Neutrino Drag

By this time, all the other Bandits and competitors and spectators had come over to see who these visitors were. Excited murmurs and exclamations filled the air at the unexplained mirage of the weird car and its occupants. All the guys were putting themselves in danger of severe whiplash, jerking their heads back and forth between Stella and the car, while the women huddled in a tight knot of suspicion and jealousy, growling and hissing like wet cats. I beamed what I hoped was a reassuring glance at Herminia, but she didn't accept it. In her midriff-knotted shirt and Big Yank jeans, she suddenly looked bumpkinish to me, compared to Stella's sophistication, like Daisy Mae next to Stupefyin' Jones, with me some poor wetback Little Abner caught in the middle.

Finally Joaquin shouldered to the front of the crowd. Doffing his helmet—a football player's old leather one he had stuffed with asbestos pads—my little buddy said boldly, "So, amigo, you're probably here to drag."

"Yes! Probability one! Speed-racing most assuredly Spacedog's goal is! Burn longchain molecules! Haul gluteus! Scorch the planetary surface! Bad to the osteoclasts! Eat my particulates, uniformed societal guardian!"

I could sense that everyone here wanted to ask Spacedog about his green skin. But this was exactly the one question nobody in the Bandits would ever voice. After all the prejudice we had experienced, and our unwritten club law of no bias against any race, we just couldn't make an exception now, no matter how strange the guy's coloration was. Spacedog had come among perhaps the only bunch of racers in the whole country who would never broach the topic of his origins.

And today I wonder just how accidental that arrival was.

The closest Joaquin could come to the topic was a mild, "So, where you from?"

Spacedog hesitated a moment, then answered, "Etruria. Small node of Europa. Earth continent, not satellite. Stella and Spacedog Etruscans are. Speak only old tongue between ourselves."

Here Spacedog unloaded a few sentences of wild lingo that sounded like nothing I had ever heard in Italy. Stella made no reply. All the listeners nodded wisely, mostly willing to accept his unlikely explanation.

"No racing in Etruria. Must to California for kicks come."

Joaquin made his decison then, speaking for all the Bandits. "Well, pachuco, Paradise Mesa is racing central in this neighborhood. Let's see what you and your crate can do."

Spacedog clapped his hands together like a five-year-old at the circus. "Most uptaking! Stella, alongside kindly Oblong Benzedrine, please wait."

I didn't know what was harder to believe: my good luck in being nominated as Stella's companion, or what I saw next.

Spacedog hopped into his car and picked up a stretchy helmet like a thick bathing cap. The cordless device was studded with shiny contacts on the inside—contacts that matched the bumps on his head. He snugged the helmet on, and suddenly disappeared from view: the mysterious car doors had rematerialized out of nowhere.

Quiet as smoke, the Flash Gordon car wheeled off then as the crowd parted for it, angling across the lake bed toward the Christmas Tree lights that marked the starting line. By the time all the spectators were properly arrayed, Joaquin had pulled up in his own car.

Joaquin hazed his hides while getting into position, sending up smoke from his tires and exhausting mind-blowing billows of nitro fumes. Very cool and intimidating. But Spacedog, invisible behind his smoked glass, didn't choose to play up his own engine power at all.

The lights worked down to green, and the cars were off.

Spacedog crossed the finish line before Joaquin had covered a third of the distance. Nobody even got Spacedog's elapsed time. The guys with the stopwatches just couldn't react fast enough.

Joaquin came to a stop halfway down the track in an admission of total defeat I had never seen before.

I turned my head to gauge the reaction of Stella, standing close by my side.

Although she continued to smile, the starry-eyed woman showed no extra emotion, as if the outcome had never been in doubt. She just radiated a kind of animal acceptance of whatever ocurred.

Within the next minute, the two drivers had returned to the starting line. Spacedog disappeared his door and emerged from his car.

"Victory! Spacedog über todo! More race! More race!"

Well, that was a challenge none of us could refuse.

Over the rest of that afternoon, as the sun sank and reddened, we threw everything we had against Spacedog and his supercar. Or, to use the nickname that the crowd was now chanting, "UFO! UFO!" Useless, all useless, like lobbing softballs to Micky Mantle.

When it was my turn to pit El Tigre against the UFO, my heart was in my throat, despite the certainty of failure. What if by some fluke I was the one to beat him? What would Stella—I mean, Herminia—think of that?

Needless to say, I didn't beat him.

Finally, after Spacedog had whipped our collective ass six ways from San Diego, we called it a day and broke out the cerveza. Spacedog made a fu

After suitable lubrication, Joaquin broached the question uppermost in all our minds.

"What's that car run on, 'dog?"

"Neutrinos."

"You mean nitro?"

"Yes, nitro. Excuse tongue of inadvertent falsity, please."

Joaquin pondered that revelation for a while, then said, "Custom engine?"

"Spacedog himself engine grow."

We all had a laugh over that, and quit pestering Spacedog. We all figured we'd have a good long look at his engine before too long.

Especially once we had made him the newest member of the Bean Bandits, a solemn ceremony we duly enacted a half hour later.

One arm around Stella's wasp waist, Spacedog raised his beer in a toast when we were done.

"Liquid token of future conquests hoisted! Leguminous reivers hegemony established is!"

We all cheered, though we weren't quite sure what we were endorsing.

· · · · ·

Well, the exploits of the Bean Bandits during the next few months of that long-ago year of 1951 should have been engraved in gold for future generations. But instead, hardly any records were kept. That was just how we thought and how we did—or didn't do—things in those days. Who had time to write stuff down or even snap a few pictures? There was always another tire to change or mill to rebore. Nobody knew that the kicks we were having would someday become the stuff of legend. We just lived for the moment, for the roar of the engines and the satisfaction of leaving your opponents in the dust.

So that's why, search until you're blue, you won't find any pictures of Spacedog and his four-wheeled UFO. Which is not to say you can't get a lot of the surviving oldtimers to talk about him. Nobody who was around then is likely to have forgetten the scorched path he cut through the California racing world. Anybody who ever saw that car of his soundlessly accelerate faster'n a Soviet MIG would never forget their jaw-dropping reaction.

Up and down the state, we raced against a dozen clubs and blew all their doors off. The Bandits had been hot shit before Spacedog, but now we were unbeatable. Soon, we knew, we'd have to go further afield for competition. Out to Bo

Everybody in the club was ecstatic, especially Joaquin. To be on top of the racing world, that was all he had ever wanted. It didn't matter that he wasn't personally behind the wheel of the top car. As long as Spacedog was a bona fide Bean Bandit, Joaquin could bask in the shared glory.