"I think I've got the same sort of girl friend that you had in Scotland," he said.
2
In the week that followed, Woody caught only a few glimpses of Mary Jane. She cut him dead each time. They'd had their quarrels before, but Woody realized that this time it was pretty serious, and there was little he could do to alter the situation.
"When a dame spends five bucks fixing up her hair to be taken out and you spend ten bucks fixing up a hot rod and don't take her out, you're back in the stag line again," his friend Steve Phillips told him philosophically. "Why don't you forget about that pile of junk and spend your time straightening things out with Mary Jane? She's a nice kid. You ought to take more care of her."
"Wouldn't do any good," said Woody. "Besides, if she's going to be my steady, she's got to take the hot rod as well. I'm not interested in dames that want me to spend the rest of my life catching up on Aldous Huxley and Somerset Maugham. Betcha neither of them can drive a car."
Woody spent the week fixing up Cindy Lou in the intervals between working in Worm's garage. He wanted to get her ready for a trial run at the salt lakes out in the Mojave Desert by the following Saturday. The salt lakes were where the drag races were held. But there could be none that weekend. However, the quarter-mile, half-mile, and mile markers would be there, and he would be able to test Cindy Lou's speed.
In the drag races, hot rods do not compete directly with each other. They go singly over the measured straightaway. Their speeds are electrically timed and the winner picked on a fastest-time basis. Steve had agreed to come out to the salt lakes to help with the timing. And even Worm began to show an interest in Cindy Lou now that she was nearing her test run.
He came over one evening while Woody was adjusting the tappets and looked at Cindy Lou with enormous disfavor.
"Mon," he said, "ye're not intending ta drive that contraption, are ye?"