Once Around the Track

by Sharyn McCrumb

  “He has already agreed to our terms,” said Tuggle. “He did sign an agreement.”

  The manager nodded. “Yes, in crayon, I expect. I still need to see it, so that I will know precisely what his obligations are. Then I can go from there.”

  Tuggle took several deep breaths and her eyes bulged, but the explosion did not come. Miraculously, the woman’s laptop was not thrown across the room, and the cell phone stayed on the table in one piece. Finally, in strangled tones the crew chief managed to say, “Deanna, get this-get Ms. Albigre a copy of the driver contract, please.”

  The secretary gave a quick nod and scurried out of the room, relieved to be given an excuse to flee. When she was gone, Tuggle said, “We like Badger. He’s a good man. He can be tricky to work with, though.”

  Melodie Albigre nodded. “Impossible, I expect,” she said. “I imagine that working with him is like trying to keep fifteen kittens in a laundry basket.”

  Tuggle stared. “I thought you said you just started working with him. How would you know that?”

  The woman smiled. “Well, he is a race car driver. There are certain traits common to most of them. Being difficult is certainly one of them. But, actually, I had Badger tested. Have you ever heard of the Myers Briggs-personality test?”

  “Nope.”

  “Really? You should check it out, especially since you have a number of employees to supervise yourself. It’s quite a useful tool.” The Albigre cell phone went off. Its owner glanced at the caller number, wrinkled her nose in distaste, and went on talking. “We at Miller O’Neill like to give that test to all of our new clients, so that we can determine what style works best in dealing with them. It divides people into four categories-thinking or feeling, perceiving or judging, introverted or extroverted, and so on.”

  Tuggle smirked. “So you classified Badger, did you?”

  “Verified an educated guess,” said Melodie. “I was already pretty sure what he would turn out to be-because quite a lot of athletes are. He’s an ISTP.”

  “The motor oil?”

  “Not STP. I-S-T-P. It is a classification of personality traits. It stands for introverted, sensation, thinking, and perceiving.”

  “Gobbledygook,” said Tuggle. “What does it mean?”

  She shrugged. “Oh…I suppose you might sum it up as Billy the Kid in a good mood. Badger lives in the moment; loves action and danger; hates schedules, authority, and routine of any kind. He doesn’t mean to be difficult or inconsiderate. It’s just the way he’s made. He’s good with machinery, though, and while he generally has the attention span of stoned ferret, he is capable of focusing for hours on end on something that really interests him.”

  “I could have told you that,” said Tuggle. “On a race track he is zeroed in like a laser.”

  “Exactly. But in, say, a classroom where they’re teaching American History, he would be bouncing off the walls. Probably was, in fact. I don’t imagine he did very well in school.”

  Tuggle’s eyes narrowed. “Wait a minute. You’re not thinking about giving him drugs, are you?”

  “No, of course not. You can’t dope a racehorse.” She paused to consider a stray thought. “Or neuter him, more’s the pity. We just wanted to know how best to communicate with Badger, that’s all.”

  “A two-by-four upside of the head?”

  “Tempting,” said Melodie with a grim smile. “In case you’re interested, it’s no good berating him or shouting at him. He will simply shrug it off. And if you read him the riot act, he will promise to reform. He will even mean it, but that’s only good for about four days, and then he reverts to being his old self.”

  “Which brings us back to the two-by-four,” said Tuggle.

  “Considering the head injuries he has sustained over the course of his career, you probably shouldn’t joke about that,” said Melodie primly. “I expect those accidents made him worse, but I’m sure he was always like this to some extent. ISTPs love excitement and danger. Managing Badger requires firmness and persistence. Whoever nags him the most wins his time-temporarily. He tends to give his attention to the person who demands it the loudest.”

  “Yeah, but I’ll bet he’d hate you for it.”

  “Apparently not. ISTPs tend to be fairly good-natured. But that point is irrelevant, to me in any case. I am not here to be his friend. Badger Jenkins is a project to be managed, and I intend to manage him as efficiently as possible.”

  “More power to you,” said Tuggle. “If he’s fool enough to put up with you, I won’t stand in your way. Just don’t interfere in my operation here, and don’t schedule Badger for anything that conflicts with the needs of this team. And one more thing-”

  “Yes?”

  “Why the hell are you using our conference table as your office?”

  At “Vagenya Tech,” as the chief engineer’s office was now called by everyone on the team, Julie and Rosalind were brainstorming with Jay Bird.

  When Rosalind had said, only half in jest, that the way to win a race was to cheat, she had been oversimplifying a basic premise of motorsports. NASCAR made rules intended to even the playing field, so that no team had any particular advantage over the others. Racing teams tried to find loopholes in those rules, or else they tried to come up with equipment modifications not yet banned in the sport. This would work briefly, and then NASCAR would discover the infraction and devise a new, more stringent rule to cover it. Jay Bird called this artful dodging an endless game of Whack-a-Mole: find a new outlet, get slammed by the inspectors, look for a new way out. One of NASCAR’s legendary drivers best summed up the teams’ position on unauthorized modifications when he said, “There are two types of racers: cheaters and losers.”

  “Creative engineering” went all the way back to the beginnings of the sport, and it ranged from something as simple as fabricating the car’s bumpers out of Styrofoam to reduce its weight to something as complicated as restructuring the entire chassis slightly off-kilter in order to minimize wind resistance.

  The patron saint of creative engineering was Smokey Yunick, the legendary racer and mechanic from Tennessee, who back in the sixties tried all sorts of gimmicks to circumvent NASCAR’s racing regulations. Once he drove his Chevelle at Daytona with an eleven-foot fuel line snaking its way back and forth in an intricate maze between its fuel cell and the engine. That illegal gas line held six gallons of gasoline in addition to what was in the fuel cell itself, which would have given him an incredible advantage in the race-nearly an extra hundred miles of racing before he needed a pit stop. The second helping of gas might have won the race for him, except that he got caught. A new NASCAR rule about gas lines followed immediately.

  Since then it had become more difficult to bend the rules. Stock car parts had to conform to templates-molds that specified the exact size and dimensions of a given part or piece of hardware down to a thousandth of an inch. Cars had been penalized for having the wrong size screw on a part in the engine. Getting caught with a nonstandard modification could cost you in fines, result in the suspension of the crew chief, and get the car sent to the back of the line for the start of a race. NASCAR was trying to close all the rat holes it could. They inspected the race cars each week, impounded them at some tracks between the last practice and the start of the race, and then at the end of each race, NASCAR officials inspected the top five finishers and then another car from the race chosen at random. The inspectors looked at the engine, the ignition, the fuel tank, the body of the car, and they even inspected the fuel for additives. The game of cat and mouse was becoming increasingly harder for racers to win, but that didn’t mean that anybody had stopped trying.

  Julie threw a crumpled ball of notepaper at the shelf of die-cast race cars. “We are a one-car team,” she said. “We do not have the benefit of multicar testing at various tracks and pooling the results. We do not have five hundred shop dogs to build cars from scratch. We do not have a wind tunnel.”

  “Well, that’s not exactly news,” said
Jay Bird. “You knew that when you took the job.”

  “That doesn’t make me feel better,” said Julie. “You were supposed to come up with a miracle, Jay Bird.”

  The old man chuckled. “How about we dress you two up in spandex and fishnet tights and send you out to bars to pick up crew chiefs?”

  “Only if Tuggle needs a ride home,” said Rosalind. “I’m not into the bar scene.”

  “Neither are the crew chiefs, I bet,” said Julie. “Come on, you guys. Stop kidding around. We need to think up a miracle here.”

  “An affordable miracle,” said Jay Bird. “That makes it harder.”

  Rosalind sighed. “How’s this for cheap? We reduce the size of the mesh on the window net. That will let less air into the cockpit and cut wind resistance. Not much, but in qualifying a hundredth of a second makes a difference.”

  “How about an air dam under the car to channel the air straight back?” said Julie. “The bottom of the car isn’t covered by template, so it isn’t even illegal.”

  “Doesn’t have to be,” said Jay Bird. “You let an extra blast of air hit that spoiler from underneath, and your boy will be an astronaut instead of a race car driver. Liftoff!”

  “He’s right,” said Rosalind. “And we can’t modify the spoiler, because it is covered by template, but maybe we don’t have to channel all the air straight back. Maybe we could fiddle a compromise between the need for downforce and the channeled air. It doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing proposition.”

  They both looked at Jay Bird.

  “It’s worth a shot,” he said. “But just so you know, this idea has been tried before.”

  “By whom?” said Rosalind.

  Jay Bird sighed. “By everybody who can spell NASCAR. But let’s give it a shot anyhow. We have to start somewhere.”

  CHAPTER XIV

  Wild Ride

  The diner wasn’t hard to find, provided that you didn’t blink between the sign that said WELCOME TO MARENGO and the one that said Y’ALL COME BACK NOW, Y’HEAR. After the three-hour drive from Charlotte, Sark was glad that the designated meeting place served coffee and came equipped with an indoor toilet. She was in need of both.

  She wondered why Badger had told her to meet him at the diner. Probably because even with directions, you couldn’t find the way to his house without a trail of breadcrumbs. Badger’s fortress of solitude in the Georgia outback was the stuff of legends in NASCAR. By meeting him in town she could simply follow him out to wherever it was that they were going. He had not yet arrived. She knew what his car looked like from having seen it parked at the race shop-a silver Chrysler Crossfire with a Georgia vanity plate that read “Badger 1.” (Probably his idea of a play on words Badger won, get it?) But “Badger 1” was not parked in front of the diner, and Sark wondered what she ought to do if he had forgotten his promise to show her around on his home turf. Hunt him down, she supposed. After making the three-hour drive from Charlotte, she wasn’t about to give up without a fight.

  She pushed open the door to the diner, and found herself staring right into the calf brown eyes of Badger Jenkins; but in this case, it was simply because the life-sized poster of him had been placed on the wall facing the door. The place was empty except for a blond waitress behind the counter, presumably the curator of this shrine to Marengo’s one celebrity.

  The walls were plastered with NASCAR photos of Badger Jenkins, all dutifully signed in Badger’s loopy scrawl, and a glass display case sported a collection of die-cast cars, all presumably former rides of Badger dating back to his salad days in the Busch series. On the wall behind the cash register were the non-Badger photos, a collection of publicity stills from former customers who had been passing through fame and Marengo simultaneously. A couple of minor country singers were represented, as well as a pro football player, the weather girl from an Atlanta television station, and several other NASCAR drivers, looking menacing in their firesuits and sunglasses, presumably friends of Badger who had come to town to go fishing with him and to have their visits forever commemorated by a signed eight-by-ten glossy on the pine-paneled wall of the diner. In one of the photos, a younger, curvier version of the waitress snuggled up to an unshaven, shaggy-haired Badger, and they both smiled happily at the camera-not posed smiles, but two really happy people caught in a golden moment.

  “Excuse me,” Sark said to the waitress, whose plastic name tag said “Laraine.” “I’m here to meet Badger Jenkins. Have you seen him?”

  Laraine smiled and went on putting sugar packets into little plastic containers. “Sure. Every inch of him.”

  “I mean today. I’m the publicist for Team Vagenya. He was supposed to meet me here for an interview.” Sark looked at her watch for effect. “I drove down from Charlotte.”

  Laraine began to wipe down the countertop with a wet rag. “I expect he’ll turn up,” she said. “Did he promise you? Did he give you his word?”

  Sark hesitated. “He agreed to the time and date,” she said at last.

  “Oh, agree.” Laraine had finished with the sugar packets and was now scrubbing the counter. “Badger will agree to anything to get women to stop hassling him. You ought to know that by now. But he sets a store by giving his word. If you actually want him to do something for you, you need to make him give you his word. Then he’s bound to go through with it.”

  “He had better go through with it,” said Sark through clenched teeth. “I take the team photos, and I wasted a whole day to do this. If he doesn’t want to look like the Creature from the Black Lagoon in every publicity shot for the rest of the season, he’d better haul his ass in here real soon.”

  Laraine eyed her suspiciously. “Don’t you have his cell number?”

  “Of course, I have it! But my cell phone doesn’t get any reception out here. I suppose I could use a pay phone. If there is one.”

  Laraine sighed and picked up the telephone, punching in one number. “There’s only one provider within range of here,” she said. “I guess that’s not the one you’ve got. Well, seeing as how you’re with the team, I guess I can call him for you. I got him on speed dial,” she explained to the testy visitor. “Of course, if he happens to be out on the lake where his cell phone won’t work, then you’d just better hope he remembers, because nobody can reach him when he’s out there.”

  “Yeah, but he has to come to shore sometime, and then he’ll wish he hadn’t,” said Sark.

  “Everybody says that,” said Laraine. “It’s water off a duck’s back.”

  Sark had a sinking feeling that she had made a three-hour drive for nothing. “Does he do that to people a lot? Stand them up?”

  Laraine went on wiping the counter with a rag. “He doesn’t mean to,” she said at last. “He’s good-hearted, just a little impractical. When people ask him for things, he just hates to say no, and when it comes to his time, he’s liable to promise more hours in the day than there actually are. Plus, he really wants to spend most of his time alone out there on the lake. I think he’ll turn up for you, though, what with you being with the team and all. It’s mostly journalists who slip his mind. He honestly does not see the point of bragging about himself for public consumption. He’d be a much richer man if anybody could make him see the value in publicity.”

  “I have tried,” said Sark grimly.

  Laraine nodded. “Like trying to teach a pig to sing, isn’t it? Look, why don’t you pick a place and sit down while I phone him, and then I’ll bring you some coffee.”

  Sark kept studying the racing posters of Badger that adorned the diner’s walls until she decided which one that she hated the least. (Badger minus the sunglasses, wearing a goofy smile, and holding up a can of motor oil as if he had found it quite delicious. Sark always liked the Vagenya driver better when he wasn’t pretending to be a comic book hero, and in her current mood, the more ridiculous he looked, the more it pleased her.)

  She slid into the booth beneath that goofy motor oil photo, musing again on how strange it was t
hat images of someone she actually knew could constitute a décor. Badger posters. Badger clocks. Badger sofa throws. Of course, there were certainly worse examples of human commercialization. The real merchandise monsters were NASCAR’s two most popular drivers, Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhardt, Jr. The range of products bearing their names and likenesses was downright frightening. Toothbrushes. Shot glasses. Valentine candy. Christmas ornaments. Mouse pads. Bath mats. She supposed that there were actually people who decorated their houses in NASCAR driver motif-there was rumored to be a Badger bathroom somewhere in Ohio-but from her outsider perspective, the resulting décor didn’t bear thinking about. If she’d had to live amidst such a theme decoration, she would have felt that she was trapped inside a TV commercial.

  To his credit, Badger himself seemed oblivious to these commercial tokens of fan loyalty. If he turned up at the shop and you happened to be wearing, say, a Badger Jenkins tee shirt, he affected not to notice. She thought that was a good strategy. It avoided embarrassment for everybody. Any other reaction on his part would have been asking for trouble. If he had acted pleased to have people sporting his likeness on their chests, he would have seemed conceited, and if he made fun of it, he would come off as an arrogant ingrate. Ignoring all Badger-themed merchandise was by far the most diplomatic way to handle the situation.

  While she waited for Marengo’s favorite son to arrive, Sark sipped her coffee and looked over her notes, so that she would know what sort of questions to ask him. In her experience, the more you knew about somebody, the better the interview was likely to be.

  According to the biographical material, Badger was a lifelong resident of the county, and he had grown up on a farm that had been in his family for five or six generations. He was an only child whose mother had died when he was born. According to the articles, he had been part Cherokee, which gave Badger a Native American heritage in which he took great pride. He’d been raised by his father on that family farm in the hills north of town, where he had spent a seemingly idyllic childhood in country pursuits, most notably hunting and fishing on his beloved lake. He sounded like Tom Sawyer, Sark thought. Or possibly Conan the Barbarian. She wondered what a typical day with him would constitute. Nothing likely to appeal to a city girl, she supposed. Fortunately, anticipating this, she had worn an outfit that would have served her well on a hike in Yellowstone: khaki pants, hiking boots, and a tan wind-breaker over a Team Vagenya tee shirt. In the trunk of her car she had stashed a snake bite kit, mosquito repellent, and bottled water.