The Black Tiger

by Patrick O'Connor

"Good luck, Woody," Rocky said. "Got to leave you now. Put your foot in it whenever you can. She goes like a bomb."

"See you in about half an hour," said Tom.

Half an hour, Woody thought. This is one half hour I could do without. The three left, and he was now alone with all the other cars around him. An almost lazy silence, disturbed only by the deep beating of the cars around, settled over the starting area. Woody pushed in his clutch and put the gearshift in low. His foot kept trembling on the accelerator so that the note of his engine rose and sank. The driver in the car on his right hand side looked over at him briefly and winked. He knows how I feel anyway, Woody said to himself. All eyes were now on the plump rubber-ball figure of the starter. As usual, he had his back to the drivers. He bent down, seeming to pick up something from the track. Then, almost before Woody realized it, he had leaped into the air and brought down the starting flag.

Woody let out the clutch as if it were burning his foot and jammed down on the accelerator. There was a haze of blue smoke before his windshield, and the whole pack of cars, with him in the middle, shot forward. Two passed by him and cut in front into a space barely big enough to hold them.

"Cripes," said Woody, "that makes me third from last." He changed into second, into third, and into high, and before he knew it, there was a knot of cars braking ahead of him to get around the first bend. How he made it himself he could not recall. He got around in a screech of tires with glimpses out of the tail of his eye of other cars, inches from him, swaying and screeching around with their drivers crouched over their steering wheels.

When he was around the turn, he glanced, by instinct, into his rear-vision mirror. It showed the clear view of the track behind him. There was not a car in sight. He'd dropped to last place in the first three hundred yards.

The thought angered him. It angered him as much as the fact that his legs were still trembling, his mouth as dry as blotting paper, and his hands unsteady on the wheel.

He jammed his foot down on the accelerator and watched the needle of the speedometer creep up to sixty-five, then to seventy, hover there a fraction of a second, and then move on past. He grinned as he saw he was steadily overhauling two cars ahead. The stop light on one of them flashed red. Ahead were a series of S-bends. Woody remembered them from his trial runs around the track. He glanced at his speedometer. Seventy-two.

"O.K., brother," he said, "you're going too fast. But you just might make it." He entered the first S-bend abreast of the Singer that had been ahead of him. He left him behind as if the Singer were standing still. But when he brought the steering wheel over to the right for the next turn, the MG seemed to lie down on two wheels and started skittering toward a pile of hay bales. There wasn't time to change to a lower gear. Woody took his foot completely off the accelerator, and it seemed for a second as if the car were going to turn over. He was thrown hard against the side and stabbed his foot on the accelerator again. For a second the car teetered. Then the MG recovered and flashed off so close to the bales that he felt a slight thud as his nearside fender tipped the edge of one of them.

Ahead now lay two more cars. And another bend. This time Woody changed down. He revved the engine to a roar in neutral and let the clutch out hard as he slipped the gear lever over into third. The MG jerked forward, and Woody headed for a gap between the two cars in front of him. If the gap remained he could get through. But if it closed he would be flung against one car or the other. He jammed the accelerator down and crept into the gap. His front wheels were level with the driver's seat of the first car and six feet from the rear wheels of the second car.