Once Around the Track

by Sharyn McCrumb

  This was worse.

  Now that she actually knew Badger as a person, she was so afraid for him that she could hardly breathe.

  She had thought that joining the team would lessen her anxiety because now at least she could keep an eye on things for him. In a small way she could even control aspects of the race car so that she could be sure that he was safe. When no one was paying any attention to her in the garage, she would check everything she could understand, which was nothing under the hood, unfortunately, but she checked tires for bubbles, lug nuts for cracks, harness fastenings for breakage. Surreptitiously, she also rubbed a thimbleful of dirt on the hood of the car. This was not illegal. She had checked the NASCAR rules. Nowhere did they mention dirt-rubbing. She just didn’t want to have to explain to anyone who caught her that the dry brown substance in the plastic bag was sacred dirt from Chimayo, New Mexico, bought off a “shaman” site on the Web. The holy dust might protect Badger from harm out there-at least if any Navajo deities were officiating over motorsports rituals today.

  Taran thought it was too bad that windshields were covered with tear-off plastic sheets, because a little holy water in the cleaning fluid couldn’t have hurt, either. Later, it cheered her up immensely to learn that sometimes they did have to clean the Lexan windshield with spray and a towel, if they ran out of the tear-off sheets or if the tear-offs blew off during the race.

  Some of the guys on other pit crews laughed at the idea of good luck charms-taping Bible verses to steering columns, or putting lucky talismans somewhere in the car-but as far as Taran was concerned, there were no atheists in the pits. If there were any omnipotent racing fans out there in the firmament, she wanted to take every chance there was of currying favor with one of them. All race fans knew that the one time Dale Earnhardt had won the Daytona 500 was in 1998 when a little girl had given him a penny for luck on race day, and he had glued the coin to the dashboard of his Monte Carlo. If such a ritual was good enough for the Intimidator, why shouldn’t she use a little white magic to protect Badger? She didn’t really care if he won or not. She just wanted him to be safe.

  And as long as she was cultivating New Age spiritual pursuits, Taran wished she knew of some way to get the hang of astral projection, because an out-of-body experience would definitely have been an asset on race day. Taran had seen many races on television and half a dozen in person at various speedways in the Southeast, but until she joined the pit crew, it had never occurred to her that the one place from which it was impossible to view the race was trackside. And Daytona was probably the worst of the lot.

  Daytona, a two-and-a-half mile track with thirty-one-degree banking in the turns, encircled an infield so large that it contained enough buildings to constitute a small town, even boasting a lake within its boundaries. In order to tell what was going on in the race, you needed a bird’s-eye view of the action, afforded by a seat in a skybox or high up in the grandstands, or else the perspective of a battery of television cameras strategically positioned at the very top of the structure in order to capture a vista of the entire track at once.

  Each team had a spotter positioned up there on the roof of the grandstand, giving the driver a bird’s-eye view of the whole track. The spotter would warn the driver if another car was coming up on him. In the case of a wreck in which smoke might reduce visibility to a few feet beyond the hood of the race car, the spotter would tell the driver whether to go high or low to avoid any obstacles ahead. Sometimes the driver was running blind-at 180 mph-and then his life was in the hands of the spotter. If you were on pit crew, you could hear the spotter on a channel in your headset, and he was your eyes for the race, too.

  The view of the pit crew, while immediate and thrilling, lacked in scope what it made up for in excitement. Cars roared by, and then vanished around Turn One, so that half the race went on behind them, on the far side of the infield, past a veritable village of buildings, crowds, trucks, and haulers, so that even if you turned around you would catch only brief glimpses of the race. All the pit crew could see was the few seconds of the race that played out as the cars swept past the pit stall.

  Taran supposed that battles must be like that for infantrymen. All they can do is fight their little corner of the war, and then wait until the skirmish is over to find out the particulars of the conflict-who won and who lost and why. She felt rather like a soldier herself. Surely a Cup race was as loud as a battle, and the same pressures were brought to bear on the participants: the tension, the feeling that you might fail your comrades through panic or inexperience or simply a lack of skill.

  You were less alone than an infantryman, though. Always there were the voices in your headset, drowning out, for the most part, the roar of engine noise. The driver would relay his questions and comments back to the team, although Badger wasn’t a particularly talkative driver. Tuggle talked to various team members to ask about the fuel situation, for example. Someone behind the wall was keeping track of fuel consumption; races had been lost at the finish line on the last lap when the car ran out of gas. It had happened to Dale Earnhardt once in the Daytona 500. Nobody wanted it to happen to Badger.

  Hurry up and wait. If she’d had to sum up the feeling of being on a pit crew, that would cover it. There were the urgent voices, the pressure to be fast and accurate with millions of people all over the country watching you, and the noise and danger all combining to make the race feel like a three-hour reenactment of D-day. And above it all there was the fierce desire to be victorious, not for yourself, but for those who served with you, so that you could seal your bond of brotherhood in a struggle crowned with success. You would know that you did your part to ensure the win, and that your teammates valued you for your efforts. There would be more money paid to the winning team, but during the race itself, she doubted if anybody gave much thought to that. For the duration of that three-hour race, they were soldiers, wielding jacks and drills instead of rifles, to be sure, but soldiers nonetheless. Badger’s life might well depend upon their skill, as much as if he had been a brother in arms. She felt that nothing she had ever done had mattered as much as this.

  So for Taran the first Daytona 500 in years that she had not seen was the one in which she took part. The next day she would watch a recording of the television broadcast of the event, and from that she could piece together what had been happening at a given time in the race, and then she would try to summon up her own confused memories so that she could fit together the two perspectives into one coherent experience: what really happened, and what it felt like to live through it as it happened.

  One thing that she was sure of, though. It had not looked or felt like the report of it that appeared on Badger’s Din.

  Badger’s Din

  Lady Pit Bulls “86” The Badger by FastDrawl

  Thank God it’s over, folks. If you’ve been reading my lamentations since Thanksgiving because racing season was over…if you’ve heard me counting down the hours until Daytona…then you may be amazed to hear me thanking heaven that the race is history, but there it is, guys. I almost changed the channel. I couldn’t take it.

  They were awful.

  If you want to measure Team 86’s pit stop times, get a calendar.

  Okay, spare me all your excuses, you bleeding hearts. Granted, the 86 is a new team with novice personnel. Granted, this is an equality gimmick as far as most people are concerned, but, folks, we are not most people. We are the diehard, tried and true, whatever-he-drives-wherever-he-drives-it fans of Badger Jenkins, and I submit to you that it is cruel and unusual punishment to make us watch him sabotaged and humiliated by this bumbling bunch of Hooters wannabees masquerading as NASCAR technicians. It scours my soul.

  Badger is the man. He drives like greased lightning. He is the king of the redneck ballet out there-and to have to watch him brought low by his lousy support staff is more than I can endure. Can we take up a collection to get him some decent help? Or, failing that, at least some hotter-looking useless babes? Is there a Sw
edish volleyball team? My twenty bucks is in the hat for a new pit crew.

  Taran read FastDrawl’s article for the third time, wishing she had not decided to check on comments from her old Internet buddies. She had gone back to the hotel to check on Tony Lafon, who was still sick. Allergic reaction to seafood, he thought. He declined her offer to bring him dinner, and he was obviously in no mood for company. He had seen the race on television, and neither of them wanted to talk about that. After a few more awkward minutes, she left and went back to her room, wishing she had someone to talk to. That’s why she had logged on to Badger’s Din.

  It had been more than a week since she’d visited the site, and she was so despondent after the race that she’d hope to commiserate with the faithful on Badger’s unauthorized fan site. But instead of sympathy, she had found FastDrawl’s screed, and now she was progressing from disbelief to shock to rage. He had no idea what it was like to be out there trying to do a job in thirteen seconds-thirteen seconds-with TV cameras zeroing in on you like snipers, and people barking orders into your headset, and having to worry about whether some car coming down pit road would lose its brakes or blow a tire and plow into you. Easy enough for that arrogant jerk FastDrawl to sit at home in his recliner, swilling beer and second-guessing the race, assuming that he could do everything better than the people who actually had the jobs. What was that quotation about critics? Teddy Roosevelt had said it, she thought.

  Thank God for the Internet: All you had to do was type in a few keywords and you could find almost any quote you’d ever heard.

  A few moments later she had found it, saved it with the copy command, and prepared to fire it point-blank at the smug little asshole at Badger’s Din.

  From Mellivora: Fastdrawl, who are you to criticize people who are actually trying to accomplish something instead of sitting on their butts critiquing life instead of living it? This is what I think!

  It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who at the worst, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

  – Theodore Roosevelt

  So, shut up, FastDrawl, as Badger himself would say, “You’re a useless streak of widdle whose opinion isn’t worth a bucket of warm spit.” If you’re going to root for Badger, support his team. If you’re not, find somewhere else to be a blowhard.

  Taran stayed online for a few more minutes, reading the crossfire between FastDrawl supporters and people who agreed with her defense of Team Vagenya. She found, though, that she didn’t much care anymore what any of them thought. They didn’t know Badger, and she did. They hadn’t lived through a Cup race, and she had. All their endless paragraphs of speculation now reminded her of the work of some remote Pacific cargo cult, building a contraption out of sticks and vines and then expecting it to fly. They didn’t understand anything at all. And she’d never be able to explain it to them.

  She logged off. She was too tired to read any further entries, and too depressed to post any more comments, even to thank those who sided with her. Tomorrow they would be flying back to North Carolina, and there they would face a critic who did count, a critic who was quite entitled to point out how the doer of deeds could have done them better: Grace Tuggle-or worse-Badger Jenkins himself.

  Taran decided to take another shower, so that Cass, her hotel roommate, couldn’t hear her cry.

  “Well, we sucked,” said Tuggle, facing the despondent 86 team in their postrace analysis.

  The pit crew and assorted other team members were back in Mooresville, sitting around the conference room table in various stages of misery, waiting for the crew chief to comment on their performance, not that they needed to know what she thought. The expression of disgust would be a mere formality, but it had to be endured. They would be watching the footage of the overhead view of each pit stop and analyzing each strategy call to see what they could have done differently. It would be unpleasant, but they all knew it was a necessary ordeal. They would never get better unless they knew exactly what had gone wrong before.

  Taran had brought her own box of tissues to the meeting, and her swollen eyes and reddened nose suggested that this was her second box since the race; the others were maintaining a stoic calm, awaiting the storm.

  “We sucked,” Tuggle said again in that voice of preternatural calm that is worse than shouting.

  “Aw, don’t be too hard on ’em, Tuggle. They’re new at it,” said a drawling voice from the doorway. “And at least we qualified. That wasn’t exactly a given, you know.”

  Nobody gasped, but nobody breathed, either. Badger and Sark were standing in the doorway, looking grim. Taran let out a stifled sob and buried her face in her arms.

  “At least he isn’t wearing the firesuit!” hissed Reve, elbowing her in the ribs.

  He didn’t have on sunglasses either, but he still managed to look intimidating to people who knew that his career and even his life had been in their hands-and that they had let him down. The fact that he was being nice about it only made it worse. Taran reached for another tissue.

  “Come in, Badger,” said Tuggle, indicating the empty chair beside her. “You, too, Sark. I’m sure the team would welcome your comments on their performance yesterday.”

  “Yeah,” Reve muttered under her breath. “Nice to know he isn’t on his yacht today, or out earning another ten grand signing his name somewhere.”

  “I’m not sure how you want me to write this up,” said Sark.

  Tuggle shook her head. “Smoke and mirrors,” she said.

  Sark nodded. “We are a new team, and we view this first race as a learning experience. We value Badger Jenkins’s expertise, and we are grateful for his patience as we learn the something-something of motorsports. Like that?”

  Tuggle sighed. “Whatever. Just don’t say I said we sucked… But we did.”

  “Well, at least we didn’t come in last,” said Jeanne, the tire carrier.

  “Only because Badger had the good fortune not to wreck the car, and because Jay Bird and Julie’s engine didn’t give out during the race,” said Tuggle. “But I’m sure you all know that apart from the DNFs who left the race in wrecks or with mechanical problems…apart from them…we were dead last, y’all. I assure you that you gave a lot of chauvinistic owners and sports writers a great deal of satisfaction with your performance.”

  That remark even silenced Reve, whose primary goal was proving that women could perform as well as men in motorsports.

  Badger had poured himself a cup of coffee, and now he sat down next to the crew chief, looking gaunt and weary. Supposedly, drivers lose about ten pounds in a three-hour race. Looking at Badger this morning, no one doubted it.

  “We’ll look at the video footage in a minute,” said Tuggle. “But before we do that, do you want to start us off, Badger?”

  He stared into his coffee and sighed. “I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

  “Well, we can start with you then. Your speeding down pit road cost us a lap. And this may be the crew’s first real race, but it sure as hell wasn’t yours, boy. We could have used that lap.”

  Taran raised a tear-stained face, ready to defend her hero. “It wouldn’t have helped,” she said in a hoarse voice that trembled on the breaking point. “I got the catch can stuck in the gas tank, and his having to come back to get that removed cost us a lap, anyhow.” She looked at Badger pleadingly. “I’m really, really sorry.”

  The others exchanged uncomfortable looks, and Badger closed his eyes and held the coffee cup against his forehead. “It’s okay,” he said
softly. “You didn’t mean to. And it’s not like any of the rest of us were perfect.”

  Taran wiped her eyes. “But I let you down.”

  Badger gave her a rueful smile. “You can’t take all the credit for this defeat. We’re a team. We all pitched in to make this fiasco.”

  The rest of the team nodded, but nobody would look at him.

  “I left off a lug nut,” said Cindy. “I had them taped to my arm, like you showed us, Tuggle, and one must have come off that time.”

  “And one time I let the jack slip during the tire change,” said Cass Jordan. “I guess I had it at the wrong angle or something. Maybe I was more nervous than I thought I was.”

  Tuggle nodded. “And the rest of you did not make any howling blunders, but you were slow. I don’t expect you to make a thirteen-second pit stop right off the bat, but I gotta tell you, you were putting me in mind of the days when drivers used to take five-minute coffee breaks on pit stops.”

  “When was that?” asked Sigur.

  “Early fifties,” said Kathy. “Leonard Wood of the Wood Brothers was the man who figured out that you didn’t have to have a faster car if your team shortened the pit stop. And that’s what we need to do, folks-shorten the damn pit stop.”

  “How?” said Reve.

  “We stop screwing up,” said Badger.

  “Practice,” said Tuggle. “We practice the moves until you can do them in your sleep. Until crowds and noise and cars whooshing by don’t faze you anymore. We’ll practice this afternoon after we finish here.” She turned to Badger. “And as for you, boy, you need to remember that you are not calling the shots on this team. I am. You can give me your opinion, Badger, but the final call will be mine. Understood?”

  “I know, Tuggle,” said Badger. “But remember I’m not driving a school bus out there. My instinct is what makes me a Cup driver.”