NASCAR First

By Dakota Franklin

NASCAR FIRST
by Dakota Franklin

CoolMain Press

• Dakota Franklin WINS Best Action/Adventure at Best Independent EBook Awards

"I sniffed the air but the smell of my brother’s burned flesh was long gone. I’ve made my living driving fast cars since before I reached puberty; dying in mangled metal is a thought that after a while numbs itself on its own banality. It no longer bothers me that I am not like other girls."

Flicka Revere is a maximum hard case in the macho pinnacle of stock car racing, NASCAR’s premier series, the Sprint Cup, in which NASCAR trumpets its triumph of making daring rednecks rich.

Flicka already has too many NASCAR firsts. Too often first in the line before the blue trailer of the NASCAR bosses to be punished for overly competitive driving and outspoken comments on television, first woman to finish a Sprint Cup race, first woman to finish in the top ten.

Now Flicka’s lover has outed her as the first lesbian stock car racer. In a series which reveres "family values" that is one first too many. Flicka’s team manager fires her on the spot, live on television.

No one will give a lesbian a ride—except Armitage. Flicka has no faith whatsoever that aristocratic racers like Armitage will succeed in NASCAR, no matter what their successes in grand prix and endurance racing.

But no one else wants Flicka, not even her incestuous, congenitally murderous hillbilly family.

"I don’t want to be the first lesbian redneck hillbilly stock car racer killed by her relatives over a rusted Stearns Toy Tonneau. Most people who’re not into old cars would think I died over a toy, perhaps a hillbilly teddy bear. My sense of humor doesn’t stretch to being an absurd corpse."

Flicka, already a target for being a woman and a lesbian, is legitimized as a victim in the eyes of the good ol’ psychopaths by Armitage’s open contempt for "NASCAR values".

But Flicka isn't planning on being anyone’s victim...

"If I’m to die young, I want it to be a head-on impact to the wall, in which all my internal organs may be squashed to jelly by the deceleration but my corpse will be externally beautiful. That’s a small enough vanity, considering my profession."

In Dakota Franklin's series RUTHLESS TO WIN, which has already won awards and enthusiastic reviews for fascinating characters, Flicka is a primo character!

“I thought the characters were great. I was swept along...a cracking good read.”
— Joo's Book Reviews

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dakota Franklin
• Release date: Nov 13, 2012
• ISBN: 9781908369086

Dakota Franklin

Dakota Franklin was born in Palo Alto, CA, the daughter, granddaughter and great-granddaughter of automobile engineers. It was therefore predictable that she would become an engineer. Her mother, an educationalist, didn't believe in putting children in boarding schools, so Dakota travelled the world, wherever her father consulted. By the time she was ten she could swear fluently in every European language, and carry on a conversation in all the major ones. After college at Stanford and MIT, and further postgraduate studies in France, Germany and Italy, she worked on jet engines for Rolls-Royce, for Ford and Holden (GM's Australian branch) on high performance vehicles (HPV), then joined her father and grandfather in the family consulting business, where she has specialized in high performance machinery. She has since worked on contract or as a consultant with all the major automobile makers with a racing or HPV profile, and in powerboat and propellor plane racing. She insists racing regulators around the world love her, whatever they may say behind her back! Dakota started writing in 1996 when a painful divorce coincided with a testing incident that put her in hospital for several even more painful months. After a false start which resulted in having to trash three complete novels, she finally acquired the right creative writing guru, and started creating the series RUTHLESS TO WIN. She lives in Switzerland with her husband, an inventor, and drives or flies to the motor cities for her current consulting projects. She has one child, a teenager who travels with her and whose eclectic schooling has turned her into a linguist, just like her mother, but who has no intention of becoming an engineer. Dakota says, "I'm finally happy. Fulfilled may not be too large a word."

Book preview

143,000 words

NASCAR FIRST

by Dakota Franklin

CoolMain Press

• Dakota Franklin WINS Best Action/Adventure at Best Independent EBook Awards

I sniffed the air but the smell of my brother’s burned flesh was long gone. I’ve made my living driving fast cars since before I reached puberty; dying in mangled metal is a thought that after a while numbs itself on its own banality. It no longer bothers me that I am not like other girls.

Flicka Revere is a maximum hard case in the macho pinnacle of stock car racing, NASCAR’s premier series, the Sprint Cup, in which NASCAR trumpets its triumph of making daring rednecks rich.

Flicka already has too many NASCAR firsts. Too often first in the line before the blue trailer of the NASCAR bosses to be punished for overly competitive driving and outspoken comments on television, first woman to finish a Sprint Cup race, first woman to finish in the top ten.

Now Flicka’s lover has outed her as the first lesbian stock car racer. In a series which reveres family values that is one first too many. Flicka’s team manager fires her on the spot, live on television.

No one will give a lesbian a ride—except Armitage. Flicka has no faith whatsoever that aristocratic racers like Armitage will succeed in NASCAR, no matter what their successes in grand prix and endurance racing.

But no one else wants Flicka, not even her incestuous, congenitally murderous hillbilly family.

I don’t want to be the first lesbian redneck hillbilly stock car racer killed by her relatives over a rusted Stearns Toy Tonneau. Most people who’re not into old cars would think I died over a toy, perhaps a hillbilly teddy bear. My sense of humor doesn’t stretch to being an absurd corpse.

Flicka, already a target for being a woman and a lesbian, is legitimized as a victim in the eyes of the good ol’ psychopaths by Armitage’s open contempt for NASCAR values.

But Flicka isn't planning on being anyone’s victim...

If I’m to die young, I want it to be a head-on impact to the wall, in which all my internal organs may be squashed to jelly by the deceleration but my corpse will be externally beautiful. That’s a small enough vanity, considering my profession.

In Dakota Franklin's series RUTHLESS TO WIN, which has already won awards and enthusiastic reviews for fascinating characters, Flicka is a primo character!

I thought the characters were great. I was swept along...a cracking good read.

— Joo's Book Reviews

Contents

Cover • Jacket Copy

NASCAR FIRST title page

NASCAR FIRST just start reading!

*

Extras

RUTHLESS TO WIN the series

Dakota BIO • Dakota PHOTO • Dakota CONTACTS

More from CoolMain Press

RUTHLESS TO WIN

Series Editor: André Jute

*

NASCAR FIRST

Dakota Franklin

*

CoolMain Press

Copyright © 2012 Dakota Franklin

The author has asserted her moral right

First published by

CoolMain Press 2012

at Smashwords

Series Editor: André Jute

Associate Editor: Sue McLarty

Cover Photo: Belovodchenko Anton

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced by any means without the written permission of the publisher. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy.

"This isn’t just a thousand to one shot.

This is a professional blood sport.

It can happen to you.

And then it can happen to you again."

—from Harry Kleiner’s film Le Mans

Charlotte

My lover rose on the rocket of publicity. A rocket rises by pushing down. She pushed me down so that she could rise to gulp in the fifteen minutes of fame that Andy Warhol promised as her birthright. Thanks a bucketful, Andy.

Still, that weekend when my whole life fell to pieces started well. The entire team was boosted out of its recent dumps, since our owner committed suicide, by our two cars qualifying eleventh and twelfth. That was better than we did all year even if not up to the standard expected from so well-funded a team.

I heard the sniggers as I walked in to drive. There seemed more of them than usual. But Charlotte is redneck country and today was another celebration of the highest redneck religion, stock car racing. There are always sniggers at a woman driver among the dealmakers and rich rubber-neckers at the back of the garage, matching the sneers, jeers and digs from the prophets who are the drivers. The mechanics are no choirboys either when it comes to blatant sexism. The crowd has twice in my eight-year career, since I was eighteen, booed me for beating a favorite son.

I am used to it. I didn’t shrug at the thought that the increased level of resentment today was probably a reflection of the upturn in my results, or give any visible sign that I heard. I have long since learned better than to give them the satisfaction.

Over the years I watched more and more women appear in the stands. Their influence will one day extend to the garage and pit lane as well, bringing better manners and respect for ability regardless of gender.

Meanwhile this man’s sport is the only place I can feed my need for speed. It doesn’t help that, unlike the few woman who drive in lower NASCAR series than the Sprint Cup, I’m slender and tall for a racer at five-eight, so I don’t appear capable of wrestling a big car around a superspeedway oval at speeds around 200mph.

Even the way I look upsets the prejudices of the good ole boys. Eat dog turd, rednecks.

I can put up and shut up or I can go away and do something else. I know I won’t be happy doing anything else but racing. So I put up and shut up, and try not to let years of spite etch my soul.

I came to the car, my helmet with balaclava and gloves inside swinging in my hand. The driver of the other car, Kev Lyles, grinned inanely at me. He grins inanely all the time; you have to watch his eyes to know whether it is a psychopathic grin when he tries to put you into the wall, or lust or smug self-satisfaction or just vapidity.

On my second day on the job, eighteen months ago, my first time in their car, with only our two cars on the test oval, Kev deliberately put me into the wall so hard that pieces of my car were picked up across the length of the infield, right on the edge of the track on the other side.

I was lucky not to suffer breakages or worse, merely bruises and blood blisters from the harness that took weeks to heal. A couple of days later Kev said, ‘Things will go better between us now.’ His dick was in his hand before he finished the sentence. I looked down at it, said, ‘I’ve seen prettier at the zoo,’ and walked out of his motor home.

Roger ‘The Bodge’ Rogers, our team manager, an incompetent mechanic before he was kicked upstairs to management to stop him wrecking the cars, blamed me for not staying out of Kev’s way. I don’t want to sound like I’m whining but anything that goes wrong in the team is my fault even if I’m not there when it happens.

According to Bodge, ‘She put a hex on us.’ That’s the closest he can come to articulating his belief that a woman in any position except horizontal, her knees up, has no place in a racing team.

I don’t suppose I won his friendship by kneeing him in the nuts the first time he tried to put his theory into practice.

Kev Lyles doesn’t carry his own helmet. He has two blonde bimbos, whom he refers to as ‘my pit pussy’, to carry his helmet. They’re on the team payroll as his ‘PR assistants’. They can neither type nor speak comprehensible English.

I don’t have either ‘assistants’ or a motor home. But I don’t resent that. I have a drive in the best-funded team I ever drove for and the cars are improving. That’s what counts.

‘You stupid bitch!’ Bodge hissed at me the moment he spotted me.

I stopped dead. Not even the terminally insensitive Kev ever spoke to me like that, never mind in public with paying customers and television camera crews within earshot.

Bodge slammed the newspaper he held on the hood of my car. ‘Read—and kiss your so-called racing career goodbye,’ he said venomously.

I read.

Essentially it was The Truth trailering a television channel’s big exposé. The person exposed was me. The channel, said the paper, would that evening accuse me of being a lesbian. My lover would appear on camera to confirm it. The paper seemed to think it amusing that her name is Camilla Hyde-Strange.

Har-de-har. I looked up into Bodge’s red face. ‘So? You knew since my knee in your nuts told you so. Or did you think it was a message to use a stronger mouthwash?’

Confusion flickered across his eyes. Unlike Kev, he isn’t actually stupid. Instead he’s sly. That makes him more dangerous than intelligence would.

Eh? Is that fear I see in his eyes?

There was talk that the corporation which funds the team, Minster Marble Hall, part of the Federico TransAmerica real estate conglomerate, would close us down after the suicide of Fred Minster, its owner and main enthusiast for racing. But that was late last year, months ago.

‘You should read your contract,’ Bodge said calmly enough. ‘There’s a morals clause.’ Then he lost it again. ‘You stupid bitch! This is just the excuse the accountants need to shut us down!’

Fred Minster, I thought, wouldn’t have fired me for being a lesbian. I met him several times. He was a cultured man who spoke beautifully, dressed beautifully, behaved with consideration and good manners. I generally know a gay when I meet one but Minster was always accompanied by a stunningly beautiful woman, a different one every time. I wondered if they were beards.

That Fred Minster strangled himself with a silk scarf confirmed my suspicion. If I knew about Mr Minster, he knew about me.

Kev, true to his self-centered character, chose that moment to join us. ‘Charlotte is my hometown,’ he said without waiting for us to finish whatever conversation we were having. ‘I don’t want her near me.’

We all know I am the faster driver.

Bodge straightened from where we still bent over the paper on the fender. ‘You will stay behind Kev and block for him,’ he said to me. ‘That’s an order.’

‘Dike,’ Kev said to me, affirmatively, still wearing his inane grin.

‘Such a pleasure to drive for a happy team,’ I said, putting on my balaclava. It is dangerous to life and limb to let the idiots upset you just before you drive. Psychological games make winners and losers just as cars and mechanics do.

‘Start considering the opportunities open to a dike stock car racer,’ Bodge said through the net side-screen.

‘I’ll see your ass in court for discrimination. The lawyers will own your house and your soul. I’ll win enough money to set up my own team. Mind your manners: you and Kev could be asking me for jobs.’

I saw a camera crew heading our way and wheeled the car away to the start as Bodge turned to fend off the reporter.

Like I said, this is my eighth year in stock cars; I know how all parts of the game are played, including the psychological ones.

Well, okay, except the one about a lesbian driver in a redneck sport and business. That one never happened before.

I qualified ahead of Kev, as I usually do, so I started ahead of him. I gave him space to pass as soon as he offered, which I also usually do. Kev powered past between me and the wall, sparing me a glance. There was no fear in his eyes. He is too stupid to be frightened, which makes him a good stock car racer in the middle ranks but also too unimaginative ever to take the next step up to becoming a contender for honors.

The difference between Kev and me as drivers is that he has reached his natural peak at the top of the middle-rankers whereas I have more to give. With the right car and the support of a good team I can be a consistent top-ten finisher. Or so I believe.

Kev didn’t give a moment’s thought to the possibility that I may put him into the wall for his offensive description of me as a dike. I’ve given him my natural place, driven behind him, for eighteen months now.

I wondered if I should be ashamed of that. But what the hell. Some may see it as acquiescing in my own oppression. I don’t. I take the team’s money—a most satisfying chunk of it—and am an employee. My employers are entitled to protect their star driver, the one who garners all the publicity.

And don’t for a moment think the arrangement doesn’t have advantages to me.

Other team owners, who in the past may have hesitated to hire me because I am a woman, have been watching as I consistently out-qualified Kev in Fred Minster’s ever-improving cars and then, like a good team player, gave him the lead spot. They watched my laps whenever I was freed from team play by Kev wrecking or otherwise breaking his car, when on each occasion I made a top-fifteen place, better than could be expected from the cars.

That’s what separates a natural driver from a jumped-up mechanic, that he makes the car go faster than its desserts. NASCAR is full of jumped-up mechanics but the dominant team owners can distinguish a natural driver from the rest. That, among other reasons, is how they became dominant. All parts of the package must work well together.

I therefore bore high hopes, before this disaster Camilla visited on me, of switching from the unhappy Minster team to a better team on my next contract, with a chance of challenging for the lead.

In short, I was driving behind the slower Kev Lyles as a career-builder. I don’t say, ‘and putting up with the macho shit’, because that isn’t unique to the Minster team though it was now noticeably worse than when Fred Minster was alive and taking a close interest. I expect to have to put up with it even in a team with more winning ways on the track.

A good ole boy rubbed me. (NASCAR lingo: a rub is a bump, also called an intimidator, what at a mall would be a small fender-bender. There are two differences. On the oval the fender-bender is deliberate—and it happens at speeds anywhere from 90mph to over 200mph.) I saw his helmet in my mirror: Stuart Little, one of the natural leaders who pitted for some reason and was now making his way up the field. He’s been behind me before; he knows what I will do to protect Kev’s tail, so he didn’t rub me again after I gave him the eye.

I watched Stuart with one eye all the same as he slotted in behind me for a whole circuit. Then Kev passed the car in front on the high side. As I squeezed through too, scraping the wall lightly when the passed driver tried to close the gap but not touching his car except glancingly with a rear quarter somewhere, the top-ten driver shot out of my draft and went low, rejoining in front of Kev.

We rode the contender’s draft past a couple of cars better than our own. We were now in the top ten. ‘Try to keep those positions,’ Bodge ordered us. Try to take them from us, I thought. Possession is nine points of the track, as of law.

We rode round and round. Nobody bothered Kev because I stood guard on his tail. The NASCAR circus is a sort of big family: at our end of the race all the drivers know not to tangle with me unless they mean real business. I confirmed my nickname, Flicka, short for Flick Knife, at eighteen by demonstrating a little twist of the wheel and a brush across the brakes with my left foot that flicks the tail out just so, into the front wheel of any driver who hassles me to send his car off course, perhaps into the wall, perhaps downwards into the path of oncoming cars, in either case out of the race.

What can I say? Stock car racing is very competitive. Better to let it all hang out on a racetrack than on the public roads. In any event, neither my birth nor my chosen profession is ladylike, never mind that I know such fancy words from a taste for reading. I am just conforming to the psychopaths who inhabit my environment. You don’t earn their respect for being a victim.

We pitted when called. At the last pit stop Bodge made the greatest mistake of his life. He took a moment to say maliciously to me, ‘Considered your future yet?’ before slapping the roof of the car with his open hand.

I rejoined the race and progressed to behind Kev. We ran in our natural place, now tenth and eleventh because a car dropped out before us.

But is it our natural place? With essentially unlimited money we should have done better despite all the upsets caused by Fred Minster’s preoccupation with the events which ended in his suicide: the court case for industrial espionage and the consequent takeover of his corporation by some billionaire New York attorney fronting a consortium of foreign and US banks. It is the people and their attitudes that keep us down, I concluded.

In particular, I thought, eleventh isn’t my natural place. Rodge the Bodge has already told me that, whatever else happens today, he will fire me anyway for being a lesbian. I owe the organization no further loyalty if it penalizes me for a condition with which I was born.

Without further thought I checked my mirror and, finding clear space, hurtled my car out of Kev’s draft and past him. I cut across his nose, forcing him to brake as I swung up the banking to take the next car in the gap opening up beside the wall.

In my earphones I could hear Kev swearing as Bodge in panic pressed all his receive and transmit buttons. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

‘Showing you what a real driver can do with even your inadequately developed car,’ I said politely, then ripped the comms cord from my helmet.

I was now in among the contenders, perennial hard cases. Honest to God, I don’t know how in the remaining laps of that race I didn’t kill myself—and half a dozen good ole boys besides—but when the flag fell I ran fourth and was trying for third. I swear, I have no recollection of the crazy risks I took though I shudder whenever I remember that race.

The car, in a photograph I saw later (I don’t really remember what it looked like when I climbed out after the race), was tattered from several impacts with other cars; close shaves on the wall left roll cage tubes peeping through steel body panels.

There was talk of NASCAR taking my place away from me for intimidatory driving but Stuart Little, a past champion with whom I was contesting third place when the flag fell, asked, ‘Why is it okay for the late, great Dale The Intimidator Earnhardt to drive like that—but not for Flicka Revere? Because she’s a woman? That’s hypocrisy!’

I’d like to report everyone was shamefaced after their prejudice was exposed by Stuart but they just quietly dropped the disciplinary proceedings and returned to business as usual. They probably started suspecting him of being a homosexual too, what with him being a Californian and standing up for me, despite his adoring wife and four children.

The reason I didn’t notice the condition of the car was that as I slid from it, Rodge The Bodge Rogers stood before me, almost at attention, and said formally, ‘You are fired for cause. You deliberately disobeyed orders. You wrecked our car. You are fired for cause.’

The formality was for the camera trained on us.

Kev pulled in. I later learned that, without me to protect his ass, he slipped to twenty-seventh place as better drivers took him.

A voice from the crowd shouted, ‘Hey, Flicka, what were you and Camilla hiding? Not that you were strangers!’ Like all idiots he explained his joke. ‘Camilla Hyde-Strange! Ha-ha-ha!’

The first camera I smashed was the one which amid the cruel laughter followed me to my road car—and tried to enter my mouth through the lens as I turned to climb in.

Cast out

There is no reason why those of minority sexual inclination should not form a happy family group. Male homosexual couples can adopt a child and artificial insemination permits lesbians to breed their own baby if they can find a suitable sperm donor.

I lived with Camilla in a house I bought when I was 22, the first year I earned enough after taxes to pay cash for it.

I should perhaps explain that, even as a woman grudgingly given the drive, I have steadily been working my way up, my earnings reflecting my ability much more accurately than any other form of behavior by my peers and employers. I have an excellent manager but that is only part of the equation; the truth is that the good old boys would rather give him their money than give me their respect, though on the other hand they don’t deny I’ve earned the money.

Let’s get the confession over too. I’m not stupid, about people or anything else, but it never occurred to me that Camilla would ever do anything as vicious and destructive as tell the media that I am a lesbian. She is weak, not vicious.

The few times I wondered what it would be like to have a child, either my own or Camilla’s, in our little family—no, I won’t put quotation marks about it, as if we are somehow freaks—I always dropped the idea because I know that Camilla will not make a strong parent. She would not have coped well on her own with the child while I was away racing.

She’s more than just weak in her character, she is deliberately helpless. This is the case in a lot of lesbian partnerships, that one partner is dominant and the other subservient. You may say, Yeah, well, many husbands dominate their wives, some wives henpeck their husbands, so why should the same not happen in gay relationships? That’s true as far as it goes. But it is too often a wider gulf than for straight couples to be comparable. Perversely, some lesbians turn themselves into caricatures of submissive femininity. Camilla is one such.

Despite that, I never once considered parting from Camilla. We were comfortable together; she was fun in her sudden diffident enthusiasms. I found Camilla in a bar for our kind of people. We saw each other a few times and then she moved in with me. That was almost five years ago. Now she has broken with me from a distance, in the most brutal way possible.

On the drive home to Durham I wondered what I did to Camilla to deserve this punishment.

I wondered how I would face the loneliness again.

I thought about being fired only once on that drive and then only to giggle at the imagined spectacle of the sputtering Bodge facing the reporters’ accusations that he employed a lesbian driver in the heart of Southern manhood, stock car racing.

Then I wondered again what I ever did to Camilla to set her on course to destroy me. I don’t suppose I loved Camilla as much as she loved me but that is only because, in everything else as well as love, I stand a little outside myself and examine the thing from all angles. That’s just me; I can’t help it.

The brighter among the other racers, I have observed, are just like me in that regard. Stuart Little, for instance, the one whom I didn’t yet know saved my prize money from the ravages of the regulators, comes complete with a loving wife and a quiverful of children and must therefore in his home be a passionate man. But in public, about his profession, he always seems very laid back, not because he really is so relaxed but to give him time to observe and think through the consequences. (I was surprised when I later heard of his cutting remark about hypocrisy that saved me from certain disciplinary action by the NASCAR authorities.)

What with the traffic caused by a quarter-million people dispersing from the race, and keeping strictly to the speed limit, it was dark by the time I saw a restaurant beside the road. It is an invitingly dimly-lit place but I never stopped there before, feeling I may not be dressed right or be unable to read a menu written in French or whatever. Hey, come on, a lot of fast food places stay in business not because of the predigested food they serve but because people don’t feel threatened by the familiar.

Camilla and I go often to smart restaurants. The movies and eating out are our thing, and sitting at home listening to classical music and reading. I developed a taste for reading while a teenager and Camilla introduced me to classical music. I am the first in my family ever to graduate high school, where I benefited from a sympathetic English teacher.

But when I’m alone on the road I eat in the brightly lit eateries with the people who come to watch me race.

I changed out of my chinos and khaki shirt in the car, and donned the pants suit that Camilla helped me choose.

Suddenly I felt quite helpless. I cried tears of rage and frustration and humiliation.

When I stopped crying I wiped my face and went into the restaurant. The rest room was beside the front door. I went in and washed my face. I don’t carry makeup but I looked in the mirror for signs of weeping.

The first thing most people notice about me is my platinum hair, so blonde it is almost white; it hangs straight to my shoulders where it flicks up naturally. My face I have always thought of as a bit narrow, overly regular in its features, with really sick-making baby blue eyes, but both men and women find me attractive. Despite being so fair my skin takes a nice tan; from being outdoors most days I seem to glow with health and vitality. I decided the slight puffiness left around my eyes by crying would not be noticed in the dim light of the restaurant.

The menu was indeed in French. Thanks to Camilla’s tutelage I knew most of it. ‘What’s that?’ I said to the waiter. As he opened his mouth to explain, I added, ‘No, bring it. Surprise me.’

‘You will enjoy it all the more, mamselle,’ he said.

He probably learned his French in Hoboken, New Jersey, and that made me feel quite at home. ‘And a glass of the house white.’

‘The cook has a better Chablis open.’

‘Good.’

My unknown entree turned out to be scallops in a white wine sauce, made with the same wine I drank from the cook’s bottle. I was pleased with myself for discerning that.

My English teacher used to take me on vacations with her family as a child minder. Her husband is a country lawyer and, I suppose, the local intellectual, though I didn’t then know the word. He spoke to me as an equal, as he did to his children. He never stopped talking except when someone briefly interrupted him with a question. I can’t remember the context but one of the things he said was, ‘It is a mistake to sneer at the American Dream. It embodies the natural human impulse to better one’s condition.’

Though I never see them as I have nothing to go home for, I write to them a few times a year. I must remember to ask him, I thought, if eating bay-bottom scavengers for forty dollars a plate in a French restaurant is bettering oneself.

Back on the road I felt better for having a full stomach. One of the other ‘lady racers’, as she describes us collectively, confided in me that she sicks up her breakfast before every race. (‘Then why do you race?’ I asked her before I could bite my tongue.) I don’t. I look forward to racing. But I eat nothing between a light breakfast of fruit and the race. Hunger sharpens the reflexes.

Camilla, who is slender and beautiful, worries that she will grow fat because when she is depressed she eats. Then she goes into the bathroom, locks the door and sticks her finger down her throat.

I should probably think of what else about Camilla, or what she does, I dislike intensely, I thought, to brace myself for the coming confrontation. But why bother? I’ll just go with the flow and cry alone later.

I dreaded the loneliness, the tawdry, bruising, disappointing contacts while I searched for a new mate. I may not find one. I was lucky to find Camilla. Most of my kind do not like my apparently self-sufficient, closed personality; even Camilla sometimes complains that ‘you don’t let me in’.

Losing Camilla, I concluded with some surprise, is a worse disaster than being fired from the Minster team which could be shut down any day by its owners, the distant real estate conglomerate now in the hands of Fred Minster’s enemies. At least I came out of that with a convincing demonstration of my true mettle as a driver which will not fail to impress other team owners.

There was a flash Cadillac in my driveway when I reached home. I drew up beside it in my second series Buick Riviera, a car older than I am which I rebuilt with my own hands, and went into the house.

Camilla sat on the brocaded antique couch in our living room, dabbing at her eyes with an embroidered handkerchief. I let her renovate and furnish the entire huge house without ever counting the cost. She is an industrial chemist with an excellent job; without household expenses, she spends a good deal on clothes, including embroidered handkerchiefs.

It was the first time those thoughts ever occurred to me.

A man with a ponytail leaned over the back of the couch without quite touching Camilla. He looked like a ferret in his white coat over black trousers. I couldn’t see his shoes but I would bet they were lizard-skin. The English teacher and Camilla made me aware of the implications of such sartorial distinctions.

The television was tuned to the sports channel with the sound turned down. I ignored them while I watched the replay of my surge up the field after the last pit stop. I marveled that I didn’t kill myself or anyone else. (The shudders I mentioned earlier were a later manifestation; when I first saw the replay I was too distracted by being in the same room with Camilla.)

I practiced in my mind saying dismissively, if anyone should ever brace me with that once-in-a-lifetime exhibition of living with three wheels over the edge, ‘Oh, it is a matter of fine judgment.’ And, ‘Such skill comes with experience, you know,’ I silently practiced patronizing any accuser.

The lawyer-husband of my English teacher was surprised to discover I played a killer game of chess almost as soon as he instructed me in the moves. One of his sons is now the youngest American chess master, so chess must run in their blood. Playing against them taught me to think ahead.

‘Yo, we’re over here,’ Ponytail said.

I ignored him until the tape finished and the commentators came on gasping like goldfish on the silenced television.

I turned to look the pair of them up and down. ‘What are you? Her pimp?’

‘I didn’t do that to you,’ Camilla wailed, gesturing at the television with the hand crumpling the embroidered hankie. She started sobbing wrenchingly.

‘Rest easy. I did that because your exposure of me as a lesbian got me fired from the team. I didn’t do it for you, or because of you, but for my own future.’

Camilla sobbed harder.

‘There now,’ said Ponytail, his hands waving inches above her shoulders.

I wondered if he is truly more sensitive than Kev and the other macho types or if he feared he could pick up a disease from touching a lesbian. I wanted to run to Camilla and comfort her but just then Ponytail walked around the couch and stood protectively in front of her.

Lizard skin cowboy boots with ridiculous elevator heels. Even so, Camilla and I would both tower over him.

I almost laughed. ‘You don’t belong here, little man,’ I said calmly.

He drew himself up to his full five-two and tossed his ponytail. Now I pigeonholed him. Gay. He didn’t touch Camilla because he cannot bear to touch women.

Listen. Not all homosexuals are people. Some lesbians are vicious slime who want to castrate even inoffensive men on principle. Some of the male variety are pathological women-haters who would throw acid into the faces of even the most harmless women. Both kinds are fascists. I don’t approve of sexists in the profession where I earn my bread, so why should I approve of undesirables whose only connection with me is that they also belong to a minority sexual inclination?

‘Camilla will get the house, of course,’ he said.

‘With you as her roommate?’ With my foot I stirred the two grayish-green fake lizard skin cases standing just inside the door.

Camilla wailed louder. I wondered if she understood what she let herself in for.

‘Why then?’ I asked her. ‘Answer me, Camilla!’

‘You can’t speak to her like—‘

I took a single step towards him and he stopped. ‘Good. Now be quiet while Camilla tells me.’

‘You were on television and I was nobody,’ she said sullenly, her eyes on her feet.

So help me God, I burst out laughing. It was just too absurd. Then I stopped. I just stood there, trying to think of something more to say. But there wasn’t anything more to say.

I could have said, I am on television because I am a gladiator risking my life, as you just intimated you are aware, to pay for this fancy house and expensive furniture that you want so much that you betrayed me for them. But that and other bitter retorts came to me only later on that sleepless night.

I could easily have put both of them on the street. I am much stronger than my slender body may lead the casual observer to believe; strength in both the upper body and the legs is a pre-condition of success in my profession. But I could not bear to be violent to Camilla. And if I touched her little lizard minder—her mentor in all the trouble she caused me—I would not stop until he was dead.

I turned on my heel and went out.

On the steps a television crew lay in wait for me. I walked on. ‘That camera is invading my private space. You are trespassing on my property,’ I said, not breaking stride. When the camera was still in my face, I wrenched it from the cameraman and dashed it to the brick-paved drive beside the Cadillac.

‘Now look here—‘ The burly interviewer, a sometime football player who took too many knocks in the head, pushed his face into mine.

I grabbed the nerve between his neck and shoulder and forced him to his knees. Over him I saw a member of his crew take a small camera from his pocket, flip open the LCD viewer and start filming. I smiled directly at him.

‘My life is already public property, thanks to your greed,’ I said casually. ‘But if you invade my property, I shall defend it. If you invade my space, you will hurt. Do I make myself clear?’ I added more incisively as I put my foot against the reporter’s chest and pushed him over onto the driveway. He scurried away on his bottom and hands. ‘Stay. You want to catch this as well,’ I said to the one with the little digital camera.

I picked up the broken big camera and walked around the Cadillac, systematically bashing the heavy camera into each panel, light and every piece of glass. It would cost more than the price of a new Cadillac to repair; I killed that Cadillac as a surrogate for its owner.

Halfway through the destruction of the Cadillac the little lizard man came out onto the porch. When he saw what I was doing to his car he ran down the steps screeching, ‘I’m an attorney! I’m an attorney!’ as if his profession would protect him against me. Apparently he too realized that his special status is not a shield in such a situation for he stopped out of my reach.

‘This short-ass lizard shyster is Camilla’s new lover,’ I said to the impromptu cameraman as I threw the wrecked professional camera through the shattered windshield onto the front seat. ‘You should interview him for your next show.’

Then I climbed into my Riviera and drove away smoothly to find a motel.

Now there’s moral turpitude for you, Rodge the Bodge, I thought without glee.

Outcast

I woke in a terrifically pissed off state to the phone. ‘Do you know what time checkout is?’ some squeaky idiot wanted to know.

‘Instead of playing twenty questions, why don’t you just tell me?’

‘Well, if you’re going to take that attitude.’

I slammed down the phone and went into the shower.

I was pissed off even before the events of the previous day recalled themselves painfully to me. I need eight hours of sleep or my temper goes. I laid awake most of the night, mourning Camilla, watching the dawn creep across the walls before I fell asleep.

I know, I know. Camilla treated me abominably and for the most reprehensible of reasons, envy and weakness, but we can’t help what we love.

When the motel clerk demanded I pay for two nights for missing check-out, I refused, snatched my card back, spilled enough bills out of my purse to cover one night, and said over my shoulder, ‘You call the cops—and I’ll call the television station and complain about the cockroaches.’

I felt so much better after that, I didn’t even squeal the Riviera out of the motel parking lot. I found a diner and ordered ham and eggs and double hash plus the strongest coffee on the premises. With Camilla I ate muesli which is raw oats with sliced dried fruit, served with barely enough skimmed milk to wet it. ‘Full fat milk in the coffee too,’ I ordered. ‘Bring me your phone book please. And a sheet off your pad if you can spare it.’

I wrote down some numbers and accompanying addresses while I ate my brunch. I drank a second cup of coffee. I left a five-dollar tip in recognition of the counterman’s open approval of a decent appetite unfettered by political correctness. ‘Give it to them in the nuts,’ he said as I walked out of the door. So much for anonymity and approval of my appetite. He saw me on television.

I found a locksmith and gave him a hundred dollars over the odds to shut his store and come with me immediately. We sat in his van down the block while the little lizard shyster supervised a tow truck removing his wrecked Cadillac.

‘His wife is surely brassed off at him,’ the locksmith said, proving that he is not a fan of the stocks. I grinned at him and he blushed as he concluded I was the wife unfortunate enough to be hitched to the revolting little man. When the lizard left in a cab, talking on his phone and not even glancing at us, we went inside.

The locksmith changed the locks while I watched. It didn’t take long for a man who knows exactly what he is doing. ‘You should brace the windows as well,’ he said. ‘These old sash-window catches can be slid open from the outside with a knife.’

‘Do you have knife-proof latches?’

‘I have a box in the van. They’re solid cast brass, keyed, too expensive for a new house I was doing. I got stuck with them. I’ll give them to you for cost and labor.’

He gave me the name of a reliable security firm. They wanted to see me at their office before they would provide service. By the time I returned with two of their men it was time for Camilla to return from work.

‘Let’s wait in the van,’ I said. ‘Do you have a camera?’

‘Of course. But they may do damage.’

‘Then let’s film that. Last night I smashed up the Cadillac of my lover’s attorney in the drive there.’

‘You shouldn’t have done that, missy.’ He is one of those men who are comfortably old even in their forties, no threat to young women unless they choose to be daring. ‘Missy’ sat well on him. I grinned at him. ‘You better hope they do quite a bit of damage.’

Camilla arrived with the lizard attorney driving her car. The garage door would not open for her remote control or on the handle. Her key would not open the front door. They went around the back.

‘The back windows are too high for them,’ I said and the younger security man took his hand off the door handle.

Camilla tried the front door again. They studied it. It is solid wood; it cost a lot of money, I remembered. They studied the shutters over the windows. Lizard lawyer fetched the wheel brace from Camilla’s car. He smashed the wooden louvers of the shutter with such force that he also smashed the glass behind.

‘Ooh,’ said the younger of the security men, presumably at the sound effects he was recording.

Camilla reached