St. Dale

by Sharyn McCrumb

  Shane never took his eyes off the screen. “It’s bad, Karen,” he said, real quiet, like he was talking to himself.

  “No. They’re just playing it up for the suspense,” I said. “He can’t be hurt. They wear helmets and harnesses and all kinds of safety equipment. And the car’s not stove in too much and it’s not on fire. They’ll cut him out or something and he’ll be fine. Look, Mike Waltrip won the race and Dale Junior came in second, both of them driving for DEI. He’ll be drinking champagne out of the trophy with ’em in the winner’s circle by the next commercial.”

  “Blue tarp,” said Shane, like he didn’t even hear me. He slid off the couch and sat shivering there on the rug about a foot from the television, like he wanted to crawl through the screen and look in the car for himself.

  I tried to talk him into going out for pizza-my treat, I said, the race is over-but nothing would budge him. “My whole life,” he said. “I’ve been pulling for Dale my whole life.”

  “I know,” I said. The first Christmas present Shane ever gave me was a little gold number 3 to wear around my neck. It matched his.

  I always thought that Shane had elected Dale Earnhardt to be his substitute dad, because his real dad wasn’t good for much, and in fact Shane hadn’t seen him in quite a few years. There’s some of Earnhardt’s kids who could have said the same once, I think, but Shane wasn’t interested in the personal details of his hero’s private life. Men mostly aren’t. I think he just looked up to Dale Earnhardt so much that he didn’t care a bit what the man was really like. As far as Shane was concerned, Big Dale was a knight in a shining Chevy, a place to channel all those feelings you’re supposed to have for your dad, and somebody you’d be proud to be kin to, whereas his own dad wasn’t much to brag about, by all accounts. Believing in Dale got Shane through childhood anyhow, but when it all ended on February 18, 2001, he wasn’t ready to let go.

  So we never did eat dinner that night. I don’t remember what came on after the race, because we weren’t really watching the show. We were just waiting for the program to be interrupted with more news about the wreck, which finally came about seven, and then Shane started to cry, and I was crying because it scared me so bad to see him like that. I didn’t know what to say to somebody in that much grief. I haven’t had much experience with people dying. Mostly it’s friends of our grandparents who pass away, and they’re usually so sick or senile that people go around talking about what a blessed release it is, though I’ve always suspected that they mean for the family instead of for the dead person.

  Now Dale Earnhardt was pushing fifty, not exactly young by high school standards, but no way was he some broken-down senior citizen ready to kick the bucket for want of anything better to do.

  “It’s not fair,” said Shane.

  Well, it kinda was, I thought, but I didn’t say so. Dale Earnhardt was known as the Intimidator, because his trademark was to tap some other car with his bumper when he wanted them to get out of his way in a race. In 1987 at Pocono, Dale won by bumping his way past Alan Kulwicki just half a lap from the finish line. And in the first Winston Shootout in Charlotte, he crashed into Bill Elliott and Geoff Bodine, and then went on to win the race, and Old Awesome Bill from Dawsonville and Bodine got so mad at Dale that they crashed into him during the cool-down lap after the race. So I know for a fact that Dale had caused a bunch of wrecks his own self, not that he ever got anybody hurt bad that I know of, unlike poor Ricky Rudd who once ran over a pit crew guy coming off the track too fast, which is why they have speed limits now in the pits.

  Still, the way that wreck happened at Daytona, it looked like somebody had tapped Dale’s bumper, giving him a taste of his own medicine, maybe, only things went terribly wrong after that. It was fair, I guess, but that wasn’t going to make it right to all the Earnhardt folks who were out there brokenhearted that night, especially not to the one I was trying to comfort.

  “Shane, look at it this way,” I said. “What if some angel had appeared to Dale this morning before the race and had said to him, ‘Mr. Earnhardt, you can either live thirty more years and die old and bypassed in some Charlotte hospital, or you can go out today in a blaze of glory on the last lap of the Daytona 500 with two of your own DEI drivers coming in first and second, and be a legend forever after…’ Well, what do you think he would have said?”

  Shane clenched his jaw. “He had a little girl,” he said.

  There was a smart comeback to that about how much time his older kids had seen him while they were growing up, but I let it go. “But what do you think he would have said, Shane?”

  He wouldn’t look at me, but finally he said, “I guess he’d have picked to go today.”

  “Well, all right then.”

  Shane sat there for a while rubbing his chin, and mulling over what I said about the angel, which I know for a fact he believes in because he was raised Baptist and he reads Billy Graham’s column, too, since our paper puts it on the comics page right under “Dear Abby.”

  “Maybe he was even living on borrowed time as it was,” I said. “Remember 1990?”

  Shane finally took his eyes off the screen and stared at me. Slowly, he nodded.

  “It was right about there, wasn’t it? Dale was the favorite to win the Daytona 500 that year. Didn’t Rusty Wallace say that the only way for Dale to lose that time would be if somebody shot out his tires?”

  “Wasn’t Rusty. Somebody on his crew said it, I think.”

  “Whatever. The back stretch of the last lap, and he’s way out in front, and he runs over a bell housing that fell off somebody’s car on the lap before, and blows a tire. And Derrike Cope shoots past him to win, probably wondering if he had two more wishes coming. Last lap of the Daytona 500, Shane.”

  “Borrowed time,” muttered Shane, and he kind of shivered.

  “And don’t forget about Neil,” I said. Neil Bonnett was just about Dale Earnhardt’s best friend in the world, and he was killed at Daytona in a practice race just a few yards up the track from where Dale himself got killed seven years later. It’s spooky when you think about it: like Neil might have been waiting to walk him through to eternity. “Maybe Neil was there for him.”

  Shane nodded. “Okay,” he said at last. “If that’s the way it was-God’s will and all that, then I want God to show me a sign. Show me that Dale wanted to go and that he’s okay with how it all went down.”

  “I don’t think God does signs anymore,” I said.

  Well, okay, maybe He does.

  A whole year went by, and we graduated. On the top of his black mortarboard, Shane put a number 3 in adhesive tape, and he made sure to bow his head when he got his diploma so that the people in the audience could see it. They started cheering and hollering, and Mr. Watkins looked out across the footlights, completely bewildered by the crowd’s enthusiasm for a mediocre student like Shane. He must have figured that Shane had a slew of relatives packing the house, but all the cheering was for Dale, because nobody was there for Shane except his mom, like always. Later Shane said he hoped Dale Earnhardt had been there in spirit to see it happen, and I smiled and hugged him, but I didn’t say anything back. I was thinking that Dale hadn’t even gone to Junior’s high school graduation, so why would he bother with some stranger’s, and besides, he was probably busy in the Hereafter.

  Racing on tracks of gold, if you believe that country song by David Alan Coe, which personally I don’t. But Shane found it very comforting.

  That summer Shane started working full time at the garage, which means he sometimes gets to work on a Busch-circuit car for a local guy. Shane is hoping that the garage work will lead to a job on somebody’s pit crew someday. He got his own place, too, which looks like a shrine to Dale Earnhardt, with the posters, the black number 3 couch throw, the Dale Earnhardt calendar, the race car lamp, the shelf of die-cast cars representing every ride Earnhardt had ever driven in NASCAR, even the pink one, and so on. I told Shane I hoped he didn’t think that this decor was going to carr
y over into our married life, and he just smiled and wiggled his eyebrows at me. He was still mourning for Dale, but he didn’t talk about it much after the first couple of weeks.

  I had asked him at the time did he want to go to Charlotte and stand outside the church for the funeral, but he said no. Race people didn’t hold with funerals, he said. So I suggested sending flowers, but he didn’t even dignify that with an answer. I guess Shane thought it over by himself for a couple of weeks, because one day he announced that he couldn’t go to the mall with me on Saturday morning because he was taking some senior citizens grocery shopping. I almost dropped the phone. It turned out that Shane had thought up a volunteer program for his church. “Driving for Dale” he called it. People who had cars would volunteer to take old folks or handicapped people to doctor’s appointments or shopping, wherever they needed to go-as a sort of way to honor the memory of Dale Earnhardt. The way Shane explained it: the best way to honor a driver was-to drive. I don’t know if Dale would have been proud of Shane, but I was. A reporter from the local newspaper even did a story about the “Driving for Dale” project, and he told Shane that somebody ought to send a letter to Dale Junior, at DEI telling him about the program. “I’ll bet you’d get a thank-you note,” the reporter said, but Shane just shook his head, and said he wasn’t doing it to impress Junior, that this was between him and the Intimidator.

  For Christmas that year, I gave Shane a quilt that I pieced together myself, with a patchwork silhouette of Dale standing beside his black Monte Carlo on a white background, and a big number 3 with wings and a halo for a center medallion. Across the top of it, I embroidered a line I found in The Oxford Book of Verse: “Smart lad to slip betimes away…” which is from “To an Athlete Dying Young,” by Mr. A. E. Houseman, and I figured Shane needed to be reminded of that sentiment. He liked it, anyhow. He even asked to see the whole poem, and when he saw that the first line was “The time you won your town the race,” he thought it had been written especially for Dale, so I didn’t tell him any different. He said we ought to put the whole poem on the Web site of memorial verses for Dale, at 3peacesalute.com, but I don’t think he ever got around to it. He put the quilt on his bed and said it was a comforter in more ways than one.

  He was pretty much back to normal by that time, although he would still choke up when he heard a Brooks and Dunn song on the radio. Kix Brooks and Dale Earnhardt were friends, and Earnhardt even did a cameo in one of their music videos, “Honky Tonk Truth.”

  The first time you see that video on CMT, you might not notice anything out of the ordinary-just Brooks and Dunn singing together as usual, but if you watch real closely you’ll realize that about twenty-five percent of the time they’d switched an identically dressed Dale Earnhardt for Kix Brooks. I must have seen it half a dozen times now, and once you know the gimmick, you can easily tell them apart. Kix Brooks looks like Dale Earnhardt-on-his-best-day, after a week at a spa, with a good hairdresser and makeup artist, and an acting coach. But there are some nice touches, like when Brooks (or possibly Earnhardt himself…no, I think it is Brooks…) nudges Dunn off the set with his butt, just like Dale used to do to other drivers with the bumper of his Monte Carlo. The joke of the song is that in the chorus, he says it isn’t him. The honky tonk truth means it’s a lie. The lyrics are supposed to be a guy telling the girl who dumped him that he doesn’t miss her, and that the pitiful fellow hanging out in the bar all day, drinking and crying, isn’t really him. So they’re singing that it isn’t him and it isn’t. Isn’t Brooks, I mean. It’s Earnhardt. They say that Brooks used to get mistaken for Dale when he went to NASCAR events, too. We thought the music video was a hoot, but now anytime it comes on the television, Shane finds an excuse to leave the room.

  Then, more than a year after it happened-the wreck at the Daytona 500, I mean-Shane got his sign.

  He called me up while I was on my shift at the Wolf Laurel Inn, which they get very testy about, so I knew it had to be important for him to risk getting me lectured at for receiving personal calls.

  “You won’t believe this!” he said, practically shouting into the phone.

  “What’s wrong, Shane?” I said, motioning for Tamara to take the iced tea pitcher to my tables.

  “I got the sign, Karen! Just like I asked for.”

  “What sign?” I was picturing something tacky like an Earnhardt signature in red neon, and I figured the Logan’s Steak House in town must have had a yard sale, because they are the only ones with more NASCAR stuff on the wall than Shane’s got.

  “Listen, Karen, I just heard about this, and you won’t believe it: a goat was born in Florida.”

  “It happens,” I said.

  “Yes, but listen to this: the goat has a number three in white hair on its side! A number three.”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t you get it? It’s got Dale’s racing number and it was born in Florida-which is where he died.”

  “Shane, you’re not buying a goat on eBay, are you?”

  “Don’t you get it? A goat! Now what are goats always doing?”

  Well, to humor him I thought about it. Goats…Dale Earnhardt…Goats…“Butting!” I said. “Dale Earnhardt used to butt other cars with his front bumper just like billy goats ram people’s backsides with their horns.”

  “Exactly,” said Shane. “And that’s my sign.”

  Well, it sort of is. Shane is a Capricorn, but if he thought that nanny goat was a sign from NASCAR heaven, then he was getting weirder than the Wiccans, and I was pretty sure that Billy Graham would agree with me.

  “I want to see that goat,” said Shane.

  “Yeah, but it’s in Florida.”

  “Well, I have to get there somehow. Maybe we could honeymoon in Florida.”

  So that’s what set him off, I think. Our perfectly ordinary plan to go to Myrtle Beach for three days after the wedding, which is what people from here mostly do, got sidelined, and all of a sudden Shane was on the Internet scheming for ways to get to Florida.

  “It’s not just the goat,” he said. “I want to see Daytona, too. Pay my respects.”

  “Sure. And maybe I could lay my bridal wreath on the Speedway,” I said.

  Never use sarcasm when you are dealing with a devout fool, because they will take you up on it in a heartbeat.

  He found this bus tour advertised: “The Number Three Pilgrimage, a ten-day tour of East Coast Winston Cup Speedways,” starting near us, in Bristol and going down through the Carolinas and Georgia, scooting over to Talladega, and ending up at Daytona, with a wreath left in honor of Dale at every speedway.

  Shane figured that was a sign, too, because the time the tour was being offered coincided exactly with when he had signed up for his two weeks off from work so that we could get married. Without even talking it over with me, Shane called the number in the ad, and told the travel agent how he was just about the biggest Earnhardt fan in the whole world, and how we wanted to take the Memorial Bus tour for our honeymoon. Well, to hear him tell it, the organizers got so excited about having newlyweds on the tour, for the publicity of the thing, that they offered him a two-for-the-price-of-one deal to sign up for the tour, which just put it within our budget. The condition, though, was that they wanted us to get married at the start of the tour, right there at the Bristol Speedway before the start of the Sharpie 500 Race, which is the first stop on the bus tour. Well, Shane was so excited about the prospect of getting to go on the Dale tour that he agreed to the whole thing right there on the phone, even gave them his Visa card number, though the deposit just about maxed out the credit limit.

  Then he had to break the news to the other half of the bus ticket, which was me. He bought a rose at the Speedy Mart, and took me out to dinner that night. He told me the whole thing over steak kabobs at Logan’s, with Dale Earnhardt glowering down on us from his shrine on the pine-paneled wall. Shane knew that this was a radical departure from our previous wedding plans and he was scared that I was going to start crying righ
t there in the booth, but he kept bouncing in his seat, too, like he wanted to get up and shout out the good news to everybody in the restaurant. After that, I didn’t have the heart to say no, and like I said, the alternative wasn’t Westminster Abbey anyhow, or even the First Methodist Church, which would have been just as good to me. No-the alternative was Mama’s Wiccan fellowship with their vegetarian whatevers and their Cherokee-Druid priestess from Knoxville, so I figured that whatever the Bristol Speedway came up with couldn’t be much worse than that.

  And that’s the Brooks and Dunn truth.

  Chapter VII

  An F-14 in a Clothes Dryer

  Bristol Motor Speedway

  Like a flying saucer on scaffolding, it loomed on a hill across an expanse of grass near the four-lane Volunteer Parkway. Harley Claymore wasn’t used to seeing the outside of the Bristol Motor Speedway from that perspective-that is, from the ground. On race day, most NASCAR drivers traveled to the track by helicopter, ferried over from the nearby Tri-Cities Airport, where drivers flew in for the Saturday evening race.

  Some of the prominent drivers owned helicopters which met them at each airport on the racing circuit and transported them trackside in style, but Harley had never been a member of that exalted circle. Once, when he’d had a couple of good finishes in a row and it looked like he might be somebody someday, he’d been given a ride to BMS in Bill Elliott’s private bird. Harley remembered sailing over green Tennessee hillsides, spiraling in on the cordoned-off patch of blacktop that was the fenced-in drivers’ area of the vast parking lot. He had stepped out onto the Speedway helipad, still feeling like he was walking on air from the honor of being flown to the track by Awesome Bill himself. But that high ride had been only one fleeting moment in Harley’s lackluster career. His customary arrival for race day was glamorous only when compared to the world of the average fan: his racing team simply shelled out the $75 for the helicopter shuttle service from Tri-Cities, just as any skybox tycoon could do, but, hey, it was better than crawling along the Volunteer Parkway at five miles per hour with the rest of middle America.