Richard didn’t want to halt, for motion was the law of the crowd. He let it sweep him on by and saw Matt’s calmness-Matt always had that-and his decency-Matt really had that-and it made him realize with surprising bitterness that Matt was really the beneficiary of all the madness of eleven years ago, though nobody could have known it then, for Matt was just a boy from the second, the trophy wife. He was good-natured and unassertive, all eyes and ears to the excellent adventure the fates had decreed would be his life.
“Yes ma’am,” Richard heard Matt say in that soft voice of his. “Be happy to.” And he took a three-year-old upon his lap and smiled for a pic. Then it was time to go and the thousand still in line had to be disappointed. Matt rose and said into a mic, “Folks, I have to get my beauty rest and keep my arm loosey-goosey for all them left-hand turns!” And of course everybody laughed.
Matt waved. Then he and Red left the venue as a golf cart arrived, and Richard saw how thin and muscular the young man was, how lean and graceful. He had the racer’s perfect body, the body that the great ones had, short and slender so there was no crowding in the driver’s seat, with muscular forearms and a longish neck, which gave him eerie pivoting ability for peripheral vision left and right, legs able to reach pedals without cramping, in short, the whole package.
The golf cart speedily vanished behind the cyclone fence that marked off the driver’s compound, that is, the fence that marked off the aristocracy from the peasantry.
Richard watched it go until it disappeared, and he imagined where it took Matt: to a luxury Rec-V customized for travel, a beautiful woman or four or six, a crew of adoring hangers-on, an accountant, maybe rock or movie star pals, the big life as imagined by America at this moment in history.
Again, melancholy came across him, a fleeting image of the eternal What Might Have Been. He’d steeled himself to believe to the contrary that, given certain behavioral dynamics within himself, there was no What Might Have Been, there was only a What Never Could Happen. It wasn’t in the cards; he didn’t have Matt’s go-along-to-get-alongness, his mellow ways, his charm. He was too fucking outlaw, he had to have it his way. He was also too smart, too self-aware. Like all athletic and warrior enterprises, NASCAR tended to reward unconscious genius. If you had irony, had read a book or two, had a taste for surrealism and grotesquerie, if you hated structure and had a natural guerrilla’s heart, it could never be for you. You saw through it too easily. It was like a church, and you were born with a non-believer’s heart. And even if you felt tremendous nostalgia for it, the honest, bitter goddamned truth was that it was never going to be and could never have been for you. For Matt it was maybe just perfect, given his perfect blend of talents and limits. For Richard it was too much, given his blend of talents and limitlessness. No matter what, he would have destroyed his inheritance, crapped in the church, and gone his own outlaw way.
That’s why he was the Sinnerman.
He turned his iPod way, way up until his anthem blasted melancholy from his brain.
Sinnerman, where you gonna run to?
Gonna run to the sea
Sea won’t you hide me?
Run to the sea
Sea won’t you hide me?
But the sea, it was a boilin’
All on that day
Now it was on to business. He looked up at the towering speedway, its circularity gone this far under its shadow, so that it was just a wall of girders and walkways on the underside of the steep auditorium seating. Next to it, silver in the August heat, was the faux-streamline building of the speedway headquarters, which looked to him like a Greyhound station in about 1937. It sat atop a shelf of land, and down here, beneath it, was the grid of lanes of NASCAR Village and all its little retail outlets. A gully, some kind of drainage arrangement full of dirty water, split NASCAR Village in two. But there were two bridges across the channel. He took out a pen and a notepad and carefully drew a map, and on it traced the quickest way from the roadway to the bridge. Oh, that would be the fun part.
He moseyed over to the far side of the gully and found exactly more of the same for another square mile or so, the tents and booths, the walkways, somewhat tackier here, the sense of bizarre for the pilgrims where everything was a holy relic of the faith, all for sale and not cheap. Beyond the village was the hill that lay at the end of a long scut of ridges trending down from the north. He let his gaze fall upon the tip of the hill probably a mile off and six hundred feet up, through mud and inclined forests. He knew that, as in many old fables, paradise lay atop the mountain. I have been to the mountaintop, wasn’t that it? But before you got to the mountaintop you had to cross a river and a plain, bringing fire and destruction along with you. What was this, the Bible?
Ah well, he thought, continuing with his map: Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.
TWENTY-FIVE
The caravan left at 4 A.M. to avoid Race Day traffic and observant eyes and to get set up early. It consisted of the Reverend Grumley in the lead car, Brother Richard driving, and two senior Grumleys, a Caleb and a Jordan, both of whom promptly fell asleep, in the back. In the second vehicle, a truck which bore the name PINEY RIDGE BAPTIST PRAYER CAMP carried most of the heavy equipment the long day’s toil would demand. The third, a van also bearing the name of the camp, consisted mostly of man- and firepower. The fourth, a pickup, bore as its loads the tents and over ten thousand bottles of water, as well as ice, coolers, NASCAR hats, T-shirts, King Richard cowboy straw Stetsons, Kyle Busch caps, and other NASCAR trinkets that would justify their presence at the location. The fifth, another van, contained more men, though these were the humbler Grumleys, the tire-change team, and others with various and sundry little tasks, according to the master plan.
The five vehicles moved through a desolate, almost-unlit Mountain City, across Iron Mountain-the spot where Sinnerman had almost taken out Nikki slid by without comment-through Shady Valley, past the last long abutment, Holston Mountain, then full into the Shenandoah for the next eighteen-odd miles to Bristol and its famed speedway.
There was no chatter. Brother Richard drove with his usual deft touch, the car alive in his hands, while the Reverend stared glumly into the darkness.
A cellphone rang to the tune of “Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here.”
The Reverend took the phone from his powder blue suit jacket and examined the caller ID.
“His master’s voice,” said Brother Richard. “Who else’d have the number and call at this hour?”
“Yes,” said the Reverend into the cell.
He listened.
“Yes, again.”
He listened some more.
“Absolutely.”
A few more seconds passed.
“I guarantee it. They are well prepared. I myself am here to lead. It will happen exactly as planned. Pray to God our luck is high, but it should be, as the Lord favors the bold. I prayed hard last night and again this morning and so I am confi-”
Brother Richard could tell he was cut off.
Finally he said, “You have my assurances. And I have yours. Then I will see you when we are home free and ready to celebrate.”
He put the phone away. His dark mood was not alleviated.
“That’s the big boss,” said Brother Richard. “That would be the gent that actually thought this up, as it clearly lies beyond the Grumley IQ pool. He’s got his doubts about you, Reverend, I can tell. He wants reassurances, guarantees. A big pair of dice are about to be rolled and, nervous as a cat like the rest of us, he just wants to make certain you have covered all the bases, right?”
The Reverend was silent.
“Sure would like to know who’s on the other end of that phone. Got my ideas. Yes, I do.”