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Case doesn’t like this Frank.
She knows that the first man she navigated for wasn’t really the first. Frankenstein is a patchwork of corpses, just like the car he drives. She tried to ask Coach about the others once, but he wouldn’t tell her anything. He gave her a basset-hound look over those bent-up glasses of his and asked was she trying to imply that the races were a cheat. That was how Coach stayed in the game so long.
The old Frank didn’t treat her like she was stupid, at least. “I’m going to do my best to keep you as pretty as you are today,” he told her, the first time she climbed into the passenger seat next to him, and she was mad -- the old letch -- but she had learned control at cost, and so she straightened her spine without retort. “You see, you navigators,” Frank explained, tilting his head in a way she would later learn to interpret as a smile, “have to remain telegenic. Your career here won’t survive a crash, even if most of the rest of you does. When the going gets tough, I jet you out, understand?”
“That’s nice of you,” Case said.
Frank shrugged. “It’s a man’s world.”
She never found out if he was really disfigured or not. He was white, his voice revealed, and he was way older than her, came from out west, California maybe. He wasn’t the original, but he never took off the mask in front of her, not once. That Frank followed the rules better than the one she’s got now. He didn’t talk to the other drivers. He didn’t throw shit out the windows. He just drove, drove like a maniac.
He was right about the navigators, too, once she thought about it. At twenty-eight, Grimm’s girl Melissa was the oldest of them. She was still with him when Case started, only because Grimm insisted on her -- and only because the burn scars stopped at her neck.
“Do you blame him?” Case asked her once on the bus, touching the shoulder red and wrinkled as a newborn.
“Fuck that,” Melissa said. “Not if he gets me out of here. On that day, I love that ugly pendejo, believe me.”
But Grimm lost the next race in a spectacular spinout, and that was the end of Melissa. Case wonders if she’s dead now or what.
Frankenstein has won four in his career. Case was with the old Frank for the last two.
It’s not really much to be proud of. All she does is point out what’s obvious in this video game they’re playing.
Sometimes in the middle of a race, she thinks about sex. She remembers being in high school and having nowhere to go but boys’ cars. Gas was expensive, so they didn't go drive far. It was all empty lots, dead streets and dead-end roads. She never made love to a man while he was driving. This new Frank, the British guy -- when they are going fastest, she thinks about just swinging her leg over onto his lap, grinding down onto him, her tits in his face. Being in the driver’s seat is always better than riding shotgun.
She could crash them both.
He doesn’t deserve her, though -- that’s the thing. He’s not even so good-looking, with his tight-ass mouth and hatchet face, the receding hairline he must think he can disguise with a close cut. Case knows she’s only obsessing about jumping her driver because she wishes she’d done it to the old Frank -- a high-speed b.j. at least. The old Frank rated better than what she’d given him. He ought to have been allowed to win something.
“Hang tough,” he would always tell her as they swung around the last curve to begin the second lap of a race, no matter how they were placed. One time, he sort of patted her arm. That was as encouraging as he got. He never talked about any real victory ahead.
She thinks about him at night in her bunk and knows that what she did was wrong. He was kind to her, and she sold him out to Hennessey. This is what she has learned in prison: Don’t be soft. Do your own time -- but only if you have to. Other people don’t matter.
It makes her feel sick, remembering, but she remembers him fondly, the mouthless man in the driver’s seat, cool slow humor in his disembodied voice. He was a death’s head animated by only two things -- the car and her.
This new guy is a damn fine racer, and OK, there’s something more to him. He’s got something that Coach and Lists and Gunner and even some of the other drivers don’t have anymore. This new Frank doesn’t give a shit about her, and nothing’s a joke to him. He has his eyes on the prize.
Case is sorry. She’s still alive when she could be dead a half-a-dozen times over -- how could she not be sorry? And she would do it again. As long as they keep her from driving out of here herself, she’s got to wait on Hennessey. She's just waiting for a chance to do it again.
She has her eyes on the prize, too.
FIN.