Page 68 of Trading Paint
When constantly changing divisions, there were nights when I never got the hang of it and then there were nights I seemed unstoppable in anything I got into.
Most of the time I was racing our own cars my dad had but other times I was racing for guys like Bucky and Bowman Oil or Ron Walker. When I raced dad’s cars, we worked on them and if changes needed to be made, we made them. If something broke, we fixed it.
One night while racing at Sunset Speedway on the West Coast, a third mile red clay track in Banks, Oregon, we blew the engine in our outlaw late model we were running and needed an engine. We didn’t have any spares that night because that was our spare in the car. I blew the original one up in Chico the night before.
Thinking our night was down for, I sulked for a good hour before Sway came walking into the pits holding a set of keys, dangling them in my face.
“What’s that?” I mumbled cracking open another beer and leaned back in the lawn chair I’d set up beside my truck.
Her smile widened as though I was her favorite flavor of ice cream. “Keys...what does it look like?”
I cleared my throat. “Whose are they?”
“Does it matter...he offered up the engine in his mustang for you.” Sway stared at me.
I stared back wondering how the fuck she got him to offer up the engine in his mustang.
When I didn’t move, she slapped the beer out of my hand while kicking my shin.
“Why the fuck are you still sitting there? Get up.”
Spencer and Tommy were already pulling the engine out of my car and preparing for the transfer.
At Sunset Speedway they liked to water the track prior to the main and then pack it down again to provide more grip for the cars. By doing that, it created better racing with a tacky track.
So there we were riding around the track packing it down for them, really just messing around, when I noticed a lot of the drivers slowing in turn four and revving their engines. Took me a good ten laps of them doing this before I figured out what the fuck they were looking at.
There was Sway, Emma and Alley sitting in the pit bleachers. The guys were staring at them. I chuckled to myself as this happened more than I could count.
When we got back to the pits and began lining up for the main a couple of the local guys were standing outside their cars when I walked up and caught a part of their conversation.
“Did you see the one in the black tank top with the jeans shorts on...I think she was the one with the reddish brown hair.” The driver of the number eight car, Mark Bayne, asked the driver of the sixcar, who I thought was Greg Ackers but I couldn’t be sure. I had never seen him race before.
Greg said, “Yeah I did see her...I saw her earlier. She’s with Riley I think. His arm was around her at least.”
That’s right. I thought to myself.
“Nah, I think that’s his friend.” Mark said.
“Fuck that,” another asshole said walking up to them. “I’m gonna take her home tonight.”
I sure as shit wasn’t going to allow that to happen. I watched to see what car he got into and then decided to make sure he had a tough race.
Turns out, I didn’t have to; he wasn’t that great of a driver and turned himself around.
I never did have the balls to ask what Sway did to get that guy to offer up his engine out of his brand new mustang.
After the race (that I won), we sat around drinking beer with the Mustang guy and by that time I was three sheets to the wind and could give a flying fuck about how the engine came about with the trophy girl sitting in my lap.
“We should change out the engines. We’ll be here all night if we don’t get started soon.” Tommy said removing the beer from my hands but left the trophy girl there. And for the record, I couldn’t tell you her name. All I can remember was she had brown hair.
“Weain’tchangin’ shit.” I told him with a lazy grin.“Give ‘emthe car.”
And we did. The Mustang guy, Patrick, got to keep his carandmy 800 horsepower outlaw late model, all for letting me run that night. I even went as far as to hand him the trophy afterward and the trophy girl once I was done with her.
I hated to admit it but I was at a stage in my life where I had a sex drive. I was eighteen, with wants, desires and just downright needs.
That need was being intensified by my best friend, who I couldn’t have.
