Chapter 35

So, we settled in for the winter. The four of us batching it worked out about as good and as bad as it had with the three of us the winter before. There still wasn't a one of us that could do much more cooking than opening a can of soup and warming it up without burning it, so other than sandwiches and stuff we didn't eat much at the apartment. There was still that cozy little café a little ways away, and we ate there a lot; sometimes we'd go to the bar that had the television set up in the corner and watch whatever happened to be on while we had a beer or three.

We'd just started to get settled in pretty good when I got a letter from Arlene. It actually came to me in care of Herb's; Frank brought it over to the shop, and Rocky brought it home to me. In her letter, Arlene came right out and said that she didn't like the nursing job very much; being new, she mostly had to work nights, and it was awful dull most of the time. Working nights put her on a different shift from her friend, so they weren't spending a lot of time together. Working nights gave her the chance to get outside during the day some, and she was spending some of her time on the beach, but usually by herself. She said she missed racing, being with the guys and me; she was counting the days until she could head back north and get back to racing.

The day after her letter arrived, I was mostly babysitting a series of algebra classes. Since I really couldn't do much teaching in that subject the classes were just a glorified study hall and about as boring for me as it was for the kids. Maybe more boring; they at least had their studying and their books to work on, and I had nothing. Finally, I got several sheets of notebook paper from one of the kids and started a letter to Arlene. I don't recall that it was anything terribly special, just bringing her up to date on what news there was, mostly about the cars and such. I wrote a bit about the kids; this was right around the height of the poodle skirt craze and a good many of the girls were wearing them. I frankly thought they looked a little stupid, and at least I could tell Arlene that.

This was also about the time that people were really worried about the Russians having the hydrogen bomb, and we had to waste time with drills where the kids had to get under their desks. That struck me as being about as stupid as you could ask for. After all, I'd seen the total devastation in Nagasaki about six months after it had been bombed. Being under a desk wouldn't have done a darn bit of good if one of those things went off anywhere within several miles. What's more, I told the kids about seeing Nagasaki, and that they better darn well hope that anything like that would never happen. I wrote to Arlene telling her about telling the kids about that, mostly to have something to write about.

After that, Arlene and I exchanged letters about once or twice a week. She admitted that most of her letters were written during her night shift when there was nothing much going on because it helped her to stay awake, just like most of mine were written when I was watching over a class to keep the kids from getting out of hand. These were just chatty letters, since most of the time there wasn't any real news to pass on.

What with everything, the time between Thanksgiving and when the schools took their Christmas break passed fairly quickly, but the time over the break made up for it, since everything dragged by slowly. I went over to the shop and worked with the guys some, and on the weekends the four of us pulled my old Ford into the shop where we tore it down and rebuilt it once again. As before, I thought about trading it to Herb for a new car, but he wouldn't give me anything for a car that old and with that many miles on it, so I decided to stretch it out for one more season and save my money.

That helped time move along a little better, but Christmas is a time for family, and once again I was spending it without one. It was ten years in a row, now; the last Christmas I'd had with my family had been in 1943, and frankly it had been a rather thin Christmas. For some reason this one held the prospect of being bleaker than ever before – there was no reason to think that because every other Christmas over the past decade had been about as bleak. One thing made it a little better: Frank's mother and father invited the whole gang of us that were wintering over to their house for a nice dinner. Even Vivian was there, and it made things seem a little more homelike.

The last New Year's Eve, Rocky, Pepper, Spud and I had spent in the apartment, playing cards and getting drunk on our butts for the lack of anything better to do. It turned out that Rocky had seen Dink now and then, so it must have been through him that Dink found out about it. However he found out, Dink and his two girls wound up inviting us over for New Year's Eve. I'd only seen Dink once briefly when we were in Livonia on one of our stops over the summer, and hadn't seen the girls at all. When we got over to their house we found that the two of them were as fat as ever, but the three of them were pretty darn chummy. I have to admit that the two girls weren't all that bad looking if you made allowance for their weight. They put on a nice feed for us, and it wound up getting pretty drunk around there that evening. They still hadn't worked out among them who was going to marry Dink, and Dink said he'd given some thought to becoming a Mormon or a Moslem so he could marry both of them. It was an unusual relationship, to say the least, but they all seemed happy with it.

Since there was a bunch of us guys there, and only Dink's two girls, somebody had the bright idea that they could liven up things if they evened up the ratio between the sexes a little bit, so they invited several of the girl's female relatives to the party. It turned out that Rocky, Pepper, and I remembered a couple of the girls from Hoss and Helen's wedding reception, which meant that we had a darn good reason to remember them. One of them was Ariel, the first and most memorable girl I'd had sex with at the reception. There was another girl there who I didn't remember, although she said she remembered me real well. The only thing I could think of was that she must have been the girl that I spent the night with and didn't remember much about.

Needless to say, it turned into a really interesting and memorable evening. I had laid off of the track honeys since the girl up in Red Wing; I didn't really have reason to do it, but somehow I felt that I didn't want Arlene thinking bad of me, even though there was no reason to be careful. But anyway, with Arlene down in Florida and having her own good times if the opportunity arose, I guess I decided that I'd been on the wagon long enough. Somehow, I wound up with Estelle – she was the girl that I couldn't remember – and she gave me something to really remember her by this time. She was really, really good in the sack and I wondered why I couldn't remember her. I guess I must have been really, really drunk at that wedding reception.

I know I woke up in the morning with a hell of a hangover, stiff and sore after sleeping on the living room floor with Estelle snuggled up next to me. As I managed to pry my eyes open I found that most of the crew was still there and that Dink's two women were busy cooking a big breakfast. I think I was beyond being surprised at that point, so I guess it didn't make much impression on me that Rocky and Ariel had managed to appropriate one of the two beds in the apartment and were still asleep. They didn't stay asleep long, but it was a long time after breakfast before they got out of bed.

Dink and his two girls had a television in their living room – it was just about the first I'd ever seen in a private home – and we wound up sitting around there watching the Rose Parade on it. We watched it right down to the end, had something more to eat, then started watching football. Rocky and Ariel came out of the bedroom for a while to watch with us but they never managed to stay with us long before they were back off by themselves again. We were a happy if somewhat exhausted crew when we headed back to our apartment after the Rose Bowl was over with.

I hadn't been to a party like that in a long, long time – not since the reception – and I hoped that Arlene had managed to have a good time. I found out a few days later that she hadn't. She had to work the night shift, and with the holiday screwing schedules around she had to work the emergency room. She said in her letter that it had been like being back in Korea, but with fewer gunshot wounds. I told her that we'd had a pretty wild party and gotten real drunk, but somehow I managed to forget to mention Estelle.

That evening changed some things in a big way. Somewhere in all that drunken revelry, Rocky and Ariel decided that they really liked each other for more than just a fun evening between the sheets. I had the only car among the four of us at the apartment, but for the next few weeks I hardly got to use it since Rocky was borrowing it to go out with Ariel. I don't know the details of what they were doing, but I know it involved the occasional movie and the occasional dinner out. It got to be a pain in the neck for the rest of us, since having Rocky gone with my car meant that the three of us left behind were pretty much stuck around the apartment, the café and the bar.

I guess I figured things would blow through pretty quickly, but I think it was Pepper who got on Rocky's back about us being stranded all the time. Rocky agreed that he'd been a little selfish, and headed over to Herb's, where he bought a real clunker of a '46 Dodge out of the back row of the used car lot. After that we saw even less of him, and he was gone a few nights along the way.

Somehow I made it through January, substituting at school, reading or hanging out with the guys at the apartment, and exchanging mail back and forth with Arlene. It was nice to have someone to write to, and to get mail from, since I hadn't had that in a long time. Along about the first part of February, Frank dropped by the apartment one evening and asked, "Mel, have they got you so busy teaching school that you can't get away to make the Daytona Beach run this year?"

"I sure can," I told him. "I'm not scheduled for anything right in there, and I sure could stand to get out of here for a while."

"Good enough," he replied. "It'll be you, me, Vivian and Carnie again. Vivian has her eye on another big Lincoln to make the run down there with."