The flashbulbs pop, the trophy comes down, and the Dead Man's Dragstrip queens drape themselves along the rail on either side — one in funeral red, one in a green that has never occurred in nature — while the driver accepts all of it with tremendous composure. He does not wave. He does not stand. He has not so much as inclined the skull since the lights went green, and the crowd is reading this as class.
It is not class. Rigor took him at the tree and rigor has not let go, and rigor, as any tuner in this pit will tell you, is worth a tenth and a half over a quarter mile, because a corpse cannot flinch, cannot lift, cannot second-guess its own hole shot. He went down that strip straight because straight was the only direction still available to him.
Somebody ought to tell the girls. Nobody is going to tell the girls.
