Stephen Hunter - Night of Thunder

You couldn’t but think about the money. If it was a religion, part of the observance was the cash transaction, as dollars were traded for official NASCAR gear and the official stuff evidently demanded a premium over the Chinese crap that the imitators and hustlers sold in their little stalls across the way.

Someone’s sure getting rich, he thought. All that damn money. Turns people to fools.

Then at last the traffic cleared, and he sped away from NASCAR Village and the speedway toward the green mountains ahead.

Why, O Heavenly Father, why, he beseeched. Lord, how thou tests me. Lord, I am thy humble servant, please send me relief.

God was busy. He didn’t answer.

So the Reverend Alton Grumley was left to his own bitter devices, and they told him, goddamnit, things wasn’t happening as they’s supposed to. Curse that girl!

He left his tiny office off the gym floor of the rec center of the Piney Ridge Baptist Prayer Camp and stepped out into the heavy, pressing heat of an August afternoon in Tennessee, and in a yard meant to accommodate Baptist jumping jacks and deep-knee bends, saw before him sweaty men struggling with an entirely different set of rigors.

“Jesus Christ, no,” shouted Brother Richard to a gaggle of Grumleys who fought with a device at the base of a large truck. It was a graceful, but surprisingly heavy, steel construction that rode its own smallish steel wheels. It was called a hydraulic jack, and was used for lifting the left or right half of a vehicle off the ground. It was crude, old, disobedient, and annoyingly stubborn. It hated Grumleys and Grumleys hated it. What they had to do with it, they had to do fast. Getting Grumleys to do something fast was like getting cats to dance. It just hardly didn’t ever happen.

“You monkeys!” screamed Brother Richard to all the sweaty, tattooed Grumley beef-the sun was high, the sky cloudless; bugs and skeeters, drawn by the stench of flushed Grumley flesh, swooped and darted. “You can’t do nothing right. You, balding guy, what’s your name again?”

“Cletus Grumley, Brother Richard.”

“You don’t come across when he’s trying to get the air wrench on the lugs. You wait till he’s got ’em coming out, then you git on around. It’s gotta work smoothly or you get all tangled up, the tires roll away, and many a race, in fact most races, are lost in the pits where the big muscle boys like you haven’t practiced enough, and it ends up looking like a Chinese fire drill.”

“Yes sir. But Mosby stepped on my heel, Brother Richard, which is why I done spilled forward. Wasn’t going forward, wasn’t meaning to, just got tripped up by Mosby.”

“Mosby, you a cousin or a son? Or maybe both?”

“Don’t know, sir. Heard it both ways. Not sure which gal is my real ma. Was raised by Aunt Jessie, who may have been the Reverend’s third wife, or maybe his fourth. I tripped on Cletus because someone, either Morgan or Allbright, pushed me.”

“Morgan, Allbright, slow down,” said Richard. “Slooowwwww downnnn.” And he tried to indicate calmness, lack of excitement, craziness by a kind of universal gesture for calming, pressing both flattened hands down as if to say, “Bring it down a notch.”

“It’s Morgan’s sweat,” said Allbright, “it stinks so it makes me want to throw up.”

“Ain’t my sweat,” said the one who had to be Morgan, “it’s your own damn farts you be smelling, Morgan farts more than any white man in this world and most Negroes.”

The issue was syncopation. An air-driven power wrench and the high-strength hydraulic jack had to be dragged sixty feet, set under the edge of the truck, and the truck jacked up. The power wrench had to tear loose the lugs. The old tires had to be yanked off and dumped, the new ones slammed on, the lugs power-wrenched tight. It had to be done fast, really fast, and the boys had been trying so hard. But maybe this wasn’t a Grumley sort of thing. There was no one else, though, time was short, and Race Day was approaching.

“Okay, boys,” said Brother Richard, “you knock off now. We’ll do it again later when it’s cooler. And don’t let Allbright eat no beans tonight, or cabbage neither.”

Richard, wiping his neck with a red handkerchief, came over to the porch where he’d seen the Reverend watching grumpily.

“Well, sir,” he asked, “you tell me. Were these boys just raised by pigs or were they suckled by them too? Or maybe sired?”

“You are the Whore of Babylon, Brother Richard. That wicked tongue will get you smitten, Brother Richard.”

“Not till after you’ve had your Race Day fun, old man. We both know that. So I will amuse myself as I see fit until we have done our jobs, and by that time, you will be so rich you won’t have any thought for Brother Richard and his sharp tongue. Now, what’s going on with the girl?”

“I have just heard,” the Reverend said, “that that daddy of hers has moved her.”

“Damn!” said Richard.

“Damn is right. She wakes up and starts singing, we are fried in batter. Maybe she won’t wake up before we move. Or maybe she’ll die or something.”

“You can’t take that gamble. You know well as I do, that girl is trouble. She has seen my face and she knows enough to tip off your plan; she makes a single phone call to ask a single question to someone who knows a little something, and we are finished. You’re supposed to be a crime lord. Do something criminal.”

“Well, son, that’s the problem. If we find her-she’s got to be in either Knoxville or Raleigh, as he moved her by ambulance, that much I know-if we find her and make sure, then we expose completely the idea that what happened to her was part of a plan, or a necessity to protect a plan. And maybe that makes all their security go up. And the plan is based on their overconfidence that no further security is needed, as you well know.”

“I do know, just as I know,” said Brother Richard, “that the plan is damned smart. Don’t believe nobody never did what you’re trying to do the way you’re doing it before, so how could they figure it out? It’s so damned smart, I also know you, Grumley, didn’t think it up. No sign of a Grumley pawprint anywhere on it. Your ilk may screw it up if they can’t get the goddamned tires switched off fast enough and we become peas in a pod for the police shooters. But I think they’ll just manage it.” Like many men in his profession, Brother Richard had a clear view of what was necessary for his own survival.

“No,” he explained, “you can’t just hope she doesn’t wake up or if she wakes up, she doesn’t remember. Even if she wakes up in six months, she may know enough to lead law enforcement straight to you, and I know you’ll roll over on me like a mangy dog with an itch. That, plus she saw my new face. I can’t have her helping a police artist by drawing a good picture of my new face. I spent a fortune on this face and it hurt like hell for months. I need a new face to operate, you understand? Old man, you have to act on this now and permanently.”

“Mark 2:11. ‘Get up off your pallet and go to your house.’ Rise, you cripple, on the strength of faith in the Lord. Walk, pray, work, and triumph. If the Lord is our shepherd, we shall not want.”

“It ain’t wanting I’m worried on. It’s arresting. They git me, I go to the chair. Then it’s frying.”

“You think you know all, Brother Richard. Even dumb old Reverend Alton knows it’s now a needle.”

“Chair, needle, you still end up dead. I am the Sinnerman, as I have explained. I do not want to face a day of reckoning. I will run from the Lord and try and hide in the sea or the moon or the mountain all on that day. You, you’ve got no worries.”