Chapter 31

The race that evening was routine, except that we ran just the two heats and everyone in the main, dropping the consolation race again. As it worked out, Arlene was in the first heat and I was in the second. She won her heat, and I was somewhere around third; I was taking it a little easy since I'd done pretty good at Schererville. I knew now that those restrictor plates were all too easy to change. I buckled down a little in the feature, but still ran about fifth. Arlene started in the back of the field and was fighting it out with Rocky for the lead when the race came down to the end. Rocky won it, but by a nose.

After we loaded up the cars that evening, I got Arlene off to the side. "A word to the wise," I told her. "Don't try to win all the time unless you want Spud to get funny with your restrictor plate."

"I thought that was just to slow down someone that's being a cowboy," she said.

"Yeah," I nodded. "But it's also to slow down someone who's winning too much. I think Spud will be willing to let you win more than your fair share of the time just for the sake of the crowd. Hell, I win more than my fair share. But you want to be careful about overdoing it. I try to hold it to about once a week, and you might want to think about that. I mean, unless Frank or Spud tells you different."

"I see," she nodded. "There's more to it than just racing."

"That's about the size of it," I told her. "Never forget that while we're racing, we're also putting on a show for the customers. People like to see close racing and lots of passing and re-passing, so it's our job to give it to them, even if it means that we don't run quite as well as we might otherwise."

After that, she won about once a week, although I don't doubt that she could have won most any time she really wanted to. The 2 car had never been that successful a car, but in her hands ... well, there was something that worked there. I can't explain it; that's just the way it was.

As it turned out, the new guy, Sandy, ran in the middle of the pack that evening and didn't do too bad a job. Spud was close to him quite a bit during the race and Frank was keeping an eye on him. After it was over with they decided that he did a fairly decent job, so they invited him to come along with us. He jumped on it in an instant. I didn't think he was going to set the world on fire but looked to me to be a fairly solid driver, and that was what we needed, rather than hot shots who were going to tear up the equipment.

We worked our way onward. About a week or so later we were in Mosinee, Wisconsin. That wasn't any kind of a big town, but it wasn't too far from Wausau, which is where I guess we were going to be drawing our crowd from. The track didn't look like much, and we were at the height of black fly season, so the flies were as thick as, well, flies. I'd seen worse places to race, but I'd seen awful lots better, too. Fortunately we had a tourist court that wasn't too bad out towards the edge of Wausau, and considering the flies we all pretty much decided to skip the work on the cars that evening and catch up on our nap time.

Wausau was one of those places that Frank had set up with Vivian to send our mail. There usually wasn't a lot of it, and hardly ever anything for me, so I really wasn't even aware of it being mail day. Before the race we took an early dinner at some local restaurant, and Frank handed out our mail. I didn't get anything of course, but John got two or three letters. That wasn't a surprise since he got about as much mail as anybody, all from his family. Occasionally he'd get a box of cookies, which he'd share out to all of us.

However, this time it wasn't cookies that he got. "Oh, shit!" he said loud enough that all of us could hear him. "I got drafted."

Being as how most of us were veterans, there wasn't a hell of a lot of sympathy, although the draft board back in Livonia could have picked a better time for us.

"So when do you have to report?" Frank asked.

"End of the month," he shook his head. "Well, if I gotta go, I gotta go."

"That doesn't leave you a lot of time," Frank said. "You better plan on taking the next bus out of here so you can spend a little time with your family before you report."

"Yeah, I guess," he said, shaking his head. "Damn, I'm going to miss you guys."

Frank called the waitress over and asked about bus schedules. It turned out there was only one bus heading southbound a day, along in the morning, but it stopped at that very restaurant. It would take him south to Madison, where he could get a bus to Chicago, and then a bus or a train from there home.

"Hey, Dewey," Sandy, the new guy piped up. "How come you ain't been drafted?"

"Don't know," he shrugged. "They ain't never called me so I never went. How about you?"

"They called me, but I've got flat feet, I'm 4-F. I didn't think too much about going to Korea, anyway."

It was kind of a quiet meal after that. The Korean War was still going on, even though most of us weren't paying attention to it. Well, Arlene took a little more interest than most, since she'd been there for two years, and she was the one to answer the question that John and the rest of us had in our minds but didn't want to ask. "You might get lucky," she said. "The war is definitely winding down. The shooting isn't over with yet but when I left there everybody was thinking that a cease fire might not be too far off."

That made everybody feel a little better. John was a good kid, and everyone liked him. He didn't win a lot, but he always ran strong and was careful with the equipment. He was taking this bad news like a man, and I made up my mind we were going to leave him with some good memories. It didn't take me a hell of a lot of selling once we got out to the track. One by one, I got to all the other drivers and got them to agree that unless his car crapped out tonight, John was going to end his MMSA career with a win.

The flies were pretty well gone after dark, but they were replaced with mosquitoes that were about as bad, if not worse. But in spite of the bugs there was a pretty good crowd that had come out to watch the show, which consisted of the local jalopies and us. As it turned out, John ran pretty good in the 69 car that night anyway, and nobody had to dog it too obviously for him to get pretty solid wins in both the heat and the feature. Frank had worked it out with the track management to run the local feature last, rather than the midget show, so the stands were still full when he pulled up to the start-finish line to do his victory lap and get congratulated. While he was there, Frank announced over the loudspeakers that this was John's last race in the MMSA as he was heading off to serve his country, and that got him a big cheer.

Then, I'll be darned if the track owner didn't come on and say, "Let's pass the buckets around so this brave young man has some money in his pocket when he heads off to war." Frank always swore up and down that it was the track owner's idea, not his, but I guess that the track owner had heard the story of the hat being passed for Hap and Junie back in Schererville.

Then, to top it off, he got a big old kiss from the track queen, a nice Scandinavian-looking girl who hung around him in the pits afterward. There was a little more kissing going on, some hugging, and finally I walked over and handed him my car keys so he could "take her home." I somehow suspect Frank had a hand in that, too, but I never asked him.

When we got back to the tourist court, my car was parked in front of John's cabin, Scotty's suitcase was sitting on the steps, the lights in the cabin were out and there were some interesting sounds coming from inside. It must have been a pretty good night, since my car was gone when I got up, although John showed up a little while later, looking pretty tired but very satisfied. I think that he had a pretty good sendoff for a young man who had to head off to report for duty, and he didn't seem to be complaining when we put him on the bus in front of the restaurant a couple hours later. I know I was thinking that it would have been nice if I'd had a sendoff like that, and I think most of us would have agreed.

We got the occasional letter from John after that, never very often, but just keeping up. As luck and the Army way would have it, he didn't have to go to Korea. Far from it; after he got out of training, he spent the next year and a half in Hawaii. He reported that the outfit there was pretty gone on spit shining their stuff but that it beat freezing his butt in the winter in Michigan or Korea, and I think he got that right.

Since we'd had to wait around for the bus, we got on the road late and it was a long haul to our next stop, which was Red Wing, Minnesota. I'd talked to Spud a little the night before about a new driver, and he said they'd have to keep their eyes open. It wasn't critical since we hadn't got the 57 back to running yet, but another few days and it would become more of an issue. If we didn't find another driver or two we might have to go back to running consolations, which were a pain in the neck now that we were getting used to doing without them. But, something always happened and I wasn't too worried about it, mostly because it was Frank and Spud's problem to worry about, anyway.

Actually, I had something else on my mind as I drove across Wisconsin. As luck would have it, John was the first one of us to pick up a track honey since Arlene had joined us. I know I've made it sound like it happened every night, but it really didn't. It didn't happen every place we went and sometimes it didn't happen for a while at all. Sometimes we'd go a week or two with nobody getting any action, and then we'd hit the right place at the right time and some of us would wind up sleeping in our cars because all the rooms were busy. You just never knew what was going to happen; it was a luck of the draw thing.

Up until it happened with John, I hadn't given much thought to how Arlene would react to one of us picking up some gal and screwing her silly. Most especially, I wondered what would happen if it was me who happened to pick up the girl. Arlene had seemed to be just a little tickled at John picking up that girl the night before – it made his sendoff that much more special, and she knew what men were, of course. But that was special, and how it would go over in the normal run of things was another question entirely.