Chapter 25

Sure enough, Lillian left us a few days after that. Carnie had hooked her up with some guy that ran some kiddie-sized flat joints; he'd been a good friend when he was younger, and he didn't doubt that he'd take good care of Lillian. I know I slipped her a hundred dollar bill for good luck, and I'm pretty sure most of the rest of the crew slipped her something, too, just so she'd have the chance to do something else if she decided she didn't like it.

The truth be told, I think most of us were just about as glad to see her go. She was with us close to three months, and we'd always managed to get along even though one woman among that many men ought to have been a guaranteed recipe for trouble. It always felt like it was just around the corner with her, although really, it never came. I don't think things could have held out over the winter like it had been, with us staying in the same place, and that really would have destroyed the close feeling we had on the crew that year.

I'll have to admit that Lillian was the starting place for a few fantasies over the next several months. Don't get me wrong – I liked her a lot, but I knew right from the beginning that it would have been a terrible disaster to fall in love with her, because she was the kind of woman that could never, ever be faithful. At least she was honest about that. But somehow, even more than the memory of Bessie long ago, she gave me the vision of what it might be like to settle down with a woman of my own, and when I thought about that the idea of settling down in one place didn't seem quite so unappealing.

Like so many people that I met in those days, I never heard from Lillian again. I hope that she was able to work it out so that she could have a good life. She really was a sweet woman, but liking sex with different men the way she liked it seemed likely to bring trouble sooner or later. I hope she managed to avoid it. Just since I've been working on this, I've imagined her even older than we are now, living in a wheelchair in some nursing home, but rolling from bed to bed servicing some of the other old farts in the place. I wouldn't put it past her. I'm not ready for a nursing home yet and with luck it'll be a while if at all, but I can think of a worse way to go.

Along in there somewhere right around the time Lillian left us, I was driving through some fairly big city jumping from one place to the next – it may have been St. Louis, but I'm not sure, now – when I happened to spot a hock shop that advertised guns. I pulled over and went in, and before it was over with I spent around ten bucks on a police-style snubnose .38 that would conceal pretty decently. The two guys in the car with me were in the store and asked me why I'd done that, and I told them, "Just to be on the safe side in case Dwight shows up again."

"You know, that's not all that bad an idea at that," one of them, it may have been Rocky, said, and the other one agreed. He turned to the guy that ran the place and said, "You got any more of them?"

Many of the rest of the crew picked up .32s or .38s over the next few days, and we kept them pretty close at hand throughout the rest of the season. We had a fairly different crew the next season, but those of us that had been around when Dwight had been shipped off still kept them handy. I guess it worked out, because we never saw him again, and that was just fine with us. I still wonder sometimes what happened to him; maybe he rode all the way to San Francisco and decided to stay there. Somehow, I doubt it, though.

All that is getting ahead of the story, but just a little bit. That was the fall of the presidential election, Eisenhower versus Stevenson. There's no way of telling now, but I think if you polled the crew most of us were Democrats, although not real satisfied with the way things had gone the last couple years with Truman. I think that most of us would have voted for Eisenhower if we bothered to vote at all, which I don't think any of us did. But, there was a lot of election hoopla around, with billboards and whatnot. I still remember the girl that came onto me in the winner's circle one evening with at least six "I LIKE IKE" buttons on. She was the first honey I picked up after Lillian left us and we had a pretty good time, but I remember thinking after I took her home that none of us had ever referred to Lillian as a honey. She'd always been more than that to us.

I think we were down in Kentucky when the election happened, but I don't think any of us paid much attention to it. The next morning, we were sitting in some "EAT" place having breakfast when two guys in the restaurant, not any of us, got into a fist fight over the outcome. We just basically stayed the hell out of the way. "Guess Ike won," Frank shrugged.

"Looks like it to me," I agreed.

"Wonder if anything's going to be any different?" Skimp said.

"Naw, they're just a bunch of fucking politicians," Scotty shrugged. "They're all in favor of the same thing: 'Gimme.'"

"Would be nice if he can end the war, though," Dewey commented.

Spud shook his head. "It's only going to happen when all the fat cats have wrung all they can out of it."

I think that was about the extent of our political discussion for the year, although I have to think that if Sonny Ochsenlaager had been with us we'd probably have talked about it some more. But no one had heard from Sonny in over a year, and no one had any idea what he might be doing. When we left someone behind us, we moved on. Half the guys on the crew now had never run with him, and it wouldn't have surprised me in the slightest if a few more of us old timers moved on the next year.

By then we were starting to run out of the fair dates. We still had a few, well down in the south, and we ran a few still dates at tracks, mostly on the weekend, but by then there were beginning to be two and three days at a crack when we didn't run at all. November dragged on, and finally the weekend before Thanksgiving we ran our last date of the season, at Opp, Alabama. It was an afternoon date, so we loaded up after the race and hauled up to a motel outside Montgomery, spent the night there, and made an easy jump to Chattanooga the next day. Once again, we stayed in the same motel we'd stayed in the last two years, and went to the same steak house for our after season banquet.

I hadn't been paying attention to the season championship, mostly because Frank didn't bother to add things up until the season was over with, reasoning that it wasn't something worth taking an extra risk for. I thought I might be in the top three, since I'd had a flat spot early in the season when things just hadn't gone my way but had done pretty decently in the tail end of the season. As it turned out, I just edged out Dink by about ten bucks, and Frank said that it had been in the last three races that I'd done it. Scotty Lombard wound up third, but with the exception of John Adorney, who'd only joined us at the tail end of July, we were closer together in money than we'd ever been before. Even Dewey, a total beginner at the beginning of the season, finished sixth.

We started breaking up at Chattanooga. We were pretty close to home for Buck there, only a hundred miles or two across the hills, and we already knew he was planning on heading home for a bit to see what he could do about a ride down south for next year. He and Dewey had been getting along pretty good, and in the last few days Dewey had decided to go with Buck, maybe help him with his car and head down to Florida with him. Buck had said that he probably wouldn't be back another year if he could come up with a decent ride, but Dewey said that he'd be back unless something came up.

Chattanooga was also a good place for the four New Jersey guys to head for home, so the four of them loaded up their Pontiac the next morning, promising to drop off Buck and Dewey on the way. It must have been pretty crowded for six guys and their gear but it was only a couple hundred miles, so that was something they could put up with. Scotty and Perk said that they might be back the next year, depending on how things went at home over the winter, so we'd have to wait and see.

That slimmed the crew down pretty good. With six vehicles, three trucks and three cars, and nine of us that left some of us driving solo the next two days back to Livonia. That seemed pretty strange after being jammed into the vehicles all year.

Coming back to Livonia seemed a lot more like coming home than it had when we'd been there earlier in the summer. Like the last two winters, there were a few of us who decided to rent a place and batch it for the winter, although it wouldn't be as comfortable as it had been when we'd had Chick and Hattie living with us. Skimp had already announced that he was going to batch it with his brother for the winter not far away – apparently his brother had been having wife troubles, too. John decided that he was going to move back in with his folks for the winter, although he'd continue to work with the crew going through the cars for the winter. That got us down to Dink, Rocky, Pepper, and me staying together. Vivian had already lined up an apartment for us, a block or so away from where Frank and Spud were going to stay. Apparently that part of the story was going to be a rerun of the last winter, with Frank running Spud out once in a while so he and Vivian could have some time together, so Spud was always going to be welcome on our couch.