Art of Racing in the Rain, The

by Garth Stein

  “I know I told him to go,” she said to me. “I know that I insisted he go, I know.” Tears ran down her cheeks. “But I so wish he were here!”

  I had no idea what to do, but I knew not to move. She needed me there.

  “Will you promise to always protect her?” she asked.

  She wasn’t asking me. She was asking Denny, and I was merely Denny’s surrogate. Still, I felt the obligation. I understood that, as a dog, I could never be as interactive with humanity as I truly desired. Yet, I realized at that moment, I could be something else. I could provide something of need to the people around me. I could comfort Eve when Denny was away. I could protect Eve’s baby. And while I would always crave more, in a sense, I had found a place to begin.

  The next day, Denny came home from Daytona, Florida, unhappy. His mood immediately changed when he held his little girl, whom they named Zoë, not after me, but after Eve’s grandmother.

  “Do you see my little angel, Enz?” he asked me.

  Did I see her? I practically birthed her!

  Denny skated carefully through the kitchen after he returned, sensing that the ice was very thin. Eve’s parents, Maxwell and Trish, had been in the house since Zoë was born, taking care of their daughter and their new baby granddaughter. I began calling them the Twins because they looked very much alike with the same shade of artificially colored hair, and because they always wore matching outfits: khaki pants or polyester slacks partnered with sweaters or polo shirts. When one of them wore sunglasses, the other did, too. The same with Bermuda shorts and tall socks pulled up to their knees. And because they both smelled of chemicals: plastics and petroleum-based hair products.

  From the moment they arrived, the Twins had been admonishing Eve for having her baby at home. They told her she was endangering her baby’s welfare and that in these modern times, it was irresponsible to give birth anywhere but in the most prestigious of all hospitals with the most expensive of all doctors. Eve tried to explain to them that statistics showed exactly the opposite was true for a healthy mother, and that any signs of distress would have been recognized early by her experienced team of licensed midwives, but they refused to yield. Fortunately for Eve, Denny’s arrival home meant the Twins could turn their attention away from her shortcomings and focus on his.

  “That’s a lot of bad luck,” Maxwell said to Denny as they stood in the kitchen. Maxwell was gloating; I could hear it in his voice.

  “Do you get any of your money back?” Trish asked.

  Denny was distraught, and I wasn’t sure why until Mike came over later that night and he and Denny opened their beers together. It turned out that Denny was going to take the third stint in the car. The car had been running well, everything going great. They were second in class and Denny would easily assume the lead as the sunlight faded and the night driving began. Until the driver who had the second stint stuffed the car into the wall on turn 6.

  He stuffed it when a Daytona Prototype—a much faster car—was overtaking. First rule of racing: Never move aside to let someone pass; make him pass you. But the driver on Denny’s team moved over, and he hit the marbles, which is what they call the bits of rubber that shed off the tires and that accumulate on the track next to the established racing line. He hit the marbles and the rear end snapped around; he plowed into the wall at pretty close to top speed, and the car shattered into a million little pieces.

  The driver was unhurt, but the race was over for the team. And Denny, who had spent a year working for his moment to shine, found himself standing in the infield wearing the fancy race suit they had given him for the race with the sponsor patches all over it and his own special helmet that he had fitted with all sorts of radio gear and vent adaptors and the special carbon fiber HANS device for protection, watching the opportunity of his lifetime get dragged off the track by the wrecker, strapped onto a flatbed, and driven off to salvage without his having sat in it for a single racing lap.

  “And you don’t get any of your money back,” Mike said.

  “I don’t care about any of that,” Denny said. “I should have been here.”

  “She came early. You can’t know what’s going to happen before it happens.”

  “Yes, I can,” Denny said. “If I’m any good, I can.”

  “Anyway,” Mike said, lifting his beer bottle, “to Zoë.”

  “To Zoë,” Denny echoed.

  To Zoë, I said to myself. Whom I will always protect.

  7

  When it was just Denny and me, he used to make up to ten thousand dollars a month in his spare time by calling people on the telephone, like the commercial said. But after Eve became pregnant, Denny took his job behind the counter at the fancy auto shop that serviced only expensive German cars. Denny liked his real job, but it ate up all of his free time, and he and I didn’t get to spend our days together anymore.

  Sometimes on weekends, Denny taught at a high-performance driver’s education program run by one of the many car clubs in the area—BMW, Porsche, Alfa Romeo—and he often took me to the track with him, which I enjoyed very much. He didn’t really like teaching at these events because he didn’t get to drive; he just had to sit in the passenger seat and tell other people how to drive. And it hardly paid for the gas it cost him to get down to the track, he said. He fantasized about moving somewhere—to Sonoma or Phoenix or Connecticut or Las Vegas, or even Europe—and catching on with one of the big schools so he could drive more, but Eve said she didn’t think she could ever leave Seattle.

  Eve worked for some big retail clothing company because it provided us with money and health insurance, and also because she could buy clothes for the family at the employee discount. She went back to work a few months after Zoë was born, even though she really wanted to stay home with her baby. Denny offered to give up his own job to care for Zoë, but Eve said that wasn’t practical; instead, she dropped Zoë off at the day-care center every morning and picked her up every night on her way home from work.

  With Denny and Eve working and Zoë off at day care, I was left to my own devices. For most of the dreary days I was alone in the apartment, wandering from room to room, from nap spot to nap spot, sometimes spending my hours doing nothing more than staring out the window and timing the Metro buses that drove by on the street outside to see if I could decipher their schedule. I hadn’t realized how much I enjoyed having everyone bustling around the house for those first few months of Zoë’s life. I had felt so much a part of something. I was an integral figure in Zoë’s entertainment: sometimes after a feeding, when she was awake and alert and strapped safely into her bouncy seat, Eve and Denny would play Monkey in the Middle, throwing a ball of socks back and forth across the living room; I got to be the monkey. I leapt after the socks and then scrambled back to catch them, and then danced like a four-legged clown to catch them again. And when, against all odds, I reached the sock ball and batted it into the air with my snout, Zoë would squeal and laugh; she would shake her legs with such force, the bouncy chair would scoot along the floor. And Eve, Denny, and I would collapse in a pile of laughter.

  But then everyone moved on and left me behind.

  I wallowed in the emptiness of my lonely days. I would stare out the window and try to picture Zoë and me playing Enno-Fetch, a game I had invented but she later named, in which Denny or Eve would help her roll a sock ball or fling one of her toys across the room, and I would push it back to her with my nose, and she would laugh and I would wag my tail, and then we would do it again. Until one day when a fortunate accident happened that changed my life. Denny turned on the TV in the morning to check the weather report, and he forgot to turn the TV off.

  Let me tell you this: The Weather Channel is not about weather; it is about the world! It is about how weather affects us all, our entire global economy, health, happiness, spirit. The channel delves with great detail into weather phenomena of all different kinds—hurricanes, cyclones, tornadoes, monsoons, hail, rain, lightning storms—and they especially
delight in the confluence of multiple phenomena. Absolutely fascinating. So much so that when Denny returned from work that evening, I was still glued to the television.

  “What are you watching?” he asked when he came in, asked it as if I were Eve or Zoë, as if it couldn’t have been more natural to see me there or address me like that. But Eve was in the kitchen cooking dinner and Zoë was with her; it was just me. I looked at him and then back to the TV, which was reviewing the day’s major event: flooding due to heavy rainstorms on the East Coast.

  “The Weather Channel?” he scoffed, snatching up the remote and changing the channel. “Here.”

  He changed it to Speed Channel.

  I had watched plenty of TV as I grew up, but only when a person was already watching: Denny and I enjoyed racing and the movie channels; Eve and I watched music videos and Hollywood gossip; Zoë and I watched children’s shows. (I tried to teach myself to read by studying Sesame Street, but it didn’t work. I achieved a degree of literacy, and I can still tell the difference between “pull” and “push” on a door, but after I figured out the shapes of the letters, I couldn’t grasp which sounds each letter made and why.) But, suddenly, the idea of watching television by myself entered my life! If I had been a cartoon, the lightbulb over my head would have illuminated. I barked excitedly when I saw cars racing on the screen. Denny laughed.

  “Better, right?”

  Yes! Better! I stretched deeply, joyously, doing my best downward-facing dog and wagging my tail—both gestures of happiness and approval. And Denny got it.

  “I didn’t know you were a television dog,” he said. “I can leave it on for you during the day, if you want.”

  I want! I want!

  “But you have to limit yourself,” he said. “I don’t want to catch you watching TV all day long. I’m counting on you to be responsible.”

  I am responsible!

  While I had learned a great deal up until that point in my life—I was three years old already—once Denny began leaving the TV on for me, my education really took off. With the tedium gone, time started moving quickly again. The weekends, when we were all together, seemed short and filled with activity, and while Sunday nights were bittersweet, I took great comfort in knowing I had a week of television ahead.

  I was so immersed in my education, I suppose I lost count of the weeks, so I was surprised by the arrival of Zoë’s second birthday. Suddenly I was engulfed by a party in the apartment with a bunch of little kids she had met in the park and at her day-care center. It was loud and crazy and all the children let me play with them and wrestle on the rug, and I let them dress me up with a hat and a sweat jacket and Zoë called me her big brother. They got lemon cake all over the floor, and I got to be Eve’s helper cleaning it up while Denny opened presents with the kids. I thought it nice that Eve seemed so happy cleaning up this mess, when she sometimes complained about cleaning the apartment when one of us made a mess. She even teased me about my crumb-cleaning skills and we raced, she with her Dustbuster and me with my tongue. After everyone had left and we had all completed our cleaning assignments, Denny had a surprise birthday present for Zoë. He showed her a photograph that she looked at briefly and with little interest. But then he showed the same photograph to Eve, and it made Eve cry. And then it made her laugh and she hugged him and looked at the photo again and cried some more. Denny picked up the photograph and showed it to me, and it was a photo of a house.

  “Look at this, Enzo,” he said. “This is your new yard. Aren’t you excited?”

  I guess I was excited. Actually, I was kind of confused. I didn’t understand the implications. And then everyone started shoving things in boxes and scrambling around, and the next thing I knew, my bed was somewhere else entirely.

  The house was nice. It was a stylish little Craftsman like I’d seen on This Old House, with two bedrooms and only one bathroom but with plenty of living space, situated very close to its neighbors on a hillside in the Central District. Many electrical wires draped from poles along the sidewalk outside, and while our house looked neat and trim, a few doors down stood other houses with unkempt lawns and peeling paint and mossy roofs.

  Eve and Denny were in love with the place. They spent almost the entire first night there rolling around naked in every room except Zoë’s. When Denny came home from work, he would first say hello to the girls, then he would take me outside to the yard and throw the ball, which I happily retrieved. And then Zoë got big enough that she would run around and squeal while I pretended to chase her. And Eve would admonish her: “Don’t run like that; Enzo will bite you.” She did that frequently in the early years, doubt me like that. But one time, Denny turned on her quickly and said: “Enzo would never hurt her—ever!” And he was right. I knew I was different from other dogs. I had a certain willpower that was strong enough to overcome my more primal instincts. What Eve said was not out of line, as most dogs cannot help themselves; they see an animal running and they track it and they go after it. But that sort of thing doesn’t apply to me.

  Still, Eve didn’t know that, and I had no way of explaining it to her, so I never played rough with Zoë. I didn’t want Eve to start worrying unnecessarily. Because I had already smelled it. When Denny was away and Eve fed me and she leaned down to give me my bowl of food and my nose was near her head, I had detected a bad odor, like rotting wood, mushrooms, decay. Wet, soggy decay. It came from her ears and her sinuses. There was something inside Eve’s head that didn’t belong.

  Given a facile tongue, I could have warned them. I could have alerted them to her condition long before they discovered it with their machines, their computers and supervision scopes that can see inside the human head. They may think those machines are sophisticated, but in fact they are clunky and clumsy, totally reactive, based on a philosophy of symptom-driven medicine that is always a step late. My nose—yes, my little black nose that is leathery and cute—could smell the disease in Eve’s brain long before even she knew it was there.

  But I hadn’t a facile tongue. So all I could do was watch and feel empty inside; Eve had assigned me to protect Zoë no matter what, but no one had been assigned to protect Eve. And there was nothing I could do to help her.

  8

  One summer Saturday afternoon, after we had spent the morning at the beach at Alki swimming and eating fish and chips from Spud’s, we returned to the house red and tired from the sun. Eve put Zoë down for a nap; Denny and I sat in front of the TV to study.

  He put on a tape of an enduro he had been asked to co-drive in Portland a few weeks earlier. It was an exciting race, eight hours long, in which Denny and his two co-drivers took turns behind the wheel in two-hour shifts, ultimately finishing first in class after Denny’s eleventh-hour heroics, which included recovering from a near spin to overtake two class competitors.

  Watching a race entirely from in-car video is a tremendous experience. It creates a wonderful sense of perspective that is often lost in a television broadcast with its many cameras and cars to follow. Seeing a race from the cockpit of a single car gives a true feeling of what it’s like to be a driver: the grip on the steering wheel, the dash, the track, and the glimpse through the rearview mirror of other cars overtaking or being overtaken, the sense of isolation, the focus and determination that are necessary to win.

  Denny started the tape at the beginning of his final stint, with the track wet and the sky heavy with dark clouds that threatened more rain. We watched several laps in silence. Denny drove smoothly and almost alone, as his team had fallen behind after making the crucial decision to pull into the pits and switch to rain tires; other racing teams had predicted the rain would pass and dry track conditions would return, and so had gained more than two laps on Denny’s team. Yet the rain began again, which gave Denny a tremendous advantage.

  Denny quickly and easily passed cars from other classes: underpowered Miatas that darted through the turns with their excellent balance; big-engine Vipers with their atrocious handling. Denny
, in his quick and muscular Porsche Cup Car, slicing through the rain.

  “How come you go through the turns so much faster than the other cars?” Eve asked.

  I looked up. She stood in the doorway, watching with us.

  “Most of them aren’t running rain tires,” Denny said.

  Eve took a seat on the sofa next to Denny.

  “But some of them are.”

  “Yes, some,” he said.

  We watched. Denny got up behind a yellow Camaro at the end of the back straight, and though it looked as if he could have taken the other car in turn 12, he held back. Eve noticed.

  “Why didn’t you pass him?” she asked.

  “I know him. He’s got too much power and would just pass me back on the straight. I think I take him in the next series of turns.”

  Yes. At the next turn-in, Denny was inches from the Camaro’s rear bumper. He rode tight through the double-apex right-hand turn and then popped out at the exit to take the inside line for the next turn, a quick left, and he zipped right by.

  “This part of the track is really slick in the rain,” he said. “He has to back way off. By the time he gets his grip back, I’m out of his reach.”

  On the back straight again, the headlights illuminating the turn markers against a sky that was still not completely dark, the Camaro could be seen in Denny’s panoramic racing rearview mirror, fading into the background.

  “Did he have rain tires?” Eve asked.

  “I think so. But his car wasn’t set up right.”

  “Still. You’re driving like the track isn’t wet, and everyone else is driving like it is.”

  Turn 12 and blasting down the straight, we could see brake lights of the competition flicker ahead; Denny’s next victims.

  “That which you manifest is before you,” Denny said softly.