Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

Tonino corralled everyone around to witness this fact that seemed incredible to him, that I spoke Italian. I was something of an instant mascot, although mostly to Tonino, the mechanics, and the team manager, and not Didi Bombonato himself, who had opposed taking me in. Didi Bombonato came across as vain and irritable, but who knows how Flip Farmer would have come across had he answered the door that day in his prefab on the bluffs above Las Vegas.

“Girlfriend of who ?” I had heard Didi ask when they first brought me back to their encampment. “One of the brothers,” the team manager said. “He lives in New York City.”

“Never heard of him,” Didi said. “We’re not an orphanage.” But the team manager made his own decision that I could stay.

Didi and I avoided each other, which was fine. Maybe I didn’t like him all that much, either. The main problem being that he was not Flip Farmer. No open American smile, no bright white teeth, no fancy purple script, nothing of whatever it was about Flip Farmer that had moved me when I was young.

Almost as bad as not being Flip, Didi was short, and short men so seldom liked me. I’m relatively tall, which seemed to count against me, and I was once even told by a short man that I was retriggering his youthful nightmares of being ridiculed by tall girls in school, and I sensed he wanted me to apologize for this, for his adolescent trauma, and I didn’t, and moreover, I gave up on short men partially if not totally, sometimes even preemptively disliking them, though seldom admitting this to myself.

Each morning, I watched Didi out the window of the trailer as he put on his driving gloves and stretched his fingers, open and fisted, open and fisted, as if he were communicating some kind of cryptic message in units of ten. After his hand stretches, a crew member brought him a little thimble of espresso, which he took between deerskin-gloved finger and thumb, tilted his head back, and drank. He had pocked, sunken cheeks, thin bluish lips, and eyes like raisins, which made him seem angry and also a little dimwitted. Not everyone can be a great beauty, and I’m not exactly a conventional beauty myself. But there was a special tragedy to Didi’s looks: his hair, which was lustrous and full, feathered into elaborate croissant layers. Somehow the glamorous hair brought his homeliness into relief, like those dogs with hair like a woman’s. There was that advertisement on television where you saw a man and a woman from behind, racing along in an open car. The driver and his companion, her blond hair flying on the wind, the American freedom of a big convertible on the open highway, and so forth. The camera moves up alongside. The passenger, it turns out, is not a woman. It’s one of those dogs with long feathery hair, whatever breed that is. Didi’s breed. After drinking his espresso, Didi would flip his hair forward and then resettle it with his fingers, never mind that he was about to mash it under a helmet. It would have been better to skip the vanity and primping and instead use his face as a kind of dare, or weapon: I’m ugly and famous and I drive a rocket-fueled cycle. I’m Didi Bombonato.

For two long days Didi and the crew did test runs in their rocket-engine vehicle, the Spirit of Italy . There was a steering issue, which they solved by relenting to a curious handling feature: under two hundred miles an hour, the steering wheel of the Spirit was turned right in order to go right. Over two hundred miles an hour, it had to be turned left to go right. And over three hundred miles an hour, once again, the wheel was turned right to make it go right.

The moment had finally arrived for Didi to make his run. I was under the Valera awning, my foot propped up. Beyond, spectators packed against a rope. Many of those who had been around for the weekend of various classes of machine had stayed at the salt flats to see this. It was both a private affair, the flats officially closed, and the main event, because Didi Bombonato was favored to beat his own time and set a new world record for land speed. It was late morning, a pleasant day, clouds wind-pushed toward Floating Mountain, their shadows like big weightless vehicles. Soon, heavy rains were expected to arrive — by the middle of next week. The season would end, the salt soaked and mushy and unusable for land speed trials.

Didi put on his deerskin gloves. He performed his hand signals and then waved at the people who pressed in behind the rope to watch him make his run. He drank his single espresso. Flipped his hair. Put on his helmet and bent low to get into the Spirit of Italy, a chrome, white, and teal canister — the same silvery teal as the motorcycle I’d crashed.

His techs were about to attach the bubble canopy when the team manager came running out of his trailer, its door slapping closed behind him, waving his arms over his head in an X. “Stop!” he yelled. “Stop! Hold it!”

Didi turned around in the tight little compartment of the Spirit and scrunched his raisin eyes in the direction of the manager, who came toward him with a walkie-talkie to his ear, listening.

“We have a problem,” the manager said.

“What is the problem?” Didi called back.

“A strike,” the manager said. “In Milan.”

The manager called everyone under the awning, around the workbenches. Didi hunched over the steering wheel in the Spirit of Italy, scowling, as if impatience alone could get his vehicle powered up and motoring along the flats, while his team decided that as loyal members of the union, which was in contract negotiations and had voted to strike, they were obligated to strike as well.

The mechanics in Milan were conducting something called a work-to-rule strike, so the mechanics on the salt flats conducted their own work-to-rule strike. It was a way of striking without striking, as Tonino explained it to me. They were still getting paid, and not at risk of being fired and replaced. They simply went absolutely by union and company code on every single procedural element of their jobs, and their unions and procedures being Italian and deeply bureaucratic, each task, if accomplished according to code, took much longer than it normally would.

Didi, not in the union, not a company employee, but a celebrity racer with an independent contract, was furious.

“You’ll do your run,” the manager assured him. “But there are a few procedures we have overlooked in the interest of time and efficiency. But really, we should not have skipped them.”

For starters, there was meant to be a fully stocked first aid box or no work could commence. Someone was sent into town to buy iodine and tweezers, which were absent from the first aid box. While this errand was run, the crew waited under an awning on the white salt, in absolutely no hurry, certainly not any hurry that would tempt them to disregard official company procedures or compromise safety. They sat and smoked cigarettes. Someone put the Moka on a butane burner.

With the first aid box finally restocked, they were ready to do a safety check on the Spirit . But then it was discovered that another procedural rule had been ignored: each screw from the Spirit of Italy was to be labeled upon removal, but not by hand; labels were to be printed on tags in lowercase Garamond with an Olivetti typewriter, which they did not possess, nor did they have any tags, so no screws could be removed from the Spirit of Italy . Long discussions commenced on what was to be done in light of this problem. The team manager said he felt they could hand-print the labels, but tidily, “As if our hands are machines,” he said. Just make the letters very uniform, he said. But they didn’t have tags, and so someone had to figure out how to make tags.