"You mean a 'fastback.' They look like this."
"Why's it called a fastback?"
"Because the back makes it look faster, I guess."
"It does look faster. Super cool."
"Hell yeah, it does."
"Did you ever have a...fastback?"
"No, not me. Not me or anyone else I ever knew owned a fastback. But now there was this one time, long time ago, I saw a race with one in it."
"You did?!"
"I did. It was the middle of the night, on the corner of Bailey Cove and Weatherly, I think. No other cars on the road. Me and Jim were riding up to the corner store to get beer when this fastback pulled up to the traffic light, slick as owl shit with a 302 Boss built to the limit and you could hear it. Hell, you could feel it."
"It had the Boss engine??" The Boss was another name I'd grown up with. It was known as a mythical motor, rare as hen's teeth and all but unattainable to mere mortals.
"That's right. He sat there idling for a bit, just taking his time, and few seconds later, well, that was when we saw the Corvette pull up."
I'd nod in understanding. Corvettes were for rich people, as I well knew. My dad's boss owned one, and we were warned to never play too close to it, to never touch it, never look too harshly in its general direction, and on the single instance where I was allowed the privilege of stepping into it, I was told to enter it with clean shoes, clean pants, clean shirt, to not scratch the leather or touch the dash. Yes, I knew full well the sort of pomposity that came with driving a 'Vette.
"The Corvette had to have had the 454 in it. Massive fucking motor. They pulled alongside each other, started revving their engines. God, you could hear it for miles." (The revving of one's engine has long been the universal signal to the other driver that a challenge had been issued, the gauntlet thrown.) "By then we'd all gone outside. Looked across the street and you could see people coming out of their houses. Even the store owner and the nighttime beer stocker came outside to watch. The whole time those two sat there revving their engines louder and louder and waiting for that light to turn green."
This was more than a race. It was a battle between the working-man underdog and the rich, racecar-driving man. I would imagine all of the people coming out to witness this event, the hundreds, thousands of residents pouring into the street in the middle of the night, lining the cracked sidewalks of south Huntsville to watch these vehicular warriors fight each other in a battle of speed and raw power. There would be lightning in the background, too, and an 80's montage ballad would play from nowhere in particular, drowned out only occasionally by the dueling snarls of V8 motors.
"What happened next?"
"The light turned green and they both lit up the tires. I say they were evenly matched from the takeoff, but the Corvette had one thing on the Mustang."
"What was that?"
"The Corvette's got something called 'Positraction.' Means that when it takes off, both back wheels spin instead of just one. So when they took off, the Corvette's wheels got traction before the Mustang's did."
"So the Corvette won?"
"The Corvette won. Still the wildest damn thing I've ever seen though."
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