Penny was shiny, and her face was round, and he saw it all the times they were not together too, and those times were many for she took her job seriously and worked long hours to get the spelling and syntax correct so a crew could translate her words into pictures and sound effects and thumping bass music and the voice of a narrator like God over your shoulder. She worked long hours but sometimes she could find the time to talk to him on her mobile phone, and sometimes every once in a while they could set up a meeting, and she could drive there, and he could go there, and they would recognize each other and talk for an hour or talk for hours, and when they met it wasn't so much about the talking, it was mostly about the looking, which they did in many ways and directions.

You have to

That's what you say

As if you can't get a grip on anything

On their first getaway vacation after the wedding they went to the town beneath the mountains and stayed at a hotel in the shadow of the rock and snowfields. When they stood on the rail of the walkway by their room door they looked down at their parking place below and up at the peak that held snow on top and clouds and hid the sun when the afternoon was not even over with.

Walker brought their bags up to the room and unpacked their things into the drawers under the TV set. After that, he just wanted to sit near the balcony rail and look up at the great mountain, and he was peaceful with no other duties, but Penny asked if he wanted to go driving in the mountains and he knew her enough even at that early stage in their marriage to know that this was the thing that she really wanted, really really really.

He drove her to the car rental place and she rented the new model that she needed to try out so badly, the Sportster Roadwhip 87 that looked so beautiful, like a song in steel with the mountain reflected in its ice blue sides and she knew that it would give her a ride worth taking, and maybe worth writing about for an upcoming commercial message.

She got directions from the people at the rental car place. They told her how to go up in the mountain where the roads turned and twisted beneath you. They gave her a map but when she drove away she rolled the map up and threw it in the back seat because she wasn't driving to check a map or to any place really that you could draw on a map.

She was alone now with the air and the car and the mountain all around her. The curves and the boulders played checkers on her face as she paid the maximum attention thru her windshield and the white line down the middle. The roads were straight and then they curved back and forth, switching her to the right, switching her to the left, and with such switches and the trees and the guardrails to smooth she took to the air like a bird learning to fly.

She knew that she was driving towards a specific thing, she knew where she was going and it was no place on a map; she had set her true destination purely on a state of being. She knew that she was driving to her dream of a feeling, and how she could find it in the roads that she stroked, she could find it here if anywhere on the curving stretches that she imagined so well and wrote with words at work for commercials.

But she wasn't going to get there. The roads did their thing and the Roadwhip did its thing but she couldn't quite get there, she just couldn't quite get there. She didn't know mountain driving; that was the first thing. She didn't know driving up so far or the limits of an open road and so few fellow drivers. She looked down at her feet pumping and at her speed dial going not as fast as she imagined and she missed the sight of the light pulsing thru the tall trees above her head, the very thing on the red of her eyes that could seal her brain to the trance, to the daydream, to where she wanted to go, to be. She missed the mighty boulders because there was a twitch to the steering wheel that disappointed her. She missed the wind's knowing tales because she was searching thru a radio dial of stations she all hated.

She drove the whole day but she didn't get to her dream of the feeling. Instead she filled her head with a laundry list of inadequacies. She repeated them again and again like a rhythm section so she wouldn't forget them if she wanted to write them down in a letter or an essay and they played their repetition on the top where the dirty snow was shoveled off the asphalt and they played their repetition on the way back down the road and its winding.

Walker, meanwhile, stretched his legs. There was a little far-off lane and he tried his way with some tiny walking in order to get even better views of the mountain up there so big.

In front

Of every house

The car

Walker was a racecar driver. He was a master behind the wheel of his Speedster 48. He knew how to cling to the turns of the racetrack road until the seat melted into his groin; he knew the gravity on his head, the speed that made a pull, that made a power, that shook him motionless.

The Indy 500 came to town. It came to the same town that it came to every year, and that town was Indianapolis. The race was today and there were shouts and there were haircuts, there was beer in the morning and sun in the afternoon sky.

Walker was the odds-on favorite. He led all the others in the first lap around the pole. He had his helmet and he was a newly married man and he had a smile and a tall stance like Gary Cooper and some wrinkles on his forehead from worrying too much about last place. If you didn't know him then, you would know him in a second.

That day was also the day of the premier of the new ad series that Penny Driver wrote about her newly married newly man. This was the series of ads that told the life of Walker from his birth in the wood of the grandstands up to his victory at the Indy 500. The famous actor Brutus Terrain portrayed Walker in the ads. He played Walker driving inside his miniature Junior Speedster, driving in his familiar Speedster 48, at ease in his pit stop and racing to an appointment.

At the cottage family home, far away from the Indianapolis speedway, Penny's father licked the gold star and prepared to place it on the timeline. He prepared to place it on the milestone marked, "Premier of first globally successful ad series." Penny's mother looked on.

Penny was also far from Indianapolis and the flags of the raceway. Penny sat at home with her laptop computer. She sat in the living room with the big screen TV in front of her. She had a deadline for a new ad campaign that she was writing and had to work out her ideas while the Indy 500 played on the exploding definition screen. She watched her series of commercials go by as the Indy race raged on and paused for advertising. She watched her series of commercials as if she had not made them months ago, as if she was just anybody, as if she was seeing them fresh, as if she was just a face in the crowd in the background TV test audience of everyone. She was impressed with her ads, as impressed as anybody would be. She thought hard about the models of cars depicted in each segment of advertising, and she wondered if she should consider a purchase sometime soon.

Walker nearly won the Indy 500 that year. He was in first place up to the last lap. His crew was crack – they changed his tires as if they were tossing pizza crust dough for expert thin crust. They had studied hard the geometry of the gas pump to save all unnecessary motion in moving in to refuel the Speedster. He had it made, he had his lead, but Knock was not far behind, and then there was the last lap, and the ball. The ball was something that wasn't in the commercial of his life. It was not in the commercial of his life on TV, but it was in the real life he had to live for himself this very day, and on this racetrack of racetracks.

The ball bounced as if it came with its own dotted line, a round kid's ball with stripes like a distant planet, and he saw the bounce and he knew he had to keep his eyes on the curve and so he turned his attention left, and that wasn't good, because the problem came from the right. The problem was the kid in shorts who was chasing the ball, chasing the ball that got away across the roadway speedway, the kid chasing the ball so that the ball wouldn't be smashed, so a speeding racetrack car wouldn't pop it and his fun. The kid was chasing his ball to get it back, and it just had to happen that he had to chase it across the Indy speedway while Walker was in the lead and the first to get there with his speed.

Walker hit the kid full on. He saw the body and the blood paint a racing stripe across the hood and windshield of his Speedster 48. He slowed with the collision and Knock pulled around him to take the lead. Walker finished second, the kid's sneakers still hanging from a Pennzoil decal.

"There was nothing you could do about it," said Bubblespitz, his pit crew leader. "A kid chasing his ball on the Indy speedway was not meant to make it past natural selection."

The people got their money's worth; the race was swell entertainment. They had a good time whether they watched the race in the grandstands or at home on their TV. Penny watched it at home on her TV and missed the part about the boy that Walker hit, but they had instant replay so she could see it for herself. When they went to commercial interruption, the last ad in the Walker series played. That ad came out a little wrong because some would agree that the whole world changed with just that accident, the ball and the boy. In the ad, Walker (played by the actor Brutus Terrain) never has to deal with the racing stripe of blood, and he actually wins the Indy 500 and has a great moment, and buys the latest model "Rasala" car to take home with him for a victory lap around his own home driveway. That specific ad would not be shown again. It was a brave act of prediction, but it was just wrong.

Walker stood in the shadows in the victory celebration. He stood on the second highest platform, he and his Speedster 48, they both stood there for second place, but a hard long shadow from the opposing grandstands painted a stripe over the both of them, he and Speedster, so you could barely tell that they were there, you could barely tell that they were anywhere on your TV. It was just the shadow of a beam of the grandstand, but it covered him thru the entire joyous ceremony.

After the coverage, the TV news had a special about the new ad series about Walker, about his life. They talked about the new ad series that had premiered during all the innings of the Indy 500. Penny watched the news special at home. It was all a surprise and a jerk forward to her. Nobody had told her that such a show was in production; nobody told her or invited her and she didn't expect that such a show would be made, and wasn't prepared for its electrons at that moment. She hadn't heard anything about it and she stopped working on her new ad campaign because she had to pay attention.

The reporter was talking to Brutus Terrain. Terrain talked about the great honor it was for him to play the racecar driver Walker. "I've looked up to him for quite a while in my long career of playing many noisy people, and he is a quiet one and I very much enjoyed the chance to play him and to work with the great director Ernest Tubbs and the whole crew necessary for such an outstanding production."

The reporter asked him about the things that influenced his acting style. Brutus Terrain said, "I watched lots of race coverage and studied the style of Walker very intently. He is a very inspirational figure and I still hope he wins the next race he races, even tho he failed today, and that is certain."

The show went on, with Brutus Terrain talking and the reporter talking, but nobody mentioned Penny Driver, nobody said her name. Nobody said the name of Penny Driver, they did not say it once, they did not say it twice, they simply did not say it. They did not say that she was the writer, that she was the one who had the conception and wrote all the sentences and oversaw all the storyboards and shepherded the whole project into production, and she was even the one who suggested Brutus Terrain to play the part of Walker in the series, if they could convince the great actor to spend his act of time in such an advertising. And now he, Brutus Terrain, was taking all the credit and she was getting none of the credit.

She lost all her powers of concentration. She could not proceed with her work on the new ad campaign. She had to leave her living room for a drive thru the traffic congestion on that grey day while Walker took the plane back home alone with the shadow still on him.

Waves are nearly visible

In the wind

Of the steel shark

The headline the next day in Walker's hometown paper, the Minneapolis Argus, said it all: "Dumb Kid ruins Walker's chances," and the lead editorial blamed Walker's mishap on pedestrians everywhere and walking in general. It said, in part, "Walkers everywhere should be ashamed of what one of their kind did to spoil Walker's chances at the finish line yesterday. And if some of them have to pay for it with their lives, it will be no surprise to the editors of this well-respected publication."

Walker kept seeing the ball bounce across the speedway with its path like waves. The slow descent to that bounce up fast and the slow down over the crest and down again all the way to the trough and the fast bounce back up to the gentle rounding crest back down. And then the boy's face just for a second, like a ball itself without its features for it was too fast for noses and mouths and throats and eyes, and then the brakes and then the body hitting and the turning and rolling like his wheels and the sound too loud for sound.

He had been driving everywhere, for all his life, even if he only had to cross the street he got in his car first, but now every time he sat down in the seat and fastened his seatbelt he'd see the ball bouncing and that boy ball face for a second, that startled face at 150 miles per hour, that face that was just a turn with two eyes and a wide open mouth like a black spot on his white fancy pants. He got in his car and his seat felt its spot and he turned the key but he could go no further.

Walker quit his racecar driving; he told the stadium operator that he needed to take a break. The word got around and people heard it and knew it and most people thought it was because of the disappointment at his loss. They thought that he was sad that he did not win the race and that is why he stopped racing, but he knew better than they knew his reasons. It was because of that face and that tiny ball bouncing; that's what he knew. He still heard the gears changing for the speedup for the straightaway, but he was stuck in his head in his older Oldsmobile and he could go no further, he could not move it an inch.

He stopped driving completely but nobody knew it. Everyone in town knew him as a racecar driver and assumed for good that he would still drive everywhere that wasn't a speedway place, even if he didn't do it for fame and glory any longer. But he didn't keep on driving. He started walking. He walked and he took the bus at first because the bus still ran back then, but he had to quit the bus not much later when all the remaining service was pulled.

It was tricky back then in those first early days. Many people were taking that newspaper editorial to heart. Many drivers were thinking about those newspaper words, and those words and suggestions were in all the other media too, and they were talked about by the angry mouths of talk radio too, and so the drivers were looking at pedestrians and thinking about their gas pedals. Walker was the hometown hero, and some pedestrian ruined the whole thing for him, and it was up to all the drivers to bring sweet revenge for Walker and his speeding Speedster 48. So if you were driving somewhere and you saw a pedestrian it was only a simple matter of slightly changing your course.

The first time Walker took the bus he stood right at the corner at the bus stop sign, and he saw somebody else waiting just one block up. He thought about his things, he thought about the day ahead of him as his eyes looked long at the street up there where the bus would come from. There were a few other cars on the street, not too many, and his eyes stopped on the little girl standing at the stop just one block up. The bus would stop for her before it would stop for him, and that was right and that was just.

He saw the bus and there was a car driving just in front of the bus, but he recognized the big bus windows and the sign above for where it was going and he felt his fare ready in his hand and then he saw that car just ahead of the bus jump the curb and drive right into and over the little girl in pigtails at the bus stop just up a block. The bus went right past her fresh corpse without stopping and up to Walker's stop.

From that time on, Walker waited for the bus by hanging back in the shadows and darting out at the last minute so the bus would see him just in time to pick him up.

The problem was that not much after that, the bus drivers started getting into the act too and getting their own sweet revenge for Walker's loss and if someone was waiting at the corner with their money in their hands for fare the bus driver would plow right into and over them and then not even open the door for the corpse or the corpses. When the cops got to the tragic scene, their car too was painted faint red on the corners where they took out a few pedestrians of their own. The cops just chalked up the bus flatten slayings as an accident.

In the early days, the cops called an ambulance to the scene of a pedestrian pounding but when the doctors got there, there was nothing to do, so the city saved some money and had the cops call the garbage crews for corpse pick-up. And later the whole cop stop was just left out and a special garbage truck was reserved for such duties, and that's what it did all day, and the bodies went straight to the incinerator for quick burning with the plastic bags and paper wrappings of all the other household trash.

Now more than ever, Walker needed the shadows and befriended them. They and their partners, the limits of our vision. He knew the blind spot well from his experience on the speedway, and now he developed its exploitation for a completely different purpose.

He needed the shadows to get around town; he needed the blind spot to trick all the drivers into ignoring him and his walking past them. There are things that we see and there are things that we do not see; Walker discovered that his secret to survival was walking his talk in the points just past our vision, and thus he got from place to place, and so he got around.

The sport of pedestrian running spread to other towns and cities, around the country from coast to coast. Drivers were taking out pedestrians all over, and if you were walking you best stay low, whether in Birmingham or Dallas or LA or Montpelier or Seattle or so on. As the practice spread the reason why was lost on a Friday and drivers just didn't ask and didn't need a reason, just like they didn't need a reason to drive instead of walk in the first place; it was simply what they did and they did it everywhere. And so there was no vacation for Walker, even on his vacations he had to stick to the shadows and move all his directions in the comfort of the blind spot or else risk his life, or else count on death from a common passing motorist.

In order to walk he had to move his hips in the correct manner so that they moved his legs so properly. He had to keep from flinching so much at all the huge sky above him and nothing so small just over his head like a car with its safe roof just over his head. There was nothing like a grandstand just over his head to make him safe from all the sky and all the too much that could be around and above him. But even so, he thought about it and he discovered that he could put something on his hair and on his head and that would press him down inside somewhere, even if it were only an ant's space, or a mouse's, just a small space or no space between the hat and his head but that made all the difference. His beat-up old hat could do all that for him, and he never wore it before this because he had no real reason, but now he had a reason, and it was to give him a cover. He put on his mushy hat and waved his feet forward and all the world came to him in truth.

And if you stand

And if you walk

You are mostly alone

"Hi Tracia? This is Livius. I'm backed up way back on the I-6907 and I'm not going anywhere fast. The traffic is barely moving and I have no idea what's going on to back all this up like a clog in my drain that I need Klog-O to cure it. It's a damn shame too that this traffic is so bad because I really wanted to see the TV coverage of the first volley of the new war battle and I don't think there's a way in hell that I'm going to make it for the first wave of bombing."

"I don't think I will be able to get there in time either, Livius. I'm stuck in traffic on the O-89273. They're clearing a wreck about a mile ahead so it's down to just one lane in either direction. I think it's going to be a long wait for me too, just like you have to wait for the silky taste of Harm's catsup. I don't think I'll be able to get to the war bar in time for the first bombs either. Maybe we can set up a place to meet Walker and Penny that's closer to us, that's closer to our traffic."

"Do you want to call Penny and set something up?"

"I'll call Penny and set something up."

Click.

"Hi, Penny? This is Tracia. I'm backed up in traffic on the O-89273 and I'm not going to be at the war bar in time for the first volley."

"Hi Tracia. The same goes for me. I'm on the M-8763T-4 and there was a massive pile up here. One lane is clear but it's like driving thru a nightmare. It's like Bad Dream brand diapers and moist towelettes. I'm going real slow thru a landscape of upended cars and trucks. It will take me forever to get thru this mess. Oops, I think I just drove over a body. I'm going to be late. Maybe Walker and Livius can wait for us somewhere."

"Negative on Livius. He's backed up in traffic on the I-6907 and doesn't think he'll be there in time either. He'll be getting there as late as we will. Maybe you could call Walker and check in on him."

"I'll call Walker."

Click.

"Hi Walker. This is Penny. Where are you?"

"Hi Penny. I'm sitting outside the war bar waiting for you. I'm on a small brick wall by the ticket window and just looking at the flowers."

"Well, we're all stuck in traffic. We'll all be there as soon as we can, but none of us think we'll be there by the first volley."

"I'll wait."

Click.

"Hi Tracia. This is Penny. Walker's already there. He's waiting for us."

"That guy of yours is such a good driver."

"He is."

"He should teach us some lessons sometime. We could really learn from him."

The tops go by, the bottoms go by, the buildings go by, the sky goes by, the wheels go by, the you goes by, the me goes by, the mountains go by, the prairies go by, the cities go by, the towns go by, the miles go by, the roadkill goes by, the animals go by, the questions go by, the silence goes by, the noise goes by, the movies go by, the TV goes by, the faces go by, the frowns go by, the music goes by, the talk goes by, the hello goes by, the bye goes by.

Candle life

Flame on two shoulders

Snuffed by car steel

Part Six

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