“They help them slow down,” Oscar said, pointing.
“No, really?” Doris shouted loudly.
Two more cars trundled toward the starting line.
So the evening passed: an earsplitting race, an interval in which Oscar and his friends explained things to Doris, who made her commentary. The raw power of the cars was impressive, but still. “This is really silly!” Doris said at one point. Oscar smiled his little smile.
“Oscar should be driving one of those!” she said at another point.
“They’d never fit him in.”
“Funny cars you could.”
“You’d just need a bigger car,” Doris said. “An Oscar-mobile.”
Oscar put his hands before him, drove pop-eyed, then cross-eyed.
“That’s it,” Doris said. “Most of those cars appear to need a bit more weight on the back wheels anyway, don’t they?”
Immediately several of them began to explain to her that this wasn’t necessarily true.
“It’s a tough sport,” Oscar said. “You have to change gears without using the clutch, and the timing of it has to be really fine. Then the cars tend to sideslip, so one has to concentrate on steering and changing gears at the same time.”
“Two things at once?” Doris said.
“Hey, drag racing is a very stripped-down sport. But that means they really get to concentrate on things. Purify them, so to speak.”
Then what looked like freeway cars appeared, lurching and spitting their way to the starting line. These were funny cars, fiberglass shells over huge engines. When two of them took off Doris finally got a good feeling for how fast these machines were. The two little blue things zipped by, moving four times as fast as she had ever seen a freeway car move. “My!”
They loved her for that little exclamation.
When the races were over the spectators stood and mingled, and Oscar became the center of a group. Doris was introduced to more names than she could remember. There was a ringing in her ears. Oscar joined a long discussion of various cars’ chances in the championships next month. Some of his friends kidded him about the Oscarmobile, and Doris spent some time with a pencil sketching the design on a scrap of paper: rail car with a ballooning egg-shape at the rear end, between two widely separated wheels.
“The three-balled Penismobile, you should call it.”
“That was my plan.”
“Oh, so you and Oscar know each other pretty good, eh?”
“Not that good!”
Laughter.
Ordinary clothes, “Americana” outfits, blue jeans and cowboy boots, automotive types in one-piece mechanics’ jumpers… Oscar’s recreations seemed to involve costuming pretty often, Doris thought. Masks of all kinds. In fact some of the spectators called him “Rhino,” so perhaps his worlds overlapped a bit. Professional wrestling, drag car racing—yes, it made sense. Stupid anachronistic nostalgia sports, basically. Oscar’s kind of thing! She had to laugh.
As they left the stadium and returned to their car they passed a group wearing black leather or intricately patched blue-jean vests, grease-blackened cowboy boots, and so on. The women wore chains. Doris watched the group approach the part of the parking lot filled with motorbikes. Many of the men were fatter than Oscar, and their long hair and beards fell in greasy strands. Their arms were marked with black tattoos, although she noticed that spilled beer seemed to have washed most of one armful of tattoos away. The apparent leader of the group, a giant man with a long ponytail, pulled back a standard motorbike and unlocked it from the metal stand. He sat on the bike, dwarfing it; he had to draw up his legs so that his knees stuck out to the sides. His girlfriend squeezed on behind him, and the little frame sank almost to the ground. The back tire was squashed flat. The leader nodded at his followers, shouted something, kicked his bike’s motor to life. The two-cylinder ten-horsepower engine sputtered, caught like a sewing machine. The whole gang started their bikes up, rn rn rnn, then puttered out of the parking lot together, riding down Sand Canyon Road at about five miles an hour.
“Who are they?” Doris asked.
“Hell’s Angels.”
“The Hell’s Angels?”
“Yes,” Oscar said, pursing his lips. “Current restrictions on motorcycle engine size have somewhat, uh…”
He snorted. Doris cracked up. Oscar tilted his head to the sky, laughed out loud. The two of them stood there and laughed themselves silly.
Tom and Nadezhda spent the days together, sometimes in El Modena talking to Tom’s old friends in town. They went out to look at Susan Mayer’s chicken ranch, and worked in the house’s groves with Rafael and Andrea and Donna, and lunched at the city hall restaurant with Fran and Yoshi and Bob and a whole crew of people doing their week’s work in the city offices. People seemed so pleased to see Tom, to talk with him. He understood that in isolating himself he had hurt their feelings, perhaps. Or damaged the fabric of the social world he had been part of, in the years before his withdrawal. Strange perception, to see yourself from the outside, as if you were just another person. The pleasure on Fran’s face: “Oh, Tom, it’s just so nice to be talking to you again!” Sounds of agreement from the others at that end of the table.
“And here I am trying to take him away,” Nadezhda said.
Embarrassed, Tom told them about her proposal that he join her. But that was not the same thing as holing up in his cabin, apparently. They thought it was a wonderful idea. “You should do it, Tom!”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
One day he and Nadezhda cycled around Orange County together, using little mountain bikes with high handlebars and super-low gears to help them up the hills. Tom showed her the various haunts of his youth, now completely transformed, so that he spoke like an archeologist. They went down to Newport Harbor and looked around the ship. It really was a beautiful thing. Up close it seemed very large. It did not have exactly the classical shape of the old clipper ships, as its bow was broad, and the whole shape of the hull bulky, built for a large crew and maximum cargo space. But modern materials made it possible to carry a lot more sail, so that it had a clipper’s speed. In many ways it looked very like paintings and photos of the sailing ships of the nineteenth century; then a gleam of titanium, or a computer console, or the airfoil shape of a spar, would transform the image, make it new and strange.
Again Nadezhda asked Tom to join them when they embarked, and he said “Show me more,” looking and feeling dubious. “I’d be useless as a sailor,” he said, looking up into the network of wire and xylon rigging.
“So am I, but that’s not what we’d be here for. We’d be teachers.” Ganesh was a campus of the University of Calcutta, offering degrees in marine biology, ecology, economics, and history. Most of the instructors were back in Calcutta, but there were several aboard in each discipline. Nadezhda was a Distinguished Guest Lecturer in the history department.
“I don’t know if I’d want to teach,” Tom said.
“Nonsense. You teach every day in El Modena.”
“I don’t know if I like that either.”
She sighed. Tom looked down and massaged his neck, feeling dizzy. The geriatric drugs had that effect sometimes, especially when over-used. He stared at the control board for the rigging. Power winches, automatic controls, computer to determine the most efficient settings. He nodded, listening to Nadezhda’s explanations, imagining small figures spidering out a spar to take in a reef in high seas. Sailing.
“Our captain can consistently beat the computer for speed.”
“At any given moment, or over the course of a voyage?”
“Both.”
“Good to hear about people like that. There are too few left.”