“Just like that?”
“Just like that. I wanted to talk to you. I’ve talked to you.”
“And now I can go home, eh?”
“Stay around for the party, at least. A bunch of amusing kids.” Banderson looked at his watch. “Johnny Harvester had a tough evening last night. He’s taking a long nap.”
“He’s here?”
“Yes. Don’t you want the money?”
Wade shut his hands tightly and managed to smile. “Thanks. I make out.”
“With a two-bit repair garage?”
“I make out,” he repeated heavily. “But what was the gag? I’d like to know.”
“I’ve made a lot of money judging people accurately. You haven’t got a good race left in you. If you had, I’d prefer you to Johnny.”
“I won’t beg for anything.”
“Isn’t that exactly what you’ve been doing?”
“Pick up the money, or I’ll tear it in small hunks, Mr. Banderson.”
“That might be amusing.”
Wade picked up the bills, tore them in halves, then in quarters, and let them slip from his hand to drift on the Gulf wind. Several pieces fell in the pool, floating on the blue-green water.
Banderson smiled sleepily. “Maybe you still have a chance to drive for me.”
“You keep talking in circles. It’s like a game with you, isn’t it?”
“You want to drive badly, Ralson, don’t you?”
“Just skip it, Mr. Banderson,” Wade said. “Do me a favor and skip it.”
“Here comes our mutual friend.”
Johnny Harvester ambled onto the apron of the pool. He wore yellow swimming trunks. He was tanned from a lot of sun. He stared unbelievingly at Wade and came over. “Oliver,” he said accusingly, “what’s Ralson doing here?”
“Now don’t get nervous, Johnny,” Banderson said.
“I’m not nervous. I just want to know what he’s here for. I want to know I’m driving your entry. For two months now you give me this yes-and-no business, and now here’s Ralson. I thought you were done, Wade.”
“The arm came back.”
“Then why aren’t you back with Rikert, damn it?”
“He has his drivers.”
Johnny sat down at the table. He was puffy under the eyes, and there was a nervous tic at the corner of his mouth. “Oh, fine,” he said bitterly. “This is just dandy.”
“You’ve been doing well, Johnny,” Wade said.
“I’ve been in there a few times. You haven’t done any, have you?”
“Not since the accident.”
Banderson was watching them both. “Youth versus experience,” he said.
Johnny shrugged. “Wade, he likes to keep you on edge. Now he’s using you to make me feel uneasy. But he’s going to pick me, and I think you know it.”
“The confidence of youth, Ralson,” Banderson said softly.
“You know where he’s getting his real kicks right now?” Johnny said. For the first time Wade realized that Johnny was half tight. “He’s got these stock-car kids. They got a circuit and they race here in town every Thursday night. Hopped-up jalopies. Quarter-mile track. Never out of second gear. So Oliver puts up prize money and these kids think he’s a great guy, and all he’s doing is proving he can push people—”
“Shut up, Johnny,” Banderson said. “You’re boring us. Go dive in the pool and wash out some of the liquor.”
Johnny stared at him, then got up meekly and went to the edge of the pool and dived in. He came up on the far side, reached, and took one of the floating pieces of paper. He said, “Hey, here’s a comer off a fifty. And there’s another. What goes?”
“Ralson tore up his expense money, Johnny.”
Johnny stared at them. “It beats the hell out of me.” he said.
When Johnny had swum away, Wade said, “If he were driving for me, I’d try to keep him in better shape.”
“I own the cars. I don’t wet-nurse the drivers, Ralson.”
Wade wanted to get up and leave. He knew it would be smart to get up and leave, and not get tied up in this thing. Banderson was playing with both of them. And yet — a brand-new wagon, a new design, a hot car for the classic. He decided he’d better have another drink. It was uncomfortable to keep thinking of Sally, and another drink would be a splendid cooling idea.
By the time the kids arrived, Wade was a little more than half drunk, and Johnny was a shade ahead of him. There were eight drivers and six young girls. They seemed to Wade to be almost pathetically young. They seemed to be well acquainted with Banderson, with Johnny, with the big house and grounds. They’d brought swim suits. They knew of Wade, knew of the smash, knew his Indianapolis record over the years.
They asked him eager questions while Johnny sulked, and Wade kept drinking as he talked, holding court, and once, in a moment of relative sobriety, he saw that the kids were not so much laughing at his anecdotes as at him, the old-timer with wild stories released by alcohol.
Seeing that he had made himself ridiculous, he shut up and began to drink more seriously. After a vague sort of blackout, he found himself with a lean young girl with taffy hair and bold, undisciplined eyes. Nineteen, he thought. Of all of them, she seemed to be the one willing to listen to him, to admire him.
So he talked to her, and she talked to him, and he found out that she was sore at a boy named Scotty Davis, the boy who had brought her. Scotty, she said, was too terribly young, and she certainly preferred a mature man to some stupid kid who thought he was the hottest thing on the stock-car circuit. He thought vaguely and with regret of Sally, and he told himself that if he made a fool of himself over this kid it would be partly Sally’s fault: she had sent him away with a deadness in her eyes.
Food was cooked outdoors by the Cuban help; everybody ate and it was time to get to the track for the tune-ups. But they had to leave Scotty Davis there, because his girl had angered him so much by her obvious play for Wade that the boy had quite stupidly drunk himself unconscious and could not be roused. Scotty’s best friend, a big-shouldered boy named Vance something, had, out of loyalty and friendship, matched drink for drink with Scotty, and so he was in a rather helpless state — not out cold, but unable to drive.
They piled into the cars and went down to the track, driving around and through the private entrance near the pits — only it wasn’t pits in the legitimate sense, Wade saw, but a field adjoining the track across from the grandstand. It was an asphalt track, a quarter mile around, banked on the corners. Big floodlights turned it as bright as day. Hillbilly music came over the P.A.
Wade was in a kind of dream state, walking around and looking dully at the battered cars. Chassis of ’34-through-’39 Fords, braced with steel pipe. Frames heavily weighted on the left to hold them down on the turns. Hopped-up Ford and Mercury engines, with dual and triple carburetion. Cars were warming up on the track, skittering and whining around like windup toys.
Wade wandered around with the taffy blonde clinging to his arm; she squeezed his arm tightly against her lean, warm body, chatting brightly about nothing.
Banderson and Johnny Harvester found them over in a corner of the lot. Banderson said, “Now here is a sporting proposition, Wade. Johnny has agreed to it. Two of these boys can’t drive tonight. Scotty had Number 48, the gray-and-white job over there. Vance had that bright red-and-yellow Number 18. The mechanics tell me the cars are evenly matched. The final tonight is twenty laps. Take your pick of the two cars, Wade, and Johnny will take the other one, and the winner drives for me at Indianapolis.”
Wade stared at Banderson’s knife-edge smile, glinting in the floodlights. “Lot of drinks... I don’t know.”