Newton Dewberry’s Go-Kart

Ten-year-old Uly scrunched up his face and looked at the inert hunk of rusty iron sitting on the table.

It was a single-stroke, five-horsepower Briggs & Stratton gasoline engine. The oil had been replaced with rust.

Uly’s friend, Newton Dewberry, stood next to him, feet fidgeting, watching and waiting while Uly took his time looking at the ancient thing.

Newton’s older brothers had installed it on the go-kart many years ago. Then they quite deliberately rode it to destruction, doing nothing to take care of it.

Newton whined, “Yoo-lee,” emphasizing his frustration by kicking a leg of the cobbled-together table standing on the thick, dry, dusty timbers of the floor of his family’s old barn. “I know you can fix any go-kart engine! I seen you do it.”

Newton didn’t know about helping verbs.

Uly protested right back, louder than necessary. “Newton Dewberry!” He liked saying Newton’s full name. “Nobody never put no oil in that engine never!”

Uly knew the rule about double negatives, but he liked piling them on anyway.

Newton pouted. “Well, it prob’ly had some once.” Then he mumbled something about it not being his fault.

Uly reached for the little engine and rocked it on the table. “And it ain’t been sitting on this table long. I know, ’cause it used to be sitting on that go-kart.” Uly turned and pointed. “Out there.”

The sun was shining brightly in the dirt yard outside the barn’s gaping maw of an entrance.

Uly looked at Newton and continued. “In the rain. Every day for a million years! It’s seized up! It’s a single chunk of iron. I can fix any go-kart engine, including this one, but I cain’t fix it today. And today is when we are.”

He made “can’t” rhyme with “ain’t.”

Newton looked at his friend and nodded. “So, we improvise.”

A grin spread across Uly’s face. “We don’t need no engine, Newton Dewberry—we need speed!”

Newton smiled big, “You’ve got a good idea, don’t ya, Uly?”.

“Help me push the go-kart out to the driveway.”

Newton always did what Uly said because Uly always had good ideas.

However, Newton had learned the hard way that his faith in Uly was not shared by everyone. He remembered the day his mom had slammed the door behind her as they walked into their house. She turned and glared at her son after one of Uly’s good ideas hadn’t turned out exactly the way the boys had anticipated. “Newton! Uly never has a good idea, son. They. Are. All. Bad!”

He pursed his lips and mumbled, “It seemed okay at the time. It wasn’t my fault that—”

“You need to use good judgement! Next time ask yourself whether the end of one of Uly’s ideas is anything you want to be standing around for. In fact, you know what? There’s not going to be a next time because—”

“But no one knows the future. Sometimes—”

“Newton! Y’all were playing with gasoline! You can predict what happens when you put a match to gasoline.”

“It wasn’t a match, it was ...”

The conversation didn’t go well after that, but that was almost a year ago.

Uly and Newton had stayed out of trouble for the most part in recent months. Also, this go-kart was as harmless as a go-kart could get.

It wasn’t remotely new. In fact, it had belonged to Newton’s father when he was a boy. The go-kart was made from a rectangular sheet-metal platform on a frame of iron tubes. These were welded together at the four corners with two more braces stretched from one side to the other. Four wheels were attached to simple mounts.

All the parts were welded together. Apparently, the go-kart factory hadn’t believed in nuts and bolts.

An upside-down V of metal tubes was positioned off-center to the left and held the steering wheel in place. At the front, the wheels were connected to steering arms which were connected to a joint on the steering column. Behind that were two little levers on brackets. One was the gas pedal and the other was the brake pedal. Both had been decommissioned.

They were definitely not playing with gasoline this time.

Behind the steering wheel, a tubular frame, also welded together, originally held two pieces of lumber. One served as a seat for two children to ride side by side and the other, if it hadn’t been missing, would have served as a seat back. The seat was partially covered in torn, cheap red vinyl. The rusted sheet-metal platform behind the seat was empty, since the most recent engine was on the table in the barn.

Half the welded joints were broken because it had at some point become a project in the hands of the notorious Dewberry twins, Newton’s older brothers. They had expressed some displeasure with the design of the go-kart because, in their words, “It was built for babies.”

It originally came with a two-horsepower Honda engine with the governor cranked down to decrease the available horsepower. This was a prudent design for a toy go-kart for small children.

Newton’s brothers—now grown and moved away—quickly grew tired of a baby go-kart when they were eight or nine years old because they no longer considered themselves babies in any way. They modified the go-kart with a five-horsepower Briggs & Stratton and then removed the spring from the governor. This little fix vastly increased the available horsepower. They also removed the muffler and the air filter to make the flow of air into and out of the engine as unobstructed as possible, further increasing the power of the engine, if not its longevity.

They then took turns driving their thoroughly hot-rodded little go-kart. While one drove the other rode as a passenger holding on for dear life. They would take turns driving at highway speeds around the barn. Not just driving but spinning doughnuts to the left in an effort to launch the other brother as far as possible into the dusty yard.

This effort never failed to produce the desired result, which was for the brother riding shotgun to go skittering and bouncing across the ground, spinning like a log rolling uncontrolled down a hillside.

The farthest distance one could launch a passenger was never recorded, but it was considerable.

Neither brother ever admitted to being hurt by any of this foolishness. By the time they grew tired of this game and were getting too big to sit behind the steering wheel, their antics had all but destroyed the go-kart, which, as noted above, was built for babies, not big, rambunctious boys who had been taught how to wrench on an engine.

Uly walked beside the left side and steered the go-kart as they pushed it out toward the dirt drive past the barnyard area. “The steering wheel works, Newton Dewberry.”

Glancing up from the back, Newton warned Uly. “But it ain’t got no brakes.”

Uly stopped and looked down the long slope of dry, compact Georgia red clay that served as the driveway up to the barn.

A quiet, paved country road crossed the end of the driveway at the bottom of the hill. When was the last time a car went by on this road?

Not only was this a road that connected nothing to nothing, there was a creek on the other side of the road opposite the end of the driveway.

A dense growth of tall shrubbery on the opposite side of the road hid a bend in the creek. The creek at that point was wider, relatively speaking, than it was in other areas. It was deep next to the road where it eroded the bank and shallow on the other side where it had deposited a sandbar.

Occasionally, Newton and Uly had jumped into the swimming hole from the side of the road. The area was too snaky for Uly’s liking, so he usually recommended other ways of having fun without admitting to Newton he was afraid of snakes.

Finally, he spun around and spoke to Newton, “We don’t need brakes.”

He took one more look at the slope of the driveway and the distance to the road while making some mental calculations. “Now, here’s the plan, Newt. We get in the go-kart and sit down and then ‘Fred Flintstone’ it backwards down the driveway to get some speed. Then right before we get to the road, I’ll turn the steering wheel hard and spin us around the other way, so we stop and don’t zoom out into the road.”

Newton nodded. “Okay.”

Uly sat on the seat and twisted around so he could see behind them. Then he and Newton kicked to make the go-kart roll backwards down the slope of the driveway.

They kept kicking, picking up more speed, and rattled backwards down the dirt path with Uly driving.

When they were almost to the end of the driveway, they both realized they should stop kicking. Uly spun the steering wheel hard, and the go-kart whipped around in a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn that almost dislodged Newton from the passenger seat. A last loud creak and clang made them wonder if another weld broke somewhere.

The boys laughed.

Newton sat there. “That was pretty fun.”

Uly looked both ways down the road. “Yeah. I guess.”

“Uly, we need more speed.”

Uly nodded, thinking. “There’s hardly ever any cars on this road. If we don’t stop right at the end of the driveway, it’ll be okay, don’t you think, Newton Dewberry?”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s push it back up and try again.”

They pushed the go-kart the forty yards up the sloping drive to the barn.

Uly pointed. “You see that old bag of cement over next to the barn? I know both of us can pick up a fifty-pound bag of feed each—”

“No way, Uly! I can’t pick up a bag of feed. Why do we need that anyways?”

“It’ll make us go faster.”

“No, it won’t.”

Uly ignored him. “And that bag weighs eighty pounds, so if we work together, we can carry it over here to the go-kart and put it right here”—he pointed—“where the engine should be.”

Newton grabbed a small limb that had fallen from a tree near the driveway. “We can chock the tires with this.”

Uly agreed and jammed the stick behind the back tires. Then they went to get the bag of concrete.

It took more effort than they first imagined because the cement was a block in the shape of a bag. It had probably been sitting on the ground at the side of the barn since before Uly and Newton were born and had turned into a solid chunk. They were able to drag it over to the go-kart and then work it up onto the back. It filled the space perfectly behind the seat. The dry-rotted old tires squashed nearly flat.

Uly stood and looked at the flat tires with some exasperation. “Newton Dewberry—”

Newton was on his way into the barn already. “I’m on it.”

He started a loud electric motor. A hissing, puffing sound came from the barn. Newton returned holding a tire inflator attached to a long red hose spiraling back into the barn. Uly was typically take-charge, but he let Newton inflate all the tires good and tight by himself.

Frowning, Uly shook his head. “There ain’t no way the inner tubes are any good.”

Uly lifted the back of the go-kart to take some of the weight of the concrete off the tires. Newton overinflated all four tires, almost like he wanted the inner tubes to pop, but for the moment, they all still held air. Then Newton tossed the inflator aside while the compressor inside the barn continued to chug.

Now that the tires were as full as ticks inflated to the point of almost bursting and the concrete weight was in place, Uly was certain this next ride down the driveway was going to be much more fun.

“I bet we do a full three-sixty at the bottom of the driveway this time,” Newton said.

Uly adjusted the wheel-chocking limb. “Yeah. And we’ll be going a lot faster! If we spin out into the road, we can push the go-kart out of the way before any cars come by.”

Uly looked up at his friend. “Okay, Newton, when I say, ‘push,’ you push the limb to me from your side and then jump in. I’ll pull the limb and throw it out of the way and jump in next to you at the same time. Got it?”

“Got it.”

Uly put his hand on the limb and looked at Newton, who was already in position. The limb was pressed tight to the ground by the weight of the go-kart.

“Three, two, one, push!”

Newton pushed the limb hard, forcing it away from the back wheel on his side. Uly yanked the limb and threw it aside, and both boys vaulted onto the seat with Uly behind the steering wheel.

The go-kart rolled back slowly.

Uly twisted around to see where they were going while Newton remained facing forward with a huge grin on his face.

Both boys only had to give one kick before they were going faster than they could add any speed to, so they pulled their feet up onto the floor of the go-kart.

The mass of the concrete had stabilized the little vehicle and transferred most of the weight to the back tires. The extra weight didn’t give them more speed. Instead, the overinflated tires remained perfectly round, which greatly reduced the amount of tread in contact with the ground and reduced friction to a fraction of what they had experienced on the first ride.

They traveled the forty yards between the barn and the road at about half the speed of an object in free fall, which eventually would be an impressive forty-two miles per hour once they reached the end of the driveway.

The go-kart rattled and screeched, bouncing in great galloping hops as it careened down the driveway with its half-broken frame twisting out of shape with every bounce.

Uly was aware that Newton was screaming. It was the same scream Newton used when he jumped off a high limb in a tree with a rope tied around his waist. Which, for the record, had been a bad idea.

The first ride down the driveway hadn’t been all that thrilling. Now the end of the driveway approached at an alarming rate. They were practically already there!

And then something caught Uly’s eye that wasn’t there a second earlier. A sudden, cold knot of fear hit his stomach, and he started screaming with Newton.

An immense semitruck pulling a full-size trailer was barreling down the narrow country road at what looked like a hundred miles an hour.

Newton, who had no idea the semitruck was inbound and would be there in about three seconds, was still screaming with a huge smile on his face as if he were on a roller coaster.

Uly heard the air horn on the truck and knew the driver had seen them—probably too late.

Six months earlier, Uly and Newton had announced to their parents that they were going to spend some time in the library. Being naturally curious, they were wanting to research their own names. This met with hearty approval from all the adults who knew them, and they were allowed to spend as much time as they wanted in the library if they were more or less well-behaved.

Newton discovered Newtonian mechanics and was quite proud of himself. Uly liked the subject as well and thought it was much more interesting, logical, and comprehensible than the source of his name: a long poem by a man named Homer who hadn’t bothered to make it rhyme.

Their research into Isaac Newton inevitably led to information about Albert Einstein, who, they discovered, made the claim that matter and energy are made of the same thing and that time is relative as opposed to always being the same all the time everywhere.

Uly had been listening to Newton read aloud from a kids’ book about the theory of relativity when he interrupted. “Newton Dewberry! These claims of ole Albert Einstein are highly unlikely!”

“Yep, you’re right, Uly.”

But Uly didn’t want to be accused of being boneheaded if new facts came along to prove his initial misgivings unfounded.

As they sped down the driveway toward the country road at forty-two miles per hour—a country road that a random semitruck driver had decided was a good one to drive down that day—Uly began to reconsider the facts he had learned regarding the special theory of relativity.

He suddenly realized that not only is all mass made of energy, but energy of one kind is related to all the other kinds. In addition, he had the extraordinary insight that he could measure anything with nothing but his mind and senses. As a result, Uly intuitively measured the speed of the go-kart and the speed of the truck and calculated the exact moment of the impending convergence of the two.

He then considered his options. One possibility was to spin the steering wheel, but that might not actually stop them and would definitely fling both boys off the go-cart in unpredictable directions, potentially landing them in the middle of the road at the precise moment the semitruck arrived at the end of the driveway. The definition of a bad idea.

A second option was to impose the will of his mind over matter and cause the go-kart to fly away, avoiding the collision with the truck. That didn’t seem to be working and he didn’t have time to practice.

Finally, he seriously considered the amount of brake power he could apply by dragging his foot on the ground. Then he decided, with his newfound understanding of relativity, he would be unable to stop the go-kart in time.

During those moments of heightened awareness brought on by extreme impending danger, when time seemed to be moving at a crawl while his brain accelerated, Uly realized that far from being wishful thinking, option two, flight, was in fact in their future.

The sloping driveway flattened out and crossed a culvert that was installed in the ditch parallel to the road. The hard-packed soil over this piece of engineering had eroded and settled over the years, leaving a slope up to the roadbed, which was slightly higher than the end of the driveway. These differences were insignificant to anyone in a car or even a bicycle.

Uly could hear the low-pitched droning hum of Newton’s joyful, boyish screaming, the perceived pitch of which had been made low by the sound waves traveling slower in Uly’s relative time perception than they normally would be. He also later swore to Newton he could detect a slight shift in all colors toward the red end of the spectrum for the same reason, but Newton didn’t quite believe it.

While still experiencing hyperawareness, Uly could see the slight concave dip in the end of the driveway that sloped up to match the slight convex curvature of the profile of the roadbed. This, he calculated, would serve as a ramp; which, when they hit it traveling at a high speed, would launch their lightweight vehicle into the air and across the road with at least one long second to spare before the truck arrived in the same spot.

One second later, he was exactly right about all of this. However, he had failed to notice one thing about their ride.

They crossed over the culvert, dipped down into the slight depression there, and crossed onto the roadbed which bounced the boys and the go-kart up.

As the boys dropped back down on the seat, it was still descending against what remained of the strength of the horizontal side rails of the go-kart frame and the bounciness of the inflated tires. At the bottom of the downward bounce, the frame of the go-kart was spring-loaded.

As they began a second bounce back up, the go-kart seat rebounded with them, heaving them into the air with a mighty pitch similar to a double bounce on a trampoline, with the difference being they were traveling horizontally at nearly forty miles an hour.

Newton Dewberry’s feet rose in front of him as he flew backwards, sailing above the shrubs at the side of the road. Then, in pure astonishment, he watched as the semitruck he didn’t know about crossed in front of him.

Uly was looking backwards when they became airborne. He rotated in the air so that he was facing the ground and watched as the disintegrating go-kart flew through the shrubbery and peppered the surface of the water with parts and shrapnel. His body continued to rotate, bringing the sky into view.

Then he became aware that they had missed the truck. His brain slipped back from emergency mode into normal, real-time speed. The low note of the truck’s air horn rose in pitch as the truck tore by.

The boys, along with the chunk of concrete, hit the surface of the creek at angles, shedding kinetic energy into the water and creating a shock wave that spewed water into the air and onto the other side of the creek.

The dense concrete buried itself in the creek bottom, but the more buoyant boys joined the wave and settled into a few inches of water on the sandy inside turn of the creek.

Uly lay on his back with his head half buried in water and sand, blinking up at the sky as water from their splashdown dripped off the tree canopy above him. Newton had continued to rotate in the air and ended up facedown in the creek next to him. He flopped over a few feet from Uly and moaned.

“Uly, was that a truck?”

“Yes.”

“We are okay, right?”

“Yes.”

“Did you forget to do a three-sixty?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I decided not to so we wouldn’t get hit by the truck.”

“Yeah, okay. That was a good idea.”

They still hadn’t moved.

Newton looked into the canopy of the trees. A few drops of water were still falling from leaves near the creek.

He pointed. “Uly, is that a tire?”

“Looks like it, Newton Dewberry. It’s all that’s left of your go-kart. Guess I’ll fix that engine next week.”