When the alarm went off in the morning, neither of us had moved very much and I felt stiff and sore from it. But her arm was still around me, and her other hand was on my tool while I had my free hand around her butt. That hadn’t happened to me since I’d left Bessie, and that was a long time before.

By then, the other guys were getting around. I got on clean clothes, went out, got my keys from Dewey, got in the trunk of the car and got out a galvanized five gallon bucket. I took it inside the room while Lillian was still getting around, threw my dirty clothes and some laundry soap in it and filled the bucket the rest of the way up in the shower. "What are you doing?" she asked.

"My laundry," I said. It was an old carnival trick that Carnie had taught us years before – by which I mean clear back on Okinawa. "I’ll take this back out to the car, put a piece of old inner tube on it to keep the lid on, and let it ride in the trunk for a while. When we get in this afternoon I’ll rinse the stuff out and string a clothesline. "I have to do it like this about every other day."

"Huh," she sniffed. "I never thought about that, but then I guess I’ve never been on the road much to have to learn about it. I think I’m going to enjoy being on the road with you guys."

"Just a hint," I told her. "If you’re going to be on the road with us, it’ll help out and we’ll all appreciate it if you’ll pitch in when there’s work to be done. Everybody else will be pitching in, you should be, too."

"All right, I guess," she sighed. "I don’t mind working. Maybe it’s better that way."

Pretty soon we got on the road, with several of the guys riding in the back of the pickup until we got to the track. Like always, we were pretty well loaded up from the night before, and it didn’t take us long before we were headed up the road.

We stopped about an hour out at a moderately decent looking truck stop – at least, it had a lot of trucks parked around it, which meant that they had a large parking lot, even though the only thing the sign said was "EAT." We headed in and got some tables. Lillian and I wound up at a table for six, along with Frank, Spud, Dewey, and Buck.

We sat there shooting the bull for a few minutes. At this point I hadn’t told Frank and Spud about Lillian telling me that she’d been a hooker and this wasn’t the time to make that announcement. "Dewey," I said. "I’ve got two questions."

"What?"

"I thought I hit that joker pretty good with my fist," I said. "But I figured there was no way I could have dropped him like that, until I saw you standing there with that crescent wrench. That’s a heck of a thing to have up your sleeve. Just what the hell were you doing with a crescent wrench in the winner’s circle, anyway?"

"Oh, my car got handling goofy about halfway through the feature, so I parked it and I was working on it," he said. "Then I thought I’d go over and congratulate you. I didn’t want anyone walking off with the wrench, so I took it with me. No big deal. What was your other question?"

"Well, what did you do with that guy last night, anyway?"

He got a big old grin on his face. "I thought that was kind of neat," he said. "Especially since I was the one to think of it."

"Dewey, this sounds better and better," I said. "What did you guys do?"

"Well, we were just going to haul him out in the country somewhere, strip his clothes off and leave him in a ditch," he grinned. "But as we headed out into the country, we came to these train tracks. It was a double crossing, and a train was waiting for another train to pass going the other way on the far side. There was a boxcar with its door open right in front of us, and I turned to Spud and said, ‘That gives me an idea.’"

"He had this great big grin on his face," Spud laughed. "It didn’t take me any thinking to see what he was thinking of. Well, we got old slugger boy out of the back of the pickup and stuffed him in the boxcar. We’d already taken off his boots and used his shoestrings to tie his hands and feet together. We no more than got him in the boxcar when the train started moving. He’s probably not going to come around for a while. Hard to say, but he might be good for Memphis before he comes around."

"If we get real lucky," Dewey smiled. "He’ll come to with a yard bull waving his fist in his face."

"Yeah," Spud laughed. "No I.D., no money, no shoes. If he gets caught by the right yard bull he might get thirty days for vagrancy."

"Oh, you guys," Lillian laughed. "I love you both. It couldn’t happen to a better guy. I owe you lots, and I’m going to enjoy thanking you."

I have to admit that we all got some laughs the next few days when we thought about Dwight – which is what Lillian told us his name was. Just about whatever happened to him was going to be a tough story to live down.

I have to give Lillian credit – she didn’t try to hide who she was or what she had been. In fact, she admitted that while Dwight may have been a first class asshole, she at least owed him some thanks for getting her out of that whorehouse in Chicago. I expected to get some static from Frank or Spud about having picked up a hooker to bring along with us, but when I got a chance to talk to Frank by himself, he said it was just fine with him so long as she didn’t cause any trouble on the crew. If she did she was going to have to be out on her ass.

Lillian made it clear to me right from the beginning that she was not a one-man woman. "The worst thing about Dwight," she said at that breakfast table the first morning, "Wasn’t that he hit me, but that he couldn’t stand the thought of me being with another guy. I like variety. That’s part of how I became a hooker in the first place."

She meant what she said. She stayed with me the next couple nights, but the following morning she told me, "Mel, I think I’ll spend the night with Dewey tonight. You won’t mind sharing a room with Perk tonight, will you?"

"No, I guess not," I told her. "At least if he doesn’t snore."

There really wasn’t a whole lot I could have said differently. I think a man likes to think that he owns a woman, that she is his and his alone, but Lillian had made clear from the beginning that she didn’t play the game that way. I’d figured this was coming, and at least she was being honest and open about it.

"I knew you wouldn’t mind," she smiled at me. "I’ll be back with you tomorrow night."

"You take it easy with Dewey, now," I grinned at her. "The last girl he spent the night with was walking a little funny when she left in the morning."

"Oh, good!" She grinned. "That sounds like fun!"

Sure enough, when we got back to the tourist cabins that night, she headed off with Dewey. Things were a little more complicated than we’d expected. Perk had picked up a girl at the track that evening, but he sidled over to me and said that it wasn’t going to be all night, and that I might as well have a couple beers with the rest of the crew. With any kind of luck I wasn’t going to have to sleep in the car that evening.

A bunch of us found a quiet little bar nearby, so quiet that the jukebox only ran once or twice. "Seems kind of strange to have you with us," Scotty commented. "You don’t mind her being with Dewey?"

"Not really," I told him. "That’s just how she is, and whether I like it or not isn’t going to change anything. I suspect you’ll get your turn sooner or later if she stays with us that long."

"Strange woman," he shook his head.

"I don’t think so," I told him. "She just thinks like a man in a lot of ways. Imagine if you were traveling with a crew of thirteen horny women. Wouldn’t you try to work your way around to all of them?"

"Well, yeah," he grinned. "Something like that is never going to happen to me, though."

"Right, me either," I told him. "Now, if you were one of them women, would you crowd your way to the head of the line or be willing to wait your turn? Look, this could turn into a good thing if nobody gets pushy."

"It just seems strange," he shook his head.

"Oh, yeah, it is," I laughed. "But let’s face it – we’re all pretty strange or we wouldn’t be doing this, right? So, what’s new?"

When we were loading up the next morning, I happened to be alone with Lillian for a moment. "You seem to be walking a little tenderly this morning," I told her. "I take it you had a good time."

"Oooohhh, yeah," she grinned happily. "That’s not the biggest thing I’ve ever seen, but it doesn’t go down easily and he sure likes to use it. I’ll tell you what, Mel, the girl that he marries is going to be in for a real nice surprise."

"If she can take it," I laughed.

"Oh, yeah," she grinned again. "She might not survive it that long, but what a way to go! I really want to get to Spud, but with him living in that trailer with Frank it’s going to be a little harder."

"Just let him know he’s next on your list and he’ll work something out," I advised.

"Good idea," she said thoughtfully. "Who do you think I ought to do after that?"

"Up to you," I said. "Just make sure that everyone gets a turn and no one gets left out."

Later that day, when we were eating lunch while working on the cars, she announced that she planned on getting to everyone, but that I’d get an extra turn now and then for being the one to invite her along in the first place. Just to keep it fair, she’d go through us in order of car numbers, and she wouldn’t mind if someone wanted to take a pass.

To make a long story short, she was as good as her word. As far as I know, Frank was the only one to take a pass. That wasn’t a big surprise, since by now we knew he had something going with Vivian and by then were getting pretty close to Livonia, so I suspected he had some different plans in mind.

There really wasn’t a whole lot special about coming back to Livonia this time, except that it sort of felt like home to some of us. Once again Herb let us use the service department of the Ford agency for a few days to go through the cars carefully to put the bigger gas tanks back in and stuff like that. One of the nice things about being back there was that we got to see Chick and Hattie again. She’d had her baby a little while before, a little girl they named Susan and they joked around about trying for a boy next time. They were still living in the house we’d all stayed in back in the previous winter, but it turned out that they wouldn’t be there much longer. There was a housing development out on the edge of town, and they’d decided to use Chick’s VA eligibility to buy a house that hadn’t been built yet, although they hoped to be in it before winter.

There was one interesting thing that came out of seeing Chick. It turned out that Runt Chenowith had talked to Vivian about the possibility of us coming to Indianapolis to be his pit crew for the 500 again, but Vivian had to tell him that we were going to be out west, too far to come for a day. However, she headed out into the shop and told Chick that Runt was looking for a pit crew if he was interested. Well, her dad happened to be standing right beside her when she said it, and the next thing they knew Herb was looking for volunteers to go with Chick and him to help out. Ten minutes later, Vivian called Runt back and told him that he had his pit crew.

Not only did they go down there for the race, they were down there both weekends for qualifying as well, at least so the guys could get a little practice with the car. Chick was able to tell us that Squirt had tried to qualify an old car that some guy had brought in hopes he could get into the race. He’d actually made it in, but his time hadn’t held and he got bumped. However, he did manage to get through the driver test with it and he had hopes of getting into the race next year. While Herb had been to Indianapolis before, he hadn’t ever seen the race from the pits. Always a racing nut, he’d really enjoyed himself, and he told Squirt that if he managed to come up with a good car for next year, he’d chip in with some sponsorship money. Squirt told Herb that he’d look around. He wasn’t going to take just anything, but wanted to find something that had a good chance in the race. Needless to say, Herb was already looking forward to next year.

While we were in Livonia, we had our only real driver change of the season. We didn’t actually lose a driver, since we’d run one short since the beginning of the year, and had gotten along with doubling up in the heats, having a local driver run the twelfth car, or just letting it sit. We couldn’t do that very well in fair season on those long tracks where we’d often not bother with heats, but run fifty or a hundred laps starting all twelve cars. Frank had been talking all season long how we’d probably pick up Bud Gaborski for the fall again, but when we got back to Livonia Bud was tied up in some job, making good money and didn’t really want to go on the road again. There may have been a girl involved in that, I don’t know; all I know is that Bud enjoyed running those long, wide tracks about as much as I did so whatever it was, it had to have been pretty special.

Because of the higher speeds, Frank didn’t want just anybody off the street, but preferred somebody who had at least some racing experience. Herb was able to solve that problem right out of his service department with the kid who ran the wash rack, John Adorney. John had run parts of a couple seasons in jalopies down at Flat Rock. He was even younger than Dewey by a few months. Herb said he was pretty good, but had a little bad luck and was between cars. Frank gave him a tryout at Flat Rock and Mt. Clemens and figured he’d do, so John wound up driving the 2 car for the rest of the season. We all took a liking to John, mostly because he was a likeable kind of guy. We taught him the tricks of driving a MMSA midget pretty quickly, and he was in the money every now and then for the rest of the season.

Even Lillian liked John; although he hadn’t been with us at Mattoon, she worked him right into her rotation. I don’t think he could have hit the floor with his hat the morning after his first night with her; I think she kind of stunned him.

One of the nice things about running the fall season, besides those long, wide fairgrounds horse tracks and the fun of being around the fairs, was the fact that Carnie was back with us. We’d seen him every so often through the spring, of course, but in the fall he didn’t have to work so far ahead of us, and he was with us three nights out of four.

I have to say that Lillian pulled her share of the load with us, not even counting her nighttime activities. She didn’t know a thing about cars or racing; in fact, I don’t think she even knew how to drive a car. In those days it was something that not every woman knew, especially city women, which Lillian mostly was. But, she could lend a hand, by washing cars, helping with the laundry, and stuff like that, although she never really was as useful as Hattie had been the last couple years. But she was our girl, and by that I mean all of us. She told us flat out that she wasn’t planning on staying with us forever, but that this summer had been a real vacation for her, in fact the only vacation she’d ever had.

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