A Bob Lee Swagger Boxed Set

by Stephen Hunter

  It was Friday, the start of racing weekend, under a hot August sky, in a Shenandoah Valley that at this moment was plastered with cars, tents, Rec-Vs, SUVs, everything short of armored personnel carriers. The vehicles rode the gentle hills like a gigantic carpet, as the hundreds of thousands came to worship, live, experience glory and fear vicariously, drink, smoke, shove, fuck, hoot, and have a hell of a good time. Most of them were beyond bliss; there was so much happiness in the meandering beast of the crowd you couldn’t but crack a smile at the heat of the joy. It turned you a little red in fact.

  But none of them were as happy as Brother Richard, as he let the crowd push him this way and that through what really amounted to a NASCAR Casbah. The streets weren’t lined with gold, not, that is, if you were buying, though maybe if you were selling. For NASCAR people were spenders. They had to take something of the great Night of Thunder home with them. They bought pendants and T-shirts and cup-holders and beer caddies and hats and thick leather jackets and sweat shirts and polo shirts and pictures and die-cast models and bottled water, beer and bourbon and corporate propaganda. Chevy, Ford, Toyota, and Dodge, the four sanctioned automobile suppliers, had gigantic pavilions, and all four had a pedestal inside. Atop each pedestal was a street shell of the hand-made, custom machine that would, tonight and especially tomorrow night, roar four hundred then five hundred times around the stiffly tilted half-mile where dreams could die in seconds, sometimes in flames, sometimes in the crunch of collapsing metal. The track where guts and grit and luck played against each other at 140 per until one boy was smarter, tougher, braver, and luckier than all the others, and crossed the line first and tasted, however briefly, godhood.

  Each of the boss drivers had a long-haul trailer set up in the village, which they’d converted to a dedicated sales outlet. There the hero’s image or number or both had been imprinted on everything, books and videos were added to the swag, hats in a hundred variations were on display—and for sale—and a crew of cashiers lined up to take your bucks. The cash flow must have been amazing; the twenty-dollar bill was the new one-dollar bill, and although the modern cash registers didn’t ka-ching like the old mechanical marvels from Dayton, you could tell yourself that you heard a heavenly choir of ka-chinging, even if it weren’t necessarily true. Brother Richard looked at all that money flowing one way and one way only and briefly considered what might have been but never was, and stifling a choking sound, he took another hard blast on the Bud he carried (like everybody else) in a bright red foam caddie.

  You could tell who was hot by the crowds. Both Kyles were doing swell and of course everybody had a thing in their heart for the wonderful Dale Jr., inheritor of the mantle and now driving for the beloved football genius Joe Gibbs; there was little business at Jeff’s, the eternal outsider’s unit, where only malcontents and self-proclaimed mavericks gathered. But the hot one just now was the young redhead, Matt MacReady, just twenty-two, already with a handful of major wins at Sprint venues, in the hunt for the big cup itself still this late in the season.

  Somehow, Richard felt himself pulled by torrents of enthusiasm, even love, toward the MacReady locality. In a second he realized why there had been such a current in the crowd. Good Lord, the boy himself was there.

  Brother Richard halted and held back. He considered it for a second, then realized that after his surgery and in his currently repackaged King Petty mode, he would stir no old memories, not to the boy, not to Red, not to any of them. So he ambled close, slipping in and out of the whirls and eddies of pilgrims, and by not pushing it too hard, he got pretty close. No, he wouldn’t get in the line, where Matt was dutifully signing posters, hats, T’s, anything, with a Magic Marker, accepting goodwill wishes and even love-horsepowered thumps on the back with grace and ease and charm.

  Richard didn’t want to halt, for motion was the law of the crowd. He let it sweep him on by and saw Matt’s calmness—Matt always had that—and his decency—Matt really had that—and it made him realize with surprising bitterness that Matt was really the beneficiary of all the madness of eleven years ago, though nobody could have known it then, for Matt was just a boy from the second, the trophy wife. He was good-natured and unassertive, all eyes and ears to the excellent adventure the fates had decreed would be his life.

  “Yes ma’am,” Richard heard Matt say in that soft voice of his. “Be happy to.” And he took a three-year-old upon his lap and smiled for a pic. Then it was time to go and the thousand still in line had to be disappointed. Matt rose and said into a mic, “Folks, I have to get my beauty rest and keep my arm loosey-goosey for all them left-hand turns!” And of course everybody laughed.

  Matt waved. Then he and Red left the venue as a golf cart arrived, and Richard saw how thin and muscular the young man was, how lean and graceful. He had the racer’s perfect body, the body that the great ones had, short and slender so there was no crowding in the driver’s seat, with muscular forearms and a longish neck, which gave him eerie pivoting ability for peripheral vision left and right, legs able to reach pedals without cramping, in short, the whole package.

  The golf cart speedily vanished behind the cyclone fence that marked off the driver’s compound, that is, the fence that marked off the aristocracy from the peasantry.

  Richard watched it go until it disappeared, and he imagined where it took Matt: to a luxury Rec-V customized for travel, a beautiful woman or four or six, a crew of adoring hangers-on, an accountant, maybe rock or movie star pals, the big life as imagined by America at this moment in history.

  Again, melancholy came across him, a fleeting image of the eternal What Might Have Been. He’d steeled himself to believe to the contrary that, given certain behavioral dynamics within himself, there was no What Might Have Been, there was only a What Never Could Happen. It wasn’t in the cards; he didn’t have Matt’s go-along-to-get-alongness, his mellow ways, his charm. He was too fucking outlaw, he had to have it his way. He was also too smart, too self-aware. Like all athletic and warrior enterprises, NASCAR tended to reward unconscious genius. If you had irony, had read a book or two, had a taste for surrealism and grotesquerie, if you hated structure and had a natural guerrilla’s heart, it could never be for you. You saw through it too easily. It was like a church, and you were born with a non-believer’s heart. And even if you felt tremendous nostalgia for it, the honest, bitter goddamned truth was that it was never going to be and could never have been for you. For Matt it was maybe just perfect, given his perfect blend of talents and limits. For Richard it was too much, given his blend of talents and limitlessness. No matter what, he would have destroyed his inheritance, crapped in the church, and gone his own outlaw way.

  That’s why he was the Sinnerman.

  He turned his iPod way, way up until his anthem blasted melancholy from his brain.

  Sinnerman, where you gonna run to?

  Gonna run to the sea

  Sea won’t you hide me?

  Run to the sea

  Sea won’t you hide me?

  But the sea, it was a boilin’

  All on that day

  Now it was on to business. He looked up at the towering speedway, its circularity gone this far under its shadow, so that it was just a wall of girders and walkways on the underside of the steep auditorium seating. Next to it, silver in the August heat, was the faux-streamline building of the speedway headquarters, which looked to him like a Greyhound station in about 1937. It sat atop a shelf of land, and down here, beneath it, was the grid of lanes of NASCAR Village and all its little retail outlets. A gully, some kind of drainage arrangement full of dirty water, split NASCAR Village in two. But there were two bridges across the channel. He took out a pen and a notepad and carefully drew a map, and on it traced the quickest way from the roadway to the bridge. Oh, that would be the fun part.

  He moseyed over to the far side of the gully and found exactly more of the same for another square mile or so, the tents and booths, the walkways, somewhat tackier here, the sense of bizarre for th
e pilgrims where everything was a holy relic of the faith, all for sale and not cheap. Beyond the village was the hill that lay at the end of a long scut of ridges trending down from the north. He let his gaze fall upon the tip of the hill probably a mile off and six hundred feet up, through mud and inclined forests. He knew that, as in many old fables, paradise lay atop the mountain. I have been to the mountaintop, wasn’t that it? But before you got to the mountaintop you had to cross a river and a plain, bringing fire and destruction along with you. What was this, the Bible?

  Ah well, he thought, continuing with his map: Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The caravan left at 4 A.M. to avoid Race Day traffic and observant eyes and to get set up early. It consisted of the Reverend Grumley in the lead car, Brother Richard driving, and two senior Grumleys, a Caleb and a Jordan, both of whom promptly fell asleep, in the back. In the second vehicle, a truck which bore the name PINEY RIDGE BAPTIST PRAYER CAMP carried most of the heavy equipment the long day’s toil would demand. The third, a van also bearing the name of the camp, consisted mostly of man- and firepower. The fourth, a pickup, bore as its loads the tents and over ten thousand bottles of water, as well as ice, coolers, NASCAR hats, T-shirts, King Richard cowboy straw Stetsons, Kyle Busch caps, and other NASCAR trinkets that would justify their presence at the location. The fifth, another van, contained more men, though these were the humbler Grumleys, the tire-change team, and others with various and sundry little tasks, according to the master plan.

  The five vehicles moved through a desolate, almost-unlit Mountain City, across Iron Mountain—the spot where Sinnerman had almost taken out Nikki slid by without comment—through Shady Valley, past the last long abutment, Holston Mountain, then full into the Shenandoah for the next eighteen-odd miles to Bristol and its famed speedway.

  There was no chatter. Brother Richard drove with his usual deft touch, the car alive in his hands, while the Reverend stared glumly into the darkness.

  A cellphone rang to the tune of “Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here.”

  The Reverend took the phone from his powder blue suit jacket and examined the caller ID.

  “His master’s voice,” said Brother Richard. “Who else’d have the number and call at this hour?”

  “Yes,” said the Reverend into the cell.

  He listened.

  “Yes, again.”

  He listened some more.

  “Absolutely.”

  A few more seconds passed.

  “I guarantee it. They are well prepared. I myself am here to lead. It will happen exactly as planned. Pray to God our luck is high, but it should be, as the Lord favors the bold. I prayed hard last night and again this morning and so I am confi—”

  Brother Richard could tell he was cut off.

  Finally he said, “You have my assurances. And I have yours. Then I will see you when we are home free and ready to celebrate.”

  He put the phone away. His dark mood was not alleviated.

  “That’s the big boss,” said Brother Richard. “That would be the gent that actually thought this up, as it clearly lies beyond the Grumley IQ pool. He’s got his doubts about you, Reverend, I can tell. He wants reassurances, guarantees. A big pair of dice are about to be rolled and, nervous as a cat like the rest of us, he just wants to make certain you have covered all the bases, right?”

  The Reverend was silent.

  “Sure would like to know who’s on the other end of that phone. Got my ideas. Yes, I do.”

  “I ain’t at no liberty to discuss certain business arrangements with a rogue like you, Brother Richard. Don’t think I didn’t notice your head went unbowed during my words with the Master before we left. That is a ticket to damnation, sir.”

  “I am already thrice damned,” said Richard. “Which ain’t nothing to you, old man, you are probably thirty-eight times damned or some such, for all your sinning. Here’s what intrigues me. Do you actually believe the Baptist bullshit you sling, or is it just a performance sustained so long it’s become second nature? Are you a con man who’s come to believe in his own con?”

  “Hellfire,” said the old preacher man. “Damnation Road. Streaks of fiery lightning. Endtimes. That’s your fate and you will rue it when Satan opens the door with his big smile and welcomes you to the flames of eternal torture.”

  “Hoochie mama,” said Richard. “I like it. The sea be aboilin’, the moon be ableedin’, and the Sinnerman don’t got no place to run. I embrace it. That’s why I like myself so much more than I like you, Reverend. I am what I am and I know it. I am not a hypocrite. I took the cards I was dealt, made my decision, played the hand hard to this moment. You hide behind some kind of self-delusionary veil, claiming the Lord’s interest while you’re just a common murderer and thief, and you lead a tribe of neo-pagans to loot the earth, rape, burn, pillage, and move on without a glance back. You’re actually pre-Christian. A PhD could make a career studying the Grumley way and its roots in the Germanic swamps. What was the original, Grummelechtenstein?”

  “We be Scots-Irish border-reiver heritage. This talk does us no good.”

  “Did he remind you he had video of you and—”

  “Shut your mouth,” snapped the Reverend.

  “Them boys back there, cousin or brother or both at once, are sleeping the sleep of the purely innocent. Nothing weighs on the conscience-free mind.”

  “Nevertheless, shut your mouth.”

  “Touchy, touchy. But I did learn something interesting today. Yes, I did. I see now the nature of your relationship with the fellow who runs you.”

  “You know nothing.”

  “Tell me if I’m wrong. He’s somebody you knew before. He’s somebody close to you. He may even be family. First off, I hear something troubled in your voice, and I hear you let him cut you off, when no one other than me ever cuts you off. So he is familiar to you. An old sponsor? Someone who saved your life? A cellmate? Someone who’s profited off you as you’ve profited off him over long standing? I hear intimacy. Damn, who’d a thought? But that ain’t all.”

  “Do tell, Brother. You are so full of yourself. Pride goeth before the fall.”

  “Sir, I done already fallen, which is why I consort with your likes. The second reason is, when this is done, there’s got to be a transfer, almost like a dope deal. You will deliver him the swag, he will take his lion’s share, you and the boys will squabble over what’s left. This is a tricky transaction, I know, I’ve driven kingpins to and from enough buys. Usually there are a lot of guns involved for security, paranoia is running hot and feverish, and at any moment for any reason it can all go broken-cuckoo-clocks, the guns come out, and you got yourself a goddamned major firefight. All that cash, just there for the taking. Yet that does not frighten you, does it, Dr. Grumley?”

  “When a Grumley give his word, his word is ironclad.”

  “Except when it’s not. Oh, there’s the leverage, the pix of the Rev and his boy toy—”

  “Richard, I warned you.”

  “—but somehow no one is concerned about the exchange. That means it isn’t a problem, everybody, way up front, is okay with it. Damned interesting. Would it be another Grumley? So the leverage ain’t mean-spirited, more like a suggestion than a threat. Everybody’s all cozy with it, especially the gun-crazy, giant gonads sleeping in the van.”

  “Richard, I ain’t speaking to you no more. When this is done, I hope never to see you no more never again. You been paid upfront, so my advice is to do your job and disappear.”

  “I always do.”

  “Pappy,” said Caleb from the back seat, “what’s ‘paranoia’?”

  By six, the caravan had decamped and unloaded. The boys worked swiftly, for here was labor hard and simple. With strong arms and backs, they sank the tent pegs and drove the poles deep into the ground. With stout hearts, they unpacked and unfolded the tables. With dead earnestness, they stowed certain boxes containing certain pieces of equipment underneath t
he tables, arranging and stapling the table cloths so that their skirts covered the items beneath. Then they got the coolers out, packed each with ice, and began to load the bottles into them, each one holding about fifty, so the liquid would be readily cold for pilgrims as the sun rose and pulled the temperature with it. They stacked the remaining cases behind the tables, almost forming a revetment which would keep anyone from noting what they were up to in its dark shadow.

  As they worked, of course, they were not alone. All along the Volunteer Parkway this close to the venue, merchants of various stripes were setting up their wares. For this road to and from the speedway would carry, by ten in the morning, a slow-motion parade, as cars crept along its jammed lanes and pedestrians coming from vehicles already parked streamed in the thousands toward the mighty coliseum. Next to the Grumley installation, for example, was PHIL’S FINE NORTH CAROLINA BAR-B-Q, where Phil and his sons had already lit the coals under the broad-bottomed grills that would hold the meat put atop them, allowing the juices of Phil’s secret mix of sauces and herbs to permeate it, so that by noontime, damn, the whole place would smell of hot pig and sweet bubbly brown sugar. On the other side, a tall Mr. Stevens had an elaborate tent that offered a line of extremely fine woven mats, some showing drivers standing before their sleek vehicles, some showing the flag or Elvis or the Iwo Jima memorial or the Twin Towers (NEVER FORGET!) or the flag of the departed Confederacy or F-15s blazing across a sky or horses rearing proudly against a western mesa or Osama in the crosshairs of a sniper’s scope, all made, of course, in China. And on and on it went, down the parkway that linked the speedway and the city of Bristol twelve miles away. The parkway that on Race Day would be a near-frozen river of automobiles moving an inch at a time.