Oxford Plains Speedway serves as a brief waypoint in Ace Merrill’s return to criminal life: its pre-release job gives him legitimate work after prison, but not a lasting change in direction.

Setting and Role

The speedway appears in Ace’s history as a workplace rather than as a site of racing action. After his imprisonment for nighttime breaking and entering, he is released in the spring of 1989 and moves to Mechanic Falls. The state’s pre-release program connects him with a position at Oxford Plains Speedway, making the track a temporary point of entry back into civilian life.

Ace’s Employment

Ace works as a maintenance man and part-time pit mechanic. He keeps the job until his sentence officially ends, then quits on that very day. The exact boundary matters: his employment lasts for the period required by his sentence, but he does not remain once that obligation is over.

From the Speedway to the Weapons Trade

While at the speedway, Ace’s old friends and customers remain nearby, and he soon resumes business and experiences nosebleeds. After leaving the job, a phone call from the Flying Corson Brothers in Danbury, Connecticut, draws him back into dealing firearms and cocaine. His arms business has expanded beyond pistols, rifles, and repeating shotguns to automatic and semiautomatic weapons. By June, he sells a ground-fired Thunderbolt missile to a seafaring buyer for $17,000 in fresh hundreds with nonsequential serial numbers. The speedway’s modest maintenance work thus stands in sharp contrast to the increasingly dangerous trade that follows.

Narrative Significance

The speedway represents a narrow interval of structured, lawful employment in Ace’s post-prison life, not a lasting reform. Later, during the second week of September, he meets a prospective weapons buyer at the Piece of Work Pub in Lewiston; the buyer wants as many as ten automatic weapons and a reliable ammunition dealer. Ace prepares to close the deal by taking cocaine in the pub’s bathroom. The progression from pre-release work at the track to this weapons transaction underscores how quickly the temporary stability associated with the speedway gives way to renewed criminal activity.