Though Telzey and Will missed going to the races that Friday night, someone else they knew didn’t.

One of the few useful pieces of information that Ashley had been able to get out of Matt d’Lamater the previous Saturday night was that he often raced on Friday nights at Meridian Raceway, about fifty miles to the east of Bradford. She didn’t know for sure that he’d be there that Friday night, but there was only one way to find out.

It really wasn’t much of a trick to talk her mother into letting her borrow her car to “go visit a friend,” and give her some cash to do it with. A little searching on the Internet gave Ashley the location of the track, and the cost of the pit pass.

One thing that Ashley hadn’t considered about Meridian being a dirt track was that it was dirty. Powerful engines and fat tires had sprayed dirt all over the place for decades, and even though rains washed some of it off, things still seemed dirty to her. Worse, in spite of the track being watered frequently, it only took a few laps to get the air filled with dirt once again. There was a light breeze blowing toward the off-track pits from the track, and that meant that there was a constant fall of dust onto everything, including her.

Again, not knowing what to expect, Ashley had gone loaded for bear, or, in her case, bare; Susan would have easily classified what she wore as “trashy.” She had on a skirt that was even shorter than the one Susan had worn for lying around the Griffin house a few days earlier, and all she had to do was lean over slightly to expose her black thong panties. Ashley wasn’t big in the bust, but she did her best to display what she had with a tight spaghetti strap crop top that didn’t leave much to the imagination, either. If that Larissa girl wasn’t around, d’Lamater wasn’t going to know what hit him. But the dirty grounds and the flying dust took the edge off of things in a hurry; within half an hour she felt gritty and grimy.

She wandered from one end of the pits to the other and back again without seeing any sign of d’Lamater or the 17 car. He was there, but somehow she just missed him, probably partially due to the fact that he wasn’t driving the Pony Stock he drove at Bradford, but a very battered Chevy in what Meridian Raceway called the “Bomber” class. She actually heard his name called by the announcer several times but didn’t pick up on it, mostly because the announcer mangled the pronunciation badly.

After two long hours she felt not just dirty, but filthy; her hair was filled with dirt and her face felt like her makeup was half race track clay. By that time she’d pretty well figured out that if it was going to take hanging around this place to be able to corner d’Lamater, he could darn well go uncornered. It was just a bad job all the way around. Like it or not, she was going to have to try again at Bradford.

The final straw was to get back out to the parking lot and find her mother’s shiny Chrysler covered in dust from the track. It was a downright mess, and she knew that she was going to have to wash it before she got it home so she wouldn’t have to explain what she had been doing that got it so messed up. That little middle school brat was responsible for this and she was going to pay, one way or another.

*   *   *

Both Will and Telzey were up early on Saturday, once again. Both of them normally liked to sleep in on Saturday mornings, and if they had gone out to the track and worked on the mowing instead of going to the tournament and party the night before they might have done it this time, as well. But, if they hadn’t gone to the events with Kayla and her friends and family, they probably would have gone to the race at Calhoun County, so they’d still have had to get up early anyway.

As had become the usual thing, Ray took the three of them to breakfast at the Chicago Inn, and brought them up to date on what had happened the night before. As it turned out, Will and Telzey hadn’t really missed all that much. Chuck hadn’t done well, finishing ninth in the feature at least partly as the result of trying a new chassis setup that hadn’t worked as well as he’d hoped, but at least he’d found that out at M-50 where he wasn’t running for points.

After breakfast they headed on out to the track and got going with the mowers. It had been a cool night, and jeans and a sweatshirt seemed about like the right clothes for Telzey when she got on the tractor. However, after a couple hours on the tractor in the sun with the day warming up, that was a little too much clothing.

At least this time Telzey had thought ahead. It was getting time for a drink and a bathroom break, so she headed the mowing rig up to the barn, shut it down and went inside. There, she changed into a bikini that Susan had given her, loaded down on suntan lotion, and headed back out to mow some more.

What with one thing and another she and Susan hadn’t had the chance to lie out in the back yard after school and get some sun like they’d talked about earlier in the week, so this was her first chance to work on her tan. While this was a bikini, yellow with an orange and blue pattern, it wasn’t all that daring compared to some that Susan had. In fact, Telzey wondered if her grandmother was fully aware of how daring some of her daughter’s bikinis were – Telzey had tried on one and it had made her feel more naked than she would have if she’d had no clothes on. This one was conservative by comparison, and she figured that this year she was going to get a really good tan, considering all the time she expected to spend on the tractor.

It took several hours to get all the mowing done, and she felt like she’d gotten a good start on the tan. While she’d been mowing, she realized that the guys around the track, Will and the others, had seen her quite a bit – and for that matter, quite a bit of her.

It was early afternoon before she was done with the tractor and took the rig back up to the barn, where Will, Chuck, Mel, and Ray were hanging around doing some odd jobs. She was aware of the male eyes on her as she climbed down from the tractor and started on the job of unhooking the mower and hooking up the track sweeper. “How’s the tan going?” Mel asked with a smirk.

“Oh, pretty well,” she grinned. “I figured as long as I was sitting out in the sun I might as well make use of it.”

“Yeah, but every time you came close to any one of us things came to a screeching halt,” Ray laughed. “Telzey, did anyone ever tell you that you’re one good-looking girl?”

“Why, yes,” she grinned. “Will tells me that all the time.”

“I knew the kid had some taste,” Ray laughed. “You might want to put on a little more in the way of clothes if you want to come down to the Chicago to lunch with us.”

“Why?” she smiled at him, “I thought the rule there was, ‘No shirts, no service, except for girls.’”

“Telzey,” Mel sighed. “You are going to be a handful when you grow up. In fact, I sometimes think you’re a handful now.”

In any case, Telzey pulled on a camisole and pair of shorts before they piled into Ray’s car for the trip down to the Chicago Inn. Once they’d made their orders, they fell to talking about racing, as was usually the case. Mel got to telling stories of the old days, and life on the road.

“Especially in a deal like that, where you’re running with everybody every day, what goes around comes around,” Mel related. “If a guy had car trouble in a heat, usually most of the guys in the other heats were trying to help him fix it, since you knew darn well that some day the guy in trouble was going to be you. But yeah, there were some dirty tricks pulled now and then, and I’ve heard of some others over the years that were even worse, although some were kind of fun.”

“What was a fun kind of prank?” Will asked.

“Oh, sometimes it was just something like smearing Limburger on some guy’s radiator. Even in an open car, that’d just about drive you out along about the middle of a feature.” He shook his head and continued. “Your grandmother took an awful lot of that sort of stuff. A lot of the guys didn’t like a woman racing, and they really didn’t like it that she would beat their butts as often as not. Besides, in those days a lot of guys thought a woman in the pits was bad luck. Frank and Spud had her racing as much for the promotional value as anything, and if it weren’t for that I don’t think she’d have been racing at all. But, I’ll tell you what, if a driver mouthed off in the open about it, Frank or Spud would be on them like flies on manure. More than one guy got bounced right out on their butts.”

“Good for Frank and Spud,” Telzey said. “From what I understand their attitude wasn’t all that common in those days.”

“Well, right or wrong, that’s how it was,” Mel said. “Telzey, there’s still a lot of guys in racing that think that a woman shouldn’t be there, and frankly, there’s a lot of women around that feel that way, too. I know that Arlene is real pleased with the way you’re starting out. There’s never been a lot of women follow in her footsteps, but at least there’s getting to be a few more, now.”

They finished their lunch and went back to the track. Telzey and Will just had routine service to perform on their cars – even the dent in Telzey’s fender had been bumped out earlier in the week. Chuck was facing more work, putting the setup on his car back to the way it had been; they all pitched in on that, then moved the cars down to the pits and got set up there.

By the time everything was ready to go the track was open for test and tune, with visiting cars running hot laps, so they went out and got a few in to make sure everything was still all right. Chuck made more than Will and Telzey, since he was still fiddling with the much-more-complicated setup on the 15 car, and by the time qualifying began he thought that maybe he’d made an improvement or two.

Will and Telzey both qualified well – as usual, not the fastest, but right up in the top few. For the first time, Telzey qualified ahead of Will, and neither of them was quite sure why, although Telzey thought that Will must have gotten off line or something during his run. A little surprisingly, d’Lamater in the 17 car wasn’t among the fastest qualifiers, although his girlfriend, Larissa Zoisite had far and away the best qualifying run she’d ever had. She was clearly getting better with practice.

As the day wound down racing got under way. Will won his heat easily; Telzey wound up running second to Jack Kaufmann in the 25 car. Alan Gustafson won his heat in the 12 car, in a close finish over Joe Wolsley in the 48. A little surprisingly, Matt d’Lamater, who was always fast, didn’t do well at all in his heat, finishing seventh, one spot behind his girlfriend in the 57.

The traveling show that week was the Vintage Modifieds again, and Telzey finally had a chance to talk with Jessie Winters, who had won the class feature a few weeks before. She proved to be a good-looking blonde in her late twenties, whose husband had built her car and did the work on it – he didn’t race himself. Jessie said she’d met Arlene Austin years before, and she’d had a little bit of an influence in keeping her interested in racing. As Mel had done earlier in the day, Jessie warned Telzey that a lot of guys resented a woman being in racing even if they didn’t say anything about it. It was always going to be tougher for a woman than it was for the guys – but that just made it more rewarding when she beat them.

Right after the intermission it was again time for the Pony Stock feature. As usual, the high finishers in the heat races had a lot of cars to work through on their way to the front, which was a pain in the butt in a way, but it made for excitement for the spectators. The only fly in the ointment this week was that d’Lamater started near the front due to his poor heat finish, and wherever he’d lost his speed earlier, he’d found it again. Five laps into the race he was in first place, and there was no catching him, although Jack, Will, and Alan gave it a serious try. Jack came the closest, but still hadn’t caught up with him enough to try a pass by the time the checkers flew. Telzey had to settle for a sixth place finish after another battle with Joe Wolsley in the 48.

After the race, Jack, Will, Alan, and Telzey gathered on top of the Kaufmann hauler. “You can’t tell me he wasn’t sandbagging that heat finish,” Jack snorted.

“I heard he said he dogged it in the heat to let his girlfriend finish ahead of him,” Alan said slowly, with the difficulty that everyone realized was normal.

“The end result was the same, it was sandbagging,” Will commented. “I mean, it was legal, I guess, but it sure looked stinky.”

“That’s an awful darn fast car for a Cavalier,” Jim commented. “Will, I know that with you running in this class that your dad can’t be too picky about tech inspection, but it’s clear to me that he’s got more engine or something than the rest of you guys do.”

“It seems like it to me, too,” Jack said. “I get the impression that he gets better acceleration than a Cavalier should. It’d be nice to see just how far over spec it is. Or, maybe it’s a hot camshaft or something.”

“Or something,” Jim agreed. “I can’t help but wonder if he has a trick computer chip in there so he’s not hitting his rev limiter when he should be.” He let out a sigh. “Will, I think I’m going to talk to your dad about it. Maybe he could get Maurice down here from Spartan or something to do tech some night. They run about the same Pony Stocks as we do here, and if he starts looking for something he’s pretty likely to find it.”

*   *   *

The truth of the matter was that Matt d’Lamater wasn’t dogging it in his Pony Stock heat. At least not intentionally; he was preoccupied and that took the edge off his racing.

Matt was a junior at Paddington High School. Like a lot of racers, he came from a family that had been racing for generations – it can be hard to get involved with the sport if you don’t have some background knowledge, and handing it down from generation to generation was a time-proven way for people to get involved. Matt had been hanging around race tracks while he was still in diapers.

Running Pony Stocks was fairly new for Matt – it was only his second year in them, and he got into it because he wanted to get some experience running on pavement. His family had mostly been dirt track racers over the years; he was not the first of the third generation of his family to race at Meridian. He had come to the conclusion that in the long run he needed to know more about pavement racing, since there seemed to be more opportunity there.

Matt also came from a family of mechanics, going back four generations, and a knowledge of what makes cars tick and how to get it is invaluable for any racer at the local level, where for the most part a driver had to be his own mechanic. Matt had quite literally cut his teeth on a wrench, and was a good mechanic for a high school kid. He wasn’t a particularly good student, except in the auto shop classes at the Vocational School, where he could have taught some of the classes. His dirt car was a hand-me-down from an older cousin, but the Pony Stock he’d put together himself. It was about as cheap a way to pull together a second race car as he could come up with, and since he started with a couple clunkers he didn’t have much money tied up in the basic car.

Although he knew that the Dodges held the hot hand in the Pony Stocks locally, he was a Chevy man through and through and wasn’t about to lower himself to running a MoPar for any reason unless someone paid him decent bucks to do so. While there may have been some things on the 17 car that were borderline in their legality, it hadn’t intentionally been built as a cheater – Matt was that good a driver, although a touch on the wild side, something he carried over from his dirt track heritage.

Like a lot of guys around his age, Matt had an eye for girls. The problem was that for the most part they didn’t have an eye for him, since he was big, coarse, a bit loudmouthed, and while not really a slob usually had grease under his fingernails. About the only time a decent-looking girl had any use for him was if there was something wrong with their car and they wanted it fixed on the cheap.

But there was an exception to that: Larissa Zoisite. She wasn’t a knockout, but there was nothing wrong with her: she was a reasonable-looking girl who seemed to appreciate mechanics and liked racing. She hadn’t had much of a chance to learn about being a mechanic, but over the last year she’d hung out with him a lot and had somehow become his girlfriend. Somewhere along the way she’d picked up the racing bug herself, and after the season ended the previous fall the two had worked out a deal where he’d help her put together a car for the next season and help her with racing it. The deal was that it was her car, and she paid the expenses, although stuff went into it from the collection of racing parts that had accumulated around the d’Lamater household over the decades.

For instance, they didn’t have to find a racing seat; one that had last done service in Matt’s brother’s Street Stock was yanked down from the rafters of the garage. Matt was a good welder and he’d welded up the roll cage from the collection of steel tubing that his father had picked up on the cheap somewhere. Because of everything, Larissa probably had less money invested in her car than anyone else racing at Bradford Speedway that evening.

Matt was not the kind of guy to think about such things very hard, but he realized that Lady Luck had been kind to him when she’d pointed Larissa at him. In general, girls like her didn’t go for guys like him very often, and he knew it. Over the last couple years they’d spent a lot of time together, racing, working on cars, and hanging out, and it was always a bit of a mystery to him what she saw in him. Not that he was complaining, but it just seemed a little unexpected.

But with that thought in mind, he was certainly confused when he found that really foxy blonde from Bradford coming onto him very, very hard, for no reason that he could see. She was a babe, no doubt about it, hair down to a very cute bubble butt that was barely covered by one of the shortest skirts he’d ever seen outside of a skin magazine, and long, shapely legs that came all the way up to said butt. She didn’t have much in the hooter department, but it was possible to overlook that considering how much she revealed of what she did have in a belly shirt that only emphasized how slender her waist was. She had obvious class; she obviously came from a family that had money – he could tell it from the way she acted.

And she was interested in him. Why?

It didn’t make a lot of sense to him, and he just wasn’t sure how to handle it. She’d come on to him very strongly last week, with Larissa looking on unhappily; this week, the girl – Ashley, he thought her name was – came on to him even harder, if anything. When Larissa saw her coming on to him, she was just about seething. His first reaction had been to brush her off, because he knew he already had a good thing with Larissa, but when Ashley seemed even more determined this week in the pits before the heat races got under way, he found that his resolve to brush her off had limits.

It had been the hot kiss in the pits when he was buckled into his car, just about to head out for the lineup, that really got him confused. Thank goodness Larissa had already pulled out to join the lineup, because he knew darn well that if she’d seen the girl lean through his car window to plant that kiss on him, Larissa would have blown not just a fuse, but the whole fuse panel.

So it was perfectly understandable that his mind wasn’t on racing in his heat race that evening, and by the time he’d caught up with Larissa he was a little reluctant to pass her. There was no telling what that blonde was going to do when they got back to the pits, but if Larissa finishing ahead of him in a relatively meaningless heat would get her in a good mood, he reasoned that it might make things go a little easier. Might. Besides, it was late in the heat and she was going good; right at the moment he didn’t feel like working that hard.

While they were on the cool-down lap, he happened to think of the Austin kid and his girlfriend – he’d seen them kissing each other to congratulate each other several times, and the thought crossed his mind that a congratulatory kiss with Larissa might keep her cool. And, if the blonde was looking on, she might even get the message that he was already taken.

As it turned out, the blonde was watching when he scrambled out of his car and went over to Larissa’s, giving her a big hug and kiss as soon as she got out of the car. He and Larissa talked for a few minutes, with her mostly being hyper about her good finish – and it was her best heat finish so far. The blonde kept her distance, and mostly disappeared when he and Larissa went over to the concession stand so he could buy her a Coke and a chili dog to celebrate.

The blonde didn’t approach the two of them again while they were together, but somehow she always managed to be in his sight. Maybe, he thought, maybe she’d gotten the message and been warned off, so he was a little more relaxed when he got in the car for the feature.

It turned out that the lousy heat finish had not been a total loss. While it cost him a few points and a few bucks, it gave him a really decent starting position for the feature, about a third of the way back with nothing but much slower cars in front of him. Given that knowledge, he’d decided to play it cool and not try to pass all the slower cars in one pass in the first turn, but to take his time and stay out of trouble. It paid off; it got him out in front in the first five laps or so. He was able to build up a fairly good lead before some of the faster cars were able to come up from the back of the field. By then the end was near and he was able to hold onto his position for his first feature win of the season.

It felt really good to get his picture taken in the winner’s circle, and to drive back to his pit stall and get a celebratory kiss from Larissa. They watched the Street Stocks run their feature from the pit stalls, but like a lot of racers they headed across to the grandstand and its better view to watch the Vintage Modifieds and the Sportsmen.

It wasn’t until he climbed into the 17 car to load it on his open trailer that he found the note: “Hey, big guy. Why don’t you call me some time? Your girlfriend doesn’t have to know.” Her phone number was included.

Yeah, the blonde got the message all right, but it didn’t seem to bother her. Now what did he do?