Pop the Clutch

by Eric J. Guignard

  And you know what? He was probably right.

  The sun fried the top of my head, and I was covered in blood and hyperventilating every couple of minutes, but otherwise it was a pleasant ride. I reached the security gate at the test site. They let me through, despite the unconscious girl next to me and the popped-up trunk lid riddled with bullet holes. They even gave me a handy paper map, showing me the route to take to the burial place. Guess Fordyce had called in a lulu of a favor.

  Predictably, the X on the map was a fake town that looked like a movie set. I pulled up in front of a “general store” and took a long breath. I wanted to stay in that moment forever.

  But a job was a job, and my job was to bury those reels.

  I slowly made my way around to the trunk, expecting the worst. But all I saw were those five metal cans, looking all innocent. What did we do, Tommy?

  I dropped to my hands and knees and started digging with my fingers. My wrists felt like they had razor blades inside them. Fortunately, the reels didn’t have go six feet under, just covered up.

  “What is this place?”

  I looked up to see new girl, hugging herself as if cold, stumbling away from the Lincoln. Oh great. Now I was going to have to kill and bury a fictional character, too. The things I do for the studio.

  “Nuclear test site,” I told her. “Tomorrow morning, whatever’s here won’t be.”

  Her eyes widened in horror. “You’re burying the film here!?”

  “Yeah. Unless you know of a better nuclear test site nearby.”

  “You can’t! You’ll destroy the world!”

  “No, just this abomination of a movie,” I said. “No offense. I’m sure you were great in it.”

  “You don’t understand, you simpleton!” she cried. “I told you, I’m a chemist. Specifically, an expert in the photochemical process.”

  “And?”

  “The creature is made of silver halide crystals. When exposed to heat and light, it manifests itself in our reality.”

  “So?”

  “You idiot—what greater source of heat and light is there in the world than a nuclear explosion?”

  Okay, new girl had a point there. I thought she was incapable of speaking lines that hadn’t been in Marvel’s script, but apparently she was slowly adjusting to our world, improvising. Good for her. Unfortunately, I’m also fairly confident that Marvel’s monster was telepathic. Because the moment I realized I was making the biggest mistake in all of human history, tentacles started popping up out of the film cans, immobilizing me and new girl, too. It wanted this to happen. And maybe Fordyce did, too. Maybe Marvel had gotten to him, told him it would be the biggest opening ever. And who could resist something like that?

  Fade to credits

  * * *

  DUANE SWIERCZYNSKI is the Edgar-nominated author of ten novels including Revolver, Canary, and the Shamus Award-winning Charlie Hardie series, many of which are in development for film/TV. Duane has also written over 250 comics for Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, Valiant, IDW, and Archie, and collaborated with James Patterson on The House Husband, The Shut-In, and Stingrays, as well as CSI creator Anthony E. Zuiker on the bestselling Level 26 series. Earlier in his career, Duane worked as an editor and writer for Details, Men’s Health, and Philadelphia magazines, and was the editor-in-chief of the Philadelphia City Paper. He now lives in Los Angeles with his wife and children.

  * * *

  DRAGGERS

  by David J. Schow

  It was track law among Faults, like a commandment: You die, you lose.

  * * *

  VIOLET CUPP WAS THE FLAG GIRL. THAT always brought the hound dogs out.

  Before Violet, the most important draw was the rods. Fully two-thirds were not even street legal, but you could see the sheer love in every turn of polished chrome, every carefully-Bondo’ed curve of bodywork (Bondo was newly popular with enthusiasts, having been invented the previous year by a World War II veteran to replace automotive filler putty, which was loaded with toxic lead—the source of the growingly unfashionable term “lead sled”). Each spark plug—the visible ones—looked brand new, without a hint of grit. All pipes, shined to mirror brilliance and then buffed again. And again. The sensuous tuck and roll; each Brodie knob as ostentatious as a vulgar engagement diamond. The rubber met the road in contact patches the width of a dictionary; huge rear tires were commonly called “balonies,” for reasons obvious to everybody except squares.

  After the blown gassers, your notice went next to the drivers, but the people everyone was really waiting to see were the “faults,” from “asphalt surfers.” But those mysterious individuals stayed out of sight and kept to themselves until rally time—anticipation was the name of their game. Until then, there was alcohol (whatever wasn’t being used by specialty cars), sex (hookups for later), dick-measuring (all varieties) . . . and rumor. The very air seemed flammable and demanding, tuning up onlookers like Benzedrine.

  Hearsay had it that a Fault named Rodrigo was coming back for his first local competition in several months. His anonymity was god-like; barely anyone knew anything about him beyond whispers.

  Violet Cupp had legs up to there, an ass beyond here, tits out to there, eyes of straight razor blue, and about three feet of raven hair down to, yup, the very same here as her butt. She had vigorously fornicated with many of the drivers—she loved guys with hot cars—with the exception of a newcomer to the heats named Breezer something-or-other. She wanted to pick him out of the throng and proposition him sometime between midnight tonight and dawn tomorrow, executing her patented cat-stretch designed to thrust her ample bosom forward so she could deliver her favorite line: “Will these change your mind?”

  Violet used what she had. Most of the mob losers took one gawp at Violet and concluded she was brainless, which was not true. She was a prize, a piece, rowdy as hell and ready to party . . . and four years from now, she would lock down a Masters in engineering and applied science, at a time when less than six percent of women in the United States possessed a college degree; when female students seemed doomed to post-grad trade-work as stenographers, nurses, dental assistants, social workers, or legal secretaries. Liberal Arts were the focus of the onrushing future. Violet recognized this and saw the coming wave. She was practical, goal-oriented, and logical. She saw little logic in denying herself a good time. In fact, she used men the way most men used most women, these days. She remained hopeful that the species might eventually evolve a bit more. Just a bit.

  Presently held spellbound in her thrall was a road jockey named DeCampo, a hard-on with a blond flattop who had taken to the fashion of wearing his belt buckle off to one side in the belief that it lent a slimming effect. He was another one of those brand loyalty rodders, a guy who believed that you should only have an Olds engine in an Olds body, for example.

  “Did you ever notice that when cops harass you, they always tell you what you want to do?” Violet said. “What you wanna do is step out of that car. What you wanna do is dig out some ID I can believe . . . ”

  DeCampo caught on, still staring at her chest. “What you wanna do is raise your hands over your head and lace your fingers.” Distantly, somebody else’s radio played “Hound Dog.”

  “Elvis got in trouble,” said DeCampo. “For singing that very song, and wiggling around on that Milton Berle show a couple of weeks ago.” He fired up a Chesterfield, cupping his hand around the flame from a book of matches. On a windy day like this one, out here far from the world of nowhere-daddys in general, he liked to make a game of lighting so skillfully that he only wasted one paper match per smoke. No second chances.

  “It’s harmless,” said Violet. “The wiggling. The gyrations. The contortions.”

  “They’re calling him the nation’s only atomic-powered singer.” He snorted as though he did not believe it, or simply hated any competition.

  “Doctors have already said the music isn’t harmful.” She looked wistful as she watched DeCampo’s smoke dissipate on the b
reeze. “Better to pay attention to a gummy blower. That will mess you up, in real life.” She didn’t need to say that she would rather eat the gluey deposits off said carburetor than ever consider disrobing in the same time-zone as DeCampo, who was just too nakedly hungry.

  Bakehurst Field was a defunct private airstrip exactly one-and-a-half miles outside the technical city limit. The mid-sized municipal field had shut down in 1951 when the owner/manager, Big Ben “Airdog” Moran, had succumbed to a sledgehammer heart attack at age thirty-six, having survived being shot down in a bomber by the Nazis, a bullet hole in his left lung, a hardpan parachute landing in hostile territory, and over a year spent in a German prison camp. The runway and taxiway remained unpaved until 1947, when they gained bituminous asphalt tarmac and landing chevrons (for such things as touch-down zones and fixed distance marks). There was a ramp and a little half-assed crosswind runway (never completed), and two out of three hangars (one had caved in due to a hurricane two summers back); the office and air traffic control bungalow had been annexed by transients and assorted small, gnawing critters until the Draggers claimed the space a few months after the hurricane. Prior to that, their events had been held at what was once a rodeo stadium, where there had been no paving at all on the track inside the dilapidated grandstands. Having actual pavement still seemed luxurious.

  The Bakehurst main runway was dead flat with nearly zero gradient. It ran 35 feet wide and 2,500 feet from threshold to threshold—a smidge less than half a mile—mostly because old man Moran had built it right up to the edge of his property line. Weather and stress had taken their toll on the surface, which was now weed-ridden and disrupted by cracks that resembled deep cuts with elevated flaps. Past the far end was a flattened dirt strip that extended about another hundred feet, which was “level” only insofar as it could be compacted by cars skidding to a halt and turning around on it. It was strewn with clods, rocks, gravel, and dig-outs like horizontal dirt graffiti.

  This was important, because a race rarely if ever stopped at the terminus of the landing strip. And nobody ever swept up the runway.

  Semi-permanent residence of the defrocked office building had been assumed by a rodental dropout named Lonnie Lacks, who sort of camped out there without running water or electricity, awaiting the bidding of the Draggers, who tolerated and occasionally fed him. Lonnie most often wore Army surplus pull-overs and sandals he had fabricated from blown Dragger tires. If you let him corner you, he’d give you an earful about how Allan Ginsberg had been railroaded into Bellevue on a trumped-up insanity plea, and how some guy named Kerouac was practically the Second Coming as far as philosophical literature was concerned. Lonnie also ran a still out of his squat, and would happily dispense his rotgut moonshine to everybody who attended the Dragger heats, at five bucks a pint—outrageous, considering a sixer of Rheingold cost $1.20.

  The crowd was never that big. This wasn’t your usual barely-legal dragstrip hoedown. Again—not for squares.

  “That guy has green on his rod,” muttered DeCampo, still trying to keep Violet’s attention even though she had turned to move away. He pointed out a newcomer who was tinkering on his engine. “Bad luck, man.”

  “Ancient history, man,” she shot back. “That was almost forty years ago. Fifty, if you count Lee Oldfield.” The source of the persistent superstition that green was an unlucky color for racers rooted all the way back to two deadly crashes, first in 1910, then 1920, the latter occurring on a board track in California infamously known as a “Murderdome.”

  The litany of hot-rod superstitions ran with the weight of the best Egyptian curses: Don’t race during a full moon; fuzzy dice were de rigueur ever since pilots sought their mojo during the war (the acknowledgement was that drivers knew they were “dicing with death”); eating peanuts in the pits was just pissing in the face of fate, daring something bad to happen. And at big Number One on the hit parade—no women in the pits, ever.

  All reasons the Draggers flaunted their illegitimacy.

  “Besides,” Violet told DeCampo, “you’ve got green piping on your shirt, champ. Don’t be so oogly-boogly.”

  Actually, the car they were looking at was predominantly black with spiderweb-like green pinstriping. The guy working on it was more concerned with rotating his distributor cap just so, to ensure better timing. Most of the rods here ran on high-octane “av-gas”—basically jet fuel—to belay engine pinging and knocking, more gruesomely referred to as “pre-detonation.” It could eat rubber hoses fast if you weren’t diligent; the high lead content meant you had to be extra-obsessive about making sure your carbs were firing correctly.

  Others checked their tire pressure, over and over, with the surety of religious ceremony. Others siphoned gas out of their tanks, to decrease their total racing weight. The mantra was always: You need the rubber to go and the gas to flow.

  Violet zeroed in on the new meat, the guy fussing with his rotor button.

  Chuck Detweiler—“Breezer” to his tribe back in Philly—had never fully recovered from his first look at James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause a mere nine months earlier, also the celebratory date of his second life-experience with oral sex, courtesy of a Williamson High School junior named Molly Patterson. This had transpired—but of course—at the Big Chief Drive-In. Molly had surfaced (just after the scene where Jim Stark asks Plato about the “chickie run”), wiped her lips with the back of her wrist, kissed Chuck deeply and fully, and summed the whole experience up as “a breeze,” thus casting the die. Not a bad deal overall, for an admission price of two bits.

  Molly had also encouraged Chuck to compete amongst the Draggers, back around the time of the last New Year’s Eve run. Molly was . . . dark. That was the word. Her expression, her hunger played as borderline evil. Tasty, seductive badness. She chaperoned Breezer to his first Dragger event. Then Molly’s family had moved out of town, her father chasing some government sinecure. Breezer would always wonder what had become of Molly.

  But the drive-ins, man, those would never fade away, not as long as citizens drove cars. Not ever.

  Instead of affecting a look he knew would be judged as Dean-manqué, Breezer limited his adornment to pegged jeans, motorcycle boots, the red windbreaker (a compromise) and Dax pomade, which could hold your hair in shape for a solid week. He also knew how to stovetop-cook the stuff up on his own, adding petrolatum and hair grease to customize the effect, the same way he calculated the most strategic fuel mixtures for the powerhouse in his very choosy, one-and-only, called the Beast with the kind of affection only Dr. Frankenstein could have felt.

  Like the patchwork man of fiction and film, the Beast had begun as a ’35 Ford Phaeton convertible sedan. Breezer had dropped in a 283 Chevy engine with a Duntov cam and an Edelbrock manifold with three carbs; the rest was a mélange of Ford bits: front suspension (from a ’32), transmission (from a ’39), brakes (’40), rear end (’40, with 4.44 gears), and steering (from a ’53 Ford pickup). The profile from dropped front axle to rear deck was sultry, pure California rake. Breezer had hit an easy 130 on the flats in ordinary competition.

  But once Breezer had seen the Draggers in action, he felt the call of mainline dope the same way he had cottoned to James Dean’s studied alienation. To become a Dragger took the biggest balls and rawest guts—as the faithful had witnessed—and Breezer felt the call, just like many others, outwardly-ordinary yet craving deeper accomplishment and credibility. It was akin to a secret cult, a private society; a scream against the norms. No gang embroidery or weird handshakes.

  The excitement really started to cook around midnight. Everybody up past bedtime, sneaking out of the house, far from parents and police and prying eyes. Only about fifty or so “members” in a club that had no name, and no badge except exclusivity; their gaze a pinpoint chromium, caffeinated on amphetamines and fuel-injected with Lonnie’s homebrewed swill. A blood rite, to be sure.

  As a first-timer, Breezer and his Beast were in harness for the opening heat.

  On
standby was a fellow introduced to Breezer as Duane, who had a Polish last name with too many consonants rear-ending each other into a three-car pileup, totally unpronounceable. Duane drove a steel-bodied “step-down” woody wagon that combined a ’48 Hudson Commodore four-door sedan with the rear roof section of a ’54 Hudson with completely hand-built ash and mahogany veneer. The “step-down” aspect was its low center of gravity; the ride served as the de facto ambulance when things got wet. The by-rote cover story was always that someone had fallen out of a car while joyriding. These darned kids today . . .

  Breezer’s opponent for the first heat was Tool Stokes, a Negro wrench who held forth from a still-vital soybean farm not far from the ex-airstrip. He had an amazing retinue of relatives and pets, including Grampaw Stokes (who maintained a very profitable apiary full of honeybees) and a one-eared, mean-tempered bloodhound named Griswold (who could actually sniff out lost jewelry, no lie). Tool was behind the wheel of his pride and joy, Matilda—a channeled bronze ’32 Ford Roadster with Edelbrock heads. Tool liked to chain-smoke Luckies and tell people different stories about how he had lost his left fuck-finger (infection, following a mishap with a band saw . . . but Tool loved the art of salty embellishment).

  Standing immediately behind the Beast was a Fault named Harry (or Henry) Coggins, suited up in a steerhide motorcycle jacket (police issue) and his lucky football helmet. He liked the green spiderweb pinstripe job and told Breezer so.

  Tool’s rearview remained vacant . . . until Rodrigo, the most feared Fault of all, revealed himself. Except for Rodrigo, no Fault had ever attempted two heats in one night; the crosstalk suggested that Rodrigo had boasted about “just warming up.” It wasn’t rumor; it was legend already.