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The stretch of highway where Sherry Littlefield stood was officially abandoned. It was named the “Loop” by old-timers who remembered when it had been the only highway leading from Agatite west across the North Central Texas prairie toward distant Amarillo, New Mexico, and Colorado and California beyond. Paralleling the railroad, it connected the small town with others of similar size, similar purpose. The tiny hamlets were established about every thirty miles, the optimum distance a steam locomotive could go before needing water. Now, many of them were dead, and most of those that weren’t were dying. Once they were proud, and they competed for supremacy in every area where measurements could be taken. Now, they were just dusty, crumbling memories, momentary distractions to the skiers on their way to and from the art galleries of Taos and Santa Fe. Actually, Sherry mused, most skiers and other tourists never saw the actual towns. They had long since been passed by when new highways were built, allowing travelers to zip through, slowed only by the occasional traffic light or speed zone. The abandoned road where she now waited became a spur, or loop, in the same way. Shortly before World War II, the state built a bypass for the main highway. The Loop was still used then, more or less as a shortcut by resident farmers and ranchers who wanted a more direct and less congested route to and from their rural homes and as a connection between downtown and the state highway’s cutoff five miles to the west.
When a second and wider bypass was built, this time with federal money, in 1955, traffic was routed completely around the town via a controlled-access, four-lane thoroughfare, and the bypass became the “New Loop” in the local parlance, to distinguish it from the old one, which remained merely the “Loop” to everyone who mentioned it. It was eventually taken over by Sandhill County for maintenance, which it never really received. Over the years, fewer and fewer people made use of it, and it was more or less closed. A sand and gravel company finally bought the virtually abandoned road from the county because it provided them with direct access to a limestone quarry a mile from where Sherry was now parked.
The gravel company went broke years ago. And the quarry had become nothing but a pit that yawned open and full of deep black gyp water from an underground spring. Now, the old road, the Loop, was referred to only by those old enough to remember when it had been an active thoroughfare. It had deteriorated over the years into nothing more than a two-mile stretch of poorly patched, weather-pitted, weed-cracked blacktop leading from the edge of town to a deadened railroad overpass next to the old gravel pit. The stretch of abandoned road was flanked on both sides by deep barditches, infested with prickly pear cactus and Johnson grass, tumbleweeds and sunflowers, home to coyotes, snakes, and whatever trash and refuse local folks were too lazy or too cheap to haul out to the city landfill. The Loop was closer than the landfill, and, in a way, it was more remote. But more important, no one cared about it. Nothing, neither homes nor businesses, had ever been erected along the sides of the Loop. Windmills and barns that used to provide regular points of reference were long ago razed or moved off or had just fallen down under the weight of snow or the pressure of howling thunderstorms. Now, only empty, mesquite-choked pasture surrounded the girl who continued to lean and smoke and search the distance while Bobby Vinton crooned smoothly from the car’s radio speakers.
Sometime in the late forties or early fifties—no one ever knew exactly when, only that it had started before the newest bypass had been constructed—the Loop became a favorite drag strip for the town’s teenagers. For years, any given night of the week would witness from ten to fifty separate contests between hot street rods, heavily customized, carefully tuned for maximum speed. The smell of burning rubber and high-test exhaust hung heavy over the starting marker—a forgotten and rusted Pepsi-Cola sign—as driver after driver spun his tires and gunned his engine and screamed down the strip of abandoned blacktop for a quarter or half mile. The Loop was a proving ground, a place where a young man and his proud machine could be matched against others, and the reputations of hundreds of teenagers were established or ruined by virtue of a quick race down the weedy, cracked, antique highway.
For generations of kids who grew up in the tiny, isolated community, dragging on the Loop was a rite of passage, an altar on which hours of work and thousands of dollars were sacrificed to the temporal teenage gods of speed and driving prowess. It was also a romantic place where hearts were won, heroes were made. And it was a tragic place where engines were pushed so hard they blew up, where dreams and ambitions spewed skyward in a quick, black column of smoke and steam, and occasionally flowed out onto the blacktop in the blood of unfortunate contestants.
More than an occasional drag strip, though, the area was also a popular hangout for youngsters bored with small-town life, seeking some place of their own, where for a while they could dream out loud, brag of triumphs to come, find society among their own kind. The barditches were littered with cast-off beer bottles and Dairy Mart cups, and more than one family in town was begun on one of the now overgrown caliche side roads that spun off the blacktop and twisted out of sight into the blank mesquite thicket. There, victorious knights of the quarter mile and their consorts as well as the vanquished, vainglorious losers and their female consolations celebrated and mourned their mutual efforts in cramped backseats or on rumpled blankets hastily spread on occasional patches of switchgrass under the thorny branches of the ever-encroaching mesquite.
Life was simpler then, it seemed, and disapproving adults who could never understand the compelling sweet temptations of illicit alcohol and the passion of true love anymore than they could appreciate the attraction of V-8 engines and positraction rear ends and hemis—to say nothing of Elvis and Rock ’n’ Roll—were as distant as the streetlights reflected off the North Central Texas sky more than a mile away.
Now, though, only dim oil stains and faded streaks of rubber testified to countless attempts by deuce coupes and chopped Mercs, hot-rod Chevys and low-slung ’Vettes to best each other off the line while keeping the pistons pounding above redline and the drivers’ honor intact.
For more than two decades, every kid in town knew what it meant to have his reputation made—or lost—on the Loop. It was a benchmark of maturity in black leather and white tees, a touchstone of adulthood that men and women talked about for years after gray flecked their hair and lines crinkled their eyes. It was the Loop, and the word conveyed far more than geography in locating or even defining those who had experienced it.