The Flamethrowers: A Novel Read online

  * * *

  My five minutes at the truck stop were almost up. I rebraided my hair, which was knotted from the wind and crimped in odd places from the padding in my helmet.

  Drivers were arguing about truck color. A purple rig shone like a grape Popsicle among the rows of semis. A cup of cola sailed toward its grille, casting a vote with a slam and clatter of cubes. The men laughed and started to disperse. Nevada was a tone, a light, a deadness that was part of me. But it was different to come back here now. I’d left. I was here not because I was stuck here, but to do something. To do it and then return to New York.

  One of the truckers spoke to me as he passed. “That yours?”

  For a moment, I thought he meant the truck. But he tipped his chin toward the Moto Valera.

  I said yes and kept braiding my hair.

  He smiled in a friendly way. “You know what?”

  I smiled back.

  “You won’t look nearly so good when they’re loading you off the highway in a body bag.”

  * * *

  ALL VEHICLES WITH LIVESTOCK MUST BE WEIGHED. I passed the weigh station, breezed through third gear and into the midrange of fourth, hitting seventy miles an hour. I could see the jagged peaks of tall mountains, stale summer snow filtered by the desert haze to the brownish tone of pantyhose. I was going eighty. Won’t look nearly as good. People love a fatality. I redlined it, still in fourth gear, waiting.

  Light winked from the back of something silver, up ahead in the right lane. I rolled off the throttle but didn’t downshift. As I got closer, I recognized the familiar rounded rear corners of a Greyhound. Builds character, my mother liked to say. She had ridden buses alone in the early 1950s, an episode just before I was born that was never explained and didn’t seem quite wholesome, a young woman drifting around on buses, patting cold water on her face in gas station bathrooms. The footage ran through my mind in high-contrast black and white, light cut to ribbons, desperate women accidentally strangled by telephone cords, or alone with the money, drinking on an overcast beach in big sunglasses. My mother’s life was not so glamorous. She was a switchboard operator, and if her past included something akin to noir, it was only the gritty part, the part about being female, poor, and alone, which in a film was enough of a circumstance to bring in the intrigue, but in her life it attracted only my father. He left when I was three. Everyone in the family said it was good riddance, and that uncle Bobby was a better father to me than my own could have been. As I approached the Greyhound, ready to pass, I saw that the windows were meshed and blacked. Exhaust was blowing out carelessly from its loose, lower panels, NEVADA CORRECTIONS on its side. A mobile prison, with passengers who could not see out. But perhaps to see out was worse. Once, as a kid, riding my bicycle around the county jail, I had seen a man staring down at me from his barred window. A fine-grade rain was falling. I stopped pedaling and looked up at his small face, framed by a gravity-flop of greasy blond hair. The rain was almost invisible. He put an arm through the bars. To feel the rain, I assumed. He gave me the middle finger.

  “Save your freedom for a rainy day,” someone had written on the bathroom wall at Rudy’s Bar in SoHo, where Sandro and Ronnie liked to drink. It remained there at eye level above the washbasin all summer. No retorts or cross-outs. Just this blank command as you angled and turned your hands under the faucet.

  I passed the bus, shifted into fifth, and hit ninety, the orange needle steady on the face of my black speedometer. I tucked down into my little fairing. I loved that fairing the moment I saw the bike at the dealership in Reno, where I picked it up. Metal-flake teal, the color of deep freeze. It was a brand-new 650 supersport. It was actually a ’77—next year’s model. It was so new no one in the United States had one but me. I had never seen a Moto Valera this color. The one I’d owned in college, a ’65, had been white.

  * * *

  I’d ridden motorcycles since I was fourteen. I started out riding in the woods behind our house, with Scott and Andy, who had Yamaha DTs, the first real dirt bikes. Before I learned to ride, I’d ridden on the back of my cousins’ scramblers, which were street bikes they customized, no passenger pegs, my legs held out to the sides in hopes of avoiding an exhaust pipe burn. They were not street legal, no headlight or license plate, but Scott and Andy rode with me on the back all over Reno. Except past the front of our house, because my mother had forbidden me to ride on my cousins’ motorcycles. I held on for wheelies and jumps and learned quickly to trust. It wasn’t Scott and Andy I trusted, one of whom angled a wheelie too high and flipped the bike with me on the back (he had not yet learned to tap the foot brake, to tilt the bike forward), and the other took a jump over a pile of dirt at a construction site and told me to hold tight. That was Andy. He landed with the front end too pitched and we went over the handlebars. I didn’t trust their skills. I had no reason to, since they crashed regularly. I trusted the need for risk, the importance of honoring it. In college, I bought a Moto Valera and then sold it to move to New York. With my new life in the big city, I thought I’d lose interest but I didn’t. Maybe I would have, had I not met Sandro Valera.

  * * *

  I was going one hundred miles an hour now, trying to steer properly from my hunched position, as insects ticked and thumped and splatted against the windscreen.

  It was suicide to let the mind drift. I’d promised myself not to do it. A Winnebago towing a Volkswagen Beetle was in the left lane. The Winnebago must have been going forty miles an hour: it seemed to stand still on the road. We were in separate realities, fast and slow. There is no fixed reality, only objects in contrast. Even the Earth is moving. I was suddenly right up on the towed VW’s rear and had to swerve into the right lane. The road was in bad shape, and I went into a divot. It threw the front wheel off balance. I bounced and swerved. The front end of the bike was wobbling like crazy. I didn’t dare touch the brake. I tried to ride out the wobble. I was all over my lane and thinking I was going to wreck, and I hadn’t even gotten to the salt flats yet. But then the front wheel began to calm and straighten out. I moved left again onto the better road surface. The wobble I’d been thrown into was my wake-up call. I was lucky I hadn’t crashed. “Speed is every man’s right” was Honda’s new ad slogan, but speed was not a right. Speed was a causeway between life and death and you hoped you came out on the side of life.

  I stopped for gas at dusk. The broad sky had turned a cold medium-blue with one star burning, a lone pinprick of soft, bright white. A car pulled up on the other side of the pumps. The windows were down and I could hear a man and woman speaking to each other.

  The man removed the car’s gas cap and knocked the nozzle into the opening of his tank as though it required force to get it to fit correctly. Then he waggled it in and out of the tank in a lewd manner. His back was to me. I watched him as I waited for my tank to fill. When I was finished, the woman was getting out of the car. She looked in my direction but seemed not to register me.

  “You made your choice,” she said. “And I’ll make mine. Creep.”

  Something about the light, its dimness and the deepening blue above us, the commencement of twilight insects, made their voices close, intimate.

  “You call me a creep after what you asked me to do? And now it’s nothing? I’m a creep?”

  The man pulled the nozzle from the gas tank and jerked it at the woman. Gasoline sloshed on her bare legs. He resumed filling his tank. When he was done, instead of putting the nozzle back on its resting place on the side of the pump, he dropped it on the ground like it was a garden hose he was finished using. He retrieved a book of matches from his pocket and began lighting them and flicking them at the woman. Each lit match arced through the dim light and went out before reaching her. Gas was dribbling down her legs. He lit matches one after another and flicked them at her, little sparks—threats, or promises—that died out limply.

  “Would you quit it?” she said, blotting her legs with the blue paper towels from a dispenser by the pumps.
/>   The angled sodium lights above us clicked on, buzzing to life. A truck passed on the highway, throwing on its air brakes.

  “Hey,” he said. He grabbed a lock of her hair.

  She smiled at him like they were about to rob a bank together.

  * * *

  Night fell in an instant here. I rode on, as darkness changed the desert. It was more porous and vast now, even as my vision was limited to one tractor beam fanning thinly on the road in front of me. The enormity of dark was cut rarely and by a weak fluorescence, one or two gas stations. I thought about the man trying to light the woman on fire. He wasn’t trying to light her on fire. Certain acts, even as they are real, are also merely gestures. He was saying, “What if I did?” And she was saying, “Go ahead.”

  The air turned cold as I climbed in elevation to a higher layer of the desert’s warm-to-cool parfait. The wind leaked into my leathers wherever it could. I hadn’t anticipated such cold. My fingers were almost too frozen to work the brake by the time I reached my destination, a small town with big casinos on the Utah border, Diamond Jim lettering glowing gold against the night. Only a killjoy would claim neon wasn’t beautiful. It jumped and danced, chasing its own afterimage. But from one end of the main drag to the other was NO VACANCY in brazier orange. I stopped at one of the full motels, its parking lot crowded with trucks towing race cars, hoping they might take pity on me. I struggled to get my gloves off, and once they were off, could barely unbuckle the strap on my helmet. My hands had reduced themselves to two functions, throttle and brake. I tried to lift money and my license from my billfold, but my still-numb fingers refused to perform this basic action. I worked and worked to regain mobility. Finally I got my helmet off and went into the office. A woman said they were booked. A man came out from the back, about my age. “I’ll handle it, Laura.” He said he was the owner’s son, and I felt a small surge of hope. I explained that I’d ridden all the way from Reno and really needed someplace to sleep, that I was planning to run at the salt flats.

  “Maybe we can work something out,” he said.

  “Really?” I asked.

  “I can’t promise anything, but why don’t we go have a drink up the street at the casino and talk about it?”

  “Talk about it?”

  “There might be something we can do. I’ll at least buy you a drink.”

  It was always the son of power, the daughter of power, who was most eager to abuse it.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Where’s your father?”

  “In a rest home.” He turned to walk away. “Okay, final offer, just one drink.”

  I said no and left. Outside the motel office another man addressed me.

  “Hey,” he said. “He’s a twerp. That was bullshit.”

  His name was Stretch. He was the maintenance man and lived in one of the rooms. He was tan as a summer construction worker but didn’t quite emanate a sense of work. He wore jeans and a denim shirt of the same faded blue, and he had a greaser’s hairstyle like it was 1956, not 1976. He reminded me of the young drifter in the Jacques Demy film Model Shop, who kills time before turning up for the draft, wandering, tailing a beauty in a white convertible through the flats and into the hills of Hollywood.

  “Listen, I have to stay out all night guarding the twerp’s race car,” Stretch said. “I won’t be using my room. And you need a place to sleep. Why don’t you sleep there? I promise not to bother you. There’s a TV. There’s beer in the fridge. It’s basic, but it’s better than having to share a bed with him. I’ll knock on the door in the morning to come in and shower but that’s it, I swear. I hate it when he tries to get over on someone. It makes me sick.”

  He was extending actual charity, the kind you don’t question. I trusted it. Partly because he reminded me of that character. I’d seen Model Shop with Sandro just after we met, a year earlier. The tagline became a joke between us, “Maybe tomorrow. Maybe never. Maybe.” It begins with oil derricks jerking up and down beyond the window of a young couple’s Venice love shack, the drifter and a girlfriend he doesn’t care about. The beginning was Sandro’s favorite scene and the reason he loved the film, oil derricks right outside the window, up and down, up and down, as the girl and boy lazed in bed, had an argument, puttered around their bungalow, decrepit and overshadowed by industry. After that we both used the word bungalow a lot. “Are you coming up to my bungalow this evening?” Sandro would ask. Though in fact it was a glass and cast-iron building, four thousand square feet on each floor.

  Stretch showed me his room. It was tidy and a little heartbreaking. The owner’s son had his collection of vintage cruiser bicycles crowding out half the space, as well as stacks of wooden milk crates filled with wrenches and bicycle parts. Stretch said he was used to it. On one side of the washbasin was a hot plate and on the other, a shaving kit and Brylcreem. It was like a movie set for a film about a drifter named Stretch who lives in a small gambling town on the Nevada border.

  At a Mexican restaurant across the road from the motel, I ordered fish, which came whole. I picked around, not sure of the appropriate method, and finally decided to cut off the head. It sat on my plate like a shorn airplane fuselage. In its cavern, instead of menthol-smelling pilots, the dark muck of its former fish mind. I had to turn away, and watched two men who sat in a booth across the room, probably also here to run vehicles on the salt flats. Big mustaches, faces barbecued by sun and wind, suspenders framing regal paunches. The waitress brought them two enchilada plates, vast lakes of hot cheese and beans. As she set the plates down, the men stopped talking and each took a private moment to look at his food, really look at it. Everyone did this in restaurants, paused to inspect the food, but I never noticed it unless I was alone.

  Stretch’s sheets were soft cotton flannel, surely not the motel’s. It always came as a surprise to me that men should want domestic comforts. Sandro slept on the floor when he was a boy, said he felt like he didn’t deserve a bed. It was an asceticism that was some way of rejecting his privilege, refusing it. I didn’t care whether I deserved a bed or not but I had trouble settling. Trucks from the highway rumbled through my airy sleep. I couldn’t warm up and lay with my jacket splayed over the blanket, leather side up like a heel of bread. I worried that Stretch was going to sneak into bed with me. When I had convinced myself he wouldn’t, I worried about tomorrow, and my speed trial on the salt. What would happen to me? In a way, it didn’t matter. I was here. I was going through with it.

  In the depths of cold motel sleep, I dreamed of a gigantic machine, an airplane so large it filled the sky with metal and the raking sound of slowing engines. I was not in Nevada but home, in New York City, which was shaded and dark under the awful machine, a passenger jet enlarged hundreds of times. It moved slowly, the speed of a plane just about to land, but with no lights under its wings. I saw huge landing flaps, ugly with rivets, open on greasy hinges, as the plane came lower and lower, until there was nothing left of the sky but a gunmetal undercarriage, an enveloping screech.

  In the morning, Stretch came in and took his shower. While the water ran, I hurriedly pulled on my leathers. I was making the bed when he emerged, a towel around his waist. Tall and blond and lanky, like a giraffe, water beading on skin that was ruddy from the hot shower. He asked if I minded covering my eyes for a moment. I felt his nudity as he changed, but I suppose he could just as easily claim to have felt mine, right there under my clothes.

  Dressed, he sat down on the bed and combed his wet hair into its seventies version of a duck’s ass, severe and tidy, but down the nape of his neck. The important matter of small-town hair. I laced my boots. We talked about the speed trials, which were starting today. I said I was running in them, but not that it was about art. It wasn’t a lie. I was a Nevada girl and a motorcycle rider. I had always been interested in land speed records. I was bringing to that a New York deliberateness, abstract ideas about traces and speed, which wasn’t something Stretch needed to know about. It would make me seem like a touris
t.

  Stretch said the motel owner’s son had a Corvette running but that he could not so much as check the oil or tire pressure, that mechanics worked on it and a driver raced it for him.

  “I have to fill out his racing form because he doesn’t know what ‘displacement’ means.” He laughed and then went quiet.

  “I never met a girl who rides Italian motorcycles,” he said. “It’s like you aren’t real.”

  He looked at my helmet, gloves, my motorcycle key, on his bureau. The room seemed to hold its breath, the motel curtain sucked against the glass by the draft of a partly opened window, a strip of sun wavering underneath the curtain’s hem, the light-blocking fabric holding back the outside world.

  He said he wished he could see me do my run, but he was stuck at the motel, retiling a rotten shower.

  “It’s okay,” I said. I was relieved. I felt sure that this interlude, my night in Stretch’s bed, shouldn’t overlap with my next destination.

  “Do you think you might come through here?” he asked. “I mean, ever again?”

  I looked at the crates of tools and the jumbled stack of the owner’s son’s bicycle collection, some of them in good condition and others rusted skeletons with fused chains, perhaps saved simply because he had ample storage space in poor Stretch’s room. I thought about Stretch having to sit in a parking lot all night instead of lie in his own bed, and I swear, I almost decided to sleep with him. I saw our life, Stretch done with a day’s work, covered with plaster dust, or clean, pulling tube socks up over his long, tapered calves. The little episodes of rudeness and grace he’d been dealt and then would replay in miniature with me.

  I stood up and collected my helmet and gloves and said I probably wouldn’t be back anytime soon. And then I hugged him, said thanks.