by Ed Gorman
Two miles of flat concrete were not anything the drag-racing teenager wanted to pass up. At first, this was the site Cliffie and his boys chose to patrol, but it became so heavily patrolled that the kids went elsewhere, leaving the mining road abandoned. But now it was the new places that Cliffie and his crew were patrolling. So little by little the dragsters were coming back to the mining road. Life is indeed a circle.
I’m a big fan of drive-in movie posters. I like the titles, too, such as Hot Rods from Hell and Dragstrip Danger.
The posters, and the movies they advertise, bring up the old argument of art imitating life-or life imitating art. Kids would’ve found out about racing their cars all by their lonesome. But it helped to have posters and movies that choreographed those events for them and showed them how to do it for the most powerful dramatic effect.
Makes you wonder what inspired kids in the Middle Ages, when there weren’t any drive-ins.
As we reached the top of the hill a three-dimensional drive-in movie poster awaited us on the mining road below.
Twenty or so souped-up cars parked on the sides of the highway. The guys were divided into two styles-black leather jackets and jeans, or red James Dean jackets and jeans. The girls were inclined to wear tight skirts and even tighter sweaters and blouses.
Some of them wore their boyfriends’ jackets over their shoulders because of the cold. Most of them wore colorful neck scarves.
Everybody had a beer. Everybody had a cigarette. Everybody knew that they were in a movie of some kind.
There were two cars at the starting line-a fire-red 1950 Oldsmobile and David
Egan’s black Merc. The driver of the Olds had a blond hanging around his neck. From what I could see, Rita Scully was pouring coffee from a thermos into a cup for Egan.
“God, I hope this isn’t liquor,”
Molly said.
“I’m sure it’s coffee.”
I pulled over to the shoulder and parked. The night air was clean and pure. Only as we got closer to the other cars along the road did the smells of gasoline and oil and cigarettes and beer begin to diminish the fresh prairie air.
We weren’t popular with the drag-racing crowd.
They let their faces show their displeasure. They didn’t say a word, but smiles changed to sneers and conversations stopped to become practiced scowls. Just like in teenage gang movies.
But the movie images broke down when you saw them close up. All girls and boys in the juvenile delinquent movies were pretty and dramatic. But up close these kids had noses that were too big or small; a walleye here, a cross-eye there; a kid with oily blackheads, a kid with an overbite that was probably funny to everybody but him. A fat girl, a boy whose name-calling was marred by his lisp.
The eyes told you even more. In the movies, the actors had no lives but the plot. These kids had too much life and it was all there to see in the anger and cold amusement and sorrow of their eyes.
Divorce, expulsion from high school, a year or two in reform school, low-wage jobs they’d toil at for long years, the scorn of their community, the anger that scared even them sometimes-it was all there to see and hear in the poses of anger and arrogance they struck as we moved deeper into the crowd.
Donny Hughes looked at me and said, “It’s the fuzz.”
Donny Hughes was the resident fool. Every group has one. He looked about eleven years old and had a black leather jacket so covered with zippers and chrome buttons that it was a parody, something a Tv comic would wear in a skit about bikers. He was so short and so scrawny that the coat looked like a burden on him. He wore owl glasses and a blond duck’s ass that would require six washings to get rid of all its butch wax.
He said, “Nobody invited the fuzz.”
Molly said, “Shut up, Donny, you annoying little twerp.”
I don’t think you’re supposed to talk to big bad bikers that way. Several people laughed.
Rita saw us before Egan did. Egan was so drunk I wasn’t sure he was capable of seeing us. She whispered something to Egan as he was swearing at his cup for being too hot. He looked up.
Frowned.
“What the hell’re you doing here?” he said to me.
Rita glanced at Molly. “I hope you realize she’s almost jailbait, McCain.”
Molly said, “Rita, you can’t let him race.”
“What’s this shit all about?” Egan said. “Get the hell out of here. I’m fine to race.”
“I don’t want him to race, either,” I said to Rita.
“He’s a big boy,” Rita said.
“He sure isn’t acting like it tonight,” I said.
“One of Cliffie’s boys ever see him, he’d yank his license for a year. Maybe longer. And he’d have it coming, too.”
That was the first time I noticed Kevin Brainard, a beefy, older guy who went six-two and easily better than two hundred pounds. He was drinking from a glass quart of Hamms. His hair was already thinning.
He wanted to intimidate and he did. You put five-five up against six-two and you don’t have much of a contest.
“He was a hell of a lot drunker than this when he raced Mitch Callahan couple weeks ago,” Brainard said.
“He was lucky, then,” I said. “Maybe he won’t be as lucky tonight.”
“Who gave you the right to come out here, anyway?”
Brainard said.
“Egan’s my client.”
“That don’t cut shit out here, man. This strip belongs to us.”
Drive-in dialogue. Real bad drive-in dialogue. He seemed unaware of just how bad, how self-conscious.
I said to Egan, “Cliffie finds out you were drag racing and drunk on top of it, you’ll go right to jail.”
“Just get the hell out of here, McCain, and leave me alone. And take the princess with you.”
“God, David, please listen to him-”
Molly said, stepping toward him.
Rita came up in front of Molly.
“Tell McCain here that in five seconds I’m telling Kevin to start breaking him in two.
And I’m serious.”
“But this is ridiculous,” Molly said. “People don’t do-”
But people do do. And people do do it all the time. They use clubs, fists, knives, guns, whatever it takes. Not in Molly’s world but in the world at large-they do do it all the time.
We were in a movie and the inevitable scene of violence was upon us. I was getting my one and only close-up right now. I looked scared shitless was what I looked like. I didn’t like to think of what Kevin Brainard could do to me.
Molly tried to walk around Rita but Rita wouldn’t let her. She shoved Molly. “You take him, Kevin. I’ll take her.”
And then it started, that inevitable scene of violence I talked about.
Rock-and-roll radios blasting. Kids forming a circle around us. Rita twisting Molly around and getting her in a hammerlock. And Brainard hunching low and coming at me.
Fight scene-take one-the assistant director shouts.
And the camera starts rolling.
My dad taught me one thing about fighting when you’re our diminutive size. Fight dirty.
Only chance you have. Leave the heroics to John Wayne and the movie stars.
So when Brainard came hulking toward me, his hands coming up and automatically forming clamps that would fit nicely around my throat, I steadied myself and hoped that my aim was as true as it usually was. He had to be in the right position and I had to be damned quick or the moment would be lost.
He came closer and closer.
Everybody was cheering him on. Some of the drive-in movie things they said were so stupid, I almost broke out laughing. Which I would’ve done if Brainard hadn’t just spat in my face. He apparently believed in demolishing you only after he’d humiliated you. Still and all, even with spittle dripping down my forehead, “Kill him, daddy-o!” distracted the hell out of me.
“Daddy-o” was a word that was popular from approximately 1954 to 1958 or thereab
outs.
Slang expires just like bread and milk do at the supermarket.
But this was the wrong time to worry about the social faux pas of using dated slang. Because this huge, angry guy showing off for the crowd was about to seize my throat.
I fired my one and only weapon, which is the toe of my 8-D penny loafer. You can’t tell right away if it worked. That’s the only thing about getting somebody in the balls. It always takes a couple of seconds to register in the other guy’s brain, as if his sac has to send his mind a telegram.
He kept coming, leaving me with the impression that my aim had been off. His clamplike hands groped for me-and then his face changed. It was as if he’d slipped on a new mask. If he’d been wearing rage, he was now wearing pain.
Pain and misery and an anger he could only put into a few spluttering curse words.
He dropped to his knees, holding his crotch. He was momentarily immobilized.
I heard Molly scream. Rita still had Molly in a hammerlock, bending her over a car hood.
I started toward them but Egan reached them before I did. He put a quick hand on Rita’s shoulder and said, “Let her go.”
“She shouldn’t be here.”
“Let her go, Rita. Now.”
Rita relented reluctantly. You could see that the pain didn’t subside any for Molly.
As she slumped against the car hood, I took her shoulder and gently tried to help her up. I knew better than to touch the arm Rita had been so expertly working on. Molly’s eyes gleamed with tears as she began the millimeter-by-millimeter process of trying to straighten her arm out.
“You two get out of here,” Egan said to my back. “A lot of these people here don’t seem to like you. Anyway, I got a race.”
His words were still slurred; he squinted to find focus.
Molly started to say something. I took her good arm and tugged her away from the car.
“Let’s go,” I said.
Then we were back to living our life inside that drive-in movie poster. There was a lot of posing and pouting, girls as well as boys, as I led Molly up the hill toward my car. Several of the hot-rodders revved their engines and their radios. It was a rock-and-roll moment, daddy-o.
“You really kicked Brainard hard,” Molly said.
“Yeah.”
“I’m glad.”
“How’s the arm?”
“I wish I would’ve been able to kick her.
She’s really mean.” Her arm was at her side.
She rubbed it with her good hand.
By the time we reached the top of the hill and the ragtop, the shouts below turned away from us and to the race.
We turned and watched. Rita positioned herself in the middle of the strip, arms raised above her head. She’d drop her arms and the cars would come screaming off the line.
“He’s really going to do it, isn’t he?”
“I’m afraid so, Molly.”
“He could get killed.”
“He’s old enough to know what he’s doing.”
“I shouldn’t have said what I said about him feeling so sorry for himself. I love him. I really do.”
And then they were off.
We had a good place to watch. From here, the two dragsters were the size of huge toys.
They both fishtailed off the line, scarring the road with black tread, rubber crying like lost children.
Molly’s fingers dug into my wrist as we stood there in the nose-numbing wind, looking down into the darkness where headlights carved out an area that looked not unlike a cave. It was all primitive and it was all dangerous and it was all juvenile but I couldn’t deny the excitement.
I’d been in a lot of drag races myself.
What’s the point of having a hot car if you can’t prove it’s hot? But I’d never gone into a race drunk.
The black car and the red car stayed pretty close right up until the end and then the black car lurched ahead.
I realized what was going to happen before Molly did. From up here it was pretty easy to spot.
The ones on the ground wouldn’t realize it until it was over and too late.
The red car fought and fishtailed to a stop a few yards before the road ended, where the trestle bridge had once been.
Molly screamed, her nails ripping into my wrist.
What he did, David Egan, was overshoot the end of the road and hurtle into the air, smashing into the hard clay wall on the other side of the narrow river where the bridge had once been.
The explosion happened first. I’d seen Egan at the gas station not long ago. He probably had a full tank.
The explosion came in three quick segments, like bursts of railroad dynamite taking out a side of hill. A furious flare glared yellow-red-green-blue against the starry night sky, the spectacle of it hushing everybody for a terrible breath-held moment, the passenger’s door ripping off and flying into the brightest depths of the explosion, glass and one of the taillights blowing up and out into the darkness.
And then the screams started from below. And people started running down the road toward the red car, whose driver was now outside his car and shouting something.
He started running around in animal-crazy little circles.
Then the car disappeared into the river. Just vanished into the fast, moon-traced water.
And Molly was screaming and sobbing and shouting.
And all I could do was hold her and let her pound her little fists into me. I had no idea what to say to her. Or to myself.
Part II
Twelve
In every small town there are one or two women who shame everybody else with their virtue. It is not forced virtue or contrived virtue and it does not necessarily have anything to do with denominational religion, though it is the essence of Christ’s words before churches began twisting it to their own ends.
It’s called decency. It’s being kind, generous, and understanding to those around you, even those you disagree with. It’s not plaster sainthood. This kind of virtue is capable of a tart comment but never a mean one; of a disagreement but never one that questions the other person’s own virtue; and even a moment or two of righteous anger when it sees a wrong. When the Goldmans first moved here, somebody wrote Jew on their garage door. The Kelly sisters went there immediately upon hearing about it, scrubbed the word off, and gave the Goldmans a rhubarb pie they’d made the night before. The Kelly sisters had grown up in the far west, where Catholics had not always been welcome. They had a good sense of what the Goldmans must have felt l.
Emma and Amy Kelly practiced such virtue every day. They were the slender, white-haired, old maid aunts who had raised David Egan after the death of his mother. They drove a 1939 Chevrolet that probably still hadn’t topped 25eajjj on the odometer and they dressed in the summery cotton dresses that they wore almost everywhere but Sunday mass.
That called for the dark blue velveteen dresses they were known for when they took their place in the choir loft. They had beautiful voices; you could hear the song of the green hills of Gael in them.
About the only time you heard them boast-and I can see their freckled girlish faces smiling as they’d say it-was when they boasted that they have never missed a Sunday mass, not even during the legendary flood of ‘dc, for twenty-seven years running. They liked beer upon occasion, a “naughty” story upon occasion, and soap operas.
Just as you could not convince a professional wrestling fan that his favorite sport was rigged, neither could you convince the Kelly sisters that soap operas were not lifelike. Their father was very much old country-true old country-spending his years as a key-and-lock man and a gunsmith. He’d often joined his daughters at church in singing hymns.
He had a great Irish tenor voice.
By the time the Kelly sisters reached the old mine road tonight, more than one hundred people had gathered to watch divers bring up the body of David Egan and a winch begin to haul up what remained of his black Jimmy Dean Merc.
Cliffie’s men let
the Kelly sisters through the road block that had been set up at the top of the hill. Their sedan wasn’t far from where I stood with Molly, who was in the process of working through her shock. I keep a pint of Old Grandad in my glove compartment for just such occasions. She’d had three hefty belts of it.
The Kelly sisters were dressed in dark zipper jackets, corduroy trousers, and golf hats that at any other time would have looked cute and jaunty. But this was not a night for cute and jaunty.
I walked over to them. They’d been on my long-ago paper route. In the summer there was always a glass of Pepsi waiting for me when I stopped by to make my weekly collection. In the winter it was hot chocolate. And always, always there was the Kelly sisters’ interest in your life.
Conventional wisdom said that the Kelly sisters took such interest in the lives of the young people around them because they’d never had kids of their own. And I suspect that was true. But it made their interest no less valuable. You said things to the Kellys you might not say to your parents-no dark secrets, you understand, but daydreams most older folks would dismiss as foolish. Things like that.
Emma’s arthritic hand took mine and she said, “We hadn’t seen him since just after lunch. Was he drunk, Sam?”
They didn’t want lies. They’d lived hard working-class lives and while they needed the same number of delusions and hopeless hopes we all needed to survive, at a moment like this they wanted the truth.
“He was pretty bad off, Emma,” I said.
Amy was the one who reacted. She crossed herself. She was praying for his soul.
“Did anybody else get hurt?” Emma said.
“No. The other kid stopped in time.”
“Thank God,” Emma said. “At least it was just himself.”
The hardness of her tone surprised me. Amy put a trembling hand to her eyes to wipe away tears. But Emma’s eyes were dry, the blue of them cold.
