Burnt Mill Road went up through the hardwoods in long climbing curves and I took them as fast as the truck would hold, and at the top of the ridge, where it crested by a gravel pull-off and a sign for an Appalachian Trail access, there was a man in an orange vest holding a sign on a pole that said STOP.
There was road work. There was a one-lane section where a crew was patching a washout, and a line of three cars ahead of me, and the flagger was standing there with his STOP sign in the long gold light, chewing gum, looking at his radio.
It was 6:53.
I put it in park. I could see, way down below us, through a gap in the trees, the valley on the other side, and in the bottom of it, maybe three miles away as the crow flies, a cluster of buildings and a track. I could see the track. It was a red oval, tiny as a fingernail, with banks of lights on poles already on around it, white and hard in the dusk. There were little colored dots moving on it.
"That's it," Haskell said.
We sat there. The flagger looked at his radio. Jesse said, "Come on," under his breath, over and over, "come on, come on, come on." A truck came through from the other direction, and then another, and then a dump truck full of asphalt, and then the flagger turned his sign around to SLOW, and it was 6:58, and the three cars ahead of me pulled forward like they had all the time in the world.
The road down the other side of the ridge was four miles of switchbacks with a fifteen mile an hour advisory sign at the top. I don't remember most of it. I remember Haskell's hand flat on the dashboard again. I remember Jesse sliding across the back seat on the curves with his cleats scraping the floor mats. I remember coming out of the last switchback into the valley and seeing the high school's sign, AMICALOLA VALLEY HIGH SCHOOL HOME OF THE EAGLES, and a line of cars parked on the grass along the road for a quarter mile because the lot was full, and the lights over the stadium, and the sound of it, faint through the closed windows, a voice on a public address system that I couldn't make out.
"Pull in at the bus lane," Haskell said. "Right there. Behind the yellow buses. They'll tow it. Let them tow it."
I pulled in behind the buses. I put it in park. I opened my door.
And from somewhere on the other side of the bleachers, flat and small in the evening air, like somebody snapping a board over his knee, I heard the gun.
There was a ticket table at the gate by the end of the home bleachers, a folding table under a blue pop-up tent with a cash box and a roll of paper tickets and a woman in an Amicalola Valley Booster Club windbreaker sitting behind it, and when the three of us came running across the parking lot toward her she stood straight up out of her chair.
"Eight dollars," she said. "Each. Cash only."