When he came to consciousness he was already there, in the narrow space just beneath the grandstands. He had no recollection of getting in there, and so that should be, according to the doctors and theorists.

The leading doctors and theorists theorized that a pregnant woman with no underwear on and wearing a skirt came to her feet at a spectacular turn on a racing day that was particularly warm; that's what they suspect. They suspect it was a warm day because she was wearing no underwear, and perhaps her sweat slid down her body in long streets of water, long racetracks of messy wet lubrication. The racetrack day was bright and blue and the cars made the turns in the curving loud miles. Perhaps the woman was cheering for her own husband, and he was driving a racecar in the race, or maybe she was cheering for her secret lover, or maybe both he and her husband, and thus her body was doubly or trebly excited. Maybe it was a crash, maybe it was a click, with the car of her loved one hurtling thru space and to its doom, and she vibrated with the shock or the pulse of it at a certain frequency that dislodged her fetus from her womb and her body and dropped it in the narrow space just below her feet and legs standing up so that her fetus fell into a sticky cup of abandoned coke, and the life-giving sugar brew in there gave the pre-baby what it needed to stay alive and gave it what it needed to continue to grow the baby life now on its own.

The baby grew body and bones and hair and spent his first months in the coke cup in the narrow space just under the grandstand seats and one day it or a shake tipped over the coke cup and onto the sloping wood floor and the baby spent his first few years in the narrow space under the grandstand seats. It was a small space just between the seats above and the roof that covered the ticket area below.

The baby grew, nourished well by all the food that fell between the grandstand slats. He ate from bits of popcorn and hot dogs and beer and sodas and pretzels and peanuts, and he slid around on his naked hands and knees nourished by the stale air down there from the slats. He heard the words of and the curses of those sitting above him, and so he learned the language of the speedway spectator. His only glimpse of the human race was the view of their butts thru the cracks between the boards, the same cracks guarded by wood that gave him light and fed him snacks.

It was a narrow space and slanted, and his hands knew it well, knew how to get up and down in search of the latest food spills and the best and latest light. He scurried like a termite, like a crab, like an ant. He was a baby miner, crawling thru his cave and it did not seem particularly unusual for him to be in such a place in such an existence because it was all that he had ever known.

The speedway crew never cleaned that space just under the speedway seats, the space that was his womb or his cave of his first few years. They never checked down there and nobody heard the baby's scurrying crawling sounds, or if they did hear the sounds they didn't tell anybody else about them, or didn't act on them on their own by looking or peeking.

One day Ned, the racing enthusiast in the bleacher seats, got so excited when his favorite driver was gaining on the leader. He got so excited that he took his keys out of his pocket to shake them for good luck. His favorite driver took the luck and pulled into the lead just at the finish line, but the same luck did not rub off on Ned. Ned jumped with the victory of joy, and in jumping up the keys flew from his hands. Ned watched them make a small circle up and down and to his feet on the grandstand slats. When Ned bent over to pick up his keys the toes of his shoe moved slightly and knocked the keys between slats and into that strange space just under and between the grandstands above and the roof below. Ned could only get the tips of his fingers between those slats and couldn't reach his keys and couldn't even see them in the darkness of that secret unknown space.

That was the day that Graylung the custodian was called on to get under the seats to retrieve those keys lost down there thru a crack. That was the day to be ever remembered as Walker's true birthday.

Baby Walker had found the keys, and they were his toy to play with. He liked when he pushed them further and the sound they made and he liked the way they held the light for him so he didn't have to look up or roll over on his back.

Graylung found the keys, and he found the baby too. When he pulled the baby out of the narrow space just under the grandstand, the baby cried for the very first time. He was already a toddler but he had just been born that day.

The stadium crew named the boy "Walker" because he couldn't walk well - there wasn't enough room to stand up and do it in the narrow space under the stands, and so his crawling habit was a hard one to break. His first name, "Orven," was the Latin word for "He who was birthed from beneath the grandstands," but everyone just called him by his last name Walker, just Walker, and when he dreams of perfect places he sleeps inside the old rotted wood grandstands with the stale popcorn and the car sounds around him that turn like a late summer insect's mating screams.

Garage door mouths

Eating agriculture

Forests for toothpicks

After the commercial break, the individual split letters spin around with sparks like gunfire and then roll together in a line to spell out the name of the ongoing coverage, "The War for Cars," in stencil font like the black uneven label on a big brown box of military supplies.

The president addresses the people: "We have begun the War for Cars because the Enemy has taken some of our cars and we will fight them and kill them to get our cars back. We will strike fast and strong, and we will, God willing, fight this war to win. We will get our cars back because we have superior military powers. The Enemy are weak and they have our cars after all, so we will hit the Enemy fighters and civilians and animals and take back our cars."

The television reporters present the images of the stolen cars thru the super-telescopic greentacular lens. Walker looks very closely at the green surface of his television set. The cars are dancing with the grain of their bodies, the super-telescopic image dances like your dreams fading from the morning. "Those don't look like our cars," Walker says. "They don't look very familiar to me."

Penny sees them too. She sees the cars like looking closely at a magazine ad; she sees them dance like the waves of a hot day distance. "Those are very nice looking cars," she says. "I would like to write some ads to sell those cars, once we take them back from the Enemy."

The correspondent on TV asks the military expert about the stolen cars. "They are nice cars and they are ours. We have started the campaign of aerial bombardment to get them back for our families and children, for the sake of our economy."

The image is exploding in its green and its distance. Sparks of light fly thru a TV shape and curls of white rise up to meet them. A bloom of smoke on the lower corner. A supply depot, or a presidential palace, has been hit by our bombs, the experts surmise.

There is more analysis, and the music to tell you so. And then it is time for the commercial break. The first one is familiar to Penny from its very fade in. "That's one that I wrote," Penny announces to her husband as the commercial grows to life. On the screen, two black trucks side by side barrel over a berm of grass and flowers. A closeup shot shows how the tread of the tires rolls over the flowers but saves their shape and textures with its wide rolling treads. After the trucks roll them over, the flowers rise back up, as if they had fallen asleep and just opened their eyes from their fluffy flower dreams.

Rain makes all the colors

Between eye and

Oil spill

The last thing you saw, the first thing you knew, the way you forgot about it all behind the wheel of your brand new car. The trips and suggestions and the gnawing and the rumblings and half told truths that you carry with a handle. The screamings from a gas pump that you do not hear with ears, that you have to imagine from the deaths and the guts, from the history that now makes the headlines, from the forgotten footsteps that never cross your street, that never walk by the street or your house. The onions and the reputations, the big fat hams you could buy or be or the cushy seats and the oil-streaked streets. Have a hamburger on me, you can get it at the drive-thru, and roll over all the sorrow and the lives past forgetting. Double the pain with headlight eyes, with rolling the wheel past all remembering, with crashing your tires over my heart and head and smashing your way thru the story and out the other side.

Vanity plate

Car butt

Rips toxic fart

Graylung has a little baby, rock it gentle in the morning, rock it gentle in the evening, make a hush with your lips and your breath when it cries too loud when it cries too long when its cry races with the motor mouths when the cry comes in first when the last flag furls. Graylung has a little baby that he holds pressed to his oil-stained overalls, that he holds with one hand and sweeps the grandstand with the best grip of the other on his broom, or he can hand off the baby in blanket to the other grease monkeys when he has to scrub with both hands to really get that stain away. Graylung has a little baby and it sleeps in bed beside him under the steel beams and wood of the grandstand between the ticket windows and their rows for waiting. Graylung has a little baby and he has to feed it with a spoon and watch the bubbles rise up to its lips and it makes sounds and it wriggles and it is a baby boy but quite grown and wearing short pants and a shirt with a race car on the front right pocket. Graylung has a baby boy, a little boy, and the baby's mouth is as closed as closed can be, and his eyes don't shine even when they look to the sun and his hands go all which way but cannot grab at the toy car. Graylung has a little boy and Graylung can hold the model racer in front of the boy's face but the boy looks off forward at a speck on the wall at a speck of nothing or his eyes look out but only see inside his head or see nothing and his hands don't spin - they just reach out peculiar as if they were rotating in outer space and not ruled by gravity and not rubbed by body but just strings hanging limply and his legs do not take him and his legs are much like water, they will float by quite comfortably but they are not like a mighty beam they will not quite hold him standing and he has legs and arms like seaweed like he cannot operate his own body and he is a boy and frequently wonders and it is not all good and suggested and the books on babies have no guidance and the good advice of the race track goers gives no helping and Graylung has an adventure called a boy who moves like a puppet but Graylung cannot get his hand inside to pull the arms and wag the mouth and Graylung cannot secure the strings to hang him and dance him like a marionette. He may do this in a dream in the night beside the young boy sleeping but when the clouds come to hold back the sun and it is barely day and the dust taunts him to sleep it is worthless advice, it is fantasy that you shall not try.

Graylung has a little boy beside him but the boy is very peculiar, this boy could be a doll with a beating heart, he could be the limp pile of garbage pulled from under the grandstand, but the pile has a liver and hands and lungs and a face that does not look and a face that cries but does not try to talk. Graylung pulled something out from the crevice in the grandstand and maybe he wishes for a boychild to name his name but maybe instead it is something to be put on a shelf, something to look at and tend but without its own mind and ways, without its own breath of movement.

Horizon of signs

The hair of hope

One has the lowest gas price

They're sitting in the bar. They're sitting in front of the big plate glass window for the sun of it, they're sitting and looking at each other or down at their plastic cups on the table and they're talking, but who knows what they're talking about and then they hear the sound and their heads turn to look out the window where the body of a pedestrian crumbles at the front of the car that hit her, brakes skid, whomp. They go back to talking but then comes the dinosaur sound of a garbage truck rolling up and the garbage men ride with their white sparkling suits to pick up the bloody body and throw it in back.

They turn all the time

They just keep going

Like the world and they were it

Graylung pulled the young boy from the birth canal of the grandstand seat space and the old man pressed the naked popsticky dirty boy to his breast, but the boy wouldn't look into the eyes of the old custodian. The boy still wound his sticky fingers around the shiny keys that he had and he held, and sometimes he looked down at these, and sometimes he looked into himself, his eyes set forward for popcorn or hot dogs or butts above him or slats of light but certainly not on the old custodian's face and the other faces and the hands and the bodies and the situation. If the young boy could see he could see only a blur, and he cried now and then but not for attention, and he did not respond, and Doryhision, the wise grease monkey, said, "The boy is like a fish out of water," but the young boy didn't even know how to flap his body to slap his way back in.

Graylung fed the boy some popcorn, and the little mouth let it in and the boy chewed and he swallowed, but he was like a sack of just a few shoes, with difficult to understand bumps and a silly strange feel but as if there were no spine, and Graylung had to hold him carefully to keep him from spilling, to keep the little boy body from falling into a useless drip.

The grandstand boy did not respond to sounds, the grandstand boy did not respond to faces, the world was too much and the boy was too shocked for his slow pull birth from the space so narrow. In his head he still could have been in his small dark thin space of food, his fingers finding some liquid or sleeping long until the light in narrow slats returned to see the world for him.

The boy knew nothing; the boy did nothing in the arms of Graylung. The boy knew nothing; the boy did nothing when the custodian set him down. The boy did not respond when Graylung covered the little boy body with some clothes, with a mini driver racing uniform, but he didn't put up a fight either, he just let the old custodian pull his arms into the jacket, he just let Graylung zip up his first pair of pants.

It was an amazing world around the pit crew and the grandstand boys but the newfound baby boy was not so interested. The newfound boy was unable to appreciate it. The world was still ribbons and so much too much to even start to look at, to even face the competition, and the little boy was unable to even begin. His brain pumped the regulating life in his barely body but his eyes and his ears and his brain and his nose and his fingers hadn't figured out the teamwork, they were all acting alone, they were all solo players at a time when comprehension of the entire situation was needed most.

The boy sat all day on the little blanket Graylung left for him. He didn't crawl or roll for food like he had in his narrow former grandstand space. He only moved to drop down on his back when sleep crept over him, and Graylung swept his brooms into the long nights and thought about experiments.

Graylung tried games, like shiny things and hiding them, but the boy lost interest and never sought them out. Graylung tried faces, tried sculpting the boy's face in the shapes that he moved his own in, but the boy just let his frown come back and his eyes out straight like empty sockets. Graylung tried out sudden sounds to shock the boy but the boy had no such reflexes but the boy just sat there with his nose running a green river.

Graylung tried carrying the boy around to different places, setting him down on the lawn between the track and pulling up some grass for the little boy's hands to hold and touch but the grass just fell out of his hand, but it just fell in and out and his eyes didn't follow it down, and his face stayed on the same page of the catalog of faces.

He set the young boy on the asphalt of the speedway, as if the white line could nudge him into talking, but the boy gave no response, but the boy didn't even want to roll with the slope. And then Graylung noticed Driver Joe in his driver's get-up and helmet like a spaceman's and he asked Driver Joe if he could take the boy into the soft cold seat of a Speedster 20. Joe said, "okee-dokie," and Driver Joe even got back in his car, to sit there in his spacesuit, to sit there with the boy.

It was dark inside the car. It was dark inside the Speedster 20 and the light came weak in the windshield and the dashboard had a faint glow that was so slightly there, that was the mind controls of your midnight dreaming, and there was a narrow seat beside Joe in his helmet and some shininess in the door and the small roof above and Walker sat in there and his eyes opened in sight and first it was still too much and then he took it all in, small piece by small piece and he was like a real baby, and when Graylung tried to pull him out again the boy cried and played the drums on the old man with his little fists like he wanted to go back and sit inside, like he wanted to go back and eat some popcorn. And Graylung noticed right away that the baby's limbs were strong as boards and not like the weed in the water, and that here was a beginning, here was the start, and he could figure it out.

It started in the car, memory and recognition, and later the boy could take in other places but none as soft and loving as that seat in the small space where he could turn his eyes and it wasn't too much and then Driver Joe turned the car on and spilled it out on the asphalt track, and young round Walker's eyes opened huge and by the second turn he was making sounds like language and by the third turn around he had a few words and by the fifth lap he was recognizing and repeating words and by the twentieth lap he understood several of the fundamentals of mathematics, and one hundred laps later he could recite the pledge of allegiance and a few short selections from Shakespeare, tho Driver Joe did not know that many, or all that accurately.

If you don't know it

And your friends don't know it

Your car will know it

Penny Driver's parents were immigrants from the old country. They had long and standing traditions behind them, they had a great family seal and a stiff way of walking and they played the old country national anthem late at night and sang along and she knew all the words and even the verse that isn't always sung these days because it's slightly embarrassing and old fashioned.

Her father with his moustache, her mother with her lesser one and they planned Penny's life ahead on their weekends, they drew diagrams and timelines to show the entire roadway of her whole life course, from Junior Ad Copywriter Scouts to a full real job to love and marriage and a family life enlightened by the ancient old country traditions that her parents brought with them on their backs over the water. She took all this in, she took it and knew it and sometimes her eyes watered for the long road ahead when they banged the piano and sang the old words and the last line with the little dip in the song that could make you all mushy.

Her parents and their small cottage home with the dog named Doggie and the cat named Kattie and the little garden of tiny yellow flowers and Penny sat in the back yard and dreamed of all that life ahead of her, and of the streets that went out in all directions, and her father brought the dinner out back and they set the table and mother brought out the candles so they could eat the traditional old country foods there in the back yard and hope, and the days went by so quickly because they had to get her to her future and the life she had to build for herself and for them.

And this was her dream too, tho not her dream of the feeling, which she had occasionally; it made her feel better. This was the sound of the backyard leaves today, and of a long life in business later when they've fallen.

From curb to curb

Like the border at wartime

The place of greatest death

Graylung was observant. As janitor he had to look for the dust in the usual and the unusual places, he had to notice the differences that a single sweep of broom might make. He had to notice differences so he could always win the annual custodial awards, and he used these skills to sweep out a life worth living for his young ward, the grandstand baby boy. He could see that the car was life and sensation, that the cardoor and the car inside were sensation and revelation for the small baby boy. It wasn't necessarily the speed and it wasn't the wheels or the time on the track; Graylung did not know what it was but he knew that it was. He didn't figure out exactly what it was that made the boy seem real, what gave the boy his senses, and that it took nothing more than an enclosed space to give Walker what he needed. Just a structure enclosed in tight around his body like the comfort of the crevice under the grandstand, and the car was the first place since his birth where he had felt that safety. It wasn't the movement, it was simply the space, and Graylung didn't quite get that bit of knowledge but he knew that the boy would develop life and traits and grow in knowledge if he was in a car. If Walker stayed outside he would simply lose his life staring off to the distance if there was distance above his head to stare at and be under.

When Walker got out of the car he saw Graylung with his eyes for the first time, or the second. He could sit and he could crawl and he could see the things around him now, but it was even better in the car, it was better with the darkness all around him and just the few lines of light from the windows, the narrow race car windshield.

His world became a speedway track, always around and back again, and he could learn to walk and talk to others too but it was easier if he could just be in a car all the time, in a car moving around the track or a car just still. He wanted the small space in the car, he turned to it for encouragement, he crept inside for approval and to make him well and he could go forward like the car went forward but it was the space that smiled in its smallness so that he could listen and hum and be.

When you live at the speedway you come to understand that distance isn't always distance, at least it isn't when it comes to cars. They always made the same old circle - you get out of it at the same place that you started. This observation applies to both the track and to the greater lands of the parking lot. It was the lovely blue interior, the vinyl and the accessories that he knew, that he somehow connected with it all, and it gave him his courage, and it gave him the reason to take all the next steps.

He learned to walk from a chair to a race car, and he learned to talk by turning the wheel and making the turns on the round road, and he learned compassion from the darkened space before the dashboard, and faces and where to look from the dials on the driver's side.

The first thought

Of the first car

Was to beat all the rest of the traffic

Part Three

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