That one second of realization seemed to stretch into timelessness. A tableau in which everyone was frozen forever in the places they’d held at that instant. Robbie, illuminated by the lambent glow from the Camaro’s headlights, and the dirt road, a path hanging in dark nothingness, and in the middle of the road, as motionless as if it were already dead and taxidermic, stood a yearling doe, daintily poised on her little hoofs as if they were high heels. She stared into the lights, uncomprehending, perhaps, or else frozen with fear-not unlike Harley himself.
Trees on one side…creek on the other…deer straight ahead…
Later he’d tried to remember what exactly he had been thinking, so as to get a better grasp of his opinion of himself. Had he been thinking: Here is a beautiful live creature; let me not kill it with my recklessness? Or was he thinking: Hitting a deer at sixty will put the damned thing through your windshield, maybe kill you, and turn your car into a damn museum courtyard sculpture, so for God’s sake, don’t run into it? Maybe he was thinking both things at once. That second seemed long enough for any amount of surmising. But while his brain had switched into slow motion, the Trans-Am kept hurtling forward at 88 feet per second, heedless of any obstacles in its path.
It didn’t matter really what conclusions his brain had reached in that leisurely instant in which it had weighed and considered all the many options-steer for the creek; slam on the brakes; swerve to the left; stay on course-because while his brain was making all those judicious evaluations of the situation at hand, his body had switched to automatic pilot and was already reacting to the situation. His foot had touched the brake-not enough to send him into a skid, not enough to make much of a difference really. Except that Connie had also reacted to the sight of the deer on the road.
He had speeded up.
Even as Harley was wondering why Connie was pulling ahead instead of swerving or trying to stop, he had eased the Trans-Am in behind the Camaro, still tapping the brake, hoping to stop in time, and watching the red taillights streaking ahead. He braced himself for a collision that never came.
At the last second, the doe, resisting the spell of the headlights, had left the road in an arching leap. As Connie’s car passed the sycamore that signaled the finish line, another bound took the deer over the creek and into the dark thicket beyond.
Harley felt like twisting the wheel and going after it. He had lost the race. Useless to protest extenuating circumstances. A bet was a bet. He took most of a mile to slow down, and then he drove slowly back to the starting line where the Camaro was parked, surrounded by the roaring crowd of Connie’s friends.
Harley forced himself to get out of the car and plaster on a smile of congratulations.
Connie Koeppen had tried not to gloat too much as he watched Harley lean over the hood of the Trans-Am to endorse the paycheck. “Tough break, man,” he said as he pocketed the money. “But you know what they say: No guts, no glory.”
“Yeah,” mumbled Harley. “But this doesn’t prove anything. There aren’t any deer on race tracks.”
Connie shrugged. “No. But there’s other drivers. You can’t hit a deer-what makes you think you could hit an Allison or a Bodine if the race demanded it?”
“Well, I didn’t want to win bad enough to kill for it,” said Harley.
Connie just looked at him, and walked away. No retort could be worse than what Harley himself had just said. He’d remembered those words all these years, wondering if that was why he had lost his ride. You have to be willing to kill to win-and he wasn’t willing. Did that make him crazy-or sane?
Years later Harley would sometimes see people from the old high school at NASCAR events, and sooner or later somebody would mention Lorne Lupton and Connie Koeppen. Funny to think of you being the one to make it to the big time, Harley, they used to say. We always thought it would be Lorne or Connie out there racing against Bill Elliott. Or sometimes one of the more cautious types-usually female-would say, “How can you make a career of racing after what happened to Lorne and Connie?”
And Harley would shrug and say, “What I’m doing now isn’t what we were doing back then.”
And it wasn’t. Maybe Lorne and Connie would have made it, but he didn’t think so. Maybe if they’d channeled their skills and their love of the race, but that drag race on Bear Creek Road had told Harley that wasn’t going to happen. Maybe you have to have the killer instinct to be a champion, but you also have to have enough common sense to live to get there.
Lorne and Connie didn’t live to see him make it to the big leagues. Late one night, the summer after graduation, they’d managed to get hold of a second car for Lorne to drive and they took their private drag race to a paved straightaway southwest of town, just the two of them. It wasn’t a quarter-mile sprint this time, but two, three miles, maybe, and not a straight road either. Maybe the twists and turns were part of the challenge. Anyhow, they’d been neck-and-neck, running wide open on the blacktop, when they rounded a curve at the end of the woods and saw the dark mass of a freight train blocking the road ahead.
There was no stopping. Not at that speed.
The next day, most of the guys in town went out to look at the site of the crash. The wreckage had been cleared away by then, and the bodies were in the funeral home, being prepared for two closed-casket funerals.
Harley had parked on the side of the road and walked the last quarter mile to the tracks, studying the road, trying to picture those last frozen seconds. All you had to do was look at the road to see it happen.
Two cars, one in each lane, side by side, streaking toward the implacable steel wall of a freight car. And one set of skid marks.
There was no surviving that collision. Surely both of them knew that. No way to avoid it, either, not at that speed.
So one of them…one of them…had slammed on the brakes, maybe a reflex, maybe a grab at one last split second of life.
And the other one had mashed the accelerator, hurling himself even faster into the side of that freight car. Accept the inevitable and get it over with. Courage or despair?
Harley never forgot the look of that quarter mile of asphalt, although from time to time he still puzzled over what it meant. Because the car that didn’t brake going into the train was the one driven by Lorne Lupton.
Chapter XII
Grandfather of NASCAR Tracks
Jim Powell stood at the window of the country chintz bedroom at Possum Hollow, looking out at the sunny morning, already as bright as noon. In the distance beyond a rose garden at the back of the house lay green folds of Tennessee mountains showing not a trace of human habitation. You’d think you were out in the middle of nowhere. Strange to think that last night after the race there had been so many cars on Volunteer Parkway that it had taken the bus a couple of hours to go three miles. He wondered where all those people were now. The drivers had taken their helicopters back to Tri-Cities to their waiting jets, of course, but that still left nearly a hundred thousand spectators earthbound in a mostly rural area. Surely there weren’t enough hotel rooms and B &Bs in the vicinity of Bristol to hold all of them. He supposed that many of them were in yet another snails’ procession of traffic on I-81 heading for more distant highways to take them home. Soon the bus tour would be joining the line of cars in the eastbound lane, because the next stop on the tour was the speedway at Martinsville, just under two hundred miles to the east.
Jim had been awake for more than an hour, lying wide-eyed in the darkness because he hadn’t wanted to disturb Arlene by turning on the bedside light. At daybreak he took his magazine over to the desk chair, and angled it so that the sun illuminated the pages, glad that the sun came up well before seven in August, because he could never sleep for more than six hours anymore. His wakefulness was partly a factor of age and partly because he needed to be a light sleeper now in order to keep an eye on Arlene. Her illness made her restless. Sometimes at night she would get out of bed and begin to wander-he wasn’t even sure she was fully conscious at those times-but she would slip out from beneath the covers and begin to walk around in the dark. Jim was always afraid that she would fall or, worse, manage to open an outside door and wander off into the night. He had read newspaper accounts of old people getting lost like that, straying off into the woods, their remains found weeks or months later by hikers or a party of hunters.