Swiss Engineering

by Rob Roberge

      I enter Skip's Volvo into the Crawford Raceway's Saturday Night Amateur Demolition Derby. I'm dizzy from the heat and the fact that I've had maybe five hours sleep in the last five days.
      "What is that?" Loomis Crawford, son of Darrell 'Big Daddy' Crawford, says from his booth.
      "For the derby," I say.
      "I know what it's for," he says and drums his pen on his clipboard. He's got rhythm, Gene Krupa with a sunburn registering wrecked cars. "I need to know where it goes. It needs a slot."
      "A slot?"
      "Where are Volvos from?"
      "It's Swiss," I say.
      "Swiss?" Loomis lights a cigarette. He looks at the car. "They make cars?"
      "I think it's Swiss. Scandinavian, maybe. It's European, pretty sure of that much."
      Loomis looks at the clipboard, taps, shakes his head. "For our purposes, it's an Other. Got no Volvo slot."
      "No Volvo slot," I repeat, nodding.
      "You haven't done this before, have you?"
      "No, sir. Seen it. Haven't done it."
      "We got some paperwork for you to sign." He hands me the clipboard. "First one is the entry fee. I'll need fifty bucks with that, check's O.K. with a local address and phone. Second one there is the transfer of ownership. If you've got the pinks, that makes life easier all the way around. The last one says you can't sue us if you get seriously fucked up."
      "Got it. But Volvos are the safest cars there are." I sign the papers and give him fifty in cash. The car that saves lives-that's how Volvo was marketed in the seventies. A cabin that could withstand the worst of collisions, brakes that stop on a dime, a car that saves lives. "I have a distinct advantage," I say, thinking of those old ads.
      "Right."
      "You don't think it's weird, me putting a car this nice in the derby?"
      "Not that nice a car. I figure you got your reasons."
      "You ever had anyone get hurt too bad?"
      "Bad enough," Loomis says. "We give you a helmet. Anything else, elbow pads, flak jacket, you got to rent that."

      The tumor in my brother's head-which bulged to walnut-sized just before his surgery and death-had given him these things called fugues. Death, dying, and hospitals give you new words. Before, the only fugues I'd ever heard of were musical ones. I'd always had trouble remembering which was bad, benign or malignant. I'd had to ask Skip which was which.
      "One grows from the roof of the cave," he said. "One grows from the floor." I thought of our family trips to Luray Caverns and the Lost Sea and the transparent fish with the neon feelers. "It's bad," he said. "You're talking to a dead man, Bro. Maybe you were right." And he hung up.
      What I was right about-or maybe right about-was him being the fuck-up he'd always accused me of being. This was Skip feeling justifiably sorry for himself. Thinking, if he was going to die at 42 anyway, he should've been more like me.

      "Don't forget the glass," says Loomis Crawford.
      "The glass?"
      "Windows. Windshield. They got to go."
      "Really?"
      "We'll do it for you," he says. "Ten bucks."
      "No," I say. "I can do it." I look at the cream-colored Volvo and its tinted glass. All-leather interior, AC, disc stereo-Skip must've dumped thirty grand on this thing.
      "I'll rent you a bat for five," Loomis says.
      "I'll use the wheel wrench," I say.
      "Suit yourself," he says. "Take a tip, though. Work inside out."
      "Why?"
      "One. Glass is made to take external pressure-it's a lot easier to pop from the interior. Two. You don't want to be grinding your back and balls in cut glass out there."

      These fugues, Skip had three of them before he died. From what I gathered, they're like waking blackouts. Not like Alzheimer's: you function, you can work, drive, talk, go through your life, basically. And then, snap, you come to and you don't remember a thing.
      The worst, Skip told me, was when he woke up in an abandoned strip-mall parking lot at three in the morning. It had rained and he was wet; pools of neon danced in puddles. He'd lost two days.
      "Two days," he said to me on the phone. "Lost."
      I told him that I'd read in Harper's Index that there were only two cases of amnesia in the U.S. last year, but that there were 472 on daytime TV. "Not quite the same," he said.
      And I wanted to say I know it's not, but I'm trying here.
      This all came to me after the funeral and the reading of the will. My sister-in-law Judy and the kids got the house and the other car and everything else they need, and I got the Volvo, which I don't need or want. I know right away the Volvo's not just a car, it's a message. Be responsible, it says. Take care of something for once. My brother had a way of giving unfriendly gifts-he once gave Judy an exercycle for her birthday. Skip and I could never really talk to each other. I loved him-he was my brother-and if I didn't dislike him, I never liked him much, either.

      I'm in the passenger seat, both boots kicking at the driver-side window and I get this rush that I haven't let myself feel before this. I kick out the window, scoot over to the driver side and kick out the other one. I'm running on some hollow momentum and something inside me is punching itself out. There are words for this: sorrow, regret, pain. There are no words for this. You know this feeling; every table in the world just had its legs knocked out from under it and things keep falling. From the back seat, I kick twice at the rear window and it resists and fights against me until it comes off in one piece, and flops down on the trunk.
      Loss precedes words is the way I've come to understand things. The first time I'd ever heard of an anterior cruciate ligament was when a doctor told me mine was torn-popped so bad that one side of it had nothing to do with the other side. I'm number two scorer-all-time-in Florida college basketball history behind Rick Barry. Look it up-Ben Thompson behind Barry, ahead of everybody else. I didn't know I had an anterior cruciate until I lost it, didn't know I had a future until I didn't. Skip was a dead man before the doctors said tumor, and before they said malignant, and was walking like a zombie through his days before he'd ever heard of a fugue. The damage was done; the naming came later.
      And I don't know who I am right now with this missing persons/demolition derby stunt. But I'm not Ben Thompson who rained down jump shots at Miami, not Ben Thompson ex-drunk, not Ben Thompson commercial & residential painter. Not Ben, Skip's brother. There is a fracture and I'll come up with names for this. All that will come later, because that's the way it's worked in the past.

      Much as I got Skip's message, I didn't see what specifically I could do with it. Then it came to me. Not like a plan, not step by step, but all at once like a safe falling on my head. I'm at the lawyers listening to the droning, and something inside me says: Go to Destin, place some missing-person ads, and enter the car in the Derby. By the time I had thought about it, had really thought about it, I'd already driven up.

      It's past midnight when the derby gets going. Hot, still over 90x, and the kind of muggy where you draw in breath, you feel moisture. There's me and 15 other cars, all big American models from the sixties and seventies. They're beat-up. I look out, I see an ocean of mud, exhaust, sunburns, and gray primer. Big Daddy calls the race. The crowd's restless and itching for the demolition. There were less accidents than usual in the preliminary races and the blood lust of Destin is high. You can feel it. They want to see pain. I look at this mass of sweating losers and I think: Why not them? These ugly, lousy people. Who would miss them? Why Skip with his kids and his wife and people who care whether he lived or died? I'm revving the Volvo in neutral, wearing a green metallic helmet they gave me, no pads or jacket. The gun is fired to start the derby and I slip the Volvo into first, circling the track. The car's rear end thuds, the sound of crushed and bent steel thunders all over the dirt. One after the other, you can hear the jolts. I'm feeling them, too. It's like bumper cars on a big scale. Before I can react, I'm backed into three times by this clown in an early seventies Duster.

      Destin, Florida, is a little clam-strip of land just south of the Panhandle. The locals call it the Redneck Riviera. Five years ago, when I was living in Sarasota, I had a painting job 20 miles north of Destin, at a condo development. Three weeks in heat so bad our plastic buckets melted, and we had to transfer the paint to metal buckets that blistered your hands. Three Saturdays running, my crew and I headed down to Destin and watched the races. The first three are midgets, the next six are homemade stocks, the last is the Derby. For fifty bucks, anyone with a car they don't mind destroying and who signs the waiver can enter. The last car running splits the entry fees with Big Daddy.
      On a slow night, there are about ten cars. A good summer night could draw twenty.

      A soundtrack clicks into my head and I'm laughing and crying and I'm in first gear, violating rule number one which is always, always back into your opponent to save your engine. I smash the guy in the Duster in the driver-side door and he bolts one way and then the other like JFK in the Zapruder film. Snap snap and he's gone down on the front seat.

      My first day in Destin I put on a disguise like a beat-up gold prospector, like Walter Huston in Treasure of the Sierra Madre. I sat in a chair on my motel patio and snapped four pictures of myself with a Polaroid One-Step-two facing dead on, one in left profile, one in right. Then I went inside to the turbocharged air-conditioning and watched these strange images-me, but not me, swell up on the paper.
      I scanned the two best pictures into my laptop, played cut-and-paste for a while until I came up with the ad. Across the top, it reads HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN? and then the photos. Beneath the photos it reads:

Last seen August 9th, in the Piggly Wiggly Parking Lot. He may be lost and disoriented. Do not approach him. Please call The Sea Breeze Motel, room #6, with any information. My brother is very sick and confused. Reward.