Many years before, long before Bert Woodward got rich from some innovative software design, he’d been a draftee in an artillery unit in the days of Vietnam. He didn’t have much use for the war or for the Army, for that matter – but for some reason he became infected with love of the big guns.

The infection lay dormant for many years – well, mostly dormant; he collected books on artillery, built a few models, and that sort of thing. It really got set off when his wife, in what she figured later was a happy mistake, gave him an antique ship’s signal cannon for his birthday.

Bert liked fooling around with the little popgun and thoroughly irritated his Ann Arbor area neighbors in the process. They didn’t become alarmed until one day Bert announced that he’d discovered that you didn’t need a permit to fire off black powder weapons of any size, so he’d ordered a replica Civil War cannon.

When the political dust settled, and it took a while, Bert wasn’t exactly welcome to fire his fifteen-pounder Napoleon in his back yard, and figured he’d better find a better place. After some searching, he found a place that was nearly ideal – an old farmhouse and a long, narrow farm that paralleled I-67; it had once been much larger but had been split in half by the Interstate. The end result was that, not only did Bert have a place at the end of a dead-end road where he could shoot off his toy, he also had an Interstate highway for a neighbor where no one was likely to complain about his noise.

Bert was a little circumspect about what he was doing until he had everything in place – he’d already been politicked and zoned out of his house in Ann Arbor. He had made sure that the Township had already zoned his land agricultural, which in the small print of the zoning ordinance allowed the land to be used for “shooting ranges.” To make sure he had things tied down, Bert incorporated as “Malvern Hill Artillery Museum.” and moved his Napoleon out there. He was occasionally joined by other Civil War cannon freaks, who organized a four-gun battery. What solid iron shot could do to an old junk car had to be seen to be believed.

Bert had collected several other interesting artillery pieces over the recent years, some workable, others not. But his interests changed slightly a few years earlier when he’d seen a TV special on a group in Delaware that was into “punkin’ chunkin’” – seeing how far you could throw a fifteen-pound pumpkin – which gave Bert the perfect excuse to build a trebuchet.

Big John wasn’t Bert’s first trebuchet, but about his fourth – the others had been much smaller test beds. At the moment, the best “hurl” that Big John had done was just under a thousand feet, and that was getting near to the best a trebuchet had ever done. Bert had also built an air-powered cannon that could get a pumpkin out a good half a mile, but it was nowhere near the air cannon record. He had plans in the back of his head to someday build a trebuchet big enough to hurl a small car, but so far his wife had been able to keep some semblance of sanity in his projects.

Bert and his trebuchet were a legend locally. Will had seen it fired before at the annual fall Punkin’ Chunkin’ Festival that Bert had organized, and it was always fun to watch. Will may have been a racer and mature for his age, but there’s something about a trebuchet that will bring out the small boy in any man. The A-frames that supported the axle stood a good fifteen feet in the air, and the long arm of the device was nearly fifty feet. It was an impressive, if temperamental, piece of medieval machinery, and had inspired many smaller versions among the boys of Bradford.

*   *   *

“You’re kidding!” Telzey exclaimed when Will explained about Big John.

“Nope, I’ve seen him fire it. It’s really cool!”

“What does he shoot in it?” Telzey said, shaking her head.

“Pumpkins, in the fall,” Will told her. “This time of year, it’s more likely to be a watermelon, or maybe a bag of flour. Whatever it is, it’ll be something that will be able to be seen when it hits.”

Telzey just shook her head, thinking something about boys and their toys, but came up short when she realized that those toys included race cars. And yeah, watching a trebuchet that big getting fired would be really neat.

“Hey, better get back in your car,” Will said. “You’re going to be next up to qualify.”

*   *   *

Matt knew that Larissa was there that evening, but he didn’t see much of her and it was clear to him that she didn’t want to see him, anyway. That just got him on edge a little more – he still had no idea of what had gone wrong with her or why she was so mad at him, and she wouldn’t talk to him when he tried to be friendly. It just didn’t make sense. Women were like that, was his only guess.

As always, Matt had a good qualifying time, and with the full field inversion used at Bradford, it put him near the back of the field for his heat race. He wanted to hustle to win it, since winning a heat carried points with it as well as winning a feature, although not as many. Although he was leading in the points, there were several people barking at his heels – Will Austin wasn’t very far back, and Alan Gustafson and Jack Kaufmann weren’t far behind him. It wouldn’t take much of a slip to be in trouble as tight as the points chase was this season.

So he was a little more wound up than normal when he came up behind John Adorney in the 52 car. John was apparently feeling racy tonight, and didn’t want to let him past. That was irritating, since John wasn’t in a points battle. He only raced every two or three weeks if he happened to feel like it and wasn’t doing something else that evening. Lap after lap went by, and John kept blocking him. About the fourth lap of that and with the end of the heat coming up, Matt didn’t have much choice if he wanted to pick up another couple places. He tried to make it seem as accidental as possible, since getting caught would mean being sent to the back of the pack, but as they went into turn three Matt got his bumper into the 52 car as gently as he could manage. It was just enough to set the car to spinning, hopefully not bad enough to call a yellow flag.

Technically speaking, Matt should have been sent to the back of the field, but either the officials hadn’t been watching closely enough or they figured it must have been accidental so he wasn’t called on it. Actually, it was a blessing; it closed the field up a bit, and he was able to jump a couple cars on the restart to get up to third in the heat. It was not as good a finish as he would have liked, but at least the points were a little better than if he hadn’t used a little Dale Earnhardt passing gear. As they filed off the track, Matt was simmering at the fact that it could have been him rather than that Amberdon kid in the winner’s circle if Adorney had just gotten out of the way when he should have.

After the rest of the heat races finished, Bert Woodward and Big John hurled a number of things out of the race track. Chuck’s old 86 car had had its roof welded roughly back on, and had been dragged to a back corner of the lot, where it could be seen from all but the lowest rows of the grandstand. Bert launched several watermelons at it, never quite hitting it but coming close a couple times. It was really neat to watch, and most everyone took time out from what they were doing to watch the demonstration.

That was especially true in the Pony Stock pits. Larissa had expected to have to be very stealthy to be able to switch gas caps on Matt d’Lamater’s fuel cell, but she hadn’t expected the pits to be all but totally deserted so people could watch Big John hurl watermelons. About all she had to do was to take the gas cap off of the fuel cell in her car, walk over to Matt’s and exchange it for the identical-appearing fuel cell gas cap in his. It couldn’t have taken ten seconds of looking suspicious, and she did it while she was on the way to the Porta-John, which gave her an excuse to be in the area. The deed was done; now all that remained was to see if it worked.

Unfortunately – or perhaps for Larissa’s sake, fortunately – neither she nor Matt figured on John Adorney getting involved in the situation. John was something special: he was eighty-one years old. In fact, John had run MMSA midgets with Mel for a while near the other end of his life, and it had been an interesting experience. He still liked to show up at the track once in a while.

But while Mel had mostly given up racing half a century before, John had not. He’d never been a heavily active racer nor a high profile one, always running down in the economy classes, jalopies, sixes, and now Pony Stocks. He really wasn’t that fast any more, and his reflexes were nothing like they’d been when he’d bounced around the Midwest dirt tracks with Mel years before, but after over sixty years of racing he had a depth of experience that was second to just about nobody. He also felt that people should be gentlemanly on the track, because he’d learned even before the MMSA days that using a fender to clear the way could be dangerous. There had been no call for that young punk in the 17 car to lay a fender on him no matter what, and he needed to be taught a lesson.

And John was just the person to teach him, too; along with Mel Austin, he’d learned the finer points of returning a favor from the late, legendary Spud McElroy. It wasn’t knowledge he’d had to use very often, but he had done it from time to time over the years. This was one of those times.

Based on his finish, Matt had to start in the Feature a few cars back from Adorney’s 52 car – just far enough back that the pack got strung out a little bit before d’Lamater in the 17 car came up on him. Although the rules required that the Pony Stocks didn’t have mirrors, John just about knew he was coming, and hugged the low side of the track, forcing the 17 car to go high. When he saw the fender coming up out of the corner of his eye deep in a corner, John feathered the throttle to let the car nearly past him, then drifted up to place his fender solidly on the 17 car’s back bumper. That made for a nice spin to begin with, but John was already back on the throttle enough to be able to whack the car in the side as it got crosswise in front of him. That effectively stopped the 17 car’s spin, but slid him right up the track into the wall – hard. By this point, Adorney had managed to disengage his car from the 17, and slid past on the low side.

Matt d’Lamater’s car was nicely beat up on both sides. The roll cage had spared him really significant damage, especially where the 52 car had T-boned him on the left, but the right rear was especially trashed. Matt was out for the rest of the evening, and he was going to be facing some serious work to even be able to run next weekend.

John Adorney was going to have to touch up the paint on his front bumper. Spud McElroy may have been long dead, but his skills lived on.

There wasn’t much Matt could do but climb from his car, help the wrecker get it hooked up, and watch the size of his points lead go fluttering away. From where he’d been sitting, he might still have the lead, but it was tight – and it didn’t help that his closest competitor, Will Austin wound up winning the race.

Oddly enough, Larissa was disappointed with the incident. It wasn’t so much that she was sorry for Matt, but sorry that she hadn’t had the chance to see whether her little gift to her former boyfriend had worked. Oh, well, another week remained, she’d see what happened then.

One of the few advantages for Matt of being in the overflow pits was that he could load right up and get out of there. He was heading for home by the time the Street Stock feature started, knowing that he was going to be spending the rest of the weekend working on the remains of his car.

That was a disappointment to Ashley, who was sitting up in the stands like the week before. It would have been nice to head over and commiserate with Matt – it might have gotten through his defenses at last – but from the grandstands she could see his pickup and trailer heading for the gate. There wasn’t any point in even heading for the pits once the race was over with; she didn’t even stick around for the fireworks. The summer was speeding by and it didn’t seem like she was getting any closer to her goal. Another week wasted, and it didn’t make her feel any better to watch the little brat finish second.

*   *   *

On Sunday, it was time to head back to Moonshine Valley to get in some dirt track racing. Chuck and Larissa hadn’t planned on going this week in order to avoid Matt. When Matt smashed up his car there was no reason to avoid the trip, although this time the two of them rode together in the truck with the single trailer. Even though Larissa’s little present for Matt hadn’t worked yet, she was much more relaxed than she had been in the last two weeks. What was done was done. It was time to move on: she needed to work on turning Chuck from a friend into a boyfriend. The question in her mind was how to go about doing it.

“Boy, it sure seems like this summer is passing in a hurry,” she commented from the right side of the pickup as they headed up the highway.

“I guess it is,” Chuck agreed. “I always figure July Fourth is the middle of the season, and it is, pretty close. It’s only a few more weeks before I head back to school.”

“Me, too,” she smiled. “It’s going to be strange to be a senior this year and know I won’t be going back next year.”

“Yeah, there is that,” he agreed. “Things look a little fuzzy after that.”

“Do you have any idea what you’re going to do?” she asked.

“Not really,” he shrugged. “I don’t think I want to be a mechanic for the rest of my life, like Will seems content to be. I want to stay involved with cars and with racing, but I don’t think I’m destined to be the next Tony Stewart. I know I’m not bad, but I’m not that good. I’ll probably just be a racer on a local level, although I think I’d like to try a few different things.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Sprint cars or road racing, maybe, just for the sake of something different. I may just stay with the 15 car through college, it’s paid for and I’m beginning to understand it.”

“You’re thinking about college?” she asked. “What are you thinking about studying?”

“If I knew I’d tell you,” he shrugged. “I’ll tell you what I think is a neat job, and that’s managing a race track like Dad does. The problem with that is that I don’t see how I could ever make a living doing just that. It about has to be a part-time deal, and when you get down to it there aren’t that many openings. But that’s a ways up the road. I’m leaning toward taking automotive engineering at this point, with maybe a minor in business administration. I don’t know of many places that offer a degree in race track management, and for good reason.”

“I suppose,” she sighed. “Are you planning on going around here, or away some place?”

“Well, the racing comes back into that, too,” he said. “I’ve been talking with Jack Kaufmann a bit, and I think he’s got a pretty good setup there, going close enough to home that he can come home to go racing. Maybe I could do that if I went to some place like Western, like he does. How about you? What do you have in mind?”

“You know, that was one of the problems I always had with Matt,” she sighed. “He’s never going to be anything more than a mechanic; that’s what he’ll be happy with, and I always figured on going on to college. At the moment, I’m sort of leaning on getting into nursing. They always seem to be begging for nurses.”

“I’ve heard dumber ideas,” he grinned. “My grandmother was a nurse and still drove race cars.”

“Yeah, and to do it in that era was pretty awesome,” Larissa agreed. “I figure on keeping on with driving for a while too, but I never saw it as being anything much more than just having fun. That kind of argues for me staying around home somewhere, too. I figure that being able to come home for the weekends makes sense to me, especially if I keep leaving my car at Bradford.”

“No reason why you couldn’t,” he smiled. “I’ve been trying to talk Dad into building some storage units out at the track, so people could just keep their cars there and not have to mess around with hauling them each week. That could make another nice little piece of change for the track, and everything is so close to the wire that every little bit helps.”

This discussion wasn’t getting Larissa anywhere near what she wanted to talk about. Maybe it was time to take the initiative. “Another day, another race track,” she sighed. “You know, just once I’d like us to have a real date. You know, dinner and a movie, or something like that.”

“It’d work for me,” he agreed. “I really like you, Larissa. But it seems like all we get to do together is hang out at race tracks. That’s fine with me, but I wouldn’t mind doing something else either. Are you doing anything tomorrow, or taking off for the holiday?”

“I’ve got to work,” she sighed. “It’d be fun to take off, but I owe Candy some extra hours for letting me off last week, well, the week before last, now.”

“Well, nuts,” he sighed. “I suppose your evenings are loaded up this week for the same reason, too.”

“Afraid so,” she said. “I have to shuffle things around so I can take off half of Friday, along with Saturday and Sunday.”

“OK,” he nodded. “How about this? I’m pretty sure I could get off most of the day Saturday, so long as we’re back to Bradford in time to race. We could load up and go somewhere during the day.”

“Anywhere you’d like to go?”

“I don’t have any real great ideas,” he submitted. “I’ll tell you what I’d like to do. Summer is racing by and I haven’t done any real summer stuff yet. You know, hang out at the lake, that sort of thing. I don’t even know where I’d go anymore. I used to have some friends that had a cottage over at Blue Lake, but they’ve sold out and moved on.”

Larissa thought for a moment before she replied. “You know, there’s an idea,” she smiled. “You know who does have a lake cottage?”

“No, who?”

“Jim and Ann Kaufmann,” she smiled. “I was talking with Susan one day and she said she and Jack go up there sometimes.”

“Now, that surprises me,” Chuck smiled. “You see Jim and Ann and Jack around the tracks so much on the weekends that you wouldn’t think they’d have time for a weekend cottage.”

“It’s not just on weekends, I guess they live out there from the way I heard it. I wonder what it would take to get them to invite us out?”

“Good question,” he said thoughtfully. “Maybe troll the idea past them that we’re thinking about heading out to the lake next Saturday but don’t know where to go?”

“Maybe,” she said thoughtfully. “How about if we say we’re thinking about heading to the boat launch at Coldwater Lake since there are no public beaches around and that’s the next best thing? I mean, and then let them suggest the alternative?”

“It might work,” he agreed. “But I wonder if there’s not a better idea.”

“What are you thinking?”

“Maybe I could run it by Will and Telzey, and see if Telzey could work through Susan to invite us. That would mean we’d have to take the two of them, but the six of us hang around a lot together, anyway.”

“Yeah, for kids as young as they are, they are pretty cool,” Larissa agreed. “How about we float it in front of Jack and Susan up at the track and see if they’ll bite?”

“Or some combination of all that,” Chuck nodded. “It might work out. If it doesn’t, how about if we just get together early next Saturday, maybe go to the mall in Hawthorne, and see what’s on at the Multiplex?”

“If all else fails, I’m not about to turn it down,” she smiled at him. It wasn’t as big a step as she’d hoped – although she wasn’t sure what would have been – but at least it was a step in the right direction.

“Good enough,” he replied. Maybe this would be a chance to be social away from the race track. He really liked Larissa, but he felt that to go farther they needed to do something away from the race tracks once in a while. This might work, he thought.