Once Around the Track

by Sharyn McCrumb

  She was making notes on her list of possible interview questions when Badger turned up, about twenty minutes late, with his usual nonchalant grin. “Sorry about that,” he said.

  She gave him a bitter smile. “Oh, don’t mention it. I’ve just been enjoying myself here in the shrine of St. Badger.” She indicated the phalanx of posters bearing his likeness that surrounded them. “And here you are in the flesh. Should I kneel?”

  He pursed his lips and did that little head jerk that meant the remark had stung. “Laraine put those things back up when I got this new ride. She says it’s good for business. Anyhow, I didn’t mean to be late. I didn’t forget. I got stuck behind a logging truck going over the hill where you can’t pass.”

  Sark raised her eyebrows. “Safe driving? From you?”

  He nodded. “If you get a speeding ticket, all it costs you is a hundred bucks or so, but if I get a speeding ticket, all hell breaks loose, and the press never lets me hear the end of it. You ready?”

  Sark gathered up the pile of press releases and scribbled index cards and stuffed them back into the large purse that served as her briefcase. “Where are we going?”

  “Figured I’d take you out to my fishing cabin on the lake. Let you see my natural habitat.”

  “Okay,” said Sark, who had been expecting this. “Shall I ride with you? Let me get my camera gear out of my car.” And my change of clothes and my snake bite kit, she added silently. You couldn’t be too careful around lakes.

  “Well, we’ll be headed west from here, and there’s a shortcut back to the interstate north from there, so it would save you time if you just took your car, instead of having to come all the way back down here. Why don’t you just follow me?”

  Sark stared at him. He was serious. “Because you won the Southern 500 at Darlington,” she said.

  “Not in that old pick-up truck, I didn’t,” said Badger.

  “Yeah, well…driving is driving. I’ve heard that Dale Earnhardt, Jr. and Jeff Gordon have sometimes tried without notable success to keep up with you.”

  He grinned. “Aw, I told you, I try to be a good boy off the track. Come on.” He jingled his keys and headed for the door, stopping to give Laraine a bear hug on his way out; then he strolled out to the parking lot.

  “Well, how hard can it be to follow him?” Sark wondered aloud. “It’s just a two-lane blacktop country road.”

  Laraine nodded. “That road sure has a lot of curves, though. Some steep hills, too, every now and again.”

  “Exactly,” said Sark. “That ought to slow him down. Badger will probably be the perfect person to follow. Where driving is concerned, his ego must be rock solid. I don’t suppose he feels the need to show off by speeding down ordinary roads to prove how macho he is. I’m sure I’ll be fine.”

  “That’s what everybody says,” muttered Laraine, but Sark was already scurrying out the door, fishing in her purse for her sunglasses.

  Badger was waiting in his truck revving the engine when she emerged from the diner. As Sark walked to her car, she took a precautionary look at Badger’s license plate, just in case they got separated by traffic. (In Marengo?) Oh well, it still wouldn’t hurt to know the license number. Red trucks were certainly not at a premium in north Georgia, and it would be reassuring to know for a fact that you were following the correct one.

  It took her a moment to realize that the Georgia truck tag was a vanity plate, because it consisted of a series of numbers, much as standard-issue plates did. But to someone who had been studying Badger Jenkins’s biography for several days now in preparation for this interview, the numbers were indeed significant. They were the numbers of cars he had driven in the early days of his career.

  She was sitting there behind the wheel thinking how endearing that license plate was-sentimental without being too boastful. (He could have had one that said “Champ” or “NASCAR 1” or some such slogan of self-importance. Well, he did have such a slogan on his Crossfire, but she supposed that was in keeping with his celebrity image around Charlotte. Here among the home folks he’d probably be given no end of grief for such pretensions. Besides, such a tag would be a dead giveaway to fans that the truck belonged to Badger, but she didn’t suppose that there were all that many Badger Jenkins groupies roaming around in the vicinity of Marengo. Except, perhaps, Laraine.)

  Sark was so intent upon her meditation on the tasteful vanity plate that she was completely unprepared for the abrupt takeoff of the truck she was supposed to be following. Badger screeched out of the diner parking lot in a red blur, headed north on the two-lane blacktop that was only “Main Street” for about a hundred yards, before it became a country road again, at which point they would probably make the jump to light speed, Sark thought wryly.

  Was he trying to lose her? The little turkey. She gritted her teeth and peeled out after him. Fortunately, there was no traffic on the road, because Badger’s truck was now a red dot receding into the distance. She couldn’t afford to lose him. She didn’t know where she was going. If he made a turn up ahead past a curve where she couldn’t see him, she’d never find him again. Why had she not thought to obtain a county map? Or at least verbal directions from the waitress.

  Because she had not expected her host to be such a macho jerk, she answered herself.

  Well, he could be as difficult as he chose, she was sticking with him. Grimly, she hunched over the steering wheel and mashed the accelerator into the carpet, not trying to overtake him, but at least determined to keep him in her line of sight.

  Once she glanced down at the CD player, deciding that music might calm her nerves; although at their current speed, The Ride of the Valkyries would be the logical choice. When she looked up again an instant later, she saw that Badger’s red truck was even farther ahead, so she had to accelerate again to close the distance. After that, she kept both hands firmly on the steering wheel in the “ten o’clock and two o’clock” position, and she didn’t take her eyes off the road for an instant. In fact, she decided that blinking was not even a good idea. Badger knew the road, every curve, every rise-but she didn’t. She also noticed that he seemed to accelerate going out of a curve, while she slowed down well before she reached it and did not resume her normal speed until she was back on the straightaway. Maybe she should try it his way, she thought.

  She kept both hands on the wheel and hung on for dear life, but she stayed with him.

  A few miles farther on, when she discovered that Badger didn’t bother with turn signals, either, she gave up taking unnecessary breaths, so intent was she upon following the road at the greatest possible speed. He was turning left. Ah, his specialty. Fortunately, when he made that course change, he was far enough ahead to allow her time to slow down and to make the turn in relative safety. She had thought that she might try to remember the route just in case she did become lost, but after that first turn, she lost track of the road changes they took, and at some point she realized that she couldn’t possibly find her way back to Marengo on her own. They had been going too fast for her to read the route numbers or to memorize the left and right turns. She must not lose him.

  Finally, after what seemed like hours, but was actually only twenty minutes or so, Badger’s red truck made one last left turn and headed up a dirt road, churning up clouds of red dust in its wake.

  Almost there, thought Sark, easing her grip on the steering wheel so that her knuckles no longer showed white. She knew that later on her arms would ache and probably her head as well from the tension, but just now she was able to ignore any physical symptoms by focusing on exactly what names she was going to call Badger as soon as she was on solid ground again. And while she was at it, how would he like a face full of mosquito repellant?

  After another jarring mile or so up the dirt road, dodging ruts and washed out places, the brake lights on the truck glowed red, her cue to slow down, although the expanse of greenish brown lake up ahead would have tipped her off that they were coming to the end of the ordeal. She ea
sed the car to a stop a little way away from Badger’s truck, let out a sigh of relief, and rested her head for a moment against the top of the steering wheel. Anybody who followed Badger Jenkins down a country road ought to have St. Christopher’s medals for hub caps.

  The red truck had pulled up in front of a glass and cedar A-framed house that most NASCAR fans would have recognized as Badger Jenkins’s fishing cabin. Although not large by celebrity standards (Sark was no expert, but she thought it might run to 3,000 or 4,000 square feet), it was well-maintained and even stylish. She had been half-expecting something thrown together by Badger himself out of recycled chicken coops, but this place looked as if an architect, or at the very least a local construction company with a set of plans from a magazine, had constructed it.

  The cedar cabin, surrounded by a vast multilevel deck with benches and geranium-filled planters at each corner, sat on a little knoll facing the lake, where an equally well-constructed boat dock sported Badger’s motorboat, a canoe, and a little green rowboat, that last vessel presumably for duck-hunting expeditions.

  Sark got out of her car and slammed the door, with blistering words hovering on her tongue, but before she could utter a single withering syllable, Badger had run up and enveloped her in an exuberant hug. “You did good!” he said. “You kept up with me. I thought for sure I’d have to pull over and wait for you.”

  Sark stared at him in momentary disbelief, and then she felt her annoyance melt away in a glow of pride. I did good? she thought. And then she realized that she had indeed performed well; he had not managed to lose her in the Georgia outback. If the drive out to the lake had been a test, she had passed it.

  I kept up with a NASCAR driver, she thought with an inward smirk of satisfaction. She must write up this episode for the exposé article that she would write at the end of the season. Perhaps the adventure was a bit upbeat for an otherwise critical piece, but she wanted to be able to boast of her accomplishment to the world at large. Besides, she thought that with the proper slant she could use the anecdote as a criticism. Maybe the incident would serve to point out that fast driving wasn’t really all that difficult-that any reasonably coordinated person could do what Cup drivers did if only they put their minds to it.

  Her good humor restored, she studied the landscape with a more benevolent eye. The lake was quite large; it curved past a tree-lined peninsula and went on for several miles, as far as she could tell. There was no one else in sight, perhaps even no one for miles.

  “So this is your fortress of solitude,” she said to Badger, sighting the lake through the viewfinder of her camera.

  “This is it,” said Badger. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  Wet, anyhow, thought Sark, who preferred her bodies of water to be encircling Caribbean islands. It was a greenish brown lake encircled by pine trees, hardly Yellowstone. Why was Badger so crazy about this place? Most of the other NASCAR drivers lived on an even bigger lake near Charlotte-Lake Norman. Why not just move there?

  “It’s nice to have this place to come back to,” he said.

  “Do you own the whole lake?” she asked with a note of surprise in her voice. It wasn’t that NASCAR drivers didn’t make good money-heck, Jeff Gordon could probably have bought Lake Erie if he’d wanted it, but Badger was not in the top tier of Cup drivers.

  “Oh, no,” said Badger. “It’s a man-made lake, you know. I own most of what you see here, but the rest-around the bend, half a mile or so away-belongs to a couple of local landowners. And there’s a state game preserve adjoining it, too, at the far end.”

  “So no close neighbors. I suppose it’s peaceful here,” said Sark.

  “That’s it,” said Badger happily. “Peaceful. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the interest that people take in me and my racing career, but sometimes I just need time to be by myself, you know?”

  Sark nodded. “I imagine things can get pretty hectic for you,” she said.

  “It sure can,” said Badger. “Sometimes the clamor seems to be nonstop. Why, just now on the drive out here, I got four calls on my cell phone.”

  She snapped a picture of the lake, framed by a stand of pines at the water’s edge. “Well, I suppose that’s the price that-You what? You got four calls…You mean just now, driving out here?”

  “Yeah.”

  She took a deep breath, in lieu of shouting, and lowered the camera so that she could glare at him directly. “Do you mean to tell me that while I was following you out here-at a pace, I might add, that prevented me from taking deep breaths or even blinking…at a speed that no sane person could possibly maintain on the Bonneville Salt Flats, much less on a two-lane country road with curves and hills…And for the duration of that absurdly dangerous drive, you are telling me that you were talking on a cell phone?”

  “Well, yeah,” said Badger, serenely unconscious of self-incrimination. “But you gotta remember that I grew up here. I know these roads pretty well.”

  “But I don’t!”

  “I know,” he said happily. “That’s why I was so tickled that you kept up with me. And in that cheap little car, too. You were great. Now, come on. I’ll show you around.”

  Deciding not to press the point, Sark trailed after him. So much for her triumphant feat of driving skill. She had been hanging on for dear life, scarcely daring to breathe, and he had been talking on his damned cell phone. Okay, maybe race car driving was a little more difficult than she had been willing to admit. Mentally, she excised that section from her article.

  She still wondered if he had driven so fast to test her, or if he was simply oblivious to high speeds through years of racing at two or three times those speeds. She decided that she was reserving judgment on whether or not he was a jerk.

  Badger seemed to have a standard routine for hosting visitors, probably a habit born of having to entertain so many journalists and TV crews over the years. First came the tour of the lake, when Badger, at the helm of his motorboat, with the life-jacketed guest installed in the prow, buzzed off to the far end of the lake, and then slowly worked his way back to his own property, pointing out items of interest along the way. At first Sark thought she would go to sleep and fall in the water, while murmuring, “Nice tree. Nice rock. Nice shrub.” But dutifully she took pictures along the way, most of them incorporating Badger into the foreground of the shot. She thought she might have taken some good feature-story portraits: Badger in his natural habitat, looking at ease and princely on his beloved lake.

  By the time they had wended their way to the end of the lake and were halfway back to where they started, an odd transformation had taken place. The lake really was beautiful. At first she had thought that it was a glorified mud puddle in the middle of nowhere, but she had resolved to be polite about it. However, somewhere along the way, his enthusiasm had infected her, and she had begun to see the land as Badger himself must be seeing it. Suddenly, without quite knowing how or why, she got it.

  The landscape was a tapestry of the brilliant blues of sky and marsh and lake water, the sere browns of dry grass and leafless shrubs, of tall dark pines, and the silver-tipped branches of the maples in arabesques at the water’s edge. She saw it as a protected place where wild things could find peace and refuge. She looked over at Badger, who was guiding the boat as effortlessly as he had maneuvered the curves of that country road.

  And for now, thought Sark, one of them has.

  While Badger tied up the motorboat at the dock, Sark took more photos of the lake, the cabin, Badger and the boat, Badger framed against the surrounding hills. She had decided to start a team archive in case any publications needed informal shots for feature articles about Badger’s life away from the track.

  “Where’s the turtle?” she asked when he had finished securing the boat.

  Badger pointed to a fenced-in enclosure near the woods. “In there asleep. His shell is still healing up. Fixing him up was a lot more complicated than we thought. Once I got him to the body shop, Jesse called the local vet, w
ho is a fishing buddy of his, to make sure we did it right. The vet came over and checked out the turtle to make sure the membrane thing under the shell wasn’t broken, which it wasn’t. That was good-less chance of infection and all. Then he cleaned the wound and put on a wet dressing to keep it from getting infected. Gave him some antibiotics, too, every day for a month, which I paid for. Good thing I’m working again.”

  Sark felt a pang of journalistic disappointment. Turtle surgery in the body shop would have made a great human interest story. “So you didn’t use fiberglass in the body shop to fix the turtle?”

  “Oh, we did. Just not until a couple of weeks later, after the wound had healed up pretty good and the layer above it had started to harden. Then we took him back down to the shop and fixed him a patch with fiberglass boat materials and waterproof epoxy.”

  “Can I see him?” asked Sark, peering into the shady enclosure through the camera viewfinder. Just visible in the shrubbery was the shell of an enormous turtle.

  “Just don’t get too near him. You wouldn’t like him much close up. He is a humongous snapping turtle, and he’s got the disposition of Kevin Harvick. He lunges at you, and he’s faster than you’d think a turtle could be. He could take your finger off in a heartbeat.”

  Sark grinned. “The turtle or Harvick?”

  “Either one, I reckon,” said Badger.

  “If the turtle is so fierce, then how do you handle him?”