Текст книги "Stranger Than Fiction (True Stories)"

Автор книги: Charles Michael «Chuck» Palahniuk

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Technology. For a small investment, you can be published on the Internet, accessible to millions of people worldwide. Printers and small presses can provide any number of on-demand hard-copy books for anybody with the money to self-publish. Or subsidy publish. Or vanity publish. Or whatever you want to call it. Anybody who can use a photocopy machine and a stapler can publish a book. It's never been so easy. Never in history have so many books hit the market each year. All of them filled with the third factor:

Material. As more people grow old, with the experience of a lifetime to remember, the more they worry about losing it. All those memories. Their best formulas, stories, routines for making a dinner table burst into laughter. Their legacy. Their life. Just a touch of Alzheimer's disease, and it could all disappear. Besides, all our best adventures seem to be behind us. So it feels good to relive them, to share them on paper. Organizing and making all that flotsam and jetsam make sense. Wrapping it up, neat and tidy, and putting a nice bow on top. The first volume in the three-volume boxed set that will be your life. The "best of" NFL highlights tape of your life. All in one place, your reasons for doing what you did. Your explanation why, in case anyone wants to know.

And thank God for factor number four:

Education. Because at least we all know how to keyboard. We know where to put the commas… kind of. Pretty much. We have automatic spell-checking. We're not afraid to sit down and take a swing at the job of book writing. Stephen King makes it look so easy. All those books. And Irvine Welsh, he makes it look like fun, the last place you can do drugs and commit crimes and not get arrested, or fat, or sick. Besides, we've read books all our lives. We've seen a million movies. In fact, that's part of our motivation, the fifth factor:

Disgust. Except for maybe six movies at the video store, the rest is crap. And most books, it's the same. Crap. We could do better. We know all the basic plots. It's all been broken down by Joseph Campbell. By John Gardner. By E. B. White. Instead of wasting more time and money on another crappy book or movie, how about you take a stab at doing the job? I mean, why not?

Then, sorry, your seven minutes is up.

Okay, okay, so maybe we're headed down a road toward mindless, self-obsessed lives where every event is reduced to words and camera angles. Every moment imagined through the lens of a cinematographer. Every funny or sad remark scribbled down for sale at the first opportunity.

A world Socrates couldn't imagine, where people would examine their lives, but only in terms of movie and paperback potential.

Where a story no longer follows as the result of an experience.

Now the experience happens in order to generate a story.

Sort of like when you suggest: "Let's not but say we did."

The story-the product you can sell-becomes more important than the actual event.

One danger is, we might hurry through life, enduring event after event, in order to build our list of experiences. Our stock of stories. And our hunger for stories might reduce our awareness of the actual experience. In the way we shut down after watching too many action-adventure movies. Our body chemistry can't tolerate the stimulation. Or we unconsciously defend ourselves by pretending not to be present, by acting as a detached «witness» or reporter to our own life. And by doing that, never feeling an emotion or really participating. Always weighing what the story will be worth in cold cash.

Another danger is this rush through events might give us a false understanding of our own ability. If events occur to challenge and test us and we experience them only as a story to be recorded and sold, then have we lived? Have we matured? Or will we die feeling vaguely cheated and shortchanged by our storytelling vocation?

Already we've seen people use «research» as their defense for committing crimes. Winona Ryder shoplifting in preparation to play a character who steals. Pete Townsend visiting Internet kiddie-porn websites in order to write about his own childhood abuse.

Already our freedom of speech is headed for a collision with every other law. How can you write about a sadistic rapist «character» if you've never raped anybody? How can we create exciting, edgy books and movies if we only live boring, sedate lives?

The laws that forbid you to drive on the sidewalk, to feel the thud of people crumbling off the hood of your car, the crash of bodies shattering your windshield, those laws are economically oppressive. When you really think about it, restricting your access to heroin and snuff movies is a restriction of your free trade. It's impossible to write books, authentic books, about slavery if the government makes owning slaves illegal.

Anything "based on a true story" is more salable than fiction.

But, then, sorry, your seven minutes is up.

Of course, it's not all bad news.

There's the talk-therapy aspect to most writers' workshops.

There's the idea of fiction as a safe laboratory for exploring ourselves and our world. For experimenting with a persona or character and social organization, trying on costumes and running a social model until it breaks down.

There is all that.

One positive aspect is, maybe this awareness and recording will lead us to live more interesting lives. Maybe we'll be less likely to make the same mistakes again and again. Marry another drunk. Get pregnant, again. Because by now we know this would make a boring, unsympathetic character. A female lead Julia Roberts would never play. Instead of modeling our lives after brave, smart fictional characters-maybe we'll lead brave, smart lives to base our own fictional characters on.

Controlling the story of your past-recording and exhausting it-that skill might allow us to move into the future and write that story. Instead of letting life just happen, we could outline our own personal plot. We'll learn the craft we'll need to accept that responsibility. We'll develop our ability to imagine in finer and finer detail. We can more exactly focus on what we want to accomplish, to attain, to become.

You want to be happy? You want to be at peace? You want to be healthy?

As any good writer would tell you: unpack "happy." What does it look like? How can you demonstrate happiness on the page-that vague, abstract concept. Show, don't tell. Show me "happiness."

In this way, learning to write means learning to look at yourself and the world in extreme close-up. If nothing else, maybe learning how to write will force us to take a closer look at everything, to really see it-if only in order to reproduce it on a page.

Maybe with a little more effort and reflection, you can live the kind of life story a literary agent would want to read.

Or maybe… just maybe this whole process is our training wheels toward something bigger. If we can reflect and know our lives, we might stay awake and shape our futures. Our flood of books and movies-of plots and story arcs-they might be mankind's way to be aware of all our history. Our options. All the ways we've tried in the past to fix the world.

We have it all: the time, the technology, the experience, the education, and the disgust.

What if they made a movie about a war and nobody came?

If we're too lazy to learn history history, maybe we can learn plots. Maybe our sense of "been there, done that" will save us from declaring the next war. If war won't "play," then why bother? If war can't "find an audience." If we see that war «tanks» after the opening weekend, then no one will green-light another one. Not for a long, long time.

Then, finally, what if some writer comes up with an entirely new story? A new and compelling way to live, before…

Sorry, your seven minutes is up.

Demolition

They come over the hills, sacrifices on their way here to die.

Today is Friday, the thirteenth of June. Tonight the moon is full.

They come here covered in decorations. Painted pink and wearing huge pig snouts, their floppy pink pig ears towering against the blue sky. They come, done up with huge yellow bows made of painted plywood. They come, painted bright blue and costumed to look like giant sharks with dorsal fins. Or painted green and crowded with little space aliens standing around slant-eyed under a spinning silver radar dish and flashing colored strobe lights.

They come, painted black with ambulance light bars. Or painted with brown desert camouflage and hand-drawn cartoons of missiles roaring toward Arabs riding camels. They come trailing clouds of special-effects smoke. Shooting cannons made from pipe and blasting black-powder charges.

They come with names like Beaver Patrol and the Viking and Mean Gang-Green, from dryland wheat towns such as Mesa and Cheney and Sprague. Eighteen sacrifices total, they come here to die. To die and be reborn. To be destroyed and be saved and come back next year.

Tonight is about breaking things and then fixing them. About having the power of life and death.

They come for what's called the Lind Combine Demolition Derby.

The where is Lind, Washington. The town of Lind consists of 462 people in the dry hills of the eastern reaches of Washington State. The town centers around the Union Grain elevators, which run parallel to the Burlington Northern railroad tracks. The numbered streets-First, Second, and Third-also run parallel to the tracks. The streets that intersect with the tracks begin with N Street as you enter town from the west end. Then comes E Street. Then I Street. All in all the streets spell out N-E-I–L-S-O-N, the family name of the brothers James and Dugal, who plotted the town in 1888.

The main intersection at Second and I is lined with two-story commercial buildings. The biggest building downtown is the faded pink art deco Phillips Building, home of the Empire movie theater, closed for decades. The nicest one is the Whitman Bank Building, brick with the bank's name painted in gold on the windows. Next door is the Hometown Hair salon.

The landscape for a hundred miles in any direction is sagebrush and tumbleweed, except where the rolling hills are plowed to raise wheat. There, dust devils spin. Train tracks connect the tall grain elevators of farm towns such as Lind and Odessa and Kahlotus and Ritzville and Wilbur. At the north end of Lind tower the concrete ruins of the Milwaukee Road train trestle, dramatic as a Roman aqueduct.

There's no record of where the name Lind came from.

At the south end of town are the rodeo grounds, where bleacher seats line three sides of a dirt arena and jackrabbits graze in a gravel parking lot, around the dented and rusting hulks of retired demolition-derby contestants.

The what are combines, the big, slow machines used to harvest wheat. Each combine consists of four wheels: two huge chest-high wheels in front and two smaller, knee-high, wheels in back. The front wheels drive the machine, pulling it along. The rear wheels steer. In a pinch-say, when somebody rips off your rear wheels-you can steer with your front ones. Those front drive wheels each have brakes. To turn right you just stop your right wheel and let the left keep going. To turn left you do the opposite.

The front of each combine is a wide, low scoop called a header. It looks a little like the blade on the front of a bulldozer, only wider, lower, and made of sheet metal. It scoops up the wheat. From the header the wheat is sieved and threshed and shot out into a truck. The driver sits up, six feet off the ground, near the engine. Size– and shapewise, it looks very much like a man riding a boxy steel elephant.

Here, your header is what you use to pop another guy's tires. Or rip off his header. Or mangle his drive belts. That's why, in years past, guys filled their header scoops with concrete or welded them with layers of battleship plating or cut them down so they were harder for other combines to hook.

But that's against the rules now. Lots of rules changed after Frank Bren ran over his own father in 1999, broke his leg, and left one huge front wheel parked on top of him. Since then Mike Bren has walked with a limp.

This year Frank is driving number 16, a Gleaner CH painted bright yellow and flapping with American flags and a huge yellow-ribbon bow cut out of plywood. It's christened American Spirit, the Yellow Ribbon. "The adrenaline rush when you're out there, it's just great," Frank Bren says. "It's not quite as good as sex, but it's close. You just love that sound of crushing metal."

The rest of the year Bren drives a grain truck. Dryland wheat ranching means no irrigation and not a lot of money. In the 1980s town fathers were looking for a way to raise cash for Lind's one-hundredth birthday. According to Mark Schoesler, the driver of number 11, a 1965 Massey Super 92 combine painted green and christened the Turtle, "Bill Loomis of Loomis Truck and Tractor was the instigator. He gave guys old combines. He sold them cheap. Traded them. Just whatever kind of deal it took, he helped them. They did so incredibly well that they couldn't quit."

Now, for the fifteenth year, some three thousand people will show up and pay ten bucks apiece to watch Schoesler ram his combine into seventeen others, again and again, for four hours, until only one still runs.

The rules: your header must be at least 16 inches above the ground. You can carry only 5 gallons of gas, and your gas tank must be sheltered in the bulk tank used for wheat at the center of each combine. You can use up to 10 pieces of angle iron to reinforce your rig. You must remove any glass from the cab. You can't fill your tires with calcium or cement for better traction. You must be at least 18 years old and wear a helmet and a seat belt. Your combine must be at least 25 years old. You must pay a $50 entry fee.

The judges give each driver a red flag to fly while he's still in the derby. "You just pull your flag and you're done," says eighteen-year-old Jared Davis, driver of number 15, a McCormick 151. "If your combine breaks down and it's not running anymore and you just can't move, they give you a certain amount of time and you just pull your flag and you're done." On the back end of Davis's number 15 is a hand-drawn cartoon of a mouse flipping the bird. Number 15 is christened Mickie Mouse.

Davis says, "These are just normal people out there for the fun of it. Just everyday working people. You get frustrations out, and you get to crash shit."

Despite all the rules, you can still drink. Tipping back a can of Coors, Davis says, "If you can walk, you can drive."

In the grassy pit-crew area behind the rodeo arena, Mike Hardung is here for his third year, driving Mean Gang-Green, a 1973 John Deere 7700. «My wife worries about me doing this, but I do a lot of crazy things,» Hardung says. «Like race lawn mowers-riding lawn mowers. It's a pretty big deal. It's the Northwest Lawnmower Racing Association. We get up to forty miles an hour on riding lawn mowers.»

About combine demolition, sitting up that high and crashing a mountain of steel, Hardung says, "It's chaotic. You don't know where you're at. You've really got to watch the weak spots, like the rear end of the combine and the tires. Then just go for the gusto and nail 'em. I'm a hitter."

Pointing out the pulleys and belts that link the engine and the front axle, Hardung says, "You have to protect your drive system so somebody can't get in there. If I tear off a belt I'm done."

Some combines have hydrostatic drives, no gearshifts, he says. The harder you push the lever, the faster the rig goes. Other combines have manual transmissions. Those drivers swear by a clutch and gearshift. Some swear by not drinking before the event. Everyone has a different strategy.

"I go out there," Hardung says. "I scope it out. Attack the bad guys. Leave the littler guys alone-unless they attack me first."

He says, "You see tires pop out there. We hit so hard we tear the headers off the front of combines or the rear ends off. A couple years ago we tipped one over on its side."

To repair the damage between heats, Hardung and his pit crew for Mean Gang-Green have brought along extra parts and supplies. Combine rear ends. Axles. Tires. Wheels. Welders. Cranes. Grinders. And beer.

"If farming gets any worse," Hardung says, "I'm going to bring my new combines over."

When asked whom he's most worried about, Hardung points to a huge combine, painted blue with a dorsal fin rising out of the top. It has large white teeth and a stuffed dummy that's half eaten and hanging out of the mouth of the header. Painted on the front in big black letters is "Josh."

"I'll be watching out for Jaws," Hardung says. "He's big because he's a hillside combine, and he's got this extra iron inside. And cast wheels. He's tough."

Josh Knodel is a rookie driver, eighteen years old. Since he was fourteen he and his friend Matt Miller have been bringing and repairing Jaws, a John Deere 6602 combine, and their fathers have driven it for them. Their first and second years, they took home the top prize. Last year they stopped dead with a blown front tire and only three combines left to beat.

"There's not much you can do to protect the tire itself," Knodel says. "The main thing I need to be careful of is not to get pinned, not to get where a combine locks me in from behind so somebody can then just hammer at my tires. I've got to try to stay out and move or else I'll get held up."

He says, "First, I'm going to try to get everybody in the dirt. I'll hit them in the back tires, try to knock their wheels out. You get down in the dirt like that and you're not nearly as fast or agile. You lose a lot of control. You lose a tire altogether and your whole rear end is just pushing in the dirt. Sometimes your rims even get ripped off and your whole ass end will be dragging in the dirt.

"I'm mainly excited," Knodel says. "I've been wanting to do this forever. Today's the day. But I've got butterflies. Last night it was tough to go to sleep." He says, "I can't remember missing a derby. It's derby time around our house. We've always come to town for the rodeo and the combine derby. This is a dream come true, definitely, being able to drive tonight. There's $300 if you win your heat. If you get second place in your heat, $200. Third place, you get $100. But if you win the whole derby, it's $1,000. There's definitely some prize money.

"There's no insurance," Knodel adds. "We don't sign anything, which is amazing. You'd think the Lions Club would have us sign something saying that if somebody gets hurt they're not liable, but I didn't sign anything. All of us out here, we're here to have fun. We realize we're at our own risk."

The grandstands are filling up. A long string of cars and trucks is pulling into the gravel parking lot. A water truck is wetting down the dirt in the rodeo arena.

At the beginning of the derby, the combines enter the arena and park in two long rows. As they wait, the crowd stands. The Lind rodeo queen for the third year running, Bethany Thompson, wearing red-white-and-blue sequins and holding an American flag, gallops on her horse faster and faster around the assembled combines. As Thompson gains speed, her flag snapping in the wind, the combine drivers stand with their right hands over their hearts, and the three thousand onlookers recite the Pledge of Allegiance. People visiting here from the city get slapped or punched in the back and yelled at for not taking off their hats.

The derby consists of four heats: the first is for drivers who have competed here before, the second is for rookies, the third is another for experienced drivers, and the fourth begins with a consolation round for all the losing combines that can still run. After the fight, the winners from the first three heats enter the arena, and everyone still moving-winners and losers-fights to the death.

After the pledge, a judge reads a tribute written by driver Casey Neilson and the crew of combine number 9, a 1972 McCormick International 503 with an ambulance light bar spinning red and blue lights on top. Neilson's good-luck charm is the Afro wig he always wears while driving. People call him Afro Man. He calls his combine Rambulance.

Over the loudspeaker you hear: "The crew of Odessa Trading Company would like to take a moment to thank the men and women of EMS and local volunteer fire departments for all their hard work and dedication. If it weren't for you, some of us would not be here."

All but seven combines leave the arena, and the first heat begins.

Over the loudspeaker, a judge says, "Lord, help us have a good show and a safe show tonight."

Right off the bat, Mark Schoesler, in the Turtle, loses a rear tire. Mean Gang-Green and J&M Fabrication butt headers. The BC Machine, the Silver Bullet, and Beaver Patrol throw dirt in the air, chasing one another in a circle. The engines roar, and you breathe in the exhaust. Mean Gang-Green's rear tire gets popped. J&M Fabrication's rear tire gets popped, and the driver, Justin Miller, looks to be in trouble, stuck in one place and ducking down, disappearing into the engine compartment of his combine. The Silver Bullet is stopped dead and declared out by a judge, and driver Mike Longmeier drops his red flag. Beaver Patrol has a rear wheel completely torn off, then its rear axle, but it keeps going, dragging itself through the dirt with just its front wheels. Then Red Lightnin' crushes Beaver Patrol's rear end. The engine housing pops open on Mean Gang-Green and smoke pours out. Red Lightnin's engine catches fire. J&M Fabrication comes back to life, Miller reappearing in the driver's seat. Beaver Patrol drags along in the dirt. J&M rips the rear end off the Turtle. The beer keg falls off Mean Gang-Green. The rear axle rips off the Turtle. And Miller is stopped dead again. The judges wave the Turtle out, and Schoesler drops his red flag. J&M Fabrication is out, Beaver Patrol is out, and Mean Gang-Green is the winner.

In the pit the crew swarms J&M Fabrication, hammering and grinding metal. Welding sparks fly. Flat tires get changed. J&M's Miller, headed to the consolation round, says, "I don't care who wins as long as we can hit as hard as we can for as long as we can."

Describing the best way to hit, he says, "I use the brakes. On these combines there's a brake for each side, so if you lock one of them up, you can spin around and get that one end of the header going. It'll be going five, six times as fast as the combine, and when you hit somebody right on the corner, it does a lot of damage to their machine."

You swing your header, he says, like a windmill punch.

"It will blow that tire. It will break that wheel right off. That header can be traveling twenty, twenty-five miles an hour. It makes a boom. It'll lift the ass end of the combine right off the ground. The ass end, it'll be one, two feet off the ground."

Between heats a forklift and a tow truck enter the arena and clear away the dead-the busted angle iron and crushed headers. Rodeo queen Thompson throws T-shirts into the audience. The beer flows.

Back in the pit area, rookie drivers like Davis and Knodel, all of them college age except Garry Bittick, driving the Tank, line up for their heat.

Within the first minute, Jeff Yerbich and his Devastating Deere are dead, the result of two popped rear tires. Little Green Men rams the Tank, tilting the combine so high it almost topples over backward. Jaws loses a rear wheel. Mickie Mouse has its header crushed and wadded up like tinfoil. The Tank stops dead and drops its red flag. Jaws chases Mickie Mouse in a circle. Knodel drives his header into the Mouse's front tires, popping them. With the Mouse stopped, Jaws keeps ramming it until the judges make the dead combine drop its flag. Jaws loses a rear tire but drags itself along. The Viking is dead. The Tank has its header ripped off. Time runs out, leaving Jaws and Little Green Men tied as the winners.

In the pit area Bittick is recovering from nearly toppling under the five tons of number 5, the Tank. At forty-seven years old, he's getting into the rookie game a little late. His son Cody was supposed to be home from the army to drive but had run out of leave time. Instead, Cody sent the flags-an Army 82nd Airborne flag, an MIA flag, and a U.S. Army flag-that fly on the International Harvester combine, the one painted with desert camouflage and cartoons of camel-riding Arabs being chased by cruise missiles.

"It was just a lot of hard hits, everybody hitting at one time, head-on," Bittick says. "Of course, the tail end of my machine came up and tipped my header off, and we broke down. We could have flipped over." He says, "It gets your heart pumping. Without a seat belt it'll kick you right out of there."

For first-timers Davis and Knodel, it was a carnival fun ride. "It was great! It was funner than hell," says Davis, holding a beer can in one hand while his crew preps Mickie Mouse for the consolation round. "I got to go out there and beat the shit out of people for fun."

For Knodel and Jaws, tying for first was a little more work. "It was way more than I expected," Knodel says. "I didn't think I was going to have to concentrate as hard as I did. I was sweating very hard up there."

One of the few drivers not drinking beer or vodka, Knodel describes how it feels to be high up in the middle of the dust and the cheering: "Actually, you don't hear anything. I couldn't hear the crowd. The only thing I could hear was my engine. My engine actually powered out on me. I was going, and I couldn't hear that my engine had stopped. With the adrenaline pumping, I was still looking for somebody to come get me. The only way I knew I had the engine fired back up was that I could look over and see the fan blades, and finally I saw them spinning again. Then I was ready to go."

In the third heat the combines start out parked with their rear ends together, facing outward like the spokes in a wheel. Among another set of experienced drivers, Rambulance slices a rear tire of Good Ol' Boys. Porker Express rips the rear end off BC Machine. Good Ol' Boys crushes the rear end of American Spirit, shattering its rear axle. Porker Express loses its rear axle tie rods and steering. American Spirit digs itself too deep into the dirt and drops its flag, dead. Porker Express locks its header under the rear end of Rambulance. BC Machine is stopped, with its engine cover open and smoking; a moment later Chet Bauermeister gets it going again. Porker Express gets crushed between Good Ol' Boys and BC Machine. Good Ol' Boys loses both rear tires but keeps going on the rims. BC Machine is dead again. Good Ol' Boys rams Porker Express from behind, driving its pink rear end into the dirt. Good Ol' Boys gets to work, ramming BC Machine. Porker Express is dead. Rambulance is dead. Good Ol' Boys shoves BC Machine in circles until Bauermeister drops his flag. Good Ol' Boys driver Kyle Cordill is the winner.

In the pit area, winning and losing teams repair their combines for the final heat. The welding rods, cutting torches, and grinders shower sparks into the dry grass, and people chase the little wildfires, putting them out with cans of beer. Barbecues grill hot dogs and hamburgers. Kids and dogs roam around combines tilted and balanced on jacks.

Near number 17, Little Green Men, a group of girls drink beer and eye driver Kevin Cochrane.

Twenty years old, Cochrane says, "Yeah, there are combine-demolition groupies. I don't think there are groupies from Lind, but they're from other towns. They kind of follow the little circuit, I think. There are only two derbies, so that's a little circuit."

Cochrane looks at the girls as one of them leaves her friends and heads over. "What are the groupies like? First of all," he says, "she's kind of a hick. Cowboy boots and shit like that. Kind of just the country way, but not like her." He nods as the girl walks up. Her name is Megan Wills. When asked why there are no women drivers, she says, "Because it's fucked! Josh got his ass kicked!"

"There used to be women drivers," Cochrane says.

"One! A long time ago!" shouts Wills, whose brother is on the pit crew for number 14, Beaver Patrol. "There's no women driving because that shit's fucked-up! I'm not going to take my ass in there. Fuck that! I'd rather get drunk and service all the hotties than fuckin' drive that shit! Hell, no!"

Cochrane tilts back his beer, then says, "I think if you don't drink any, you get too nervous. You get in there and you're all nerved up and shit. You got to get a little laid-back."

Before the consolation round, the judges walk through the pit area, telling people their thirty minutes of repair time is more than up. Only Mickie Mouse and J&M Fabrication are ready and waiting in the arena. The sun is below the horizon, and it's getting dark fast. Over the loudspeaker the judges announce: «We need nine combines in the ring. We only have two. We got seven to go.»

Frank Bren, the driver of American Spirit, runs up, his T-shirt and hands soaked dark with motor oil, sweat, and crusted blood. "We're not going to make it," he tells the judges. "We can't get a hydraulic line changed out."

A judge reads the names of the combines still expected in the arena. "You're pushing the time limit," he says. "And you're pushing the judges."

Rambulance enters the ring, dragging a flat rear tire. Red Lightnin' makes it in. The Silver Bullet limps in. As the round starts, Red Lightnin' rams Rambulance, and sparks fly from the hit. The Silver Bullet digs its header into the front tires of J&M Fabrication. Rambulance loses its rear axle. Mickie Mouse loses a rear wheel. J&M Fabrication rams head-on into Red Lightnin'. Then Rambulance butts headers with J&M so hard that the rear ends of both combines bounce three feet into the air. Mickie Mouse snags Red Lightnin' hard enough to rip both rear wheels off, then pops a front tire. The hit rips the header off Mickie Mouse, and Davis drops his flag. He sits, sprawled in the driver's seat, his arms spread and his face tipped up at the dark sky. Rambulance drags itself around a field littered with bolts and scraps of metal. The Silver Bullet and J&M Fabrication slam Red Lightnin' so hard that the hit kills the Silver Bullet. Then J&M drops its flag.