After Baltimore, Jack sent out thank-you notes, leaking them to the newshounds. And sometime along the way—I think it was before number three, down in Charleston—he painted that incandescent lightning bolt from his NASCAR career down the rolled-steel armor on his hood. It was just like the old days: an express elevator to the top. His footage was playing every time you tapped a newsfeed. Like many race drivers, he was a little guy, Jack—5'10" and 160 pounds or so. That weight-to-speed ratio again. But he seemed like a much bigger man. He was as handsome as Old Scratch himself, and he inspired loyalty like no man I’ve ever seen. For a while, he kept a suite in the Adler Hotel, wearing his brand-new scar from the Tallahassee job, entertaining women and dining out on his notoriety.
But the New Feds had taken notice. We were plenty hot by then. Word on the street was that Buffalo was aiming to scalp us. After a month or so of jumping at shadows, Jack picked up the Heckler & Koch, a lethal-looking bastard if I ever saw one. Soon we were all sporting ordnance, pretending to be gangsters, or maybe not pretending, though in my heart I was never anything more than an old pit boss. But Jack still had a case of the nerves, so we moved shop to a farm outside of Little Rock. It belonged to Eileen Sheldon, one of Jack’s girls from the NASCAR circuit, and if she’d put a few miles on the odometer since then, well, who hadn’t? She was still a fine-looking woman—big-boned and kind of rangy—and she took Jack into her bedroom that very night. More important, she had a big barn where we got to work upgrading the vehicles.
By then Lola and I had started sleeping together. As I’ve said, I’d had a hankering for her all along—she was a petite kid, with dark hair and eyes so black you could catch reflections of yourself if the light hit them right—but like Jack, I’d known she had too much value as a jack man to even think about it. A crew is a finely oiled operation. The last thing you need is personal tension to gum up the works. But thinking wasn’t part of the equation. A driver and his shotgun man have to trust one another completely, and a close brush with the grave—and every job counted on that score—left you with a yen for a little human warmth. When we reached the safe house after the job in Baltimore, we just kind of fell into the sack together. Nobody said a word about it, but after that it was understood: Lola Bridger was my girl. I count this as the biggest mistake of my life, but I couldn’t know that then. And God, I loved that girl. In my heart I love her still.
A gentleman doesn’t speak of such things—and I don’t intend to in any detail—but late one night we found ourselves futzing around alone in Eileen Sheldon’s barn. The radio was playing some old dance tune, slow and easy, and we’d both had a beer or three too many. Me, I was poking under Jack’s hood, when Lola says something I don’t hear. I straightened up to listen and, bonk, knocked myself dizzy on that rolled-steel armor. Next thing I know, Lola’s saying, “You okay?” and we both got to giggling and one thing led to another and we ended up having it off right there in the hay. What I’m trying to say is, there was some heat in that relationship, if you take my meaning, and if neither one of us ever professed our love aloud, we didn’t need to. It was understood.
We lingered three months on Eileen’s farm, and it was a kind of idyll. Joe Hauser was a mean hand with a spatula. We ate like kings, and afterward Joe would sit back like a sultan and watch us wash up. Everybody but Jack took a hand in the suds. Nobody caviled, either. Jack was a different order of being. It would be unseemly for the wheelman to dirty his hands scraping leftovers into the disposal. But Jack and Eileen had it sweet and steady, and so did Lola and I. In retrospect, I think that was the best time of my life. If I could have stretched it out forever, I would have. But all good things, right?
Jack wanted to drive, and he’d gotten some intel on a convoy coming out of Buffalo and heading toward Nashville. Everything Jack had predicted had pretty much panned out the way he said it would. The United States had splintered along lines geographic and sectarian—and these weren’t always in agreement. The New Feds were trying to put down insurgencies on half a dozen fronts. The insurgents themselves were engaged with pockets of New Fed loyalists in their midst who needed reinforcement and resupply: guns, grub, and gasoline. The convoys would have been impossible in another era, but the satellites were useless and the fighter jets had been grounded by particulates in the atmosphere. The air war was a joke, leaving the convoys to defend themselves against occasional skirmishes—and us. I was against the whole thing. I worried about Lola behind the wheel of the Spyder, and I was none too enthusiastic about taking more fire myself. But you didn’t cross Lightning Jack, and besides, part of me wanted to see what the rebuilt vehicles could really do. I was a gearhead at heart.
The answer was, they did fine. We cut a truck free of the convoy on 65 South, just north of Bowling Green, broke down the cars, and hit the road again by nightfall, three hundred thousand New Confederate dollars richer. I think Jack sold the gas back to the New Fed loyalists who’d been scheduled to receive it in the first place, which was good for a laugh, especially when the update hit the newsfeeds. We pulled off two more jobs in the next two weeks: Raleigh and Frankfort. We were really hot by then, and we scooted for home under cover of darkness. A Fed patrol—maybe twelve guys armed with popguns and rocks—stumbled across us at the second rally point, but between Jack’s G40 and five other buzzsaws, we cut through them like a good wheelman cutting through the pack. By this time we were back in New Confederate territory, and we didn’t face any more resistance on our way to Eileen Sheldon’s farm. When we rolled up, Eileen was waiting at the door to meet us. We’d escaped pretty much unscathed—Lightning Jack was nothing if not lucky—though the iron plating on our vehicles had been dinged dozens of times and Dean Ford had taken a round clean through the shoulder. Eileen disinfected and packed the wound—Lord, I’ve never heard such a racket—but Dean pulled through. His arm was never quite the same, though, and his days as swingman were over.
Me, I hoped our days as outlaws were over, too. And they were, though we didn’t know it at the time.
For a while, the idyll resumed. We spent the stifling Arkansas days working on the vehicles. We ate Joe’s cooking. Evenings it cooled down into the 90s. We sat on the porch drinking beer while Lightning Jack lounged on the hammock strung between two big oaks out front. Everything seemed free and easy, but the truth was the Feds had turned up the heat on Lightning Jack. He’d heisted three tankers in three weeks, and they needed to stop the bleeding. Plus, he was more famous now than he’d ever been in his NASCAR days. Taking him out would be a coup for Buffalo, and it might curtail the ravages of Gallant Jim and Albertini and the half-dozen other gangs that had sprung up in our wake. Worse yet, the rumors of undercover Federal agents that had forced us out of Memphis had started floating around in Little Rock. It was enough to make a man nervous.
Despite all that, Jack was anxious to get on the road again.
“I want to drive, Gus,” he told me one afternoon out in the barn. He leaned against the hood of the Dragon and crossed his legs at the ankle. A shaft of sunlight pierced the roof—the barn had seen better days—limning him in a golden nimbus. The scar from the Tallahassee job was a vivid white streak across his forehead. A millimeter to the right—less, even—and it would have splattered his brains across the rear window of his black Dragon. Sometimes I think it would have been better that way.
“Remember when we met? You blew that race on the truck circuit because you were too aggressive.”
“I remember.”
“Sometimes you got to know when to pit, Jack.”
“I want to win,” he said.
“Well, the stakes are a lot higher than they were in Daytona.”
I didn’t say it—I didn’t have to—but the stakes were life and death. I didn’t know how many crow’s nest gunners I’d killed, but I figured in all that shooting I must have taken my fair share. And that didn’t include the seven tanker drivers who had gone down, or the boy I’d shot in that New Federal patrol that had stumbled across u
s after the Frankfort job. I still remembered him. I favored an older daisy cutter, the G39-X, a predecessor to Jack’s Heckler & Koch, but it was still lethal. It had cut that boy nearly in half, and I couldn’t stop seeing that image in my mind—the shocked look on his face as the bullets tore into his midsection and his mortality dawned on him for the second or two it took him to bleed out. He probably hadn’t thought about it before, not in any real serious way, and he didn’t have long to think about it then. But you could tell it made an impression. He was the one who stuck with me most, but none of them were very far from my mind in those days. I couldn’t lie to myself that I was merely a crew chief anymore. The knowledge of what I had become and what I had done sometimes woke me up in the night to gaze out the window into the dark, rolling hills of the farm. When I’d showed up at Jack’s gate after the Citizens’ Militia had drafted me, I hadn’t realized I was signing on for this.
Lola, too, seemed to be having some trouble coping—or that’s what I thought, anyway. She grew distant and quiet, and while she still shared my bed, there were no more good-natured tussles in the hay. Sex became perfunctory, a grim duty. It’s not that I didn’t love her anymore. But a river of blood flowed between us now, and we couldn’t find a way to bridge it. We didn’t spend much time in the barn together, and when we did we kept our conversation to the point: “Reach me that spanner, will you?” or “Can you give me a hand with the lift?”
I guess the rest of the crew must have known before I did—love can blind you that way—but no one said a word. You didn’t cross Jack, for one thing, but I think the true reason is that none of them wanted to break the glue that bound us all together. We’d divorced ourselves too much from the rest of the world for us to risk it. With those rumors of Federal agents in the air, even Little Rock was off-limits. So we lived for one another, and we lived for the cars, and we lived for Lightning Jack. He was the most solitary of us all, I suppose. As the wheelman, he stood a step above his crew, isolated by his skill and by his fame and by the scar that forever marked his identity. The easy days of living in the Adler Hotel and making the social rounds were over. He was a marked man, and I think he knew that he was living on borrowed time. I believe that’s why he was so anxious to hit the road and boost another tanker—it was the only time he really felt alive anymore. And I think that’s why he started sleeping with Lola, as well. For the thrill of it, nothing more. To this day I don’t believe he meant anything personal.
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 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 official files remain closed. And what about the cleanup? Where are the investigators and where are 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 a.m., 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, sometime 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 the rest, 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 Confe
deracy 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 Lightning 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.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 Page 24
