Pop the Clutch

by Eric J. Guignard

  Both Rodrigo and Harry-or-Henry refused the usual offer of handcuffs. Rodrigo didn’t even glance toward his competition. All that bullshit about gentleman rogues and honor on the battlefield had no place here. He strapped his own crash helmet tight.

  Violet Cupp stood between the cars, her legs spread wide, exuding a come-on so primal and practiced that it almost counted as an attack. She stretched to give the male contingent the cleavage they wanted. She paused with a naughty sneer, then made a silent-movie bad-girl kissy-face . . . and dropped the checkered flag.

  Breezer put his pedal down smoothly. Parallel to him, Tool kept his eyes locked full forward, relentlessly accelerating. Their beloved and pampered engines roared approval and demanded more. Tool’s ever-present Lucky dangled from his dry lips, its cherry hot, its ash disintegrating on the wind.

  And behind them, Rodrigo and Harry-or-Henry hung on to the specially-reinforced rear bumpers, intentionally designed not to wrench free when held by a screaming human being dragged behind an automobile at zero-to-sixty in seven seconds or thereabouts, depending on the supercharger, horsepower, overdrive options, shifting strategies, and so on. They had to hang on, or lose—they had both refused the cuffs which would have secured them to their hangs.

  At about ten elapsed seconds they would tear past the quarter-mile marker. Ten seconds after that, maximum, they would run out of road. Four to eight seconds for a full stop, from speeds up to eighty miles per hour.

  Then they would see what was left of their passengers, their Faults.

  Except something happened that Breezer could not see. Tool’s car veered off-track at high speed, taking Rodrigo with it. The Beast blew onto the finish dirt alone.

  Far behind him, Harry-or-Henry was still rolling on the tarmac, broken arms flopping like tentacles, blood already starting to fly. Breezer still couldn’t hear any of the sounds the guy or his bones were making.

  Back at the starting line, blond-boy DeCampo attempted a lame joke: “So where do you think the ‘roll’ in ‘rock ’n roll’ came from, anyhow?!” Nobody laughed.

  Violet rolled her eyes. Nope. Never would she cozy down on DeCampo’s little red wiener, no day, no way, no how. Not now. Never.

  Tool’s heap shambled to a halt in a storm front of track-shoulder dust, but Rodrigo was nowhere to be seen . . . until Breezer saw the big guy filling up the Beast’s driver’s side window, heard him yanking open the door, felt him rousting Breezer out of his ride with one fisted glove.

  “You cut Tool off! You cut me off! That fucker had better die, and I mean it!”

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

  Rodrigo’s voice was hot tar and broken glass. He was strong enough and mad enough to hold Breezer aloft one-handed. Breezer’s boots dangled a foot off the ground. Rodrigo’s breath would haze your eyes to tears and make you regret thinking of roadkill. His teeth ran in irregular crags that looked sharpened, maybe filed. One eye was fused almost shut by an old injury. The more visible eye had a huge black iris, like a dog’s. His shredded leathers were smoldering and Breezer could see him bleeding from a dozen fresh wounds. Rodrigo tore off his helmet with his other hand and smashed it down to spin in the gravel with that abrasive bucket sound helmets make. Close-up, Rodrigo’s exposed head seemed twice the size of Breezer’s own, upholstered in thick features, scar tissue, and crimson rage. His hair hadn’t grown back on one side after a previous race. His features had caught a lot of flak, and his skin looked like rubber bacon.

  “Fucker!” A fist the size of a six-pack plowed into Breezer’s face and flattened his nose to tomato pulp. Then Rodrigo dropped him and stalked away.

  Rodrigo was not a brute, nor a subhuman, Breezer thought as his brain popped a fuse. Rodrigo was barely an Earthling.

  Then, nothing. Nada.

  ***

  WHEN BREEZER AWOKE, Violet was leaning over him, so guess what he was staring at. Distantly, somebody else’s radio was playing “The Great Pretender” by the Platters, which would eventually chart at number one on both the pop and R&B hit list.

  Breezer mangled a few sounds by way of inquiry. He gathered that Violet was patching up his nose. It felt as though a divot of bone and bad choices had been gouged out of the front of his skull with a pickaxe.

  “Near as we can figure, Henry must’ve let go of your bumper. I knew he should have used the cuffs; he was too green.”

  So the guy’s name had been “Henry” after all.

  “ . . . he rolled right in front of Tool, and Tool had to swerve, and that swung Rodrigo offsides, y’know, his center of gravity? Which messed up Rodrigo’s grip . . . and bam, here you are. Your nose is definitely busted.”

  Breezer struggled to ask the obvious, a backwash of blood bubbling in his throat.

  “Henry’s not dead yet, but soon. Then maybe Rodrigo will calm down. And it’ll be Ray’s problem.”

  Ray was another individual with peculiar but specific responsibilities here, very similar to Duane the meatwagon pilot, except in Ray’s case the by-rote cover story was I’m afraid your kid has blown town with no forwarding address . . . run away from home . . .

  (In actuality, casualties got dumped off Beaudine Bridge after midnight with full quasi-military honors—also Ray’s idea, which was why he was nicknamed the Undertaker.)

  “Except now Rodrigo is hollering for your blood, too. Screaming foul. He’ll never forfeit, and he’ll be wanting payback—just so you know.” She tried to be gentle with the tape on Breezer’s face. “That’s a headache you can’t take a pill for.”

  It was exactly the same as dreading the reigning bully with an after-school vendetta against you. It didn’t have to make sense. It just was. Past a certain point of being terrorized, you heard the bell and walked out onto the playground with a new mindset. All chips in. No more running or hiding; no more excuses or prevarications.

  “I’m ready.” Breezer still wasn’t ready, but he said the words anyway. His vision seemed shrouded in a sodium-yellow fog that softened things at the edges.

  “Tell me something, while you’re looking.”

  He finally met her eyes. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. What is it with you guys and breasts? Call me curious.”

  Breezer didn’t hesitate to respond. It took his immediate attention off his throbbing face. “It’s the most obvious visual way you’re different,” he said quietly. “Everything else is hidden away. They’re not like eyes or lips, which men have, which can be highlighted with paint, kinda like pinstriping. We can’t help but be attracted to the difference. Just like we can’t help being attracted to this event, right here. It’s different. It’s something more. It’s like you can’t not look. Maybe it’s part of the reason I decided to come here and get my face broken.”

  “Good answer,” she said. “You’re definitely worth sleeping with.”

  That made his heart give an off-time thud.

  The dragway had tasted its preferred refreshment—blood, leaked motor oil, flung droplets of human sweat. Its appetite had been whetted. It was now awake, alive, and ready for another round.

  Breezer’s vision remained fuzzy and unreliable. He barely registered the second heat.

  Lily P. (for Price) dropped down at the helm of her own Roadster, which she’d discovered rotting behind a Texaco station in 1954 and rebuilt from the ground up with a ’52 Olds engine connected to a ’39 Ford tranny using a Cregar adapter—her idea. Channeled body, sculpted nose, custom hood and fadeaways—all her. A dyke as tough as a cement nail, Lily was never without a cigarette dangling from her bee-stung, pinup lips, or her scarf, which she wore like a World War I ace. DeCampo had once seen her loop that scarf around the neck of a cat-caller and nearly break the idiot’s spine. She existed, and competed, in complete defiance of the norm superstition about no women in the pits. The same basic sufferance extended to Tool Stokes, as well.

  Dragger heats were not where conventional rodders congregated.

  Li
ly’s opponent was the locally infamous Speed-Shift Madison, at the helm of his chop-top ’32 three-window Ford Coupe, running a supercharged flathead Mercury with Evans speed equipment. Canary yellow with “69er” painted on both doors.

  Behind Lily was a Fault named Lloyd Farewell (no kidding, that was his real name—“farewell”) versus “Jerky” McDonagh (former real-world name, Jerry, who had survived at least two previous events with a wealth of dislocations, burns, abrasions and scar tissue, hence “jerky”). Both opted for the handcuffs after seeing what had happened to Henry Coggins.

  Lily prevailed, and Lloyd Farewell did not die. By much.

  “Oh, shit,” said Violet to Breezer. “Here he comes.”

  Rodrigo filled up Breezer’s vision. Dear Lord, but he was ugly to behold. The flesh occluding Rodrigo’s damaged eye was like a bad weld, but worse, that eye still moved around, not tracking with its brother, but cognizant in a totally different way. You could make out the man’s skull in his expression, the clenched and off-center jaw, scraped bone itching to burst free of the last scraps of baked brown flesh, especially on the side where his hair had been sandblasted away long ago.

  “Challenge,” Rodrigo said in his cemetery voice. “I challenge you.”

  Breezer was struggling to focus, his right eye still blurred. An eye for an eye, he thought.

  For a challenge, drivers had to be picked, or volunteer. Challenge was a right reserved to any Dragger, any Fault who felt cheated. Rude payback, in the most direct and painful way possible, the law of the asphalt jungle.

  “I don’t think I can drive,” said Breezer, hopelessly knowing what came next.

  “You don’t drive. Not against me, puto. You compete. Or I’ll break your fucking neck right here.”

  The crowd, the watchers, the observers, had gathered around them. Tool Stokes and Lily P.; Henry Coggins (bleeding, bandaged, wobbly, but still breathing); Undertaker Ray and Ambulance Duane; Lonnie Lacks (swigging his home-brew, as his own best advertisement); DeCampo (who looked as though he’d just wolfed bad pork down the wrong tube); Lloyd Farewell and Jerky McDonagh (whose own wear and tear made him look like a bathing beauty next to Rodrigo); Violet and all the others. A jury, mulling a verdict. In the center, facing his foe, was the guy formerly known as Chuck Detweiler, now just Breezer, being judged, all around.

  Nearby, somebody’s radio was playing “Honey, Don’t” by Carl Perkins. The B-side of “Blue Suede Shoes,” on Sun Records, a rockabilly classic in its own right.

  In his entire life, Breezer had never reacted favorably to someone—anyone—telling him no. Or don’t. Sudden rage blindsided him.

  “You name it,” he said, staring directly into Rodrigo’s good eye, the one with the dog-pupil. “If you’ve got the sack to game it. Except . . . lose the leathers. Show everybody how fucking hideous you really are.”

  The color actually drained from Violet’s complexion. Her half-smoked Kool nearly plummeted from her mouth.

  Rodrigo seemed to swell bigger, to engorge like a boner, as he smirked and peeled off his shredded Perfecto, which had once resembled the one worn by Brando in The Wild One, if you could imagine that garment barbecued until its surface was more like pemmican. He was bare-chested beneath.

  Everybody gasped, or held their breath.

  Rodrigo’s torso was leanly muscled, ridged and scarred in the manner of golem or gargoyle skin. Crimson droplets dappled him in aerosol; he appeared to be sweating blood, not losing it deleteriously. Not a hair to be seen anywhere, and his nipples were long gone. But the most spellbinding thing were his tattoos. Dozens of them. All calendar dates. Up one side and down the other, on his shoulder blades, on his biceps, on his backs. Every victory. 5/22/51. 7/13/55. 12/24/54. Some mottled and faded blue, the way old military tats turned to mud. 2/2/53. 2/15/53. 2/28/53. Some unreadable, like hieroglyphics. Some blackened, like burns or blood-patch or road rash. Over fifty of them.

  Henry Coggins came unhinged at the knees and collapsed. Duane rolled him over. Henry was husking air like a gut-shot antelope. “He’s in bad shape,” said Duane. “We’d better—”

  “Better nothing,” said Rodrigo, turning to nail Breezer with his hot, canine gaze. “Let me show you how this works.”

  Rodrigo shoved Duane to one side—impressive, because Duane was a big guy—and straddled Henry Coggins, grabbing his head in both hands, bringing his face so close their foreheads were touching. “Told you I meant it,” he whispered. “Time to let go.”

  What happened next could have been a hallucination or mass hypnosis, but Breezer sensed it was neither. This was as real as it got.

  Plenty of Henry’s blood had gone from inside to outside. Even through his field dressings, new blood seemed to flow, in defiance of gravity or common sense, toward Rodrigo’s grasping fingers. Past his wrists. Up his arms. And into Rodrigo’s own new cuts and scrapes and shreds, which buttoned themselves up, fading into the bas-relief of his ruined flesh.

  Henry Coggins sagged into death without so much as a rattle.

  “And no helmets,” Rodrigo said unnecessarily to Breezer.

  ***

  “YOU DON’T HAVE to do this,” Violet told Breezer.

  Lily P. had stepped up to drive Rodrigo. The glint in her eyes suggested that perhaps she had a plan to merely back over the son of a bitch. Then forward. Then back, then repeat, until he was macerated to a stain. Unless that would not work against a monster.

  Tool Stokes, egged on by Rodrigo over the first heat, volunteered to drive Breezer. Tool thought of pulling the Army .45 from his glove box and putting a slug into Rodrigo’s brain pan . . . but what if that didn’t work, either?

  “He’ll beat you,” Violet said.

  “He might beat me, but he won’t win,” said Breezer. “I’ve got a magic talisman.” He pulled a furry piece of paper from the fob pocket of his Levi’s. It was folded into a tight little square about the size of a Chiclet, yellowed and worn. “You hold onto it for me.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Violet.

  “I came here for him,” Breezer said levelly. “This was all supposed to happen exactly this way. Don’t worry about me.”

  “You’re gone all the way nuts,” shrugged Violet. But she stashed the folded paper, which felt like very ancient newsprint. Stashed it in the best possible place, too—under one bra strap. “Tell me something: Have you ever done this before?”

  “Nope.”

  She sighed. “Nice knowin’ ya.”

  He couldn’t breathe through his busted nose. He stepped up behind Tool’s ’32. No helmets. No handcuffs. No nancy-boy stuff. He rucked off his jacket, still zipped, leaving his very un-Dean-like tank top.

  “You can keep the wife-beater, snowflake,” Rodrigo rasped from about ten feet away, positioned behind Lily’s Roadster. “All that pink meat is sweet, but nobody needs to see your titties.”

  Breezer gave him the finger without looking at him.

  Both Roadsters—Tool’s and Lily’s—grumbled contentedly as they guzzled fuel from custom-built, mild-steel tanks.

  Rodrigo took to one knee and grasped the rear drag bumper. Breezer did likewise.

  And Violet dropped the flag.

  Tool’s balonies spewed a double helping of takeoff smoke right into Breezer’s eyes as the rear of the car dropped down and dug out. The roar of the engine obliterated everything else.

  Everything else. Rodrigo didn’t exist anymore, nor did Lily, the track, the onlookers. All Breezer could feel as his scrotum was abraded by the runway was the sensation of both arms trying to rip free of their sockets.

  With friction came heat. Breezer’s face wasn’t on the pavement—yet—but it felt the same as hovering over a lit burner on a stove, his sweat evaporating as soon as it popped. From the waist down, his brain had decided on a brand new definition for Hell.

  Then, pain. Elapsed time could not have been more than a second and a half. Breezer knew he was already bleeding, fresh rips in his skin now ripping wider, his jeans
sanding away to dandelion fluff. His feet felt afire in their motorcycle boots.

  Something inside him broke like fruit dropped from a great height. Fuck it all, he was starting to roll laterally, the same as a crippled ship listing to port.

  Velocity and new damage tore his right-hand grip free, and he pawed to regain it. He glimpsed his own blood lubricating the insides of his knuckles.

  Then Tool soared over the first genuine bump in the roadway. Breezer nearly screamed, but that was not possible; his teeth were clenched and would permit no sound to escape, save the desperate, almost sobbing pant of each superheated breath. The whole universe smelled like burning rubber and scorched bone.

  Bam! His broken nose hit the bumper, one, two, three times. He could not swallow his own blood fast enough.

  Bam! They were off the runway and onto the dirt, pluming up their own fogbank of brown dust. Breezer could not hold on any longer. His hands were dumb grasping tools, shellacked in blood. Bam! they hit the end of the track, and bam! Breezer was free of the car, and rolling helplessly.

  His left ankle snapped inside his boot. His right elbow similarly snapped, before he stopped tumbling sidewise over burrs and weeds and broken bottles and discarded lug nuts and pointed rocks and junk wood with nails sticking out of it and . . .

  Rodrigo was not really dusting himself off, merely pretending to. Bloody, sliced to ribbons, still standing, still aware in his inhuman, reptilian way, thinking about new scar tissue and a new tattoo. Breezer, barely able to do anything except remain on his back, exsanguinating, took a microscopic amount of pleasure in noting that Rodrigo was limping. Slightly, but still.

  Rodrigo’s shadow blocked out the moon as he squatted over Breezer.

  “Losers lose,” he said, his voice more clotted than before. “Losers die.”

  Everybody from the track had caught up with them, surrounded them again, to witness the payoff to the drama.

  Breezer felt a broken front tooth with his tongue. A bubble of blood formed between his lips, abruptly popped, and sprinkled blood on Rodrigo’s face, where it was absorbed.