Paul Di Filippo - Neutrino Drag

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 115.18KB 23 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Neutrino Drag

by Paul Di Filippo

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.

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Paul Di Filippo - Neutrino Drag.pdf

共23页,预览3页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Paul Di Filippo - Neutrino Drag

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: