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My head hurt. Lots.
I think I was dimly aware that other parts of me hurt too, but it was hard to take notice of it because of the pain of that axe driven into my skull. Or, at least that was what it felt like.
When I could think halfway clearly, which wasn’t often, the main thing I could think about was seeing Sandy getting sideways in front of me. I must have stomped on the brakes a thousand times, except for the fact that my leg wouldn’t move. I kept seeing my 66 car sliding up over his, seeing the crowd, seeing the dirt, and then seeing nothing.
Along in there I had a few other dim impressions. At one time I thought I heard Frank and Spud talking to me, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying, or if they were making any sense at all. A couple times I was sure I’d seen Arlene, all dressed in white. That didn’t make any sense. What would she be doing dressed in white unless she was an angel? If she was an angel this must be heaven, so why did my head hurt so much? No idea; it didn’t make sense. Nothing much made sense at all.
I had no idea of time passing, didn’t notice whether it was day or night, or what.
After a time – and I can’t tell you how long a time – things started to make a little more sense. I guess I wasn’t with it very often, but somehow it became clear to me that I wasn’t in heaven, but in a hospital bed. That made sense to me; as bad as I hurt, it must have meant that a hospital was where I was supposed to be. Not too much after that, I was sure I saw Arlene leaning over me, dressed in white.
"Arlene?" I whispered.
"It’s me, Mel," she said softly. "I thought you were starting to come around."
"Hurt . . . " I managed to reply. I’m not sure if I was telling her that I hurt, or wondered how bad I was hurt.
"I don’t doubt you hurt," she smiled. "You were hurt pretty bad, but I think you’re going to be all right now. Now, you just relax and take it easy."
Seeing Arlene dressed in white was starting to make a little sense to me. "Nurse?" I asked.
"Yes, I’m your nurse," she smiled. "Since I was going to be here anyway and they were short staffed, I decided to make myself useful. I borrowed the uniform. It looks dreadful, doesn’t it?"
"Looks . . . good," I croaked out; neither my voice nor my mind were capable of handling anything much more complicated just then.
"I hope you meant that anything looks good on me," she smiled. "I’ll take that as a compliment, anyway."
"Yeah," I whispered. I don’t remember anything much after that for a while; I guess I must have fallen asleep again.
Things made quite a bit more sense the next time I woke up, although I still had no idea if it was minutes or hours later. Arlene was there, still wearing the nurse’s uniform. They weren’t brightly colored, or scrubs, like nurses wear today, but plain white dresses, cut rather baggy, with a hemline almost down to the ankles. It did look pretty dreadful on her, but might have looked better if it had fit her. But she looked good anyway, so I didn’t mind. Maybe my head wasn’t hurting quite as bad, and I guess I felt a little better.
"Hi," I said.
"Are you feeling any better?" she smiled.
"Maybe a little," I told her. "My head hurts, though."
"No doubt it hurts," she said, leaning over me to take my pulse. Apparently my heart was still beating, since she didn’t say anything about it. "You took a pretty good whack with it when you jumped Sandy’s car and rolled. When I got to you, I wasn’t sure you were alive. I still don’t know why you didn’t break your neck. In any case, you had a pretty bad concussion and it’s taken you a while to come around."
"Anybody else hurt?" I asked.
"No," she said. "Unless you count Sandy crapping his pants. I don’t know whether that happened when his steering went out or when you drove over his hood."
"Steering?" I frowned. "What happened?"
"A tie rod end broke," she said. "The wheel went all cockeyed and there wasn’t anything he could do to save it. I’m afraid I got into you a little and helped you get over him, but there wasn’t much I could do about it, either. It was just bad luck all around."
"Sounds like it," I agreed. "I doubt if there’s much I could have done different."
"Me, either," she agreed. "I’ve thought about it a lot and replayed it in my mind over and over, and I think the same thing. Anyway, in addition to your concussion, you had a broken arm and a broken leg, along with some internal bleeding. We had to go in and sew you up a little. I’m afraid you’re going to be laid up for a while, Mel. No more driving for you for a while."
"Don’t think I mind," I told her. "How about you?"
"Oh, I’m fine, I just had the fright of my life when I saw you go over in front of me," she said.
"I meant you driving?"
"Not for a while, at least," she smiled. "I told Frank there was no way I was going to be leaving you alone and unconscious in a strange town, and they understood that. He and Spud were in the other day, and said they were just as glad that I was going to stay with you. They didn’t want to leave you behind but there was no way to take you with them. They think a lot of you, Mel, and it really bothered them to have to leave you here."
"Where are we?" I asked, beginning to realize that not only had the show moved on, it had moved on some time ago.
"Oh, we’re still in Bradford," she said. "At one point there was some talk about moving you up to the hospital in Hawthorne, that’s the county seat, but we pretty well decided that there wasn’t much more they could do for you there than we could do for you here. It’s not a bad little town. We’ve been in lots worse."
I guess I still wasn’t in that good of shape; that much discussion and thinking just about exhausted me, and I guess I fell asleep again. There’s one nice thing about being asleep, you don’t realize that you hurt so much, and it passes the time. I know I was awake for brief periods after that, but never for very long.
I was feeling a little better – it must have been the next day – and just lying there, staring at the ceiling, thinking a little about what this all meant for me, when I heard someone come into the room. I had already learned that it hurt to move my head, so I just rolled my eyes, to see Arlene come in with a strange man. "Mel," she said. "This is Dr. Bronson. He’s been looking after you."
"That’s not quite fair," he chuckled. "She’s the one that’s been looking after you, I just look in on you from time to time. You seem a little brighter today."
"I think so," I replied, getting a look at the doctor. He was in his forties, I would guess, the kind of guy who had once had an athletic build but was putting on a few pounds. It also looked like he’d once had a full head of hair, but was losing a little of that. He seemed to be a nice guy, not all stuck up like some doctors I’d seen, not that I’d seen all that many over the years.
"Arlene says you’ve been talking a little, getting more lucid," he told me. "That’s good. Your body must be healing itself. There’s not much we can do for a head injury like you had other than wait it out, so you seem to be coming along fine."
"That’s good," I said. "How long before I’m back to normal?"
"There’s no saying," he told me honestly. "With head injuries like you had there’s no way of telling for sure. You might never come all the way back. You might always find yourself a little impaired in some way. But then again, maybe not. You may shake off most of the effects in the next few days. Your arm and leg, well, if you didn’t have the head injury and you had someplace to go, we could probably release you now, but you’re going to have a problem getting around for a while."
"Arlene said I had some internal injuries," I observed.
"You did," he said. "The steering wheel or something must have caught you wrong, that’s hard to say, too. We had to open you up and fix some bleeders. I have to say, when you get injured you bring one hard-headed nurse with you. From what I know she was taking care of you about as soon as the car came to a stop, rode the hearse here with you, and probably did as much to stitch you up as I did. Then, when we had to open you up, my usual surgical nurse happened to be out of town and I was all set to send you to Hawthorne, when your girl said, ‘Doctor, I’ve operated in worse conditions than these, and I’m a competent surgical nurse.’ Well, so she is, and I operated under a lot worse conditions when I was in the South Pacific, too. It turned out that she was right; she’s a darn competent nurse and a pleasure to work with. As it turned out it was just as well that we opened you up here, you might not have survived the ride to Hawthorne."
"It wasn’t that bad," Arlene protested. "But I was concerned about you, Mel."
"Arlene," I smiled. "It seems you did more than I knew about, but about what I would have expected you to do."
"Well, I tried," she said. "After all, I had something to do with punting you over Sandy."
"I doubt there was much you could have done differently about that, but you sure made up for it afterward," I told her, and turned back to the doctor. "So, I take it I’m stuck here for another few days?"
"Right," he said. "We’d want to keep you under observation anyway. According to Arlene, you don’t have any place else to go, so this is probably as good a place to stay as any for the next few days."
"I guess," I said. "I really don’t feel much like going anywhere right now, anyway."
"That’s to be expected," he replied. "And I don’t blame you. Given everything that’s happened we’re not all that anxious to run you out of here. I’ll look in on you a couple times a day, but if there’s anything you need, don’t be afraid to tell Arlene or the other nurses."
"I will," I promised him.
"I’ll be back in a few minutes," Arlene said. "I am at least technically working here, so I’ll have to make the rest of the rounds with Dr. Bronson. Don’t go away."
"I doubt I’ll have much choice," I told her.
After they left, I started to think about things a little – I guess I was enough better to be able to do that. Whatever else happened, I was out of a job. It still wasn’t clear to me just how long before that the MMSA had moved on, but it was clear that it had been several days. In any case, it was clear to me that I wasn’t going to be doing any driving anytime soon, not with my right leg in a cast the way it was. I hadn’t asked how long I was going to be in the casts, but remembered from somewhere that it usually took a couple months to heal a broken arm and leg. That meant that if I did make it back to the crew, there probably wouldn’t be much of the season left.
When you got right down to it, I wasn’t all that sure how bad I wanted to go back to the MMSA anyway. For a year or more I’d felt that I’d been growing tired of it, and the time was coming to do the next thing, whatever that was. This season hadn’t been as much fun as the previous ones. On the other hand, being laid up like I was just wasn’t going to be very useful when it came to looking for a teaching job. There wasn’t much I could do about it right then as far as I could see, anyway. I’d just have to wait and see what happened, and it seemed to me that it was going to be hard to wait.
I thought back to the year before, when Hap and Junie had gotten banged up. From what little I knew, Hap had been hurt about as bad as I’d been and Junie not a lot better off, but Buckshot had stayed behind with them. He was some kind of a shirttail cousin, and took on the responsibility until he could get the two of them home, then had come back to join us. I’d wondered what it felt like to be left behind in a town when you knew nobody like that, and now I could tell you that it would have been awful damn lonely if it hadn’t been for Arlene. Was she going to stick around until I was on my feet again, then go rejoin the MMSA? Could I go home? The only thing I had that barely resembled a home was Livonia, where I knew a few people who would be there during the season, people like Hoss and Hattie and Chick and Dink, and, well, Vivian. It wasn’t much of a home, and I didn’t know what I could do there. It really wasn’t a place I wanted to be around all that much, anyway. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be around the racers anymore, and whatever happened this was a good time to move on with my life, that much was clear. If I was around Livonia, spring would come, Frank would be short of drivers, and there I’d go again.
I laid there on my back kicking it around in my mind for I don’t know how long. Maybe if Arlene was just being nice to me, I could go back to Hartford when she left to go back to racing. It wasn’t that I had any desire to see my brother Phillip, because I didn’t, but hell, maybe Mavis would still be looking for a husband. Mr. Vogt might be needing a teacher, too. Or, I supposed I could go to San Diego. I hadn’t seen my sister in over ten years and my folks in almost that long, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to be around them, either. Besides, with my leg in a cast there was no way I was going to be driving the Ford anywhere soon, let alone to Nebraska or California. That made it pretty clear that if she left I wouldn’t be going much of anywhere for a while.
In the back of my head there was one question that kept floating around: Arlene. At one point I’d had the hope that we could put something together. Back there in Fort Lauderdale we’d been pretty close to it if either one of us had just buckled down and put our minds to it, but neither one of us had. Even down on Padre Island there had been the hope that we could work on it when the season ended, but after the fracas with Ace it had seemed like Arlene had gotten more distant from me. For the most part I’d given up hope. But she was here, and not on the road with the racers. Did that mean something? Or, like she’d said, she couldn’t bear to leave me alone in a town where I didn’t know anybody? I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I felt like I needed to talk to her about it, but like so often with Arlene, what I wanted to say and what I felt I could say weren’t exactly the same things.
After what seemed like quite a long while Arlene came back into the room. "I take it you’re feeling better," she said.
"A lot better, I guess," I told her. "At least things are making some sense, and I can think about things."
"Well good," she smiled. She came over to the bed and leaned over, I thought to do something medical. In fact, she gave me about the best medicine she could – a really good, healthy kiss, lots of tongue and it went on and on. "I’ve kissed you before," she said when she pulled away quite a while later. "I think you knew it, but I couldn’t be sure. This time I am sure. God, I’ve missed that the last few months."
With that one kiss a lot of the questions I’d been mulling over got cleared up. "I’ve missed it, too," I told her. "You don’t know how much I’ve wanted to do that."
"Me, too," she grinned. "But after that business with Ace I realized that we were going to have to be real low profile with each other. It seemed like we were drawing away from each other, and I hated it."
"I thought you were pretty disgusted with me," I said.
"Oh, there’s no way I could be," she smiled. "Ace was really being a pain in the ass, and you dealt with the situation for me. We’re going to have to not be blatant about it while you’re here in the hospital, but at least staying apart for the sake of not causing problems with the crew is something that’s in the past."
I can’t tell you how big a relief her words were to me. At a minimum, we were at the point we’d talked about at Padre Island – be around each other away from the MMSA and see what happened. I really hadn’t been expecting that; I had been thinking it had been pretty well over with. "You’re saying that you don’t want to go back racing?"
"I’m going to miss it," she said. "But I’m not going back without you, and I’m not going back to it with you and have it like we had it before. If we go back, and that’s a big if, at a minimum it’s going to have to be clear to everybody that we’re just a little more than good friends."
"I can live with that," I told her. "But I’m not at all sure I want to go back to racing. I think you know that I’ve been getting a little tired of it."
"To tell you the truth, I have been, too," she said. "You remember that night a couple months ago out in Kansas, where we got into that Dust Bowl with the Baptists? I went around and around that track eating all that dust and manure, and thinking about how clean a hospital is. If we decide to go back, well, fine, but it won’t kill me if we don’t."
"That’s fine with me," I told her. "I was thinking about dropping off the crew for a while when we got to Livonia so I could spend some time looking for a teaching job. I didn’t want it to be in Livonia, because I knew if I was around Frank and Spud and the gang, spring would come and I’d be all tempted to go out and race with them again."
"You told me one time that if you got a teaching job that you were about going to have to turn your back on racing and keep it there," she said. "That sounds like a good idea to me."
"I think that’s about where we need to be," I agreed. "Let’s face it, there’s no chance that I’ll be able to go racing again for at least a couple months with my leg in this cast, so it’s not an issue for that long, anyway. After that, well, we’ll have to see. But I think maybe the time has come to turn my back on it and do something else."
"Honestly, I’m coming to the same realization," she replied. "I don’t know what it was that I wanted to prove by racing with you guys but I think I proved it. Maybe it’s time to move on to the next thing. I guess we’re just going to have to get you back on your feet and see what the next thing is."
"How long is that going to take?" I asked.
"Oh, we can probably have you out of the hospital in the next few days," she said. "But you’re not going to be able to do much for yourself for the next six weeks or so. That’s kind of a shame."
"Yeah, it puts off deciding whatever it is we’re going to do next."
She grinned at me. "Well, that too," she smiled. "But I’ll tell you what, I was the one that put that catheter into you and as out of it as you were it wasn’t easy since I got you hard even though you were so far out of it. That’s a pretty good tool you have there, Mel, and I can hardly wait until I can feel it in me."
What do you say to that? I’ll tell you what, as hurt as I was I could still blush, but I realized that the future had just changed on me. Again. "I can hardly wait myself," I told her. "It seems like I’ve waited forever now."
"I think we’ve waited so long that we can wait a little longer and do it right," she said. "Besides, I don’t think that I want Beverly catching us getting it on in here."
"Beverly? Who’s that?" I asked.
"The head nurse," she replied. "She’s a sweet old gal, she’s been very good to me. She’s the one who’s been loaning me these uniforms. I guess I’m not quite in uniform, I’m supposed to be wearing a cap, but they don’t have any Milwaukee State caps here and the nearest ones I have are in Schererville. I just haven’t taken the time to go over there since I don’t want to get into it with my family again."
"Well, that makes sense," I said. "It’s been what? A year now since you’ve seen them?"
"I’ve gone longer than that," she shrugged. "We haven’t even exchanged many letters. I guess they’re pretty disgusted with me. Anyway, that probably rules out the idea of going to Schererville to wait for you to get better. To tell you the truth, Bradford doesn’t seem like all that bad of a place to wait it out. It’s not a bad little town. It’s mostly a farm town, a few industries, and not a bad place to live. I’ve got a fairly decent job here for the moment; the pay could be better, but it’s not much worse than I was getting in Ft. Lauderdale. Besides, I don’t have to work nights. I really got to hating that."
"I could see how you could," I told her. "How come you don’t have to work nights here? I thought that was all done by seniority."
"Most places it would be," she replied. "But there are two girls here whose husbands work third shift, so they volunteered to work third shifts here so they could be on the same schedule. It works out pretty well."
"Yeah, I guess it would," I told her. "So where are you staying?"
"With Beverly," she said. "When I’m there, I’ve pretty much just been sleeping there. Most of my off time I’ve been here with you."
"Had to have been dull," I commented.
"Well, yeah, it was," she said. "Like I said, Beverly is a sweet old girl who literally gave me the dress off her back, but she’s never been married, and I’m afraid I scandalize her a little from coming to town with a bunch of men driving race cars. I mean, she’s the kind of person who thinks the Bible is all right except for all the begatting going on. I don’t know how she’s managed to work OB all these years."
"Maybe that has something to do with it," I suggested. "She’s just seen the end results, not the fun of getting there."
"You could be right," she smiled. "It makes sense to me. And I’ll tell you, I’m ready for some of that fun. It’s been an awful long time, and I’ve wanted to have some of it with you about as long as I’ve known you. I was really jealous of that girl up in Minnesota last summer, because she was lucky enough to get it and I wasn’t. But I’ll promise you, I’ll try to do better than she did."
"I’ll tell you what, I’m about ready to take you up on that," I said, "Except for all this lousy plaster."
"That’s going to put a crimp in things for a while," she said. "But it won’t be that way for all that long. Now, I think I’m just going to have to leave you here and frustrated for a while. I am at least theoretically working here and I’ve got some other patients to look in on."
"You’re right," I said. "I shouldn’t be monopolizing all your time."
"No big deal," she said. "I shouldn’t be too long."
"I’ll be waiting," I said as she walked out of the room. I lay back against the pillow and just let my head spin. It was spinning pretty good anyway, but the conversation of the last half hour or so had really set it going. Needless to say, things didn’t seem anywhere near as hopeless as they had half an hour before.
So, that was my last race for the Midwest Midget Sportsman Association. I’d had some good years, exciting years, memorable years, and things I would remember for the rest of my life, but whatever else happened I could see this was going to be the clean break that I needed. It was more than time enough to press on with my life.
For now, I’ll just leave it that I did – and by that, I mean, Arlene and I did. All that was fifty years and more ago, although it doesn’t seem like it sitting out here on the back porch of my Florida retirement home that I bought largely out of my part of the check from the old family farm. A lot happened in that fifty years, and maybe I’ll get the chance to tell some of those stories sometime. Remembering this stuff and telling it to the voice recognition program on a laptop computer that we couldn’t have dreamed of back then, then buffing up the results has kept me occupied for most of the winter. Now it’s getting to be time to head back north, so I guess I’ll let this go for now. Maybe next winter I’ll be able to sit down and tell some more stories of what happened with Arlene and me.