Drive Like Hell: A Novel

by Dallas Hudgens

  “She doesn’t look like Jaclyn Smith, either.”

  “Kate Jackson?”

  “Nope.”

  “Well, what famous celebrity would you say that she looks like?”

  “I don’t know. She doesn’t remind me of anybody. That’s why I like her.”

  “Well, is she good-looking?”

  “Of course, she’s good-looking. At least in my opinion, she is.”

  Dewey lit another cigarette. “So, you snaked her yet?”

  “Jesus, Dewey. I don’t think that’s any of your damn business.”

  Dewey slid the cigarette out of his mouth and drew his head back to get a better look at me. Something about the pose reminded me of Barney Fife.

  “You’re already in love with this girl, aren’t you?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “You sound like you got it bad,” he said.

  “Man, that’s crazy talk.”

  “Then why did you say it was none of my business?”

  “Hell, because it’s not. You don’t see me asking who you’re snaking, do you?”

  He shook his head and grabbed a handful of chips. But then he tossed them back in the bowl like he’d decided he didn’t like barbecue potato chips anymore. Instead, he took a long drag off his cigarette.

  “You need to go listen to that song,” he said.

  “Which one?”

  “‘Love Hurts.’ That’s which song. That just about sums it up.”

  “Listen, I didn’t ask for any advice.”

  We watched the opening to Beaver, saw June handing everybody their lunches as they headed out the front door. It made me hungry for a ham and cheese sandwich, only I didn’t want to go fix one for myself.

  I cracked the episode after a couple of minutes. I told Dewey it was the one where Beaver spills paint on Wally’s suit jacket and then Eddie Haskell helps cover for the Beav, proving that he’s not such a motherfucker after all. It wasn’t one of my favorites. Eddie was more entertaining when he acted like a jackass.

  Dewey pulled the dollar out of his pocket, straightened it, folded it, and passed it down in a gentlemanly fashion.

  “Nick’s right,” he said.

  “About what?”

  “I gotta find a woman. I’m starting to sound like a bitter asshole. A bitter, just-before-turning-thirty asshole.”

  “Well, what about Pearl? Why don’t you ask her out? Strippers have to date somebody, you know. And it sounds like this last guy was nobody’s bargain.”

  His face shone with a little hope. The sun had changed directions in the window. It was hitting the back of Dewey’s neck, shooting across the room and clipping off the bottom corner of the TV screen.

  “I really like Pearl,” he said. “She even told me her real name.”

  He turned his head and considered me. “I mean, Pearl Nicklaus is just a stage name.”

  “Yeah, I kind of had that feeling.”

  “She told me she didn’t want to use that fake name when she was talking to me. She said it felt different with me, that I wasn’t like the other customers.”

  “So, what’s her name?”

  He smiled. “Melissa. Just like that Allman Brothers song. It was playing on the jukebox one night, and I started singing it to her. When I was done, she leaned into my ear and told me that was her real name.”

  “That’s a good song,” I said.

  Dewey nodded in agreement.

  “But I liked your song, too,” I said.

  He gave me a long disbelieving look. “You’re not shitting me, are you?”

  “Swear to God,” I said. “It made my nipples hard.”

  We’d forgotten all about Wally and the Beav.

  “Melissa’s got this blonde hair,” Dewey said. “It’s real long, and she uses this shampoo that smells like bananas. Damn, I love that smell.”

  “Yeah, this girl at the Holiday Inn smells like Juicy Fruit. She stole ten packs of it for me.”

  Dewey squinted and cocked his head like a lap dog pondering a treat. “Juicy Fruit?”

  “Yeah. I used to be more of a Dentyne man, but I’ve switched over to the Juicy Fruit camp.”

  The phone rang before we realized how stupid we sounded. Dewey settled back into the sofa cushions.

  “That’s probably for Nick,” I said.

  Dewey looked at his watch. “The Hillbillies are starting in five minutes.”

  The phone was sitting atop the TV tray at my end of the sofa, still ringing away.

  “Damn,” Dewey said. “They’re persistent, aren’t they?”

  “I guess I better take it off the hook,” I told him. “We won’t get any peace unless I do.”

  I lifted the receiver and set it down on top of an old Creem magazine. Angus Young was on the cover, one leg kicked up, arm high in the air, ready to strike a power chord. He was the only guy I’d ever seen who could look cool in a pair of shorts.

  I settled back into my hollow of the sofa, figuring whoever was calling would eventually hang up. But something wasn’t right.

  “I think you might want to take that call,” Dewey said.

  I looked over at the receiver. “Shit.”

  “That is so rude,” Claudia said. “I can’t believe you’d leave somebody hanging on the line just so you could watch a TV show.”

  “Well, I thought it might be somebody else. We get a lot of people calling this time of day, trying to sell us stuff.”

  “How much TV are you watching, anyway? I thought you agreed to cut back.”

  “Oh, I’ve cut way back. Me and Dewey were just getting ready to watch one of those National Geographic specials.”

  “On what?”

  I looked to Dewey for help. “What’s this one about, anyway?”

  “Elly May fucks Mr. Drysdale,” he said.

  I clamped my hand over the mouthpiece and gave him the finger.

  “You’re running that thing twenty-four hours a day, aren’t you?” Claudia asked.

  She had me dead to rights. Hell, I even slept with the TV on. She let out a sigh, but I knew that she wasn’t really mad. “As long as you’re going to work and staying out of trouble, I guess it’s all right.”

  “I’m holding up those bargains. I might even add some hours to my work shift when school gets out for the summer.”

  “Are you keeping up with your schoolwork?”

  “Nick makes me show him my homework every night.”

  Technically, that was true. Of course, I’d been showing Nick the same set of geometry problems for the past month. He hadn’t caught on. As for grades, I’d become the master of the C-minus.

  “So, you actually enjoy bussing tables?”

  “Yeah, I enjoy seeing how a hotel operates. It’s a fascinating industry.”

  Truth be told, I enjoyed talking to Rachel, and getting stoned with Rachel, and robbing the gift shop with Rachel, and lying on my back while Rachel squirted Coke out of the bar fountain into my mouth.

  “Well, don’t work too hard,” Claudia said. “I might have to disown you.”

  “You’ve got nothing to worry about. Too much Fulmer blood in me.”

  There was a pause. I could picture her cradling the receiver on her shoulder, firing up a Virginia Slim. I stood up and carried the phone back to Nick’s bedroom so that Dewey could watch the Hillbillies in peace.

  “So everything’s going okay?” she asked.

  I tossed some dirty clothes onto the floor and sat down on the foot of the bed. “Yeah, everything’s great. I think this was a good idea for all of us.”

  “What about Nick? What’s he doing?”

  “He’s not home right now.”

  “He hasn’t been leaving you there by yourself all the time, has he?”

  “Nah, he’s here a lot,” I lied. “He’s keeping pretty regular hours these days.”

  “I just want him to be careful,” she said. “Wade Briggs told me that Sheriff Muskgrave is on some sort of drug crusade ri
ght now. There’s an election year coming up, you know.”

  My arms went numb when she mentioned Muskgrave. I wasn’t sure what to say, so I tried to steer us elsewhere.

  “Yeah, I know. Nick said that Jimmy Carter might be out on his ass if he doesn’t get the economy back up.”

  “You better hope he doesn’t get voted out of office,” she said. “He’s a fine man. All people care about these days is filling their cars up with cheap gasoline. They don’t even bother to see all the good that he does.”

  I knew that Jimmy Carter would distract her. It seemed that everyone had some strong feelings about our homegrown president. I was pretty neutral, though. His didn’t appear to be an easy job. I couldn’t even imagine where you would have gone to smoke a joint in the White House.

  I tried to change the subject again. “So, when did you talk to Wade Briggs?”

  “We talk from time to time,” she said. “I asked him to keep an eye on you guys for me.”

  “So he’s moonlighting as a private eye now?”

  “He’s doing it as a friend,” she said.

  I heard a noise in the background, like a power drill. “What’s that?”

  “Oh, Charlie’s got the blender out. If it’s five o’clock, you can bet he’s making frozen margaritas.”

  “So, how’s life with Mr. Forty-eight Long?”

  “Well, we drink a lot.” She laughed. “Charlie fixed us up a batch of banana daiquiris this afternoon. It’s a new mix his stores are carrying. It was actually pretty good. I poured them into these big Solo Cups, and we took a walk on the beach until Charlie got a stitch in his side.”

  “Well, what else are you doing?”

  “Actually, I’ve been thinking about going to school. I’d like to be a voice coach, or maybe teach music somehow. Charlie said he’d pay for it.”

  “That sounds like a good idea.”

  “Doesn’t it, though?”

  I thought she might tell me more, like where she was planning to go to school, or when she was getting started, but she didn’t. She blew a mouthful of cigarette smoke away from the receiver. It sounded like a sigh.

  “Charlie’s new stores are doing great,” she said. “He’s even got a drive-through place down here. Can you believe that? I told him he needed to start making home deliveries next. Just place an ad in the paper: IF YOU HAVE A DRINKING PROBLEM, CALL THIS NUMBER.”

  12

  Once summer kicked into gear, I began to spend as much time with Cash as I did with Nick. We worked on the Cougar in his garage every Saturday afternoon, getting the suspension and the throttle just right. Cash knew his shit where cars were concerned. That Cougar was always tuned to perfection, the body all shined up and dent free. It looked like it belonged in a museum instead of on a dirt track.

  Cash was a top-shelf driver, too, probably the smoothest in the hobby stock class. The only thing that kept him from winning races was his tendency to shrink away from contact. He was racing to survive instead of to win, just like Lyndell in the old days.

  I invited Rachel to the races one night. I wasn’t sure she would take me up on the offer. The Green Lake Speedway didn’t seem like her kind of scene.

  But she showed up right at nine o’clock. She came walking out of the dust after the first qualifying heat, wearing a black T-shirt, hiking boots, and Levi’s, toting her backpack and looking totally out of place among all the other girls in their fake French jeans and spaghetti-strap tops.

  She crossed the track with that walk of hers and started scanning the pit. The pit was the beehive between races, cars parked nose to bumper, tires and tools strewn like a tornado had just blown through. The place smelled downright flammable, with a cloud of gas fumes hanging overhead. Not that it ever stopped anybody from smoking. Almost every man there had a cigarette snagged in his teeth. The whole crowd was smoking and clanging wrenches and revving motors and pouring gasoline.

  I was down on my knees checking Cash’s tire pressure since his qualifying heat was next. I called out Rachel’s name, and she jerked her head in my direction and walked over to the Cougar. She was smiling, her lips shiny from the raspberry lip gloss she’d stolen out of the gift shop.

  “I think I know some of these people,” she said.

  “From where?” I asked.

  She smiled. “The bulletin board at the post office.”

  “Most of these fellows are law-abiding citizens,” I told her.

  She raised her eyebrows. “So, I guess those are fake prison tattoos?”

  I showed her around Cash’s Cougar, let her look inside and under the hood. She indulged my enthusiasm, even tried to appear mildly interested, though I was extra careful not to overdo things. I just couldn’t help being excited, what with her standing there and the car gleaming under the track lights, scarlet red with a white roof and white circles on the doors sporting black number twelves. Since Cash was his own sponsor, Cash Bail Bonds had been scripted across the rear quarter panels in black paint. The only other artistic touch was a small yin-yang symbol on the driver’s side door. Rachel noticed that right away.

  “Is your driver Buddhist?” She sounded hopeful.

  “In a way,” I said.

  She appeared skeptical. “What does ‘in a way’ mean?”

  “It means he really likes kung fu movies. He’s a big Bruce Lee fan.”

  She rolled her eyes. “So, where is he? Praying in the temple?”

  I told her that Cash was, in fact, underneath the stands at that very moment doing his “pre-race meditation.” What I didn’t tell her was that the meditation entailed the consumption of half a joint and a bag of Doritos.

  Rachel stepped away from the car and did a slow three-sixty, taking in the whole scene, the oxblood track and the packed bleachers along the straightaways, the plywood press box with the checkered-flag paint motif and the light poles rising out of its roof like a huge set of claws.

  “So, this is why you never work on Saturday nights?”

  “Yeah, this is why.”

  I told her that my father used to race. “He brought me with him a few times when I was a kid. I just liked it, that’s all.”

  She narrowed her gaze like she was trying to see inside me. “That’s all?”

  “Well, he sort of taught me how to drive, too. He used to let me drive his Chevelle on some of the streets around here.”

  “How old were you?”

  “About ten, I guess.”

  “Jesus!” She looked away and laughed. “How did you reach the pedals?”

  “I just scooted up to the edge of the seat. It wasn’t that hard.”

  “Did you drive fast?”

  “Not really. I mean, I’d get it up to about ninety or ninety-five on a couple of the quarter-mile stretches, but that’s about it.”

  “At ten years old?” Rachel asked. “You could have gotten killed.”

  I couldn’t really argue with her there.

  “So where is your father, anyway?” she asked.

  The question caught me by surprise. “Don’t you think you’re being kind of nosy?”

  “I thought you said it was one of the side effects of smoking pot.”

  “It is, but I think you become immune after a while.”

  “Maybe I have a strong resistance,” she said.

  I decided to lay it all out on the table for her. I trusted her not to say anything stupid.

  “Lyndell’s got a new family up in Bristol, Tennessee. He builds engines for a racing team.”

  “What about your mother?”

  “She’s living with her boyfriend down in Jacksonville right now.”

  Rachel had just slid a fresh stick of gum into her mouth. She paused in midchew and studied my face. I supposed she was trying to think of what to say, so I decided to save her the trouble and change the subject. I eased up beside her and made a sweeping gesture with my arm, as if the track were a green orchard, or some other lush landscape, that I wanted her to appreciate.

  “If
there’s one key to having fun at the track, it’s taking the time to learn a little something about the drivers. Once you get to know them as human beings, you start to feel like you have something invested in the outcome of the race.”

  She let out a sharp little bark of a laugh. “Oh, really?”

  She sounded skeptical, but she was smiling, too. She was willing to play along.

  “Take Carl Bettis over there, for example.” I pointed Carl out to her. He was a heavyset guy, sporting wall-to-wall tattoos and a grungy green-

  and-red Mountain Dew baseball cap. Carl had a crowbar in his hands, and he was cussing and trying to pry a dent out of his collapsed front fender.

  “So tell me something about Carl,” Rachel said. “I mean, outside of the obvious fact that he’s got superb taste in headwear.”

  “Well,” I said, “it might interest you to know that he is currently drunk off his ass.”

  She put her hand over her mouth in fake horror. “Oh, his poor mama.” She incorporated a lame Southern accent into her exclamation. She thought it was pretty funny, but I kept quiet. I didn’t want to encourage her to do it again.

  She went back to her regular voice. “Will they let him drive like that?”

  “Oh, yeah. He’s been driving on the sauce for years. Used to do it back when my father ran here. He even tried to hook up a beer tank in his car one time. Mounted a wiper fluid case to the floorboard and ran this long tube up to his mouth so he could drink while he was racing.”

  “Did it work?”

  “No, not really. All the vibration made the beer too foamy.”

  Rachel pointed to a slight, glassy-eyed fellow who was sitting atop a stack of tires, chewing gum and steadily rocking back and forth.

  “What about him?” she asked. “What’s his story?”

  “Oh, that’s Ebo Mitchell.”

  “Is he drunk, too?”

  “No, he rocks like that all the time. Even when he’s driving. Keep an eye on him during the race. You can see him rocking through the window.”

  “He looks kind of sad,” she said. “Like a little stray puppy. Maybe I’ll pull for Ebo. I mean, if your guy doesn’t win.”

  “Well, Ebo doesn’t usually do that well. You might want to pick somebody else.”