St. Dale

by Sharyn McCrumb

  Wordless with dread, he adjusted the mike for her.

  “Okay, here goes,” she crooned into the bus PA system. “It’s about Richard Petty going to heaven. Oh, don’t roll your eyes, Bekasu. It’s a cute story. Besides, it’s clean. Okay, so the story is…this is a long time in the future, of course-I hope!-but Richard Petty finally dies.” She scanned the audience until she spotted young Matthew. “He may have been a little before your time, hon, but you know who Richard Petty is, right?”

  Solemnly, the little boy nodded. “The King,” he said. “Like Elvis, only NASCAR.”

  “That’s him. He wears a big black cowboy hat like Mr. Reeve back there. Okay, so Mr. Petty dies, and he goes up to heaven. God meets him at the pearly gates and starts showing him around. Finally, after they’ve toured the streets of gold and seen the heavenly choir and all, God takes Richard Petty out to a country road that looks just like the piedmont, North Carolina-you know, red clay and pine trees-and there at the foot of a hill, God points to a little white frame house with a big front porch, and roses on the picket fence, and chickens in the yard. Richard notices a faded number 43 flag on a pole beside the front steps.

  “So God says, ‘Richard, this is your house. You’ve earned it, and I know you’ll be happy here. Welcome to heaven.’

  “So Mr. Petty, he starts up the steps to the front door, when suddenly off in the distance on a hill overlooking the forest of pine trees, he notices a big old palace. It looks like the Disneyland castle, only it’s made of shining black rock with a black sidewalk, and a big old black-and-white Number 3 banner flying from the tallest tower. Sure enough, there’s a big old ‘D-E-I’ logo painted on the drawbridge.

  “Well, all of a sudden Richard’s little white frame house didn’t look so good to him anymore. He walked back down the sidewalk to the gate where God was standing, and he said, ‘Lord, I don’t want to seem ungrateful for your gift house here, but something is troubling me. You know, I was a legend in NASCAR. I won seven championships, too, Lord. And I won the Daytona 500 seven times. He only won it once!’

  “‘What do you mean, Richard?’ asked God.

  “‘Earnhardt!’ he said, pointing to the shining black castle. ‘I want to know why Dale Earnhardt got a better house up here than I did.’

  “So God chuckled and then he said, ‘Shoot, Richard, that’s not Earnhardt’s house. It’s mine.’”

  The other passengers laughed the polite chuckles of people already familiar with the punch line, but Reverend Knight called out, “Mr. Petty should have known that.”

  “Known what?” said Justine, handing the microphone back to Harley.

  “That the big black castle was God’s house. You said it had ‘Dei’ painted on the drawbridge. Domus Dei-House of God. So I knew.”

  Justine just looked at him and shook her head sadly.

  Cayle leaned across the aisle. “D-E-I stands for Dale Earnhardt, Incorporated,” she whispered.

  “Oh.” He pulled out a small leather notebook and made an entry. “Dale Earnhardt Incorporated…DEI. Hmmm…”

  “Do people in heaven have houses?” Matthew wanted to know.

  “Well…” Bill Knight hesitated, trying to scale his answer to his audience. “I think this particular story was metaphorical, although in the Bible, Jesus does say, ‘In my father’s house there are many mansions…’ So I guess you can take it either way, Matthew.”

  The boy had gone back to his Game Boy, so perhaps he was satisfied with the ambiguous answer.

  “How’s the game going?” Bill asked him, hoping to change the subject.

  Matthew shrugged. “It’s okay. Kinda lame, though. I’d rather have a racing game, but this was all they had. This one is about this knight who has a mechanical horse, and a magic mirror that can tell if people are lying to him, and a ring, of course. There’s always a ring.”

  “What does it do?”

  “Lets you talk to animals.”

  “Well, that could be handy.” Bill smiled. “If I’d owned that ring I wouldn’t have had to buy a new living room rug. So what does the knight do with all this gear?”

  Matthew sighed. “Fights monsters. Same as every other game. I’d rather have the racing one.”

  “Well, maybe we can find you one.” Bill thought that a game championing fast driving might be marginally more healthy than one encouraging players to violence. He tried to remember what games he had played at that age, in his pre-electronic childhood, the era when a house had only one television, a black-and-white set in the middle of the living room. He could remember sandlot baseball and bike riding with the other guys, every dog in the neighborhood trailing after them like a canine convoy. He remembered his childhood in mirror fragments: sunshine streaming through pine needles; a litter of newborn hamsters, like tiny pink thumbs, nestled in an old chiffon scarf; long night drives to his grandparents’ house, his parents in the front seat singing Hit Parade tunes because the radio wouldn’t pick up any stations; his grandfather’s chair with its comforting smell of old leather, tobacco, and cough drops. What would Matthew remember, he wondered.

  They were approaching the Speedway by the time Harley remembered that he had not given all the Number Three Pilgrims a chance to say much about themselves. Now there were too many distractions and not enough time to get to everybody. Better save it for the dinner hour. He glanced at his clipboard, and skipped to the next spiel.

  “The Bristol Motor Speedway, folks,” he said into the microphone. “At point-five-three-three miles, it’s one of the smallest tracks in NASCAR, but don’t think it’s easy on account of that. One lap on that track takes fifteen seconds. It’s an oval with 36-degree banked turns. With those steep sides, driving there at 100 miles per hour is like trying to fly an F-14 around a clothes dryer. Anybody ever been to a race here?”

  No hands went up.

  “Yeah, I didn’t think so,” said Harley. “Bristol races sell out years in advance. It’s almost easier to get a sponsor than it is to get a seat. And the hotels are probably booked into the next millennium. That’s why we’ll be staying at a bed-and-breakfast tonight. Possum Holler-it’s a real nice place they tell me. Got lots of rooms. And they specialize in racing weekends. I hear there’s a sign in the front hall that says Terry Labonte Fans Welcome. Other Racing Fans Tolerated. We’re heading for the Speedway first, though. Bristol Motor Speedway-one of the hardest tickets to come by in all of sports. Oh, Cayle, your buddy Mr. Yarborough made history here at this track in 1973 by leading in every single lap of a 500-lap race.”

  “Did you ever drive here?” asked Matthew.

  “Sure did, sport. Last time was in ’95. Terry Labonte was leading the pack and Earnhardt was trying to get past him, so on turn 4 of the final lap-headed right for the finish line-Earnhardt gave Labonte a little tap on his bumper that should have spun him out across the infield, leaving the way clear for Dale to finish first. But it didn’t work like that. Somehow Terry Labonte managed to keep enough control over that car to stay on the track, and he went over the finish line in first place-but backwards. Tail end first.”

  “Did it count?” asked Matthew.

  “Sure did. First is first.”

  “And where did you finish?”

  “Well, you could say that I finished before Terry did. My engine went out on lap 34, and put me out of competition in a cloud of black smoke. I got to see the finish from pit road, though. It was almost worth it.”

  They were silent for a couple of minutes, in deference to Harley and the loss of his engine. Then Justine brightened and called out, “So tell us about this speedway wedding. I might want one someday.”

  Harley was ready for this one. “The folks at Bailey Travel figured you’d want to know about that. How are we fixed for time, Mr. Laine?”

  At the steering wheel, Ratty Laine gave a grunt of disgust and said out of the corner of his mouth, “Take all the time you want. This road is a parking lot. Volunteer Parkway traffic’s flowing like molasses in January.�
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  Harley nodded. “I’ll bet the locals know a shortcut or two. Wish I’d thought to ask about one at the airport.”

  “But you’ve driven here,” said Matthew.

  “Inside the Speedway, not out here,” said Harley, repressing a shudder. “Took a helicopter right to the Speedway parking lot. Wish we could do that today. Anyhow, as I told you before, our first event of the tour is a wedding to be held smack-dab in the middle of the Bristol Motor Speedway. Now you might not think BMS is a romantic kind of place, but as a matter of fact Mike Waltrip proposed to his wife Buffy in Victory Lane after he won the Busch Grand National event here in 1993, so I guess that sets a precedent.”

  “I saw that race,” said Jim Powell. “It was two days after Alan Kulwicki died here-the reigning champion he was-and people were still in shock after the plane crash. So when Mike took the checkered flag in the Busch race, he turned that car around and did a Polish victory lap in honor of Alan. And then in Victory Lane, there was Benny Parsons trying to interview him, and Mike went and popped the question to his young lady right on the air. It was quite a moment. Happy and sad all at once. I swear Arlene must have cried for two days after that. Didn’t you, hon?”

  His wife gave him a vacant smile and he patted her hand.

  Harley noticed that Justine’s face had clouded over at hearing the name Waltrip again, so he hurried to change the subject. “While we’re crawling through this traffic, we have a little something to pass the time here on the bus.” He held up a cassette tape. “One of the couples getting married today is taking their honeymoon with us on this tour, and, as part of their deal with the company, the bride-to-be agreed to send us a homemade tape, talking about how they came to do this. I’m going to play it for you now, so that when the newlyweds come on board, you’ll feel like you’re already acquainted with them. Here goes…”

  Chapter VI

  The Bride’s Tale

  “Honky Tonk Truth”

  Tap…tap…testing…I wonder if this thing is working-Oh, I guess it is…

  Hello. My name is Karen…um…Well, it’ll be McKee by the time you play this, I guess. Or almost…Anyhow…um…I just wanted to say that we’re getting married at the Bristol Speedway, me and Shane…

  “Well, of course it wasn’t my idea. People keep asking me that-like they think I’d planned it that way back when I was a little girl, staging those under-the-porch weddings with Malibu Barbie and Dream Date Ken (Kleenex veil and clover flower bouquet).

  Oh, sure. Me in a white organdy dress and a straw picture hat, carrying a bouquet of wild multiflora roses, tripping toward the minister in the infield of the Bristol Motor Speedway, wedding march on the PA system, fifty thousand total strangers looking on, and a passel of media types smirking like possums every which way I looked. Not to mention Dale Earnhardt serving as best man, even though he would have been dead for sixteen months by then.

  The wedding of my girlish dreams? Not hardly.

  I just wanted to marry Shane McKee, that’s all. The rest of it was his idea.

  When I told Shane’s wedding plans to the waitstaff on my shift at the Wolf Laurel Inn, they said I ought to be glad that my fiancé was taking any interest in the ceremony at all. They said most men get about as involved in weddings as a convict does in an execution: just dreading it while everybody else makes the arrangements.

  Mama’s friends took a different view, of course. They pride themselves on it. After she and Daddy called it quits when I was twelve, Mama joined the local Wiccan Friends of the Goddess and Book Discussion Group, which is sort of a Junior League for the counterculture around here. The members of the coven are mostly divorcées over forty or unmarried college professors, and so they are all prime candidates for a religion that puts men in the back pew instead of in the pulpit. I’m not a member-Mama says it will take another fifteen years and a few stretch marks to make me see the point-but of course I have to attend the gatherings that are family events, which means the vegetarian picnics and the Winter Solstice party, which is just like a Christmas party, except that the presents are given out by a lady in white robes instead of by Santa Claus. At the Solstice party once I asked Mom if she believed in the virgin birth, and she said it wouldn’t surprise her one bit, because she had yet to see any man lift one finger to help with any of the Christmas preparations, so she figured that must be the precedent for it.

  The Wiccan Friends of the Goddess position on marriage is that it is a submission to the patriarchal oppressor-well, in theory anyhow; some of the members are married or have been-although they try to be supportive of any member who is dating somebody, which gives them both the appearance of being broad-minded and the opportunity to say I-told-you-so when the relationship crashes and burns. But despite their misgivings about the male of the species, they did throw me a bridal shower. I was worried about that when they told me about it, because Wiccans are supposed to perform their rituals sky-clad, which is goddess-speak for naked, and the thought of spending an afternoon playing toilet paper bride with a roomful of naked ladies just made my head hurt. Mrs. Tickle, the librarian and coven leader, told me not to worry about that, though. “We will all wear long loose robes,” she told me, “because if you’re over forty-five and sky-clad, the sky had better be overcast.”

  Of course after they found out about Shane’s idea for the ceremony, the Wiccans said that a NASCAR wedding was just the sort of tomfool thing a man would dream up. But since I had been hearing them go on about their ideas for a traditional pagan ceremony for weeks by then, I began to get relieved that all I had to worry about was motor oil puddles and the Associated Press, instead of a Cherokee-Druid priestess from Knoxville and a wedding night in the neighbor’s corn field.

  Shane was all fired up about the wedding, I’ll give him that. I think he always figured on marrying me, but he’d never given a second thought to the ceremony itself until February 18-you know, when it happened.

  Shane hasn’t been the same since.

  We had been dating since seventh grade, so the idea of us getting married wasn’t really a surprise. It was more inevitable, like getting the license when your learner’s permit is about to expire. We were juniors that year, fixing to graduate the next June. Next year, I was figuring on applying to the local college, which is all we could afford, and Shane was hoping to switch over to full time at Williams’ Body Shop and get a place of his own, so the subject of marriage was coming up more and more. Shane was driving dirt track on the weekends, and last summer he’d done some work on an ARCA car for a guy over near Charlotte. I’d go to the race track to watch him, and he’d ask me if I was ready to be a driver’s wife. “You have to be a size eight or smaller,” he’d say, and I’d laugh, but even if he was kidding, he was right about that.

  We’d kid about it as we waited in line for movie tickets or sat on the couch in the basement, him in his red-and-black number 3 hat watching NASCAR on TV and me looking through old copies of Modern Bride that I had bought from the Goodwill for a quarter apiece.

  “Hon, what do you think of this dress?” I’d said, shoving the magazine under his nose during a commercial.

  Shane glanced at it for maybe two seconds, and then he said like, “Fine, if I can wear my white Earnhardt Goodwrench coveralls.”

  And he’d grinned when he said it, so I laughed and went back to turning pages.

  ’Cause I thought he was kidding. Well, maybe he was. I had already looked into tuxedo rentals at the mall, and Shane was okay with that. The Goodwrench overalls remark was just something he’d said to try to get a rise out of me that Sunday afternoon before the race started. The Daytona 500. February 18, 2001.

  Well, you know how that ended, I guess. The whole world must know that, I reckon. But nobody coulda been hit any harder by it than Shane McKee. He was tore up worse than that black Monte Carlo. In fact, it wasn’t hardly torn up at all, which was why I had such trouble believing it at first.

  I’d never seen Shane cry before-not even t
hat time in eighth grade when Bo got hit by a Kenworth. He loved that dog-still keeps a picture of him in his wallet to this day-but when Dale Earnhardt hit that wall in the last little bit of the 2001 Daytona 500, I thought we’d have to call the rescue squad for Shane.

  He had been looking forward to the Daytona 500 since Christmas, and I can’t say that I had, but I was determined to be a good sport and watch it with him. I know it’s the Super Bowl of auto racing and all, but I didn’t exactly find it riveting, just watching a bunch of cars with numbers painted on the side, going around in a circle, turning left for three solid hours. Not at first anyhow, but after spending years with Shane McKee, I did begin to get the hang of it. I didn’t know all the drivers by number and sponsor the way he did, but I could recognize most of the important ones, though I tended to get all the Bodines mixed up. Mostly I spent the afternoon paging through my fashion magazines, and glancing at the screen every now and again, especially when Shane yelled at somebody. By the last lap, he was about yelled out, and he was sitting on the edge of the sofa cushion, saying, “Come on Mike,” as if his voice was going straight into Mike Waltrip’s headset. Then he just froze and stopped making any sound altogether, and that’s when I looked up to see what the matter was, and saw the replay.

  “It’s not that bad,” I said when we first saw the black car up against the wall, within hollering distance of the finish line. “He’s always doing stuff like that.”

  Shane didn’t even look away from the television screen. He started shaking his head.

  Then trying to cheer him up, I said, “It was an unusual wreck, though, wasn’t it? Not a Bodine in sight.”