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Good things come to those who wait, I guess. I won the feature that evening. We’d had to run earlier than normal because of not having any lights, and the sun was down and it was starting to get dim when I managed to hold off Sonny in the 77 car and pull off the win. It had been a while since I’d won, although I’d finished in the money several times, so it felt good to pull to a stop in front of the grandstand and accept the trophy that Frank carried with us to be presented to the winner each night. We had to give it back after the crowd left, of course, and it got a little beat up over the season. After the race, of course, some of the crowd gathered around to talk racing and the like.
Part of the reason we loaded all the cars in a hurry, except for the winning car, was that funny things could happen to a car if it was just allowed to sit out when there was a crowd around. People would try to steal stuff for souvenirs, or kids might try to scratch their names in the paint, or like that, so we always had to keep an eye on the cars after the race. The winning car was more exposed, but there were usually three or four of us around it to keep the vandals away.
As luck would have it, there was a gal in the crowd that seemed taken with me. She was dark skinned with long, dark hair and she was awful darn pretty. Her name was Rosita, and with a name like that she about had to be Mexican. She had a little of that accent, too, and it was awful interesting. I’m not sure if it was the effect that Chick and Hattie had been having on me all day, but she sure got my attention and I started sweet talking her a little. The next thing I knew I was asking her if she’d like to go someplace where we could be by ourselves, and she said she’d like that.
We had to wait for the crowd to die down a little, and along in there I got to talk to Hoss for a minute. "I think I got a live one," I told him.
"Have fun," he replied with a grin. "I think I’m gonna go look for a cop. Don’t wait up for me."
After I had done what I had to do, Rosita and I got in my car and we headed in to the old hotel where we were spending the night. I no more than got the door to the room closed before Rosita was on me, and I mean to tell you that young lady could kiss a man half to death. It wasn’t too long before we had clothes scattered all over that room, except for her brassiere, which was one of those old full-coverage things that seemed made out of armor plate protecting two pretty good hills. I went to take it off, but she stopped me. "You don’t play with my tetas," she told me. "Those are just for my boyfriend."
After a while I figured it was time to be done with messing around and get down to business. Just about that time I heard some familiar bumping and screaming from the next room – Chick and Hattie were going at it again. "She sounds like she’s enjoying it," Rosita grinned. "Let’s see if we can enjoy it as much." She rolled onto her back and I took her up on her invitation. It would be awful hard to say if she enjoyed it as much as Hattie, but it had to be close either way.
It was after midnight before she said she had to be getting home. We had one last round, and both of us got dressed. I never did get a look at her bare tetas, much less get to play with them, but it would have been fun. Her boyfriend was sure lucky about that, I thought. By then, Chick and Hattie had settled down, and the place was quiet. We got down to the street, and I found Hoss asleep in the right seat of the Ford. "You can go up and go to bed," I told him. "I’ve got to take the lady home."
"OK, fine with me," he mumbled, stirring around.
"Did you find a cop?" I asked him.
"What?" he yawned. "Oh, yeah, it was pretty good."
It turned out that Rosita lived in a shack out on the edge of town, and I guess some of her family lived there, too. She didn’t want me to drive her right up to her door for fear that she might wake someone up. We sat in the car kissing and cuddling for a while, and she even let me play with her tetas through her blouse and brassiere a little before I let her out and drove back to the hotel.
Hoss was sound asleep when I got back to the room, and I wasn’t very far behind him even though I had to put a towel on the wet spot on the bed. Rosita had done a pretty good job of bringing things back into balance for me, and I slept pretty well.
Of course, Hoss had to tease me some when we got up in the morning. "God, I don’t know how I got to sleep up here last night," he commented. "It smelled like a whorehouse on a busy Saturday night. I take it you had a good time."
"Not too bad," I told him. "Just between you and me I would have to say it was more than not too bad. In fact, I’d have to say that it was pretty good. How did it go with you?"
He yawned again and replied, "I’ve seen better, but then, I’ve seen worse. It was a really nice ride for five bucks. Got my ashes hauled, and that counts for something."
We got our stuff around and out to the vehicles, then went to breakfast across the street, where the rest of the crew was already or was straggling in. Hoss and I sat down with Frank and Spud, like we usually did. "So, how are you two this morning?" Frank asked.
"Oh, tolerable," I grinned.
"Yeah, tolerable," Hoss agreed.
"I can’t speak about Hoss, but I could tolerate a little of what Mel had last night," Spud laughed. "She looked like one hot little babe."
"So Mel," Frank grinned. "Now that Chick is spoken for, are you going to take over the job of MMSA pussy hound?"
"I don’t think so," I told him. "But I’m not going to turn my back on a good chance, either."
"A man would be a fool to do that," Spud laughed.
What with everything, I was in a little better mood when we got on the road a little later. Chick and Hattie had gotten me a little on edge, but Rosita had pretty well taken care of that problem. I figured I could hold out until the next time, although watching the two of them getting a little cuddly at breakfast made me think that a person could do better than having the occasional one night stand. But then, it was no guarantee that Chick and Hattie were going to be together very long past the first decent sized city we passed through, which I knew would be Denver in a few days, and there was already a pool going around on how long it would last.
I stopped at a truck stop along the way to our next stop to restock my depleted rubber supply from the night before. In those days you didn’t have condoms on big display racks in every drug store. In fact, they were a little hard to get, except in truck stop rest rooms, by which you understand that they had lot lizards hanging around the truck stops on the major highways back then, too. Some things don’t change.
If I recall correctly, our next stop was Dalhart, Texas. We headed out into Colorado from there. We’d all been looking forward to the race in Colorado Springs, since we knew it was going to be a big deal. One of the things that Carnie had tried to set up was for us to play on or near a military base right after the first of the month, when people got paid. Since we were all veterans, we knew that the people in the Army only got paid once a month, and it was traditional to have a big payday night drunk. In an effort to moderate that, some base commanders would invite some sort of traveling show, a carnival or something like us, to play right around payday to try and moderate some of the craziness.
But it didn’t happen this time. While we were tearing down the night before in some town in southern Colorado, Carnie came driving in to tell Frank that the show had been canceled at the last minute. "Why’s that?" Frank asked.
"Well, they’re on an increased alert because of the war," Carnie said. "So they’ve restricted access to the base."
"War? What war?"
"Don’t you guys listen to the news, or read the papers?" Carnie asked. "There’s a war going on in Korea, and from what I can figure out it’s not going too well. They’re sending units from Japan to try and stop the commie Koreans from coming south."
"Shit," Frank said. "News to me. We’ve been out in boondock country where the only newspapers around tell you who Mabel had to dinner last week, and the only news on the radio stations is how we’re going to hell if we don’t come to Jesus. We’ve only got two or three radios with us, and I don’t think anyone’s had one on in weeks."
It turned out that the news that a war had broken out in Korea was nearly a week old, but we just hadn’t been plugged into it. It’s amazing to look back today and realize how isolated from the news we were, because it wasn’t much like today. There was no such thing as national news on TV; in fact, I’d seen my first TV set in a bar in Milwaukee the winter before, and I hadn’t seen one since. There really hadn’t been much on it and it didn’t seem like it was worth my time. There were the national radio networks – CBS, NBC Blue, and NBC Red, which later became ABC, along with a couple other smaller ones. The networks were pretty good about news, and it was the waning days of all the famous old radio shows. But this was all in the days of AM radio. We had been in a section of the country where there were mostly a bunch of little short-range potboiler radio stations that either played hillbilly music or was all gospel and preaching, so, like Frank said, we mostly didn’t bother to turn what radios we had on. I didn’t have a radio in the Ford – cheap cars didn’t come with radios in the days when it was built. Woody may have had a radio in his car, but I don’t remember now; none of the trucks had them.
So, there wasn’t a whole lot we could do but head on into Colorado Springs, where we’d had tourist cabins already reserved. Carnie had thought about trying to set up an alternate show at a local race track but he couldn’t make schedules match and there wasn’t time to promote anything, so we just had the day off. At least if we had to have a day off it was a decent town to have one in. A few of us decided to drive up to the top of Pike’s Peak, just for something to do; that made the old Ford wheeze like hell to crawl up to the top. Later in the summer they closed that road for a race to the top, and it would have been fun to try in the race cars but that came later in the summer, so that was that.
We probably couldn’t have run it anyway. We were, in terms of those days, outlaws. The AAA sanctioned a big chunk of the racing in the country. If you had an AAA license and you ran in some other series, you would get your license pulled so quick it wasn’t funny, since the AAA was the big dog on the block and wanted to be the only dog. There were other circuits around in those days, and some of them could be a little picky if you ran outside their series, too. NASCAR in those days was one of a bunch of little circuits, but they could be snotty about their drivers running outlaw races, which is part of how they got to be a big deal. But, they weren’t a big deal then, and most of us if we’d heard of them at all had only heard about a bunch of moonshiners running Strictly Stock cars on the beach circuit at Daytona, and that was about all we knew.
The whole outlaw business was the main reason why the MMSA mostly consisted of drivers you never heard of before or since, guys that had just run on little local dirt tracks, usually competently but often not real well. None of us except for Frank and Spud had loads and loads of experience, and they hardly ever ran with us. I was a little behind the rest in experience, but I was catching up fast in that department from running those little hot rods most every night.
I like to think that I may have been a little more talented than most, because by this time I ran about as well as everyone else in spite of not having as much experience. I didn’t win the feature every time out, but by this time it was about once every other week, and I finished in the money about twice a week, which was about as good as everybody else did or maybe a little better. The cars really were pretty even; I think that every one of us who stayed with the MMSA for more than a couple months that summer won at least one feature, and every one of us finished last at one point or another, too. I know I had to run the consols a fair amount, but I didn’t have to sit out a feature very often.
After the disappointment in Colorado Springs we headed on north. We didn’t even stop in Denver, except at stop lights; there was a midget circuit going on there and we didn’t want to get involved. We did run somewhere up in the north part of Colorado, then went to Laramie, Wyoming, if memory serves, before heading back into Nebraska at Scottsbluff, then on to Spearfish, South Dakota before turning and working our way back east.
Whoever had Denver in the pool on when Chick and Hattie would part ways didn’t win it; in fact, it went the other way, if anything. The farther we got from Floydada the happier and brighter she seemed to get. She wasn’t just along for the ride; she was pulling her share of the load, mostly helping wash cars or do some of the other little jobs that needed to be done. One day along about in here Rocky and I were riding together on a long jump when we decided to stop for lunch; Chick and Hattie pulled in right behind us, so the four of us settled in for burgers and fries or whatever. Up to this point Hattie hadn’t said much about why she wanted to leave Floydada with only the clothes on her back, although we figured Chick knew something about it.
It turned out that he really didn’t, but we all found out about it. From the moment we walked into the place, Hattie seemed very uncomfortable. She sat with us while she ordered, but was obviously getting more nervous every time the waitress came near. The waitress was an older woman and seemed pretty harmless, but Hattie obviously didn’t think so. Finally, she got up and went out to Chick’s car before the meal came, and Chick headed out after her. Rocky and I asked to have everybody’s lunch wrapped up to go, since we could see that something was going on that we didn’t understand.
When Rocky and I got out to Chick’s car, we found Hattie crying on Chick’s shoulder. "I’m sorry," she said when we brought the food. "I know it doesn’t mean anything, but that woman reminds me too much of my aunt."
"What’s she got to do with it?" Chick asked.
"She let her husband rape me," she sobbed. "Not just once, but about every night. If she knew where I was she’d send him after me."
"It’s not going to happen, not while you’re with us," Chick told her comfortingly.
Over the course of the next little while, most of the story came out. Hattie wasn’t as old as we’d guessed she was; she was only eighteen. Her folks had died in a car crash earlier in the year, and she’d had no choice but to be taken in by her aunt and her husband, who really had to be some piece of work. To make it worse, he was some kind of Holy Roller preacher, so even if she could have complained about it to someone there was nothing much that could be done about it. The hell she went through lasted the next several months, until the day she was in the little general store when Chick came in and explained that he was traveling with the racing bunch – and he’d been nice to her.
It didn’t take long for Hattie to realize that if she was a sex toy for her aunt and her husband, with no benefit to herself, there was nothing wrong in being someone else’s sex toy to get out from under them. And of course, Chick was sending the message consciously or unconsciously that he was looking for action. Hattie was so broke that she actually had to sneak into the race track, but she’d made up her mind that if she wasn’t leaving with Chick she was leaving with another one of us.
The surprise to her came shortly afterwards. She’d been screwed by her aunt’s husband (who wasn’t her uncle) for months and hated every second of it, but the moment she realized she was screwing for her own benefit, she started to like it. It was thrilling to be having sex because she wanted to, not because she had to. Up to that point, all Chick had really known was that Hattie had really wanted to get out of Floydada but hadn’t really known much about why. By the time Hattie told us the details he was about ready to start driving back that way, only stopping to get gas and get a gun. It took all of us, including Hattie, to talk him out of that.
By then Chick was about as worked up as Hattie, so I had Rocky drive his car while the two of them sat together in the back seat and cuddled. "Damn," Rocky told me that evening. "I always thought it wasn’t much more than an ongoing shack job, but I think they’re really gone on each other."
Well, to be honest I think most of us thought pretty much the same thing, that Chick was stringing her along for the sake of having a little regular action. Even in the beginning she was a cut or two above the type of girls that Chick had been chasing most evenings after the races, and we figured that he knew a good thing when he saw it. We figured that it wouldn’t take long for his interest to fade, but it didn’t.
It probably didn’t hurt that day by day Hattie perked up a little more, and spruced herself up a little more. She’d deliberately let herself look unattractive, and think of herself as unattractive, mostly to try and be less appealing to her aunt’s husband; now she let all that slip away, and fixed herself up a little in the process. In spite of living on the road with us, and frankly living in the dirt with us, she began looking better and better. One day when we were in some little town a little early, she got Chick to drop her off at a beauty shop, and she came back with a nice looking perm that made her look pretty darn good. We began to realize that Chick had actually scored himself a beauty, and one a lot brighter than any of us had first thought. I think Chick already realized that, but it just drove the lesson home to him. The old Chick we had known, the one trying to score with every scag he could, was long gone, and we could hardly believe it was the same person.
Having a woman with us, and an attractive woman at that, changed us just a little bit. Up until along in here, our language had been pretty foul, at least when we were by ourselves. After all, we were a bunch of unattached guys on the road, and most of the time we had little reason to watch our mouths. Now, we found ourselves cleaning up our language, our manners – and even cleaning ourselves up much more than we had, not that any of us thought we were going to score with Hattie, but, well, just because. She went a long way to remind us of a different world out there, one that we’d turned our backs on. At the same time, to a big extent Hattie was one of the guys, "With it" as Carnie would say. After a while Frank started picking up the cost of her room and board as well as giving her a small salary, because she was useful to us in many ways, not just washing cars or helping rig the PA system.
I’m not real clear on where all we went in those days. I do know that we must have hit Colorado Springs right after the first of July, but by the end of the month we were in Michigan. This had been worked out in advance; Frank wanted to touch base at home along toward the middle of the season, and our home base was Livonia, even though I’d never been there before. Spud wanted to pick up some parts, and Frank wanted to see Vivian, both on some business, and because she was Vivian. It wasn’t really a break for us, since we’d long been scheduled into several tracks in the area, but at least we got to stay in the same place for a few days.