We hit a stretch along in there where we ran mostly rodeo rings for a couple of weeks. I’ll tell you what, that was real different from being on a regular track. The rodeo rings were small, and we never really got up a lot of speed but it sure seemed like we were flying in a space that small. It seemed to be a little strange to be out there under those big western skies with all that open space and running in such a small and constricted space, but usually it worked out all right since there were usually pretty good crowds and pretty close in. There were some of those small towns where we’d been the only outside entertainment in town for years, and sometimes it seemed like we’d just about have the whole town out for the race.

I used to enjoy running those rodeo rings for some reason, at least partly because I did pretty well at them. A lot of the guys didn’t; Arlene never took to them very well, for instance. You could always be pretty well assured of a fast and furious race, at least partly because we ran multiple heats of only four cars. These were pretty short, so if you were going to come from the back to the front you had to be doing it right now. You spent a lot of time turning, and turning a pretty tight corner. There wasn’t much time to accelerate between the corners, either, even though we accelerated pretty quickly from running in first gear. There was an art to running a track that small, no doubt about it.

Looking back on it, it makes me wonder why we didn’t tear up the cars pretty bad, or maybe kill someone at rodeo rings. We were always pretty close to the crowd, there wasn’t much room to race, and the fences between the cars and the crowd could still have been more substantial, even though they were usually board fences meant to keep a Brahma bull out of the crowd. As I recall, we never hurt a car very bad and never hurt a person.

The tracks were so small we had to have the pits outside the track, so we often got to watch the heats from a spectator viewpoint. The typical rodeo ring had fairly soft dirt, so that meant that when you power slid through the corners you would raise a huge cloud of dust, and sometime it was hard to see where you were going if you weren’t the one in front. It was incredibly dirty for the spectators, but most of them knew what dirt was and were thrilled to see the show. I recall standing up against the fence watching another heat run, with Arlene and a couple of the other drivers standing there with me, and after one heat we were just covered with dirt, just from standing there watching.

Let me tell you, the hose on that water trailer was an awful welcome thing once a rodeo ring race was over with, and one of the down sides to winning was that you were often the last one to get to it. Even then, it was only enough to hold you until you got a chance at a bath or a shower.

I remember one of those times especially well. I don’t remember where it was that we were running, but there was a little river right down next to the rodeo ring, and for whatever reason we got even dirtier and muddier than normal, considering that normal was pretty bad even if we were running on a regular track. It was also very humid that evening, and off in the distance you could make out the lightning of a far away thunderstorm. Over the course of the race, when we were standing outside of the track, I think every one of us made mention of the fact that as soon as the race was over with we were going to go jump straight in that creek.

It turned out that we weren’t the only ones with the same idea. I think it came straight to half the spectators as well. It was pretty dark when the race ended, but a ton of people headed off toward the creek while we were loading up. By the time we got over to the creek there must have been a couple hundred people in it, and much to our surprise most of them were nude – it was a huge skinny dipping party! Well, we joined right in, of course – it was darker than somewhat except when a distant bolt of lightning lit things up a bit, and then not much. I know I was more than a little surprised to see Arlene right out there in the middle of us, wearing no more clothes than she’d been born with. Let’s just say that while I didn’t get to see a whole lot there was no doubt that she was a woman. We stayed out there for a long time, just enjoying the cool night air and the cool water on our bodies after what had been a hot and dirty evening. It was one of those memories that stick with you for a lifetime.

I recall asking one of the townspeople if that sort of thing happened very often. He said it was the first time he’d ever heard of such a thing happening. This spot was a well-known swimming hole and got used pretty often to cool off on a hot day, but usually people wore swim suits or the like, rather than just going in with bare butts like were all over the place that evening. But there was yelling and hollering and screaming, splashing and teasing – people were having a good time. They’d gone to the races to have some fun and as it turned out they’d gotten more than they bargained for. When you got right down to it, that was the business we were in – helping people to have fun.

It was almost certainly a weekday night, because we were almost always in a place where they had a bigger track on the weekends. I suppose that night turned into some kind of legend in that little town, and I’ll bet that some preacher sounded off about it to beat the band the next Sunday. It had been a long time since I’d been in a church, but I can still just about close my eyes and imagine the preacher raising hell about it. And, I can also imagine some old men sitting around the café forty or fifty years later recalling how they saw Mable bare naked the night the racers came to town back in oh, about 1953 or so. And, as far as that goes, I can just about imagine Mable sitting on the far side of the café smirking at how she teased all the boys in town that evening back when she was young and good-looking and loved to have fun, still amazed that she’d been so brave or crazy to have done such a thing.

One of the special things about running in those races was that a lot of the towns had never even heard of such a thing as a motel or a tourist court. We had to actually camp out some, but very often we’d get invited home with some of the spectators to spend the night. It was always fun to sit around someone’s house, telling tall tales and being treated like we were really a big deal, and really, it was something that didn’t happen very often. We almost always got treated to a big farm breakfast out of one of those invitations, and it was another chance to tell some stories about racing and the gypsy life we led. It was pretty far from the day to day life in a small prairie town, and I suppose we managed to make it seem pretty glamorous. From growing up in a small town like that I knew it sometimes gets awful lonesome, and I often wondered how many of my stories led to kids from small towns heading off to the big city and the bright lights.

One day along toward the middle of that Upper Midwest swing we were heading from South Dakota down to Kearney, Nebraska, and it struck me that I wouldn’t have to go very far out of my way to go through Hartford. I hadn’t been in Hartford since I got home from the Army in 1946, and to be honest I didn’t feel like I’d left anything there that would give me cause to go back. But I did feel like I ought to at least try to look up Mr. Vogt, my old principal who had talked me into going to college. I hadn’t made a lot of use of that college degree so far, but I figured that the time would come when it might prove handy.

We tended to switch riders around a lot that summer, so we didn’t get too tired of the same person. Sometimes when you’re together in a crew like that you get awful tired of the same people all the time and shifting things around helped out with that a little. Sandy was riding with me that morning, so when we stopped for breakfast, I asked Sandy if he’d mind riding with someone else on down to the next stop so I could take care of some personal business. I told Frank and Spud that I’d catch up with them, and when we got on the road again I headed on down toward Fremont County.

After a while things got real familiar, and I started to recognize things that I’d known for many years. There was no way in hell I was stopping at the farm. I still was pretty burned at the way I’d been treated when I got back from the Army, and I was afraid if I walked in there it would just be cause for another fight and even more bad feelings than there already were. I didn’t even care to let anybody know where I was or what I was doing, except maybe for Mr. Vogt.

Hartford is a small town. It probably wouldn’t have been big enough to support an MMSA race, even on the ball diamond, unless we were halfway between two dates and needed to kill an evening some place. It had happened plenty of other places, but it hadn’t yet happened there. Being a small town, I knew where Mr. Vogt lived, and I drove right straight there. There wasn’t anybody home, but I thought I might just hang around a bit and try again in a little while.

There wasn’t a lot to for me to do in Hartford to kill time, and except for Mr. Vogt there wasn’t anyone I particularly cared to see. About the best thing I could think of was to head down to the Hartford Café and have a cup of coffee, and realized that there was a chance that Mr. Vogt might be there anyway.

The place hadn’t changed much since I’d last been there not quite seven years before. It was pretty empty, and wherever Mr. Vogt was, he wasn’t there. Who was there was the waitress, Mavis Hackenberg – well, at least it had been Hackenberg in high school although it seemed likely she was married now. She had always been one of the prettiest girls in school, but she looked a little weathered now and had put on a few pounds. "So, Mavis, how you been?" I asked. I wasn’t as afraid to talk to her now as I had been back when I’d been the poor boy in high school.

"Mel!" she replied brightly. "It’s been years. What have you been doing with yourself?"

"Oh, this and that, traveling a lot," I told her, trying to down play things a little. "I was heading down to Kearney and thought I’d look up Mr. Vogt."

"He was in earlier, but it’s been a while," she told me. "Can I get you something?"

"Cup of coffee, I guess," I said. It hadn’t been all that long since I’d had a pretty decent breakfast, so I didn’t have any reason to be hungry. "So what you been up to?"

"You’re looking at it," she sighed, glancing around the nearly empty café. "It’s a job, I’ll give it that."

"So did you and Gene ever get married?" I asked. Gene Roland and Mavis had been the hot couple all the way through high school, and it was always one of those understood things that she was taken, no matter how much any of the rest of us would have liked to have been able to go out with her.

"Yeah, we did, for all the good it did me," she said, sounding both bitter and exasperated. "He took off on me a couple years ago, leaving me with two kids. Said he was going to look for work in California. I haven’t heard a word out of him since, the weasel."

Somehow that didn’t surprise me, although it wasn’t something that I’d say to her face. I suppose a lot of us thought that she was too good for Gene and she would have been better off with one of us. "That sounds like a lousy thing for him to do," I commented.

"He was sure real nice to me in school, but I’ll tell you the truth, Mel, by the time he left I wasn’t all that sorry to see him go," she sighed. It was clear that there had been more than a little unpleasantness going on between the two of them before he left. With that, she changed the subject: "So what have you been doing in all the years you’ve been gone?"

For some reason I didn’t want to tell her that I’d been racing the last few years. Racers, like carnies, weren’t exactly held in high regard back in those days. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed what I was doing and was even proud of it sometimes, but it wasn’t the memory of me that I wanted left in my old home town no matter how much I didn’t care if I ever saw the place again. So, I only told Mavis part of the truth. "Well, I went to college, Chadron, and then Milwaukee," I told her. "The last two years I’ve been teaching in Michigan in the winters."

"College?" she said, eyes wide with amazement. "You’re a schoolteacher? Somehow I never expected that out of you."

"Well, if it helps any I never expected it out of me, either," I smiled, and tried to change the subject a little. After all, being a substitute really wasn’t quite being a real schoolteacher.

She looked at me seeming to be just a little more interested than she’d been when I first walked in. I’d been the poor kid that wasn’t expected to do much more than be a farm hand, and I hadn’t expected much more than that out of myself. It certainly appeared that she thought that I’d done a lot better than she’d expected. "So," she smiled as she sat down in the chair across the table from me, "Are you married or anything?"

"No married, no anything. I got fairly close once," I told her, thinking of Bessie, "But it wasn’t going to work out so I let it go. I was too busy with going to college at the time anyway, and I’ve been too busy with everything else since." I decided it was time to change the subject because I could look at her and see her wondering what the chances were. "So, what’s happened to the kids we went to school with?"

"Gone, the biggest part of them," she told me. It wasn’t anything I didn’t expect to hear; a lot of kids in my high school class had been counting the days until they could get out of Hartford. "There aren’t a lot of jobs around here, you know that. There’s a few still around. Edith Slocum, you remember her, she wound up marrying Jimmy Driscoll, of all people, they’re out working his dad’s farm . . . " It didn’t take her long to run through the list; there were only less than thirty kids in my graduating class, counting me – technically, I never graduated, since I left school early when I was drafted.

"I’m afraid I can’t add to the gossip much," I told her. "You’re the first person from the class I’ve seen since the spring of ’44."

"I don’t hear much anymore," she shrugged from her seat in the chair across the table from me. "It’s just the same people I see, and not a lot of them since most of the class has been gone. So, have you been out to see your brother?"

"No," I told her. "And I don’t care if I do. I guess you know we had a little difference of opinion when I got home from the Army."

"I heard something about that," she sighed. "A little gossip goes a long way in this town. He comes in here once in a while, but he sure seems to have gone to pot that last few years. What do you hear from your folks?"

"About as much as I hear from Philip, which is to say nothing," I replied, a little bit sour, the memories of how lousy I’d been treated swimming to the surface. "I haven’t heard anything about them in years."

"Then you must not know that they’re not around Hartford any longer," she said.

"Hadn’t heard that," I admitted, a little surprised. "What happened?"

"Your dad got real sick, I’m not sure what, something to do with his lungs I guess," she said. "It was, what, three or four years ago? The last I knew they were going to go out and live near your sister, out there in California. I take that to mean that you haven’t heard from her, either."

"The last I heard she was in San Diego," I told her. "And that was back in ’46. I don’t have any idea what her address is or anything."

"I’m pretty sure my mom would know, she writes Christmas cards to just about everybody under the sun," Mavis said. "Would you like me to call her up and ask?"

I wasn’t really all that sure I wanted to even get in touch with Shirley considering that she had to be in pretty close touch with my parents, but Mavis was trying to be nice. She wasn’t exactly putting moves on me or anything, but I could pretty well see that if I were to show some interest she would show some, too. Even though I wasn’t very interested, I figured I might as well let her get the address if for no more reason than to divert her for a few minutes, so I told her to go ahead and do it.

She headed over to the old wall phone, the kind with the crank, where you had to call the operator to be connected. Those had pretty well disappeared in more urban areas by that time, but there were still plenty of them in smaller towns. There used to be a lot of jokes about those old party lines – when the operator called anyone on the line, everybody on the line knew you were being called and a lot of busybodies listened in to pick up what gossip they could. Usually you didn’t say anything on one of those calls that you didn’t want the whole town knowing what was going on, and that really was no joke. The news that I’d been in town, was a college graduate and a school teacher was going to be all over the place in a very short time. That just about made the trip to Hartford worthwhile for me, just to spread the word that I was a lot more successful than anyone had ever dreamed I was going to be.

The story would almost certainly get to Philip, too. That would piss him off in a number of different ways, and if anyone deserved it, he did.

After Mavis got done with her mother, she came back over to the table and gave me my sister’s address. I let her warm up my coffee, and we sat and talked for a few minutes about the old days. It amused me just a little to watch what had been one of the most desirable girls in high school trying to figure out an angle on me, but I wasn’t buying. Finally, I told her that I figured I’d better go try to catch Mr. Vogt again, paid her for my coffee, left her a good tip, and headed back out to my car.

I went back over to Mr. Vogt’s house, but there was still no sign of him or his wife. I wrote him a quick note telling him that I’d dropped by, was sorry that I missed him, and that I really thanked him for his advice and help back in ’46. I don’t think I was in Hartford two hours before I was back on the road, heading for Kearney.

The road out of town was even more familiar than the one going into town, since the farm lay out that way. I didn’t bother to go down the side road to it, though; I just didn’t care and actually was a little concerned that I might get tempted to stop if I went by there. So, I went through the intersection at 55 and didn’t look back.

I will admit to feeling more than a little strange as I drove on down to Kearney. I realized that if I’d had the time to kill, and no race that evening, it would have been fun to hang around Hartford because I would have had a good chance to hump Mavis Hackenberg or whatever her name was now. That had been one of my unattainable dreams from high school, and I felt it would have been real easy to do that afternoon. It might even have been fun, if for no more reason than to prove to myself that I wasn’t in high school in Hartford, Nebraska any more. Maybe it was just those memories of high school hanging over me, but it was clear to me that Mavis was looking for some guy and was even a little desperate. There wouldn’t have been a lot of eligible men her age in Hartford any more – at least ones that she’d want anything to do with. Apparently that included Phillip, from what little she’d said about him, which admittedly wasn’t much.

I suppose I was dreaming a little, but it was pretty clear that if I even put a little time and effort at it something long term could have been developed with her very easily. It was not that I wanted to develop anything long term with her, at least partly because she represented a part of my life that I was just as glad to have behind me. But developing something long term with someone? Well, that was a different story. The fact that I’d covered up the fact that I was a race driver and only a substitute teacher took on even more importance to me. I guess I had my pride and wanted the folks in the old home town to think that I was doing better than I really was. That couldn’t help but make me think about where I was and what I was doing. Right then it didn’t make me all that happy with myself. Being a race driver was something I was just doing for now, it wasn’t something that had a long term future in it. Although I was having some good and memorable times, it was clear that it wasn’t anything that I could be building a life doing.

This was the fourth summer that I’d been driving for the MMSA, and I guess I was starting to think that maybe I ought to consider settling down, really making use of that teaching certificate, and finding someone to settle down long term with. I’d been looking forward to that time coming when I’d been in college, but after I joined up with the MMSA settling down had been pretty far from my goals. Realistically, while I enjoyed my life and what I was doing – or else I wouldn’t have been doing it – it wasn’t quite as much fun as it once had been.

But how would I do it, and where? For that matter, when? It wasn’t an easy question. Obviously I would have to get a job teaching somewhere, maybe Livonia, maybe somewhere else. Livonia was a nice town; I liked it there and had friends there, so it was a real possibility. But I wouldn’t turn down the idea of being in a smaller town – after all, if nothing else, my visit to Hartford had reminded me that I was a small-town boy at heart.

Whatever happened, it was obvious that I wasn’t ready to quit what I was doing, at least yet. However, I could see the time coming as I drove through the Nebraska corn country. Most of the fields that I passed were looking pretty good, I thought, looking at them with my farm boy eye. And, as far as that went, even Mavis wasn’t all that bad. Maybe if I got a teaching job somewhere and I couldn’t find someone to spend my life with where I was at, I might just come back to Hartford and see about sweeping her off her feet.

But, maybe not, too; back in high school she’d put me down for being a poor boy a little too often for my taste, and I had enjoyed the feeling of the tables being turned on her at last.

Maybe leaving her in the rear view mirror in Hartford was the best payback I could imagine.

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