Hot Laps (3 page)

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.