Faith 300
In 1969 Don McTavish qualifies for the Permatex 300. I imagine he's nervous but happy; designed for racing Don has faith in his abilities. Confident and humble he might not express his faith in his ability to control a race car those terms, he’d most likely say, “I’m running pretty good right now.” Don pilots his white number 5, 1969 Mercury Comet with four hundred twenty seven cubic inches under the hood he's got gobs of power - strong motor. The car is fast. On the track, the car hums, no actually it roars like something angry at the world; he is in the belly of the beast. On purpose. His unexpressed faith is that with a few breaks he has a chance to win and if he wins he gets to kiss the Trophy Girl and the Trophy Girl is blonde and busty and her hair is in a lacquered beehive and she is wearing pumps and a satiny poofy dress. And as the race progresses the Trophy Girl is having a few drinks to take the edge off because everyone expects a Trophy Girl to sleep with the promoter, which some of them do but she hasn’t yet. She doesn’t want to be that kind of girl.
Don is queer for racing for he loves sitting in race cars more than steering Trophy Girls. This racing queer rips along; he is a strange alien existing in the toxic atmosphere of leaded exhaust and deafening sonic roar of unmuffled big block engines. He’s cuddly comfortable in big greasy noise with his racing fellows. The pace laps are constricted; tight. The flag drops the engines open throat roar, and there seems no place to go just yet. The track is crowded; tight, the field is something like fifty cars. Eight laps into it and things have opened a bit, he’s okay; car feels great, plenty of throttle left for the straights and for later when the real racing starts.
Ninth lap, something happens, they are so close, so very, very close, the guy behind him unable to avoid, bumps Don. He’s way up on the outside of the track, not the best place to be. Now they are flying, around one hundred and sixty miles per hour; a bump into the guardrail. The guardrail collapses. And now he meets the butt end of the concrete wall going full speed into the third turn. The car explodes. The big roaring engine is flung one hundred feet; a mindless lump of steel and grease. He’s spun at a forty-five degree angle in the lane, then sixty, then ninety degrees his tires explode ignited by heat and friction. This is just the beginning. The car has a mind of it’s own; Don a traveler in nightmare. The devastation terrible beyond all others and just like that, there is nothing in front of Don. No. There is nothing. The front clip is gone, the fenders, engine. The firewall has disappeared and everything attached to it; gas, break, and clutch peddle; gone. The wreck yanked the steering wheel right out of his hands and tossed it into the metalic maelstrom, the front of roll cage has disappeared. The car, less substantial than a Roman chariot spews pieces and fluids in a sweeping arc like a lawn sprinkler, the crippled wreck turns revealing Don buckled in, scrunched in the corner of the seat, shoulder harness across his chest, hands useless at his side. He’s spinning, spinning, spinning, without means of control in a world turned horror. Salvation is in the hands of the gods and his faith. And as he spins in a cloud of tire, blown engine, and radiator smoke a dark and sinister force blasts through the cloud, eddying the smoke around the shape of the racecar around the churning tire wells, and you can see the thing as it unfolds yet you dassent avert your gaze as the dark car and Don McTavish are drawn into magnetic cataclysm. And as Don’s white car spins to face its opponent there is the crashing explosion that turns known objects into shards of metal and rubber and glass and other sharp edged, toxic, industrial waste, a small white sack that used to be Don McTavish; human, somehow still attached, is dragged along with the disintegrating, tumbling ruin, Hector behind Achilles chariot. Ahab strapped to his quest. Faith alone does not save men.
