Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

Having suffered the complicated weight of guilt for his father’s sordid power, M felt it was his right not to discuss it with anyone, not to explain it or apologize for it. M had to be his father’s son, and wasn’t that enough, Sandro said, as we’d turned up Spring Street, heading to Rudy’s for a drink. “He doesn’t have to explain his background to onlookers, or worse, the self-declared morally outraged.”

M and Sandro had a very particular bond over these things. M’s father’s enemies, the leftist guerrillas, had even torched a Valera plant outside of Buenos Aires, which Sandro and M had laughed about together, on one of the two occasions when I met M. It was one of the few times I saw Sandro find anything humorous about being a Valera.

* * *

The next morning, the slowdown was over. Everyone was ready. It was finally time.

But Didi did not emerge from his trailer suited up, limbering himself to set records in the Spirit of Italy, as he had done each previous morning. At about noon he finally appeared, wearing street clothes, his hair oily and uncombed, a bored and deadened expression on his face. It seemed the spirit of Didi had been maimed or stalled by all the waiting. But a couple of hours later, the vehicle ready to go, he recaptured his Didi fire, suited up, and did two runs, setting a new record at 721 miles an hour.

Because the strikes had dragged on for four days, by this time there were no longer any spectators. Just the six techs, Tonino, me, and a few reporters. There was a formal toast, a press conference with the reporters, and then Didi was taken to the airport in Salt Lake City, to depart for a European tour to promote Valera tires. He didn’t stick around for the impromptu party that night, when the mechanics whooped and drank and hugged one another.

I was propped on a couch as the techs celebrated. I could not dance on my sprained ankle, but since I was the only woman, I danced with each of them by being scooped up and swung around, then delicately placed back on the daybed. We had only an AM radio, tuned to Top Forty—“Hooked on a Feeling” and that song about a woman’s brown eyes turning blue, which I’d assumed meant she was declaring she would make her eyes the blue of the woman who’d replaced her. “I’m gonna make my brown eyes blue.” Replace my replacement. That night, I realized it was not I’m gonna, but don’t it make them blue, which changed the meaning. It was a stupider song than I’d imagined.

The Valera mechanics and Tonino toasted one another and Didi in absentia and said the Americans could go do a bel culo . Someone said Didi, too, could go do a bel culo, and then their voices hushed and they were, I imagined, talking politics. They were still outside after I went to bed. I heard the dry pop of one or two more champagne bottles uncorking, low voices, and then quiet. Wind whistling across the flats, the snap of canvas awnings, and a periodic light clink of something metal faintly hitting something else metal.

The next morning the team manager came in to speak with me. I was hoping to catch a ride with them to Salt Lake City, and from there fly home to New York. He said of course, and that they had a favor to ask of me as well. It was actually a bigger favor. A magnificent one, in its way, but it would also be a kind of honor, and he wanted me to think carefully before responding.

“We want you to drive the Spirit of Italy, ” he said.

“But why? In any case, I can barely walk.”

“All you need is your right foot, for gas and brake. Didi needs to keep the salt occupied so the Americans don’t come back and beat his time; there’s a team from Ohio on its way here. It will take a few days to prepare, to train you, and by the time you’ve done your run, the rains will arrive. We can shut them out for the whole year. A woman’s record is easy; the current one is two hundred and ninety miles an hour. That’s nothing in the Spirit. If you go three hundred and five you’ll feel like you’re coasting, then you tap the brakes and that’s it.”

I had always admired people who had a palpable sense of their own future, who constructed plans and then followed them. That was how Sandro was. He had ambitions and a series of steps he would take to achieve them. The future, for Sandro, was a place, and one that he was capable of guiding himself to. Ronnie Fontaine was like that, too. Ronnie’s goals were more perverse and secretive than Sandro’s, but there was a sense that nothing was left to chance, that everything Ronnie did was calculated. I was not like either Sandro or Ronnie. Chance, to me, had a kind of absolute logic to it. I revered it more than I did actual logic, the kind that was built from solid materials, from reason and from fact. Anything could be reasoned into being, or reasoned away, with words, desires, rationales. Chance shaped things in a way that words, desires, rationales could not. Chance came blowing in, like a gust of wind.

From zero to two hundred, turn right to go right.

From two hundred to three hundred, turn left to go right.

Faster than three hundred, turn right to go right.

and Valera was learning all about it. Not the kind you drank. There weren’t even any cows in this jungly part of Brazil, except for the repulsive sea cows he’d seen in photographs, flopped up on muddy riverbanks. They tapped this milk from trees, a liquid that dried to rubber.

The rules in the Amazon, he learned, were different. You had to wait longer. A tree was damaged if you tapped it before it was fifteen years old. In Asia, where most rubber had come from before World War Two had begun, a year earlier, the trees could be tapped at the tender age of eight or nine, brought directly into service like very young girls, and they withstood it. But the biggest difference was that in Asia you planted trees and harvested them. It was farming, industrial farming. In the Amazon, you cultivated the stuff from the wild. The jungle was like a standing army, a reserve that would summon forth a product, become something other than green, useless, hostile nature, and Valera liked this idea, of conscripting nature into service.

The way it was going to be arranged was a kind of perfection. Like a wooden box put together without any nails, joists, screws, or even glue. Just jigsawed pieces designed to perfectly interlock and hold one another in place. The rubber tappers would work on credit. They would be held in place by the need to be paid. All variety of middlemen, necessary to move the stuff downriver to port, also would work on credit. It was all indebtedness and credit, zero outlay of actual money. Credit came from credo, which was to believe. Cre-do. I believe. He could cite Latin all he wanted, unencumbered now of Lonzi, no Lonzi correcting him for calling on the root of things. The root of things mattered. Cre-do. The Indians in the jungle were going to work for free.

Harvest and smoke the rubber, send it back to Europe, and make a lot of money. A lot of money. That was the plan when Valera expanded into tires in 1942.

“You smoke it? To make money?” six-year-old Roberto had asked him.

“No, piccolino, you don’t smoke it. You smoke it like you’d smoke cheese, or meats. To preserve.”

This smoking of rubber: they did it over huge outdoor fires, on enormous paddles, with rags tied over their faces, not only over the nose and mouth but the whole face, to protect their eyes as well. They can see enough, the overseer he’d hired assured Valera. They see just barely, through the weave of coarse cloth. He pictured them moving around the fire, faceless mummies bumping into one another. Men in gray, blank, woven masks, adding rubber to form great balls. The balls were called biscuits. Biscotti. Each weighed one hundred pounds. That was the weight unit Valera’s overseer set. A good comfortable crushing weight, carried on the head, the maximum. You set it at 150 pounds, the overseer said, and they cannot carry it. A hundred pounds on the top of an Indian’s head, they suffer but they manage. Not impossible — that was the idea. He understood that this was the overseer’s main skill, to recognize what was within human limits, but just barely. “Within, but just barely” was the optimum calibration, the unit of profit. One-hundred-pound biscuits of smoked rubber, overland, on heads. Big biscuits of rubber, head-crushing but not impossible. Men loading the smoked rubber biscuits on boats that would travel a thousand miles to the river’s mouth, the coastal port of Belém. At Belém they would be cleaved in half with hatchets. To judge their quality. Split like brains, and the lighter the shade of the biscuit’s insides, the higher its value and price. The darker, the poorer its quality. Dark rubber was less pure. “Like everything dark,” said the overseer, laughing in a vigorous way, as if instructing Valera to laugh with him, but Valera didn’t.