6
The shock of sudden death wears off quickly among the young. To teenagers, death of any kind is mostly something that happens to someone else, someone not as smart, someone not as careful, someone older—someone else. The Big Wreck, then, horrible as it was, did not slow down many kids for long. Although Chet Cunningham made a show of having his patrolmen drive out to the Loop several times a night for a couple of weeks, he only had so many men to spare and a busy community to worry about. Soon, he turned his attentions elsewhere. Within two months after the accident, even though many claimed they could still see streaks of blood on the concrete near the old underpass, drivers were back on the Loop, once more trying out their cars and filling the evening air with screaming rubber, roaring engines, and the jeering laughs of the victorious directed toward the hangdog expressions of the losers.
After racing the half mile, though, few turned around and went back to town immediately. More often, the contestants would slow their vehicles, acknowledge the winners, and then coast up to the underpass, which some anonymous young pundit had dubbed the “Needle.”
It was an apt nickname for the narrow roadway opening. In a way, it looked like the eye of a needle. Left over from the days when the Loop was little more than a wagon trail, the underpass cut an arch-shaped hole directly through a small granite ridge that rose out of the pastures on both sides and curved around behind. The top had been graded for an old railroad tap line that hadn’t been used in living memory, but the narrow tunnel remained as testimony to a time when practicality dictated that any opening through a high ridge was better than driving a team nearly five miles around to more traversable ground.
The tunnel, the Needle, itself wasn’t but thirty yards long. In front of it, the highway narrowed to a single lane, just spacious enough for a wide-bodied modern car or double-axle dump truck to pass without striking either side. Beyond it, to the west, the road originally broadened once again for normal two-way traffic. Warning signs and old road markers on both sides cautioned approaching motorists to stop and, illogically, to yield right-of-way to any oncoming traffic. The imagined vision of cars backed up for miles, each line waiting for the other to pass through before proceeding, always elicited a smile from newcomers, but in truth, by the time cross-country traffic was heavy enough to create such a problem, the old Loop was no longer used by anyone but locals.
The actual tunnel was blasted out of the living rock, then hand-finished by workers using jackhammers and hand chisels. Concrete buttresses had been added when the Loop was paved in the mid-thirties. That was when the warning signs had been put up. Since the construction of the new highway, no one had replaced them or taken them away. Everyone knew about the underpass, but after the road was closed to public traffic, only the gravel trucks had to concern themselves with it when they lumbered through to the quarry on the other side. Before the two pickups tried stupidly—and more or less unintentionally—to pass through at the same time and had become wedged together so tightly that bulldozers had to be called in to pull them out, no one had ever had an accident there.
Chief Cunningham was instantly alerted when racing on the Loop was renewed after the Big Wreck. He talked to several of the more likely violators, all of whom denied any knowledge of such foolish and illegal behavior, then he renewed regular patrols up and down the roadway. He also stationed his night patrolmen near enough to come roaring in if the sounds of drag racing echoed out of the area. He had the local paper publish an article iterating the strong penalties for drag racing anywhere in or near town, and he asked high school principal Hap Bailey to make an announcement underscoring the police department’s new no-tolerance policy toward drag racing.
Initially, this had the desired effect. All drag racing stopped, at least all that was previously taking place in the early evening hours. But teenagers eager to try out their wheels soon learned that policemen quickly wearied of patrolling deserted roadways and sitting lonely in their cars next to deserted pastures. The kids also figured out that after midnight, almost all of the duty officers were called back into town to patrol the business and residential streets. As a rational result, races were postponed until later at night, often well into the early morning. Then, contestants could meet in prearranged contests to match their motorized steeds and driving skills against each other without fear of interruption from the authorities. The noise of their screaming engines was seldom overheard by concerned townspeople, who were, usually, sound asleep under newfangled and clanky air conditioners that hummed unevenly through summer nights.
For a while, races were conducted in relative secrecy. No one else was hurt, and the anticipation of the contest gave the kids of town something to look forward to, to take pride in. Virtually any evening would find knots of teenagers gathered on the Dairy Mart parking lot, whispering the news that Danny’s ’48 was going to go up against the newly hopped-up ’55 Gregg had just finished working on, or that once and for all the question would be settled as to which was faster, the Porthole T-bird Janey Walsh received for Christmas or the ’58 ’Vette Odell Roberts had brought home from his hitch in the Navy.
It soon became a mark of status to have raced there, even to have lost. For many more, it was a mark of pride merely to have been there, to have witnessed a major contest between two hot cars and their determined drivers. It was, of course, a bigger boast to have won multiple races, to own the hottest dragster in town. And, for the most part, the kids were careful, both in the races themselves and in keeping their common secret about this fascinating attraction. For a long time, dragging on the Loop remained what it had been before the Big Wreck, harmless fun with only the slightest hint of genuine danger to spice the action.
Then Bobby Dean came to town.