Upside Down Club,” Josh Crummer

Upside Down Club

Josh Crummer

We live beneath two and a half miles of concrete skyway; gentle morning traffic whispers over every sunrise like a nature host, though in truth we deified machines and gasoline long before the Interstate arched above our rivers like a varicose vein.

Only those whose fathers tilled virgin Chippewa marshland remember the raceway on Westervelt and Kochville, a thousand arriving on opening day: Davenport, Roberts, Chasnis, Johncock, and Fairchild, local celebrities lifting a young city’s eyes from bone-dry bleachers to a sloping brown oval. If a car flipped along the high banks, its driver joined the Upside Down Club: impotent steel turtles flinging clay from their rubber feet while children laughed and laughed.

Stars watch from the nosebleeds as weathered men weave on-my-way-home alibis their wives pretend to believe, park their rusted pickups at an angle at the local well, buy another Blatz and talk tales somewhere between a sincere testimony and a fisherman’s tale—

I went every Wednesday night for thirty-five cens. I was always amazed at the race car

that sat on top of the cement arch at the entrance; could never figure out how it got up there—

while the overgrown raceway rests outside, keeps itself amused with a blue jay’s nest, a coyote’s trudge, and, on the high banks, an upturned turtle.