Running Wide Open

  The Cap’n Crunch didn’t do much to stave off my hunger, so when the cartoon was over I got up to search the kitchen. I didn’t find any cereal, or even bread for toast, but I did discover some eggs in the fridge. As I mixed about half a dozen with the last of the milk, Race woke up again.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Cooking breakfast.”

  Race rubbed a hand across his face, sighed, and hefted himself up, wadding his blankets into a ball and tossing them to the far corner of the couch. “You already ate all the cereal,” he pointed out, waving a hand at the empty Cap’n Crunch box on the kitchen floor.

  “So?” There’d hardly been enough in that box to satisfy a three-year-old.

  “So somebody has to pay for that stuff.” Race edged around the coffee table to shut off the TV then pull a clean shirt from the pile of clothes I’d had been sitting on. A semi-clean shirt, anyway. He had to pick bits of soggy Cap’n Crunch off it.

  “Any food left?” he asked, padding barefoot through the kitchen.

  “Dude, there wasn’t any food before I ate.”

  “Guess it’s time for a grocery run.” Race opened the freezer and pulled out a carton of Twinkies. He tipped out the last cake then tossed the box toward the garbage can. It missed.

  “Very nutritional breakfast you’ve got there,” I said, watching him tear open the wrapper with his teeth and devour the Twinkie in two bites.

  “Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.”

  * * *

  That afternoon Race dragged me to the grocery store, where he loaded up the cart with all sorts of healthy foods like Twinkies, potato chips, and microwave burritos. He seriously altered the structural integrity of everything in the pile by tossing a six-pack of beer on top. Not normal beer, like Budweiser or Miller, but some weird brand called Guinness.

  On the way home, I had to draw the line when I heard Jimmy Buffett start in on Margaritaville for the fourth time in two days.

  “Don’t you have any other tapes?”

  “Sure, there’s a box around here somewhere. I just can’t ever find it.”

  “Y’know, there’s this amazing device called a radio receiver, and it’s built right into your stereo.”

  Race turned to grin at me. “No kidding?”

  I pulled my feet off the dash and scouted the floorboards until I found a shoebox full of cassettes. After popping the offending tape out of the stereo, I glanced at its title. Songs You Know By Heart. Now wasn’t that the truth.

  We didn’t get back to the trailer until after three.

  “Look, kid,” Race said. “I gotta go to the shop and put in some time on that roll cage. You wanna come along?”

  “Nah, I think I’ll stay here.”

  Something in Race’s posture went slack, like he’d just found out the cop who’d pulled him over for speeding was gonna let him off with a warning. “Okay. Well, if I’m not back by six, go ahead and fix yourself something to eat.”

  I spent the afternoon vegging in front of the tube. It was nice having the place to myself, at least until my channel surfing landed me on Lord of the Flies. It’s this story about some British schoolboys who get stranded on an island. The society they form slowly disintegrates until they start killing each other. I didn’t know what it was about that movie, but even though it spooked the hell out of me, whenever it was on I had to watch it. The idea that little kids could treat each other that way didn’t surprise me. People were messed up. The whole world was messed up. By the time it was over I was thoroughly depressed.

  Six o’clock came and went, but Race didn’t show up. I didn’t feel like cooking, so I ate a bag of Doritos. That only took the edge off. A half-gallon of chocolate ice cream helped, but I had to break down and cook a frozen pizza before I filled myself up.

  Race still wasn’t home by a quarter after seven. No big surprise. There had to be a hundred things he’d rather do than hang out with some strange kid.

  Around eight I got up to snag a Pepsi. As I moved Race’s beer aside I thought, why not? It wasn’t like he was here to stop me.

  I’d never had Guinness before, but I figured beer was beer. Wrong. Guinness was nasty. It tasted burnt. Still, it was alcohol. Race hadn’t appeared by the time I choked down the first bottle, so I got myself another. The second one wasn’t quite as bad. The third tasted almost decent.

  As the alcohol percolated through my body, satisfying every brain cell and muscle fiber, the stress of the past two weeks melted away. I lit up a smoke and explored Race’s music collection. Not a single CD in all those cassettes. It was rock, though, and respectable stuff at that: Queen, CCR, Van Halen. I selected Pink Floyd’s The Wall and stuck it in the tape deck, cranking the volume and slumping on the couch with my fourth beer.

  With the TV on mute, I whizzed through the channels until I came to a Gilligan’s Island rerun. The contrast between the goofy castaways and the dark music felt satisfying. I flopped back, inching my feet up the wall and tracing the wood grain pattern of the paneling with my toes. Then the alcohol turned traitor on me. My blissfulness fizzled as I thought about how quick my dad had been to send me away. Sure, I’d been getting into trouble for a long time—since clear back in fifth grade. But it had never been anything serious until the deal at the zoo. How could Dad give up on me so easily? Pitiful as he was when it came to confrontation, why was that the thing that had finally made him take a stand?

  Not that I wasn’t used to him bailing. He’d sat back and watched Mom tear me a new one for as long as I could remember. And sometimes he even blamed me for it, like on my ninth birthday.

  We’d been getting ready to eat dinner when Mom stormed into the kitchen, yelling about a notice I’d gotten from the library and stashed in my sock drawer. A bill for ten dollars in fines. I’d hidden it because I didn’t want to get ragged on about reading instead of going out for Little League like a normal kid. Usually I was good about taking books back, but I’d been short on bus fare, and I sure as hell couldn’t ask Mom for a ride.

  “When are you going to learn to be responsible?” she ranted. “Do you think I’m made of money? You’re going to pay for this yourself.”

  “How?” My allowance was practically non-existent. I was always getting docked a dollar for not taking out the trash, fifty cents for talking back, a quarter for each piece of clothing I left on the couch.

  “Well, if you don’t have money, I guess I’ll have to return this.” She dropped a package in front of me, wrapped in dinosaur paper that might have been cool if I’d been turning five. Dad glanced at the gift, but he kept his mouth shut.

  My skin flashed hot and my body turned to concrete. Not for a second did I doubt Mom would make good on her threat.

  “Go ahead,” she said. “Open it.”

  “I don’t want to.” It was better not to know what I was missing.

  “I. Told. You. To. Open it.” She shoved the package across the table, the acid in her tone a warning that there were worse things than losing a present.

  With my face rigid, I yanked off the paper. A set of walkie talkies, the ones I’d been wanting for months. An extravagant gift because my birthday was December 31st and we were always broke after Christmas.

  My hand lingered on the box until I forced myself to pull it away. “Take ’em back. I don’t care.”

  My feigned indifference set her off. She slammed back from the table, telling me what an ungrateful brat I was as she went to the counter to grab my cake. “You can just forget about having any of this,” she said, stepping on the lever that opened the trashcan.

  I watched as the cake I’d been waiting for all day slid into the garbage. Mom ceremoniously pulled her foot away. The lid slapped down to imbed itself in chocolate frosting. “Get your own dinner,” she said, turning to leave the room. “I’m too upset to eat.”

  Dad got up and pulled his jacket from the peg by the door. He always made himself scarce when Mom went ballistic. My eyes caught his from across the kitchen,
begging him to take me along just this once. He gripped the doorknob and his gaze shifted to the floor.

  “Don’t look at me. You know better than to rile her.”

  Even now, the memory made me want to slug him. I guess it shouldn’t have been any surprise he’d shipped me off, with a history of crap like that. I got up and went to the fridge for another beer.

  I was halfway through the last one and well into side two of the tape when my uncle came home. By then it was dark. Blue ghosts of TV light haunted the walls, reflecting off the insides of the windows.

  Race made it across the trailer in two steps. He snapped off the stereo, abruptly ending Comfortably Numb.

  “Hey, Speed Racer!” I said, saluting him with my bottle.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Are you drunk?” Race flipped on the overhead light.

  My pupils zipped down to pinpoint size so quick I could practically feel the recoil. “Ahh!” I hollered, throwing my arm across my face. “Turn it off!”

  He left it on.

  “Did you drink that whole six-pack?”

  Slowly, I drew my arm away from my eyes and blinked at him. “Nah, I saved half this last one for you.” Beer dribbled out of the bottle I held, splattering off the edge of the coffee table and down to the floor. The sight of it got me giggling so hard I slid off the edge of the couch. Five other bottles, which I’d balanced on the edge of the overcrowded table, avalanched over me, along with several dirty dishes and a stack of racing magazines.

  “Dude,” I said. “I’m so shredded.”

  “I noticed,” Race said dryly. Then, with a note of annoyance he added, “Do you have any idea how much that stuff cost?”

  Oh, sure, I get wasted and the only thing he can think of is the price of his precious imported beer.

  “Hey, buddy, don’t sweat it, I’ll buy you another six-pack. Hell, I’ll buy you a case.” I levered myself between the couch and the coffee table, sending another wave of crap cascading to the floor. It took several tries to pull myself up. Race stood quietly while I made my attempts, his jaw tensed and irritation flickering in his eyes. I thought sure he was gonna let me have it. Then something gave way in his expression, and resignation replaced the anger.

  “Kid,” he said, “this was not the best thing you coulda done the first time I left you alone.”

  That was it? A feeble reprimand was the best punishment he could come up with? “Maybe you shouldn’a left me alone,” I said. “You ever think of that?”

  “Maybe I thought you could handle it,” Race countered, his voice still eerily calm. “You’re fifteen years old. That’s plenty old enough to be trusted to look out for yourself for a few hours. I can’t babysit you every minute. I’ve gotta earn a living.”

  “I thought you were an artist.”

  “Do you have any idea how many graphic artists there are in this town? If I didn’t do a little welding on the side I’d starve.”

  “And that’s my problem?”

  Race’s tone stayed level. “It is if you want to stay here.”

  “Who says I wanna stay here?”

  Several long seconds passed as Race studied me. “All right, if that’s how you feel, I’ll call your dad tomorrow. I was hoping we could make this work, but I’m not gonna force you. My life would be a lot less complicated without a teenager in it.”

  A cold jolt cut through my buzz. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You’d be happy if I left. You prob’ly never wanted me here to begin with!”

  “Kid—”

  “Fine. I’ll go pack my stuff right now. I’ll leave you to your race car, and your fancy beer, and your crappy-assed stink-hole of a trailer!” I staggered around the coffee table, slipping on one of those damned magazines. Race caught my arm before I could do a face-plant.

  “Le’go!” I said, fighting his grip. “Damn it, let me go!”

  Race’s left hand clamped my other bicep. I struggled, but it didn’t do any good. Soft as my uncle might come across, he was plenty strong. He got right down in my face.

  “Cody, listen to me. I know being here must be tough on you, but it’s the only reasonable choice you’ve got. I don’t want you to go.”

  He was lying. He had to be. If my own dad could throw me out, why should some guy I hardly knew be willing to keep me around?

  “I want to make this work,” Race said.

  Why did he have to be so damned understanding? Why couldn’t he give me hell, like any normal person?

  “What do you care?” I demanded, the mellow of the beer winning out over my anger and leeching the fight from me.

  Something hard glinted in Race’s eyes, then he sighed. “Let’s just say I’ve got my reasons.” His grip slackened, but I was too wiped out to break free.

  “How ’bout you go crawl in bed and sleep this off?” Race said. “We can start over tomorrow, okay?” He released me then draped his arm over my shoulders to steer me across the room. The gesture cut straight through my emotional Kevlar, but somehow I managed to suck it up as Race led me down the hallway.

  The wheezed-out bed groaned as I fell onto it. Race tossed a blanket over me, then, not yet familiar with the cast-iron nature of my stomach, he stuck a wastebasket beside the bed.

  “Goodnight, kid,” he said. “I hope to hell you don’t have a hangover tomorrow.”

  Chapter 3

  I wasn’t hung over the next morning, but I did sleep late. Race was already up when I slipped into the kitchen to forage for breakfast. Using a half-eaten Twinkie as a pointing device, he gestured at my T-shirt, which read, Please forgive me, I was raised by wolves.

  “Well, that explains a lot,” he said. “And it calls to mind such an accurate image of my sister.”

  The comment stirred a tiny feeling of camaraderie in me.

  “You feeling okay?” Race continued, studying me as if he genuinely cared.

  “Sure.” I ducked around him and went for the cupboard. His attention was making me feel twitchy.

  “Good, because we’re leaving for the speedway at two. We’ll meet Kasey at the shop first. There’s one last thing I’ve gotta do to the car.”

  “Who’s Kasey?”

  “My crew chief and biggest sponsor. So try not to live up to the slogan on your shirt.”

  * * *

  At the shop, I flipped through a book about engines while Race fiddled with something under the hood of his car.

  “So where’s this big sponsor?” I asked, tossing the book onto a workbench and pulling out my smokes.

  “Probably slaving away over a car. Kasey’s a workaholic. Hardly ever takes a day off. I understand that’s how it’s supposed to be when you own a business, but I wouldn’t know from personal experience.” Race gave me a conspiratorial grin. “I’m kind of a slacker.”

  The crew chief still hadn’t arrived when Race finished his repair. He hooked his trailer to the hitch on the van then backed up in front of the Dart. He’d just gotten the thing loaded when a mean-looking ’60s car with a deep purple paint job roared into the parking lot. The engine was so loud—so powerful—that I felt the vibration in my chest and through the soles of my shoes. It stirred something primal and vaguely reminiscent of the rush that goes through me every time I catch a glimpse of a hot girl.

  The door of the car opened and a woman stepped out. A rush-inducing woman. Her eyes echoed that perfect blue of an Oregon September day, and the hair pulled back from her face gleamed a rich cinnamon color.

  She let loose with a smile that could’ve melted every glacier on Mt. Hood. “You must be Cody.”

  “Kid, meet my crew chief, Kasey McCormick,” Race said.

  “Your crew chief’s a chick?”

  He raised an eyebrow at me. “Got a problem with that?”

  “Heck no.” I glanced at Kasey, who seemed to be enjoying my stupefaction. Abruptly, I turned back to Race. “It wasn’t an oversight was it, your not telling me she was a she?”

  Race answered with a monstrous gri
n.

  * * *

  Kasey took off on her own, while Race and I detoured through the Burger King drive-thru before heading to the speedway, which was located a mile or so west of his shop. A green and yellow sign—no doubt a tie-in to the town’s University theme—marked the entrance. From the highway, the place didn’t look like much, just a grandstand with an asphalt oval stuck in the middle of a field. Dust billowed behind us, covering the race car in a fine powder as we bumped along the gravel driveway.

  Up close, things looked even worse. A few small buildings and the wall that backed the grandstands were constructed from sheets of plywood. Weathered white paint, which must have dated back to the age of black-and-white TV, flaked from every surface. The parking lot was nothing more than a mowed field.

  My uncle pulled up to a little shack at the end of the driveway. The grandmotherly-looking lady inside greeted us. “Well, hello, Race! Rumor has it you’re planning to take the points lead away from Addamsen tonight.”

  Race chuckled. “I think that’s a little optimistic, Cheryl.”

  “You’ll do it, sooner or later. I have complete faith in you.” The lady gave him a smile that made me think she was only a step away from ruffling his hair.

  After Race introduced me, Cheryl had us sign some kind of release—probably so my parents couldn’t sue if a chunk of flying metal took my head off. Then she stamped my hand and gave me a slip of paper. “That’s your pit pass, hon. Don’t lose it, okay?”

  The track looked as sorry as the buildings, with its asphalt cracked and patched down low in the corners. A cement block barrier, topped by a battered chain-link fence, protected the grandstands, but the only wall to keep cars out of the infield was along the front stretch.

  In the pits two strips of asphalt provided access to and from the front straight and separated the rows of cars, which sat amid powdery dust and close-cropped weeds. A third paved road, full of potholes, led to the backstretch. That was about all there was, other than a run-down concession stand, a few light posts, and a Porta-potty.

  We found Kasey leaning over the fender of a Camaro that sported a two-tone blue paint job. The number 4 was stenciled on the roof and doors. A skinny guy with dark hair, who looked a few years older than Race and Kasey, hung over the opposite fender. I figured he must be the driver because he was dressed just like Race in a one-piece outfit that I’d been informed was called a firesuit.