The Highway Kind(49)
She put both hands on the handle and pulled the pram to turn it, to head to her house. She looked at me then, one last time, her eyes now dark in the shadow of her hat.
“But that doesn’t mean I will ever forget. I won’t do that either, Ferdie. Good-bye.”
I stayed there for some time, long after she had disappeared; I heard the clang of the gate on the other side of the park.
I knew enough.
It was my car. And Bernie was my friend.
Author’s Note: This story is really a piece of historical narrative rather than historical fiction. The events are factual, taken from primary sources of the time and from analyses published after the accident. The technical details are taken mostly from Aldo Zano’s thorough analysis of the record attempt and the Stromlinienwagen’s engineering details. Most of the people mentioned are real people, and their backgrounds, positions, and relationships are drawn from biographical accounts. Only the inquiries undertaken by Dr. Porsche and Elly Beinhorn are fictional. I am deeply indebted to Doug Watkins, both for the original suggestion for the story and for the research material that gave it its bones.
WHIPPERWILL AND BACK
By Patterson Hood
CHARLIE ALWAYS DROVE way too fast. The car was overpowered and rusted, and the road twisted and wound through red-clay foothills and pine thickets. Lester was slouched down in the passenger seat, rolling a joint with one hand while exclaiming and gesturing wildly with the other. They both had Milwaukee’s Best cans between their legs as the car tried to hang on to every curve. There was a cooler with a bunch more Milwaukee’s Best cans on some ice just behind the driver’s seat and every so often Lester and Charlie would throw their empties out the window, Charlie would say, “Lester, grab another Beast,” and Lester would grab two more, open them, and light another joint. It could have been just any Thursday night, or any other night, for that matter. With one difference.
“I ain’t heard Dale lately. Think we ought to check on him?”
Lester’s question didn’t seem to register with Charlie at first and he just kept on driving. Perhaps he didn’t hear him, as Thin Lizzy’s Live and Dangerous was blasting really loud from the Craig PowerPlay eight-track, that part where “Cowboy Song” runs straight into “The Boys Are Back in Town,” which normally Lester would know better than to interrupt. It had been a couple of hours since they had left the Zippy Mart and initially everything had gone fairly smooth. They were friendly with Dale. Not best buds or nothing, but he always had good dope and would let them shoplift if no one else was in the store and only occasionally asked for a kickback. He was stuck way out of town and he didn’t really know anybody out there and it got lonely and spooky whenever he had to pull that seven-to-three shift, so he was generally glad to see Lester and Charlie come in, even if it was just to steal something. Dale would call the cops thirty or so minutes later and say some “colored kid” had driven off with some gas, might have shoplifted too. Then he’d describe a customer from earlier in the evening. This was before they installed cameras everywhere, back when you could get away with stuff like that.
The Chevy Chevelle SS was nearly ten years old and was pretty much ragged out. It had originally been a dark metallic green but now had oxidized to a color somewhere between piss and rust. It burned oil and leaked some too, needed new tires, and Charlie had to pump the brakes a little before every stop sign. The stereo was the only thing fully working on it and it had seen better days. Charlie had only a few tapes, but they all were what the ad on TV referred to as Freedom Rock and he usually ended up playing Thin Lizzy anyway so it didn’t matter.
Charlie was small-framed but strong with muscular arms and close-cropped dark curly hair. He had a chipped front tooth and the blackest of eyes but he always looked like he was smiling or about to.
Lester was slightly taller and much skinnier than Charlie. He had greasy hair, fair skin, and peach fuzz on his upper lip like a boy five years younger. His ragged jeans were slightly too big for his thin frame, and his Willie Nelson T-shirt was faded. He was more or less a permanent part of Charlie’s passenger seat, staring out the windshield and as agreeable as a dog. Charlie could always count on Lester for a yes vote to whatever he suggested, and Lester could always count on Charlie to drive and have a cooler full of beer and some weed. Maybe even a little blow. What the hell else was there to do?
Charlie had bought his Chevelle secondhand from the mama of its original owner, Jimmy Ray, who had died in the passenger seat of a buddy’s Camaro in a crash a few years earlier. Jimmy Ray’s mama liked Charlie since he’d helped put out her aunt’s kitchen fire, and she couldn’t stand looking at that car anymore. She practically gave it to him just to get it out of the driveway. It was still in pretty good shape when Charlie got it, but being a Chevy, its door handles kept coming off and the roof liner kept falling down and the suspension had become mushy and the steering loose. But it always started when he turned the square key. It would flat-out shit and git, as they say, and that big 396 had the greatest low-rumble sound in the world. It guzzled gas, which by 1979 had become a little expensive after the oil embargo, and the fuel gauge didn’t work anymore so Charlie had to keep it topped off, but he loved that car more than anything in the world and always talked about what a classic it would someday be and how he was going to one day get the cash to fix it up to showroom condition and keep it that way. Besides, Charlie could get rubber from twenty miles an hour, and once he’d gotten it up to a hundred and twenty-five going across the Natchez Trace Bridge. He named it Jimmy Ray after its late original owner and he and Lester liked nothing better than hauling ass down some backcountry roads with the windows down and the stereo blasting and the wet summer air blowing through their hair.