Chapter 22

That spring and summer were a little bit strange, because we went for months with the same eleven drivers we'd left Livonia with in the spring, and that had never happened before, at least while I'd been with the show. Oh, we'd pick up a local driver to run with us for a show or two, but it was just for those shows and for whatever reason they never joined up with us.

Since we had an odd number of guys, that meant that we didn't have to always share a room. That made it handy when some one of us would pick up a honey for the evening since there was always a spare bed for their roommate to head to, so that cut down on the nights that someone had to spend sleeping in one of the cars. The way we worked it was that the feature winner got to sleep alone, which worked out pretty good since the feature winner was more likely to pick up a girl than the others. Although, if someone else picked up a girl and the winner didn't then the spare bed got put to use anyway.

I'm not sure how it came about, but somehow I wound up with Dewey as my roommate more often than not. Dewey was a nice kid, but he was still a kid, if you know what I mean. He'd had absolutely no experience in a race car when he joined – not that I'd had a lot more when I joined – but he learned fast. Before long he wasn't always running in the consolations, and in fact was finishing in the money now and then if the race ran right for him.

He was a quiet kid and kind of hung back from the group a little. I'm not saying he wasn't friendly, but he was far and away the youngest of the crew and about the only one who wasn't a veteran, so he didn't always fit right in. The Korean War was still going on, and that bit about him not being a veteran raised a question or two in my mind. One rainy day when we didn't have anything better to do I asked him about it. "How come you aren't in the service, at your age?" I asked.

"I ain't been called," he said. "I don't plan on going if they don't call me. My brother did that and he got killed in Korea."

Well, that was understandable as hell, I thought. "You know, you're probably going to get called sooner or later," I said.

"Probably," he shrugged. "But maybe I won't be, either. Maybe the war will be over by the time they get around to it. Like I said, if I get called, I'll go."

"Can't ask for much more than that," I said. "This war is different. Back when I was in the Army I felt like I was lucky to get drafted so I could get in before the fun was over with. It turned out it wasn't a hell of a lot of fun, and we've got people with us who had it a lot worse than I did."

After a time Dewey was more one of the group. He was always careful, and always dependable. He would only rarely get into an all-out battle for position, but had a tendency to dog your tail and wait for an opening, and once he got some track sense he was good as spotting those openings.

One night, toward the end of the spring swing through the south and west he got a little lucky with the flow of the race and wound up winning, his first time to do it. He wasn't twenty-one yet, but that didn't stop us from trying to get him drunk to celebrate his first victory. I won't say we got him drunk, but we got him flying pretty good. He was sick as a dog when we got back to the motel that night and spent a good chunk of the night worshipping the porcelain goddess. The next morning he had a head on him that just wasn't funny, and he slept most of the way on our jump to the next bullring.

I have to say I never saw him get drunk after that, even after he won the next time a month or so later. So, we fixed him up with a girl that was hanging around the victory circle after the race by talking him up to her. I wound up spending the night with Rocky while Dewey had the girl in our room. From what we could figure out they must have had a pretty good night, since the girl was walking a little sore when he borrowed my car to take her home the next morning, and he had a big grin on his face over breakfast a little later. Nothing much was said, but then nothing much had to be said, either.

A couple nights later, in Matoon, Illinois, I had a pretty good battle with Buck through most of the feature. The lead changed hands several times, and I finally beat him out on a high-line pass at the finish. Although I'd been in the money a couple times I hadn't won in a while, so it felt good to break my luck and know that I still could get the job done. I pulled into what passed for a winner's circle, and Spud handed me the trophy; the local paper even took a photo, which didn't happen very often.

One of the nice things about winning was that you got to stand around and shoot the shit with fans a little. Often as not it was a good time to pick up a honey for the evening, and I'll admit I was looking forward to breaking my luck there, too. Sure enough, there were several women there, but my eyes were drawn right to one gal, who had a build like the proverbial brick shithouse, and long, black hair done up in a perm. I could see that she had eyes for me, but I could also see that she had a boyfriend or husband or something with her, and he wasn't at all happy about her, along with being so loaded that I could smell the booze on him from several feet away. She was friendly, and I tried to be nice, although my sights had pretty well settled on a little brunette that seemed to have stars in her eyes and hot pants for me.

The crowd had thinned out pretty good and I was just getting set to ask the brunette if she'd like to go have a drink or a late dinner with me, when the black-haired girl acted like she didn't want to be beat out, and put her arm around me. That pissed her boyfriend off real bad; he yanked her away with one hand and took a big swing at her with his other, hitting her in the face pretty bad.

That really pissed me off. Granted, she was stepping out of line by putting the make on me while her boyfriend or whatever was right there, but that didn't give him call to be hitting on her. In only a second he was getting set to take another swing at her and I was swinging at him. I hit him hard, and he went down right there, at least partly because at the same time I hit him on one side of his head Dewey hit him on the other side of the head with the flat side of a big crescent wrench.

Both Dewey and I turned to the girl as he fell in the dirt. "You all right, miss?" I asked.

"I'll be OK," she sniffed. Not real OK, I thought; she was going to have a great big shiner in the morning. "I wouldn't have been if you hadn't stopped him, though," she went on.

"Has he hit you before?" I asked.

"Yeah," she said, "Lots."

"Then why are you putting up with it?" I asked.

"I wouldn't put up with it if I had a way to get out of this damn town," she replied angrily.

"What, are you trapped here or something?" I wondered.

"I don't have any place to go," she said, the tears rolling. "If I tried to leave he'd hunt me down and kill me."

By now there were several of the guys hanging around. "Sound familiar?" Frank smiled.

"Hattie, right?" I said to him. "I was thinking about that myself."

"Your choice," he said with a grin.

I turned back to the girl, but I was thinking about Chick meeting up with Hattie a couple years before. To be honest, I had yet to meet up with a track honey that I really wanted to take with me, but this gal was awful pretty and I suppose it hit me in a soft spot. "What's your name?" I asked.

"Lillian," she said. "Lillian Eberle."

"All right, Lillian," I said. "If you really want to get out of town, you can ride with us for a while until we can find a safe place to leave you."

"But ... but what about him?" she asked. "He'll come after me."

"I think we can rig it around to give us a little head start," Spud grinned. "And you'll be with us if he does come after you."

"Oh, God, yes," she cried. "Take me with you. I'll fuck every one of you to thank you if you can keep him away from me."

I guess I have to say that I rolled my eyes at that. It was clear right from the beginning that Lillian was no Hattie, in more ways than one, and I could see trouble in the future. We were only about a week out of Livonia by that point, and I figured probably we could find a place to leave her there. At least I was already hoping we could. "Maybe you don't have to be quite that grateful," I smiled. "We don't have anything against helping out a pretty woman in trouble."

"Well, I still would if you wanted me to," she smiled. "Anything to get away from that bastard. How can you keep him from following us?"

"We'll come up with something," Spud smiled. "If Mel takes you to wherever you've been living, can you get your stuff to take with us?"

"I don't have much," she said. "I ... I ... yes, I can."

"Good," Frank said. He bent down, rolled the guy over, and pulled his wallet and car keys out of his pants. He opened the wallet, pulled out a wad of bills, and handed it to her. "Here's a little grubstake for you. Now you and Mel go find his car, put the keys and wallet in it and lock it up. Then Mel will take you to get your stuff."