Kindle Edition
Amazon
Monte Dutton, Writer
Category:
Action/Thriller
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services LLC
ISBN-10: 1974641031
Type: Fiction
Pages: 257
Copyright: Aug. 19, 2017
ISBN-13: 9781974641031
Price: $2.99 (eBook)
In the sequel to Lightning in a Bottle, Barrie Jarman faces hardships in his rookie season at stock car racing's premier level.
At the age of nineteen, Barrie Jarman has grown up in a hurry. He is poised on the edge of stock car racing stardom. He’s making ten times as much money as a year ago. He has a top-flight ride with a top-flight team in the top flight of the sport. He is exactly where he wants to be.
Life Gets Complicated. It’s veteran motorsports writer Monte Dutton’s sequel to Lightning in a Bottle, the acclaimed novel about the kid with the character of his generation but the spirit of stock car racing’s rowdy past.
At the end of Barrie’s frantic first year, he parties with his girlfriend, Angela Hughston; his best friend, her brother Errol; his new pilot, Rafe Trujillo; his teammate, veteran Jay Higbe; his estranged father, Big Jim; and a boozing old relic from the sport’s past. He befriends a pro football player at a Las Vegas awards ceremony. Life is good, and Barrie is often stoned.
Uncle Charlie, his friend, companion, confidante and source of perspective, quietly tries to keep Barrie headed in the right direction.
Barrie confronts the distinct possibility that he is a corruptive influence on those around him. He has little doubt about his own capacity to straighten up. He’s worried about Errol, though, who’s getting more bad influence on the side. Errol doesn’t know that Barrie is in a position to help him. Barrie doesn’t know if Errol is ready for a chance to join the Jerry McCarley Enterprises driver lineup.
When Barrie gets down to business, when he puts on his firesuit and climbs into Number 59, all seems well again. He puts his new Ford Fusion on the front row for the sport’s biggest race. After his new sponsor throws a party to celebrate, a pair of thugs beat Barrie senseless in a remote parking lot.
Barrie has more riding on the upcoming races than those outside his circle of friends know. He has to race. He can’t call the cops. He can’t let FASCAR, the ruling body, know how badly he’s injured. He drops out of sight. While he receives treatment in a condo on the beach, a fake excuse for his absence is circulated. Other excuses show up in a gossip sheet that has targeted him for some reason.
Obviously, Barrie has enemies.
Pain steels his resolve. Like the icons he grew up idolizing, Barrie does what it takes.
Excerpt
Chapter 1
Home Sweet Home
When the FASCAR season ended, Barrie Jarman had no shortage of bad influences trying to get at him. They came with his territory. He was the choice of the partying young, who wanted to party with him. Our little “complex” – me and Marlene in our three-bedroom “ranch style,” Barrie and Angela Hughston in the cabin above the pond, and the construction of a new house for them at the top of the hill on the other side – became an object of some public curiosity.
Hell, I had to run a segment of electric fence for thirty yards on each side of the security gate. That didn’t prevent two or three drunks a week from climbing over the gate. As a general rule, once I walked outside and said “get on out of here,” they did. I had to carry my twelve-gauge out on the porch one time, but we never had to call the law. The fans had cultivated an image of Barrie as a racing version of “Johnny B. Goode,” him and his woman, holed up in the woods, stock car racing rebels.
On several occasions, while we were out on the road, en route in the motor coach ¬¬¬-- also known as “the bus” -- to Eufaula or Galax, Barrie had told me he needed company to keep him occupied. In addition to being his race-track spotter and his driver, he’s my nephew, and I take it seriously. Now he has Angela, and she has his attention. I just man the front gate.
Back in the summer, Barrie managed to get us on the ground safely after his pilot, Fritz Farley, suffered a heart attack on the way to Salem, Oregon. Everyone else on board, with the possible exception of Fritz, who was unconscious, had heard Barrie say that, once the season was over, he was going to stay stoned for a month. Given the frantic circumstances, not one of us on board – Angela, the sportswriter Cullen Popovich, and I – had begrudged him the declaration, particularly as it occurred en route to Barrie winning the first Casseroll Series race in which he competed.
Despite dominating the season – seven victories, three poles, and an average finish of 7.7 – Barrie had not won the Enervation Series championship. He had finished sixth in the final race and third in the official standings. The FASCAR season ended, by rule, with four drivers tied for first place entering the final race in Orlando, Florida. None of them won the race. The champion, Cal Horlen, finished second, which was tied for his best finish of the season. A.J. Ajaye took fifth in the race and second in the standings. Horlen was the son of an Oklahoma oilman. Ajaye was the first Indian-American – his father was Punjabi – to race in FASCAR. Ajaye, who grew up in California, had one victory.
It didn’t really matter, though. Horlen was headed back to the Enervation Series. Ajaye, too, although he was running a limited Casseroll Trophy schedule with a minor team. Barrie was trading his Mustang for a Trophy Series Fusion from Jerry McCarley’s two-car, Ford-supported stable. Barrie would still drive Number 59, but he was replacing Cade Rawlings, with whom he had differences. Not only was Barrie moving into the big leagues. McCarley had pawned off his rival to another, less prominent, team. Rawlings was lucky to get a ride at all.
The season was over. The awards banquet was over. Thanksgiving was Thursday. Marlene was preparing sweet potato custard, chocolate eclairs, red-velvet pound cake, broccoli casserole, oyster dressing, a cured ham basted with Cheerwine and brown sugar, green beans, homemade bread, and probably a half-dozen more dishes I can’t recite here. That left me in charge of smoked turkey.
In view of the season we’d all been through, all this qualified as relaxing.
The only evidence I had that Barrie and Angela were alive was the occasional plucking of guitar strings from the screened-in back porch of the cabin. I was about half expecting to hear of Angela being pregnant, but when Barrie wandered over to the brick-enclosed smoker to review the birds, he allowed as how him and Angela were nowhere close to wanting kids just yet. He said they were “thoroughly contracepted” and, by God, he wasn’t going to bring a child into the world before his daddy was a champion.
“Uh, four different track championships in two divisions and two years at I-26 Raceway,” I said.
“A year ago, and I might have some rugrat born or on the way to a little freckled-faced redhead with a tattoo of Luke Bryan on her left butt cheek,” Barrie said. “Now I’ve got an African-American princess who’s smart and educated and … like a wildcat under the sheets.”
Barrie didn’t seem like he was high. Just horny.
“Why come you smoking so many birds?” he asked. “You planning on setting up a stand outside a football stadium?”
“Nah, it’s an old habit,” I said. “I’m surprised you don’t remember from last year.”
“I was racing on Thanksgiving both years since I moved up here. I ain’t never had nothing but leftovers.”
“Hell, I didn’t think about that,” I said. “It’s, uh, you know, you can’t have too many friends. With this big pit, it’s a shame just to smoke two or three. So, I run around and deliver turkeys to the same people every year, so now they know it’s coming and they ain’t got to bake, or smoke, or deep-fry, their own birds. First thing tomorrow morning, I’ll take them around.”
“Let me go,” Barrie said. “I’ll be the delivery boy. Who gets ’em?”
“Short Stuff. He’s been my best friend here locally for years. The Sheriff. The preacher. Uh, magistrate. Police chief. Oh, yeah. I think I’ll drop one by to your drug-dealing buddy. When we get done, we’ll take one up to Jerry.”
A man named Arthur Burford had sponsored Barrie before he signed his FASCAR contract with Ford and Jerry McCarley Enterprises. Burford’s business endeavors were reputedly shady.
“Oh, yeah,” Barrie said. “I’m definitely going.”
Everything about Barrie was now widely known. After he’d crash-landed the plane and then won the race in Oregon, he’d made the rounds of the TV talk shows. Cullen Popovich had made a name for himself and Barrie by writing several firsthand accounts of the adventure. Frank Maglie, his agent, had him set up for commercial shoots after Christmas. The fans knew that Barrie was from Spartanburg, South Carolina, but now lived in a cabin on his uncle’s farm and valued his privacy. They also knew he liked to tool around Lacewell Rapids, North Carolina, in a 1994 Ford pickup track whose red paint was faded and flat. They knew he played guitar and used to smoke weed, but he’d outsmarted FASCAR when D.C. Casseroll had tried to rig a drug test, and now Barrie was everywhere, and the racing czar hadn’t been seen, at least in public, since. Barrie had turned nineteen on September 8, and everyone seemed to have an opinion about him. The rough and rowdy loved him the same way they loved the Oakland (soon-to-be Las Vegas) Raiders, and the educated and enlightened loved him because he seemed like a stock car racer who knew more than just enough to be dangerous. Old timers resented him for “running around” with a black woman, though he and Angela rarely left the cabin. Others claimed he was too big for his britches, and that was understandable since he’d come so far so fast. He didn’t poll well in family values.
Racers wanted to race him (usually this was some kind of online simulation). Preachers wanted to witness to him. Musicians wanted to jam with him. Stoners wanted to smoke with him. All Barrie and Angela wanted to do was live a halfway normal life for a while. Marlene read the fan mail. She assured me that white women had not given up on Barrie. Dona Quiros screened his email and ran his Twitter. The fan club was run through Jerry McCarley Enterprises. The new pilot was 23-year-old Rafe Trujillo of Tucson, Arizona, who had flown the Beechcraft Baron 58 back from Kearney, Nebraska, after it had been repaired and checked over after the crash landing. Now Rafe was sharing an apartment with Errol Hughston until Barrie could get his and Angela’s house built and they could move into the cabin. Both the lovebirds had Ford Mustangs of their very own. Angela drove the blue convertible Barrie had bought her in Wilmington, Delaware, during the Great Drug Test Fiasco, and Barrie had a souped-up red one that Ford had given him on the day his Trophy deal had been announced.
Still, most of the time, Barrie tooled around in the pickup. The red Mustang spent most of its time with a canvas cover over it. Angela drove hers every chance she got.
It’s funny the way the offseason is. Everyone wants to live a normal life. Then two weeks of normality drives them slap crazy. Husbands and wives start bickering and, sometimes, cheating on each other. People drink too much, or smoke too much, or gamble, or spend money they haven’t got. I can’t see much evidence that the money Barrie’s got has driven him nuts yet. He indulges himself a little. A beautiful new guitar arrived about a month ago. His salary just went up tenfold. The base salary was $250,000. Now, at the Casseroll Trophy Series level, it’s $2.5 million. He still gets half the purse. That money is going to go up four-fold, at least. He could win every race in the Enervation Series and make less than if he finished fifteenth in every Trophy race. If I’d had that kind of money when I was nineteen years old, I expect Marlene and I would never have gotten married, so I reckon it would have been a bad thing. I never had Barrie’s kind of talent, though. No one does.
Lord, I’m glad Barrie has Angela. She’s perfect for him. For obvious reasons, she keeps him occupied better than I ever could, and she understands him. Their relationship grew when they were on that plane together. It brought us all closer. Now Rafe, who helped talk Barrie and the plane at his control down onto Interstate 80, via cell phone, is the pilot. The Hughstons were holding off their Thanksgiving dinner until Sunday, and Rafe was flying Barrie, Angela, and Errol up to Maryland on Saturday morning. Barrie’s local friends, the ones who had worked on his short-track cars and played ball with him at McVeigh Country Day, were a bit miffed at being kept away, but Barrie just told them he was spending time with his woman, and they’d catch up at the big Thanksgiving celebration. Almost a year earlier, he had been disappointed that he couldn’t get any of his fellow FASCAR contemporaries to bring in the New Year at our place. Now he’d had enough of them and wanted to hang out with his real buddies. Most of the established drivers were already off to some exotic resort location – the Caribbean, Hawaii, Baja California – or scattered around the country in their own hometowns. Barrie was particularly interested in friends loyal enough not to take embarrassing pictures and spread them all over the Internet.
Still, Thanksgiving was not without surprises.
The dinner was supposed to start around dark, after two pro football games had already been played on TV, and we could get our fill of vittles before a third one began. When Barrie and I got back from delivering smoked turkeys, hopped-up cars and pickup trucks were lined up on the road because no one was answering when they pushed the buzzer, and nobody knew the code. God knows where Marlene was. She’d probably decided she had to have a better brand of cranberry sauce. We led the procession back down the dirt road to “the complex,” and vehicles were parked all over the yard before the first ballgame started. Errol and Rafe were already there – they had the code – but they’d gone off to the pond with Angela so that they could skip rocks or something.
Three of Barrie’s school buddies brought guitars, and the whole crowd enveloped Barrie and left me without the help of him, Angela, and the rest, and plenty to do, even when Marlene got back. I had little doubt things were going to get rowdy, but I couldn’t blame Barrie much for wanting to kick up his heels. I figured the guitar would keep him occupied, and maybe he’d be able to pace himself.
Enter Big Jim, who is my brother and Barrie’s dad.
One reason Barrie moved in with me, two and a half years ago now, was that he was a crackerjack racer, and I might be able to help him out a little. Another was that his daddy had become an alcoholic, and things were rough at home. They’d had a rocky reunion back during the season after Barrie started winning FASCAR races, and it had gotten to where the only way they could get along was on the telephone. Jim and Emily Lu rolled into the yard about three o’clock, and the Explorer Barrie had just bought his parents was loaded down with several cases of cheap beer, Barrie’s sister, Faye, and her husband, Zach Stewitt, and a surprise guest.
Wilt Redding. A man who was still running the dirt tracks although he was at least seventy years old. A man who had twice finished second in the FASCAR point standings, though he hadn’t won a race since what is now the Trophy Series last raced on dirt. A man who had told Barrie the way to get in shape for driving a race car was “to drive a fucking race car.” A man who’d told him the key to success was being relaxed. A man who had apparently become close friends with Jim Jarman.
A man who was drunk on his ass. Like Barrie’s daddy. My brother. Two hours from Thanksgiving dinner, and the wheels were about to fly off. Put Barrie with his friends, drinking. Add in the love-hate relationship between him and his old man. Then make an icon of Barrie’s, Redding, a drinking buddy of Big Jim.
The pressure of the Pompano 400 was nothing compared to that.
“Wilt! What a surprise! How you been?” It then occurred to Barrie that he should greet his father. “Daddy. How about … a beer?”
Chuh! Jim was already popping a top.
“I just want to thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for that hay baler,” Jim said. Everyone thought it was a joke they didn’t understand. So they laughed.
“Angela,” Barrie whispered, “let’s me and you go in the cabin for a minute.”
Barrie, uh, spirited her away. “Be right back, y’all.”
When they were out of earshot, or so he thought, Wilt turned to Jim, and asked, “Who’s that nigger woman?”
“That’s my boy’s gal,” Jim said. “Says he loves her.”
“I’ll be dogged,” Wilt said.
“Her name’s Angela,” Errol said. “She’s my sister.”
No one else spoke. Errol, who was struggling with his temper, excused himself and followed Barrie and Angela inside.
“I’m sorry,” Wilt said. “Shit. I thought she was a whore.”
Inside the cabin, Barrie put his hands on Angela’s shoulders, looked her in the eyes, and said, “I am about to smoke weed again. Do not be alarmed. Weed is not highly addictive. It has been more than a year since I last par … took. While I have missed it, racing kept me occupied, and it will do so again, but this is the way my daddy and I interact. His goal is to get me to drink with him, and I won’t do it, and it pisses him off, and I just won’t give him the satisfaction. However, if I can get stoned, and if that serves the dual purpose of pissing him off and settling me the fuck down, it will be well … worth … it. Okay?”
“Okay,” she said.
“You want to get high, too?”
“Maybe. Let me see how things go.”
“All right.”
Errol arrived on the scene.
“That guy Wilt is a racist,” he said.
“Picked up on that, did you?” Barrie asked.
“No, when you two left, he asked your dad who the nigger was.”
“What’d Big Jim say?”
“He said Angela was your woman.”
“True enough,” Barrie said. “What’d you say?”
“I said she was my sister, and then I had to come on in here because I was about to get pissed, and I probably don’t need to get pissed at your dad and some, I don’t know what, racing legend?”
“True. Errol, were you telling the truth that first time me and you and Angela went out with Maura Huntley that first time in Pompano Beach? When you said you had never smoked pot, and when Maura went outside and bought some?”
“Yes.”
“How about you, honey?”
“Okay, like, I’ve smoked it a few times,” she said.
“Really?” Errol asked.
“Yes.”
Barrie interceded before they had some spat. “Well, Errol, old buddy, old pal, I think it’s time for you to chill. Hang on. You two go back in the bedroom and wait for me. I’m going to get Jackie Leon. In the meantime, have a beer.”
Barrie didn’t come back right away. He played a song on guitar. He motioned to his old dirt-track crew chief. He whispered to the other guitarists to put on a show. Big Jim and Wilt were clapping and singing off-key. Barrie slipped off again and said he had a powerful urge to use the facilities. Jackie followed a couple minutes later. When Barrie, Angela, Errol, and Jackie all came back to our bonfire, they were wearing sunglasses.
It quickly became apparent that the crowd outside was smoking weed, too. Big Jim and Wilt Redding were splitting one. Faye and Zach had joined the party. The wind was blowing too much to build a fire, but it didn’t seem to preclude keeping a joint lit. Barrie just picked up his guitar, and taking in the absurdity of it all, proceeded to play several songs that dealt with the subject at hand.
“Aw, shit,” Wilt yelled, “play some Willie.”
So Barrie did. His daddy’s favorite song was “Goodhearted Woman.” He let Big Jim be Waylon.
I might as well have been herding pigs when I had to get that band of red-eyed zombies up to the house. I almost wish the Sheriff had dropped by. That would have been fun to watch. All in all, though, having a crowd of stoners for supper wasn’t as bad as if they’d all been drunk. They all ate well, and that was something Jim seldom did when he was drunk. Emily Lu either didn’t notice everyone was high, or she preferred not to. Marlene just smiled and said, “Why don’t we open up a bottle of that wine, Charlie?”
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