The Art of Racing in the Rain. Garth Stein

at the photo again and cried some more. Denny picked up the photograph and showed it to me, and it was a photo of a house.

      “Look at this, Enzo,” he said. “This is your new yard. Aren’t you excited?”

      I guess I was excited. Actually, I was kind of confused. I didn’t understand the implications. And then everyone started shoving things in boxes and scrambling around, and the next thing I knew, my bed was somewhere else entirely.

      The house was nice. It was a stylish little Craftsman like I’d seen on This Old House, with two bedrooms and only one bathroom but with plenty of living space, situated very close to its neighbors on a hillside in the Central District. Many electrical wires draped from poles along the sidewalk outside, and while our house looked neat and trim, a few doors down stood other houses with unkempt lawns and peeling paint and mossy roofs.

      Eve and Denny were in love with the place. They spent almost the entire first night there rolling around naked in every room except Zoë’s. When Denny came home from work, he would first say hello to the girls, then he would take me outside to the yard and throw the ball, which I happily retrieved. And then Zoë got big enough that she would run around and squeal while I pretended to chase her. And Eve would admonish her: “Don’t run like that; Enzo will bite you.” She did that frequently in the early years, doubt me like that. But one time, Denny turned on her quickly and said: “Enzo would never hurt her—ever!” And he was right. I knew I was different from other dogs. I had a certain willpower that was strong enough to overcome my more primal instincts. What Eve said was not out of line, as most dogs cannot help themselves; they see an animal running and they track it and they go after it. But that sort of thing doesn’t apply to me.

      Still, Eve didn’t know that, and I had no way of explaining it to her, so I never played rough with Zoë. I didn’t want Eve to start worrying unnecessarily. Because I had already smelled it. When Denny was away and Eve fed me and she leaned down to give me my bowl of food and my nose was near her head, I had detected a bad odor, like rotting wood, mushrooms, decay. Wet, soggy decay. It came from her ears and her sinuses. There was something inside Eve’s head that didn’t belong.

      Given a facile tongue, I could have warned them. I could have alerted them to her condition long before they discovered it with their machines, their computers and super-vision scopes that can see inside the human head. They may think those machines are sophisticated, but in fact they are clunky and clumsy, totally reactive, based on a philosophy of symptom-driven medicine that is always a step late. My nose—yes, my little black nose that is leathery and cute—could smell the disease in Eve’s brain long before even she knew it was there.

      But I hadn’t a facile tongue. So all I could do was watch and feel empty inside; Eve had assigned me to protect Zoë no matter what, but no one had been assigned to protect Eve. And there was nothing I could do to help her.

       8

      One summer Saturday afternoon, after we had spent the morning at the beach at Alki swimming and eating fish and chips from Spud’s, we returned to the house red and tired from the sun. Eve put Zoë down for a nap; Denny and I sat in front of the TV to study.

      He put on a tape of an enduro he had been asked to co-drive in Portland a few weeks earlier. It was an exciting race, eight hours long, in which Denny and his two co-drivers took turns behind the wheel in two-hour shifts, ultimately finishing first in class after Denny’s eleventh-hour heroics, which included recovering from a near spin to overtake two class competitors.

      Watching a race entirely from in-car video is a tremendous experience. It creates a wonderful sense of perspective that is often lost in a television broadcast with its many cameras and cars to follow. Seeing a race from the cockpit of a single car gives a true feeling of what it’s like to be a driver: the grip on the steering wheel, the dash, the track, and the glimpse through the rearview mirror of other cars overtaking or being overtaken, the sense of isolation, the focus and determination that are necessary to win.

      Denny started the tape at the beginning of his final stint, with the track wet and the sky heavy with dark clouds that threatened more rain. We watched several laps in silence. Denny drove smoothly and almost alone, as his team had fallen behind after making the crucial decision to pull into the pits and switch to rain tires; other racing teams had predicted the rain would pass and dry track conditions would return, and so had gained more than two laps on Denny’s team. Yet the rain began again, which gave Denny a tremendous advantage.

      Denny quickly and easily passed cars from other classes: underpowered Miatas that darted through the turns with their excellent balance; big-engine Vipers with their atrocious handling. Denny, in his quick and muscular Porsche Cup Car, slicing through the rain.

      “How come you go through the turns so much faster than the other cars?” Eve asked.

      I looked up. She stood in the doorway, watching with us.

      “Most of them aren’t running rain tires,” Denny said.

      Eve took a seat on the sofa next to Denny.

      “But some of them are.”

      “Yes, some,” he said.

      We watched. Denny got up behind a yellow Camaro at the end of the back straight, and though it looked as if he could have taken the other car in turn 12, he held back. Eve noticed.

      “Why didn’t you pass him?” she asked.

      “I know him. He’s got too much power and would just pass me back on the straight. I think I take him in the next series of turns.”

      Yes. At the next turn-in, Denny was inches from the Camaro’s rear bumper. He rode tight through the double-apex right-hand turn and then popped out at the exit to take the inside line for the next turn, a quick left, and he zipped right by.

      “This part of the track is really slick in the rain,” he said. “He has to back way off. By the time he gets his grip back, I’m out of his reach.”

      On the back straight again, the headlights illuminating the turn markers against a sky that was still not completely dark, the Camaro could be seen in Denny’s panoramic racing rearview mirror, fading into the background.

      “Did he have rain tires?” Eve asked.

      “I think so. But his car wasn’t set up right.”

      “Still. You’re driving like the track isn’t wet, and everyone else is driving like it is.”

      Turn 12 and blasting down the straight, we could see brake lights of the competition flicker ahead; Denny’s next victims.

      “That which you manifest is before you,” Denny said softly.

      “What?” Eve asked.

      “When I was nineteen,” Denny said after a moment, “at my first driving school down at Sears Point, it was raining and they were trying to teach us how to drive in the rain. After the instructors were finished explaining all their secrets, all the students were totally confused. We had no idea what they were talking about. I looked over at the guy next to me—I remember him, he was from France and he was very fast. Gabriel Flouret. He smiled and he said: ‘That which you manifest is before you.’”

      Eve stuck out her lower lip and squinted at Denny.

      “And then everything made sense,” she said jokingly.

      “That’s right,” Denny said seriously.

      On the TV, the rain didn’t stop; it kept coming. Denny’s team had made the right choice; other teams were pulling off into the hot pits to change to rain tires.

      “Drivers are afraid of the rain,” Denny told us. “Rain amplifies your mistakes, and water on the track can make your car handle unpredictably. When something unpredictable happens you have to react to it; if you’re reacting at speed, you’re reacting too late. And so you should be afraid.”

      “I’m