**Race Day
Part 3**
Rats. Richard was the guy who had worked there last summer. He had known where to go right away. Bad luck right off, but we pulled out and DREW grabs the paper and reads
“Peter Peter Pumpkineater,
Had a Lighthouse and couldn’t keep her!”
“Oh no.” said DREW.
“Lighthouse?” Andy looked mystified.
“It’s the lighthouse at Point Peter.” DREW told us.
“Where’s that?”
DREW rolled his eyes and drawled out “It’s at POINT PETER! At the bottom of the County. It’ll take us half an hour to get there.”
I checked the gas gauge. “I’ll do it 15 minutes,” and just as I swung the wheel six other cars burst into the lot, all around us. People were already jumping out, running to Amy and I had to turn around to the left, to another sideroad to get back to the gate. Watch the oncoming, screaming out onto the highway going west, gas it, forty, fifty sixty seventy miles an hour.
“We take Highway Ten all the way down, right?” I shouted.
Andy looked at me, shrugged his shoulders. He obviously had never been there. I had only been there once. DREW leaned forward and drawled, lazily,
“Ten all the way down to Huysmans Corners, that’s where the General Store is. Then left on the shore road right to the point.”
Seventy five eighty eighty five ninety ninety five.
“Do we have a map?” I asked.
“Dunno.” Andy said, scrounging around in the car, then “No maps, mon. Do we have any TUNES?”
“Oh, uh, I might have some tapes in the center arm rest. Just open it up here…”
Andy flipped up the armrest and skept scrounging. He finally pulled out a tape, smiling, but then his face looked worried when he read what it was.
“Burl Ives Sings Christmas Classics! Cam, this isn’t TUNES!”
One hundred. One hundred two.
“Ah, sorry, this is my mom’s car.” I tried to change the subject, “Look, we should apply some scientific method here. We have no map, right?
“Right.” Andy said.
I could feel DREW rolling his eyes in the back and adjusting himself to the seat’s contours already.
“This car has a fifth gear. That means it can cruise at one-o-five. And we have lots of gas.”
“Yeah? That’s pretty cool, mon.”
“Yeah, and that means we can get those guys on the straightaways, like right now to Point Peter. But they got a head start of like a minute of two.”
We were approaching the General Store, there it was right outside the Cherry Valley cemetery. Nobody else on the road, lots of light, the General Store was a great landmark sitting on top of a gentle rise, like something from the Waltons. I gear down, engine do the braking, and then hit the turn to the left while accelerating back up for traction, forty, fifty, sixty.
“What’s Richard driving? His dad won’t let him drive the car.”
“He’s with Tommy Lewis. Maybe Tommy is driving.” DREW piped up.
“Nah, Richard’s driving. Trust me. Maybe he’s using Tommy’s car.”
“If he’s using Tommy’s car it’s a first,” Andy said, “cause Tommy never lets anybody drive it. He rebuilt that engine by himself. Well, with his dad.”
“Then lets hope Tommy is the worst fucking garage mechanic on Earth, cause here’s the priority list:
Priority One,
We gotta win this race.”
There was a pause, then DREW asked “What’s Priority Two?”
“I don’t know.” I said.
“Priority Two is TUNES!” yelled Andy.
“Good on ya! Where we gonna get tunes? You know, I could make a pit stop if it meant tunes, but they gotta be really good.”
“What we need is some Led Zep.” DREW said from the back.
Andy and I glanced at each other.
“YEAH, MON.” Andy’s eyes started getting big, like a starving man at a banquet. “Led Zep would go down real GOOD right now.”
“Man, don’t say Led Zep. We can’t get any. It’s gonna drive us crazy.”
“Led ZEP! LED ZEP LED ZEP!” DREW yelled from the back, “Priority Two is Led ZEP!”
“Okay, Priority Two is to acquire a Led Zep tape by any means possible whatsoever. I’ll stop if you guys know where we can get one. And Priority Three is a STORY.”
“What do you mean, mon?” asked Andy, interested.
“Until we get the music happening, each one of us has to tell a story. It’s gotta be something funny or strange that’s happened to you. Andy starts.”
“Aaaaah, I don’t know any stories, mon,” but he was thinking…
Seventy eighty ninety still nobody in sight, where were the other cars?
“Alright” Andy says, “Got one. You know Sam Campbell?”
“Oh yeah, sure. We’re best friends.”
“Well, Sam lives on a farm, right?”
He sure did. Saying Sam lived on a farm was a bit of an understatement. His dad was the top feed corn producer in the County, he owned thousands of acres and rented a few thousand more each season. Endless fields of corn waving in the breeze all around their house.
“Well, they have cats, y’know? To kill the rats and mice. Can’t have rats in the corn silos.”
“Nope. Sure cain’t.” I said, imitating a hick.
“So Sam’s dad has cats. Lots of cats. Hundreds of cats all over the place.”
I knew exactly what Andy was talking about – Sam’s yard was crawling with cats, it was like a creepy cat zoo.
“There’s so many cats” Andy continued, “they don’t know how many cats they have. And they keep breeding all the time, mon. And they breed with their brothers and sisters, its disgusting, so they’re all retarded. The Campbells don’t care, cause the cats only eat mice, so who cares? But those cats are so retarded and crazy they’ll attack anything. Sam’s been brought up to think of them as vermin, like little furball mice vacuum cleaners. They’re just trash to him, like garden weeds, y’know?”
“Yeah? Where the heck is this story going, Andy?” DREW asked, leaning between the front seats now.
“I’ll tell you, mon, listen up! So I went over there when his parents were gone to some convention, I had a little half baggie and wanted to see his place, and we went out into his barn at the side.”
“I know exactly where that is.” I put in.
“Yeah, it’s that old place, y’know? And he opened the door and all these CATS came out. It freaked me out, mon, and we hadn’t even smoked anything yet. So we lit this BIG FAT JOINT, mon, a really BIG spliff, and we were about half way down it and then this little kitten crawled up to Sam’s leg and bit him, mon. Bit him right on the ankle. He dropped the joint, and I had to scramble for it to make sure we didn’t burn the place down, and then I found the joint,”
“Good,” said DREW, “this story has a happy ending.”
“…and when I stood back up Sam was holding onto the cat and he was STEAMED, mon. He was really mad. He took the cat and threw it as HARD AS HE COULD right at the wall, mon!”
“Yuck!”
Andy nodded at us, wisely.
“Yeah, it was freaky, mon, especially on that good Columbian, but remember that cats were like bugs to Sam. He didn’t think twice about killing one.”
He paused for the effect.
“That cat hit the wall, SPLAT! You could hear it crunching all up, then it sort of slid down to the floor. I couldn’t stop looking at it, that little kitten looked up right at me, then it sort or took a breath, huuuuuuh….” Andy was making a cat dying face, trying to take its last breath. “Huuuh, then it shut its eyes, it was just like those gangster movies where the bad guy gets it in the end and he’s slumped against a wall with cops all around him, that cat, little Puffy, took its last breath, and a tiny bit of blood appeared at its lips, then its little head sort of slumped down, and its whole body relaxed. Dead.”
“Whoa.” DREW said. He had really got into the story.
“Yeah, and then I looked up at Sam, mon, we were really stoned, and he was lighting another match, to fire up the doob again. He didn’t care, it was just another cat.”
“Did you smoke any more?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah. A joint’s a joint.” Andy smiled.
Ninety ninety five and we could see the lighthouse.
