Local hero

He Read Our Tip-Offs

The first got him a race car, the second got him killed.

By the Rebel News county desk. Knox County, Sunday 12 December 1993. 1 min read.

On a bright winter day an early-nineties stock car, white with a royal-blue nose and a huge orange 34 on the door and roof, sponsor stickers along its flank, slides out of the paddock of an abandoned speedway throwing up gravel; the bearded driver in a dark beanie and a plum balaclava pulled down to his neck grips the wheel behind the window net; behind the car the dead stagger across the infield after it, one already flat on the track, and a small red hatchback sits abandoned in an empty pit garage under a rusting grandstand. — The pit crew never showed. He didn't wait. Rebel News picture desk

KNOX COUNTY. We print tip-offs so you'll go. Most of you read them, nod, and go back to sorting cans. One man read two of them and went.

He left his ever-expanding safehouse before sunrise in a little two-door you wouldn't trust to the shops. At the Irvington Speedway he fought his way through the front offices with a blade and a gun, walked into the paddock, and there she was. Number 34. Right where we said. He drove her home in time for supper, and she lives in his storage lot now, which is a better retirement than most of us are going to get.

Then he drove into Louisville. Louisville! The crowd took his windows before he'd found a parking spot, so he left the car in the street and walked. This is a man who had never tiptoed in his life. He learned downtown, climbing through army tankers, and came out the other side in a pickup, then home in an ambulance he found in West Point.

On a grey day in downtown Louisville a bearded man in a dark beanie, a bloodstained jacket over a police vest, a bandolier of brass cartridges and navy kneepads creeps between two rusting olive army tanker trucks, one gloved hand on the steel and a flashlight in the other, a navy duffel bag on his back; down the leaf-strewn street behind him a dark sedan with its windows smashed sits slewed across the lane, the dead crowded around it. — Quietest man in Louisville. First time trying. Rebel News picture desk

Then he read the other tip-off. The army surplus store west of Fallas Lake: the guns, the helicopter, the crowd. He took a taxi out there in the dark, stopped at the pharmacy on the way like a professional, pulled up fifty yards from the door and stepped out. He was dead in four seconds.

At night in pouring rain a man in a beanie with a duffel bag and a bandolier steps out of the open door of a yellow taxi and shines a flashlight across a wet car park at a roadside army surplus store with a helicopter's tail rotor showing over its roof; a packed crowd of the dead is pouring across the lot toward him, every face turned into the light. — He didn't leave a tip. Rebel News picture desk

Here's why he's a hero: by the afternoon he was elbow deep in an engine again, welding soon after like the morning never happened, and by dark the dead outside his gate were lying in rows.

At sunset in a rain-wet storage lot with red roll-up doors, a grinning bearded man in a beanie leans into the open engine bay of the white and blue number 34 stock car with a wrench, a red watch on his wrist; behind him two ambulances are parked by a chain-link fence where the dead press against the wire. — Death is not a sick note. Rebel News picture desk

The man from the storage unitssince the last issue

35minutes, Irvington to his gate in number 34
94dead on speedway day
194hours survived before the taxi
202dead since the comeback

If you meet him on the road, shake his hand. Bring shotgun shells: he'll swap you a van with the keys in it, and I'd put money on him going back to that surplus store. Ride along.