Blind Spot

by Chris Fabry

  “I got Timmy Carhardt in the cab with me,” Charlie said, clicking the mic.

  The radio was dead for a minute.

  “Tell Tim we said hello,” the driver replied. About half a dozen of them echoed his words or double clicked their mics.

  “How’d you get down here?” Charlie said.

  “I not only lost my tickets, but I lost my ride back to Tallahassee. I assume you guys are headed straight back to Charlotte.”

  “That’s right. I’d love to take you over there, but I got a deadline.”

  “I understand. Do you think you could just let me off near Jacksonville? I could call my cousin from there.”

  Charlie thought awhile, which meant there were a few minutes of just the country music and the crackle of the CB. Finally, looking straight at the road, he said, “We miss your dad out here. It’s not the same without him.”

  “Yeah. Same here.”

  “You getting along all right?”

  “I’m in school now, making lots of friends.” He didn’t know why he lied. Maybe he wanted Charlie to think everything was okay with him. “And the people I’m staying with are good to me.”

  “That’s good. I always wondered where you went. Must have been a tough last few months.”

  The sound of the road and the squawk of the CB and the radio brought everything back. It was like coming home again.

  “Charlie, what do you think the chances would be of me coming back and riding with a team again? I’d pull my weight. Help with anything.”

  “I thought you said you had it good in this new situation.”

  “Yeah, I do, but . . .”

  “You miss Chester, don’t you?”

  They both laughed, and Tim scratched the dog’s head. “Yeah, there’s nobody like old Chester. It’s a pretty far-fetched idea, I know. Maybe after I finish school, huh?”

  “Yeah, that’s a good idea. Finish school and see if you still want to get back out here.”

  When they neared Jacksonville, Charlie put out a call on his CB to a family he knew that was headed west from there. The father turned out to be a man Charlie had worked with years before in Andalusia, Alabama.

  “We have an extra seat, no problem,” the man said when they met at a gas station. “Hope you don’t mind riding with some snoring kids in the back.”

  “Don’t mind at all,” Tim said.

  Tim thanked Charlie and gave Chester a good-bye pat on the head. Charlie tried to say something, but he finally just lightly punched Tim on the shoulder and ambled off to his truck.

  They were a few miles down the road when the dad looked in the rearview mirror and asked Tim where he lived and how he’d liked the race. Most of the others in the car were asleep.

  In Tallahassee, Tim asked the man to drop him at a nearby convenience store. He offered to pay the man for his trouble, but he wouldn’t take anything.

  “See you, Tim,” the mother said from the front, shifting in her seat for a better position.

  The man stepped out of the car. “I know all about what happened to you. Last year at Talladega, right?”

  “Yeah, that was my dad.”

  The man put a hand on Tim’s shoulder. “I want you to know how sorry we are. Afterward I read a story in the paper that mentioned you. Our family has been praying for you ever since.”

  “I appreciate that, sir,” Tim said. “I wish I’d have met you folks before I headed to Daytona.”

  The man handed him a business card with his phone number on it. “Anything you need, call me.” He bit his lip. “Do you know the Lord, son?”

  Tim nodded. “Oh yeah.” He said it because he knew that’s what the man wanted to hear. But the truth was, Tim wanted to finish his sentence with and I don’t want anything to do with him.

  “You’ll be okay from here?” the man said.

  “Yeah, my place is just back there. I thank you for your kindness.”

  Tim walked the rest of the way home, past a few barking dogs. A raccoon was in a garbage can, its tail twitching. It looked right at Tim, then went back to the half-eaten bag of microwave popcorn.

  The front door was locked, and Tim didn’t have a key. He jimmied his window open and crawled through, landing on his bed. He lay there a few minutes, listening for anyone stirring in the rest of the trailer. Fully clothed, his backpack still slung around his arm, Tim fell asleep and didn’t wake up until he was late for school the next day.

  Chapter 21

  Midnight Conversation

  JAMIE TRIED TO SLEEP, stretched out in the middle seat of the family’s Suburban, but she couldn’t get the sight of her dad’s wrecked car out of her head. Or the sight of Butch Devalon standing by his car at the end of the race, pumping his fists, his crew whooping around him and shaking champagne bottles all over. The Devalons were probably already home. Like a lot of teams, they had flown their jet to Daytona.

  She’d seen the replay of the wreck a few times in the camper and cringed when one of the announcers asked Devalon to explain what happened. “Well, that was unfortunate. I got a little excited in the middle of the pack and kind of bumped Dale. I was lucky to get out of there without damage to the car, and we had us a good one today. Took us all the way to the finish line.”

  “What’s it feel like to be leader in points after the first race of the season?” the announcer said.

  “Feels real good to get a win. A win is good anytime of the year but especially to start the season. I’m happy as a clam. Of course, it’s a long season, so we’ll just have to see what happens.”

  Burrowing around Jamie’s brain was the conversation she’d had with Butch Devalon. Was he setting her up, or did the Devalon team really want to sign her? She couldn’t talk with her dad about it and wouldn’t, unless Kellen opened his big mouth.

  “Hey, Dad,” Jamie whispered. He turned down MRN on the radio, and Jamie looked at her mother, fast asleep beside him, her face illuminated by the dashboard lights. “Did Scotty tell you what he ate that made him so sick?”

  Scotty had been taken to a nearby hospital and had to stay overnight. The doctors said he needed fluids, and they wanted to watch him.

  Her dad chuckled. “You know Scotty. He’ll eat almost anything that isn’t on the move. He made the rounds of the different haulers. It’s hard to tell what it was, but I can tell you this: as sick as he got, he’ll stick with our food from now on.”

  Jamie’s mind swirled with everything from Chad to her dad’s interview after the race.

  Her dad’s familiar voice came on the radio, answering a question from a reporter. “Well, it’s just one of those things that happens. The car was running well, and I felt like we had a good chance, but you have to take the good with the bad. Everything happens for a reason, and we’ve got a long season ahead.”

  She looked at her dad and could tell from his face, even if no one else could, that he was mad.

  “How’d you feel up there with the spotters?” her dad whispered.

  “Good, I guess. I hate that I couldn’t get you out of that mess.”

  “You did great,” he said. “I was real comfortable with you watching my back. Maybe you were the one who gave Scotty the bad food.”

  Jamie laughed.

  “Any more thoughts about selling your cars?”

  “Yeah. This is something I really want to do, Dad. I know you’re against it. . . .”

  He stretched and put his arm on the seat back and patted her arm. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I want to give you the go-ahead. I want to work with you so you can reach your dream. I just have this gut feeling that it’s not the right time. And if I was to give in on this when I feel so strongly, it wouldn’t be right.” She leaned back, and he looked in the rearview mirror. “Let’s keep talking. Gonna be a hairy few days, trying to get the car in shape for California, but we can hash this out. There’s nobody who’s more on your team than me.”

  Jamie closed her eyes. Butch Devalon’s face flashed through her mind. She le
aned forward and touched his shoulder. “Thanks for trusting me with the spotter’s job. Maybe you can return the favor someday.”

  “You got it, kid.”

  Jamie looked at her mom. Did she sleep with a smile, or was that there because she’d heard every word?

  Chapter 22

  Caught

  TIM WALKED TO Community Church, a sprawling building with a parking lot as big as a shopping mall’s. There were flags around one building with windows that ran from the ground all the way to the roof. He spotted the red SUV toward the front of the lot. He glanced at the building to make sure no one was watching. The place looked deserted.

  He pulled out his pocketknife and went to work, shoving the blade into the sidewalls. He thought about smashing the windshield, but that felt a little like overkill.

  The tires were flat within a couple of minutes, and he walked away slowly, like he’d just been out for a stroll. Headlights shone in the distance, and two vans pulled in. He froze, a deer in the headlights. More like a deer holding a sharp knife in the headlights. He quickly closed the knife and shoved it in his pocket.

  The van stopped near him, but he kept walking. A door opened on the other side, closed, and the van sped away. He kept his head down, his hat pulled low.

  “Tim?” someone shouted. A girl’s voice.

  He turned to see Kimberly heading toward him.

  “Did you just get here? We’ve been over at the soup kitchen. We do that once a month. You want to come in? We have a short meeting inside before the night’s over.”

  “I gotta get home.”

  “Oh, how’d Daytona go? I heard it was a good race.”

  “Yeah, exciting.”

  “Everything work out with Jeff?”

  “Sort of. He here tonight?”

  “No, he only shows up when there’s food or bowling. Actually, I felt kind of bad suggesting him because he’s not one of our strongest guys, if you know what I mean. I don’t even know that he’s a believer, but I do know he’s a big race fan.”

  “Wait,” Tim said, his heart racing. “He’s not here tonight? Isn’t that his car?”

  “I don’t think so. He drives a ratty old thing that’s falling apart. I can get you his phone number, if you’d like.”

  /////

  Two days later a police officer showed up at the trailer park and asked to talk to Tim. Tyson wasn’t home from work, and Vera was more than a little agitated to see a badge at their door. What would the neighbors think? Tim was sure that was going through her mind.

  “Were you over at the Community Church a couple of nights ago?” the officer said. He was a stern-faced guy with a military haircut.

  Tim knew Kimberly had seen him, so he couldn’t lie. “Yeah, I was there. Just cutting through the parking lot.”

  “Where were you going?”

  “On my way home.”

  “You know anything about four slashed tires?”

  Tim hesitated.

  “Why don’t you come with me.”

  Tyson pulled in as they were driving away. Tim thought about waving at him from the back of the squad car, but he didn’t.

  Instead of taking him to the police station and throwing him in jail, which is what Tim thought would happen, the cop drove to the church and escorted Tim to the front desk, where a woman dialed a number. She hung up and told them they could go in. They walked upstairs to an office area. The cop seemed to know where he was going.

  “They keep a surveillance camera going 24-7,” the officer said. “They caught you in the act, but we didn’t know who you were until we found the girl you were talking to.”

  Great, Tim thought. Ratted out by Miss Christian Teen America.

  The pastor met them at his office door and shook hands with the officer. He stood in a long room with lots of books on mahogany shelves.

  Tim couldn’t help but notice the old coins in a glass case. He’d seen ones from the 1800s, but these looked even older.

  “Thanks for helping with this,” the pastor said to the officer, then turned to Tim. “He’s a member of our congregation here. He agreed to help us work this out.”

  “I’ll be downstairs,” the officer said.

  “Have a seat, Tim.” The pastor offered him one of the overstuffed chairs by his desk, then sat facing him. “You want to tell me why, of all the cars in the parking lot, you chose mine? Have I done something to upset you?”

  “I’m sorry about your car,” Tim said. “It was a mistake.”

  The man’s brow was furrowed, and Tim imagined it was the way he looked when he preached about hell. But there was something about his eyes that made Tim want to tell him the truth. So he did. The whole story of meeting Jeff and getting stiffed on the way to Daytona just spilled out.

  The man listened, his hands together, index fingers resting on his lower lip. “Sounds like a bad experience,” he said when Tim finished. “Why didn’t you smash the windshield?”

  “I thought about it.”

  The man smiled. “So what do you think I ought to do?”

  Tim thought a moment. “If I paid you back for the tires, would you call it square?”

  He nodded. “I think that would work. Do you have a job?”

  “Not yet.” He reached in his pocket. “But I got $100. That’s a good start—don’t you think?”

  The man dipped his head in thought. “Tell you what. Keep that until I find out exactly how much it’s going to cost. You seem like a responsible young man. Maybe you just had a lapse in judgment. You don’t have a police record.” He grabbed a piece of paper from his desk. “We have a janitorial position that hasn’t been filled. It’s three nights and weekends. You’d clean up after the kids’ meetings and church services. Not very glamorous but it pays. You interested?”

  After what had happened with Jeff, Tim didn’t want anything to do with any church on the face of the planet. But this guy seemed evenhanded, and Tim needed the money to pay him back for his tires. “How much?”

  The pastor told him the hourly rate. It sounded more than fair. Probably more than Tyson made an hour.

  “Okay, I’ll do it. Just until I get your tires paid off.”

  Chapter 23

  Maxwell Trouble

  JAMIE’S AD FOR MAXIE went in the paper the next week. She cleaned and polished both cars until they shone. She’d scraped Maxie against a concrete pole in the school parking lot, and she tried to paint it herself but couldn’t match the color. Only two people came to look that week, and one made an offer. It was half of what the car was worth.

  Jamie’s dad raced at the California Speedway the next weekend, and people from their church gathered to watch at the house. It was a tradition that the people in her mom and dad’s Bible study got together and prayed before the races in the spring and fall, when the family didn’t travel with him.

  Jamie was as polite as she could be, but when she saw Vanessa Moran, she couldn’t believe it.

  “Jamie, you know Vanessa from church, don’t you?” her mom said.

  “Yeah,” she said, not impolite but not necessarily inviting either. As soon as she could, she excused herself and retreated to the garage. She flipped on the black-and-white TV on the workbench and changed Maxie’s oil.

  “So this is what you do in your spare time?” Vanessa said, venturing into the garage like it was some foreign country. When Jamie held out her oil-stained hands, the girl made a face.

  “What did you think they ran on, sugar and spice?” Jamie said.

  “You don’t have to get surly about it. How’s your dad doing?”

  Jamie turned up the volume. “He’s having wedge problems, and he cut a tire in a spinout. Just got the blue flag.”

  Vanessa squinted at the tiny screen. “How can you tell all that? I thought they just went around and around until somebody won.”

  Jamie wiped her hands on a rag and pushed hair from her face. “There’s a lot of teamwork and strategy to racing.” She almost started to explain, but sh
e figured it would be wasted on Vanessa.

  “No, go on. Tell me more. Maybe I can teach my dad. All he knows is how much money everybody makes. What’s the blue flag?”

  “They have different colored flags to communicate to drivers. Green means go, of course. The checkered flag . . . well, you have to know what the checkered flag means.”

  “They’re supposed to stop and play checkers? No, I know—it’s the one the winner gets. But I’ve never seen a blue flag.”

  “It’s got a yellow stripe on it. If you get that, you’re supposed to let the lead cars pass you.”

  “Kind of like a yield sign.”

  “You got it.”

  “That can’t be good.”

  “Like I said, he’s had his problems. But the race is 500 miles, so he’s got time to catch up.” Jamie looked at the screen again. “These guys in the lead are on the same team. They’re going to work together to finish as high as they can.”

  “You mean they help each other out?”

  Jamie nodded. “You get points for leading the most laps, for winning a race, and other stuff. The driver with the most points at the end of the year wins the cup. They also have team winners. Now the guy in third, he’s drafting them both to go faster, and at some point he’ll try to pass—”

  “Why are they all in a line like that?”

  “Cuts down the wind resistance.” She used her hands to explain. “When the cars go 180 or 190 in the straightaway, like at Daytona or Talladega, the wind slows them down. But if a car pulls right up behind them, the wind is displaced—it just goes over the cars easier and makes them go faster. Add another car or two, and it makes the whole group move faster. The California Speedway isn’t as long, so you don’t get those speeds. But if you try to pull out and pass from that pack, you can find yourself all the way at the back.”

  “How do they know when they can pass?”

  “That’s where the spotter comes in. The drivers have radios to communicate with people on the roof of the grandstand. They tell them when they’re clear to pass.”