PART 4

Sture Modig was overwhelmed by his first few days in the army. He was paraded naked from one place to another. His head was shorn; he received shots in both arms till he couldn’t bend his elbows, then was given new clothing, most of which didn’t fit.

Sture felt as if somehow he had lost everything that mattered in life: his animals, the farm, his mother, his father; and nobody seemed to care.

He was assigned a bunk of woven canvas straps covered by a straw mattress perched high on top of another bunk. He sat there with his needle and thread, carefully tailoring and adjusting his new clothes to fit. He shined his high boots till they glowed, while his arms ached and he daydreamed of the farm. He worked on those boots with the heels of his hands so they wouldn’t pinch his feet. Without knowing it, Sture was well on his way to becoming the ideal soldier.

He quickly grew accustomed to the six-o’clock wake-up, late for Sture. He enjoyed the food about which others complained. He began to be proud of his smart appearance in a military uniform.

On the field and at the rifle range he far outstripped his fellow draftees. He became expert with the rifle and 30-caliber machine gun; he qualified as a sniper. He was tireless on marches, spurring his fellow draftees on. By the end of the first month he was marked by his superiors for non-commissioned grade.

Because of its predictability, its very mundane demands, military life was ideal for Sture Modig. He enjoyed taking his rifle apart, cleaning it; here was a machine he could appreciate. The reality of ballistics appealed to him. Here was a true Spartan life.

At the end of basic training, he was called into the company commander’s office. By now, Sture knew all the rigid formality of military bearing and actually liked that, too. He snapped to attention in front of the company commander. This captain had been a Greek-literature major at Princeton, had asked for and received his commission automatically. He was assigned as captain to an infantry company, but still hadn’t qualified with his pistol.

“Private Modig, your sergeant, Sergeant Meek, has recommended you be promoted to corporal as his assistant squad leader. You will receive your notification of promotion in the next week but you may sew on your stripes now. Congratulations.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Sture knew he deserved it. He deserved to be company commander far more than this pale, stubble-bearded man in front of him, a man who spent his evenings in town dancing, or drinking at the officers’ club.

Sture waited for the mandatory salute ending the discussion. Almost as if he’d forgotten, Captain Fitzgerald gave his salute so Private, soon Corporal, Modig could return it, spin on his heel, and leave the orderly room.

Sture climbed up on his bunk. He pulled out the corporal stripes he’d already bought and proceeded to sew them on the sleeves of all his shirts with neat, tight lock stitches.

Sture was soon shipped overseas with the 32nd Infantry Division.

Before his outfit was shipped, however, Sture Modig made platoon sergeant. He was the only draftee in his regiment promoted so fast to such rank.

His outfit was one of the first American divisions actually to participate in the fighting. They were attached to a French command and took a terrible beating with staggering casualties. They fought bravely, starting August I along the banks of the Vesle, Aisne, and Ourcq, attacking northward. They captured Fismes, east of Verdun, on August 1–2. Although General Pershing had thought first of breaking up this division of the Wisconsin National Guard, it soon became known as the Powerhouse Division. On August 30 they captured Jovigny, and overran the plateau around Terny.

On the evening of the first attack, his platoon lieutenant was killed and Captain Fitzgerald just disappeared. For two weeks, in the midst of combat, while replacements were being awaited, Sture Modig served as acting platoon leader. One of the other platoon lieutenants filled in for the missing Captain Fitzgerald.

In early September, 1918, Sture Modig was commissioned a second lieutenant of infantry, one of the first field commissions awarded to an American in this particular war.

War was something at which Sture was good. His men, most older than he was, respected him. His benevolent smile and innate confidence inspired confidence in others. His lack of fear in danger, his adept decision-making, justified, verified this confidence. At Terny, he was awarded the bronze star for bravery, also his first purple heart for a shrapnel wound received during a heavy bombardment. He spent three hours in the hospital tent while his wound was dressed. He then, without permission, worked his way back to his outfit.

There was a cheer heard through that section of trenches when he showed up, his hand bandaged and his arm in a sling. He smiled his enigmatic smile and passed among his troops, enjoying their adulation but looking for any sloppiness in their weapons, or lack of safety in their positions.

It was in the St.-Mihiel offensive in mid-September that the regiment took its most serious casualties. There was rumor of armistice but the war went on. A minor skirmish developed almost on its own as a sort of coup de grâce by the Americans, an auto-da-fé for the Germans facing them.

In the process of this raging battle, the captain of Sture’s company was seriously wounded. He later lost a leg, then his life.

Sture Modig was by acclaim and natural authority company commander. He became Cap Modig to all, despite the fact that Lieutenant Burns, as executive officer, outranked him. Lieutenant Burns had been a history major at Harvard when he managed to arrange a commission with the help of his lawyer father in Boston. He could keep company records, manage the company roster, but recognized his own ineptitude as line commander. He willingly ceded field command to Modig. After two captains lost in a few months, the job did not hold much appeal for Lieutenant Burns. Sture was promoted to first lieutenant.

It was the last days of September. The weather had turned unseasonably cold but still the men were plagued by mosquitoes. Two of Cap Modig’s men, one of them Sergeant Meek of the second squad, his old squad, were caught out in a shell hole under enemy fire. It was in a gas-filled blind alley called by the Germans Stumpflager. Clouds of yellowish-brown smoke began billowing toward them from the German lines, clinging close to the ground. It was chlorine gas mixed with phosgene and mustard gas. This was not the first time Sture and his men had experienced this sickening, all-pervading virulent weapon: droplets that stung, burned, and ate out the lungs. But they’d always managed to retreat in time. Gas masks, promised, never arrived and, even when used, were not effective.

Sture ordered his company back to the next line of trenches, then started working his way out to the shell hole. He found his old sergeant, Sergeant Meek, dead, a piece of shrapnel buried in his temple, blood coming out of his nose and mouth from some other serious internal injury, his eyes open and empty in the burning gas. But the second soldier, though unconscious, was still alive. Sture hoisted him over his shoulder and started running back through the suffocating, brownish-yellow, blowing clouds of gas. The gas clung to the ground and there was no way to avoid it. He tried to hold his breath, not suck in the burning, destroying, fetid clouds. But he couldn’t. He gasped in agony and struggled on with his heavy load through the slippery mud. He felt a hard thud in his upper leg, which knocked him sideways and over onto the wet ground. He struggled back to his feet again, lifting the wounded man onto his shoulder, and staggered on with blood streaming down his leg into his boot. He was practically unconscious, his throat, eyes, lungs, nose burning so he could scarcely breathe. He fell down the parapet into the arms of his men.

“Get back! Get back farther! Come on, let’s go!”

He tried to stand but fell unconscious. His men hurried him and the man he’d carried onto a makeshift litter, and they all retreated before the billowing, sickening droplets of death.

Cap Modig woke in a bed. His eyes were bandaged. When he tried to breathe he couldn’t suppress the scream. A hand out of nowhere held on to his. He struggled. He felt as if he were drowning.

“That’s all right, lieutenant. Just try to relax. You’ll be all right.”

It was a woman’s voice. He felt the hypodermic needle slip into his arm and then a muffling thickness surrounded him until the fire in his chest quieted and he went to sleep again.

It was two weeks before Cap could stay awake more than two or three hours without morphine. But something in him knew he had to live with the pain; the soft rubbery weakness of the drug wasn’t life as he wanted it. He gritted against the searing pains of breathing, suffered through the agony of fighting back coughing fits; often surrendering to the racking, rending pain when he couldn’t stop himself from hollering out.

And he was still in the dark, a red-black haze, frightening because it wasn’t the way he remembered things to have been when he simply closed his eyes. This was more: a wet, thick darkness, not restful, a blinding red of dark with spots of light like fireflies drifting or sparking across his eyes.

He lay there, day after day, losing some days to the needle, holding on to others. They never put him out unless he screamed. He felt gently with his arms and found a tube attached to one arm; there was another tube in his penis. He felt like one of the cows on his failed milking machines, or a tomato plant held up with stakes and strings.

Sture didn’t have will enough to lift the tight bandages over his eyes. Twice he knew the bandages had been changed while he was asleep because the smell decreased. Complaint never occurred to Sture Modig. He knew this is the way life is; sometimes it’s hard and you must wait, be patient, till you find out what’s happening.

It was almost a month later when he knew there was someone standing beside him, talking to him.

“Lieutenant Modig!” He said the first part like the mo in eeny, meeny, miney, mo, rather than like the moo of a cow. “I’m going to take the bandages off your eyes. I want you to tell me how much you can see. Can you talk at all?”

Cap nodded his head. He hadn’t tried talking because he didn’t want to start coughing, but he’d screamed so he must be able to talk.

Slowly, with much unwrapping and clipping of scissors, the bandages were unwound from his head. At the end there were only gauze pads left over each eye. Carefully, the doctor lifted one pad and Cap opened his eye slowly until he felt a blinding pain. He closed his eye and then slowly squinted it open again. He could see blurs of light, couldn’t focus, couldn’t recognize anything.

“Can you see, lieutenant?”

“Blurs.”

Cap exhaled the word softly, quietly, delicately.

“That’s good, you’ve still got some sight in that eye anyway.”

Cap for the first time realized how serious the chance of his being blind was. So many things he couldn’t do if he were blind: couldn’t ride a bicycle, couldn’t help much on the farm, couldn’t see the beautiful world. Tears started burning in the corners of his eyes as a new gauze patch was adjusted over the eye he’d opened.

The doctor started slowly lifting the other patch. There were areas of pussy mucus sticking the pad to the eyelids and to the lashes; he gently separated them.

“Now try this one, lieutenant. Can you open it?”

Cap was feeling a strong need to cough, to bring up another glob of thickness gathering in his throat. He held back. He opened his eye slowly to avoid pain from the light. There was no pain this time. Again he saw blurs, light movements, but it was not as bright as with the first eye. He didn’t know the doctor’d had the shade drawn by one of the nurses.

Cap thought he might be even more blind in this eye. The doctor was flashing what seemed like a red light on his eyeball, pushing the lid up and away so the skin cracked. He closed it again, slipped the pad into place.

“Nurse, you can wrap him up again but less tightly this time. We’ll have those bandages off in another week.”

“Well, lieutenant, you’re lucky; you’ll see, you might even see as well as you did before.”

Cap only nodded, trying to hold back the burning tears and the choking need to cough. He felt terribly alone. He wondered, as he had so often during the past weeks, what’d happened to his company, if any more had been killed, if they’d taken back the territory they’d fled before the gas, who was the new company commander?

“Well, you have two things to celebrate, lieutenant. You will see again, and the war’s over. The armistice was signed three weeks ago. When you get out of the hospital you can go home. The Huns got themselves licked, thanks to brave men like you.”

Cap stayed quiet. He tried to smile, to bring forth one of his glowing smiles, but it wasn’t there. He felt as if he’d missed the end of the party. He was glad the war was finally over, that no more soldiers would be killed, but he hated not being there with his good friends, his company.

Cap Sture Modig was sent to a hospital in France near a town called Contrexéville. It was a hospital specializing in seriously gassed patients. They were given curative waters, encouraged to eat much fruit and lie out in the sun when it wasn’t too cold.

It was several months before he could breathe without pain and months more before he could do even the lightest exercise without bringing on spasms of coughing and retching. His eyes gradually improved until he had full vision, but this took almost nine months. Cap did eye exercises he’d devised himself, focusing near, then far, shifting his eyes from side to side, concentrating on making the fuzziness go away. The doctors were amazed. They didn’t actually expect anyone with the degree of eye injury Sture suffered to totally regain sight.

Cap’s gums had also been affected by the gas, so he lost most of his teeth except for four on top in front and six on the bottom. The roots had turned blue-purple and rotted out. He was fitted for a full mouth plate so he could chew food properly.

Also the bulk of his thick blond hair had fallen out, leaving only a thin, fuzzy coating over top of his head. The doctors were not sure if real hair would ever grow back. Cap’s scalp was rubbed each morning and evening with hot oil to try stimulating some growth, but nothing helped.

He was truly Captain Sture Modig now. He’d been promoted to that field rank in recognition of his service. He was also issued a second purple heart and a distinguished service cross. He mailed both back to his parents in Wisconsin along with simply written explanations as to why he still was not home. He did not tell them the extent of his injuries. Cap Modig had learned to lie by omission.

He was twenty-two years old and was growing up the hard way. He was also growing restless in the hospital. The handsome, blond, blue-eyed youth with so much promise was now a sallow, sad, unsmiling man who’d lost confidence in promises.

Finally, just a year after he was wounded, in late 1919, he was discharged. He was declared seventy percent disabled on a permanent basis. For the rest of his life he would receive a monthly disability check from the U.S. government.

His parents cried when they saw him. It was almost impossible to recognize him as the smiling, always helpful, almost saintly boy who had gone away. He was no longer innocent. In his heart he felt a deep, unresolvable guilt. Cap suffered from what in those days was called shell shock, a combination of a sense of loss for the comradeship he’d known in the midst of battle and a guilt for still being alive.

The farm was in deep trouble. The prices of milk, butter, grain were so low his parents couldn’t meet the mortgage payments on their acreage. During the years, they’d paid off the second mortgage by hard work, but now had loans on the $10,000 first mortgage. The combination of interest payments owed on the mortgage at $3.60 per acre and taxes of $1.90 per acre were greater than could be earned. Sture’s father was fast becoming a renter farmer, with an insurance company holding the loan on his property; he was in grave danger of losing his equity on the whole farm, a lifetime of hard labor. This was happening at that time to farmers all over the region: Minnesota, Idaho, Wisconsin, the Dakotas.

Sture decided he could make the farm pay if he invested in a tractor. He had all his back disability money and pay from the time he was in the hospital as well as his discharge bonus. He put it into an International Harvester tractor.

This tractor became the joy of Sture’s life. He had reason to live again. He’d work it all day in the field, breaking virgin territory into meadows, pulling stumps, plowing. Then, at night, he’d work on it in the barn, taking it apart, learning all its mechanical secrets, designing improvements. Often, he’d stay awake all night, breaking down, studying, analyzing the function of his machine. He began to regain something of his innate confidence in life, in living.

But the farm still couldn’t make enough money. Cap was fighting something beyond him, an economic tragedy in the making that finally disintegrated into the Great Depression. Sture was also beginning to be restless on the farm.

Cap, who now wore a cap all the time to hide his premature baldness, wanted to be around motors. He was convinced he could get a job as a mechanic in Detroit, then send home money to help his mom and dad hold on to the farm: There was good money to be made in Detroit if one had mechanical skills, and Cap was convinced he was as good as anybody could be with machines, almost as good as he was with animals.

His parents were not happy, but they knew it was the only way they could keep the farm, their life dream of being independent. They also saw that Sture was not himself any more. He didn’t get the same joy from animals. He rushed through milking to tinker with his tractor. He was a grown man and had to make his own life.

Cap walked to Detroit from the farm. He carried extra socks, two extra shirts, extra underwear, and a second pair of pants, all wrapped in a large red bandana at the end of a stick. He looked like a hobo in a comic strip. He also carried a small leather satchel with his tools. Cap didn’t see anything funny in it; this was the way he could carry his things with the least bother; it was like carrying a rifle and an ammo case.

It didn’t take Cap long to get a job in Detroit. It had become a center for manufacturing automobiles. Cap quickly was recognized as a natural. This bland-faced bald man knew machines as if he’d invented them.

Within the year, Cap was picked as mechanic by a racing team racing competitively all over America.

The great boom in auto racing, especially board-track racing, was just then coming to the fore. Cap worked with a team racing the durable and popular Dusenbergs.

Cap began to travel with them. He went to the two-mile oval board track in Maywood near Chicago. It was here he first had a chance actually to drive one of the cars in a tryout. He was electrified by the experience. Here was a chance for speed in which his damaged lungs and bum leg didn’t hinder him. Cap had tried running at the farm, slogging up hills, drifting down, coughing all the way, struggling for air. Even a mile run was more than he could manage, with his shrapnel-damaged leg.

Next they raced at Omaha, a mile-and-a-quarter track. Cap began to get a reputation as a mechanic who could also drive. The drivers and other mechanics watched how his natural quickness, his fearlessness, his ability to think under stress gave him control of cars at high speeds. Cap began to enjoy his double reputation as mechanic and potential driver.

It was at Des Moines, a one-mile track with steep bankings, some steep as forty-five degrees, where Cap got his chance. The driver of the second car was too drunk on the day of the race to drive. The decision was to let Cap try it.

This car was a “blown job,” a souped-up 1922 model. Cap took his qualifying heat and then came in second in the main event. The main event was twenty-five laps, and there were sixteen cars running. Cap pushed his high-powered job to the maximum but it wasn’t the best car. Cap was the best driver, but he came in second.

From then on, Cap was a major driver. He made more money each year. In three years he’d paid off the mortgage on the farm. But he wasn’t ready to go back milking cows. The speed, the superlative design of these machines had him captivated. He began to learn that, even more than in the war, here his fearlessness was exceptional. It was what he had to sell.

Cap raced in Kansas City, Tacoma, Playa Del Rey, Indianapolis, Omaha, Santa Monica road races, the Atlantic City Speedway board track. He won on boards at Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn, and came back to Detroit to win again on the tiny half-mile track there.

After that race he took off two weeks to go visit with his parents at the farm. This wild-eyed man with the tight-set jaw was even more unfamiliar to them than the hurt and wounded boy who’d come back from the war. Cap’s mother and father didn’t know how to treat him. To them, he was still Sture, although he hadn’t been called that in over three years. He wore a leather cap now with a short bill. He turned it around on his head when he raced; the bill protected his neck from flying splinters on the board tracks. Because of this habit, his racing name was Cap, as much from his headgear as from his former military rank.

While he was home, Cap helped with the milking and plowing. He took his beloved tractor completely down and rebuilt it. His father watched over his shoulder, shaking his head in amazement. What kind of a son did they have?

He left the tractor in better shape than when he’d bought it new. He’d added yet more improvements: bored out the cylinders, put in oversize pistons, improved the carburetion, and installed an electro-start, battery, and generator. He left the tractor in great condition, but he also left farming. The excitement and challenges of race driving now occupied completely the forefront of his mind.

Four years later, after many races, Cap was in California. He was racing with another team, a more important team, a team that raced all the major tracks throughout the nation.

America was in the midst of a grand party, an hysterical party, an ongoing celebration of war’s end, of seeming new prosperity. It was totally unrelated to the grinding, constantly losing battle his mother and father were waging on the farm. It was impossible for Sture to put the two worlds together in his mind, so he didn’t. He was addicted to, fascinated by, the speed of these new machines, the competition, his own skills virtually unmatched, the adulation he received from every side as he won more and more prizes.

He was staying at the Coronado Hotel right on the beach outside San Diego and had just driven a successful race in which he’d barely missed first place. It was evening, he’d eaten dinner in his hotel room, and was bored. So, he decided to go down by the waterfront.

He borrowed one of his team’s spare cars to drive into the area where sailors hung out.

San Diego was then primarily a sailors’ town. Sture was yearning for people of his own background, simple people who knew how to work with their hands. He was, more and more, as a famous auto racer, surrounded by the idle rich, the bored wealthy, looking for cheap thrills; using Sture as a way to obtain them. There were women who wanted him as a plaything, but Sture didn’t want to play or be played with. He was still leery of women.

Sture went into a bar. It was noisy, smoke-filled, crowded, just what Sture was looking for, a place where he could sit and watch, feel part of things.

He had been there perhaps an hour or more when a small, compact sailor came in the door. He had a burlap sack under his arm, and slung it onto the bar.

“Hey, anybody here wanna buy a lion? The skipper won’t let me ship this one on and we’re heading out for Lima tonight.”

Cap, always interested in animals, drifts over. Judging from his voice and loud bravado, the sailor had apparently been to other bars before he hit this one. Cap moves close to the lion cub. It lies bewildered, close to dying, thin, bedraggled, its fur matted and sticking in tufts from its thin body.

Cap reaches out for it, pulling the stinking burlap away. “O.K. if I hold this feller for a minute, sailor? He looks pretty tuckered out.”

The sailor leans over to look at Cap. He’s been getting free drinks all along the waterfront walking into bars with the lion cub. He’s about decided just to drown the animal when the evening’s over. He’s tired of cleaning up filthy, stinking messes, trying to feed it with a milk bottle, then pushing down its throat handfuls of scrap meat he begged from the cook on ship. He’d bought two cubs in Mombasa and the other had died after two days at sea. There’d been a lot of complaining in the locker from his mates about the one cub that was left, and now he had to get rid of it.

“You wanna buy this little lion, matey? I’ll sell it cheap.”

He shouts this out, clamoring for attention. He gets it. So far he’s gotten it wherever he’s gone. It was for this he’d kept the poor critter alive, thinking of when he got shore leave, how he’d be the center of things with a real lion.

“No, I don’t know what I’d do with it. I’m on the move all the time myself.”

Cap splays the cub out on the bar. He picks at where the milk and meat have clotted around the cub’s muzzle and pulls some running sleep from the corners of its eyes. The cub looks as if it doesn’t have much longer to go; it’ll probably be dead before morning.

Cap lifts the cub, holds it against his chest. The cub wraps its huge soft front paws around his neck. The rest of the bar has huddled closer. The cub almost tilts off Cap’s cap to expose his bald head. Cap reaches up quickly to hold it in place. He’s still embarrassed by his baldness.

Cap is surprised how light the cub is: it’s literally only skin—loose skin—and bone. Cap pulls his head back to look into the cub’s eyes and sees they’re half closed, lusterless. There is a bluish cast over them.

“How much you asking, anyway?”

“How much’ll you give me, mate?”

Cap looks into the cub’s eyes again. He’s sure the poor dumb animal is dying.

“I don’t really know what I’d do with a dead lion cub. He’s too little to make a lionskin rug in my den where I could seduce Theda Bara or somebody like that.”

Cap is playing to the crowd, too, now. He’s trying not to show his anger at the condition of the helpless cub.

“You saying I’m mistreating this lion, mate; that whatjur sayin’?”

Most of the merchant sailors in any bar are looking for a fight, not necessarily one they’d get mixed up in themselves, but something to watch. Still, some of them are really looking for a fight, especially those about to ship out. They want a few cuts, black and blue marks, a black eye, maybe some loose teeth to share with their mates at sea, something to nurse during a long cruise; something to back up the wild stories they’ll tell about shore leave. If you can’t take a woman with you, the next best thing is the remnant of a tough fight.

Cap realizes this. He doesn’t want to get involved in any rough stuff. He’s getting all the competition he needs driving cars. He’s low on aggression, hostility, desire to prove anything. He hasn’t much to waste on lonely sailors.

“Nope, but he does look pretty well done in. I’ll bet it’s hard keeping a cub like this on a boat; lions aren’t exactly seagoing animals.”

The sailor leans over even closer to look at Cap. The sailor’s unsteady on his feet. He has vomit and the smell of sick cat on his uniform. Cap stares levelly. He hopes he doesn’t have to fight a more than half-drunk sailor for a dying baby lion.

The sailor leans back, swills down his drink.

“All right. You look like an O.K. guy. What’ll you give me for him, anyway?”

“How’s twenty bucks sound?”

“Like plain robbery, that’s how it sounds.”

The sailor reaches over and takes the cub from Cap’s arms. He grabs him from underneath behind the front paws just below the shoulder joints and holds him up in the air with one hand.

“This bastard’s offered me twenty dollars for my lion cub. Anybody here willing to give me more than that?”

There’s quiet up and down the bar. The bartender moves along the bar toward the sailor. Cap stares up at the cub; there are some dark marks across his muzzle as if he’s been hit or scratched. Cap holds out his hand for the cub.

“O.K. I’ll make it twenty-five, but that’s it.”

The sailor yanks the cub away. Cap reaches into his pocket and pulls out his wallet. He has most of his prize money stashed at the hotel but he has forty dollars in his pocket. He pulls out two tens and a five, spreads them like a poker hand, looks the half-drunk sailor in the eye, then shifts them to the eyes of the cub. This lion is so sick, so tired, he looks more like a newborn calf than anything. The sailor lowers the cub onto the bar again, looks at Cap aggressively.

“Hell, this critter’s worth at least a hundred dollars to any zoo. He’s a valuable animal. I paid fifty dollars for two of them and had to pay the coxswain another ten to let me keep them on ship. Lost the other just out of that crummy African port. This one’s worth more than a lousy twenty-five bucks, I can tell you that.”

He orders another drink. Cap spreads and leaves his money on the bar. He’s beginning to wonder what he’s doing. He knows he’s not drunk, but what in hell will he do with a baby lion cub? He knows he’s thinking the cub will die in a few days at the most, but even so, how’ll he smuggle it up into his hotel room? What’ll he do with it during the days? He can’t possibly travel across the country in a car with a lion cub.

There’s a moment’s pause and the sailor sweeps Cap’s money off the bar.

“O.K., matey. You drive a hard bargain but this here lion’s yours now. He needs a couple bottles of milk a day and he’s started eating meat. Here’s the bottle and some nipples.”

He reaches into the shore bag at his feet. “Try to keep him warm nights; he comes from a hot place. I tell you he’s gentle as a kitten but watch out for them claws; he’s not careful sometimes and they’re sharp.”

He pulls up the sleeve of one arm and shows long raked scars down the length of it. The sailors at the bar laugh. They all figure this landlubber with the leather hat’s been taken to the cleaners. Who the hell wants a lion cub anyway? He’s not much different from some alley cat, only bigger.

The sailor pulls down his sleeve.

“Here, mate, have a drink, on me.”

Cap joins in, glugs down his drink. He has the cub against his chest; from its breathing he can tell it’s asleep. Its thin stomach rises and falls. Cap is surprised at how long the cub’s body is, even though it’s young. When the cub breathes out he can see the vault of his ribs; there are soft folds of skin over his empty belly. Cap wants to get out fast, buy some milk, some meat, a brush, and take the cub back to his hotel.

Cap leaves to the cheers and jeers of sailors. He buys the things he needs at a little market by the waterfront, one he knows is open till midnight. It’s where he buys soda crackers and ginger ale to nibble on in the hotel when he can’t sleep. The old man in the store can’t believe Cap has a real live lion cub in his arms. He’s sympathetic but scared. It’s the first time Cap runs up against the almost universal fear of large cats.

Cap manages to smuggle the cub into his room by going up the back way. He puts some milk in the bottle with a nipple the sailor gave him. The cub’s so sleepy, or maybe in the process of dying, Cap has a hard time getting him to start sucking, but once he starts the cub empties the bottle twice. Then Cap opens up the pound package of ground round he’s bought and puts it on the floor. He lowers the cub to the rug; the cub collapses onto its side. He’s so weak he can’t stand.

So Cap takes pieces of meat and pushes them into the cub’s mouth. When he gets it past the milk teeth and onto the tongue, the cub gulps and swallows. Cap gets half his meat into the cub’s mouth before it falls asleep.

By now, it’s almost two in the morning and Cap is tired himself, but he puts the cub on his bed and, using the hairbrush he bought at the store, starts currying the cub’s fur, pulling out knots, straightening all the snarled hairs until the cub begins to look presentable. Presentable for death, Cap thinks. He turns out the light and goes to sleep.

Cap is wakened in the morning by a rough licking on his cheek. It’s the lion cub and it’s standing shakily next to Cap in the bed. His eyes, although still covered by the bluish haze, are open, awake, aware. He’s standing, a bit wobbly on the shifting bed, but standing.

Cap reaches up and pulls on the cub’s ears.

“Hey there, feller. You’re supposed to be dead. What you doin’ standing up on my bed, getting ready to eat me, huh?”

Cap rolls out of bed and pours more milk into the bottle. The cub sucks at it voraciously, pulling on the nipple so it almost tears, pushing hard against Cap’s hand. He’s obviously been starved.

“You really are a tough one, feller. That’s what I think I’ll call you, Tuffy; if you live long enough.”

Cap’s beginning to feel he might very well be the owner of a live, more or less healthy, growing lion cub. It’s something he hadn’t bargained for. He puts the rest of the hamburger Tuffy didn’t eat the night before on the floor and Tuffy snuffles it down. He looks up at Cap, strolls around the bed.

Cap sees where he’s made a mess in one corner.

“Oh, boy, just what I need.”

Cap cleans up after Tuffy, showers and dresses as the cub follows him around the room. He knows he has to buy more food and some kind of collar and leash for the cub. Cap’s supposed to race the next day up on the Beverly Hills board track. He needs to join the team and help pack up the cars, all the equipment.

Cap goes out the back way again, puts Tuffy in the car he borrowed, and goes around front to pay his bill. He shops on the way and buys three more pounds of meat with two bottles of milk. He’ll have to win more races just to feed this cub.

At Beverly Hills, on the board track, Cap does win. It’s his first win in five races, so he considers Tuffy his lucky omen. He introduces Tuffy to the rest of the racing team. They aren’t too enthusiastic about a lion cub being around, but after somebody’s driven and won a major race you don’t argue much. The lion is Cap’s problem anyway. Cap doesn’t seem to have anything for women so maybe he’s got something special for lions.

The next weeks Cap drives in an open car, cross-country to a race at Maywood, near Chicago. Tuffy is in the front seat beside him. Cap stops every hour or two to feed the cub, curry his fur, or give him a chance to do his business. Tuffy, by now, is beginning to act like a real lion, that is, sleeps most of the time. But, when he isn’t sleeping, he’s sitting up on the passenger’s seat staring out the front windshield or out the side as the landscape passes by. There isn’t too much traffic but Tuffy carefully observes passengers in cars that pass and they in turn look carefully at him.

The road is mostly paved but Cap has three flat tires, about right for the trip on those roads.

Sometimes while Cap is driving, the cub puts one of his heavy paws on Cap’s arm almost as if he’s helping. By the end of the trip, Tuffy’s hair is beginning to shine.

Cap has no fear of Tuffy; that’s one of Cap’s troubles; he doesn’t know when to be afraid. Tuffy doesn’t seem to fear Cap either.

At Maywood, Cap wins again. He knows how, in a certain way, he’s driving for Tuffy; trying to make things right between them, even though Tuffy is locked up in a cabin outside town.

Cap knows better than to go into a hotel with the rest of the driving team. They’d go crazy if he walked in with a lion cub. Somehow, Cap feels that having a lion as a pet is right for him. It fits with everything he feels about his own life. Tuffy is a perfect blend of his love for animals and his need for risk, his attraction to danger.

Then, gradually, Cap begins to think about what will happen to Tuffy if he crashes, is hurt or killed. The team would probably take him to the SPCA or a zoo. The careless ease, lack of fear, he’s always known dissipates. The team, the other drivers, can’t understand what’s happening and Cap can’t tell them.

Three months later, in Atlantic City, he has the crash that was coming; his combination of fear and bravado catches up with him. He wakes in a hospital having suffered several fractured ribs, a scalp cut, and a broken collarbone.

Cap senses he’s finished as a major racing driver. He’s lost his nerve. Whatever it was that kept him concentrated on the task at hand, whether farming, fighting, playing, fighting war, whatever it was, is gone. He knows fear, the prospect of death, injury, the same as everyone else. His imagination has in some strange way been set free.

While in the hospital, partially drugged by morphine, suffering from shock, pain, Cap keeps asking for someone to go take care of Tuffy. Tuffy is locked in a cheap cabin at a lodge, inland three miles from the beach. It was the only place Cap could be sure of keeping him. Tuffy is now six months old, larger than a large dog, and frightens almost everyone who sees him.

The nurses and doctors in the hospital are convinced Cap’s delirious as he keeps talking about his lion and how somebody must feed it. Cap doesn’t know what to do.

There is a young woman who was in the stands at the race. She works as an operator for the telephone company and came to the race only because the girls with whom she works dragged her there. Her name is Sally.

Sally is a quiet, simple girl with notions. She bobs her hair and has it dyed a light blond color. She wears lipstick and heavy eye makeup. Her idols are Jean Harlow and Carole Lombard. She buys movie magazines, song sheets, True Confessions, and, daring for those times, smokes cigarettes. She’s a hopeless, childlike romantic.

When Cap crashes, she’s terrified and wonders what’s happened to him. She telephones the hospital from her board at work and finds he is seriously but not mortally injured. She talks to the nurse and discovers no one has come to see him except for a few visits by members of his racing team.

She decides to dress in her newest outfit and go visit. She wears a cloche hat, long beads, and her new button-down-front dress. They can only throw her out. She has a simple-minded adulation of the notorious, and Cap Modig is notorious in his field.

When Sally comes to visit him, Cap is mortified, scared. Not since he was a little boy has he been in bed while a woman was in the same room. He still has his irrational mistrust of the ambiguous, unpredictable: art, music, sickness, and especially women. Here are two of them stalking him at the same time.

Sture’s head is bandaged to cover burns and minor abrasions as well as the eight stitches just above what would normally be his hairline. Sally does not know he is bald. She thinks him incredibly handsome for an older man. Cap is thirty-two, Sally twenty.

Cap is very concerned about getting someone to feed Tuffy. After accepting Sally’s consolations, and after being embarrassed by her obvious adulation of him as driver—adulation he feels he doesn’t deserve at all, when in his heart he knows he’s finished—he finally gets around to it.

“Miss, would you do me a big favor? I hate to ask but there’s no one else and it’s something that must be done. I’ve been worried crazy about it all the time I’ve been here.”

Sally looks at him, so pale in the bed: his head, all his chest, his arm in bandages and one arm in a sling. “I’d like to help however I can, Mr. Modig.”

Cap looks at her. Almost before he starts, he realizes how crazy it will sound, how he can’t expect a young, glamorous woman to do what he wants done.

“I don’t know how to ask this. You see, I have a lion cub in a cabin outside town. It isn’t far from here, not more than three miles, and there’s a bus that goes right by. It’s called Shore Lodge. He’s there in the cabin and is probably starving. I haven’t been able to get any food to him for three days.”

Cap stops as Sally puts her hands over her mouth, her eyes open. Tears start springing into her eyes.

“I’m sorry, miss. I only thought I’d ask. I’ll have to figure some other way. Maybe one of the team will come visit again and he can go feed him.”

“Oh no, Mr. Modig; I’ll do it. Do you mean you have a real lion here in Atlantic City? How long can he go without food and stay alive? Maybe he’s dead!”

“I hope not. Grown lions can go a long time without food and he’s almost six months old now. But he must be hungry. He wouldn’t ever hurt anybody. He hasn’t learned to hunt or anything. To be perfectly honest, he’s probably my closest friend in the world, except for my parents.”

Sally stares at him. She hadn’t thought of a race driver as someone with parents, and she’d thought he’d have many friends. She thought he was like a movie star, an artificial sort of person, more or less unreal, made up in magazines, living a separate life, nothing like everybody else.

“What does he eat? Tell me exactly what to do.”

She looks Cap straight in the eye for the first time. She sees him. She sees the shy farm boy who has only just learned to love—his first love a lion cub.

And Cap sees her. He sees past the bob, the peroxide-bleached hair, the eye makeup. He sees the little girl playing grownup.

“Over there in that closet are my clothes. In my jacket is a wallet. Go over and take out the wallet.”

Sally does as she’s told. She feels as if she’s entering into something very intimate; she’s never gone through the pockets of a man’s clothes. She has no brother and her father died when she was fourteen. She carries back the wallet, formed to fit in the back pocket of a pair of pants as Cap usually wears it, sweat-stained.

“Now open it up. In the back part you’ll find money. Take out five dollars.”

Sally opens the wallet, takes out money. She closes the wallet. She goes to the closet, puts the wallet back in his pocket. She stands with the five dollars in her hands, looks at Cap.

“You don’t need to give me money, Mr. Modig. I have money. I have a good job with the telephone company.”

“That’s no reason you should pay for Tuffy’s food. Tuffy’s my lion. I think you’ll like him; he’s very loving and kind.”

Cap stops.

“I’m still not sure I should let you do this.”

“Is it dangerous? Will he try to eat me up?”

Her question is so obviously sincere Cap smiles, then laughs. It hurts his head, his shoulder and ribs. He coughs.

“No, he’s perfectly safe. It’s just he might be so excited he’d break past the door and escape. Even though he’s young, he’s very strong.”

“I promise I’ll do my best, Mr. Modig. We had a big dog once and I took him for walks. I could hold him when nobody else could. I’m stronger than I look.”

“I’ll bet you’re strong. By the way would you call me Cap or Sture, please? You make me feel old calling me Mr. Modig.”

Sally looks down at the five dollars in her hand. She looks up, shifting from one foot to the other.

“Would you stop calling me Miss, too, Mr. Modig, I mean Cap? It makes me feel I’m talking to you on the switchboard and I don’t feel that way at all. Please call me Sally, that’s my name.”

A blush comes over her face, and she turns her whole body away from Cap. He, in turn, feels a sweat rising on his forehead under the bandages.

“O.K., Sally. First go buy five pounds of hamburger. You don’t have a motorcar, do you?”

Sally smiles and shakes her head.

“Not on what they pay a telephone operator I don’t.”

“Do you know how to drive?”

“How can I drive if I don’t own a motorcar?”

They both smile at each other. It’s a brief moment of ridiculous joy. Cap has a hard time getting back to the subject: his starving lion, Tuffy.

“O.K., then. I guess you’ll need to take that bus, it’s the bus going out the Blackhorse Pike.”

“I know the one, the number twelve. I’ve taken it out to a place where there’s dancing and music, a place in a big elephant. Do you know it?”

“No, I’m sorry I don’t. I don’t know how to dance, anyway.”

“Maybe someday I can teach you. It’s fun. But first you need to get better and out of bed.”

Cap looks at her. She’s so shy in some ways and then so direct in others. She’s like a good animal.

“Yes, but first we must feed Tuffy; that is, you’ll have to feed him. I forgot; you’ll need the key.”

Cap points to the closet again. “In my right pants pocket you’ll find a key attached to a piece of wood. It has the number of my cabin on it; I think it’s thirteen.”

“No wonder you had bad luck and crashed. You know you were winning before you had that terrible crash. I was so excited and proud of you. You were so brave.”

Cap is blushingly embarrassed. Sally goes to the closet. Reaching into his pants pocket is even more adventurous, more intimate. She feels the hard round wood of the key holder and pulls it out. She holds it up for Cap to see. “Is this it? It’s number thirteen.”

“That’s it. When you get to the cabin, open the package of meat before you open the door. Then, holding tight on to the doorknob, slip the package into the door and close it quickly.

“Listen on the outside to hear if Tuffy comes and eats; that is, if he’s still alive or still in there. He might have made so much noise because he was hungry the owner could’ve called the SPCA and they might’ve hauled him off.

“If he’s there you’ll hear him eat; he makes a lot of grunting and snuffling sounds, you can’t miss it. If you don’t hear anything, open the door carefully again and listen, then look to see if he’s there. If he’s there and isn’t moving don’t go into the room, just come back to me here and I’ll call the SPCA.

“You never know with a lion; he could only be asleep and when he sees you, you might not know what he’s doing. I don’t think he’d ever hurt anybody, but then he hasn’t been hungry like this since he was a little cub.”

Sally is listening with her eyes open.

“What do I do if he isn’t there?”

“Then go to the owner of the lodge and telephone the SPCA. You can explain what’s happened.”

“Will I be arrested?”

“No, just tell them I sent you. I’m sure Tuffy will be there, though. He’ll be hungry and restless. Also he’s probably lonely. He’s never been alone by himself so long in his life.”

“He really is your best friend, isn’t he?”

“Yes. I find it hard making friends. I have a lot of people I like and I think they like me but we don’t become friends, or maybe we are friends and I don’t know it.”

“I’m your friend, Sture.”

Cap stares. It’s a long time since anyone’s called him Sture. He looks away. He’s wishing he could escape from the bed; he’s scared and at the same time inside he’s churning, the way he does on a tight turn, wheel to wheel with another car.

“I guess you are, Sally. And if you can rescue Tuffy, I’ll never forget it.”

With that, Sally turns and leaves the room. Cap settles back in his bed and tries pulling himself together. He’s feeling more shaken by the last half hour than he was when the car spun out and burst into flames. He feels he has fallen into some kind of new life, starting with Tuffy and now this young girl.

Sally finds number thirteen at the lodge without trouble. No one at the lodge office seems to notice her. The cabin is one of the farthest back, against the pine barrens so common in that part of New Jersey.

She listens carefully at the door but hears nothing. After unwrapping the hamburger as Sture has told her, she slowly turns the key in the lock. She pushes the door in and Tuffy the lion shoves his muzzle into the space. Sally is frightened, shocked, surprised so she almost lets go of the door. She forces herself to put the meat on the ground at the threshold and shoves it in with her foot. Tuffy pounces on the hamburger immediately, gulping and swallowing with grunts and groans of contentment. He looks up at her twice while eating. Each time Sally is prepared to pull the door shut but Tuffy continues to concentrate on his food.

Finally, with his large, rough tongue he’s licking the last bits of meat from the package. His yellow, round eyes look up at Sally. Then he quickly forces his face through the opening in the door and leans so hard she can’t hold back. As the door swings farther open, Tuffy can apply his full strength and wrenches the doorknob from her hand.

Sally stands with her fists against her mouth as Tuffy comes out, stalks around her, and begins rubbing his face, his body, against her so hard he almost knocks her over. He’s behaving exactly the way any domestic cat would, except he weighs almost a hundred pounds.

Sally pulls herself together and goes into the room. Tuffy follows her. She closes the door behind him. He isn’t trying to escape, he’s only wanting company; as Cap has foretold, he’s almost more lonely than hungry.

The room smells. Sally sees where Tuffy has made his messes. She takes a newspaper from the table beside the bed and scoops them up, flushes them down the toilet. She opens a window slightly from the top to air the room.

Tuffy stays close to her rubbing hard against her whenever she stoops or stops. When she’s finished, she sits on the side of the bed. Here she is in the cabin of a man she hardly knows, feeding and cleaning up after his lion. She’s between crying and laughing. What would the nuns say? This is even more of an adventure than a Gloria Swanson movie.

Tuffy comes up and rests his large head across her lap on the bed. It’s such a natural thing for a dog but seems wrong for a large cat. Sally pushes his head away and Tuffy starts prowling around the room.

Sally finds some milk in the wooden icebox in the kitchenette. The ice has long ago melted, so it’s warm but not sour. She pulls the melted ice-water pan out into the middle of the floor, pours milk into another pan, and puts it beside the water. While Tuffy drinks, she carefully edges her way to the door, opens it quickly, and goes out. She locks it behind her and walks surreptitiously past the office of the lodge keeper. It’s the kind of lodge where casual visitors to guests’ rooms are tolerated, even expected.

Back at the hospital, Sally tells Cap all that she’s done. She tells him she has to work the next day but she’ll go out in the evening after work and feed Tuffy. She’ll come visit Sture, too.

“I can’t thank you enough, Sally. Looks as if I’m going to be in this hospital when the team leaves for Langhorne. I’ll need to catch up later. You’ll never know how much I appreciate all you’re doing; not many people are brave enough to go into a room with Tuffy alone.”

“But he’s so gentle. He loves to be loved. He’s like a big pussy cat.”

“He probably thinks you’re part of our pride. I’m really glad he took to you like that.”

“What do you mean ‘pride’?”

“A lion’s family is called his pride. Since I got Tuffy I’ve been reading all the books on lions I can find. Mostly they talk about lions in zoos and the diseases they get; there isn’t much about how lions actually live in the wild. I wish I could take Tuffy back to Africa and set him free with other lions.”

Sally smiles. “I like being part of Tuffy’s pride.”

During the week Sture is in the hospital, he and Sally start confiding about their past lives. Sally feeds Tuffy, then comes to visit Sture until visiting hours are over. Sture tells about his boyhood on the farm, about his bicycle, about being in the war and getting wounded. He tells her about his lost hair and lost teeth, about his lungs, about his hurt leg.

Sally tells about her poor family, about having a sister who died of galloping consumption at thirteen, about her father dying of the same deadly disease, contracted while trying to nurse her sister. She tells how she quit school in sixth grade and was lucky to get a job with the telephone company. She’d always wanted to be an actress but now knew she’d never be one, just work at the telephone company until she met somebody at one of the dances who would want to marry her.

“I’d think anybody who’d ever met you would want to marry you, Sally.”

Cap says it before he knows it’s coming; it’s what he feels. He still can’t believe that this lovely woman, in many ways only a girl, is still unmarried, still not taken. The women he’s met so far in his life, except his mother, have all been so hard and grasping, so easy to read and yet so hard to know.

He feels Sally is almost like the sister he’d always wished he had. He likes the way they can talk together, laugh together, and enjoy long private silences, looking into each other’s eyes quickly, looking away.

“Would you want to marry me, Sture? You act as if you’re afraid of me, afraid to be a friend. Would you go to a dance with me before you leave for Pennsylvania? I’d like that. That’s the way you could pay me back for helping with Tuffy.”

She looks straight into Cap’s eyes, not looking away this time. Cap tries to look back into hers but is so confused he needs to look away. He raises his good arm and puts the back of his hand across his face. He tries to keep his voice in control as he speaks, his hand turned backward over his eyes. He thinks of how he was almost blind, how he fought for his sight.

“Sally, I’m too old for you. I’m too old even for myself. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to drive a racing car again. I’ve lost something inside, a way of believing everything would always turn out all right, that nothing could really hurt me. I’m beginning to be afraid, Sally. If you’re going to race cars, you can’t be afraid or you’ll get hurt.

“That’s how I had this crash. I was afraid and trying to make myself think I wasn’t. I took stupid chances at the wrong time because I wasn’t in tune with myself.

“You’d best forget you ever knew me. I’m an outsider, a wanderer, and I guess I’ll always be one. You’ll make a good wife to some real man, and a fine mother to beautiful babies. That’s what you need, not a vagrant type like me. God, I’m old enough to be your father. How old are you, anyway?”

“I’m twenty, Sture. And I’m old enough not to believe what you’re saying. You only say those things because you’re discouraged here in the hospital. You’ll be yourself when you get out, get driving again.”

Cap looks at her. She’s saying what he’d like to believe, but he knows it isn’t true. Still, he’s glad to hear her say it.

When Cap finally is out of the hospital, Sally comes regularly to see him. She goes on long walks with Tuffy and Cap in the pine barrens. They talk about all the things they’d never talked about to anyone else before. Cap tells how he loved the animals on his parents’ farm, how he talked to them, how much he enjoyed school.

Sally tells how she hated school, couldn’t do the work; always wanted to run away to Hollywood. Sally tells how she’s bored with her job at the telephone company, how she hardly gets breaks even to go to the bathroom; how the other operators are coarse and mean.

Cap discovers that Sally smokes cigarettes. He embarrassedly tells her how his lungs are burned out and he can’t be around cigarette smoke. Sally snuffs out the cigarette she’s smoking and says she’s been looking for an excuse to quit, that it’s a filthy and expensive habit and she only started because her friends at the telephone company smoke.

Here, walking in the woods with a young lion we have two people. One looking like the classic flapper, giving the appearance of being fast, as loose as the women she’s imitating; yet actually, naive, inexperienced, scared. And the other, our Cap, brave beyond reason, gifted above all, man among men, however also scared, unprepared for the hard life he can see looming before him. They fall into each other, both feeling they’ve found the perfect blend of humanity and an ideal of the opposite sex they wanted but of which they were afraid.

Sally starts coming directly from work to Sture. Cap sends a telegram to the racing team saying he’ll meet them in Detroit, that he isn’t well enough to race yet.

When they first sleep together in Sture’s cabin, they’re both virgins. They come to the end of play-acting against the wall of physical reality. Their unsuccessful efforts only increase the mental, spiritual bonding between them as they laugh uncontrolledly at their mutual ineptitude.

They’d locked Tuffy in the small bathroom, and, after laughing, they cry together, then sleep together, wrapped in each other’s arms, legs, knowing the end of aloneness. Sture’s whole life, his reasons for living are changed.

When Cap goes to Detroit, Sally quits her job and goes with him. Cap insists they get married but Sally puts him off. She finally agrees to a civil marriage before a justice of the peace in Elkton, Maryland. Her only concern is that she not get pregnant. Sally is willing to be married but not ready to be a mother. Sture represents love, affection, passion; a chance to get away from the boredom of her life, but she still clings to her aspiration of being something on her own.

They’re now comfortable with each other sexually and blossom in the joy of discovering their long-suppressed sensuality.

Tuffy rides cramped in the back seat of the motorcar. He’s accepted Sally easily into the pride but is perhaps feeling somewhat displaced by her in Cap’s affection.

The drive from Atlantic City to Detroit is a marvel to Sally. She’s never been farther than Philadelphia and rarely has ridden in a motorcar. The entire experience makes her glad she’s left her job. She feels guilty not being able to send the five dollars from her pay check home to her mother, but Cap says he’ll make that up. Since they’re married, that seems all right to Sally.

At Detroit, Cap drives on a dirt half-mile track, difficult and dangerous driving. He finds he not only can’t pull away from the pack, take the lead, he can barely keep up with it. The team figures he is still suffering from his last accident and needs a few races under his belt to get his nerve again. But Cap knows otherwise. He knows he’ll never be willing to take the kinds of risks he’s always taken without thinking. Now he’s thinking too much. He’s thinking of Tuffy, of Sally, of himself. He’s no longer just a comfortable, natural animal.

He races twice more, first at Omaha on a mile track and then at Altoona, Pennsylvania. He’s scheduled next to race in Laurel, Maryland. In both races he’s had the same problem. It’s as if he’s forgotten how to do something perfectly simple, like walking or milking a cow. He knows what he has to do but he can’t get himself to do it.

The worst thing is he doesn’t even want to force himself to it any more. He not only can’t drive competitively, he doesn’t want to. In Altoona, Cap and Sally stay with Tuffy in a lodge outside town.

Sally cuddles against Sture, puts her arms across his chest, whispers in his ear.

“Don’t talk like that, Sture. You know you’re the best driver around, as good as De Palo or Shaw or Bill Cummings or any of them.”

“Yeah, maybe I’m good as Frank Lockhardt and look what happened to him. I was there. And I don’t really think I was ever as good as those guys. I’m a lot better mechanic than any of them but I’m just not crazy-mad enough to be an outstanding driver. Sometimes they drive almost as if they want to be killed.”

“Please, don’t say those things, Sture. It scares me.”

“Well, it scares me, too, Sally. It’s what I’m trying to tell you, I’m scared.

“Look, Sally, honest, I know you came off with me because you thought I was a big-shot automobile racer and now you find out I’m so scared I can hardly get myself to ride a kiddy car. If you want to go home I’ll give you the money and you can just forget you ever knew me. It’d be the best thing. We could get a quick divorce, and since you feel we’ve never really been married, since it wasn’t in the church, you can go to confession and start out fresh again.”

There’s a long silence. Sally lifts herself with her elbows on Sture’s chest. “Is that what you really think of me, Cap? Do you think I ran away with you just because you’re an automobile driver? Do you really think that?”

“What I really think, Sally, is I want you to feel married to me and stay with me. But I also want you to know what I can and can’t do. I don’t want you to be sorry afterward.”

So they make love again, the most complete and somehow least complete of all communications. The next day, Sture tells Sally his plan.

“Listen, Sally, I have just over ten thousand dollars in the bank right now. I know if I keep racing I’ll only get worse, and I’m sure to get hurt or killed. I’m a menace now to the other drivers as well as myself.

“I thought of buying a garage and running that, but I’m still not ready to settle down and I don’t think you are either. So tell me what you think of this idea.”

Cap looks at Sally. They’re having coffee in their cabin. Tuffy has been fed and is asleep under the table with his chin on Cap’s foot.

“I know of a car for sale. It’s a 1930 Model T Ford Miller 91 with a Fronty overhead valve conversion. It’s narrow, light, and I know some things I can do to make it a perfect sprint car. Then, instead of racing in this crazy race scene with international and top-flight drivers I can race the dirt tracks, the county fairs. With this car I could win easily and beat out the local cowboys with their souped-up jobs. I can buy the car and a Ford truck in good condition with a trailer to haul it with and we could be off. What’d’ya think of the idea, Sal?”

“Is that what you want, Sture? I want you to be happy and I don’t want you to get hurt.”

“It sounds fine to me and we could take Tuffy along in the truck. I could probably fix him a place to live in there; it’s big enough. The team’s getting nervous about Tuffy anyway and I hate leaving him alone all the time when I race. He’s liable to break out from one of these cabins, then some idiot of a sheriff will most likely shoot him.”

“It sounds wonderful, Sture. We could go from one county fairground to the other and it wouldn’t be so dangerous, would it?”

“Safer than driving on the road. I think we could have a good time all the way. There’s all kinds of betting at those county fairs, and we can make more money that way, too, with you doing the betting and me doing the driving. We’d make out great. I think anybody’d be glad losing money to a pretty girl like you.”

Sture bought his Ford Model T Miller converted Fronty and a truck to pull it. He paid $5,000 for the entire rig, half of his capital. At that time, a good job paid $25 a week; $5,000 was four years’ hard work.

Sture tinkered with that car for a month, making the conversions and adaptations he thought would turn it into the ideal “sprint car,” a car that could get going fast and maneuver easily. Sture knew his car wouldn’t have much of a chance in big-time racing, because there’s nothing more obsolete than last year’s car, but it could be a winner on dirt-track sprinting.

And he was right. Cap Modig became the terror of county fairs. With his jackrabbit car he’d get off fast and hold his lead for the short runs.

The typical race would have four qualifying laps to shake out all the cars not fast enough for racing. Then there’d be a trophy dash to determine the fastest four cars. These four cars would then compete in the main event. The main event would usually be twenty-five or fifty laps on a half-mile track.

Cap won more than his share. Sally did the betting, and even at short odds would usually more than equal the prize money Cap won.

The most dangerous part for Sture was that the tracks were so short he’d have to lap some of the worst drivers before the end. Some of these cowboys wouldn’t pull over to let him by. He wasn’t afraid so much for himself as he was for the car: half of his capital was tied up in it.

He kept working on the car after every race, tinkering, tuning up, making minor improvements. It was a good life for the two of them. They bought a tent and they’d usually camp near the fairground, but not too near because of Tuffy.

Cap and Sally lived this roving life for three years, moving with the seasons. Tuffy was developing into a full-grown lion. He could already pull off a roar, and his mane was thickening and darkening. He was still playful and would wrestle with Cap evenings. When Cap wrestled with Tuffy, sometimes the local people would come out to where he was staying and watch. Cap could probably make as much money wrestling Tuffy as they were making on the track.

The meat bills for Tuffy were a major factor in the budget. Sally, partly out of jealousy, partly fear, and partly resentment at the cost, kept encouraging Cap to sell Tuffy or give him to a zoo.

Cap knew he’d have to do something, sooner or later, with Tuffy, before an accident happened; but he couldn’t think of Tuffy in a cage all the time with no company and he knew that something of his own sense of security, his deepest joy, was invested in Tuffy. It was a fine thing for a man like Cap owning an honest-to-goodness full-maned lion, especially since Sally still didn’t want to have children. She said it would be impossible being on the road all the time. She was young; they could wait till they settled down.

Cap would buy his meat for Tuffy from local butchers and sometimes at horse-slaughtering houses. Tuffy needed about ten pounds of meat a day. He used his teeth to pull the last meat off a bone, and his jaws were so strong he could crunch down and splinter a horse or cow thigh bone to get at the marrow. But his favorites were the cheapest meats: the kidneys, lungs, and intestines.

Cap loved to watch Tuffy eat. The lion’s claws would actually dig into the bone as he held it to gnaw off the meat. Cap could almost understand why people were afraid of lions. Meanwhile, Sally was getting less and less comfortable around Tuffy. She told Cap it scared her when he stared at her as if he could wish her away.

One of Cap’s favorite positions was lying with his head on Tuffy’s chest, snuggled under his forelegs. Sometimes when Cap tried to get up, Tuffy loosened his top leg and flopped it across Cap’s face without unleashing his claws. The claws were now each more than an inch long, and sharp. A vet near Kalamazoo, Michigan, one Cap took Tuffy to when he had a cold, said Tuffy should be declawed, but Cap wouldn’t have it done.

Cap even liked the smell of Tuffy, especially just after he’d been brushed. He had the smell of the first sweat on a man before the air gets to it and turns it sour, not nervous sweat, but honest, hard-work sweat. But Tuffy’s smell couldn’t be from hard work; lions are among the laziest creatures in the world. If they’re fed they’ll sleep most of the time or just lie around.

In New Jersey, at a small county-fair track not far from Asbury Park, Sally and Cap are walking down the midway of a traveling carnival that has set up beside the track. Sometimes a race meeting lasts four or five days and carnivals like this take advantage of the crowds. They pitch their tents and set up equipment: small Ferris wheels, merry-go-rounds, various rides, sideshows, and other acts.

It is in the evening after the last day of racing. Cap has won two races. He and Sally are walking down the midway of the carnival, late, after most of the crowds have gone.

There are booths for pitching baseballs against metal milk bottles, or popping balloons with darts, or banging a sledgehammer on a scale to ring a bell—all the sucker traps that make carnivals fun.

At the end, closing off the runway, are two interesting setups. One is a boxing ring with a really beat-up-looking pug sitting on a small ring stool. The ropes of the ring are covered with red velvet. The manager of the act, a bald-headed, middle-aged, well-pouched man, is sitting on the edge of the ring at the feet of his fighter. The fighter has heavy eye ridges from many poundings, and both ears are cauliflowered. There are thickened scars on his brows and on his cheeks. He’s sitting with his back to the ring, his arms looped over the ropes, his gloves on his hands, but the laces loosened. He looks to Cap like somebody who’s really been through the mill, someone, like himself, who has too many scars. The promoter yells over to Cap.

“Hey there, feller, you look tough. Why not give my boy a workout? There’s nobody around to bet so it’ll only cost you ten bucks; if you can stay in there with him for three rounds it’s worth a hundred to you. What d’ya think, make a big impression on your pretty girlfriend there?”

It’s only a half-serious proposition; he doesn’t even stand up. Cap strolls over, shakes hands with the promoter, with the fighter. The fighter pulls off his glove and shakes with his bandaged hand. Cap sees the fighter is slow, standing up shakily, somewhat back on his heels, rocking above them, looking down, practically expressionless, a slight smile revealing missing teeth in front, probably has just about as many teeth left as Sture. But Cap feels this man, even fighting on instinct, would be deadly close in, past his prime but still out of any ordinary person’s class, just as Cap now is as a driver.

“Nope. I wouldn’t have a chance with the champ there. I drive cars, couldn’t punch my way out of an empty apple box.”

The manager cocks his head, birdlike, looks closer at Cap.

“Hey, you’re the guy won that race today, ain’t you, the one people say has a full-grown lion with him somewhere, that right?”

“That’s right.”

“Ya know, I was thinking about that lion when I heard about it. We could have him declawed and he could fight my boy here the way they do with kangaroos. It’d be an act nobody could resist; we could go big time with an act like that, a boxer fighting a lion. He don’t bite or nothin’, does he?”

Cap smiles, looks at Sally. Her eyes are wide open, listening, watching. She still hasn’t had much experience with carny folks, their wild ideas, their dreams, impossible propositions. Cap smiles at the promoter.

“Naw, he’s not for sale. And besides, even with his claws pulled, he’d knock your boy right out of the ring, probably break his neck. A full-grown lion can snap the back of a mature horse or buffalo with one swipe; they’ve got power in the shoulders you wouldn’t believe. They make Jim Thorpe look like a marshmallow.”

“Well, just thought I’d ask. Could you tell me why you’re keeping that lion anyway; going to teach him to drive a car or something like that? He must cost a fortune just to feed.”

“No, he’s a friend, a pet. I bought him down in San Diego when he was a cub, in a bar there. I don’t actually know what I’ll do with him in the end. Maybe give him to a zoo someday. I hate to think of it.”

They talk a few minutes more then move over to another attraction next door that’s been interesting Cap since they set it up. It’s one of those “Wall of Death” acts. They’ve put up a huge wooden bowl twenty-five feet high or so, with straight wooden sides. These sides are held together by wide metal straps screwed tight on the outside of the wall. There are steps up to a catwalk around the top from which people can look down inside to see the act.

There’s also a platform in front of this Wall of Death where the performers do tricks to attract crowds.

Into the platform are built rollers. The performers ride their motorcycles on those rollers.

Cap’d gone by before and seen the riders dipping and doing tricks, running the bikes on the rollers. They’d made a lot of noise and done some impressive tricks such as standing on the seats of the motorcycles. Once Cap saw one of them stand on his hands using the handles of the motorcycle. He wondered what they did on the inside, if they did any of the tricks in there they did on the rollers. It had to be like some of those high-banked fast curves at Des Moines. If you got out of your car there, you could hardly stand on the track.

Two guys are on the platform out front. They’ve got one of the motorcycles, an Indian, broken down and are working on it. The mechanic in Cap, as well as the driver, is fascinated. It looks as if they’re trying to adjust the timing. He stops and watches; one of them looks up, smiles, then looks again. He turns to the other driver, working on the other bike.

“Hey, Jimmy. Here’s the guy who drove that Ford Fronty job and won today.”

They both turn back to Cap.

“Boy, those rubes didn’t know what hit them; they didn’t have a chance against that machine and you really drove them into the ground. Hey, you’re Cap Modig, ain’t you? Holy cow! I didn’t recognize you today. You’ve always been one of my big heroes, one of the real drivers, one who came out of the garage; a mechanic, not just some rich playboy.

“Gees, I thought you got killed in a crash in Atlantic City or something!”

“Not quite; just banged up some. But it finished me for big-time racing. Maybe that’s why you thought I was dead. I raced a couple more times but I’d lost it.”

The two young men are standing. For them it’s like looking at the ghost of Valentino or Caruso or even Frank Lockhardt. They’re both young, strong, full of life, greasy-shirted, greasy-handed, nails and cuticles packed with black dirt the way it is for anyone who works all the time with machines.

They make Cap feel old. They’re both under thirty and the younger one probably a long way from thirty, maybe under twenty. The younger one swings his leg up over the machine he’s been working on, another Indian; he rolls it off the kick stand and pushes it over the rollers.

“Ever try one of these, Mr. Modig? It’s the greatest thrill in the world, almost like flying.”

He looks over at Sally, who’s leaning on Cap’s arm, taking it all in, fascinated.

“Honest, Mr. Modig, you ought to try. We’ve got these bikes specially geared for that wall in there. You got to get up fast or you’re dead; a driver like you would love it.”

He’s playing to Sally. She leans tighter against Sture and he puts his hand over hers.

“I drove one of those Indians once, but I’ve never raced one. I only borrowed a machine and took a few short trips. That damned engine scared me, I must admit, all that power between my legs. But it’s a thrill all right.”

The young one kicks his engine over and guns it a few times. The boxer and his manager look across. Then the young driver strips off his undershirt in the cool evening air. He has an eagle astride a motorcycle tattooed on the top of his left shoulder. His body is tight, muscular, a gymnast’s build. He’s short, not more than five feet seven, not much taller than Sally, and he’s wearing high-heeled boots.

He begins by larking and dipping, his own speed keeping him up as with a gyroscope. He stands on the seat, first holding on to the handlebars then letting go. He’s locked the accelerator cable so the engine keeps up its speed. He stretches out his arms, then swivels his hips so the motorcycle tips left and right, synchronized with his swivel. He smiles, bright, wild-eyed, cocky. He knows he’s good and keeps his eye on Sally.

Cap thinks it’s hard not to wish he’d get down before he hurts himself. Cap knows it’s only carny corn and he and Sally are probably more in danger themselves standing there. That motorcycle might catch or turn and swing off the platform at them, but something in him won’t flinch. He moves himself slightly in front of Sally to protect her in case something does happen. Finally, the young fellow lowers himself back onto the seat, unhooks the accelerator throttle, shifts down, and leaves the motor purring on the rollers, wheels stilled.

“Come on, try it, Mr. Modig. It’s the real thing.”

Cap knows he’s being egged on but it’s the kind of temptation he can’t resist. Almost any machine, any risk situation, has a strong attraction for him. If it weren’t for this personality flaw he wouldn’t’ve wound up riding cars at county fairs trailing around a grown lion. If it isn’t hard, it isn’t interesting to Cap Modig.

Cap springs onto the platform, playing young, slightly pulling his hurt leg by hurdling with a one-handed vault. He takes the handlebars from the kid and swings his good leg over the bike. It’s a wide, comfortable seat. Cap checks all the controls, accelerator, brakes, gears, revs it a few times with his feet still flat on the platform.

He shifts carefully into first and lets out the clutch. The wheels start, and as the gyroscopic effect comes on, he slowly lifts his feet and hooks them into the foot pegs. It’s a strange feeling having the back wheels turning and the bike going nowhere. The bike’s taken on life, but there’s no pull of acceleration. He shifts up one more gear, gives it more gas, adjusts the magneto a fraction for more spark. Then, gently at first, he starts dipping as if he’s going into and out of curves. He finds it really is a good feeling, some of the thrill in driving without all the fear. You’re not going to run into anything and nothing can run into you.

But Sture finds the old devil is still there inside, urging him to stand up on that seat, show up the young bastard making eyes at Sally. But, at the same time, he knows he’s liable to break his neck and it wouldn’t prove anything anyway, so he lets up on the accelerator, comes to a halt, switches off the motor, rolls the machine back off its rollers, and swings down the kick stand.

This time he lifts his bad leg up high over the seat trying not to wince. There’s still a piece of shrapnel dug into his femur high on the inside of his leg near the hip joint. The doctors at Metz said it wasn’t worth taking out, they’d do more harm than good just cutting through muscle to get at it.

Two days later, while Cap is strapping his car up onto the truck, the older of those two with the motorcycles comes over. Cap and Sally are ready to take off for a track just about fifteen miles away in Wall township. It’s another dirt track on a county fairground.

The young fellow stands around watching. Cap figures he has something on his mind. Tuffy is tied under the truck and stays quiet, looking out. Cap’s trained him to stay under there to keep from scaring people half to death. Cap looks up and smiles at this guy, who smiles back, lights a cigarette, offers him one. Cap refuses. He couldn’t smoke. With the little bit of lung he has left after his gassing, just being around someone smoking is almost impossible. Sal has kept her promise and hasn’t smoked since they got married.

The young guy rocks back and forth on his boots.

“Hey, you wouldn’t be interested in a trade, would you?”

Cap stands up. He doesn’t understand what this is about. He looks under the truck at Tuffy. Does he want to trade something for Tuffy? Maybe he wants to trade something for Sally; maybe the young guy put him up to it.

“Look, I’ll trade my whole rig over there, wall, bikes, truck, the whole thing, for your car and that truck. You can keep the lion.”

He peeks again at Tuffy, who’s asleep. He stamps out his just-lit cigarette.

Cap’s reaction is that this man must be crazy. It’s like asking somebody if they want to trade lives.

Cap pulls hard on one of the straps holding his car in place and looks to see if there’s anything serious here. It’s a crazy idea, but he’s half interested. He knows sooner or later some fool’s going to crash into him or he’s liable to do something dumb himself. He stops and puts his hands on his hips, listening.

“I tell you there’s a good living to be made with that wall. You have to travel most of the year but you’re already doing that. I know getting a bike up on the wall and doing a few little stunts would be nothing for a real classy race driver like you.

“If you want, I know Jimmy’ll stay around and do most of the stunt stuff for you, anyway. He’s absolutely crazy to go up there and put on his act. I give him fifteen dollars a week and found; he really earns it. He’s a hard worker putting up and taking down that wall, too. That’s the worst part, getting the damned thing up and taking it down again each time. I talked to Jimmy about it and he’ll stay with the act if you decide you want to trade. But we ain’t got no contract or nothin’, you can just dump him if you want.”

Cap’s thinking. Do they really want to live the carny life? He knows if something happens to his car he’ll wind up a grease monkey in a garage somewhere working for somebody else. He’s not ready. He’s not sure he could take the gaff he’d have to put up with just staying alive, keeping a job.

Running a motorcycle around a wall is one hell of a long way from being a war hero and race driver, but then he knows he’s not a race driver any more, no hero either. He’s already halfway to being a carny man without even knowing it. Next thing he’ll be one of the geeks eating raw chickens, stomping around naked with his bald head and bum leg for people to laugh at.

“Tell me, what’s your typical daily or weekly take when you run that thing?”

The young motorcycle driver lights another cigarette, strikes the kitchen match from his pocket by running it down the side of his overalls.

“Depends. Depends on the place and time of year. If you can find a good summer concession in a place like Atlantic City or here in Asbury Park, something like that, you can really rake it in. Maybe, if you work up a good enough act, you could practically live the rest of the year on what you make summers.

“Little short gigs like this fair don’t last long enough and there’s not enough people; it’s hardly worth putting the wall up and taking it down. Yesterday we only took in thirty-two dollars, but the day before it was almost fifty.”

He stops, letting smoke curl across his face in the evening light. He looks over Cap’s head, staring.

“I tell you one thing, though. It’s what got me thinking about this whole idea of trading. You have a real ace-in-the-hole with this here lion of yours. If you could get that big cat to sit in a sidecar and let himself be driven around a wall, you’d have a regular gold mine. You’d scare people out of their wits with a full-grown lion roaring as he goes around and with no cage between him and them. I’ll bet you’d make over a hundred dollars a day right on the boardwalk at Asbury. Or you could check other places like Wildwood, Atlantic City, or even Cape May. Being scared is what people come into this kind of act for; they want to be scared without taking any real risks. That’s why they go to races and circuses, too, right?”

Cap knows it’s true but hasn’t thought about it much. He’s wondering just what he’s doing with his life. Maybe he should go back and take over the farm. His dad’s getting too old for the job and his mother’s slowing down.

“O.K., but what’s your angle? What is it you want out of this? If you’ve got such a good deal why give it up?”

“I want to race a really good car. All my life I’ve wanted to race but could never get up enough money for a honest fast job. If I can’t win some with that one you’ve got there I’ll never do it. It’s sort of a last chance.”

Cap thinks how, in a certain way, it’s a last chance for each of them. They stroll over to the Wall of Death, half dismantled. Chuck, the owner, with whom he’s been talking, shows Cap how it’s done, how the whole thing can be put up or broken down in about four hours. Cap looks over the bikes and listens to the motors on each of them; the pistons on one sound sloppy but that would be easy to fix. Jimmy’s standing around watching, something like a slave at a slave auction. In a sense, he’s being sold with the rest of the chattel and isn’t even sure if the new master will want him.

Cap takes his car off the truck and lets Chuck run it around the dirt track a few times. He gives him some hints about a slight pull to the left and how this pull can be used making tight turns on a counter-clockwise track. Sally stands beside Cap as they watch Chuck push the car around some turns. Cap sees this young feller might make a fair racer with experience but probably won’t win much, even with the Fronty.

Sally holds on to his arm.

“Do you really think you’ll do this, Cap?”

“What do you want, Sal? We can still back out of this whole thing you know, or we can keep on with the racing, or get into this carnival stuff.”

Cap waves his free arm back at the carnival area. Most of the tents and trailers have pulled out. The boxing ring is dismantled and being stored on another truck.

“I want to do whatever you want, Cap! I’ll be happy wherever you are, no matter what you’re doing. But I hate to think of you riding a motorcycle around on that wooden wall; I’m afraid you’ll get hurt. What keeps the motorcycle up there anyway? Is there some kind of trick?”

“No, it’s just the speed of the motorcycle pushing out against the wall holds it up, the same way you can swing a pail of water around, have it upside down, and the water doesn’t spill out, sticks there in the pail.”

Sally smiles, reaches over, pulls Sture’s head down close, and kisses him.

“Can you imagine? I’ve never swung a pail around in a circle. Does that show I’m not a farm girl?”

“Just means you haven’t had a chance. I think you’d make a darned good farm girl myself.”

Cap pulls her around in front of him, holds her out at arm’s length, looks her up and down.

“You look kinda strong to me, lady, and feel those muscles.”

He pretends to squeeze them as Sally pulls up her short cape sleeves and crooks her arm to make a muscle.

“I really do have muscles for a girl, don’t I? Maybe it’s from plugging in and taking out all those telephone lines.”

“There is something else we can do, Sal, go back to the farm. I’ve been thinking I’d rather do that than be a mechanic if it comes right down to it. I’d like to go back to that farm and have a whole passel of kids.”

“I’m not ready for anything like that yet, Sture. Give me some more growing time.”

Sally comes close to Cap. He looks over her head. Chuck’s stopped the motorcar and is walking around it. He comes up to them.

“Well, it’s O.K. with me if it’s O.K. with you.”

Cap looks at Sally and she looks at him. She smiles. And so it was done. They traded lives.