Drive Like Hell: A Novel

by Dallas Hudgens

  “It’s the gallopin’ fucking gourmet!” Stan announced.

  “Graham Kerr,” I added, “but with bigger balls.”

  Yuri hated Graham Kerr. He was always talking about how he could have done a better cooking show when he was drunk. At the mention of Kerr, Yuri stopped dancing and stood up straight. He wagged his finger in my face.

  “And don’t you forget that, beeg boy.” Then he smiled and slapped my back so hard it hurt.

  Yuri crouched a little and peered through the door’s porthole. He stared for a long time, like he was lining up a putt. He finally straightened himself, tugged at the hem of his shirt, and burst through the doors with the confidence of an island dictator.

  “Paul Newman, my friend! Ha! Ha! Ha!” He stretched his arms out wide, ready to give Cool Hand Luke a bear hug.

  Newman flinched as though someone had just lobbed a grenade into the room. But then his eyes lit up in recognition. He grinned, pushed his chair away from the table, and stood up with his own arms outstretched. Stan and I stared at each other in disbelief.

  “Well, fuck me up the ass with a pineapple,” Stan said. “He really does know him.”

  I shook my head in bewilderment. “Either that, or Newman’s a better actor than I give him credit for.”

  Rachel walked over with a tray full of garden salads, destined for the dining room. Naturally, she acted like she could have cared less about the acting and racing legend currently in our midst.

  “Could I get by, please?” Her voice had an edge of irritation.

  Stan and I parted to give her an open lane, but Stan appeared confused by her lack of interest in our famous guest.

  “Do you know who the fuck is out there?” he asked.

  Rachel looked at him like he was an idiot. “Yeah, he walked right by me when he came in. I mean, big fucking deal.”

  “He walked right by you?” Stan touched her shoulder, genuinely impressed. “So, what did you think?”

  Rachel shrugged. “He’s short.”

  Stan smiled as if that explained something. “All actors are short,” he said. “That’s what drives them. They’ve got a Neapolitan complex.”

  Rachel snorted in a scornful way. “It’s Napoléon, you retard. A Napoleonic complex. Neapolitan is a fucking ice cream.”

  “She’s right,” I told him. “It’s that ice cream with the stripes in it.”

  Stan, the former SAT wizard, squinted as though he were trying to think his way through a complex word problem, one of those involving trains leaving stations A, B, and C. He finally shook his head, dismissing us both. “No, I think Napoléon had a different complex.”

  Rachel let out a hopeless groan. “You really need to lay off the weed for a while.” Then she backed her way through the door, and disappeared into the dining room.

  Rachel and I took our usual nine o’clock break. Stan called out to us as we were walking to Rachel’s car to get stoned. He was standing at the kitchen’s back door.

  “Hey, man! Hold up a second!”

  We waited for him in the middle of the parking lot, beneath a buzzing light pole and the fat moon. Stan looked like a TV detective jogging across the asphalt in his blazer. I half expected to see a piece strapped to his side.

  “So, what’s up?” I asked him.

  He was winded, his face flushed in the warm night air.

  “I was gonna check out Paul Newman’s car,” he said. “Tammy at the front desk saw him pull in. She said he’s driving this cool-as-shit 280-Z. You guys wanna go?”

  I looked at Rachel. “That’s a cool ride,” I assured her.

  She just rolled her eyes. “Why not?” she said. “Let’s go see the car that Paul Newman drove to the Holiday Inn. I’m sure it’ll end up in the fucking Smithsonian someday.”

  Stan led us across the lot to the other side of the hotel. The car was parked near the swimming pool. Newman had tucked the white Z between a black Caddy and a green LeSabre.

  “Well, there it is,” Stan said triumphantly. He extended his arm like he was Monty Hall showing off a grand prize on Let’s Make a Deal.

  Now that we were there, we didn’t really know what to do. Stan and I stood at the rear bumper of the car considering the vehicle as though it might come to life and give us profound instructions. Rachel stood behind us with her arms crossed, looking bored.

  The car was a ‘78 model, smaller than the new ones and cooler, in my opinion, more of a real sports car, a two-seater with none of those stupid jump seats in the back.

  “How much would one of these things set you back?” Stan asked.

  “About twelve grand,” I told him. “Thirteen if you did some after-market stuff and jacked up the horsepower.” I ran my finger along the sharp edge of the hatchback lid.

  “It’s a cool car,” Stan said, “but you’d think he’d have something tougher than this. You know, like a Ferrari or a Lamborghini.”

  “He races Datsuns,” I said. I remembered this fact from having read about Newman winning the Le Mans twenty-four-hour race. “They probably just gave him this to drive while he’s in town. Look, it’s even got Georgia plates.”

  “So, basically,” Rachel said, “you’ve gone out of your way to look at Paul Newman’s loaner car.”

  “It’s not your ordinary loaner,” Stan said. “I mean, it’s like the man has driven it, you know. It’s been fucking what do you call it? Validated?”

  Rachel wasn’t offering any help, not after the Neapolitan episode.

  “It’s like it’s got a fucking stamp of approval,” Stan said.

  He fixed Rachel with a satisfied gaze. But then it seemed to dawn on him that the experience wasn’t going to get any deeper than this.

  “I guess I better get back inside,” he said. “Gotta go serve some Yuri grub.”

  After Stan had tramped off, I stood there a while longer.

  “Let’s go,” Rachel said. “I feel like a total fucking loser out here.”

  But I stepped up to the driver’s side door and peered inside. I couldn’t help myself. I always liked to peek into nice cars. It didn’t matter who owned them.

  “Whoa,” I said, “look at this.”

  Rachel sighed impatiently. “Let me guess. It’s Paul Newman’s fingerprint, and it’s got the face of Jesus on it.”

  “No, it’s not that. It’s this.”

  I clutched the door handle, gave it a squeeze, and felt the latch pop open—kachink. I looked at Rachel and held up my hands in an innocent way, as if the door had opened itself.

  “Well, what do you know,” I said. “It’s unlocked.”

  Rachel’s body jerked as though someone had startled her from behind. She glanced over her shoulder and all around the lot. Once she realized the coast was clear, she smiled.

  I waved her over, and she rushed to where I was standing. She had a gangly way of running. It made me think of those lanky creatures on Wild Kingdom that were always hightailing it away from the lions. Me and Dewey always pulled for those guys.

  Rachel grabbed my shoulder and jabbed a finger into the small of my back. “All right,” she said. “Up against the car. I’m making a citizen’s arrest.”

  I pried her hand away from my shoulder. “Take it easy, Deputy Fife. It’s not a crime if the doors are unlocked.”

  She snorted. “Yeah, like I’m going to trust you.”

  I looked around again to make sure no one was coming, then I slid right inside. The back of my poly work pants squeaked against the black leather when I wiggled myself down into the seat. The hide had a familiar smell to it, like a late-night drive on an empty road. I felt twitchy all of the sudden, my reflexes tuned up. I wanted to share that feeling with Rachel.

  “Go around and get in,” I told her.

  She was crouched below the roof of the Buick parked beside us, trying to stay out of sight. She was still smiling, but also picking at one of her fingernails in a nervous way.

  “This is so fucking stupid,” she said. “But in a good way.�
��

  Once she was inside, we shut the doors. We sat quietly in the dark for a moment. I had one hand on the wheel, the other on the stick shift—no way Newman would have driven an automatic—poised like we were set to do some traveling.

  “So, where are we going?” she asked.

  “It’s your call,” I told her. “I haven’t thought about it.”

  She stared out the windshield for a moment, over the long scoop-nosed hood of the car, out at the bushes and trees planted around the swimming pool. Shadows from the lighted pool rippled across the milky paint job.

  “What about Champaign?” she said.

  “What the hell’s in Champaign?”

  She thought it over. “Not much, really. It’s kind of flat and dull.”

  “We’ve got that here,” I said. “Plus a big lake.”

  She agreed. “I guess I’m open to suggestions.”

  “What about California?”

  She shook her head. “It seems kind of unoriginal, don’t you think? Everybody goes to California.”

  I checked the radio dial to see which station Newman had been listening to. It would have been cool to tell Carlton that Newman had been cranking WPND, listening to one of his Pink Floyd supersets. But the radio was set at 89 on the FM side. I thought that might have been the public radio station. I slid the dial over to WPND’s 102 spot just for the hell of it.

  “I used to wanna live in California,” I said.

  Rachel had already opened the glove compartment. She was rummaging through it. “Oh, yeah?”

  “Yeah, I wanted to live in a trailer like Rockford. You know, right on the beach. Do some surf-casting, keep my pistol in a cookie jar.”

  I flashed her my Fulmer smile—which would not have been able to disarm a bomb—just to let her know the trailer thing was old news and I realized it had been a stupid idea.

  She shut the glove box, turned, and studied my face. She was smiling like I’d just said something sweet and endearing. “That doesn’t sound so bad.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Of course I’m serious. I like your ideas. They’re original.”

  “But that’s not an original idea. I stole it from a TV show.”

  Rachel shrugged. “Hey, the best I could come up with was Champaign. I mean who the fuck would steal a car and go to Champaign?”

  She stared at me like she was really expecting me to answer, like maybe she was hoping I’d say it wasn’t such an unusual choice.

  “So do you really know how to hot-wire a car?” she asked.

  “Nah, I’m pretty useless unless somebody leaves the keys inside.”

  “Well, I guess that limits our options.” She sat there looking out the windshield, and then she grinned in a sly way. “Though I guess we could always stay here and get stoned.”

  I noticed a pair of sunglasses lying on the corner of the dashboard, Ray-Ban aviators. They were the real deal, not the drugstore kind like I wore. I slid Paul Newman’s sunglasses onto my face and looked at Rachel. I could barely see her in the darkness. She was like a shadow.

  “That seems kind of inevitable, doesn’t it?”

  She smiled. “Sad, but true.”

  She fished our pot pipe out of her leather jacket, and we packed it and sparked it right there in Paul Newman’s loaner. Soon, the smell of rope blanketed the grease stench that had soaked into our clothes and hair. We just sat there smoking, passing the pipe between us. Whenever our eyes met, we’d burst out laughing.

  “This is even better than knocking off the gift shop,” Rachel said. “It’s got its own kind of righteousness, you know. I mean, everybody’s in there kissing this guy’s ass, and here we are.”

  She reached over and slid the glasses off my face. She put them on and leaned in to kiss me. “Are you my car thief?” she teased. “My grand theft auto darlin’?”

  She was doing the Southern accent thing again. But that wasn’t the reason I pulled away from her.

  “What’s the matter?” she whispered.

  “That’s not why you hang out with me, is it? Because you think I’m a criminal?”

  She pulled back a little to get a better focus on me. The glasses swallowed her small, heart-shaped face. They made her look like a little girl.

  “What’s the matter with you?” she asked. “Is Stanley’s skunk weed making you paranoid?”

  My thoughts sloshed around in my head like water. It sometimes happened that way when we were smoking. I wasn’t exactly sure of what I was going to say until half of it was already out of my mouth.

  “My brother told me he might leave his girlfriend,” I said. “He told me he was gonna move to Shreveport, Louisiana.”

  She pulled back even farther now. She settled into her seat and leaned back against the door.

  “Are you going with him?” She narrowed her eyes, appearing concerned.

  I shook my head. “Probably not. I don’t really know what I’ll do.”

  “You like living with him, don’t you?”

  “Well, yeah. I mean, I know it’s only been a few months, but it seems like I’ve been with him forever.”

  She gazed down at the floorboard, twirling the glasses around by an arm. “It works that way, you know.”

  “What way?”

  “Well,” she said, “any time you have people living under the same roof, there’s bound to be a disaster. It doesn’t matter how well things are going, they’ll eventually get fucked up. In fact, if things are going well, that’s when you should start getting really worried.”

  “You think so?”

  “Oh, fuck, I know so.”

  Rachel handed me the pipe. I raised it to my mouth but stopped at the last second.

  “You know what Nick told me?”

  “What?”

  “He told me that he used to talk to his girlfriend about having kids, about having a house, a regular job, all of that stuff.”

  “He doesn’t seem like the type,” she said.

  “Yeah, I know. But he even wants to join a golf club. That’s the whole nine yards right there. He says he’s gonna manage a radio station. That’s gonna be his line of work.”

  My hand was resting against my thigh, clutching the smoldering pipe. I took a halfhearted toke and passed it over to Rachel.

  “I don’t ever want to have kids,” she said. “No fucking way.”

  That didn’t surprise me. She said this sort of thing from time to time. But I knew that it wasn’t entirely true. It was a different story when we had sex, the way that she liked to play Russian roulette. No pill, no rubber. She was like a fucking Rolex, she said. She marked her calendar with green, yellow, and red dots, and she told me we’d work around the colors. Just like a traffic light. But there was this one time that she’d wanted to run the red light. She was different that night, more urgent in the way that she moved her body beneath mine, her legs pressing against my hips as though she didn’t want me to pull away, her face almost crimson, her eyes locked onto mine. “Stay inside. I don’t want you to pull out.” We were on the floor in her bedroom, and she was clutching my shoulders, digging her tiny fingers into my skin. I told her it wasn’t a good time to be talking crazy, and what if I belted one past the third baseman? Then what? But she told me she didn’t give a fuck. “I don’t care what happens” is what she said. Hearing those words, I was sold. I was ready to enlist, to keep the Fulmer banner flying. It wasn’t two seconds later I was about to explode. She must have seen it in my eyes, like cherries on the face of a slot machine. And I guess the reality of everything kind of smacked her upside the head. The next thing I knew, she was pushing me away, acting real urgent. “No! Pull out! We can’t. I’ll get pregnant.” I barely made it in time, spilling myself right there on her pale tummy. Neither of us said anything. I just stayed there on my elbows and knees, panting and staring down at the sad puddle of Fulmer spunk on her belly. All of my boys stranded out there in the desert with no ride home.

  The smoke inside the car had
gotten thick. I cracked the window to stir a breeze. “You mind if I ask a nosy question?”

  Rachel grinned and rolled her eyes. “Okay, that’s it. No more pot for you.”

  “No, I’m serious. I just don’t want to piss you off or anything.”

  “Okay,” she said. “You can ask. But I’m not promising an answer.”

  “It’s about those frog pictures,” I said.

  Rachel laughed. “Jesus Christ,” she said. “You’re fucking obsessed with those frogs. What is it? Do you want me to take you frog giggin’ next spring?”

  “No, it’s not that. It’s just that I thought it was kind of strange how you have all of those drawings up but then you don’t have any pictures around of your father. Not in the whole place.”

  She turned to the side window and stared into her own faint reflection.

  “We don’t have photographs of anybody,” she said. “I mean, what’s the big deal? We’re just not camera people.”

  “Nick takes a lot of pictures,” I said.

  “Your brother’s pretty old-fashioned, isn’t he?”

  “In a way, I guess. He’s got tons of photos, though, like ten shoe boxes worth under his bed. Old stuff, too, like black-and-whites. He gets them out all the time. What’s funny is how he’ll lay them out in order on top of the bed. You know, what do they call that order that goes in time?”

  “Chronological order,” Rachel said.

  “Yeah, that’s it. Only he won’t talk about the pictures themselves. He’ll start talking about what happened between the pictures. You know, like, ‘This was the year I sold my first bag of pot,’ or ‘Two weeks after this picture, I got laid for the first time.’ Shit like that. It’s fun because you can see the difference, you know. Like how he’s smiling a lot bigger in the pictures after he got laid.”

  “So what does this have to do with the frogs?” She sounded confused.

  “I’m not sure,” I confessed. “I guess it just feels like something’s missing. You know, after those frog pictures.”

  She gazed down into the pipe. What with us doing so much talking, it had almost burned itself out. There was barely a glow inside the bowl.