It’s a warm night with no threat of rain. There’s a sizeable crowd gathered at the makeshift track, fifty or sixty spectators milling about, some sitting in the temporary bleachers that Boss Harvey has borrowed from the fairgrounds in Wilkesboro. Boss Harvey’s brother-in-law is the reeve of Wilkes County and it was he who arranged the loan. There’s a booth beneath the seats, selling hot dogs and soda. Bubble gum is two cents and licorice a nickel. Boss Harvey doesn’t miss a trick.
The crowd is anxious for action of any kind. It’s Saturday night and Mason jars of moonshine are being passed about in plain sight. No revenuers here. Boss Harvey is over at the entrance to the track. Admission has been raised to twenty-five cents and Boss tells the gatekeeper Sue Ann Tibbles, who weighs two hundred and forty pounds and happens to be his sister, to make sure nobody sneaks in under the fence. It seems unlikely; if there is anybody who scares the local boys more than Boss Harvey, it’s Sue Ann Tibbles.
Leaving the gate, Boss walks toward the starting line, striding in his coveralls and heavy Wellington boots. He has a cigar stub the size of a pine cone clenched unlit between his teeth.
“Where in the hell is that twerp Edgar?” he demands. “Night coming on, we need to get this thing rolling.”
Edgar emerges out of a cluster of men. “We got to get the cows off the track,” he tells Boss.
“Cows? What cows are you talking about?”
Edgar points to the far end of the track. In the coming dusk, there are a half-dozen Herefords, grazing in the infield.
“Why in the hell do we got cows on the goddamn racetrack?” Boss Harvey shouts.
“Being cows, they might not know it’s a racetrack,” Edgar says. “They might be of the opinion it is still a hay field.”
“Never mind your lip,” Boss Harvey says. “Get ’em the hell out of there!”
“I was just fixing to do that,” Edgar explains and he goes back to the men he’d been talking to. He gets a couple to join him and they go trotting off to see to the cattle.
Bobby Barlow arrives as Edgar and the others are chasing the uncooperative Herefords around the field. Rolling up to the gate, he tells Sue Ann that he’s there to race, excusing him from the admission fee, and then idles the coupe over to the rest of the cars at the starting line. Boss Harvey spots him and makes a beeline over.
“Hold on, peckerwood,” he says. “Two-dollar entry fee, and no—I ain’t taking your goddamn IOU.”
Bobby gets out of the coupe. “You getting smarter, Boss? I can remember when you couldn’t spell IOU.”
A few of the boys get a laugh out of that, which does nothing to improve Boss Harvey’s attitude toward Bobby. He reaches out and grabs Bobby by the collar.
“Never mind your wisecracks, gasbag,” he says. “Pay up or get the hell out.”
Bobby brushes the hand away, then takes the two dollars from his pants and stuffs it in Boss Harvey’s breast pocket. “Boss—if I want any shit out of you, I’ll squeeze your head.”
From her vantage point on the grassy knoll above the track, Ava watches the exchange between Bobby and Boss Harvey. She had arrived a half hour earlier, paid her admission and walked along the fence to where she now sits, avoiding the boisterous crowd. She isn’t quite sure what she is looking for but she has decided that the answer to at least one of her problems might be somewhere on these premises. She could be wrong, as she has been somewhat frequently, of late.
Boss Harvey stares Bobby Barlow down as he walks over to join the other drivers gathered around their cars. Boss calls a youngster over and speaks to him, whereupon the kid gets on a bicycle and rides out through the gate, pedaling back toward town as fast as his legs can manage. When he’s gone Boss turns, hands on his hips, and glares down the track where Edgar and the others are still chasing the half-feral cattle.
Bobby and the other drivers are waiting. A quart jar makes the rounds. Ava smiles. Maybe she merely needs to set up a booth here at the track. She could sell Flagg copperhead by the pint or the jug. That would solve both her marketing problems and the transportation woes too. Of course, as a plan it isn’t feasible. It is a little too close to home for that.
It takes a while but Edgar and his fellow wranglers finally manage to chase the Herefords into the adjoining field, from whence they came. Edgar props a fallen gate back into place and then marches back along the track like a returning hero. Boss Harvey produces the starter’s flag—a blue bandana on a stick— from his hip pocket and waves the cars into position, making a point of putting Bobby at the very back of the pack. Seconds later he drops the flag and the cars surge forward as one, exhausts roaring, tires spinning as they fly down the track.
The race is twenty laps. Within minutes the air is laden with dust, the smell of exhaust fumes and burning oil, the scream of smoking clutch plates. As usual, half of the drivers are green teenagers driving family sedans and pickup trucks, and they careen all over the track. One car goes into a corner too quickly, and flips over. Another blows its engine and coasts into the infield.
Boss Harvey positioned Bobby at the back of the pack to handicap his chances. He could have started Bobby in another county and it wouldn’t have mattered. The stripped-down coupe is twice as fast as the other vehicles in the race, and Bobby is ten times the driver. He picks his way easily through the crowded field, drifting through the corners and roaring past everybody in the straights.
Ava watches from the hill, the noise and fumes an affront to her senses. She has no interest in any of the cars or trucks and doesn’t care who wins. But the driving itself intrigues her. Not the teenager drivers; most of them end up in the ditch, or on their roof. The Flaggs have already tried men who can do that. It’s the few skilled drivers that she watches, how they slide through a turn and accelerate into a straight, how they overtake another car on the inside, with inches to spare. Ava hadn’t noticed any of this the first time she’d been here with Morgan. Things have changed since then. Perhaps Ava herself has changed since then.
Edgar stands alongside Boss Harvey near the finish line. Sometime in the middle of the race, a Wilkes County police car arrives and Chief Truscott Parr and his deputy Danny Watson get out to watch. Apparently everybody in Wilkes County is a fan of stock car racing. Ava wonders who exactly is minding the store back in town. Not that Wilkesboro has ever been a hot bed of criminal activity, and is even less so now, when nobody has anything worth stealing. She notices that the pints of liquor being freely passed about now disappear. Chief Parr is known as a hard case on the making and distributing of moonshine.
By the end of the race, Bobby has lapped the entire field once, and some cars twice. He coasts over the finish line. Boss Harvey waves a red bandana now, indicating that Bobby is the winner. Bobby rolls to a stop a few yards away, where’s he’s immediately surrounded by a small crowd, mostly kids still in their teens. They clap him on the back as he gets out of the car and cluster around to admire the engine in the coupe.
Boss Harvey approaches Bobby and hands him the twenty-dollar purse. Boss’s attitude has changed for some reason. He smiles at Bobby and shakes his hand.
“Nice job out there, son,” Boss says.
Bobby makes a showing of counting the money under Boss Harvey’s eye. “It was a pleasure, Boss.”
“A pleasure to watch too.”
Bobby looks warily at the big man. “You’re getting real sociable in your old age, Boss.”
“Don’t get used to it, boy,” Boss Harvey says.
With that, Truscott Parr comes up behind Bobby and clubs him senseless with a billy club. Bobby drops in a heap, rolls over on his back and lays still. On the hill, Ava is not quite certain what she just witnessed. Or why it occurred. She gets to her feet and watches while Parr and the deputy grab Bobby beneath the arms and drag him to the police car.
Next morning, Bobby lays on the hard cot in the Wilkesboro jail, adjacent to the police station. He’s been awake since six o’clock. There’s a goose egg on the back of his skull where Truscott Parr’s nightstick landed and scrapes on his chin from where he landed in the dirt. He has a pounding headache.
At around nine, he hears somebody moving around in the front of the station. There are the sounds of drawers being opened and closed and keys rattling. Then Truscott Parr appears in the doorway to the lock-up.
“Wake up!”
Bobby puts his eye on the man. “I’m awake.”
“Then get up.”
“Can’t be court this morning,” Bobby says. “It’s Sunday.”
“That’s right, genius,” Parr says. “At least you know what day it is. Come on, you and me are going for a walk.”
“When you going to tell me why I’m even here, Parr? I know my rights. You can’t arrest me and hold me for no reason.”
“Around here, I can do what I want.” Parr unlocks the cell door. “Get on out of there.”
Bobby gets to his feet and when he does, his headache worsens. The man who caused it stands ten feet away, smirking.
“I want to know why I’m here,” Bobby says again.
“I’ll tell you when I’m good and ready,” Chief Parr says. “First we need to have us a conversation. Now come on.”
Bobby steps out of the cell. “Where we going?”
“Follow me and shut up,” Parr says. “And if you got any notions of running, forget it. You’ll earn yourself another whack from my nightstick.”
“I wasn’t running the first time, dipshit.”
Parr lets the comment slide. He leads Bobby outside and around back of the station. Bobby’s coupe sits there in the alley, parked alongside a Wilkes County police car, a Chevrolet sedan. Bobby turns on Parr.
“Who said you could drive my car?”
“Deputy Watson drove your car and we don’t need your goddamn permission, gasbag,” Parr says. “I’ll drive it off a cliff if it pleases me.”
Bobby walks around the coupe, making sure it hasn’t been damaged.
“I want you to tell me how come this rattletrap is so damn fast,” Parr says. “It’s the fastest car in the county and you ain’t exactly the smartest person in the county so why in the hell is it so fast?”
“That’s the conversation?” Bobby asks.
“That’s the conversation,” Parr says. “I got moonshiners coming out the goddamn woodwork and my Chevy sedans can’t hold a candle to them jacked-up cars they drive. So you tell me how you do it.”
Bobby drops down to have a look underneath the car, concerned that the deputy might have damaged something driving it out of the field. On one hand, he has no desire to tell Truscott Parr anything. But then he doesn’t appreciate the chief calling his intelligence into question.
He straightens up. “I can tell you why I got the fastest car this side of hell—but it ain’t going to do you any good. You can’t do what I do. You don’t have the brains and you don’t have the skills.”
“Let me worry about what skills I got or don’t got, punk,” Parr says. “Tell it.”
Bobby is still deciding. Parr glares defiantly at him, and Bobby returns the look. The police chief has a flushed face and yellow horse teeth. His breathing is shallow and quick. He is a few years older than Bobby and has been chief for a decade or more. Bobby had never much cared for the man, and that was before Parr had sneaked up and clubbed him senseless for—so far as Bobby had been told—no reason in the world.
“I’ll tell you, Parr,” Bobby decides. “I got a buddy works in a machine shop over to Charlotte. Tiger Thompson—him and I was in France back in ’18. Remind me—what branch of the service were you in?”
“I couldn’t go,” Parr says defensively. “Dislocated my shoulder back on the farm and it never did heal right.”
“Ain’t that a shame,” Bobby says. “It’s a wonder you can still swing a billy club like you do. I guess it helps when the guy you’re swinging at is looking the other way.”
“What about the goddamn car?” Parr demanded.
“I’m getting to it,” Bobby says. “Well, my pal Tiger has the run of the shop after hours. Him and me used to juice those army trucks in France. You know––when we were over there fighting the Kaiser. Serving our country.”
“Keep it up, shithead.”
“About three weeks ago I took that engine there over to Charlotte, and him and me bored it and stroked it. Relieved the block and beefed the cam. Put on an Eldelbrock intake manifold with three Stromberg carbs. Brought the engine home and put her back in the coupe, in front of a bulletproof Cadillac transmission. Welded up the spider gears in the rear end so she’s solid posi-track.”
As Bobby’s talking, Parr walks over to look at the engine in question. Bobby reaches inside the coupe and finds his cigarettes. He lights one as he turns back to Parr.
“You’re like a monkey looking at the inside of a watch,” Bobby laughs. “But now you know what makes my car so fast, although I suspect I might just as well been speaking Chinese just then. What are you going to do with the information?”
“I’ll just tell you what,” Parr says. “Today you are going to sign this car over to the Wilkes County Police Department. Then we’re going to take it over to Buck’s Garage and have him put the fenders back on and give it a paint job and turn it into an official police car.”
Bobby stares at the chief in disbelief. “You figure I’m just going to give you my car? You figure I’m going to give you my pride and joy so’s you can chase down a bunch of damn moonshiners? Why in the name of Christ would I do that?”
“I’ll tell you why,” Parr says. “After you sign over this car, I’m going to tell the authorities over in Stony Point that you were right here in town the day they’re claiming you and that skirt robbed that gas station.”
Bobby falls silent. He’d almost forgotten about the incident, even though it had been less than two months ago. They’d driven off with seven dollars and change and a carton of Luckies.
“Cat got your tongue all of a sudden?” Parr asks. “Maybe you don’t remember that gal, name of Luanne Dixon. She remembers you. She told the Stony Point police it was all your idea. Is that right, Barlow? Did you lead that poor girl down the garden path? Most judges I know have little regard for men who lead innocent girls down the garden path.”
Luanne is about as innocent as Ma Barker, Bobby thinks. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do,” Parr says. “And there’s more I can talk about. The First National Bank over to Lenoir was robbed two weeks ago. A gal looking a lot like this Luanne went to the bank manager’s house and held a gun on the man’s wife while her partner—a man about your age, I’m told—went to the bank and told the man to call home. They got away with over three thousand dollars.”
Well shit, Bobby thinks. It sounds as if Luanne found another sucker to go along with her grand schemes, although it did not appear as if they had gotten her out to Hollywood and movie stardom yet.
“That’s got nothing to do with me,” Bobby tells the chief.
“We’ll see about that,” Parr says. “That girl Luanne sang about the gas station job; she just might sing about this one too, once they explain to her what her future might look like if she don’t. Gas stations are small potatoes, but the state of North Carolina takes a dim view of folks holding up banks. Not only that but it seems to me that you recently got out of jail for stealing automobiles. I can’t see that working in your favor neither.”
“You say the bank was two weeks ago?” Bobby says. “I’ve been working for Charley Walker’s Texaco for nigh on a month. I been there every damn day.”
“Oh, I have given that some thought, you best believe,” Parr says. “I figure you’d think you had a perfect alibi. But everybody knows that old Walker is gone half the time, out fixing farm implements or whatever. What’s to stop you from closing up shop for a couple hours, driving over to Lenoir to do a little bank robbing and then be back here in time for supper? Especially in this hopped-up car you’re so proud of.”
Bobby pulls on the cigarette. “You can invent all the stories you want. There’s no way anybody can put me in Lenoir that day. You know why? Because I wasn’t there.”
“You wasn’t there unless this Luanne woman says different,” Parr tells him. “That poor innocent gal. So, we’d better get the paperwork signed over on this car and then you won’t have to worry about it. What do you say?”
“What do I say about signing my coupe over to you?” Bobby asks. “I say kiss my ass.”
Parr’s red face gets redder but he holds his temper. “All right, we’ll just put you back in that cell for a few days and let you think about it.”
“You can’t hold me with no charges,” Bobby reminds him. “Oh, I forgot to mention,” Parr says. “I just this minute decided to cooperate with the Stony Point department and charge you with the gas station job. Now what do you say?”
“I already said it,” Bobby tells him. “You can kiss my ass.”