The Highway Kind by Patrick Millikin
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I can only suspect that the lonely man peoples his driving dreams with friends, that the loveless man surrounds himself with lovely loving women, and that children climb through the dreaming of the childless driver.
—John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley
Stealing a man’s wife, that’s nothing, but stealing his car, that’s larceny.
—James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice
PREFACE
ON A DRIVE from Phoenix to Colorado Springs recently, I pulled over east of Holbrook, Arizona, where a thin strip of weedy asphalt wound in and out of view. This remnant of Route 66 soon disappeared as it merged with the interstate for several miles, then branched off again to continue its path. As I drove on to the sound of freight cars clanking on the nearby railroad line, the years seemed to slip away and I found myself transported into the country’s recent past. For decades, Route 66 connected travelers from the east to the “promised land” of California, serving everyone from Depression-era Okies fleeing the dust bowl to an endless succession of young would-be actresses seduced by the allure of Hollywood. Military convoys utilized it during World War II, and later, in the 1950s and ’60s, hell-raising teenagers drag raced hot rods on the two-lane blacktop. The iconic route bore witness to a remarkable period of change and upheaval.
When President Eisenhower signed the Federal Aid Highway Act in 1956, he launched the immense interstate system that would create unprecedented ease of movement around the country. This signaled the demise of Route 66 and other venerable roads and in some ways marked the end of our innocence as motorists. Roads meant everything to the country, and then they meant something else. With high-speed thoroughfares came convenience, but also anonymity and a dramatic rise in interstate crime and accident-related deaths (up until the early 1960s, seat belts remained optional in many vehicles). Postwar prosperity ushered in a golden age of the country’s car culture: the middle class was on the rise, gas was cheap, and in Detroit the race was on to create the biggest, the most luxurious, the fastest cars. Americans were going places, and mobility equaled freedom. It is an easy era to romanticize now: a time of sleek, big-finned sedans, when knowing one’s way around an engine symbolized masculinity, and owning a car meant a literal sort of empowerment.
We live in a vastly different world today, but many of us still spend significant portions of our lives alone in our cars. Over the years, the automobile has come to represent not just our freedom, but our isolation. For many Americans, driving is the closest we’ll get to a meditative state. When we’re not checking our e-mail or text-messaging with our friends, we’re driving and we’re thinking. We silently plot crimes, decide to quit drinking, sneak cigarettes, muster the courage to leave our husbands or wives, binge on fast food at anonymous drive-ins. Our cars facilitate our secret lives.
And perhaps this is because roads remain the most democratic of all our institutions. For the moment, anyway, we’re free to roam wherever and whenever we wish (if we can afford to do so), and the roads connect us, from the lowliest barrio to the most exclusive neighborhood. Follow a lowered ’60s Impala, a Honda minivan, or a new Mercedes S-Class sedan, and you’ll likely end up in three very different places, listening to three very different stories.
American crime fiction and cars have been accomplices from the beginning, partly because they both developed during the same time. The classic Western loner became, in urban America, the hard-boiled detective maneuvering down the mean streets in his car. The mythology of the Old West depended on an American wanderlust that nicely translated from the horse to the automobile, and the terse and tough realism defined by Hammett, Chandler, and Cain (among others) has always owed more of a debt to Natty Bumppo and Huck Finn than the British drawing room. At its best, crime fiction in this country remains a kind of outsider art form, providing a street-level view of the American landscape.
Tales of Fast Cars, Desperate Drivers, and Dark Roads is the subtitle for this collection of car-inspired stories, and to be sure, the reader can look forward to equal measures of all three. When I solicited the authors, I kept the guidelines pretty loose in order to encourage as many different approaches as possible. The stories were to be about “cars, driving, and the road.” I expected a provocative mix of visceral, plot-driven stories and more outré existential tales; what I didn’t expect was the deeply personal, almost confessional tone that many of these stories possess. Ben Winters establishes the mood with his opening salvo about a veteran car salesman and a test drive gone horribly wrong. Willy Vlautin writes the aching tale of a middle-aged housepainter, a Pontiac Le Mans, and a young kid’s painful coming of age. George Pelecanos contributes a moving elegy to the Vietnam era, when Mopar was king and young men raced cars in the night. Then there’s Diana Gabaldon’s inventive reimagining of a notorious real-life Autobahn accident in Nazi Germany as narrated by Dr. Ferdinand Porsche, not to mention Joe Lansdale’s unforgettable tale of two kids on the road during the Great Depression. Luis Alberto Urrea rounds out the collection with his surreal story about an old man bent on vengeance, a tricked-out VW bus, and a cartel boss known as El Surfo. These are but a few of the varied treasures to be found herein, so whether you’re a gearhead or just someone who digs a good exciting tale, you’re in for a wild ride.