by Shey Stahl
From then on, I took her to dinner every Tuesday night and every Sunday we had movie night. Eventually Arie, Lexi, Lane and Cole joined in but Tuesday night was all about us. We never told anyone we had this weekly ritual…it was our special time together.
And over time, she told me her entire life story. I learned a lot about our family through her and while it was interesting, I also learned new inventive ways to fuck with all of them. It was all in good fun and my sixty-seven-year-old grandmother had a blast finding ways to prank our unsuspecting family members. Each week we had a new target and when we ran out, it was a random draw.
When you thought about it, I couldn’t be a normal person to pull her out of her depression she’d been slipping into nor was I that great of a listener but apparently, I was what she needed.
While I had a few minutes, I checked my phone just to make sure she hadn’t sent me a text message or anything. Sometimes she told me where she wanted to go, other times she left it up to me as to where we went. I had one text message from her that just read: Jameson.
That meant the random draw for pranking someone tonight was Jameson. And since they were leaving soon, it would work out perfectly.
I sent her back a text: Nice choice, Grammy.
My parents were leaving for California on Friday.
It’s not unusual for them to be gone for months, or longer, since my dad was racing a full schedule with the World of Outlaws. Unlike the series he used to race, NASCAR, they race an eighty race schedule as opposed to thirty-six.
Since they were going to be gone, and I was eighteen, what do you think my plans were for this weekend?
Certainly not a relaxing evening by myself.
I was throwing a party.
The last time I threw a party when they were gone, we kept it pretty calm. The time before that?
Not so much.
It was a great night I would never forget. I set the street on fire, landed a pool in our pool, and very nearly burned my parent’s house down. We had this bright idea, or I should say my cousin Lane did, that we could have this fire jump and have him jump his dirt bike through it.
It looked pretty cool. As did the field when he set it on fire.
I blamed the dry weather we’d had but in all actuality, we had nearly destroyed my parent’s house. It’s not like I planned all that either. The night just got away from us. As did the fire.
So we laid off the college frat-style parties and I hoped like hell this one didn’t get too out of hand either. I loved living at home and I had a feeling one party too many and I’d be looking for a place to live.
Cole, another cousin of mine, came walking in with no shirt and flip flops carrying his phone in one hand and a video camera in the other.
“Thanks for fixing the mailbox, since you set it on fire.” I said watching him continue to walk toward me.
“No problem.” Standing in front of me now, he smiled wide. “So …” he gave me that nod he had when he was up to no good. “Tommy’s truck is parked out there.” He hinted, raising his eyebrows.
Cole was one of those guys where you wondered how they were still alive. It wasn’t uncommon for me to get nightly texts with pictures of his bad decisions. I kept telling him to stop documenting all this, you never knew when the evidence would come back to haunt you. But no, he still did it. As if that was half the entertainment for him. I had a distinct feeling that once he turned twenty-one in September and was allowed in bars this would get even worse.
Cole laughed as I told him about Willie’s new obsession with showing everyone his dick. As if we needed to see it. Didn’t stop him though. It was his form of entertainment in a life of living on the road.
“What’d you do, take a picture or something?”
“No.” I shook my head. “He literally pulled down his pants and showed my mom his dick. No lie.”
Cole’s smile was bright, just like his blue eyes. Cole loved hearing about Willie and the dumb shit he did. Probably because though Willie was thirty-three, it seemed Cole was finally more mature than someone. “What’d she do?”
“Punched him in the balls once he pulled his pants back up.”
“Nice.”
“Willie didn’t think so but I bet he’d never show my mom his dick again.”
“Good point. I’m surprised your dad didn’t kill him for doing that.” His eyes darted to the doors behind me. “You better do it soon. They’re leaving in a couple hours.” And then his smile got bigger. “You hear there’s a new girl starting?”
“Jesus,” pressing my lips together, I tried not to laugh. “It’s like a new toy to you guys. Yes, I know there’s a new girl starting.”
“You know her?” Was immediately asked, and then, “I hear Noah fucked her already.”
That actually surprised me because out of Noah and Charlie, some of us were sure Noah was still a virgin. Apparently, he wasn’t.
“I know who she is but I haven’t seen her since I was a kid. She’s Tate’s niece.” I looked over at Noah across the shop from me holding his cell phone in the air thinking he could find service, and smiled. “I asked him earlier if he knew her, he said he didn’t know who she was.”
“Oh. Well he might not know it’s her. I only know because Dad told me.” He seemed defeated in a sense, or confused, you never could tell with Cole, and looked at the blown engine in my stall. “Man, did you see the highlights before this one blew?”
“I did. It’s crazy.” His hand lazily rubbed the back of his neck. “I haven’t seen anyone run like that at Tucson ‘cause it’s so flat and wide.”
“If anyone can, Jay can.”
“He’s gonna kick your ass if he hears you say that.” I laughed. Dad hated for anyone to call him Jay. We still did just to piss him off but if he was within earshot and caught on, he’d knock you upside the head for sure.
Before I forgot, I got right in Cole’s face a jobbed my finger in his bare chest. “Did you order the jelly?” and then I smiled. We were going to need it for Friday night and I couldn’t have him dropping the ball since it was his idea in the first place to fill the pool with jelly.
He laughed. “Of course I did.”
“Good.”
Glancing around at my tools scattered everywhere I was about to tell Cole I needed to get to work when I saw Tommy walk inside the shop and then upstairs to my dad’s office. I would have snuck outside to fuck with his car but my dad’s office overlooked the parking lot. Tommy would see.
Weekly I peed in his gas tank. After a while, it started running like shit and we had him convinced his cherry red 1980 Pontiac Firebird (with a personalized license plate that said Firecrotch) I was sure was the last one on earth, was about to blow up. It’s worth mentioning here that I might have had something to do with this. I will say it’s not like it does any permanent damage to his car.
Tommy also thought he was cursed when it came to keeping his recreational cars running right. It might have something to do with the urine content in his gas tank but he’d never know that. It might have also had something to do with the fact that he was driving around a car as old as he was.
Cole snuck upstairs to give Bailey, Lane’s wife, crap for a little while allowing me to get started on the engine. I smiled to myself knowing he’d probably come back with a bruise or two for not having a shirt on. When he left I got to work on tearing down my dad’s engine from Tucson. The pistons had pushed through the block.
Most of our engines were used for about fifty races and then we rebuilt. And if you were on the luck my dad was on, they were lasting ten races before you were blowing them up. He was rough on them.
Most know my dad as Jameson Riley, and notably for his NASCAR career where he won fifteen championships in his career before retiring at forty-two. It took less than six months into his first season of retirement and he was back to racing sprint cars where his talent for racing was originally cultivated.
I couldn’t blame him for returning to dirt. There�
�s just something about that roar produced by sprint cars that gets people. Hell, it gets to me too. I don’t race anymore but it’s not because I don’t love it. Because I do. Someday I’ll go back just not right now. Frost Nationals coming up again and a few of us talked about going back just to show grandpa some respect but we’d yet to make decision on it.
I knew eventually we’d all go back, together, for some closure.
Most might wonder why I don’t race anymore.
Well, I originally quit because it just wasn’t fun for me anymore. Now, I guess the reason wasn’t really that but maybe when to find time. Dirt track racing was what I enjoyed.
I grew up at the NASCAR tracks but when I got old enough, I spent most of my time traveling with my dad’s sprint car team.
This is where Ryder Christensen came in. My hero. My corruptor.
There are many who’ve corrupted me over the years, but mostly it was Ryder and Tommy. Hell, they actually took pride in it.
When I was with them, the corrupting would usually start with Ryder saying, “Casten if you get me a beer, I will...” and every time it was a different outcome for me.
Ryder or Tommy would ramble off some request, usually beer runs and I’d come up with a demand. Being a kid at the time, most of the time I wanted candy. For some reason unbeknownst to me, my parents didn’t like me to have candy.
I had the optimal deal there with Ryder and Tommy and developed some excellent ways to sneak beer away from the other teams. Sure, they had their own beer and own money to buy the beer but what fun was that?
Anyway, my mom never caught onto this. Even though she was usually there, she would just smile at me. Sometimes I thought maybe she knew and just wasn’t saying anything because it was also entertaining to her watching a six-year-old walk around with his jacket full of Coors Light.
Eventually, I got bored and stealing beer was above my six-year-old world and I was sure there was a bigger payout for things like, I don’t know, stealing cars?
I stole a car or two, drove them around the parking lot and then would park them in different parking spots while Cole, Noah, Charlie and me watched those poor unsuspecting folks look for their cars after the race.
We did this a few times and sooner or later actually stole a few and parked them down the street. We decided when the cops showed up to report the missing car that it was tad risky for a six-year-old (we being me and myself). So we went back to stealing beer.
A couple years later, someone said something along the lines of me stealing a car and my mom got right in their face and said, “He’s eight. He wouldn’t steal a car!”
Little did she know I actually stole two to be exact when I was six and then rearranged a handful of them. I always returned them though. I thought for sure if I at least returned them, it would keep me out of jail.
With time I moved on from beer stealing and carjacking around ten and got into things like persuasion. You’d be amazed what you can convince people to do when you have chubby cheeks, bright green eyes and dark lashes to bat at them. As I said, this worked well for me.
Those were some of my greatest memories. But, shit changed.
After Ryder died when I was eleven, my focus was lost with racing. He was killed in Perris, California, after his wingless sprint car flipped going into turn three and he tagged the wall.
The hit to our family was heavy having just suffered a big loss from the company plane that crashed where fourteen team members died.
Losing Ryder left me with little drive to actually race any more. At the time when he died I was racing one of his midgets through the USAC ranks. I did it for fun and it was no longer fun for me to be on a track inside the car, so I quit. Everyone understood and never questioned why. I think most knew why but never said anything. Maybe I’ll get back in a car someday, and I actually hope to but only when it’s time.
Life around the track changed considerably without my counterpart but Tommy and Willie were still good fun. All the guys with JAR Racing were role models to me and my brother and in a way, they played a big part in who we were as much as our parents did. It wasn’t the same anymore without Ryder but they were all there to make sure we were alright.
“Hey, Casten?” Tommy yelled from the balcony overlooking the engine shop and drawing me from my thoughts. “You coming with us to Cali?”
“No.” My attention was on the engine but when I looked up, which was what he was waiting for, he nailed me right in the head with fucking diaper he’d stuffed into a t-shirt gun.
Luckily it was just pee filled. Last time it wasn’t.
And people wonder why I peed in his gas tank.
Some might wonder where the diaper came from. Thankfully it wasn’t Tommy’s that I knew of. More than likely it was Abigail’s, Lane’s one-year-old daughter. Bailey usually brought her in on Tuesdays. Since she split her duties between CST Engines and JAR Racing, she occasionally had to bring Abigail with her.
The two buildings that housed Dad’s businesses weren’t always together.
He moved the shops around when he sold partial ownership of Riley-Simplex Racing with Tate. Now the NASCAR shop (Riley-Harris Racing) was down the street about a mile where the Cup cars were housed.
This building housed CST Engines, and in the same building only separated by a showroom was JAR Racing.
My duties were with CST where I worked mostly building sprint car engines, we cleaned them, inspected, did all the machine works and assembled them. We did everything in house because that’s how my great grandpa started it and that’s how it would remain.
Charlie, Noah and I built the engines but we had two machine guys that worked with the Cup engines we did, Kevin and Brad.
Noah and Charlie still did a lot of quality control but we hired a few more guys to do research and development too.
After a series of parts owners stealing money and a misjudged fabrication specialist, Dad had strict guidelines for hiring which explained why even a receptionist, was someone we’d known for a while.
Though I doubt she’d remember, I’d known Hayden since I was younger but rarely ever saw her. She was Tate’s niece and I’d met her when I was seven I believe. I remember her kicking me in the balls for pushing her off the tire swing at the kid’s playground in Daytona.
Hopefully she didn’t have the same reaction this time when we met.
I hadn’t finished disassembly yet when Charlie and Noah came back over and we talked about getting two engines next door so they could be loaded on the trucks before they left to California.
Charlie started pacing and rattling off the results of the dyno test we did wondering why we couldn’t keep an engine in Dad’s car these days.
“Hey, Noah,” I smiled. “So what’s with you and Hayden?”
“Hayden?” his expression was blank for a beat, and then his cheeks puffed out as he drew in a breath. Slowly he let it out as if he was thinking and then couldn’t recall.
“How do you know about that?” Charlie shot me a glare replying for Noah. He had a better memory than Noah.
“Cole told me.”
Noah seemed confused for a minute and then smiled, remembering. “Nothing’s with us. It was just a one-time thing.”
Charlie, as usual, responded with great annoyance towards me. “Stay away from her, Casten.”
Charlie was on the verge of a mental breakdown these days, I honestly believe that and Willie and I had determined this was because he wasn’t getting laid.
And if you knew Charlie, you understood why this was. He never shut the fuck up. He always had something to say. I imagined that women just steered clear because of this.
There was a lot of commotion going on around us, conversation was easily disrupted. We had nearly all the guys from JAR Racing inside the engine shop checking out Dad’s engine and then working on preparing for their five week west coast tour.
“Hey, buddy!” Dave Richie, another guy who was hired to work with JAR Racing, patted my back. Dav
e replaced Grady as the fabrication specialist but he also did a lot of work on the cars at the track. He fit in well with Willie and Tommy and they had some sort of three amigos thing going on.
Dave was quite possibly the worst addition to JAR Racing. And I don’t mean that in a way where he was a bad guy, because he was actually one of my favorites, but he was a bad influence on everyone. And, if you ask Willie, personally responsible for his recent divorce.
He was a nice guy, just wild.
Dave followed me with heavy steps over to the dyno room where we had an engine in there, Greg and Rusty stood outside with their heads turned toward the computer monitors. They were responsible for research and development for CST which meant they spent the majority of their time inside the dyno room.
Standing there, I watched Dave as he rubbed his hand up and down his beard. A nervous twitch maybe, but he always did this. Dad usually gave him shit about it and told him it made him look like some kind of creepy child molester. For the most part he quit after that but when he got anxious, he rubbed his jaw.
“So Tommy’s car is out there …” Dave, who always fucking whispered in the middle of a conversation, lowered his voice. “You gonna …” he shrugged and his voice returned to a normal pitch. “Do what you normally do?”
Everyone, but Tommy, knew what I did. And if I didn’t know any better, they were just as entertained by it as I was. It wasn’t some big secret.
“Why do you do that?” I looked to Dave for an explanation.
“Do what?” His eyebrows furrowed shadowing his dark eyes, and then released as he blinked.
“Whisper? It’s hard enough trying to hear you with the dyno going and now you gotta whisper. Speak up.”
Dave shrugged, as if my question didn’t even warrant an answer. “Hey, where’s that new girl at?”
“Fuck if I know.”
Everyone was so caught up in this girl I found it actually entertaining. We hadn’t had this much excitement around here since Willie’s wife showed up, thinking he was alone in the sprint car shop, and gave him a lap dance. He wasn’t alone. Best show I’ve seen in a long time and it’s a shame that got divorced because she was fucking hot. Not only was he not alone in the shop that night, but there was also a GoPro mounted to the wing of Rager’s sprint car that caught everything. And I do mean everything.