St. Dale

by Sharyn McCrumb

  “So what’s the penalty?’

  “They send you to the back of the line at the restart, which means he lost a lot of ground. Never did catch up.”

  “Did he think he could get away with it?”

  Sarah Nash who had been listening to this explanation with an expression of solemn disapproval, interrupted. “Sterling Marlin admitted that he had pulled the fender away from the tire to stop the rubbing, but don’t forget what else he said.”

  “What was that?” asked Jim.

  “He said that he had once seen Earnhardt do exactly the same thing at the race in Richmond, and that NASCAR had not penalized Dale for it.” She gave him a sour smile. “Sterling said he supposed the rules must have changed since then. Of course, he didn’t suppose anything of the kind. All the drivers will tell you that Earnhardt got away with things that the rest of them would be slapped down for trying.”

  “Bekasu always says the same thing about me,” said Justine. “I used to break curfew and every other rule Daddy handed down, and he just couldn’t bear to punish me for it. I guess some people just get to go through life in the express lane.”

  “Poor old Sterling. He lost the Daytona 500. Think how he must feel,” said Cayle.

  “I know exactly how he feels,” said Bekasu.

  At the next vendor table Matthew, who knew all the facts and foibles of the NASCAR crowd, had happily explained to Bill Knight what Marlin and Stewart had done that season to become the butt of tee shirt jokes. Next year it would be somebody else’s turn. Now he was naming the driver and make of car that went with each of the racing bumper stickers on display.

  One of the vendors had NASCAR-related badges in the shape of race cars or drivers’ numbers. Harley found the red and blue emblem of the Bristol Motor Speedway and held it up. “Y’all ought to get you one of these!” he called out over the din of the crowd. “You can get one pin for every speedway we go to.” In the mad scramble that followed, Harley reflected that he ought to have asked the guy how many Bristol pins he had on hand, but fortunately the item was not in short supply and, by checking with other merchants in the same tent, they managed to round up a Bristol badge for each pilgrim.

  “Should we put them on our hats?” asked Cayle.

  Bill Knight smiled. “On his hat seten Signes of Synay,” he said.

  “Was that a yes?” asked Justine.

  “It works,” he said. “I’ve always pinned mine to my hat. I have a cockle shell and a bell and a badge of keys.”

  If he had been hoping to use this remark as a springboard to discussing his retracing of medieval pilgrimages, the gambit did not succeed. With a collective shrug, his fellow travelers surged forth to the next table of goods-Earnhardt memorial tee shirts. The one that pictured a dove in a rainbow and the caption Dale Got His Wings-Feb. 18, 2001 was much admired, but no one bought it.

  Justine, yawning broadly, noted that the race would not start for another six hours, and she suggested that they all go to the bed-and-breakfast to rest before it began. Harley, spotting his chance to get off the leash, immediately offered to sprint back to the bus and ask Ratty to take them away.

  “He’d be glad to do it!” he assured them with a straight face, hustling them back across the footbridge to the parking area.

  Ratty had not been glad to do it in the least. Harley had found him curled up in the driver’s seat, his Winged Three cap over his face, and the bus door closed to keep in the air conditioning. A few determined thumps on the window brought him back to consciousness, and he cranked open the door with a sleepy scowl. “What?”

  “Can you take the folks over to the bed-and-breakfast?” said Harley. “They want to rest up until race time. It’s been a long day already for some of them.”

  Ratty stared at him openmouthed. “Have you seen this traffic?”

  “Well, it’s not far is it? It’s not downtown. The place is on a country road according to my notes here.”

  “Might as well be Memphis, this traffic.”

  Harley assumed his most sympathetic expression. “Well, I told them that,” he said. “But it’s awful hot out here, and some of them are pretty well up in age. And there’s the little sick boy, of course…”

  Still scowling, Ratty switched on the ignition. “Have ’em here in five minutes,” he said. “Probably take us an hour to go three damn miles.”

  Harley nodded his thanks and sped away. Fifteen minutes later, he had settled all the passengers on the bus, with promises to be waiting for them at precisely 5:30 under the giant banner photo of Alan Kulwicki.

  Then, with sweat pouring down his face, Harley went back inside, hoping to run into somebody from the old days who could get him onto pit road. This wasn’t going to be easy. Security was tight these days, now that NASCAR drivers had a following like rock stars. Hell, some of them, like Gordon and Little E., had a following of rock stars. But that wasn’t going to be the hard part as far as Harley was concerned. The hard part was going to be putting on a big happy grin, going hat in hand to people who had once been his peers, and asking them for a favor. Networking didn’t come naturally to the likes of Harley Claymore. It felt like taking charity and the thought of it made him cringe.

  To make the process even harder, an old family story rose unbidden to his mind. Harley’s daddy had been a nine-year-old boy back up in Wilkes County. Young Willie Moore had lived on a farm with a passel of brothers and sisters, and his folks had raised tobacco and run some hogs-subsistence farmers, they’d call them nowadays-but they never went hungry and, until television came along in the fifties to show them a different world, they never knew they were poor. But one morning when the Moores went to school, a social worker or some such do-gooder was waiting there outside the principal’s office with a big old box of shoes. Somebody somewhere had decided that everybody in school was going to get a new pair of shoes. Maybe the shoes weren’t exactly new. Maybe they were castoffs from some town down state, but anyhow, each child was to be given a pair that more or less fit his feet. Willie Moore had tried to explain to his teacher and the do-gooder lady in the tweed suit that they weren’t allowed to take charity. It was an unspoken rule in the Moore clan, but clearly understood by the children nonetheless. Doing without was better than being “beholden” to strangers. Willie, the oldest of the school-going Moores, had attempted to explain this principle to the shoe lady, but his objections were met with scorn. What needy child wouldn’t be glad to have a fine new pair of shoes, she had told him. At last he had given up, since sassing teacher ladies was also on the list of activities forbidden to Moore children. Reluctantly he had given in, accepting the new brown oxford shoes in exchange for his scuffed and worn old pair. The younger ones followed suit and that afternoon they had all walked home, a little self-consciously, in their new footwear. The teachers and the charity folks must have congratulated themselves on a job well done. Every time he ever told this story, Willie Moore would say that he wished those school people had been there to see what happened when the children got home. The next day, all the children came back to school in worn-out shoes or barefoot, and some of them had to eat their lunch standing up.

  You don’t take charity. That lesson had been drummed into Harley six ways from Sunday. Where he came from, one way or the other, you learned that lesson. Later he had learned that it wasn’t how the world worked at all, and that sucking up took some people further than talent took others, but that didn’t make it any easier for him to attempt it.

  Swallowing his shame, Harley walked up to the drivers’ entrance. He didn’t have a pass to get onto pit road, but the Cup circuit was like a small town where everybody knew one another and Harley had been around long enough to be acquainted with a lot of people. Not just drivers, but owners, haulers, mechanics, spotters. All he needed was for one of them to remember him and to be in a benevolent mood that afternoon. He just hoped that the old acquaintance would be somebody he genuinely liked, so that it wouldn’t feel so much like begging when he had to a
sk for help.

  Just in time he remembered to stuff the embarrassing Winged Three hat in his back pocket. He’d never live that down.

  There was always a gaggle of people standing beyond the barrier, cameras in hand, pens and autograph pads at the ready, waiting for a celebrity to walk by. Harley eased his way into the crowd, close enough to the walkway to make himself heard without shouting, waiting for his chance. At least he had kept his license up to date-his NASCAR license, that is, the one that qualified him to drive in any NASCAR competition. Flashing that card ought to get him past the gatekeepers if somebody vouched for him. He tried to remember if he’d got in anybody’s way in his last few races, because being snubbed by a driver holding a grudge was just about more than his pride would take cold sober.

  It was still too early for most of the drivers to be going in, but some of them did opt to enter by mid afternoon, either from nerves or from an obsessive need to observe the team’s last minute preparations. There were still some drivers who knew their way around an engine. Ryan Newman, for instance. Harley wiped his brow in the hot sun, and listened to the conversations around him while he waited for his chance.

  “Which one is Ryan Newman?” asked a young girl nearby.

  “The one that looks like Prince Andrew,” said the older woman next to her.

  Harley filed that remark away in case he needed to make small talk with Ryan Newman anytime soon. The woman went on to make other driver celebrity comparisons, some of them quite astute. She said that Ricky Rudd looked like former President Clinton, but Harley couldn’t detect any resemblance there. His fans were the best dressed, though. Whatever that meant. Instead of the tee shirts worn by most other race fans, the Rudd supporters wore snazzy black sweaters, emblazoned with the word Rudd in red, and matching racing pants. But a resemblance to the former president? He couldn’t see it. Kurt Busch and the Keebler Elf, though-now that one registered. He didn’t plan on mentioning it, but Harley figured his chances of being able to talk Kurt Busch into getting him past the guards were even more remote than his chances of winning the race from the grandstand.

  Finally, after half an hour of eavesdropping in the breathless heat, a rabbity young man in coveralls headed past. Harley recognized the guy as a former CART driver, who had given up the steering wheel for a job on the pit crew of a Winston Cup driver. Now what was the guy’s name?

  Tony Something. That was it. Harley edged up to the restraining rope, with very little resistance from the rest of the crowd. This guy wasn’t a driver, and he wasn’t famous, so no one wanted a picture with him and only the diehards and the anal-retentive would request his autograph. Everybody else had rushed to a spot farther back, because someone claimed to have spotted Rusty Wallace on his way in.

  “Hey, Tony!” Harley stuck out his hand, and tried to look casual about the encounter. Desperation wouldn’t get you in. “Harley Claymore,” he said, by way of reminder. “How you doing, man?”

  “Can’t complain,” said Tony, glancing about nervously. “Guess I’d better get in there and work, though.”

  “How ’bout I come with you?” said Harley. “I’d like to say hello to the boys while I’m here.”

  Tony gave him a long appraising stare. “You got a hot pass, Harley?”

  Harley’s smile never wavered. “Not on me, Hoss. But you know me. I’m no tourist. I just need to talk to some people.”

  The mechanic hesitated, embarrassed by the exchange. Finally, he shrugged and said, “Come on in, then. But if Security throws you out, don’t blame me.” He nodded to the guard and jerked his thumb toward Harley. “Ex-driver,” he said by way of explanation.

  The guard, young enough to be just out of high school, looked doubtful, but Harley had already crawled under the plastic rope and was striding past the checkpoint, feigning a deep interest in what Tony had been up to for the past couple of years.

  “So how are you feeling these days?” Tony asked him, when he had run out of team and family news of his own. “You wrecked pretty bad a while back, didn’t you?”

  “Oh, I’m a hundred per cent again now,” said Harley. “Can’t wait to get back in the game.”

  Tony looked at him for just two beats too long, the politest expression of disbelief. Finally he said, “Yeah, well…I reckon you know best, Harley, but, I gotta say, sometimes when a man gets hurt while he’s racing, he loses that killer instinct that a driver has to have in order to win.”

  “I’m as good as I ever was. All I need is a chance to prove it.”

  “Well, good luck, man. Long as you’re not after my job, I wish you the best.” Tony hurried away then, ready to start his day’s work in preparation for the evening race, and maybe anxious not to be seen with someone down on his luck. Nobody wants to be jinxed on race day. He remembered the story about a driver’s lucky underpants-a winning streak lost because he left them behind in the truck after one race, and the Wood Brothers did the laundry.

  The Wood Brothers…the legendary team owners out of Stuart, Virginia…Their list of drivers read like a Who’s Who in NASCAR, and stretched all the way back to the fifties. Harley wondered if it would be any use talking to them…He must take care to be nonchalant in his visiting this afternoon. Any whiff of desperation would doom his chances from the outset.

  He began by strolling up and down pit road, making a mental note of who he saw that he knew, so when he had decided which one of them constituted his best ally in getting taken back into the charmed circle, he could work his way back along pit road and then make his pitch to the most sympathetic ear.

  He wandered from one team to another, and although a few old acquaintances looked up and muttered hellos, they were busy getting ready for the evening race and nobody had the time or the inclination to socialize with an outsider. Harley kept walking.

  “I ’member you!”

  Harley turned, hoping to see a crew chief or an owner, but the stout fellow with the scraggly gray ponytail, the turquoise track suit, and the matching squash blossom necklaces was not part of anybody’s race team. He was a fixture at the Speedway, though. Harley summoned a smile and stuck out his hand. “Hello, Hector,” he said. “Long time no see. How’s it going?-And, by the way, that was just a standard greeting. I don’t really want to know.”

  Hector Sanders, NASCAR fan and self-proclaimed Indian shaman, had appointed himself the prophet of the Bristol Motor Speedway. The consensus was that Hector was (a) harmless, and (b) probably not a powerful wizard, despite the fact that, during a Winston Cup race, it was his custom to stand in the infield or some other prominent spot and hex the drivers of his choice. He would strike a theatrical pose, make a series of hand signals, and chant as he spun round (although, this may have been an attempt to follow the progress of the race at a track in which a lap took fifteen seconds). Everybody in racing knew him and they put up with his antics because, in a profession in which you risked your life on a regular basis, it was nice to find somebody who made you look sane by comparison. (Besides, what if he really could put a curse on your tires?)

  “You’re not back driving tonight, are you, Harley?” Hector shut his eyes for a moment, as if he had the day’s roster inscribed on a chalkboard in his head.

  Harley stared. Hector was wearing a red cap sporting a white number 9 and a Dodge emblem. Bill Elliott. He wondered if this was a good sign for Bill or an impending curse. Aloud he said, “No, Hector. I’m not driving in the race. I’m just here as a spectator, same as you are.”

  Hector struck a pose. “I am not a spectator. I channel the luck. I decide who gets blessed this evening.”

  Harley nodded. Hector played favorites. Some of the drivers humored him-gave him caps and signed photos. He repaid these favors with spells of protection or, perhaps, by hexing the competition. Nobody was sure what the rigmarole of chants and hand signals represented, but they looked impressive, and in a sport where dying was always an option, it didn’t hurt to play it safe with purveyors of good fortune.

  H
ector fingered one of his turquoise necklaces and peered at Harley from beneath caterpillar eyebrows. “You’re out here a-trying to get you another ride ain’tcha, boy?”

  “Guess I wouldn’t say no to one,” Harley admitted. “Why? Have you heard anything?”

  “I don’t gossip,” said Hector. “I know things.”

  “Anything about me?”

  Hector closed his eyes again, reading his internal message board. A moment later he opened them wide. “Dale Earnhardt’s going to help you out, Harley.”

  “Junior?”

  “Did I say Junior?”

  “Uh-huh. Well, it’s great to see you again, Hector. Who are you zapping tonight?”

  “Rusty Wallace. I’m partial to old Rusty.”

  Harley nodded. “Rusty’s going to win, huh?”

  Hector shrugged. “No. I can’t let him win, but I’m going to protect him. He’ll come through this race without a scratch on him.”

  “Well, I expect he’ll appreciate that.”

  Hector nodded majestically, accepting his due as a maker of miracles. “And would you like me to speak to somebody about getting you hired on?”

  Harley shook his head. That was all he needed, the local space cadet to champion his cause. With help like that, he’d be lucky to get the night shift in a car wash. “I think I’ll just do it the hard way,” he said, walking away.

  Hector Sanders called after him, “Okay, suit yourself. I’ll give your good luck spell to Jeff Gordon, then.”

  Harley nodded. “Yeah, good idea,” he said to himself. “Give Jeff Gordon a little more luck. He can’t walk on water yet.”

  The rest of the hot and noisy afternoon went by in a succession of shouted conversations and sweaty handshakes. People promised to keep Harley in mind, but nobody came out with a firm offer. He scribbled his post office box address and a cell phone number on a succession of napkins and autograph cards, but nobody had made him any promises to get in touch. By five o’clock, Harley figured he had done all the networking his constitution could stand, so he left pit road in search of a cold drink and wet washcloth before it was time to meet the tour group for the race.