arc. Darkness and a rank green smell blew in through the windows. The axles bumped in the ruts so hard they couldn't get the bottle to their mouths. Grass and trees and wedges of night sky tilted in the headlights. Billy laughed, and Dina laughed, too.
“Figure eight,” Bix said with the suave cruelty of a bomber pilot. Billy's heart swelled. He told himself he was in love with crazy motion.
“Yeah,” he said. Because he couldn't get the bottle to Bix's lips he poured a splash of vodka over his head. Billy felt the edge of the world, the harsh blossoming happiness that moved too fast for ordinary life. Only when you raced, only when you took the risks, could you enter this other dimension that shot through time and space at triple speed.
Larry hummed the “Blue Danube Waltz.” “Da da da da da, taa taa, taa taa.”
“Go,” Billy screamed. “Go go go go go.”
The cow came from nowhere. They swerved into the final loop of their figure eight and there it was, black and white, big as an oncoming car. Billy saw its shining black eye. He saw its nicked white ear. He screamed. Larry screamed. Bix cranked the wheel and the car jackknifed with a shrill mechanical screech. Dirt sprayed up through the windows. Billy's eyes and mouth were filled with dirt. The car skidded, lurched, and stopped so suddenly Billy was thrown into the front seat. He couldn't see. He felt his forehead crack against something that wasn't hard and wasn't soft. A splinter of a dream flashed inside his head: a desert sandstorm with a dark, cloaked figure running through it. Mick Jagger sang, “Who could hang a name on you?”
A silence came up under the music, a steaming windy silence.
Billy blinked, rubbed the dirt from his eyes, blinked again. He saw that he was lying on his stomach, looking down at a boot. A brown work boot. Bix's. He turned around and looked up at Bix.
Bix still sat behind the wheel, smiling and bleeding.
“Shit.” Bix grinned. “Sweet shitting mother of Christ.”
Billy saw that he was lying on the front seat with his head under the dashboard. Bix and Larry were still in their seats. Dina sat blinking in the back with a confused but polite expression, as if the conversation had turned to a topic she didn't fully understand.
“A wreck,” Billy said. “We had a wreck.”
“Wow.”
“Shit. Sweet Jesus.” Bix chuckled. Lines of blood ran freely down his forehead. A garnet-colored drop trembled on his nose.
“Bix, you got hurt,” Billy said.
“I did?”
“Man, you're bleeding.”
“I am?”
“The car could blow up,” Billy said. “Don't crashed cars blow up?”
“I don't know.”
“We better get out of here. Come on.”
Everyone remained utterly still, as if they had all suddenly realized that the car was balanced on the edge of a cliff and any movement could send it toppling into the abyss. Bix remained with his hands on the wheel, smiling and bleeding majestically. Larry looked forward with his habitual expression of good-natured awe, and Dina continued to sit, polite and confused as a great-grandmother, in the back seat.
Billy said, “Move. It's going to blow up.” They all scrambled out into the altered night, the settling whirlwind of dirt. Billy ran a half dozen paces, then turned. Dina was behind him. Bix and Larry had run the other way. The car stood at an angle, its nose in a ditch and its rear wheels a foot off the ground. It was, at once, both titanic and pathetic.
“God,” Dina breathed. “Are you all right?”
He nodded. “I just bumped my head a little. Bix is the one who's hurt. Hey, Bix.”
Billy ran to the far side of the wreck, where Bix and Larry stood in attitudes of calm appraisal, hands fisted on their hips. “Unbelievable,” Larry said.
“Bix,” Billy said. “Hey. Let me see your head.”
Bix put his hand to his forehead with a certain reverence, as if his wound was something precious. “It's okay,” he said. “I just knocked against the wheel a little.” When he brought his hand down the fingers were slick with blood. He smiled.
“We flew,” he said.
“Yeah,” Billy said. He stood close to Bix. He could smell the blood, mixed with grass and the faintly fried odor of Bix himself. “You sure you're all right?”
“Never better. You?”
“I'm okay. A little bump.”
Bix looked at his bloodied fingers. He put his hand to Billy's forehead and made a slow, deliberate circle.
“War paint,” he said.
Billy's forehead tingled. He was wearing Bix's blood. Dina, the