The Crash1953
Part two
Author’s Note:
In Part One of “The Crash” the story’s protagonist, Gus, joined forces with his father to build a motorless race car to compete in the Warrington, Massachusetts, First Annual Soap Box Derby. As they neared completion of their father-son project, a crisis struck the family in the form of the intensifying battle to free or execute Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, suspected of conspiring to deliver data about U.S. nuclear-bomb technology to the Soviet Union. Gus’s father, a former member of the Communist Party, became increasingly involved in the pre-execution crisis, leaving Gus desperate to finish the car before race day.
Some ThriveNYC readers may recall that Part One of “The Crash” was set in the first person, with Gus as the narrator. As a work in progress, I have taken the liberty of changing the narrative voice from first person to what I call a “close” or “intimate” third person. So, although the story is still told from Gus’s point of view, complete with his innermost thoughts and perceptions, Gus is no longer an “I”; rather, Gus is now a “he,” or a “Gus.” I am hoping the distance rendered by this shift in narrative POV will lend a note of objectivity to the proceedings without destroying the personal point of view afforded by first-person narratives.
I and the ThriveNYC staff would be curious to hear any reader responses to this shift.
To read part one, go to www.thrivenyc.com/nyc22/thecrash1953.html
C.D.
By CHARLES DEGELMAN
The soap-box-derby race course was laid out on Water Tower Hill, the steepest, straightest piece of road in town. In New England it is no easy feat to find a quarter-mile stretch of road that runs in a straight line, uphill, downhill, or on level ground. Most of the roads in Warrington, Massachusetts, were paved-over carriage roads or farming and hunting trails that followed the path of least resistance through the rolling woodlands and pastures. But Warrington was growing. With the growth came a demand for more water. A few years before, the town had erected a water tower on the highest hill on the poor side of town. In order to build the tower, the public-works department had cut a road straight up the hill for the trucks that would carry the great, curved sheets of steel to the point of assembly.
One gray, blustery April day, Gus straddled his bike and headed up Water Tower Hill. He wanted to see what it was going to be like to run his newly built soap-box racer down that grade. Gus and his friends had all been up Water Tower Hill with their bikes, but they couldn’t make it over the ridge to the lake, so it wasn’t a heavily traveled kid route. Gus could pedal two-thirds of the way up, but the top third was too steep. He couldn’t keep enough momentum going, even when he stood on the pedals and cut back and forth across the road. He had to walk, pushing his bike beside him. He wondered how the construction trucks, carrying those huge metal plates for the water tower, had made it.
At the top of Water Tower Hill Gus turned and looked down the road that would become the track on race day. He was out of breath; his heart pounded in his chest and ears. The road fell away quickly and narrowed into a thin ribbon that played itself out across the pasture below. He stood there alone in the April wind for a long time, exhorting himself to take the plunge. Did he dare? What if he skidded on the gravel? Like all kids who lived on bikes, he could easily recall how it felt to pick sand and gravel out of scraped and bloody arms, elbows, and knees. But he had to practice, didn’t he? So he would be ready for the real thing.
He decided to let fate take its hand: The next time a crow cawed, he would shove off down the precipitous slope. The next time a cloud passed in front of the sun, he would do it. The next time ...
“Chicken,” he uttered out loud. Gus knew that would do it. He couldn’t stand being considered a chicken, especially by himself. Resigned to his fate, he pointed the spindly front wheel of the bicycle downhill and took the plunge.
The bike quickly gathered speed on the first pitch. The wind in Gus’s ears rose from a flutter to a whistle to a howl. The scenery began to blur and his arms ached with the effort it took to keep the front wheel pointed precisely downhill. One wobble on this gravel and it would be all over. The wind roared in his ears like thunder and buffeted at his chest. He flew down the final pitch and blasted past the muddy foundations and roughed-out framing of the new tract homes being put up on the pastureland at the foot of the hill. Tears whipped back from his eyes. The howl of the wind began to die down and he let himself relax. He didn’t have to pedal once, all the way to the main road.
When Gus stopped at the intersection, his arms and legs felt as if they were going to fall off, and a funny buzzing nattered in his ears. The taunting voice had disappeared; Gus had proved he was no chicken, that was for sure. He promised he would never coast down Water Tower Hill again, at least not on two wheels. In his own sturdy, four-wheel race car, well, that would be different.
Back home, when Gus got there, his old man was still totally caught up in the plight of those two supposed Communist spies, the Rosenbergs. Gus couldn’t understand what they had done wrong — if they had done anything wrong — and, according to his father and his father’s friends, a case against the couple had been built up in court by cowardly and crazy people — turncoat “friends” of the Rosenbergs who would say anything to stay off McCarthy’s blacklist, or simply to please “the authorities,” whoever they were. The Rosenbergs were about to be executed any day now.
Gus’s schoolmates took to taunting him, saying the Commies were going to get “fried in the chair,” that “they’d get what they deserved.” It all seemed crazy and weird to Gus, but very far away. He wanted his old man to stop being so upset about the whole thing and help him finish his soapbox racer before it was too late.
After failing to coax his father off the couch and out of his sadness, Gus announced: “Hey, Pop, I’m going downstairs to finish up the racer myself. See ya.” He plunged down the stairs to the basement and began making chaotic noises with hammers, drills, and sanders. He didn’t care if his old man helped him finish or not. He was going to have that car ready by race day.
Gus’s independent ploy succeeded: Depressed though he might be, his old man wouldn’t let the brainchild of his genius slip through his hands. Down the stairs he came, brusque and grumbling -- but in that one night they tightened the steering, cut and mounted the slab of tire tread onto the foot of the oh-so-clever brake mechanism his father had devised, and painted the car’s fuselage a bright fire-engine red. After his old man went back upstairs, Gus opened a can of yellow enamel and hand-wrote his name just below the rim of the cockpit, the way he had seen it done on the soap-box racers that had made it to Akron, Ohio, for the Nationals. The yellow lettering ran onto the still-wet red enamel, but he wiped each letter with infinite care, tidying them back with a turpentine-soaked rag.
It seemed to Gus as if half the town had turned out on race day. At least all the guys his age and their dads were on hand to check out each other’s cars or to feel dumb and out of it because they hadn’t built a racer. Gus felt very important as he unloaded the bright red machine from the trunk of his parents’ Henry J., a lemon of a car that the Kaiser automobile company had come out with the year before. It was supposed to be a people’s car, a practical, no-frills, down-to-earth vehicle for the working guy, but in reality it was a piece of junk that began to overheat and fall apart about a month after his old man brought it home. It was embarrassing to own one. But there they were, and Gus knew he had one of the best-built soap-box racers on Water Tower Hill, so the heck with the Henry J.
Each entrant had to measure and weigh his vehicle in front of the authorities to make sure it fell within the official Soap Box Derby regulations for size and weight. As they jockeyed the racer onto the scale, Gus’s father was busy wisecracking to the other dads about how good the car was. Gus couldn’t tell if his old man pulled too hard, or if Gus stumbled on the edge of the scale, but somehow, he plunged forward and smashed his nose on the car’s plywood backrest.
Gus recovered quickly and yanked his end of the racer off the scales, but his nose stung and the pain made him feel half-blind. A mist formed in front of his eyes. How was he going to see his way down the hill? Gus was terrified, but he kept the pain and fear to himself as they loaded the racer into the back of Johnny Contadini’s dad’s plumbing truck and whined slowly up Water Tower Hill in first gear.
Gus’s old man asked how “we” were doing, and Gus said he was doing just fine but he couldn’t understand what “we” had to do with it: He — Gus — was going to take the plunge down Water Tower Hill on his own with a smashed-in nose and mist in front of his eyes. He hunched his shoulders, and father and son made the rest of the trip in silence.
A quartet of dads hefted the racer down from the truck and rolled it to the starting line for a practice run. Gus had borrowed a football helmet from his next-door neighbor, Franny (for Francis Xavier) Carpenter. Our hero pulled on the helmet and a pair of leather gloves his mom had bought him specially for the race, but he still felt shaky and blinded from the fall on the weight scale.
But the top of the hill and the starting line was crawling with kids and their dads, and Gus wasn’t going to let anybody see how scared he was. With his old man holding onto the rear axle, Gus wiggled down into the confines of the cockpit. The car was pointed straight down the fall line of Water Tower Hill with two burly adults holding onto the rear axle. The race marshal nodded and dropped a red flag, the two burly men let go, and Gus commenced to roll down Water Tower Hill on his practice run.
The racer began to roar on its hard, rubber-rimmed wheels as Gus and his car vibrated down the steep opening pitch. The car bounced madly over the asphalt, but Gus kept it on the course. After all, he had made it straight down Water Tower Hill on two wheels, hadn’t he? He knew he could make it easy on four, even if his nose was banged up and he couldn’t see. Then …
Snap!
In the midst of the noise and commotion, the steering cable parted company with its mounting bracket on the left side of the front axle and came whipping back across Gus’s helmet. The steering wheel went loose in his hands and he became a passenger as the car took a hard left off the road, leapt a ditch, plunged through a thicket of underbrush, and smacked into a telephone pole.
The next few moments were fragmented: Gus sat in the cockpit stunned, listening to the silence. He may have hit his head on the steering wheel, but he couldn’t recall any such blow.
He heard voices, but they sounded far away, people asking if he was all right.
A lady’s voice was crying: “Oh my God, oh my God.”
His father arrived out of breath.
Gus pushed himself up out of the car and crawled through the underbrush onto the asphalt. Everybody was staring at him. He felt private and embarrassed, as if they had caught him going to the bathroom, so he turned around and went back to his racer. Silently, he pushed through the men and boys that surrounded the car and picked up the loose end of the steering cable.
“Are you all right?” his father asked.
Gus didn’t answer.
His father looked Gus up and down, turned him around, and dusted him off.
“Look at that,” his father said to the other men, pointing to the front of the car. “Not a scratch.”
Gus coiled the cable up, stuffed it into the cockpit, and began to drag the soap box back onto the road.
One of the burly men slapped him on the back of his helmet and said: “Attaboy.”
Gus heard cheering and applause as more faceless men pulled his racer back up the hill. As he re-tied the cable to the steering bracket, Gus’s father explained to the assembled males that this was rudder-control cable for airplanes, the real thing; it hadn’t broken, you see, it had just come untied from the turnbuckle.
The practice session was over. It was time for the real thing. One car after another rolled away from the line and disappeared over the crest of the hill, only to reappear long moments later, played out at the bottom of the hill. Most of the cars were raggedy little things with wobbly wheels, but they all made it safely down the hill in one swoop.
Gus sat on his car, speaking to no one until it was his turn to race.
His father grabbed him by the shoulders and looked into his eyes. “You sure you want to go through with this?” he asked.
“If you don’t know, how am I supposed to?” Anger clouded Gus’s brow. Before his old man could answer, Gus climbed into the racer, settled himself into the seat, and pushed against the brakes until his feet burned. “If my brake cable snaps . . .” He didn’t allow himself to finish the sentence. If his equipment failed him a second time, what would happen? What if he had been traveling faster, near the bottom of the hill, when the cable had snapped. Who would take the blame? Who would decide what to do next?
The questions raced through his head until another person inside Gus raised his hand in the air and — for the second time — the burly men pushed him to the start line. The flag dropped, the burly men let go, and Water Tower Hill began to pull him downward. The rising sound of the wind formed a tube that separated Gus from the people and the foliage at the side of the road; they began to blur into elongated splashes of color as he gathered momentum. He was alone with the sound of his car and the rattling vibration of the car at speed. The telephone pole hung over him, frozen for an instant in stop-action against the sky.
Something bitter rose up in Gus’s mouth, something that, later in life, he might recognize as anger, or defiance. He didn’t remember feeling anything at the time, but he hit the brakes. Not for long. Just enough to make an impact in his forward momentum. When he let the brakes off, he could see the finish line, still far away, but crystal clear.
Now he was in charge. He felt strong, excited. His body strained forward, urging his handicapped racer down the course. He whipped out onto the flats past the newborn suburban homes, and flashed across the finish line. He could hear the cheers as he gave the brakes a second push — after he had crossed the finish line.
Gus came in second, just behind Johnny Contadini. Johnny’s dad had slipped a flywheel from an old Chevy underneath the seat of his kid’s racer before the little bastard flew down the hill. The added weight gave Johnny the momentum he needed to rattle into first place. Two weeks later, Johnny Contadini and his dad went on as local champs to the Soap Box Derby Nationals in Akron, Ohio. Johnny finished 137th and Gus stacked his own racer on its nose out of the way at the back of the garage.
Two weeks later, on a Sunday, the Rosenbergs were electrocuted at Sing Sing. They said that Ethel Rosenberg didn’t die right away. They had to give her two or three extra jolts of electricity to kill her.
Gus’s father never got the job at his friend’s factory. The factory’s first contracts were for servo motors for the U.S. government. Gus’s father couldn’t get a security clearance for government work because he had been a Communist back in the 1930s. He had to look for work in Boston, which was fine with him, because that’s where all his friends were, but he never did land a steady job. And Gus, he never told anybody that he had hit the brakes on that second run down Water Tower Hill. No. He kept that to himself.
Charles Degelman is a writer and editor living in Los Angeles. He is currently working on a novel set inside the anti-war movement of the 1960s.
