The Axles From the Fifty Eight Derby

The Heats

Beckett won his first heat by a length. I do not know anything about soapbox cars, but even I could hear the difference. The other cars rattled and clacked going over the seams in the old pavement. His hummed.

He lost his second heat by a nose to a big girl from Doyle in a car her father had built out of a kitchen cabinet.

It was a beautiful car, and she drove it beautifully, and I was proud of him for shaking her hand at the bottom.

Lonnie stood at the curb near the top the whole time, in the shade of the bank awning.

Every time Beckett went by, he came out into the sun and put both fists up over his head and hollered. I have never seen an eighty-year-old man holler like that.

People started to notice him. Somebody’s grandmother asked him if that was his grandson.

He told her no, ma’am, that’s my axle, and she laughed, and then she looked at the wheels, and she stopped laughing and looked at him again.

The Word Going Around

In a town as small as ours, word goes down a sidewalk faster than a soapbox car.

By the third heat, people who had known Lonnie for fifty years were walking up the hill to shake his hand and look at the wheels.

Somebody went in the bank and came back out and said, it’s the same ones, I just looked at the picture.

A man I went to high school with told me he remembered his granddaddy talking about the Fite boy who won in fifty-eight.

Nobody, that I heard, said one word against my brother. That surprised me then. It does not now.

People here mostly know what a mower means in August, and what three yards mean to a man who fixes engines for a living.

But they knew. You could see them knowing. And when they looked at Beckett, they looked at him a certain way, the way people look at a boy who has handled something hard with good manners.

The Final

Beckett’s two best times put him in the final with four other cars. The final was one run each, a straight time.

The big girl from Doyle. Two brothers from out by the lake in matching red cars. A boy from Smithville in a car shaped like a bullet.

He went fourth. I walked down the sidewalk ahead of him so I could see the bottom, my heart in my throat, trying not to run and running anyway.

At ten-twenty they let him go.

He rolled down Main Street in his red helmet, crouched low in that blue car the way Darrell had taught him, chin down, elbows in.

The old spoked wheels caught the sun and threw little flashes of light all the way down the hill.

Lonnie stood at the curb with both fists up, yelling like it was 1958.

The crowd was three deep on both sides, and I could hear them start to holler too, people who did not even know my son’s name, because they knew whose wheels those were.