“Shut up, Steve. Shut up!”
He turned and yelled for time as he got under the wheel. The man came up with his watch, clicking it smartly as Rex hit the black starting line. Behind us the useless sirens wailed a song of mourning.
At one o’clock the new rubber was on the car. It was in the starting lineup, and the throb of the power plants was heavy as a blanket around us. The crowd was heavy and the Italian sun was hot and direct.
His place in the lineup was poor and his time had been so bad on the morning run that I hadn’t wanted to leave the car in. But when I spoke of withdrawing, be had given me just one long look and I had shut up.
The flag dropped and they roared by the starting line. Steve’s fingers sank into my arm as we watched Rex yank hard to the right, take the special out onto the rough shoulder, gun it out ahead of two cars, forcing his way further ahead in the formation.
One hundred minutes of pure torture. Thirty-six curves in each lap, one hundred places to shift gears in each lap.
The first car around was the black AutoUnion, the green Maserati tagging it closely. And Rex was fighting the Cisitalia for third place. They came out onto the wide pavement in a screaming power slide, side by side, wheels turned away from the direction of the curve, steering with the throttle.
The driver of the Cisitalia made the mistake of correcting the backwhip at the end of the slide with his wheel. Rex straightened with a power thrust, opening up daylight between his deck and the Cisitalia. It was crazy, reckless driving, but he was not alone in that.
On the second lap and the third and fourth, he still dung to third place, the Cisitalia dogging him closely.
From where we stood we could see two hundred feet up the narrow downgrade, to the last curve they had to make coming down the mountain. A minute or so after Rex had gone by in the fifth lap, nosing up to the green Maserati, we saw the blue car blow its head on the downgrade, saw it spew the sleek deadly oil onto the asphalt and out onto the curve.
The crowd, race-wise, began to scatter away from that curve.
The race was so spread out that it was impossible to get the cars out of the way. The black Auto-Union roared around the upper curve and down the hill. He used a lot of brakes on the dry pavement before he hit the oil. He went into a power glide that took him out onto the rough shoulder. He bounced high, and fought it back onto the straightaway. Rex, nose and nose with Maserati, hit the oil with sickening speed. Oil spray rose high as they slid. The Maserati bounded, end over end, out across the wide field and Rex straightened slightly, turned to hit the wide shallow ditch at a better angle. The Special bounded high, landed on all four wheels, still under power. He swung it in a long rough curve back through the ditch and up onto the highway. The front right corner sagged from the broken suspension, but the car still ran.
It was then that Steve fainted.
As it turned out later, the broken suspension cut Rex’s speed on the curves. In the remaining four laps the Auto-Union stayed well ahead. If the race had been two miles longer, the Cisitalia would have nosed out Rex, forcing him back into third place. As it was, he took second.
He climbed out of the Special, his legs shaking. We had to cut the gloves off his hands because his pulped flesh clung to the glove linings.
And while we did that, he stood and grinned at Steve.
He told us at dinner, as he ate gingerly with his bandaged hands. His words didn’t mean a lot. Something about seeing her in the car. Something about feeling dead inside ever since Will had taken the fence. And he said that after the cross-country race, ovals would be tame, that is, if I’d take him back on.
I looked at Steve’s face, at the softness of her lips, at the answer in her eyes as she looked at Rex.
I sighed with heavy resignation and wound up another fork-load of spaghetti.
