In the first couple laps we passed most of the rest of the field, running up there high all the way. Scotty had gotten around Pepper for the lead, and we were a while closing on him, but after a while we managed it. Frankly, I was driving hard as hell to try and stay up with Arlene, because she was driving like she had her tail on fire. It took us another lap or so to get past him, and by then we were coming up on lapping Willy in the 69. I was mostly concentrating on my driving, but I figured he must be mad as hell and her father had to about be blowing a gasket.

Sure enough, before we made another lap we caught him. Just to make it fun, we split him, Arlene taking the high side out of turn four while I went low; one second he was there and the next he was history. Now that I was down low, I figured that if I was going to pass Arlene it would have to be on the low side, not that I was all that sure that I wanted to pass her, at least for this race. We ran pretty much side by side for the rest of the race, and as it turned out she had about a third of a car length on me when the checkers flew.

We pulled into the pits while Arlene took her victory lap – I learned later it was her first. The hot rods were pulling out of the pits for their next heat, and sure enough, Willy came up out of that cockpit like he’d been sitting on a bee, and headed over to Spud, just mad as hell. "Jesus," he said. "You had that thing fixed. There’s no way I could run with the rest of you guys! This thing is a fucking dog."

"It’s been running right with the pack until tonight," Spud lied. "It takes a little talent and a little skill to drive these things. You don’t just bully them, it takes some finesse."

About that time, Tom made it over to Spud and started in on him in the same vein. "All right, you two," he said. "I’m going to drive the car in the next heat just to prove to you that it’s all right. Then we’ll switch for the feature, just to prove to you that thing is about equal with everything else. Is that all right with you?"

"I still think you’re full of shit," Willy said. "There’s no way in hell I’m that much slower than the rest of you."

"Like I said, driving these things is an art," Spud told them. "I mean, hell, Arlene was running with our season champion two years in a row, and she beat him. Like I said, she’s got the talent."

"Well, by God, we’ll just see about this," Tom said as he and Willy stomped off.

Spud gave a big old grin and motioned over at Arlene and me. "Got him going a bit, I guess," he laughed.

"Sure did," I smiled. "He ought to have some fun with the 27."

"Damn right he’s gonna," Spud beamed. "Go over to the trailer, get under the seat on the right side, and there’s a wood box about six inches square with the restrictor plates in it. Get out two marked with a ‘7,’ and when his back is turned, change the plates. Don’t worry about the lead seal. Hang onto the ones you take off it, I’ll put them on the 27 if we get the chance."

"Not taking any chances, are you?"

"Not if I can help it," he said. "Arlene, you drove one hell of a race. Now, I’ll go argue with them some more so hurry up and get the change made."

I left Arlene standing there with a confused look on her face while I took off running. It only took a minute or so for me to get back with the right restrictor plates; there were a couple wrenches in the box and I brought them. I glanced up to see that Spud had a pretty good argument going with Tom and Willy, and their backs were to me. "What are you doing?" Arlene asked as I opened the hood and went to work on the carburetors.

"Tell you in a minute," I told her. "Keep your eye out and tell me if they look this way."

I had never actually changed a restrictor plate before but I’d pulled a carb a time or two. It was no great trick; just two bolts had to be loosened from each carb, the old plate slid out and the new one slid in place, then the bolts tightened back down. It probably took me two or three minutes before I had the hood closed again. "Did we get away with it?" I asked.

"I don’t think they even looked up," she smiled. "Now, what did you just do?"

"Come on, let’s go get a couple sodas and get away from this car," I smiled.

We headed over to the box truck. The cooler was sitting out on the ground where it usually was; I pulled out a couple Cokes, opened one on the bumper of the truck and handed it to her, then opened one for me. "All right," she said after taking a big old sip, "What did you just do?"

"Well, you know how these cars are all supposed to be pretty equal, right?" I grinned. "The air restrictor plates under the carbs is how Spud keeps them equal. The guy who’s been driving the 69 has been a real cowboy, so Spud dropped the plate size down a little to keep him out of the way of the rest of us. That’s part of what happened with those two last night. Spud usually keeps the restrictor plates pretty close to his chest, but what I just did probably hopped the 69 up by maybe twenty horsepower."

"So it’s going to be equal with the rest of the cars?" she smiled.

"If I know Spud, the 69 is now the hottest car in the field," I laughed. "I don’t think any of us are going to hold Spud in the feature. The 27 really is kind of a dog. It’s fast, but it handles goofy. We don’t usually let someone drive it unless we know that they know what they’re doing, and no one likes driving it. But Spud is probably the best one to give it a little show."

"You guys . . . " she beamed. "You guys are really on my side, aren’t you?"

"Dern tootin’," I grinned. "Like I told you, most of us are vets, we have to watch out for each other. You get extra points for what you went through. It’s kind of our way of thanking you for doing a job most of us would have had trouble doing even if we’d been trained for it. On top of that, we have kind of a history of helping out women with family troubles. You’ll probably hear the stories sooner or later."

"I think I fell in with a good bunch of people," she smiled. "You guys are all right."

Pretty soon it was time for the next midget heat. Arlene and I were kind of sitting back and watching things, sipping on our Cokes and smoking cigarettes when the heat took the field. It looked a little strange with only five cars in it, and Spud in the 27 at the back of the field. He didn’t stay there long; it wasn’t a real, real wild race but he steadily worked his way up through the pack, and was battling it out with Dewey for the lead at the finish line. Dewey won it, but only by inches.

I’ll have to admit that I didn’t think either Spud or the 27 was that good. I found out later that I was right – Spud had gone to the other four drivers in the heat and asked them to help him make the 27 look good. Dewey told me that he was actually trying to make it so Spud won in a close one, but he mistimed it a little bit. As it turned out it didn’t matter – the 27 looked like one of the more competitive cars.

The hot rods had several races to run before we got to run our own feature, which was the final event of the evening. Early on, I slipped the restrictor plates and the wrenches to Spud, and he slipped them to someone else, Rocky I think, who actually made the change on the 27 car while Spud spent a little more time with Tom and Willy. The fact that Spud had parked the 27 between the box truck and the trailer even made it easier.

Technically, Willy should have been on the pole, but because he was new to the midgets Spud had him start on the outside in the feature, with Red on the pole. Dewey and Arlene were clear in the back, with me and Spud a row in front of them.

As I recall, the feature was thirty laps. Willy seemed to think that since he now had a decent car and was starting in front he was going to show everybody up. Naturally, it didn’t work out that way. Red got a jump on him at the start, and Perk was right behind him, so Willy was running like third on the back stretch and a couple more cars passed him in the third and fourth turns. Dewey, Spud, Arlene and I had quite a battle, switching back and forth. I think Spud could probably have run away from us in the hopped-up 69 but he must have hung back a little to make it look good. We couldn’t have gotten more than three laps into the race when the four of us split Willy in the 27, two to each side, and giving him plenty of room since we knew he was probably having his hands full with the 27.

From there on down we had a race that was an all-out classic side by side MMSA battle. I think all four of us led at one point or another and there was never more than a car length or two between first and fourth place. From what Frank said later we had the crowd on their feet and roaring every inch of the way. This was the kind of show we liked to put on, and we were seriously racing all through it – well, maybe except for Spud, who I still think could have run away from the rest of us.

And the finish? Oh, that too was an MMSA classic. We lapped Willy for about the fifth time on the back stretch, but that broke our tight little pack up a little when we split him two to a side again. Arlene had the outside line, while Spud ducked under her to try and make the pass. Dewey was ahead of me, but I had a little speed on him and went above him to try for a high side pass, so we were running four wide across the finish line. It was clear to everyone that Arlene won it by a nose, and I finished second just ahead of Dewey, who had maybe a wheel on Spud. Other than the fact that Arlene won it, we never did actually sort it out.

I’ve often wished that we could go back in time and run that race over again, but with everything being equal instead of having the deck stacked against Willy so bad. We didn’t realize at the time that Arlene was actually that talented a driver, and I think she could easily have beaten Willy nose to nose. But we were playing it safe for Arlene’s sake, mostly because her brother and her dad had pissed us all off a little bit.

I will give Tom credit: he was more than a little grumpy about the outcome, not just Arlene showing Willy up, but showing him up so bad it was almost sickening. But he congratulated her on a good race, and the truth is that she won it fairly. Well, pretty fairly, anyway, although what we did to Willy was on the unfair side. But who said that life has to be fair, anyway?

Willy was just about ready to kill someone if he could have figured out who and why. He could explain away losing the heat because the car was a dog, but to have another driver hop in that dog and battle for the win in the main didn’t do his arrogance any good. And to get in the car that almost won the second heat and get lapped five times, that just added insult to injury. And to have his little sister not only beat him, but win both the heat and the main? Oh, boy! She’d just taken him on at his own game, and walked away with all the marbles.

I’ll tell you how bad it was: that was Willy’s last short track race. Ever. He was still a racer, but he switched over to drag racing, which was getting real popular at the time, and he was moderately successful at it. In fact, more than moderately successful; years later he was one of the first guys to go over 200 miles an hour in a slingshot rail. As far as I know he never found how bad he’d been set up that night and I sure wasn’t going to be the one to tell him.

But if anything sealed Arlene as being one of us, it was watching him rant and fume that night after Arlene took the victory lap and had her picture taken for the local paper. As far as anyone could remember, it was the first time that a woman had ever won a feature race at Schererville.

Arlene was all set to ride home with her family. Even though it was going to be a short drive she could see it wasn’t going to be pleasant, so I made a point of inviting her out for a beer with the gang after the race, and told her that I’d drive her home afterwards. We wound up in some noisy juke joint and it was obnoxious enough that one beer was enough. She and Frank worked out that she was going to drive her Studebaker on the road with us since we were a little short on seats for everybody, and that she’d meet us at the track the next morning. I wound up taking her home – it wasn’t far. When we pulled into the driveway, she looked at the cars parked there and said, "Well, Willy’s gone home. That’s something."

"You expect trouble?" I asked, knowing that I had my .38 in the glove compartment.

"Oh, yeah, but I’ll have to be the one to handle it," she said. "Dad will keep his word, even if he doesn’t like it. If you were there it’d just be worse."

"Well, be careful," I said. "I’ll see you in the morning, I hope."

"Wouldn’t miss it for the world," she smiled. "Thanks, Mel. Thanks for everything."

Being a gentleman, I walked her to her door. It would have been nice to have had a little kiss although for some reason I wasn’t expecting it. Arlene just didn’t strike me as a track honey, and I didn’t expect that I was going to be in her bed any time soon. So, we just said goodbye, and she headed inside. I decided to hang around outside in the car for a minute in case something blew up as soon as she went in the door, but nothing did. After a couple minutes, I figured I’d better go, so I started up my Ford and drove off.

I was real relieved to pull into the track the next morning and see her Studebaker sitting there, while she sat on the fender, smoking a cigarette. I pulled to a stop alongside her and got out. "I take it everything went all right," I said.

"Pretty much," she smiled. "Dad wasn’t real happy with me, but then he wasn’t real happy with me when I joined the Army either. I don’t think he’s going to be real happy with me until I settle down some place, preferably with a husband to keep me in line."

"Whoever that is," I smiled, "He’s going to have his hands full. You had breakfast yet?"

"I had a cup of coffee and some cereal," she said. "Spud told me last night that we usually stop on the road for breakfast after we get going."

"Yeah, we usually try to have a late breakfast but a big one because lunch often turns into lunch meat sandwiches and chips, and dinner is kind of catch as catch can. Sometimes we eat out, sometimes it’s hot dogs at the track. Where’s Frank and Spud?"

"They headed over to the hospital to see about Hap and Junie," she reported. "They probably aren’t going to be real long."

There really wasn’t a lot to do, since we’d gotten the race cars and our stuff loaded the night before like we always did. It was mostly a case of waiting for everyone to show up, and everyone knew to not be late unless it was a real emergency, so we just sat there talking for a bit. Fortunately, everybody showed up on time, and having Arlene there with her car made things a little more comfortable for the rest of us – it was no fun going several hundred miles with three guys across the front seat of my old Ford.

Everybody else had just gotten there when Frank and Spud showed up, reporting that Junie was getting better and that Hap was starting to come around. Buckshot was going to stay behind with them, so that made us feel a little better about the rest of us having to leave. After all, while none of us had particularly liked the two of them they were part of our group, and that made things a little different. The track management had passed the hat for the two at the race the night before, and it came to several hundred bucks when it was all counted up. It was the track manager’s idea, not any of ours, and I thought it was a nice gesture on the part of all involved. Once again it made me wonder how I’d do if I were to get left behind like that, hurt and alone in some strange small town where I didn’t know anyone. It was not a happy thing to think about, so I didn’t dwell on it.

We were facing a moderately long jump that day, clear across Illinois to Geneseo, not too far outside the Quad Cities area. We got on the road and headed on up US-30, and stopped pretty soon at a promising looking EAT place somewhere around Chicago Heights. About all I could say was that the reality didn’t live up to the look and we all pretty well agreed that we’d stop for lunch before we got to the track.

It was a pretty long haul in those days of two-lane roads. Where 30 jogged to the north at Joliet we got off and continued on state roads, some of which were on the small side. We stopped at some little town for an early lunch about an hour away from the track, and got in along in the middle of the afternoon. We headed on into town, checked into our tourist court of the day – Arlene got a room to herself, of course – and headed back to the track to get set for the evening’s racing.

Arlene had already gotten a taste of what had to be done to the cars the day before, but now we went over it in detail. She may have been a woman but like the rest of us she was going to have to be responsible for the routine maintenance on the cars, gassing them, keeping them clean, and so forth. She went to it without any question; it was part of the job and she knew it.

I might as well go ahead and say that while most of us were mechanics, Arlene wasn’t, but she wasn’t afraid to work on a car once she knew what she was doing. She knew quite a bit to start; even as a little girl she’d worked with her dad on his race car, so she had a little grounding in them. That first day it took her a little longer than the rest of us since she didn’t know where everything was or how to do it, but you never had to tell her more than once. We’d had plenty of people come through over the years who took a whole bunch longer to pick it up, and some never did.

Things went well enough that we actually had a little time to work on the 57 car. We hadn’t loaded it into the box truck, but left it on the front of the trailer so we could get to it a little easier. There was clearly going to be a lot of work to be done to it. If we could chip away at it for an hour or two a day we figured we ought to have it able to run in a week or so, and looking decent a while after that. Right then, as short of drivers as we were, it didn’t matter a whole lot.

We were still short on drivers; Frank and Spud had hoped to recruit someone else there at Schererville, but got caught up in all the shenanigans with Willy and Arlene, so that went by the wayside. We were pretty close to Sonny Ochsenlaager country, but Frank made a couple phone calls and couldn’t track him down, so that was a great idea that didn’t work. I hadn’t really expected it would, but it had been worth a shot.

The race that evening was another one of those deals where we were the special event at a regular track, only this time the track was running jalopies. Frank got with the track owner to see if there were any prospects for drivers, and he came up with one, a kid by the name of Sandy Kempa. I say kid; he was about Dewey or John’s age, which is to say a few years younger than most of the rest of us. Spud had him take a few laps in the 69 car – with the restrictor plate back to normal – and he wasn’t too awful bad, so we decided to see how he’d do in the race before we asked him to come along with us. I don’t know whether John was taken with Arlene or what, but he told her that if she wanted to keep driving the 2 he’d be just as happy driving the 77, and it was fine with her. With Spud in the 27 again, that gave us a driver for every runnable car we had, and that seemed like it would work out all right.

Frank doubled as our track announcer, as he always did. He talked to Arlene a bit about making a big deal about her being a woman driver, and she was fine with it; she seemed to take it in stride that we were putting on a show and she was part of it.

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