Night of Thunder

Richard heard the cheer of the crowd. He looked in his side mirror and was saddened to see that he had started no fires, though he’d knocked down some electric wires and they bled sparks in a few places, dangerous and beautiful and spectacular at once. Then suddenly one of them ignited something and the fire rose and leaped, at least on one half of Driver’s Row, and soon enough flames consumed a great many of the battered retail installations.

Damn, that was good! Do it git better?

“Richard, my poor Grumleys in the back. They ain’t got no seatbelt.”

“Their heads are too hard for injury. You can’t hurt a Grumley by hitting him in the skull. But okay, let’s go.”

He came next to a little bridge across a gully, initially cut off by traffic blocks set in the earth. But a less important Grumley job had been to wander down there during the race itself and pull them out. Richard rumbled across the bridge, pulled up an incline, and came again to flatness and temptation. Now the speedway was half a mile behind him, the mountain half a mile before him, and the structures on this side of the gully less substantial.

“Go, Richard,” shouted the old man.

This wouldn’t be as fun. It was all ticky-tack, tents and ramshackle lean-tos, all of it held together by aluminum and canvas and tape and twine, representing the lower end of the NASCAR money pyramid. Not corporate power but scavenging entrepreneurial nomadism.

“Ho hum,” said Richard. “Don’t think nothing’ll burn or electrify, sorry to say.”

“Richard, you don’t got to narrate everthing. This ain’t a damn movie.”

“Oh, it is, old man. You’re Tommy Lee Jones, avuncular and charming, but now old and weary. I’m the mean Kevin Costner, not the sensitive Kevin, Caleb is Marky Mark, and maybe somewhere there’s a hero who’ll bring us down, but Clint retired and nobody took his place, so I don’t think so.”

After these important comments, Richard finally consented to do his job, and roared through the lesser precincts of NASCAR with much less pizzaz, as if he’d grown bored, having the attention span of a gnat. It was just snap, crackle, and pop, as the flimsy structures were eaten alive by the power of the Cash in Transit truck, and no pile of hats or Chinese Confederate flags or fu

But as tactical enterprise, the genius of the plan soon became evident. There simply was no way any four-wheeled vehicle could have followed them, because Richard left behind him so much more damage than had been there before, and whether or not pla

Richard drove on, he flattened, folks danced in delight, some throwing beer bottles at him, not so much to stop him but to participate in the wanton pleasure of the evening. Now and then a police bullet sounded a pitiful ping as it bounced off the heavy armor but failed to penetrate. At the far end, the anticlimax arrived with a whimper. Richard found a dirt road that led to a gated installation in the lee of the mountain, built up some nice speed and fragmented the cyclone gate with his Ford cyclone, and roared along the edge of the mountain, which presented itself to him as an incline swaddled in trees.

“There ’tis,” shouted the old man, and indeed, up ahead, an archway in the trees revealed a dark portal, behind which lay the serpentine of a switchbacked track to the top, glistening with perpetual mud from a dozen mountain springs, its existence all but forgotten, a relic left over from logging days. “Here’s where you earn all that goddamn money we done paid you!”

“Think there’s a man in America who could get a rig this heavy up a road this steep and sharp? Well there ain’t but one, and he took the Pike’s Peak hill climb three times ru

“You’d best have it, boy.”

“Hang on, Grandpappy. The elevator is reading Up.”

He plunged ahead.

A lesser man would have wept. Not Caleb. His shattered nose blossomed blood, and he felt like a piece of popped corn in a corn popper, floating this way and that, a hard trick with a thirty-pound rifle in his hands.

“Goddamn him, that sumbitch, go

“The fucking little prick, he doin’ this ’cause he thinks he’s special, it’s his little trick on us poor dumb Grumleys.”

“He thinks we ain’t human!”

It was, in other words, no fun in the box. The five boys each were made clumsy by submachine guns, their body armor, their spare magazines, the darkness, the claustrophobia. It was like a submarine undergoing a depth-charge raid by the Japanese. They were tossed this way, then that, without visibility. On top of that, shrapnel, in the form of thirty-pound bales of bills in tamper-evident plastic bags flew around the interior like really heavy pillows. They fucking hurt when they hit you, and they could hit you at any time from any angle. Then there was a lunch box or two, maybe a few cans of Diet Coke, and who knew what else afly in the dark atmosphere of the steel box and though the shocks supporting it were thick and strong, they did little to protect against the vicissitudes of crumple and crunch that Richard produced as he wreaked vengeance on NASCAR for the crime of being NASCAR. Back here, a hero was needed, a man of strength.

But these were Grumleys, greed-driven and sensation hungry, the brains scientifically bred out of them, so they had no hero. No calm voice took over and soothed, not even Caleb’s, as that unhappy warrior simply sat as still as possible, clutching the huge Barrett.50, trying to breathe through blood, while dreaming of driving the Barrett’s butt into Richard’s strange, disguised head and watching it shatter. The rest got through the ordeal of the ride on the strength of their considerable sheer mea

It was dialogue. It was not oration, still less a lecture, and least of all some kind of pontification. No, it was chat, conversation, attention to nuance, cooperation, and teamwork. This is how you climb a hill that doesn’t want to be climbed in a big vehicle that doesn’t want to climb it. Richard listened and talked with the components of the adventure. He felt the traction in each tire, not a chorus, but the voice of each as the expression of a personality; he felt the play between torque and transmission even in the crude containment of the automatic gear shift as these two dynamisms bartered their way through the complex transaction. He felt the tremble of vibes from the shocks, the subtler orchestration of a