Chapter 9

Arlene and I had already had dinner, but on the way over to the grandstand we happened to pass by the concession stand, where I caught a whiff of hot dogs. I'd eaten a lot of track hot dogs over the years and thought I'd had my fill of them, but I'll tell you, those smelled damn good. It didn't take long for temptation to get the better of me.

The concession stand proved to be about as much a dump as anything else. God alone knows how Smoky managed to run the thing without the county health department throwing a fit, but it's hard to louse up making a hot dog. As I recall, they were on the expensive side – maybe fifty cents each, although I don't remember for sure now, but one of the places he didn't skimp on quality was on those wieners – darn, they were good, loaded up with good chili and fresh onions. There's nothing much like a track chili dog and French fries to get you in the mood for some racing.

With our hands full of track food, Arlene and I found our way into what passed for the grandstand. These were nothing more than the same kind of bleachers you used to see at football and baseball fields, relatively low, with bench seats and foot boards, built so that they could be taken down and moved. I found out later than they had done duty at some high school football field up until about the time of the Korean War, and Smoky had bought them cheap. They hadn't had much maintenance since then; here and there you could find a few replacement boards, but most of them seemed original and more than a little creaky and filled with splinters. The crowd was pretty thin, and I noticed that a lot of people were sitting on folded blankets or boat cushions or something. Arlene and I found a place up towards the top that didn't look too bad and got our butts on the planks.

It was getting close to race time, and like I said, there wasn't much of a crowd. "I wonder if it's like this every time," I commented to Arlene.

"It wouldn't surprise me," she replied. "This doesn't strike me as a place that you'd want to go unless you had to, although I think we've both seen worse."

"Yeah, but we were down in the pits, not up in the stands," I agreed. "Not that the pits here are anything to write home about, unless you wanted to write home about the bad stuff. I mean, let's face it, people expect dirt tracks to be dirty, but this is ridiculous. You have to take care of the customer at least a little."

While we sat there a few more people drifted in, but not many. Without saying it in so many words, Smoky had said that he was struggling to keep going, and from the looks of things I didn't doubt it. Now, although it had been a few years, I had seen an awful lot of local race tracks both good and bad, and I had more than a little hint of what separated one from another. This place had been worse than average when I'd wrecked there back in '54, and it hadn't improved any since. Of course, I couldn't say if Smoky had any money to throw at fixing things up, but if he had it would have been well spent. While I was enjoying being back around racing a little, at least for an evening, I still couldn't work up much enthusiasm about being back around it on a regular basis.

After the national anthem was played on a scratchy record player, the racing program got under way. Just going from memory, there were about twenty Junior Stocks entered, a few more Sportsmen, and a handful of modifieds. In order to drag things out, there was a series of heats in each of the classes. The Junior Stocks came first, and obviously I paid a lot of attention to them.

There were three heats of six or seven cars each. Most of them were frankly jalopies like the one Don Boies was driving, but there were a few cars that were a cut above the jalopy level, like the one the Mansfield kid was driving. One thing I'd learned a long time before was that if a jalopy looked like junk it probably was. The cars that looked better were the better cars – if the driver had money enough to put into something like paint, he had enough money to do what needed to be done under the hood, too.

I found out later that Smoky set the heats by qualifying rounds that had taken place before Arlene and I arrived – fastest qualifier on the pole in the first heat, second fastest on the pole in the second, fourth fastest on the outside pole of the first heat, and so on. It was a pretty standard way to do it, and I couldn't find fault with it. That meant that was pretty much a couple good looking cars at the front of each field, and the end of each field was filled with junk that would hardly run. Not to my surprise, the Mansfield kid was on the pole of the first heat. The field went around the track a few times to warm up, then got the white flag for the one lap to go signal, and the next time they field came around the green came out.

The heat was only supposed to be ten laps, but that Mansfield kid came off the pole like he was shot from a gun. After watching him run away from the field for a lap or two I realized that his driving technique wasn't all that good, so he must have had a mill under that hood that could have powered a fighter plane. In six or seven laps he was coming up on the back markers that were just trying to keep running, a couple of beat up old jalopies that were at least trying to race each other to keep out of last place. One of the kids had gotten a nose under the other kid and they were running side by side through the corner, but apparently not fast enough for the Mansfield kid; he got a nose under the kid trying to pass the other beater and gave him a nudge, which caused the kid to spin and hit the other car.

The damage wasn't all that bad; one of the kids spun into the infield, gathered it up and kept going, but the other one was in the middle of the track at a dead stop. I glanced up at what passed for a flagman's tower; the yellow was flying, and by all rights there should have been a black flag flying for Mansfield, but there wasn't. I'd spent an awful lot of time around race tracks, and the Mansfield kid's trick was just about the dirtiest bit of driving I'd ever seen. It would have been nice if those two kids who got spun could get hold of Mansfield out behind the bleachers or something and teach him some manners, but I knew it wasn't going to happen. Without actually having been there to see it, it was pretty clear to me that this wasn't the first time the Mansfield kid had pulled a stunt like that.

"Did you see that?" Arlene asked.

"Yeah, I did," I told her. "It looks to me like he's going to get away with it, too."

"My God, Spud would have kicked that young punk's ass up between his shoulders for pulling a stunt like that," she snorted. "I can't believe he's going to get away with it."

"Looks like he's going to," I shrugged. "There's the big reason I don't want to do this thing."

For myself, I was just about ready to get up and walk out. If that was the kind of shit that I was going to be up against, it was no wonder that the numbers of kids in the class had been declining. It wasn't going to be something easy to stop. But, I decided to stay around just to see how much worse the rest of it was going to be.

The yellow flag didn't stay out long; a push truck shoved the stalled car into the infield, and the field lined up in single file behind the Mansfield kid. By this time there were only like three laps to go; needless to say, after the green flag dropped the Mansfield kid blasted off again, but three laps weren't enough to get him back up to the back markers so he could wreck someone else.

There's no reason to give a blow by blow description of the other two Junior Stock heats. Although I'd talked to several of the drivers and their families in the pits before the race, I didn't really know most of them so I could just sit back and watch. In the second heat there were two cars that blasted off from the rest of the field like Mansfield had done, so I could just about pick out who had the cheater engines, and cheater Lord only knew what else. The two of them actually ran a pretty good race; neither of them could really get past the other one and make it stick, and if the same kid led two laps running it was only by accident. But, seven or eight laps into the thing the two of them came up on another barely running back marker. The kid tried to stay out of their way, but that didn't matter – they just flat crowded him up into the fence, probably laughing their guts out as they did it. It was just about as dirty a move as the Mansfield kid had made, except that it took the two of them to do it. Again, it was as blatant a rough driving foul as I'd ever seen, but there wasn't a hint of a black flag from the tower.

"Jesus," Arlene shook her head. "Is that how they play the game here?"

"Looks like it," I told her. "You see why I don't want to mess with this?"

"Yeah," she said. "But you realize that a handful of young punks are going to run those other kids right out of racing forever. Who would want to keep it up when there's that kind of shit going on?"

"Looks to me like Smoky doesn't much care," I told her. "Damn shame, but there it is."

The third heat was a little different. There was a kid in a good-looking car that had arrived late and had to start at the back of the field. I figured he wasn't going to be there long and he wasn't – he tried to pass the whole damn field on the inside even before the green flag fell. He almost made it, too. Almost, but not quite. The field headed three and four wide into the first turn with him down low, but he drifted up into the second place car and spun him. The end result was nothing short of a hell of a mess; when the heat restarted there were only four cars running and at least one of the cars that had been towed off was never going to race again. Now, I wouldn't want to call it intentional rough driving but it was damn stupid of the kid. No black flag, of course; by now, I figured that Smoky didn't even own one.

I was damn happy to see the last of the Junior Stock heats over with. That wasn't racing, that was motorized schoolyard bullying, and I couldn't see why there were so many kids out there that were willing to put up with that stuff.

The racing continued. Next up were the Sportsman heats, again three of them. Like the Junior Stocks, the cars ranged from appearing pretty good to appearing like junk. The racing appeared a little cleaner; at least I didn't see any out and out intentional wrecking or schoolyard bullying, and there was some good racing. This was more like it, I thought.

The Sportsmen were followed by the Modifieds. There were only a handful of them, maybe seven – after all these years I don't remember clearly, but there weren't enough to break it down into two heats so they did it in one. These were big cars and powerful; the drivers knew how to drive. When they bailed off into the first corner with dirt flying all over the place they were going like hell and the sound was so strong you not only heard it, you felt it. As few as there were, they put on a good race, and I'd have to say that I would have enjoyed it if I hadn't been left with a sour feeling in my stomach by the Junior Stock races.