Drive Like Hell: A Novel

by Dallas Hudgens

  I asked Rachel if she wanted to get out of the car to witness the great floating turd that was Cash’s houseboat.

  “I’ll take my chances on living to see it another day,” she said.

  She lay back in the driver’s seat and turned up the stereo. She had a Television cassette in the deck—that croaky singer of theirs warbling over a reggae beat. She leaned her head against the side window and stared out the windshield, her thoughts obviously far away.

  Cash and Dewey were sitting on the rear deck of the Register, drinking Michelob and wearing jackets to fend off the wind. Teddy P. was playing on Cash’s boom box.

  “It’s the Gambler,” Dewey said.

  He and Cash laughed like he’d actually said something original. They were sharing a joint. I did the only natural thing, which was to flip them off.

  I tried to be careful with my step, but soon realized the boat deck was completely dry. That wasn’t the only noticeable improvement aboard the vessel. Fresh plywood framed the cabin, and a shiny black Evinrude was latched to the back side. Last, but not least, the fishy smell had been greatly reduced, if not quite squelched.

  “Not bad,” I said. “You planning on keeping it?”

  “Fuck, no,” Cash said. “I’m keeping my costs down. Spit and shine, and then I’m selling in the spring. The man at the marina thinks I can take a two-grand turnaround on it.”

  He passed the joint to Dewey, who took a toke and offered it up to me. I declined the opportunity, having decided to go without for a while.

  “I got this shit from your buddy at the Holiday Inn,” Dewey said.

  “Who, Stan?”

  “Yeah, we had to find somebody new with Nick gone.”

  He sounded apologetic, though I understood the situation.

  “It ain’t half bad,” Cash said.

  “Must’ve been grown near some water,” Dewey said.

  The wind kicked up and jangled a bell hanging from a little sailboat. The green water lapped at the shore nearby.

  Dewey asked how I’d gotten to the marina.

  “In the passenger seat,” I told him.

  Cash craned his neck to peer over the side of the boat. “Who’s that waiting for you? Miss Tempo?”

  He and Dewey started giggling. I’d quickly come to learn that it wasn’t much fun being around stoned people when I wasn’t stoned as well.

  I asked Dewey if he’d remembered to bring Nick’s camera. I’d stashed it back in Nick’s closet after taking care of business with Muskgrave. Dewey reached up under the beach chair and pulled out a paper sack. The Nikon lay wrapped in the soft, crinkled paper.

  “What’d you want it for, anyway? You got a shoot tonight in Muskgrave’s boudoir?”

  “Nah, I just thought I might start taking some pictures. Maybe I’ll send y’all some from Illinois.”

  I lifted the camera to my eye and told them to smile. Instead of saying “cheese,” Dewey said “gonorrhea.” The shutter clicked, but there was no film in the camera. It would have been a good shot, too.

  Cash passed along the number of his bondsman friend in Skokie, Illinois. He told me to give the man a call when I was ready to get started in the business. I wasn’t just yet, but I figured it was a good idea to leave the door open.

  “And try to stay in touch,” Dewey said. “Give us a call.”

  I told him I would, though I knew that my promise was as useless as that empty camera. I felt certain that we’d all forget each other soon enough. I would have bet a bag of Stan’s weed on it.

  44

  The defroster wasn’t doing its job, so I wiped the fog off the windshield with my sleeve. I was waiting for Rachel, sitting in the Peugeot in front of her mother’s apartment building, its white brick shaded a bruised gray in the rainy morning light.

  I’d been the one to send her back upstairs to wake her mother and tell her good-bye, clutching the car keys in my hand and refusing to hand them over until she relented. She hadn’t been too happy about it. She even threatened to punch me in the shoulder. And now I had this feeling she wasn’t coming back down.

  I reached over to lay on the horn but caught myself and decided against it. Our driving directions, scribbled on a paper napkin, were taped to the dash. The tape was starting to give way, curling back from the fake Italian leather. I just sat there in the passenger seat and watched it. The car engine idled. The rain fell softly. Nothing moved. And all our plans had changed.

  The thing is, she hadn’t even known the route to Champaign in the first place. For all her talking and planning, she’d hardly even considered the actual getting-there part of it. I had to call Cash the night before and ask him to plot us a course on his road atlas. Rachel was sitting on the sofa not saying a word, just staring off at the pictureless wall.

  My meeting with Dot Knox was set to begin in eight minutes. I already had our suitcases in the trunk, those and a thirteen-inch RCA that I’d bought with some of my Lance Hillin money. Brute was sawing logs atop an army blanket that I had spread across the backseat. He was primed for nine hours of car captivity, courtesy of Sominex-laced Ken-L Ration.

  I could have never been mad at her for changing her mind. That’s not to say a good bit of hope hadn’t sunk right down into the bottoms of my new Fayva dress shoes. And despite everything, this was still a situation that called for action. I understood that much very clearly. And so I opened the car door, walked around, and took charge of the driver’s seat. One way or the other, I was going to get my goddamn license back.

  I ditched the shoulder sling, eased out of the apartment complex, and hit the main road. My shoulder throbbed when I changed gears, but it still felt good to do it again. It felt good to be in control. I pushed that little car’s motor like I’d pushed it the night the helicopter was behind us. The wipers squeaked and the defroster fan hummed. The big lake was hidden in the fog.

  I parked on the street, across from the Justice Building’s lot, so that no one would see that I had driven myself there. Brute raised his head, looked around the car, and whimpered. I reached back and patted his head.

  “It’s all right, big boy. I’ll take you home soon as I’m done here. We’ll go get us some Krystals.”

  Stepping out of the car in my new suit and tie, I felt my heart slow down a bit. And then, gazing up at the sky, I spotted an airliner among the gunmetal clouds, a mere speck on a far-flung trajectory. The clouds were moving east, the tiny airplane west, and the rain was falling from the sky at an angle. I had no idea where I was going to land at the end of the day, where I might sleep or what I was going to drive when I got there. My shoulder was hurting, and my suit was wet, and despite my best efforts, I was still late for my court date with Dot Knox. But for an instant, all of that stuff reassured me. It all felt like a miracle, everything that had brought me here.

  And then a car passed on the street, an older Valiant moving fast through the rain, leaving a spray in its wake. The brake lights shone, and then the Plymouth turned and disappeared at the intersection. I never got a look at the person, or people, inside the car. It could have been a man sipping whiskey on his way to work, or a woman rushing home from a rendezvous with her lover. For all I knew, it might have been a grown-up and a little kid, one of them driving and the other leaning back, talking with his eyes closed: “If you remember one thing, let it be this…”

  What I remembered was slinging that Chevelle around the curves on Green Lake Road, tires squealing and spitting up loose dirt from the shoulder of the road. As the pavement straightened, I dropped the Muncie down into fourth, punched the accelerator, and let the wheel unwind. The speed pushed my head back into all of that space between me and the seat. I held on tight to the wheel. It felt like a hurricane was trying to blow me into the backseat. The engine was screaming, piercing right through my heart.

  Lyndell stopped playing piano on the dashboard long enough to applaud me. “That’s the Fulmer touch,” he declared. “That’s smooth as glass. Goose-shit smooth. Johnnie Walker B
lack smooth.”

  He laughed a little and slapped at my shoulder in a gentle way. “Hey, how about this one?”

  I took my eyes off the road to give him my full attention.

  Lyndell was grinning. “Smoother than Charlie Rich in a silk suit.”

  We both started laughing. We were hurtling through the dark with trees and water all around, laughing like a couple of lunatics. Lyndell reached over, grabbed my arm, and squeezed it. Then he leaned in like he was going to tell me a secret.