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:
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.
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.
