Chapter 38

We started working our way north. For the next few days I sort of wondered when Ace would show up again, mad as a wet hen. I dug my snubnose .38 out of the Ford's glove box and carried it for a while, just in case, but after a few days it started to become a pain in the butt and I slowly quit doing it. We didn't go too long before Frank turned up another local driver to go with us, a guy named Larry. Larry talked in such a thick Texas accent we started calling him 'Tex' just about the first night and never gave it up.

I still don't know what it was with the nicknames we had for almost everybody on the crew. Well, a lot of drivers had nicknames back then, it was a little more accepted than it is today in general. Over the years Frank tried to hang "teacher" on me when he was announcing the race from the stands, but it never stuck with the drivers – I was always just "Mel," which I guess is a nickname, after all.

One night a month or so later we were running at some little town in Kansas, not too far outside Kansas City. It was a still date on a makeshift track, and we were the only attraction. Even though it was a nice night the crowd was lousy and it seemed like it was hardly worth the effort to even put on a show. It was one of those deals that had been promoted by some sort of a local club, Kiwanis or Rotary or something, and while I was hanging around waiting for the race to start, I got to talking with one of the guys from the club. "Kind of a washout for you guys, isn't it?"

"I guess," he said, looking at the sparse crowd. "We did pretty good on the ticket sales ahead of time, so we won't lose anything on it. But we'd hoped to make out pretty good on the people that showed up without buying tickets in advance. Guess that's not going to happen."

"I wonder why?" I said. "I don't know all that much about it, but usually the gate is pretty good if the weather is nice, and this is a sweet evening."

"It might have been," he said. "But we had some sort of Baptist road show come in and lean on all the churches to turn out everybody for this big revival, so I guess everybody's off getting their souls saved. I even caught hell from my wife for being here instead of there, but we scheduled this clear back last winter and nobody ever heard anything about them Baptists till last week."

"Well, at least you're not losing money on it," I said.

"Yeah, there is that," he said. "Goddamn Baptists think they can run everything their way and everyone has to get out of their way."

We got the race under way. Now, our cars were loud but they weren't that loud, and people go to races to hear the noise and see the dust fly. Like I said, it was a makeshift track so it was dirtier and dustier than normal, but there was a nice little breeze blowing so what crowd there was could see what was going on. What we didn't know was that the Baptists weren't all that far away, and right downwind, and as it turned out we hosed them down with a pretty good dust storm. So, they called the cops.

A couple cars of local cops showed up just about the time the first heat ended, basically carrying a bitch about the dust and the noise. I guess Frank and whoever the head of the local club was had a few words, but all the permits and whatever had been taken care of, so there really wasn't anything that they could do. The second heat got under way in good shape, kicking up more dust and noise.

As soon as it was over with, Frank got together with Spud. "I don't have a good feeling about this," he said. "Screw the consolation, let's get everybody into the main and get this over with."

"This is a mighty small track for a dozen cars," Spud protested.

"Tell everybody to be careful, but I want all the noise and dust we can get," Frank told him. "Let's get this going."

I'll tell you what, the next twenty minutes or so were about the scariest time I had all the time I was racing with the MMSA. If we'd thought it was noisy and dusty before, it wasn't anything to what happened in the feature. Frank wanted noise and dust, and that's what we were going to give him. Everybody was powersliding around, along with getting hard on the throttle out of the turns to set their wheels spinning and make more noise. It was so dusty that it was hard to see anything, and there were a lot of cars running on an awful small track. After a couple laps, I wasn't really racing anymore; I was just trying to find my way around the track without hitting anybody, and I guess everyone else was doing the same thing. I know Frank was theoretically scoring the thing from up in what passed for the grandstands, but how he managed to see any of us was beyond me.

Several times I almost hit somebody, or somebody almost hit me. If Spud ever threw a yellow flag I never saw one, so I guessed everyone else was doing about the same as I was, which isn't to say that I didn't have a close call or two on every lap. I know I banged wheels with Tex a couple times on one lap, and we were both just trying to stay away from each other, rather than just race. I grew up a little north of the Dust Bowl country from the thirties but I remember people talking about how bad it had been down there, but I can't imagine it could have been half as bad as on that little dirt track that night.

Roughly half an eternity later, I could make out Spud waving the checkered flag, or at least some flag that I hoped was checkered. I slowed down as quickly as I dared and pulled into the infield, which wasn't a heck of a lot less dusty than the rest of the place. That little breeze was still blowing, so the air soon cleared; I shut off the now brown 66 car and looked around, counting eleven other intact cars, which seemed like a full-blown Baptist miracle to me after that madhouse. I was glad I'd worn a handkerchief around my nose and mouth because it was the only reason I was still breathing. As the noise settled out, I could hear Frank announcing Arlene as the winner and calling her to the winner's circle.

I have no idea if Arlene actually won that race or what. It could have been any one of us. I know I started about the middle of the pack and if I passed anyone I didn't see them; I know I'd been passed a couple times. Arlene said later that she didn't think she'd actually won either, but I guess Frank had to give it to someone. Arlene had pulled off the track with the rest of us, and she had to start the 2 car up to drive it over to the winner's circle, where Frank came down from the stands and handed her the trophy. I didn't go over to congratulate her; I was too busy coughing up dust and trying to clear the crap out from my eyes, where it had gotten in spite of my wearing goggles.

About then Spud came over to me. He was just absolutely covered with dust, brown from head to foot. He often got a little dusty but this time he looked like some kind of primitive monster that had just crawled out of a mudhole in a bad horror movie. "Get everything loaded up," he said. "Tell the other guys. We've got trouble, we've got to get out of this town as quick as we can."

We didn't waste time tearing down and loading up, in spite of everything. I don't think it took us twenty minutes to have everything loaded and ready to go. Those of us with cars made a fast trip over to the tourist court, and we just cleaned the place out, grabbing suitcases and stuff from everybody's room and tossing them in the first available car. I think we were in and out of there in less than ten minutes, wondering what had happened. We headed right on out of town to try and catch up with the MMSA convoy, all of us just still dirty as hell. We were a while catching them, enough so that I was beginning to wonder if we'd taken the right road.

Finally, we managed to catch up with them, several miles into the next county. We kept on going for a ways, until Frank, who was driving the semi, pulled off a side road and into a little state park at some artificial lake.

It was getting about dark by now, and all of us were filthy, just about as bad as we'd ever been, if not worse. That lake looked awful good, and at least I managed to get my wallet out of my pants before I was in it and the rest of the crew was right there with me. I started pulling off my clothes and rinsing them out a bit – it wouldn't count for a wash, but there was no reason to turn the wash water in my galvanized can in the car to solid mud. "Frank," I said finally, "What the hell was that all about?"

Frank explained about the cops coming after the first heat to complain about the noise and the dust disturbing the Baptists. "Not only did they screw up the gate for the evening, they had to complain that we were taking people away from them and causing them trouble," he said. "I figured that in a small town like that they swung a pretty good club, but I was a little pissed off. I guess we really dusted them down good during the feature, because not long after it got going we had a little group of them show up to complain. One of them claimed to be a local judge and that he'd issued an injunction against racing. He insisted that we stop the race immediately so they could get back to their saving their souls."