Bo
After tightly hugging the curve,
the red Lamborghini with black racing stripes raced back to near 100 mph on the
straightaway. The driver, a stocky black man, kept just one hand on the wheel
as he chased the sun along the Southern California coastline. Next to him in
the passenger’s seat sat a smallish, older man with a folder set neatly on his
lap and his hands clutched, white-knuckled, to the sides of his seat.
Over the steady roar of the
700hp engine, the man spoke: “Don’t—don’t you think you ought to slow down?”
The corner of the driver’s lips
turned up in a smirk as he chuckled. With his eyes maintained on the road, he
replied, “I ought to slow down.”
And so, as if in a challenge,
the driver pushed the speedometer over the 100 mph mark. The passenger leaned
his head back, more from the feeling of his stomach acids churning than from the
G-force, which was noticeable, and let out a quiet groan. Approaching another
curve along the mountainside, the driver took his foot off the pedal and
coasted around it, slightly unaware of the growing scream of his travel
partner.
The driver’s name was Vincent.
Vincent Edward Jackson. But to his friends, he was simply known as ‘Bo’. In
fact, he’d been called that so long he couldn’t even remember when it started.
A nickname from his father when he was a child. The one thing from his younger
life he still hadn’t found a way to put behind.
“So-so as you can see, she’s
got, got—she’s got an impressive horsepower,” the passenger spoke, noticeably
paler than before. “And she runs like—like—like a top.”
Bo laughed. “She runs good, all
right,” he spoke quietly, below the hum of the engine. Run. It was a word he’d said many times and heard even more. Run. Yes, he could run just as well as
the finest Italian sports cars could tear down the California coastline. He
could hug corners, change direction on a dime. He could control his own destiny
with his feet. The wind simply rolls where it can, looking for the path of
least resistance. But Bo…Bo ran where he wanted to—resistance be damned.
“Wh-what are you?” the passenger
spoke, unable to finish his thought. He looked behind frantically as the
cruiser flashed its brights, trying to get the Lamborghini’s attention. “You
have to-you have to stop! You have to pull over!”
Bo released the tension that had
crept up on him. “No, friend. We’re ridin’ this horse into the sunset.”
As if on cue, Bo quickly
switched his foot to the brake and turned the car a full one-eighty degrees in
a haze of squealing tires and smoke. From there, he brought the car to a stop
and waited for his pursuer to close in before pressing down hard on the gas
pedal once more. “Hooolllleeeeyyyyy sshhheeeeeeee!” his passenger cried.
Steely-eyed, Bo raced toward a
spot that appeared only he could see—a crack in the cliffside caused mostly by
nature, though now perhaps, a bit by fate. With graceful precision, he steered
the car into the opening of the crevice and flipped on the brights. It was dusk
out, the sky still a mix of purples and oranges, but inside the mountain’s
wound his visibility suffered.
“You can’t be serious,” the
passenger said. “This is—this is madness! Where are we going? This is—this—this
is criminal!”
“With all due respect, friend,”
Bo responded, “your lack of confidence is a real character flaw of yours.” He
traversed the sudden jutting rocks, keeping the vehicle running in line with
the narrow path created by some ancient river. Behind him flashed an irregular
pattern of high-beam lights. “Looks like the son of a gun followed me in,” he said.
His foot added more pressure to the gas pedal. “Let’s see how well this
corn-fed pig can keep up—”
The engine of the car roared
with each lunge he made on the pedal. As the walls of the mountain’s interior
seemed to suddenly leap out in front of him, he’d adjust, almost instinctively,
and move out from the way of danger. When it appeared the path opened in front
of him, he took advantage and brought the vehicle back up to racing speed
before having to adjust again. A quick glance to his passenger found that the
squeamish middle-aged man had his folder covering his eyes, as if he didn’t
have the power to keep his lids shut on their own.
Bo jolted the car to the left,
then back to the right to avoid a tricky zig-zag pattern in the mountain’s
wall. “I can smell your wet Jockeys,” he said between chuckling. A fallen tree
sat ahead of them, lodged, horizontally, between the walls of the crevice. The
passenger ducked, as if his own head were in danger of decapitation. The car
passed unharmed beneath it. “You know,” he continued, “the measure of a man’s
fear isn’t in how he faces it—” A quick swerve to the right. “—It’s how he
controls it. Facing your fear is a psychological feat. A mental feat.
Controlling your fear is a physical one.”
Right as he finished, he heard
the echo of screeching tires and crushing metal through the narrow crevice, the sound carrying itself quickly. The high-beams behind them had disappeared. Bo
kept the car in motion for another minute or so before they came upon a large
boulder set touching both sides of the canyon. He brought the Lamborghini to a
calm stop and let the engine run at a low hum before turning it off. The lights
set upon the rock in silent acknowledgment.
“Wh-what do we do now? We’re
stuck here!” the passenger cried. Bo heaved a sigh, and then looked down at the
backs of his hands upon the steering wheel. Before long, he removed the keys
from the ignition, stepped out, stretched and looked to the sky. The stars had
come out, shining down into the crevice of the California granite. The same
stars his family was most likely looking on back in the suburbs of Chicago. The
same stars he’d looked upon as a boy himself. Bo smiled softly.
The passenger of the Lamborghini
stepped out and looked sheepishly over at Bo. Soon, their eyes met and he was
surprised by the calmness of Bo’s appearance. Bo approached him, handed him the
keys to the car. “Thanks for the test drive—” he paused, looking at the man’s
nameplate, “—Bill, but the shocks seem kinda tight. I’ve got it from here.”
With that, Bo left the man
standing next to the hot car, soiled pants freezing against his skin, and ran
toward the boulder. Even with the bum hip he still hadn’t straightened out from
his injury, he traversed the boulder like a spry, young man just out of college
and ran, gingerly, the final two-hundred yards to the city lights of Santa
Cruz, California.
