JEFFREY WEBB - CLUTCH

Jeffrey Webb is a teacher and writer from Charleston, West Virginia. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from West Virginia Wesleyan College. His stories and poems have appeared in such publications as The Pikeville Review, Red Mud Review, and The Charleston Anvil. He has also contributed to the blog at Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

CLUTCH
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         Randell played linebacker in high school. Now, he had nothing left from his playing days but a limp and a few fading memories of past glory. He thought about those fading memories as he ran a scarred hand over the hood of the car as if he were running a hand over the curves of a lover’s body. Like the ad said, it was a ’69 Chevelle, painted black on the outside, white leather seats on the inside, and a 396-engine that roared like a caged panther when it started up. In the June sun, the car, over forty years old, shined without a scratch. Just as perfect as the day it came off the line.
              “You want ten thousand for her,” Randell said.
            “That’s right. Ten thousand,” Cooley, an old man with older hands, garbled between spits of sunflower seeds. “Put a lot of work into her.”
            Between the pile of lawnmower parts in the garage and a broken down Volkswagon in the front yard, the Chevelle was the nicest thing Cooley owned. From the looks of it, the Chevelle could have been the nicest thing anybody owned up that hollow.
            “I can get you five,” Randell said. “Can’t do any more than that.”
            “Sorry. Not taking anything less than ten for her.”
            Randell looked at Cooley’s hands. They were stained black with grease and oil. The man was pushing sixty, and it was clear those hands had been black every day of his life.  
            Randell looked at the car. “You sure did put a lot of work into her.”
            “Sure did,” Cooley said. “Got her from a police auction couple years back. Put in a new engine. Gave her a new paint job. I’ll tell you this: she looks a hell of a lot better now than when I first got her.”
            A coal truck hammered by on the road beside them, vanishing quickly around a bend in the road and leaving only its trail of black exhaust hanging in the air.
       “I don’t know. Sometimes I like things a little beat up,” Randell said, remembering his old coach saying that scratches and scars earned on the field were nothing but war wounds to be worn with pride. “Ten thousand, huh?”
            “Ten thousand,” Cooley said, spitting. “She’s a classic.”
            Randell felt the hood one more time, the smoothness of it, and he sighed.
                                                                      #
            Randell sighed as he gripped his utility knife and bent over and cut straight down the middle of a cardboard box packed full of canned vegetables. Sometimes he wondered if the knife’s retractable blade would be enough to cut off a finger of his, wondered how much that would hurt, if it would even hurt at all. The blood shooting out, spraying across the store’s grimy tile floor and the shelves. Underneath the flickering fluorescent lights, Randell pushed the thought into the back of his mind and hoisted the cardboard box up off that floor, cradled the box in one arm against his body and lifted, one by one, cans from the box to the store shelf.
                                                                        #
          “Can I get you anything else?” Pearl asked. She had a nice smile and big breasts. Then again, most 250-pound women do have big breasts.
            “Yeah,” Randell said. “You could get me a few thousand dollars.”
            “Darling,” she said, “my ass may be fat, but do I look like a Kardashian?”
            “Another whiskey, then.”
            The bar only sold beer. Going there almost every night after his shift at the Fas Chek, Randell knew that. Pearl cracked open a Budweiser and set it on the counter in front of him. Seeing as how he was only the third customer to walk into the Hog Trough that night—the other two customers a couple of rednecks splitting a bucket of Miller Lite and breaking their third game of pool—he had her full attention.
            The Springsteen song on the jukebox cut off. After counting out a dollar in quarters, Randell slid off his stool and staggered over to the machine. He slipped the quarters into the slot, punched in his selection. “Dancing in the Dark” kicked on for the fourth time that night, and Randell returned to his beer.
            “What’s with you and this song?” Pearl asked.
            “It’s my favorite song.”
            “I’ve never heard you play it before, and you come in here tonight and practically have it on repeat.”
            “Song’s been on my mind all day.”
“Must be a girl.”
            Randell smiled, tired, smiled like he’d rather be doing anything but smiling.
            “Come on,” Pearl said. “It’s a girl, isn’t it?”
            “Virginia Beach,” Randell said. He took a drink, shifted on his stool to get his ass more comfortable. He kept his eyes on the scars of his hand. “Virginia Beach, summer of ’84. Maybe ’85. Sometime around then. Drove eight hours in my Chevelle with my girl by my side to see Springsteen on his Born in the USA tour. God, that was a good show.”
            “I bet.”
            “Yeah,” Randell said, remembering that night even more, remembering how his girl got pulled up out of the audience by Springsteen and danced onstage with the Boss during “Dancing in the Dark.” The concert was outside, the air full of heat and salt, the girl’s cherry-colored ponytail bouncing with every movement of her body. “That was a long time ago, though.”
            “The eighties weren’t that long ago.”
            Randell remembered another night, the Chevelle rumbling to a stop beneath three wooden crosses on a hilltop clearing overlooking the interstate. Randell had shut off the lights, left himself sitting in darkness between Jesus and the thief on the right, and he remembered climbing into the backseat, climbing on top, the smell of gasoline, grunting and sweating and their hot bodies sticking to the leather seats.
“Feels like a long time ago.” Randell traced a finger over his scars, the white lines, some more faded than others, etched across his skin.
             Pearl leaned in close to see Randell’s hand.
            “I hope you don’t mind me asking,” she said, “but I’ve always wondered. Did it hurt when you got those? Those scars?”
“The stiches hurt more than the glass.” Randell took another drink, swallowed hard. “Got my first stint inside for these scars.”
               “And does that got anything to do with that girl, too?”
          Before Randell could answer, one of the rednecks from the pool table lumbered over and asked Pearl for change for a dollar. As she opened up the register drawer, Randell reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out his wallet, Max Weinberg’s drums pounding in his chest and the alcohol pounding in his head. Randell tossed cash on the counter, and, by the time the bartender gave the redneck change and turned around, “Dancing in the Dark” had stopped playing yet again and Randell was gone.
                                                                           #
            The house was dark, and the gray light of the moon struggled to penetrate the hollow, the trees and mountains running interference. Randell took the last bus of the night to the mouth of the hollow and had walked from there the three miles to the house, stood across the two-lane road and watched for any sign of movement inside, but there was none. No traffic passed as he crossed the road, made his way across the yard, made his way past the broken down Volkswagon and the garage full of lawnmower parts. He ran a hand over the Chevelle, like he had earlier in the day, from the trunk up to the roof and down to the hood, and then, reaching into the back pocket of his jeans, he pulled out his utility knife, pushed up the blade.
            Randell listened for any sounds, listened for any cars coming down the road. He heard nothing.
            With one long cut, from the Chevelle’s front to back, tail to sternum, Randell dug the knife’s blade deep into the paint, the metal-on-metal screech piercing the silence, and then he stepped back and admired what he had done, the scratch he had made. He turned, then, toward the house, limped up onto the porch.
           Slowly, Randell opened the screen door, which dangled loose by one hinge, and tried the handle of the front door. Locked. He took a step back, considered the windows for a moment, scanned the house to see which could be the easiest to break and climb into, but then he changed his mind and returned to the door, pounded a fist hard against it. When no one answered, he continued pounding. Finally, after about a minute, a light flicked on inside, locks clicked, and the door opened.
            “Jesus,” Cooley said, rubbing his eyes as he stood there in nothing but white briefs and a matching t-shirt. “What the hell are you doing here? You know how late it is?”
            “Your car,” Randell said. “The Chevelle. I think it’s gone down in price.”
            “What the fuck you talking about?”
            Without hesitation, Randell shoved the man backward, sent him crashing into a coffee table littered with beer bottles, the glass clanking as the bottles fell to the floor. Cooley tried to stand, but Randell pounced on him in an instant, took Cooley all the way to the floor and squeezed hard on his throat.
            Cooley, unable to do much to fight back, stretched out a shaky hand and gripped the neck of a beer bottle. He raised it and brought it down onto Randell’s head with a thud, the bottle not breaking. Randell looked at the bottle, then at Cooley, and then back at the bottle. In a quick motion, Randell jerked the bottle out of Cooley’s hand and tossed it across the room, sent it flying into the painting of an old man saying grace that hung on the wall.
            As punishment for Cooley fighting back, Randell pummeled a fist over and over into the man’s face, blood gushing, exploding, out of Cooley’s nose as if Randell were smashing tomatoes against the ground. By the time Randell stopped himself, stood up from the puddle of a man he left on the floor, Cooley could only lay there, unable to move, breathing as if he were a flat tire slowly leaking its last bit of air.
            “Keys,” Randell said, glancing around the mess of a room. “Where are your keys to the Chevelle?”
            No response.
            Randell flipped over couch cushions stained with cigarette ash. He stepped on beer bottles, tripped over boots and VHS tapes and a baseball bat as he tore through the place, searching for those keys. Finally, after several minutes, he found them in the kitchen, hidden in an old coffee can sitting next to a microwave so out-of-date it didn’t even have a popcorn button. There were three sets of keys in the can. Randell grabbed all three.
                                                                     #
            The hollow’s road—a continuous stream of potholes and roadkill—twisted and turned through the mountain valley, Randell navigating those turns at sixty miles an hour with the high beams of the Chevelle lighting his way. His hands, with knuckles sore and bloodied, clenched the wheel with gorilla strength. At the mouth of the hollow, the road bled into Old Route 60. Driving east, Randell gunned the car past the Second Chance Baptist Church, past the abandoned apartment building condemned for once housing a meth lab. Coming up on a straight stretch, he stomped the gas pedal to the floor, the panther roaring, and steered onward into the night.
                                                                         #
            The headlights lit up the field with a yellow haze pushing through the dark. Leaving the Chevelle parked at the gate, Randell stepped out of the car and walked to the field’s fifty, or, at least, to where he thought the fifty was, a goalpost way behind him and a goalpost way in front of him. He looked to the bleachers. The same wooden bleachers with the same initials and cuss words carved into them that had always been there and would always be there. In the moonlight, he saw where glass had been broken out in the pressbox, a collection of smashed beer cans by the bench on the home sideline. It’d been years since Randell played on that field, years since anybody played on that field.
             Even the grass was gone, most of the field nothing but dirt and dust.
Randell stomped a foot against the hard earth and watched as a cloud of soot drift into the air. He clapped his hands, hunched his shoulders, and crouched into a football stance with his hands out, legs spread shoulder-width apart. Used to be that the crowd would be cheering for a stop right about this time, Randell looking toward his coach pacing the sidelines, looking for any last second calls, then looking to his teammates, the strong side linebacker on one side and the weak side on the other. He’d look at the other team, over the line of scrimmage, stare the quarterback directly in the eyes.
            The center snapped the ball. Offensive line shifted into a run block, and Randell watched the quarterback hand the ball off to the fullback. The 300-pound senior barged through a hole in the middle of the defensive line, coming right at Randell, and Randell had nothing else to do but plant himself on that ground, to get as low as possible. When the fullback tried to run him over, Randell dug his toes into the ground and wrapped his arms around the fullback’s gut and their pads banged together and the two of them went to the ground together. It was a stop.
            “Alright,” Randell said to nobody because nobody was there, “we got to do that again. Third down, boys. Don’t let them have it. Play hard and get pressure.”
            He clapped his hands to break the imaginary huddle, crouched into his stance again, knew it was going to be a pass.
            He looked over to the bleachers, could still picture the seats full of people holding signs, ringing cowbells, waving pom-poms. He looked to the sidelines, the row of cheerleaders with their backs to the field, shouting at the top of their lungs in order to get the crowd shouting at the top of theirs.
            Randell knew which one she was, even if her back was to the field, even if it was night and she was thirty yards away. He knew her cherry-colored ponytail, the way it bounced when she bounced, the way her fingers tickled the air. He watched her until she looked over her shoulder at him, shouted his name, and then he knew what he had to do.
            When the ball was snapped, Randell rushed forward, charging past the center. Doing it on that dirt field, with a limp in his leg, he moved slower than he did in the past, but he remembered his moves, the way he spun his hips to the left to get around the running back, his hands up high to obscure the quarterback’s vision, and then diving, falling on top of the quarterback and recording a sack.
            They said his name over the loudspeaker. The crowd cheered.
            Like he said to Pearl at the Hog Trough: that was a long time ago.
            Now, nobody cheered as he picked himself up off the field. He looked to the sidelines, saw no cheerleaders, no teammates, no coaches. The scoreboard at the south end of the field—lit up that long ago night with points for both teams—was gone, probably stolen and parts of it sold off for petty cash.
           Randell limped off the field, his shadow cast large across the field as he moved toward the Chevelle’s bright headlights. At the car, he took one last look at it all: the bleachers, the sidelines, the dirt and dust, the cheerleaders. The girl with the cherry-colored ponytail, cheering and saying his name. Over and over she said it, smiling.
Randell pushed all that into the back of his mind, looked back over his shoulder at the Chevelle humming in the night.
                Randell remembered going to the bar that night back in the summer of ’84 or ’85, that night of the Springsteen concert in Virginia Beach. The bar was a block back from the beach, close enough to still hear the waves if a person listened for them, some place that had probably been torn down and replaced with a parking lot. It had been packed with people drunk from the show, people getting drunker with drink specials and shots. She tried to explain it to him later, tried to tell Randell that while he was in the bathroom pissing out the beer that the guy just came up and started talking to her, had recognized her from dancing onstage with the Boss. She tried to tell Randell she was too drunk to know any better, that before she could stop herself she was out in the parking lot with the guy, his cock in her mouth. Randell found them in the cab of the guy’s truck, didn’t hear the waves crashing over on the beach as he yanked her ass out of there and the guy following with a tire iron, hitting Randell upside the head with that tire iron. Randell saw black, saw black and then saw red. He grabbed the guy’s hair and put his head through the window of the Chevelle, Randell cutting his hand all to shit in the process. When it was over and Randell decided the guy had enough, or maybe it was Randell who had enough, the girl said, “You always do this, Randell. You always fucking do this.”
            Randell remembered her saying to him that night, a police siren growing louder and louder, her saying to him, “You hear that? You know what that sound is? They’re playing our song. That’s our fucking song.”
Randell remembered the cops taking him to the emergency room before they took him to the police station. Randell remembered the stitches hurt more than the glass.
            With his back to the field, his back to all those memories, Randell sent a fist plowing through the driver’s side window of the Chevelle, the glass breaking and stabbing his hand. He looked at the broken window, looked at the cut he’d made down the side of the car an hour earlier, and he smiled.
                                                                           #
            As he drove, blood dripped in tears onto the white leather seats. Little bits of glass hid nestled in his skin, but he didn’t bother to pick the bits out. He pushed the pain and the glass and the bleeding hand out of his mind and sped down the empty road, driving as if the earth were collapsing behind him. When his eyes drifted up to the rearview mirror, he thought he saw them, the young lovers, saw himself on top of her in the backseat, pressing into her, holding her, catching his breath over top of her, his head hung as if he were in prayer.
            He thought he saw them in that rearview mirror, bathed in the red and blue flashing lights of a police car.
Randell gunned the engine. The Chevelle charged onward into the night.