"Indeed they are." He reached for a rag to wipe the sweat off his face, saw the gleam of motor oil on it, and put it down again. "It used to be, almost every car qualified to make a race, which would have guaranteed us a few thousand dollars participation money anyhow, but now with fifty six teams trying out each week for only forty-three slots—well, we're just throwing good money after bad. We spend thousands to get to the track; we fail to qualify by a few tenths of a second; and we then come home with nothing. Half the time we don't even get to race. What sponsor is going to pay us a hundred K a week when we don't even make the show?"
I shook my head sadly. He'd get no argument from me there. Facts is facts.
J.P.'s frown deepened into a furrow. "We're a week or so from laying people off, Rattler. I hate to say that, but I don't know what else we can do."
"We could make the race for once," I said, and he managed to laugh and still sound sad at the same time.
"Make the race," he said. "Well, that would take a miracle."
A miracle would have come in handy, but I don't hold with accepting charity from anybody—not even from folks wearing halos—so I didn't figure on going to the nearest church, lighting a candle, and asking for a handout. I figured if there were miracles needed, I'd best see about devising one on my own.
Now, my people have been in these hills a long time, and we don't run to saints and such, but I do have a streak of Cherokee blood in my veins wider than the Holston River, and I had learned a thing or two besides engine mechanics from those bootlegging, full-blood great-uncles of mine. I can do a deal of things that don't have anything to do with racing: heal wounds with a white quartz stone; talk the fire out of a burn; find water with a fork of willow branch. But I had never tried anything as big and scary as what I proposed to do now. This was messing with serious magic, and I didn't do it lightly.
No point in me trying to tell you the particulars of it. Like my granddaddy used to say, "You can't explain what you don't know any more than you can come back from where you ain't been." And likely it only worked because of my bloodlines, anyhow. But in the light of the full moon I gathered the plants I needed from a little mountain meadow near my people's healing lake, and then I , took them along to the funeral home in Kingsport.
The fact that a local dirt-track driver named Eddie Taylor had just got killed last night wouldn't make the national news and didn't deserve to, but if he'd had the right breaks and a few more years to hone his skills, he might have rated a raft of tributes around the country. Eddie had wanted to be a big-time NASCAR driver, and while he had the nerves and the skills for it, he never got the chance to prove it. Last night on Highway 23, Eddie crashed into a tree, swerving to avoid a deer in the road. Now, aside from his racing prowess, Eddie was known around these parts as a keen and skillful deer hunter. It struck me as ironic that Eddie would die trying to spare the life of a critter that he would have proudly blown to Kingdom Come under different circumstances, but maybe the universe likes a joke as much as anybody. Just shy of Eddie's twentieth birthday, it was all over for him. A damn shame, I thought, him never having a chance. It sorta justified what I was doing, I told myself.
Funeral homes are not all that closely guarded, because most people would rather get rid of a corpse than acquire one. Anyhow, at 2:00 a.m. nobody was on the premises, and I managed to get what-was-left-of-Eddie off the steel table and out to my truck, because we had somewhere else to go.
Exit 67. The road to the Tri-Cities Airport, where all the drivers fly in when they race at Bristol. One icy April night about fifteen years ago, one of those planes hadn't made it to the runway. It had crashed in an open field a mile away, killing the pilot and one of the best NASCAR drivers I'd ever seen race. Oh, maybe you haven't heard of him: He didn't have a chance to win seven championships like Earnhardt did, but maybe he would have if he'd lived. He'd never really had his chance, either.
So I dragged Eddie Taylor's body out to the middle of that field—just where I'd seen the wreckage of that plane—and I laid it down in the moonlight, sprinkled my herbs, and I called life back into the dead. It's like a door opens somewhere, maybe in your mind, and you can talk through it to someone you can't see.
I said, "I know you're here, Champ. I can feel it. You died here. I came to offer you another chance to race. Over here. Where it counts" For all I knew, the Champ was spending eternity racing against the likes of Dale Earnhardt, Davy Allison, and all the Flock brothers over there, but that wouldn't get him into the record books here. Even if only he and I knew it was him back doing the racing, it would mean something to him. I figured he still had something to prove.
The night breeze blew cold on the back of my neck, while I waited for him to consider the offer.
Then just as a silvery cloud swallowed the moon, the late Eddie Taylor sat up and said, "Deal."
He looked okay. Eddie was a handsome kid in that chicken hawk, redneck way that puts you in mind of Steve McQueen, and he hadn't been messed up in the wreck. Just took a whack in the chest that stopped his heart. People in NASCAR might have recognized the Champ, even after fifteen years, but nobody would be looking for the face of Eddie Taylor in a Cup car. I gave him a new name just to make sure. Victor Northstar. I planned to claim him as a Cherokee cousin.
He looked all right, by the way. Eddie Taylor had only been dead a few hours, so there had been no real deterioration, and once you put the life force back into a corpse, all the internal systems start working again, so the body doesn't decay or get a beard of moss, or any of that horror movie stuff. It just picks up living right where it left off. He just looked like a regular guy, which was kind of a shame because these days NASCAR likes its drivers to look like soap opera stars or male models. Eddie was just average. Hendricks wouldn't have hired him, but I was betting that Trampas-LeFay would take what they could get.
It wasn't hard to talk J. P. Trampas into hiring him, and it wasn't a moment too soon, either. The current Trampas-LeFay driver was a pretty-boy NASCAR star who had stooped to driving for us, because he was on the wrong side of forty and because in accent and temperament, he was a stubborn throwback to the old days. After we'd missed enough races to embarrass him, and he'd started to worry that his paychecks might bounce, he did us all a favor and quit. J.P. was about to pack it in when I introduced him to my cousin Victor.
"He's the best driver this side of heaven," I said with a straight face. J.P. hesitated, so I added, "And he'll work dirt cheap."
So we were back in the game.
I'll leave out all the parts about the phony biography I concocted: the IDs and the NASCAR driver's license and all, which took some ingenuity on my part, but just because something is hard work doesn't mean it is interesting. Maybe if we had been an important team, people might have taken a closer look, but we were so hopeless, I believe we could have put Tim Flock's monkey behind the wheel without causing much comment. Maybe the Cherokee factor helped, too. NASCAR is all about diversity these days. Well, you don't hardly get more underrepresented than "dead," so I figured we were doing them a favor, even if they didn't know it.
"Victor" came to live with me in my little A-frame back in Possum Holler, east of Kingsport, though we didn't let on about that, because people want to think NASCAR drivers live glamorous lives. Anyhow, we didn't spend much time there, because we had to make up for lost time in the racing shop.
We decided to take it easy on him at first—no fan meet and greets, and no TV. The press interviews were the easy part. Sportswriters expect cliches and platitudes from the drivers, and in these touchy times only a fool would give them anything else. I had to explain that to the Champ, but once he caught on, he could talk piffle with the best of them: "Like to thank the sponsor and the good folks at Trampas-LeFay for all their support. We just never got it to work quite right. Maybe next week."
Even dead people can manage to say that.
Nobody had to teach the Champ how to drive again. Some of the technicalities of race cars might have changed in fift
een years, but the sport itself was still a cross between ballet and mud wrestling, and the Champ was still a master at the technique. They're still mostly racing at the same old tracks, so he knew all his old tricks at them, as well: how to pass at Bristol, where to speed up in Turn Two at Darlington, and which groove to run for speed at Talladega.
Of course, we still had to work mechanical magic to give our driver a competitive car to work with, and, considering how many millions of dollars the other teams had that we didn't, I almost wished I'd conjured up a rich sponsor instead of a dead driver, but what with one thing and another, we did manage to get him into the race at Charlotte.
The Champ still knew how to drive, and we did a thing or two to the car that they didn't catch us at, and so his qualifying lap was good enough to get us in at a starting position of twenty-eighth out of forty-three positions starting the race. We didn't figure we had a chance to win, but they pay more than fifty thousand dollars even to the guy who finishes in last place, and that was money we needed to stay in business. We didn't expect a top-ten finish.
We didn't get one, either, because no shoestring operation can compete with the wind-tunnel and 500 engineers teams, not even if the Archangel Gabriel was driving for them. So we knew the car wouldn't be competitive, but we did think the Champ could hold his own.
"What the hell's the matter with him?" Kit Porter, our beleaguered crew chief, who is better than our record would have you believe, was whiter than the ghost we were currently employing.
I came to all the races to look after the Champ, but since I wasn't part of the pit crew, I lingered behind the wall, making myself useful in case they needed any repairs midrace, beyond the usual repair resource: duct tape. I had been checking out the next set of tires, and not watching the track, when Kit stormed up to me, wanting to know what was wrong with our driver.
"He's letting cars pass him like he was standing still. Every time a car comes near him, he scoots out of the way like he's terrified. Like this was his very first race."
I shook my head. That certainly didn't sound like the Champ. He didn't win a NASCAR championship by being a shrinking violet. Fifteen years ago I had seen him beating and banging his way down the track, racing against Dale Earnhardt himself, and he never gave an inch. The Champ had gone into the wall so many times he could probably tell you which speedway he was at by the taste of the dust. Why would he suddenly lose his nerve?
I walked over to the wall to observe the progress of the race. It isn't easy to watch a race from the infield, especially at a mile-and-a-half track like Lowe's Motor Speedway. I could only see the cars for the few seconds that they swept past our pit stall on their way to the next turn in the oval, but that few seconds was enough to show me that Kit Porter had been right about our driver: He was dodging the other cars for all he was worth, and it was costing him track position with every second, as one by one even the slowest cars started whizzing past him.
"What's the matter with him?" asked Kit. "You'd think he'd never raced before."
I mulled that over. The Champ was certainly no rookie, but that body he was currently inhabiting had belonged to Eddie Taylor . . . who had died in a head-on collision. I wondered if somewhere deep in the muscles of that body was an ingrained fear of car wrecks. He sure had a right to feel that way, but I couldn't let that memory wreck our race team. I had an idea, though. NASCAR teams are in constant radio contact with their driver. They can advise him on tire wear and fuel mileage, and up on top of the grandstands a spotter warns him of trouble ahead or a car gaining on him out of his line of sight. So I could talk to the Champ, but since team frequencies are made public, I would have had a lot more listeners than just the Champ. "Give me a headset," I told Kit Porter. "Our driver needs a pep talk more than he needs a spotter right now. And put us on a closed-channel frequency. I don't want anybody eavesdropping on this conversation. Not even you."
Kit Porter handed me his own headset. "Whatever works," he said. "But make it quick."
I nodded, and took a deep breath while I worked out what to say. I sure hoped the channel was on a private frequency, but I decided to be careful anyhow. "Champ," I said into the microphone. "This here's Rattler. We got us a situation here, and it's going to cost you your comeback if you don't get a grip on it. Part of you is scared of the other cars. Do you get my drift?"
Silence.
I tried again. "What I am telling you is that the body driving the car is afraid of dying in a car wreck. And that body seems to have a pretty good memory of what that was like. Next caution, bring it in for a pit stop. There's one thing we can try. Eight wheels corner better than four. You know what I mean?"
I heard a grunt in my headset, and the Champ said, "Yeah."
I went over and tapped the crew chief on the shoulder. "I told him to come in for a pit stop next caution. When he does, disable his brakes."
"What?"
"He needs to relearn racing as a contact sport. Do it." Eight wheels corner better than four. I was referring to the move in racing when you speed up on the inside of the car you are passing by, not slowing down going into the turn. You are, of course, going too fast to make the turn, so in the middle of the turn your car slides up the track, flush into the car that you are passing. Using that other car as a crutch keeps you safely on track and allows you to complete the pass. The problem is that sometimes doing that puts the other car into the wall.
The Champ had cut his teeth on that maneuver, but the other passenger in our driver's body would be appalled at the thought of deliberately hitting another car. I figured if we took out his brakes, he wouldn't have any choice.
A dozen laps later, one of the rookies ran out of talent and hit the wall on Turn Two, which gave us that caution lap we were waiting for. The Champ pulled in, the pit crew swarmed all over the car, and, per my instructions, they kinked the two front brake lines.
To actually sever the brake line would have been a hassle. Fluid spills everywhere, and you can't repair it quickly, but it is possible to put a kink in the brake line, or to put vise grip pliers on it. Technically, there are four brake lines on a race car, and tampering with any one of them would only affect the brakes to that wheel, but since any reduction in braking force is enough to cause a problem on the racetrack, the driver would be forced to compensate for his loss of braking power, which is exactly what I wanted.
Thirteen seconds later, the car roared back onto the track, and forty-two other NASCAR drivers were unaware that we had just sent a loose cannon out among them.
Caution laps run as sedately as Sunday afternoon freeway traffic, so nobody noticed anything amiss until they dropped the green flag again to restart the high-speed racing. The Champ worked his way past 160 mph in a couple of heartbeats, and then Turn One was looming in front of him. Poor Eddie, whose body was understandably a little confused about whether or not it was dead, tried hard to keep that car away from everybody else on the track, but going into a turn at 200 mph without brakes didn't give him too many options. He could either go into the wall, or he could use another car as a crutch to get him out of that corner. Maybe he froze from the terror of the situation or maybe the Champ just overruled the body's reflexes, but when the car started to get loose, the driver swung it a little to the right, where one of the sport's golden boys just happened to be trying to pass on the outside. Eight wheels are better than four. That twenty-million-dollar set of training wheels carried us through the turn and into the straightaway slick as goose grease. Unfortunately for the golden boy, the weight of our car unbalanced him and sent him sliding toward the wall, where he ended up with a crumpled right front panel, and he collected a couple of other cars in the wreck. As always when wrecked cars are cluttering up the track, they threw a caution so they could clean up the mess, and when they did, we took the opportunity to bring the Champ back in, and we fixed the brakes. I figured he had the hang of it again now, and I was right.
We didn't win, of course. In a three-hour stock-car race, the diff
erence between first place and fifteenth place is less than a second, and as I said, it takes a few million dollars to buy you every tenth of a second, which we still didn't have, but at least we made the race and finished in the middle of the pack. That's more than we had accomplished in a long time. But, while I might have been happy just to have a half-decent season, it wasn't enough for the Champ—or for J. P. Trampas, who was still pouring fifty grand a week into this racing operation. Sand down a rat hole.
"He's a good enough driver, Rattler," J.P. told me as we were loading the car back into the hauler. "But he still can't make enough of a difference in our standings unless we can afford to provide him with decent equipment."
"I wish I could conjure up a sponsor," I said. "But there are limits even to Cherokee magic."
"I think I have an idea about that," said J.P. "Let me see what I can do."
By the time I heard the details of J.P.'s brilliant idea, it was too late to do anything about it, except hope that it wouldn't blow up in our faces.
NASCAR has changed a lot since the Champ last took the checkered flag. Back in those days, drivers were ordinary-looking fellows who knew their way around an engine, but now the sport is an international multibillion dollar behemoth, and the drivers are expected to be movie stars in firesuits. If you are a corporation looking to pay a race team ten million dollars a year to advertise your product, then you want a lot of charisma for your money. J.P.'s idea was to turn our driver into a celebrity. After all, "Victor" was supposed to be my Cherokee cousin, and NASCAR was all about diversity these days. The Ganassi team's new Hispanic driver had brought a whole new set of fans into NASCAR, and J.P. figured he could do the same with his Native American phenomenon. So he wrote up some press release, giving the sports journalists Victor's bio, which consisted of the pack of lies I had given our official team publicist, who was also the wife of the jackman. Then, since the next race was Martinsville, relatively close to home, J.P. arranged for our driver to do a bunch of local appearances the week of the race. He'd be doing a signing in a local auto parts store, meeting with NASCAR fans at a charity event at the Roanoke coliseum, and doing local TV and radio interviews. It was a helluva schedule, but the big-time NASCAR drivers do it every week of the season, each week in a different city. It's part of the job. Didn't use to be, in the Champ's day, but it was now.
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