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Chapter 8
So, I was forced to reassess my position as I rode around with the driver’s ed kids the rest of the day. I still didn’t think I should do it, but Mike had given me a couple of good reasons to reconsider. When it was all said and done, I knew that I was going to at least have to bring it up to Arlene. I guess I was really hoping that she’d tell me no.
I guess I should have known better. That evening, I explained the whole thing to Arlene – Smoky’s asking me, Mike’s comments about it, and my thoughts. "It might be fun, in a way," she smiled. "I’ve been missing the racing, too, you know. It wasn’t bad when we were living in town, but hearing the roar from the track every Saturday night keeps making me think that we at least ought to go check it out sometime. We don’t have to go racing, and you don’t have to get involved in this thing with Smoky, but wouldn’t it be nice to touch the old days a little?"
"I’m glad you didn’t say ‘good old days,’" I snorted. "Compared to what we have today, they weren’t all that good."
"No, they weren’t," she agreed. "But it was a real adventure, something to remember. Come on, I’ll find a sitter, and we can at least go see how bad it is. It’ll be nice to be away from the kids for an evening."
That didn’t leave me with a lot of choice. The next morning, I called up Smoky and told him that Arlene and I were going to come check the track out Saturday night, and he agreed to have pit passes waiting for us at the back gate ticket house.
As I recall that was a Thursday. I spent the next couple days being a little nervous. I knew darn well that I was thinking about doing something that I really shouldn’t do because I knew trouble lay down that road. I had a feeling that going to the race that night was going to lead to more darn trouble than I wanted. I could still get out of it but was pretty sure that I wasn’t going to try.
Finally, along late in the afternoon Arlene and I got set to go. As dirty as we knew the place was going to be, we just dressed in jeans and work shirts since there was no point in messing up good clothes. We had an early dinner since we had no idea what the track food would be like and it seemed pretty likely that it wouldn’t be much good. The babysitter was a college girl I’d known through high school; she showed up on time, and there was no longer any putting it off. We got in the Chevy since there was no point in messing up the good car, and drove down to the track. Sure enough, there was Diane Ziegler, a kid I’d had in one of my history classes, and she had the passes for us. We talked for a moment about how her summer was going. She was going to be a senior that year and was looking forward to being done with school, but we ran out of conversation pretty quick, so she had us pin the passes to our shirts and we drove on into the pit area.
I parked the Chevy off to the side and got out. It was still pretty early, but there were a dozen or so cars there already. "What do we do now?" Arlene asked.
"I guess we just wander around and see what’s to be seen."
We walked over to the nearest car, which was still on the trailer. It was what they called a modified, but one look at it told me that the car was stretching the definition about as far as it could be stretched. It was still sitting on the trailer, and a couple guys were underneath it, draining the oil out of the rear end so they could change the gears for this track. While they were messing with that I took a closer look at it, and it didn’t take much looking to see that this thing had never been a street car. It had a space frame chassis welded up out of steel tubing, sort of like the old Kurtis Kraft midgets I used to see – and like the Indy cars I used to see, too. The body looked like it might once have been a ’32 Ford coupe chopped and channeled to within an inch of its life, but a closer look revealed that it had never seen a Ford plant – it was fiberglass. The engine was clearly a Chevy V8; it had two four-barrel carburetors.
"What’s that mill?" I asked.
"Three twenty-seven," came a voice from under the car. "Bored out to 390."
"Winds out pretty good, I bet," I commented.
"Yeah, when it’s running right," the voice said. "We tried running a Corvette fuel injection on it, but it doesn’t run worth a shit with it. We decided to try dual quads and see if that might help."
I knew better than to ask what kind of horsepower it might have – these guys might not have had it on a dynamometer and if they did that was something they might want to keep a secret. Smoky had said that there were cars out here that had to be pushing 500 horsepower, and I could believe even more – that big of an engine, those carbs, probably a hot camshaft and custom headers among other things made 500 even seem like it might be on the conservative side. Although it was a bigger car than the midgets Arlene and I had driven, it was clear that this thing was considerably hotter. Even if this weighed twice what one of those old MMSA midgets weighed, it had five times the power. That was going to make for a lively ride, at a minimum.
More cars were arriving, some on trailers, others on tow bars. We stood and shot the bull with the guys for a couple minutes – we never saw their faces, at least not right then – and finally we decided to wander on down the line. "Not exactly like the 2 car, is it?" I chuckled softly to Arlene.
"Good grief, no," she shook her head. "I don’t think I’d care to drive one of those things, even just for a hot lap or two."
"Me, either," I agreed. "There was a time I would have liked to have tried, but those days are long gone. Let’s look at some of these Junior Stocks. That’s what we came for, after all."
We found one not far up the line. It was a ’51 Plymouth with the old Chrysler flathead engine. The car looked pretty beat up; it was rusted out more than a little bit, and there were several dents, some of them pretty big. The left side and right side front fenders didn’t match the paint on the rest of the car or each other; the grillwork was missing and the bumper was bent. The car had been gutted out, there was a single seat behind the wheel. The number "64" had been painted roughly on the side, with a cheap brush, it looked like. It was pretty much what I would have considered a jalopy, except that it was newer than the jalopies I remembered. There were four teenage butts hanging out from under the open hood. "Beats the hell out of me," I heard one halfway familiar voice say.
"Problems?" I spoke up.
Four teenage heads looked up at me. "Yeah," one of the boys said. I recognized him; it was Don Boies, from my Auto Shop II class the previous year. I knew the other kids, too; two of them had taken Auto Shop I, and one was Phil Sharp, who had been out at the track with me earlier in the week. "The only thing I can figure is that it’s jumped time, but we don’t have a timing light."
"It’d be useful, but it’s not absolutely necessary," I told them. "You can tune it pretty close by ear if you can get it running at all."
"That’s just it, we can’t get it to run. It won’t hit a lick," Don said.
I took a little closer look at the engine. "Not surprising," I said. "You’ve got it flooded to beat the band from trying to start it. Got a screwdriver?"
"Flat or Phillips?" Don asked.
"Doesn’t matter," I told him. "Take the air cleaner off and stick the screwdriver down the carb throat to hold the choke open."
"This has a hand choke," Don protested, seeing what I was driving at. In those days, sometimes an automatic choke would stay closed on you when you wanted it open when the engine was partway warm.
"Might be that the cable has come loose," I told him. "I can smell the gas."
Don shrugged and pulled off the air cleaner so he could get at the carb. He reached out and moved the choke – it swung back and forth, sliding on the cable. He took the screwdriver and tightened the screw that held the cable on. "All right," Don said. "Phil, get in and hit the starter."
It took a little bit more fiddling since the car was badly flooded, but soon they had it going. It was running pretty ragged. "Yeah," I said. "Your timing’s off, but it’s not that bad. Sounds like you need to retard it just a hair, maybe two hairs since you’re going to be racing it. But you’ve got a miss there, too. It’s most likely a plug or a plug wire, I’m not sure which."
Three of the four kids had been through my auto shop classes, so it didn’t take them long to figure out that it was the number two cylinder that wasn’t firing. As I stood there watching, Don found a plug wrench and yanked the plug. "Jeez," he said. "Pretty foul."
"Yeah," I agreed, glancing at the plug. "The gap is off, and you’re getting some oil in the cylinder. Probably needs rings, but you might not want to bother on a heap like this."
Don shook his head. "It’s probably not worth the effort," he said. "We just wanted to have a little fun and keep from getting run off the track. There’s no way we’re going to win anything, but it’s fun to be out there. I don’t have a spare plug, though."
"Got a pocketknife?" I asked. "Clean it off the best you can with that, then use the thickness of the blade to gap it. You might want to think about pulling the other plugs and see how bad they are."
"Thanks, Mr. Austin," Don said. "I should have been smart enough to see that."
"The best tool you have for working on cars is between your ears," I told them. "Stop, take your time and think about it. If you get rushed, then you make mistakes."
He shook his head. "Seems to me I’ve heard you say that before."
"I’ve said it an awful lot over the years," I told him. "You run out here much?"
"When I can," he said. "I spend more time working on the car than racing it. It’s still a piece of shit – uh, excuse me, Mrs. Austin."
"Don’t worry, I’ve heard the term," Arlene smiled.
"It’s a piece of, uh, manure," Don continued. "It’s fun, but it seems like I spend half my time fixing things that have gotten bent up because someone wanted me to get out of their way. There are two or three guys out there that get more fun out of wrecking someone else than they do out of racing."
"I’d heard that," I nodded. "I was just curious to see how bad it really is."
"Sometimes it gets pretty bad," Don said. "I don’t have a lot of money to throw at this, and there are guys out there whose folks have put a lot of money into their cars. I just want to go out and have some fun, but getting deliberately wrecked every other week is taking the fun out of it. When this car gets wiped out, I’m probably done for the season."
"That’s a shame," I said. "Seems like there are jerks in this life wherever you go."
"That’s the truth," he said. "Hey, thanks for setting us on the right track, Mr. Austin."
"My pleasure," I said. "I’m going to wander around and check out a few other cars."
We wandered on down the line, past several other cars. People were working on some of them, and others just sat there while people stood around and shot the bull. I recognized a few of the adults from around town, and more of the kids. It wasn’t all local kids; I probably only knew a quarter of them or less. In every class the cars ranged from pretty rough to pretty good looking, and you could about tell from that who was going to run good and who wasn’t.
Every time I came to a car that was obviously a Junior Stock, I stopped and looked it over and talked with the people around, the drivers, and sometimes the parents. After a while, we came to a ’51 Chevy with the stovebolt six in it. It was pretty clean looking, compared to some of the other cars; it was clear that it hadn’t come directly from a junk yard. "Nice looking car," I said to the kid with it.
"Not too bad," he said, looking up at me. "Hi, Mr. Austin."
I took another look at him. If he wasn’t John Mansfield’s younger brother then Glenn must have had a woods colt out there somewhere. He had that same black hair in a greasy Chicago boxcar cut, same dark eyes, same big size, and that same arrogant young punk attitude. Considering that he was fourteen or fifteen at the most, he had to have cultivated it for a while. He must have learned it from his brother, I figured.
"Bert Mansfield, right?" I asked, and quickly added, "You run all right with it?"
"Pretty good," he said. "This is my second year. I’ve won a couple times this year, and got beaten out of it by just a hair last week."
"Sounds fairly good to me," I said, realizing that this was one of the kids I’d been hearing about. If ever there was a kid with the attitude of a bully, this was him. He was reasonably respectful to me, but I’ll bet if another kid around his age crossed him there would be fists flying mighty quick. "You can’t win ’em all."
"I should have won last week," he sneered. "But that Totten joker from over around White Pigeon got in my way and blocked me. He’d better not do that to me again."
"Sometimes the run of the race just doesn’t go your way," I shrugged. "I’ve had it happen often enough to me."
"Yeah, but that was just plain stupid. He doesn’t have to pull that stuff." He said it in such a way that I understood that if the Totten kid showed up tonight he was going to get an introduction to the fence courtesy of Bert’s fender.
"That was just uncalled for," I heard a man’s voice next to me. I turned to recognize Bert’s father, Glenn; I knew him from around school, although not at all well – and not that I particularly cared to, considering his reputation. "He had no cause to be racing him when he was a lap down. And then to just pull out in front of Bert, well I told Bert he ought to have dealt with it right on the spot."
No, I thought, Bert didn’t get that punk bully attitude from his older brother. They both got it from their father. "Well, since I didn’t see it, I guess I can’t judge it," I said diplomatically. "But like I said, sometimes the run of the race doesn’t go your way."
"What would you know about it?" he sneered. "I ain’t never seen you here before."
"Oh, I’ve raced a little," I told him, "Just not recently. I was the Midwest Midget Sportsman Association champion three years running, so I know a little about racing."
"Oh, yeah," he said. "I remember you now. You got wrecked here years ago, didn’t you?"
"Yeah, I was busted up pretty bad," I told him. "It was just an accident, though. The tie rod end broke on the car in front of me, and I didn’t have any place to go but over him. It wasn’t anybody’s fault."
"Yeah, but you were the one that wound up getting hurt. Seems to me you ought to have done something about it."
"Never had the chance," I shrugged. "That’s all water over the dam, anyway, and a long time ago, to boot."
"So, what are you doing here tonight?" he asked.
"Oh, just wandering around, checking things out, seeing what’s changed over the years," I told him. I wasn’t about to say that I was considering taking on trying to control the Junior Stock class, because I could see that the moment he found it out we were going to be facing off with each other.
"Well, we don’t get the crowds that we used to, that’s for sure," he said. "Car count is falling off some, too. I keep telling Smoky that he’s going to have to increase the payout to get more people here. It ain’t hardly worth it when a win only pays fifty bucks. Used to be that if you didn’t like one place you could go race somewhere else, but there’s been a lot of tracks closing the last few years. I think all the kids are going drag racing, but that’s just to see how much money you can burn."
"Yeah, it’s not like real racing," I agreed. "But I guess it’s getting popular. You do some racing, I take it?"
"I used to," he said. "But then the boys got interested in it, so I put most of my effort into their cars anymore. Maybe when Bert’s out of high school I’ll think about building me another Sportsman or something. I’m getting a little old for all the rough and tumble, but I guess an old dog still has a few bites left in him. How about you?"
"Oh, I’ve thought about it from time to time," I said, not bothering to tell him that I didn’t think much of the idea. "But I guess I’ve got other things to do in my life these days. I had enough racing to hold me when I was younger."
We talked a little more, and then Arlene and I moved to walk on up the line. "Boy, it’s pretty clear it’s going to be his way or the highway, isn’t it?" she asked quietly as soon as we were out of earshot.
"Yep, there’s the main reason why I don’t want to take on this chore," I said. "I don’t know him that well, but I don’t like him much, either. If it weren’t for him, I think I might be able to enjoy it some. It’d be fun to work with the kids, teach them a little bit. I’ll tell you what, Arlene. When we met, I was a teacher who had turned to racing. I think now I’m a racer who’s turned to teaching."
"But you’re still a racer at heart," she smiled. "You know, I guess I still am, too. There’s something about this that gets my blood flowing." She hugged my arm and continued, "I think I’m going to be glad that the kids will be asleep when we get home tonight, because I’m already looking forward to you driving me tonight."
"We could say the heck with it and go home now," I suggested, getting her meaning.
"No, the kids will still be awake," she smiled. "And besides, I think I need to watch some racing to really get me going."