CHAPTER TWO
The Chariot of Fire
If my bedroom was my sanctuary, Rick's brother's 1974 Chevy van was our mobile
headquarters, our war room, and our ticket out of the mundane.
It pulled up at my curb at 1:45 PM, announced not by a horn but by a mechanical rattle
that sounded like a skeleton falling down a flight of stairs — a specific, characteristic sound that
the residents of our block had come to recognize the way you recognize an old neighbor's car.
That rattle meant us. That rattle meant Saturday. That rattle, and the thick, choking cloud of blue
exhaust that hung in the humid Stockton air like a weather event.
The van was painted a specific, unappealing shade of metallic brown that we
affectionately called 'The Bean.' Not because it looked particularly bean-like — more because
the name had the right combination of dignity and absurdity that the vehicle seemed to demand.
It was a relic of the previous decade, a rolling ashtray built in the era of shag carpet and CBradios, a machine that had seen better days but still carried the weight of our collective ambitions
with surprising reliability.
Rick had obtained use of it through his older brother Dave, who worked at an auto parts
store in south Stockton and treated the van with the specific affection that men of a certain era
reserved for vehicles that had never once left them stranded. Dave was twenty-two and already
seemed ancient to us, already in possession of a life with its own gravity — a girlfriend, a lease,
opinions about torque — but he lent the van on Saturdays with minimal conditions. Don't scratch
it. Don't drink in it. Don't do anything stupid.
We interpreted 'stupid' generously.
Stepping inside The Bean was a full sensory experience.
Thick, burnt-orange shag carpet covered every square inch of the floor, the walls, and
even parts of the ceiling. Not installed carpet — more like carpet that had been applied with
enthusiasm and a staple gun during a period when the shag aesthetic was considered aspirational
rather than alarming. It smelled of stale fries, the ghost of an old pine-tree air freshener that had
long since surrendered to the prevailing atmosphere, and the lingering scent of what Dougie
called 'prophetic' gas station corn dogs — prophetic because, according to Dougie, they predicted
your future by the way they made you feel two hours later.
In the hundred-degree Stockton heat, the interior felt like a literal oven. The kind that
cooked your thoughts until everything seemed like a good idea. The kind that turned a brown van
into a spaceship, a levee road into a highway to somewhere important, and four teenage boys into
the central characters of a story that hadn't been told yet.At the wheel sat Rick.
Rick Morales was seventeen going on forty-five. He had the quiet competence of
someone who had been paying attention his whole life and had simply not found a situation yet
that required him to deploy all of it. He drove the way he did everything — with a contained,
precise economy of movement, both hands on the wheel, eyes on the road, speaking only when
something actually needed to be said. Which was less often than most people thought necessary
and exactly as often as Rick thought necessary. In the van, he was the pilot. We were the flight
crew. He tolerated us with affection.
'Get in, baloney! We're losing daylight!' Jimmy yelled from the passenger seat, his arm
hanging out the window, slapping the side of the door like he was urging a horse forward.
James Briggs — Jimmy — was the mouth of our operation. The energy. The one who
named things and thereby made them real. He had a quality that is rare and slightly dangerous in
a seventeen-year-old: he could make you believe, completely and without reservation, that
whatever was happening right now was the most important thing that had ever happened. He
could make a Tuesday afternoon feel like a championship game. He could make a drive to the
river feel like the beginning of a legend. He had been doing this to us since ninth grade and we
were fully, helplessly addicted.
I slid the heavy side door open with a metallic shing — that sound was its own
announcement, the specific sound of Saturday beginning — and was immediately greeted by the
sight of Dougie.Every group has one. The guy whose heart is ten times larger than his common sense,
whose survival is a daily miracle, and who somehow manages to make the rest of you braver just
by existing. Douglas Fitch — Dougie — was sitting on a plastic milk crate in the back of the
van, a massive, poorly wrapped bandage engulfing his left forearm with the kind of commitment
that suggested both a serious injury and a complete absence of medical training.
'What happened to you?' I asked, hoisting myself into the van and trying not to burn my
bare arm on the exposed metal of the door frame, which had been sitting in direct Stockton
sunlight for approximately four hours.
Dougie looked down at the bandage with a bizarre, genuine sense of pride. Like a man
who had accomplished something notable.
'The Jarts, man. My dad buried 'em in the backyard. Officially banned.'
He said this as though the burial were an injustice rather than a reasonable precaution.
For the uninitiated: Jarts were lawn darts. Twelve-inch aerodynamic missiles with metal
spikes on one end, sold in sets of four and marketed as a family game for outdoor recreation.
They were, objectively, weapons. The Consumer Product Safety Commission would eventually
ban them entirely in 1988, a decision that surprised no one who had ever met Dougie Fitch.
'I thought I could catch one,' Dougie explained, with the solemnity of a scientist reporting
on a controlled experiment that had produced unexpected results. 'Turns out gravity is faster than
I am.''You tried to catch a falling lawn dart?' Rick asked from the driver's seat, shaking his
head until his long hair brushed his shoulders. He met my eyes in the rearview mirror with an
expression that communicated: I have accepted that this is my life.
'That's not a game, Doug,' Rick continued. 'That's an attempted lobotomy.'
'It's the wind-up that gets you!' Dougie insisted, gesturing wildly with his good arm in a
way that caused everyone near him to lean instinctively away. 'You think you've got the timing,
and then —
'
'And then gravity,' Jimmy finished.
'And then gravity,' Dougie confirmed, nodding with the dignity of a man who has learned
something important the hard way and does not regret the tuition.
While Dougie clearly wasn't operating at the upper end of the intelligence spectrum that
afternoon, he was undeniably the bravest among us. Or perhaps, as I later came to understand,
just the most cheerfully indifferent to consequence. In our world, that distinction barely mattered.
He was the glue that kept us from being too cautious. He was the one who said yes first, who
jumped off the dock first, who volunteered for every absurd scheme without pausing to calculate
the odds. He made us braver by making fear seem optional.
'Pop it in,' Jimmy commanded, nodding toward the Pioneer deck mounted under the dash
— a piece of equipment considerably nicer than the van itself, installed by Dave with the
priorities of a man who understood what actually mattered.I reached into my pocket, pulled out the tape I'd spent all morning capturing, and slid it
into the player with the careful reverence of a sacrament. The tape clicked in. The mechanism
engaged. And then the opening of 'Every Breath You Take' surged through the mismatched
speakers — two in the front, one mounted on the wall behind the driver's seat, one whose
housing was held together with, inevitably, duct tape — and the song filled The Bean like a
weather change.
As we pulled away from the curb, I looked at my wingmen.
Jimmy, already half out the window, face turned into the hot air, eyes bright.
Rick, hands at ten and two, doing thirty in a twenty-five zone with the precision of
someone who understood that speed limits existed for a reason even if that reason occasionally
needed testing.
Dougie, waving his bandaged arm at nobody in particular out the back window,
conducting some private ceremony of departure.
'Alright, listen up,' Jimmy said, turning around in his seat to face us with that look — the
one that meant whatever came next was going to be declared important before it had happened.
'This is the Last Great Summer. You understand that? It's going to be awesome. This summer is
for the history books.'
We were seventeen. The gas tank was half-full. The tape was running. Stockton was
baking in the rearview, and something — the river, the rest of our lives, whatever came after —
was waiting in front of us.Everything outside the windows was shimmering in the Stockton heat. It felt, for the first
time in a long time, like the movie had finally started.
I think about that van more than is probably reasonable for a grown man. I think about
the orange carpet and the duct-taped speaker and the way the sun came through the smoked-glass
windows and turned everything amber. I think about Jimmy's face, turned into the wind like a
dog on a highway — that specific, uncomplicated joy that some people have when they are
exactly where they want to be. I didn't know, then, that I was already in the best part. You never
know that until later. That's both the problem and the point.