Chapter 10

Good things come to those who wait, I guess. I won the feature that evening. We'd had to run earlier than normal because of not having any lights, and the sun was down and it was starting to get dim when I managed to hold off Sonny in the 77 car and pull off the win. It had been a while since I'd won, although I'd finished in the money several times, so it felt good to pull to a stop in front of the grandstand and accept the trophy that Frank carried with us to be presented to the winner each night. We had to give it back after the crowd left, of course, and it got a little beat up over the season. After the race, of course, some of the crowd gathered around to talk racing and the like.

Part of the reason we loaded all the cars in a hurry, except for the winning car, was that funny things could happen to a car if it was just allowed to sit out when there was a crowd around. People would try to steal stuff for souvenirs, or kids might try to scratch their names in the paint, or like that, so we always had to keep an eye on the cars after the race. The winning car was more exposed, but there were usually three or four of us around it to keep the vandals away.

As luck would have it, there was a gal in the crowd that seemed taken with me. She was dark skinned with long, dark hair and she was awful darn pretty. Her name was Rosita, and with a name like that she about had to be Mexican. She had a little of that accent, too, and it was awful interesting. I'm not sure if it was the effect that Chick and Hattie had been having on me all day, but she sure got my attention and I started sweet talking her a little. The next thing I knew I was asking her if she'd like to go someplace where we could be by ourselves, and she said she'd like that.

We had to wait for the crowd to die down a little, and along in there I got to talk to Hoss for a minute. "I think I got a live one," I told him.

"Have fun," he replied with a grin. "I think I'm gonna go look for a cop. Don't wait up for me."

After I had done what I had to do, Rosita and I got in my car and we headed in to the old hotel where we were spending the night. I no more than got the door to the room closed before Rosita was on me, and I mean to tell you that young lady could kiss a man half to death. It wasn't too long before we had clothes scattered all over that room, except for her brassiere, which was one of those old full-coverage things that seemed made out of armor plate protecting two pretty good hills. I went to take it off, but she stopped me. "You don't play with my tetas," she told me. "Those are just for my boyfriend."

After a while I figured it was time to be done with messing around and get down to business. Just about that time I heard some familiar bumping and screaming from the next room – Chick and Hattie were going at it again. "She sounds like she's enjoying it," Rosita grinned. "Let's see if we can enjoy it as much." She rolled onto her back and I took her up on her invitation. It would be awful hard to say if she enjoyed it as much as Hattie, but it had to be close either way.

It was after midnight before she said she had to be getting home. We had one last round, and both of us got dressed. I never did get a look at her bare tetas, much less get to play with them, but it would have been fun. Her boyfriend was sure lucky about that, I thought. By then, Chick and Hattie had settled down, and the place was quiet. We got down to the street, and I found Hoss asleep in the right seat of the Ford. "You can go up and go to bed," I told him. "I've got to take the lady home."

"OK, fine with me," he mumbled, stirring around.

"Did you find a cop?" I asked him.

"What?" he yawned. "Oh, yeah, it was pretty good."

It turned out that Rosita lived in a shack out on the edge of town, and I guess some of her family lived there, too. She didn't want me to drive her right up to her door for fear that she might wake someone up. We sat in the car kissing and cuddling for a while, and she even let me play with her tetas through her blouse and brassiere a little before I let her out and drove back to the hotel.

Hoss was sound asleep when I got back to the room, and I wasn't very far behind him even though I had to put a towel on the wet spot on the bed. Rosita had done a pretty good job of bringing things back into balance for me, and I slept pretty well.

Of course, Hoss had to tease me some when we got up in the morning. "God, I don't know how I got to sleep up here last night," he commented. "It smelled like a whorehouse on a busy Saturday night. I take it you had a good time."

"Not too bad," I told him. "Just between you and me I would have to say it was more than not too bad. In fact, I'd have to say that it was pretty good. How did it go with you?"

He yawned again and replied, "I've seen better, but then, I've seen worse. It was a really nice ride for five bucks. Got my ashes hauled, and that counts for something."

We got our stuff around and out to the vehicles, then went to breakfast across the street, where the rest of the crew was already or was straggling in. Hoss and I sat down with Frank and Spud, like we usually did. "So, how are you two this morning?" Frank asked.

"Oh, tolerable," I grinned.

"Yeah, tolerable," Hoss agreed.

"I can't speak about Hoss, but I could tolerate a little of what Mel had last night," Spud laughed. "She looked like one hot little babe."

"So Mel," Frank grinned. "Now that Chick is spoken for, are you going to take over the job of MMSA pussy hound?"

"I don't think so," I told him. "But I'm not going to turn my back on a good chance, either."

"A man would be a fool to do that," Spud laughed.

What with everything, I was in a little better mood when we got on the road a little later. Chick and Hattie had gotten me a little on edge, but Rosita had pretty well taken care of that problem. I figured I could hold out until the next time, although watching the two of them getting a little cuddly at breakfast made me think that a person could do better than having the occasional one night stand. But then, it was no guarantee that Chick and Hattie were going to be together very long past the first decent sized city we passed through, which I knew would be Denver in a few days, and there was already a pool going around on how long it would last.

I stopped at a truck stop along the way to our next stop to restock my depleted rubber supply from the night before. In those days you didn't have condoms on big display racks in every drug store. In fact, they were a little hard to get, except in truck stop rest rooms, by which you understand that they had lot lizards hanging around the truck stops on the major highways back then, too. Some things don't change.

If I recall correctly, our next stop was Dalhart, Texas. We headed out into Colorado from there. We'd all been looking forward to the race in Colorado Springs, since we knew it was going to be a big deal. One of the things that Carnie had tried to set up was for us to play on or near a military base right after the first of the month, when people got paid. Since we were all veterans, we knew that the people in the Army only got paid once a month, and it was traditional to have a big payday night drunk. In an effort to moderate that, some base commanders would invite some sort of traveling show, a carnival or something like us, to play right around payday to try and moderate some of the craziness.

But it didn't happen this time. While we were tearing down the night before in some town in southern Colorado, Carnie came driving in to tell Frank that the show had been canceled at the last minute. "Why's that?" Frank asked.

"Well, they're on an increased alert because of the war," Carnie said. "So they've restricted access to the base."

"War? What war?"

"Don't you guys listen to the news, or read the papers?" Carnie asked. "There's a war going on in Korea, and from what I can figure out it's not going too well. They're sending units from Japan to try and stop the commie Koreans from coming south."

"Shit," Frank said. "News to me. We've been out in boondock country where the only newspapers around tell you who Mabel had to dinner last week, and the only news on the radio stations is how we're going to hell if we don't come to Jesus. We've only got two or three radios with us, and I don't think anyone's had one on in weeks."

It turned out that the news that a war had broken out in Korea was nearly a week old, but we just hadn't been plugged into it. It's amazing to look back today and realize how isolated from the news we were, because it wasn't much like today. There was no such thing as national news on TV; in fact, I'd seen my first TV set in a bar in Milwaukee the winter before, and I hadn't seen one since. There really hadn't been much on it and it didn't seem like it was worth my time. There were the national radio networks – CBS, NBC Blue, and NBC Red, which later became ABC, along with a couple other smaller ones. The networks were pretty good about news, and it was the waning days of all the famous old radio shows. But this was all in the days of AM radio. We had been in a section of the country where there were mostly a bunch of little short-range potboiler radio stations that either played hillbilly music or was all gospel and preaching, so, like Frank said, we mostly didn't bother to turn what radios we had on. I didn't have a radio in the Ford – cheap cars didn't come with radios in the days when it was built. Woody may have had a radio in his car, but I don't remember now; none of the trucks had them.

So, there wasn't a whole lot we could do but head on into Colorado Springs, where we'd had tourist cabins already reserved. Carnie had thought about trying to set up an alternate show at a local race track but he couldn't make schedules match and there wasn't time to promote anything, so we just had the day off. At least if we had to have a day off it was a decent town to have one in. A few of us decided to drive up to the top of Pike's Peak, just for something to do; that made the old Ford wheeze like hell to crawl up to the top. Later in the summer they closed that road for a race to the top, and it would have been fun to try in the race cars but that came later in the summer, so that was that.