Shot Dunyun: The Shark still tagging our ass, he's some asswipe in a Maserati Quattroporte Executive GT painted Bordeaux Pontevecchio. Craning around, I watch out the back window, and he's not a lone Shark. Riding shotgun is a cloud of pink. A bridesmaid. Our Tina Something we ditched. Her teeth make a round oval, her mouth's that wide open. Tina's laughing that hard as the Shark's bumper clubs our ass.
Still holding Tina's bouquet of fake flowers, Rant's twisting inside his seat belt, trying to see, and says, "Why's he after us…?"
Echo Lawrence: After you're tagged out, the brides and grooms, the best men and bridesmaids, they all fake their anger. Fake-screaming and pop-eyed. Fake-fighting for the people slowed down to watch. The rubberneck effect. Passing traffic slows to a crawl to watch the spectacle. The police never stop, not for a fender bender.
The wedding parties, they're just trying to milk out the moment their life gets slow. The pulse when two cars come together.
These are regular people watching their lives squeezed down into dollars, all the hours and days of their life compressed the way the crumple zones of a car get sacrificed. The total hours of their waiting tables or sorting mail or selling shoes, it gets screwed down until they have enough money to pool and buy some wheels. A wedding dress. String some tin cans and buy some shaving cream.
The next new-moon night, these people are cruising or getting cruised. They're driving and waving to the rest of us not in the action. They're watching in every direction for a Shark, listening for the clatter of enemy tin cans, until another team of "Just Married's" see them and give chase. A swerve and black tire marks, one car darts after another so fast the tin cans stop touching the road. One red light and—that's the moment time explodes. What automotive crash-test engineers call "the pulse."
From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: Beginning with Santa Claus as a cognitive exercise, a child is encouraged to share the same idea of reality as his peers. Even if that reality is patently invented and ludicrous, belief is encouraged with gifts that support and promote the common cultural lies.
The greatest consensus in modern society is our traffic system. The way a flood of strangers can interact, sharing a path, almost all of them traveling without incident. It only takes one dissenting driver to create anarchy.
Echo Lawrence: When a back car hits a front, brides get thrown against their seat belts, their veils whipped forward so fast your face gets a rash that players call "lace burn." That moment, time slows down. All the hundred years of every boring day—they explode to fill that half-moment. That pulse.
Here's time squeezed down until it explodes into a slow-motion moment that will last for years.
Your car you saved to buy, it's punched down, smaller, but your life's pumped back up. Bigger. Back to life-size or beyond. The brides on the side of the road, throwing white rice to hurt, they're just trying to make that moment stretch. Milking the pulse.
Shot Dunyun: Tina and the Shark get bigger in our back window, laughing and leaned forward so hard their breath fogs the windshield. Their bumper pushes our five o'clock, squeaking our springs and shocks. Their front tires spin so close that Echo's parking alarm starts to beep. Beeping faster. Beyond close, the Shark's wheels bite off one of our dragging tin cans, pinching each can flat and snapping the string. So close that Echo's parking alarm goes to sounding one long beep.
Rant leans forward to pat Green's padded tux shoulder and says, "By the way, congratulations."
And, still looking at that gold quarter, Green says, "For what?"
From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: Perpetuating Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny breaks ground for further socialization—including conformance to traffic laws which allow the maximum number of drivers to commingle on our roadways. In addition, insisting that the journey is always a means to some greater end, and the excitement and danger of the journey should be minimized. Perpetuating the fallacy that a journey itself is of little value.
Shot Dunyun: Tina and the Shark bite off another can, bump us again, drop back. Laughing. Rant says, "You…," and he hitches a finger between Green and Echo, saying, "You got married…"
Green says, "New team at two o'clock."
And Echo says, "Find me a hole!"
Echo Lawrence: With both my feet I'm standing on the gas pedal, already planning to blind that Tina Something with a handful of raw rice. I can see my wheels in some junkyard still smeared with "Just Married" toothpaste.
From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: The activity casually referred to as Party Crashing rejects the idea that driving time is something to be suffered in order to achieve a more useful and fulfilling activity.
Tina Something: At the next gaddamn police impound auction, I'll be bidding against Echo. In less than one odometer click, we'll both need new wheels.
Shot Dunyun: And the bullshit Shark drops back.
Echo Lawrence: Tina's slammed against her headrest. Her tits and pearls thrown up, high, around her neck. Veil burn. Steam rises behind them, and their six o'clock's been tagged. Taken out.
From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: Our Shark has been preyed upon by someone else. The Maserati has been slaughtered amid a litter of cowbells, shattered glass, and tin cans.
Shot Dunyun: Echo pitches us around a corner, into a dark alley. She shuts off the headlights and taillights, letting the motor idle. She parts her veil to take a better look at Rant, and Echo says, "Get your Day Boy ass out of my car!"
Offering the gold coin to her, Green says, "Do you know what this is worth?"
And Rant Casey, he touches the backseat and sniffs his fingers, saying, "That girl who peed, three, maybe four weeks back" — Rant looks at us—"she ate bell peppers that day."
Rant grins his tar-black teeth at us and says, "Any of you folks know a fellow by the name of Chester Casey?"
17–Hit Men
Lynn Coffey (Journalist): The poet Oscar Wilde wrote, "Each man kills the thing he loves…" Each man except the smart ones. The ones who don't want to serve time in prison, the smart men used to hire Karl Waxman.
Tina Something (Party Crasher): How'd I know what Wax was up to? I couldn't know. The first night he Tag Teamed me, that Honeymoon Night when Echo ditched me, Wax pulled over to the curb in a Maserati Quattroporte Executive GT. Painted dark red, Bordeaux Pontevecchio. Rosewood panels in the dash. The headliner is sewed out of Alcantara suede, and the heated seats actually give your butt muscles a constant Swedish massage.
Wax buzzed down the electric window on my side. I'm still standing on the curb in my pink bridesmaid gown, and Wax waves something floppy and white at me. That's how Wax introduced himself.
"Before you touch anything, baby," he tells me, "you put on these."
It's latex gloves.
Lynn Coffey: It's tragic. Young people seldom purchase these exotic sports cars, certainly not professional basketball or football players. They could never fit in the bucket seats. No, almost all such cars go to older-middle-aged or elderly men who seldom drive them. These Maseratis and Ferraris and Lamborghinis sit garaged for years, like lonely mistresses, hidden from direct sunlight.