I rolled the whole thing around in my mind all the way back. Half a dozen times I all but turned around and headed back to Ft. Lauderdale, with the idea of putting it to Arlene that we ought to get serious. But, I always convinced myself that the timing was all wrong to do something like that, with the racing season not far off. Yet, the more I thought about it, the more I was frustrated with the thought that I hadn’t pushed her a little when I’d been with her. By the time I got back to Daytona Beach I wanted to be with a woman, and right about then I’d settle for just about any woman.

It was mid-afternoon when I got back to the motel in Daytona Beach. It turned out that Carnie was there, and he had two hillbilly girls in bed with him. They weren’t the same girls as we’d had four years before, but there was little difference. "Sorry," I told him. "I’ll leave you guys alone."

"Sorry, hell," he snorted. "I’m damn glad you’re back. These two babes are about to fuck me to death. Help me out here, will ya?"

Well, hell, I thought. Arlene is three hundred miles away and it’s pretty clear to me that there wasn’t going to be anything happening with her anytime soon. "All right," I said. "Anything to help out a friend."

It wound up being a long night that got rid of a lot of my frustration. Carnie and I didn’t cut anything like as wide a swath through the women this time as we had the last time but we had some good times over the next few days, mostly with girls that I was glad to see gone when they left. I know I felt uncomfortable about it, knowing Arlene was sitting down there in Ft. Lauderdale by herself, but since we didn’t have any real commitment with each other I wondered if I should be feeling guilty or what.

By this time things were starting to get a little more interesting around the race track. I spent at least part of each day over there, just checking things out. Things had changed an awful lot since I’d been there back in 1951. There was still a pretty good variety of cars there, but they were a lot different, now. The Nashes and Hudsons and the other cars that had been so prominent in 1951 were still there, but they weren’t front runners. This was the height of Carl Kiekhaefer’s reign with his Chrysler 300s, and there was little question about which kind of car it was going to be, more of which Chrysler. They were still running on the old beach course and would for a few more years yet, but things had gotten a little more professional.

After a while I ran across Goober Buford, the guy whose car I’d driven for a bit back in ’51. He was driving a Chrysler, and was expected to do well. Things had changed enough that there wasn’t any chance that I was going to get to take a few laps in that thing, but we had a nice talk about the old days.

A little while later, I was more than a little surprised to come across Hap, who was planning on driving a ’52 Oldsmobile he’d gotten some place. Junie and Buckshot were working with him on it, and he was doing pretty well. Hap and Junie had pretty well made up their minds to campaign the car around the south that summer, which meant that they weren’t interested in coming back to drive for us, and I guess I was just as glad. Hap had pretty well thrown off the effects of his accident up in Schererville the previous summer, although he said on damp days he sometimes walked with a little bit of a limp. Buckshot was still making up his mind about whether he was going to come back, although he told me that he didn’t plan on it unless he could drive the 27 car.

When race day rolled around, Frank, Carnie, and I watched it from the grandstands, with Vivian and a couple girls that Carnie had picked up somewhere. We made it through about three quarters of the race before we all got rather bored, and Carnie’s two girls especially so. We went back to the motel, and I never saw Goober finish second in his Chrysler. I’ve always been a little sorry about that.

We’d planned to hang around for a couple days afterwards, but when Frank, Vivian, Carnie, and I talked it over the next morning we pretty well agreed that we’d done what we’d come to do in Florida, and that we might as well head back to Livonia and take our time about it. We were in the car twenty minutes later, heading north toward yet another season.

A couple of weeks before we were set to get back on the road again I got home from a particularly dull day of substituting to find Rocky waiting alone in the apartment for me. That was a little strange, and it had never happened before – with the hours we worked, I usually got home an hour or so before the rest of the guys, more if they’d decided to stop off and have a beer on the way. I figured he had to go somewhere or do something, so I didn’t say anything except, "So how’s it going today?"

"I’ve had better days," he sighed. "How about you?"

"I’ll tell you what, today made me wish we were starting the season earlier, like we did last year," I told him. "I’m just plain counting the days. How about you?"

"To tell the truth, I’m not looking forward to it," he said, sounding a little resigned. "Mel, I’m thinking real hard about not going."

"Rocky, I’ve felt that way from time to time," I told him. "Mostly, I’ve learned to go and lie down until the feeling goes away."

"This is different," he said. "I know that sometimes it gets a little old being on the road all the time but I’ve always looked forward to it in the past. I’m not looking forward to it this year. I don’t want to go."

"Ariel is leaning on you, I take it," I nodded, reading between the lines all I needed to.

"Not really," he shrugged. "We’ve, uh, we’ve gotten pretty close, and I don’t want to leave her behind."

"You’re afraid that she may not be here when we get back next fall," I replied softly.

"Yeah, that’s about the size of it," he said. "Ariel, well, she’s something special. I don’t want to lose her."

I knew that Ariel was something special, all right. After all, I’d been in bed with her back at Hoss and Helen’s wedding. She’d been a firecracker there and was a darn good looking woman. Rocky knew about that, of course, but it was something that we never talked about. "Is she making sounds about getting married?" I asked.

"Well, yeah," he said. "I mean, she hasn’t come out and said anything, but she’s hinted around about it. I don’t think it’s a bad idea, either. It’s just that it’s going to be her or going racing, it can’t be both. I was over and talked to Dink’s boss at the Buick place this afternoon. He needs someone, and he can put me on right away. I’m thinking real hard about it. It’s just that, shit, I’ve been with Frank and Spud since the beginning. I wasn’t the world’s greatest driver, and hell, I never have been, but they’ve always been good to me. I hate like hell to have to just walk away and leave them hanging for a driver. Hell, Frank’s got it hard enough finding guys this year as it is."

"So it comes down to Ariel or Frank, right?"

"Yeah, I guess," he nodded.

"I can’t tell you what to do, Rocky," I said after thinking about it for a moment. "But ever since I ran into Frank back in Milwaukee that time, he’s been hurting for drivers, so one more or less isn’t going to make a whole lot of difference. So you have to ask yourself the question, is Ariel worth it? There are worse things in this life than coming home to a woman like her at the end of the day, and going back to an empty bed in some fleabag of a tourist court might be one of them."

"There is that," he said. "But damn, I hate to give up the racing. I really like it."

"So, big deal," I said. "Just because you’re not on the road with us doesn’t mean that you can’t get yourself an old Ford and be a local racer one or two nights a week. You don’t have to be traveling all over the damn country."

"Yeah, I suppose," he said, brightening a little. "Look, Mel, I know you’re a little closer to Frank and Spud than the rest of us since you spent that time in the Army with them. They’re good enough friends that I don’t want to screw things up with them. How do you think they’re going to take it if I were to tell them I’m not going this year?"

"If you’re leaving for a good reason, I don’t think they’ll mind," I told him. "Hell, look at all the guys that have left over the last four years since I came aboard. They’re going to be sorry to see you go, sure, but that doesn’t mean that you’re not going to go with their good wishes. I mean, hell, look at Hoss and Chick and Dink, they’re still good friends and pitch in now and then when it’s needed. There’s no reason you can’t do the same thing." I let out a sigh to give myself a little time to think about it, then went on. "Really, that’s not the question you should be asking yourself," I told him. "What you need to be asking yourself is what is Ariel going to do if you decide to stay."

"What do you mean?" he frowned.

"Well, wouldn’t you feel pretty goddamn silly if you decided to stay behind for her sake, and then she decides that one winter was long enough to look at your ugly face and shows you the door?"

"Yeah," he replied, thinking about it. "Yeah," he said again finally. "I guess I’d better go have a talk with her."

The truth was that I wasn’t real sure what Frank intended to do for drivers anyway. The last time I’d talked with him he hadn’t sounded real optimistic about it, although he’d always managed to put something together in the past. With it now a tossup whether Rocky would be going with us, the only drivers I knew about for sure were Pepper, Dewey, Arlene, and me. Skimp had been able to fill in several times in the past, but he was back at work at the Ford plant so now it seemed pretty unlikely that he would be going with us.

The last time I’d seen Frank he told me that Scotty had managed to come up with a good IMCA big car ride in New Jersey, and that was a big step up from MMSA midgets. Of the other New Jersey guys, Red had told him at the end of the last season that while one season had been fun, one season had been enough, too. Frank thought that Perk might be back but hadn’t heard for sure, yet. He also thought Sandy Kempa might be coming back from Illinois. Hap and Junie were going to be running stock cars down south, which was fine with Frank under the circumstances, but he had some hope that Buckshot might be coming back. When we’d seen him down at Daytona Beach Frank had told him that he was saving the 27 car for him.

If Rocky was going to quit, Frank deserved to know about it as soon as possible, but it wasn’t my place to tell him, at least just yet, but I made up my mind I was going to lean on Rocky to let Frank know he was thinking about it.

In the past our first few races of the year had been right around the Detroit area, so we’d been able to fudge on the driver shortage a little bit by having guys like Chick and Hoss fill in for a few days. That wasn’t going to happen this year. We were having a late spring and a wet one; there was still snow all over the place, and there was a lot of flooding. We weren’t even going to be able to make our usual test runs on the cars since every dirt track in the area was hip deep in mud. If we had tried to run on them we’d have torn them up to no end, and probably torn the cars up as well.

One of the things Frank had done in setting the schedule a little later was to cut out all the races we’d run in the past on our way down south. Our first race was going to be in Pensacola, Florida, not all that far from where we’d run our final race of the season the year before. The last I’d heard Frank was planning on leaving a couple days early and driving right down there so we could test and tune at that track. It had seemed like a good idea at the time I’d first heard about it, and with the crappy conditions in Michigan it was sounding like a better and better idea all the while. Once again I found myself wishing that I’d spent the winter in Florida with Arlene, but that was water under the bridge, now.

If Rocky made it back that evening it was after I went to bed. I didn’t see him until after work the next evening. "So, did you get something worked out with Ariel?" I asked him.

"Yeah," he smiled. "We’re going to go ahead and get married, the weekend before you guys leave. I told Frank about it today, and he wasn’t mad or anything. He wished me the best of luck. I talked to Vivian about it, and Ariel and I are going to move in here after you guys leave."

"Another single man bites the dust," I told him with a grin.

"Happens to all of us sooner or later," he smiled. "I’ll tell you what, I never figured a grease monkey racer like me would wind up with as good a looking babe as Ariel. But I got a question for you. We’re not going to do anything special for a wedding, just a justice-of-the-peace thing, but would you be willing to be my best man?"

"Of course," I told him. "That’s the least I could do for a friend like you."

So it was that a few days later I put on my one suit and went with Rocky and the rest of the guys to watch him and Ariel get married. They were right, it wasn’t a big wedding, and the wedding reception wasn’t one of those big Greek things – we just went down to a neighborhood bar and had a few before the bride and groom took off to spend a couple nights in a hotel somewhere.

The next morning, I loaded my stuff in the car and headed down to Herb’s Ford agency, where we’d parked the MMSA vehicles after closing out the shop. Pepper, Dewey, and I had gotten together with Rocky and decided to leave them what furniture and stuff we had in the apartment as a sort of wedding present, to help them get going, not that our old junk furniture, what little there was of it was worth anything much.

Sandy, Buckshot, and Perk had shown up in the last few days, with Perk driving a ’51 Plymouth he’d picked up cheap. Somewhere in the last few days Frank had come up with three new drivers, mostly from calling around to various guys he knew at tracks here and there looking for prospects. One of them, named Tubby, was tall and just about so skinny you had to look at him twice to see him once; he was a Chicago area guy who had some experience in midgets. The other two had just been local racers driving jalopies. They all sounded pretty good, but we knew we’d have to see how they worked out on the track. Arlene would be joining us at Pensacola; there was no point in her driving clear to Michigan to just have to turn around and drive back to Florida again. That left us with ten drivers, which with Spud made eleven. If everybody worked out we’d be able to get by for a while.

It was a gray, cold, misty day when we loaded up and headed out. It had been an awful long and dull winter, with only the good times down in Daytona Beach and a few other things to break it up. Now we were leaving again, and with the way the schedule had been changed around we wouldn’t be seeing Livonia again until the middle of July, when it would be time to change things over for the fall fair season. I was glad to be back on the road again, glad to be starting another season, and was looking forward to seeing Arlene again.

We didn’t kill ourselves driving south on pretty much the same route that we’d taken coming north last winter. We stopped the first night in Louisville and the second near Birmingham, and as we got closer to the Gulf Coast the weather finally began to turn decent. Along in the afternoon of the third day, we pulled into a dirt track outside of Pensacola, where I was happy to see a red and white Studebaker waiting for us.

No, Arlene and I didn’t have any big "good to see you again" hug and kiss. Oh, we had a little hug, but again it was just one of those "between friends" things. Whatever happened between us was going to have to not be in front of the gang, and we both realized that without it having been said between us. Even so, it was good to see her again; as much as I knew she didn’t like her job at Ft. Lauderdale there had been times that I’d been scared that she might have decided to stay with it.

Even though we were all pretty tired from being on the road since early in the morning, we were all anxious to get the cars out and see how they did. None of them had been tested, except for a few first-gear runs around a parking lot near the shop, and since that was on pavement it didn’t tell us much about how they handled on dirt. As always, Spud was the first one to take the cars out, to see if they were up to his standards; as had become the usual thing over the past couple years I drove every one of them before we gave them to the drivers. Spud and I managed to develop a small bitch list on almost every car, which was the normal thing. Nothing was real serious, but most of us were busy fixing those things.

Along with everything else, we had three new drivers to break in to the MMSA way of doing things. As soon as we got their cars checked out we sent them out to make a few laps to get used to them, and then I went out and ran with them. Tubby wasn’t real bad, and he got the idea right away, but midgets were totally new to the other two guys and it took a while to get them comfortable in the cars. They clearly weren’t going to be contending heavily for wins in the first few weeks, but from what I could tell they were fairly competent drivers, which wasn’t always the case with people that we picked up.

After two days of testing and tuning we had things pretty well ready for the season. It was good to see a race the next evening, see the grandstands pretty well filled with people, to get out and finally race again. We’d made it through the winter, and it would be hard to ask for more.

It was nice to be able to kick off the season with a win, although it didn’t come easy. In the feature Arlene, Dewey, and Buckshot all led at one point or another in the last five laps, and I wound up sneaking below Buckshot, who was up on the rim, then passing the other two on the high side in the last hundred yards. It was the kind of finish the spectators loved, and we sure hoped to give spectators a lot more of them in the coming months.

We pretty well stayed near the Gulf Coast for the rest of the month, mostly running places we’d never run before, almost all of them on established dirt tracks. We got down as far south as Corpus Christi, Texas, which was the farthest south we’d ever run the MMSA midgets.

I don’t want to say that Arlene and I stayed away from each other all during that time, but we didn’t go out of the way to get closer to each other, either. If anything, we weren’t as close as we had been back in the fall, running those fair tracks. I didn’t know if she was keeping things low key because of being around the gang, but I was beginning to think that maybe I should have come on to her a little more back in Ft. Lauderdale, because it seemed as if the spark had gone out. Once again, I was wishing that I’d decided to spend the winter with her because more and more I was feeling that I’d lost my chance.

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