The Spark and the Drive by Wayne Harrison

Author:Wayne Harrison
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781466837355
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

20.

At least once a week, Nick and I raced the ZL-1 at Wickersham’s. We staged undramatic upsets against cars that had been exalted like royalty over fish sticks in the school cafeteria.

I kept my promise not to tell Mary Ann about the races, and having secrets infused me with a self-possession that I imagined important men had—senators, generals, technology engineers. It was a man’s burden to keep secrets. Though of course there was the other secret, the cowardly one I still couldn’t dare myself to tell Nick. But I kept the truth from Mary Ann because she would worry, and that she would worry made the racing dangerous, though that was never how it felt with Nick behind the wheel.

From the Corvette’s passenger seat, I only saw how strategically he drove. He’d lurch up to the back fender and fall back, then pull even just before the end, so that every time it seemed he’d won by dumb luck more than anything—a bad shift or an extended burnout by the other car. He got nowhere near red-lining the Corvette—he didn’t need to, was smart not to, though inside I begged him to, just once, just once. There was no sense of chance and thus no fear I felt, no adrenalized clenching or loss of spit, because Nick drove without surprise, feeling the perimeter of the Corvette as if it were an extension of his body, reading the minds of anyone who put up money against him, and surging not a second sooner than was required to win.

This is what I mean when I say reading their minds: Most races are won or lost in the first two seconds, when a novice might dump the clutch at too high an rpm and break the tires loose. This happened with a big Fairlane Cobra, as Nick knew it would. Of course he wasn’t reading minds. He was just aware of how the kid revved the engine to clean the exhaust before the flag came down. Nick said to me, “He’s going to fishtail,” and then he launched us faster than he had before, faster than I knew the car was capable of launching—the front tires came fully off the ground and slammed back down after breathless floating seconds, when I saw that the Fairlane was not beside us, that its headlights were swinging through the corn, and I turned back to see the car’s rear end in our lane, pulling out of a fishtail that would have sideswiped us had Nick not gotten the fuck out of there.

I understand now that my complacency was irrational. Anything can happen at a hundred and fifteen miles per hour on a dark, unpainted road barely wide enough for two cars, and once we crossed the finish line he had only seconds to let off and start feathering the brakes so that by the time we stopped there was maybe fifty feet before the road turned to gravel and swung up through the big hardwood trees. But Nick was in his element.

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