March 24, 2009 — Having just discovered CARS . . . and not finding any decent novels or really engaging stories in books that folks older, as well as younger, might enjoy . . . I thought I'd try my hand at the kind of story here that I'd like to read myself. Even though I'm working on wrapping up a story in another realm here, I just couldn't keep myself from starting this one!

My thanks to Disney's Pixar Animation Studios for creating and owning the movie CARS and its characters. Keep turning out these inspiring cinematic home runs!

Oh, and as Mater would warn, "Of course, there be a few spoilers from the original picture 'round here, sure as snow makes a highway slick! So 'ya might wanta 'git and see it furst!"

Enjoy!

— Norwesterner

It was late in the evening when Mack pulled back into town, hauling by what had now become known as Lightning McQueen's Radiator Springs Racing Team . . . everyone else insisted he keep his name in the title. The team now occupied two trailers. But ol' Mack didn't mind the extra load.

Most of the team traveled in the lead trailer, loading through the side, while Lightning traveled in the second trailer so he could still make his flashy arrivals out the rear. Both trailers were connected by rubber bellows. But while the cars could all talk, or draw curtains across as they liked . . . they just couldn't really crawl past each other inside and change places. They tried that once, but the result wasn't pretty!

Lightning had rearranged his own traveling quarters as well though, so that he could share them with at least one of his teammates. That's what he called them, and practically everyone in Radiator Springs now . . .

— — — — —

"We are all a team . . . and teammates now," Lightning decided to tell everyone when they had gathered at Flo's one evening a while back. "Both the final race of last season, and the first couple of this season, have been the best races of my life. They haven't been great because I won, or came close. They've been great because you've been there — or back here in town — supporting me, urging me on. Knowing you've been behind me has given me an energy, determination, and . . ." he paused a minute, "joy . . . yes, joy . . . that I've never known before."

Sally was practically tearing up as she nudged up against him approvingly, and there wasn't a dry eye among any of the cars or trucks gathered around anymore.

"Way to go, Stickers!" she whispered to him encouragingly, as she closed her eyes and continued to nuzzle him.

While he tried his best not to be pleasantly distracted by Sally, even she noticed the effect she was having on him. She backed away just a little while straightening herself up.

Lightning endeavored to continue. "I-I may be the one out there on the track. But I'm there only because of you all. And while I once raced alone, and was a 'one car show' . . . I would no longer want to be out there without you . . . all of you. This is my home now. And all of you are the friends — practically the family — I never had before."

"We're in this together. We're a team!" he concluded enthusiastically, amid everyone's cheers. "The oils are on me!" The cheers then grew even louder.

After the talk and celebrating went on a while longer, things eventually died down and everyone started to head for home.

"Sorry to distract you there, Stickers," Sally quietly said to him as she and Lightning left together. "I'll try not to do it again."

"Hey, what if I don't mind being distracted . . ." he said warmly back to her.

— — — — —

Lightning enjoyed that memory again as he sleepily looked out the window, seeing the now familiar Radiator Springs Drive-In theatre slip by.

Almost home . . . and almost seeing Sally again, he contentedly thought to himself, as he looked back at Mater dozing away in front of him.

Mack finally came to a halt on the still bare lot that was to become the team headquarters, and opened the trailer doors remotely while broadcasting on the videocom, "Here we are everybody! Home Sweet Home Radiator Springs!"

As Lightning yawned, Mater stretched, causing a crash as he inadvertently knocked down a shelf of Lightning's bobblehead cars.

"Mater! Be careful in here," Lightning warned him. "Things are a lot closer in here than in your own garage. Come to think of it, you don't have anything in your garage, do you?"

"Sawry Lightnin'. This be prob'ly why," Mater noted apologetically.

While he sometimes got irritated with the problems his friend caused and the messes he made, Lightning could never really get mad at Mater.

Mater tried to put the shelf and its trinkets back up, but they kept falling back down.

"Aw, it's okay, Mater. Just put it all off to the side, and we'll have Guido put it all back, okay? He's better at that than either of us," Lightning said, wanting to be able to get out of the trailer before morning came, as much as anything else.

"Thanks, Lightnin'. I'll done make this up to you, I will!" Mater said as he gently pushed the shelf and trinkets off to one side before he started to back out of the trailer.

Lightning finally emerged from the trailer to a small gathered crowd of teammates, townsfolk, and a fair number of visitors now. Even his arrivals home were now becoming a tourist attraction in themselves. While he was always glad to see a crowd greet him, and the cameras flash around him . . . Lightning found himself looking for just one face in the crowd, but he wasn't seeing it again.

Finally a blue streak pulled up from the distance, raising some dust as it came to a stop on the lot and slowly made its way through the crowd.

"Sorry I'm late, Stickers!" Sally said almost breathlessly. "Running both our growing business empires is making me forget to even gas up and eat sometimes!"

"Yeah, I understand . . . business first." Lightning said through his teeth with a barely disguised degree of almost glum resignation, as he put on a forced smile for his camera-wielding fans again.

"What?" Sally asked, detecting something was wrong.

"Not here, not now, okay?" Lightning again said quietly through his forced smile.

"Yeah . . . okay . . ." Sally said looking down, suddenly feeling quite stung by his unusual abruptness.

"I'll be back at the Cozy Cone's office, okay?" she continued feeling downcast, excusing herself and making her way back through the assembled crowd.

"Sally . . ." Lightning called after her, trying but unable to push through the crowd himself for the moment.

Sally heard him, but didn't stop. She knew she had been preoccupied, but she didn't feel she deserved what she had just experienced. "I've been working hard for both of us!" she said tearfully as she drove the short distance back to the Cozy Cone. "Being cut off and shut up like that is not fair!"

Sally also couldn't help continuing to feel that she was a distraction to Lightning when he was 'on the job' — either racing, or greeting fans and the press. She had also seen the racing and celebrity scene, both on TV and when she was a hot-shot attorney in Los Angeles — how lady cars just hung themselves all over centers of attention like Lightning. If it's one thing Sally absolutely refused to be though, it was becoming just another beautiful but brainless celebrity 'hood ornament' . . . even to Lightning!

Sally motored in behind her desk at the motel's lobby. But she couldn't focus on work anymore.

"Aaarrrggghhh," she quietly groaned in frustration, getting out from behind her desk, turning out the lights and going to bed in her own cone.

Finally excusing himself for the night from the crowd, Lightning motored cautiously back to the Cozy Cone. He could see that Sally had been ticked, even hurt by what he'd said. He inwardly regretted the way things had happened this evening during their all-too-short reunion.

"I can't have real conversations in the middle of crowds!" he justified to himself. "Besides, she's almost never there when I come home . . . and she's never joined me on the road or at races yet, like most everyone else in town has by now! Why? Why does she ignore me, neglect me like that? I thought we cared about each other!"

By the time he arrived at the 'Cone, Lightning was so steamed that he was almost glad that Sally had turned the lights out and gone to bed in her own cone.

"Fine!" he muttered under his exhaust. "I don't want to talk to you either tonight!" he continued as he motored into his own Cone Number One, practically slamming the door down behind him.

Sally heard that slamming. "Don't you dare wreck that cone!" she said under her own exhaust. Settling onto her mats for the night, Sally now found tears in her eyes however.

"I've missed you, Stickers," she quietly whispered to herself. "Why is this happening between us? Why are we getting so busy that there's no time for drives . . . no time for talk anymore? Things need to be done in each of our worlds; but why are things happening the way they are?"

Sally had no answers as she switched off her light and tried to go to sleep.

Outside on the road in front of his own practice, Doc Hudson had been watching, and hearing what had been happening between Sally and Lightning.

He'd seen it before . . .

— — — — —

It was a crowded dirt track on a busy race day. The sun was hot, the roars of dozens of racecars warming up and taking practice laps was loud, almost deafening, and the dust was choking. In the middle of the ramshackle pits, a young, preoccupied racing coordinator was carrying a load of paperwork and announcements towards the announcer's tower. She bumped into a racecar as she hurried.

"Hey! Watch where you're going!" the dark blue racecar growled, ticked at being jostled like that.

"I'm sorry!" the coordinator apologized as her papers now spilled around her in the pit area.

"Oh miss, I didn't see. I'm sorry . . ." the racecar now apologized as well, spellbound at finally seeing the light pink Cadillac Deville sedan that had been hidden behind that stack of papers.

"That's . . . fine . . ." she said back to him, now equally spellbound at her first sight of him, and admiring his sleek design and curved, bold lettering proclaiming to all who he was.

"Uhh . . . let me help you with all that, miss . . ." the racecar now offered.

"Thank you . . ." the attractive coordinator blushed, now allowing herself to stare openly at him as they worked together to gather the papers up.

— — — — —

Doc had seen that encounter blossom into a promising relationship over the rest of that 1951 season, and the following one as well. But he had seen that each car had allowed things to get in the way . . . pride, stubbornness, urgent things that had to be done, but that weren't really all that important.

"I should never have let you go, Dora . . ." he sighed wistfully to himself. "I never found another one like you."

Feeling the crack in his frame again, Doc was becoming conscious of his own possible mortality. He kept welding it back together himself, but it kept opening up again.

"No car lasts forever," he reminded himself, "unless it's laid up for good in a museum!" While he didn't mind having a wing of a museum dedicated in his honor, he refused to become an exhibit in it himself. If it was one place Doc refused to end up in, it was in a museum.

He looked back across the road at the Cozy Cone Motel.

"I'm not going to let the two of you make the mistake I did," Doc said to himself, as he eased back into his own office and home for the night.