The ambulance was there in a second, and everybody hustled away to make room for the ambulance attendant. Woody stayed as near as he was allowed and saw a doctor bend over Randy. When the doctor stood up, he didn't say anything. He just shook his head and got back into the ambulance.
Then Woody knew that Randy was dead. The Black Tiger had killed him.
14
In the weeks that followed Randy's death, nobody made any mention of road racing or the Black Tiger around Worm's garage. There was a tacit understanding that both topics should be ignored. Woody worked harder than ever at his job and tried to put both subjects out of his mind. He saw Rocky only at the funeral, and then she went back to San Diego to live with an aunt. Woody did not know what happened to the Black Tiger. And he hoped he would never hear of it or see it again.
Worm made only one comment on the fatal accident that killed Randy. "Yon Black Tiger is a killer car," he said to Woody. "I told Randy so and tried to warn him against racing it. But he was no a man that ye could warn."
It was not, however, as easy to get away from road racing as Woody hoped. When he went into a drugstore for a hamburger, he found himself eying the road-racing magazines. When he bought a newspaper, the sports pages with their columns on road racing had an irresistible fascination for him. He did not want to look at them. Yet he found that he could not refrain from doing so. Names seemed to leap out of the pages at him—Tom Wisdom, Kurt Kreuger, Dave Kingston. It was strange how out of several thousand printed words on a page, one word would stand out as if it were printed in a different color.
A week after Randy's death, Woody called up Mary Jane and asked her for a date. She sounded neither cold nor very friendly on the phone, and said she was doing nothing that night. Woody asked her out to dinner. When he called for her, he began to realize how much he had missed her. It seemed as if he had been only a portion of himself and now he was made whole again. They spent a pleasant evening, not saying anything about what was past or about any plans for the future. It seemed as if the two of them just wanted to enjoy the present for the moment.
Mary Jane seemed much more grown up to Woody that evening. She talked neither of Somerset Maugham nor of boys she'd been out with while they were quarreling. Woody felt peaceful while he was with her for the first time in many weeks. When he went home, he slept well, and the following day was whistling at his work and much more his old self.
Worm noticed the change and was pleased by it. He was not a man to pry into others' affairs, but he had been worried about Woody, toward whom he adopted an attitude part father and part elder brother.