Drive Like Hell: A Novel Read online

  We both laughed. All I could see was Nick with his grown-up head and long hair, but a kid’s body and a little leather motorcycle jacket.

  “Now that story is the truth,” Lyndell said. “That’s the God’s honest truth.”

  “It’s a good one,” I said.

  He drank the last of the bourbon, reached out the side window and hooked the bottle over the top of the car. It bounced down the hill, finally clanking against some rocks near the lake’s edge.

  “I never did get around to telling Nick the truth about C.W.,” he said. “I’ve been wondering if that might have done some good.”

  He gave me this aching look. A few years would have to pass before I could recognize someone casting out for a reassuring word. All I knew then was that he seemed to be waiting for me to say something. So I asked a question that I’d always wanted answered. It felt like as good a time as any to ask.

  “Do you and Claudia love each other?”

  He took a hard pull on his Kool and blew out the smoke. He watched the cloud rise as if it might hold the answer. “We do,” he said. “It’s just a complicated thing. It’s not as simple as those songs Claudia likes, where somebody’s always to blame for things going wrong.”

  He let out a sigh. The music was barely trickling from the dashboard, Glen Campbell singing “Wichita Lineman.”

  “You meet somebody,” he said, “and then you fall in love with them because they give you something you ain’t ever had before. But the mean part of love is that, after a while, you find yourself needing other things. So you go out looking for it from somebody else. Hell, everybody does it. They might say they don’t, but they’re full of shit. And the church folk, they’re the worst of all about it.”

  He flicked his cigarette onto the road and rolled up the window.

  “So, why do you keep coming back?”

  It was almost like I’d pulled a gun on him. He drew back from me, and his face turned white as the moon. He stared off into the distance, searching for words.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s like I was her first, and I can’t help thinking I should have been the only one.”

  He looked at me again. “But I suppose I already had my chance at that. At least that’s what Claudia says.”

  He left after that night. He went up to Bristol, Tennessee, and took the job working on engines at the race shop. Several years later, he married the daughter of the man who owned the racing team. They even had a baby girl together.

  I was fifteen when Claudia told me all of this. She said she’d gotten the news from Carl Bettis, one of Lyndell’s old racing buddies who worked at the Amoco.

  “Can you even picture that?” she asked. “Lyndell Fulmer working a full-time job and keeping up a family? They say he’s even quit drinking.”

  Truth is, I hadn’t even thought about Lyndell for a couple of years. I meant no offense by it. He’d just become like an old, broken piece of furniture that you move out to the garage with every good intention of reclaiming one day. Problem is you end up setting something else in front of it, and then another thing, and another, and pretty soon you’ve forgotten all about that one chair.

  Besides, I had other things on my mind just then, namely selling a nickel bag of pot at the 7-Eleven and getting my driver’s license when the official date rolled around the coming spring. I was doing a little dealing of my own with Marty Atkins, trying to save money for a car that I could fix up to race at the speedway. Not that I was exactly on the fast track to ownership. My pot operation was small stakes, most of the inventory consisting of weed that I stole from Nick’s house. Nick was on parole at the time, following a second round of incarceration over a measurable quantity of contraband. He was one misstep away from a twenty-year sentence.

  “Are you mad at Lyndell?” I asked.

  “Of course not,” Claudia said. “You should never begrudge someone their happiness.”

  She looked like the saddest person in the world when she spoke those words.

  I pushed my chair away from the kitchen table. I stood and watched Claudia. She was leaning against the door, looking down, fingering the frayed edges of her hat brim.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll probably be late tonight.” And then she left.

  The house was awfully quiet. I walked over to the sink and switched on the radio. It was already tuned to the country station. I didn’t recognize the song that was playing, but it sounded sad, a pedal steel guitar driving slowly and plaintively across a bridge. I switched the radio back off, stopping the lyrics before they ever caught up to me. I can’t say if it was about a man or a woman, happiness or despair, people leaving, returning, drinking, or dying. For all I know it might have been about love itself, how it can be a complicated and mean companion.

  1

  I turned sixteen on a Saturday, March of 1979. I woke early to a cool spring morning, the air bristling with the sharp smells of the season: the mulch and the fescue and the fig bush that always reminded me of spice cake. A hopeful gown of yellow light had settled over everything.

  Claudia chauffeured me down to the DMV. The two of us were standing there when they unlocked and opened the doors. After a perfect score on the written portion, just as I’d expected, I was well on my way to duplicating that feat on the driving test. That’s when the patrolman dicked me out of five points in the parallel parking trial, claiming I’d touched the rear pylon.

  “You must be high,” I said. “I wasn’t even close to that thing.”

  He looked up from his little clipboard. “You wanna run that by me again,” he said.

  “Yeah, there’s no way I hit that pylon.”

  He angled his flattop at me and started pointing with his fat little index finger. “For your information,” he said, “I can fail your ass just for having a bad attitude.”

  “Well, why don’t you have Ponch and Jon come out here and watch me do it again ‘cause you just screwed me out of five points.”

  He nodded, really pleased with himself. “You keep talking like that,” he said, “and you won’t be driving for a long damn time.”

  We were standing at the rear bumper of Claudia’s Mazda GLC. Claudia and I referred to it as the “Gross Little Car.” Claudia coughed from where she was standing on the sidewalk. I got the message and backed down.

  The next step was waiting in line to have my picture taken. I’d grown my hair out extra long for the occasion, had even practiced different types of scowls in front of the mirror. The act must have been working. The woman in line ahead of me turned and handed me a flyer for a Campus Crusade barbecue.

  Once I’d had my picture snapped, I stepped into another line. This one moved so slow you’d have thought the people up front were getting haircuts. After all the waiting, I was severely underwhelmed when the patrolwoman sitting behind the desk handed me a flimsy piece of paper instead of a laminated license with my menacing mug on it.

  “Is this all I get?”

  The woman took a sip of her coffee and rolled her eyes like every idiot who came through the line asked the same question. “Permanent license is sent through the mail. Two weeks.”

  She looked over my shoulder while I was still standing there. “Next!”

  Claudia tossed me the keys for the two-mile journey back to the house. That was my big reward. I tried to pass a cement truck on the main road into town, but the Mazda wasn’t up to the task. I had to drop back in line and let the truck fart diesel fumes all over us while three other cars filed past us.

  “We oughta drop your sewing machine into this thing. It’d probably run faster.”

  Claudia laughed. “What’s the matter, did that little patrolman get under your skin?”

  “He was a peckerhead. You give a guy like that a badge and a gun, it’s bad news.”

  “Well, you’re lucky he even gave you a license. You show up looking like Charles Manson and acting a smart-ass. What’d you expect?”

  “I should’ve gotten a hundred on tha
t test.”

  “Just relax,” she said. “It’s not like you get to drive faster or anything.”

  She switched on the radio and started fishing for music.

  “Speaking of law enforcement,” I said, “have you called the cops about the TV yet?”

  She shook her head and held up her hand to shush me. She’d come across Willie singing “Red Headed Stranger.”

  “You know who stole it,” I said. “Just call Wade Briggs and tell him to go pick up Reggie. You don’t even have to press charges. Just tell Reggie to give back the TV.”

  She was pulling her hair into a ponytail, gazing into the vanity mirror at her eyes. “I’ll be seeing Wade tonight at the fish camp. Maybe I’ll say something.”

  Wade Briggs was Green Lake’s newest deputy, as well as the latest lead picker and singer for the Green Lake Gang. Claudia had gotten to know him at the fish camp, where they traded verses on “Slipping Around” and “One by One.” I saw no harm in asking the singing deputy to roust Claudia’s deadbeat ex.

  “Are you really gonna ask him?”

  She let her hair fall and looked at me. “I just said I would, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah, but I can tell you don’t mean it. You might feel bad about cutting Reggie loose, but that doesn’t give him the right to come in and take our RCA. That’s like stealing a cowboy’s horse.”

  Willie was still singing.

  Don’t cross him, don’t boss him

  He’s wild in his sorrow.

  “I could get it back, you know.”

  Claudia batted her eyes nervously. “What are you talking about?”

  “I mean, I know where Reggie’s staying. I called that guy he knows at ABC Pawn. Reggie’s been camped out over at the Fisherman’s Cove Motel ever since you broke up with him. Seems he’s back in the breaking-and-entering business again. He’s been giving ABC a lot of business.”

  “Why’d he tell you that?”

  “I put on my Robert Mitchum voice and told him I was GBI. I told him Reggie was in some deep shit, and if he didn’t start singing, we were gonna shut his ass down and send him to Reidsville.”

  Claudia sighed and closed her eyes. “Oh, Lord.”

  I turned onto our street and drove past the little houses until I reached the chalky, white face of our own two-bedroom rambler. The house was starting to get that beat-down and gloomy look, like an old relative who sits around all day drinking and talking about his ailments; not a relative you want to spend a lot of time with, especially without a TV to drown out the complaining.

  I climbed out of the car, and Claudia took the wheel. She had to get to her day job at the fabric store. She rolled down the window, and I leaned over to hear what she had to say.

  “Now you listen to me,” she said. “I don’t want you taking this little investigation of yours any farther. Just let me talk to Wade tonight, and I’ll see if he has any ideas.”

  “You won’t do it.”

  “Quit saying that.”

  “I mean, damn, we missed Rockford and Dallas last night. That’s no way to live.”

  She just shook her head, rolled up the window, and backed down the driveway. I stood there alone, under the gold sun, with my limp piece of paper blowing in the wind. I knew what I had to do.

  Our landlady, Mrs. Dees, lived directly across the street from us. She was an elderly woman just shy of being a shut-in. She owned a white Ford Maverick and stowed the keys above the sun visor. I’d sort of borrowed her car a few times before, just to make runs to the 7-Eleven so I could sell weed and pick up frozen pizzas. I’d always returned the Maverick before she had noticed it was missing. On one occasion, I’d even topped off the tank for her—and that’s when high-test was pushing a buck sixty a gallon.

  I peeked through Mrs. Dees’s living room window to make sure that she was watching her Saturday-morning wrestling, and then I climbed in the Maverick, coasted down the street, and started the engine on the fly. The block inside was almost as feeble as the GLCs. We were in the dark age of economy cars and oil embargoes. It was not a great time to get your driver’s license or steal a car. And, sadly, this had all come about while our former governor, Mr. Jimmy Carter, was occupying the White House.

  The Maverick had a slush box, so there was no stick to slide around. It didn’t really feel like driving at all. It was just going somewhere, getting from A to B. I kept it slow and steady, right at the speed limit, steering through town, across the railroad tracks, and beyond the city limits toward Nick’s place.

  Nick was renting an old tenant’s house in those days, a two-bedroom nest that had once been part of the Van Earl chicken farm. He shared the place with a fellow named Dewey, who worked maintenance down at the hydroelectric plant. Dewey played drums in Nick’s band and also bummed lots of rides from Nick, since he’d lost his driver’s license for three months due to excessive DUI arrests. Dewey was a funny guy who loved watching TV almost as much as I did. As a tribute to his favorite show, he stowed his weed in the sleeve of a Hawaii Five-O record album.

  Nobody was home when I got there, which was fine with me, as it only served to make the task at hand that much easier. I lifted a window and climbed inside.

  The living room smelled like stale beer and cigarettes. The furniture was on the spartan side, just a tattered green sofa, a busted recliner, some Coca-Cola TV trays, and Dewey’s white-pearl Ludwig Classic drum kit. Nick’s gold Les Paul stood propped in a corner, right beside his Sun amp. Posters and album covers cluttered the walls, mostly Nick’s blues heroes: Son House and Robert Johnson, a Honeyboy and two Sonny Boys and a pair of Blind Willies. Their expressions were solemn, faces gaunt, guitars held close to their sides as if they were next of kin.

  Jimi Hendrix had his own wall, set apart from the bluesmen, right above the TV and the tinfoil vines climbing out of the rabbit ears. Gazing at Jimi, I noticed a recent addition to the decor: a pair of blue panties draped over a corner of the TV set. I couldn’t help standing there for a moment to take it all in. The place always gave me this big, happy rush of recognition, like I was seeing my own future.

  I found Nick’s golf bag tilted against the wall in his bedroom. The fat leather holster was his office. He kept most of the pot in there, along with his cash, a ski mask, and his “shooting wedge,” which is what he called his Daisy .22 BB pistol. It looked enough like a genuine damage-imparting weapon. I stuffed it along with the ski mask into the front of my jeans, grabbed a couple of nickel bags I didn’t think Nick would miss, and headed out the way I’d come in.

  Reggie was the youngest guy I’d seen Claudia date. He was probably in his late twenties, whip thin with long, dark hair, a scraggly beard, and cowboy boots. Claudia was big into the Outlaws in those days: Willie, Waylon, Kris, and that bunch. She liked Willie best, though she thought that Kristofferson held his own in the songwriting department. Reggie was no musician, but he had the outlaw look going for him. Plus, he could dance a little. That was enough to land him three months in Claudia’s life.

  Reggie proved to be quite the delicate outlaw, though. He suffered from vertigo, which rendered him a first-story operator. Trying to stretch himself, he’d taken a couple of nasty tumbles, one from a second-story window with a pillowcase full of loot tucked under his arm. That one left him with a severe concussion. The doctors thought it had impaired his memory, but they hadn’t known Reggie before the accident. After some jail time, he tried to go legit as a short-order cook at Waffle House, but he couldn’t keep the orders straight. Scattered, smothered, covered—the poor sonuvabitch would nearly have a nervous breakdown if you said one of those words around him.

  Claudia had given Reggie his walking papers soon after hearing the news about Lyndell. Reggie was despondent. He’d just lost another cooking job, this one at the Ham ‘n Egg Kitchen, a step down from the Waffle House to begin with. He showed up at our place one night at 2 A.M., crying on the front stoop and asking Claudia to take him back. She woke me up and asked me what she should do.
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  “Jesus Christ, call the cops. He’s out of his fucking gourd.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever made anyone cry in my whole life,” she said.

  Reggie finally left. But he returned the next day when we were gone. He busted a window, climbed in, and took our nineteen-inch RCA ColorTrak. True to form, he left behind his Levi’s jacket, probably after he’d wrapped it around his hand to break the window.

  I tried to talk Claudia into calling the cops as soon as she came in from work, but she just sat there at the kitchen table wringing her hands.

  I held out the phone receiver, but she wouldn’t take it from me.

  “Why won’t you call?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. I just keep thinking about him crying.”

  She averaged about 3.2 boyfriends a year, and she was usually the one who applied the brakes, so I couldn’t understand what had gotten into her all of the sudden.

  The pawnshop owner had passed along Reggie’s room number at the Fisherman’s Cove. I slid Nick’s ski mask over my face and knocked hard on the door of 212. I could hear the TV playing the Saturday-morning wrestling on channel 17. The announcer, Gordon Solie, was breathless: “And here come the Freebirds! They’ve jumped Kevin Sullivan for the thousandth time!”

  The TV died. The only sound in the air was the birds chirping in the trees down near the lake. I banged on the door again, this time with the butt of Nick’s BB pistol.

  “Open the fuck up! It’s the GBI!”

  My voice had a whiskey-and-cigarettes edge to it. James Coburn with a hangover. I’d tried to get it that way smoking a fat one on the drive over. Now my head felt light as a balloon. I almost started laughing.