The Outside Groove (13 page)

I felt honored, in a crazy sort of way, that they seemed to be heading for my pit.

Bernie gave me one of her swoop handshakes with a complicated tangle of fingers at the end. “You did all right out there, Casey,” she said. “Not half-bad.”

“I took that one driver, at least,” I said. “Number three. The plumbing and septic car.”

“Septic about describes him,” T.T. said, tucking loose black hair into her cap. “That was Scooter Walsh.”

The girls laughed—not the lilting laugh of the Flu High Dolphins. There was some bite in the Sharks' laugh.

At the sound of the tow truck door opening and shutting, they all quieted down. Jim came around the rear of the wrecker and pulled out a tire ramp. “Sorry to break this up,” he said, “but I've got to get back to work.”

“No problem,” T.T. said, thumbs hooked in her pockets as she twisted back and forth at the waist.

Jim didn't look up.

When he was finished rolling Theo onto the flatbed, he gave me a light punch in the shoulder. “Good run, Casey,” he said. “I'll catch up with you in a couple of days.”

“Thanks, Jim. I appreciate your help.”

The Sharks said nothing as they watched Jim drive away.

Uncle Harvey was talking to Mr. Ladd up in front of the racing director's trailer. He gestured for me to join them.

“I've got to go, too,” I said. “Good meeting you.”

“Jim, was it?” Bernie said.

The Sharks all looked at me, as if hanging on my words. “Yeah,” I said. “Jim's my crew chief. He's my whole crew, actually, except my uncle.”

“Well, he's plenty, that Jim,” Tammy said, fixing her tube top again. “He's not your man?” Her cell phone rang. She pulled it from her pocket, examined the display, and silenced the ringer.

“Jim's just a friend,” I said, “and my crew.”

“Big Jim,” T.T. said, tugging her pockets with her thumbs.

“What about you?” Bernie said, her sunglasses passing over me like an airport metal detector. “Got a boyfriend? Girlfriend?”

I looked at the ground for a second, not sure how to respond. “I've got a date to the prom. Does that count?”

“The prom,” T.T. laughed. “Hey, Bernie, you get asked to the prom yet?”

Bernie turned toward the track. A tall driver in a brown firesuit, maybe thinking that she was watching him, waved. She didn't wave back. Another driver a couple of pits down, a guy roughly Wade's age, leaned against the front panel of his car, drinking a cup of coffee. With his shades on, I couldn't tell what he was looking at, but it seemed to be Bernie, me, or one of the other Sharks.

Bernie turned in his direction.

He raised his coffee cup to her.

“This here is my prom,” she said and waved back. She didn't walk over, though. She slid her shades onto her forehead, and when she smiled at me, her blue eyes made it easy to see why she was so popular around there. “You coming back next week?”

I looked at Uncle Harvey, who waved me over more animatedly. “I'm up for it,” I said. “Definitely.”

“We're going to need your number,” Tammy said, pointing her phone at me.

“Yeah, and I've got to show you something.” Bernie took a step closer and extended her right hand. “Shake,” she said. She gripped my hand and shook it. As I was pulling my hand away, she hooked her fingers in mine. “Hook them,” she said. “That's one. Then it's two, the thumbs.” She tapped her thumbprint against mine. “Now flex out your fingers so that the backs of your fingers flick against mine.” I did it. “That's three. Now hit palms.” I smacked palms with her. “Four,” she said. “Now do it fast. Shake, hook, thumb, flick, palms.”

I did the handshake again, and then a second time, and by the third time, I had it down.

“It's the Byam grip,” Bernie said. “It's just for the three of us—well, four now.” She slid her shades back down and looked toward the driver drinking coffee down pit row. “Come back anytime you want, Casey. We'll be right here.”

When I came downstairs the next morning, Wade LaPlante Motorsports World Headquarters was in full-on pre-race preparation mode. The driveway and garage were a frenzy of males arguing and drills shrieking, an engine grumbling periodically as if to punctuate the noise. As I passed through the dining room on my way to the back patio door, I saw Fletcher through the door leading from the kitchen to the garage. We exchanged a quick wave.

I stepped outside and gauged the weather—just a tad breezy. I zipped my cross-country sweatshirt and started out on a long, slow loop—long enough so that, by the time I returned, the entire Wade LaPlante Motorsports team would be up at Demon's Run.

I ran about five miles out, three back, and then walked the last two miles home so that I could pass through the village, which I knew would be quiet as people drove home from breakfast or church and headed up to the racetrack. A few people waved from inside their stores as I strolled by. As I reached the corner by the Coffee Pot Cafe, an elderly man and woman across the street turned around. “Hi, Casey,” the man said. I recognized them: Mr. and Mrs. Prout. Mr. Prout had been the superintendent of schools when I began at Fliverton Elementary. Mrs. Prout had been my mother's piano teacher when Mom was a kid.

As I waved to the Prouts and passed through an invisible cloud of coffee vapors, I felt swaddled in a cocoon of safety—unlike the jittery feeling I got driving past the abandoned buildings and boarded-up storefronts of Byam. I felt like I'd just stepped out of the Willow River, and a few good neighbors were wrapping me in a towel just because they'd watched me grow up, they knew my family, and this mattered to them, when all that mattered to me was that I get far, far away. I wondered if they'd care about me when I was gone.

I walked all the way home, skirting the river for the last mile or so, eager to hear the steady hum of the spring thaw coursing through the valley. The morning had grown overcast, the water turning pencil-lead gray, but the damp soil smelled of spring, and the willow trees, recently stiff in the winter air, now leaned over the flow.

Standing at the water's edge, I remembered how, when I was very young, I used to imagine the river leading to the ocean, and the ocean leading to some exotic destination, like the places I wrote essays about in school: Spain, Egypt, Australia. Some days, if Mom and I decided to sit on the dock and read (which we never did after Wade started racing Karts), I'd pretend that boats passing by had come from those places and that the people aboard were not familiar at all. They weren't the same people I saw every day in town. They didn't even speak English.

I gazed downriver and wondered if I'd miss this spot when I was finally kicking through the fallen leaves scattered along the cobblestone walkways of the Cray College campus. I knew I would.

***

Jim and Uncle Harvey didn't even look up from their work in the shop as Hilda and I crested the hill and crossed the yard.

Uncle Harvey had a gauge in one hand and a rag in the other. Jim rested one boot on Theo's front end. As I stepped into the garage, I spotted the GED booklet on the workbench.

“How's it going?” I said.

“Not too bad,” Uncle Harvey said. “You got out of Saturday's race in pretty good shape, all things considered.”

“Felt pretty good.”

“Speaking of which,” Uncle Harvey said, “I'm parched. You two want anything?”

“I'm set,” Jim said, chatty as ever.

“Nothing for me, thanks,” I said.

Uncle Harvey stepped into the yard.

Jim took a rag from his back pocket and wiped his hands, then tossed the rag onto the workbench.

I picked up his GED booklet. “Want me to quiz you?”

Instead of his usual grousing, Jim said, “Go ahead,” and he slid his boot off Theo and crossed his arms.

I flipped to the section on geometry. “So, you've got a right triangle.”

“Yup.”

“You've got the two smaller sides—”

“The sum of the squares of both of the short sides equals the third side squared. The hypotenuse. The long side. That one.”

“Nicely done.”

“Pythagorean theorem.”

“You've been studying.”

Jim leaned back on his boots and looked across the yard.

“Do you mind me asking you a personal question?” I said.

Jim walked to the edge of the garage. For a second, I thought he was going to leave, but he stopped and looked into the sky. “Probably going to get some weather,” he said.

I walked over and stood next to him. “Maybe a little.”

After a minute or so, during which thunder pounded dully off in the distance, probably still a couple of towns away, Jim said, “You want to know why I didn't finish high school?”

“Yeah. I mean, I don't blame you. School can be pretty boring. ”

“I ran away from home some years ago.”

I didn't know what to say to that.

“Had to,” Jim added. “Got into some trouble, most of it my fault, but not all of it.”

“Where was this?”

Jim set his jaw and narrowed his eyes, as if he'd spotted a snake in the yard. “I don't like talking about it,” he said.

I held my words, not wanting to find myself standing there with grumpy Jim Biggins, the sullen John Henry of the pits, instead of the guy who, a couple of minutes earlier, seemed to be having the tiniest bit of fun with a GED quiz.

“Point is, I'm getting settled here,” he said and nodded at the booklet in my hands. “One step at a time.”

“Seems like you might be ready to pass this thing.”

He took the booklet from me and flipped through the pages. “I didn't even know about this until I came here,” he said. “Didn't even know taking this test was an option. No one had told me.” He shook his head. “Didn't know about anything. Just kind of flailed around. It's funny, the things you have to learn if you don't have someone to show you. Simple, little things. But I'm getting it.”

“How'd you find out about the GED?”

Still flipping through the pages, he gestured toward the cottage. “Towed a car up here one day and got to talking to Harvey.”

I looked at the house, where I spotted Uncle Harvey passing by the living room window. For the first time, I noticed the flowers in the flower box under the window—white flowers. I also noted that he'd planted some others in a pot on the front steps. There was something very inviting about the cottage, despite the side and back lawns being a junkyard—car and truck bodies in various states of demolition, his fishing boat leaning against the shop, the narrow tin shed listing a bit to one side under the weight of a motorcycle frame.

“He ever talk to you about racing?” I said.

Jim laughed softly. “Lately it's all we ever talk about. You keep us pretty busy.”

“I know,” I said, my eye resting on the tin shed. “And I'm grateful, believe me.”

Jim closed his book. “Harvey's helped me out a lot. I was a lost puppy when I hit town. Like I said, he's the one who told me about the GED. And when I took it and flunked it, he said I just had to study harder, but if I needed a quiet place to study, I could use the shop or the cottage if he was working. That was, oh, two or three months ago.” Jim laughed again. “I've got to tell you, Casey, I've never seen him this happy. Now, I don't know the man well, but he seems twenty years younger than he was before you got him all hooked back into racing. Talk about racing? Try to get him
not
to talk about racing.”

“I meant, like,
his
racing. When he and my dad had their team. He ever talk about that?”

“Strange, isn't it?” Jim said, looking toward the house. “You'd think he would. But, then, he doesn't seem to care much for people around here.”

“That's not so strange.”

Uncle Harvey emerged from the cottage.

Thunder crackled again, closer, seeming to creep up from the south.

Jim left in the wrecker, and Uncle Harvey started tinkering with Theo.

“Well, I should be going,” I said. “I've got to work.”

Uncle Harvey, crouched down next to Theo's left front tire and looking up into the wheel well, just waved a wrench at me.

Halfway to Hilda, I stopped in my tracks at the sight of my mother's blue station wagon turning up Uncle Harvey's driveway. I reflexively turned to my uncle, who, maybe sensing something strange in the air, stood, leaving the wrench on the shop floor. He shot me a puzzled look, maybe because of the expression on my own face: horror.

Uncle Harvey walked no farther than the threshold of the shop as my mother pulled into the yard and got out of her car. “Hi, Harvey,” she said, sounding relatively cheerful considering the rather menacing glint in her eyes as she approached me.

“Hello, Carol,” Uncle Harvey said and stuffed his hands in his pockets.

“Hi, Mom,” I said, just to say something.

She walked up close enough to hug me. But she didn't hug me. “I'm very disappointed,” she said in a low voice, as if to keep this conversation between the two of us.

“I didn't think you'd let me—”

“You didn't think, that's what you didn't do,” she said. “You didn't think how I'd feel to be lied to.” She scanned the wreck-strewn yard. “ ‘Behind the industrial arts wing,' did you say?” She let out a huff. “Why, that looks like your car right over there.”

“You never told me I couldn't come up here,” I said.

Mom narrowed her eyes. “And you never said that you
were
coming up here.”

“Would you have let me?”

Mom hesitated.

“What about Big Daddy?”

A look of panic flashed in her eyes.

“See? No one cares about what I do until I do something they don't like—”

“I signed your release form,” Mom said. “I trusted you.”