4
At first, local law enforcement officials winked at the Loop’s use as an unofficial and highly illegal drag strip. They knew about it, of course. Everyone knew. Too many cars had been stretched too far and had to be towed in from out there for them not to know. Besides, most of the town’s adults had been out there themselves when they were younger and more foolish, more willing to risk maybe a whole summer’s wages on a single, all-or-nothing contest.
Blown engines, trashed transmissions, shredded tires, and even a serious crack-up from time to time had raised serious questions around the drugstore coffee bar. But no one had ever been hurt out there, and since most of the teenagers were “good kids” and restricted their hot-rodding to the Loop, there really wasn’t much motivation to put a stop to it. After all, most reasoned aloud whenever the subject came up, a quarter- or half-mile drag race out on an abandoned piece of highway was safer and more sensible than having the same contests run down the town’s streets. There, somebody might be seriously hurt, they assured one another. It’s just a way of having some fun. They’d all seen Rebel Without a Cause, of course, but that was only a movie. Nobody had ever been hurt out there. Besides, they argued, how fast can these kids get up to in a quarter or half a mile?
And, more quietly argued, what else was there for teenagers to do in a small town? Working on cars and testing their mechanical abilities seemed as good a way to burn off energy as any. It was safer than other things. And it was cheaper, too.
Then there was a bad wreck, the “Big Wreck.” In 1957, two hopped-up ’49 Ford pickups, open beds loaded with the drivers’ friends, spun out and started what was planned as a half-mile contest. They were rolling neck and neck, shouting and spraying each other with beer, laughing and leaning out when they passed the quarter-mile marker, a giant highway sign that read in vintage 1935 lettering that had faded over the years:
SINGLE TRAFFIC
UNDERPASS
1/2 MILE
The kids in the trucks’ beds saw the sign, began yelling at each other and banging on the cab roofs, encouraging the drivers to push harder. They were throwing bottles at each other now. Tempers flared. Catcalls increased. Speeds accelerated, and quickly they approached the half-mile marker that had been the target of dozens of hunters’ rifles and was so pockmarked with bullet holes they could hardly read it:
DANGER!
SINGLE TRAFFIC UNDERPASS
1/4 MILE
At this point, the race should have ended, engines should have wound down, and jeers and shouts should have echoed from the winners while the vehicles slowed and turned around to head back to town in jubilation or disgrace.
This time, though, there was no winner. Both trucks screamed past the familiar marker, their occupants pounding and cheering in the back, their drivers glancing sideways trying to gain a clear advantage so they could declare a victory. It was a dead heat, their front bumpers exactly even as they rushed on, picked up even more speed. They were closing on the underpass, but no one was slowing down. Neither would give up. Neither was chicken.
A quarter mile from the last sign, the highway narrowed to one lane. Warning signs festooned the side of the ridge through which the old underpass cut, but it was too late for warnings. Neither driver would give up his lane, and fender by fender and side by side they bore down on the concrete buttresses on the outside of the old underpass.
The riders fell silent for a second or two as the highway continued to disappear under the front wheels of the vehicles. Then, a different kind of yelling and pounding started. The glee of competition gave way to the terrified realization of what was about to happen. Shouts went up to “Stop!” “Brake!” “Turn off!” But there was no time to slow the vehicles, let alone stop them, turn them, brake them. Still running at full throttle, wide open and roaring, each driver expecting the other to give up, the trucks crashed into the concrete walls to the left and right of the underpass, their door handles so close not even a finger could pass between them.
The pickups’ cabs disintegrated. Six of the youngsters were killed outright: both drivers and their girlfriends who had been beside them. Two passengers had broken necks from being thrown from the open beds. Five died in the coming week, their backs and skulls crushed beyond hope. The four who survived would be crippled in one way or another for the rest of their lives.
It took most of the next day for a Department of Public Safety forensics team called in from Wichita Falls to separate the bodies of those inside the cabs from the twisted metal that surrounded them. Frank McNabb and Beverly Nash were actually buried in one coffin. Their parents gave out that they were about to be married, that this was the way they would have wanted it, but that was news to most of their classmates. The truth, whispered as it eventually was around the corridors of the high school, was that no one could tell which body part belonged to whom, so grotesquely meshed were the corpses.
“It was a mess,” one of the state troopers reportedly said. “Worse than anything I saw in the war, and I was in the South Pacific! There just wasn’t anything left of them kids but blood and bone, teeth and hair.”
There also was little left of the trucks even to tow them in. Loaded on flatbed trailers, they were hauled into town, where they remained for six months on the courthouse square’s parking lot as a grim reminder of youthful folly, particularly to Chet Cunningham, the chief of police, who was unreasonably blamed for the whole thing. It was he, after all, people said, who allowed such a disaster to happen by ignoring what he often called “a little harmless drag racing.”