes, a tank of gas, and some beef jerky and left with the lights still on and door unlocked. The Zippy Mart was out past Barton, near the Mississippi line, and probably one of the most remote convenience stores in the state. Dale had been begging his boss to have a second person work the late shift with him for ages but the asshole was too cheap to do so. A previous employee of the late shift had been shot in the head. They’d found him tied up in the office the next morning, blood all over the place. It was in all of the papers. The guy that did it was on death row but that didn’t bring anybody back. Dale figured that getting into Charlie’s trunk would be a way for him to pick up a little extra dough and maybe it would teach his boss a lesson.

  All was smooth until they got to Whipperwill, which was where kids would go back then to show off their fearlessness by jumping off the cliffs into the Tennessee River. Some of the higher bluffs were probably forty feet or more, and you could break your neck if you landed wrong, or you could hit a log or one of the rocks that jutted out. About once every couple of years some teenager would get killed or paralyzed, which only seemed to make it more attractive to young rednecks who felt they were invincible and had something to prove. The trail from the road to the cliffs was littered with beer cans and used rubbers. Every so often the cops would crack down on it and police the place, but times were hard and they couldn’t really spare the manpower to actually shut it down, and besides, many of the cops themselves had come of age jumping off those cliffs and banging little redneck girls in those woods. Usually it would empty out by midnight or so, especially during the week, but on this night it was still unexpectedly crowded so they decided to keep driving around for a while, with Dale still tied up in the trunk. They would head up to the Line and get some more beer, then double back in a little while after it emptied out. Then it sort of slipped their minds.