11
I remember the smell of the newspaper, the way it was folded to the page with the starting grid, the ten rows of three cars each, the blocks of information-number, driver, owner, sponsor, engine, body, speed. My father's scribbled notes as each car dropped out of the race. Engine. Transmission. Tires. Crash. My mother finishing up the dishes picked up the coffee cup my father had forgotten he used to weigh the edges of the paper down. There was a blot staining the top of the statistics, a blurred circle, smeared, smearing. My father sat and listened to the race's mur mur, my baseball mitt on one hand, the other hand rubbing the neat's-foot oil into the darkening pocket.
12
The pace car moved by at the walking pace of the parade. We were on the Parnell bridge over the St. Joe. Ricky Brown was going on about the 'Vette, the particulars of its engine displacement, the block's bore, the compression ratio. A girl from our high school was a queen of something that year, and she waved at us. Too cool, all of us but Ricky turned away from the parade and, leaning on the bridge's railing, looked at the river just below the deck, swollen and running fast in spring. Ricky called out to the guy driving the car, hunched over listening to the radio, "Who's leading? What lap?"
13
A Saturday before the race, I went with my dad to May Sand and Stone to pick up the bags of cement and sand. He had an Olds Cutlass coup, white with a blue top and bucket seats. In high school I would total it, running off the road into the ditch. The windows were cranked down and the radio was cranked up high to the time trials. We followed the trace out to the gravel pit. I liked hearing about the driver on the bubble, the slowest car about to be bumped by another qualifier. The overgrown ditch on the side of the road was all that was left of the canal built to connect the Great Lakes with the Mississippi, bankrupting Indiana before the Civil War. The water was stagnant and weedy. On the bobbing cattails, red wing blackbirds perched. Their calls were like the rattles of mixing balls in cans of spray paint.
14
Small planes circled, dots followed by a dash of their banners, their advertisements, unreadable from this distance, tracing their spiraling paths. I was driving home, north, to Fort Wayne. I took the wrong exit on purpose to circle the city the long way around so I could listen to the race. The radio said the race was halfway through and under a yellow caution flag. A survivor of the most recent wreck was thanking God. Thirty-three miles of four-lane beltway until 1-69. I worked my way between the other cars and trucks, racing. I could not see the track from the highway, just the planes trailing their exhaust of messages, circling above it in the distance.
15
The race, on the radio, is background, drowned out by the stutter of the electric clippers my father uses to sculpt the hedge in the backyard. His shirt is off, stuffed into his back pocket. It looks like a tail. Mother sits on the chaise lounge on our slab of a patio, painting her toenails a bright red. Two orange extension cords snake out through the grass, one winding toward the radio and one attaching to the clippers. We've planted impatiens in the shade of the garage, the egg carton nursery flats nest inside each other. I coil the hose next to the spigot. Maybe later we will wash the car.
16
I walked to my high school. I took State Boulevard, which was an old township road running east and west that had, when the city grew up around it, become a main cross-town corridor. When I walked it, during the rush hours, I kept pace with the cars crawling along in the daily traffic jams. Sometimes a string of cars would break away only to stall again at the next light, a half block ahead, where I would catch up again. Ahead of me was my high school, North Side, across the St. Joseph River from the Old Crown Brewery. It was spring. The brewery made the neighborhood reek of fermented spent grain. Behind me was North Highlands, where I lived and where, as it was high ground, the radio and television stations planted their transmission towers. Coming home, I saw the strobing beacons on each become visible as the sun set and the city grew dark. The cars creeping along next to me in the street had their windows down. It was spring. The patter of the radio leaked out. A song, a weather report, the ninth caller. As I walked along, the volume seemed to fade and pulse with the strips of tiny suspended warning lights at the other end of the road.
17
A sign says this is the deepest hole in Indiana. Empty yellow dump trucks follow the access road cut into ledges screwing down to the quarry's floor where groaning excavators gnaw at a trench. I am in a metal observation cage extending out over the lip of the pit looking down forever. The loaded trucks spiral up, trudging around ever-widening loops scored against the sloping walls to the top. The reports from the track of the time trials and practice laps are running on the PA system interrupted by an announcement that someone's order has been filled or someone else has a phone call. Dust steams up to the brim. I am floating above the dust swirling below me, looking at it roil through the open steel grid at my feet. Suddenly, Phantoms from Baer Field rip by overhead, practicing the Memorial Day fly-by.
18
"Stay tuned to the greatest spectacle in racing," the voice on the radios said. The transistor radios seemed to be fading, their batteries taxed. The cement of the patio was setting up. In a corner of the slab, our fathers allowed us to write our names with a ten-penny nail and press our handprints into the spongy surface. We washed our hands at the spigot, a puddle of mud forming at our feet. We stretched out on the grass. A tire commercial. A milk commercial. An interview in the pits. The cars roaring by drowned out the people speaking. I tried to hold the level level. I held it above me, up to the sky, nudging the bubble back and forth between the hairlines in its little yellow tube of fluid.
19
My mother went to the race once. When she was in college in Indianapolis, women from her sorority rode in the festival parade before the start in vintage cars around the track. My mother rode in a horseless carriage made by Studebaker. She wore an antique duster and a big hat with goggles. She waved to all the people in the grandstands, a half a million people. The speedway becomes the second largest city in Indiana on the day of the race, she always says. Making deviled eggs on Memorial Day, flicking the dollop of yolk mixed with mayonnaise in the cup of the hollowed half, dusting the two dozen halves with paprika and pepper, she remembers the boxed lunch she ate that day in the sunny stands, the race itself an intermittent distraction in the background.
20
When I was in kindergarten, I was in the parade. I rode a float, sitting in a lawn glider that glided back and forth beneath an arching garden arbor decorated with paper roses and on a lawn of artificial grass staked with lawn flamingoes and a plastic birdbath with real water that got us wet when the wind blew. A white Impala pulled the trailer, and my father was in the back seat looking out the back window up at me riding on the glider. I wore a crown I kept for years afterward on the globe in my room. I remember the old trees making a roof over us, how slow we went down Parnell, the way people on each side of the street waved with one hand while the other hand held a radio to an ear.
21
The high school loop ran north and south from one Azar's Big Boy to the other through the center of town. The lights were timed and we hit every one, not stopping. We went over rivers and under overpasses where sometimes hulking Nickel Plate or Wabash trains clanked on tracks above us. The streets were the old state highways, wide and one way, lined with glass-globed lights still painted on the top to black them out from the air. You couldn't be too careful. We talked, my buddies and me, about going to Ohio, where they sold 3.2 beer to minors, but we never did. We were unable to escape the gravitational pull of the place. Our high school going by. The musk of the brewery and the slow-moving river choked with cottonwood. WOWO on the radio. "I have no desire to ever see that race. You sit in one place and see the cars for, what? a second or so and then wait a couple of minutes for it to happen again." There, the neon cross of Calvary Temple. There, the old City Light power house. There, the armory. Powers Hamburgers. The Lincoln Tower. The Old Fort, a replica of the old fort, a guard walking the walls looking out for the vandals we fancied ourselves to be.