Scarlet Thunder Page 2

  “No, definitely not,” Uncle Mike yelled. “Why would I have asked you to ship the stuff to Long Pond when I knew I was coming to Loudon? Long Pond is later in the schedule.”

  He listened quietly, frowning with frustration.

  “Look,” Uncle Mike said. “I know they sound similar. Maybe you misheard me when I asked you to fill out the shipping forms. It doesn’t matter whose fault it is. I need that equipment yesterday. Find the truck, stop it and get the stuff on an airplane.”

  A long pause. I guessed his secretary was calling the shipping company on another line.

  “Tomorrow?” he yelled. “Tomorrow? You’ve got to get the stuff here today! I don’t care what it costs us. If it’s not here today, we’re in trouble.”

  He snapped the cell phone shut.

  “Not good, Trent,” he said to me. He pointed at the racetrack behind us. “Somehow our gear is headed toward the wrong city. I mean, if it was already there, it wouldn’t be so bad. We could have it reshipped. The stuff could be here by this afternoon, and we’d only lose half a day.”

  At ten thousand dollars a day for crew and expenses, half a day was bad enough.

  “Where is it?”I asked.

  “Somewhere between California and Pennsylvania,” he said. “On a truck. Somehow it got shipped by ground instead of overnight by air. And to the wrong place. I don’t get it. My secretary doesn’t usually make mistakes like this.”

  He shook his head. “As if I need this to worry about. On top of everything else.”

  Everything else included the mice in the cooler. No one could figure out how they’d gotten there. That little episode had delayed the commercial three days. And Hunter Gunn had demanded extra salary to continue. That, with the cost of delays, had come out of Uncle Mike’s budget. He’d told me that his production company had actually lost money on the deal. The commercial was supposed to have made him fifty thousand dollars.

  “If we only miss a day,” I said, “it can’t be that bad. At least not compared to—”

  “Don’t remind me about Junior Louis,” he said. “And yes, it is bad. The mess with Junior Louis made us miss last week’s race. So every day we miss now is crucial. Extremely crucial. I absolutely have to deliver this documentary on time.

  “I haven’t told any of the crew about the urgency to make this deadline. I didn’t think it was something to worry about,” he continued. “I mean, when I signed the deal, I figured there was no way to miss.”

  “Miss?”

  “You know my company is simply a production company. I’m doing this under contract to Lone Coyote Studios, who in turn will make money by selling the documentary to the sports network.”

  I knew all that. My big ambition was to be a director. I wanted that more than anything else in the world. I wanted it so bad that I thought about nothing else. So whatever I read or listened to or watched was all related to the film industry.

  Uncle Mike continued. “My contract with Lone Coyote Studios promises delivery of the finished one-hour documentary by August fifteenth. Because the airtime is worth a lot of advertising dollars to the racing team’s sponsor, if we deliver on time my company will get a huge bonus: one million dollars.”

  “The bonus is great,” I said. “But the deadline...”

  I’d been hanging out with Uncle Mike’s small film company for five summers. Long enough to know something about the business. After we finished filming, we would need several weeks in post-production to get the piece ready. In other words, we were cutting it close already.

  “Exactly,” he said. “It’s already July, and we’re running out of time. And there’s a reverse bonus built into the contract. My company gets fined two hundred thousand dollars for every day the project’s late.”

  I whistled as I did my math. “On time is worth a million. Five days late costs a million.”

  “Scary,” he agreed. “I agreed to the terms, because I need the bonus to get the next project I have in mind going. It’s one that could make my career as a director. I just never dreamed we would be late, so I figured it would be worth the risk. But with all the problems we’ve been having...”

  Yeah, I thought. This was the first summer I had seen such big things go wrong. The mice in the cooler had caused delays and huge unexpected costs. And now, with the gear lost somewhere on a highway between us and California, this project wasn’t looking good.

  My face must have shown my worry.

  “There is one piece of good news,” Uncle Mike said, trying to cheer me up. “At least for you.”

  “Me?” I asked.

  “Yup. You. I want you on a camera this shoot.”

  “What?!?” I nearly yelled in my excitement.

  “Think of it as a promotion for all the summers you’ve spent as my gopher—and as thanks for the hours of research you’ve done to help me understand racing. I want you to use a handheld, shooting whatever you think might look good. I’m not making any promises about how much of your footage we’ll use, but consider yourself your own director. You get to choose what to shoot and what angles to shoot from. Play it like a music video. I’ll take care of the main cameras, but I want you to look for the little touches that can add depth to the documentary.”

  “Cool,” I said. “Really cool.”

  At that moment, I stupidly believed this was going to be my best summer yet.

  chapter five

  You can watch high-speed stock-car racing all you want on television, but you’ll never really know what it’s like unless you’ve been there. Don’t get me wrong, I find it exciting enough to watch on television. But it doesn’t come close to the electricity of being there in person.

  It was early on qualifying day, so the stands were only three-quarters full. Still, that was about a hundred thousand people. Yeah. A hundred thousand. Which is just a big number until you look up from the pits. Then you see a wall of brightly colored shirts about a half mile long and dozens and dozens of rows high. The roar of the crowd, a high-powered hum of energy, somehow rises above the pounding thunder of the full-throttled cars that sometimes reach two hundred miles an hour.

  You never really understand what two hundred miles an hour is either, not from television. The camera follows the car, and you see the car get bigger and smaller as it comes and goes. But when you’re standing there beside the track, you have to snap your head from side to side to follow a car as it flashes by. Two hundred miles an hour is a blur of screaming color. At that speed, the car goes a mile in under twenty seconds. Some airplanes don’t go that fast.

  But being at the track is about more than what you see. Or hear. There’s also the vibration from those huge howling engines...the rumbling of the ground... the smell of high-octane gasoline...and the excitement of the crew in the pit area, something edgy that spills over and gives you the same fear and thrill.

  I knew, because that’s where I stood. Right in the middle of the pit crew.

  Their attention was on a bright red Chevy covered with logos and decals. It had come off the track after a practice run. It stopped in front of us. And the driver got out of the car.

  With so many people gathered near the car, no one really seemed to notice Uncle Mike or me. So we just watched.

  The pit crew wore red coveralls with a big, white, oval patch on the back. Inside the white oval I recognized the logo of a famous chewing gum. I knew from the research that I had done for Uncle Mike that the gum company was the major sponsor of the Scarlet Thunder racing team.

  A tall guy with a lean face and a crew cut seemed to be in charge. I knew his name because of the photographs I’d seen of the team. He was the crew chief: George Lot.

  He spoke to the driver.

  “How’s the car feel, Sandy?”

  “It’s too light through the turns,” the driver said through the open visor of the crash helmet.

  If I hadn’t known ahead of time why we were here to film, I would have been surprised by the driver’s high soft voice. And I wou
ld have been even more surprised at the long blond hair that tumbled free when the driver removed the crash helmet.

  Sandy Peterson.

  She was one of the sport’s hottest rookies. Some people thought she was great for racing. Others didn’t like her. She had quite a reputation. She was never afraid to speak her mind, and she wouldn’t back down when fighting for what was right. She was a great subject for a television special.

  Because I had trained myself to see things as if they were filmed and already edited, I wished we had our cameras. I wanted to catch Sandy as she stood among the pit crew. There was a smear of dirt on her forehead, making her light blue eyes seem even bluer. Sweaty strands of hair stuck to her face. She ran her fingers through her hair as she continued to speak.

  “In fact,” she said to George, “there’s a wobble there that I don’t like. I’m pretty sure it’s the rear spoiler. I think I’d like the angle set a little higher.”

  During the past five summers with Uncle Mike, I had heard him say again and again that a good director should know as much as possible about a subject before coming to a set. Because of that, I had spent hours and hours and hours reading all I could about stock-car racing. And because of that, I knew the basics about the back spoiler.

  As a car travels at high speeds, it cuts through the air. The air flows over the car and catches on the rear spoiler. That pushes the back end of the car down. The higher the spoiler’s angle—the more straight up it is—the more air it catches. The good thing about the downward force is that it pushes the tires toward the ground and makes the car less likely to skid. The bad thing is the trade-off. While more air pushing the car down makes it more stable, it also makes the car slower.

  “Set the angle on the rear spoiler higher?” another man said. He moved closer to George and Sandy, almost pushing his way between them. “You could bleed away half a second per lap.”

  This man was a shorter, slimmer version of George Lot, but with long hair parted in the middle. I searched my memory and came up with a name for the face. Lance Lot. George’s younger brother.

  Lance turned his focus toward George. “That spoiler’s set at sixty-seven degrees. That gives us the max speed for this track. And we need max speed to win. We can’t do that with a driver who’s afraid to drive.”

  Everyone seemed to freeze.

  “Lance, this is not the time or place,” George began. “If you have concerns, bring them to me in private.”

  “No,” Sandy said. “I’d rather deal with this in the open. If your brother wants to drive, he should prove himself in a race car. If not, he can keep his mouth shut. He’s not the one who will kiss a concrete wall if the back end slips going into a corner.”

  I wished double hard we had the cameras going. Funny thing is, after a day or two, no one notices them. Sure, the first day, people watch what they say and how they look because they’re really aware of the cameras. But if the cameras are always around, it doesn’t take long for them to become part of the background. And if we had them here, this footage would be great. Just like bad news gets higher ratings, arguments are more interesting to watch than interviews.

  Sandy pointed at the car behind her. “I’ll bet whatever you want that the spoiler is not set at sixty-seven degrees. You may think it is, but it’s not driving that way. I can feel it on the corners.”

  Lance spit on the ground. “I set it myself. I know I’m right. I—”

  He stopped. Another pit crew member was shaking his head and pointing at the spoiler.

  “Looks like someone bent this corner,” the man said. “It’s a bit flat.”

  Sandy smiled at Lance. She pushed her helmet hard into his stomach. It pushed a woof of breath out of his lungs.

  “Fix it, please,” she told Lance. “And find out who had a chance to mess with the spoiler and why. We don’t have much more practice time before my qualifying run.”

  She left him holding her helmet and walked toward Uncle Mike.

  “Hello,” she said, smiling and extending her hand in greeting. “I’m Sandy Peterson. And you must be the famous Mike Hiser, here to give us our hour of television fame.”

  “It’s an honor to meet you,” Uncle Mike said, shaking her hand.

  “So,” she said, “I’ve got about fifteen minutes before I go back on the track. Let’s sit down so you can tell me what you want to do and how you’re going to do it.”

  chapter six

  The infield of the racing track was filled with dozens and dozens of motor homes and trailers. Many racing people find it easier and cheaper to travel in a trailer as they follow the circuit from track to track.

  The three of us found lawn chairs in the shade of a motor home, away from the pit crew. The shade helped but didn’t give much relief from the hot wind.

  Sandy looked at me as if noticing me for the first time.

  “Who are you?” she asked me. “And what are you doing here?”

  “This is—” Uncle Mike began.

  “I didn’t ask you,” she said to him. “Let him answer for himself.”

  Uncle Mike snapped his mouth shut. I’d never heard anyone talk to him this way before.

  “I’m Trenton Hiser,” I said. “I do all kinds of odd jobs to help things run smoothly. But my real job is to learn as much as I can about directing.”

  We had to speak louder than normal to be heard above the engines revving loudly in various places along the pit road.

  “Hiser,” she said with a question in her voice. She jerked her thumb at Uncle Mike. “He your dad?”

  I shook my head. “My uncle. My parents and sister are in Los Angeles.”

  I hardly thought of them when I was away. If being away from home was the price I had to pay to reach my dreams, I had decided it was worth it.

  “You look too young to be out of school, let alone to think about becoming a director.”

  “It’s summer and school is out,” I said. Her amused grin showed me she was teasing. So I gave her a small grin myself. “And you look too young to drive a stock car at this level. Besides, only men should be race-car drivers.”

  “Trent—” Uncle Mike began.

  Sandy laughed. “I deserved that. Besides, I wanted to see if he could stand up for himself. Sometimes people who get hired because they’re family don’t have brains or a backbone. This one does.” She flashed me another grin. “We’ll get along just fine.”

  “I’m starting to see that I can believe some of those press clippings I collected,” Uncle Mike said, smiling. “What was my favorite headline?”

  Tapping his teeth, he sorted through his memory. “Yes. I remember: ‘Pit Bull Woman Hangs on for Victory.’”

  She laughed again. “That one was better than ‘Ladybug Stomps Back.’”

  She shook her head. “You know, in some ways, it’s great to be a woman driver. In other ways, it can drive you nuts.”

  Uncle Mike leaned forward. The way he did as a director when he sensed he was about to learn something that would help him frame his subject. I knew why. We had discussed this ahead of time. The thing that would make this documentary interesting was the “woman driver” angle.

  “It’s great,” she said, “for the very reason that you’re going to be hanging on every word I’m about to say. You and the rest of the world treat me differently because I’m a woman. That translates into big media exposure. Big media exposure means big sponsorship. When it costs millions a year to run a team, sponsors are important.”

  She looked Uncle Mike directly in the eyes. “Let’s face it, if I were just another male driver, you wouldn’t be here, right?”

  I felt guilty, as if she had read our minds.

  “Let’s not forget that you have won a few races,” Uncle Mike said.

  “The fact that you ducked my question proves my point,” she answered. “And that’s what’s bad about being a woman driver. People can’t look past my being a woman and see me simply as a driver.”

  She pointed beyond
us at the track. “Out there, it takes guts to survive. And, at times, almost a mean streak. Think about it. When a driver bumps your car at two hundred miles an hour to make room for himself on the track, you know it’s not a tea party. Especially when a second or so between first and second place might be worth enough money to buy a house. But what happens when I bump back and send someone into the wall? He’s the victim, and I’m Pit Bull Woman.”

  Again, I wished the cameras were here. I knew exactly what I’d do if this were my film. I’d cut back and forth between her words and some bang-bang race scenes, and there would be some real juice to it.

  She looked at her watch. “Anyway,” she said to Uncle Mike. “We don’t have much time. Practice days are the only time I have to really learn the track; they’ll have me back in the car any second. So tell me what you plan to do.”

  “The usual,” Uncle Mike said. “Cameras everywhere. We’ll get a hundred hours’ worth of film and sort it out in production.”

  “Sounds boring,” she said. “How’d you get this big creative reputation?”

  “Ouch,” he said. “A shot like that hurts.”

  “Well,” she said, “there’s a lot riding on this for me. The danger of giving you permission to film is that you guys might become a real distraction, and that might hurt the racing team. But on the other hand, I couldn’t afford to pass up a one-hour shot at prime-time television. So make it worthwhile.”

  “I do have one thing in mind,” Uncle Mike said, “to make this different from other documentaries.”

  “Good,” she said.

  “I want to put lightweight cameras in the car. Views out the front window and back so we can film what’s happening around your car. I’d like to have you miked too. I want you to tell us about the race as it happens: What’s going through your mind. What you’re trying to do as you do it. I want the viewers to feel like they’re on the track right beside you.”