by Dale Bailey
Fifty years previously the maneuver wouldn’t have been possible. A law enforcement satellite would have lit them up the minute they cut that tanker loose. But in these days of peak oil and global warming, a satellite is lucky if it can punch a signal through the atmospheric murk once in a million pings. Still, it was a daring crime. In a U.S. of A coming apart at the seams, with D.C. irradiated, Manhattan blown clear off the map, and insurgencies booming from sea to shining sea, a single thermos of petroleum was a hell of a thing to lose. There must have been half a dozen gangs working the black market in gasoline in those days, from Gallant Jim’s up around the lakes to Victor Albertini’s out on the left coast. But famous as some of them were, none of them could match Lightning Jack’s crew or his legend. None of them could match his style. He’d sign in on Channel 19 to mock the truckers on their CB radios as the shit rained down, and he’d send thank you notes—he had the prettiest script—when he was done.
But this time things had gone wrong. They’d taken out the driver and cut the tanker free of the convoy all right, but as the eighteen-wheeler swerved across the lanes, it clipped Lola Bridger’s Spyder. She went spinning back into traffic where a tanker crushed her like a bug and jackknifed in the middle of the highway. The next fish in line slammed it side on, igniting an explosion so big that it must have singed God’s beard. A heartbeat later, the swingman rolled his own rig, reducing Joe Hauser’s Gilead to a greasy stain on the pavement. Lightning Jack dropped the hammer, and that Dragon leapt forward like a rabid Doberman fixing to break its chain. Four and a half minutes later, it struck the crash barrier on I-20. That fire burned hot and clean. By the time it was done there was barely enough left to put in a pine box. The networks reported it all the same, and DNA confirmed it: the Feds had gotten their man.
But there are those who’ll tell you that the charred carcass they pulled out of that car was a ringer and that Lightning Jack lives to this day. Some say he’d finally made his nut and retired to some clement place like the Upper Peninsula of Michigan or maybe Edmonton, others that he took his thieving ways out west, where he gave Victor Albertini a run for his money. That’s the way with famous outlaws. Some men will attest to this day that Jesse James died of old age, and that John Dillinger wasn’t the man the FBI pumped full of holes in front of the Biograph Theater.
I’m here to tell you that they’re wrong. Lightning Jack died almost forty years ago. Don’t bother telling me otherwise, because I’m the only man who knows the truth. After all, I was there. I knew Jack, you see. I knew him from the time he was a bean.
He’d already acquired the nickname—some say he gave it to himself—by the time I met him, and he was barely out of diapers then. The man—if you can call a seventeen-year-old boy a man—was flat great behind the wheel from the start, and I’ll swear to that until my dying day. I knew it the first time I ever spoke to him. I’d been knocking around the Truck Series for a year by then, trying to catch on somewhere, when I saw him blow a sticker at the Charlotte Motor Speedway. I’d had my eye on him for weeks. He’d been in the lead until the tire betrayed him. This was maybe a flaw in his driving—he hadn’t pitted as often as he should’ve—or maybe a flaw in the tire, I couldn’t say for sure, but as he coasted into pit row, flapping leather, the field sped past him. I figured the wheel was too bent to mount a new scuff, but we’ll never know for sure: the front tire carrier fumbled the exchange. Lightning Jack came out of that truck like a piston firing. His helmet went one way and Jack went the other, straight up into the tire carrier’s face. He probably would have hit him—he did fire him—if Joe Hauser, the rear tire man in those days, hadn’t simmered him down.
I’d known Joe since we’d been boys racing go-karts together. It was by his invitation that I was in the pit in the first place. I had an inkling that Joe might be able to broker me a job, and I had planned to show Jack that I knew my way around an engine, nobody better. But sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good. Even so, I might have slipped the opportunity like I’ve slipped so many others if it wasn’t for my own big mouth. I always was a talker, and an opinionated bastard to boot, and those traits have gotten me into more trouble than they have gotten me out of, but just then they worked in my favor, for as Jack vaulted the wall and strode into his pit stall, I couldn’t help myself. I said, “You left money out there on the track.”
Jack turned to face me, and I saw then what a handsome devil he already was and would become. He aged well, Jack, and even when a New Fed bullet creased his forehead during the Tallahassee job a decade later, the scar it left behind only gave him a rakish look that seemed to make him more popular with the ladies. Some men you just can’t beat.
“What did you say?” he asked, and the whole time Joe is standing behind him, slashing the edge of his hand across his throat. Shut up, shut up.
But I never could. So there we stood in the maintenance stall, me and Lightning Jack, everything stinking of spent oil and smoking rubber and sweat, and what I do is, I turn up the volume. “I said, you left money out there on the track.”
“How do you figure?”
“Two ways. One, you were too aggressive. It ain’t all about driving, son”—this though I didn’t have but five years or so on him—“it’s also about timing. You got to judge your tires and your fuel, and pit at the right time.”
“I reckon driving has got me this far.”
“Well, it’s not likely to get you much farther. NASCAR is big-time racing, son.”
“Don’t call me that again,” he said, and I never did. Some men you have to learn not to push, and others you just know. Jack was one of the latter. I never met a man who had a more charming disposition, but you didn’t cross him but once, not Jack. The front tire carrier could attest to that.
“What’s the second way?” he asked.
“Hell, you know that. Prize money. Who knows whether you could have loaded a tire on that front wheel, but if you’d let the guy try, you might have placed. You don’t have to win every time.”
“The hell with placing. I want to win.”
“Of course, you do. But you have to take the long view. Rack up enough points, you win the series and step up to the next division. From there it’s only a short hop to the show, Jack.”
“You go on and get out of my garage,” he said. “I don’t know how you got in here anyway.”
And he put his back to me.
I should have let him go. But no one ever missed a turn in hindsight, did they? Instead, I said, “You need me, Jack. There’s not a thing about cars that I don’t know,” and I think that’s what did it. I wasn’t asking, I was telling. And if Lightning Jack liked anything in a man, he liked confidence. He had it himself in spades. He wasn’t a bragging man, but he knew there wasn’t much he couldn’t do with a car and he didn’t get in his own way when it came to doing it. I think that’s why he spun on his heel to look me over, a long, appraising look, like a man who’s getting ready to drop a fair chunk of change on a brand new piece of iron and wants to make sure he doesn’t get taken.
“What’s your name?” he said.
“Gus March.”
“Well, Gus March, I reckon you can lug a tire as well as any man. I seem to have an opening in that department.”
“It’s a start I guess. But I’ll be running your crew inside a year,” I said.
“That so?” He smiled as if he’d let go of some internal tension, the strain maybe of the race and losing it, and he looked simultaneously like the boy he was and the man he would become. There was something golden in that smile, a kind of glamour that would charm the knickers off just about every woman that swung into his orbit and that would make the men give up everything and follow him to the ends of the earth. I know because I felt it then, and before it was over I did follow him. He made a kind of chuffing noise, something between a snort and a laugh. Then he turned away again. “Don’t let me down, Gus,” he said, and his glamour hadn’t rubbed off on me so much that I promised I wouldn’
t—not aloud, anyway. But I felt the promise in my heart. In the end, I did let him down, though. We always do, I guess. It’s what makes us human. Still, that was a long time coming. In the meantime, I had other promises to keep, among them my pledge to be his crew chief before the year was out. I did it, too. It’s true: there’s not a thing about cars I don’t know, and there’s less that I can’t fix. I’m not a bragging man myself. It’s not bragging if you can do it.
Those were the twilight years of motor sports, of course, and if I grieved to see them go, I was glad that I’d gotten in soon enough to see them at all. Sponsorship was way down and so were ratings. Things had gotten a lot like it was in the beginning, when a man with a car didn’t have to have a twenty million dollar team to buy his place on pit row. He could earn it, the way Jack did, with his smile and his talent. He breathed new life into a dying sport, same as Ali had done for boxing. You couldn’t tap a newsfeed back then without Lightning Jack smiling out at you. I can see him now, the way he was before a race, that unearthly calm he had about him. “Let’s ride, Gus,” he always said as he strapped himself into the cockpit, and for a while the ride was a wild one, like an out-of-control elevator hurtling to the top. You’d have thought the other drivers would have hated him, but Jack was funny like that, incandescent as the lightning bolt he’d painted down the hood of his midnight-black Dragon. He lit a room up, and people loved him for it. But even that wasn’t enough to save us.
By then the soup we all took in with each breath was so thick that in some of the bigger cities—Tokyo and L.A., for instance—people wore surgical masks every time they stepped out the door. Electric vehicles had never caught on—they’d never solved the battery thing—and though public transportation had skyrocketed, plenty of people still gassed up to go. There’s just something about a gasoline motor, the sense of contained deviltry in it, pistons hammering as gas explodes—actually explodes—in the cylinder and drives the crankshaft like a dervish in his finest hour. Meanwhile, the Feds down in Washington steadily whittled away at drivers’ rights. It wasn’t much more than window dressing really. Peak oil had taken hold and the flow dried to a trickle. By the time Jack crashed coming out of the third turn in the last Daytona, there just about wasn’t any place left where a man could wind a motor out anymore.
When NASCAR disbanded, Jack’s team broke up. Me and Joe Hauser and Lola—the finest jack man I ever saw—stuck around for a while. Jack was glad to have us. We wanted to drive, even if it meant running thousand dollar drags in the middle of the Birmingham night. Amateurs all around us, and Jack ate them up like candy hearts, so charismatic that they didn’t mind watching him fold away their money. Jack was all about winning even then. But a time came when even Joe and Lola and I began to drift. The last of the street gas began to run out for one thing. First it was a night or two between races; then it was a week or a month or more. Plus, there was the competition. A man can only go so long stealing lunch money before his conscience begins to nag him.
Jack fell into a funk. He took to drink, thickened up around the middle. I got to where I had to get away from it all. Before you knew it, I had a straight job, working on hydraulic lifters in Montgomery. Joe Hauser drifted out west and started pushing paper for an insurance company. Lola—the only one of us with a college degree—landed a position as an executive at a fiber optic plant, and before you know it, she was running the place.
Then the NRA’s dirty bomb put the quietus to D.C. The New Feds relocated to Buffalo, but by the time they got themselves organized, it was too late. Insurgencies had begun to break out like a bad case of the clap. State’s Rights and all that. I’m talking secession, the seizure of all military assets by right of eminent domain, and vigorous defense of self-declared borders. A dozen other special interest groups followed the NRA into terrorism.
Jack, with his usual prescience, had seen the way things were headed. He showed up at the hydraulic plant one afternoon and took me to lunch. It was the kind of Alabama day where just breathing you sweat through your shirt. When we got into the air-conditioned diner, I heaved a sigh of relief. “Goddamn, but you’re a sight for sore eyes, Jack,” I said and for a moment I couldn’t do much more than stare at him. He was his old self, sinewy and lean behind a pair of Aviator glasses, his unruly mop of hair close cropped.
“It’s good to see you, too, Gus,” he said. “Hell, not a minute goes by I don’t think about you and the old days.”
“Good times,” I said, and for a moment we were silent in contemplation.
An icy cold Coca-Cola appeared—you could see the glass sweating it was so cold—and then a couple of menus. I ordered a burger and fries without hardly noticing the lady serving us. Jack and I chatted in a desultory way about past times as we ate.
“You and Lola ever have anything together?” I asked at one point. I’d often thought about trying my hand with her myself—she’d have probably shot me down like a clay pigeon—only I feared horning in on Jack’s territory, and I would never do a thing like that.
“Lola?” he said. “She was too important to the organization.”
After that, the conversation turned in other directions. We were both melancholy by then, anyway. We missed the track, the stink of exhaust and the sizzle of anticipation as we took the pavement, the burst of activity whenever Jack slipped in to pit. I ran the fastest crew on the circuit—I can’t tell you how many times other drivers tried to poach my guys—but every time we rolled out onto the asphalt we strove to shave a tenth of a second off our time. In a close race, a tenth of a second can make the difference between winning and losing.
So we chewed over what we’d been doing in the year or two since we’d last seen each other. I didn’t have much to share. I worked at the hydraulics plant eight hours a day and saw a lady named Mary occasionally, but neither one of us really had our hearts in it. Jack didn’t have much to say either. He’d spent a long time in that funk and then he’d pulled himself together, stopped drinking, hit the gym. I thought the conversation had hit that lull that old friends who’ve grown apart so often do, when they find themselves staring at each other across the gulf time has opened up between them. It saddened me. I didn’t have many close friends in those days, and I hadn’t realized how much I missed the easy camaraderie that grows up between men bound together in a common enterprise.
“How come you to get yourself together like that?” I asked just to break the silence, and Jack got quiet all over again. He looked me over, and I recalled the first time we met, the way he’d studied me, like he was getting ready to surrender some serious change for a hunk of rolling iron, and he wanted to make sure he liked what he was seeing. I realize now that he was wondering whether he could trust me, and I’m glad that he decided he could. Things would have gone differently if he’d chosen otherwise, and I might have been a happier man now, but it would have hurt something awful to know that Lightning Jack hadn’t trusted in our friendship.
He didn’t answer me. Not directly, anyway. What he said was, “Real tragedy what happened in Washington, wasn’t it?”
I allowed it was, though I hadn’t been especially fond of the party that was in power at the time. Nor the one that wasn’t, either, if it came to that.
“This is only beginning,” he said. He leaned forward, lowering his voice. “The whole thing’s going to come apart, Gus. Wait and see. Nothing but spit and baling wire ever held this country together anyway. If it were a car, it would be a jalopy sure.”
I allowed that this was true, as well—with the caveat that, all due respect, it didn’t take any genius to see it. “Hell, Jack, Georgia’s already gone and you hear the same rumbling right here in Montgomery.”
“Sure,” he said, and now he leaned back, flung one arm across the back of the booth, and grinned. I thought our waitress, who was just then delivering the check, might go into heat. When she was gone, he ticked the rest of the secession risks off on his fingers. He finished up with California and the Midwestern Alliance a
nd said, “You know what that means.”
“War.”
“That’s right. And a hell of a big one, too.”
“Best thing you can do is keep your head down when the shooting starts.”
“I got a different perspective,” Jack said. “The way I figure it, the New Feds are going to win this thing. I reckon that at least half the military are going to stay loyal. You’re going to see pockets of resistance to just about every insurgency that springs up, and soon enough Buffalo will be coordinating them. And the New Feds have the codes to the nukes. It’s going to be a hair-raising ten years, but I think we have a window of opportunity here.”
“Opportunity for what? To get our heads blown off?”
“We run that risk no matter what. There’s no keeping out of the fray.”
“Well, what do you have in mind?”
“Tell me, come war, what’s the most valuable commodity on earth?”
“I don’t know. Those nukes, I guess.”
“Weapon of last resort, unless a terrorist gets hold of one. The New Feds are going to try to keep it conventional—and you can’t fight a conventional war without—“
“Oil,” I said.
“You got it.” He aimed a finger at me and dropped the hammer. Bang. “Just try firing up an Abrams tank on a Sears Diehard,” he said, grinning that cocky grin of his, “and you’ll see what I mean. The New Feds are already moving convoys of tankers down the old interstates. It’s only a matter of time before someone picks one off.”
“You’re a crazy man. Let’s say—just for the sake of argument—you can manage it. Who are you going to sell it to?”
“Anyone who wants it. Insurgents. Gearheads hungry to fire up their old iron. Hell, I’ll ransom it back to the Feds. I don’t care. I’m an amoral son of a bitch, Gus. I just want to drive.”
