When he got to drinking Marv liked to think about the old days, back when he and Hal had more hair than sense and they had no worries beyond whether their tyres would last until the next race meet. Dirt Dawg and the Highway Hound. First time they’d each showed up at track with their new names emblazoned across the top of their windshields they’d been laughed at by the old hands, the guys that had been on the circuit for a few years. They stopped laughing soon enough when they stopped seeing that windshield and only saw their taillights pulling away from them, left to pointlessly chase the newcomers through clouds of kicked up dust. It was all unofficial. You heard from somebody that knew somebody when the next meet would happen, either on some marked out piece of scrub land or, sometimes, late at night on streets that would probably be quiet enough to be safe or where a local sheriff had been paid off to close the place down. Marv liked the off-road tracks, Hal the streets. Hence the names.
They were good. It wasn’t just the drink talking, they were really good. Some of it was won in the garage, both of them spending hours tinkering with their cars until they were set just right, tuning the engine, tweaking the suspension, stripping out anything not bolted down that was just excess weight. Hal was the first to strap a nitrous oxide booster to his engine and he’d blow everyone away in drag races on the long stretches that they sometimes ran north of Culbertson, up by the cemeteries. Then they’d sit around laughing, inhaling the remnants of a leftover canister of the stuff; too young to buy beer but buzzing on the same fuel that had injected their victory. Not all of it was technical though. Even without the gizmos and gadgets they were the best drivers. Marv liked to say that they were too stupid to be afraid of dying and that gave them an edge. He’d throw his head back and howl and Hal would match him, their signature announcement before the start of each race, steadily matching their howls with the revs from their engines until they’d whipped up a furious frenzy of noise, men and their machines in harmony.
It had changed when Marv met Anne-Marie. She had loved the racing, it wasn’t that, it was that he suddenly felt a little less stupid and, as a consequence, a little more afraid of dying. There were corners he braked for a little earlier, racing lines he ceded to others that he would never have ceded, gaps between cars that now looked too narrow that, before, he would’ve forced his way through. He lost his edge. The Dirt Dawg got a little less dirty, less feral. She’s tamed him. He knew that was the whisper round the circuit but truth was that he’d tamed himself. He could see more in their future than stripped-down, souped-up Chevy’s, wanted more than the accolade of being the fastest thing on four wheels in Hitchcock County. Maybe the whole of Nebraska. Whatever, his horizons were a little broader now and stretched beyond the State line.
They’d married with a small ceremony at the local church. They didn’t have any money but Marv had persuaded Frank to let them take over the bar for the afternoon and into the evening. It started respectable with some speeches and a buffet spread that was all they could stretch to and it ended less respectable with tequila shots and a slurred singalong to ‘Jack And Diane’. Hal was best man and had insisted on driving them from the chapel to the bar. One last drag race, for old time’s sake. The Dawg and the Hound. He’d gunned the throttle, held the car on its parking brake until the tyres started to smoke, and then released it, hurtling them forwards. The ride of your life. Hal had shouted it halfway down the street, eyes locked on the road in front of him. In the back Anne-Marie had nestled her head into Marv’s shoulder and whispered this ain’t the ride of your life, honey, you wait until later.
That was the last time him and the Hound rode together. Hal couldn’t or wouldn’t leave the race circuit alone and didn’t seem to notice that younger guys coming through were getting quicker whilst he was slowing down. He used to feel like he was the still point as the world moved around him, perfectly calm in the eye of a storm. Only now he didn’t feel quite so fixed, was getting buffeted by the storm whilst he was trying to navigate it. Before everything happened in slow motion, the road out front a series of photographs he could hold in his mind, place himself and his car in, but slowly everything started to blur, like a faulty VHS machine that was stuck on fast forwards, dancing lines of static obscuring the picture. Marv had told him to stop. Nobody else, maybe, could tell but Marv saw him miss racing lines, watched him half a second off the start line, fishtailing because he’d left his braking too late, misjudged another bend. They’d argued about it and drifted apart. Last time Marv had seen him had been at Frank’s. He’d walked in and Hal was drunk at the bar, picking the label off his beer bottle, railing to nobody in particular about how Clinton was a phoney. He’d got up when he saw Marv, pushed past him to the exit. Another phoney. Whole damn country’s full of them.
Marv heard about the accident from some of the old crew still on the racing scene. There was a cross country run they still did sometimes that he knew from back when he was the king of off-road. Some fields east of Trenton, couple of circuits and then a sprint finish in to Massacre Canyon, barrelling under the railroad bridge marking the finish line. It was a challenging run, especially when it had been dry for weeks, the tracks hardening into a series of uneven jolting bumps, the cars jumping, drivers fighting to keep tyres on the floor. Back in the day it was the kind of run that the Dirt Dawg owned, the kind of run that made his name. Hal had never liked those races, he’d always preferred the surety of tarmac and the straight line speed down an empty stretch of freeway. Maybe he was trying to prove something that day, Marv didn’t know. All he heard was he pushed too hard in the final sprint, opened up his nitro way too early, way too far, hit a rise and lost control, stacked his Mustang into the side of the bridge. If he’d been wearing a helmet they said he might have survived but the Dawg and the Hound never wore helmets.
If it was one of those afternoons that started with a beer and then stretched into the evening, time marked out in a growing stack of bottle caps on the bar, then Marv might get to thinking that his whole life had been one long drift, too much power early on and then just trying to find some balance to stop the whole thing spinning out of control. Anne-Marie died about ten years after Hal, summer of ’94. She was no age and he didn’t really understand what they told him in the hospital in the short time between diagnosis and her passing. He understood the bills. For all Clinton’s promises it didn’t seem to make much difference to people like them and none of his driving gigs came with medical insurance. It took him ten years to pay it all off, taking a long-haul truck job, spending his days and nights traversing the country, hoping the noise from his twin twelve cylinders would drown out his grief. He made some kind of peace with it and settled back in Trenton because he didn’t know where else to go.
The truck wash had been an idea he’d been turning over in his mind in the last couple of years of driving. There was pride in the community of truckers ploughing the highways, they might not come right out and say it but he’d watch them take a rag to polish up a bumper or vacuum out their tractor. Sure, they were all a little rough around the edges but they liked their rig to be smooth. He’d opened Dirt Dawg’s Truck & Car Wash in the Fall of ’05, figuring that he had enough money to make it through that first winter and then demand would pick up into the summer, no rain to rinse away the dust and grime from the road. The name had seemed obvious and, maybe, he hoped there were still some around who remembered the original young buck that had worn that title, remembered when nobody could touch him across the county dirt tracks, remembered when nobody could touch his partner on the streets. Just glory days. No-one seemed to remember except him and Frank. You’re like that song, Marv. Holding to glory days. Frank would put it on in the bar sometimes to amuse himself, usually on those nights where either the stack of bottle caps or Marv would topple over.
He was tired. He knew he was slowing down and he wasn’t resisting it, he wasn’t interested so much in raging against the dying of the light as fading down the dimmer switch himself. His days of being on full beam were done. He took on that kid, Johnny, to run more and more shifts and he saw something of himself in the boy, something of who he used to be. A certain restlessness, a certain attitude. They never spoke about the future but Marv thought that perhaps he could pass the business on, let himself be bought out by this pup, let the old dog finally rest, finally stop drifting. Johnny had other ideas.
The night Johnny and Diane pulled their Bonnie and Clyde stunt, jumped town with the pick-up, Marv was drinking at Frank’s. He’d only had a couple. Frank was regaling the bar with his story about travelling up State to see the Trump rally and how he was going to bail out the little guys, the forgotten guys, the American guys. Marv didn’t want to hear it all over again. He’d stopped wearing the MAGA hat that Frank had got him after a while; the more he saw of this guy the more he just thought he was the same as all the rest of them. Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama. None of them had done anything for him or for Anne-Marie. Hal would have called him a phoney and he reckoned he probably had it about right. He left the bar and decided to check that Johnny had locked up as he had to pass the truck wash on his way home anyway.
He noticed the girl first. She was sat on the sidewalk, hugging her legs up to her chest. Something about it reminded him of Anne-Marie, how she used to sit up on the hood of his car in the same kind of pose. It used to drive him mad and he’d yell at her to get down, shout about the rivets on her jeans scratching his paint work, but she’d just laugh at him and chide him for loving his car more than her loved her. And she knew that wasn’t true. He thought he recognised this girl, she looked like the one that had been helping up at Cindy’s, had moved in there for a while after that nasty business between Cindy and Randall. Cindy said she was a nice kid. Marv never thought of himself as the smartest guy but he saw the make-up, saw the cropped top and the too-tight jeans, saw the girl trying to front up as a woman, hanging around beside a known stop off for groups of men. He saw what this was. Saw someone else drifting and about to spin out of control.
You steer into it when you’re about to spin. So he gave her something to steer into.
“Come see me tomorrow if you want work,” Marv said. “I think I might have an opening. Dress for washing cars though. You know, appropriate like. It’s honest work and I got more demand than Cindy does. Place like this, dogs go out of fashion but trucks and cars? They seldom do.”
He thought about Johnny, out there running the highway, and decided to let him go. He could understand why a young man might want to get of Trenton. He figured he’d abandon the pick-up along the way and there couldn’t be many Dodge Rams on the road decorated with Dirt Dawg decals and a horn that blasted a whistling howl. He’d get his truck back but, even if he didn’t, some things were more important. He’d lost the Hound and he’d lost Anne-Marie, damn near lost himself, but he wasn’t going to let this girl get lost too.
This concludes the loosely entwined trilogy about Trenton, Nebraska. I guess it’s mainly Marv’s back story. You can decide if Jennifer sticks it out and eventually takes over Frank’s bar or not. I like to think she maybe does.
This is another story in my 26,000 word commitment for Great Ormond Street Hospital in July ’23. Fundraising page here
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