The Betsy (1971) (2 page)

I held onto his hand, not wanting to let go. Everybody I liked had to go away. First Grandpa, now Mr. Hardeman. “Will I see you when you come back?”

He nodded.

I still held onto his hand. “I’ll be in the park every Sunday at this time and I’ll look for you.”

“The first Sunday I’m back, I’ll be here,” he said.

I let go of his hand. “That’s a promise.”

I watched the nurse push him down the path until they were out of sight, then I got back into my car. It wasn’t until almost twenty years later that I found out exactly how much trouble L.H. One had gone to in order to have the surprise for me.

I was in Duncan’s office in Design Engineering getting a rundown on the car I was to be testing the next day when suddenly the old engineer turned to me.

“Remember that Bugatti L.H. One had us fix up for you when you were a kid?”

“How could I forget?” I replied.

It was true enough. From that moment on it was nothing but automobiles for me. Nothing else had a chance.

“Did you ever wonder how much it cost?”

“Not really.”

“I have the original work order that he signed. I kept it as a souvenir.” He unlocked the center drawer of his desk, took it out and gave it to me. “Do ye know he pulled the whole office of Design Engineering and Fabrication off the line and had them working on your car for twenty-four straight hours?”

“I didn’t know,” I said. I looked down at the paper in my hand. “Experimental Chassis,” read the charge slip. “Ordered by L.H. I. $11,347.51.”

I felt a light touch on my shoulder and opened my eyes. It was the English nurse. “Dr. Hans is here.”

I turned the chair around. He was standing there, his spectacles shining and, as usual, his six flunkies behind him.

“Good morning, Mr. Perino,” he said. “How do you feel this morning? Any pains?”

“No, Doctor. It only hurts when I laugh.”

He refused to smile. He gestured to the nurse and she pushed over a table on which there were shining steel instruments. “Now we shall see how good we were,” he said in his usual half whisper.

I stared down at the table in fascination. I felt almost hypnotized by the gleaming instruments. I watched him pick up a short-bladed curette. This was it.

How many men in their lifetimes have a chance to get a new face?

 Chapter Two

It all began in May after the Indianapolis 500. My beast burned out on the forty-second lap and I pulled in. I didn’t have to see the look on the pit boss’s face to know I’d had it. I left the track without even waiting around for the finish.

It wasn’t until I opened the door of my motel room that I realized that I had left Cindy back at the raceway. I had forgotten all about her.

I opened the small refrigerator and broke out some ice cubes and poured some Canadian whiskey over them. Sipping the drink slowly, I went into the bathroom and turned on the hot water in the tub, then went back into the room and switched on the radio. I searched the dials for the race reports. TV was blacked out within a fifty-mile radius.

The announcer’s voice came on. “It’s Andretti and Gurney, one and two on the eighty-fourth lap. A real battle of the giants, folks—” I switched it off. It had been like that from the very start of the race.

I finished the drink, put the glass down on the refrigerator top and went back into the bathroom. I turned on the cold water and plugged in the portable Jacuzzi whirlpool pump and watched the clouds of steam leap from the churning water while I stripped down. The bathroom was filled with steam by the time I eased myself into the hot water.

I leaned my head back against the tub and let the churning water push away at the aches and pains in my bones. I tightened up my gut and closed my eyes. It happened again. Like it always happened every time I closed my eyes for the past five years.

I saw the first lick of the flames coming up from the engine against the windshield. I down-shifted into the curve and fought the wheel. The high wall came up in front of my face and we hit at one hundred and thirty-seven miles per hour. The beast went up on its nose and hung there for a moment while I stared into the roaring stands, then the flames reached up and we went over the wall into them. The sick sweet smell of my burning flesh and scorched hair came into my nostrils. In the distance I could hear myself screaming.

I opened my eyes and it was gone. I was back in the tub with the Jacuzzi singing its soothing song. Slowly I closed my eyes again.

This time it was all right. I floated in the water.

The telephone began to ring. Modern motels have everything. I reached across the john and took the telephone from the wall.

“Mr. Perino?” the long-lines operator singsonged.

“Yeah.”

“Mr. Loren Hardeman calling. Just one moment, please.”

I heard the click and he came on. “Angelo, you all right?” There was a genuine concern in his voice.

“I’m okay, Number One. And you?”

“Good.” He laughed. “I feel like a kid of eighty-five.”

I laughed. He was ninety-one on his last birthday.

“What the hell is that noise?” he asked. “Sounds like you’re going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. I can hardly hear you.”

I reached over and cut the Jacuzzi. The roar faded. “That better?”

“Much,” he said. “I’ve been watching television and saw you go into the pit. What happened?”

“Valves burned out.”

“Where do you go next?”

“I don’t know,” I answered. “The only thing I’ve penciled in for sure is Watkins Glen. But that’s not until the fall.” I heard the outside door open and Cindy’s footsteps come toward the bathroom. I looked up and she was standing in the doorway. “I thought maybe I’d go over to Europe for the summer and try the action there.”

Her face was expressionless. She turned back and went into the other room.

“Don’t do it,” he said. “It’s not worth it. You’ll get yourself killed.”

I heard the refrigerator door slam and the clink of ice in the glasses. She came back with two Canadians on the rocks. I took one from her hand and she put the cover down on the john and sat there. She sipped her drink.

“I won’t get killed,” I said.

His voice was flat. “Quit now. You haven’t got it any more.”

“I’ve just had a run of bad luck.”

“Don’t give me that crap,” he said. “I watched you on TV. I remember when you wouldn’t give up a turn to God. On that last lap before you went in you left a hole big enough for Coxey’s Army to drive through.”

I was silent. I took a pull at my drink.

His voice softened. “Look, it’s not so bad. You had some pretty good years. In ’63 you were the number-two driver in the world. You would have been number one in ’64 if you hadn’t climbed that wall at Sebring and been laid up for a year.”

I knew just what he was talking about. And I had the nightmares to prove it.

“I think five years is enough time for you to give yourself to find out you haven’t got it any more.”

“What do you think I should do?” I asked sarcastically. “Join the ‘Wide World of Sports’ as a commentator?”

A touch of asperity came into his voice. “Don’t get fresh with me, young man. The trouble with you is that you never grew up. I should never have souped up that kiddie car for you. You won’t stop playing with it.”

“I’m sorry.” I had no right to let out on him the frustration I felt toward myself.

“I’m in Palm Beach,” he said. “I want you to come down here and spend a few days with me.”

“What for?”

“I don’t know.” From the way he sounded I knew he was lying in his teeth. Or maybe they weren’t his teeth at all. “We’ll just talk.”

I thought for a moment. “Okay.”

“Good,” he said. “You coming alone? I have to let the housekeeper know.”

I looked across at Cindy. “I don’t know yet.”

He chuckled. “If she’s pretty, bring her. There’s little enough to look at down here besides the sea and the sand.”

He clicked off and Cindy took the phone from my hand and put it back on the wall. I got up and she gave me a towel. She took my drink and walked into the other room.

I dried myself and, wrapping the towel around my waist, followed her. My drink was on the table and she was on the floor doing things with her four-track tape recorder. I took another pull at the drink and watched.

She was placing the small reels in containers and marking the boxes. She was a motor-sound buff. Something about the roar of an engine turned her on. Some girls like vibrators, all she needed was noise. Put her in the car seat next to you and gun the motor, then place your hand on her cunt and you came away with a cupful of honey.

“Get any good sound?” I asked.

“Some.” She didn’t look back at me. “Is it over?”

“Why? Just because I forgot to pick you up?”

She turned around. “That’s not what I’m asking,” she said without expression. “Fearless says the talk around the track is that you’re quitting.”

Fearless Peerless was one of the backup drivers on J.C.’s team. He worked mostly on the dirt tracks trying to move his way into the big time. I tried to keep the edge of jealousy out of my voice. “Fearless bring you home?”

“Yes.”

“You got eyes for him?”

“He’s got eyes for me.” It was fact. He wasn’t the only one and I knew it. She was something special.

I felt the heat in my balls. “Set up the player.”

She stared at me for a moment, then silently put the player on a small table at the foot of the bed. Expertly she set up the four speakers, two on each side of the bed, and plugged in the lead wires. She glanced at me.

“Put on the big tape. The one you made at Daytona last year.”

She took the reel from her case and threaded it into the machine. She turned to look at me.

By now my hard-on had distended the towel around my waist into a tent. “Get out of your clothes.”

She stripped and stretched out on the bed, her eyes watching me. She still hadn’t said a word.

I reached over and switched on the player. The lead tape hissed and then the crowd noises filtered through. Suddenly there was an explosion of sound as the engines roared. The race had begun.

I stepped onto the bed and stood over her. Her lips were parted and she seemed to be scarcely breathing as the pink of her tongue parted her white teeth. She was all honey-brown and gold except for the narrow white band around her small full breasts and the triangle of her hips and legs. The coral pink of her nipples popped open and up at me and the soft down between her legs began to glisten with tiny diamonds.

I moved up on the bed and pushed my feet under her armpits until her shoulders rested on them. Then I pulled off the towel.

My hard slapped up against my belly. I stood there over her face and she stared up at me. I didn’t move.

Suddenly she whimpered and reached up and grabbed my cock. She pulled me down into her mouth, gobbling and making noises deep in her throat. I sank to my knees over her face, moving with the writhing and thrusting of her hips behind me.

I felt her tongue licking at my balls and then move under me, searching out the secrets of my anus. And all the while she held the knob of my cock in one hand, moving it like a gearshift to position me.

Her whisper was muffled. “Let me get on top of you.”

I rolled over to my side, then on my back. Still holding my cock she clambered over me, then slowly lowered herself onto it. It was like dipping into a tub of boiling oil.

“Oh, God,” she moaned, rocking herself slowly back and forth on me, rubbing her clitoris against my pubic ridge.

The roar of the racing engines began to travel from speaker to speaker around the bed, filling the room with an explosive violence of sound, and she moved with it, climaxing anew at each cycle around the track. I could feel the fuel of her excitement dripping down my testicles and under me.

She began to half moan and scream with the frenzy of her passion. Wildly she shook her head from side to side, spilling her long hair into a constant fan. She began slamming into me, harder and harder. I smashed back against her.

“Good,” she muttered. “That’s so good.”

I held my arms straight out from my sides, behind her. As she came back toward me I slapped her viciously, one hand on each buttock. She jammed into me and came back. I slapped her again and kept it up to the rhythm of her movements.

She began to climb the walls, her moans became shrieks of pain and ecstasy. The roar of the engines as they came toward the finish line began to mount, almost drowning her out.

Suddenly Carl Yarborough crossed the finish line in his Sixty-eight Merc at 143.251 miles per hour and she created her final orgasm, drowning me in the flood of her juices.

She hung there balanced on my cock for a moment, her eyes glazed and far away, then slowly, she crumpled and slid from me.

She lay quietly, her breathing slowing down to normal, her eyes open, looking into mine. “It was wild,” she whispered.

I just looked at her.

She put her hand down on my cock. Her eyes opened slightly in surprise. She began to stroke it gently. “It’s still hard,” she whispered. “You’re fantastic.”

I still didn’t speak. There was no point in telling her I hadn’t made it.

She moved down and kissed me and took me in her mouth. After a moment she raised her head. “You’re all covered with me.”

I nodded.

She kissed my knob and tried to part its tip with her tongue. She turned her face and, holding my cock against her cheek, spoke softly. “Where will I ever find another man like you?”

I put my hand in her hair and turned her face up to me. “Are you going with Fearless?” I asked.

“Answer my question first,” she said. “Are you quitting?”

I didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”

She did hesitate. I’ll say that much for her. “Then I’m going with Fearless.”

And it was over. Just like that.