Night of Thunder

“Nick, Swagger. I have to run something by you and sooner would be so much better than later. Call me on this number please, bud.”

But Nick never called him back.

He was disappointed. He loved Nick. Years ago, so long ago he’d repressed it and most of the memories had vanished, Nick had believed in him. He was on the run, set up by some professionals, briefly number one on the FBI hit parade. Every cop in America was gunning for him. Then along came Nick, who’d looked at the evidence and saw that the narrative everybody was dancing to simply couldn’t have happened. By the laws of physics, too many anomalies, too many strangenesses. Nick looked hard into it, then hard into Bob’s killer eyes, and believed.

Bob knew: He was reborn that moment. That was the moment he came back. That was his redemption. That gave him the strength to play it out, to go hard again, to find the lost Bob the Nailer and put the drunken, self-pitying loser-loner behind him. Nick’s faith became Julie’s faith became Nikki’s faith became Miko’s faith, all in a line, and let him be what he was meant to be, what he’d been born to be. And it let him almost, after all of it, get close to the one god he worshiped, his great, martyred father.

But Nick wasn’t there. Where the hell was Nick?

So he called the number he had for Matt MacReady.

Again, he just got the machine. “This is Matt. Leave a message.”

“Matt, Swagger here. Boy, hate to bother you so soon before a race. One question: Recently I saw the tracks of some kind of machine. Steel wheels, maybe eight or ten inches apart, cut deep in the dirt. Hmmm, I recall all kinds of tracks in the pits when I visited you. Any idea what those kinds of tracks could be? Sure could help me. Thanks and good luck on Race Day.”

He did catch up on the news from a Knoxville twenty-four-hour radio station. According to the reporter, the two dead men in the Johnson County Grocery Store shootings had been identified as Carmody Grumley and B.J. Grumley, both of no fixed address, both known to have organized crime connections and thought to be part of a mobile, shifting culture of strong-armed men used in various mob enterprises over the years. Each man had a substantial rap sheet. Young Terry Hepplewhite, the grocery clerk who shot it out with the robbers, was being hailed as a hero, though he had yet to meet with the press and tell his side of the story.

Grumley, he thought. The Grumley boys. What is this Grumley? Another question for Nick, who could dig up a file on Grumley.

Instead of going to his motel, where he thought these Grumleys might have had lookouts waiting, Bob went to the first church he saw, which was John the Revelator Baptist Church of Redemption. Just a one-story building with a steeple that hardly went up twenty-five feet, it wasn’t a mighty structure but had a rough quality, as if it had been slowly assembled brick by brick in the humblest of ways. When he entered the hushed devotional space, he first thought he’d gone astray, for two worshipers were black, and it occurred to him that their memory of large white men in jeans and boots might not be all that warm. But shortly a young black man in a suit and tie came out of a walkway and came over to him.

“May I help you, sir? Do you come to worship? You are welcome.”

“Thank you, sir,” Bob said. “But actually I have a biblical puzzle to solve and I thought someone here might pitch in.”

“I can try. Please come this way.”

The doors led Bob to a spare office with many Bibles and other books of religious persuasion occupying the shelves on one wall.

“Have a seat. My name is Lionel Weston, I am the pastor of John the Revelator.”

“My name is Bob Lee Swagger, and I’m greatly appreciative, sir. This has to do with a passage that has come to my attention. My daughter was interested in it before an accident she had, and I’m wondering what it could mean.”

“I’ll try.”

“Mark 2:11.”

“Ah,” said the Reverend Weston, “yes, of course. ‘Arise from your bed and go to your home.’ Or sometimes, ‘Arise from your pallet and go to your house.’ Christ has just performed a miracle. He had restored mobility to a paralyzed man. Doubters have assailed him even as worshipers have brought the sick and malformed to him. Not from ego, not from pride, but from compassion, he has restored this man’s limbs to strength. It’s one of the great miracles of the text. In fact, one might say those words express the pure joy of God’s power, his ability to restore the infirm through faith. Does that help, Mr. Swagger?”

Bob’s puzzled expression evidently communicated a truth to the minister.

“Possibly it has metaphorical meaning to your daughter. She’s saying, ‘I can walk.’ Her sickness has been cured. She’s had a revelation of sorts. Was she in spiritual or physical pain?”

“Sir, I don’t think so. In fact, this muddies up the waters considerably. Could it be a code, a code word, a signal?”

“Mr. Swagger, I don’t think God talks in code words. His meanings are clear enough for us.”