We drove the long, straight section of Hollow Road that local kids since the early 1920’s had been using for drag racing. The west side of the road was steep and piney. The east side of the road was more fallow cornfields.
No sign of cars.
We headed for the old mines.
“Do you think he’ll ever grow up?”
“Sure. Someday.”
“How long will it take, do you think?”
“Offhand, I’d say three years, eleven months, and forty-two hours.”
“I’m serious.”
“I don’t have any idea, Molly. It’s easy for us to say he feels too sorry for himself. He hasn’t had an easy life, even with all the stuff his aunts have done for him.”
“That’s why he treats women the way he does. That’s what I think, anyway. He’ll see some boy he’s jealous of and then he’ll take the kid’s girl from him. Just for a week or so. But it makes him feel good, strong, you know what I mean?”
“Sure. And when he gets women to fall in love with him, it lets him, at least for a little while, think that he’s as good as everybody else.
Especially girls from the upper class.”
“I read an article that said that for boys like him the conquest is everything. Then they have to move on to more conquests to make themselves feel good again.” She tamped a cigarette from her pack. “That’s what Sara was all about. I couldn’t compete with her money.”
She made a small fist. “God, I can get so mad at him-and yet I love him so much, too. I go around wanting to protect him all the time. Mostly from himself.”
Right after the Civil War, coal mining came to our state and prospered until well into the next century, at which point, as if by divine edict, the mines began to be too expensive to operate.
A few mines remained open but for the most part the miners moved on.
There was a moonscape ruggedness to the mined-out land now-stubby, mutated-looking pines dotted over hills of rocks and coarse grass on the sides of which were the boarded-up yaws of the mines themselves. A fair number of adventurous kids had been lost in those mines over the years, and about the same number of derelicts, fugitives, and madmen had hidden out in them. A small trestle bridge had washed out about two miles from the mining area about ten years ago and since the mine road wasn’t used all that much anyway, the county supervisors decided to leave the land bridgeless.
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.”