Somehow, Richard felt himself pulled by torrents of enthusiasm, even love, toward the MacReady locality. In a second he realized why there had been such a current in the crowd. Good Lord, the boy himself was there.
Brother Richard halted and held back. He considered it for a second, then realized that after his surgery and in his currently repackaged King Petty mode, he would stir no old memories, not to the boy, not to Red, not to any of them. So he ambled close, slipping in and out of the whirls and eddies of pilgrims, and by not pushing it too hard, he got pretty close. No, he wouldn’t get in the line, where Matt was dutifully signing posters, hats, T’s, anything, with a Magic Marker, accepting goodwill wishes and even love-horsepowered thumps on the back with grace and ease and charm.
Richard didn’t want to halt, for motion was the law of the crowd. He let it sweep him on by and saw Matt’s calmness-Matt always had that-and his decency-Matt really had that-and it made him realize with surprising bitterness that Matt was really the beneficiary of all the madness of eleven years ago, though nobody could have known it then, for Matt was just a boy from the second, the trophy wife. He was good-natured and unassertive, all eyes and ears to the excellent adventure the fates had decreed would be his life.
“Yes ma’am,” Richard heard Matt say in that soft voice of his. “Be happy to.” And he took a three-year-old upon his lap and smiled for a pic. Then it was time to go and the thousand still in line had to be disappointed. Matt rose and said into a mic, “Folks, I have to get my beauty rest and keep my arm loosey-goosey for all them left-hand turns!” And of course everybody laughed.
Matt waved. Then he and Red left the venue as a golf cart arrived, and Richard saw how thin and muscular the young man was, how lean and graceful. He had the racer’s perfect body, the body that the great ones had, short and slender so there was no crowding in the driver’s seat, with muscular forearms and a longish neck, which gave him eerie pivoting ability for peripheral vision left and right, legs able to reach pedals without cramping, in short, the whole package.
The golf cart speedily vanished behind the cyclone fence that marked off the driver’s compound, that is, the fence that marked off the aristocracy from the peasantry.
Richard watched it go until it disappeared, and he imagined where it took Matt: to a luxury Rec-V customized for travel, a beautiful woman or four or six, a crew of adoring hangers-on, an accountant, maybe rock or movie star pals, the big life as imagined by America at this moment in history.
Again, melancholy came across him, a fleeting image of the eternal What Might Have Been. He’d steeled himself to believe to the contrary that, given certain behavioral dynamics within himself, there was no What Might Have Been, there was only a What Never Could Happen. It wasn’t in the cards; he didn’t have Matt’s go-along-to-get-alongness, his mellow ways, his charm. He was too fucking outlaw, he had to have it his way. He was also too smart, too self-aware. Like all athletic and warrior enterprises, NASCAR tended to reward unconscious genius. If you had irony, had read a book or two, had a taste for surrealism and grotesquerie, if you hated structure and had a natural guerrilla’s heart, it could never be for you. You saw through it too easily. It was like a church, and you were born with a non-believer’s heart. And even if you felt tremendous nostalgia for it, the honest, bitter goddamned truth was that it was never going to be and could never have been for you. For Matt it was maybe just perfect, given his perfect blend of talents and limits. For Richard it was too much, given his blend of talents and limitlessness. No matter what, he would have destroyed his inheritance, crapped in the church, and gone his own outlaw way.
That’s why he was the Sinnerman.
He turned his iPod way, way up until his anthem blasted melancholy from his brain.
Sinnerman, where you gonna run to?
Gonna run to the sea
Sea won’t you hide me?
Run to the sea
Sea won’t you hide me?
But the sea, it was a boilin’
All on that day
Now it was on to business. He looked up at the towering speedway, its circularity gone this far under its shadow, so that it was just a wall of girders and walkways on the underside of the steep auditorium seating. Next to it, silver in the August heat, was the faux-streamline building of the speedway headquarters, which looked to him like a Greyhound station in about 1937. It sat atop a shelf of land, and down here, beneath it, was the grid of lanes of NASCAR Village and all its little retail outlets. A gully, some kind of drainage arrangement full of dirty water, split NASCAR Village in two. But there were two bridges across the channel. He took out a pen and a notepad and carefully drew a map, and on it traced the quickest way from the roadway to the bridge. Oh, that would be the fun part.
