That spring and summer were a little bit strange, because we went for months with the same eleven drivers we’d left Livonia with in the spring, and that had never happened before, at least while I’d been with the show. Oh, we’d pick up a local driver to run with us for a show or two, but it was just for those shows and for whatever reason they never joined up with us.

Since we had an odd number of guys, that meant that we didn’t have to always share a room. That made it handy when some one of us would pick up a honey for the evening since there was always a spare bed for their roommate to head to, so that cut down on the nights that someone had to spend sleeping in one of the cars. The way we worked it was that the feature winner got to sleep alone, which worked out pretty good since the feature winner was more likely to pick up a girl than the others. Although, if someone else picked up a girl and the winner didn’t then the spare bed got put to use anyway.

I’m not sure how it came about, but somehow I wound up with Dewey as my roommate more often than not. Dewey was a nice kid, but he was still a kid, if you know what I mean. He’d had absolutely no experience in a race car when he joined – not that I’d had a lot more when I joined – but he learned fast. Before long he wasn’t always running in the consolations, and in fact was finishing in the money now and then if the race ran right for him.

He was a quiet kid and kind of hung back from the group a little. I’m not saying he wasn’t friendly, but he was far and away the youngest of the crew and about the only one who wasn’t a veteran, so he didn’t always fit right in. The Korean War was still going on, and that bit about him not being a veteran raised a question or two in my mind. One rainy day when we didn’t have anything better to do I asked him about it. "How come you aren’t in the service, at your age?" I asked.

"I ain’t been called," he said. "I don’t plan on going if they don’t call me. My brother did that and he got killed in Korea."

Well, that was understandable as hell, I thought. "You know, you’re probably going to get called sooner or later," I said.

"Probably," he shrugged. "But maybe I won’t be, either. Maybe the war will be over by the time they get around to it. Like I said, if I get called, I’ll go."

"Can’t ask for much more than that," I said. "This war is different. Back when I was in the Army I felt like I was lucky to get drafted so I could get in before the fun was over with. It turned out it wasn’t a hell of a lot of fun, and we’ve got people with us who had it a lot worse than I did."

After a time Dewey was more one of the group. He was always careful, and always dependable. He would only rarely get into an all-out battle for position, but had a tendency to dog your tail and wait for an opening, and once he got some track sense he was good as spotting those openings.

One night, toward the end of the spring swing through the south and west he got a little lucky with the flow of the race and wound up winning, his first time to do it. He wasn’t twenty-one yet, but that didn’t stop us from trying to get him drunk to celebrate his first victory. I won’t say we got him drunk, but we got him flying pretty good. He was sick as a dog when we got back to the motel that night and spent a good chunk of the night worshipping the porcelain goddess. The next morning he had a head on him that just wasn’t funny, and he slept most of the way on our jump to the next bullring.

I have to say I never saw him get drunk after that, even after he won the next time a month or so later. So, we fixed him up with a girl that was hanging around the victory circle after the race by talking him up to her. I wound up spending the night with Rocky while Dewey had the girl in our room. From what we could figure out they must have had a pretty good night, since the girl was walking a little sore when he borrowed my car to take her home the next morning, and he had a big grin on his face over breakfast a little later. Nothing much was said, but then nothing much had to be said, either.

A couple nights later, in Matoon, Illinois, I had a pretty good battle with Buck through most of the feature. The lead changed hands several times, and I finally beat him out on a high-line pass at the finish. Although I’d been in the money a couple times I hadn’t won in a while, so it felt good to break my luck and know that I still could get the job done. I pulled into what passed for a winner’s circle, and Spud handed me the trophy; the local paper even took a photo, which didn’t happen very often.

One of the nice things about winning was that you got to stand around and shoot the shit with fans a little. Often as not it was a good time to pick up a honey for the evening, and I’ll admit I was looking forward to breaking my luck there, too. Sure enough, there were several women there, but my eyes were drawn right to one gal, who had a build like the proverbial brick shithouse, and long, black hair done up in a perm. I could see that she had eyes for me, but I could also see that she had a boyfriend or husband or something with her, and he wasn’t at all happy about her, along with being so loaded that I could smell the booze on him from several feet away. She was friendly, and I tried to be nice, although my sights had pretty well settled on a little brunette that seemed to have stars in her eyes and hot pants for me.

The crowd had thinned out pretty good and I was just getting set to ask the brunette if she’d like to go have a drink or a late dinner with me, when the black-haired girl acted like she didn’t want to be beat out, and put her arm around me. That pissed her boyfriend off real bad; he yanked her away with one hand and took a big swing at her with his other, hitting her in the face pretty bad.

That really pissed me off. Granted, she was stepping out of line by putting the make on me while her boyfriend or whatever was right there, but that didn’t give him call to be hitting on her. In only a second he was getting set to take another swing at her and I was swinging at him. I hit him hard, and he went down right there, at least partly because at the same time I hit him on one side of his head Dewey hit him on the other side of the head with the flat side of a big crescent wrench.

Both Dewey and I turned to the girl as he fell in the dirt. "You all right, miss?" I asked.

"I’ll be OK," she sniffed. Not real OK, I thought; she was going to have a great big shiner in the morning. "I wouldn’t have been if you hadn’t stopped him, though," she went on.

"Has he hit you before?" I asked.

"Yeah," she said, "Lots."

"Then why are you putting up with it?" I asked.

"I wouldn’t put up with it if I had a way to get out of this damn town," she replied angrily.

"What, are you trapped here or something?" I wondered.

"I don’t have any place to go," she said, the tears rolling. "If I tried to leave he’d hunt me down and kill me."

By now there were several of the guys hanging around. "Sound familiar?" Frank smiled.

"Hattie, right?" I said to him. "I was thinking about that myself."

"Your choice," he said with a grin.

I turned back to the girl, but I was thinking about Chick meeting up with Hattie a couple years before. To be honest, I had yet to meet up with a track honey that I really wanted to take with me, but this gal was awful pretty and I suppose it hit me in a soft spot. "What’s your name?" I asked.

"Lillian," she said. "Lillian Eberle."

"All right, Lillian," I said. "If you really want to get out of town, you can ride with us for a while until we can find a safe place to leave you."

"But . . . but what about him?" she asked. "He’ll come after me."

"I think we can rig it around to give us a little head start," Spud grinned. "And you’ll be with us if he does come after you."

"Oh, God, yes," she cried. "Take me with you. I’ll fuck every one of you to thank you if you can keep him away from me."

I guess I have to say that I rolled my eyes at that. It was clear right from the beginning that Lillian was no Hattie, in more ways than one, and I could see trouble in the future. We were only about a week out of Livonia by that point, and I figured probably we could find a place to leave her there. At least I was already hoping we could. "Maybe you don’t have to be quite that grateful," I smiled. "We don’t have anything against helping out a pretty woman in trouble."

"Well, I still would if you wanted me to," she smiled. "Anything to get away from that bastard. How can you keep him from following us?"

"We’ll come up with something," Spud smiled. "If Mel takes you to wherever you’ve been living, can you get your stuff to take with us?"

"I don’t have much," she said. "I . . . I . . . yes, I can."

"Good," Frank said. He bent down, rolled the guy over, and pulled his wallet and car keys out of his pants. He opened the wallet, pulled out a wad of bills, and handed it to her. "Here’s a little grubstake for you. Now you and Mel go find his car, put the keys and wallet in it and lock it up. Then Mel will take you to get your stuff."

"All right," she said with a smile. "You’ll take care of him?"

"Sure thing," Spud grinned, making me wonder what he had on his mind. I glanced around, to see that the locals had all left, including the little brunette that I’d had my sights set on. I wasn’t disappointed as it looked like I’d just landed a bigger fish. Spud continued, "Dewey, keep an eye on him while I go get the pickup. If he shows signs of coming around, whack him again. Mel, Lillian, you get going."

The two of us headed out to the customer parking lot, which was pretty close to empty. She led me over to a ’39 Dodge that had seen better days – there were mashed fenders on all four corners. "Your buddy drives drunk every once in a while, I take it?" I said.

"Shit," she snorted. "He does everything drunk, not just drive drunk."

"Jesus, Lillian," I said. "Why the hell did you put up with an asshole like that?"

"It’s a long story, but it comes down to the fact that I didn’t have a lot of choice," she said bitterly as she tossed the keys and wallet inside, and pulled out her purse. "To tell you the truth, I’m scared as hell to go with you guys, because I don’t have any idea of what I’ll wind up doing that’s any better than what I was doing when I took up with him, but I don’t know if that might not be better."

"What was that?" I asked as I locked the right side doors and closed them, while she finished up on the left side ones.

"Oh, hell," she said sadly. "I might as well tell the truth now. I was a hooker, Mel. I worked in a house up in Chicago. It was owned by the mob, and there was no way in hell I could leave until one night he snuck me out of there. So, no, I don’t have any place to go and can’t even go back there."

I shook my head. "It’s hard to believe that an asshole like that is a step upwards in life, but you’ve fallen in with a good group, and we’ll do our best to be square with you."

"Yeah, that’s the hell of it," she said. "He really was a step up in life."

We headed back, got my car, and headed into town. She and her buddy – I never knew if he was her husband or boyfriend or what – lived in a beat-up little house that was little better than a dump. There were a couple junk cars sitting outside, and the yard was filled with trash. The house was a little better inside, but it was still a dump. It didn’t take long for Lillian to pack a couple small suitcases, and they still weren’t full. "That’s all I need," she said. "Let’s get out of this fucking place."

In a few minutes we were back at the motel we were staying at for the evening. I saw that the pickup was there, which meant that Dewey must have left Spud at the track where he and Frank shared a trailer. I took Lillian into the room, then headed back outside.

"You take care of the guy?" I asked Dewey.

"Yeah," he smiled. "He won’t be a problem."

"Good enough," I told him. I locked my wallet in the trunk of my car, and gave him the keys.

"What’s this?" he asked.

"I’m not sure how far I trust her," I told him. "This just means that I won’t get rolled while I’m asleep."

"Oh, one of those kinds of things, huh?" he smiled.

"Afraid so," I shook my head. "She sure as hell ain’t no Hattie."

I headed back into the room. I was tired and a bit drawn out. It would have been nice to find a decent bar and have had a draft or two, but I didn’t think it was a good idea to leave Lillian alone and didn’t think it was a good idea to be seen around that town with her. She was in the bathroom, apparently checking the damage in the mirror. "Could be worse," she sighed. "The bastard has done a lot worse to me. I should look all right in a few days and I think I can cover it with makeup pretty good."

"Just sorry it had to happen at all," I said quietly.

"Did they get him taken care of?" she asked.

"Dewey said he won’t be a problem. He didn’t say how. That’s the guy that whacked him with the crescent wrench."

She smiled and said, "Good for him. I’ll have to make sure to thank him, too."

"You mean fuck him, right?"

"If he wants," she said. "I don’t mind."

Once again I rolled my eyes, unable to get over the feeling that there was big trouble on the horizon. "I’ll tell you what, Lillian," I said. "I’m just about beat to shit tonight, and I’m sure you’re pretty well frazzled, too. Why don’t you take that bed over there," I said, pointing at one of the twin beds in the room, "And I’ll take this one."

"Don’t you want to sleep with me?" she asked in a shy, downcast voice.

"I don’t know," I told her. "Frankly, I think you might be a lot of fun in bed, but I don’t want you thinking that you have to do it."

"I don’t mind," she said. "Mel, you probably think that most hookers don’t really like sex, they just act like they do because they have to, right?"

"Well, yeah."

"It’s not always the case," she said. "Oh, yeah, there have been times that I’ve hated hell out of it, but I enjoy taking some guys for a ride, guys that appreciate it. The fact that I don’t have to do it makes me want to do it. But I’d like to sleep next to you tonight whether we fuck or not. I know you don’t know me very well and you’re probably a little scared of me, but already you’ve cared for me more than any man has done since I don’t know when."

"Oh, all right," I said, surrendering to the inevitable. "I really need to get a shower and get all this track dirt and shit off me."

"I could stand one, too," she said. "Unfortunately, that shower isn’t big enough for the both of us."

"Why don’t you go first?" I suggested. "I guess it takes a woman longer to get around than it does a man."

"I will, and thanks," she smiled. "Mel, you’re OK, you really are. You know that?"

She headed for the bathroom, while I took off my coveralls – I hadn’t even managed that, and they were filthy from the track that night – and then my street clothes, and sat on the bed in my underwear. I wasn’t sure what to expect, and Lillian kept surprising me. It wasn’t that I necessarily minded spending some time in bed with a whore. After all, Myukio had taken my cherry back in Japan, I’d had sex with some of the other girls in that house. On top of that, I had picked up two or three in Milwaukee over the years I was there, at times when I wanted sex and Herm didn’t currently have a friend who had a friend. But it had been a while since I’d had to pay for it, although some of the honeys that I’d picked up at tracks over the last couple years weren’t a whole lot better. I expected that some of them would have been willing to play for pay if the situation were right.

But somehow, this didn’t seem like play. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there was something else going on. Lillian just wasn’t acting the way I’d expected her to act, but then, I don’t know what I expected anyway.

Before long, she stuck her head around the bathroom door. "I’m done in the shower if you want to get in," she said.

"Good, I’m ready," I said. I got up, peeled off my underwear, tossed it on the pile of dirty clothes, and headed into the bathroom, to find Lillian standing in front of the sink with a towel wrapped around her, doing I don’t know what. She didn’t say anything as I stepped into the shower and went to it.

Like a lot of guys, I didn’t screw around a lot in the shower, and I was out in a pretty short time. Lillian had left the bathroom, so I dried off and at least ran a towel over my hair, which got it partway dry. I stepped back out into the main room, to find Lillian lying in my bed, with the covers rolled back, not wearing a stitch.

I don’t think I really need to describe the next half hour or so in real detail, other than to say that she knew what she was doing and she was darn good at it. She seemed to enjoy what she was doing to me, and I hope she did. I wanted to believe that it wasn’t an act, but I don’t know how I would have told. But she gave me a hell of a good ride, and whether she enjoyed it or not, I know I did. Acting or not, I didn’t remember ever having any better, so I guess that counted for something.

After we wound down, I got up, took the rubber off, flushed it and washed myself down. "We still don’t have to sleep together," I offered. "It’s going to be pretty tight for us in that twin bed."

"I know," she smiled. "But Mel, I want to feel you up against me. I feel safe when I’m with you, and it’s a long time since I’ve felt safe with a man."

There was no way I could put that off. I slid into bed beside her, and she threw the covers over us, wrapping her arm around me in the process. We snuggled up close together, kissed a little, talked a little about nothing in particular, and were soon asleep.

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.