Night of Thunder

He looked to the left, saw trees in pale illumination and saw that it had to be the base of the mountain. His thought now was to run the edge of the incline and see if he could cut trail, and where the boys had gone up, follow them.

It seemed to take for-goddamned-ever. He couldn’t run full out-the way was tough, and he had to wiggle this way and that off-road and around natural obstacles. He couldn’t see far enough ahead to make any speed at all, and though the land looked flat, it yielded up a bumpiness concealed in the height of the grass.

He came at last to some sort of installation in the lee of the mountain, a complex of corrugated tin buildings sealed off by cyclone fence, its approach from some other angle. He prowled around the perimeter and came upon a gate that had been smashed in. No lawman had made it this far. He pulled open the gate, found himself at last on level roadway, and followed the tracks of a heavy vehicle with born-to-raise-hell treads on the tires that had churned its way back beyond the buildings. At last he found an archway in the trees where a much-disturbed dirt road and dust in the air signified the recent passing of a major vehicle. The road had to lead up.

Bob circled, backtracked a hundred or so yards, then gunned his engine and jumped gears. He hit the road in a fishtail of spewed mud, slithered around a boulder, penetrated heavy woods, and began the stark upward climb, his bike fighting the mud below and the gravity that pulled it backward.

THIRTY-SIX

Brother Richard paused for a second, feeling the thrill of the moment, feeling the low hum of vibration running from the amped diesel to his foot on the pedal, feeling his fingers in barest contact with the truck through the wheel, feeling all the million little tingles of tremor and jiggle and bounce that signified a vehicle with a load, a lot of fuel, and a wide open road.

“Richard, boy, goddamn, time’s a wasting,” said the Reverend.

“No, no, just look for a second. Look at it now to fix it in your mind.”

“What you talkin’ about, boy? All this here don’t matter a frog’s fart, just get us to the mountain!”

“It matters to me, old man.” He smiled, turned and looked at the old man, and the Reverend saw for the first time how insane Richard was. He swallowed. The driver was one twisted visitor from beyond Pluto with his superiority, his mechanical and driving genius, and now this, his weird and furious insistence of enjoying the ride as if it were sex.

Richard winked.

“Remember Slim Pickens in Strangelove?”

What the hell the boy talking about? The Reverend thought this was crazyman talk.

“Remember ‘Yee-haw,’ the ride down to Armageddon, the sheer joy of it all? Well, old man, it’s yee-haw time!”

Richard punched it. With a lurch even its toughened-up shocks couldn’t soften, the heavy cash truck surged forward. First up was some sort of Jack Daniels tent, the center of which was a huge construct of whiskey bottles and cases. Richard aimed and hit dead zero. He felt the flimsy canvas yield without a whisper, devoured by the roaring bull of the truck, and the whiskey bottles shattered in a spew of brownish chaos, asparkle with the light, blown this way and that by the big vehicle’s velocity. It was a whiskey explosion. He emerged from the mess with a truck bathed in eighty-proof Jack, good for curing colds, relieving virgins of their burden, burying grudges or exposing them, as well as causing the ruin of many good men of high birth and low, and being a boon companion on a long flight through lightning.

“Richard, goddamn boy, you just git us to the hill. Don’t you be smashing things.”

But Richard had another agenda, and the Reverend now saw that this thing here, this glory-run through the civilization that was NASCAR, this was the point.

“See them feathers fly?” Richard shouted, eyes lit by the glare of superego blitzed on brain chemicals. “Well, they shouldn’ta run!”

He was truly insane, particularly to the narrow mind of Alton Grumley, who didn’t realize Richard was channeling Bo Hopkins from the first shoot-out in The Wild Bunch, nor that he had morphed into both Holden and Borgnine.

“Let’s go,” he said. Then he answered himself, “Why not?” and let a little sliver of psycho’s giggle escape, just as Borgnine’s Dutch had in that movie all those years ago.

“Richard, Richard, we don’t have the time.”