Welcome to Fred (The Fred Books) (18 page)

I endured each class in agony and rehearsed my confession of love until the words rolled off my tongue as emotionlessly as the Pledge of Allegiance. When lunch arrived, I trudged to the cafeteria, my trancelike appearance belying the raging pulse pounding in my veins. I mechanically bought a lunch and shoveled the contents in my mouth, ignoring everyone around me. Then I went in search of Becky, clutching my notebook like a life preserver.

I found her kneeling in front of her locker, getting her books for the next class. I took a deep breath and decisively walked up to the locker, stopping in front of her without a word. She looked up expectantly, but my rehearsed speech fled from my mind. A horrifying sense of déjà vu rushed over me as I saw a flashback of a white sheet of paper fluttering into a black orchestra pit. I stared down and she stared back, both of us as silent and still as statues. As usual, my hair hung before my eyes like a shield, but this time it failed to protect me from the incapacitating assault of her gaze. In a convulsive rush I opened the notebook and dogwood petals showered over her. One flower remained intact. I picked it up and held it out. “For you,” I croaked.

She smiled in surprise, a May queen crowned with dogwood petals. Before I could speak, she uttered the words that slayed the hope budding fretfully in my heart. “You know, Mark, that’s what I like about you the most. You’re such a good friend, and you do such nice things. I wish I had a brother like you.”

Friend! Brother! I gasped; I swooned. Plague! Destruction! Woe! Death! The dreaded word—friend—gripped my soul and froze the proclamation of love in my throat. I tried to twist my grimace of dismay into a smile but only succeeded in producing a ghastly leer. Incapable of speech, I staggered off in a stupor of confusion.

Friend! How could she say such terrible things to me? The f-word no guy ever wanted to hear from a pretty girl. Was her heart made of stone? Had she no feelings at all? My only consolation was that no one had been around to hear it. In that moment I vowed to take this secret with me to the grave. Oops.

CHAPTER NINETEEN
On the heels of the Tuttle disaster, I buried my devastation in the grand tradition of disenchanted lovers throughout history. I risked my life in foolish adventure. Lacking a Foreign Legion, I made the best of what was available: I took a ride with Darnell.

Fred was a veritable breeding ground for daredevil drivers, but after a few years in high school, Darnell had become the dominant daredevil, the preeminent road hog, the Grand Pooh-bah of reckless driving. His formal title was Darnell Ray: the Terror of the Back Roads, but most folks called him “Darn ElRay,” especially if they encountered him driving down a dirt road. He cruised them as if he were headed to Houston on I-10, trailing clouds of glory and dust.

Darnell was much like the Israelites in that his journeys were accompanied by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. At least, illuminated by the taillights, it looked like a pillar of fire. He could raise a dust cloud on a four-lane highway from the residue that settled in the bed of his truck.

If you were driving down a dirt road, the first clue that Darnell was on the same road would be a vague fuzziness on the horizon. You would pull off your glasses (assuming, of course, that you were wearing glasses) and check them for smudges. When you put the glasses back on, you would notice a dark spot in the smudge. About the time the spot began to assume a definite shape, you would realize that a vehicle was bearing down on you with deceptive speed—a vehicle at the front edge of a dense cloud of dust, as if it were one of Bradbury’s Martian ships surfing the leading edge of a raging sandstorm. Before you could get a grip on the window handle, you would hear a cacophony of rattles and your car would be engulfed in a choking maelstrom of grit. You would at least mutter “Darn ElRay,” if not lose your religion altogether.

Even Dad, as pristinely correct in his speech as any rational animal, was moved to strong language when baptized in dust by Darnell. “That dadgummed reckless whelp of the earth!” he would exclaim, fumbling with the window. This was serious terminology from a man who normally possessed the equanimity of a tortoise.

The instrument of terror Darnell wielded was a ’52 Ford pickup of indeterminate color, christened the Hound of Hell by Dad when he was feeling particularly charitable. The years had added large patches of rust, and Darnell’s driving had added salvage parts of various hues, from fire engine red to primer gray. To attempt to describe the color scheme of the Hound would be like trying to describe Texas weather. “Which day?” would have to be the first response.

Darnell’s dad, known as Good-Buddy Ray since he called everybody “good buddy,” grew up on a farm in Arkansas, its primary cash crop being a liquid derivative of corn. Before you start thinking that he was a foreigner, I should tell you that G. B.’s mamma, Darcy, was from Fred and got romanced away for a few years by a sweet-talking Arkansas boy visiting kinfolk in Caney Head. They eventually moved back to Fred after Darcy convinced him that Arkansas lacked the culture and grace to which she had been accustomed in Fred.

G. B. built his first vehicle from parts he found rusting in the Ozark hills and drove it most of the way back to Fred, although it had to be towed the last two hundred or so miles when the fan came loose in Domino and chewed halfway through the hood. He had a priestlike devotion to the service of vehicles, performing repairs with the ritualistic solemnity of a liturgy. If great artists painted frescoes of mechanics on the ceilings of auto-parts stores, G. B. would doubtlessly have been pictured on the ceiling of Harmon Johnson’s service station, lying on his back beneath his Kenworth, anointed with oil, his head surrounded by a nimbus of salvage parts.

So, as you can see, Darnell didn’t stand a chance. The grease had permeated G. B. so completely that it was genetically passed on with a vengeance that would have even surprised Lamarck. Like a crack baby being born hooked, Darnell was born with it in his blood. It flowed SAE 10W30 in his veins. He drove go-carts all over Fred until adolescence stretched his bones out long enough to clear the dash and the pedals. By the time he was thirteen, he was driving the first incarnation of the dreaded Hound of Hell with which he terrorized the citizens.

Darnell normally drove dirt roads, not out of fear of the law but because they offered more excitement. They were narrower, twistier, and more conducive to fishtails and donuts. Plus, only on a dirt road could he leave a wake of dust as a tangible, if transitory, testimony to his speed.

So the afternoon after I had been so inhumanely abused by Becky, C. J. Hecker came over to give me a guitar lesson. We were in the garage enjoying the Indian summer and annoying the neighbors (the closest of which was a quarter-mile away) with endless attempts at “Born to Be Wild,” when a clamor of rattles drowned out our amplifiers. A cloud drifted into the garage. When the dust cleared, I saw Darnell grinning from his truck in his characteristic pose. He invariably skidded up to any destination in a cloud of dust, and when the fog thinned, he always looked the same, as if he expected the paparazzi to jump out at any second for a photo op. The pose consisted of the right hand gripping the knob at the top of the steering wheel, the left arm (usually sunburned) jutting out of the window, a cap jammed on his head at an angle, and a grin straight out of
MAD
magazine.

“Say, doll, let’s go swimmin’.”

C. J. and I looked at each other and nodded. In a matter of seconds we were hurtling down a back road to the swimming hole that everyone called Toodlum Creek, despite the fact that the county map labeled it as Theuvenins Creek. I was stuck in the middle. C. J. was new to the area and had evidently never been a passenger in the Hound of Hell. He was an aggressive driver in his own right, but now he was in the presence of a master. I detected a substratum of tension under his air of nonchalance. He even gripped the window to the point of white knuckles on a few curves. I was accustomed to it, having spent a few years building up immunity. I calmly followed my normal program when riding with Darnell: I silently prayed like a drowning man.

Despite C. J.’s expectations, we arrived at Toodlum intact. The water was typical East Texas muddy creek water and was home to its share of fish, turtles, and snakes, but the critters usually left us alone, especially if we made lots of noise. It was a popular spot. Sometimes even girls would come down and swim.

We spent the rest of the day drowning our sorrows in the creek, seeing who could swing the highest or the farthest, or who could jump from the tallest tree, or who could stay under the longest. When it started getting dark, we piled into Darnell’s truck. As we pulled onto the dirt road, Darnell said, “Hey, let me show you this neat road I found. I call it the Roller Coaster.”

I shrugged my shoulders. With Darnell, I was at the mercy of the “Key Rule” : The one with the key makes the rules. C. J., on the other hand, was already dreading the ride back, and the revelation that it was about to be lengthened did nothing to lighten his mood.

“Hey, look, I have to get back to Warren, and it’s getting dark.”

Darnell frowned at him through his greasy glasses and pointed to the sky with one hand. The other hand gripped the ball on the steering wheel and spun it around as he took a corner of at least 120 degrees at forty miles an hour. “Hey, it’s still light. You got plenty of time.”

C. J. clung to the bar between the window and the vent like it was a spike on the north face of Mount Everest. With white knuckles and a white face, he glared at the sky as if it had betrayed him, the silver fleck in his eye seeming to darken with anger. Under the canopy of green that shielded the swimming hole, we had experienced a false twilight, but now that we were out in the open, it looked like we had a couple of hours of daylight left.

After we rounded the curve and C. J.’s jaw muscles had relaxed to the point that he was able to pry his teeth apart, he made another attempt.

“Uh, my sister needs the car to go to Beaumont.”

I was pretty sure that was a lie because I knew his sister was eight years old, but I didn’t interfere. Every man must work out his own destiny. I felt certain that C. J.’s destiny included a trip down the Roller Coaster but I wasn’t a prophet. Maybe he would be the one to break the heretofore-unbreakable fortitude of Darnell Ray.

If Darnell had any good qualities, and I must admit it was a disputed question, they would be his constancy and his passionate determination to make every moment of life entertaining. He was an unassailable rock of resolution. Once he had embarked, no quantity of supplication could stay his course. C. J. may not have known it before the Roller Coaster, but I was confident he would know it before the end of the ride.

“Hey, look . . . ,” he began again, but a vicious S-curve buried in enough sand to start a private beach loomed ahead, and his jaw snapped shut reflexively as he gripped the window and braced himself.

Driving through deep sand at high speeds is almost like driving on ice. Once you start sliding you have little traction, especially if you are skidding because you slammed on your brakes. Darnell knew better. He started into the curve by shifting back down into second gear and punching the gas. The Hound of Hell spun around in a flume of sand as we rounded the first curve going sideways. It’s a strange sensation to look straight out the windshield and see fence posts zipping past like cars at the Indy 500.

Halfway between the two curves, Darnell pulled his foot off the accelerator, spun the wheel back the other direction like a cowboy doing rope tricks, and punched his foot back down. We spun 180 degrees and slid around the second curve, watching the pine trees on the other side of the road racing past in pursuit of the fence posts.

When C. J. finally found his voice, he lost his temper. “You idiot! What if there was a car coming the other way?” he screeched in tones capable of shattering a windshield.

Darnell just grinned and continued to stare down the road. “But there weren’t.”

“But what if there was?” C. J. demanded, bringing his voice down three octaves, which was still several octaves above his normal level.

“But there weren’t, so it don’t matter,” Darnell said deliberately, as if he were explaining something obvious to a retarded child.

C. J. found this answer so infuriating that he couldn’t even articulate a reply. Strange guttural noises emanated from his throat, and he lunged across the seat at Darnell. I tried to push him back, but it was Darnell jerking the wheel to the left that slammed C. J. back against the door. A slight correction to the right kept us from plunging into the ditch.

C. J. grabbed his elbow, which had made sudden contact with the window handle, and rehearsed a few phrases in Cajun his brother-in-law had taught him. I had a Cajun uncle, but he never gave me any lessons on these particular phrases, so I can’t give you the exact translation. I got the impression it had to do with details of Darnell’s family tree. The gist of it was that, according to C. J., if Darnell had one of those big family Bibles on the coffee table with the genealogy in the front, there would be crucial gaps in the record on the paternal side for several generations. This exercise in oral history took some time and distracted C. J. enough for Darnell to make several astounding maneuvers without eliciting further comment.

We traveled on down a dirt road I had never seen before, buried deep in the woods. The sun advanced more quickly than expected, and before long it disappeared behind the tree line. This didn’t necessarily mean that night was imminent, since the true horizon was well below the tree line, but it did mean that the light was beginning to fade. And the further we went, the more the pines became mixed with hardwoods that overhung the road.

Before long we found ourselves on a narrow, red clay road that twisted and turned through the hills. Like most East Texas roads it had a ditch on each side, outside of which the ground rose back up level with the road or above it. Fence lines had disappeared, and the trees crowded closer and closer to the edge of the road. As the light waned, soon all we could see was a narrow corridor covered by an archway of trees.

The road was only wide enough for one car, but Darnell sped down it at forty or fifty miles per hour. The further we went, the more pronounced the curves and hills became and the deeper the road cut into the terrain. I watched the walls rise on either side. By the time Darnell was forced to turn on the headlights, we were speeding along a tunnel with six-foot clay walls on either side. I didn’t know roads like this even existed in Fred. The curves were so sharp it was impossible to tell what lay around them, and the hills had crowns so abrupt that the headlights shot up into the canopy of leaves and pine needles. Sometimes it seemed possible that there was no road in the darkness on the other side of the hill.

But more terrifying than the uncertainty of the road was the very real possibility of a car approaching from the opposite direction. It took no time for me to become alarmed to the point of panic.