The Legend of Groovy Hollow: Ballad of Tommie Jo Swanson by A.E. Engine

THE LEGEND OF GROOVY HOLLOW

A Novel

By Cody Williams

The Fifth Line

Also By Cody Williams Bunny Boy

The Ballad of Tommie Jo Swanson: A Legend of Groovy Hollow is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Published in the United States of America by A. E. Engine Publications First Edition.

Website: www.codywilliams.weebly.com

Website: www.dailydownforce.com

Website: www.groovyhollowraceway.com

For my dad, the biggest NASCAR fan I know

THE LEGEND OF GROOVY HOLLOW

THE BALLAD OF TOMMIE JO SWANSON

A Publication of A. E. Engine Publications

In Association With TRUE TERROR PUBLICATIONS

Prologue

Jerry Slater was standing on the corner of Hickory and Elm when he heard the revving of an engine roll out of the crawling mist off in the distance. Initially, he dismissed the sound as a trick of the ear, a mean prank his mind was playing on him as he waited for his connection in Whisperwood to arrive so they could make the exchange. Still, he immediately thought of the Groovy Hollow racetrack located in the woods, and his skin began to crawl, and his pulse quickened. Growing up there, he had heard the stories of the Groovy Hollow Raceway all his life, and though he didn’t believe in ghosts, there was some element of truth to the story, a real-life occurrence (maybe a tragedy, maybe not) that made it all too real to out-right ignore. It was just a campfire story he would tell himself, and that would make him feel a little better for a little while.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone to check the time. It was nearly two o’clock in the morning. Christ, where was the kid? He was due there to make the exchange almost an hour ago. Looking at his phone now, he hadn’t received any messages or calls to explain the unusual delay. Maybe something came up. He rationalized and told himself that he would give it ten more minutes before he packed it up and headed home. A noticeable biting chill was in the air, and Jerry pulled his jacket tighter. He glanced back at his phone. In the upper right corner of the screen, read the words NO SERVICE. Great. Just great.

Jerry had lived virtually his entire life in the small town of Commonwealth. And he knew as well as anybody that there were only three ways out of the poverty-riddled streets of his hometown racing at the local short tracks every weekend, just barely making enough to cover all the bills, the drug operation headquartered out of Whisperwood and the neighboring Biltmore; and, of course, the finality of death.

Jerry had tried his hand at racing in the past. Despite Mama’s protests, he was once determined to make something of himself, driving that used pastel-colored late model stock with the

number 33 plastered on the side over in Kingsport, at Hickory, and, of course, someday, the mythical Groovy Hollow Raceway. Mama had always detested this dream, telling him that one day, he was going to crash, and it was going to be so bad that there “ain’t gonna be no coming back from it.” He dismissed it as common motherly naggings and continued to work on his racecar week in and week out. However, the problemwith trying to make a career in the local short-track scene is that the purses were not big enough to cover all the weekly bills, let alone provide food for the table. Mama damn near broke her back cleaning houses over in Johnson City for some of the wealthiest members of the Tri-Cities Community to cover the expenses he wasn’t raking in on the late model circuit as well as to make sure they’re both fed and healthy. But Mama wasn’t a spring chicken anymore, and whenever she was gone, Jerry knew that he’d be screwed.

The second biggest issue with trying to make a career in the local racing scene is that if you only had one car (which Jerry and his Mama did; they couldn’t afford a second one), you best keep your nose clean week in and week out and ought not to get caught up in someone else’s messes. The problem for Jerry, though, was that he wasn’t just getting caught up in his messes. He caused a large bulk of them himself: nasty crashes that, more often than not, had seen a driver or two get hurt. Luckily, there were no fatalities, not while he was racing. Still, there were enough injuries to make Jerry reconsider his Mama’s insistent protests, and he inevitably hung up his racing gear altogether.

He sold the car to some old man in town. The man wasn’t elderly or anything. He likely would have been around Mama’s age, maybe a tad bit younger, but he was old enough for Jerry to wonder why he would be looking around to getting into racing at his age. Racing was a young man’s game, especially at that level, and Jerry was nearing the threshold of aging out of it himself. Ultimately, he decided that it didn’t matter. After all, the man’s money was good, and it helped him and his Mama out big time for a little while. But it didn’t take long for the wolves to come back, howling at the door, and for the eviction notices to be hammered into the cheap wood of their front door.

Jerry got a job working nights at the local laundromat, but the pay was middling at best. Mama took on more clients in the surrounding area and worked harder than she had ever worked in her life, even harder than just after Daddy died. Things changed when Mama fell at the Watson Estate and had to take some time off work to have her surgery and to heal up. But the doctors weren’t sheepish in letting him know that it was entirely possible that Mama would never work again. With her out of

work indefinitely, Jerry needed to find something else, a side gig that paid handsomely, so that he and his Mama could continue just barely keeping up with the bullshit life had to throw at them.

How Jerry connected to the Pyre group in Whisperwood was a simple story. He knew a guy who knew a guy. Reggie introduced him to his contact and asked if he’d ever done glass. Jerry shook his head, not knowing what Reggie and the Connection were discussing, but it didn’t matter much.

The arrangement was this: Once a week, the Connection would deliver him a box at the most isolated corner of Commonwealth. Jerry wouldn’t ask what was in the box and wouldn’t care. The Connection would then hand him a thick envelope full of cash. He’d shove it in his back pocket and take the package to the ally behind the Post Office. There, he would leave the package for some guy named Gus (if that was his real name), and he’d go home, counting the money on the kitchen table as Mama slept in the living room, the TV on and mindlessly playing one of those old black and white Universal Monsters films as they did on the regular almost every Friday night.

The amount of cash was never the same. Sometimes, it was right at $550, while at other times, it was well over $600. Still, for a weekly fee, that wasn’t bad at all, not to mention his other regular paycheck from Wright Laundry and the compensation from whatever odd jobs he picked up around the community. Sometimes, he mowed the grass. Sometimes, he’d clean a house just like his Mama. There was always something he could be doing in Commonwealth, and, with Mama laid up like she was, he had to do what he had to do. He checked his phone again. Eight minutes had passed. Two more, and he was getting the hell out of there. He fought the urge to count the minute down to the very last second, figuring that that would only make the time pass agonizingly slower than just waiting it out. Off in the distance, he heard the sound of an engine again. But it wasn’t just a common car engine; all its sound was choked out by a muffler it was loud, echoing throughout the whole valley. Jerry thought of the speedway again. There was no way there was going to be a race run at this time of night or even a practice session. Local laws wouldn’t stand for it. Disturbing the peace, Jerry thought with a scoff. Wasn’t that the point of auto racing? To be loud and rowdy, thus disturbing the peace!? When the Groovy Hollow Raceway was rediscovered a number of years ago, there was somewhat of a debate as to what the people of Commonwealth ought to do with it. There was a group of locals who advocated to demolish it, considering it something of an eyesore and a potential

disturbance of their peace of mind. Jerry shook his head at the thought and laughed, happy that that bunch of cockatoos didn’t get their way. Not that they didn’t try, and their efforts were fierce. Online petitions were created. Social media accounts, too. The hashtags #SaveTheSpeedway and #DemolishTheHollow began to spar on Twitter. Jerry Slater was a proud member of the former, he thought with a smirk and fully delved into the online harassment side of things social media tends to inevitably encourage. Suppose he could make the day worse for just one of those smug SOBs wanting to tear it down. That made his day. Hell, that might’ve even made his whole damned week! Eventually, thankfully, the community won out. While in the initial court hearings, the government admitted that they didn’t quite know what they were going to do with the track, they also voted to deem Groovy Hollow Raceway as a historic landmark protected by state law. That was when the cash really started to flow in. With the legendarily infamous Groovy Hollow rediscovered, the state of Tennessee flooded Commonwealth with some dough, insistent that they fix it up and start hosting racing there again. And that was exactly what happened. It was largely a community effort to clean it up, make sure it was free of overgrowth, and ensure the grandstands were stable and safe. Only the protesters who argued that the speedway would disrupt their lives held out on the project. Who needs ‘em? Jerry thought with scorn at the time and still firmly held the sentiment to this day. If they don’t love it, they can leave it!

One minute to go by now, surely. Maybe even less. The chill in the air was getting to Jerry a little bit. He could no longer feel hishands, and his toes seemed absurdly cold. “Screwthis,” he huffed, noting the fog of breath that escaped him. He thought it was a little early to get that cold, but he let it go. It was time to get the heck out of there! He’d text the Connection and tell him the kid from that other town never showed. It wouldn’t be a popular thing to tell him, but, hey, it was what happened, and he was damned tired of waiting.

Jerry tucked the package under his arm and started to walk home. The fog seemed eerily thick now, possessing the odd stink of sulfur. From behind, spilling out of the thickening mist, came the sound of a rumbling, unmuffled engine. Jerry stopped dead in his tracks. He rolled his eyes and cursed. If the Commonwealth police heard the sound of the car that was no doubt behind him, the owner would no doubt be ticketed. Jerry knew that firsthand. It happened to him, on occasion, back when he owned his own late model. He didn’t miss those fines and fees, so at least that was a silver

lining. He turned then, putting up a hand as he expected to be blinded by the bright golden twin beams of headlights. But everything behind him was dark. There was a single streetlamp on the corner where he had previously stood, but everything else was swallowed up by complete darkness. Just beyond the reach of the lamp’s glowing orb was the darkened outline of a car. It just sat there, idling loudly. Due to the shadows, Jerry couldn’t quite make out its most distinctive features, but it was obviously a car, and a massive one at that, sitting taller than most cars in the Commonwealth community.

“Hey,” Jerry called back. “Hey, pal!” Jerry always loathed the sound of his own voice, thinking it made him sound like some dumb redneck twanger. “You might want to shut that off. The engine! If the po-po hears that thing, there’ll be some real trouble for ” his words trailed off. The engine of the car revved loudly, and then it crept, ever so slowly, into the orb of light reflecting on the street. It was impossible, simply couldn’t be! Jerry recognized the car a late model stock with a pinched Camaro front nose. It was splattered in black, orange, and white paint, and the hood read THE HALLOWEEN MACHINE. Jerry’s first thought at the realization was to assume that it was some sort of joke like he was being Punked or something. “Very funny,” he called out. But nobody was laughing. Nobody made a sound.

Jerry took a nervous step back, completely unaware that the box had slipped from under his arm and had fallen down, tumbling over into the street. The Halloween Machine advanced but took its time, moving at a mile, maybe only two miles per hour, crawling towards him. “Hey! Hey buddy!”

The car stopped. “You got me, all right. You played your little joke. How ‘bout you shut that thing off and step out here, man to man!” Jerry squinted, trying to get a good look at the driver through the windshield. But with all the darkness inside the car and the fog, he couldn’t make out much of anything, save for a single shape behind the wheel that could’ve been anybody. There was a moment of dead silence save for the rumbling engine of the car. Jerry waited. Waited. Waited for something, anything to happen. The suspense inside him wound tight like a chain around his neck. Then, something did happen. The car lunged forward. The engine screamed, echoing throughout the valley, and the tires squalled. Smoke from both the exhaust and the rubbery tires mixed and mingled with the fog, and the whole area smelled like burnt rubber.

Jerry turned and ran. He ran until it felt like his heart was going to give out, and his legs were about to fall out from under him. But he didn’t run long. He disappeared into the mist, the car close

behind him. All sounds faded into nothing. Commonwealth was quiet and peaceful yet again.

Chapter 1

Tommie Jo wanted to be a racer for as long as she could remember. It was an obsession that, like many fans of the sport, started with Matchbox cars. One of her earliest memories was watching the live-action adaptation of Scooby-Doo with her mom and dad. Momhad burnt the popcorn (she always burnt it), and she and her dad were making faces at one another, choking down the kernels as the added salt and sprayable butter did little to cover up its overly charred flavor.

A short time after watching the movie (maybe a week later?) Mom had taken her to Walmart. Tommie didn’t want to go initially shopping, especially at that young age, was just so boring but the bribe of getting a toy in return for accompanying her mother made her more than agreeable. The first toy aisle Mom took her down was the doll aisle. The shelves were full of Barbie and baby dolls, all standing stiffly in nauseating pink boxes. She has always hated the color pink. Purple, she could get behind. But pink

After finding little of interest in the first aisle, Mom wheeled her down the aisle containing different kinds of card and board games. Mom looked intently for something that might tickle her daughter’s fancy, bringing over various Uno cards, insisting to her that it was fun and that she would teach her. None of that did it for her. They went to the next aisle, and Mom stalled. “We don’t want this aisle,” Mom said and started to retreat.

“No! This one, Mama, this one!” Tommie shouted. She pointed down at it, and Mama gave her a certain raised eyebrow look.

“Really?”

Tommie nodded eagerly.

Mama nodded, shrugged, said, “Okay,” and started to take her daughter down what she considered the Boy’s Aisle

They pushed past the various sections of WWE, UFC, and Minecraft toys, stopping only when Tommie pointed and said, “That, Mama! I want that!?”

Mama stopped, pulled a packaged 1:64 scale car from the shelf, and handed it to her. “This one?”

“Yes! Yes!” The car was a black and orange painted generic racecar with SCOOBY-DOO advertised on the rear quarter panels. On one side of the car was Scooby’s face, broad in a grin, his impossibly long tongue hanging out. On the back rear of the car was an orange lip. Later, she asked her dad what that was. That was when she learned it was a spoiler but didn’t understand its purpose. Shooting out from the car's hood was a big chrome V-8 engine.

Thus began Tommie’s collection of 1:64 diecast cars. This car led to an obsession with Hot Wheels and, once she was a little older, with NASCAR. She still had this car, sitting proudly on the shelf above her bed alongside various other NASCAR cars and figurines from classic horror movies from the ‘70s and ‘80s. She loved horror almost as much as she loved racing, and she believed there was a pretty good balance between horror memorabilia and NASCAR merch scattered throughout her room. Those were their two most valuable pastimes for her and her dad, watching NASCAR with her dad on Sunday afternoons becoming the earliest of her routines.

The first race she ever watched on TV, from initial green flag to checkered, was the 2014 Daytona 500. It was a long day, that race lasting late (for her) into the night, but with the help of a series of naps during a lengthy red flag postponement due to weather, she could stay awake to see the end. And what an ending it had! There he was NASCAR’s undisputed most popular driver taking the checkered flag to win his second Daytona 500, snapping a long, nearly two-year winless drought. Part of her fell in love with Dale Jr. that night, and she has been a firm member of Junior Nation ever since. What she remembered the most about the race was the caution right before the final two-lap shootout to the end. In his white, blue, red, and gold number 88 Chevy, Earnhardt had picked up a piece of tape on the grill, putting his win into question. And the TV crew calling the race whom she later realized was the NASCAR on FOX dream team of Darrell Waltrip, Mike Joy, and Larry McReynolds, albeit a little into the sunset of the peak didn’t miss on the opportunity to amp up the drama. They made it clear to the audience watching at home that overheating might now be an issue.

Tommie looked at her dad then, and he looked back with a reassuring smile. He knew what she was thinking. Heck, he was probably feeling the doubts himself. “Don’t worry,” he said, “there’s only two laps to go. He won’t overheat in that amount of time. If anything, the tape might help him, might better the handling of his car.” Tommie didn’t know if the tape on the nose of Junebug’s car made much of a difference. But it didn’t matter. Dale Jr., the Pied Piper of Daytona, completed the two laps relatively unchallenged. After the checkered flag flew, one of the announcers (she thought it might have been Mike Joy) pointed out that a black number 3 had returned to Daytona that weekend. As he stated this fact, he lamented, Wonder where that black piece of tape came from!? It was impossible to know for sure, of course. Still, Tommie liked to imagine the ghost of the great, late Dale Earnhardt peeling back some of the tape that was holding together Austin Dillon’s wounded number 3 car and carefully placing it on Jr.’s grill to give his son the advantage. But that was more of a storybook ending than anything else. Since then, watching races with Dad has become a staple of their weekend plans.

When Tommie turned 16 a couple of years ago, her father bought her a car. But the car was not street-legal. She wouldn’t be driving up anddown the streets of Commonwealth, takingit to school, or even to the movies on a Friday night. No, what Dad had purchased was a used Chevrolet late model stock car meant to race on the local short track circuit. Dad had gotten it from a local racer in town looking to move on from the business. Dad told her that he believed the poor little man just experienced too much heartbreak behind the wheel of the car, where he raced primarily at Kingsport Speedway, though he would, occasionally, make the trip to Hickory or even down to Florence. The plan, initially, was for the two of them to fix it up together a father-daughter project of sorts. “I need a hobby,” Dad had told her once while looking under the hood, surveying the work that needed to be done. He looked at her then, a gleam in his eye telling her he was so proud of his daddy’s girl. “I figured you needed one, too,” he flashed her a wink.

“When we’re done,” he asked him then, “fixing it up, I mean what are we going to do with it? Sell it?” She said this, a marked disappointment sounding in her voice.

Dad puckered out his lower lip, and he rolled his eyes. “If you want to. I bet it could get you through college. Or at least pay for some of it. Or ”

“Could we race it?”

The grin on Daddy’s face confirmed his true intentions of purchasing the car. Tommie ran over to him and gave him a big squeeze around the neck and a peck on the cheek.

The car, which Tommie later named Amelia, was a fixer-upper. The man who owned it before, Jerry Slater, was pretty rough on his equipment, often crashing out and unable to turn much of a profit racing. Daddy said that he then turned his life to more questionable business dealings but that it wasn’t his place to judge. Jerry would eventually have to come to terms with all the wicked things he had done just to make a little bit of money. But Daddy’s primary interest was getting the car up and running so that she, Tommie herself, could one day be turning laps over in Kingsport or at any of the other local short tracks in the area.

The original number on the side was 62 Tommie didn’t like it; she didn’t think it fit her. “I want something with an 8 in it,” she told her dad. “But I don’t want it to be just 8 or 88. I don’t want to copy Dale Jr., But it’s important that there’s an 8 in the number.” Dad nodded but didn’t say anything, probably thinking that number selection would be a more appropriate conversation once the car was ready to turn some actual laps on the track. The number they ultimately went with was 28 in big, block font. In the year that followed Tommie’s 16th birthday, she and Dad got the car running and moving. Dad even took a couple of laps around Kingsport, and she visualized getting her racing license to compete there one day, too. That was until Groovy Hollow Speedway was rediscovered. That, over anywhere else, was where she wanted to make her late model stock debut.

Chapter 2

Tommie had never heard of Groovy Hollow before, not before the rediscovery of the lost track. The track was rediscovered in the summer of 2021 to the surprise and perhaps disappointment of many of the community. The small town of Commonwealth became something of a spectacle then. Race fans within driving distance (and even a couple who weren’t) made the trek to their tiny little corner of the map to look at the long-lost speedway. One of her favorite YouTubers, S1apSh0es, even made a video about it. And, being a resident of Commonwealth, she found a slight sense of pride in this new piqued interest for what was, only a few short weeks ago, a distinct track lost somewhere in the Twilight Zone of motorsports.

Doug Richards, a descendant of the founding family of the speedway, was the one who stumbled upon it. After spending much of Doug’s early childhood in Commonwealth, the Richards family moved north to Bangor, Maine. They abandoned the track and turned their backs on the community of Commonwealth, just as the residents of Commonwealth had turned their backs on them. The last year of the speedway’s known existence was shrouded in controversy. For one thing, ticket sales dwindled, no matter howaffordable Steven Richards tried to make the prices, often risking his profit. A lot has been speculated as to why the speedway withered up and died even before the tragedy that would eventually prompt the family to close its doors and shutter its windows. But they were linked strangely. Back in the 1990s, during the track’s heyday, one driver dominated the Groovy Hollow Raceway unlike any other. As the story goes, he drove his iconically painted black, orange, and white late model to more than 10 track championships and was utterly unbeatable at his home track. His car, dubbed The Halloween Machine, was a dominant force to be reckoned with, and racing against it became somewhat of a novelty. Racers fromall over the country, especially at the beginning of the driver’s reign, signed up as a chance to take him down. But, the problem with dominant drivers is that once there’s a foregone conclusion that said driver was going to take the trophy, fans lose interest and start to leave in droves. For the Richards family, Bucky Blackwell, the infamous Halloween Machine's driver, was bad for business. And he just had to be stopped at any cost. Steven Richards, in an act of dangerous desperation, would often put a bounty out on Blackwell, usually with

thousands of dollars on the line, that would go to any driver who could beat him. Any amount in the thousands was huge for these small struggling race teams, so needless to say, many hopefuls signed up on the entry list each weekend, thinking they were the ones to take down the undefeated Bucky Blackwell finally.

With the additional dough on the line, the races turned mean. Over-aggression became a massive problem at Groovy Hollow Raceway, totaling many cars and teams filing for bankruptcy, ultimately selling off their battered parts. But for Bucky, how badly his Halloween Machine was bruised and beaten didn't matter. He somehow always ended the race on top. And, the next week, he’d return, his car fully restored and looking brand, spanking new. “It wasn’t fun anymore,” a former Commonwealth resident had said in a local TV interview produced when the track was first rediscovered. The interviewer asked why he had canceled his season tickets years before the track's last race was ever run. “Well, when you know who’s going to win, I don’t know, it just sort of spoils the fun of it, doesn’t it? I mean, Bucky was the king of that track and an undisputed king. He didn’t have a David Pearson to his Richard Petty. There never were any challengers to him, and it just ruined it, especially for me.” When the interviewer asked him if he’d be interested in signing up to be a season-long ticket holder again, he replied with a shrug and said, “Let’s just see if they reopen it. I imagine there’s a lot of work to do and many things to shift through. If they race, I might go to it. If they don’t, that’s fine, too.”

The tragedy that ultimately closed the doors of the already struggling track happened on Halloween night in the year 2000. Bucky and his Halloween Machine started from the pole and had led every lap so far in the race. Steven Richards and other high-ups in the press box were told of a cell of weather moving closer to the track. Storms. Richards looked up at the scoreboard, seeing that 157 laps of a scheduled 200 had already been run. With just over 40 laps to go, Richards thought they could get to the end of the event before the weather crashed over the speedway. “I ain’t calling it,” he reportedly had said, puffing on a fat cigar. To his protesters, he said, “Look, we’re already in trouble here. We’re on our last legs. If we call the race now, all these people in the stands, what are the odds they come back? Some of ‘em might. Others, though We’ve lost enough fans. I ain’t doin’ nothin’ else to drive even more off.”

So, the race went on for about 12 more laps. By lap 169, drivers were complaining about a fine

mist leaking out of the sky, coating their windshields. The moisture smeared with debris, making it increasingly difficult to see. The cars slipped and slid through the turns. A few came close to spinning out. What happened next would be lodged into the memories of Steven Richards until his dying day in 2013—a flash of blue lightning cut across the sandy, black sky. He grabbed the microphone then, finally convinced to end the race prematurely. But before he could make the announcement or say anything at all, another bolt of lightning flashed across the sky, shooting down to the track. It struck the roof of Bucky Blackwell’s fabled Halloween Machine, and the track was washed in a brilliant white light. Sparks rained down, and the stadium lights winked out. Before anyone could fathom what the heck just happened, everyone at the track opened their eyes, coming out of a thick fog. Groovy Hollow Raceway was gone vanished as was the Halloween Machine.

The Richards family moved away after that, up north somewhere, by all reliable accounts. And they did their best to distance themselves from the haunting memory of the speedway. That was until the late 2010s when Doug Richards took to TikTok, rekindling the interest of fans for the lost track. Richards, in his short snippet of a video, declared that he was on a mission to locate the forgotten track at any cost and bring it back to its former glory. He spent several years camping outin the woods of the larger Appalachian area, praying to one day find the answers he (and his growing online following) so desired. It was in the early summer of 2021 when those prayers would finally be answered.

Chapter 3

The track seemed to have just turned up out of nowhere as if there was a rip between what was real and what was a legend, and it just crawled out from that pit of nonexistence—that darkness— from where all urban legends stem. As the story goes, Doug Richards was out at the Emmerson Diner in downtown Commonwealth when he just had an inkling. As he had told and retold the story, embellishing a few key details here and there, after three long years of a lack of success in locating the long-lost racetrack, he just knew, as he was munching away at his quarter-pound burger and fistfull of fries, that that day, in particular, was going to be different. There was “something in the air,” as he described it in one of his many interviews post-rediscovery. After chowing down, he decided that he was in the mood for a hike, and he knew the perfect trail along the Watauga River in northeast Tennessee. He hopped into his Jeep Ranger and drove to a nearby campground. He got out, made sure his canteen was sufficiently full, and went on his way, whistling an old bluegrass tune as he walked.

As he inched ever closer to the long-dormant speedway, he said that he felt the presence of something, admitting that it was hard to describe. The closest thing he could compare it to was “like resting at the bottom of Mount Everest and looking up, humbled in its looming shadow.” He looked ahead, and through the trees, he could see that something was out there, buried in the woods.

Unknowingly, he picked up his pace and accelerated from a walk to a slight trot. Gravel crunched beneath the soles of his shoes, and dust kicked up into the air. As he got closer, the track became clearer. Through the shady trees and knotted woods, he saw thefirst rusted sightings of grandstands. Atop of them was a press box and huge lights. At long last, Groovy Hollow Raceway had been found.

Doug quickly reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. Hastily, he went to the TikTok app and went live. “Ladies and gentlemen, I have found it! Behold, the myth, and the legend—Groovy Hollow Raceway!” He turned his phone to better show off the ruined remains of the track. He said nothing more until the stream timed out. Then, he put his phone away and took it all in himself for the first time. The track was a barebones facility consisting only of a single set of grandstands along the front stretch and a series of decrepit old houses spaced out on the property. There was a single

concession stand on the outside. He stood there in awe, appreciating what he had discovered while also thinking about the ramifications. Suddenly, he felt as if he was no longer alone, the speedway coming to life and creeping towards its own consciousness.

It didn’t take long for news to spread regarding the rediscovery of the fabled track. For the longest time, all Doug wanted was to find the track, a physical embodiment of his father’s legacy and curse. Now that he had, he was asking himself, What’s next? The logical conclusion of that was simple enough and right in front of him: Next, we race! But, of course, it wasn’t that simple. The facility was in desperate need of a lot of work, a great undertaking that could take years to handle, if not decades. But even if Richards was able to assemble a crew to clean up the track and make it look more presentable, the oddsthat there would be enough interest from sponsors and even theresidents of Commonwealth of seeing racing return there was slim to none. Tommie learned of the track’s rediscovery from Dad, who poked his head in her room and asked if she had heard the news. “What news?” she asked him, just barely over the screams of Jamie Lee Curtis, the scream queen in the original Halloween movie.

“They found it!” He was excited and not making much sense. “Found what?” she asked.

“I can’t believe they found it.” Dad was out of breath, heaving. It took him a few minutes and a glass of water to get him to calm down enough to tell her the gist. “There was this racetrack when I was a kid. Here, just outside of Commonwealth. Originally, they called it the Commonwealth International Speedway. But the more common name for it was Groovy Hollow Raceway.”

“Groovy Hollow?”Tommie asked and gnawed on the name a moment. It sounded alittle hippiedippy to her, but she dug it nonetheless. “How’d it get that name?”

“Because of the Halloween Machine and its driver, Bucky Blackwell. His car was groovy, all right—painted in a slick back and orange scheme. It was spooky fast, too. He practically owned the late model scene at the track, dominating it for nearly a decade. He won everything. I think Groovy Hollow was the only track he ever raced at. And he beat everybody there. Even some future stars who made it to NASCAR. You probably don’t remember John Rex, do you?”

Tommie shook her head.

“Well, he was a driver from around here, built in Kingsport. He never made it big in terms of being like a Cup driver. Never made any Xfinity starts either, I don’t believe. But he didrun a handful of truck races. He never attempted a full season. Never could secure sponsorship, I don’t think. But he was serviceable in the NASCAR Truck Series. He even scored a win in the season-opening race at Daytona. That was, jeez, almost ten years ago? Maybe a little more? He was driving the number seven truck for Red Steed Racing.”

Dad said and squinted with a thin smile on his lips. “Anyway, him being from the area, he came over here one year to compete before the track well,” he swallowed hard, “disappeared. He ran pretty well, too. I think he ran maybe second. But he was no match for Bucky. Nobody ever was. Like I said, he owned that track, and the winner’s circle may as well have been an extension of himself. Heck, the same could be said about the whole darn track, I think. Rex came in second, two laps off the pace behind Blackwell and his blasted Halloween Machine.”

“Really? He lapped the whole field twice?” Tommie asked.

Dad nodded. “Yeah. Sure did. He really stunk up the show around here for a while there. He wasn’t the only one, though. Terry Layne tried his hand at it, too. Even he finished second to Bucky, a lap off the pace.”

“Terry Layne where do I know that name? The announcer?”

“Making me feel old, kiddo,” Dad said. “Yeah. But before he was an announcer, he was a driver. A Daytona 500-winning driver, at that. He won another race, too, I think. Both were coming from Daytona, of course. But while Rex and Layne never became a couple of the all-time greats in NASCAR history, they still made it up there to some of the most elite levels in motorsports. That’s more than what a whole lot of local racers ‘round here do, you know? And Blackwell beat up on both of ‘em!”

“If he was so good, why haven’t I heard of him? You talk about him like he’s, I don’t know, some sort of legend or something. Why isn’t he talked about? What’d he do?”

Dad’s smile faded then. A gleaming, dreamlike twinkle in his eyes, he said, “That’s a loaded question, hon. There are stories about him and his past. I think you used the word legend Yeah, he was a legend of sorts, all right. Maybe for the wrong reasons. But all that’s just hearsay. I’ll tell you if

you want to hear it. But you’ll have to take it with a grain of salt. Then, of course, there’s what happened. And I have my own opinions about him and why he never blew up into superstardom. You know, based on the stories I’ve heard.”

Tommie inched closer to the edge of her seat. “Tell me. I love a good story. As long as it’s spooky!” Tommie had always been a sucker for a good ghost story.

Dad nodded. “I’ll start with my opinion first. I think Bucky Blackwell never made it up the ranks and into NASCAR because he didn’t want to.”

“That’s crazy talk! What racer worth their salt doesn’t want to be a NASCAR driver someday? That’s just…unfathomable!” Tommie said.

“Yeah,” Dad nodded, “well, not everyone thinks that way, Tommie. Some people, particularly working people, race cars just for the fun of it. And, if they’re good at it, they make a little extra money for the week so that things won’t be so tight at home. They treat it more as a hobby or a side gig than anything super serious.”

“And this Bucky Blackwell guy, he was like that? A family man racing for a hobby?” Dad shook his head. “No, no. He was no family man. He did enjoy racing, I think. But not nearly as much as he loved winning. And he loved winning almost as much as he hated losing. He was a menace on the track. Off the track, he mostly kept to himself, at least in racing and even communal circles. Nobody knew that much about him, really. And that’s when speculation starts to creep in. He was mysterious, Tommie. Eerily mysterious. But the reason I don’t think he ever even attempted to climb up the NASCAR ladder stems from that selfishness. Beating the snot out of the local talent was fun to him. That was his real passion. He maybe even loved it. But once you start ascending up the ranks, inevitably, you’re going to get beat. And I don’t think he could stand the thought of that. I think he was more than satisfied with what he was and what he was doing.”

In truth, Tommie could understand that. Nobody likes to lose, and, in her opinion, the people who say that the fun of a game is just playing, no matter the outcome, are either lying or complete lunatics!

“There were other reasons, of course. A lot of people at the time thought that he had his hands in some shady dealings. All that turned out to be true, and it became public knowledge after the disappearance.”

“Disappearance?” Tommie asked her Dad. The word seemed strange somehow, utterly alien, and she couldn’t get a firm grasp on it. The implications of that strange word seemed too far out, spreading away in distant space.

Dad nodded his head. “Yeah. Well, this is where the story starts to become a little, I don’t know, spooky. This is when it turns into a campfire story passed down through the generations.” Dad got a smile on his face, and his eyes sank. He was thinking of happier times—the good ole days, he liked to call them. But Tommie would be lying if she said that she didn’t sometimes wonder if those longgone days were actually better or if Dad and so many others were just looking back through a film of rose-colored lenses. “I guess I can continue that and pass the story on to you.”

Dad told her the story of Bucky Blackwell and what happened to him and the infamously mysterious Groovy Hollow Raceway. And it was a wild story, for sure, hardly plausible. But Tommie did as she was told. She didn’t interrupt and let her Dad spin his yarn. When the story was finished, Dad was silent for a moment. His posture kind of relaxed, and that dreamy look fogged his eyes again. But this time, he wasn’t smiling. It was like he was remembering those self-proclaimed good ole days, but the rose-colored glasses had slipped fromhis face and fell onto the floor. “Dad,” Tommie said, and Dad snapped back into himself. The smile reappeared on his face. “Is that story really true?”

Dad shrugged. “I don’t know. I think parts of it are true or have some truth to them. Who can say whether ornot it’s completely historically accurate? Nobody ‘round here, that’s for sure. Maybe the only person who knows the complete truth is Bucky Blackwell himself. And he ain’t here, is he?”

“I guess not,” Tommie agreed, and a short film played in her mind. She could envision the fabled Halloween Machine sliding into the tight corners of Groovy Hollow Raceway, the flash of lightning striking the rooftop number, and all the brilliant colors that would come with such an inexplicable explosion.Then, the filmstrip ran out. The screen went black, as black as thesurrounding Commonwealth woods in the heart of night, where not even the light of the moon can reach.

Chapter 4

Dad had heard through the grapevine (most likely on the Facebook social media app that people of his generation tend to use) of an effort being put together to clean up around the Groovy Hollow Raceway that had been rediscovered (or maybe mysteriously reappeared?) in an attempt to have racing return to the area. He asked Tommie if she wanted to be involved, and, of course, she eagerly agreed. Still not knowing how straight to take her father’s tale of Bucky Blackwell and the disappearance of the track, she was excited to see the location where the whole ordeal allegedly took place. She put on her favorite pair of jeans, the white pair of cowboy boots her mom bought from the country-western store over in Pigeon Forge, and tied her hair up in a ponytail. She knew it was going to be a dirty job.

She went down the stairs to meet her dad, who was already at the door waiting for her. Dressed in his typical flannel, jeans, and a trucker hat he had won from an online contest reading OUT OF THE GROOVE on it, he smelled strongly of Old Spice deodorant and aftershave. He had already packed a cooler he lugged around on his back as they hiked through the woods. Inside it was five 24-ounce bottles of Mountain Dew and three waters. Tommie looked at him and flashed him a raised eyebrow look that said REALLY? and Dad knew what it meant. She had him well trained. With a sigh that seemed to beg the question what are you, my mom? He let the backpack cooler fall from his shoulders, and he headed back for the kitchen. When he returned a couple of minutes later, Tommie inspected the bag again. He had put back three of the Mountain Dews and put in an additional four waters. She could live with that compromise.

“Let’s go,” she said and led him out the door. She took a brief glimpse at the late model stock sitting in the garage, and her heart fluttered. It was still very much a fixer-upper, but, in time, she and her Dad would get it rolling again. Maybe even sometime soon! She blew the car a kiss and gave it a wink. Dad rolled his eyes but couldn’t help but laugh. She didn’t care. She was going to be a racer someday, and she was going to drive that late model car on track at Groovy Hollow Raceway. She just knew it. And today was the first step in that journey.

They got into the truck, and Dad backed them out of the driveway. It didn’t take them long to

reach the woods, and they pulled in behind a growing line of cars and pickup trucks. Dad put the truck into PARK and shut off the engine. “Are you ready for this?”

But by the time he asked, Tommie was already getting out of the truck and slinging the heavy backpack cooler on her shoulders. She could handle it. “Come on,” she said, “let’s go,” and she slammed the door shut.

Dad couldn’t fight that kind of enthusiasm, so he followed behind her quickly. There was a gathering of people, mostly men, and their sons, pooling on the shoulder of the dirt road. Tommie and Dad joined them. They mingled for a while, reminiscing about older races and how things had changed for the worse. They talked about NASCAR mostly and touched a little bit on the local short track scene, which, Tommie knew even then, was dwindling. But nobody mentioned Bucky Blackwell, his devilish car, or his reign of terror. No one would dare, and she certainly wasn’t about to bring it up. She figured that it’d only put a damper on things.

When it seemed that everyone had run out of things to say, someone took charge. “All right, everybody! Thanks for coming out today. Myname is Eddie. I started the Facebookpage thatbrought you all here. I’ve been a NASCAR fan almost my entire life. I root for Kyle Busch, mostly, which, I know, isn’t very popular. But I also just generally love the sport. And there would be no NASCAR if there weren’t local short tracks like Greenville Pickens, Florence, and Groovy Hollow Raceway. Young drivers need places like this to cut their teeth, learn, and develop. My hope, as well as the hope of Mr. Richards,” Eddie paused a moment and gestured to another man in the crowd standing next to him, “is to, someday, reopen Groovy Hollow Raceway and host some local short track events throughout the racing season.” Eddie spoke with a sort of confidence that Tommie admired. He was the leader, a take-charge type, and Tommie had no problem following him. “And the road to that dream and that goal starts today and with all of you. If we can make the track look presentable, maybe we can attract some sponsors, which is just the shot in the arm this track and this community needs!”

Some murmurs broke out into the crowd, mostly nonsensical static, the kind of sound that comes through on an old-timey radio when the knob is turned between two different stations. Somewhere from behind Tommie, she couldn’t see his face. Someone asked, rather sheepishly, just

over a whisper, about Bucky Blackwell and his strange disappearance. Tommie’s first inclination was that he was a reporter of sorts. The whispers amongst the crowd ceased all at once. Collectively, they turned to face him. What they saw was a lanky, towheaded young man with rat-like features. There was a cigarette tucked in behind his ear. Over his shoulder hung a camera on a strap, and in his hands were a notepad and a mechanical pencil. Definitely a reporter. And his question seemed to chill everyone in the crowd. Even herself.

Eddie cleared his throat. “Yes, uh, we are aware of the stories and the legends. Whether or not they are true is not really our concern. It’s in the past, and what’s past is past. We’re looking to the future. And we think that this little bullring of a track could attract quite a crowd if it were ever to be resurrected.”

Resurrected. Tommie didn’t like that word. Momentary flashes of scenes from the Universal Picture’s adaptation of Frankenstein appeared before her very eyes. She loved that movie in her heart of hearts. But the book was better. That was almost always the case the book was always superior. But she thought of the story and, for a moment, saw the track as the dreaded monster conjured up by a post-modern Prometheus. But she shook the thought away. It was ridiculous, really, and she turned her back on the reporter.

“Do you think it’s haunted?” the reporter asked a ridiculous notion.

Eddie stumbled a moment, hesitant, but ultimately didn’t take the bait. “Can I ask you who you write for? I noticed the pad and pencil. Are you with the Press or the Herald Courier?”

“Nah, I’m with a small independent publication. The Nowhere Chronicles.”

That told Tommie all she needed to know about the man. She had seen copies of The Nowhere Chronicles sitting, undisturbed, on wire racks at dollar stores and gas stations, usually beside a copy of USA Today. The covers were bright and attention-grabbing, but for all the wrong reasons. It was a tabloid consisting of stories adapted from various local legends, an underground TMZ for all things strange and bizarre. Those kinds of mags were fun to read at times, but they were not to be taken seriously. Though, given the legend around Groovy Hollow Raceway, Tommie had to admit that it seemed like the kind of thing that would be written up about in that sort of lowbrow publication.

Eddie must have known the publication as well. He let out something of a scoff, which tapered off into an airy chuckle. He smiled. “Right, well, I have no further comment, Mr. ”

“Jones. Howard Jones.”

“Right, well, Mr. Jones, I nor the people here today, volunteers, mind you, have any further comments for your…story. He stressed the word story. Go write it. Do what you do, and we’ll do what we do. Okay?”

And with that, Eddie turned and pumped a fist into the air. “This way to the track,” he said. And with Doug Richards by his side, they led Tommie, Dad, and all the other volunteers through the woods to the racetrack. She felt like she was part of the tour group in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Chapter 5

When Tommie sawthe condition of the track, she felt a sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach. A sense of hopelessness flooded her, and she knew, just knew, that they were never going to get that track up and running. It appeared, at first glance, way too far gone. A lost cause, maybe, and she could easily see some land developer presenting Doug Richards with an offer he just couldn’t refuse, tempting him to sell it once and for all. The land developer would almost certainly tear the track down, clear out the area completely, and put like a Walmart or shopping mall in its place. Or maybe a whole shopping center with stores like Old Navy, Gap, and Bass Pro Shops, not to mention a slew of new booming restaurants. If that ever happened, the legend of Groovy Hollow would die forever, buried and everything. But that was why they were there, right? To straighten it up and make it look usable? But Tommie didn’t know if that was possible, and,looking at the condemned wreckage now, it all just seemed to be too much. It was overwhelming.

She wondered if she was alone in her suffocating doubt. Maybe she was, maybe she wasn’t. However, one thing that was certain was that when it came to most of the volunteers who showed up to lend out their time, there was a sense of hope. Collectively, they all just stood and stared at the abandoned speedway for several minutes. And if Tommie wasn’t completely insane, she thought a couple of the men (the ones who appeared to be the most burley, with thick curly beards covering the lower half of their faces) were starting to tear up. She heard sniffing sounds followed by a series of long, exaggerated exhales and what sounded like them wiping their dripping noses on the sleeves of their shirts. Tommie didn’t look at them, didn’t want to acknowledge it. She only looked up at her Dad, who met her eyes. He smiled slightly, and his eyes, dilated as they were, possessed some form of spark. Though she had never seen her father as looking ancient, he was no spring chicken, either. She knew that and, as she became older herself, started to notice it more and more. But at that moment, he de-aged somehow, looking closer to a little boy on Christmas morning, excited to unwrap his presents, rather than the jaded, hung-over father nursing the wounds from his good time the night before with a big mug of steaming hot black coffee. His eyes said one thing, and the message was clear: Let’s do this!

They got to work, starting with clearing out the surrounding brush on the outside of the track and collecting it all in one massive pile where the remnants of the gravel and dirt parking lot bordered the grass field. But it didn’t take long for them to grow bored with the outside work. They stopped, vowing to clear the field out another time when it was much more appropriate to do so. They all really wanted to go inside the track to see how it had held up after all these years.

Eddie led the volunteers to the front gate. It was just a simple chain-link fence with a small wooden shack that had once been white but was now faded and splintery. Atop the track was a sign reading TICKETS. The gate was clasped shut, held that way by a rope of chains and an oversized padlock. Eddie reached up and grabbed at the chain link fence. The whole thing, red with rust, seemed to sway like it might all come down. But it didn’t. The gate rattled against the chain, and Eddie looked at Dough Richards and asked, “Do you have a key?”

Doug shook hishead.“No. Dadnevergaveit to me, anyway.When hedied, there were a bunch of keys locked away in his safe. I didn’t know what they were for or what they went to. But they’re at the house now. Probably lost in a junk drawer somewhere; I dunno. I bet one of them went to this.” He shrugged. “We don’t need ‘em.” Doug let the oversized backpack, embracing his shoulders, fall. It was the first time Tommie noticed just how cartoonishly large it was. He sat it on the ground with a clank and unzipped it with one hand while fishing out bottled water from the mesh side pocket with the other. He paused, took a long drink, and returned the bottle to the pocket as he pulled out a big pair of bolt cutters. Eddie moved aside, and Doug proceeded to cut the chains, which took a couple of labored attempts. But Tommie knew he was successful when she heard the sound of the rusty chains rattle down the face of the fence and coil onto the ground. It was the most satisfying sound she could ever think to hear at that moment.

Doug and Eddie each grabbed a side of the gate and pulled it towards them, opening it. The aged metal groaned against each other, and Eddie said, “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the famous Groovy Hollow Raceway!” He and Doug led them inside.

They walked off to the right near where what Tommie believed was supposed to be Turn 1. There was a break in the wall there as, in the corners, there was no pit wall, only a small hill of sand trailing down from the lightly banked asphalt. “We’ll have to put in an outside wall,” Doug said, and Eddie nodded as if it had already been decided that they were doing this and that Groovy Hollow

would once again be hosting local short-track racing in the not-too-distant future. While Tommie had her doubts, this made her heart flutter with optimism. And she could see herself, one day, wheeling that number 28 late model stock her father had bought her around the track’s sweeping turns, fighting loose conditions. It sounded like a whole lot of fun!

Tommie looked back at the grandstands. They would have to be replaced, too. The metal foundation was rusted and crooked leaning, and the wooden seats and steps rotted and busted. She looked up at the press box. GROOVY HOLLOW was painted on it in thick black paint, the former Mr. Richards embracing the track’s Halloween esthetic. The plexiglass windows of the press box were smeared with brown dust and dirt. Bore bees were flying in and out of it in neat, organized lines. She was sure that, somewhere up there, there was a nest of hornets or some other kind of wasp. Tommie didn’t have many fears, but bees and particularly wasps were her biggest ones.

Tommie grimaced and shivered, gnawing at her bottom lip. Then, her eyes were drawn back to the plexiglass windows of the press box. There was someone in there, she thought, asshe perfectly made out a darkened silhouette in the unmistakable shape of a man. She reached out to tug at her father’s sleeve, to gain his attention just like she had when she was a little girl, but he was too far out of reach. The shadow took a step back and was gone, engulfed by further darkness.

The asphalt of the track itself was remarkably clean. There were a few cracks here and there with a minimal amount of weeds sprouting from them, and the surface was very worn. It would be hard to handle, for sure, but, all in all, it looked completely raceable. The infield was a little worse for wear. The roof of the infield garage was caving in on itself, and victory lane, which rose from the infield like a stage, was dirty, the concrete arch overseeing the entrance of it collapsing into gravelly rubble.

“We can take care of these weeds,” Doug said, looking at Eddie. “I got a weed eater out in the truck. Be right back!” And then he was off, slipping back out through the gate and sprouting out into the woods.

Dad grabbed a couple of trash bags and handed Tommie one. “Here,” he said, “let’s start getting this trash up.” And they did. They started on the front stretch and worked their way down into turn 1. Dad whistled a tune that was familiar to Tommie, but she couldn't tell where she had heard it

from. Maybe it was something Dad whistled into her crib when she was a baby or by rocking her to sleep when she was a young child. Whatever the case, the tune was melodic and lovely. And it warmed her heart.

Doug returned about fifteen minutes later with the weed eater. He was heaving, out of breath from lugging the heavy Kobalt through the twisting woods. He and Eddie took turns trimming the weeds through the open wounds on the track’s surface. Tommie, Dad, and the other fathers and kids picked up trash, and some of the men moved different parts of debris awayinto clustersby the outside retaining wall to be dealt with later.

Most of the stuff Tommie found, she threw away losing lottery tickets, weather-battered paper cups, plastic nacho trays from the concession stands. She did, however, keep a few things as souvenirs. There was a chip from the outside wall that was mostly intact. She shoved it into her bag. And there was an old ticket stub. The writing was hardly legible, only the word HOLLOW appearing at the top in a faded holographic image. She could also make out the seats. It said ROW 3, SEAT 13. She shoved that into the back as well, and they carried on. By the time they had cleaned up half the track, the sun was starting to dip below the trees, and the sky was a deep, burning orange. It was time to call it a night.

Chapter 6

The next weekend, they went back to the track. They did some more work, clearing out more of the trash and weeds from the backstretch down into turns 3 and 4. By and large, the racing surface looked better, but the facilities seemed worse somehow, as if they were in advanced stages of decay and rotting at an accelerated rate. On the third weekend, the group from Facebook met for a final time, but they didn’t do much work other than tinker here and there, surveying what all needed to be done. The men drank beers except for Dad. He didn’t drink anymore, but he sipped on a long-necked glass of bottled Mountain Dew he bought from a Roadrunner convenience store down the road. They were more expensive, but Dad always said they were the best on the account that they’re made with real cane sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup. Tommie thought they were just bad for him all around but didn’t say anything. He had earned it with how hard he’d worked, so she figured she’d set her nagging aside. Besides, the retro look of the glass bottle looked kind of cool. It was like the paint scheme Tommie had seen online from Darrell Waltrip back in the ‘80s driving the No. 11 car for the now-extinct Junior Johnson Associates team. Dale Jr. had done a throwback to that car on two separate occasions, and she almost asked Dad if she could have the bottle when he was done. It’d make a great accessory to her racing memorabilia collection.

After the third weekend, the Facebook group disbanded. The track was closed to the public, supposedly surveilled by local law enforcement on the hunt for trespassers when there was nothing to do on a quiet Sunday morning. Everything fromthe track went radio silent. This concerned Tommie as her fears that Doug Richards had been approached by some suave businessman in a suit to buy the property out from under them, out from under Commonwealth, came creeping back. She asked her Dad about it a couple of times, and he shrugged the notion off. But he didn’t know. He couldn’t have known, not really, what exactly was up Doug Richards’ wealthy cuff-linked sleeves. Some men, especially those with an abundance of wealth, will say just about anything to get what they want, no matter the people or communities they hurt in the process. It sure would stinkif their efforts inshaping the track up were just a pawn in some real estate developing scheme.

The murmurs didn’t begin until the beginning of August. July had been a miserably hot month,

and Tommie was looking forward to the weather cooling off a bit despite the fact that she was dreading the return of school, which had taken far too many valuable hours and real estate in her life. It was the night just before school was fixing to start up again. Tommie was in her room making sure her book bag and all its accessories were working and ready to go. Next was to lay out her clothes so she wouldn’t have to do so in the morning. She got up off her bed and started to walk towards her closet when she heard a couple of quick knocks on her bedroom door. She paused and turned. “Come in!” she said, slightly annoyed by the fact that her father was interrupting her prep.

He poked his head in. “Do you have a minute?” He smiled wide, almost giddy.

“Um, sure, I guess,” Tommie said. She walked back to her bed and fell down into it hard, riding the waves of the croaking springs. “What’s up?”

Dad opened the door a little wider and came in. He was holding his laptop, a big screened HP he often used for work, and brought it over to her. His finger was on the mouse pad, and white light from the screen illuminated his glasses. His smile seemed even wider then, almost insane. He scrolled through a page, Tommie noticing the small illegible text zooming by in the reflection of his specs. Then, he stopped, finding whatever he was looking for. He turned the screen to face her and said, “Look!”

The website was Facebook, and what she was looking at was a newish page (it was created on July 15th) called GROOVY HOLLOW RACEWAY. Under it, in the info box, it read:

The historic 0.3756-mile short track is back!

Announcement pending! Fall 2021!

Tommie looked up at her dad, who grinned wide as he could. “Uh-huh,” she said, feeling hopeful but also realistic. Tommie knew that Facebook was prone to fake accounts and scams galore. “You really think this is the real deal?” Her brow furrowed.

Dad’s smile faltered. “Of course I do! Why wouldn’t I?”

“Dad, you get friend requests from bots using attractive women as their avatars all the time. They basically litter your notifications with comments from posts you made two years ago, and they clutter up your inbox. How do you know that this is not something similar?”

Dad’s smile fully fell away then. He turned his computer back to him, squinted his eyes, and looked hard at the Facebook page. “I don’t think it’s that. No! Look, there’s even a phone number and email link in the info box, see?” He turned the computer back to her. “Maybe I’ll call them tomorrow. See if it’s on the up and up, you know?”

Tommie did know, and she hoped, with all her heart, that her reservations were misguided. “Yeah. That’s probably a good idea. And, if it’s legit, we have a speedway that’s all our own. Even closer than Bristol!”

“Yeah. And we can get like season tickets or something!” Dad exclaimed. “Sounds like a blast!” Tommie said.

Dad shut his laptop and ruffled Tommie’s head like he used to back when she was little. Then he was out of the room and down the hall, most likely to do more research about the speedway and its potential grand reopening, only to find nothing official. In fact, all he was able to find other than the possibly phantom Facebook page was a Reddit thread with a question about the page and a response from someone within the Commonwealth community expressing how badly they wish for the page to be a scam. “The track has been gone forever,” the post read. “Commonwealth has moved on from racing, and I’m not going to abide by this town, my town being bombarded with noisy, obnoxious racecar drivers and drunken race fans!”

The official announcement came on the Friday of that week. A short video was posted to the apparently legitimate Facebook page of Doug and Eddie announcing the grand revival of the Groovy Hollow Raceway. The plan, initially, was to run a single late-model stockcar race on Wednesday, October 27th, 2021, at 7 PM. A limited number of tickets were set to go on sale onthe coming Monday, the proceeds of which would be donated to charity. Any future race was pending on the success and fan interest of the first, making it a make-or-break event.

Sponsoring the event was the likes of Toxic Waste Hazardously Sour Candy, which was to be presented by a company called Groovy Media.

Dad brought the laptop to Tommie to show her the video. He shaking so badly of excitement that she had trouble seeing if the men on screen were, indeed, Doug and Eddie. “It’s real!” Dad exclaimed happily.

Tommie smiled. “So it seems!” She stood up and crossed her bedroom to peer out at the night sky. The moon was full that night, and clouds scattered across the sky and moved slowly.

“Should I buy tickets? I bet they’ll go fast!” Dad said.

Tommie told him that he should, and Dad set a reminder on his phone for eight o’clock Monday morning to prompt him to do so. Looking out her window and down at the car Dad had bought her for her sweet sixteen, that was the moment when she knew, just knew, that one day when she was ready, she was going to race that number 28 beauty at the infamous Groovy Hollow Raceway.

Chapter 7

There were bumps along the way in hosting the first Groovy Hollow race in over a decade. For starters, an opposition group was formed; they created pages on both Facebook and X called VOTE

NO TO HOLLOW, their avatars being the picture of the track outline with a red circle and diagonal slash drawn through it. To the best of Tommie’s knowledge, the whole effort was spearheaded by a shrewd woman named Carol. At the very least, she was the one who fought the hardest against the reopening of the speedway, attending several Commonwealth town council meetings to drum up support for her futile cause until they just couldn’t ignore her anymore. A hearing was scheduled at the end of August. The city council advised Doug and Eddie to suspend their efforts at least until a final decision was made. They ignored this advice as they continued to promote the Groovy Hollow 300 while drumming up some support of their own.

Tommie watched the hearing, which was streamed live on Facebook. Dad plugged his laptop into the TV, and they settled in, eagerly waiting for the results. Tommie nervously gnawed at her fingernails, biting them down painfully into the quick. This was the first time she had seen Carol in the flesh. She was a rat-faced woman with her pointed nose high in the air, acting as if her crap didn’t stink. Her hair was brown, but she was old enough, and based on the deep wrinkles on her face and crow's feet carved into the corners of her eyes, Tommie was almost certain that her hair color was the product of something out of a bottle. In her primary argument, the woman said, “Listen, we have to be practical about this. We have to think about the children!” In Tommie’s opinion, the first sign that someone is losing an argument is when they ask you, without much more substance, to think of the children. “To reopen the speedway would disrupt their way of life! Bus routes would have to change. Traffic would be more clustered, and the strangers! Nothing but a bunch of drunks coming in and out of town like a revolving door. I don’t want that for my kids, and if you were a good parent, neither should you!” She went on to say, “I understand that once upon a time, the track was vital to this community. It was! To deny it would be foolish of me!” Tommie could agree with her there, though she seemed largely foolish overall. “But the track closed. A community grew in Commonwealth, a community that wasn’t and will never be race fans. Groovy Hollow Raceway is a piece of Commonwealth history! But that’s just it. It’s all just history, and we need to move forward and not be

so focused on what’s in our rearview mirror. There are lots of other tracks in the area where the local racers can race. There’s Kingsport, Bristol. Heck, there’s even one in North Carolina that ain’t too far of a drive. Why disrupt an entire community who doesn’t care about racing just to satisfy the few?” She went on, “I’m not saying that you, Mr. Richards, should close the track entirely. I think it would be a great place to host some concerts and other events of that nature. But racing is dead in Commonwealth and has been for a very long time. I ask the panel today to please veto this option to reopen Groovy Hollow Raceway as a racing facility. Thank you!”

“What a total quack!” Dad exclaimed. He tossed a couple of popcorn kernels in his mouth, chewed them, and swallowed. “That lady doesn’t know what the heck she’s talking about!”

“And that hair!” Tommie said. “That’s a Karen haircut if I’ve ever seen one.” They both laughed at this until the hearing went into recess. Then, she looked at her Dad and asked, “Do you think they’ll really do it? Reopen, I mean? Or do you think that woman will win?”

Dad shrugged. “I don’t know. I’d like to think they reopen it. Clearly, that woman doesn’t know what she’s talking about; she’s crazy and unhinged. But that doesn’t mean the council won’t go for it. It all comes down to money, Tommie. Whoever has the most financial backing in their corner usually wins. That’s why the world is as messed up as it is.” He paused a moment to munch on some more popcorn and take an audibly satisfying swig of his Mountain Dew. With the bottle crackling in his hand, he said, “But I have hope, Tommie. I have hope that one day, Groovy Hollow will reopen, and there’ll be racing there once again.” He turned to look at her. “And hey, who knows? Maybe with Mable out there, you’ll even turn some laps there yourself.” He winked at her.

In the end, the council ruled in favor of the Groovy Hollow representatives, and the prepping for race week carried on. The VOTE ‘NO’ TO HOLLOW campaign appealed but did not prevail. Shortly thereafter, they disbanded, citing differences in strategy as the key component. From that, several groups formed, none of which made much noise. Dad secured Tommie’s and his tickets, and before they knew it, it was October 27th. Raceday!”

Chapter 8

On October 27th, 2021, late model short track racing returned to Groovy Hollow Raceway, but it was not the only return of the night. The day for Tommie started as any other—she woke up, showered, did all of her morning routines, and went downstairs for breakfast. Mom had made a pot of maple and brown sugar oatmeal with cinnamon raisin toast. It was Tommie’s favorite. She joined her Mom and Dad at the breakfast table. Dad was still in his pajamas as he took a day off from work to prepare for the day. He sipped from a mug of coffee with #1 DAD written in black letters on the side. Tommie remembered when she had bought the cup at a souvenir shop in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, on the way home from a church trip to Dollywood one summer. Dad drank coffee fromit every morning, which made her heart happy. He was reading the paper, but when she entered the kitchen, he raised the mug to toast her.

“Sit down, honey. I made your favorite,” Mom said. As she prepared for work, she was wearing her uniform, a blue polo shirt and black slacks. She managed a small convenience store in Newport. Tommie did, and she ate in silence for a while until both pieces of her toast were gone, and only a little bit of the oatmeal remained in her bowl. She was still going to school. That was the plan, as she had had perfect attendance since Kindergarten and had no intention of giving up that award at the end-of-year awards banquet at school.

“Now remember, honey, I’ll be by to get you after lunch. Say around 12:30 or so. Qualifying starts at three, but I’d like to get over to the track in time to just look around, you know? At the souvenir tents and whatnot.”

Tommie did know, and she wholeheartedly agreed, nodding as she took the final bites of her oatmeal and pushed the empty bowl away from her. “Sounds good.” She started to get up to kiss her Mom and Dad on the cheek. Randall, her bus driver, was surely there by now, and she didn’t want to keep him waiting. He got a bit ornery when he had to wait. She started to get up when her Mom flashed her a look. Tommie sighed. “Fine,” and picked up the empty bowl and carried it over to the sink. She placed it gently inside, squeezing a small pea-sized amount of Dawn dish detergent into it and filling it full of warm water to soak. Then, she kissed her Dad and then her Mom, and they said

their goodbyes.

As she knew he would be, Mr. Randall was sitting on the shoulder of the road waiting. He honked his horn at her. “Coming, I’m coming,” she hollered but doubted that he could hear her over the loud roar of the bus’s engine and hissing of the exhaust. She climbed the stairs and fed into the aisle. “Thanks, Mr. Randall,” she said.

“Oh well, you’re very welcome. But get out here a little sooner next time. I have a schedule to keep,” he said. Tommie nodded and rolled her eyes. The bus was already moving down the road before she found her seat near the back of the bus. She sat down next to Samantha, her long-time best friend.

“What’s that?” Samantha asked, a note of disgust in her voice. She pulled at Tommie’s shirt, a Tshirt she had bought several years ago at a souvenir trailer parked outside of Kingsport Speedway. The image on the front and back was the same a NASCAR Wheelen Modified #39 car with THE ROCKET MAN written in bolded red-orange type. It was not the most fashionable thing she could have worn, but hey, it was race day, and she was feeling special.

“It’s a Bryan Newcastle shirt,” Tommie said. “When heretiredfromNASCARCup Series racing, he dipped down into the modifieds. He was at Bristol mingling with fans last year. I got him to sign it for me. Look!” She leaned forward, showing off the barely legible scribble of a signature signed in Sharpie just over her right shoulder.

Sam smiled and shook her head. “You and your racing!” she said and sort of giggled. It was an endearing sound. “So, are you excited for the race today?”

“Sure am! Dad’s picking me up early. After lunch, though, you won’t be missing me too bad throughout the day.” Sam’s last class with Tommie for the day was Mr. Bowers’ 10:45 AM math class.

“So, you won’t miss Mr. Bowers’ test then? Good. You know, it’s an open-note, openfriend quiz!”

“Yeah. Unfortunately, I’ll still be there for that.” Tommie said.

“You mean, fortunately! You can’t skip out on me, girl! We’re going to tandemthis test, you and I!”

Tandem. Tommie smiled at the word. It was a word Tommie used somewhat on the regular before Sam even knew what it meant. She used it because of the old two-car tandem form of drafting at tracks like Daytona and Talladega that the Cup Series guys used to do back in the mid-2000s.

Though, at the time, Tommie hated it and often preferred larger pack-style racing at the plate tracks, sometimes she missed it, particularly when any given race at Daytona, Talladega, or, now, Atlanta got to be strung-out, boring “train racing” with all the cars forming a single-file line atop the track next to the wall with minimal passing opportunities available. Talk about a snooze-fest! At least with the two-car tango, there were always comers and goers, and the ends to races were always dicey.

“I’d never skip out on you, Sam! We’re going to ace this test, and we’re going to do it together!”

They did their secret handshake.

“Bet!” Sam said excitedly. They ended the handshake by putting their foreheads together and looking each other dead in the eyes.

Chapter 9

Dad, as promised, came to pick her up from school just after noon. It was a Wednesday, which meant that the Commonwealth High School cafeteria was serving a choice of mini corn dogs or fish sticks with a side of soup beans, mac and cheese, and cornbread. Never a fan of fish, in stick form or otherwise, Tommie opted for the corn dog “nuggets” (hold the soup beans) but helped herself to a second serving of mac and cheese that was better than it had any right to be. She had just polished off her last bite of battered dog dipped in a mixture of ketchup and mustard when Mr. Crandel, the second assistant principal of the school, approached her. “Tommie, your dad is in the office to pick you up.”

Tommie looked at Sam, who smiled at her. “Go on! Go, go! I’ll take your tray.” “Thanks, Sam,” Tommie said happily.

“You’re welcome. Now go. And have fun!”

Tommie nodded. Of course, they were going to have fun. There wasn’t anything like getting out of school early to go to a race. She gathered up her things, wrestled them into her book bag, zipped them up, and made a beeline for the front office, where she met Dad. “Are you ready for your doctor’s appointment?” Dad said and winked at her.

Tommie shoved at him, mouthing for him to knock it off. He was going to blow it! As they were heading out the door, Ms. Barnett, the front desk secretary, called after her, “Have fun out there today, Tommie! Ihopeit’sagoodrace.”Tommielookedback,andthewoman was winking at her. She looked up at her Dad, who was having difficulty containing his excitement. She always loved the passion of her father, especially when it came to racing. He was just too excited to keep the secret of Tommie’s little faux doctor's appointment just between the two of them.

She hugged him and climbed up into his truck. Dad did the same on the driver’s side and turned the key. The big Ford F-150 roared to life. Tommie looked over at him as he pulled his Chase Elliott 2020 Championship hat down tighter over his head as he fumbled with his seatbelt. When it clicked into place, and he pulled the belts tight, he looked over at Tommie. “You excited?” He asked.

“A little more than,” Tommie replied.

“Well then, let’s go,” he said. He shifted the truck into gear, and they were off, headed for the races. After they parked in the gravel pit of a parking lot and got out of the truck, Tommie and her Dad could hear the roaring of engines racing around the short oval. The sound wasn’t as loud as it could have been, with Tommie noting that it was probably just one car or two turning laps in practice.

“What time did practice start?” Tommie askedher dad ashe grabbed the backpack cooler and threw it over her shoulders.

“I think the first session was around eleven? I think there was an hour break between noon and one.” He looked down at his watch. “This is probably the second session.” He reached into the back pocket of his jeans and took out a track schedule he had printed up the night before off the revamped Groovy Hollow website. “Ah, yeah, here we go,” he said, pointing. “This is session 2 of 4. Qualifying will go down at about five, I reckon. Race starts at 7:30.” He folded the paper and shoved it back down into his jeans pocket.

Tommie looked around at the track and the land around it. She was astonished by how much it had changed since she was last there gone was the overgrowth of nesting weeds; gone were the condemned buildings and the porta potties; gone were the grandstands and the old-school press box harboring all sorts of bees and wasps. The smell of fresh paint coated the air around them.

Outside, to the right of the men’s room, was a Pepsi vending machine that was, by its looks, relatively new. Tommie could tell by the way the wall looked on the corner of the track that SAFER barriers had been added. A new, high-rising grandstand structure with a new, state-of-the-art press box perched on top ran parallel to the front stretch. There were small, plain white trailers littered around the parking lot from which different driver’s merchandise was being sold. Tommie assumed that the haulers that brought all the cars to the track were likely on the other side, outside turns one and two.

“Come on, let’s go! I want to see as much of the on-track action today as I possibly can!” Dad said, and Tommie concurred. They took each other by the hand and started for the entrance of the track. Tommie was hardly aware that her excitement had taken her from a fast walk to a trot and then to a slow run. Dad was following from behind, struggling to keep up. But he wasn’t complaining. He wanted to see the insides of the facility just as much, maybe even a little more, than she did. When they got to the front gate, a man with a full, wooly red beard and long brown hair was there to

check them in. He inspected their coolers and scanned the two barcodes of the day passes on Dad’s phone, and stepped aside. “Have fun and enjoy,” the man said. The nametag over his heart read CODY, and under the name was the official Groovy Hollow Raceway logo.

“Thanks,” Tommie said as she and Dad slipped by the man, who then turned to help the next person in line. The crowd inside the facility was thin, but Tommie had a feeling that it wouldn’t stay that way for long. In fact, she hoped the place would be absolutely packed; she wanted the Groovy Hollow race to be the biggest success it could be so that they’d get to do it again for many years to come.

All the tickets sold, save for a few of the press box tix gobbled up by the big wigs and sponsors of the surrounding area, were general admission tickets, meaning that they could sit virtually anywhere they wanted. Dad scrolled through his phone. “Where do you want to sit?” He asked.

For Tommie, the answer was obvious: “Start/finish line, where else? Maybe about halfway up the stands? I don’t want to be so low that I can’t see the other side of the track.”

Dad nodded. “Okay. That’s where we’ll head then.” He paused a moment to look around. “Do you want to maybe shop around some or get some concessions?”

Tommie shook her head. “No, I just want to go in and look at the track.” She put her hand over her stomach. “Besides, I’m still full from lunch at school. We can come back out later. Maybe after qualifying?”

Dad agreed, and the two went into the grandstands to find their seats.

Chapter 10

The seats in the grandstands were aluminum bleachers that were hard on both Tommie’s and Dad’s butts, the two of them taking turns periodically through the practice sessions to stand up and walk around, searching for any form of relief. They watched practice off and on while also glimpsing into a program Dad had picked up at the information booth located near the front gate. The program had all the drivers' numbers and names of those who were attempting to qualify for the event. There was a grand total of 80 late model drivers and teams showed up to make the 40-car main event.

“Roughly half of these drivers are going to be very disappointed,” Dad said, and Tommie agreed. But it was easy to predict a couple of the drivers who were definitely going to be in the show. For starters, there was Brandon Power, who was driving the No. 6 late model Chevy Camaro. Tommie spotted that car instantly, and she recognized the likeness of Eric Estepp on the hood and his brand, Out of the Groove, stamped on the quarter panels. “That Brandon Power guy, he’s a NASCAR guy, ain’t he?”

“Yeah,” Tommie confirmed. “Xfinity Series. He drives a car that looks almost exactly like that.” She pointed at the number 6 Camaro as it turned laps around the track. “The sponsor on that car, Out of the Groove, that’s my favorite YouTube racing content creator. Eric, the host, does pretty much daily videos about NASCAR: race recaps, daily news, that sort of thing.” Tommie squinted and looked for the classic black and yellow colors down in the pits. Eric was there, and it wasn’t hard to spot him. “There, he’s standing right there, Dad.”

Dad followed Tommie’s finger and zoned in on the pits. “Who? That really tall guy? Man, how tall is he, do you think?”

Tommie shrugged. “I dunno. But that’s him all right. It must be so exciting to sponsor a reallife racecar!”

As the practice sessions came to a close, Tommie noted that there was another car that had an excellent shot at making the main event. It, like Power’s OOTG car, wasn’t easy to miss with its bright neon green and yellow wrap. The number on the car was 25, and sponsoring the car was Toxic Waste Hazardously Sour Candy. In the corner, just in front of the rear Hoosier tire, was the logo

Dogleg Media. Tommie wasn’t familiar with that creator (yet), but she noticed how frequently the No. 25 was near the top of the scoring pylon after each practice session. She flipped through the program, listing all the drivers in numerical order. The driver of the number 25 Toxic Waste Chevy was David Smith, a short track legend in his own right. With the sheer speed of that hotrod, unless something terrible happened in his time trials, the number 25 machine was going to make this race handily. He did. David Smith solidly put his number 25 Toxic Waste Camaro in the show by scoring the pole position. Brandon Power, also seemingly a threat for the main event win, qualified for the race as well, lining up fourth. Other hot shots in the field were Carson Levin, Dexter Malone out of Whisperwood, Terry Layne out of Knoxville, John Rex out of Kingsport, and Benson Bell, who would make his unprecedented return to racing, driving the number 75 NASCAR-sponsored Toyota. Bringing up the rear was a driver Tommie had never heard of before, but Dad knewhim Jerry Slater. His car was unsponsored and black, the number 00 slapped on the sidein a deep neon orange. Slater would be the last to make the field, starting in the 40th position.

“Hey, I know that guy!” Dad said, pointing at Slater in the program. Tommie reached over and took the program from Dad. She looked at the man her father had pointed out as Jerry Slater. And there was something about the man she just didn’t like an eeriness to the photograph; it was like looking at Jeffery Dahmer’s mugshot. He looked angry but also lost, tired, and left out to dry; the absence of hope on his face and in his sunken eyes was immeasurable. He appeared wayward. “Really? How do you know him?”

“I bought Amelia off him. Jerry used to race frequently around the area. But I don’t know. He just decided he wanted out one day. He listed Amelia on the marketplace, and I saw it when I was scrolling through Facebook. I thought to myself, Tommie’s turning 16 soon. Why not buy it and fix it up? Maybe we could even go racing with it someday. And now, Groovy Hollow Raceway is open again.” Dad nudged her and offered her a wink. “Who knows, maybe you can even make your racing debut here within these hollowed walls.” Dad let out a chuckle, thinking he had made a really funny joke. In truth, it sounded like something the Cryptkeeper might have said in that old 1990s HBO show, Tales from the Crypt, and Tommie appreciated it. Then, Dad’s smile faded. “Looks like Jerry got himself another car. Good for him. I’m glad he made the main event,” Dad said, but there was a noted cautious tone in his voice.

As the go-homers took their cars out through the gate on the backstretch to load them up disappointedly, Tommie and Dad went down to the concessions beneath the grandstands. Dad got a hot dog loaded with chili, mustard, and diced onion, along with Mountain Dew, to drink, while Tommie opted for the small personal Hunt Brothers Pizza option and bottled water. They got a loaded chili cheese fry to split between them. The food was amazing, as food typically is at sporting events, though the jury was still out in Tommie’s mind if that was because the mediocre concession stand hot dogs were just part of the larger ambiance or if there really was quality there. Whatever the case, Dad said that his hot dog was pretty dang good. “But nothing can beat those hot dogs they have at Martinsville,” he added and gave Tommie a wink. “Maybe we can make the trip up there sometime.”

Tommie nodded and devoured her pizza, leaving nothing but the crust (the pizza’s bones) behind. The bread was too filling for her. After they finished eating, they stayed hunkered down beneath the grandstands until it was almost sunset, Tommie wanting to avoid as much exposure to the sun as she could. She remembered to put sunscreen on that morning, but she supposed that she hadn’t put on enough. Her skin had turned from a pale white to a bright pink, and it sizzled. They reemerged to their seats around the time the announcer in the press box was starting driver intros.

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the first hopefullyannual Groovy Hollow300 atthe historic Groovy Hollow Raceway!” Tommie noticed the man’s voice but wasn’t quite able to put a finger on it. Not yet. Not until the announcers stated their names. “This is Jeremy Sandburg, a.k.a. The Iceman and I am joined herein the booth with none other than co-host of the Racing History Podcast, Davis Gilligan! Are you all ready for some Wednesday night racing!?” The crowd, including Tommie and her Dad, erupted into cheers. “Well, let’s get this party started by introducing the daring young men and women who will be trying to take on this historic lost speedway!” There were more blasts of cheers, and this group was louder than the first. At first, Tommie thought they might’ve even been able to mask the roar of the cars.

“Yes, well, we sure are excited to bring you the first edition of what will hopefully become an annual spectacle the Groovy Hollow 300!” Jeremy’s booming voice echoed off the mountain but was quickly covered up by the roar of the endearing fans in attendance.

“That’s right, Jeremy,” Davis chimed in. “We are thrilled to be here with you tonight, and we

cannot wait to go short track racin’ under the lights here at Groovy Hollow! Let’s meet our starting lineup for tonight! And one thing to remember: none of these drivers are busts. They were the forty best cars to attempt to qualify for this event, and they have traveled far and wide to put on a great Wednesday night show for you, the fans! With that in mind, let’s give all these brave men and women a big round of applause!” The roar of the crowd again eclipsed all other sounds in the stadium, and it lasted for a couple of minutes before slowly tapering off.

“Now, let’s meet our driver!” Jeremy retook the center stage. “Starting in the fortieth position, driving the number double-zero Chevy for Smokin’ Slater Enterprises, Commonwealth’s own, welcome back to racin’, Jerry Slater!” The reaction for Slater was lukewarm. He received a few goodnatured applauses and cheers, but there was an underlying murmuring from shocked fans who just couldn’t believe he was back. Dad clapped but hesitantly with a weary look on his face.

Slater walked across the stage at the start/finish line, took a moment to wave toward the crowd, and then proceeded to his car. Tommie noticed that he was walking funny, as there was a noticeable limp, and he had an accented sense of care for his strut. He looked off, too. His skin was a waxy pale, almost with a tint of blue. Bruised purple bags hung low under his eyes, which were utterly blank as if there was no consciousness at all in them. He reached his car and took a moment, leaning up against the right front fender, using it as a crutch. He looked winded, out of breath, and from such a short distance. One thing was for certain Jerry Slater did not look well. Tommie looked up at her Dad to see if he had noticed his appearance as well and was just as baffled. The dark look of concern on his features indicated that he had.

“I don’t like this,” Dad said, but not to Tommie nor to anyone in particular. He spoke the words simply as a thought voiced out loud, left out in the cold, unprotected, and for anyone to interpret. They ran down the list of drivers from field fillers to the potential race winners out front. Some drivers (particularly the NASCAR spoilers) got more applause than others, but the names and even the sound of the roaring crowd faded into the background. Tommie’s focus kept flipping back to Jerry Slater, who looked worse and worse with each passing second. Before long, it was time for the daredevils to strap in and start their engines, and Tommie watched as Slater struggled to walk around the front bumper of his car. He seemed to waiver there in the air woozily. He leaned to the right, catching himself on the front left fender before his right knee gave out from under him, and he went down. His

head thudded against the concrete, and though she knew she probably hadn’t, Tommie thought she could hear the crack of his skull as it bounced off the hard surface.

The crowd, in awe, stood up, pointing and voicing their concerns. But all that noise was little more than a simmer above the chaos, seasoning the scene. The officials, all wearing Groovy Hollow crew shirts with a small OUT OF THE GROOVE patch on the left breast, rushed to the scene, tending to Jerry Slater. They checked his pulse, and it was seemingly good, though maybe a little weak, and before they knew it, an ambulance was backing up next to a crowded cluster of suits and officials around Jerry. Drivers stood, watching with concern from a safe distance. Jeremy and Davis wrestled with shock in their uncomfortable silence in the booth.

It took a moment to load Slater up onto the stretcher and get him completely situated. Tommie’s initial instinct was to look away, to shield her eyes as if what she was witnessing unfold in real time was taboo. Yet, all the same, she couldn’t look away. Her face started to burn, and she got the sudden urge to cry, but she chokedit down. She lookedside-eyed at Dad. The tears in his eyes were prominent and shimmering. His eyelids threatened to burst with the weight of the overwhelming emotion.

Slater moved a couple of times on the stretcher, which, in Tommie’s mind, was promising. But she had been a race fan long enough that the absolute worst thing to do is to understate the severity of any given situation. She learned that much watching the horrific crash in the 2020 Daytona 500 the year before. That was the closest thing to a casualty in one of NASCAR’s top-3 touring series since the last scary crash at Richmond in 2003. And who could forget the incident that would claim the life of all-time NASCAR great Dale Earnhardt? But this issue, whatever the true nature of the situation was, was an off-track problem, and Tommie said a silent prayer, pleading for everything regarding Slater’s position to be all right.

Once Slater was loaded up in the ambulance and it started to pull out from the back end of pit road, the gate in the outside retaining wall swung open. Crewmen for the 00 Chevy took out a solid black car cover and started to cover the car. Tommie watched as the orange 00 disappeared before her very eyes, masked beneath the black veil of the cover. She was so out of it at that point that she hardly even heard the firing and revving of an engine somewhere outside the track.

Somebody heard something, though, as she heard a man ask from behind her, “Anybody else hear that?” But his voice was a ghost with little substance attached to it it was window dressing, and it snuck by Tommie just like a good, benevolent phantom should. The malevolent ones, though, wanted to be heard and seen. Theydemanded nothing short of everyone’s undivided attention. Those were the ghosts who had something to say, something to communicate with the living, an unfinished business of some kind.

The ambulance, which flashed its lights but otherwise muted its sirens, rolled out fromthe backstretch and into the gravel pit surrounding the facility. The officials manning the gates started to shut it when the sound of an engine revving again cracked through the barrier of sound created by the gawking public. As the ambulance disappeared around the corner, another vehicle of an entirely different make and purpose drove onto the backstretch. Tommie couldn’t believe it, and neither could her Dad or anyone else who was bearing witness asthe infamous Halloween Machine slithered into the frame. The car was just as Dad described it an older version of the late model stock car, splattered in bright black, orange, and white colors with its name proudly advertised on the hood THE HALLOWEEN MACHINE. The number on the door was 31, and Tommie assumed that it was meant to represent the thirty-first day of the month, All Hallows Eve itself. The car came to a stop and waited, the rumbling of its engine the only sound in the whole stadium. Otherwise, Tommie thought it was so quiet that one might be able to hear a pin drop. Then, the car started to roll once more, entering the third turn at a crawling pace. The crewmembers of the 00 team looked relatively unfazed by this. Tommie watched them as they gathered their sparse tools and supplies and sat them on the decklid of the 00 late model as they started to roll it backward out the entrance of pit road. She watched how they moved like well-oiled machinery, blank, indifferent looks on their otherwise ghastly faces.

“They look bored,” Tommie said aloud, but nobody paid her any mind, not even Dad. Bored wasn’t the right word anyhow, not really. It was too soft of a word, in all honesty. In reality, the crewmen didn’t look bored at all. They looked dead.

Tommie speaking aloud sparked something in the crowd. She doubted whether or not anyone had heard her, let alone processed what she had actually said, which was distinguishable from what she was really thinking. But it broke a seal of some sort, giving the rest of the members of the dumbfounded crowd whatever permission it was that they thought they needed to speak themselves.

One man behind them cursed. Another prayed to God. One woman whimpered in the background, almost like she was afraid to make too much racket, thinking that the man behind the wheel of the infamous number 31 Halloween Machine might hear her if she sobbed too loudly.

Some members of the crowd fainted. There was a lot of commotion in those tiny clusters of chaos dispersed throughout the maddening crowd as loved ones, or maybe just fellow do-gooding spectators, shouted for help quickly!

Tommie looked up at her Dad, who had this strange expression on his face. It was a worrisome look, yet not one of surprise. He expected this sort of thing to happen. He looked down at her and tried to force a smile. “Buckle up, Tommie,” he said to her. “I think we’re gonna see something here like most people have never seen before. I think we’re in for a real spectacle.” Tommie paid extra attention to how her father’s voice cracked and waivered when he spoke the word spectacle. Then, he looked away, back down at the track. Tommie did the same, and they watched as the creeping No. 31 Halloween Machine met up with the car and the crewman of the double zero car. The brakes of the Halloween Machine squalled as he rolled to a stop. The zombie men tending to the double zero car stopped pushing, turning their full attention to the driver of the number 31. The driver of the Halloween Machine stuck an armout the windowand did some sort of three-fingered gesture Tommie didn’t understand. Then his arm slithered back inside through the window. The driver shifted the car back into first gear and drove forward, his tires spinning a little on the blacktop as he pulled out from where he had stopped.

On their side of the track now, Tommie looked to see if he could see anyone inside the fabled Halloween Machine. She squinted and strained her eyes as much as she could in a futile and dizzying attempt to see something, anything, but there was nothing there. The windshields, both front and back, were completely blacked out. On the passenger side window opening, she couldn’t see what was inside the car, not even under the bright burn of the bleached white stadium lights. It was entirely black on the inside to the point where nothing was decipherable not a helmet, not a sponsor logo, not gloves, not even a fire suit.

Tommie looked over and saw the zombie men pushing the withdrawn double zero out of the third turn and onto the backstretch, heading for the gate inside the wall.

Jeremy cleared his throat in the booth. “We are, um, sorry about this undeniably bizarre interruption to tonight’s festivities.” By the shakiness in his voice, Tommie could tell that he, too, was rattled. There was a shuffling in the background, a sort of muted arguing that Tommie couldn’t quite make out. “Nevertheless, I think it’s time we get this show on the road. What say you, Davis?”

“Yeah, yeah. Enough with the weirdness. Let’s get on with driver intros!”

“Right!” Jeremy said, sounding a little more like the voice Tommie had heard on The YouTube channel but still noticeably rattled. “Due to a medical emergency, I regret to informall of you that Jerry Slater and his double zero Chevy have withdrawn from his fortieth-place starting position. We want to wish Jerry a full recovery, and our thoughts and prayers are with him. Let’s take a moment of silence, please, in honor of our brother.”

The crowd went silent, removing their hats and bowing their heads. Tommie did the same but didn’t shut her eyes—they remained fixated on the number 31 Chevy at the end of pit road, watching it intently. The silence of the crowd seemed to stretch outward to immeasurable lengths. Down on pit road, the various crew members and racing officials stood somberly except for at the end, where The Halloween Machine sat idling. It had no crew members, no teammates or staff to be seen anywhere. The Halloween Machine seemed to be a solo act for the first annual Groovy Hollow 300, and that realization put Tommie at ease slightly. Surely, the driver, whoever it was, could not last the entire length of the race without a single pit stop for tires or fuel. But part of Tommie suspected that the situation with the fabled number 31 Chevy went far beyond what was typical, even in late model racing. It seemed to be an anomaly unique and disturbed. Jeremy came back over through the PA system. “With that, let’s begin our starting ceremonies byfirstparticipatingin driverintroductions.”The crowd applauded cautiously, many of them keeping a keen eye on the idling number 31 sitting menacingly at the entrance of pit road. There was a pause then, a hitch in the cadence. Tommie could hear more murmurs from the muffled voices in the background, followed by Jeremy quietly uttering, “Okay, okay!” He cleared his throat, seemingly regaining his composure. “As track executives have just informed me, there has been a change in the script. Since Jerry Slater is unable to compete here tonight, his double zero team has withdrawn. That said, the 41st-place qualifier, as well as most other subsequent ones, have already left the premises. Therefore, taking over his spot in the field, driving the number 31 Halloween Machine Chevrolet is the man, the myth, the legend,”

he really leaned into the word legend in a way Tommie detested. “It wouldn’t be a race at Groovy Hollow without him, I suppose. Welcome back, Bucky Blackwell!” There were cheers and applause for the mythical driver in the crowd, but they were few and far between. Even the ones that were there possessed a marked lack of enthusiasm and were more hesitant offerings of good sportsmanship than anything else.

It was clear through driver introductions that the wind had fallen out of the sails of the crowd. The first annual Groovy Hollow 300 at the revamped Groovy Hollow Raceway seemed to be doomed from the jump. And it was all because of The Halloween Machine and Bucky Blackwell. Jittery nerves were felt communally throughout the crowd, and Tommie felt them, too, along with the sense of drowning disappointment. It was like the memory of watching a childhood home burn to ash beyond recovery. Some of the drivers, such as David Smith in the twenty-five car and the NASCAR regulars, got cheers, but even they felt lackluster when compared to the expectations, particularly Power, who was, by far, the most popular and high-profile driver on the entry list. And it all had to do with that number thirty-one car, sitting there idling on the end of pit road, watching menacingly from the rear of the field where Tommie had a feeling he wouldn’t be for long, waiting to get the show on the road. When the time came for the engines to be fired and the cars started to roll out on the track, there was a slight release oftension,though the nervousness remained and would eventually sour overinto sheer dread.

When the green flag waived, the roar of the engines grew into a collective mountain of sound. Tommie immediately put her earplugs back in and watched as David Smith led the field to the green flag and down into the first turn. As the field passed by the grandstands, Tommie’s eyes darted to the rear of the pack where the number thirty-one Halloween Machine of Bucky Blackwell galloped up the speed. It didn’t take long for him to start picking them off, either.

However, every time Mr. Blackwell got to the rear bumper of the car in front of him, there was this moment where Tommie (and everyone else in the crowd, she imagined) held her breath, waiting for the seal to burst. But it never did. Though Blackwell did offer a few “love tap” shots from behind the car in front of him, and though the driver he was tailgating most likely wasn’t happy with him, it was nothing egregious. Tommie had seen worse driving in today’s NASCAR Cup Series, and they were the all-time greats the true all-pro team! These were local short track racers, and while the

tension wound around her throat like a chain, it never pulled tight enough to choke off her airstream. The most aggressive Bucky got in those opening laps was to give the driver in front of him a shot from the back in the corner, which then sent the out-of-shape driver up the track, but they were always able to hold onto it. It was just the classic bump and run.

Astonishingly, they were able to make it all the way to lap 58 before the first caution for incident would occur. And it really had nothing to do with Bucky at all. At least not directly. By that point, Bucky Blackwell, in his infamous number thirty-one Halloween Machine, had managed to make it up to third place. He was charging hard, putting pressure on the two cars out front as they were maneuvering their way through slower, lapped traffic. The Halloween Machine had several donut tire markings on the doors and quarter panels on each side of the car. He wore those race-run tattoos like proud battle scars. But the nose of the Chevy Camaro was relatively clean and undented, smeared only with the grimy sludge of hot rubber and dead bugs.

Power was leading the race by this point. Power, a veteran on the short track scene of the southern United States, had managed his tires well as others faltered, creating a lot of comers and goers until a new leader assumed the point. David Smith was lagging behind with a rearview mirror full of Blackwell and the appropriately painted Halloween Machine. Tommie didn’t know for sure, but she thought maybe the new driver’s crew chief came over the radio and warned the driver of the number 88 Speedco Chevrolet for Boychik Motorsports that Blackwell was gaining and quick. Maybe that was why Power pushed the envelope a little too far. In his haste to get through lap traffic, Power got into the driver of the number 03 (Tommie looked it up the driver’s name was Jon Lunceford) Mustang, which ultimately sent him around in the middle of the third and fourth turns. Lunceford backed his family-owned car into the outside retaining wall, and Tommie couldn’t help but thank the track’s lucky stars that the new owners had good enough sense to build a wall there where there was only a sand pit before.

The overall pace of the race came to a screeching halt. The drivers slowed and started to catch their breath while also likely plotting with their crew chiefs down in the pits on what the strategy ought to be going forward. Tommie knew the main concern down on pit road was most likely tires. If teams could stretch fuel to gain even a small amount on their competition, they would. But if the tires are falling off at a big rate, as she suspected they were, that would be their primary concern. In years

past, Hoosier tires had typically been made of a harder compound than the Goodyears. That was the case back in the 1980s and ‘1990s with the tire wars and what ultimately led to Hoosier exiting NASCAR altogether, save for the lower ranks such as ARCA and the Modifieds. The tires were harder, so even though they did wear throughout a race, they wouldn’t show the wear. This led to spontaneous blowouts, causing several driver injuries and, in some cases, fatalities. Goodyear has been experiencing similar issues lately, but with their exclusivity contract with NASCAR, they weren’t going anywhere any time soon. Hoosier, on the other hand, was more appropriate for shorter races and shorter runs, hence why they’re the perfect tire to use in ARCA and even here at Groovy Hollow. Brandon Power led the field down pit road, save for Bucky Blackwell, who astonishingly stayed out, assuming the lead. A fit of confusion struck the crowd, with several of the smugger spectators saying things like, “He’ll be a sitting duck!” with an accompanying condescending scoff. Tommie, however, wasn’t so convinced. She held her breath as if a bad feeling was setting in, kicking off its shoes and making itself at home. When the field lined back up, swerving to their lanes to either side of the choose cone, they prepared to retake the green. Bucky chose the outside lane, leaving Power in the eighty-eight on the inside. That should have been the preferred lane. However, once the green flag waived again, the pack rushed into the first and second corners. The leader had a slight advantage in one, but it would be Bucky Blackwell, who would be standing tall, retaking the lead on the outside, heading into the third turn. From there, he never looked back. The 31 rocketed out to a large, gapping lead and was soon smothered in lap traffic. It didn’t really slow him down, though. He maneuvered expertly through the back half of the field and was on the verge of even lapping the leaders by the time the checkered flag flew. He never pitted. He didn’t have to. His car handled phenomenally, and his tires never wore, not even in the slightest. As the fabled Halloween Machine took the checkered flag and the field started down pit road, the celebration began. Bucky started by making donuts around the finish line on the front stretch. Then, amidst all the smoke from the rubber tires, which finally burned, Tommie couldn’t quite explain what happened. In an otherwise clear sky, a bolt of lightning seemed to flash out of nowhere. It inexplicably struck the roof of the Halloween Machine, and the whole track was washed over with a brilliant white flash of light. Tommie shielded her eyes. Dad pulled her closer. Someone in the crowd screamed, “It’s happening again! Hang on!” Tommie did hang on. She reached out and

squeezed her Dad, pulling him ever closer to her. The stadium lights around the track added to the brightness before shattering, sparks and shards of glass raining down over the track and in the grandstands. More screams. Tommie felt her forearms scraped and battered by the silvery nails of glass, but that was the extent of her injuries. When the light died, and the whole track was shrouded in seemingly everlasting darkness, Tommie removed her arm from her face and got a good look down at the track. In the immense darkness of night, there was nobody resting on the finish line. Bucky Blackwell, a man of myth and legend, had once again vanished in plain sight. This time, though, left behind the famed Groovy Hollow Raceway as a grim reminder of his dominant legacy and shady, ghastly urban legend. The Raceway would remain over the course of the next year into 2022, a grim promise that Bucky Blackwell would someday return to continue his undisputed reign of terror over the track.

Chapter 11

In the weeks that followed the first annual Groovy Hollow 300, not much was said about Bucky Blackwell, his whereabouts, or speculation of what happened that night. The only theories being spoken of were spouted out by the drunks at Goblin’s Pub over in Johnson City, but they didn’t amount to much. The truth was that when it came down to it, anyone who was stone-cold sober didn’t want to mentally touch the topic, even with a ten-foot iron rod.

Tommie didn’t forget Bucky Blackwell nor his slickly painted Halloween Machine. She didn’t forget about Jerry Slater either, especially whenever she was sitting in what was now her number 28 Late Model Camaro that previously belonged to the former racer. She did follow up on Slater. He had been transported over to the Duane Franklin Memorial Hospital in Kingsport and was located first in their ICU unit. When she finally got her full driver’s license, Tommie took a drive over there a time or two just to see what was on the up and up and/or whether or not his condition had changed. And every time, she was bitterlydisappointed. Following his embarrassing collapse the night of the Groovy Hollow 300, Jerry Slater had slipped into a coma. Brain activity was there, per the doctors, so he wasn’t brain-dead, but his breaths were shallow and haggard. Tommie didn’t know if he would make it out of the woods or not, but she prayed for him every day, from fellow racer to fellow racer. The last time she saw him before the second annual Groovy Hollow 300 was scheduled to commence, he looked bad. His skin was pale gray, and the veins in his face were accented, making it look almost black. He had lost a bunch of weight, and Tommie thought he looked like he was hanging on by a mere thread. Doctors didn’t know what to make of his case. None of the tests they threw his way matched up. The coma seemed almost otherworldly and mystical. Not that the doctors believed in that sort of thing. Tommie did. She had seen it with her very own eyes with Bucky Blackwell. During her many visits, as she looked at Jerry, she wondered if his remaining there was somehow connected to Bucky’s return and subsequent disappearance. When school let out for summer break, Tommie threw herself into working on her racecar. She started bright and early every morning, around dawn, and didn’t end until dusk on most nights, her Dad by her side cheerfully whistling along with every classic rock song that happened to be blasted

over the radio. Sometimes, particularly on those later nights when she felt like engaging in an oldfashioned campfire ghost story, she thought about asking her Dad about Bucky and what he thought had happened to him. But the look on his face that trembling fish-belly white expression of fear that night as theyleft the track always stopped. Sometimes, it was better to let sleeping dogslie…until they woke up for good and started causing a ruckus.

Tommie turned her first laps in her number twenty-eight machine that summer, testing over at the Kingsport Speedway, but that was the extent of it. She wasn’t licensed to race (yet!) and could only turn a few laps when her dad could afford to rent out the track for an afternoon. Dad tried to get in contact with Eddie and Richards over at Groovy Hollow but to no avail—the line was always busy or just straight-up dead. Going through the woods to see the track as they were apt to do at times of immense boredom, it looked, once again, forgotten and abandoned, like the most lonely of ghost towns. Police watched the place frequently, ready to prosecute trespassers whenever they sawthem. It would appear that, at least for the time being, that the Groovy Hollow Raceway was under strict lock and key orders.

As the summer wore on, if you had askedTommie or her Dad whether or not the Groovy Hollow 300 would return the following fall, they most likely would have answered with an unequivocal “No.”

The proof was in the pudding, so to say, and by all available evidence, Groovy Hollow, still standing, looked like a dead sight. Some YouTubers addressed the strangeness around the speedway, but most were silent. S1apsh0es was really the only one with a big enough profile to make a whole video about it. The video was titled “What’s the Deal with Groovy Hollow?” and featured him and his crew going near the track and using drone technology to get a glimpse of the inside. To Tommie, it felt dirty and deceitful, like looking into the blank stare of a cold corpse, but she couldn’t look away. Towards the end of the abbreviated video, the drone was shot down. The sound of gunshots could be heard off-camera, and the view itself went snowy before collapsing into black. At the end of the video, S1ap wrote some white text over the blackened screen, providing some explanation as to what had happened, but it was vague and answered a few questions. The subject was eventually dropped altogether. S1ap went radio silent on the matter, refusing to answer fan questions about the speedway. A couple of weeks after posting, the video was demonetized on YouTube and subsequently pulled down thereafter.

Tommie followed Jeremy and Davis on social media. They, too, were silent on the matter of Groovy Hollow, and if any questions were asked, be it through a direct message or point blank on the platform, they were ignored and deleted. Blocked. The future of Groovy Hollow Raceway looked as bleak as ever. It was buried, for all intents and purposes. That was until Eric Estepp, the groovy out of YouTube’s Out of The Groove, came out with a newcryptic video. The videoin question was posted to the video-sharing site on October 19, 2022, and it began with a very gray aesthetic. Dead trees and browning grass were shown, followed by a far shot of Eric with a shovel digging something up in an undisclosed wooded location. The video then cuts to him holding an old VHS tape. Written in faded pencil, the label read:

GROOVY HOLLOW OCTOBER,

1987

Eric then turned back to face the camera, a strange grin appearing on his face before the video ominously faded to black.

“Dad! Dad! Come here!” Tommie shrieked. Her heart erupted into a dead sprint, and her fingertips shook. She could hear her dad thumping through the house frantically. He sounded like a stampede of elephants.

He jerked the door open. Mom wasn’t far behind him. “Tommie! What is it? What’s the matter?” He asked.

Tommie pointed to the computer screen. “Look!”

Both Momand Dad rushed over to take a gander. Momexhaled and said, “Oh, you two and your racing!” She turned to walk out. “Didn’t mean to frighten you, Mom,” Tommie said.

Mom exhaled, seemingly deflating. “It’s fine, dear. I’m all right.” She left them alone then, her nerves clearly shot as she shut the door behind her.

Tommie replayed the video for her Dad. “What does this mean?” he asked. “A publicity stunt?”

Tommie shrugged her shoulders. “Maybe,” she admitted. “But if it is, it’s an awful effective one.” She turned to look at her dad. “Do you think it has something to do with Groovy Hollow

Raceway? Maybe another race there?”

Tommie could tell by the way that her dad looked that he doubted it. He had seen the S1ap video as well. He saw the drone footage. Groovy Hollow seemed to have rotted away, coming a fossil above anything else. “Possibly. I bet there’s be some sort of announcement this week.”

The announcement came via social media the following Thursday. There was hype that morning, and Tommie was paying close attention to her Twitter notifications on her phone throughout the school day. The main teaser was a blurred-out banner of sorts with familiar Out of the Groove and Groovy Hollow colors. The official announcement was dropped via Eric Estepp’s Twitter account at noon, right on the dot. Tommie was in the cafeteria eating lunch (the menu that day was a spicy chicken sandwich or bacon cheeseburger Tommie opted for the former) when her phone buzzed. She immediately grabbed it, guggling it around in her hands, almost dropping it. She pressed the side button, but the phone gave a delayed response. Eventually, though, the screen did light up, and she swiped upwards, keying in her passcode before swiping down once in and tapping frantically on the small blue Twitter bird icon. The app seemed to take forever to load, but once it did, Tommie couldn’t contain her excitement. She squealed, getting a few disapproving looks from the lunch ladies and several of her peers. Sarah reached over and grabbed her. “Calm down, honey. Deep breaths.”

Tommie listened to her friend and slowed her breathing, which made her feel lightheaded after the initial rush of excitement. “You’re right. Sorry,” she said, feeling a little woozy now. What inevitably brought her back down to earth was her phone buzzing with a text from her Dad.

The text read: GROOVY

HOLLOW 2 IS APPARENTLY A GO. TIX?

Tommie quickly texted back: YE, PLZ! and went back into the Twitter app. She turned her phone to show Sarah babbling incoherently, but she got the gist. The second Groovy Hollow racing event was scheduled for Friday, October 28th, 2022. There was to be a coinciding stream with apparent “found footage” that perhaps explained a little bit about how Bucky Blackwell came to prominence. That was to air the Wednesday before, the 26th of October, live on Eric Estepp’s Out of the Groove channel in place of the NASCAR Weekly Podcast.

“All right, I get it,” Sarah said with a good-natured laugh, pushing the phone away. “But you need to cool it. Ms. Berges is giving you the stink eye!” Tommie looked over to the cafeteria manager,

who looked down at her and shook her head.

“Sorry,” Tommie said softly enough to make Ms. Berges unable to hear. She wasn’t sorry, though. Not in the slightest.

Fromthere, the rest of the school day seemed to drag by. The classes seemed longer and more boring than ever. The teachers seemed especially monotone. In Tommie’s mind, all she could think about was the droning sound of engines flying around Groovy Hollow Raceway once again. And she couldn’t wait. It’d only be a matter of time.

Chapter 12

There was no party of race fan do-goodersto clean up the track this go-around. In the weeks leading up to the second annual Groovy Hollow race event (to the bitter grumbles of angry Karens living in Commonwealth), various professionalsin the areas of construction and business consumed the small town, trying to get everything in the best shape they could leading up to the long-awaited sequel to the previous year’s race. Various promotional signs could be seen around the community and on the billboards along the two-lane highways feeding in and out of Commonwealth. There were more Facebook and Twitter ads, as well as trailers on YouTube ramping up excitement for the event. Last year, the Groovy Hollow 300 felt very grassroots and small. But in 2022, it felt more like a real production legit.

As promised, as serving as somewhat of a preamble to the main event on Friday night, Eric Estepp streamed an alleged origin story of Bucky Blackwell and his Halloween Machine, which, apparently, was once under the control of the Junkyard Jacks, a supposed extinct gang of racing rebels from the heyday of the Groovy Hollow Raceway. Unlike Bucky Blackwell and his Halloween Machine, as well as the Groovy Hollow track proper, the whereabouts of the Junkyard Jacks were a mystery, even to the urban legend junkies—the writers and readers of the Nowhere Chronicles. In the end, Blackwell beat them on the track, and they stopped showing up, seemingly falling off the face of the earth and fading to black with a whimper.

Thus, inlay the theme of this particular Groovy Hollow race: the race was to be a throwback of sorts, with many drivers choosing to throwback to late model greats who never quite made it to one of the three national NASCAR touring series or chose not to pursue it for whatever reason. Brandon Power decided that he was going to throwback to Richie Evans, the king of the modified series. The scheme fits in perfectly for the Halloween season. It was a bright orange car with a black roof and black numbers on the sides. David Smith decided that he was going to throwback his No. 25 car to his all-time favorite driver, Jimmie Johnson, specifically the scheme with which he won his seventh and final NASCAR Cup Series title. What remained a mystery was whether or not The Halloween Machine would return yet again to defend Bucky Blackwell’s unmatched reign of terror.

Dad bought tickets and printed them off, storing them in a safe place until it was time to go to the track. The family had adopted a new puppy named Willis, who enjoyed chewing up paper and household valuables, including Tommie’s throwback Mountain Dew hat produced when Dale Earnhardt Jr. threw it on back to Darrell Waltrip’s iconic number 11 car from the ‘80s at Darlington.

When the day of the race came, like the year before, Dad picked Tommie up early from school. They went through the same old song and dance with the secretary before leaving the school building and hopping up in Dad’s truck. “I didn’t want to spend a whole lot of money on concessions there this year,” Dad said as he started the truck, and it rumbled to life. “So I figured that we’d just pack our lunch. Picnic-style, you know?”

“Sure, good idea. What’d you pack?” Tommie asked, fastening her seatbelt.

“Bologna and sandwich bread. The honey oat kind. I know that’s your favorite.” “Cool. Did you get some ”

“Yes, dear, I remembered the mustard,” Dad said teasingly as he shifted his truck into DRIVE and peeled away from the school.

They went home first, ate some lunch, and packed up the essentials. Tommie remembered the sunscreen, replaced a couple of her Dad’s Mountain Dews with some water, and was ready to go. Dad did a couple of final sweepsof the house, never wanting toleave anything necessarybehind. Since Mom was at work, she guessed it was good of him to be overly cautious rather than mindless. It was going on one o’clock when they finally left the house and headed for the raceway.

The on-track schedule was more-or-less the same as the year before they had a couple of practice sessions so the drivers could get their cars under them before turning laps in time trials to determine their starting positions. There were more people already there in the parking lot this time around than in the previous year, as the gravel lot was already over a quarter full. “We’ll have to walk a little more this go around,” Dad said, but Tommie didn’t mind walking. In fact, she’d have to get it in her mind to pull back on the reigns a little bit so as not to leave her father in her dust.

They got out of the truck, and she threw the backpack cooler over her shoulders and slammed the door “Hey, miss?” a man said, walking up to her. She jerked around, somewhat startled to find an older man wearing a warm smile. This put her at ease some but not all the way. Her mom and dad

had long advocated for her to be inherently mistrustful of strangers, especially as they approach a parking lot. He was carrying a weathered Dr. Enuf box with him. Balancing it and all its contents on his outstretched forearm, he reached inside it and pulled out a pin that was a cross wrapped in a red, white, and blue ribbon. “For you,” he said, and a card was attached to it. The card read:

FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH OF WHISPERWOOD.

Come worship with us!

Tommie put it into the pocket of her jean shorts and thanked the man. He didn’t say a word, only nodded his appreciation, and then was off.

“What’d he want?” Dad asked, and she turned, startled again. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, fine, daddy. He just gave me this pin.” She pulled the pin out from her pocket and showed it to him.

Dad took it, considering it a moment before handing it back to her. He nodded. “All right then.” He looked around suspiciously for the old man, but he was nowhere to be seen. It was as if he had disappeared like a ghost into a foggy night, leaving behind no traces but a patriotic pin. Thinking of ghosts, Tommie’s thoughts unwillingly turned to Bucky Blackwell. Would he make an appearance tonight to defend his title? Only time would tell, Tommie supposed, but the prospect of such a thing heightened her anxiety, and, in the hot sun, she found it hard to breathe. “Come on, let’s go!” Dad said, and the two of them started heading towards Gate 1.

As they approached the gate, Dad pulled the tickets out from his back pants pocket and handed one of them to Tommie. She grabbed it and unfolded it. Pictured on it was the likeness of the Halloween Machine doing donuts on the start/finish line. The picture must’ve been snapped right before the lightning struck.

She handed her ticket to the man in the red vest at the gate. His hair was longer than the year

before, but his nametag still read CODY. He took the ticket from her, scanned it into the system, and handed it back along with a lime green paper bracelet. “In case you leave and want to come back in, we can’t scan tickets twice,” he explained. They went through the cooler on her backpack and walked through a metal detector.

“They sure have more bells and whistles than last year,” Dad observed just as he finished getting patted down.

“Come on, let’s find our seats,” Tommie said, and they headed for the grandstands.

Tommie and her dad paid specific attention to the first practice session. They had gone to the info booth down beneath the bleachers, but the final programs for the event weren’t ready yet. Odd considering that the facility itself seemed to have taken a violent shove into the modern era gone were the porta johns and rickety infrastructure; they had working toilets now with their own septic system. The concessions stand, too, had a sizeable upgrade as they no longer were housed in tents that could blow away at the suggestion of a heavy wind; now, they were encased in concrete huts with black overhead awnings. Groovy Hollow Raceway logos were emblazoned in the corners. They were also able to take cards beyond the cash-only debacle that was last year. Luckily, Dad had cash on him. He always did, just in case. But the people were handing over credit and/or debit cards, and along with it came the various electronic chirping noises. It was a welcome symphony, for sure.

Tommie and Dad must’ve scanned the pit road a dozen times or so, looking for any car that might strike some chord of memory. The usual prospects were there back was David Smith in his number 25 Chevy, this year sponsored by the ROAR! Viewer’s Guide, in association with Groovy Media, Brandon Power was back, driving a number 6 Heartburn-Be-Gone Chevy with associate sponsorship by Big-Box. Newcomers were added to the mix as well, as well as various local green racers and kings of the east Tennessee/western North Carolina scene. At the very end of pit road, though, there was a car that was still covered. Its car cover bellowed in the wind at each passing car as they came out of turn four headed for the start-finish line. The cover was plain black, but the way it ominously sat there, playing opossum, made Tommie’s stomach churn. She looked at her dad. If he had noticed it, he showed no sign of it. He might’ve just skipped over it, paying the resting car no mind at all. Through his binoculars, he was too busy looking for the Halloween Machine, but it was nowhere in sight. Tommie wondered grimly if maybe that meant it was too early for Bucky Blackwell to make his dreaded appearance. After all, he didn’t fester into being until just before driver intros the year before.

Practice carried on as if nothing was out of place. Dad opened the cooler, saw that he had only two of his glass bottle Mountain Dews in there, and shot Tommie a side-eye. He knew what she had done. He cracked open the bottle to the welcome hiss of carbonation and took a long gulp. It was an

unusually hot day, even for Commonwealth, for it to be the end of October. The sun was bright and hot, and there was little cloud cover littering the bright blue sky. The aluminum bleachers were working their tanning bed magic, and Tommie could feel it. She reached into the side pocket of the cooler and handed her dad over the tube of SPF 70. “Put this on,” she said, but he declined, declaring that burning up was a small price to pay for a lucrative tan. “Suit yourself,” Tommie said, but the truth was that it bothered her. She knewabout the harmful rays of the sun, recalling being taught the lesson back in grade school by Blue Lizard Sunscreen. Blue Lizard was a new sponsor over at Bristol Motor Speedway that year, and a representative came to her Charles Park Elementary school to spread the good word about the dangers of too much sun exposure. What made the lesson stick, specifically to Tommie, was that, for promotional purposes, the company was running a contest between each 4th grade class at the school. The objective of the contest was to design a school bus that transported racegoers from the (at the time) free public parking over to BMS proper. The winning class would all get to go see the race live and in person, taking along a family member of their choice. For Tommie, the choice was easy, and it was a good opportunity for her and her dad to watch a race for free. They had been going religiously by that point, but who could still turn down a free race? Needless to say, Tommie’s class won, and they all got to go to the 2004 Food City 500. It was one of the first times she got to share that part of herself with her classmates, and it was beyond cool.

She shoved the sunscreen back into the side pocket of the backpack and crossed her arms, turning her attention back to the practice session. Her eyes drew back to that lonely covered car resting at the end of the pits. There was no driver and no crewmen in sight. As the second practice session drew to a close, Tommie decided that she was hungry and was going to make herself a bologna sandwich. She unzipped the cooler backpack and pulled out the loaf of honey oat bread, the bottle of mustard, and the pre-packaged “All American Beef” bologna. She made her sandwich, putting what she deemed “just the right amount” of mustard on it (the gooey yellow condiment was beading and dripping off the sides of the bread), and then handed the ingredients to her Dad. She made a sandwich for himself, skimping on the mustard, in Tommie’s opinion, and the two enjoyed their little picnic in the stands. It was an ideal day, or it seemed to be. Tommie was happy. Dad seemed to be happy, too, if not somewhat fried by the sun. He was turning so red that he almost looked like alobster. Luckily, qualifying was coming up soon, and the sun had just started to dip below

the horizon of the black surrounding hills.

The cars started to line up for qualifying, and Tommie noticed something depressing: less than half of the cars that showed up to attempt the field this year compared to last year. By all accounts, despite the race being practically dominated by Bucky Blackwell and the Halloween Machine, the first Groovy Hollow 300 was thought to be a massive success. Yet, there were fewer competitors willing to participate in the sequel. Tommie wondered why that was. It could have something to do with sequels never living up to the hype and sensationalism of the original. Her mind turned to countless horror franchises that had spawned at least one sequel and how they’d failed the original film. There were cases, of course, where the second movie ended up outperforming and being better than the original, but that was hardly ever the case. Tommie didn’t want to even consider the idea that the sequel Groovy Hollow 300 event might be a bust before it even began, and she shunned the thought, pushing it far away from her.

The first driver out to qualify was Ernest Long, and Tommie recognized his throwback scheme right off the bat. The sides of the car were predominately black and yellow, with a white 13 door number branded on the side. But what got Tommie’s attention the most was the branding on the hood of the car. It was colored a hot neon pink, and the writing read THE JUNKYARD JACKS. Tommie remembered the name of the historically infamous racing gang that supposedly ruled the scene prior to Bucky Blackwell and the Halloween Machine taking the reigns. There were two other matching cars in the field, the similarly designed black and yellow number 66 with a neon yellow hood and the number 24 with a blue hue to the hood.

Tommie stood up and said to her Dad, “I’ll be right back,” and started to turn. Dad called after her, “But wait, it’s starting!”

She turned back to face her dad. “Yeah, I know. I’m just going to see if they’ve got the programs in yet, that’s all,” she said. She had a sinking feeling that something wasn’t right with the Junkyard Jacks, and she didn’t think beyond the realm of possibility that Bucky Blackwell would make his return. She ran down the bleacher steps and under them, darting directly for the INFORMATION tent near the front gate. The same woman was there before the fiery redhead with the soothing southern voice that kind of reminded Tommie of Reba McEntire. “Excuse me, miss?” Tommie said, approaching the woman.

The woman paused from what she was doing and looked up. She smiled, and that grin was almost as bright as her blazing hair. “Oh, yeah, I know what you want. Lucky for you, I just got a few delivered. Hot off the press, they say!” She laughed then, and it was a warm and genuine sound that was pleasant to the ears. The woman turned, fishing through some things in a cardboard box behind her before pulling out an official Groovy Hollow 2 program sealed in a plastic Zip-Loc bag. At the bottom was a small diecast car. Rather than sporting the number 22 for the year and Groovy Hollow 2 providing the sponsorship, the tiny 1:64 scale diecast was a copy of the number 31 Halloween Machine from the year prior. The sensationalizing of Bucky Blackwell’s legacy and his victory last year has been confirmed. Tommie almost walked away then, refusing to buy such a product based on the diecast alone. The woman’s face darkened then into an expression of concern. “Oh, what’s the matter, honey? Why, you look like you’ve just seen a ghost!”

“Maybe I have,” Tommie thought aloud, but when she looked up to see the woman’s frown bolden, she shook off her concerns. She put a smile on her face despite all the tension and discomfort she felt. “I’ll take it.” She reached into her jean shorts pocket and pulled out a crumpledup twenty-dollar bill. “Will this cover it?” she asked.

The woman took the highlycreased bill and observed it. “Well, really, the programs are twentytwo dollars. You don’t have an extra couple of bucks on you?” Tommie started patting her pockets. Nothing. The woman held up a hand, laughing. By the sound out on the track, Ernest had finished his qualifying lap, giving way to the next Junkyard Jack, apparently named Randall Wheeler.“I’m just playin’ with you, girl. Grow a sense of humor. Here you go!” The fiery woman pushed the program toward Tommie.

Tommie took the programand held it close to her. She was somewhat surprised that the touch of the diecast didn’t burn through her shirt. It felt cursed, that was for sure!

“Don’t mention it. Enjoy the race, Tommie!”

Tommie started to walk away but turned back when the woman spoke her name. She opened her mouth to askher howshe knewwhat her name was, but the woman turned, returning herattention to what she was doing before Tommie so rudely interrupted her. Maybe she had told the woman her name when she walked in? Maybe Dad came down and talked to her at some point? Either way, she decided that maybe it didn’t matter. She went back up to her seat and sat down beside her dad just

as Randall Wheeler was crossing the line in his number 24 Chevy. Their times were nearly identical.

“Oh, hey, they got some in,” her Dad said, sitting down his half-finished Mountain Dew and taking the programfrom her. “Wow, that’s a pretty cool diecast!” Dad exclaimed. “Another collection for the shelf over your bed, huh, Tommie? It’d fit right in with all those horror movie figurines you have.”

It would fit in perfectly to the décor of her room. However, unlike most of the horror movies she’d seen, this one hit a little too close to home. But she didn’t say anything about that, knowing that, most likely, Dad wouldn’t know where she was coming from anyway. “Yeah,” she said, “can I see the booklet?”

Dad pulled the book out from the plastic bag, focusing mostly on the diecast. “Wow! Would you look at the detail!”

Tommie, on the other hand, thumbed through the program. She went to the number 13. The name listed was Ernest Long. There was no picture of the man, just a blackened silhouette of a man with an average body type. She glanced over at the infield garage area, hoping to see either Ernest Long or Randall Wheller standing by their cars, but nobody was there. Their cars were parked and left alone with their window nets down, no crewmen to be seen around them. She glanced down at the end of pit road. Some sluggish crew members in all black stood around the last car in line. They moved like zombies, and as they uncovered the double zero car, Tommie was met with a whirlwind of horrific flashbacks.

“He’s back,” she said softly, not knowing for sure if Dad would hear her, but he did.

“Who? Blackwell?” He placed thediecast carefully down beside his Mountain Dewand grabbed for his binoculars.

“No,” Tommie said. She pointed. “End of pit road. It’s Jerry Slater!”

It was possible that Jerry looked better than he had the year before. But the difference was small. He didn’t look so much like a corpse, but he didn’t look entirely healthy either. Considering his past and the crowd he used to run in, Tommie figured that maybe he hadn’t been healthy in a very long time. Still, he looked sickly, and though he didn’t appear to be dead yet, Tommie got the burning feeling in the pit of her stomach that he would be soon.

“Well, would you look at that?” Dad said, but his voice was strange. It was small and diminished as if he didn’t know what the appropriate thing to say was. He knew Jerry. He knew him better than most people. He knew what he was into and the questionable decisions he’d made throughout his whole life. Tommie got the sense that he almost pitied the man. “He looks better, don’t you think?” Dad asked, but the question was rhetorical.

Despite the rhetorical nature of Dad’s questio,n Tommie said, “Yeah, I guess so,” lying through her clinched teeth.

“Yeah, well, hopefully, he’ll get to race this year, huh?” Dad said and did his best to put on a hopeful yet weary smile.

The qualifying session carried on. The Junkyard Jacks, all three of them, topped the scoring pylon with Ernest nabbing the pole. David Smith qualified in fourth, with Brandon Power rounding out the top-5 starters. Surprisingly, and in a steep contrast to last year, in which he barely made it into the big show by the skin of his teeth, Jerry Slater qualified mid-pack in the 22nd position. Thirty-nine cars participated in time trials, and the announcer started rounding off the starting order. The announcer this time was somebody whose voice Tommie didn’t recognize. It wasn’t Jeremy or Davis. It wasn’t any of the other YouTubers who made racing content. It was a new voice, and there was a radio-like quality to it as if the man had been trained to be a DJ over at The Hawk. It was smooth and high-pitched, sharp even. He paused when announcing Slater in the lineup. He said, “And we here at Groovy Hollow want to send a warm welcome back to Jerry Slater! Slater attempted to qualify for this race a year ago but was struck with an unexpected illness. He’s back now, and not only did he qualify for the race, he did so in a convincing fashion. So, way to go to Jerry. We’re thrilled he’s back!”

There was a hesitant clatter of applause from fans who were just starting to filter in. He continued running down the list of starters when he said, “And that brings us to our fortieth and final entry in tonight’s race!”

Tommie and Dad looked at one another. Dad said, “Only thirty-nine cars qualified!” “I know,” Tommie whispered and started gnawing in her bottom lip.

“Starting fortieth tonight, ladies and gentlemen, is the defending winner of this race!” “Oh no,” Tommie moaned.

“He’s the man, the myth, the legend, appearing here again for all of you via a special invite; ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together for the driver of the number 31 Halloween Machine Chevrolet, the legendarily infamous Bucky Blackwell!”

Cautious applause littered throughout the grandstands. On the backstretch, some officials opened up the gate in the wall, and the sound of an engine fired up and was approaching slowly. Déjà vu, Tommie thought and watched, just asshe had the year before.The Halloween Machine crept into her vision and rolled out onto the track. With its black tinted windows, Bucky gassed up his Halloween Machine and drove it down into the corner, headed for pit road. Tommie’s eyes went straight for Jerry Slater, who stood beside his car, cleaning the dirt out from his fingernails and appearing entirely disinterested. She remembered his collapse. how the EMTs loaded him up in the ambulance and carried him away. She recalled how the zombified team heartbreakingly covered the car back up and was pushing it around the corner when Blackwell paused, seemingly having a word with them. Was all of this planned? Tommie shuddered to think so, but there were entirely too many coincidences for it not to draw at least some suspicion. And what was this back via special invite business about?

Dad seemed to collapsein his chair. He lookedat Tommie. “Well, I guess we know who’s going to win it this year, again.” His disappointment was boldly marked.

Tommie looked to the front of the field at the three Junkyard Jacks cars. The drivers and crews were standing around, laughing and carrying on, seemingly having a good time. They weren’t worried, whatever the case. They’re old rivals! Tommie thought. She said, “I don’t know, Dad. There might be more to it than that. Those Junkyard boys might just give him a run for his money!”

“One could hope,” Dad said, ironically with that hope visibly draining out of him. Collectively, the crowd stood and went through the motions of the opening ceremonies. Bucky Blackwell didn’t so much as get out of his car, which caught the attention of a number of fans who grumbled their disproval. “Disrespectful!” one of them said in a huff; “Disgraceful!” said another. Nonetheless, the ceremonies carried on without so much as a pause. It wasn’t long before all that noise died out, and all that was left was the purring of the engines as they were given the command. The one giving the command this year was, yet again, Eric Estepp from Out of the Groove. He hyped

up the crowd the best he could, occasionally looking back to the car and bringing up the rear of the pack. Did he know about the Bucky Blackwell invitation? Surely not! But you never know. Soon, all that was left to do was to pull the belts tight and go racin’. The cars slowly rolled off pit road, feeding out onto the track. They turned their pace laps, the flagman readied his flag, and then it was all green, green, green. The track roared to life.

It would be hard to imagine not nearly every eye being fixated on that black, orange, and white number 31 Halloween Machine as he started, in a hurry, slicing and dicing his way through the back of the pack. Fading to somewhat of an afterthought was Jerry Slater, who also started moving forward but slowly, taking his time and perhaps saving his equipment. It wasn’t long, though, before that double-zero Chevy had cracked the top 5, and Bucky was hot on his heels. It piqued Tommie’s interest to see how the two might race one another. After all, Bucky Blackwell effectively replaced Slater in the race the year before following his strange and sudden medical episode. But out front, the Junkyard Jacks were holding the rest of the field at bay. Fourth place, Brandon Power saw those matching neon-painted cars stretch their lead farther and farther away.

Slater patiently worked on Power to pass him as Bucky Blackwell slipped into sixth and then fifth right behind him. That was when the first caution of the night flew.

The spinner spun in the back of the back right in front of the leaders. Upon replay, Tommie could see the contact that started it. Ernest Long was leading the race and approaching the end of the field to start lapping cars. He drove his number thirteen car deep into the third corner, and there just so happened to be a driver there a slower driver. The number on the door was 47. Tommie quickly flipped to the program to find the driver involved. Carol Oates was the driver’s name. She was eighty-two years of age, racing in what would possibly be her final race. Under the abbreviated driver bio section of the page, a quote by her was written out. It read: “My daddy was the best racecar driver I’d ever seen. He spent his whole life racing. I’m racing this last race for him.”

Tommie looked back up at the track with tears stinging her eyes. Carol Oates’s car was resting with its rear smashed up against the outside wall. The Junkyard Jacks raced on as if nothing happened and it was no big deal. To be fair, though, so did the rest of the pack. Most of them didn’t

know Carol Oates from Eve—she was just some woman, a fellow driver. But looking at her picture in the program and how she looked like somebody’s sweet grandma from the deep wrinkles, goodnatured and hopeful smile, and curly white hair, Tommie’s heart sank. The spectators pointed at the wreck as it unfolded, and Tommie was thankful that she had missed seeing the initial impact at that moment. Some fans clapped and cheered because, rather than enjoying a good quality racing product, all they were there for, in reality, was to watch the wrecks. They had no idea who was inside that car when it crashed into the hard concrete wall, nor did they care. If anything, they wanted safety crews to hurry up and finish the cleanup so that they could watch more of the carnage. The safety crews took their time dealing with the driver of the No. 47, which only made Tommie’s heart sink lower. A red flag was displayed over the flag stand, and, slowly, as the seriousness of the situation started to sink through, the crowd fell silent. In the end, they had to cut Ms. Carol Oates out of her car. They placed her on a stretcher. She did not appear to be responsive. Then, they loaded her up in the back of an ambulance, started the siren, and ushered her away towards the hospital. Safety crews cleaned up the debris and cleared the track of the car. While all of that was going on, Tommie’s eyes became fixated on the new viewing screen hovering over the scoring pylon. She watched as the operators showed the brutal impact again and again at different angles. By the looks of it, to Tommie, it looked like a careless driver. Ernest Long didn’t even pretend to slow down. He didn’t even try. Rather, he threw his number 13 Chevy into that corner with every intention not to “rattle her cage” but to drive right through her, her fate be damned. Now, she was in the back of an ambulance riding to the hospital, and he was sitting on the backstretch leading the race and letting his engines and tires cool.

Though the officials and safety personnel weren’t stocked as high as those at a real NASCAR race, it was still a better situation than the first year. As a whole, the cleanup took a total of about twenty minutes, and soon, the cars were refired and turning laps under yellow. Tommie didn’t know why race officials did this (maybe it was out of fear of something else bad happening, maybe it was for some other reason), but they kept the cars pacing under caution for an extended amount of time, almost to the point of absurdity. But after another fifteen minutes or so of wasting time under yellow flag conditions, the race restarted. Fans settled back down, allowing Carol Oates and her condition to drift far away from their minds as they waited for the next piece of insanity the night had in store.

Bunched back up now, Bucky Blackwell made his move. He passed Jerry Slater for fourth and was chomping at the heels of the Junkyard Jacks. Now, with no slower traffic in his way, the Jacks couldn’t get away from the Halloween Machine. Jerry Slater stayed pretty close, too, not wanting to be kicked out of contention. The first of the Jacks Bucky passed was Randall Wheeler in the 24. He didn’t make it easy by any means either, as the two driversleaned heavily on one another. After a couple of laps of hard battle, Bucky finally got around Wheeler, sending him back into Slater's clutches. Slater wasn’t to be counted out either; he roughed up the back bumper of Wheeler's car, knocking him out the track and out of the racing groove into the marbles. Blackwell went through to third, and Slater slipped into fourth.

The Halloween Machine then set its sights on Mike Davies, the third member of the Junkyard Jacks ensemble and driver of the number 66. Davies wasn’t about to pull aside, and after around ten or so laps of hard racing, Bucky finally booted himup the track. He lost control of his car and smashed hard into the outside concrete barrier. The car was totaled. Still, they raced back to the line, but no one was standing in the way between Bucky Blackwell and his Halloween Machine and the original of the Junkyard Jacks, Ernest Long. Unlike Carol Oates, Mike Davies was able to climb out from the wreckage of his number 66 machine. He stood beside his mangled car, waiting for the field to pass by. He was a big man, almost too large for Tommie to imagine him being able to fit inside a late model stock. His head was large, his face was round, his shoulders broad. And by the expression on his face, Tommie knew that he wasn’t too happy. As the field crawled by, he walked down the track and gave Blackwell a couple of one-fingered salutes, much to the chagrin of the crowd. Controversy creates cash, and there ain’t nothin’ like tempers boiling over during a Friday night short track bout. Davies was eventually ushered into the back of an ambulance and hauled to the infield care center. Cleanup continued as safety crews and officials loaded up the destroyed number 66 car of Davies and took it back to the garage. By the time the race was ready to restart, they were inside ten laps to go.

The race would restart with eight laps remaining, and Blackwell proved why he was the undisputed master of Groovy Hallow Raceway. It could have been argued that Bucky’s Halloween Machine jumped the start. It was a close call, and one racing official didn’t feel the need to make it. They deemed the restart good, and Blackwell, who chose to restart on the inside lane right behind

the leader, was already moving down the track into turn one, ready to divebomb Long.

This created a three-wide battle for the lead Bucky was as low on the racing surface as he could go, Ernest Long was pinched in the middle, and Jerry Slater was running on ice in the outside lane’s marbles. Somehow, they managed not to crash coming out of turn 2. Slater faded and dropped back, settling into third with six laps remaining. Blackwell and Long battled on side-by-side.

The final caution of the night occurred when the other remaining Junkyard Jack, Randall Wheeler, sent his number 24 Chevy into the corner a little too aggressively in an attempt to gain the upper hand on Slater. Unfortunately, the car didn’t stick and shot up the track. Wheeler made contact with Slater, and he attempted to correct himself before driving head-first into the outside wall. Tommie recalled a time when that wall wasn’t even part of the facility, and all that was on the other side was a sand dune running down towards the creek. She would think later that not having a wall there would have prevented what happened to Slater. Would he have been able to roll his car up in the sand and climb out upset, granted, but relatively unscathed? She didn’t know, and she supposed that there was no point in speculating. What happened still happened in the end, and pointing the finger at any particular oversight was a farce. The flagman immediately threw the caution flag with 3-laps-to-go, and the pack was riding down the backstretch, trying their best to slow up before reaching the wreck in the crux of turns 3 and 4.

Slater’s double zero came to rest with the driver's side pressed up against the wall. Safety crews rushed over, and the bad feeling Tommie had when Carol Oates crashed returned with a vengeance. However, unlike Carol Oates, who was beaten up, clearly, but otherwise still somewhat responsive, there was nothing when it came to Slater nomovement, no thumbs up to signal to both the spectators and the crowd that everything was going to be all right. Rather, there was a sense of urgency. The pack ran two more laps under caution before the officials would throw the second red flag of the night. They called the cars down pit road and told the drivers to shut ‘em off until further notice.

They had to cut Slater out of the car, which took a long time. Tommie watched on nervously, gripping the trembling hand of her father. It was never fun as a fan of the sport to sit through moments like that, to be scared out of wit's end. But it was different for her Dad, Tommie knew. He went to high school with Slater back in the day. They never were really friends (or at least Dad never

gave any indication that they were), but they knew of one another. They passed each other in the hallowed halls of the Commonwealth High School; maybe they shared a sup or two, but maybe they didn’t. But that wasn’t really the point. Dad knew the man and bought his daughter a late model from him when it appeared that maybe his dreams of being a racer had given up on him. With last year’s medical scare, it was a wonder he ever got to compete again. Now, here he was, and he wasn’t just turning laps in the back of the pack. He was actually contending. Maybe he didn’t have the race-winning speed to compete with the Junkyard Jacks, but he did have a little bit of something under his hood.

The track fell silent as the ambulance disappeared out of the backstretch gate, taking yet another racer to the hospital. As the sirens faded to nothing, officials met on pit road. It was decided then that they would restart the race, green-white-checkered style, by having a two-lap shootout to the finish. The next flag to fly, whether it be a yellow or anything else, would officially put an end to the second edition of the Groovy Hollow 300.

After refiring their engines, the field ran two slow laps under caution before the flagman threw the green flag in the air. Heading into the first corner of the shootout, Blackwell had the advantage, but Ernest Long hung strong on the outside, taking the lead by inches as they headed down the backstretch. It was much of the same as the leaders rolled through turns 3 and 4 and took the white flag side-by-side. Into turns 1 and 2 for the final time, Long was a little more aggressive. He cut to the left and slammed hard into the side of Blackwell’s Halloween Machine. But, if anything, the move did more damage to his own car than it did to the fabled number 31, which carried on confidently with defiance in its motor oil like an indestructible tank.

Long, meanwhile, momentarily lost pace. He swerved, trying to collect himself, and, once he got his car back under him, rushed for the third turn with no intention of making the corner. It was a swing-and-miss. The front bumper of the number 13 Junkyard Jack throwback didn’t connect with the rear bumper of Blackwell’s Halloween Machine. Rather, Ernest Long lost control, drifted up the track, and slammed into the outside wall. Bucky Blackwell crossed the finish line first to win yet another of the cursed events, virtually unchallenged.

Tommie looked to the heavens, waiting for that bolt of lightning to streak across the black sky yet again. But lightning rarely strikes twice, if ever. Instead, the stadium lights winked out. The sound

of them shutting off sounded like a car collision in and of itself—it was a thunderous whack that resonated and echoed through the valley. Thesound of static came over the loudspeakers, along with the sound of some kind of struggle. The outage lasted, in reality, only about a minute. But standing there in the darkness with her sea of confused fellow spectators, it felt like an eternity.

Eventually, the lights did power back on. But unlike when they shut off all at once, powering them back on was a slow burn. The static in the loudspeaker faded, and all that could be heard other than the commotion of the frightened crowd was the buzz of the stadium lights. They started dim but grew in brightness with each passing second. By the time the stadium was half-lit to the capacity it was before, Tommie noticed that the Halloween Machine had vanished, yet again, into the night.

Along with Blackwell went the three Junkyard Jack cars into the night. All that remained down on pit road were drivers scratching their heads in confusion. It appeared that not even they knew who won. But Tommie knew. It was Bucky Blackwell in his Halloween Machine. She knew this, too: something was terribly wrong in Commonwealth. And it had something to do with Bucky and that car. And maybe even the Junkyard Jacks. She knew not what his plan was or if there even was one. All she knew was that she was determined to stop them.

There were a number of circumstances that prevented Tommie and her Dad from going to the third annual Groovy Hollow 300. The most practical of the reasons was that Tommie had acquired an injury that needed a little bit of surgery to repair. She had broken her leg in a late model stock car crash at Kingsport Speedway back in midsummer and was still dealing with the fallout. It wasn’t the first time she had ever been behind the wheel to compete, but it was the third, and the track decided to reach out and bite her as she crashed into the outside wall near the start-finish line. She was battling Troy Kroger in his family-owned number 77 for Kroger Fam Motorsports for the thirteenth position. She wasn’t having a great run and knew, feeling the leaders breathing down her neck, attempting to put her a lap down. The two young drivers’ inexperience was exposed as they tangled on the straightaway and wrecked. Troy didn’t walk away unscathed he was diagnosed with a concussion after further evaluation but, at the time, he was able to walk away without the appearance of serious injury. Tommie wasn’t so lucky. She not only felt the bone in her thigh snap, but she also heard it or thought she did. She couldn’t remember exactly, but, sitting around at the hospital, she replayed the moment of the incident in her head on a loop like a movie she couldn’t peel her attention away from. In those memories, yes, she could definitely hear the bone snap, and it was a sickening feeling. The pain, she remembered less of, though it was certainly there.

Needless to say, she needed assistance getting out of the car and into the ambulance. She was rushed to the hospital similarly to Slater and Ms. Oates the year before and went through the whole song and dance of x-rays, diagnosis, MRIs, and an agonizing speech about how long the recovery process was going to be. “Four to six months,” was what the doctor told her was the mean recovery time, and that was for a regular person,less sofor an athlete. Since she was a competitor, the process would be more rigorous and could last up to a year for her femur to get back to feeling “normal” again. Tommie cried at the news. It was the first time she could remember crying since the night of Groovy Hollow 2 when so much was lost and left uncertain.

Perhaps a more impractical reason for skipping out on the third edition of the sacred event was entirely based upon superstition. Despite curiosity about what came of The Junkyard Jacks and

Bucky Blackwell (along with the constant teas of their return of year 3), Tommie wanted to rid her mind of all that mess. She feared seeing something that she knew she’d never be able to forget a horrid sight to scar the eyes and mind.

The now-retired racer, Carol Oates, lived out the rest of her days at the Ivy Park retirement home. It was the wreck she endured in the second Groovy Hollow 300 that ultimately became the nail in her coffin. She didn’t have the energy she once had nor the drive. Tommie visited her there a couple of times, volunteering as a candy striper in her free time. It was mostly just something to list on her various college applications (though she wasn’t entirely sure she even wanted to go to college anymore…she wanted to race and nothing else), but there was a humanitarian aspect to it as well. She felt bad for what had happened to the sweet old woman. Besides that, she was interested in learning about her story. Being an aspiring racer herself, she longed to learn more about other racers’ experiences with the business. And, as she herself was recuperating from a complex surgical procedure, she figured that this might have been the best opportunity to get to knowthe racing legend.

During her first visit, not a whole lot was said. That first time, she was there strictly as a visitor, not yet taking to the ranks of her future fellow candy stripers. Carol was in and out of consciousness for the two and a half hours she was there. “You can talk to her, honey, but I ain’t sure it’ll do you much good. I doubt she’ll talk back to you,” Rochelle, one of her future best work friends, told her before she went into Carol Oates’ room for the first time. And Rochelle was right. Other than a few mumbles and grunts, there wasn’t much said between them.

Tommie did all of the talking that first day. “Hey, Carol,” she started somewhat sheepishly. “My name is Tommie. Uh, Tommie Jo Swanson. We’ve never met, but I’m a huge race fan and ”

That was the only time Tommie saw the old woman react in any sort of way. She winced as a pained expression flashed across her face. Then her right arm flew across the hospital tray over her, knocking over a Styrofoam cup of cold ice water.

“Crap!” Tommie yelped and quickly grabbed some paper towels over the sink to sop up as much of the water as she could. “Sorry,” she apologized, but the old woman didn’t respond. She seemed to calm down then, sinking inward. Tommie decided then not to say anything else about racing. It was not until she and apparently Carol Oates were ready to talk about it and/or hear about

it. For the rest of the visit, Tommie just sat with her and kept her company while Carol labored to breathe.

As she was leaving that first visit, she saw a flyer by the front desk of the nursing home. She grabbed it and observed it. It read:

Need Volunteer Hours for College Applications? Consider joining the Ivy Park Home of Recovery! Looks great on any resume!

Rochelle noticed her looking at the flyer and said, “You should do it, girl! It’s a great experience!” Then she leaned in closer. “And some of the male candy stripers ain’t too bad lookin’ if you know what I mean.” She nudged her arm, and Tommie smiled.

“I’ll think about it. Thank you.” And think about it, she would. She thought of Carol and the possibility of getting closer to her and figuring out her story. That thought led to so many more residents of Ivy Park just like her, and her heart ached for them. While she was laid up, she figured this would be the perfect opportunity for her to do some good—give back.

When she told Dad about her intentions to join the candy stripers, he smiled and said it would be a “marvelous idea.”

“Yeah, that’s great, honey!” Mom chimed in over dinner. They were chowing down on pot roast with beef, potatoes, and carrots. “It’d be great for a college application. The deadlines are coming up, you know. You’ve gotten several things in the mail from Carson College over in Newport. Maybe it’s time to organize an official campus visit.”

Of all the colleges in the northeast Tennessee and southwest Virginia area, Carson College was the one that sent her the most information via snail mail. They were recruiting her hard. In truth,

all Tommie knew about the college was that they had sponsored some cars for NASCAR teams in the Cup Series a handful of times in the past. And Liberty sometimes sponsored William Byron. Beyond that, she didn’t know much about colleges and all their complicated ins and outs. “Yeah, maybe,” she said, pushing a carrot around her plate.

“Who knows, you could be a great pharmacist someday!” Mom persisted. “Pharmacist? You’re joking, right, Mom?”

“No, honey! It would be a great job for you. You clearly care about people and want to make them feel better, what with the candy striper application and whatnot.”

“Maybe it’s a good plan B,” Tommie admitted, “but still, I’d rather be a racecar driver.”

Mom didn’t say much after that. She bowed her head and continued poking around at her food, but the way she was prodding illustrated to Tommie that her answer had made her mother lose her appetite. The last thing in the world she wanted to do was disappoint her mother. But Mom thought of things in the practical sense what profession was more “legit” and “proper” for the rest of the world to accept. Driving cars for a living in the local short track circuit was hardly glamorous, not like driving in NASCAR. But even that profession, too, raised some eyebrows at times. When Tommie was younger, being a fan of auto racing or NASCAR was cool. Now, though, it had a reputation more in sync with Nickelback than Green Day; its legitimacy was always questioned. NASCAR wasn’t a real sport in the eyes of many. Not like the NFL, NBA, or NHL, though all those leagues had their own dam of legitimacy problems. What made NASCAR so unique, anyhow? Besides, as she got older, most of the kids in her circles leaned more towards F1 fandom in lieu of NASCAR, despite the fact that Formula One was usually a stinker of a show. Tommie believed that there was a necessary balance between entertainment and athleticism. One with a complete lack of the other often resulted in a traveling circus or dull single-file racing where no one could pass.

Dad cleared his throat. “Well, college aspirations aside, I think it’s a great thing, honey, for you to volunteer at Ivy. Don’t you, dear?”

Mom put down her fork and smiled. She wiped the corners of her mouth and said, “Why yes.” There was a shockwave of emotion in her voice that Tommie didn’t expect. “It’s a great thing, honey. Excuse me, please.” Mom stood up and exited the room.

“Did I say something wrong?” Tommie asked her father.

Dad took a deep breath and sighed. He said, “No, honey. As long as you spoke your truth and you know, without a shadow of a doubt, where you want to end up, your answer never would have been wrong. But you have to understand, to your mother, this being a racecar driver was always a pipe dream.” Dad must have caught a glimpse of Tommie’s flinch at the phrase pipe dream because he quickly reworded. “I mean, she thought of your racing thing as a hobby, which I guess is how it started. Wouldn’t you agree?” Dad paused, waiting for Tommie to nod. It was an insulting notion, and she never did. He continued, “I think she thought it was sort of surreal. You have to understand, dear, your mom didn’t raise you thinking you were going to become some hotshot racecar driver. That would have been a ridiculous expectation. Then, once you started testing and especially once you started competing at a semi-profession level, it was almost like a dream for her. Believe me, Tommie, we’ve talked about it numerous times, especially after your first race. But then you got hurt.” Dad motioned to her leg under the table. “And that scared her. She went from being in this dream where you were out racing and talented at it, might I add, but was then pulled back into the harsh reality when you wrecked that this is, by no means, a safe sport. Not at this level. Really, not at any level. You saw what happened to Carol Oates and Jerry Slater last year, didn’t you?”

Tommie nodded. She thought of the old woman again lying helplessly in her hospital bed. She couldn’t wait to talk to her. She never lost faith in the notion that someday, the elderly racer would wake up and that the two of them could have a legit conversation.

“Well, after that happened, your mom was still in that daze. I guess most parents are. Or even close friends of racers. They think It just can’t happen to them. Racers have to have that attitude going in. I guess family members do, too. If they didn’t, they’d lose their sanity in grief. This was your first wreck, Tommie. And it won’t be the last. It scared your mother. And though I know that you are a racer and that you’ll get back in that car, albeit when you’re ready, you need to approach your mom and her hesitation to allow you to do so with understanding. Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you?”

Tommie nodded again. The message was loud and clear. But even then, Tommie had no desire to do anything but get better and get back in the car. Her racing story was only just beginning. A moment of silence passed between them, the two of them soaking up the conversation. Then,

Tommie leaned in close. She whispered to her father, “That’s something else I wanted to talk to you about, Dad. But I didn’t want to bring it up in front of Mama. Now, I’m glad I didn’t. But Carol Oates, she’s in that nursing home she’s in Ivy Park.”

Dad stared at her in disbelief for a moment, or rather, maybe as if what she had just told him didn’t register. He took another bite of his salted beef and potatoes and took a sip from his longneck glass bottle Mountain Dew. He was buying them by the six-pack by that point. “Carol Oates. The race her got injured over in Groovy Hollow?”

“One of them, yeah,” Tommie said, reminding her father that Jerry Slater, too, was injured and in critical condition.

“Wow. I see. Well, how is she? Is she ”

“I think she’s doing okay. But that’s part of the reason I wanted to volunteer. I wanted to see if she… ”

“If she pulled out of it?”

Tommie nodded. Her father knew her and her macabre tendencies too well. “Really, I was hoping that she had a story or two to share. You know, so I can find out more about her, her life, and her career.”

“You’re thinking that maybe it will inspire you in some way.” Tommie nodded.

“Right. Well, I think it’s a great idea.” Dad paused a moment to take another bite of his dinner. Then, he leaned in real close and whispered, “But maybe keep all this on the DL for your Mama. She worries about you, kiddo.”

Tommie nodded her agreement. They each finished their dinner, did the dishes, and then called it a night.

Chapter 15

Tommie started her stint as a candy striper at Ivy Park the next week. Rochelle welcomed her with open arms and a big, long bear hug. “Honey, I’m gonna show you all the ropes,” she told her. “I’ll tell you who’s hot, who’s not, and who’s hot but has too much baggage for a fling to be worth it.” She said in a hushed tone. Tommie silently agreed to the plan, but where she really wanted to go instead was to visit the sickly Carol Oates.

The first day volunteering at Ivy Park was much like her first visit no response from Carol other than a few grunts, some inconclusive nods, and some sporadic farts. Her schedule was three days a week. She was on her feet for much of the day but was given permission to break asfrequently as she needed to whenever her bum leg started to bother her. Luckily for Tommie, she had always had a big threshold for pain.

The unresponsiveness of Carol Oates, which ultimately resulted in Tommie just talking to the wall about racing, went on for about a month. That month was long and stagnant, seemingly neverending. Then, by the grace of God, the elderly woman showed some promising signs. Increased brain activity was one of them, particularly when Tommie was in the room and trying tointeract with her. To the doctor’s insistence, Tommie’s visits to the Oates’ room became more frequent, which sparked more brain activity. Then, after about six weeks of only small but steady progress, Oates took a big leap for the better: for the first time since the incident, she opened her eyes and looked around. It took another two weeks for her to get her voice back, and when it returned, it was raspy. But at last, the two of them could communicate, and that filled Tommie with joy as she had never felt before, falling just shy of the thrill of sitting behind the wheel of her late model stock. Maybe something in the medical field (or maybe even the caretaker field) wouldn’t be such a mismatch for her after all. Still, it never would become her primary focus. That was and always would be on getting her racing career up and off the ground.

In their first couple of conversations, not much was spoken about the ins and outs of the racing profession. They were racing adjacent—she wanted to know what had happened to her and needed to be reminded of it often but the subject was hardly the focus of their talks.

Rather, Carol Oates was more interested in talking about the dreams she had while she was under her recurring nightmares. There was one in particular that stuck out to Tommie the most. In the dream, Carol said that she was in the starting lineup of the first-ever Groovy Hollow 300. Everyone smiles, and the stands are packed. Fans are cheering, the flashes of their cameras twinkling like a sea of stars. That detail was how Tommie knew that, in her mind, some of the facts muddied. Cameras with flashes were outdated when it came to being used by the general public. That and the fact that Carol didn’t compete in the first Groovy Hollow 300 but the second. Carol teared up when she recounted the events of the dream. The atmosphere and excitement in the air, as she described, was unreal. She said that it was enthralling, in a way, but there was something else underneath it a sense of unease that lurked like a shark skimming shallow waters.

“I chalked it up to nerves, you know? No matter how many times you get behind the wheel, those butterflies in your stomach never fully leave you. When you haven’t done it in a while, the flittering of those winged wonders intensifies. Even in the dream, I knew it had been a while since I had been in the car. But I never retired. I guess I still haven’t. Instead, racing retired me.” There was a sense of sadness and clarity in that sentence. Carol Oates smiled and blinked away a small forming puddle of tears. “But what any racer wants is just one final race, or one final season, to do what you’ve always known and sort of say ‘thank you’ to the fans who’d stuck by you and made this sport so great. I quit driving when my daddy took sick. It was a really bad and very slow demise. The disease that doctors couldn’t even figure out, and I just referred to as The Grip, chiseled him away inch by painful inch. Shortly after his passing, Mama took ill, too. She hung around a little bit longer than Daddy, but I think that had more to do with her own stubbornness than anything. Stubbornness is genetic sometimes, kid.

“I thought I was done with racing, kid. I really did. I won’t say that I sometimes didn’t get the itch. That’d be a fib. But the more removed I was from it, the more peace I made with the fact that I was done and I was okay with being done. But when they brought back Groovy Hollow, I just knew I had to give it a shot, and that would be my last race. I turned out to be right, didn’t I?” There was a brief pause for Carol to cough up some phlegm into a wadded-up tissue. She squeezed it in her hand. “I wasn’t able to do it that first year. I’m glad of that, to be honest, but I’m not sure it would have mattered either way. I was sick. I’d been sick for some time. Breast cancer. I had it for about two

years. I thought I was done for. But, miraculously, the week of the inaugural Groovy Hollow 300, it went into remission. I was relieved, as were my doctors and my family. But more than that, I was…determined again. I decided right then and there that I was going to be back behind the wheel.

“I took the next year to rest up. Get my head right, you know? And my body. The chemo had taken almost everything from me, physically and mentally, and I was at my wit's end. I was sick and tired for most of those two years. And I was tired of being sick and tired. I decided to kick those feelings, that pain right out the door. The only problem standing in my way was that I hadn’t been behind the wheel in a while. It had been a long time since I had done it, and to say that I was nervous would be an understatement.

“I watched that first race back. Had to have a little bit of help from Harold, my nephew. He’s a computer science major over at Virginia Highlands in Abington. Such a smart young man and handsome, too. I tell him all the time how shocked I am that he doesn’t have girls hanging all over him. But for Harold, his studies always come first. You and I respect that, right?”

Tommie stared at her with a blank expression, which illustrated her confusion.

Carol further explained. “Racing. That’s what’s going on up here almost all the time.” The old woman pointed at her wrinkled forehead between her brows and gave it a gentle double tap. “We’re consumed with it, almost. I think a lot of people are passionate about what they do. Whether it be racing, your studies, or something creativelikewriting or painting. Youalmost run a risk of those things becoming your whole identity. But secretly, I think we’re fine with that.

“Regular people, they may not understand it. And that’ll bug us. You’re a racer, miss. And a young one at that. You have a lot of road still to run in front of you. You’re just momentarily parked in the garage. And something to learn and understand early is that that even those closest to you will never understand you. Not really. They might posture like they do, but it’s just posturing theatrics. In truth, you’re a mystery to them. So am I and anyone who chooses a profession, or even a hobby, and becomes enthralled with it.”

Tommienodded.Shethoughtofhermother.IfwhatCarol wassayingweretrue,her mother would never understand her wants and dreams. That was a sad reality to grasp, but Tommie understood it and took that disappointment in stride.

Carol Oates winced and shifted uncomfortably. “Miss, would you be a doll and ask the doctor if I could get my next dose of pain meds?”

“I think it may be a bit early, Ms. Oates,” Tommie reminded her.

Carol waived her off. “Call me Carol, please, dear. And your name is…?” “Tommie.”

“Tommy ” Oates said and closed her eyes. Her brow furrowed. She was clearly hurting quite substantially.

“Yeah, Tommie. Spelled with an I. E. at the end.”

Carol Oates smiled through her discomfort. She nodded. “Right, well, Tommie, could you please leave me? I don’t mean to be rude, dear, but I’m a bit talked out at the moment. I think I just need to rest my eyes.”

“Sure, no problem,” Tommie said, gathering all her supplies and clearing off the old woman’s tray. She carried the trash to the metal canin the corner and started toleave. She turned to tell Ms. Oates that she would ask the doctor about her pain meds, but before she could beg her question, the old woman was asleep and snoring.

Tommie left the room and shut the door lightly behind her, leaving the woman to dream of better days.

Chapter 16

Carol Oates didn’t mention Bucky Blackwell or even allude to him again until three weeks later. Their conversations, in the meantime, were brief and sporadic. For a while there, the old woman wasn’t in much of a talking mood. She was either in too much pain or simply too tired to carry on much of a conversation. Even in those short bursts of interaction between them, Carol mostly lamented how things used to be when gas was only cents on the gallon, bread was only a quarter. The general cost of living was cheaper, and life itself was simpler. In the world of racing, they talked mostly about NASCAR. Clearly, she wasn’t a huge fan of the NASCAR playoff system or its various stage racing gimmicks. She loathed driversof the newer order and clamored for the “bloodline” drivers such as Chase Elliott and, back when he raced, Dale Earnhardt Jr. At the mention of Junebug’s name, Tommie’s ears perked up. She talked about watching his second Daytona 500 victory with her dad a decade ago and what a huge deal it was that he won.

“Of course, it was a huge deal!” Oates exclaimed. “He was NASCAR’s most popular at the time. And the sport can only truly thrive when the most popular figure in the sport is performing well. He sort of fell off a cliff for a while there, didn’t he? Those were dark years for NASCAR.”

“Yeah,” Tommie agreed.While she knewshe and Carol didn’t agree on everything (for instance, Tommie somewhat liked the NASCAR playoffs but understood the criticisms), she could see where the old veteran racer was coming from. “What do you think about the new car?”

Carol shook her head, “Don’t care for it. It takes too much out of the driver’s hands. It’s now about the building of a perfect racing machine rather than about talent or skill. Well, that ain’t racing. I say most of the short track racers nowadays are better racecar drivers than some of the big boys in NASCAR. A lot of them are only there because their daddy had deep pockets or something. It’s a money game now, and I detest that. Some drivers or even executives in the industry thumb their noses down at local short trackers, whether on asphalt or dirt. But I’ll tell ya this: American short track racing is the most modest and honest racing alive today. That’s not to say that corruption doesn’t happen. It does. It happens everywhere in everything. That’s another thing that’s gotten worse over time. But it’s more honest. That’s all I’m saying.” Carol took a moment’s pause from her rant to take

a bite from her tray. Today, on the menu were turkey slices and instant mashed potatoes drowning in a pool of brown gravy. She chewed and groaned, unsatisfied. “Tastes like crap. Tommie, could you be a dear and see if there’s some salt somewhere?”

“I doubt the cafeteria will let you have salt, Ms…I mean Carol.” “True. But I bet they’ll let you have some if you ask for it. You’re young. They don’t think they have the right to suck all the flavor out of your food like they do me. You don’t have to tell them that it’s for me.”

Tommie nodded and did what she was told. She went to the cafeteria and asked the manager for a packet of salt. After a brief glance of distrust, she handed Tommie some packaged silverware. Inside the thin plastic wrapper were a plastic fork, a plastic knife, a single napkin, and a small rectangular duel packet of salt and pepper. Tommie took it back to the old woman, unwrapped it, and forked it over.

“Yes! Thank you, dear.” Carol opened the salt and dumped it liberally over her turkey slice. Then she spiced up her potatoes with the black pepper. She took a couple of bites before smacking and licking her lips. “Ummm, now that’s much better. Thank you again, dear. Where was I?”

Tommie shrugged her shoulders. She couldn’t remember herself for her life. While she was interested in what the elderly racer had to say about the current state of the highest form of her profession, she had heard that whole song and dance before. Search it on YouTube, and you’ll find a plethora of videos denouncing the NASCAR playoffs and even a few defending them or explaining how they would tweak them.

“Doesn’t matter anyway, I reckon.” Oates exhaled and seemed to deflate. She struck Tommie as thinner and more frail than before. She moved noticeably slower, too. Tommie glanced up at the clock over the door. Noon had come and gone, and it was around the time it was typical for all the wind to be sucked out of the old woman’s sails. She was getting tired now, and she yawned. She glanced down at her tray almost mournfully. “I only ate half of this. It tastes so much better now, has more flavor, and I’m not sure I can eat another bite. Would you like it, Tommie?”

Tommie shook her head. “No. I mean, thank you, but I’m not allowed to…”

Carol waved her hands in the air dismissively. “Right, right. Well, very well then. You probably

don’t want the slop, anyhow. Why don’t you go out and get a good burger? A burger and some fries, maybe. And a strawberry shake. Oh, what I wouldn’t give ” A sadness came over Oates then, and she seemed to shrink even further. Before long, she had drifted away again, and the snoring would soon commence. Tommie cleaned her up, threw away the uneaten food, and left her for the day.

By the time Tommie and Carol were mutually ready to discuss Bucky Blackwell and what had happened the first two years the Groovy Hollow 300 was run, there was a noticeable leap in the old woman’s stamina. She didn’t tire as easily and seemed sharper, perhaps getting back to the relative sharpness she allegedly had before her crash.

It was Tommie who initially brought it up one early afternoon. Carol had just finished her lunch (and she could eat around three-fourths of it, a huge improvement!) and was watching TV. Practice was on from New Hampshire Motor Speedway. “I remember when Adam Petty was killed there.” Her voice shook slightly. “Such a sad day. He had such promise, just like his granddaddy.”

“Carol, can I ask you a question?” was how Tommie started it.

“Yeah, go ahead.” She said, taking a sip of her juice. It was a blend of orange and pineapple, Tommie believed.

“What made you want to return to racing? Specifically, I mean the Groovy Hollow 300. What gave you the itch?”

“Oh, Tommie! You’re a racer. Thatitch never goes away. You’ll find that out when you get older, and that nagging voice in the back of your head prompts you to call it a career that the time is right. But there’s another voice, too, and it’s even more persistent. The ones that stubbornly tell you that you ain’t done yet. It’s the one you want to listen to the most. Maturity is knowing when to ignore it. But I didn’t ignore it. Didn’t we go over this story before?”

“You started, I believe, Carol. But we didn’t really get into it.”

“Aye, I see. Okay. We can go over that if you want. I had heard about the event. I was, unbeknownst to me, just getting over mycancer at the time. My nephewHarold came over and hooked the whole thing up. I know nothin’ ‘bout the internet, Tommie I don’t know how it works, I don’t even really know what it is; I don’t know how to use it. I needed his expertise. So, he came over and got me all hooked up. I didn’t know you could plug up a laptop into a TV with one of those HD cable

thingies. He explained that most people have SMART TVs, whatever that means. I’ve always been a bit weary about all that mess, Tommie. It scares me, in a way, and sometimes I’m afraid that the human race is starting to get a bit too big for its britches in terms of technology and all its advancements. But what does it matter? This world was spinning before I came into it, and it’ll continue spinning long after I’m gone. Life will always evolve.

That’s the way it is we all adore our toys until they grow stale and something newer and better comes along.” Her voice dried and started to feel a little raspy. “Tommie, could you fetch me a glass of water? Chilled, if they have it.”

“Sure.” Tommie stood up and headed for the cafeteria. She returned with a medium-sized Styrofoam cup full of ice water. She handed it to the elderly racer. Carol Oates sucked at the water, making a high-pitched kissing sound. She smacked her lips, refreshed. “Much better. Thank you, dear. Where was I? Ah, yes, Harold got it fixed up where I could watch the race. Harold had never been much of a race fan. I took him over to Bristol a couple of times in spite of my sister’s protests. He enjoyed the atmosphere more than anything. NASCAR fans really know how to tailgate. But once the engines started, he covered his ears and cried, especially the first time, because he wanted to go home. Even the last time I took him, when he was a teenager in high school, he went with these big headphones on. I glanced over at his iPod gadget. He was listening to Kiss while chatting up some girl. Not once did he everlookup at the action or payit any mind other than to treat it asan annoyance. But he was good enough to hook me up so I could watch Groovy Hollow, so there’s that.

“He said, ‘Aunt Carol, here is how you disconnect and get back over to your cable box.’ Yes, I know that cable is out of style these days. But I don’t get that whole streaming nonsense. Who needs Netflix or that Lulu or whatever in the beans you call it? Gimme my Charter cable, and I’m a happy camper. I just want to be able to watch Blue Bloods as it airs. That and, of course, NASCAR when it’s on and football when it isn’t. He did something to his computer to show it to me. I can’t even begin to tell you what he did. Either I don’t remember it, or I just didn’t understand it. Maybe even simultaneously likely. I just told him that I’d leave it as is, and he could come over and disconnect it the next day. I told him that I’d probably turn in after the race, anyway, and I did, though I couldn’t sleep.

“Harold left, and I got to watch the thing. I was surprised at how detailed it all was, production

quality-wise, considering it was something airing over the internet. I guess the internet really has caught up with cable television. But I’m a stickler. Always will be. Have to accept it at this point. But I didn’t enjoy the race as much as I was hoping to. Don’t get me wrong, it was great entertainment. The announcers were entertaining and funny at times. What spoiled it all for me was…well, his return.”

“Who? Bucky Blackwell?”

Carol’s complexion went fish-belly white. She looked as if she had seen a ghost. “Yeah, him and that blasted car of his. You know, after he, quote-unquote, disappeared, I tried to find his car. I’ve always been fascinated with local lore. Not ghost stories. Those always gave me the heebie jeebies. Just unsolved mysteries, things with a logical explanation, not things to make your hair stand up on the back of your neck as you sit around a campfire. Though, I admit that sometimes those two things overlap. That’s usually when I drop it. You see, I didn’t believe the stories that the track just up and disappeared, along with Blackwell as his infamous Halloween Machine. It all seemed way too fantastical for my taste, and I was sure that, somewhere, somebody knew who and where Blackwell was and where he stashed his car. Blackwell, he wasn’t a nice man. He had his hands in some bad cookie jar, to say the least. Racing was his side gig. I didn’t know that he loved racing. So many of us love the sport. We even bleed it. I know you’re the same way, Tommie. You eat, breathe, and bleed this sort of stuff. Bucky Blackwell, he was a different animal altogether. And the word animal is used only a little loosely. He loved to win. I think that was really all he cared about, not the comradery of the sport or the sportsmanship angle of it. He liked winning and not just barely by a nose. He liked stomping his competition.

“Needless to say, I never tracked down his Halloween Machine during his absence. Clearly, he still hasit. I guess he’s had it all this time. But what bothered me the most about that night, in particular, was the circumstances in which he got into that race two years ago. Eighty cars showed up to qualify. Blackwell’s 31 wasn’t one of them. Instead, it was a man named Jerry Slater who looked a little worse for wear. You were there, weren’t you, Tommie? You know what I’m talking about?”

Tommie nodded. “He looked sick,” she confirmed and sat down, her elbows propped up at her knees as she took in this miraculous lady’s story.

“He looked like death,” Carol emphasized. “But you saw that he looked off, good. Keep that in

mind. Then, right before the opening ceremonies were about to begin, he collapsed. And amidst all the chaos, who came strutting in to take his slot in the race?”

“Bucky Blackwell… ”

“You got that right! Blackwell. Now, if the whole mess didn’t already look suspicious enough, Blackwell, the famed driver rumored to have gone missing during the last ever race held at Groovy Hollow, pounced on the opportunity of a withdrawn car. Then, as Slater’s team was wheeling his car out of the track, Blackwell drove at them and stopped. They exchanged words. Nobody knows for sure what was said or discussed. Nobody except Bucky and Jerry’s crew, that is. Seems a little too organized, a little too coincidental

“What are you suggesting?” Tommie asked. “That Jerry Slater was…drugged or something?”

Carol pointed a finger at her and narrowed her eyes. “What I’m suggesting is that something ain’t right with those two We saw it that first night, but I don’t know. I didn’t think much about it, I guess. We were so shocked and in complete disbelief over Jerry’s sudden medical emergency that the suspicion of it all was just sort of glazed over. Maybe that was by design. Regardless, I think something bad happened to Jerry that night. And I think Bucky Blackwell and his crew knew about it and were responsible for it.”

Tommie’s head was spinning now. She had her own suspicions but never vocalized them before. She didn’t want to run the risk of sounding like a conspiracy quack. But hearing Carol say very similar things out loud made her feel a little less alone, as if she could now be open with her thoughts on the matter and not have to hide from it due to its improbabilities. “What do you make of his disappearance after the race? Bucky, I mean?”

Carol flashed her a curious smile then. “What might you think of it, Tommie?”

“To be honest, I have no idea. The whole thing seems so…”

“Impossible?”

“Yes! But…”

“ …but you saw it with your own eyes.” Carol and Tommie shared a knowing glare within which so much was said.

“Yeah.”

“Curious, ain’t it, Tommie Swanson?” It was. “I think Bucky has tapped into something. Something bad. And it has ties with the track. That’s what I think. But the specifics of it, I don’t know. But I sure would love to find out.”

The two sat in silence the rest of the day. Carol watched the news before falling asleep. Tommie took out her trash, wiped her mouth, and left the room as quietly as a mouse.

It was a week or so later when Jerry Slater himself, the man, the myth, the legend, was admitted to Ivy Park. He got a room to himself, closed off from the rest of the world. He entered the facility silently, so silently that neither Tommie nor Carol knew of his arrival until toward the end of Tommie’s shift that day. She knew that something was going on, but something almost always was. There was a lot of commotion around Jerry and the room that housed him a lot of doctors in and out, a lot of nurses but that was hardly a rarity when it came to new patients, especially new patients with traumatic injuries as severe as Jerry’s. Tommie was on her way to fetch Carol a cup of ice when, out of the corner of her eye, she spotted him. At first, it didn’t register fully. She knewshe recognized the crippled man, but the name didn’t appear to her instantly. Rather, she was met with a severe case of acid reflux and anxiety she couldn’t explain.

As Carol munched on her ice chips, Tommie mulled over the situation in the room three doors down. She thought of the man and how familiar he looked. She did that for about an hour before it finally hit her that Jerry Slater was the newest guest housed at Ivy Park. “Jerry Slater!” Tommie cried!

Carol was startled. She shook slightly, spillingsome of her ice chips fromher cup. “What’s that?”

“There’s a new patient at Ivy Park.”

“I know,” Carol said wearily. She narrowed her vision, interested in where Tommie was going with it but afraid all the same. “I’ve seen the doctors rush by. They didn’t pay me no mind. There must’ve been something serious.”

“Yes, and it’s him, Carol! It’s Jerry! He’s in the room three doors down.” Carol batted her arm through the air dismissively. “Can’t be.”

“Why not? Jerry crashed the same night you did and was sent to the hospital.”

“Yeah, but Jerry’s young. His body would have recovered from his injuries a lot faster than mine. He was probably released and back at home. Whoever you saw down there is someone else.

Maybe a doppelganger or something.”

“No, Carol, I’m telling you that it’s him! It’s Jerry to a T. What if his injuries were more severe than either of us thought?” Tommie felt foolish then. After the second annual Groovy Hollow event, she did a little research into Jerry and his whereabouts. She was focused primarily on Carol, likely feeling similarly to how she did, that he’d heal quicker and much more easily than she would. But she thought back to his head-on collision with the wall. It was a hard hit, and she felt stupid for not considering that he could have been really, really hurt.

Carol fell silent, considering this. Then she kicked her covers offof herand swung around, dangling her feet off the edge of the bed.

“What are you doing?” Tommie asked, rushing over to the bed and holding out her arms just in case the old woman were to topple over.

“I’m going to go see it for myself! Be a lamb and fetch my walker, Tommie. It’s folded up and stored in the wardrobe.” Tommie had never seen Carol out of her bed before. She knew that the old woman wasn’t strictly bedbound (she received physical therapy services twice a week), but she was always out of the room when Carol was being “worked on.”

She hurried over to the wardrobe and opened it. The nostalgic cinnamon scent of the elderly brought back nostalgic memories of when she used to visit Grandma Bonnie when she was younger. She hadn’t thought about Granny Bonnie in a long time. She passed away from a brain aneurysm a while ago, and Tommie’s mom deemed her too young to attend the funeral. To this day, she doesn’t like funerals. They were scary affairs that were best avoided at all possible costs. As she fished out the walker, unfolded it, and carried it over to Carol, she asked, “Are you sure this is a good idea?”

Carol waived her off like she tended to do. “The physical therapist told me I needed to be more active. On most days, I’m too worn out to leave this bed. But I think I need to get some steps under my belt if I ever have a prayer of getting out of here.” Guided by Tommie, Carol attempted to get out of the bed but fell back down. She repeated the attempt only to find the same result. She murmured some words under her breath, and Tommie could tell by the nature of their hissing sounds that the old woman was beating herself up perhaps a little too aggressively. On the third attempt, she stood. She waivered off balance, and Tommie moved closer so she could catch her if she started to go

down, but after a few seconds, Carol steadied herself. She leaned forward, grabbing at the rubber grips on the walker's handles. “Shoot. Come on, now, Tommie. Take me for a walk. We’ll cruise right by Slater’s roomif itisindeed him. Then we’ll know a little something, potentially, about his condition.”

Tommie hooked the old woman by the arm and led her out into the hall

Chapter 18

“Somethin’s the matter with him,” Carol Oates said with a labored breath. Tommie was standing beside her, fluffing her pillow and helping her get resettled in bed. It was a nice short walk, a definite step in the right direction for the old woman’s recovery. Carol tired quickly; they didn’t even make it halfway down the hall when the goal, at least in Tommie’s mind, was to go all the way to the front desk before heading back to the room. They did, however, stroll by Jerry Slater’s room. His identity was confirmed as the name was written on the dry-erase board on the door. Seeing him sparked something grim inside Carol. She knew instantly that he was in dire straights.

“Well, obviously,” Tommie agreed as she pulled the blankets back up on the old woman, and she continued squirming to get settled. “He had a bad wreck.”

“Yes, but that ain’t what I’m talkin’ about.” “What are you talkin’ about, then?”

Carol took in a deep breath and let out a long drag. “There’s something off, Tommie. Or is it just me? You know, sometimes I have a hard time tellin’ if anyone else can…I don’t know, but I sense when something’s clearly amiss like I can.”

Tommie readied herself to respond, but a double knock came on the door. Slowly, the door crept open. It was a nurse, and she was there to deliver Carol’s medicine. “Good afternoon, Carol. How’s my favorite patient today?”

Carol flashed Tommie a “we’ll talk later” glare before taking another labored breath and saying, “I have my good days and my bad ones. It’s more-or-less a 50/50 split at this point. I hope you brought me somethin’ good this time and not that other crap you’ve been giving me. That stuff doesn’t help the pain.”

Nurse Hillary flashed Carol and Tommie an apologetic smile. “Sorry, same stuff. Doctor’s orders.”

“Well, you tell that Dr. Retzlaff that this ain’t working. I’m in a great deal of pain, and I need him

to update my dosage like yesterday!”

Nurse Hillary nodded and said, “I’ll relay that message.” She then turned to Tommie. “Do you mind giving us just a second?”

“Sure,” Tommie said. “I’ll be back, Carol, after you take your meds, okay?” Carol waived her off.

Tommie left the room and waited outside in the hall for a couple of minutes before the nurse came out. “She’ll be out pretty soon. Say about 20 minutes.”

Tommie nodded.

“She was a little feisty. Has she been that way all day?”

“All day. All week. All year. Her whole life.” Tommie said with a smile.

Nurse Hillary laughed at this. “Well, she kept prodding me about the new patient. Mr. Uhh…”

“Slater? Jerry Slater?”

“Yes, that’s him. Do the two of you know him or something?” “Know of him is more accurate. Is he… ”

“He ain’t out of the woods. That’s all I can tell you. I don’t know any of the specifics, just as I told her.” She nodded her head towards Carol’s room. Then she started down the hall, eager to get to her next task before calling it a shift.

Tommie slipped back inside the room. Already, she had seen a change in Carol’s mood and demeanor. She seemed to shrink in her bed, looking just generally exhausted. Her eyelids sagged and blinked as she struggled to stay awake, and her mouth went slack. She looked over at Tommie as she sat down in the armchair in the corner of the room. “I think I only have a few minutes, Tommie, before I go under. Twenty minutes my butt!”

“It’s hitting you hard?”

Carol made a strange sound that was almost akin to a laugh. “Harder than the outside wall.”

Tommie winced at the statement but ultimately dismissed it, knowing she wasn’t in her right mind. If anything, her thoughts were cloudy, and the previously bright and shiny day in her head was fixing to turn to night. “I heard that Nurse Hillary gave you some insight on Slater.” She smiled sleepily. “Just sort of the cliff notes, Tommie. Nothing in too excruciating detail. He

was over at the hospital. Franklin Woods Memorial, I think. Initially, he was in ICU but was eventually pulled out.” Carol paused then and yawned hugely. “The meds, hon. They’re hitting me badly. Anywho, he was in the ICU for about a month, maybe a little more.”

He was in a medically induced coma that first week, Tommie learned. Then they brought him out of it. He started toimprove, so they took himout of the ICU. He seemed to be on the mend, making great strides in a short time. They thought he’d be released ages ago and back at home, on the road to making a full recovery. But that didn’t happen; about a week prior to his scheduled discharge, he took a turn for the worse. The nurse said that he had stopped eating and fell unresponsive. Brain activity took a nosedive, too. They said that he wasn’t braindead, that there were a few pulses firing off up there, but he still hasn’t responded since falling under. They moved him here so that his family could see that he was taken care of.

“I guess the hospital was overcrowded.” Carol paused to yawn again. Her eyes shut entirely at that time as she grew weary of fighting them to stay open. “He’s in his family’s hands now. His daughter, in particular. I didn’t even know he had a daughter. Apparently, she moved to Tampa some number of years ago. I…don’t…think…they…talk too…awful much.” She fell completely silent then. Within seconds, she was sawing logs.

Tommie went over to her, tucked her in, and left her old mentor to her dreams.

Chapter 19

Jerry Slater passed away the following Saturday. He was not alone; his daughter, who ultimately decided to pull the plug, was with him. On TV, the playoff cutoff race at Daytona was showing. The plug was pulled shortly after the conclusion of the race.

Carol knew that something bad had happened. She was watching the race, too, and was annoyed by the constant hustle and bustle in the hall outside. She asked Nurse Richard a couple of times if she could have her door shut, but he declined. “Sorry, the door must be open for now, darlin’.”

“Well, what the heck is goin’ on out there?” she asked.

Nurse Richard shrugged. “I don’t know. I just got here. Are you done with your dinner?” She was, having just pushed around at the hospital cafeteria mush with her plastic fork. She pushed the tray away from her and folded her arms.

Nurse Richard sighed and took her tray. “You can stay up just a little while longer. I’ll be back shortly for lights out, okay?”

Carol reluctantly nodded, and Richard left. The medication hadn’t gotten to her as much that night, and that she was thankful for. She waited a minute long enough for Richard to hurry down towards the cafeteria, and then she threw her covers off. She would go check out and see what all the hubbub was about. She needed todo some walkinganyway if only to tell the physical therapist that she at least attempted to get her exercises in.

It took her a few attempts to get off the bed so that she could walk unstably over to the wardrobe. Once she did, though, she took each wobbly step carefully and slowly. The last thing in the world she needed was to experience a fall. That would only set her recovery back all the further if she was ever able to recover in the first place. She opened the elongated door of the wardrobe and gingerly removed the walker from inside. With a slight struggle, she opened it up and placed it in front of her. She squeezed the cushioned rubber handles and slowly exited the room, turning right and heading straight for Slater’s room.

Carol got a brief glimpse through the small sliver of an opening in the cracked door. She could no longer see his face. The white bedsheets covered it as they started disconnecting him from the various machines that worked hard to prolong his life. He passed!? Carol screamed inside with alarm. She almost wanted to go in there, to poke her nose where she knew it didn’t belong.

Nurse Richard stopped her. “Carol! What are you doing out of bed!?”

Carol looked up. The big hulk of a man stood halfway down the hallway. He started towards her, walking with a purpose.

“I’m going back!” Carol called and turned, heading back for her own room. Before she could reach the door, however, Nurse Richard was already on her. He quickly ushered her in and helped her back into bed.

“Lights out now, Carol!” he told her. After she got settled in bed, he reached over and clicked the lights off. The room plunged into darkness. Once he was gone, Carol reached for her phone. She went to CONTACTS and found Tommie’s name. She clicked it and then hit TEXT, just as Tommie had shown her to do. From there, she relayed her message:

JERRY SLATER IS DEAD. CALL ME! TOMORROW!

Dad found Tommie in her room. She was crying, having read Carol’s text. She tossed her phone onto the nightstand a little too hard, and it skidded off the surface and clattered against the wall. She buried herself in her pillow as she listened to her Dad hastily climbing the stairs and gently knocking on the door. He opened it just a crack and poked his nose in. “Tommie? Are you all right? I heard a

“I’m fine,” Tommie said, trying to piece together her wavering voice. She sniffed and wiped her

nose into her pillowcase.

Dad hesitated a moment. Tommie almost felt it. Then, he sheepishly asked, “Can I come in?”

Tommie didn’t answer. In truth, she wanted him there, but she didn’t at the same time. Tommie and her dad had a very close bond, which was apparent even when she was the youngest. She was always described as a daddy’s girl. Their shared interest in racing and fast cars only strengthened their bond. But at the same time, she was raised to be a racecar driver, and racecar drivers had to be tough. If they cry, they don’t show it. As a racer or an athlete in any sport, Tommie imagined, it was important to psych your opponents out. You’re always in the best position when you go toe-to-toe against someone who can’t decipher your thoughts. That’s when you’re the most dangerous behind the wheel. That was a driver at their most intimidating. Sometimes, that attitude can leak into real life as well. And though it can often be interpreted as coolness or a lack of affection, it was really done out of fear of losing that valuable edge.

Tommie and her dad had a great relationship. Tommie knew that and could see it every day. Every girl in the world could only wish they were as lucky as she was. Still, he was also part of that racing world, and a small part of her (a minuscule but still present part) feared that he would somehow look down on her for showing her emotions and wearing them on her sleeve. It was a ridiculous notion, sure, but one she felt nonetheless. It seemed as legitimate as anything else in the world.

He took her nonanswer as consent and hesitantly walked in. He left the door open, and the light from the hall ate away in the surrounding darkness of her bedroom. “Tommie? What’s the matter?” Dad asked. Again, she didn’t respond. He walked slowly over to her and sat down at the foot of the bed. The way the mattress dipped brought all those emotions out, and Tommie started to sob into her pillow.

“Hey, hey, hey! Come on!” Dad said, reaching out to shake her on the shoulder. “Whatever it is, it can’t be that ” he paused a moment and let her go. He withdrew and fell unsettlingly quiet. Then, he asked, “Oh, honey, is it Carol? Is she ” he trailed off, afraid to finish the sentence.

The notion that it could have been Carol who passed and not Jerry filled Tommie with unfathomable anguish. It was a fictitious notion, after all. Carol was still alive and as feisty as ever.

And yet, just thinking about the possibility of her death sent dark daydreams trouncing through Tommie’s head. It was like she really had lost her, as little as that made sense even to Tommie like she really was dead, and this was her in the future, mourning the loss of her new friend.

Tommie sat up and wiped away some rogue tears. “No. Carol’s fine,” Tommie said simply.

Dad breathed a sigh of relief. “Oh, good. Then what is wrong? Something has to be, right?”

“It’s Slater,” Tommie said. Saying his name aloud somehow stopped the emotional outburst, if only for the time being. They were silent a moment. Dad looked away and stared unblinkingly out into space. Though he and Jerry were never friends in the most traditional sense, they were still of the same age, classmates. Tommie couldn’t even begin to imagine how hard it was to lose somebody, a peer so close to your own age, someone who you had seen at least in passing every day of your youth.

When Dad finally spoke, he said, “Slater? Jerry Slater?” He blinked in disbelief.

Tommie nodded. “He was checked into Ivy Park about a week ago.” “So, he was already pretty much in bad shape.”

Tommie nodded again. “It wasn’t good, Dad.”

“But I heard that he was on amends. I mean, we all knew that he’d never race again, but we never would have thought… ”

“The chatterat thehospital was that he tooka turn for the worst. He was on the path to recovery, and then, all of a sudden ” Tommie didn’t finish the explanation. She didn’t have to.

Dad nodded his understanding. He stood up, wiped his own eyes, and cleared his throat. “Well, uh, that’s unfortunate for sure. It’s late, Tommie. Let’s turn in. We can talk about all this tomorrow, okay?”

“Okay.”

Dad walked to the door and out into the hall. Before closing the door, he looked back at her and smiled. “Good night, sweetie. Sweet dreams.” He closed the door, and the room's darkness reigned supreme once again.

Tommie tossed and turned throughout the night. Sweet dreams? That was impossible. In the small bursts that Tommie found herself able to sleep, her dreams were nightmarish single stills

from the most gruesome horror films in her collection. She fell asleep and awoke in horror, sure that she wasn’t alone. Rinse and repeat. And, before she knew it, the morning sun was rising from the depths of the surrounding forests.

Chapter 20

Tommie sat down at the dining room table for breakfast. Dad was across from her, scrolling on his phone and presumably looking at the news, which seemed more sensational with each passing day. Mom was in the kitchen. Tommie could hear her humming from the doorway. She always hummed when she cooked, and that was how Tommie was able to gauge her mood. She seemed to be in a good mood that particular morning.

Tommie, meanwhile, had never felt more devastated. It was strange in a way to be so affected by the loss of Jerry Slater. She didn’t really know him. In fact, not even a single word had been exchanged between them. The loss of anyone is a sad affair, but normally, unless the person was prominent in her life, she was able to get over it rather quickly. Or, at the very least, steering her mind toward a different direction or alternative train of thought was much easier. But Jerry’s death loomed over her like a darkened storm cloud—it threatened to rain but never poured. If it started to rain on her mind and Tommie could cry it all out, she believed she might feel better. But alas, her eyes were dry, carrying immense sadness but unable to show it in any meaningful way.

She looked over at her dad. He staredintently down at his phone, swipingleft and right, scrolling. She wondered what he was thinking and whether or not Jerry’s death was as much of a load on him as it was on her. It was probably worse, in all actuality. Though he and Jerry were never really friends, they knew of one another and sometimes talked. Tommie got the sense that Dad pitied Jerry in a way like he was a foolish younger brother making a ton of mistakes that backed him into binds he could never escape. But still, there was a good person there, however, deep inside, and that was the real tragedy of the matter. For all of Jerry’s flaws, and they were plentiful, he was still a good person in the end, whether he believed it himself or not.

Tommie’s late model, sitting covered up in the garage and untouched for months, came from Jerry. In a way, it was a piece of Jerry that was now in the possession of Tommie and her Dad, and she didn’t quite understand what to do about that fact.

“Is Mom making breakfast?” Tommie asked her father to break the silent spell that had befallen them.

Dad looked up and hummed, “Hmmm?” “Mom. I take it she’s making breakfast?”

Dad blinked distractedly. “Yeah, yeah. That’s what she’s doing. Should be out really soon.” He was quiet then and returned his attention to his phone.

“What are you doing?” Tommie asked.

“Looking atobits online,” Dad confessed morbidly. “It’s too early for Jerry’sto showup on here, I think. I wonder who’ll write it? His mom, maybe? Or she might get someone at the paper to do it. I don’t know.”

“Are you looking for the arrangements?”

Dad nodded, and Tommie noticed his eyes starting to well up. He didn’t cry, though, and Tommie was relieved. She had never seen her father cry.

Mom came into the dining room and carried a pot. Her humming had ceased. “Here we go,” she said as she put the pot down into the holder. Tommie looked inside. Creamy oatmeal. “I’ve got toast in the oven. It should be done any minute now. And I’ll bring in the brown sugar and cinnamon.” She spun around then and headed back for the kitchen. Her humming had ceased.

Tommie reached forward and grabbed the wooden spoon from the pot. She plopped down a generous helping of steaming oatmeal in her bowl and waited for Mom to return with the sugar and cinnamon. Dad did the same, not once looking up from his phone at Tommie.

Whatever obits he was reading on that screen captured his full attention. “Dad? Are you okay?”

Dad blinked and looked up as if coming out of a dream. He shook his head as if ridding himself of any and all remnants of the dream. “What? Yeah. Yeah. I’m fine. The real question here is: are you all right, kiddo?”

Tommie’s eyes darted away from his. She was determined not to cry in front of him. “I don’t know, honestly. I didn’t even know Jerry, but…”

“But it’s hitting you hard. I know. I understand. It’s affecting me pretty badly, too.”

Tommie shook her head. “No. I mean, I get why it would upset you. You knew him, talked to him. Heck, Dad, you made a business deal with him,” she said, motioning towards the car out in the garage.

“That doesn’t mean that I knew him that well. I knew of him. Like we’ve seen and walked by each other in the halls at school or at the grocery store when we were older. I’ve seen him race, but we haven’t even had any conversations about that. But when someone dies, Tommie, it’s hard on everybody.” Dad looked like he wanted to continue the conversation but stopped when Mom walked back into the room. He smiled and looked up at her. The two shared a brief kiss before Mom placed the brown sugar and cinnamon shaker down on the table.

She sat down between Tommie and her father and helped herself to some oatmeal. For a while, all that could be heard was the sounds of silverware striking glass bowls and uncomfortable shifting. Mom cleared her throat and gave Dad a certain look. She then nodded towards Tommie. Clearly, she had something on her mind.

Dad cleared his throat then. He looked away almost as if he were ashamed to have the impending conversation. Perhaps he was. Maybe he knew just about how well it was going to go. “So, uh, listen, Tommie,” Dad said after taking a short refreshing sip of his Mountain Dew. “Your mother and I talked last night. About what happened. And we think… ”

Before he could finish the sentence himself, Mom cut him off. “We think you ought to spend a little less time at Ivy Park.”

Tommie wasn’t surprised. Mom had never been shy about her feelings towards racing and Tommie’s future in it If she thought that Carol and Jerry were bad influences on her, why wouldn’t she say something to deter her from spending her afternoons there? Tommie didn’t get angry or cross. She knew that lashing out would have the opposite effect on her desired outcome. Instead, she sat there in her silence, stirring her oatmeal. Suddenly, she didn’t have much of an appetite. Mom and Dad tried to gauge her reaction but ultimately failed.

Dad waited out the silence as long as he could. Then he said, “We just don’t think it’s the healthiest place for you to spend your time right now, you know? Do you understand?”

“Of course she understands!” Mom exclaimed. “She’s a smart girl!” Mom turned to her and

smiled. “Tommie, while I’m thrilled you’ve volunteered so many hours there, and no doubt that time was valuable to you and your future. I’m not questioning that. I just think that maybe it’s time to move on and volunteer in another area of life, like maybe at the animal shelter or something. You love animals! I think it’d be a great fit!”

Finally, Tommie spoke. “What I really love is talking to Carol. About racin’.”

“I know you do, honey. That’s not the issue. And I’m sure Carol is a wonderful person. But, at the same time, you have to remember your priorities and keep them in check. You have the ACT coming up. Now, you’ve gotten your volunteer hours in. That’s great. Now it’s time to focus on other aspects of college litmus tests. I bought you that book and study guide from Amazon. Have you even opened it?”

“Yes, I have,” Tommie said, which wasn’t technically a lie. She did crack it open and got about halfway through the first chapter before deciding that she was bored out of her mind. After that, she turned her attention to Frankenstein by Mary Shelley instead.

“Good. But you need to study hard for this test. There’s a lot riding on it, honey.” Dad remained silent.

Tommie was calm. She didn’t raise her voice, nor did she lash out, spouting cross things just to hurt her mother. Again, there was nothing to gain in that sort of behavior. Rather, she stood up and gently pushed her bowl of oatmeal to the side. “You said I ought to keep my priorities in check, right, mom?” Her mother nodded. “Well, I am. My number 1 priority is getting back in the racecar as soon as possible.”

“Tommie, you’re not going to make Groovy Hollow this year ” Mom said.

“You don’t think I know that? It was supposed to be my first time this October, you know? My first time ever racing at our home track. And I admit I suffered a setback. But that’s all it is: a setback. I’m going to watch the race over at Ivy Park with Carol. And it’s going to kill me inside, knowing that I should be out there. But I’ll get through it. I’ll get better soon. And I’ll be in that race next year. Just you watch. No matter whether you think I can do it or not.”

“We’re not attacking your abilities, Tommie,” Dad stepped in. “And if that’s really what you want to do, we’ll support it.” Mom flashed him a revealing glare. “But there’s more to life than racing.

The situation Carol’s in now, and Jerry was in, should be enough to make you realize that.”

But his words were just noise. Tommie turned and left the dining room. She walked across the living room, grabbed her coat and her purse, and left the house, heading straight for Ivy Hall.

Chapter 21

“They’re just worried about you,” Carol reassured Tommie.

“I know that,” Tommie admitted. “But that doesn’t make it any less irritating.” She paused a moment before asking the question that was burning deep inside her. “How did you deal with it?”

“Deal with what?” Carol’s mouth was full of whatever mush the hospital cafeteria was serving up that day. It was gray and looked like some kind of protein surprise.

“You know, your family, your friends. Were they worried that you wanted to be er, were a racer?”

Carol shrugged. “I’msure they did,” she said, swallowing down the sludge with a grimace. “And I’m sure they spoke out about it, just like your family did with you.”

“You don’t remember?”

“No. Tommie, those moments are so insignificant in my life. Because they didn’t serve a purpose for my ultimate goals. Neither did I ever consider them enough to really have much of an impact on my situation. So, no, I don’t remember their protests. Or, maybe a better way to put it is that I ignored them.” She paused then, taking the opportunity to get a sip of water from her Styrofoam cup. She smacked her lips. “But I also had the slight advantage of taking after my daddy. He was a racer, Tommie. Worked as a mechanic by day and drove cars at night around the local bullrings.”

“Was he any good?” Tommie asked.

“He was the best. He was a wizard when it came to driving cars. Mama never took to it much. She didn’t really like that he did it, even at a semi-professional level. But any hopes of him giving up evaporated over time. By the time I came along and started to show interest in racing, Mama had been case-hardened.”

“Sometimes, I guess I just feel like they don’t understand me. I mean, I’m talking to them in plain English, but it’s like I’m speaking Chinese or something.”

“It’s because they don’t understand you, Tommie. They just don’t. They might say they do, but it’s all malarkey. Your dad, you say that he works on the car with you?”

Tommie nodded.

“Well, he might be able to understand you more than your mama. But not fully. Never fully. There’s a difference between restoring an old stockcar and actually driving one around the track, at competition, no less. And for someone like your mama who never did it, never wanted to do it, and never showed any interest in it as a fan, it is like you’re speaking Chinese at her. It just doesn’t register. And that’s okay. As long as you understand the reality and get that it isn’t anything malicious.”

Tommie was silent for a moment. She looked down and twiddled her thumbs before Carol said, “I’ve had enough of this crap. Can you dump it, please?” The old woman shoved the tray away from her somewhat dramatically.

Tommie stood up and walked over to her. She wiped the elderly driver’s mouth and removed the tray. When she came back, she asked the woman, “So, how do you drive it?”

“Hmm?”

“Groovy Hollow. How do you drive it? I plan to race there next year and I just wanted to know whether or not you had any tips for me.”

“Very carefully is how you drive that track. The straightaway is very wide. It funnels down into a single groove on the inside. You never want to get out of the groove. It’s too slick. You’ll crash. The only real way to pass is to either knock the driver in front of you out of the groove so that they must check up significantly or try to fan out to the inside on one of the straightaways and try to beat ‘em down into the corner from there. It’s a real old-school style of racing. Like NASCAR used to do back in the day. Think old Bristol during the days of Earnhardt and Labonte, a far cry from the multi-groove style of racing they have and promote today.”

“What about working the throttle? Is there a key to that?”

Carol Oates chuckled. “Yeah, there’s always a key to that. It’s part of the art of driving. I’d let off heading into each corner. You’ll want to tap the brakes. Resist the urge. You’ll feel uncomfortable at first, like you’re at risk of flying straight out of the track. But the cars have enough downforce to be

where you’ll be, all right? Somewhere just past the center of turns 1 and 2, there’s a bump. Be wary of that. That’s also around the point where you’ll want to gas it back up, but it varies from car to car. Depends on how the thing’s handlin’, you know? Turns 3 and 4 are a little bit different. My advice in regard to that corner is to get out there and practice. Keep your eye on the wall. Feel the car, and where it feels most natural, gas it back up in the corner. Try to find some sort of visual cue, like an advertisement on the wall or something. A hotdog stand, anything. Just practice and search for it. That’s really all you can do.” She paused then and looked up as if deep in thought. “You want to know the darndest thing, Tommie?”

“What’s that?” Tommie asked with good humor.

“I know when the track…reappeared, it was run down. Or so it seemed. But when I watched that first race back, it looked as it once did worn but not in desperate need of a repave. It looked like a driver’s kind of track, a handling track, which is part of the reason I was enticed to return to behind the wheel. When I got out there a year later, though, the asphalt was darker. I drove more smoothly than I anticipated.”

Tommie shrugged and asked, “Could it have been just a visual difference? I know that there were murmurs of a repave when we cleaned it up. Whether or not they did, I don’t know. And things do look different sometimes on TV or online than they do in real life.”

“I don’t know. Could be,” Carol said, and they left it there.

Chapter 22

The third annual Groovy Hollow 300 took place on the night of Tuesday, October 24th. Though her leg was feeling miles better and she was on the clear road to recovery, Tommie Jo Swanson was sitting out, sadly, at the age of 18 years old. She made arrangements to watch the race with Carol in her room, receiving special permission from the head of the hospital to remain in the facility after hours, so long as she agreed to check out at the front desk and immediately leave at the conclusion of the night’s event.

She didn’t get there early enough to watch qualifying and practice. School had taken a toll on her, and she went into the garage to tinker with Amelia alongside her father before losing track of time and heading to the retirement home in a frazzled and dirty hurry. “I thought maybe we’d watch the race together,” Dad said, somewhat disappointed. His feelings were bruised, that was for sure, and Tommie’s heart ached over it.

“We will next year, just like old times.” She paused them and considered Amelia. She tapped at her name, which was written in the lost art of cursive over the driver's side door. “Well, maybe not exactly like old times,” she said, beaming with pride.

Dad matched her expression. “Okay, then. I’ll be getting a VIP pass, won’t I?”

“Of course! You and Mama both!” She kissed him on the cheek. “But I gotta go now, Dad. I’ll be back, and it won’t be too late!”

“It better not be,” he said. “It’s a school night.”

Tommie waived her goodbyes and left. She wasn’t dressed in her candy striper uniform she didn’t go to Ivy Park in that capacity. She palled around with Rachel at the front desk before heading down the long, sometimes depressing hallway. She tip-toed past the room that used to house Jerry Slater. She peered inside. The room was empty as a new occupant hadn’t moved in yet. ButTommie, getting a pretty good sense of howthings were around there, guessed it wouldn’t be too long until one did. At the moment, though, the room was quiet and still. There was a darkness to it, but it didn’t

seem eternal. The white moon shone brightly through the window, and curtains were brushed aside. The bed was empty, and she knew it would be neatly made with the sheets pulled tight so no creases or wrinkles would appear. A troubling thought came to her then: could the rooms in a nursing home be haunted? What about the whole facility? If any place was going to be haunted, shouldn’t it be a place such as this? Then she fell down the terrible rabbit hole of thinking about just how many previous residents passed in that very room. How many passed in Carol’s room? Probably too many to count. But Carol wouldn’t. Tommie was certain of that.

She put all those awful thoughts aside and walked three doors down. She knocked at the open door. It was a pleasantry of a gesture above all else. Carol sipped her chocolate milk and glanced at the door. She wasn’t alarmed she suspected her. “Tommie! Come in and get us all hooked up! The race is about to begin!”

Tommie did just that and glanced at the clock over the door. It read 7:30, but Tommie knew that it was set five minutes fast. All the clocks in Ivy Park were. She questioned this on occasion but was never given a reason for it. It probably didn’t matter, anyhow. In no time, Tommie had her laptop open and logged onto YouTube for the live stream. There was an animated countdown, and as it reached number 1, Tommie felt a small prick of regret. Oh, how she wished she was there! She probably should have been there. And she knew this feeling of remorse and missed opportunity would only intensify once the screen came on and she could fully see the track. But if she couldn’t be there and she wasn’t watching it on the couch with her father, sitting there with a seasoned racer like Carol was the next best thing.

The Out of the Groove music sounded over her crappy computer speakers. Man, it sounded so much better on TV. Even Eric’s voice when she would watch his videos on the flatscreen Smart TV in her living room sounded so much more cinematic. It was depressing how big the gap was between the quality of sound on a computer and that of a television. But she shook the thought away.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are pleased to welcome you back to our annual Groovy Hollow 300 event, hosted by the mysterious and gorgeous Groovy Hollow Raceway!” Eric Estepp said. He was in the booth this year rather than on the track to give the command to start engines. This was a good change, Tommie guessed. Though she had never seen the stream coverage before and

couldn’t comment on the performance of the previous years, she always thought he’d be a good color commentator or maybe even a play-by-play analyst.

Danny Jackson and Hawk Steiner from YouTube joined him in the booth. There was a fourth man in the booth, someone Tommie had never seen before. He was tall and skinny with sun-kissed skin and a shaved head. A bar at the bottom of the scream read his name and who he worked for:

GREG MALONI, Groovy Media.

“With us here today is Greg from Groovy Media. How are you doing, Greg?”

“I’m doing great, guys, and I’m thrilled to be here with you all at the infamous Groovy Hollow Raceway for tonight’s race. All the proceeds go to charity, and it should be a fun time.”

Eric said, “This has been a passion project for you for a long time now. Tell us a little bit about how you became involved in this project and what you’re hoping will come of it.”

“Well, like I said, Eric, all the proceeds for this race from sponsorships and donations, not to mention ticket sales, all go to various charities that we’re involved in. So, that’s pretty neat and the most important thing about thisevent. And I’m very proud of our outreach and everything we’ve gotten to do with it. With this single race, we were able to give back to the Commonwealth community like nobody ever has before, and it’s just been a real treat. Not to mention the on-track product, which has been a real treat for us for the last couple of years.

We’ve got a lot of young and talented racers putting on some of the best on-track product of any short track series across the country.”

“It certainly has been a great race the last couple of years. And then, of course, there’s the return of Bucky Blackwell to his old stomping grounds,” Danny chimed in. There was a pause then in the broadcast that seemed almost unnatural. Tommie and Carol looked at each other and then turned their attention back to the screen.

Greg took in a deep breath and sighed. “Ah, yes. Bucky Blackwell. He certainly is a master of this track. For the last two years, he dominated this event. Though, last year, the Junkyard Jacks sure gave him a run for his money.”

“The Junkyard Jacks,” Eric started, “sure were a rough and tumble group, weren’t they? Will they be returning this year?”

“Yeah, the Junkyard Jacks sure were…an interesting group. But, no, they weren’t here to qualify, and a spot was not saved for them. That’s not to say that we didn’t reach out. We did. We just never heard anything back. But if they’re up for it, we’d love for them to turn back out for next year’s event. They sure put on a helluva show for Groovy Hollow 2.”

Danny said, “Well, we knowthat the JunkyardJacks aren’t returning. But what about defending race winner Bucky Blackwell?”

“Yes,” Greg said with a big grin on his face. “Yes, Blackwell is back with his infamous Halloween Machine. Last year, there was some controversy about it, and I understand. Let me explain: Last year, the promoters and I created a rule that states so long as we have this Groovy Hollow event and it is annual, the past winner, or the champion of the race, gets an automatic invite and a reserved spot in the field. We didn’t make that rule change transparent last year, and itsparked some controversy amongst our fans, claiming that we were showing favoritismto Blackwell, which just wasn’t and isn’t the case. Last year, Blackwell opted not to qualify in order to save some of his equipment. Therefore, you at home and the spectators here did not see him turn a single lap in practice or qualifying. But he will be in the event, starting all the way back in the 40th spot. Last year, he raced to the front and won. Can he do the same this year? That suspense and all this excitement is what this sport and event truly is all about.”

“Thanks for clearing that up for us, Greg,” Eric said, turning back to face the camera. “It’ll be a real pleasure to be able to watch this race from this angle and see how the storyline of Bucky Blackwell and the Groovy Hollow Raceway unfolds as the laps tick down here today.”

“That’s right, Eric,” Danny said. “We can’t wait for the engines to fire, so let’s go trackside for the opening ceremonies.”

The mics in the booth cut out, and the camera panned away, showing a color guard displaying the American flag. The track fell silent. The overhead announcer’s voice boomed through thestadium, saying, “Will everyone please rise as you are able and remove your hats as the Commonwealth High School ROTC presents our nation’s colors.” There was a thick silence then, which lasted for about a minute. Then the at-track announcer cut through the haze and said, “Before we get to the singing of our National Anthem, we here at Groovy Hollow Raceway would like to take a moment of silence to

honor one of our fallen brethren—a fellow local racer who participated in this race last year, Jerry Slater.” The Slater name echoed through the surrounding mountains. Tommie squirmed uncomfortably and glanced over at Carol. Her face was stony, her lips pressed firmly together.

The moment of silence felt as if it lasted, in reality, several moments, like it was never-ending. In Tommie’s mind, the world stopped turning. She glanced over at the closet in Carol’s room. He was left open just a crack, and Tommie began to wonder if it was like that when she first walked into the room. It had to be, right? There was no way that it just popped open on its own. Her gaze remained fixated with that thin sliver of an opening. The rich darkness inside seemed darker than even the shadow-laden hallway outside. As she stared at it, her mind started to play tricks on her she saw things move that shouldn’t have been, couldn’t have been there, squirming in the darkness. But perhaps the most terrible thing she saw in a snippet of silence was a black, corrupted eye sunken amidst a white, moonlit face, watching her, peeping out.

“Thank you,” the track announcer said, and the face and its writhing companions vanished. Nothing was left. Nothing was ever there in the first place. There was nothing, absolutely nothing to be scared of. “And now, to perform our National Anthem, please welcome the Commonwealth High School Marching Bandit Band!” The snare drummer started his roll, and the drum major started to conduct. The band was huge, dressed in their usual burgundy, white, and gold getup. The plumes in their shakos, black with sparkling flecks of gold, reached upward as if to touch the sky.

As the bombs went bursting in the air and the flag was still there, Tommie glanced back to the closet in the corner of the room. Nothing was there. She felt increasingly silly by the second but still on edge all the same. She considered getting up and closing the darn closet for a second, but she was afraid Carol would dog on her and her paranoia. It was unlikely, she knew, and out of the old woman’s character but still a legitimate concern. So, instead, she sat there to the left of Carol’s bed, keeping an eye on the thin gap of corroded darkness.

On the screen, the camera panned to the sky as fireworks exploded over the night. The crowd roaredexcitedly.Tommienotedthenjusthowmuch, witheachpassingyear,thisGroovyHollowevent, which started as a short track cultish kind of race, was growing into a real full-fledged production that could rival NASCAR. She and Carol watched the fireworks burst and rain their burnt orang sparks down on the slumbering mountains off in the distance.

Then, little time was wasted. Drivers were already climbing into their cars. The camera didn’t pan over to the No. 31 Halloween Machine until Bucky Blackwell was already in the car and masked behind his black-tinted windshield.

“And now,” said the at-track announcer, “for the most famous words in motorsports, please welcome… ” The crowd roared on, a preamble to the rumbling of the engines they were just moments away from.

The announcer approached the start/finish line with a microphone in hand. He paused a moment, taking in the ambiance of the moment. Tommie could only imagine how electrifying it truly was. “How are y’all doing tonight!?” The crowd’s cheers grew louder and restless. “Are you ready for some racin’?” The crowd’s reaction made it clear that they were. “Well then, with no further ado, DRIVERS! START! YOUR! ENGINES!” He belched into the microphone. The symphony of starting engines commenced. The camera panned out, and the starting lineup appeared on the bottom of the screen. Claiming the pole, looking for his third attempt to dethrone Bucky Blackwell, was Brandon Power in the No. 44 Chevy. Starting alongside him was David Smith, driving his usual number 25 but this year sporting the black, pink, and white colors of his favorite NASCAR website.

As the ticker went through the field, Tommie wished harder that she was there, smelling the smells and hearing all the glorious sounds a race weekend naturally produces. On more than a couple of occasions throughout the night, she reached beside her for a program that wasn’t there.

Predictably, the last driver shown on the ticker, starting all the way back in the 40th position, was Bucky Blackwell. The graphic appeared with his name and hometown (he was from Whisperwood, just a 30-minute drive from the track), but where his likeness should have been was nothing but a ghostly black silhouette. Still no picture, Tommie noted. He won the thing two years and counting, and there’s still no picture. It was an oddity, for sure.

Then, as if the announcers on the screen were reading her mind, Eric said, “And you may notice that there’s no picture of Bucky Blackwell on our starting grid. That’s not because none exist,” he explained. “But he’s a hard man to catch on camera. And the rare instances when someone does, it’s always corrupted in some way it’s either fuzzy and so dark you can barely make him out.” It was a sensible enough explanation, Tommie supposed, but she still didn’t like it. It was dreadfully

eerie.

“Well, that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense,” Carol argued but then paused, pondering something. She sighed. “But I’m not surprised. He’s a shifty character, that Blackwell. Maybe he doesn’t want his picture taken because of his…extracurricular activities. “Or maybe there’s another explanation, a supernatural one.” Tommie side-eyed Carol for an indication that the old driver was joking. There was none. Her face remained stony and grim, as serious as a heart attack you can’t come back from.

She thought about asking Carol what she meant by it but decided not to. In truth, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know. But, if she fully intended to race against Blackwell the following year, maybe it was something she needed to know and take into account. But she would burn that bridge when she got there. She glanced over at the opening of the closet door. In the rich darkness, she saw things moving, squirming. And while all that was unsettling enough, she was still glad that no moonlit face was there, staring back at her with its awful sunken eyes.

“Starting last,” Carol said ponderously.

“He won’t stay there long,” Tommie noted, and Carol nodded in agreement. Brandon Power led the field from the pit road onto the worn surface of the track. Tommie paid special attention to that after Carol brought it to her attention. She was right the track did look a lot rougher than last year. Though, Tommie considered that that might have been a trick of the camera. Everything looks different on camera than it does in real life. She chalked it up to a deception of the lens. Still, the racing surface looked as if it were just barely being held together by toothpicks and tape. If the drivers had any trepidation over the condition of the track, they didn’t show it. They drove up on the slight banking in turns one and two, weaving backward and forwards, cleaning as well as rubbing some heat into their tires.

The field ran some pace laps. They ran down pit road to gauge what should be pit road speed and checked for any and all issues they may have, then lined up for the start. The lap before the official green flag seemed uncharacteristically long for a track so short in size. But the moment they had all been waiting for came in all due time. As Power entered the start/restart box, he gunned it up and let the field to the green flag. The race was underway.

The race, in the early stages, was a good one. As both Carol and Tommie predicted, Bucky Blackwell, even without the pick that was Jerry Slater, made his way to the front in a hurry. David Smith wrestled the lead away from Brandon Power after the first ten laps. But by Lap 30, Blackwell was in the lead and pulling away to great lengths.

In her mind, Tommie told herself that if she could only be out there, things would be different it’d be a different outcome. But she was fully aware that every driver out there had once thought the same nonsensical thing. She glanced back at the closet. The face was back. Inside, the dead face of Jerry Slater was staring back at her, his awfully twisted features gnarled into a scream of deep agony. She stifled a scream and looked at Carol, who seemed oblivious to the apparition. Until the figure disappeared moments later, Tommie wrestled with whether or not to draw Carol’s attention to the ghost. On one hand, she didn’t want to frighten the old woman. A scare of that magnitude wouldn’t be in her best interest health-wise for obvious reasons. But she also asked herself if Carol would be frightened by the sight of Jerry’s ghost at all. It was possible that rather than being scared out of her wits, she’d feel vilified in her concerns that something with Groovy Hollow Raceway and Bucky Blackwell wasn’t on the up and up. Supernatural, Tommie thought to herself and glanced back to the closet. Jerry was fading now. Pretty soon, there wouldn’t be much of him left. Until he came back, she reminded herself with horror and shook the unpleasant thought away.

In the race, with the laps winding down, the circumstances becoming more dire as they inched towards the finish, Blackwell raced just as he had in the race’s previous two runnings with urgency, aggression, and little remorse. Whenever the camera panned to show the crowd, Tommie was surprised, though she probably shouldn’t have been, by how many fans she saw wearing Halloween Machine gear. His fandom certainly seemed to be spreading like a disease, and Tommie didn’t understand it. He was a relatively dirty driver, not to mention his questionable past and all the other problematic issues concerning his legend. That was when the wires in her head connected: legend.

For fans of any sport, NASCAR and racing being no exception, there’s always a sort of attraction toward the “bad boy.” For years, despite his run-ins with Dale Jr., a significant number of fans flocked to Kyle Busch. Before him, many of those same fans loved Dale Earnhardt, even cheering him on when he committed the most egregious acts on track. And though the fanbase of the most popular driver in the sport (that being Bill Elliott in Earnhardt Sr.’s time and Earnhardt’s own flesh and blood, Dale Jr. in Busch’s) despised those black hat-wearing drivers with great fervor, it almost didn’t seem to matter. Their hate was almost like fuel to keep the fire going, igniting something beneath both the drivers and their unpopular fan bases.

In Groovy Hollow, Bucky Blackwell was a man of legend. Not much was known about him, his checkered past, nor his phantasmic present. His reputation loomed over the sport and the racing facility the way only a true superstar’s (or supervillain’s?) could. It was almost as if he overshadowed the sport himself. Blackwell led most of the closing laps of the race, unsurprisingly, en route to his third win in a row. They watched the screen with great anticipation as the No. 31 Halloween Machine was doing burnouts. Amidst all the gray smoke rising up from the sizzling pavement, the mythical car of Bucky Blackwell faded and disappeared.

“You see, supernatural!” Carol called out, pointing at the screen.

Tommie stared back over at the closet. Jerry Slater's face was nowhere to be seen. “Yeah,” she said with a yawn, not from boredom but from genuine exhaustion. “I think we ought to call it a night, Carol. Okay? I’ll come by and visit you tomorrow.”

“You work tomorrow?” Carol asked.

“No. But that doesn’t mean I can’t stop by.” The nurse cleared her throat at the door. “I think that’s my cue to exit. Good night, sweetie,” Tommie told Carol, who slipped out and was ushered by the nurse.

Tommie didn’t sleep well after leaving the hospital. Mom was already in bed when she walked through the front door. Dad was still up but somewhat dozing. He heard the door click shut behind her and was startled. He blinked through his onsetting sleep and smiled. “Tommie! Enjoy the race?”

No, she wanted to say. No. And it’s not just because I wasn’t out there. There’s something wrong in Commonwealth. And Bucky Blackwell is at the center of it all. But all she could manage to do was swallow her fear hard and say, “Yeah. Yeah, it was a good race.”

Dad shook his head, riddinghimself of some of that sleep.Then he cocked his eyebrows. “Even the winner? You enjoyed that?”

Tommie shook her head. “Well, no. But you always told me, especially during the years Dale Jr. wasn’t running particularly well, that the sign of a true race fan is enjoying the racing, regardless of who actually goes to victory lane. Isn’t that right? Or did you forget?” She teased her father. The teasing felt good and normal when all she wanted to do was go to her roomand spend the night alone. She would get to do that in time, though. Right now, it was about putting up a confident front.

“Right. Yeah.” He looked at her a moment through squinted eyes. Then blurted out, “Something’s buggin’ ya.”

Tommie looked at him with the deadest expression she could and said, “Oh?”

“Yeah,” Dad said. “And I think I know what it is. You’re upset that you couldn’t be out there, right? This was supposed to be your debut, but… ” he shrugged as if the gesture finished his thought. In a way, it did.

“Yeah,” Tommie agreed reluctantly. “Yeah, I guess that’s it.”

“Well, Tommie, you and I know you’ll be out there soon. Next year, probably. And then you can be the one to take it to ole Bucky Blackwell.” He turned his attention back to the TV. The stream had ended, and he fumbled through the Smart TV’s various functions to put it back on the cable box. He didn’t flinch when he said Blackwell’s name. Rather, he stared blankly at the TV, fishing through

channels.

Tommie thought it was odd but decided not to dwell on it. She said as she rubbed her eyes and put up a fake yawn, “Well, Dad, I think I’m going to turn in. It’s been a long night, you know?”

Dad nodded, and Tommie went upstairs to her bedroom. She shut the door behind her gently and headed straight for the bed. The long night that had already transpired was about to grow even longer. The covers pooled around her ankles as she lay there in the bed. She stared up at the ceiling, waiting for the Sandman to come and work his magic. But he never made an appearance. Tommie tossed and turned through the night.

A couple of times, she got up, walked over to her bedroom window, and stared out. The street below was dimply lit by yellow streetlights amplified by the cosmic glow of a full moon. It was empty and quiet as it should have been in the middle of the night on a Commonwealth street. Still, a crisp uneasiness in the air nipped at her.

From that window, Tommie could see the woods and the stone path that led to the Groovy Hollow Raceway, but crooked trees masked the track itself. In her head, she could imagine the sounds of a revving engine echoing out of those woods, and she started to wonder if Bucky Blackwell was out there somewhere. She wondered, considering that the track and he seemed to be one and the same or, at the very least, related, if he might be out there somewhere, watching her…taunting her. The thought broke her arms out into gooseflesh and sent her mind to wander around drunkenly in the darkest corners of her imagination.

Tommie shunned the window and walked back to her bed. She got in it but kept the covers off. It was too hot in the house, and she was already covered in sticky sweat. She knew that she’d never be able to sleep in such conditions, so she got up again and walked over to her TV. She turned it on and mindlessly flipped through the channels just as her dad had when she came in, hoping that it would be the medicine she needed to make her a little drowsy and too tired to think about Blackwell, the race, and what was to come in the next year. However, rather than finding anything mind-numbing enough to court the Sandman to her, she stopped on the IFC channel, which was showing a syndicated broadcast of the original 1989 Pet Sematary movie. For a moment, she thought of flipping past it, knowing darn well that if she kept it on that channel, she’d never sleep through the night. But

something stopped her. Instead of flipping past the channel, she left it on, the sounds of the film providing her a strange comfort she couldn’t quite explain.

She returned to glance out the window. Nothing had changed except when she looked at the garage below, the building that housed her wounded No. 28 Chevrolet, and saw that the door was cracked just a smidge. It was impossible to think that she or her father would ever be carelessenough to let such a thing happen. So, in her disbelief, she blinked three times and refocused her eyes. Upon looking at the garage door again, it was as it should have always been closed and presumably locked.

She returned to her bed, no longer feeling overwhelmed, and pulled the blankets over her. She watched the movie while occasionally glancing aside at her closet door, which was left slightly ajar. Had she left it that way? She didn’t think so but couldn’t be sure. Whatever the case, she wasn’t about to go to sleep with the closet door slightly open—not after what she had seen in Carol’s room at the nursing home.

Tommie got out of bed, and the music from the film started to amp up. She felt like she was in a horror flick herself a nightmarish Days of Thunder with all the ghosts and demonic racecars one would expect. She grabbed hold of the doorknob. It was cool to the touch. One. She counted. Two. The doubt started to creep in now. There was no way she would be foolish enough to open the closet door. Was she? Three! Tommie swung the door open and quickly reached for the light just inside. She hoped nothing grabbed her, but it didn’t. The light came on and bleached her room. There was nothing inside the closet except for her own silly paranoia.

She sighed and uttered an airy laugh. She left the light on and returned to her bed. She watched the movie before finally, and gracefully, getting the couple of hours of sleep she craved. Her dreams fed off the film and whatever horror flick that no doubt played after. She enjoyed the movies in her mind for what they were, knowing that they were fake—except for the last one. Oh, that one felt all too real.

In her dream, Tommie is at the racetrack. What racetrack isn’t known, not off the bat. Not that it matters much. Tommie enjoys being at all sorts of tracks all over the southeast. She just enjoys the atmosphere: the sounds and smells, the crowd with a shared interest, and the swagger of the drivers. Tommie is going to be one someday. She just knows it. (Someday, Tommie laments like an omniscient narrator. Someday, that’s going to be me. This is how Tommie knows she is dreaming and the dream itself is tightening around a memory.)

Dad is there, as she knew he would be. He’s towering over her to her left, a reminder of just how tall he used to be before time and growth on her own part seemed to shrink him. He is eating a hot dog slathered in neon green relish. She notices her looking and hands it over to her, offering her a bite. Tommie can feel the look her face makes. She tenses up and shoves the hot dog away. She never liked relish, and she had no intention of starting anytime soon. Dad laughs, and it’s a joyous sound. He reaches for yet another sip from his longneck glass bottle of Mountain Dew. Tommie doesn’t grab it from him this time. She doesn’t shoot him disapproving looks or hope that her father will take better care of himself. She lets it go, and it doesn’t have anything to do with her caring less. She doesn’t think that’s true she just knows that it’s not a hill worth dying on, not in the grand scheme of things.

She turns back to the track, feeling her pigtails bob along her shoulders. She’s younger, but as far as her exact age goes, she isn’t sure. She just knows that she hasn’t had her hair tied up into pigtails in ages. Then she notices what she’s wearing a candy-striped shirt she doesn’tremember ever owning beneath a pair of denim overalls. But what astounds her the most is that while she feels younger, she still has all her wits about her that maturity that comes with the passage of time and the general loss of innocence. The late model stocks are all lined up down on pit road. They’re uncovered, crews surrounding them, giving them their final touches.

Suddenly, day turns to night, and the air possesses a welcome chill to eat away at the hot, sunbaked day that preceded it.

Tommie takes a good, long look at the cars lined up on pit road. Some of them, she recognizes. Out front is a number 88 red Sun Drop car. She realizes that time is split and all jumbled in her head because that specific car didn’t run until the present day at North Wilkesboro, 2024. And the driver who drove that race, she was blanking on his name. But that’s not who is climbing into the car now. Rather, it’s Dale Earnhardt Jr. himself. As if on cue, the announcer above introduces the future (or current?) NASCAR Hall of Famer. Junior waves to the crowd before slipping all the way into his car and getting ready to race.

That isn’t the only car she recognizes. There are others. The Junkyard Jacks are back in all their neon liveries; David Smith has come back, this time sporting a car carrying his own brand, Dogleg Media. There are all the other usual suspects, of course. But the car that catches her eye the most isn’t any of the Junkyards, the various local hopefuls, or even the Halloween Machine itself, which is resting steaming at the back of the pack, just as she knew it would be. Rather, the car that catches her attention the most is lined up to start in the 13th position a solid black car with a silver, almost chrome number 28 on the door. Tommie feels a certain kind of kinship to that car, and she points at it, tugging her Dad’s sleeve to show him. But when her hand reaches for him, there’s nobody there. Her fist balls up over empty air.

Tommie looks to her left. The grandstands are empty. She looks to her right. It’s all the same. She looks at the press box atop the bleachers, but the harsh white stadium lights are blinding. There’s nothing to be seen up there except for the vague resemblance of the Groovy Hollow Raceway logo and a single darkened silhouette beyond the foggy glass windows.

Tommie returns her attention to the track down below. She is the only one in the grandstands now, and she feels uncomfortable and exposed. The cars are still all lined up as they should have been, but the various crew members and workers down in the pits and garage area are gone, and they have vanished. Tommie has never heard a racetrack so unnervingly silent before completely devoid of all sound and commotion. Then, a single engine fired. The number 28 Chevrolet started to

roll, and Tommie got a good look at the name just over the door. It popped, unlike the ghostly scheme of the car. The name read SLATER.

With Jerry Slater presumably behind the wheel, the number 28 car runs the length of pit road and feeds up onto the track. It runs first at a virtual walking pace before slowly speeding up once it gets over on the backstretch to caution speed. After a couple of laps, Slater throws the car into gear, and the engine roars to life. He approaches the first corner at full speed and turns about ten good laps on his own, virtual qualifying laps. Then, another engine fires. And just as Tommie knew it would, the number 31 Halloween Machine started to limp down that agonizingly long pit road. Tommie observed the track surface then. It was aged badly, overgrowth peeping out through busted cracks. She notices for the first time that the outside wall in the corners that were installed just before the inaugural Groovy Hollow 300 is again missing, only sloped sand dunes there to slow out-of-control cars. Groovy Hollow Raceway is, once again, a relic of the past a time capsule that might have been better left unopened. But none of that seems to faze Slater or Blackwell. Bucky Blackwell powers up his Halloween Machine to speed, and the two drivers duel. Slater led most of the action, with Blackwell nipping at his proverbial heels. There are a couple of times where the action leans towards taking a violent turn. Blackwell lightly touches the rear bumper of Slater’s (or Tommie’s?) car, knocking him out of the groove a couple of times. But Slater always battled back hard on the outside, just enough to stay ahead of his nemesis.

It goes on like that for maybe twenty or thirty laps. The pace of the race begins to slow as the tires fall off. Rubber builds on the racing surface like little black beads, breaking their perfect traction. That’s when it happens: the front bumper of the Halloween Machine makes contact with Slater’s car, sending him up the track. But Slater doesn’t go down without a fight. He drives back down the track, and the two slam doors. Blackwell and his Halloween Machine get squirrely, and he chases it up the track. Further contact is made, and it keeps going until both cars are sent tumbling down the sand dune towards the surrounding forest.

Tommie doesn’t remember leaving the grandstands. Rather, she just appears atop the dune. The sound of stadium lights switches off smack through the night behind him. She turns. The track is gone. Behind her is nothing but blank, black emptiness. She is alone. She turns back to stare down

the dune. Her number 28 car has come to a rest a little farther than she remembers. The Halloween Machine is nowhere in sight.

Tommie starts to run towards her car. Its mangled, bent sheet metal is crushed up like an imploded aluminum can. Its steaming, mangled corpse of hot metal and brush comes to rest at the trunk of a thick tree. Though Tommie is running, it takes her a long time to get to the car Her feet are sinking ever deeper into the sand with every exaggerated step. Finally, though, she reaches it. She grabs the window by the driver's side door and peers in. The car is empty.

Tommie takes a stumble backward. She wonders what the dream means. But can’t think of it, not now. As the night tightens threateningly around her, it snuffs her out. Her dream self winks into nonexistence, just as Groovy Hollow Raceway had all those years ago, the remains of which nothing but a tainted, hushed legend for time to forget.

On December 25th , 2023, Carol Oates spent her last Christmas at the Ivy Halls Retirement Home. Carol was there, walking with a little less favorability to her right side, a decent sign of recuperation. She had a gift for Carol and had wrapped it herself in a paper she printed from the internet. The racecars printed on the paper weren’t exactly NASCAR stockcars, nor were they late model stocks they looked more like the new age cars nudging Lightning McQueen towards retirement in the movie Cars 3, but they were close enough. They were racing adjacent, which was fair game. The gift came in a box only slightly smaller than a shoebox. Tommie handed it to Carol, who smiled, knowing that she’d soon be out of there. The old woman wasted little time unwrapping the gift, tearing the pages, and tossing them aside with noted eagerness. She was excited, looking more youthful by the minute, like a child awaiting a gift she had waited all holiday season on. Tommie glanced back at Mom and Dad, who supported her from behind. She was surprised, mildly, that they agreed to come with her. But they did, and not once did they talk about how Carol was a bad influence or how they wished she’d give up her dreams of racing. Today wasn’t about them, and they knew it. That was what made them such good parents in the first place.

The body was modern because that was all the custom diecast artist Tommie had met online had at her disposal. But the design was fully retro. It was a throwback in the purest form to Carol’s father and his hot pink number 22 Pontiac. Carol held the car in her hands for a moment. Then, she gently sat it off to the side. She raised her arms to her face, unable to contain her emotions. When Tommie heard the woman cry, she felt awful instantly. But all of that went away when she felt the strong squeeze of Dad’s hands on her shoulders behind her. He leaned down and whispered in her ear, “That’s likely the best gift she’s ever gotten. You did good, kid,” and he kissed her cheek. That made her feel a little better.

When Carol collected herself, she thanked her with a warm, generous hug. She said, “And when, not if, you get back on track, I wanna be there. Front row. Or down in the pits. Whichever you prefer.” Carol also gave her a good, gentle peck on the cheek before they said their goodbyes.

Carol was discharged from the Ivy Hall Hospital in January. Tommie was there to help her out and even take care of Carol in her home, which she had gone without seeing for far too long. Carol offered her a job as her personal nurse, noting that she had connections with an at-home care agency that would be more than willing to hire her on. “You just say the word. And we’re not talking full-time, sweetie. I know that you’ve got your racing to work on. I’m just talking a couple of days a week. Part-time.”

But Tommie declined the offer, much to Mama's disappointment. “I can’t, Carol. I’m sorry,” Tommie said, and Carol replied that she understood, though Tommie didn't know whether she actually did. But she reiterated that she still wanted a warm seat to sit in when Tommie finally did return to the track, which Tommie graciously guaranteed. “You got it, toots,” Tommie said with a wink, leaving her elderly friend behind.

By the time her birthday rolled around in mid-February, Dad started to amp up a big surprise. He brought it up intermittently throughout the month leading up to her big day, touting it as the biggest and best surprise since her sixteenth birthday when she was given Amelia. That sent the hype meter into the stratosphere. How could he possibly top (or even match) Amelia?

“Here,” he said, wrapping her head and eyes in a blindfold. Mom was standing behind her, recording. Tommie went along with it, though she was a little apprehensive. She never cared much for in the way of surprises. She recalled the sense of dread she felt right before Dad uncovered Amelia four years ago, and her throat tightened, and her mouth went dry in response. But she did her best to conceal that uncomfortable fear inside her. Dad led her through the front door, and she could smell the crisp February air. It was relatively early in the morning, and Tommie was still in her PJs. The frosted grass under her slipper crunched with each step. He turned her to the right towards the garage. Tommie was hit with a sense of déjà vu and technicolor vertigo as she recalled her past. Her skin broke out into gooseflesh, though Tommie couldn’t tell if this was a reaction to the chilly morning air or her nerves getting the best of her. “No peeking,” Dad said as Tommie adjusted her blindfold.

“I’m not. It was just sitting weird,” she said, which was partially true she could feel her own eyelashes rubbing against herright eye, causing it to burn and water. Shelowered the hand tampering with the blindfold, and clasped her two hands together in front of her, waiting. The sound of her dad

raising the garage door, the way it rattled all the way up the track, filled her with nervous anticipation.

Tommie readied herself to take off the blindfold but felt her Mama from behind as she pressed a hand against her back and whispered, “Not yet, sweetie. Almost.”

Tommie uttered a groan of discomfort and let her mom lead her forward. In her mind, she could almost see clearly where she was going and what was there. She could see the rear bumper of Amelia in front of her as she was led around and into the garage on the driver’s side.

“Okay, you can take your blindfold off now,” Dad said, and Tommie wasted little time doing so.

She let the piece of cloth fall to the chilling concrete garage floor. Sitting restfully in front of her was Amelia with a slightly revamped paint scheme. Her favorite paint scheme of all time was the Gray Ghost scheme, which was run originally by Buddy Baker back in NASCAR’s founding era. Tommie knew it, though, from the two times Dale Earnhardt Jr. drove the scheme, the first being the 2008 All-Star Race at Charlotte. He ended up driving the car again years later, in 2016, as his annual Darlington Throwback. Tommie always favored the second edition of the car rather than the Citizen Soldier 3 Doors Down collaboration from ’08. She had nothing against 3 Doors Down (she liked that song “Kryptonite” for what it was), but the Nationwide “N” being orange, as well as the orange outline of the numbers, seemed to pop better in her mind. Now, she was staring at her own rendition of the Gray Ghost scheme. There was no sponsor to speak of on the hood, so rather than leaving it blank, Dad hired a graphic designer to write THE GRAY GHOST in big gothic letters that looked straight out of a 1960s horror film. She thought of The Haunting, remembering the font used in its trailer, and smiled. It almost mirrored it.

The number 28 on the door was stylized just like Baker’s classic ride, the numbers being chrome and metallic with an orange border to recall Junior’s rendition of the infamous scheme. Tommie let out a wail so high pitched that Mom and Dad had to cover their ears. She hugged them, knowing how her Dad and Mom differed on the prospect of their little girl becoming a professional race car driver and setting it aside for the better good.

“I takeit youlikeit?” Dadsaid,laughing. “Like it? I love it! It’s it’s ”

“The best birthday present you ever got?” Dad asked with a cocked eyebrow.

Tommie shook her head. “No. It’s the most perfect gift I’ve ever gotten from anyone. The best was the car itself. This, though ” Tommie started but didn’t complete the thought. Dad nodded, seemingly understanding her meaning. She quickly reached into the sagging pocket of her pajama pants and pulled out her phone. She took a picture of her own and sent it to Carol, who she thought was at home and resting easily. The caption of the text just under the photograph read THE PERFECT

BIRTHDAY! Carol replied a little over an hour later after the excitement had died down with a smiley face party emoji.

Dad walked over to the car and held up his hands to visualize a movie screen. “Groovy Hollow 4: The Halloween Machine versus The Gray Ghost,” he said. “Kind of has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?”

Tommie agreed that it did and gave him another squeeze around the neck because words would never be enough to express how grateful she was. She looked at her Mom then. Mama had stopped filming, and she held her phone loosely in her hand. She looked at Tommie with a long, saddened face, but beneath it, she was smiling. Tommie went over and gave her mom an even bigger squeeze than she had her dad. “Thank you, Mama,” she whispered in her mother’s ear.

“Oh, you’re welcome, sweetie. But this was all your Dad. He hired the right people, and they pieced this little dream of yours together. I only cheered from the sideline.”

“I don’t mean for this,” Tommie assured her. “I know it scares you, the thought of me getting back behind the wheel. I know it scares you awful bad. But it’s something I have to do, Mama. I just have to.”

Mama pulled her away. A single tear fell from her right eye, smearing her makeup. She wiped it away. “I know, sweetie. And honestly, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I want you to be happy, Tommie. And, more importantly,” she paused a moment and looked over at Dad. She winked. “I want you to win!”

Tommie first tested the revamped edition of Amelia, the New Gray Ghost, at Kingsport Speedway that April. Dad had tried to book a date at Groovy Hollow, but, as with the last couple of years, the phone line was busy. He must have tried every number and email provided on the Contact Us tab of the Groovy Hollow website, but to no avail. The phone lines were always busy, and the emails went unanswered. Even the Facebook and X pages remained dormant after the last event, as they were nearly every year until the weeks just prior to the current year’s race.

But in spite of this, she knew that a Groovy Hollow 4 would take place. It had to, and it would, in time. She just needed to be patient.

There was a good deal of rust on her for that first test session in Kingsport. She ran her first handful of laps slow and off the pace, just wanting to get a feel for the car. At first, it was uncomfortable and terribly loose. She almost spun a number of times, none more scary than when she entered the first corner. She thought she had lost the car right then and there and tensed up. A lightning bolt of pain struck through her leg, reminding her of her past injury. She wasn’t afraid of getting hurt again. Rather, she feared hurting the car. The last thing she ever wanted to do was to back Amelia into the wall. That would only mean more work for her and Dad, and the work would be in a pinch. She wasn’t even sure they’d have the time and money to fix the damage with the race looming in just a few months. But she saved the car and didn’t crash it, thanking her lucky stars.

When she started to increase speed, she felt a little more comfortable in the driver's seat. After all, it had been a while since she had driven anything at all, let alone something in real competition. After about 50 laps of practice, she still wasn’t fully up to race speed but was inching closer to that goal with each passing lap.

There were a lot of distractions in the car that day, distractions that she’d never really shake. Her leg injury, nerves, and doubts about her ability aside, she also got a strange sensation that she was not alone. With the HANS device required, she couldn’t move her head to look beside her. Obviously, there was no passenger seat beside her, but she imagined a darkened, misshapen figure

clinging to the roll cage bars like a daredevil living a most extreme dream. She strained her eyes to see, but the helmet got in the way. That was one of the times she nearly lost it. The rear of the car stepped out behind her, and she had to chase it up the track. She came within an inch, maybe less, of making contact with the outside wall.

Dad came over the radio, “How you holdin’ up in there, Tommie?”

Tommie snapped her attention back to the task at hand and tried to put that feeling of another presence as far out of her mind as possible. “Fine, Daddy. Just a little rusty,” she said, and it was true enough.

“All right then. Just don’t press it too hard, okay? Remember the big picture, okay?” “Tenfour,” she said and got back to driving the preferred line around the circuit.

The tires were completely shot after about a 75-lap run. She brought the Gray Ghost down pit road and parked it at the stall adjacent to the start-finish line. Dad was beside her in a hurry, yanking down the window net. “How was that?” he screamed over the rumble of the engine. Tommie shut it off and loosened her belts. She climbed out and took off her helmet and HANS device, placing them on the roof of the car beside her name.

“That was fun,” she said, which was, of course, the understatement of the year. She popped out her earplugs and dangled them around her neck as she adjusted her hair. “Harder than I remember, but still a blast. I missed it.”

“Well, I’m sure Amelia missed you,” Dad said, but Tommie ignored him. She lowered herself, taking in a good look at the passenger side of the car. There was no figure there, no ghostly presence to make her uncomfortable or fearful. Dad looked, too, and asked, “What are you looking for?”

Tommie stiffened and shook her head. “Nothing, nothing. I’msure it was nothing.” But she was deeply unsettled and not herself.

Dad cocked an eyebrow and waited for further explanation. When none came, he said, “Well, you were slow at first, but that’s okay. It’s hard to ride that horse when you’ve been off it for so long, especially considering how the last go around went. But you picked it up, and quicker than I honestly expected. You were going nearly race speed around lap 30 or so. Did you feel like you were back?”

“I don’t know,” Tommie said honestly. “Really, I don’t feel like I ever left. Or, at the very least, it never left me.”

Dad nodded and got back to his analytics. “Tires started to fall off around Lap 40, but it was a steady decline until Lap 50 when lap times took a nose dive. Did you notice a huge difference in handling? I saw that you had a bad moment around the time the steeper falloff occurred.”

How can I tell him I almost wrecked the car because I was spooked by a shadow I never saw? She didn’t know, so she didn’t fess up to that at all. Rather, she simply said, “Yeah, there was a difference for sure, and it caught me off guard a time or two. But no, I don’t think it was too big of a difference in terms of handling. Once I got the hang of it, it was fine. On edge at times but still mostly fine.”

Dad smiled and patted her on the shoulder. “Well, that’s just fine, honey. I’mproud of you, you know? It took a lot of guts to get back in the car after the accident. A lot of drivers, they lose their footing after something like that. You done good!”

“Thanks,” she said, unsure of what else to say beyond it.

“I don’t want to go through another set of Hoosiers. They’re expensive. Why don’t we call it a day? I heard your Mama was fixin’ a meatloaf dinner with all the fixings. You can tell her how the test went, calm her nerves a little.”

Tommie smiled and nodded. The two of them packed up, loaded up the car, and headed for the house. Dinner was ready and on the table by the time they got there. Tommie happily helped herself to a thick slice of the meatloaf and poured a liberal helping of extra ketchup on top. Additionally, she plopped a big spoonful of mashed potatoes onto her plate and covered it with corn and mac and cheese. A lot of people don’t like their food touching one another, which Tommie never got. A lot of little kids especially were like that. She recalled a time when she was younger and at a birthday party when a boy devolved into a screaming mess when his ice cream melted into his cake. Tommie? She couldn’t have cared less. She mixed the two, and then just as she mixed her pasta, corn, and even a little bit of the ketchup from the meatloaf into her potatoes, she chowed down contently. It was all going to the same place anyhow. And the food was scrumptious! It was easily the best darn meatloaf Mama had ever made. Tommie was sure to tell her just that, too. “You’ve outdone yourself, Mama!

“Well thank you, sweetie,” there was a twinkle in her mother’s eyes. She took a bite of the food herself and chewed it up in a hurry. Then she asked, “How did testing go today?”

“It went well,” Dad said. He turned and smiled at Tommie. “Just like riding a bike, ain’t it?”

“Yeah,” Tommie agreed, though she herself had never learned to ride a bike, not without training wheels, at least. That was one of her primary regrets. At ten years old, she was still sporting her trusty training wheels. Some of her classmates poked fun at her over it. If that wasn’t enough to get her to forego learning to ride a bike altogether, the crash into an angry flock of geese down by the river surely did her in. She vowed then to never get back on a bike, be it a regular one or a motorcycle. It was strange whenever she stopped to think about it, though. She shunned bikes out of fear but climbed willingly into a late model stock with the intention of one day going 200 miles per hour on the NASCAR circuit without a second thought.

“Well, good!” Mama said and helped herself to another bite. “Were your times…I don’t know…good? Fast, I mean?”

“She got up to about what race pace is over at that track. Not quite up to snuff in qualifying trim yet, but she’ll get there. I’m sure of that. That’s what we’re going to do next, Tommie. We’ll go over to Kingsport and test qualifying setups. We know what the car does on the Hoosiers for the long run. Now we just need to get the short run figured out, and we’ll be all set.”

Tommie nodded her agreement.

Mama said, “I really wish you could get in and test over at Groovy Hollow. She needs to turn laps on that track if that is where she’s going to race.”

“I agree,” Dad said, “and I’ve tried. Nobody will return my calls. My emails. My Facebook messages. Heck, even my Twitter messages.”

“It’s X now, Dad,” Tommie said and laughed a little.

Dad looked at her with squinted eyes. He flicked a kernel of corn at her. “Don’t even get me started on that stupidity! It’ll always be Twitter in my head. Anywho, most likely, the first laps Tommie

makes at Groovy will be when the race weekend starts.”

“That’s ridiculous. When is that?”

“Don’t know yet,” Tommie said, amplifying her frustration. But she smiled at her Dad to assure him that she’d be ready whenever the time came.

“That bunch is AWOL!” Dad declared.

“True. They’ll make an announcement by September, though. They always do.” Tommie reassured them.

“Maybe they just won’t have one this year,” Mama added.

“They will,” Tommie said positively. They’ll race at Groovy Hollow this year. They’ll race there every year that the track is standing, she thought. Her mind wandered then. She wondered when or if the track would disappear again.And if it happened, would it ever resurface? The uncertainty of that made Tommie’s stomach rumble, and she suddenly lost her appetite. Still, she forced herself to clean her plate. Mama worked so hard on it, and it was her favorite meal.

Whenshewas doneeating, Tommie stoodup.She pushed her plateaway and excused herself. She told them it was her bedtime. Mama and Dad nodded their understanding. She kissed them both on the cheek and headed upstairs to call it a night. As she slipped into her pajamas, she texted Carol. TURNED MY FIRST LAPS TODAY. I’M A LITTLE RUSTY, BUT IT FELT GOOD TO GET BACK OUT THERE. HOPE YOU’RE DOING OKAY.

Just before she drifted off the sleep, her phone dinged. Carol wrote back: ALL’S WELL ON THIS END. I’M GLAD YOU’RE BACK ON TRACK. LOOKING FORWARD TO GROOVY HOLLOW.LOVE

CAROL OATES. Tommie smiled and snickered at this. For what it was worth, Carol seemed to be adapting very well to her new phone.

Tommie was already asleep and snoring when her closet door popped open. The darkness inside ate away at the light. If she could have seen what was inside, she would have seen the pale blue face of Jerry Slater staring back at her with his slacked jaw and sunken eyes. But she didn’t see. She slept on, dreaming about racing and going fast.

Chapter 28

Registration for the annual Groovy Hollow 300 dropped on Friday, September 13th , at around noon, prior to any official announcement. The news came as a surprise to Tommie, and she likely wouldn’t have even known about it if she didn’t get a text from Carol shortly after the applications were posted online. The text from Carol read: GOT AN EMAIL TODAY. FROM GROOVY HOLLOW RACEWAY. WHEN CAN YOU COME OVER?

Tommie texted back: LEMME CLEAN UP AND I’LL BE RIGHT THERE. BEEN WORKING ON AMELIA ALL AFTERNOON. Tommie excused herself from her Dad and said that she needed to get washed up.

Dad said he’d likely continue tinkering around with the car until dinner. “Will you be back for dinner?” Dad asked.

In truth, Tommie didn’t know the answer but said, “Sure.” She left the garage and went in the house, careful to kick off her greasy work boots before trotting upstairs and taking a shower. She didn’t bother with makeup or the clothes she would wear. She just threw on a pair of wrinkled jeans and a dirty T-shirt that didn’t smell too offensive and left the house. She got to Carol’s at about a quarter past three o’clock. She killed the engine and walked up the long front walk to ring the doorbell. While she waited for Carol to answer, she lamented just how much she liked Carol’s home. It was an old house built in the Victorian style. It was the type of house that would be great for hosting an annual haunted house attraction for the Halloween season.

Tommie thought that maybe she’d be able to convince Carol to host such an event, but the side of her that was more rational doubted that her elderly friend would get behind such a juvenile stunt. Besides, Carol hardly had the same love of horror movies and books that Tommie had.

The old house groaned, settling into its eternal location. She could hear every footstep Carol made towards the door, them increasing in volume as she approached. Finally, she opened the door. It was dark on the inside and musky-smelling. Tommie winced at the old dusty odor as Carol waited

for her eyes to adjust to the bright white light of the outside world. “Tommie, yes. Come on in,” the old woman said and turned to lead Tommie deeper into the house. Tommie was sure to shut the door behind her, closing out the sun’s light. “My desktop is in the dining room. I’ll go boot it up. Before you come in here, Tommie, could you please empty that blasted dehumidifier? You can empty it out in the sink.”

Carol went and sat down at the “desk” on the dining room table. It wasn’t so much a desk as an old antique pedal-powered sewing machine. She turned the computer on, an old white Dell with a fatback monitor and tower that made digestion noises as it started to run. Tommie emptied the dehumidifier and put the empty bucket back in it. There, that’ll help with that smell, she thought. It wasn’t that it was a particularly foul smell. It just smelled of old and close to rotting wood. The dehumidifier kicked on and started sucking out the moisture in the living room. Tommie went to join Carol in the dining room, where she had her Yahoo email account pulled up. It was different than Tommie’s own email as she had never been accustomed to anything but Gmail.

Carol clicked on the first email on the screen to open it. “See, here it is.”

Tommie leaned in closer to get a better look. She read the email while moving her lips.

The email read:

Ms. Carol Oates:

We here at the Groovy Hollow Raceway hope you’re doing well and have fully recovered after your unfortunate incident at the track during Groovy Hollow 2. To extend an olive branch, we offer you this specialinvitation to race in thisyear’s fourth annual GroovyHollow300 at the infamous Groovy Hollow Raceway. Please fill out this online application if you wouldn't mind.

We look forward to seeing you back on track soon. An official announcement is pending.

Best,

Doug Richards

Owner and Operator of Groovy Hollow Raceway Incorporated

“Can you believe this mess?” Carol asked. “Last year was my last ride. I was certain of that even before I climbed in the car. But now, look at me. Even if I wanted to get back in behind the wheel, which I don’t” (Tommie looked at her. She saw the certainty of Carol’s face, but she still had doubts. She believed the fire to race was still in there somewhere and that it burned brighter and hotter now than it did even a year ago.) “I’m not able to no more. Who do these people think they are, taunting an old woman like this?”

“Are you sure that’s what they’re doing?”Tommie asked. She scrolled tothe bottomof the email and then back to the top. She looked closely at the email: dougrichards@groovyhollowinc.com. “Looks legit.”

“Oh, I’m sure it is legitimate, Tommie. That’s not the point. They should know darn well the condition I’m in after that wreck. Even all these months and months later.”

“Do you mind if I forward this to myself?” Tommie asked.

“No. Go ahead. Hey, you should use this application to sign up.” Carol suggested.

“If it works,” Tommie said. She clicked the forward arrow on the top right corner of the screen and typed in her own email address to send it to herself. She pressed SEND. “There, I’ll give it a better look over when I get home.”

“What do you want me to do?” Carol asked.

Tommie shrugged. “Ignore it, I reckon. You’re not going to race anyway, right?”

“Shoot, no!” Carol exclaimed. There were pools of tears in her eyes that shimmered with the realization that her last ride ended with a brutal crash. Tommie figured that somewhere deep down, Carol truly believed that someday, she’d get another chance at that properlast ride. But nowshe knew that someday would never come.

“Okay,” Tommie said lamely. It was all she could think to say; telling Carol just how sorry she was for losing her passion would likely do more harm than good. She checked the phone just to make sure the email had been received. It had. She kissed Carol on the cheek and left accordingly, promising that she’d be back for a longer, more proper visit soon. When she got home, she told her Dad about the application and how she forwarded it to

herself via Carol’s account. “You’re signing up?” It was more of a rhetorical confirmation than a genuine question.

Tommie nodded. “Yep. I figured I’d go up and do that right now.” “You go, girl,” Dad called as she left the garage for the house proper.

In the living room, Mom was playing a game of solitaire on the coffee table and losing. She was looking down at the hand she was given with perplexed misgivings. When she heard the doorbell chime and Tommie walk in, closing the door quietly behind her, she looked up and smiled. She rehashed the story of the application Groovy Hollow sent Carol. “That poor woman, she can’t race!” Mom said. An impolite thought when blurted out, especially if it had been in front of Carol, but not one that was altogether untrue.

“She’s not racing, Mama.” Tommie swallowed hard. “I am.” She told her Mama that she forwarded the invitation to herself and intended to fill it out as soon as she got back upstairs. Mama didn’t interrupt her, not even once. But a look of discomfort did wash over her face. Tears started to pool in her deep baby blues. But Tommie didn’t address it.

Mama blinked. “Well, that’s all fine and good, sweetie. Your Dadand I’ll be there, cheering you on!”

“Thanks, Mama.” Tommie turned and started up the stairs before Mama stopped her.

“Oh, honey, I almost forgot. You have something in the mail. Aletter.There’s no return address, so it likely didn’t come via the Post.” Mama stood up and went to the kitchen. She returned with a letter-sized envelope in hand. It was unopened. “I didn’t open it,” Mama said, stating the obvious. “It doesn’t seem too thick, though. Like I said, it’s probably a letter, though I’m not sure who communicates that way much anymore.”

Tommie took the envelope from her mother’s hand. The address was written across the face of the white, almost transparent envelope in messy handwriting tattooed in bolded blue ink. It was addressed to her full name, Tommie Josephine Swanson. Tommie ripped it open. It wasn’t a letter at all, but rather a photograph taken from what looked like across the street. It showed their house with an open garage door. Dad was working on Amelia. Tommie was nowhere to be found. She looked at her mom with a sense of surreal confusion.

Mama saw the look on her face and hurried over to her to check out the contents of the envelope for herself. “Oh, my?” She asked, along with a litany of other unanswerable questions.

Tommie blotted them out. She faded, thinking of all the possibilities, most of them dark and twisted, of what this could mean. Was it a threat? A promise? It hardly seemed harmless.

Tommie decided that she couldn’t deal with this right now. She left the Polaroid with her Mama and ran upstairs. She had a race to apply for, anyhow.

The official announcement of the fourth annual Groovy Hollow 300 was posted online on Eric Estepp’s Out of the Groove YouTube channel, as per usual, on October 18th at Noon. The video was grainy, possessing that old-school, throwback feel Tommie had grown to expect fromGroovy Hollow's announcements. Eric hyped up the return of Bucky Blackwell and his infamous Halloween machine and even dropped some hits that the Junkyard Jacks may make an appearance or two. Her name wasn’t mentioned, not that she really expected it to be. By all accounts, she was expected to be a back marker entry, assuming she even made the field. It also wasn’t said how many cars were attempting to make the race, but she figured that it would be an entry or two above the allotted 40.

As she watched the video and saw the archival footage of the previous year's races, Tommie began to feel her throat tighten. Her nerves were starting to get the best of her, and she swallowed hard in the hopes of choking them down. Now was not the time for anxiousness, not with a race on the way. Appearing again in the race, as announced by Estepp, were the Groovy Hollow loyalists who always made an appearance: David Smith and Brandon Power, among a couple of other faithful.

The video ended with a grainyimage of a mock cemetery, perhapsin the track'sinfield. Tommie exited out of her window and sat there in a ponderous silence for a few minutes. Then, she heard a scratching sound. She looked up and around, her eyes darting from wall to wall in an attempt to find the source. After a few seconds of dizzying disquiet, she determined that the sound was coming from the closet behind her. Tommie stood up, and her initial instinct was to back away. She pressed her backside against the window overlooking the front lawn. The cool glass was cold to the touch, so cold in fact that it nearly burned. She looked over her shoulder and could see the garage down below. The door was left slightly ajar, and just when Tommie started to get concerned at the possibility of someone in there messing with Amelia, she heard the metallic turn of a doorknob.

Tommie gnawed on her bottom lip and stifled a scream. The last thing she wanted at that moment was for Dad to come running to her room. She wasn’t a child anymore, and she was way too old to be scared of monsters in her closet. But, intruders, that was a whole different story. Tommie

had seen enough slasher flicks as well as movies about ghosts, ghouls, and demons to know that the real threat, in any case, was a psychopath who was all too human.

The closet door popped open. There was an uncomfortable sound of whooshing air. Tommie felt the room around her grow cold, and she studied the space immediately in front of her, wondering if she’d be able to see her foggy breath. The closet door opened slowly. It groaned and moaned painfully on its rusted hinges. Darkness crept in. Inside the closet, the black atmosphere of the unknown was more pronounced, bolded somehow accented to the most unsettling extremes. Amidst that writhing blank atmosphere, she saw deep within its twirling nest of shadows the illuminated blue face of Jerry Slater. He grimaced painfully and opened his mouth as if to speak, but his words, those terrible chants, fell upon deaf ears.

Tommie ran across the room. She felt the darkness caress her shoulders as she leaped over her bed and pulled open her bedroom door. She flicked the main overhead light switch on, and her bedroom became ignited by yellow rays of light. It ate away at the darkness, leaving Tommie to feel a little better. Still, she lingered on the threshold of her door, scared to go back inside her quarters. She looked at the closet. There was nothing there but a mess of dirty clothes on the floor and clean outfits hanging up neatly. She waited a minute. Two. Three. By the fourth, she took a cautionary step towards the closet, reaching out, ready to defend herself if something (or someone) reached out from her laundry and tried to grab her. She opened the closet door a little wider. She took another step back. Then, she found her courage and reached in, rummaging through her closet. The clean clothes that were hung up fell to the floor and mingled with the dirty clothes. She reached to the back of the closet and touched the wall. She knocked on it. Solid. She reached to the right and to the left. Nothing but a wall on either side separated only by now largely empty clothes hangers.

It was my imagination, she thought with some relief but also with the horror that she was losing her freaking mind. Tommie backed away not towards the door but to the window. She never once fully took her eyes off the ajar closet door. Even when she glanced over her shoulder and out the window at the garage door that was now shut (more imaginary practical jokes?), she kept it firmly within her periphery. She was relieved when nothing slithered out of the door in the confused haze of her cornered vision.

Tommie thought of Jerry Slater, and though she tried to push the mental image of him far away from

her mind’s reach, it kept coming back to her like a ship returned to her by the consistency of an ocean’s tide. Abruptly, she figured that she ought to go down and check on Amelia. She walked to the door, stepping over her bed again, sure not to get within reach of the closet door (though she did wonder in the back of her head if distance really would stop such a mad intruder), and bolted down the hall. Dad must have heard the heaviness of her footfalls on the first-floor ceiling because he stopped her as she rounded the banister and darted for the front door. “Woah, Tom-Tom! Where’s the fire? More importantly, what’s the fire?”

Tommie did her best to put on a straight, self-reassured face. She swallowed her lies. “No fire, Daddy. I just wanted to go out and see Amelia.”

“Any particular reason why?”

“Nope,” she said as calmly and as matter-of-factly as she could.

Dad nodded and smiled. “Oh, I see. One of those strange driver quirks. Did you see Eric’s announcement video?”

“I did.”

“Have you heard back from the office over there? Have they looked at your application?”

“No. I mean, I don’t know. I’m going to assume yes. But I’m sure I’ll get an email of some sort in the next week or so. Maybe even tomorrow.”

“Okay, well, just ”

Tommie didn’thear theendof her father’ssentence. She was outthedoorandheading for the garage before he could finish. “Hang on,” she said, trying to delude her own rudeness. “I’ll be right back!”

Outside, the sun was fading over the hills. Its dying light cast a bruised purple hue on it, and the moon shone brightly. It was big and commanding. She stood for a moment, unmoving, outside of the garage. She wondered if the intruder was still in here, though she doubted it, more willing to play the whole evening off on her overactive horror movie imagination.

She entered the security code on the outside carefully, and the garage door shook and rattled in its track as it rose. Tommie prepared herself for a shock like a good plot twist, preparing a scream in her throat. But it died there, and the garage came to full view as if the scene were anticlimactic.

She felt a strange mix of relief and disappointment. There was nobody in the garage. Not that you can see, her superstitious self prodded, but she shook it off. Amelia slept alone beneath her sheet, undisturbed. Cautiously, Tommie stepped inside. She ran her hand along the rear decklid and tugged gently at the spoiler. “Soon,” she said.

“Real soon,” Dad said from behind her. Tommie jumped. Her heart leaped up into her throat. She gagged, feeling as though she was choking. She turned to face her father. He was smiling at her good-naturedly, standing with a slouched posture and his hands shoved deeply into his pockets. It was his Aw Shucks stature. He walked farther inside and met her at the car’s rear bumper. He, too, stroked the sheet covering the rear of the car. He looked at her, and his expression changed. He stiffened, becoming alert, bordering on alarmed. “Tommie? Are you sure you’re okay? You’re white as can be. You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”

Tommie flinched at the word ghost. Was that what form of existence Jerry Slater was regulated to after he passed? Maybe, but she had her doubts. Most of all, she hoped that wasn’t the case. Being a ghost had to be the most haunting experience anyone could ever have. And why would he choose her? She turned and looked at Amelia. She was his baby first. What was it about ghosts and cars? Tommie thought of Christine by Stephen King and smiled. She always liked that book, despite its odd shift from first to third person halfway through the book. The movie was better, in her opinion, and it was one of the rare instances where the film adaptation beat out the source material in her mind. But she liked the backstory of the car better in the book. In the movie, the titular Christine was born bad. She took her first victim in the film’s opening shot while Christine was still on the production line. In the book, though, Christine was a haunted car haunted by the ghost of her former owner, an evil and bad man. She didn’t think that Amelia wasn’t haunted. Or maybe she just refused to consider it. Whatever the case, she dropped the thought, denying its possibilities.

“Bad dream,” Tommie lied. She had heard before that it was possible for someone to experience a dream while technically being awake. And though she wasn’t laying in bed and experiencing a fit of sleep paralysis, it did seem like a better explanation if she ever abandoned her previoustheorythatherimaginationhadconjured uptheghostof JerrySlater.Thecarwas untouched, unharmed. That was good. Now, she ought to be able to rest easy, right?

Dad nodded his acceptance of her explanation. Tommie let go of the spoiler and turned to face her father. “I’m wiped,” she said, and she was. For the first time that evening, she felt so tired and overrun.

“You look it,” Dad said and hugged her. Dad always smelled good—smelling of Old Spice and Stetson cologne. She hugged him back. “Come on,” he said, “let’s go to bed. We can work more with Amelia tomorrow. Hey, if you want, I can fix a bag of popcorn and some chocolate milk. We can watch a scary movie, just like in the old days. Or a racing movie, your pick.”

“Why not both?” she asked, knowing she’d fall asleep before they even finished the first one. Dad agreed. They went in, sat in the living room, and had snacks. The first movie they watched was Christine. Tommie was surprisingly able to make it through that one. But they were only about a quarter of the way through Days of Thunder, her Dad’s all-time favorite movie, when she finally drifted off.

As she slept, she dreamed of Jerry. But he wasn’t a ghost in those dreams. No, he was alive and well, a guest at their house. He was there to relay a message to her, but before he could ever say what the message contained, he either started speaking gibberish, or the dream would start over. They felt endless, different each time in small ways but still largely the same. She felt like she was living in Groundhog Day, which was pure, unfiltered torment.

Chapter 30

Tommie never received an email from Groovy Hollow Holdings Incorporated. So, when the day of the race came, she and her Dad loaded up and headed to the track anyway. She might not have been invited to the party like Carol, but she was going anyway crashing it. Nerves unsettled her stomach as she hopped into her dad’s truck. She texted Carol and asked her if she needed a ride. Mom was driving separately and had offered to pick up her elderly friend if needed. Carol texted back, saying that she didn’t. Harold, her nephew, had graciously agreed to take her. So, with that, they backed out of the driveway and headed towards Groovy Hollow.

They arrived at the facility within five minutes of their departure. It hardly seemed long enough. Tommie looked into the right-side view mirror. She could see Amelia strapped down to the trailer behind. Her sickness of anxiety abided. They pulled up at the registration booth. Both Tommie and her dad hopped out as Mom waited patiently from behind.

“Is this where we sign in?” Dad asked as the two of them approached the woman at the table. She was wearing an orange vest over a blue shirt. The GROOVY HOLLOW RACEWAY logo was stamped over her heart. She was an older woman, not quite elderly, but not a spring chicken anymore, either. And yet, her skin seemed to pop it was full of rosy color, full of light, and nearly free of wrinkles. A thick layer of ruby-red lipstick was smeared on her lips. She looked up from the papers she was shuffling. Her eyes sparkled blue. She noticed them, perhaps for the first time, and smiled wide enough to show off all her teeth. They were clean, straight, and pearly white. Tommie could see the fog of whatever alternative world she was lost in, leaving her gaze.

“Hi, can I help you?” she asked. Her voice was smooth and kind, warm and inviting.

“Yeah. Do we check in here? For the event?” Tommie nudged behind her at Amelia resting on the trailer beneath a rather unflattering gray sheet. Wait until they see the paint scheme, though, Tommie thought, beaming with pride. Her Gray Ghost was absolutely dropdead gorgeous.

“Oh, you’re a driver,” she said. She looked down at the messy stack of papers in front of her. “Yes, ma’am, you can check in right here. I just need your name so I can pull up your application on file.”

“Tommie Jo Swanson,” Tommie said. Shespoke the words carefully andclearly.That was when it really hit her that they were there and doing this, for real. Before, racing in the Groovy Hollow 300 was a distant dream that was hardly a reality, no matter how determined she was. Though she truly did believe that someday she would arrive at the track as a competitor and test her skills against some of the best racers in the world, it had always seemed distant for her not really out of reach but way off to where it could only be grazed by her fingertips. Now, though, she turned to face the track, considering Amelia behind her. She saw the size of the grandstands and the infrastructure of the concrete walls outside, and she could imagine the asphalt track inside. It was real. It was happening. Within the next hour or two, she would be turning her first laps on the infamous track and seeing how much she needed to adjust the car prior to qualifying.

The woman continued to thumb through files on her laptop as well as the loose sheets of paper covered in black markings in front of her. Her smile faltered before becoming a frown. “I’m sorry, I don’t see anyone here by that name. Could you have registered by a different name, perhaps?”

“No, I put my name. I’m sure of that,” Tommie said, feeling defensive. She felt, for the first time, the threat of having it all crash down around her her hopes and dreams, her entire purpose. It started to make her sick to her stomach. She turned over her shoulder and considered the porta john over there. Her tummy rumbled angrily. “Could you check again?” Tommie didn’t want to sound rude.

The woman didn’t deserve such backlash, but, at the same time, she was close to living out her dream. And to have it snatched away from her when she was so close, she couldn’t abide by that, and anyone standing in her way was bound to take the brunt of her anger and disappointment, right or wrong. It was an unfortunate casualty but a necessary one nonetheless. She had come this far. The last thing she wanted to hear was you’re not allowed

The woman took a second look. After apparently still not finding Tommie’s registration form, she looked up uncomfortably and checked a third time. She shook her head. Nothing. Tommie’s nightmares, the ultimate disappointment, seemed more real and obtainable now. That was crushing. Devastating. “Nope, I’m sorry.” The woman shifted. “Do you remember how you filled out

your application? Was it on the website because sometimes it can get a little buggy?”

“It was through email,” Tommie answered.

The woman’s eyebrows raised. “Oh, you’re an invited guest?” The smile returned to her face. She blinked three times.

Tommie shrugged. “Well, not really. I struck up a friendship with this woman who raced her last year.” Tommie’s stomach made a noise again. She clutched at it to soothe it, to calmits protests. It didn’t work. “Carol Oates. She ”

“Ah, yes, the woman who had that accident. I hated to see that. An unfortunate reality of this kind of sport, though.”

Tommie went on. She didn’t want to think about the risks of racing, and it was sort of cruel for this woman, this stranger, to bring that up, especially in front of her dad. “Carol got an email inviting her to return. She said no that she was done with racing. Retired. But she encouraged me to apply through her email, and I did.”

“I see.” The woman fell silent a moment. She went back to focus on her computer. “Well, I’m not seeing any Tommie Jo Swanson listed here.” Those were the exact words Tommie didn’t want to hear. She had failed. She had failed already, and she hadn’t even gotten to turn a single lap. Talk about the cruelest of blows. Then, the woman snapped her attention back to her. “But there might be something I can do.” She turned and fetched an old-timey paper application and a wooden number 2 pencil. She clipped the application to the clipboard along with the pencil and handed it over to Tommie. “Our website has been somewhat glitchy over the last year or so. Every now and again, there are some applications that…let’s just say, fall through the cracks at no fault of their own. When that happens, to appease angry and frustrated competitors, the brass allows them to file a paper application to go under immediate review. And though your situation isn’t exactly that, I think it's close enough. Within the same ballpark, for sure!” The woman winked at Tommie and her father. Maybe everything was going to work out after all.

Dad thanked the woman, and the two returned to the truck. A different woman with glowing orange sticks and a reflective yellow vest motioned for them to pull forward, and they did, setting up camp in a field near the backstretch gate. Tommie quickly filled out her application, double-checking

everything through it once, and turned it back into the woman at the information booth. The woman said that she’d get it to the right people and that it was just a waiting game from there.

It took about an hour and fifteen minutes for Tommie to get a call. She almost didn’t feel the buzzing of her vibrating phoneagainst her thigh. Missing the call because sheleft her phone on vibrate would have been a blunder to end all blunders. The caller ID didn’t outright recognize the number, but it had a business area code, and Tommie answered it quickly, nearly dropping the phone. “Hello? Hello?” She could hear the eagerness in her own voice, which embarrassed her slightly. Still, she didn’t feel the need to put forth the effort to mask it.

“Good morning. Is this uhh Tommie Jo Swanson?” The man’s voice on the other end was smooth and had a charming southern drawl. He sounded a little bit like Sawyer from Lost. She always had a crush on him and his smooth-talking ways. It was a cliché, she knew, kind of like how so many women were infatuated with Matthew McConaughey.

“Yes! Yes sir!” she said eagerly.

“Well, hi there, Ms. Swanson. This is Joel Tapper. I’m the admissions coordinator for the Groovy Hollow 300 this year, and we have just reviewed your application.”

“Uh-huh?”

Tapper continued. “Well, we’re pleased to offer you a spot on the entry list for this year’s race.” Tommie wanted to scream in excitement. “But before we get into the nitty and gritty of all of that, I must inform you that we have quite a stacked field this year. Including you, 68 drivers have filed to compete this year. All 68 will qualify at 1 pm today for one of 39 starting sports.

As you know, the defending winner gets an automatic provisional and will start the race in the 40th position. So that means that there are 68 drivers for 39 spots. That means that 29 of those drivers will not make the main event. That’s an unfortunate reality of auto racing, particularly at the grassroots level. I just wanted to touch base and make sure you understand that you have no guaranteed spot in tonight’s race.”

“I understand,” Tommie said. She was silent for a moment, but her mind was running a million miles a minute. Going in, she knew that she would have to qualify her way into the show. She also knew that Bucky Blackwell and his Halloween Machine were going to make the field regardless. But

speaking to the man, the pressure started to mount. The crisp October air seemed hotter, and her clothes felt as if they were choking her.

“Perfect. Now, as you know, the first practice this year starts at eleven o’clock a.m. You’ll need to go back to the credentials booth to get your driver pass and two VIP passes that’ll go to anyone of your choosing. In the infield, smoking or alcohol is not permitted. If you are caught with it, any time you turn on the track will be disallowed, and your entry will be automatically withdrawn. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Great! As I said, the first practice is at 11 AM. It’ll last until about 11:45, and then there’ll be a fifteen-minute break. Happy Hour begins at 12 noon and will last until 12:55. Coverage for qualifying is slated at 1, with the first car scheduled to roll at 1:05. You can enter the track whenever there’s no activity on the track. There’s no tunnel, so once you’re in the facility, you’ll bethere until thecompletion of qualifyingor the racetonight. However,if thereis an on-track incident between yourself and another driver, and you escalate the tensions either during or after the conclusion of the race, you will be called to our official's booth and dished out a punishment that can be anything from a monetary fine to suspension from further events at the track. And the suspensions can be indefinite in nature if the officials feel that that’s the best course of action to take.”

“Sure thing! Got it!”

“Awesome. Head over to the credentials booth and check in. Then, you can head on to the track. There will be one inspection held after qualifying. After your qualifying attempt, your car will be impounded. If you do happen to make the race but your car is found to be illegal, your time will be disallowed automatically, and you will be disqualified. Good luck today. We’ll be rooting for you!” The call ended. It was a lot of information for Tommie to take in, and the matter-of-fact way in which the man spoke did little to ease her budding dread and frenzied nerves.

Dad flashed her a puzzled glance. “Who was that?”

“Some guy over the competition,” Tommie answered. She was already blanking on his name.

“Oh? Are we in?”

“We’re in!” Tommie thought she ought to smile, and she tried, but she knew that it came off

as paper-thin and insincere.

Dad noticed it, too. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, yeah. Hang tight here. I’m going to go to the credentials booth to check in.” She did and returned a few minutes later with a driver’s ID dangling from a lanyard around her neck and two other VIP passes on matching lanyards. She handed one over to her Dad. She turned to look at her Mama. “Mama, they’d only let me have two…”

Mama put up a hand. “Give it to Carol, sweetie,” she said without a stutter.

“What about you?” Tommie asked. Meanwhile, Dad fought with his lanyard to stay tucked beneath the collar of his polo shirt. Tommie couldn’t help but laugh.

“I’ll buy a ticket and watch from the stands. No biggie. Carol and your Dad should really be the ones down there working with you. I can cheer you on just as loudly from the grandstands.”

Tommie smiled, and tears stung her eyes. She gave her mother a big hug. “I love you, Mama. We’ll see you soon!”

Mama kissed her forehead. “I love you too, sweetie. Just be careful.”

“I will,” Tommie promised. And just like that, they uncovered and unloaded Amelia. She and her father headed into the track through the gate on the backstretch.

Amelia sat on pit road, parked diagonally into a pit stall. They pitched a tent behind the bit wall to provide them with a little shade. Dad worked under the hood for about an hour, just giving things another look before closing and latching it. By the time his own inspection was finished, it was time for the opening practice to begin. Tommie was the first driver out on the track. She turned the first handful of laps by herself, just getting a general feel for things. On those initial set of tires, the car was wicked loose. She nearly lost it a couple of times and thought back to her dream. Man, she was thankful for those walls being installed in the corners rather than there just being a downward-sloping sand dune running off into the woods. She did her best to shake the dream away from her. And it went, but not before bringing with it the image of Jerry Slater’s moonlit face peering out at her from her cracked bedroom closet door.

Tommie let off the gas and brought Amelia down pit road. She slammed on the brakes when she almost missed her pit stall, skidding the tires and screeching to a halt. There were a handful of drivers turning laps now. In her rearview, she could see the rooves of their cars zoom by but couldn’t make out any of the colors of the paint schemes. They looked more like white and black smears than anything else. Tommie undid her belts, took off her helmet, and climbed out. Dad was there to give her a headset, and she clapped it over her ears.

“How’d that feel?” Dad asked. “Loose. It’s real slippery out there!”

“I saw.” He took a moment to glance up at the scoring pylon in the center of the track.

Tommie followed his gaze. She was sixth now out of six cars, fixing to be seven, who turned laps in this opening practice session. “Sixth,” she said, confirming her disappointment.

“Yeah, we’re a little slow. But don’t worry about that right now. We’ll find speed. First, we have to make you a little more comfortable in the car. When you can drive it and handle it a little better, we’ll turn faster laps.”

Tommie, unsure of herself, nodded. “Okay,” she said and put on a pair of thick mirrored

sunglasses. Maybe then nobody could see the hurt stinging her eyes. She crossed the pit wall as more cars took to the track. She grabbed her phone and went through her messages. She got one message from Carol stating that she was there. Tommie texted back PRACTICE NOW. BE OUT TO MEET YOU IN ABOUT TWENTY OR THIRTY MINUTES. Carol responded with a thumbs-up emoji followed by a gif of roaring applause from a well-dressed crowd in a theater. The cation at the bottom of the gif read CONGRATULATIONS! Tommie rolled her eyes and set her phone down. What has she gotten herself into by pushing Carol into the fast-moving world of technology?

She walked back over to the car,repositioningher headset. Before sayinganythingto her father, she looked back at the scoring pylon. Twenty-four cars had now made laps. She sat twentieth of the twenty-four. At least she, in those very shaky opening laps, was faster than a handful of others. She also glanced at the top of the pylon to see who was fast. The usual suspects were Smith and Power, the duo leading the way. The pylon didn’t give lap times, but Tommie had the nagging feeling that there was a large gap between third and fourth. But it won’t be them leading the way on the final lap, Tommie thought grimly. Her mind went to the mythic Halloween Machine and the stranglehold on the competition Bucky Blackwell and his bad car had at Groovy Hollow. Even more dread pooled inside her.

Dad turned to look at her, his mouth open as if to say something. But it all got washed away. A look of concern replaced his glee. He was having fun. Regardless of the result in qualifying and practice, he was having fun. It would have been no big deal if they hadn’t made the race, to Dad. They’d simply pack things up and try again next year. Tommie was happy for him and his optimism; the last thing she wanted was to snatch it away from him. But to Tommie, this was make or break. There might not be a next year if she doesn’t perform well here this weekend.

Dad sawthat worry and potential heartbreak on her face. He put a gentle hand on her shoulder like a good dad ought to and flashed her his goofy, encouraging smile, the kind fathers give to their young’uns when they tell them that they truly can grow up and be anything they want to be. At that very moment, they really believe that they can; they see all the potential in the world for what it truly is. “It’s going to be all right, Tommie,” he said. “I’ve made some adjustments to snug the car up some on entry. We’ve got this. I want you to go back out and run maybe twenty laps. We’ll see if you can improve. I bet you will! Then it’ll just be about fine-tuning. Okay?”

Tommie nodded her agreement. She took off the headset and eagerly climbed back into the car. Dad fastened her window net and she pulled off pit road. She didn’t know exactly what her dad did to the car but it did behave much better in the corners. That was to say that it didn’t constantly feel as though it was going to slip out from under her at any given time. She could feel Amelia under her, building her confidence.

The first lap she felt was slow, but she was just feeling things out. She didn’t need Dad to chime over the radio and tell her that she was under speed, but he didn’t. He put his whole confidence in her and said that she would get it when she was ready, and she did. She increased speeds lap by lap, pushing the car as far as it was willing to go. She searched for the best line.

She ran five laps up by the wall in the corners and then tried the inside. There was no denying that there was more speed and more momentum on the outside, but the inside line was the quickest way around, or so she felt.

As her 40-lap run progressed, she felt how the car changed on the tires. The tires were harder than she expected, meaning that they didn’t wear as easily. But, as she got to the end of her run, she felt the car slipping back into its former instability. That was when she knew it was time to return to the pits. Shortly after she took the hard left and fed down pit road, the red and black flags came out, indicating that the session was over.

Tommie brought Amelia to a halt in the stall, and Dad started to check over the tires immediately. She undid her belts and took off her helmet, climbing out. “Was that any better?” It was. She knew it was, felt it, and knew it had to be.

Dad rubbed the tires and nodded. “Yeah. A little better. How’d the car feel?”

Tommie looked up at the scoring pylon. She ended the practice in the 56th position. Nowhere near good enough to make the race. “It felt a lot better. But we’re still way off, aren’t we?”

Dad, with a puckered bottom lip, considered his practice sheet. He wrote some things down and erased some others. “We’re not as far off as you think. Come here.” Tommie went there and looked at the practice times. “Among the 10-lap averages, you were in the top 40. 28th, to be exact. So I know that we have the speed over the longer runs.”

“I felt more confident on the shorter run, though.”

Dad nodded. “Yeah. Comfortability is important. If the driver ain’t comfortable, the driver ain’t goin’ fast. So, I wanted to fix that first. Glad you felt a difference. In terms of speed, we’re all right there together. So, next practice, I’m going to work on setups that will give the car a little more umph. I’d like to get the car accelerating a little better off the corner. Entry’s fine, or so I gather. But we’ve got another practice to get through. I’ll get to work. You go out and get Carol before they close the gates again.”

Tommie nodded, and she walked away from Amelia and Dad. With each step, her heart sank a little farther in her chest. It burned inside her. There was no way she was going to make this race absolutely no way.

Outside, Carol and Mama were talking. Tommie approached them, doing her best not to cry. Carol looked good. Real good, especially after being cooped up in that blasted hospital for so long. She was dressed in comfortable mom jeans and a pink polo shirt with a pink ribbon embroidered on the left breast. Carol was a cancer survivor after all. Not only did she beat up on competitors on the track, but she also beat cancer’s butt? That was truly wicked!

Carol saw her coming and rushed to her. A little surprised, Tommie flinched as the old woman hugged her. She was getting around all right, that was for certain, and Tommie was so happy for her. It was like watching a kid truly in their element. This track, Groovy Hollow, was her ancestral home a home where Bucky Blackwell set up camp as an unwanted guest. Tommie felt that Carol believed that she was the one to dethrone him once and for all. Tommie felt that pressure and the heat inside her, and her anxiety intensified. After a few seconds, Tommie returned her friend’s hug. “I’m so proud of you, Tommie!” Carol whispered in her ear.

“Yeah, well, thanks for coming, Carol. I promise I’ll try to make you proud.” Tommie took a hand away from Carol and motioned Mama forward. Reluctantly, Mama joined the group hug.

Carol gave her a final big squeeze and then let go. She stood back. She was wearing a big smile, and her face was radiant and lively. “I take it you’ve already turned your first laps. Did it feel good?”

“Yes,” Tommie said, and it did. Despite not being as fast as she wished, it felt good being back behind the wheel. She considers that she ought to keep that frame of mind going forward. No matter how the day turned out, the fact that she was fast and by no means the slowest car out there, she had a little something to feel good about. If she didn’t make the race, there was always next year. Or the year after that, and so on. Deep inside, she still knew that this was her one shot. And it was best not to squander it.

Off in the distance, buried by sounds, came the muffled thunder of the PA system.

Tommie turned to Carol. “I guess we should probably go,” she said. She took Carol by the hand, and on they went. Mama waved her goodbyes behind them and started for the ticket booth.

Once inside and down in the garage area, Carol took an instant liking to Amelia. She ran her wrinkled hand along the left front fender and even got a good look inside. Tommie could see the tears pooling in her eyes. “You miss it?” she asked.

“Yeah. Alot more than I thought I would,” Carol admitted. She paused for a moment and looked up. Wiping away a single tear, she smiled. “But my time has passed. It’s your time now. Make the most of it, won’t you?”

Tommie told her that, of course, she would. She had not come all this way to halfway do anything. For her, it was all or nothing.

“I really like this scheme, Tommie. Gray Ghost, right?”

“It is. One of my all-time favorites. Dale Jr. drove it twice, and it was "

“Buddy Baker, I remember,” Carol said. Of course, she did. Carol Oates was more than just a hobby racer. She was a student of the sport. “It’s an appropriate scheme for this race. It being near Halloween and all.” She and Tommie exchanged a look, and Tommie got the reference. She was thinking of Bucky Blackwell and his infamous Halloween Machine. Tommie wondered if it was there yet or if he just showed up right before the race was about to start like a hard-partying rockstar stumbling onto the stage after the band had already started playing.

Time ticked down, and it was time for Happy Hour. Tommie slipped into Amelia and fired the engine. She backed out of the stall and drove slowly down to the end of pit road. Like the last practice, she wanted to get the first crack at the now rubbered-up track. The mission this time was to just run a quick qualifying lap as fast as she could on fresh tires. She did as she was told. The car was noticeably different in the way it felt. The car jarred hard as she went down into the first corner and hit that first bump. The impact was so hard, in fact, that she felt like Amelia lifted off into the air for just a split second before slamming back down on the track. The wheel almost tugged free from her tightly gripped hands. She washed up the track on the backstretch and threw the car into turns 3 and 4. She repeated this for another lap before shutting off her engine and feeding down onto pit road. She came to rest in her stall and immediately started unbuckling to climb out.

Dad came on the radio, “Hang on, hang on. We’re going to make another run. I just want to wait a few minutes.”

“What the heck did you do to this thing?” Tommie asked.

“I just made a few adjustments. Unfortunately, due to impound procedures, we’ll have to start the race on this setup. Later on, we can make adjustments and make the car a little more comfortable for you. But if it’s speed you were concerned about, I don’t think you have much to worry about anymore. That was a fast lap!”

“Really? On my end, it was like riding a bull. I was just hanging on for dear life!”

“Oh yeah, really,” Dad said with a laugh. Tommie watched him through the windshield as he and Carol considered the stopwatch and the practice sheet from the last practice. It was all smiles in the number 28 pit at that moment, and Tommie thought with a new sense of earned confidence that she had got this. She did, after all, belong. They waited on pit lane for about fifteen minutes. Cars zoomed around on the track, making qualifying attempts of their own.

Once Dad saw a break in the action, he said, “All right, kid. You ready to give it another go?”

“10-4,” Tommie said to sound as official and professional as possible. Then, she backed out of her stall and waited at the end of pit road for an additional couple of minutes. Then it was time to make another run, and that she did. Her second run felt a little better than the first, probably because she knew more about what to expect from the car. That wasn’t to say that there weren’t wrenches thrown here and there. Amelia was behaving wildly on the dips and bumps of the racing surface, which seemed to age at an accelerated rate.

After two laps, she returned to pit road, allowing the car to cool before making a final attempt.

Dad changed the tires and put fresh ones on, and Tommie went out, making her final run. When the red and black flags were displayed on the tail end of that final run, Tommie brought the car back down the pit road and climbed out. Nervously, she walked over to her Dad and Carol, ignoring the scoring pylon, eager to find out how she ran from them. Dad sometimes sugarcoats things. Carol, though, was who Tommie expected to be a straight shooter because she was a racer herself. There’s no benefit in sugar coating. Not if she wanted to get better. It was best to tackle reality and her own shortcomings head first. “So, where’re we at?” she asked earnestly.

Dad and Carol exchanged a look she didn’t quite care for. “We’re close,” Dad said. “Super

That was when Tommie glanced up at the scoring pylon. She wasn’t in the top 10, not that she expected to be. She had no delusions. She watched the bottom of the pilon. Not 11th or 12th. Not 13th nor 14th. She wasn’t even 39th or 40th. Or 41st or 42nd. It wasn’t until 43rd came across the screen that she saw her number 28 flashing next to it. Damn.

The booming announcement that all drivers are to report to the media center came over the loudspeakers shortly after qualifying. Tommie hardly had a chance to look at the practice timesheet before the announcement was made. She looked at her dad questioningly.

“Driver’s meeting,” Carol said. “And you’ll probably draw numbers for the qualifying order.”

Tommie nodded. “Okay. I guess I’ll be back,” she said. In her mind, she would only be in there, what, an hour? That sounded right. She gave both her father and Carol a hug and headed straight for the media center located on the south end of the infield. The room was packed and overly warm with all the bodies in there. Tommie felt short of breath, and her nerves heightened. She wanted to leave. She wanted to leave bad.

The man who stood atop the stage at the podium was a fellowshe didn’t recognize. He cleared his throat, and the soft rumble of voices in the crowd tapered off. He introduced himself as Hyde Wheeler, the chief racerunner for the Groovy Hollow 300 this year. He made short business of thanking them, saying things like, “This event would never be possible if it wasn’t for each and every one of you and your interest in racing here today!” It was true, Tommie figured, but it was also true that this race would never be possible without the annual appearance of a certain phantom driver who drives a spooky Halloween-sponsored number 31 Chevrolet. It was a sad thought, sure, but Tommie guessed that if it wasn’t for Bucky Blackwell and all the mystery and legend surrounding his larger-than-life status in the sport, this event, as a grassroots race, would’ve dried up and died after that first year. To give them a little more credit, maybe they would have made it to a second year. Maybe. But Bucky was the draw. Tommie knew that, and little effort was made to conceal that basic fact. His name and the likeness of his car were plastered all over the Groovy Hollow website, along with a likely embellished story as his bio. His name and the Halloween Machine were both branded all over the tickets. And each and every year, it was “Can anyone take down the gruesome and ruthless Bucky Blackwell at the historic Groovy Hollow Raceway?” He was the show, and Tommie

got the sense that the rest of them were just field fillers.

“I’ll keep this brief because I know it’s hot in here. The AC’s out, and there are a lot of bodies. So, I promise to just go through the main points and get us all out of here. I know that we’d all rather be out on the track anyway, and qualifying is looming!” Mr. Hyde Wheeler ended his spiel of gratitude and got down to business. He went over the basic rules. In qualifying, drivers got two laps. The fastest lap would be the one that counted, and only the top 39 would make the race. Yada, yada. It was pretty straightforward.

When it came to the race, the length would be 300 laps around the historic 0.74-mile Groovy Hollow Raceway. No stages, not like NASCAR. It was a complete throwback in that sense. Drivers were allowed four fresh sets of sticker tires in their pits but had to start the race with the setup and set of tires they used during qualifying (as the cars will be impounded and inspected towards the race). If anything illegal is found in the car during inspection, that driver would be disqualified immediately, and the driver with the 40th fastest time would be bumped up and into the field. That made Tommie feel a little better, and she breathed a sigh of relief. What were the odds that all the cars that attempted a qualifying run were legal, anyhow? It was slim but not impossible, and Tommie cautioned herself not to put all her eggs in the basket of someone else’s screw-up.

When Mr. Hyde Wheeler was finished going over all the rules and regulations for the day, he dismissed them but urged them to stick around in the tent outside for the drawing. If a driver didn’t stick around to draw for a qualifying spot, they would lose their opportunity to do so and effectively be disqualified from the race. Tommie was the first one out of the building, and the fresh air was there to greet her as she spilled out. The air inside had grown so stale and hot. It was hot outside (the infield of any track always seems to be the warmest place on earth), but a slight welcoming breeze carried the air across her face and through her braided hair, drying up some of her sweat.

The drivers drew in numerical order. Tommie patiently waited until they finally got to number 28. She walked up to the large pine box, which contained folded index cards with numbers printed on them. She unfolded hers. The number 49 was printed in big, bolded numbers. She showed Mr. Hyde and then turned to show the rest of the drivers as if she were a game show valet. “The 48th qualifier, Miss Tommie Jo Swanson!” Mr. Hyde yelled into a microphone somewhat obnoxiously.

There was a small clatter of claps. Uncomfortably, Tommie Jo refolded the number and held it crumpled up in her hand. The 49th to qualify, she thought to herself. I’m good with that. In her mind, it was best to qualify later rather than earlier. At least if you’re one of the latter drivers to turn a lap, you know just about where you stand as soon as you get out of the car.

The most agonizing part of the qualifying session, once it started, was the long wait. 49th in line did little favors for Tommie’s anxiety. She somehow both dreaded and needed to be in the car all at once, as if her brain was split into the devils and angels clinging to each shoulder. Only one of the Junkyard Jacks from two years ago returned. It was Ernest, and he flashed Tommie a disgusted sneer as he climbed into his neon pink number 63 throwback and set out to qualify. He was the first of the bunch and stayed at the top of the board until being dethroned by Brandon Power, driving a number 44 Out of the Groove sponsored car.

Slowly, Tommie and her number 28 unsponsored Gray Ghost crawled up the grid. She thought that maybe if she were in the car and behind the wheel, she’d be able to better manage the complex feelings she was feeling in the several moments leading up to her eventual qualifying attempt, but she never could know for sure. Maybe all the butterflies and doubts haunting her mind were normal when it came to driving. She looked over at Carol and started to ask her but quickly shut her mouth and dropped the thought like a hot pan. It was ridiculous, after all, that any legend of Carol’s stature could ever feel nerves from behind the wheel. It was unfathomable to her.

As they waited, Tommie glanced over her shoulder at the car a number of times, feeling that something was amiss with it, that something wasn’t right. It was a bad sinking feeling that she couldn’t quite verbalize to describe and wasn’t so sure she wanted to. It’s the nerves, she warned herself. Just the nerves and the reassurance made her feel a little bit better, but she didn’t go far enough to put her at 100% ease. As strange as it might have seemed, she felt like someone was sitting in her car. From the blurred corners of her vision, yes, she could almost make out a darkened shape of a person sitting there in the driver seat, both hands on the wheel at nine and three. But the apparition was gone whenever she turned to face the car properly. Just nerves. Just the nerves, she told herself again, saying that she was being foolish, but it didn’t help this time because, on some level, she knew she wasn’t. She thought of the closet and saw the dead blue face of Jerry Slater staring out at her from within its darkened confines, and her heart started to beat faster.

Only three cars in front of her now. Then there were two. It was time to get in the car and strap in for the make-or-break two laps of her life. The car positioned two cars in front of her was Chad Duncan. His time was fast, yes, and he shot straight up to the top of the board, but to Tommie, his run seemed to all happen within the blink of an eye. She had hardly gotten her own gloves on when he was heading back down pit road, and the car in front of her was rolling off. Crap, It’s now, or never, she thought and fired the engine. In her number 15 Ford, Shelly Dawson qualified in front of Tommie, and her run also seemed to be over in remarkable time. There was no hiding now. All or nothing, Tommie told herself and started rolling out onto the track.

Tommie wasted little time getting up to speed. Careful not to spin her tires, she fumbled through the gears and was at top speed by the time she entered the third turn. She took the green flag, and the car plowed into the first corner. She ran through that jarring bump on the inside, and the car almost came out from under her. “Hang with me, Amelia,” Tommie said, gripping the steering wheel tighter. Throughout her run, she felt as if the car was everywhere all at once, as though it wouldn’t stick to one line. She ran a little higher in turns one and two in her second lap, which avoided some of those brutal bumps on the inside, but she was sure it brushed off some speed. As she crossed the line to take the checkered flag, she immediately reached forward and shut her engine off. She got the strangest sensation once again that she was not alone. With the HANS device, it was hard to crane her neck to look over at the passenger side of the car, but she looked over, straining her eyes, and could have sworn she saw that same darkened shape clinging to the rollbars for dear life. That was ridiculous, she assured herself, and did her best to block out such outrageous nonsense.

By the time her run was done, she was eager to get back to the pits. She felt overly hot, and her throat tightened. She thought she might get sick, and the last thing in the world she wanted to do was spew right there in the heated dome that was Amelia. She followed the directions of the official motioning her toward the garage area. She called her dad on the radio. “How was that?” she asked, and she waited a moment for a response. None ever came. “Dad? Carol?” Nothing but bitter silence. That couldn’t be good! Her mind went to two separate places at that moment: either something was wrong with the radio (which was bad but not disastrous as it was the best-case scenario), or there was news, and it was bad. She felt already, without even knowing the results, that she had failed. She parked Amelia and eagerly got out of the car. As she slipped through the window and

down to the track, she felt an odd sense of loss, as if the car and herself, for a single moment in time, had become one and were acting in tandem with one another, as if she was as worthless without the car as the car was without its driver. She walked over to Dad and Carol, who stared down at a datasheet, their faces perplexed. “What’s the matter?” she asked, but of course, she knew what the matter was she was slow, so slow, in fact, that she wasn’t even in the top 39 after that run. Instantly, she was already out, never even getting the thrill (and horror) of being put on the bubble; she was out of the show from the start. She just knew it.

Dad kept his attention on the data page, ignoring her. It was unlike him to do such a thing. Unless something was very, very wrong. Carolbroke away fromthe data sheet and looked at Tommie. Her frown turned upside down into the widest grin Tommie had ever seen. “I think you’re going to make it, dear!” she said.

At first, Carol’s reassurance didn’t quite register. Make what? She asked herself stupidly. The answer was so obvious that if it were a snake, it would have reached out and bit her, and no protests would have come from her end. It took an embarrassingly long time for her wires to connect where she could realize what Carol was essentially saying: her lap time was good. Darn good.

Tommie pushed past Carol and reached for the datasheet. “Almost an entire second better!” Dad said proudly, but Tommie wanted to see it for herself. During practice, her lap time around the track stalled at 24:88. She had improved in her qualifying run to 23:92. Though the difference between the two numbers was small, in racing, it would prove to make up all the time in the world. She glanced up at the scoring pylon. She wasn’t in the top 10 or even the top 15, but she was just outside that threshold. With 20 cars left to qualify, Tommie Jo sat 19th on the board. Good enough to make the race, she thought. She waited for the remainder of that qualifying session, breathing more easily.

The race was set to kick off at 7:30 Eastern. Drivers were to report to the main stage positioned at the start/finish line by 6:15. The time between the conclusion of qualifying and the prefatory matters before driver introductions for Tommie was spent outside, tailgating with Dad, Mom, and Carol. It felt good to let loose some, but Tommie didn’t want to let the reigns out of her hand too far. There was still a race to go, after all, and not only did she want to run okay, she wanted to be a serious threat for the win, as improbable as that seemed.

When qualifying was all said and done, Tommie was sitting 32nd on the board. With two disqualifications ahead of her, she would be rolling off tonight in row 15 in the 30th position. That’s ten positions ahead of Bucky Blackwell, she thought in the back of her mind. I wonder how long it’ll take to see that Halloween Machine in my rear-view mirror. But mostly, in the moment, she did her best to put that out of her mind. She was intimidated, in truth, but thought it best not to show it. To her, Blackwell needed to be just another racer, another obstacle to overcome, myths, legends, and superstitions be darned!

She didn’t want to eat too heavily of a dinner, so she opted to have a single hot dog with mustard and a small bag of Crowned King Barbecue potato chips. To drink, she had only water compared to Carol’s iced tea and her father’s typical glass bottle of Mountain Dew. When they were almost done eating, Mom asked, “So, honey, are you excited for the race tonight?”

She was, but she was also extremely nervous. For a moment that didn’t last long enough, in her opinion, she had almost forgotten that a race was even taking place that night. Her Mom, reminding her of it, though, cast a dark cloud over those good-time feelings, darkening her weary head. Her nerves reminded her that they were very much so unsettled, and they threatened to get the best of her yet again. Rather than giving into them, though (she had come too far to throw it all away and run now), she forced them down deep within her as far as they would go she locked them away so that they no longer screamed but were rather little more than whispers in the static of her consciousness. It was time to get her game face on. When the clock struck 6:10, she hugged her

Mom, who wished her luck and ushered Carol and Dad inside. Not long after that, driver introductions started.

They skipped over Blackwell’s entry, opting to announce him last, as usual. Starting at 39, Tommie counted down along with the announcer, who sounded an awful lot like Steve Phelps himself (no, it couldn’t be could it?) until he got down to the 31st starter. Tommie readied herself. Then the announcer said, “Starting in the 30th position, please welcome the driver of the number 28 Gray Ghost Chevrolet, Commonwealth’s own TOMMIE

”

JO SWANSON!!!

Tommie stepped through the curtain and onto the stage. She was surprised slightly by the clusters of flashing lights. She waived to the crowd, and they went crazy. But they didn’t know her from Eve, did they? Was this the hometown effect? Tommie didn’t like to think so but thought it was. Maybe she dreamed that it was, to be the most precise. She walked across the stage and down the steps onto the track. She didn’t ride in the back of a pickup. They didn’t have all those bells and whistles at Groovy Hollow. All that she had to do was get her head firmly in the game and head straight to her car, and that was exactly what she did.

They announced Chad Duncan as the pole winner, and there was a modest amount of applause for him. Then the crowd and everyone in the industry down on pit road went bone-chillingly silent. All that could be heard from down in the infield was the buzzing of stadium lights, which circled around Groovy Hollow like a makeshift halo.

They all waited in suspense. Off in the distance, they could hear the kickback of an engine exploding to life. It revved, showing off its fiery muscles. Then it started to approach. The deep growl grew louder as the car rolled nearer. Tommie craned her neck to look at the backstretch and get any sort of peek of the Halloween Machine, but there were too many trailers blocking her view. She could hear it, though, when it turned onto the trackand spilled into the turn. The sound of the enginebecame more concentrated then. Fromthe overhead speakers, the announcer, who the constant rumble could barely hear of the No. 31’s engine, said, “And now, the star of our show! Starting in the 40th position, driving the number 31 Halloween Machine Chevrolet, Bucky Blackwell!” She saw the car then. He rolled to a stop a row behind her, its brakes squalling as it came to a rest.

Even through the opening ceremonies, for which Tommie merely went through the motions, she couldn’t take her eyes away from the Halloween Machine. Seeing it this far up close, she realized

that it wasn’t just that the car's windshield was tinted. It may have very well been crystal clear, but beyond it was a thick black cloud of smoke. At first, she thought that something might have been wrong with the car, like there was an exhaust leak or something. But the air around the car remained clear and clean of toxic debris. Tommie leaned forward to get a better look at the open passenger side window for a sign, any sign at all, that the smoke was leaking out of the car. But the thick, black mist remained contained as if trapped in a bubble. It was more than that, though; as she stared longer at the mass, it looked less like smoke and more like a cloud. It was turning, rotating, all ways at once.

Like a heartbeat, heat lightning flashed amid the black, and she thought, for a single second, that she saw something moving within the thick, suffocating atmosphere a pair of squirming and writhing tendrils that were restless. Through squinted eyes, Tommie tried to make out the shape of Bucky sitting behind the steering wheel but couldn’t. All she could see was charred black hands with bone showing through the peeling skin gripping the steering wheel, ready to go.

Fireworks in the mountains punctuated the National Anthem. It was now or never time to go racing. Tommie hugged her Dad and Carol, never once taking an eye away from Bucky’s car, before slipping into Amelia and pulling her belts tight. She put her helmet on, and Dad tested the radio. She told him it sounded all good on her end as Carol fastened the window net and offered her a good luck fist bump. Then came the time the fans and drivers had all been waiting for. Tommie didn’t know who was giving the command this year, and she didn’t ask.

Inside the car, they couldn’t hear it anyway. After the command was given, Dad said, “Fire ‘er up!” Tommie hit the ignition button. Amelia growled eagerly to life.

They spent a few minutes letting her engine purr, resting on pit road. Tommie and Dad took advantage of that time to check all switches, dot all the i’s, and cross all the t’s. When they started rolling onto the track, Dad reminded her to be mindful of her brakes. It was a long race by late model stock standards, and he didn’t want them to overheat. Tommie said, “10-4,” and he reminded her that the jarring qualifying setup was still in the car. He said that the first handful of laps until the competition caution on lap 25 was going to be a handful. He told her to just develop a pace in those opening laps and to play it conservatively. She repeated, “10-4.”

After a fewlaps out on the track, the pace car brought the field down pit road. Tommie’s pit was in stall number 15, and as she passed it, she put a hand out the window and saluted her team. Many

of Dad's hires were from Jerry Slater’s old team. They were a little weird, quiet, so to speak, but a relatively nice group of guys, by Tommie’s estimation, despite their zombified demeanor.

They lined up to take the green flag. As the lights went out in the pace car out front, Tommie glanced into her rearview mirror. The Halloween machine was lurking ominously behind her. She still couldn’t see through the windshield. She didn’t like that, and a lump arose in her throat. But there was no time for panic now.

They slowly came around the third turn, and the pace car dipped down on pit road. The fans in the stands stood, and it looked like a series of waves rising in upset, stormy water. The flagman put a hand up, a gesture that seemed to say easy, easy, before he waived the green flag.

The engines of the collective field raged to life. Tommie stomped down on the gas. She felt the tires spinning but not gaining traction. Bucky Blackwell’s Halloween machine slammed into the back of her. She chased her out-of-control car up the track, and Bucky slipped down on the inside. For a moment, Tommie was sure she was heading straight for the wall without having even completed a single lap. But strangely, something caught the car. It all happened so fast. It usually does in racing. For a split second, it felt as if everything was getting away from her even what was right in front of her face was blurred and rushed. But at that moment, when everything seemed doomed, she saw three hands on the wheel. Her own two were sitting at 11 and 5, trying to wrestle with Amelia to keep her out of the wall. The other one wasn’t hers at all. It was a big baseball mitt of a hand with its long, bony fingers gripping the wheel at 12 Noon and giving a slight tug to the left. The car fell back on track then and the hand disappeared once the rest of her senses caught up with her. She looked over to her right but could see nothing. But she felt that she was not alone in the car. And whatever phantom was riding with her just saved her race.

Tommie got into some sort of a groove in the first 25 laps leading up to the competition caution. The

car was far from comfortable—every bump seemed jarring and upsetting, every corner felt as if her rear end was about to come out from under her and she was going to wipe out into the wall but she clamped it down in the corners, forcing it beneath her until she saw the sweet graces of a caution flag flying from the flag stand.

“How’s it holding up in there, kiddo?” Dad asked as he came over the radio.

Tommie’s initial response was to tell her father that she needed to get out of the car and that she wasn’t alone. She strained her eyes, trying to glimpse the passenger end of the roll cage, and she could see…something there. But what, she couldn’t make out. It was like making sense only of a bolded outline of a figure without being able to fill in what existed in the middle, if anything did exist in the middle at all. She shoved those concerns deep inside her. Even though she felt as though she wasn’t alone, she felt no menace or malice from the spirit riding the shotgun in her car, so she let it go. The presence was responsible for saving her from wrecking, after all. She came over the radio and told her dad, “Terribly. It’s awful to drive. I need adjustments. I need to be a little snugger in the corners.”

“10-4. Bring ‘er down next time around. We’ll change tires and try setting it up closer to that first practice.”

Tommie thought a moment. In her rearview, she saw only one car. “Dad, am I 38th?” “104. But don’t you worry! We’ll fix you up!”

There was another nagging thought on her mind that she just had to ask. “How far away was the leader from putting us a lap down?”

There was a silence for a moment as Dad seemingly thought the question over. “I don’t know. Maybe a straightaway. But don’t you ”

Carol interrupted, “Don’t worry about that, Tommie! Drive out of your windshield, not your rearview mirror. Driving out of the rearview will only encourage mistakes.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Dad said.

Tommie said, “10-4,” and when she got the chance, she brought her number 28 Gray Ghost down the agonizingly long pit road to Stall Number 15. She was careful when pulling in, and the

crew started servicing the car. For a group of alleged zombies, they were quick to act. They changed all four tires, gassed it up, and made the appropriate adjustments. She was the last car to come off of pit road, but that was okay. She had a little more confidence now, assuming that Dad really did fix the car and put it back to how they had it near the end of the opening practice.

The field was on a split strategy. Most cars, even most of the leaders, came down pit road for some fresh Hoosier rubber. But there were a handful of cars (Tommie didn’t know the exact number and didn’t ask she was last off pit road, anyway), but she figured there were around 12 or 13 cars who stayed out if she were to give an educated guess. They rode around a couple of laps before Dad came on the radio and said, “This one’s the choose. Choose the inside unless I tell you otherwise.”

Tommie readied herself to swerve down to the inside of the track when Dad came back on the radio and said, “Abort! Abort! Go outside!” Without arguing, Tommie did what Dad suggested and swerved right to the outside of the orange painted-on cone just past the start/finish line. It leapfrogged her up a row back into 38th, her original starting position.

With a momentary rest that didn’t seem anywhere near long enough to Tommie, the field lined up yet again for the restart. The flagman displayed the green flag, and they were off yet again. Tommie, careful not to spin her tires this time, accelerated easily and shifted cautiously through the gears. This backed up her line behind her, but once she got up to race speed, she noticed a striking difference in how the car handled. The bumps seemed smoother, and she felt as if she were going faster than before, though she knew that she was probably in a similar ballpark if not turning at the exact same speeds.

There was a long green flag run during which Tommie improved from her 38th restart position up to 24th, but it came slowly and not easily. She didn’t know for sure if she was really the one passing cars or if the handling of the other cars was just slipping while hers remained steadily the same. They ran so long that the drivers who stayed out had to pit and ended up going a lap down. The caution flag flew yet again, and Tommie could see the wreck in the rearview. Chad Duncan tangled with another car. The flagman displayed the yellow once again, and Tommie let off the gas, slowing. She came over the radio to her Dad and asked, “Was that the leader who crashed behind me?” He was about half a straightaway back.

Dad said, “Yep. Duncan. Hate to see that.” “How

many cars are on the lead lap, Dad?”

Dad was silent a moment as he counted through the field. He said, “Well, we’re in 15th So, judging by the ones behind you, I’d say 18, give or take?”

“15th?” For a moment, Tommie forgot about the school of cars that fed down into pit road halfway through the run.

“Yeah. Some strategy, along with the fact that you were passing cars left and right, was able to get us there. Great job, baby girl!”

“How many laps have we run?”

Dad was silent again. Tommie could practically see him calculating. She smiled. “I think we’re on lap 141. Ten from halfway, I think. Yes, confirmed. Ten from being halfway.”

“Are we pitting this time?” Tommie asked.

“Affirmative. Bring it down. Careful not to speed. I’d really like us to restart with the top 10 firmly in our view!”

“10-4,” Tommie said. She wanted that, too. She felt as if she were in a dream.

The strategy of the cars who stayed out last time around wasn’t working out, with many of them being trapped either one lap or several laps down. Therefore, when the field funneled down pit road this time, nearly the whole field came down. Tommie minded her speed and counted down along with Dad to the 15th pit stall. The gray-blue zombie men dashed over the wall, and they moved quickly. Almost fast enough to where they looked like little blue blurs surrounding her car. They were done servicing her in seconds. While they worked, Tommie became aware again of the presence to her right, who sat just out of her sight. But the thought was ejected from her mind when the jack let down, and she raced back out in line and off pit road.

Dad did his calculating silently. Then he came over the radio and said, “Looks like we’re going to be restarting in 12th! Way to go, guys!”

“All right! Great job!” Tommie said and lined back up. When it came time to choose her lane for this restart, she went up to the outside, which advanced her a couple of rows. She would restart the race fourth in line on the outside and in the eighth position overall. They ran several more laps under caution, so many that she radioed over to her Dad and asked him what the holdup was.

“Debris,” he said simply enough.

“Phantom debris, I don’t see anything!” Carol chimed in.

Phantom. Tommie mulled the word over, thinking of Bucky Blackwell and the Halloween Machine. Tommie almost asked where the infamous number 31 was but didn’t. She was high enough in the lineup now that she could see him. With Duncan’s issues and possibly a brilliant pitstop, he was starting on the point on the inside of the front row. Then, without thinking, she said, “I’m coming for you.”

“What?” Dad asked.

“Nothing,” Tommie said, feeling the burn of embarrassment in her face. Still, she didn’t take an eye off Blackwell’s car upfront. As they came to take 150 laps to go, the flagman readied himself. Then, the green flag was flying. Tommie carefully shifted and accelerated into the first turn, which cost her a little bit of time at the line, but had made most of it up by the time she reached the third turn.

At this point in the race, the bottom was still the preferred line, but the top was being rubbered. Tommie guessed that in time, it’d be pretty sporty, too. Heck, it was already able to hang with the inside line everywhere except for the front row. Tommie could see Blackwell’s car grow smaller and smaller in the windshield. It wouldn’t be long before he vanished in the first turn while she was still trying to get up and off turn 4. After a while, they all settled into running the inside for the time being.

Tommie filed into 9th and started clicking off laps in a comfortable rhythm.

Judging by the tire wear of the first couple of runs, they’d have to make at least one more final pit stop. Dad was calculating when they ought to take the leap. He said they could split the run perfectly and pit with 75 laps to go but wasn’t entirely sure how the tires would be holding up towards the end of the race. Tommie suggested that pitting later would give her fresher rubber for the end of the race and make her more competitive. Dad argued that that was true but didn’t want to wait too long as it would put them way behind the drivers who pitted earlier. They decided mutually that they would pit with around 50 laps to go, maybe even staying out as long as 40 laps left, though that felt like pushing it a tad.

However, all that strategy got thrown out the window when a caution flag flew with 60 to go.

Like the first incident, Tommie saw this one in her rearview as well. Except rather than being a straightaway behind her, it was right behind. As they turned green flag laps, Tommie began to pay more attention to her rearview. If Bucky Blackwell was coming along to put her a lap down, she wanted to see him coming so that she could prepare to be the toughest car he’d ever have to pass. He never made it to her, though. A driver named Jeremy Taylor was running 10th. By the looks of it, Blackwell got to his back bumper and just booted him out of the way.

Taylor, who was driving a bright green and yellow number 34, threw it back to Days of Thunder and went around and made hard contact with the outside wall. It destroyed the back of his Toyota, crushing it up like a tin can.

The flagman instantly displayed the caution flag, and the field slowed. As The Halloween Machine shrank in the rearview, Tommie breathed a sigh of relief. All the cards were on the table now. It was time to go all in.

During pit stops, Tommie and her father elected only to change the right-side tires, leaving scuffs on Amelia’s left. They packed the Gray Ghost full of fuel, and the race off pit road was on. In her mind, Tommie counted the cars in front of her. But as some swerved into their stalls while others left theirs, the numbers got all jumbled in her head. Mindful not to speed, she cruised down the length of the pit road to the yellow line at the end. From there, she let the cards lay where they may.

Dad came over the radio and said, “Looks like we’re P-4! Way to go, crew!”

Tommie cheered and repeated her father's words, fists pumping in the air. They lined up and waited for the lapped cars to come down and get service of their own. The Halloween Machine felt close enough to touch. It sat there, rocking back and forth across the track, within reach.

When it came time to choose, Tommie saw that the top was open. She had an opportunity to start on the outside next to Blackwell, but she wasn’t about to pass up that opportunity. Not for one second. She swerved to the right side of the painted-on orange cone and confidently took the position of the front row outside as if making a statement. Or maybe a declaration. She was done being intimidated by Blackwell and his strangely indestructible racecar, and if only at that moment she truly believed she was. She craned her neck to see the smug look on Blackwell’s face, but the window net was in the way, obstructing her view.

Tensions seemed to wind inside her like a chain tightening around her throat as the field headed down the backstretch and into the third turn. The tightening only worsened as they entered and came out of the fourth corner. The flagman held the green flag all rolled up in his hand, and when the leaders entered the restart box, he let it fly.

Tommie didn’t waste time getting up through the gears and making sure the tires didn’t spin this time. She gunned, praying she could stay with Blackwell at least through the first two turns. And that was exactly what she did. Amelia fired on all cylinders. Her engine boomed and growled to life as her tires quickly found their traction. The Gray Ghost and the Halloween Machine remained, fighting side-by-side all down the backstretch and in and out of turns three and four. Tommie thought that maybe, just maybe, she led that lap but couldn’t be entirely too sure. Dad neither confirmed nor denied her suspicion. He just let her and Amelia do their thing.

Tommie and the Gray Ghost raced alongside the Halloween Machine for a handful of laps, not really gaining an advantage (other than the occasional nose) over the other. When they took 39 to go, she felt Blackwell drift up the track. She didn’t see it, only felt it, but her instinct proved correct when he doored her coming onto the backstretch. She got up into the outside concrete wall and just barely kissed it. The impact brushed off some speed but not enough to hinder her outside charge. He did the same in the third and fourth corners, although this time more aggressively and egregiously. The Halloween Machine slammed hard into her left door this time, and they both washed up the track.

Tommie braced for impact and knew this hit would be significantly harder and potentially race-ending. Then she felt a hand over her own.

Through the world that seemed to be spinning out of control, she saw a nearly transparent blue hand cap her own. She tried to look to her right, but the HANS device prevented her from seeing who was there. But she knew. When she looked into that blue skin, she knew. Slater.

With his help, she steered the car back into the groove, and his literal helping hand disappeared as easily and subtly as it came to assistance. She lost some ground on Blackwell but he wasn’t in the best of positions himself. When he washed up the track, it opened the door for David Smith’s Dogleg Media car to slip in on the inside. Tommie fell comfortably into third place, her car firmly under her yet again, and watched the battle.

At first, it seemed as though Smith might have had something for the infamous Halloween

Machine. Internally,Tommie cheered himon.Even if she couldn’t win, shehad had a great and steady race up to that point. Any outcome going forward would be acceptable so long as Blackwell was defeated when the checkered flag flew. David edged ahead of Blackwell, nearly clearing him as they headed into the first turn. But Blackwell wasn’t going to take that lying down. Tommie watched as the Halloween Machine cut down the track ever so slightly, right-hooking Smith into the outside concrete wall. The caution flew instantly, and the head-on impact of Smith’s number 25 Chevy echoed throughout the surrounding woods. Tommie was sure. No! She screamed inside but started backing off the throttle.

“Holy crap! Back it down, Tommie! Back it down!” Dad said as he came over the radio. “I can’t believe he did that!”

“I can,” Carol said. “He’s a scoundrel! Don’t take that crap from him, Tommie. If he’s going to dish out racing like that, he’s going to have to learn to deal when he gets it right back!”

Tommie barely heard what either of them said, and her concerns and attention shifted to David Smith. She hoped he was all right, and she breathed a huge sigh of relief on the third caution lap after the incident when she saw him climb out from the steaming hunk of metal that used to be his racecar. He was walking with a slight limp but appeared otherwise unharmed.

Thank God, Tommie thought and filed in behind Blackwell in second.

It took a long time to clean off the track and make sure the wall wasn’t damaged. As she rode there behind Bucky Blackwell, she stared in through his rear windshield, trying to get any glimpse of the man behind the myth and legend of the Halloween Machine. But inside, the car was far too foggy. Unless it was just her imagination, the air in there seemed to shimmer, almost like murky water upset by a constant tide. In the graininess, she made out certain figures swimming by. Near the driver’s seat, for a split second, she feared that she sawa glowing red slit eye, but it faded back into the depths even more quickly than it came. She pulled Amelia closer to the bumper of the Halloween Machine and waited like a predator ready to pounce.

When it came time to make the choice, Tommie thought that it was a no-brainer to go outside again. But this time, she had to get him. In the first corner, she either had to force him into a mistake himself or take him out. It really was that simple. The final lap before the green flag was once again

displayed felt like an eternity. Dad came over the radio and said, “This is it, Tommie. There’ll be 10 to go when we take the green. Be careful not to spin your tires. Good luck, honey. You’ve made your Daddy proud.”

With a tear, she thanked her father and hoped that Carol would say a word or two.

Carol did chime in. “You got this, kid. Bring it home, honey, and we’ll see you down in victory lane!”

“10-4,” was all she could think to say. She bit down on her emotions, suppressing them deep within her. Her heartbeat started to ramp up again, and she grasped the steering wheel. Pull them belts tight one more time, she heard the echo of Darrell Waltrip’s saying ringing in her mind. They came out of the fourth turn and entered the restart box. Blackwell got a good jump. Tommie pressed the throttle down, and the car lurched, but then it lulled behind. She could feel the wheels spinning under her, unable to catch traction immediately. “Crap!” she said, and Ameilia started going after only a second of a delayed response. But that single second felt like the end of everything. Before her very eyes, as she saw Bucky Blackwell and the Halloween Machine clear her, she thought she saw everything fading away.

“Get down, bottom of the track.” His voice was unmistakable. Jerry Slater’s hands reappeared over hers, and together, they tugged the wheel, filling in the gap between Blackwell and third place. “Throw it down in the corner, as low as it’ll go. Even on the apron, if you have to!” Slater told her. And they did. Together, they yanked the wheel to the left, and the Grey Ghost ran down onto the apron. As they entered turn 1, she was under Blackwell. She glanced at his window net, and through the diamond gaps, she thought she saw a perplexed skinless skull staring dumbfounded at her with fire in his eyes.

Amelia didn’t stick down low. She drifted up the track but caught herself on the door of the Halloween Machine. A tire on the number 31 car exploded like a gunshot. Before Tommie could fully understand what had happened, The Halloween Machine was no longer beside her; it was the star apprentice in her rearview. In the mirror, as Tommie assumed the lead and Jerry faded away from her, she saw Bucky Blackwell back his infamous car into the outside concrete wall, just where he had sent David Smith laps earlier. Impossibly, a bolt of lightning from the heavens cracked open a fractured black sky. It hit Blackwell’s car with such force that it seemed to jar the Earth. The next thing

Tommie knew was a brilliant white light washing over her. It was like going into a secluded tunnel made entirely of dead lights, and when she arrived on the other side, everything was dark and quiet.

Like the wink of her eye, one minute she was racing and taking the lead, the flag man was preparing to display the yellow flag, and Bucky Blackwell was crashed into the outside wall in turns 1 and 2. The next moment, she was sitting in a field with someone. Darkness engulfed her, and trees surrounded her. In the rearview now, she could make out the vague blackness of other cars parked in the woods. Dad and Carol rushed over to her and took her window net down. It was startling to be honest, but Tommie was glad to see them. “What the heck just happened? “ Dad asked.

“I don’t know,” Carol said. “But Groovy Hollow Raceway, it’s gone,” she said.

Tommie took off her helmet and unfastened her belts. She climbed out of Amelia and sat perched on her window. She looked around. Carol was right Groovy Hollow Raceway had vanished for the second time in her troubled history. And with, like the last time, she took Bucky Blackwell and his Halloween Machine with her.

Nobody covered the fourth annual Groovy Hollow 300 after the fact. When Bucky Blackwell, his demonic racecar, and the track winked back into the void from which they came, the live stream of the event ended abruptly in a snow blizzard of TV static. No websites reported on the winner, and no papers covered it save for The Nowhere Chronicles, which could be found on the same wire racks as all the other tabloids sold in Dollar General stores and gas stations. In them, though, no winner was ever referenced. Moreover, the stories were just about the track, its strange history, and the peculiar misfit racecar driver named Bucky Blackwell and his lean, mean Halloween Machine.

On Racing Reference, the driver credited with the win was none other than Tommie Jo Swanson, who never received a trophy or a payout. She didn’t even consider herself the winner. Not really. Because, in the end, Blackwell escaped, and the race, unfinished, would always be deemed unofficial.

THE BALLAD OF TOMMIE JO SWANSON: A Legend of Groovy Hollow

By Cody Williams

Begin on February 4, 2024

Completed on August 30, 2024

About the Author

Cody Williams is the author of the novels Bunny Boy and The Ballad of Tommie Jo Swanson, the novella

The Fifth Line, and numerous short stories. He is also a staff writer for The Daily Downforce, a publication of A. E. Engine, and his writings have appeared in the NASCAR Pole Position magazine. When he isn’t writing, he is working his day job at a small high school in northeast Tennessee and playing trombone in the Johnson City Community Concert Band. He lives near Bristol, Tennessee.

Follow Mr. Williams online at:

www.codywilliams.weebly.com

www.twitter.com/CodyWill www.instagram.com/codywilliamsauthor www.dailydownforce.com/author/cody-williams