The race that evening was routine, except that we ran just the two heats and everyone in the main, dropping the consolation race again. As it worked out, Arlene was in the first heat and I was in the second. She won her heat, and I was somewhere around third; I was taking it a little easy since I’d done pretty good at Schererville. I knew now that those restrictor plates were all too easy to change. I buckled down a little in the feature, but still ran about fifth. Arlene started in the back of the field and was fighting it out with Rocky for the lead when the race came down to the end. Rocky won it, but by a nose.

After we loaded up the cars that evening, I got Arlene off to the side. "A word to the wise," I told her. "Don’t try to win all the time unless you want Spud to get funny with your restrictor plate."

"I thought that was just to slow down someone that’s being a cowboy," she said.

"Yeah," I nodded. "But it’s also to slow down someone who’s winning too much. I think Spud will be willing to let you win more than your fair share of the time just for the sake of the crowd. Hell, I win more than my fair share. But you want to be careful about overdoing it. I try to hold it to about once a week, and you might want to think about that. I mean, unless Frank or Spud tells you different."

"I see," she nodded. "There’s more to it than just racing."

"That’s about the size of it," I told her. "Never forget that while we’re racing, we’re also putting on a show for the customers. People like to see close racing and lots of passing and re-passing, so it’s our job to give it to them, even if it means that we don’t run quite as well as we might otherwise."

After that, she won about once a week, although I don’t doubt that she could have won most any time she really wanted to. The 2 car had never been that successful a car, but in her hands . . . well, there was something that worked there. I can’t explain it; that’s just the way it was.

As it turned out, the new guy, Sandy, ran in the middle of the pack that evening and didn’t do too bad a job. Spud was close to him quite a bit during the race and Frank was keeping an eye on him. After it was over with they decided that he did a fairly decent job, so they invited him to come along with us. He jumped on it in an instant. I didn’t think he was going to set the world on fire but looked to me to be a fairly solid driver, and that was what we needed, rather than hot shots who were going to tear up the equipment.

We worked our way onward. About a week or so later we were in Mosinee, Wisconsin. That wasn’t any kind of a big town, but it wasn’t too far from Wausau, which is where I guess we were going to be drawing our crowd from. The track didn’t look like much, and we were at the height of black fly season, so the flies were as thick as, well, flies. I’d seen worse places to race, but I’d seen awful lots better, too. Fortunately we had a tourist court that wasn’t too bad out towards the edge of Wausau, and considering the flies we all pretty much decided to skip the work on the cars that evening and catch up on our nap time.

Wausau was one of those places that Frank had set up with Vivian to send our mail. There usually wasn’t a lot of it, and hardly ever anything for me, so I really wasn’t even aware of it being mail day. Before the race we took an early dinner at some local restaurant, and Frank handed out our mail. I didn’t get anything of course, but John got two or three letters. That wasn’t a surprise since he got about as much mail as anybody, all from his family. Occasionally he’d get a box of cookies, which he’d share out to all of us.

However, this time it wasn’t cookies that he got. "Oh, shit!" he said loud enough that all of us could hear him. "I got drafted."

Being as how most of us were veterans, there wasn’t a hell of a lot of sympathy, although the draft board back in Livonia could have picked a better time for us.

"So when do you have to report?" Frank asked.

"End of the month," he shook his head. "Well, if I gotta go, I gotta go."

"That doesn’t leave you a lot of time," Frank said. "You better plan on taking the next bus out of here so you can spend a little time with your family before you report."

"Yeah, I guess," he said, shaking his head. "Damn, I’m going to miss you guys."

Frank called the waitress over and asked about bus schedules. It turned out there was only one bus heading southbound a day, along in the morning, but it stopped at that very restaurant. It would take him south to Madison, where he could get a bus to Chicago, and then a bus or a train from there home.

"Hey, Dewey," Sandy, the new guy piped up. "How come you ain’t been drafted?"

"Don’t know," he shrugged. "They ain’t never called me so I never went. How about you?"

"They called me, but I’ve got flat feet, I’m 4-F. I didn’t think too much about going to Korea, anyway."

It was kind of a quiet meal after that. The Korean War was still going on, even though most of us weren’t paying attention to it. Well, Arlene took a little more interest than most, since she’d been there for two years, and she was the one to answer the question that John and the rest of us had in our minds but didn’t want to ask. "You might get lucky," she said. "The war is definitely winding down. The shooting isn’t over with yet but when I left there everybody was thinking that a cease fire might not be too far off."

That made everybody feel a little better. John was a good kid, and everyone liked him. He didn’t win a lot, but he always ran strong and was careful with the equipment. He was taking this bad news like a man, and I made up my mind we were going to leave him with some good memories. It didn’t take me a hell of a lot of selling once we got out to the track. One by one, I got to all the other drivers and got them to agree that unless his car crapped out tonight, John was going to end his MMSA career with a win.

The flies were pretty well gone after dark, but they were replaced with mosquitoes that were about as bad, if not worse. But in spite of the bugs there was a pretty good crowd that had come out to watch the show, which consisted of the local jalopies and us. As it turned out, John ran pretty good in the 69 car that night anyway, and nobody had to dog it too obviously for him to get pretty solid wins in both the heat and the feature. Frank had worked it out with the track management to run the local feature last, rather than the midget show, so the stands were still full when he pulled up to the start-finish line to do his victory lap and get congratulated. While he was there, Frank announced over the loudspeakers that this was John’s last race in the MMSA as he was heading off to serve his country, and that got him a big cheer.

Then, I’ll be darned if the track owner didn’t come on and say, "Let’s pass the buckets around so this brave young man has some money in his pocket when he heads off to war." Frank always swore up and down that it was the track owner’s idea, not his, but I guess that the track owner had heard the story of the hat being passed for Hap and Junie back in Schererville.

Then, to top it off, he got a big old kiss from the track queen, a nice Scandinavian-looking girl who hung around him in the pits afterward. There was a little more kissing going on, some hugging, and finally I walked over and handed him my car keys so he could "take her home." I somehow suspect Frank had a hand in that, too, but I never asked him.

When we got back to the tourist court, my car was parked in front of John’s cabin, Scotty’s suitcase was sitting on the steps, the lights in the cabin were out and there were some interesting sounds coming from inside. It must have been a pretty good night, since my car was gone when I got up, although John showed up a little while later, looking pretty tired but very satisfied. I think that he had a pretty good sendoff for a young man who had to head off to report for duty, and he didn’t seem to be complaining when we put him on the bus in front of the restaurant a couple hours later. I know I was thinking that it would have been nice if I’d had a sendoff like that, and I think most of us would have agreed.

We got the occasional letter from John after that, never very often, but just keeping up. As luck and the Army way would have it, he didn’t have to go to Korea. Far from it; after he got out of training, he spent the next year and a half in Hawaii. He reported that the outfit there was pretty gone on spit shining their stuff but that it beat freezing his butt in the winter in Michigan or Korea, and I think he got that right.

Since we’d had to wait around for the bus, we got on the road late and it was a long haul to our next stop, which was Red Wing, Minnesota. I’d talked to Spud a little the night before about a new driver, and he said they’d have to keep their eyes open. It wasn’t critical since we hadn’t got the 57 back to running yet, but another few days and it would become more of an issue. If we didn’t find another driver or two we might have to go back to running consolations, which were a pain in the neck now that we were getting used to doing without them. But, something always happened and I wasn’t too worried about it, mostly because it was Frank and Spud’s problem to worry about, anyway.

Actually, I had something else on my mind as I drove across Wisconsin. As luck would have it, John was the first one of us to pick up a track honey since Arlene had joined us. I know I’ve made it sound like it happened every night, but it really didn’t. It didn’t happen every place we went and sometimes it didn’t happen for a while at all. Sometimes we’d go a week or two with nobody getting any action, and then we’d hit the right place at the right time and some of us would wind up sleeping in our cars because all the rooms were busy. You just never knew what was going to happen; it was a luck of the draw thing.

Up until it happened with John, I hadn’t given much thought to how Arlene would react to one of us picking up some gal and screwing her silly. Most especially, I wondered what would happen if it was me who happened to pick up the girl. Arlene had seemed to be just a little tickled at John picking up that girl the night before – it made his sendoff that much more special, and she knew what men were, of course. But that was special, and how it would go over in the normal run of things was another question entirely.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I didn’t have anything going with Arlene, not that I would have minded it if the situation were right. I could see right from the beginning that this girl was something special, and that she was no track honey. We were friends, but by then most of us on the crew were friends with her. I may have been a little closer to her than the rest, but that was mostly because I’d been the one to come up with the idea of setting up the race between Willy and her, and then helping fix it so it worked for her. On top of that, we were the only two college graduates on the crew, we’d gone to the same college, and in talking about it here and there we’d discovered that we’d met a few of the same people. But right at the moment, she was nothing particularly special. She was just one of the guys, and if I was a little closer to her than some of the others, I was a little closer to Rocky, say, than I was to Scotty, too.

But it was clear to me that most likely sooner or later some track honey was going to come on to me awful strong. I figured I better know what I was going to do before it happened, just so I didn’t run the risk of possibly screwing things up with Arlene. This was made more complicated by the fact that I didn’t know exactly how I felt about Arlene, but I did think that I wanted to keep my options open.

I didn’t come to a final decision on that subject on that drive through Wisconsin. What I did decide to do was to brush off any honey that came on to me in the near future to see how Arlene reacted, and to hope that some of the other guys would score first so I could watch and see what happened. I wasn’t all that comfortable with the idea, since those kinds of opportunities really didn’t come along that often.

So wouldn’t you know that very night there was some corn-fed Minnesota gal who decided she had an itch in her panties and I was just the race driver to scratch it? She was blonde and pretty darn good looking. She might have been a touch on the heavy side, but it certainly wasn’t so bad that she would have appealed to Dink if he had been around. I mean, this gal was seriously ready to trot. She threw her arms around me and had her tongue in my mouth before I realized what was happening, and somewhere in there she grew a third arm because I could feel her hand on my joint while I was hugging her.

I could make all the plans I wanted to, but it had been a while, she was ready to go, and when a man gets the wind up and doesn’t have any reason to hold back all the plans and logic in the world head straight for the window. We had an odd number of guys in the rooms at that point, it was my turn to be alone, and I’ll guess you know I didn’t think twice. Before too long the two of us were heading back to the tourist court, and any thoughts I may have had about Arlene were far in the distance.

Let’s just say that while I spent the night with the gal – I have no idea what her name was and I’m not sure I ever knew – that the reality didn’t live up to the promise. She may have acted like she was ready for action, but what she mostly wanted was to just lay there and let someone do it to her, not really join in, so to speak. She kissed all right but she laid there like a sack of flour when it was time to get on with it. I didn’t plan to spend the night with her, but we both fell asleep and the next thing we knew it was morning. Well, early morning in Minnesota, approaching high summer, so it got light way early and no one else was stirring, so we got around and I took her home. It was right at that awful time when I couldn’t make up my mind whether to go back to bed for another forty winks, or just give up and consider the day started.

My mind was made up when I noticed that a little restaurant just up the road from the tourist court happened to be open. I decided to pull in and get a cup of coffee, and maybe some breakfast; I was hungry, and breakfast with the gang was still going to be several hours off. The place was all but empty, but when I walked in wouldn’t you just know that Arlene was sitting there at a table by herself. "Morning, Mel," she smiled. "How are you today?"

Figuring that I’d better face the music, I walked over to her and said, "Oh, tolerable. Mind if I join you?"

"No, go right ahead," she said. "So was your honey last night tolerable?"

"Just barely," I admitted. "Lots of bark and not much bite."

"Well, you never know, I guess," she shook her head. "If you just took her home you must have had a pretty good night."

"A pretty good night’s sleep," I said. "So what gets you up so early?"

"I’ve always been an early riser, I guess" she replied. "The sun was up, I just couldn’t sleep anymore, so I decided to walk over and get some breakfast."

Well, that explained why her car wasn’t outside. I realized that if I’d seen the Studebaker sitting there I probably would have avoided coming into the place. "You want to get over that," I told her. "There are times that sleeping in is about the only sleep you get. I guess we don’t have much of a jump today, I might catch a nap in the car this afternoon."

About that time the waitress came over to get my order, bringing some coffee along with her. I ordered a pretty good breakfast, while in the back of my head I was still wondering if I’d screwed things up with Arlene for a third-rate night with that Minnesota honey. Well, if I did, I did, I realized. She didn’t seem to be hopping mad, so I decided to just let it go and see what happened.

"I thought you ran pretty good last night," she commented as the waitress left.

"Not bad," I told her. "Sometimes things come together, sometimes they don’t. So, are you having a good time leading this gypsy life?"

"So far, I really am," she smiled. "I can see how it could get old after a while, but I was right. It’s just the thing I needed to get Korea out of my system."

"Well, it must be agreeing with you," I said. We sat there talking for a while, mostly about racing. I told a few racing stories, and a few stories about some of the stuff we’d done over the past few years. After a bit, I figured I might as well get it right out on the table, so I decided to tell her the story about Lillian, Dwight, and the Railway Express job that got done to him twice. I didn’t hold back on the part of the story that Lillian had been sleeping with the whole crew in rotation, me included.

"I can understand about her," she smiled. "There are times that a woman wants it about as bad as a man, and sometimes even worse. I find that I can make do if I have to, but I know that some women can’t."

That made it pretty clear to me that she wasn’t ready for the spot in my bed that the Minnesota honey had warmed up, but that I wasn’t in trouble with her for doing it.

Arlene was her own woman, even if she was one of the guys, but I got to thinking that when she decided she was ready she wasn’t going to be taking no for an answer.

We put on shows all over the Upper Midwest for the next six weeks. We spent more time in Minnesota and Iowa than we did elsewhere, but we played as far to the northwest as Minot, North Dakota and as far southwest as Hutchison, Kansas. As always out in that country, we were not on real race tracks a lot of the time, and raced on horse tracks, rodeo rings, ball diamonds, and sometimes just a track laid out in a dirt field. More often than not we were in a place we hadn’t raced before, usually in some pretty small towns, smaller than we’d bother with elsewhere in the country. In spite of that, for the most part we had good crowds except when the weather was lousy. Fortunately it was good most of the time, enough so that it was one of the nicer swings I remember from my MMSA days.

After my experience with the Minnesota honey in Red Wing, I still was pretty confused about what I ought to be doing if something like that happened again, which seemed likely to happen sooner or later. It hadn’t seemed to bother Arlene any, but on the other hand we really didn’t have anything going on between us except for being good friends. On the other hand, for some reason I felt that I really didn’t want to offend her by chasing after strange women at the race tracks. I finally decided that for the time being I wasn’t going to go looking for honeys, but if one came after me real hard I might just take her up on it if I happened to be in the mood. As I recall, it was several weeks before the opportunity came up again; when it did, I didn’t worry about it.

Not too long after Red Wing we got the 57 car put back together and running. It didn’t actually look too bad, although the paint job we wound up putting on it was pretty second rate; we all looked forward to letting Hoss spend a few days with it back in Livonia. Several of us gave it test drives, and I think most of us who drove it thought that it wasn’t too bad, and probably handled better than the 27. We had a number of different local drivers in it from one time to another, and sometimes in the 27, too, but for the most part, not for very long. The core of the crew was pretty stable for a while, but there was a lot of coming and going for the last couple of spots.

You would think that with as many short tracks as we went to there would have been people falling over themselves wanting to drive for us, and often there were. However, when people realized that we were on the road all the time with only a rare day off, most didn’t want to give up regular jobs or their season points at their local tracks, or their families or sweethearts to come along with us. All too often when we did find someone willing to throw up all that and come along, they just couldn’t get into the mindset that we were putting on a show as well as racing, and that being careful with the equipment was more important than winning. Somewhere along in there we did manage to pick up a guy by the name of Rusty who managed to stick with us through the fall season, so that gave us a full crew if Spud was driving. The only problem was if we were some place where we were the only show, Spud had other things to do instead of driving, so it wasn’t a permanent solution.

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