Part 10
"I'm a hospital volunteer," Joe Quinn said. "Name of Joe Quinn. "I'm a retired engineer, and my goddaughter is a nurse, and when I said retired people should do things for the community, well you know how these conversations go, so here I am. I have learned two things about you: you like motor racing, and you don't like pain killers. So I am supposed to distract you with interesting facts about racing, since I have filled my head with all sorts of useless information on the subject, or irk you with my company so much that you want to take those pills."
"I already know which nurse this goddaughter is."
"You have my goddaughter quite perplexed," Joe said. "You appear to present a professional problem, the most trying of her career thus far. Don't worry, you won't be the last. Now I've never had a surgery. Lucky, I guess. You can bet I'd be taking whatever they gave me to take, though I've never taken anything like that. Now if they'd had something like that when I had my wisdom teeth out, I would have taken it for sure. That was the worst pain I ever had in my life. In those days, they didn't have all this fancy laser surgery and modern painkillers. Now it is no big deal. As you can probably tell me."
"No, I can't say I can."
"Well, if you have to have them out in the next few years, it won't be nearly as bad as this," Joe said. "You'll be out again in no time. Now this here, you're going to be held up a long time as it is, and it's going to hurt a long time, and hurt a lot worse than my boring stories from the past, and that's saying a lot. But if you want to take this stuff, I'll sit here with you, and make sure nobody pesters you. I come highly recommended. My goddaughter can tell you I've never hurt a fly. I mean, I have swatted a few flies here and there. But I can yell really loud. In the pit crews at Indy, you have to, or nobody is going to hear a word you say."
Zander started to smile in spite of himself.
"Who did you crew for?" he asked.
"Who didn't I crew for? In those days, everything wasn't so organized. You can see I'm not really all that young. There was Bill Vukovich and Bob Sweikert. Jimmy Bryant, Al Kelley, Johnny Boyd, Rodger Ward. You've never heard of them, I bet. Way back before your time. I'll never forget the race in '55. Vukie was killed in that race. He only drove one way, which was fast and hard."
Joe Quinn went on, by this time he was cranking away like he always did, like around the kitchen table after dinner. Whenever he would stop for a bit, Danny or Tim or Brad or Quinn would ask him a question or ask him what happened next. Zander Smith didn't do this, but whenever Joe paused, he was still looking at him and didn't look too annoyed. Joe thought it worth another spin. Maybe I can put him to sleep, he thought.
He didn't sleep. But he did ask what happened next a couple of times. Joe kept spinning away, he talked about the Brickyard, and different kinds of cars, and Daytona and Dover and the Poconos.
He veered off into his college days at Notre Dame and how he played baseball there. "Baseball, not football, doesn't that figure? We were like next to nothing," he said. He started on what Quinn called his Baseball Stories, the crazy doings of the characters who had played with him on that team. Finally, Zander Smith closed his eyes. Joe Quinn smiled. A couple more of the outfielder's silly pranks, and the patient would be out of consciousness of pain for awhile.
