The Outside Groove (7 page)

At the dinner table, Big Daddy would occasionally shoot me a concerned look and ask me how my race prep was going (“OK, I guess”), if I needed any driving tips (“No, thanks”), and where I was practicing (“A big pasture on public land out near the interstate”—not a lie but not the whole truth either). I could tell that he didn't like the idea of me behind the wheel of a Road Warrior car, but I could also tell, from the way he'd glance at my mother after I answered his questions, that he considered my racing plans more her responsibility than his.

 

When Sunday, the day of the season opener, finally arrived, I got up at dawn but skipped my morning jog. I stretched out, though, and pulled on some cargo pants and my cross-country team sweatshirt. I tied my hair back in a ponytail and slid into my old black Chuck Taylors, knowing their rubber soles would grip the accelerator, clutch, and brake while allowing some bottom-of-the-foot sensitivity.

I crept downstairs as quietly as I could, grabbed a couple of energy bars from the cupboard, and headed out the kitchen door leading to the garage. As I crossed the garage, I heard the kitchen door open behind me. Getting into Hilda, I looked back to see Mom passing through the garage and stepping into the driveway in her bathrobe. I started the engine but rolled down my window as she approached.

She bent over to peer in. “Be careful, Casey,” she said. “Promise me you'll be careful.”

“I promise.”

Mom started to say something else but hesitated, looked toward the house, then turned back to me. She wore a strange expression. It was one of her woman-to-woman expressions, and yet somehow different. The early-morning lines in her face scrawled an anxious message that I couldn't read. “You OK, Mom?” I said, even though I was running behind schedule and she and I really didn't talk much anymore.

“No. But you're going to do this anyway, aren't you?”

I revved Hilda's engine in response.

Mom stood and folded her arms. She gazed toward the river, tight-lipped in the gauzy morning light. I might've expected her to be concerned for my safety, but she seemed unhappy about my decision for other reasons, reasons she wasn't disclosing. After a few moments, she sighed. “Remember, Casey,” she said, “you promised to be careful.” And with that, she turned and walked back to the house.

***

Uncle Harvey had driven Theo out of the shop and into his front yard by the time I arrived. He appeared to be checking the tires. I got out of Hilda just as he stood and disappeared into his house. I walk up to Theo and touched the black numbers on the driver's-side door—06—then inspected my fingertips for wet paint. A few days earlier, Uncle Harvey and I had decided that 06 was the only logical choice, given that six cars went into making one Theo. The number adorned the doors, roof, and hood.

“I considered champagne,” Uncle Harvey said, returning with two glasses of orange juice. “But you're underage, and Blodgett would smell it on your breath.” He handed me a glass.

“I don't drink and drive,” I said. “Don't even drink.”

“Smart.” Uncle Harvey held up his glass. “Here's to the Road Warrior division, which is as close to pro wrestling as you can get without putting on a pair of tights.”

We clinked glasses.

“Oh, speaking of which...” Uncle Harvey reached into Theo and pulled out a mint-green firesuit thankfully not as drab-looking as the car's paint job. He tossed it to me.

“Thanks,” I said. “How much?”

“It's your birthday present for the last, oh, few years.”

“That's what you said about the car.”

“We needn't debate this, I don't think. Got a buddy downstate sells the stuff. We did a little bartering.”

I held the firesuit up to my body. It looked more or less my size, although it must've been cut for a man slightly larger than me, because I could tell it'd be baggy.

“So,” Uncle Harvey said, rapping his knuckles on Theo's roof, “any words to mark this momentous occasion?”

I'd never been much of a speechmaker, so I just raised my glass and said the first thing that came to mind: “To family.”

As I moved to clink Uncle Harvey's glass again, he pulled his hand back, a glower falling over his face. He caught himself, though, smiled, and touched his glass to mine.

A couple of seconds later, Jim's truck cranked up the hill. He angled the front end toward the shop and backed the flatbed toward us. “Morning,” he said with a wave out the cab window.

“Hey, Jim,” I said.

He climbed out of the truck. “That rig ready to load?”

I looked at Uncle Harvey.

“It's not going to be the homecoming parade, you know,” he said.

“I know.”

“You're going to get hit—maybe hard and maybe often.”

“I'm prepared for that.”

He scratched at his chin and chuckled. “No, you aren't. But you're going to get hit anyway. Did I tell you that you could die?”

“Yes, you told me. But I won't.”

“No, probably you won't. But you know that you could?”

“Yes.”

Uncle Harvey took a couple of steps back, a distant look in his eyes as he stared toward the pasture I'd used as my practice track. “Figure out what your limits are, and figure them out early,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Take your car around the course as fast as you can, but build up your cornering speed gradually. Push yourself a little harder each lap until you know where that threshold is where you'll lose control. Don't be shy about cornering in the outside groove just because it's outside and not right tight inside.”

“Makes sense,” I said but secretly disagreed with him. While I didn't know my uncle well enough to assess his geometry skills, I was exceedingly confident in my own, so I held to my plan to run on the inside track—the shortest distance around. A mathematical truth.

“And if a driver bumps you from behind, hold on tight and keep your rig straight. He's looking to move you this way or that and slip around you. Bump-and-run, they call it.”

“ Bump-and-run. ”

“Yeah, just a nuisance, really, if you're ready for it.”

“I'll be ready.”

“This is dangerous, Casey. That's all I'm saying. What kind of uncle would I be if I didn't give you fair warning?”

“You've warned me.”

Uncle Harvey spat. “Well, just remember this last thing then,” he said.

“Shoot.”

“You can't win a race in just one lap, but you sure can lose one.”

I looked at Jim, but he just shrugged. “I'm not sure I understand,” I said.

Uncle Harvey held out his arms, palms skyward, like a preacher reciting a prayer. “Take what the race brings you. Patience,” he said. “That's what it means.”

I didn't see what patience had to do with being the first car to pass underneath a checkered flag, but I nodded anyway. I gave Uncle Harvey a thumbs-up, and Jim and I loaded Theo onto the wrecker.

***

As Jim and I plunged down Uncle Harvey's road, I reached to stop a booklet from sliding off the seat and onto the floor. Resting it on my lap, I read the cover:
GED Mathematics: The Most Comprehensive and Reliable Study Program for the GED Math Test.

“You studying for this now?” I said.

Jim glanced at the book. “Right. Took the test once already. Failed.”

I flipped through the booklet, stopping here and there before finding the most advanced exercises. They looked pretty basic to me. I set the booklet in a more secure spot on the dashboard. “You taking it again?”

Jim grabbed the booklet and stuck it behind his seat. “That's my business,” he said. “I'll take it when I'm ready.”

The guy was obviously comfortable not making a lot of small talk as we rumbled through town. I'd never been the most talkative person, either, but I might've at least tried to get to know him a little, find out where he was from, that sort of thing. The way he sat behind the wheel, though—stone-faced, checking his mirrors like a pilot checking instruments—told me that this errand was more like work to him than a social outing. I didn't know why he'd agreed to haul me to Demon's, since he owed me no favors, but it seemed like he and Uncle Harvey had some kind of agreement about it. Given that I hadn't had another plan in mind for transporting my ride to the track when I decided to start racing—didn't even have a car—I didn't try to coerce Jim into conversation. His silence unnerved me, but the drive to the racetrack wasn't that long.

Jim and I were one of the first race teams, if you could call us that, at Demon's Run. Mr. Blodgett stood inside the back entrance to the pit area, wearing a navy blue windbreaker with D
EMON
'
S
R
UN
T
RACK
O
FFICIAL
on the back and white racing stripes down each sleeve. He had a clipboard tucked under one arm, and he was talking to some guy in a navy blue Demon's Run baseball cap, red earphones encircling his neck like a scarf, and a fire engine red D
EMON
'
S
R
UN
T
RACK
O
FFICIAL
jumpsuit. I thought he might be the pace-car driver or one of the Hook men. It'd been a couple seasons since I'd been there.

When Mr. Blodgett saw Jim's tow truck, he gestured for him to pull in and drive to a vacant space near the end of a row of spaces, each roughly twice the width of a regular parking space, maybe twice as deep. As Jim and I passed Mr. Blodgett and the other guy, they both stared at me. “Take a picture, it'll last longer,” I muttered.

“Wicked mature,” Jim said.

I'd almost forgotten he could talk.

As Jim and I offloaded Theo, I tried to ignore the drivers and crewmembers watching me. Since Jim and I collectively knew exactly zero useful things about racecar preparations—“setup,” Wade and Big Daddy called it—we didn't have anything to do once Theo was in his slot. Jim went to the concession area for coffee. I climbed inside my car and waited, peeling old stickers and tape off my helmet. The thing had enough scrapes and gouges in it to make me think that the previous owner hadn't been a racecar driver but maybe a parachutist with a tendency to miss his mark. Or a guy in a circus who got shot out of a cannon—and onto a pile of rocks.

Another trailer, one hitched to an aggressively loud white pickup truck, backed into the adjacent bay. The racecar on the trailer was a pickup too, an old Chevy painted rust red with a yellow number 49 on the door, roof, and hood and Frenchie's Fireworks Nook in yellow across the front panel. A man climbed out of the driver's side, and out the passenger side slid a kid I recognized from school, Kirby Mungeon, a wild-eyed junior with a shaved head. Kirby looked at me and smiled—and I wouldn't have called it a friendly smile. I fought the impulse to slink down below my dashboard but, instead, nodded to Kirby and pretended to be adjusting my safety-harness straps.

When Jim returned, I got out and sat next to him on the wrecker's tailgate while he studied for the GED. I was anxious and bored enough to consider inviting Jim to let me know if he had any questions about the exercises in the book, but I held back. He and I still weren't exactly best friends.

As the pits filled up with cars, the area transformed from a sunken, fan-shaped asphalt tarmac roughly the size of four football fields into something more closely resembling a Civil War battle encampment. It'd been a few years since I'd been back there, so I'd forgotten that Blodgett, in keeping with his general meticulousness, arranged the cars in a particular order: The Thundermaker Sportsmen formed an arc across the outside of the fan, their fancy enclosed car trailers aimed toward the woods surrounding the pit area. The Road Warriors arced across the middle of the fan. The tire compound and tech area, two adjacent bays of activity, were situated roughly where the handle of the fan would be—between Road Warrior pit row and the track itself. The turn-one/turn-two bank rose behind the tire compound and tech area on the other side of a chainlink fence, fifty yards of grass, and a big grassy berm. One-way signs kept cars moving in a clockwise direction through the pits.

As much as I admired the orderly results of Blodgett's pit design, I also cursed the fact that, once the Thundermakers started checking in at the tire compound and tech area, they began a relentless circular parade of eight-cylinder engine roar around Road Warrior pit row. I also could've done without some of the looks I got from Thundermaker drivers as they rolled past.

Looking beyond the pits and into the grandstands didn't calm me down any, though, so I pretty much focused on the patch of asphalt right in front of me. A few minutes later, I was startled by Jim noisily closing his GED book and sliding off the tailgate. I looked up as he walked quickly down to Theo, where Big Daddy was circling the car. “It's OK, Jim,” I said, not sure what he was about to do. I still knew almost nothing about the guy.

I didn't catch what Jim said to my father, but when he waved Big Daddy away from the car, Big Daddy laughed. “Who's this, your crew chief or your bodyguard?” my father said as I caught up to them.

“This is Jim Biggins. Jim, this is my dad.”

Jim and Big Daddy shook hands awkwardly. “Sir, you're not supposed to be in this pit,” Jim said.

Big Daddy smiled. “I know that, Jim. I know the rules. I just thought I'd drop by to wish my daughter luck. That all right with you?”

With his eyes still on my father, Jim tilted his head toward me. “It's up to her.”

“It's fine,” I said.

Jim turned to me, back to Big Daddy, then back to me again. Then he walked back to the wrecker.

“Guy takes his job pretty seriously,” Big Daddy said.

“Yeah, well, he's the only crew I got.”