Neutrino Drag Read online

  Neutrino Drag

  Paul Di Filippo

  Paul Di Filippo

  Neutrino Drag

  I know why the Sun doesn't work the way the scientists think it should.

  Me and a guy who called himself Spacedog fucked it up back in 1951, racing our roadsters in a match of Cosmic Chicken out in space, closer'n Mercury to hell itself.

  I never told a soul about that last grudge match between me and Spacedog. Who'd've believed me? Spacedog never returned to Earth to back my story up. And no one else was there to witness our race anyhow, except Stella Star Eyes. And she never says anything anytime, not even after fifty years with me.

  But now that I'm an old, old guy likely to hit the Big Wall of Death and visit the Devil's pitstop soon, I figure I might as well try to tell the whole story the exact way it happened. Just in case Spacedog's car ever maybe starts eating up the Sun or something worse.

  · · · · ·

  I got demobbed in '46, went back home to San Diego and opened up a welding shop with the few thousand dollars I had saved and with the skills the Army had generously given me in exchange for nearly getting my ass shot up in a dozen European theaters from Anzio to Berlin. Palomar Customizing, Obdulio Benitez, proprietor, that was me. I managed to get some steady good-paying work right out of the holeshot, converting Caddies and Lincolns to hearses for the local funeral trade. The grim joke involved in this arrangement didn't escape me, since I still woke up more nights than not, drenched in sweat and yelling, memories of shellfire and blood all too vivid. If any of a hundred Nazi bullets had veered an inch, I would have already taken my own ride in a hearse—assuming any part of me had survived to get bagged—and never been here building the corpse wagons.

  One of the first helpers I hired at my shop was this high-school kid, Joaquin Arnett.

  You heard me right, Joaquin Arnett, the legendary leader of the Bean Bandits, that mongrel pack of barrio-born hotrodders who started out by tearing up the California racing world like Aztecs blew through captives, and then went on to grab national honors from scores of classier white-bread teams across the nation. By the time he retired from racing in the Sixties, Joaquin had racked up more trophies and records than almost any other driver, and fathered two sons to carry on his dream.

  But back in the late Forties, all that was still in the future. I hired a wiry, smiling, wired kid with skin a little lighter than my own, a kid with no rep yet, but just a mania for cars and racing.

  Joaquin got his start picking up discarded car parts—coils, magnetos—and fixing them. He had taught himself to drive at age nine. By the time he got to my shop, he'd been bending iron on his own for several years, making chassis after chassis out of scrap and dropping flatheads in front, fat skins in back and deuce bodies on top. Once he got his hands on my shop's equipment, he burst past all the old barriers that had stopped him from making his dreams really come true. The railjobs and diggers he began to turn out in his off-hours were faster and hotter than anything else on the streets or the tracks.

  Joaquin had been driving for the Road Runners and the Southern California Roadster Club since 1948. But when 1951 rolled around, he decided he wanted to start his own team. He recruited a bunch of childhood buddies—Carlos Ramirez, Andrew Ortega, Harold Miller, Billy Glavin, Mike Nagem, plus maybe twenty others—and they became the Bean Bandits, a name that picked up on the taunts of "Beaners!" they heard all the time and made the slur into a badge of ethnic pride.

  When Joaquin first came to work for me, I was driving a real pig, something the legendary little old lady from Pasadena would've turned her nose up at. An unmodified '32 Packard I had picked up cheap before the war, which had subsequently sat on its rims in my parents' garage for five years while I was overseas. I plain didn't care much about cars at that point. They were just transportation, something to get me and Herminia—Herminia Ramirez, a distant cousin of Carlos's—around town on a date.

  But working side by side with Joaquin, watching the fun he had putting his rods together, was contagious. The customizing and racing bugs bit me on the ass, one on each cheek, and never let go. Soon on weekends and nights I was elbow-deep in the guts of a '40 Oldsmobile, patching in a Cadillac engine that was way too much power for the streets, but was just right for the dry lakes.

  The Bean Bandits, you see, raced the cars they created at a couple of places. Paradise Mesa, the old airfield outside the city that was our home track, and the dry lakebeds of El Mirage and Muroc. There the drivers could cut loose without worrying about citizens or cops or traffic lights, focusing on pure speed.

  When I started running my new Olds—painted glossy pumpkin orange with black flames, and its name, El Tigre, lettered beautifully across both front fenders—first in trials with the Bean Bandits and then against drivers from other clubs, I found that my nightmares started to go away. Not completely, but enough. That sweet deal alone would have hooked me on racing forever, if all the other parts of it—the sound, the speed, the thrills, the glory—hadn't already done the trick.

  The real excitement started when we discovered nitro. That was nitromethane, a gasoline alternative that did for engines what the sight of Wile E. Coyote did for the Road Runner. At first we thought nitro was more volatile than it actually was, and we carried it to meets in big carboys swaddled in rags. "Stand back! This could blow any second!" Scared the shit out of the competition, until they got hip to nitro too. And eventually, when we discovered the shitty things pure nitro did to our engines, we began to cut it fifty-fifty with regular fuel. Still, plenty of extra kick remained, and nitro let us get closer and closer to the magic number of 150 mph with every improvement we made.

  I remember Joaquin boasting to me one day, "Papa Obie, soon enough we're gonna be as fast as them damn new UFO things people are talking about."

  I don't feel like I was ever a real card-carrying member of the Bean Bandits. I never wore one of their shirts with their silly cartoon on it—a Mexican jumping bean with sombrero, mask and wheels—and I never lined up at the staging lights known as the Christmas Tree with them in any for-the-book races, just the unofficial drags. The main thing that kept me out of the club—in my own mind anyhow—was my age.

  When I left the service I was already twenty-six years old, and by 1951 I had crossed that big red line into my thirties. Joaquin and all his buddies were a lot younger than me. They liked to tease me, calling me "Papa Obie" and names like that. Not that they ever discriminated against anyone, on any basis. Mostly Hispanics, the Bandits had members who were Anglo, Lebanese, Japanese and Filipino. They would've took me on in a heartbeat. But my concerns weren't the same as theirs. They had nothing in mind but kicks. I had a business to run, and was thinking in a vague way about marrying Herminia and settling down.

  Still, I hung out with the Bandits a lot and never felt like they held me at arm's length. Practically every weekend in 1951, you could find me behind the wheel of El Tigre, hauling ass down three dusty miles of dry lake bottom trial after trial, the nitro fumes making my eyes water and nose burn, smiling when I beat someone, scowling when I got beaten and already planning refinements to my car.

  Yeah, that was my routine and my pleasure all right, and at the time I even thought it might last forever.

  Until Spacedog and Stella Star Eyes showed up.

  · · · · ·

  That Saturday afternoon at Paradise Mesa the sun seemed to burn hotter than I'd ever known it to shine before, even in California. I had gone through about six cans of Nesbitt's Orange Drink between noon and three, a few gulps used to wash down the tortillas we had bought at our favorite stand on the Pacific Coast Highway on our way up here.

  At that moment, Herminia and I were sitting on the edge of one of the empty trailers used to tr
ansport the more outrageous hot rods that couldn't pass for grocery getters, trying to get a little shade from a canvas tarp stretched above us on poles. We were the only ones facing the entrance to the dragstrip. Everyone else had their heads under hoods or their eyes on the race underway between Joaquin and some guy from Pomona. Joaquin was running his '29 Model A with the Mercury engine, and the driver from Pomona was behind the wheel of a chopped and channelled Willys.

  That was when this car like nothing I had ever seen before pulled in.

  This rod was newer than color TV. It looked like Raymond Loewy might've designed it fifty years from now for the 1999 World's Fair. Low and streamlined and frenched to the max, matte silver in color, its window glass all smoky somehow so that you couldn't see inside, this car skimmed along on skinny tires colored an improbable gold, making less noise than Esther Williams underwater, but managing to convey the impression of some kind of deep power barely within the driver's control.

  I had gotten to my feet without consciously planning to stand, tossing my last cone-topped can of soda, still half-full, onto the ground. Herminia was less impressed, and just kept slurping her Nesbitt's up through a straw.

  I think now that might have been the instant things started to go wrong between us— when Herminia didn't register the magnificence of that incredible car.

  This Buck Rogers car pulled up a few yards away from me, and then doors opened, one on each side.

  And those damn doors just seemed to disappear! All I could think was that they had slid into the body of the car faster than my eye could follow, like pocket doors in a house.

  The driver stepped out first, followed on the other side by the passenger.

  From the driver's side unfolded this lanky joker well over six feet tall. He wore a wild Hawaiian shirt with a pattern of flowers and ukuleles and surfboards and palm trees that seemed to form hazy secret images where they overlapped and intersected. The shirt hung loose over a pair of lime green poplin trousers. Huaraches revealed bare feet, but sunglasses concealed his eyes. He had Mitch Miller facial hair—Big Sur bohemian mustache and unconnected chin spinach—but his head was otherwise hairless. And then there was the matter of his skin.

  I've always heard people say that someone had an "olive" complexion, and usually what they mean is that the person they're talking about is dago-dark. But in this case, it was really true. All the skin I could see on this guy was a muted dusky green, kinda like dusty eucalyptus leaves.

  While I was still trying to get my mind around both the guy and his car, I caught sight of his passenger.

  Back in the Army, I used to truly dig this girlie cartoon the thoughtful brass produced for us dogfaces. "Ack-Ack Amy" was the name of the character, and the artist—I made a point of remembering his name—was Bill Ward. Man, could he draw stacked babes! Even on paper Ack-Ack Amy seemed so physical—although I doubt there had had ever been any real gal built like her—that you could almost feel her in your arms. Especially if it was a lonely night in your foxhole.

  Back home, I ran into Ward's stuff again. He was doing this funnybook where the gal was named Torchy, and he had only gotten better at drawing. Torchy was Ack-Ack Amy times ten, more woman than any six regular gals rolled together.

  The woman who got out of the strange car could have been Torchy's va-va-voom fashion model sister.

  Her hair was chin-length, colored platinum, with a flip. Milk-white skin contrasted with her boyfriend's jade tint. Her nose was pert, her lips lush and lively and her jawline was honed finer than the cylinders in a Ferrari. Thinking back, I certainly didn't notice anything funny about her eyes from that distance. Mostly because I was so knocked out by her body. That body—oh, man! She had firm, outthrusting boobs like the nosecones on a Nike missile, a rack that Jane Russell would've have killed for, and they were barely concealed under a blue angora sweater which molded itself to every braless curve. (The sweater was long-sleeved, but she wasn't sweating that I could see, even in that heat.) Pink toreador pants lacquered her sassy rump and killer legs, and a pair of strappy high heels in crocodile leather raised her almost as tall as her companion.

  My heart was threatening to throw a rod. Herminia finally noticed my reaction, and immediately got huffy. She sneered at the newcomers, especially the woman, said, "Que puta!", then returned to her soda, slurping up the last of it with exaggerated rudeness.

  I covered the distance between me and the strangers in about five long bounds.

  Once I got up close to them, I noticed three odd things.

  The shell of the car was cast all in one piece, and was too thin to hold any concealed doors. It didn't look like any metal I had ever seen either, more like plastic.

  The man's bare head featured concentric circles of bumps on his skull, just under his scalp, like somebody had buried a form-fitting waffle-iron grid underneath his skin.

  And the woman's eyes had no pupils. In place of the expected little human black circles stepped down against the hard sunlight, her irises were centered with sparkling irregular golden starbursts.

  My first impulse was to inquire about his appearance, but I couldn't figure out how to do it tactfully. And then the moment when I could have passed, as he stuck out his hand for a shake. I took his paw, and although his grip was strong, his hand felt all wrong, like it had been broken and reassembled funny. Then he spoke.

  "Zzzip, guten, chirp, bon, zzzt, hallo! Name Space, skrk, chien, zzz, perro, no, zeep, dog! Name Spacedog is. Here to, zzzt, race I am."

  The guy's crazy speech was studded with pauses and wrong words. Weird noises—buzzes and clicks and grinding sounds, some of them almost mechanical in nature—alternated with the language. He reminded me of a bad splice job between a tape of an argument in the U.N. cafeteria and one of that new UNIVAC machine at work. But I can't continue to imitate him exactly for the rest of this story, although I can hear his voice today just as clearly as I did fifty years ago. Just remember that every time I report Spacedog's conversation—some of which I only puzzled out years after he had vanished—all those quirks were part of it.

  "Well," I said, trying to maintain my cool, "you came to the right place." I was dying to get a look under the nonexistent hood of his car. And the furtive glimpses of his dashboard that I was snagging through the open door were driving me insane! There were more dials and knobs and buttons and toggles on that panel than any car had a right to feature. And some startling missing parts: no steering wheel or pedals!

  But all thoughts of engines vanished when I realized Spacedog's girlfriend had come around to our side of the car. And now she stood close enough to me for my breath to stir the fuzzy fibers of her sweater.

  "Obdulio Benitez," I said, and put out my sweaty, trembling hand. She took it with her small dry palm and delicate fingers and smiled brilliantly, but said nothing.

  Spacedog spoke for her. "This Stella is. Crypto-speciated quasi-conjugal adjunct. Exteriorized anima and inseminatory receptacle."

  I couldn't make heads nor tails out of this description, but my brain wasn't working properly just then. I felt like a million buzzing bees had flowed through that ultrafemale handshake and now swarmed in my veins.

  Stella continued to smile broadly, without speaking. I couldn't manage to get out a single word myself.

  Very reluctantly, I released Stella's hand and tried to focus on Spacedog.

  By this time, all the other Bandits and competitors and spectators had come over to see who these visitors were. Excited murmurs and exclamations filled the air at the unexplained mirage of the weird car and its occupants. All the guys were putting themselves in danger of severe whiplash, jerking their heads back and forth between Stella and the car, while the women huddled in a tight knot of suspicion and jealousy, growling and hissing like wet cats. I beamed what I hoped was a reassuring glance at Herminia, but she didn't accept it. In her midriff-knotted shirt and Big Yank jeans, she suddenly looked bumpkinish to me, compared to Stella's sophistication, like Daisy Mae next to Stupef
yin' Jones, with me some poor wetback Little Abner caught in the middle.

  Finally Joaquin shouldered to the front of the crowd. Doffing his helmet—a football player's old leather one he had stuffed with asbestos pads—my little buddy said boldly, "So, amigo, you're probably here to drag."

  "Yes! Probability one! Speed-racing most assuredly Spacedog's goal is! Burn longchain molecules! Haul gluteus! Scorch the planetary surface! Bad to the osteoclasts! Eat my particulates, uniformed societal guardian!"

  I could sense that everyone here wanted to ask Spacedog about his green skin. But this was exactly the one question nobody in the Bandits would ever voice. After all the prejudice we had experienced, and our unwritten club law of no bias against any race, we just couldn't make an exception now, no matter how strange the guy's coloration was. Spacedog had come among perhaps the only bunch of racers in the whole country who would never broach the topic of his origins.

  And today I wonder just how accidental that arrival was.

  The closest Joaquin could come to the topic was a mild, "So, where you from?"

  Spacedog hesitated a moment, then answered, "Etruria. Small node of Europa. Earth continent, not satellite. Stella and Spacedog Etruscans are. Speak only old tongue between ourselves."

  Here Spacedog unloaded a few sentences of wild lingo that sounded like nothing I had ever heard in Italy. Stella made no reply. All the listeners nodded wisely, mostly willing to accept his unlikely explanation.

  "No racing in Etruria. Must to California for kicks come."

  Joaquin made his decison then, speaking for all the Bandits. "Well, pachuco, Paradise Mesa is racing central in this neighborhood. Let's see what you and your crate can do."

  Spacedog clapped his hands together like a five-year-old at the circus. "Most uptaking! Stella, alongside kindly Oblong Benzedrine, please wait."

  I didn't know what was harder to believe: my good luck in being nominated as Stella's companion, or what I saw next.