The Suicide Motor Club (18 page)

“Are you quite sure that's necessary, Officer Henson?”

“I need you to pull your car across and block the road.”

She got back in her car and angled it as instructed. The officer stood in front of it, clearly waiting to signal other cars. He seemed unaware of her existence.

“Is it very bad? The wreck?”

“It's a bad wreck,” he said.

She flinched when she heard a crash and yelling from farther up in the darkness. Emergency lights flashed past a curve in the road.

“Do you know when I might be able to go on my way?”

“No,” he said, without looking at her.

Now a serviceman in uniform drove up behind her and then two more cars. A farm truck pulled up coming from the other direction and the officer waved him onto the shoulder and around. The woman looked at his face, saw the same faraway expression she had observed on Officer Henson.

“I hope I don't sound selfish, but I really need to be on my way.”

She was roundly ignored.

A fifth car pulled up and, seeing the mess, turned around and went back west toward Kansas and Oklahoma. Now a banged-up black Camaro came from the direction of the accident and skirted over the shoulder just as the farm truck had, a deathly pale young man at its wheel. Once it was past the roadblock, it poured on the gas and roared west.

What have all these people seen?
the young woman wondered.

“Officer?”

“The devil's coming,” he said, wiping his mouth with his sleeve.

“Excuse me.”

“The devil. The real devil.”

“I'll just be on my way,” she said.

“STAY HERE,” he yelled.

Crazy he's crazy

“Hey, buddy, you all right?” the serviceman said.

“Stay in your car, sir.”

The serviceman watched him, lit a cigarette.

Now a hellish red car rolled up full of a ghastly crew, the smallest of which, pale and furious, slipped out the window and into an abandoned car that had been sitting by the side of the road. The bald man at the wheel of the red car saw her looking at him, and his hateful return gaze made her look away.

The devil the real devil

Both cars now sped off west, as the Camaro had done two minutes before. From the east, a siren wailed.

A third state trooper, his face ashen, rolled up and, addressing Henson, said, “Deputy.”

Thank God,
she thought.
Maybe I can get out of this awful place.

Henson looked at the woman in her car, his eyes even wider. He pointed at the state trooper who had just pulled up, a gaunt fellow clearly stricken by what he had seen up the road.

“See?” Henson said to her, pointing at the trooper. “I told you.”

“Deputy,” the trooper said again, more urgently. “Did the red car go west? Did you see a red Pontiac sports car?”

Deputy Henson drew his service revolver and shot the state trooper in the cheek.

—

THE '67 GTO WAS FOUND THE NEXT DAY, ABANDONED IN THE MIDDLE OF A DILAPIDATED
stable not far from Hornet, Missouri. Although exhaustive forensic examination of the trunk produced blood and hair matching the women who had gone missing from St. Louis, no body was recovered and the alleged abductors left nothing of themselves. No prints. No hair. Nothing to indicate they existed at all.

It was like the car had driven itself, and had simply decided to stop.

HORNIK CHEVROLET SAT ON THE WESTERN SIDE OF DUNN STREET IN MORGAN,
Georgia, just between the Daphne Movie Theater, where the legend
The Wild Bunch
stood out in black letters, and Milo's Burger Heaven, whose sexy blond angel and hamburger motif had been hotly preached against by the pastor of the Morgan Baptist Assembly, one block down. This same old reverend, famous for waking the block with shouting night terrors, made it clear that angels, who were our “last and very dear defense against the machinations of the rough beast” ought not be used as “pimps and bawds for the wares of men.” The movie theater had received even more liturgical attention than Milo's Burger Heaven, notably during the Sunday sermon following the Friday release of
Barbarella
, “little more than pornography and much less than a godly man demands of his entertainment”;
Rosemary's Baby
, “The devil likes nothing better than to be made familiar to us in film that we may not fear him”; and
The Graduate
, “an adulterer's fantasy made celluloid-real.” Not that the reverend scorned all film—he had been observed to leave
A Man for All Seasons
weeping tears of joy, and had declared it “the most moral and intelligent film of our day.”

Neither had Hornik Chevrolet escaped the old man's grapeshot.

“Charles Hornik, who goes in the tight pants, turtlenecks, and
bobbed haircuts of today's youth, and caters to them with his cars of muscle, and tells them to call him Chuck, shall precede them into hell, and lead them there, too. What young man needs to go at one hundred miles an hour down the road? Where is such a man headed, if not the furnace? A fiery death awaits these hot-rodders, and an even more fiery eternity. If we must drive cars, let us go humbly in cars that do not rumble and growl and screech their tires, that other men might look at us and covet that which we have. Or, better, let us walk. And if we must go to the city, let us ride the bus. Is there any one of us too good to ride the bus? Is there any one of us so important we must race where we go at one hundred miles an hour? If Mr. Hornik thinks I am wrong to warn him, let him come and tell me to my face, but you will not see him here. He stays outside God's house, and, for all his colored pennants, for all his glad back-clapping and handshaking and barbecues for veterans—which I must say is a godly thing, but not enough alone—yea, for all that, when the day of wrath comes, I fear Charles Hornik shall not find his name in the Book of Life, not as Charles, and most certainly, I assure you, not as
Chuck
.”

Chuck Hornik's Chevrolet dealership was the jewel in the crown of Morgan, Georgia. Its top salesmen, Hap and Beau, were two of the wealthiest men in town (after Hornik and a retired Coca-Cola executive), and they put keys in the hands of Georgia Bulldog sophomores, Atlanta drag racers, even businessmen from as far away as Miami and Houston. The only dealer in the country that could match Hornik's reputation for putting big engines in light cars was Don Yenko up in Pennsylvania, but anybody south of Virginia who wanted to lay down rubber or roll a real monster into the drive-in came to Hornik. A recent article in
Motor Trend
had bumped sales an additional fifteen percent and inspired Joe Frazier to order a custom 427 Chevelle, which Hornik expected to turn around within the week.

On this particular night, Sunday, July 6, Hornik had long since
gone home when the F100 pickup truck and the '65 Impala cruised down Dunn Street, slowed, and kept going. This was near midnight with a quarter moon hiding behind scudding clouds and the crickets just singing hard in the woods and fields nearby. The bank clock's illuminated sign read 90 degrees. The Impala executed a three-point turn in front of the theater and then parked behind the deserted library past Burger Heaven. A smallish figure and a taller one got out and walked to the dealership, looking first at the Z28s and Novas lined up in herringbone ranks up front, finally sidling over to the fence to see what goods might be in the back.

“That's what I was hoping. Yes Lord, I was dearly hoping this.”

It sat parked near a lesser Z28.

It was perfect.

Cole wished he had a hat to remove out of respect for whoever had crafted the exquisite vehicle he beheld: night-black, gently curved, resting on fat tires that promised bullfrog-leap acceleration.

“Is that a COPO?” Rob said, holding his own greasy hat in his hands.

“You better believe it. Yeah, damn if it ain't a number 9561. The article said they'd already sold three of 'em this year, two black and a red. Others musta gone. I mean, just
look
at this bitch, and I mean that word in the best possible way.”

It didn't take them long to get into the office and find the items they were looking for, keys first of all. Back outside, the stars and Venus peering through the grayish haze of small-town streetlights, they popped the COPO's hood and slavered over what they saw there.

“Iron block 427, that thing'll even burn a Vette. Luther swears himself not a Chevy man, but that's just him being ornery. He's gonna want this one, but he ain't getting it. And they ain't another one all the way to Cocoa Beach, if the magazine's right.”

“What're we waitin' for?”

“Nothin. Just getting to know the bride before the weddin's all.”

—

THREE MILES OUT OF TOWN, IN THE NEWEST, WEALTHIEST SUBURB OF MORGAN,
Georgia, Chuck Hornik and his wife were up late fighting. She paced in the kitchen of their brand-new house, stopping each time at the place where the linoleum gave way to the den's carpet as if recognizing the perimeters of their respective territories. Chuck sat on the couch he had already resigned himself to sleeping on, staring at the stone fireplace they had never yet lit. Atop the coffee table before him, a marble ashtray held a mass grave of his-and-hers butts, his crumpled and yellow, hers straighter and white but stained with varying intensities of carmine lipstick. A bottle of Squirt soda lay on its side next to this, along with a rocks glass full of watery yellowish liquid that reeked of vodka. Between swigs, Leila held the vodka bottle by the neck as if it were some dead yard bird she had throttled.

“And,” she said, “don't think I don't know what it means when Little Miss Something smiles in line at the grocery.”

“I'm sorry,” he said.

“She knows I'm walking in the door just the same as I know she's standing there.”

“I'm sorry, I'm
sorry
,” he said, sounding more angry than sorry.

“I don't believe for a minute,” she said, seeming to forget what she was talking about, her eyes moving back and forth rapidly, her cigarette going to the vodka bottle hand so she could thumb a small brine of tears and mascara out of the corner of her eye.

“I'm tired of saying it,” he said.

She turned her back on him, paced to the oven, turned around.

“I don't believe for
one minute
she just remembered Jesus loved her and smiled that smile. That was for me.”

“It's been two years.”

“For ME!” she said, jerking the neck of the vodka bottle at herself.

Chuck used the first and second toes of his sock foot to snare the other sock and strip it off, exposing a foot that surprised him with how old and bony it looked. Who put his dad's foot on his ankle? He lit a cigarette and stared at the strange old foot, not sure why his wife had gone quiet but glad for it.

“Course you can come in,” she said.

“Come in where?”

He peeked into the kitchen to find that she had zoned out again, just looking out the kitchen window onto the deck. Was she about to get on him about stripping and varnishing the deck? Her piss-off could turn on a dime when she was chicken-necking that bottle. Now she grabbed an oven mitt and blotted her lipstick on it, leaving a huge red smear.

He wanted to refresh his glass but it wasn't worth going in the kitchen to try to unchoke the vodka chicken. He finished the barely cool glass of Squirt, vodka, and melted ice, took off his other sock, and lay back on the couch, covering his eyes with his arm.

“Just go to bed,” he said.

“And it isn't like I don't know what it means when you say you're taking a new Chevelle out on Mill Town Road. I know what Mill Town Road means.”

She was slurring now, so mad at him in her bleary stupor that her voice took on a strangled quality.

“Man who sells cars has gotta drive 'em,” he said, disengaging. The truth was, his drives after work didn't bear close inspection. He waited for her to figure out her next line of attack but instead of words he heard the bottle slosh, heard a gurgle. As much as it grieved him for her to drink like that, it meant her slurs would soon thicken and sleep would follow right behind. She would sleep late the next morning, and that private hour or so before he went into the dealership would be the day's sweetest morsel.

Perhaps she had already slinked off in her bare feet and crawled into bed, settled the sleeping mask over her eyes like a hostage's blindfold.

He nearly fell asleep in the thick quiet of their new house, but then he remembered that he would want to turn the lights off. Leila mocked him for the way he followed her around the house turning out the lights, but she wasn't the one paying the light bill. Not that the utilities were that expensive—all his income decimals had shifted a full numeral right in the last five years—but burning lights in every room when it was just the two of them wouldn't make them any richer.

He sat up and started at what he saw.

His wife stood in the kitchen.

Not alone.

A huge pale man in a neck brace held her wrist to his mouth and sucked it like he was trying to give her a hickey there. A bald man in sunglasses hugged Leila's hips to his, kissing or sucking her neck. Leila was looking right at Chuck, grinning absently and drooling. A woman squatted behind her, holding something sharp and bloody, licking the blood-slick back of her leg just below where her pleated pantsdress ended. A very tall man put Leila's cigarette out in the sink and then leaned against the counter, waiting his turn.

Chuck started to get up, but a cool hand held his forehead and pushed him back down—someone had been standing behind the couch. That someone now moved fast, straddling the prone man's stomach, pushing all the air out of his lungs in a
woof
. The stranger looked into Chuck's eyes. Everything got warm and friendly.

The man spoke.

The man wouldn't stay long.

The man thought his wife would probably be all right.

The man just needed some papers signed.

After Chuck signed the papers the bald man put Leila to bed, saying she was “one hot number” and seeming to find that very funny. The smaller stranger helped the bewildered Chevy dealer back onto the couch and told him to sleep and forget. As the strangers slipped out
the kitchen door, then melted into the night between the pine trees, Charles Hornik's eyelids grew heavy. He fixed on a piece of his own letterhead lying on the three-month-old avocado carpet. Beneath his home address, six words stood out in black marker; he drifted off while staring at those words, though their significance eluded him.

TELL US
WE CAN
COME IN

—

THE F100 HAD ALREADY LEFT, ITS DRIVER RANGING AHEAD TO SCOUT FOR A DAYTIME
nest, so the brand-new, barely street-legal Camaro rumbled through downtown Morgan followed by the Impala. They rolled down Main Street and took a left on Dunn, heading south toward Interstate 75. When one
A.M.
fell on Morgan, Georgia, the driver of the Camaro wore a broad, content smile. He punched the accelerator and the car screamed into the night toward Valdosta and Florida, the Impala struggling to keep up. In his lumpy bed at the edge of Morgan's oldest block, the old reverend woke from a nightmare and yelled.

—

WHEN CHARLES HORNIK SHOWED UP THE NEXT MORNING, HE WOULD FAIL TO
notice the shiny finger marks on the dusty grille of the air vent, which was, in any case, too small for a man to crawl through. Hornik's mind would be occupied with the riddle posed by his wife's alcoholism and self-destructive impulses—he had awakened to find his wife smiling serenely in her sleep, the bed sheets spotted with blood. When he pulled these back, he had gasped. A meat thermometer protruded from the back of her thigh.