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 running and some other uphills as well, and has done the trick on bikes and go-carts and destructo jalopies and tractors and big-daddy trucks and hell, even a kiddie cart or two.”
“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, gonna whip his ass!” screamed another flying Grumley, immediately before hitting the goddamned wall or sharp shelf or any of the dozens of hard surfaces inside the box.
“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 meanness, their similar hunger to pulp Richard when the day was done, and dreams of swag and whores and drugs and other cool Grumley things.
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 announcements from the enhanced diesel as the Xzillaraider had blown out the parameters of the performance package, and the diesel fuel burned hot and long and fierce, turning its own chambers a molten red, threatening to go volcanic at any second. On top of that, through the imperfect vision cones of the illuminating headlights, Richard read the curves, finding the ideal line in each, read the texture of the mud in the road, divining where its gelid smoothness contained strength and where only watery treachery. He sensed which logs could be crushed, which knocked aside and which, still strong, had to be avoided. It was a complex negotiation, and he was right that few men in the world could have done it, and few would have wanted to.
It seemed to take forever, and Richard at a certain point felt his muscles locked against the wheel as if the wheel was the enemy and the addition of his human strength could make a difference. He cued himself to relax, and felt the iron melt from his neck. Though bathed in sweat, he felt at last a kind of relaxation, because it occurred to him that that which he feared most-a sucking pool of mud that would engulf him to above the hubcaps-would not befoul him.
“Jesus Christ,” said the old man, “I think you done it, boy. I think we going to make it.”
The truck broke from gnarled, mythic wood into a kind of grassy meadow and it suddenly occurred to Richard that there was no more hill to climb.
He brought the truck to a stop. He opened the door and almost fell out, limp with exhaustion, spent and wasted and hungry for vacation. He sucked coolish air, felt coolish air against his brow. He looked, saw stars, pinwheels of ancient energy, dancing light years off. Jesus, what a fucking thing.
“We here, boy, we done it,” sang the old guy. From behind came an outpouring of Grumleys as the boys liberated themselves and had a moment of pure bliss. They were on top of the world. Ma, we’re on top of the world. From hating Richard, they flew to loving him. Richard had never been so admired in his life. He felt like a rock star as hard Grumley hands pounded him on the back.
“Okay, boys, you git that dough on the roof,” yelled the old man, and then turned to speak on the cell, “Tom, get that bird in and get us the hell out of here. Time to go home.”
As behind him, the Grumleys set about to move the money bales to the roof of the truck so that they could be tossed into the hovering chopper, Richard moseyed off a few yards and came to a vantage on what he had done.
He looked down from a thousand feet on the vast structure of the speedway and the NASCAR civilization that had spread forth and put roots down upon the plains.
He saw wreckage. He saw fire. He saw a thousand emergency service vehicles spitting out goobers of red light. He saw smoke, drifting this way and that in the wind, he saw the crushed, the broken, the smashed, the atomized. He saw pain, disbelief, destruction, disaster. He saw the beast wounded. He felt in himself an insane pride in the ruination. Sure you could have detonated a bomb like some A-rab boy-fucker, or opened up with a Glock like a sad, sick Korean kid, or any of another dozen methods of high-octane take-down, but to drive through it, to smash and grind and pulp and express the ultimate contempt in traction and horsepower-say, that was pretty fucking cool. It was so Sinnerman. He felt a sense of profound fulfillment.
Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.
But then he heard it. They all heard it. The sound of a motorcycle as it churned up the same hill they’d just mounted.