Fiddler Fair (anthology)

She shook herself mentally. Woolgathering again; it was a good thing she was out of the cockpit and on the sidelines, if she was going to let her thoughts drift like that.

Jimmy nodded understanding as the steering-­specialist made little wiggling motions with his hand. Dora cast another glance up and down pit row, then looked down at the hands of her watch. Time.

She signaled to the crew, who began to push the car into its appointed slot in line. This would be a true Le Mans start; drivers sprinting to their cars on foot and bullying through the pack, jockeying for position right from the beginning. In a way, she would miss it if they went to an Indy-type start; with so little momentum, crashes at the beginning of the race were seldom serious—but when they were, they were devastating. And there were plenty of promising contenders taken out right there in the first four or five hundred yards.

She trotted alongside Jimmy as they made their way to the starting line. “All right, now listen to me: save the engine, save the tires. You have a long race ahead of you. We’ve got a double whammy on us,” she warned. “Remember, a lot of drivers have it in for Bugatti because of me—and the Europeans aren’t really thrilled with the Bugatti preference for Yankee drivers. The other thing: this is Ford country; Ford is fielding six cars in the factory team alone. None of the other chiefs I’ve talked to know any of the drivers personally, which tells me they’re in Ford’s back pocket.”

“Which means they might drive as a team instead of solo?” Jimmy hazarded shrewdly. “Huh. That could be trouble. Three cars could run a rolling roadblock.”

“We’ve worked on the engine since the trials, and there’s another twenty horse there,” she added. “It’s just the way you like it: light, fast, and all the power you need. If I were you, I’d use that moxie early, get yourself placed up in the pack, then lay off and see what the rest do.”

She slowed as they neared driver-only territory; he waved acknowledgment that he had heard her, and trotted on alone. She went back to the pits; the beginning of the race really mattered only in that he made it through the crush at the beginning, and got in a little ahead of the pack. That was one reason why she had given over the cockpit to a younger driver; she was getting too old for those sprints and leaps. Places where she’d hurt herself as a dancer were starting to remind her that she was forty-five years old now. Let Jimmy race to the car and fling himself into it, he was only twenty-five.

The view from her end of pit-row wasn’t very good, but she could see the start if she stood on the concrete fire-wall. One of the men steadied her; Tonio, who had been with her since she was the driver. She handed her clipboard down to him, then noticed a stranger in their pit, wearing the appropriate pass around his neck. She was going to say something, but just then the drivers on the line crouched in preparation for the starting gun, and her attention went back to them.

The gun went off; Jimmy leapt for his car like an Olympic racer, vaulting into it in a way that made her simultaneously sigh with envy and wince. The Bugatti kicked over like a champ; Jimmy used every horse under that hood to bully his way through the exhaust-choked air to the front of the pack, taking an outside position. Just like she’d taught him.

The cars pulled out of sight, and she jumped down off the wall. The stranger was still there—and the pits were for the first time today, quiet. They would not be that way for long, as damaged or empty cars staggered into the hands of their keepers, but they were for the moment, and the silence impacted the ears as the silence between incoming artillery barrages had—

She headed for the stranger—but he was heading for her. “Miss Duncan?” he said quickly. “Jim got me this pit pass—he came over to see us do Death of a Salesman last night and when he came back-stage and found out I race too, he got me the pass and told me to check in with you.”

“What kind of racing?” she asked cautiously. It would be just like Jimmy to pal around with some kid just because he was an up-and-coming actor and saddle her with someone who didn’t know when to get the hell out of the way.

“Dirt-track, mostly,” he said modestly, then quoted her credentials that made her raise her eyebrow. “I’ll stay out of the way.”

The kid had an open, handsome face, and ­another set of killer blue eyes—and the hand that shook hers was firm and confident. She decided in his favor.

“Do that,” she told him. “Unless there’s a fire—tell you what, you think you can put up with hauling one of those around for the rest of the race?” She pointed at the rack of heavy fire-bottles behind the fire-wall, and he nodded. “All right; get yourself one of those and watch our pit, Porsche, and Ferrari. That’s the cost of you being in here. If there’s a fire in any of ’em, deal with it.” Since the crews had other things on their minds—and couldn’t afford to hang extinguishers around their necks—this kid might be the first one on the spot.

“Think you can handle that—what is your name, anyway?”

“Paul,” he said, diffidently. “Yeah, I can handle that. Thanks, Miss Duncan.”

“Dora,” she replied automatically, as she caught the whine of approaching engines. She lost all interest in the kid for a moment as she strained to see who was in front.

It was Lola, but the car was already in trouble. She heard a tell-tale rattle deep in, and winced as the leaders roared by—

Jimmy was in the first ten; that was all that ­mattered, that, and his first-lap time. She glanced at Fillipe, who had the stop-watch; he gave her a thumbs-up and bent to his clipboard to make notes, as he would for almost every lap. She let out her breath in a sigh.

“Miss Duncan, how did you get into racing?”

She had forgotten the kid but he was still there—as he had promised, out of the way, but still within talking distance.

She shook her head, a rueful smile on her lips. “Glory. How fleeting fame. Retire, and no one’s ever heard of you—”

“Oh, I know all about the Grand Prix wins,” the kid said hastily. “I just wanted to know why you stopped dancing. Jimmy told me you were kind of a—big thing in Europe. It doesn’t seem like a natural approach to racing. I mean, Josephine Baker didn’t go into racing.”

She chuckled at being compared to the infamous cabaret dancer, but no one had ever asked her the question in quite that way. “A couple of reasons,” she replied, thoughtfully. “The biggest one is that my dingbat brother was a better dancer than I ever was. I figured that the world only needed one crazy dancing Duncan preaching Greek