by Dale Bailey
It was Eileen who finally broke the whole thing open for me, like lancing an angry boil. We were in the kitchen alone, chopping up vegetables, when she said, matter-of-fact like, “He’s sleeping with her, you know.”
In my heart I think I’d known it all along. When Lola came to me that night, I turned on my side and lay awake a long time, staring into the dark. I’d trusted Lola, sure. But I’d trusted Jack even more. I’d trusted our friendship, though he’d as much announced the truth himself, hadn’t he? “I’m an amoral son of a bitch, Gus. I just want to drive.”
But Lightning Jack’s driving days were over.
Which brings us full circle, I guess.
Jack didn’t wind up puttering around his garden in the Upper Peninsula, and he never gave Victor Albertini any competition out in the Golden State either. But the conspiracy nuts are right about one thing.
The I-20 tape is a put-up job. You can argue that the video was manipulated, or even created from whole cloth, and don’t think I haven’t heard plenty of speculation along those lines. I’ve known people who could talk themselves blue in the face when it came to crash trajectories and video grain—and would, too, if you’d let them. But when it comes down to brass tacks, I agree with them. I’ve been around cars my whole life, and back in my NASCAR days I must have seen half a hundred crashes or more. Simply put, the overcorrection on the video isn’t sufficient to cause the Dragon to roll. I know. I built the damn thing. The air dam was low and wide, never mind the weight of the rolled steel armor. The downforce on that car was tremendous. Even in the skid, those tires would have stuck to that pavement like glue.
But let’s assume for a moment that I’m wrong. Let’s assume that the video is real.
The question then is the matter of provenance. It can’t be confirmed that the tape came in only half an hour after the crash. We have only New Fed assurances on that score, and the files remain closed. And what about the cleanup? Where are the investigators and where the glib network newsfaces doing stand-ups in front of the wreckage, their flawless features sculpted by the strobing blue and red beacons of the emergency lights? The most notorious outlaw of his era had just been killed. Where are the boots on the ground?
As for Lightning Jack, I did for him myself.
I suppose you’ve figured that out on your own by now, but I don’t think any of us—even me—knew that I was capable of such a thing. Tension weighed heavily upon the farm by then. The sense that New Fed agents might any moment sweep down out of the hills was palpable, and we kept our weapons close to hand. After Eileen’s revelation, Lola and I continued to share a bed. As long as she didn’t leave, we could both—we could all—pretend it hadn’t happened. But Eileen put Jack out of her room. Without explanation—he was the wheelman, after all, and he owed no explanations—he took to sleeping in the hammock, in the warm summer air. It was there that I did the thing.
It was nothing I had planned. I was drinking whiskey in the darkened kitchen one sleepless night, that’s all, and I caught a glimpse of him through the window, dozing there. The knife lay in the drainer, close to hand. Without thinking about it, I took it and stepped outside. My foot fell upon the squeaky riser of the porch steps, but he didn’t wake up. If he had, everything would have been different. We might have talked the thing through. I might have let his charm seduce me yet again. But he merely stirred, murmured something unintelligible, and lapsed back into slumber. He never knew a thing until I slipped the knife between his ribs—I can still remember just how easy it went in—and even then I don’t think he believed it. He gazed up at me with a question in his eyes—a kind of wonder, I think, that I could betray him. He opened his mouth to speak, and I laid my hand across his lips. I leaned in close to his ear and began to slowly twist the blade, like a man tightening a lug nut.
“Shhh,” I said. “Be still now, Jack. It’s time to sleep.”
A heartbeat passed, and then another, and then he did.
It’s the rest of the thing I’ve never been able to figure to my satisfaction. We’re entering the realms of pure speculation here, but I believe New Fed agents really had infiltrated Little Rock, and they must have been watching the farm for days, maybe longer. I slipped the noose, that’s all. I hoofed it past dawn. Somewhere around eight AM I flagged down a bus out of Conway. I changed at the East Washington station in Little Rock, surrendering up a handful of cash for the first stagecoach out of town. It dropped me in Jackson, Mississippi, where I holed up in a cheap motel for weeks, living on vodka and takeout. As best I can figure, some time during that period New Fed agents must have taken the farm. I can imagine it all too clearly: the stark white flare of muzzle flash in the darkness, the hiccup of automatic weapons, the crew falling one by one, their bodies riddled by New Federal slugs—Joe Hauser, Dean Ford, and all the others, Lola most of all. I can see her lying in the doorway to the farmhouse, her arm flung out toward the still-smoking SAR bullpup she cherished, her body cooling as the sun rises over the Arkansas hills. I can see the blood. Imagination, I know, but sometimes imagination is enough. Sometimes it’s too much, and I wonder that a man as practical as I am—an engine man to the core—should be cursed with so much of it.
The New Feds must have been furious at being deprived of their prize. Three months after I landed in Biloxi and nailed down a straight job—hydraulics, again—Buffalo released the tape and Lightning Jack’s saga came to an end. But the oil raids weren’t over, not yet. Lightning Jack had shown how the thing was done, and the Midwestern Alliance and the New Confederacy both had borrowed the technique, upped the firepower, and started knocking off entire convoys. The Feds—as Lola had put it to me in Birmingham all those months ago—armored up. Military escorts tripled in size, heavy ordnance came into play, and the tankers themselves became rolling dreadnoughts. Cutting one out of the pack was a suicide mission—as Gallant Jim found out in the Oak Park Massacre. Not two months later Federal agents killed Victor Albertini in the lobby of a San Francisco hotel. Mason, Cholewinski, and Smilin’ Susie Samowitz all went down in the months that followed. The Age of the Gasoline Outlaw was officially over.
Me? I kept my head down and waited for the New Feds to come for me. They never did. It’s been a lonesome kind of life these last forty years. There’ve been women now and again, but no one steady. I had too much road behind me to really settle down, and I don’t think I ever did get over Lola. Now that I’m an old man, with eighty looming just beyond the horizon, I find myself thinking of her more often—and the truth is not an hour has passed in all those years past that I didn’t think of her already. You probably reckon that I dwell on her betrayal at the end, but the truth is I think mostly of the good days that came before. There were a lot of those good days, more than our fair share, considering the circumstances. We loved each other with a ferocity and desperation that only the hunted can know. And more important still, we had the things we loved in common to bind us together—love of the pavement and the rolling iron that ran across it and the mighty engines that made them go. As for the betrayal, I don’t blame her much. As I’ve said, there wasn’t a woman on the planet that Lightning Jack couldn’t charm out of her knickers in ten minutes flat. She never had a chance, and neither did I.
If I’m going to be honest about it—and I don’t see why I shouldn’t be—I don’t think Jack did either. I guess I miss him most of all. I forgave him. I believe he was a prisoner: to his charisma and to his ego, to his skills and to his hunger for victory, and to the fame all those things together bought him. And despite all the harm we did—and we did great harm, I’ll be the first to admit it; every night I am borne to sleep on a tide of blood—for all that harm, I believe to this day that Jack didn’t have a bone of true malice in him. He just wanted to drive, and like a thousand other gearheads who cruised the night streets on black market gasoline in those days, he was going to find a way to do it. The only difference is that he was Lightning Jack, had been all his life, and couldn’t find a way to stop being Lightni
ng Jack. He was a competitor, he had to have a stage. He never could pit before it was too late, and in the end he got everyone he loved—and he did love us in his way, I’m sure of that—killed. I have many regrets about those days, but I guess what I regret most of all is that I wasn’t there to take my final stand with Lola and the rest of them. I betrayed them all. I should have stood by my wheelman to the end. There is something sacred about the work that binds a crew together, and I profaned that bond, and I have lived too long with my regret. I’m glad the finish line is in sight at last. I don’t think I could stand another lap.
Troop 9
Every Girl Scout knows that good homes make a country great and good; so every woman wants to understand home-making.
Scouting for Girls (1920)
Girl Scout Troop 9 went feral sometime in mid-July, during a camping trip in the lower Adirondacks. This happened just after the war, when the lean, hungry years of ration cards and scrap-metal drives were still fresh in everyone’s minds, women had only lately returned home from the munitions factories, and a week-long idyll in the mountains, sleeping in tents and reciting the Girl Scout Laws, seemed like just the thing. Later it would become terrible, of course, but then you could hardly imagine such a thing, so no one objected when Scout Leader Betty Grishnam proposed the trip.
By this time the girls of Troop 9 had been together eight years or so. They were all fourteen or fifteen years old—they’d started together as Brownies—and they had grown up in a world without men, aside from those too old or enfeebled to carry a gun. The girls’ mothers worked night and day riveting together massive flying fortresses and shipping them to the front, so the girls of Troop 9 spent virtually every hour together. They practiced the art of building campfires. They learned that the buds of the slippery elm were safe to eat, while the Amanita toadstool was not. They hiked the foothills for days at a time, until their muscular, brown thighs grew smooth and hard as stones beneath their skirts, and they could slip off the path and into the woodland murk as silently as shades.
When they met, they performed the Girl Scout handshake with their left hand and the Girl Scout salute—three fingers upraised—with their right. They were respectful to their elders and devoted to the principles of Scouting for Girls. They had been together so long by then that their cycles moved in synchronicity and they could almost understand one another without speaking. They no longer had much need to talk. On that first night in the woods, when they unrolled their mats around the fire to toast hot dogs, they sat in a companionable silence so complete that it faintly unnerved Betty Grishnam, who remembered her own girlhood days as a time of endless giggling about boys—which boys were cutest and which ones were funniest and which ones they liked best and why. The girls of Troop 9 didn’t seem to care much about boys one way or the other, or if they did they didn’t talk about it.
A full moon looked down through the trees, swathing everything in webs of shadow. Ann Miller’s hot dog slipped off its stake into the coals. Susan Hardesty, who had been Troop Leader for as long anyone could recall, smiled, and a brief titter, not unkind, ran around the fire. Ann didn’t seem to mind. She just skewered another hot dog and crossed her strong legs Indian-style before her. And Susan Hardesty? She bit into a hot dog without bothering with a bun, and when the grease squirted out onto her hands, she licked her long delicate fingers clean with the fastidious precision of a cat, her eyes half lidded with pleasure.
Something in Betty Grishnam shuddered to see it. “Susan,” she said, “that’s no way for a lady to eat.” Susan smiled sweetly and apologized, but Betty had had enough. “I’m going to bed,” she announced. “I expect you to be in your sleeping bags by ten.” She was snoring raucously herself well before that, and the girls of Troop 9, sitting silently around their campfire and eating hot dogs, tittered once again.
A Girl Scout’s Honor Is To Be Trusted
They had gathered to begin their expedition that day in the eye-splitting glare of the July morning, five cars wheeling one by one into the sunbaked parking lot of the A&P, where Betty Grishnam awaited them in her husband’s old pickup. There would have been eight cars—eight girls to every Troop! Scouting for Girls dictated—but Ann Miller and Jo Anderson had spent the night together (they always did) and Susan Hardesty had met her Corporal, Louise Jackson, for breakfast at Simm’s Diner to put the last touches on the week’s activities schedule. They had walked the two blocks to the A&P together, swinging their packs with the grace of young girls poised on the brink of adulthood, still beautiful in their youth. You would have wept to see them.
No one could have imagined what would happen later, least of all John Hardesty, who’d been a corporal himself once, snaking up Omaha Beach as German 42s spanged off tank barriers, and men screamed and cursed and died all around him. His best friend—Frank White, who was twenty-nine, and had two daughters of his own—peering out from cover, more or less disintegrated in a scalding spray of blood and bone that Hardesty still felt on his cheeks some mornings. But he didn’t talk about it, any more than he talked about the surrendering German soldier he’d spontaneously executed two days later in revenge. Blood for blood, he’d thought at the time, taking the German’s rifle as a trophy, and if the equation didn’t balance quite as well as he had planned—Hardesty didn’t know what he regretted more, the blood on his face or the blood on his hands—well, some things you just didn’t talk about.
But he wasn’t thinking about that now. This morning he had nothing more on his mind than swinging by the rendezvous point and saying a quick goodbye to the baby girl he doted on—the baby girl who’d been all grown up when he got back from overseas and whom he still didn’t really know yet. He’d already said goodbye once—he and Mary both—when Susan slung her pack over one shoulder and departed for Simm’s in the gray half-light of dawn. Mary was pregnant again—better late than never—and Hardesty had his heart set on a boy this time around. He ached to teach a son to fish and shoot and throw a football. But there was something special about a girl: you wanted to hug her close forever because you knew what an awful place the world could be and how ill prepared she was to meet it. He sometimes thought it would be better if Susan would never leave home at all, but the truth was, she’d have a husband of her own someday soon, and probably a couple of little ones to boot.
His girl was growing up and the best he could do was stop by the A&P to deliver up one last piece of advice (again) and hold her tight for just a moment longer, which is exactly what he had planned when he slid his Chrysler into a spot by the little cluster of girls loading their gear into the back of Ern Grishnam’s battered old Ford.
“Hey there, you gals,” he called, climbing out of the car. “Suze here yet?”
Suze—she hated the nickname, but Hardesty couldn’t break himself from using it—wedged her pack in with the others and turned to face him. Credit her with smiling, anyway, he thought. He could already see that it had been a mistake coming. He’d embarrassed her in front of her friends, but what could he do now? He’d set himself on the track and he’d have to follow it through.
“Hi, Dad,” she said.
“Hi yourself,” he said, pulling her into a rough embrace—if she’d been a boy, he’d have knuckled her scalp. “Watch out for yourself out there, okay?”
“I know what I’m doing, Dad.”
“Well, see that you watch out for yourself, anyway. Okay? Promise?”
“Scout’s Honor,” she said, relenting at last. She flashed him the sign and turned away to help Kate Robinson wrestle a bundle of tent poles into the truck bed, and Hardesty just stood there for another heartbeat, looking on like an idiot, taken with his daughter’s beauty—with all their beauty, really, standing golden in the sunlight, on the fleeting edge of childhood. “Listen,” he said, “Can I give you a hand loading up?”
“We’ve got it, Dad.”
“Sure. Right.”
He smiled and waved at Betty Grishnam. “Take care of my girl, you hear?”
“You can be sure that I will, Mr. Hardesty,” she said, and that was that.
Hardesty climbed behind the wheel of the Chrysler and spun it back toward the street. Betty Grishnam smiled at him as he passed. Neither of them knew just how wrong she was.
A Girl Scout Obeys Orders
When Betty Grishnam woke, late, with the sun casting wind-drift leaf shadows on the canvas of her tent, she woke to a silence so pristine that she knew in her heart—even before she skinned out of her sleeping bag and stumbled into the little clearing where they’d set up camp—that something had gone terribly wrong. According to Girl Scout procedure, the girls should by this time have been well into the process of policing the area—boiling water for oatmeal over the campfire, inspecting the tents, stowing gear and pulling on shoes for the day-hike down to the lake. None of these duties were especially loud, but taken together they should have produced at least a low electric hum of activity.
Instead, nothing. Nothing at all. Just the sound of the midmorning breeze rustling canvas and the call of a starling somewhere in the trees. And when Betty fumbled her way outside, her eyes confirmed her suspicions. The fire had been carefully banked, the equipment stowed, the tent flaps secured—but the girls were nowhere to be seen. Maybe they’d set off on the hike without her (they would never do that) or maybe they were playing some kind of mean-spirited joke on her (also not true, though she sometimes wondered about Susan Hardesty). But in her heart she knew the truth: the girls were just gone. And here was a further mystery, she realized, sweeping open the neighboring tent: they’d left their equipment behind. Knapsacks and walking sticks, snacks, shoes—shoes?—and clothes. Their clothes lay neatly folded atop their sleeping bags. Their clothes! And their sleeping bags had not been slept in.
