Scott Nicholson - Ashes

Leather on leather, glove on shift ball, the faint smell of oil in the air. Wide-tread rubber clinging desperately to asphalt, a ton-and-a-half of steel-and-chrome stud machine that could grab and growl in five gears, not counting reverse. It was great to be alive.

J.D. Jolley peered at the strip of black ribbon that rolled out in front of his headlights. The ribbon disappeared into the larger strip of night. Night hid the rest of the world, and that was fine with J.D. The world was nothing but litter along the highway, as far as he was concerned.

He pumped the accelerator once, then again, steadily, listening to the thrush of exhaust. A lot of muscle drivers stomped, but J.D. never stomped. You had to treat a '69 Camaro like a lady. With tenderness, compassion, lots of foreplay if you wanted a smooth ride.

"You're purring like a kitten in a kettle tonight, Cammie," J.D. said, patting the dashboard. "Warm as a manifold cover and wet as a water pump. What say we get it on?"

The moon was out, weakly grinning down on his left shoulder through the clouds. No matter how far he drove, the moon never seemed to move. It was one of those things about the world that J.D. accepted without a second thought. Hell, that was up there in the sky, and the moon didn't have a damned inch of asphalt. Maybe if those pencil-necked engineers ever came up with solo rockets, he'd take another study of the heavens. But until then, the sky was nothing but wind resistance.

He hung his arm out the window. A good little back-breeze played against his elbow. Ought to add a couple of miles per hour. He was shooting for one-forty tonight.

This was his favorite stretch of road, a nice straight three miles of open country. The local cops never patrolled out here for the simple reason that the only traffic was farm tractors and cattle trucks and the occasional riding lawn mower. The few farmhouses in the area were back from the highway, buffered by wide green and brown fields lined with barbed wire. Nobody to bother but the big-eyed cows, and they were practically kneeling in awe.

J.D. pressed the clutch and slid the Camaro into first gear. He clenched his left hand on the steering wheel. A lot of muscle guys had those faggy vinyl wraps on their steering wheels, but J.D. liked the natural factory feel. Same way with his women.

The back seat practically needed reconditioning, he'd worked the shock absorbers so much. A '69 Camaro drew the babes. They couldn't resist the sleek curves and classic lines, not to mention the throbbing under the hood. True, it was a lower class of women, but hell, one was pretty much the same as another when their legs were splayed out the back window.

So women were allowed in his meat wagon. But not on his midnight runs. Those were reserved strictly for him and his Cammie, a bond that was far more sacred than any relationship of mere flesh. This love was truer than motherly and was right up there with religious love. This was a man and his car racing against themselves.

For that same reason, he never dragged in the Saturday night specials with the hot rodders. There was a brisk betting business going on in this two-factory Iowa town because there wasn't much else to get excited about if you didn't invest in hog futures. The local cops were under orders to steer clear of the four-lane east of town when the muscleheads fired up their engines. But solo riders like J.D. were cracked faster than a powder-dry engine block.

If they did blue-light him out here, he could easily outrun them. They had those little pussyfoot cruisers that whined if they even got within sniffing distance of triple digits. They were driving damned imports, made in Korea even if the label said American. Ought to be a law against that.

J.D. closed his eyes and gave the gas pedal a little boot leather. His bucket seat shivered and he shivered with it, even though it was April. He was joining with the car. The spoiler was his open and gasping mouth, the carburetor throat was sucking oxygen, his crankcase belly was growling, hungry for petroleum, and the tires itched like his moist toes. The muffler was backfiring brimstone.

He popped the clutch at the same moment he popped open his eyelids. The asphalt squealed in agony as he left a fifty-foot scar up its spine. He straddled the dotted white line as he power-shifted into second, leaving another mist of scalded rubber hanging in the air behind him. J.D. glanced at the tachometer, saw that he was at 7,000 RPM, and he booted into third. Cammie was already at sixty and they'd not yet begun to party.

This was better than sex. This was red-eyed adrenaline, a spark in the old plug, a rush that made the small hairs on the back of J.D.'s neck stand up and dance. Fence posts blurred past both quarter panels as the Camaro's grill chewed up moths and the slipstream set the sawgrass swaying along the ditches. The G-force pressed J.D. against the seat. An excited sweat gathered under his eyes and his tongue felt like a gasket between the valve covers of his teeth.

He squinted at the small fuzzy dot ahead where the headlights petered out, at the murky oblivion that was always his destination. He was getting there, he felt it in his bones, he glanced down and saw the needle tacking toward one-ten and his bowels had gone zero-gravity. He was reaching down to glide into fourth when he saw the pale shape, a small figure that grew large too soon, from nothing to five-feet-six in only three seconds, and J.D. barely had time to see the face in the sweep of headlights.

Later he would tell himself that there was no way he could have observed all that detail in a fraction of a second. It was his imagination that must have painted the portrait. Eyes like a spotlighted deer's, wide and brown, impossibly deep. Eyebrows frantically climbing the white slope of forehead. Mouth open, choking on a scream that could fill the Holland Tunnel.

It was a glancing blow. J.D. didn't remember doing it, but he must have nudged the wheel slightly and his virgin-tight rack-and-pinion responded instantly. Otherwise the Camaro would have bucked and rolled, tumbling through the shin-high corn and strewing vital organs and steaming spare parts across the stubbled fields. At over a hundred, mistakes got amplified. But in that overdriven moment, J.D. was more car than man, high octane in his blood as he manipulated the automobile back onto course.

His foot had instantly left the accelerator but he had resisted the impulse to lock down on the brakes. The braking instinct was natural, but the resulting fishtail would have had J.D. ending up with a drive shaft necktie. The muffler growled as he downshifted and when he reached sixty he began working the brake pedal. He pulled to the side of the road and felt his heart beating in time to the idling pistons.

"Damn, Cammie," he said, when at last he was able to take a breath. "That was a close one."

He left the engine running while he opened the door and stood up, disoriented from the abrupt change in motion. He walked to the front of the car and knelt at the right fender. There was a crumple in the panel and the headlight chrome was dented and hanging loose. He took off his glove and ran a gentle hand along the fender and a few chips of candy-apple red paint flaked onto the shoulder of the road. He saw a smudge on the bumper and wiped at it.

Blood.

He looked back up the highway, but under the veiled moon, he couldn't see anything on the pavement. J.D. got behind the wheel and shifted into reverse.

"I'm so sorry, Cammie," he whimpered. The closest thing hed ever had to tears tried to collect in his eyes. "It was just an accident."

He held the horses in check as he backed up, keeping the revolutions steady. The crankshaft turned quietly in its pit of golden thirty-weight. He'd damaged her flesh, but he could take care with her heart. J.D. pushed the gas pedal gently as he cut a U-turn and drove up the road.