The Speed Queen

by Stewart O'Nan

  You know how when you’re really stuffed you say you’re never going to eat again? This time it’s true.

  Sorry, I’m a little tired right now. Big food always makes me sleepy. I did Darcy’s white crosses with my diet Pepsi, so I’ll be fine in a little bit. I should get going on your questions. It’s already nine because “Primetime” is on; Janille never misses it.

  I was wondering though, even if it is a novel, if you say Natalie did it, can she sue you? What about Gainey’s money, could she get any of that? I guess I should’ve asked Mr. Jefferies all this before we signed the contract. Too late now, huh?

  That’s all right, it doesn’t change what I’m going to say. You paid your money so you’re getting the whole story, like it or not. What you do with it after that is up to you. You’re the big writer.

  29

  I don’t remember exactly when I first did speed with Lamont. We didn’t start shooting it right away. That wasn’t for a long time. First we just did pills.

  Weekends we’d go to car shows out of town, over to Albuquerque or down to Houston. We needed the 442 to win some prizes so we could sell it for more. We always took a few black beauties to help us get back. Lamont got them from this Indian guy in our complex who worked for the college. India Indian. They were mostly caffeine, I think, because that summer when the guy wasn’t around, Lamont got some from Paul with the Charger, and they were different.

  We were going to Phoenix, about six of us, all in different categories. There was a guy named Cream with a tubbed Mach I and someone with a Yenko Nova. It would take about 16 hours, taking our time. Everyone except us had a trailer. They all left Thursday morning. Lamont figured we could do it in one shot, 40 all the way across and then 17 down. We’d leave after work around midnight and get in around dinner on Friday; that way we’d still have time to clean up the car before the prelim judging Saturday morning.

  Thursday before work, Lamont packed up his buffer and the sheepskin mitt he used to do the hood. He packed up his creams and waxes and the mirror squares that went under the engine and the rear end. I picked out a case of 8-tracks and made some sandwiches we wouldn’t eat.

  Work took forever. I’d almost stopped drinking by then, and I was proud of myself for saving my pint for Monday. Lamont was early. I had my drawer closed out before Mister Fred Fred made it across the street.

  I can take that drive now, mile by mile. 40 West. It’s what they built to replace that stretch of Route 66. It’s just like the song:

  You‘ll see Amarillo,

  Gallup, New Mexico,

  Flagstaff, Arizona, don’t forget Winona—

  Actually Winona’s before Flagstaff, that’s why he says don’t forget it. But that part of 40 is what we were on. My dad said it took them five interstates to replace Route 66 and none of them were half as fun.

  I don’t know. The Cadillac Ranch is something, and that’s on 40. It’s right past Amarillo, in the middle of a field, a line of Caddys sticking up out of the ground like Stonehenge. We went through there around four in the morning on our way out and didn’t see it, but we stopped on the way back and walked out to see them. We were happy because we’d won our bracket; Lamont had the check in his wallet and his back pocket buttoned up. We were both flying, and the sun hurt our eyes. It was early morning; there was no one else around and just a little wind. The field had alfalfa in it and dried cow pies. There was a path all the way out. In the distance you could see a silver water tower like a rocket. The Caddys were half buried and spray-painted red. We walked around them, stupid from being in the car so long. There was graffiti all over them, and broken beer bottles in the dust.

  “They’re in order,” Lamont said, and pointed out the tail fins. “There’s one for every different fin.” He named and dated them and gave me their whole histories. Biarritz, Coupe de Ville, Fleetwood, Calais.

  “They look like bombs that haven’t gone off yet,” I said. “They look like graves. Look how the water sits inside the taillights. And how come there’s no seats—did people steal them?”

  We’d been talking nonstop since the drugs kicked in, but I felt like there was a lot more to say. All the words in my head were going by like traffic. When I stopped talking, my thoughts ran out ahead of me. We stood there holding hands, looking at it like a monument for the dead or something.

  “Hey,” Lamont said, like he was going to say something important, “is this some speed or what?”

  “Tell me about it,” I said. “Can I drive now?”

  “No tickets,” he warned me.

  “Hey,” I said, “we’re rich.”

  Back on the highway, Lamont cracked a diet Pepsi for me and stuck it in the cup holder. It didn’t taste like anything. He slid a hand through one leg of my shorts. It was hard to concentrate on him and keep my eyes on the road. I kept speeding up and then letting my foot off the gas. Finally we pulled over. The air conditioning was chilly. The semis made the whole car shake.

  “We should do this every day,” I said.

  Later we stopped at a Speed-A-Way and Lamont bought a copy of that month’s Old Car Trader. He went right to the Chrysler-Plymouth-Dodge section and started flashing me pictures of Roadrunners. He read off a bunch of them that had been completely restored.

  “We can’t afford that,” I said, like he didn’t know.

  “Here you go,” he said. “1969, documented Hemi, 4 speed, lemon twist yellow, 84 K miles, good condition, no rust, must sacrifice at 7500.”

  “Where is it?” I said.

  He looked up the area code on a chart in the front.

  “Wichita.”

  “What time is it?” I said.

  “Nine thirty-five.”

  “How much cash you got on you?”

  “I’ve got the checkbook,” Lamont said.

  And that’s how we got The Mach 6 Killers’ Death Car.

  There’s an exhibit, you know, right outside of Tucumcari. I saw a picture in this book on roadside attractions. They’ve got one of Liberace’s Rolls-Royces and the original Monkeemobile, even a Christine. Right in the middle of them is our Roadrunner with a Mach 6 tray on the window and a plastic hamburger and fries. You can even get a postcard of it. It looked good, and I thought Lamont would have liked that, knowing someone was taking care of his baby. Sometimes when I’m driving, I’ll pull up outside and wait for someone to recognize me. Then I just scream right out of there.

  I haven’t said anything about Lamont’s folks because they weren’t really part of our life. The Gants were his fifth set of foster parents, and he’d only been with them a few months before he turned legal and got a place of his own. Nothing against them, they just weren’t around that much. After Gainey was born we went over to see them one Sunday. They lived off Wilshire in a so-so neighborhood and they had three other foster kids by then. We got dressed up to go over, and while we were there everything was fine, but when we got home Lamont got all quiet. I put Gainey down for the night. Lamont was on the couch, still in his good clothes but with his tie undone.

  “They’re busy,” I said.

  “I know,” he said. “They were fine.”

  “Want a beer?” I said, and he said, “Sure,” but like it wouldn’t help. That was the last time we saw them. They didn’t come to my trial.

  His real mother sold Lamont for a car when he was a baby, or that was the story. His father wasn’t her husband. The car broke down and his mother went to ask for him back and got in a fight with the other woman. They got arrested and the court took Lamont away. It was a big story in the newspaper back then.

  That’s about the only story Lamont tells. He says it was a ’51 Mercury Monterey, and that’s why he’d never buy a Mercury even though he loves the old Cyclones. The other three families he wouldn’t talk about, or how he got the scar on his neck.

  I’m telling you this because I don’t think you should just blame the drugs, like in Reefer Madness. I don’t mean you should blame Lamont’s being a foster kid either, I ju
st think the reader should know that. He was very proud of being a father to Gainey; it wasn’t something he took for granted.

  30

  Crank, meth, crystal. White. Lamont used to say, “If it ain’t white, it ain’t right.” That was the good stuff. I’ve heard of kids making bathtub crank from muriatic acid and Vicks inhalers. It’s all junk really, the worst thing in the world for you.

  The pills you’d get were bennies or black beauties, christmas trees, purple hearts. Most of them were caffeine. They made your gums sweat so bad you had to spit all the time.

  We just called it crank, or speed, or drugs. It’s not very colorful, I’m afraid. Maybe you could make up a word for it.

  Whatever you do, don’t make us crackheads. That’s just disgusting.

  31

  It’s like you think you can do anything. And you remember that feeling afterwards, not how burnt you were; that’s what makes you want to do it again. It’s psychological that way.

  I never learned to hit myself. Lamont did all of that. At first it was just on weekends. Saturday after lunch, he’d say, “Where you want to go?”

  “Anywhere,” I’d say.

  And he’d say, “How fast you want to get there?”

  It’s like sex, your body anticipates it. Lamont would get everything together to cook it up. He just flicked his lighter and I was wet. I sat on the edge of our bed, watching the spoon go black and the bubbles popping. It was like he did it slow on purpose to get me going. He drew it into the syringe, and I could feel my blood moving, trying to get into position.

  I didn’t even want to see it. I laid my arm on the night table and looked at the wallpaper, the seam where the pattern nearly matched. He tapped the inside of my elbow and plumped up a vein.

  “You okay?” he checked. It was a ritual, the last chance to bail.

  “Dandy,” I said, and he drove the spike home.

  You want me to describe that first rush. It’s like a flood. It’s like standing on the front of a train flying down a mountainside. It’s like you’ve been sick for the longest time and suddenly you’re all better. You feel really lucky. It’s almost funny how lucky you feel. It makes you laugh.

  Your skin tingles all over, like a light sunburn. We’d spend the first hour in bed, Lamont going over me slowly. I’d just lie there with my eyes closed and tell him what he was doing to me. He liked that, when you talked. He wanted to know how he was doing. It was nice; even on Saturday, Casa Mia was empty in the middle of the afternoon. Only once did the neighbors complain, and that’s because I was hitting the wall with the back of my head. Lamont liked to talk too. He used a lot of unnecessary language, which I thought was very sexy at the time. Natalie was the same way.

  We’d take a shower together and get dressed and go out driving and look at things, wash the car, maybe pick up some cigarettes on the way back. You’d go through two or three packs and not even know it. You’d light one and find a new one burning in the ashtray. Nothing did anything to you, it’s like you were superhuman. You’d drink a six of Miller and all it would do was make you go. And forget food, you didn’t even want to think about it.

  You could concentrate, but only on little things, and only for a short time. I used to write down what I wanted to get done while I was up. Because you have all this energy. The problem is you get distracted. You’ll be doing the dishes and the next thing you know you’ve got all the spices down from the cupboard and you’re putting them in order. You start cleaning the closet and end up with three flashlights in pieces on the kitchen table.

  Five or six hours later you want to crash but you can’t. It’s like Insomnia, it just drags on. Your mouth tastes like an ashtray and you haven’t eaten since breakfast and you know you’ve still got another two hours to go.

  Physically it’s hard on you, that’s why you can’t do it on a regular basis. You can’t live on it. Back then I weighed about half of what I do now. The first time my mom brought Gainey in to see me, she didn’t recognize me. My face was just bones. It wears you down. You chew your fingernails, you grind your teeth. You scratch your arms raw and then pick at the scabs. It’s just not a very attractive drug.

  But those first few hours, it’s like you’re there. You’re fifty feet tall and your nerves are made out of gold. It’s like you and the world are going exactly the same speed. When the sun’s hot on the dashboard and there’s no one on the road and you’ve got the whole day in front of you, it’s like you’re going to live forever.

  32

  That was exactly what it says it was for—obstructing justice. May was just when I was sentenced; I was actually arrested in December.

  It was before Christmas. I’d gone to this Christmas party for everyone who worked at the Village Inn and this guy A.J. drove me home. I was late and forgot to call Lamont and when I got home he wasn’t happy, half because I’d been drinking.

  A.J. stayed outside in his car to make sure I got in okay, and Lamont didn’t like the way I waved to him. I explained that he was a friend from work, but Lamont wouldn’t let it drop. All I wanted to do was get in bed.

  “He’s just a good friend,” I said.

  “Now he’s a good friend,” he said. “How come I never heard of this good friend until tonight?” He said some other things he didn’t mean, and I was too drunk to let them slide. It was silly, really.

  “Look,” I said, “can we talk about this tomorrow?”

  “We’re talking about this now,” he said. When I walked past him into the bedroom, he pointed at my face and told me not to walk away.

  I locked the door on him.

  He was slapping it and yelling all kinds of stuff and I was yelling back sometimes—really unnecessary stuff, telling each other what kind of people we were, what was wrong with each other. We didn’t really mean it. Finally he started kicking the door in. It was so cheap his foot came right through it, which of course he blamed on me. I just sat on the bed and laughed.

  Someone downstairs called the cops. By the time they knocked on the door we were done fighting; we just weren’t talking to each other.

  The woman cop took me into the bedroom.

  “We were just having a discussion,” I said.

  “Looks like a good one,” she said, pointing her pen at the door.

  “He didn’t touch me,” I said.

  “You’ve had a little to drink tonight, is that right?”

  “Not much,” I said. “Two beers.”

  I gave her all the information. No, he’d never struck me before. No, he had no prior history of drug usage.

  When we came out to the living room, Lamont had cuffs on.

  “Thanks a lot, Marjorie,” he said.

  “He never touched me,” I kept telling them, but the guy was steering him toward the door. I got in his way.

  “I can’t believe you’d do this to me,” Lamont said. I was crying, my nose was running all over the place.

  “Ma’am, step aside,” the woman said. “Ma’am, I’m only going to tell you this once. I don’t think you want to go to jail tonight.”

  I just wanted to kiss him, to tell him everything was all right between us.

  “I’ll come down and get you out,” I said. “Okay?”

  “That’s it,” the woman said, “you’re gone.”

  She grabbed me by the shoulder, spun me around and pushed my face into the wall. Lamont was shouting now. The woman bent one arm up behind my back and snapped the cuff on. Before she could get my other wrist, Lamont bowled her over and all four of us were on the floor.

  “Marjorie,” Lamont called.

  “I’m okay,” I said, because I was then.

  If you have the mug shot, you can see where she pushed me into the wall. Look how full my face is. We’d only just started snorting it. Look how young we look. That was December of ’84. I was twenty then. It seems a lot longer.

  That was one reason my mom wasn’t talking to me when I was living with Rico. When we were drinking, we used to beat o
n each other. We used to throw things. The toaster, the remote—it was just crazy. One time when I was in the emergency room, they called my mom to come pick me up. Rico and me had been fighting over him seeing this other girl from his work, and I told my mom that was it, I was leaving him.

  I was just mad, and when I calmed down I tried to explain to her why I was going back. She didn’t even try to understand. She only saw that he hit me. We had this huge fight, and she begged me not to go back to him. She said I was being stupid and that he’d kill me and all this other stuff, and finally she said that as long as I was with him she wasn’t going to speak to me.

  “Fine,” I said, “I don’t need this kind of stuff anyway.”

  And in the end she was wrong, that wasn’t why we broke up at all. We broke up because Rico got in a bad accident one night in his old Grand Prix and didn’t get hurt. It was raining and he was coming home from the Golden Corral. He was coming up Classen when this guy in an Imperial pulled out into his lane. Rico swerved to miss him and lost it and hit a telephone pole going sideways.

  The Grand Prix was totaled. The steering column snapped off the headrest. Rico told me he woke up in the passenger seat. He didn’t have his belt on or anything. There wasn’t a cut on him, nothing. And right then and there he started to believe in Jesus.

  Is that funny? He started to believe Jesus was looking out for him that night and he started to read the Bible. Before he came to bed he’d get down on his knees and pray. Sunday he’d get dressed up and go to church alone, and I’d just watch him. We fought about it. I thought he’d gone crazy. That’s what it’s like, it completely changes you and nobody who hasn’t been through it understands. I didn’t. One Sunday when he was in church, I packed up my things and left. That’s when I moved in with Joy and Garlyn. I didn’t tell my mom I’d left. I was still waiting for her to call me.