Once Around the Track

by Sharyn McCrumb

  “I expect you do hear me. I’m talking loud enough. Just get it through your head that I expect you to do a proper job and to work as hard as the rest of us. You be here when I tell you to be here, and you put us first. Not your business deals or your fishing buddies or your daddy’s tractor problems, or whatever the hell else you come up with that interferes with the running of this team. Do-you-understand?”

  She saw his jaw tighten, and on each cheek there was a spot of color in an otherwise ashen face. Tight-lipped, he nodded.

  “Fair enough,” she said. “You know, Badger, I believe I would be your momma if you were still young enough to take a belt to. Except that you’re no little kid. Hell, you’re older than Jeff Gordon, and sometimes you look hotter than a two-dollar pistol. And posters of you like that one”-she nodded toward the firesuit photo-“can make even me think thoughts about you that would melt the decals off that race car. Except that I know better than to confuse the paint job with what’s under the hood. You ain’t him. You never saw the day, boy. Well, in real life you’re not him, anyhow. But maybe if you learn to work with me instead of fighting me every step of the way, you can be him on the race track. I’d like you to make me believe it’s that stud on the Technicolor poster that’s driving my car. Will you try to do that?”

  He nodded, taking deep breaths like he figured breathing in was better than letting any sound come out right now.

  “Well, all right, then. We have a deal.” She took a deep breath. One hurdle down, another big one to go. “Did anybody tell you who the sponsor is?”

  Badger’s face brightened. “Yeah. I’m real happy about that.”

  Tuggle blinked. “You are?”

  “Why, sure. Richmond and Martinsville are about my favorite tracks, and I’m a big fan of the Hokies in football. And there’s King’s Dominion…”

  Tuggle digested this information. Then she nodded, not even surprised, really. “The Hokies. Virginia Tech, right? Badger, do you by any chance believe that your race car is being sponsored by the Commonwealth of Virginia?”

  “Well, sure. Somebody in the front office mentioned it to me. Isn’t it great? I’ll be honest with you: I was surprised. You’d think they’d want to sponsor Elliott Sadler, though, wouldn’t you? On account of him being from there. Or maybe Jeff Burton.”

  “Well, I think I can explain that to you, Badger. What they told you was that the sponsor is Vagenya. Yeah, I know it sounds about the same when you say it, but they didn’t mean the state. Vagenya is the name of a new drug, and the pharmaceutical manufacturer is our team sponsor.”

  “Vagenya,” said Badger, thinking hard. “Never heard of it.”

  “No,” said Tuggle, “I don’t expect you would have. But since you’re driving for those folks, you’ll probably get asked about it in press interviews.”

  Badger assumed an expression that he probably thought of as crafty. “Y’all want me to say I use the stuff?”

  Tuggle’s lips twitched. “That won’t be necessary, Badger. Thank you all the same.”

  “Vagenya, huh?” He savored the word, probably trying to commit it to memory. “Va-gen-ya. What does it do, anyhow?”

  She hesitated. “You have a meeting coming up with the team publicist. Since it’s her job to prep you for media interviews, I think I’ll let her explain it to you.”

  Badger’s amiable countenance clouded over again. “A meeting when?” he said. “I’m pretty busy this week.”

  Tuggle stared at him expressionless for a long moment waiting for him to blink, and when he did, she said, “You’ve already forgotten what I just told you, haven’t you? You will not give this team lip service instead of full cooperation. You will give us one hundred percent, or else the only drug you will need to worry about is Preparation H, because I will shove my foot so far up your ass…Now, get over to the shop and see do they need you.”

  Without a word, Badger turned on his heel and left the office.

  Deanna, the secretary who had been hiding in the photocopy room, crept back out when she heard the slamming of the office door. She was in her early thirties, and on her desk was an old Badger Jenkins coffee mug, bearing a photo of a younger Badger with his hair in an Arthurian pageboy, wearing a blue firesuit reminiscent of a knight’s tunic and leaning against a wall with such a reverent expression that he lacked only the horse and sword to look like Sir Galahad.

  “Wow,” she said. “I can’t believe you talked to him like that. He’s so famous.”

  “I’m trying to keep him that way,” said Tuggle grimly.

  “But you were so mean to him. When you said all those harsh things, his eyes glistened, and I was afraid he was going to cry. It was all I could do to keep from bursting into tears myself. I just wanted to hug him.”

  “More fool you,” said Tuggle. “That boy needs to straighten up. Being pretty might help you win fans and sponsors, but the rest of this sport is pure Type A male and it’s run by corporate piranhas. They won’t put up with his shenanigans for one second. Time somebody told him so.”

  “Do you think he listened?”

  The crew chief sighed. “More or less,” she said. “I reckon I’ll have that speech down by heart before I’m done giving it, though.”

  Deanna looked thoughtful. “I’ve got some items here that fans sent in for him to autograph, and he always says he doesn’t have time…”

  Tuggle gave her a look.

  The secretary shook her finger at the framed firesuit poster of Badger Almighty. “All right, Pretty Boy,” she said. “Sit your ass down at the conference table and sign those hero cards right now.”

  Tuggle nodded. “Keep practicing,” she said. “I’ll shoo him back in here when we’re done at the shop and you can tell him that for real.”

  The secretary sighed. “Yeah, but I’d rather hug him.”

  CHAPTER IX

  The Dominatrix

  Badger Jenkins didn’t think anybody would recognize him in the Mooresville Wendy’s. Maybe Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhardt, Jr. got mobbed everywhere they went, but most of the other drivers, when they weren’t wearing firesuits, were relatively anonymous. Although if you were going to be recognized anywhere, it would be in Mooresville, the epicenter of behind-the-scenes racing. Desperate fans on the prowl for NASCAR stars had even been known to mistake local plumbers and lowly shop dogs for Busch drivers, and anyone with a beard could pass for Martin Truex. Even Elliott Sadler. If your autograph book bore the inscription “Casey Caine,” that was a good sign that the blue-eyed young man in the coveralls at the Waffle House had not, in fact, been Cup driver Kasey Kahne.

  Since Badger wanted an uninterrupted ten-minute lunch, he had kept his sunglasses on, just in case. He didn’t have much time to eat. They wanted him at the shop in the early afternoon, and he had got busy with phone calls-it was always something-so now he figured he had only a few minutes to wolf down a burger, and then he’d better get over there, to keep Tuggle off his case.

  He had just lifted the oozing burger for another bite when a scraggly woman in starling black slid into the other side of the booth. “Badger Jenkins,” she said. “Nice to meet you. I don’t have much time.” She set her cell phone down on the table next to his French fries and scowled at her wristwatch as if it were directly responsible for her shortage of time.

  He had no idea who she was.

  A fan? Badger set the burger back down on the wrapper and summoned a wan smile. He eased the Sharpie out of the pocket of his jeans and glanced around for something to autograph. It wouldn’t be the first paper napkin he’d ever signed for a fan. This woman seemed more than a little flaky, but you got used to that after a while. “How’re you doin’?” he mumbled, as if her intrusive behavior were completely normal.

  The woman eyed the Sharpie with a sneer. “Oh, I don’t want your autograph,” she said.

  He blinked. She didn’t look like somebody who would be a fan of his. After a while you could sorta tell who favored whom in racing fandom just by
the way they dressed and talked. Come to think of it, he couldn’t even hazard a guess at which driver would attract the likes of her. Well, okay, if he had to guess, he’d say she’d be a Kevin Harvick fan. Harvick was a Californian, and a little unconventional himself. Yeah, that would fit.

  The scraggly woman could have been any age between thirty and fifty-and as plain as she was, nobody would have cared which. Her helmet of dyed crinkly black hair framed a moon face with skin the color of library paste, raccoon eye shadow, and carefully penciled-in lips colored clown red. She wore some kind of sleazy, shiny black outfit that might have cost a lot, but if so, the designer was probably somewhere yelling “Gotcha!”

  Badger didn’t mind plain, dowdy women, as long as they didn’t lunge at him. He tried to be nice to everybody, and generally he succeeded, but he had hoped to eat his lunch in peace. So he sat there waiting for her to say what she wanted, and he hoped it wasn’t “Kevin Harvick’s cell phone number,” which he didn’t know anyhow.

  “Badger, I am Melodie Albigre, and I’m affiliated with Miller O’Neill Associates,” she said, as if that explained everything.

  He blinked. If she was expecting a lightbulb to go on in his brain, she’d have a long wait coming. Badger knew all the Cup team names, one or two law firms, a couple of sponsors, and maybe a dozen or so rock groups, but as best he could recall, none of them was named “Miller O’Neill.”

  “It’s a management firm,” she said.

  Badger adjusted his expression to reflect “shrewd and businesslike.” He was good at facial expressions-like a German shepherd, contriving to look serious and wise in the presence of about-to-be-dropped food. Whether any concomitant thought ever accompanied Badger’s appropriate demeanor was a matter of considerable speculation. He ventured a comment: “Management. You mean like…apartment buildings?”

  “No. I do not.” She didn’t look like a fan. She wasn’t smiling or simpering or fishing NASCAR cards out of her purse. She reminded him of a particularly stern grade school teacher he’d once had, one whose pet name for him had been “Insect.”

  “Miller O’Neill manages celebrities,” she informed him briskly. “And race car drivers. I am quite well known. I’m surprised you haven’t heard of me.” She contrived to make it sound as if that were his fault. “I do a bit of everything. I write grants, set up television shows. Anything, really. We need to discuss your future-insofar as you have one, Badger.”

  “Shrewd and businesslike” was congealing into “annoyed,” but Miss Albigre was unmoved by her listener’s reaction. “You need help,” she said briskly. “I heard that you have been hired by the new women’s Cup team. Congratulations. You have been given a second chance, and you need someone to make sure that you make the most of this opportunity. Someone to generate prospects for you. Commercials. Endorsements. Because you’re not famous, you know, Badger. You’re not Jimmie Johnson. And you’re certainly not getting any younger. You’d better secure your future while you can.”

  Badger shrugged. “I do all right,” he said.

  “Really?” She had that you-gave the-wrong-answer look that he remembered from sixth grade. “Do you? What provision is there in your contract for, say, appearance fees?”

  “Uh. Well…” He tried to smile. “I don’t exactly have everything we agreed on the contract spelled out in writing in the contract. I just give my word.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Idiot. How many times have you gone into the wall? No contract, indeed! You obviously need somebody to manage your career.”

  “I’m just not sure I can afford-” Badger’s cheapness was legendary.

  Melodie Albigre gave him a chilling smile. “You won’t be able to afford anything if you keep going as you have been. But don’t worry. Miller O’Neill pays my salary. It will all come off the top where you won’t miss it. You’re certainly lucky that I am between projects at the moment, aren’t you?”

  Badger felt as if the floor were tilting. “Uh…well.”

  “Of course, you are. That’s settled. I can handle everything. I will see that you make lots of money. And you’ll need it, won’t you?”

  “What?”

  In a failed-to-spell-cat-correctly voice, she said, “Well, there’s just a rumor going around that a development corporation is planning to put a retirement community on that north Georgia lake you’re so fond of. Golf course. Two hundred condos. Tennis courts. Roads. I’m surprised you hadn’t heard. But perhaps it isn’t a done deal yet. You might be able to buy the land yourself, I suppose. If you could afford it.” She eyed him critically. “You may be a hard sell in a promotional sense. You’re not very sexy, if you ask me, but I suppose there are people who’d like you. Hicks and old ladies, maybe.”

  He tried to speak, but there were too many conflicting thoughts battling for precedence in his head, so that his only response was a feeble croak of alarm.

  The human steamroller nodded, as if she spoke croak fluently. “Leave it to me,” she said. “Now, I need your cell phone number, your home number, a team number where you can be reached…Is there anything in your life you don’t want me involved in?”

  “Uh, I guess not.”

  Looking back on it later, he thought that a portion of that conversation had been skipped over. The part where Melodie Albigre should have asked him if he wanted a manager, and if he was actually consenting to be bossed around by her without limitation. He was sure that he would have said no. But she didn’t ask. She just rolled over him like a Sherman tank en route to Berlin, and before he knew it, he had acquired a manager he hadn’t known he needed. It was like getting a fairy godmother, he supposed, if your fairy godmother could be a dowdy, bitchy woman who didn’t much like you.

  If Badger had paid more attention to the vampire movie he saw once at the county drive-in, instead of trying to exchange bodily fluids with his date of the evening, he might have found one of Miss Albigre’s questions quite familiar. “What don’t you want me involved in?” According to folklore, you had to invite a vampire into your residence or else they could not cross the threshold. And while Melodie Albigre was certainly not a vampire, whatever she was, he had just invited her in. But at the time he was not apprehensive about the arrangement. He had someone to run his life and make money for him, practically for free.

  He began to scribble all his phone numbers on the paper lining of the Wendy’s tray, and for the first time in their brief acquaintance, Melodie Albigre smiled.

  CHAPTER X

  Tryouts

  ENGINE NOISE

  Your Online Source for NASCAR News & Views

  Hearts Like a Wheel? Look out, Badger. We hear you’re going back into a Cup car, and your car number will be 86. We don’t know who your primary sponsor is, but it ought to be Amazon.com, because that’s who your team is going to be: all Amazons. Yep, you heard it here first, folks: The “adorable” Badger Jenkins has been captured by an all-woman racing team. Woo hoo! Looks like he’s going to be the “lucky dog” in every race. Pit crew tryouts are this week at the team headquarters in Mooresville. Hot pass, anyone?

  “Are you nervous? I am!” Taran Stiles whispered to the burly woman beside her.

  The big woman shrugged. She was wearing an extra-extra large Darlington tee shirt, and she had used red yarn to tie her greasy blond hair into a limp pony tail. She didn’t look like fear played a big part in her life. “Nothing to stew about,” she said. “Either you make it or you don’t. There’s plenty of other teams, you know. Plenty of better paying jobs, for that matter.”

  Well, that was true, thought Taran. She had investigated the matter online for several weeks now, and she had learned that some of the Busch pit crew members even worked for free, or for expenses, anyhow. Cup racing at least paid pit crew a salary; less than she had been making in her corporate cubicle, but she reasoned that she ought to go out and have adventures while she was still young. The cubicle would still be there when she was too old for wilder endeavors.

  She still cou
ldn’t believe that she was actually in Mooresville. It was only a small town north of Charlotte but to true racing fans, Mooresville, North Carolina, was the center of the universe: headquarters of many of the race shops, home to some of the Cup drivers, and the site of the Dale Earnhardt Incorporated building, the legendary Garage Mahal of the Intimidator himself. It was also the current residence of Badger Jenkins. According to Engine Noise, he had left his fishing shack at the lake in Georgia and moved to Mooresville to be close to his new team. He might even be here today. Taran shivered. And all she had to do to be allowed to stay here was to do well on the pit crew audition.

  At first glance the race shop yard looked like the setting for cheerleader tryouts: fifty women in shorts and tee shirts milling around or chatting in small groups, waiting to be told what to do. Closer inspection, though, would definitely rule out cheerleader tryouts. Some of these women could have been linebackers, and several of them looked old enough to have daughters in high school.

  There was no doubt about who was in charge, though. The stern-looking woman in an official team wind-breaker with the word “Tuggle” embroidered on it was stalking around the yard, eying the prospective crew members as if they were horses and she was the buyer for Alpo. Judging by her scowl, she didn’t seem unduly impressed by what she saw. Occasionally, though, she would stop and talk to one of the women, and then make a notation on her clipboard for future reference.

  This is it, thought Taran. My one chance to work with him. For luck today she had worn her best Badger Jenkins tee shirt, the one from his former team, commemorating his winning of the Southern 500. The one he had actually signed for her one blazing afternoon in Atlanta, when she had waited in a sweltering line for what seemed like forever just to get thirty seconds of his time.