St. Dale

Chapter XI

April 1982

Three miles back on Bear Creek Road-just about the only flat, straight stretch in the whole county. At least one without oncoming cars to worry about. The perfect Thirteen-Twenty: Just over a quarter mile of straightaway, creek on one side, woods on the other; a fine and private place. It was late April, the first time since winter that the narrow road was dry, and by now most of the potholes would have been filled in with gravel by the farmer who lived at the end of the lane. Newly minted leaves ruffled in the night breeze, and moonlight silvered the tree branches, turning the dirt road into a white river shadowed by the blackness of Bear Creek rippling alongside it.

Harley Clay Moore had been the first to arrive that night. He had skipped baseball practice (which he wasn’t much good at anyway) to get home early and tinker with the engine, and now it was as ready as it would ever be. He had to leave before his dad got home, though. If the old man saw him working under the hood, he’d be bound to guess what was going on and then Harley wouldn’t have had a cat’s chance in hell of getting out that night. So he had taken a package of Twinkies for dinner and driven out to Bear Creek Road before it was even dark. He was too nervous to wait anywhere else, half afraid that if he delayed his arrival, he would chicken out and not show up at all. Taking advantage of the solitude before the others arrived, he had walked up and down the Thirteen-Twenty, the quarter-mile straightaway, checking for rough patches, noting where the edge of the road was clear of logs and boulders. In a drag race that lasted only a couple of heartbeats, there was no use trying to figure out the best place to make his move. There wasn’t time for strategy in a drag race. Later on, though, if he was good enough, there’d be real races when tactics did matter. Finally he might reach the big leagues of NASCAR: three-hour campaigns that played out like battles, where supplies and strategy counted for as much as skill and courage.

As a last resort for killing time, he’d brought his English book, more as a distraction than out of dedication. Harley was nobody’s idea of a scholar. He passed the time until sunset trying to finish the reading assignment in the gathering twilight, but he found that he was reading the same sentence over and over. Too keyed up to focus on a page full of long, peculiar words. Wann that aprille…Well, it was April, all right. That’s about all he could relate to in that moldy old story. He opened the glove compartment and took out a picture of his favorite NASCAR driver, Darrell Waltrip, last year’s champion. He had torn the photo out of the sports page of the Charlotte Observer and he stashed it in the car for luck, like a St. Christopher’s medal, but better.

He looked at his watch. Half an hour until the appointed time-still too early, but he’d have first choice of a starting position. Meanwhile, he would find ways to pass the time. Walk the course again. Maybe take another look at the engine. His driver’s license was so new that the clothes he wore in the photo hadn’t even been twice through the wash yet, but that didn’t mean he was new to driving. He had been behind a steering wheel ever since his feet could touch the pedals. That was one of the advantages of living on a farm. There were plenty of places to drive without getting on a state road. But this was a far cry from mowing the hayfield with the tractor, and Daddy had never let him do much more than steer the race car out of the barn. He had spent most of his childhood washing wrenches and sweeping up the garage, waiting his turn in the driver’s seat, but his father seemed to think that sixteen was about half the age you ought to be before he’d trust you with his race car, which was ridiculous. Why, the old man hadn’t been much more than sixteen himself when he first started spending his weekends driving dirt track. He hadn’t cared what his parents thought about the matter, but nowadays he seemed to think that inflation applied to age as well as to money. So Harley burned with impatience, knowing that he’d be a better driver than the old man if only he had half a chance to prove it.

He knew the theory. He understood the moves, the tactics. He’d watched racing scenarios play out in everything from toy cars to local dirt tracks, to the occasional race on television-Formula One stuff, mostly, but some of the techniques were the same. And he listened to the NASCAR races on the radio. Sometimes he could see those races better in his head than he could see the ones broadcast on television. He argued about them with his friends, guys like Mike Gibbs, who was so car-crazed that he didn’t have car magazines on his bedside table, car magazines were his bedside table. And Connie Koeppen, another aspiring racer, who was a rabid fan of a surly young driver named Dale Earnhardt.

Connie had been teased mercilessly about his idol’s fall from grace in the past season, ’81. Earnhardt had started his career in a blaze of glory, being named Rookie of the Year and then winning the championship itself the next year, but in ’81 Earnhardt had not won a single race. Connie would argue that he would have won at Charlotte if his ignition hadn’t cut out, and he was looking like a contender in Atlanta, too, before engine failure took him out of the race.

Harley’s favorite was Darrell Waltrip, who had won the championship last year and now was driving for the legendary Junior Johnson. Waltrip was brash and confident, earning himself the nickname “Jaws,” but he had the skill to back up his bravado. Harley thought he wouldn’t care what people called him as long as they respected him-or, even better, envied him.

A race. Finally, after an apprenticeship that had seemed to last his whole life, he was going to see if he really could measure up. Tonight he would be driving for real. A challenge. A taunt really, made by a couple of the school’s older daredevils, ready to cut a new driver down to size.

Connie Koeppen and his buddy Lorne Lupton, a couple of car-crazed seniors, had heard about Harley’s souped-up Trans-Am, and they dared him to pit it against their machine. “Paycheck to paycheck,” Connie had said, thrusting his hatchet face close to Harley’s nose. This wasn’t strictly accurate, since Connie was a rich kid who had an allowance instead of a job, but Harley took his meaning and the challenge.

Koeppen and Lupton thought their joint effort was unbeatable, and they were itching to prove it. Ever since they had pooled their skills and their savings to put together the fastest car they could afford, they had been trying to test their creation against anybody else’s set of wheels, but since they preferred to race for cash instead of bragging rights, nobody wanted to take them on. Until Harley, who had more guts than sense. He knew they would be tough competition. Connie claimed that he had even driven a few dirt track races at the local speedway-without his parents’ knowledge, of course. Doctors’ kids weren’t supposed to be hanging out with the riffraff at the racetrack.

“Bear Creek Road tonight at seven,” Connie had said in the hall after algebra. “Put up or shut up.”

Midnight would have been better. More fitting somehow for such a momentous showdown, but, hey, it was a school night. Lupton and Koeppen might think they were kings of the road, but they had curfews, same as Harley did. So he would be racing against their best shot at a race car, just at dark, for a week’s salary, winner take all.

Harley couldn’t afford to lose. His wages from a weekend job at the sawmill didn’t amount to much, a little less than fifty dollars after they took the taxes out, but it kept his gas tank filled, and sometimes when Daddy ended up a little short from needing a new part for the race car or when he didn’t place in the money in the Saturday race, Harley’s check might mean meat instead of beans for supper that week or paying the overdue light bill. He supposed that he was a fool to risk that money on one minute of hell-bent driving up the darkness of Bear Creek Road, but Daddy could hardly object, could he? Well, he would object, of course, if he knew. He’d raise Cain if he ever found out, but Harley figured that racing was in his blood, so Daddy had nobody to blame but himself.

Racing. Pouring money down a gas tank. Wasn’t that what Daddy was doing at Hickory or Asheville or Wilkesboro most every weekend? It took a chunk of money to run a stock car, even if you did every lick of the mechanic work yourself. You still had to buy parts and gas and tires. Every week. You were lucky if a set of tires got you all the way through one race, which meant that for the next meet, you’d need enough cash to buy a whole new set. Whoever said polo was a rich man’s game ought to try fielding a stock car.

So between the parts and the entry fees and all, a good bit of Daddy’s factory salary went to feed his racing habit, and Harley had never begrudged him a cent of it, even when it meant going through the winter with holes in his shoes. Racing was important. He just wanted to be a part of it-not just cleaning up around the shop, but really in the middle of it, clashing fenders in a red-dirt arena in piedmont North Carolina. Daddy wasn’t too keen on sharing that part of the experience, though. As far as he was concerned, Harley could jockey the wrenches and leave the driving to the old man.

Being the race car driver’s apprentice was getting old now, though. At sixteen Harley thought it was time he found out if he had the knack for it. Even if he lost the race tonight, the run would be worth the money he’d lose just to find out if he could out-drag the brainchild of Lorne Lupton and Connie Koeppen. Maybe if he could hold his own out here, it would be time to ask Daddy if he could go along to the dirt track, too. Or figure out a way to get there on his own.

Lorne Lupton didn’t come from a family with money, so he couldn’t manage a car of his own, but Lorne was one of Nature’s born mechanics. He could probably soup up a lawn mower. Knew his way around an engine blindfolded. That’s where Connie came in. Constantine Koeppen-Connie for short-was no great shakes as a mechanic but he was a daredevil, mad for fast cars and the thrill of a race. His dad was a surgeon at the county hospital, which meant that he could afford the basics of a good ride. Money buys speed-it was the first article of faith in the racing bible.

For his sixteenth birthday, Connie’s dad had bought him a new red Camaro. Within three months he had blown up the Camaro’s engine drag racing, and his cutthroat driving had left the car with more dents than a golf ball, but instead of asking his dad to get him a new ride from the dealership, Connie had gone into partnership with Lorne, who told him what he needed to make the car a contender, and what all of it would cost. After Connie ponied up the repair money, Lorne went to work, replacing the original engine with a 454 out of a wrecked ’70 Impala wagon they’d found at the local junkyard. That heart transplant from seventies’ iron made the Camaro faster than the Chevrolet people had intended for a street rod to go.

Their partnership had made for one formidable opponent. Lorne was the mechanic. Connie Koeppen did the driving. Besides his lust for speed, Connie had a mean streak that would do justice to a tusk hog, coupled with a complete absence of fear, which probably explained his devotion to Dale Earnhardt. Like Dale, Connie Koeppen would do flat-out anything to keep from coming in second. The Camaro had probably cost more than Harley made in a year, between the purchase price and the cost of the parts that Lorne used to soup it up, but Connie didn’t seem to care if he wrecked it or not. He figured that as long as he was careful not to get any speeding tickets, he could always get his dad to finance a replacement. Besides, Connie Koeppen was crazy. Give him an inch, and he’d put you into the river. If you found yourself on a narrow lane, barely wide enough to hold two cars abreast, and if Connie Koeppen was driving the other car, he was bound to take his half of the road right out of the middle-even if he had to bash in his own car in the process-and leave you scrambling along on what was left.

Lorne, a quiet, methodical soul who probably pretended he was the engineer on the Starship Enterprise, had given the Camaro’s engine a high-tech advantage, and Connie had the killer instinct to make the most of it. Harley wasn’t sure what his own special gift was. Desperation, maybe. Nobody could have wanted to win more than he did.

It had taken Harley more than a year of sawmill wages and odd jobs to scrape up enough cash to make his own shopping trip to the junkyard. Before he went, he’d asked for advice from one of his dad’s racing friends, a hurried conversation at the track while his dad was making a test run. The old fellow, a jackleg mechanic, had scribbled a wish list on the back of his pay envelope. After a few weeks of scratching around Harley had managed to locate most of the items he’d recommended.

First, Harley had used his savings and his little bit of Christmas money to buy an old Trans-Am. He’d paid a local farmer to tow the heap to his tobacco barn, where Harley had proceeded to rip out the motor, which he swapped back to the scrap yard for more small parts. In place of the regulation motor, he had installed the 455 out of a wrecked ’70 Bonneville. Then he jazzed it up with a set of Holly four-barrels on an Edelbrock manifold so fine that the result was an uber-motor that could practically pass you in neutral. The old Pontiac was a lot faster than it looked, that was certain.

When he had finished the Trans-Am’s transformation, Harley continued to keep it stashed in his neighbor’s barn. One look under the hood and his old man would know exactly what he was up to, and then he’d be grounded until gasoline was ten bucks a gallon. He was careful not to let Lorne get too close a look at the car, either. On the outside, the Trans-Am still looked like a rusty bucket of bolts, but if all his little adjustments kicked in as planned, the thing should take off like a rocket. Sure, the car was older than the Lupton-Koeppen Camaro, but there was no disadvantage in that. Nobody in his right mind would race an actual eighties’ car when there was sixties’ iron to be had. Harley’s dad always said that the new emission standards had done the same thing to American autos that neutering did to a bull.

It was dark now, but still warm from the heat of the day. Harley was sprawled in the driver’s seat, almost relaxed enough to drop off to sleep when the distant shine of headlights announced the arrival of his opponent and a few carloads of spectators. So this wasn’t to be a private heat between racers, but a public ritual, with half the senior class along for the ride. Just as well, thought Harley. With spectators there’d be some neutral person to hold the money, drop the rag, and witness the outcome. (Or to go for help. But Harley didn’t think of that. He was sixteen and immortal in that first race, and the thought of anyone’s needing assistance never crossed his mind. Maybe if you were a no-holds-barred racer, the thought of a wreck couldn’t enter your head, or else you’d hold back. You’d choke and you’d lose.)

The crowd of hangers-on-mostly the guys who hung out at the smoking yard at school-had brought six-packs and a couple of fifths of bourbon. A couple of football players had also brought their female counterparts, girls of the big hair and raccoon eyeliner persuasion, to whom this event would have all the prestige of a prom. Connie would thrive on the attention of an adoring audience, with girls to cheer him on. Harley and Lorne, probing under the hoods of their respective cars, barely noticed that anyone else was there.

Connie was all swagger, strutting around in a Duke Blue Devils sweatshirt-his dad’s alma mater. It remained to be seen if his grades would get him into the university as well, or even if he could be persuaded to go. He tapped Harley on the shoulder. “Did you bring your piggy bank?” he asked. “This race is gonna cost you all of it.”

Lorne still had his nose stuck in the Camaro’s engine, too focused on some mechanical adjustment to care about the theatrics of the occasion. He looked up only briefly, to say to no one in particular, “Get those other cars out the way. Park them up the road toward Akers Farm, behind the starting point.”

When this was done and the preliminaries had been settled, the dark road was lined with shivering spectators, and Mike Gibbs was standing in the middle of the dark road between the two cars, holding a white handkerchief at shoulder height. Harley hunched over the steering wheel, keeping his eyes on Mike, waiting for the go sign. He had forgotten about the faces peering at him from the sidelines, so intent was he on revving his engine against the brake, with one foot on the accelerator and one on the brake to keep in check until the signal was given.

Harley knew Connie preferred another method of revving up: he aimed for the red line but kept his car in neutral. At the instant the handkerchief dropped, Connie would slam into gear and lunge forward into the darkness. That split-second gear shift would cost him an instant of precious time, but he must have figured that the Camaro had enough power to make up for it. Connie hadn’t even insisted on a coin toss for who had to drive on the wrong side of the road. Since Harley had arrived first, he declared, he could keep the right-hand side. Besides, nobody drove up Bear Creek road after dark, so side-of-the-road was not a factor in the race.

Harley kept his eyes on Mike’s handkerchief, shining in the pool of headlights. He felt a film of sweat on his upper lip and his hands felt so clammy that he had to wipe them on his jeans to make sure that they didn’t slip on the steering wheel at the crucial moment, which was fast approaching. A heartbeat later the white handkerchief began to fall, and Harley slammed the gas pedal to the floor. Tires squealed and the Trams-Am hurtled forward, even with Connie’s Camaro; then the two of them sped down the dirt road, heedless of the shouts from behind them.

A quarter mile farther on-a distance carefully paced out in daylight-Robbie Bradley was leaning against the big sycamore, flashlight in hand, to signal the end of the race. The contest would be over in fifteen seconds. A quarter of a mile in cars that could go from zero to sixty in one breath. Sixty miles an hour-that’s 88 feet per second, then, steadily accelerating to who-knows-what for most of the next 1,320 feet. Fifteen blurred seconds. It was all reflexes. Stomp and go and steer and before you could blink you’d passed the tree and it was over.

Harley gripped the wheel and hung on, focused on the light that Robbie Bradley was waving from his post by the sycamore…Almost there…almost there when the deer burst out of the woods and stopped dead in the glare of the headlights. In the middle of the road.

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.