There hadn’t been a roaring engine on the track in years. But tonight the racket of drunk voices in the viewing room echoed out into the darkness of the cracked asphalt that snaked away in the dust below. In the gloom, a lone silhouette plodded along the once iconic speedway, the hack of the old man’s decaying lungs bleating relentlessly into the night air, only stalled by the occasional swig of dark liquor burning up his throat.
While the men and women spun stories of yesteryear and fraternised their livers with heavy beer and strong whiskey in the clubhouse, the lone man on the track gazed to where the old floodlights used to stand. His eyes glazed over with sadness; the abandon with which the town’s spiritual home had fallen to compounding an already tired soul.
Tonight was a night of celebration, of the unceasingly reckless life of the town’s brightest shining light, but whilst everyone who was anyone were partying in a fluorescent blaze of light, the old man, sitting in the dust, could only hold his chest as it heaved with pain born of emptiness and anger.
She’d been ten years old when she’d first strolled into the Goonarang racetrack, with fierce green eyes, ratty hair, leathery bare feet and a snarly grin that lacked any front teeth. Back then, a younger Abe had been president of the club; the cigarettes had yet to pollute his lungs and his hair had yet to flee from his eyebrows. In those days, the racetrack had been a proper boys’ club, the lifeblood of a town of dairy farmers and the colossal milk processing plant. It had been built by farmers with worn faces earned by hours of hard yakka in the harsh sun, and heavy creases on their brows born of rivers of grimy sweat. They’d all bring their bright-eyed sons down every weekend to tame their need for speed and adrenaline, and kick back and drink until it was their turn to haul themselves behind the wheel. Every Saturday the roar of well-oiled machines tearing around the track brought families and endless kegs of beer to the clubhouse. By midnight it seemed like the whole town was there in a throng of alcohol-induced bliss.
Amy had been the first girl to ask to race with the boys, but none of them wanted her on their track, working on their cars or leaving them for dead in the dustbowl. To save his sanity, Abe finally agreed. She’d come every Saturday for two months, spitting through the gap where her front teeth should have been about how she could wipe the floor with the smug little boys he had racing the juniors cup on weekend afternoons. Every time, he said no, and every time she’d storm back in the next race day just as defiant as the last. One day, she’d brought a wrench with her and said she’d do maintenance on every single car there if he let her race the boys just once, adding that she’d shred all their wheels and take the wrench to their paint jobs if he didn’t let her drive. By now, he’d accepted that the only way to get this fiery little woman off his back was to let her drive just once. He knew there wasn’t much chance of a little bare foot loner beating any of the seasoned lads in their souped up karts, and he looked forward to the day she’d piss off and come watch the boys like the rest of the women
Five years on from the day he let her on the track, and most of the boys quit in shame; they couldn’t stand getting lapped by a girl every weekend. They weren’t bad racers, but she tore around the track with a reckless abandon Abe hadn’t seen in his fifty years; sometimes it left him in awe, and sometimes it left him with a sick feeling in his stomach.
Two years later, and she headed off to Ballarat to race better competition. Abe knew the club was on a steady decline. The advertisers withdrew, families went to church or played in the park on weekends instead, and the drunk crowds found their home at the pub down the road and never returned.
Amy would call Abe every weekend to tell him about her latest win, or the cute boys she’d batted off after she towelled them up on the track. She’d tell him to stop fucking smoking every time he choked into the phone. She asked relentlessly about the club. He never had the heart to tell her about the debt collectors nipping at his heels, or how they could no longer cover the maintenance on the track; it’d been overtaken by thick brown dust and hoard of bugs; the clubhouse had given way to mouldy walls and cracked linoleum.
One night Abe had to drive down to Ballarat to bail Amy out of lockup after she’d been caught speeding thirty clicks too fast on the highway; she lost her license not a week past her eighteenth birthday and her new club stood her down. Without racing she fell into a shadow from which she would never quite escape. She never went back to racing. Soon the phone calls home dried up, and any word of her whereabouts faded.
By twenty-three she had two young kids to two different men, both of whom she’d loved fiercely. However, her ill temper and their timidity had caused them to flee, and with them went her daughters. She’d refused to return home to Goonarang, or to face her old mentor since the first police incident. After a few more misdemeanours, she resigned to catching the bus, staring down any kind face that looked like they might want to strike up conversation. Some weekends, she’d watch the kids at the Ballarat race track scoot around the bends cautiously, and dreamt of the childhood she’d charged through, without the vice-like fear that grappled her every step and coursed through her blood as an adult. The only unconditional happiness she’d known was the blur of speed, the click of changing gears and the thrill of a near miss while hurtling around a corner. Without diesel churning through her veins and fumes exhausting her lungs, there was nothing to fill her terminal emptiness.
The call from the police had come three years after anyone from Goonarang had last heard word of her. Abe had been waiting for it for years now. She had been a kindred spirit, an agitated soul like his own with which any stop in momentum could be fatal. They’d found her car wrecked against a peeling old gum on the highway just out of Melbourne; she’d hit the tree so hard she’d decked it onto the road.
The police said that she’d been on her way back from visiting her youngest daughter. They’d found her seatbelt unstrapped and dangling loose in the carnage. The stuttering officer on the phone had stressed his condolences repeatedly. Abe had hung up before he could make more of a mess of it. Though he knew Amy was entirely incapable of living without the thrills and escapism of adrenaline, his soul had warned him for years of the inevitability that it would one day be her grave bringer. Nothing could prepare him for the brutal emptiness her departure left him with. The next week he drove to where she’d passed and paid his condolences to her daughters whom he’d never met. They had Amy’s toothy smile and it left him even more shattered, blubbering agonisingly on the long drive home.
As the wake bore on in the clubhouse, Abe couldn’t help but picture the sweet young woman he’d known when nobody was looking at her seriously. Amy had been a terror on the track. She’d always unstrapped herself as soon as the flag waved, just for the thrill, but behind closed doors there was a devastating vulnerability nobody else got to see. While she’d draw a knife or wrench on him with her trademark ferocity if he tried to enquire about her family, there was a pureness to the joy she got from winning the respect of one of the rusted-on diesel heads, or not burning pancakes she’d make every Sunday morning at Abe’s parents’ house. There was a childishness to Amy that Abe had once thought had been robbed from her, but the odd flicker in her eye or bounce in her step that appeared when she finally felt that she belonged to something, had slowly told him otherwise. She’d become the town’s most feared and revered woman before she was old enough to vote, but her flame had flurried and extinguished before she’d reached twenty-five.
Whilst many in the clubhouse were cackling over stories of her recklessness and bravery, or masking their fear of her temper with tales of admiration and comradery, Abe could do nothing but stare about the place she’d made her own and left behind as fast as she’d arrived in a storm of fumes and fury.