Chapter 26

The winter dragged slowly onward. The days weren't too bad, and I could get through some evenings by reading some book or other, but that got old after a while too. However, Rocky and Pepper weren't the kind of guys to curl up with a book, and they spent a lot of evenings hanging around a neighborhood bar that had a television set. I used to go with them once in a while, almost always on Friday nights when they had the Gillette Friday Night Fights on. Those were pretty good, but sitting in a bar with a beer in my hand watching a fuzzy black and white picture of two guys battering each other got old after a while too.

I think it was Rocky that summed it up best one night: "You know what's missing this year?" he asked out of nowhere.

"What?" I said.

"Hattie," he replied flatly.

There wasn't anything intelligent that I could reply to that, other than to say, "Yep." He was dead right and I knew it. Hattie was Chick's wife, of course, but it took her to make a family out of us. We all pulled together like a family should and she treated the rest of us like we were her brothers or something. Without her around it was just the three of us guys doing a bad job of batching it for the winter.

I worked the odd day at the shop with the guys, but mostly it was substitute teaching. Unlike last year, I didn't have a long-term position this year, so I might be teaching phys ed in one school one day and algebra in another school across town the next, although God help any kid who ever learned any algebra from me. Mostly it was just babysitting, except on the odd days that I taught social studies or auto shop, where I could actually contribute something. That got old pretty quickly, too, and I was getting itchy to get back out on the road.

Eventually it got to be February. It was Pepper's turn to be the fourth person on the annual Daytona expedition with Carnie, Frank and Vivian. They were gone pretty close to two weeks, and came back with nice tans. Pepper reported that Buck had a car in the race, but had only finished in the middle of the field. He and Frank saw Dewey while they were down there. Dewey told them he'd be back to run with us in the spring, but that it was a hell of a lot warmer to spend the winter down south than it was to freeze his butt in Michigan, and most of us agreed with that.

About the time that Frank got back, he had to get serious about the driver situation, which had gotten worse while he'd been gone.

Things in the shop had slowed down a bit while Frank and Pepper had been gone, and along in there Dink took a few days off. We hardly ever saw Dink outside of work because he was spending his time with the two fat cousins he'd been living with. We teased him about it a little, but he was getting a good deal of feminine companionship, which is more than the rest of us were managing, so we weren't in a position to tease him too hard. I was teaching that day, but he really surprised Spud when he came in one morning, announced that he was taking a job at the Buick dealership across town, and they wanted him there as soon as he could be there. He'd decided to make the arrangement with his two girls a little more permanent. He said he liked them both but they hadn't worked out among the three of them which one he was going to marry, so he thought maybe he'd just continue shacking up with the both of them. None of us could figure out how the three of them could manage to sleep in a double bed, so we figured he had to switch off between them some way, but he never explained what it was.

In any case, that took Dink off of the driver's list for the next summer. A few days later, Skimp came into the shop and told Spud that he'd taken a job on the line at Ford's Rawsonville plant, which paid a lot better money than what he could make with the MMSA. He'd been dating some gal off and on over the winter, so that may have had something to do with it, too. Skimp had been the oldest of our whole crew, and toward the end of the last season it had seemed to have been wearing him down.

So, when Frank got back he discovered that our tight little crew from the summer before had done a lot of scattering. Only Pepper and Rocky had been driving for the MMSA longer than I had, and Pepper by only a month or so. Of the rest, the only one working with us was John Adorney, and he said he'd be back. Dewey had told Frank he intended to be back, but Frank wasn't about to believe him until he showed up. Frank was pretty sure that two of the New Jersey guys from last year didn't plan on being back but thought that Perk and Scotty might show. So, that was four, and maybe as many as seven drivers, when we needed to have ten or eleven, and preferably twelve.

Fortunately, Frank had done a little more around Daytona than just hole up with Vivian, although according to Pepper he'd done quite a bit of that. Frank had a notebook with several addresses of guys that he'd met down at the race that might be possible drivers, so he got letters off to them, and called Runt and Squirt out in New Jersey, hoping they'd have some leads for him.

I won't go through all the stuff that Frank went through because I didn't know all of it myself – since I was teaching school instead of spending a lot of time around the shop, I wasn't always aware of everything that was going on. Along toward the end of March Dewey rolled in ready to go racing, and Scotty called to say that he and Perk would be along in a few days and would be bringing another driver with them they thought would fit in. Frank put out the word around the local driver's gossip circuit and managed to come up with a guy by the name of Dutch Kindleberger.

Just a couple days before the season was set to open Frank was still working his contacts, trying to come up with another couple bodies, when the most decrepit-looking '37 Plymouth you ever saw rolled in with three hillbilly friends of Buck on board. They were two brothers named Hap and Junie, and some distant cousin of theirs called Buckshot. That Plymouth didn't look like it could last another ten miles, it was that beat out. It had enough left in it to make it out to Frank's uncle's barn, where they left it to sit out the summer. Frank wasn't too sure what to make of the three of them, at least partly because Buck hadn't been the world's greatest driver or the world's smartest, but right about then he was ready to try anything.

Some of the rest of us had already taken the cars out to Flat Rock to give them their spring test, but we went out the day before our first race to break in the guys who hadn't run with us before. For the first of April, it was a warm spring day for Michigan; things were greening up a little, although the trees were still winter bare. The sun beat down on us pretty good, warming things up nicely and holding promise for a good summer to come.

Red, the third New Jersey guy took right to the way we were trying to do things, but I guess he'd already had a pretty good briefing from Perk and Scotty, and from what they said he'd been around midgets for a while. Dutch and the three hillbillies were a different story; we had a hell of a time trying to get through their thick skulls that the idea was to look like we were racing, not try to knock everyone else off the track so they could go on and win. Frank laid down the law right away that somebody messing up a car punting someone else for position was going to be out on his ass so quick it wouldn't be funny. Dutch seemed to get the message after that, but those three North Carolina hillbillies could have given dumb lessons to fence posts.

We wrapped up our testing during the daylight so we wouldn't have to pay to have the lights turned on, and headed back to Livonia. When we got back, Rocky, Pepper, and I got cleaned up, and decided to head over to the bar to have one of their fat bar burgers, some fries, and catch the fights on the TV.

The fights were popular and the place filled up early for them, but we were lucky enough to get there early and get a table with a good view of the TV set. We each ordered drafts and settled in to wait. "I'll tell you one damn thing," Rocky said. "It sure ain't going to be the crew we had last year, that's for sure."

"Damn straight," Pepper agreed. "I'll bet damn good money that we won't go all through the season with the same drivers we started with, like last year."

"Hell," Rocky snorted. "I'd be surprised if we make it a month. I think I remember that Dutch guy from when I used to run jalopies around here, except we called him 'Crash' then. Would you like to guess why we called him that?"

"I get the picture," I shook my head.

"I think he totaled something like five cars in two months," Rocky said. "They were just junkers, but still. We spend all winter spiffing up those cars and then we get assholes like that that'll tear 'em up in minutes. That don't set too well with me, if you know what I mean."

"Yeah, I was thinking the 27 car was going to get run some this year," Pepper agreed. "Actually, we ought to talk to Spud and have him have one of those guys run it right from the beginning while we keep a good car in reserve in the box truck."

"You could do that," I shook my head. "But what do you want to bet it's the only one that wouldn't get piled up?"

"That's the way things work, that's for sure," Rocky nodded. "And Lord! I thought Buck was dumb but somehow them three inbred hillbillies have got to learn that you can't bang fenders on an open wheel car 'cause there ain't no fenders to bang."

"Yeah," Pepper laughed. "You know why a hillbilly goes to a family reunion? To meet women."

Rocky and I laughed at that, then Rocky shook his head and commented, "Unfortunately, there's more truth to that than there is fiction."

"I don't see where there's a hell of a lot we can do about it," I shook my head. "About all we can do is hope that Frank bounces their ass if they get too crazy and that nothing gets too torn up in the process."

"Yeah, actually you're probably right," Rocky shook his head. "And you ought to add to that the hope that none of us gets too messed up in the process, either."

We sat there and batted around those general thoughts for a while, adding that we all thought that Red seemed to be getting the idea of what we were doing pretty well, and that was at least something. We had a few more drafts, and then the fights came on, so we sat there and watched them for a while before we headed back to the apartment for the night. I couldn't help but feel that the season was getting off on the wrong foot and that there wasn't much good that could come of it. While I was looking forward to being back out on the road, right at that moment the idea of a classroom didn't seem all that bad.