Drive Like Hell: A Novel

by Dallas Hudgens

  She held up the pink garment and let it drop inside the empty spare-tire well. “That’s my mother’s,” she explained.

  I pointed to the gum supply. “Can I have a stick?”

  She slammed the trunk and slung the empty backpack over her shoulder. “Follow me,” she said. “I’ll get you all the Juicy Fruit you want.”

  It didn’t take me long to figure out where we were headed, or what we were going to do when we got there, but I followed her to the gift shop anyway. I followed her the way that some people talk about following that light when they’re near death. I leapt right off my wave of good citizenship, sheriffs and judges be damned. The next thing I knew, I was crouched low inside the darkened gift shop.

  “You gotta stay down,” she whispered. “I mean, that was your first mistake. Really amateur. I could see your head bobbing around in here from the back of the bar. You looked like you were on a fucking pogo stick.”

  Rachel told me to wait by the door and tell her if I saw anybody coming. Then she unzipped her backpack and went to work.

  She hit the newsstand first. She pulled down an armful of magazines and swept them right into the bag: Cosmo, Rolling Stone, Vogue, and Glamour. After that, she went for the gum rack and then the sunglasses. She grabbed a tacky white pair of cat’s-eyes. She looked my way and modeled them for me, cocking her head to the side and shrugging her shoulder in a sexy way.

  She was brash and fearless, like Cale Yarborough on a short track. Watching her in action gave me a boner right there in the gift shop. It beat the hell out of any letter Stan could have written to Penthouse.

  The next thing I knew, she had slithered out of sight. She was behind the glass counter that housed the cash register. I could see her arm reaching up and pulling stuff off the medication rack. That’s when I noticed Yuri. He was walking slowly, practically teetering in his Courvoisier fog, gradually making his way out of the bar. He appeared to be up to something, looking over his shoulder and then peeping around the corner to check out the action at the front desk. Satisfied with his surveillance, he turned and headed toward us.

  I crawled across the floor and ducked behind the counter with Rachel. She was still wearing the sunglasses.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” she said. “I told you to stay up front.”

  “It’s Yuri,” I said. “He’s coming.”

  “Here?”

  “Yes, here.”

  About that time, the bells on the door jingled. We dropped fast, like there’d been gunfire. We lay there on our sides, facing each other.

  Yuri bumped into something almost as soon as he walked through the doorway. We heard glass banging together and then Yuri mutter, “Fucking ashtrays.” The wind chimes were the next indication of his location. He must have walked right through them. As prowlers went, he had the finesse of a blind mule.

  His destination was the glass counter. He jiggled the sliding door in front until it finally opened. Then he reached inside and went for the cigar box. We could see his bandaged hand above us groping around in the darkened case. He scooped up a couple of face turds and slammed the case shut. It made a loud noise. Yuri whispered, “Shhh, little box.”

  Rachel and I were trying not to laugh. She clamped both hands over her mouth, and I buried my face in the front of her leather jacket. I breathed in the smoke and the cowhide, and, for a second, it smelled like Lyndell’s Chevelle. Maybe that car wasn’t the only fun place to be late at night.

  I lifted my head when Yuri had gone, and we both let ourselves laugh. The gum in Rachel’s mouth fell on the floor, but I could still smell it on her breath. Juicy Fruit, like she’d promised.

  “If I’m an amateur, then what’s Yuri?”

  “Oh, he needs a remedial course,” she said. “That’s way beyond my tutoring skills.”

  I started to feel bad about making fun of Yuri. I pictured that open-sided railroad car and Yuri rattling through the cold of Russia with his mother’s stiff arms around him, not knowing where the hell he was headed.

  “What’s the matter?” Rachel asked.

  I shook my head. “Nothing.”

  “What? Did you forget to return something you borrowed?”

  I didn’t even bother to look irritated. I pushed her cheap, almost stolen sunglasses up on her head and looked down into those dark eyes. I leaned in to her mouth. I did it quickly, silently, like a burglar stealing his way across a darkened room.

  11

  Dewey had just finished playing his song for me and Nick. He was sitting in the recliner, cradling his Western Auto guitar, staring down at the floor and the lyrics scrawled in his red spiral notebook.

  “Fuck,” I said. “That’s good. That’s really good.”

  Dewey had strummed the chords to the melody, laying it out there like a pretty tiled roof above his singing. It was his voice that carried the song. While his pipes might have been a little rough around the edges, they were also sturdy and elegant in the way of an idling ‘63 Corvette. Which is to say that he could make the hair stand up on your arms.

  Nick had been working with Dewey, helping him learn to write music. This had been Dewey’s first shot at a song, so he was eager to earn a good word from his mentor.

  Nick hopped off the bar chair, scratched at his chin, and sighed, extending Dewey’s misery a few seconds longer.

  “I don’t know, Dewey. It’s kind of predictable.”

  “Well, what’s the matter with it?” Dewey set his guitar down beside the recliner. He looked awfully glum.

  “It’s just kind of simple,” Nick said. “I like to be challenged, you know. I like some wild-ass chord progressions, some adventure in the melody.”

  I felt like Nick’s criticism was a little harsh. After all, it wasn’t like he ever played any of his own songs for us. He was real private about his blues compositions, always grumbling about how something sucked, or needed more work.

  Nick sat back down on the bar chair and grabbed the Green Lake Gazette that he’d been reading. He tried to go back to the Sports page, but Dewey wouldn’t quit staring at him. He finally got the message and set the paper down in his lap. He gazed from me to Dewey, and then back again.

  “Oh, all right,” he confessed. “It’s good. There, are you satisfied? You write one damn song your whole life, you asshole, and it beats the shit out of anything I ever wrote. I hate your guts, you big tub of shit.”

  Dewey was beaming. He grabbed his PBR can off the floor and took a long, satisfied swig.

  “So who was the song about?” I asked.

  “Well,” Dewey said, “it’s actually about two different girls. But I combined them. It’s what they call a composite.”

  Nick peered over the top of his newspaper and rolled his eyes. “Now he’s gonna fucking talk shop.”

  I asked Dewey the girls’ names.

  “Pearl Nicklaus and Cheri Lovely.”

  Nick dropped the paper and started laughing. “Those are strippers at the Booby Trap.”

  “So what?” Dewey said. “There’s no law against writing songs about strippers. They’ve got sad stories to tell.”

  Nick shook his head. “As much money as you spend at that place, they oughta be listening to your sad stories, not the other way around.”

  Dewey’s regular forays to the Booby Trap were no secret. Nick joked that Dewey kept the Shoreline Cab Company in business with his titty-bar excursions to Atlanta.

  “Pearl was telling me about this boyfriend of hers,” Dewey said. “She told me how he got her drunk on her birthday and gave her some blotter paper with Tweety Bird on it, because he knew how much she liked Tweety. Anyway, it was some bad shit. She was down on the floor tripping, and he was hauling all her stuff out to his truck. TV. Stereo. Her grandmother’s wedding ring. She’s lying there seeing these fucking elephants on the ceiling, scared out of her damn mind, and he’s stepping over her, stealing everything she owns. Even took the damn mattress. Headed down to Slidell, Louisiana. Never even called to see if she
was okay. And it just got me started to thinking, you know, that what he did was the opposite of love, that if you loved somebody, wouldn’t you be willing to give them everything you had? I mean, that’s the real shit, when you’d give your life, or go to jail, for somebody.”

  Nick lit a Winston and exhaled wearily. “Dewey, this is why you need to get out and meet a real woman, instead of somebody who dances on a table for a living. I mean, these girls, they know what a guy wants to hear. They know who wants to be told they’re hot shit and who wants to hear a sad story. Whatever it takes to keep those green-backs coming in, they’re gonna say it.”

  The phone rang, long and loud, the way it used to when a phone call really meant something. It startled us right out of our conversation. Nick picked up the receiver, since he was the most likely candidate to receive a call. He stretched the cord back to the bedroom, talking in a hushed tone. I assumed it was a business matter.

  Dewey stood up and groaned. He was rubbing at his belly and making a sour face.

  “Damn,” he said, “I had me a sackful of Krystals at lunch, and they’ve just about torn my guts out.”

  “Well, you don’t have to announce it,” I told him. “This ain’t a Pepto commercial.”

  “Why don’t you go ahead and lay out the buffet?” Dewey said. “I’m gonna go back here and try to grunt.”

  It was almost four o’clock, time for the ever important two-hour stretch on channel 17. That meant Andy Griffith, Leave It to Beaver, The Beverly Hillbillies, and The Munsters, as fine a foursome as you could pull down with a $4.99 UHF antenna.

  Dewey and I were quite familiar with these shows. By our calculations, we’d seen each episode an average of seventeen times, and we were not ashamed to admit it. We had even turned our expertise into a daily contest called Name the Plot. The loser coughed up a dollar every time he was beaten to the punch. I’d been on a roll the past week, lightening the load in Dewey’s wallet to the tune of fourteen dollars. He’d been itching for payback.

  I laid the snacks on a tray and set the tray down on the middle cushion of the sofa. It was the usual spread: pretzels, barbecue potato chips, and peanut M&M’s. I grabbed a Coke for myself and another Pabst for Dewey.

  Dewey walked out of the bathroom, grabbed a handful of chips, and proceeded to plop his ass down at the other end of the sofa.

  “Everything come out all right?” I asked.

  “Yep, just fine.”

  Andy’s whistled theme song had barely ended when Dewey started snapping his fingers and batting his eyes as though his memory was taking a severe jarring. The man had never owned a poker face.

  “I know this one already,” he said. “This is where Uncle Joe from Petticoat Junction guest-stars. Only he ain’t playing Uncle Joe. He’s Mr. Wheeler, this flimflam fellow, and Aunt Bee gets the hots for him.”

  The facts were pouring out of him like a trumped-up confession, and I wasn’t buying it. He was already rubbing his fingers together, gloating over the dollar bill he was expecting me to hand over.

  “You sorry sack of shit,” I said. “You looked at the TV Guide.”

  Dewey snorted and tried to act offended. “The hell, I did.”

  “Yeah, right. Like there’s any fucking way you could have already figured that out. All they show is a pickup truck, and you got it nailed. That’s bullshit.”

  “Bullshit, my ass. I recognize the truck. I’ve got a photographic memory.”

  “Yeah, from the fucking TV Guide.”

  “Oh, so you’re gonna turn it around now. Make me the bad guy.”

  “If you’re cheating, I am. We agreed not to look at the TV Guide.”

  “Well, I didn’t cheat. What are you gonna do anyway? Call the NCAA? Have ‘em put me on probation?”

  “I can handle my own damn investigation.”

  “You got no proof.”

  “Oh, yeah? Then what were you doing in the bathroom just now?”

  “I told you already. I had to lay some pipe. Drop the kids off at the pool. Shit, shat, shut. Do I need to make it any clearer?”

  “That’s bullshit,” I said. “You’re like clockwork, every morning at seven-thirty, as soon as you come out of the bedroom and set your eyes on the Sports page. It’s like God’s own laxative.”

  “Well, a man can shit more than once a day. That don’t mean he’s a criminal.”

  “I bet if I went in that bathroom, I’d find the TV Guide. Where’d you hide it, anyway? Under the sink?”

  Dewey didn’t have anything to say about this. He pulled his Marlboros out of his shirt pocket and shook one from the box. He always smoked when he was nervous. I could see him eyeing me as he snapped his thumb down the back side of his Bic lighter.

  “Look at yourself. You’re sweating like a cheap refrigerator.”

  “I ain’t done shit,” he said. He wiped at his brow, took a drag off his cigarette, and pointed at the TV. “Let’s just watch the show, all right? This is a good one.”

  I pulled a dollar bill out of my pocket, wadded it into a ball, and tossed it in his lap. He couldn’t even look me in the eye when he stuck the dollar in his shirt pocket. But I gave him the skunk eye for a good long while, just to let him know that I’d be watching him from now on.

  “Don’t get too attached,” I said. “Ol’ George is coming back to my side of the sofa once Beaver starts.”

  Nick walked out of the bedroom wearing his leather jacket and carrying his motorcycle saddlebags. “What the hell’s going on out here? Sounds like a fucking cockfight.”

  “Your brother’s a sore loser,” Dewey said.

  “Yeah, most people are pretty damn sore after they get screwed,” I said.

  Nick raised his hands in a plea for calm. “Look, I gotta go to work. Y’all try to play nice while I’m gone.”

  Dewey looked up at Nick and frowned. “You mean you’re not gonna watch Andy with us?”

  Nick shook his head. “You know how much I hate that show.”

  “I don’t see how you can hate Andy,” Dewey said. “Hell, I’d move to Mayberry if I could.”

  “It’s a little too white bread for my taste,” Nick said. “If I had to live somewhere like that, I’d probably blow my damn brains out.”

  I asked Nick if he’d be home in time to drive me to work.

  “I gotta be out late tonight. I’ll call Bev and tell her to pick you up.”

  “What about band practice?” Dewey asked. “I thought we were gonna jam tonight.”

  Nick made a face and looked down at the floor. “You better call up Carlton and tell him we’re off for tonight. And while we’re on the subject, I might be sidelined for Friday night, too.”

  “But that’s our fucking gig at Whatchamacallit’s,” Dewey said. “Hell, we can’t cancel on them. That’s a good venue for us.”

  Nick offered up an apologetic shrug. He was already backing himself through the doorway. “I’m sorry, Dewey. It’s out of my hands.”

  We finally went back to watching Andy. Mr. Wheeler, the flimflam artist, was pumping something out of a can onto Aunt Bee’s roses. “My goodness,” Aunt Bee said, “you’ve got a spray for every bush.”

  Dewey nudged me with his elbow. “Wonder what kind of spray he’s got for Aunt Bee’s fur bush.”

  “Man, that’s sick,” I told him. “She could be your grandmother.”

  We kept the jokes coming until Andy had to run Wheeler out of town. That’s when Aunt Bee gave her sad speech about pitying the poor soul of the drifter, pitying the fact that he misses out on so much in life: family and friends and home-cooked meals. Dewey and I got real quiet then, like we were in church or something.

  “You know, I really could live there,” Dewey said. “I don’t care what Nick says.”

  I told him I could see Nick’s point. Thirty minutes a day was probably enough of Mayberry. “It’d get old in a hurry. You’d probably be better off living in Mount Pilot.”

  “Nah, that’s the concrete jungle,” he said. “I�
��d get me a little house out in the woods near the Darlings, so I could jam with them. Then I’d find a good creek where I could grow me some pot. Hell, me and Barney could get lit together.”

  I tried to picture him and Barney sitting at the counter of the Bluebird, scarfing down pie after they’d gotten stoned, but it was hard to imagine Dewey in black-and-white.

  “What about you?” Dewey asked. “You still wanna buy you a trailer and move to the ocean like Rockford?”

  “I don’t know about that anymore. I’ve been thinking maybe it’s not too bad right here.” I leaned over and sniffed the sour arm of the sofa. “This sofa needs some fucking Lysol, but otherwise…”

  Dewey grinned. He had these big pearly white teeth, like something out of a toothpaste commercial.

  “Oh, hell,” he said. “You’ve got a girl, don’t you?”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Well, I didn’t read it in the TV Guide. I can assure you of that.”

  “I guess that’s why you’re wrong this time.”

  Dewey let out a deep sigh. “If you don’t want to admit you’ve got a girl, I mean if she’s ugly or something, and you’re ashamed of her, I understand. But when you’re ready to talk, I’ll be here. Ol’ Dewey will always be here, a sounding board, a shoulder to cry on, whatever you might need. I mean, I’m sure there’ll probably come a time when you could use some advice, and old Dew—”

  “All right,” I said. “Just shut the fuck up.”

  Dewey piped down and waited, his face full of anticipation.

  “I met this girl at the Holiday Inn. We work in the kitchen together.”

  It felt good to get it out, like speaking of Rachel had actually made her real.

  “What does she look like?” Dewey asked. “No, wait. Let me guess. Tall blonde with nice, full tits. Kind of a Susan Anton type.”

  “She’s got dark hair, actually.”

  “Well, that’s okay. Jaclyn Smith’s got dark hair, and there ain’t no flies on her.”