St. Dale

by Sharyn McCrumb

  When he had finished the Trans-Am’s transformation, Harley continued to keep it stashed in his neighbor’s barn. One look under the hood and his old man would know exactly what he was up to, and then he’d be grounded until gasoline was ten bucks a gallon. He was careful not to let Lorne get too close a look at the car, either. On the outside, the Trans-Am still looked like a rusty bucket of bolts, but if all his little adjustments kicked in as planned, the thing should take off like a rocket. Sure, the car was older than the Lupton-Koeppen Camaro, but there was no disadvantage in that. Nobody in his right mind would race an actual eighties’ car when there was sixties’ iron to be had. Harley’s dad always said that the new emission standards had done the same thing to American autos that neutering did to a bull.

  It was dark now, but still warm from the heat of the day. Harley was sprawled in the driver’s seat, almost relaxed enough to drop off to sleep when the distant shine of headlights announced the arrival of his opponent and a few carloads of spectators. So this wasn’t to be a private heat between racers, but a public ritual, with half the senior class along for the ride. Just as well, thought Harley. With spectators there’d be some neutral person to hold the money, drop the rag, and witness the outcome. (Or to go for help. But Harley didn’t think of that. He was sixteen and immortal in that first race, and the thought of anyone’s needing assistance never crossed his mind. Maybe if you were a no-holds-barred racer, the thought of a wreck couldn’t enter your head, or else you’d hold back. You’d choke and you’d lose.)

  The crowd of hangers-on-mostly the guys who hung out at the smoking yard at school-had brought six-packs and a couple of fifths of bourbon. A couple of football players had also brought their female counterparts, girls of the big hair and raccoon eyeliner persuasion, to whom this event would have all the prestige of a prom. Connie would thrive on the attention of an adoring audience, with girls to cheer him on. Harley and Lorne, probing under the hoods of their respective cars, barely noticed that anyone else was there.

  Connie was all swagger, strutting around in a Duke Blue Devils sweatshirt-his dad’s alma mater. It remained to be seen if his grades would get him into the university as well, or even if he could be persuaded to go. He tapped Harley on the shoulder. “Did you bring your piggy bank?” he asked. “This race is gonna cost you all of it.”

  Lorne still had his nose stuck in the Camaro’s engine, too focused on some mechanical adjustment to care about the theatrics of the occasion. He looked up only briefly, to say to no one in particular, “Get those other cars out the way. Park them up the road toward Akers Farm, behind the starting point.”

  When this was done and the preliminaries had been settled, the dark road was lined with shivering spectators, and Mike Gibbs was standing in the middle of the dark road between the two cars, holding a white handkerchief at shoulder height. Harley hunched over the steering wheel, keeping his eyes on Mike, waiting for the go sign. He had forgotten about the faces peering at him from the sidelines, so intent was he on revving his engine against the brake, with one foot on the accelerator and one on the brake to keep in check until the signal was given.

  Harley knew Connie preferred another method of revving up: he aimed for the red line but kept his car in neutral. At the instant the handkerchief dropped, Connie would slam into gear and lunge forward into the darkness. That split-second gear shift would cost him an instant of precious time, but he must have figured that the Camaro had enough power to make up for it. Connie hadn’t even insisted on a coin toss for who had to drive on the wrong side of the road. Since Harley had arrived first, he declared, he could keep the right-hand side. Besides, nobody drove up Bear Creek road after dark, so side-of-the-road was not a factor in the race.

  Harley kept his eyes on Mike’s handkerchief, shining in the pool of headlights. He felt a film of sweat on his upper lip and his hands felt so clammy that he had to wipe them on his jeans to make sure that they didn’t slip on the steering wheel at the crucial moment, which was fast approaching. A heartbeat later the white handkerchief began to fall, and Harley slammed the gas pedal to the floor. Tires squealed and the Trams-Am hurtled forward, even with Connie’s Camaro; then the two of them sped down the dirt road, heedless of the shouts from behind them.

  A quarter mile farther on-a distance carefully paced out in daylight-Robbie Bradley was leaning against the big sycamore, flashlight in hand, to signal the end of the race. The contest would be over in fifteen seconds. A quarter of a mile in cars that could go from zero to sixty in one breath. Sixty miles an hour-that’s 88 feet per second, then, steadily accelerating to who-knows-what for most of the next 1,320 feet. Fifteen blurred seconds. It was all reflexes. Stomp and go and steer and before you could blink you’d passed the tree and it was over.

  Harley gripped the wheel and hung on, focused on the light that Robbie Bradley was waving from his post by the sycamore…Almost there…almost there when the deer burst out of the woods and stopped dead in the glare of the headlights. In the middle of the road.

  That one second of realization seemed to stretch into timelessness. A tableau in which everyone was frozen forever in the places they’d held at that instant. Robbie, illuminated by the lambent glow from the Camaro’s headlights, and the dirt road, a path hanging in dark nothingness, and in the middle of the road, as motionless as if it were already dead and taxidermic, stood a yearling doe, daintily poised on her little hoofs as if they were high heels. She stared into the lights, uncomprehending, perhaps, or else frozen with fear-not unlike Harley himself.

  Trees on one side…creek on the other…deer straight ahead…

  Later he’d tried to remember what exactly he had been thinking, so as to get a better grasp of his opinion of himself. Had he been thinking: Here is a beautiful live creature; let me not kill it with my recklessness? Or was he thinking: Hitting a deer at sixty will put the damned thing through your windshield, maybe kill you, and turn your car into a damn museum courtyard sculpture, so for God’s sake, don’t run into it? Maybe he was thinking both things at once. That second seemed long enough for any amount of surmising. But while his brain had switched into slow motion, the Trans-Am kept hurtling forward at 88 feet per second, heedless of any obstacles in its path.

  It didn’t matter really what conclusions his brain had reached in that leisurely instant in which it had weighed and considered all the many options-steer for the creek; slam on the brakes; swerve to the left; stay on course-because while his brain was making all those judicious evaluations of the situation at hand, his body had switched to automatic pilot and was already reacting to the situation. His foot had touched the brake-not enough to send him into a skid, not enough to make much of a difference really. Except that Connie had also reacted to the sight of the deer on the road.

  He had speeded up.

  Even as Harley was wondering why Connie was pulling ahead instead of swerving or trying to stop, he had eased the Trans-Am in behind the Camaro, still tapping the brake, hoping to stop in time, and watching the red taillights streaking ahead. He braced himself for a collision that never came.

  At the last second, the doe, resisting the spell of the headlights, had left the road in an arching leap. As Connie’s car passed the sycamore that signaled the finish line, another bound took the deer over the creek and into the dark thicket beyond.

  Harley felt like twisting the wheel and going after it. He had lost the race. Useless to protest extenuating circumstances. A bet was a bet. He took most of a mile to slow down, and then he drove slowly back to the starting line where the Camaro was parked, surrounded by the roaring crowd of Connie’s friends.

  Harley forced himself to get out of the car and plaster on a smile of congratulations.

  Connie Koeppen had tried not to gloat too much as he watched Harley lean over the hood of the Trans-Am to endorse the paycheck. “Tough break, man,” he said as he pocketed the money. “But you know what they say: No guts, no glory.”

  “Yeah,” mumbled Harley. “But th
is doesn’t prove anything. There aren’t any deer on race tracks.”

  Connie shrugged. “No. But there’s other drivers. You can’t hit a deer-what makes you think you could hit an Allison or a Bodine if the race demanded it?”

  “Well, I didn’t want to win bad enough to kill for it,” said Harley.

  Connie just looked at him, and walked away. No retort could be worse than what Harley himself had just said. He’d remembered those words all these years, wondering if that was why he had lost his ride. You have to be willing to kill to win-and he wasn’t willing. Did that make him crazy-or sane?

  Years later Harley would sometimes see people from the old high school at NASCAR events, and sooner or later somebody would mention Lorne Lupton and Connie Koeppen. Funny to think of you being the one to make it to the big time, Harley, they used to say. We always thought it would be Lorne or Connie out there racing against Bill Elliott. Or sometimes one of the more cautious types-usually female-would say, “How can you make a career of racing after what happened to Lorne and Connie?”

  And Harley would shrug and say, “What I’m doing now isn’t what we were doing back then.”

  And it wasn’t. Maybe Lorne and Connie would have made it, but he didn’t think so. Maybe if they’d channeled their skills and their love of the race, but that drag race on Bear Creek Road had told Harley that wasn’t going to happen. Maybe you have to have the killer instinct to be a champion, but you also have to have enough common sense to live to get there.

  Lorne and Connie didn’t live to see him make it to the big leagues. Late one night, the summer after graduation, they’d managed to get hold of a second car for Lorne to drive and they took their private drag race to a paved straightaway southwest of town, just the two of them. It wasn’t a quarter-mile sprint this time, but two, three miles, maybe, and not a straight road either. Maybe the twists and turns were part of the challenge. Anyhow, they’d been neck-and-neck, running wide open on the blacktop, when they rounded a curve at the end of the woods and saw the dark mass of a freight train blocking the road ahead.

  There was no stopping. Not at that speed.

  The next day, most of the guys in town went out to look at the site of the crash. The wreckage had been cleared away by then, and the bodies were in the funeral home, being prepared for two closed-casket funerals.

  Harley had parked on the side of the road and walked the last quarter mile to the tracks, studying the road, trying to picture those last frozen seconds. All you had to do was look at the road to see it happen.

  Two cars, one in each lane, side by side, streaking toward the implacable steel wall of a freight car. And one set of skid marks.

  There was no surviving that collision. Surely both of them knew that. No way to avoid it, either, not at that speed.

  So one of them…one of them…had slammed on the brakes, maybe a reflex, maybe a grab at one last split second of life.

  And the other one had mashed the accelerator, hurling himself even faster into the side of that freight car. Accept the inevitable and get it over with. Courage or despair?

  Harley never forgot the look of that quarter mile of asphalt, although from time to time he still puzzled over what it meant. Because the car that didn’t brake going into the train was the one driven by Lorne Lupton.

  Chapter XII

  Martinsville

  Grandfather of NASCAR Tracks

  Jim Powell stood at the window of the country chintz bedroom at Possum Hollow, looking out at the sunny morning, already as bright as noon. In the distance beyond a rose garden at the back of the house lay green folds of Tennessee mountains showing not a trace of human habitation. You’d think you were out in the middle of nowhere. Strange to think that last night after the race there had been so many cars on Volunteer Parkway that it had taken the bus a couple of hours to go three miles. He wondered where all those people were now. The drivers had taken their helicopters back to Tri-Cities to their waiting jets, of course, but that still left nearly a hundred thousand spectators earthbound in a mostly rural area. Surely there weren’t enough hotel rooms and B &Bs in the vicinity of Bristol to hold all of them. He supposed that many of them were in yet another snails’ procession of traffic on I-81 heading for more distant highways to take them home. Soon the bus tour would be joining the line of cars in the eastbound lane, because the next stop on the tour was the speedway at Martinsville, just under two hundred miles to the east.

  Jim had been awake for more than an hour, lying wide-eyed in the darkness because he hadn’t wanted to disturb Arlene by turning on the bedside light. At daybreak he took his magazine over to the desk chair, and angled it so that the sun illuminated the pages, glad that the sun came up well before seven in August, because he could never sleep for more than six hours anymore. His wakefulness was partly a factor of age and partly because he needed to be a light sleeper now in order to keep an eye on Arlene. Her illness made her restless. Sometimes at night she would get out of bed and begin to wander-he wasn’t even sure she was fully conscious at those times-but she would slip out from beneath the covers and begin to walk around in the dark. Jim was always afraid that she would fall or, worse, manage to open an outside door and wander off into the night. He had read newspaper accounts of old people getting lost like that, straying off into the woods, their remains found weeks or months later by hikers or a party of hunters.

  It didn’t happen every night. The new medication seemed to help some. Arlene could go for days or even weeks seeming almost like her old self and then, without warning, the erratic behavior would begin again. Being in a strange place could cause it; he’d noticed that. Any change in routine seemed to upset the precarious balance of her reason and send her tumbling into confusion once more, but he was there to protect her. He wanted to keep her in the world as long as he could, because he didn’t want to live without her.

  She had slept well last night, perhaps tired out by the plane ride and the excitement of the race. The trip had exhausted him as well, so he was thankful to have had an easy night with her.

  “We’re leaving bright and early!” the bus driver had announced.

  Jim looked at his watch and sighed. Early. Nine o’clock-early? Why, by that time back home in Ohio he’d have had breakfast, read the paper, and done half a day’s work. Well, at least the late departure would give Arlene a chance to catch up on her rest. He glanced over at the other double bed to make sure that she was still sleeping. Yes. The lump under the blankets stirred a little in sleep, but there was no sound from her. He smiled as he watched her sleep. He supposed that other people looking at Arlene would see a vague and frail old woman, but he just saw-Arlene. Most of the time he didn’t register the changes that time had wrought in the pretty golden-haired girl he’d married back in 1955. When you live with someone every day the changes of age come so gradually that you scarcely notice them unless you happen to come across an old photo album, and then the shock is so great that you wonder how it slipped your mind. Slipped your mind. Everything was slipping Arlene’s mind, and that he could no longer ignore. It was the same with the mental changes, too, at first. Even now it was hard to separate ordinary carelessness from the earliest symptoms of the disease. The time she’d burned her hand getting the cornbread out of the oven? Was that the first sign or not?

  Martinsville. That brought back memories. He wished that when the bus headed off up I-81 that the road would roll up behind them, erasing all the years between this room, this day, and the last time they had been together at Martinsville.

  Arlene had been so excited to be at the race. Her hair was still more honey-colored than gray back then, and her eyes had sparkled with delight as they walked together through the campground, greeting old friends and looking at all the banners and handicrafts celebrating the fans’ favorite drivers. Arlene was wearing her Earnhardt vest, the one she had quilted together into a patchwork composed of threes, black Monte Carlos, and checkered flags. It had been much admired by passersby as they strol
led hand-in-hand past the rows of campers, and Jim remembered how proud he had been, how happy.

  The word among the longtime fans was that Dale Earnhardt was going to be available for twenty minutes that afternoon to sign autographs at a sponsor’s booth behind the Speedway, and he had suggested that they go early before the line got too long. But Arlene just shook her head and looked up at Jim with a smile tinged with mischief. “Let’s go back to the camper instead, Jim,” she said. “I believe I’d rather spend the afternoon with you.”

  “But why are you taking mother on this bus tour?” his oldest daughter had asked. Jean lived in Seattle, was married to some software baron, and she was always after her parents to come out and visit with her. Jim suspected that she saw their visits as a grown-up form of Show-and-Tell, an opportunity for her to display her tasteful gray Escalade, her angular modern house with its geometric furnishings of steel and glass. Jean seemed to think that good taste meant emaciation in all things. They would go out and visit her, perhaps for Christmas if Arlene was feeling up to it, but a trip to Seattle wasn’t what he wanted for their anniversary journey.

  “I understand your wanting to travel with her while she’s still able, Dad, but surely there are things she’d rather do? She’s always wanted to go to Ireland.”

  Jean hadn’t spent much time around her parents in the past decade. Jim realized that her image of her mother was frozen in some past era, perhaps when Jean had been in high school. No matter how many times he talked about Arlene’s deteriorating mental condition, it didn’t quite register with Jean. Perhaps denial was in itself an incurable form of dementia.