Once Around the Track

by Sharyn McCrumb

  Hey, Ed! According to Julie Carmichael, our chief engineer, “By the grace of God and the genius of Jay Bird Thomas,” Badger Jenkins is now one of the forty-three entries in the Daytona 500. There is a great sense of relief and accomplishment here at 86 headquarters. But I think the real feeling is that, although Badger is an incredible driver, we were also very lucky.

  Yo, Sark! Glad to hear your team made the big race. Maybe I’ll watch it while I read the New York Times Sunday afternoon. Did your boy win the qualifying race?

  Nope. Let me see if I can explain without making you sorry you asked. You can get in to the Daytona 500 by being one of the thirty-five top finishing teams from last year-but since the 86 team did not even exist last year, that was not an option for us. You can also get in by scoring one of the best times in the qualifying round. Or you can finish first or second in one of the races that determines who gets in.

  I almost understood that, but then my eyes glazed over. So via which of these many choices did Badger & Company get in?

  Well, that’s where it gets even more complicated, Ed. One of the guys who got in on time trials also finished really well in the qualifying race, and since you don’t need both of those ways to gain entry into the Daytona 500, that created an opportunity for next guy on the list to make it in, and so on. Anyhow, Badger did really well in the Bud 150, even though he didn’t place in the top five. But there were a lot of wrecks caused by aggressive drivers, and he managed to avoid them, and then by some miracle, he did not have any engine problems or tire malfunctions, so partly by being a good driver and partly by being fortunate, he squeaked by, and after his competitors qualified in other ways, he was the last guy to make it in to the Daytona 500 on the basis of his qualifying speed. The team seems to be alternately thrilled and terrified at the prospect of being in the big race.

  Well, thanks for that erudite explanation of the intricacies of stock car racing rituals, but hey, Sark, the next time I ask you a casual question like that, could you just say, “They decide that by examining chicken entrails.” It would make just as much sense to me and it would save you a lot of typing.

  See? I told you this sport wasn’t for dummies! Oops-I sound like a convert, don’t I? Well, at least it’s all beginning to make more sense to me. I’ll keep you posted on our adventures.

  I’ll look for you in Victory Lane Sunday afternoon.

  Yeah. That’ll happen. I just hope he finishes before the start of next year’s race.

  Badger got more requests for interviews after they had lucked their way into the starting lineup for the race. The press had a command center of cubicles and TV monitors in a large building in the infield of the speedway, and Sark had to usher Badger in for a press conference on Friday, where he stood beside Tuggle squinting in the bright television camera lights on the little stage at the front of the room. The fact that he had made the race was not the big story. The fact that the All-Woman Team had made the race-now, that was news.

  “So what’s it like to work with a handsome race car driver?” someone called out.

  Tuggle shrugged. “Let me check with one of Kasey Kahne’s people and I’ll let you know.”

  Amid the laughter, she and Badger exchanged a high-five look. They had been expecting that question, and Badger himself had suggested that answer. They fielded the rest of the puff questions with equal ease, reserving the serious attention to the real questions about race strategy and team preparations.

  The final question, directed to Badger by a smirking male sport writer, was also inevitable. “Hey, Badger! Tell us about your sponsor-Vagenya!”

  Badger smiled. “I know your wife wanted you to ask us that, Bob.”

  “Tuggle, do you use Vagenya, or does Badger do the trick?”

  Tuggle’s scowl could have lowered room temperature, and Badger, eying her, shook his head sadly. “You boys are going to get me in trouble here. You know what a temper she’s got.”

  When the delighted laughter died down, Badger assumed his earnest were-retriever expression, and said, “Vagenya is serious medicine, folks. If our advertising can bring it to the attention of people who need it, that’s a good thing, isn’t it?”

  The respectful silence almost lasted long enough for them to make a graceful exit, but then a quick-thinking wag from Sports Illustrated said, “Well, if you crash into Mark Martin’s Viagra car, they’ll probably have to turn the hose on you to get them apart.”

  In an unspoken accord, Tuggle and Badger smiled weakly, nodded their good-byes to the assembled journalists, and left the room before the laughter subsided.

  All in all, the questions had been entirely predictable, and they handled themselves well for a first team press conference. They had declined to hug for the cameras, and they had not allowed themselves to be baited into making incautious remarks.

  “We did okay,” said Badger.

  “Unless they make up quotes for us,” grunted Tuggle as they left the building.

  The rest of the crew didn’t see much of Badger before race day, prompting Reve to mutter about the Upstairs Downstairs nature of racing hierarchy. Drivers were treated like royalty, and the number of volunteers for the harem boggled the mind.

  “They must think they’re gods,” muttered Jeanne, who had just seen a stunningly beautiful girl hit on a pit crew guy who looked like a garden gnome. And he wasn’t even a Cup driver. She could not imagine the offers they got.

  “When we can’t find him, he must be somewhere screwing like a mink,” said Sigur.

  “Well, you’ll never know,” Kathy Erwin told them. “In the old days, this place could have topped Sodom and Gomorrah, but nowadays they tend to be more discreet.”

  “Most of the drivers are married,” said Taran.

  Kathy took a deep breath, struggled to keep a straight face, and mostly succeeded. “Yes, that’s quite true, Taran,” she said.

  “Badger isn’t married, though,” said Jeanne. “He’s probably buying his condoms by the case.”

  “You’ll never catch him,” said Kathy. “And since we have to work with him, believe me, you don’t want to. It’s none of our business. Just be glad he doesn’t hit on us.”

  They were never able to find out what Badger was doing in his limited free time in Daytona, but they pictured him frequenting expensive restaurants in the company of movie stars far into the night, and possibly sleeping off a hangover beside said starlet on the race morning before the drivers’ meeting.

  All except Taran, that is. Although she would never have admitted it to anyone for fear of being laughed to scorn, Taran kept thinking of an illustration she’d seen once in a book on King Arthur, depicting the medieval squire on the night before his ordination, kneeling in prayer before an altar, his head resting against the hilt of his broadsword. She pictured Badger in his purple firesuit, helmet under his arm, kneeling in prayer in his motor home. She found this image so comforting that she resolved never to find out what he really did on the morning of a race.

  But they were busy enough, anyhow, getting ready for the race, occasionally signing an autograph or posing for photos with passing fans, or shooing away journalists who were curious about the all-female pit crew. They spent long hours at the track, ate Granola bars and peanut butter sandwiches in the hauler, and trudged back to the hotel long after dark, too tired to do much besides shower and fall into bed, getting ready to do it all again the next day.

  “I can’t believe I’m really here,” said Jeanne Mowbray, the tire carrier, on one of the rides back to the hotel. “When I was a kid back in Ohio, I lived next to the highway that the haulers took heading for the speedway up in Michigan. We’d get lawn chairs and put them up in a pasture alongside the road, and just sit there and watch those brightly painted haulers roll by. Nobody we knew even went to the race, but we’d listen to it on the radio. And we had seen the trucks go by.” She sighed. “And now-I’m here!”

  “There’s an ocean out there somewhere,” said Cindy Corlett. “I never
thought I’d get this close to an ocean and not see it.”

  “I’ve been coming here since I was eight years old,” said Kathy Erwin, “And I’ll tell you what my daddy used to tell me when I’d ask to go to the beach: Just pretend you’re in Vegas, honey.”

  “Well, if Badger wins, I’m going to the beach,” said Cindy.

  Kathy snickered. “If Badger wins, Cindy, the beach will come to you.”

  Finally, Sunday arrived, a gray day of leaden clouds and cool temperatures, and an ocean of people all converging on the speedway, those that weren’t there already, that is. Some of the spectators arrived in campers days before the race itself and spent Speed Week in a Mardi Gras of revelry. But for the pit crew Sunday was a dizzying combination of work day, final exam, and D-day all rolled into one. More than one of them had sent her breakfast swirling down the toilet before they set out for the track in the predawn darkness.

  A few more hours of preparation, a pep talk from Tuggle, and they would be as ready as they’d ever be. From behind the stack of tires that she’d be changing in the race that afternoon, Sigur Nelson peered at a sturdy blond man wearing an orange Cingular NASCAR jacket. He was nodding solemnly at their crew chief, who was gesturing and talking to him in urgent tones that the pit crew couldn’t overhear. Sigur blinked and looked again.

  “Hey, Kathy!” she hissed. “What is Jeff Burton doing in our garage? Isn’t he driving the 31 for Childress today?”

  Kathy Erwin, the only crew member from a NASCAR family, took a long look at the visitor. “That’s not Jeff Burton,” she whispered back. “It’s his older brother.”

  “The one who won Daytona a few years back?”

  Kathy shook her head. “No. Not Ward. I’m pretty sure that’s Brian Burton over there. He’s the middle one. Instead of going to NASCAR like his brothers, he finished college and runs the family construction company.”

  “Oh. The smart one.”

  “Yeah, but he’s also the one who won a slew of go-cart championships when the Burtons were kids. People say he’s the best driver of the three of them.”

  “The best driver in the family did not turn pro?”

  “It happens,” said Kathy. “Dale’s daughter Kelley was the most talented of the Earnhardt kids. Even better than Little E., they say.”

  Sigur digested this information. “They’re not replacing Badger out there today, are they?”

  “No. I think they’re replacing his spotter. I haven’t seen Tony around this morning, and yesterday at dinner he said he felt like he was coming down with something.”

  “He’s allergic to shrimp,” said Taran. “I warned him not to eat fried seafood at the restaurant last night. They use the same oil to cook everything. He says he’ll be okay in a couple of hours, but Tuggle thought we ought not to take any chances.”

  “Brian Burton would be the perfect spotter for Badger,” said Kathy. “He’s smart, and he knows how to drive. I’ll bet they’ve known each other for years. Badger used to go duck hunting with Ward. They all had similar driving experiences early on. And most important-”

  “Are the Burtons from Georgia?” asked Taran.

  “Virginia. But they sound a lot like Badger.” Kathy grinned. “Boy, when those two get going, it’s gonna sound like Navajo code talkers on our scanners. Oh, look! I was right. Tuggle is offering him one of our purple team jackets with the Vagenya logo on the back.”

  “Yeah, and he’s backing away,” said Sigur, stifling a giggle. “He must have heard of Vagenya, and he wants to keep on his Cingular jacket instead. Can he do that?”

  “He’s doing us a big favor,” said Kathy. “As long as he keeps Badger out of the wrecks out there, I think he can do anything he wants.”

  In their purple Team Vagenya uniforms they stood on the pit stall, waiting for the madness to begin.

  “Taran had better snap out of it,” muttered Sigur. “Look at her standing there in a trance. You’d think we hadn’t practiced this a zillion times. She’s like a racehorse that can’t focus because of all the distractions at the track. We ought to put blinders on her.”

  “She’ll get used to it,” said Reve. “It is rather overwhelming at first.”

  “But she’s a race fan. She’s a trained member of this pit crew. She ought to have known what to expect. More than I did.”

  “It’s different in person,” said Kathy Erwin, who had grown up on speedways. “Bigger. Louder. It’s always daunting to people their first time. This track is huge. Give her a couple of minutes. She’ll settle.”

  The countdown until the start of the race was certainly different from the practice days at the shop, and even later on the speedway itself when all you had to think about was doing your job as quickly and efficiently as you could. That had been difficult enough, but now the challenge was to perform with that same calm proficiency in the eye of a festive hurricane of color and noise.

  The pageantry of race day was impressive enough viewed in miniature on a television screen, but when the full blast of it rolled over you in waves of team colors, engine roars, and the smell of leaded gas, the effect was numbing. More than one hundred thousand people were staring down at you, watching you work, while engines thundered. Air Force jets swooped low over the speedway in the flyover at the beginning of the race, and then all the pit crews lined up on the track, like spokes in a giant wheel, in a rainbow of team colors, to stand at attention while a famous singer-someone whose CDs you actually owned-sang the National Anthem.

  “Who’s that walking Badger to the 86?” asked Cindy, as she watched the procession of drivers heading for their cars. “I thought the wives escorted them. That doesn’t look like a Miss Georgia to me.”

  “No, he divorced that one,” said Jeanne. “Is it a dumpy scarecrow-looking woman? I think that’s his manager. I hear they don’t like her much around the front office.”

  “Did she kiss him?” asked Taran in a stricken voice.

  “Nope. He barely looked at her,” said Jeanne.

  “Badger focuses,” Kathy informed them. “A lot of drivers do that. Before the race even starts, he’ll begin to block out everything but the driving. In his mind he is already on the track. He wouldn’t know it if he had been walked to the car by the Bride of Frankenstein.”

  “He just was,” said Tuggle, who had caught the tail end of the conversation.

  All the fanfare of race day would have been distracting enough for the first few minutes, no matter which team you were with, but for Taran there was one extra element that she hadn’t considered, and for a moment of fleeting panic, she found herself wishing that she had been hired on the pit crew of, say, Greg Biffle or Joe Nemechek, where this particular problem would not arise. But, oh no, she had to be the catch can for Badger Jenkins. Her driver. And to stand right there while he walked to the car…

  Except it wasn’t Badger.

  Taran had got used to seeing Badger around by now-the little chicken hawk guy with the aw-shucks grin and the wave-on-a-slop-bucket walk, strolling around the shop in his baggy jeans and faded tee shirt. She had even had a couple of casual (nice-day-isn’t-it? How-you-doin’?) conversations with him, and while it was true that when he tossed away his empty bottle of blue Gatorade, she had fished it out of the trash and kept it, she told herself that she could throw it away any time she wanted to. It was just that the plastic bottle looked rather nice with ribbons tied around the neck, holding a fistful of flowers or feathers collected on her morning walks. She had brought it with her to Daytona. For luck, she told herself. In the hotel room she had set it in front of her signed and framed eight-by-ten photo of…Photo of whom?

  A stern-looking man in dark glasses and a purple and white fire suit standing in front of the race car.

  It was one of the formal shots Sark had taken for team press releases, and in the photo a tall and handsome man stared at the camera. Embroidered on the chest of his firesuit, right beneath “NASCAR Nextel Cup,” were the words Badger Jenkins, but the man in the phot
o certainly wasn’t the affable little guy who wandered around the shop, eating beef jerky while he passed the time of day with the mechanics.

  The man in the photo wasn’t Badger: It was him. The guy she had watched in televised races and cried over when he wrecked and fantasized about for more nights than she cared to count. The Dark Angel.

  And just as the race was about to begin that’s who had walked past her and swung himself with practiced ease through the driver’s side window of the race car. Taran froze, staring at this apparition, while the few remaining brain cells still on duty tried to assure her that the guy in the firesuit really was just little old Badger-only gift-wrapped. It didn’t help, though.

  “Will you snap out of it?” hissed Reve, nudging her in the side. “It’s just Badger, for God’s sake. He gets into his car through the driver’s side window-just like everybody else from Georgia. Now we have work to do. Get over him!”

  Taran nodded, still frozen, staring fixedly at the car, which was now proceeding around the track in those preliminary laps before the green flag signaled the start of the race.

  “I’d advise you to get a grip on yourself,” said Sigur. “Because, you know, if you do a lousy job on the pit stops, you could cost him the race. Would you want to have to explain that to him?”

  Taran shivered, picturing herself cowering before the menacing presence of the Dark Angel in the purple firesuit. He wouldn’t even have to scold her if she cost him the race. She would probably throw herself off the top tier of the grandstand in sheer mortification at the thought of failing Him. Somehow, the thought of laid-back little Badger telling her that her mistake was forgiven did not make her feel any better. She was pretty sure that when it came to winning races, the Dark Angel was always the being you would be dealing with.

  Of course, his wrath wasn’t really the point, was it? What really had Taran frozen in her tracks was abject terror. Suppose he got hurt out there? She was the one who had worried about him when he was just a face on a coffee mug, a stranger whose fate was completely beyond her control. She was the fan who sometimes cried during the National Anthem in sheer apprehension over what would happen to her driver once the race began.