What You Have Left (12 page)

Maddy didn't back down. “Now you know how it feels,” she said.

Wylie was about to step in when Dale beat him to it. He draped a friendly arm across Tag's shoulder, and it was like watching a horse trainer soothe a nervy colt. It probably didn't hurt that Dale and Tag had played Legion ball together, or that Tag bought his Sunday clothes at Dale's store. Dale was telling Tag how sorry he was about the wreck. He was sure it was an accident, he said, and he was sure they could work something out, something fair and square. Wylie kept expecting Maddy to say enough's enough—she hated Dale acting like he was her father—but tonight she seemed perfectly willing to sit back and let him clean up her mess.
There was nothing for Wylie to do except stand there looking useless. Once Tag cooled down, Dale actually convinced him and Maddy to shake hands. “That's it,” he said. “Good sports. Both of you.” By now the crowd was thinning out, disappointed no punches were thrown. Tag started back for his car, then stopped and gave Wylie a hurt look.

“And what do you got rolled up in that newspaper, brother?”

The last time Maddy won a race, three weeks earlier, she and Wylie had celebrated with a plate of vinegar fries, sitting on the hood of her car and joking about the skimpy prize money, how it would maybe buy a fan belt or an air filter for their dream car. Dale and Sheila were still up in the grandstand, and Wylie'd had Maddy all to himself. Tonight, he hardly felt like he had her at all. She was sticking close to Dale. She said she hoped he didn't really plan on giving Tag any money to fix his car. Dale told her he'd worry about that later; right now all that mattered was that nobody got hurt.

The fender of Tag's Ford was bent into his rear tire. A couple of guys were helping him peel it back so he could at least tow the car home. Sheila went over to keep them company, and Wylie decided to lend a hand. So what if it pissed Maddy off? He wanted to smooth things over before work tomorrow morning, and he was hoping that if the other drivers saw there was no bad blood between him and Tag, maybe they'd take it easy on Maddy next week, for his sake if not hers. He was about to fetch his crowbar from the truck when he noticed Kip Allen, the chief steward, talking with Maddy and Dale.

“You must be kidding,” Maddy said.

Wylie walked over and asked what was going on, and Kip told him somebody had filed a protest. Maddy wouldn't get the win—or the winnings—until her car passed inspection.

“Who put up the teardown money?” Dale said.

Kip shrugged. “My guess would be Tag.”

Dale looked disappointed. Tag was still squatting in the mud, but he and his pals had stopped pulling on the fender long enough to watch Kip deliver the news. They didn't try to hide their amusement.

Wylie was glad he hadn't made a fool of himself by going over to help. “Who ever heard of protesting a hobby race?”

“Not my idea,” Kip said. “You can either break down the car, or you can forfeit. I get to go home sooner if you forfeit.”

After Kip went back to his scut work, Wylie kicked the Ford's tire. “Shit. They can keep their fifty bucks.”

“I am
not
forfeiting this race,” Maddy said. “Damn it, I told you this would happen.”

“You told me you wanted to win,” Wylie said.

“Wait a second.” Dale looked from Maddy to Wylie. “The car's not legit?”

After the last race, as the infield crowd was trickling out into the night, Maddy set the toolbox beside her car, popped the hood, and began tearing down the engine. It was almost eleven o'clock. Kip looked on, stifling a yawn. Sheila sat on the hood of the pickup with a beer, her legs dangling between the headlights, which were trained on Maddy's engine. A small group of onlookers had gathered. They were hobby drivers, mostly, and they'd stuck around to see Maddy get her due.

Across the track, Dale was smoking a cigarette in the empty grandstand. He wanted no part of this. He'd been peeved that Maddy never told him about the car, but mostly he just couldn't believe she planned to go through with the inspection. “Let me get this straight,” he'd said. “You're willingly going to tear down the engine and
prove
you were cheating?” Maddy told him sometimes a person doesn't see what's right under his nose. She reminded him that if the car passed, she got to keep the fifty dollars for winning the race
plus
the hundred dollars teardown money. And anyway, she said, she had no choice: she had to call Tag's bluff.

“Tag's the one calling
your
bluff,” Dale said.

“I'd forfeit, myself,” Wylie said, “but it's up to the driver.”

Dale had just walked off, shaking his head. Now he was watching the whole sorry scene from a comfortable distance, and Wylie wished he were, too. Maddy had his stomach in knots. Wrecking Tag had been a jackass thing to do, but at least he understood it. Not this stubbornness, though. She had to know the car would never pass, but she seemed to have talked herself into thinking it might, that she wouldn't have to forfeit
and
she wouldn't get nailed for cheating. That was Maddy: she couldn't help trying to have it both ways. Five more minutes and she'd have the engine apart, and everyone would know what they'd been up to, and then she'd turn to Dale to bail her out, and that would be the end of Wylie. Even a lugnut like Tag would know what to do if he were in Wylie's shoes: round up Sheila and hit the road before everything came crashing down.

But Wylie stayed put. It was one thing not to help tear down the engine, but he couldn't just leave her. By now she had the carburetor and the intake manifold off. One by one,
the grandstand lights winked out until only the infield lights remained, swarms of moths orbiting the high poles. Except for the people who'd stuck around to watch, the place was empty, nothing but mud and trampled grass between Maddy's car and Tag's. He was leaning there with a beer. Maddy called over to him: “Getting your money's worth?”

“Don't look at me, sugar,” Tag said. “I didn't put up no money.”

A buzz went through the crowd. One guy, the driver who'd come in second place, was laughing and saying he
wished
he could take credit. His buddy mimicked Maddy in a slurry falsetto—“Getting your money's worth, Taggy?” Somebody else hollered for her to quit stalling. In the middle of all this, Sheila slid down off the truck. Wylie could barely make her out in the glare of the headlights, but he didn't need to see her face to know, sure as he was standing there, that she was the one who'd filed the protest. And from the look of it, she had some more business to take care of. She'd grabbed a couple beers and was weaving across the infield toward the gate, toward Dale, who apparently was about to hear the truth about his fiancée. Maddy seemed to have forgotten all about the car. She was biting her lip, following Sheila's progress as if she were watching a bad crash in slow motion. One of the head bolts slipped from her fingers and clanked down through the engine.

“Let's go, let's go.” Kip tapped his micrometer against his leg, impatient for Maddy to get the cylinder head off so he could measure the bore. “I don't got all night.”

Maddy didn't seem to hear him—she looked dazed— but she knelt in the wet grass anyway and began searching for the bolt in front of the tire, behind the tire, under the bumper. She'd been ignoring Wylie, determined to take
apart the engine by herself, but under the circumstances, it was turning out to be more than she could handle. “Help me,” she said.

Wylie watched Sheila as she crossed the track and disappeared into the shadow of the grandstand. Depending on what she knew, he still had a shot at convincing her there was nothing going on between him and Maddy. If that didn't work, he could always come clean and beg forgiveness— which was exactly what he could see Maddy doing with Dale. And who could blame her? Why put your faith in a guy like Wylie, a guy so bent on playing it safe that he had to wait for his girlfriend to blow the whistle? Right this second, Sheila was probably taking a seat next to Dale, bumming a smoke, offering him a beer.
You know, he's sleeping with her.
He could chase her down and fight for something he knew he didn't want; if it wasn't happiness, at least she'd never break his heart. Instead, he stooped beside Maddy and groped around in the darkness under the car. He didn't find the bolt, but he found her hand.

 

An hour or so before Lyle was fired for burning the most famous flag in America, Holly lost the last of their savings playing video poker on a machine likely owned by her father-in-law, Ellis Gandy, founder and president of Gandy Amusement. It was the end of May, and the heat had slammed into Columbia that morning like a wrecking ball. Lyle was at work at the statehouse. The building—subject of the master's thesis he'd failed to finish—was getting its first major face-lift in almost a century. The state had been too cheap to hire archaeologists to help with the excavation, so the task of unearthing artifacts had fallen to the workers. When Lyle's crew had discovered a buried trove of liquor bottles and discarded bones, he'd quickly fingered the corrupt Lincoln Republicans, who maintained a barroom right next to the senate chamber during Reconstruction.

“Apparently,” Lyle told Holly at breakfast, “they were so lazy they just threw their garbage out the window.”

Holly checked the kitchen clock. It was nearly half past eight. Normally Lyle was long gone by now, but here he was, helping himself to another cup of coffee, telling her how he'd managed to pocket two of the antique liquor bottles before
the guys from the state museum had arrived to tag the artifacts and trundle them away. To hear Lyle tell it, this wasn't really stealing; he was the one who'd found the bottles, and anyway, what good were they packed away in boxes at the museum?

For all Holly cared, he could have stolen the statehouse itself. Her only concern was being at the video parlor when it opened at nine, but she had to wait until Lyle left or risk him seeing her car parked at Fortunes on his way to work. She glanced out the window. The last traces of fog hung low and spotty over what had once been soybean fields. She considered asking Lyle if he had any cash—for groceries, she'd say. She was almost broke. No more money meant no more poker.

“We counted the bones,” Lyle was saying. “Pork was their favorite.”

“Aren't you going to be late?”

Lyle put down his coffee. “Don't you want to hear about what we found?”

A week earlier, Holly had been the one suggesting they might actually have a conversation at breakfast sometime. Most mornings, if Lyle spoke at all, he spoke to the newspaper. He'd always been one to give
The State
a good talking-to, and once upon a time, this had intrigued Holly—there was something vaguely sexy about a man with political bones to pick—but lately he muttered and swore at the news like it was some kind of personal insult. All it took was a story about the Confederate flag or the state's failed attempts to rid itself of video poker, and boom, off he'd go.

“Sorry,” Holly said. “I just thought you'd lost track of the time.”

“It's my job,” he said. “Let me worry about it.” The
implication being, he at least had a job to worry about. Not that he'd ever come out and say as much, but he'd said enough to turn Holly's face hot as she stole another glance at the clock.

That morning, she was supposed to be at the antique mall tending the booth she'd rented the previous summer, selling off the old farm implements and china she'd inherited when she inherited Cal's farm, but as usual, she stopped off first for a few hands of five-card draw. Fortunes Emporium was a converted cinder-block feed store that had been subdivided into a warren of rooms housing five Pots-O-Gold each. At 8:50 a.m., there was a line out front waiting for the attendant, Billy Pecan, to unlock the door. These were the days when video poker ruled the state. Holly had read somewhere that South Carolina had three times as many places to gamble as Nevada, and whenever she thought of her father-in-law, Ellis Gandy, one of the piedmont's chief suppliers of poker machines, it left her whipsawed. “Your dad must be making a mint,” she'd said to Lyle more than once. But that's all she said. She had no business sounding like she wished Lyle were getting rich, too.

Years ago, before they'd met, Lyle had dropped out of graduate school and gone to work at Gandy Amusement, what was then his family's jukebox and pinball business, but on the day his father decided to add poker machines to their distribution routes, Lyle quit on the grounds that he didn't want to make a living off other people's misery. He hooked up with an outfit that renovated old homes and meanwhile launched a personal boycott, refusing to patronize any establishment that housed a video-poker machine. By the time Holly married him, a few months after Cal died, Lyle had his own crew and was trying to make a go of it as a contractor.
Holly wanted to help, so she went back to school for a semester and took enough business courses to make herself useful as an office manager. While Lyle was out on the job, she manned the phone and fax machine in what used to be Cal's workshop, printing off invoices and purchase orders on their new laser printer. They spent weekends remodeling their own house, stripping woodwork, painting, tearing out old carpet, refinishing floors. Somewhere along the line, their modest projects gave way to more ambitious ones, and when they ran low on money, they reached for their stack of credit cards, thick as a poker deck. It was a familiar story, Holly supposed: You got a little and it only made you want more. Soon, everywhere they turned, they saw things they hadn't paid for: bathrooms done up in marble and sandstone, an HVAC system with enough BTUs for a polar bear, a kitchen straight out of
Southern Living.
It was around the time they decided to convert the attic into a master bedroom that Lyle's biggest client went belly up and business slowed down. To make matters worse, property taxes on the idle farmland were eating them alive. When Lyle got tired of struggling every week to make payroll, he closed up shop and took a construction job with plenty of overtime. Rather than get a real job herself, Holly leased the booth at the antique mall. They started seeing less of each other, and that started taking a toll.