Blind Spot

by Chris Fabry

  Jamie squinted. “Me? Why’ve they been talking about me?”

  “Probably heard how bad you did on your last math test.” Kellen laughed.

  Jamie flicked his ear but kept her gaze fixed on Mr. Devalon.

  “One of the Devalon owners was at the track that night in Alabama. He’s got a good nose for new drivers, and he said he thought you might have what it takes.”

  Jamie’s eyes grew wide. She didn’t know what to say.

  Mr. Devalon went on. “Now I won’t blow smoke at you. I don’t think females can go very far in this sport. Don’t think they have what it takes physically or mentally. But he seems to think it’s good for attendance to get ’em suited up. Makes the female fans happy, you know. Diversity and all that. I can pretty much guarantee you a woman’ll never make it to the top 10, let alone win a cup. But then, there’re a lot of people who’ll never do that. Like your dad.”

  Jamie tried to ignore the digs against her father, but they kept coming.

  Before she could say anything, Kellen said, “Why do you hate our dad so much? Are you jealous?”

  Mr. Devalon pushed his hat up and spread both arms like a hawk on the back of the leather couch. “What’s there to be jealous about? You guys have a ride like this? Has your dad won a race in the last two years? Or has it been three?”

  “No, but life’s more than the stuff you buy or always coming out on top,” Kellen said.

  “So, you’re the philosopher in the family. That’s good.” He crossed his legs. “No, I don’t hate your dad. I just don’t think he belongs on the track. He’s a goody-goody. The Lord this and the Lord that. Seems to me he shouldn’t blame the Lord for his poor performances—he should blame himself. And he ought to turn his little girl loose, who’s probably a better driver than he’ll ever be.”

  Jamie stepped forward, ignoring what he’d said about all women and her dad. “What does your owner think I should do?”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Shane told me he’s thinking about signing you up. He’d probably throw a little money at you, move you into a car. This is off the record, of course. No promises. He’s the kind of guy who can change his mind in about three seconds. And there’s another potential opportunity—”

  “What about Chad?” Jamie interrupted. “If this guy is so all-fired ready to sign people up, why wouldn’t he sign your son?”

  “Chad’s in a different situation. We don’t have as much financial pressure as you and your family. I’ll help him along, and he can move up through the ranks. But someone like you . . . well, you need the extra help. And with the push to bring in minorities and women, you might just make it.”

  Jamie knew exactly what he meant. She’d heard about it before. A team signed an up-and-coming driver for a little money, gave him (or her) enough to keep him happy and racing for the team, and in a few years, if the new driver moved successfully through the competition, he could move up. It was a one-in-a-thousand chance the owner was taking, but if the man found a great driver, it would be well worth spending the cash.

  Chad walked in from the back just as Jamie’s cell phone rang. “We’re pulling some burgers off the grill. You’re staying, right?”

  She answered the phone, then hung up. “That was my mom. We have to get back.”

  “Go ahead and take some food,” Mr. Devalon said. “We’ve got more here than we could possibly eat.”

  Kellen grabbed a plate, but Jamie took him by the elbow. “Thanks, but we have to be going.”

  On the way back to their camper, Jamie made Kellen promise he wouldn’t say anything about what he had heard.

  “Why? You afraid Dad won’t let you sign with them?”

  “I just don’t want them knowing, okay?”

  “Fine. But you should’ve let me bring some of those shrimp. Mom would kill for those.”

  Chapter 14

  Traveling

  “WHERE YOU THINK YOU’RE going?” Tyson said as Tim walked onto the front porch of the trailer. Tyson wore just his boxers and an old T-shirt.

  Tim hadn’t been able to sleep—he was so excited to get to Daytona. And with all the noise Tyson had made the night before, drinking and playing cards with his friends, he’d figured the man would sleep until noon. “I told you guys I’d be gone today.”

  “Where?”

  He could have kept it to himself, but there was something that made him want to let Tyson wallow in his misfortune. “Going down to Daytona.”

  The man’s eye twitched, and a real look of understanding came over him. “Why didn’t you tell me you wanted to go? I’d have taken you.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Who you going with?”

  “A friend.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea. I’m gonna get dressed and drive you down there myself.”

  “I only got one ticket,” Tim lied.

  Tyson cursed. He walked back inside and paused at the doorway, as though he was going to say have a good time or something like that. But he just cursed again and shut the door.

  Jeff pulled in an hour late in a red SUV. He had some grunge band on the radio that he had to yell over. The kind of music Tim really didn’t care for, especially this early in the morning. It wasn’t the words or how loud the guitars were or anything like that—it was that he couldn’t understand it. Maybe he’d been traveling with his dad a little too much and his love of country music had rubbed off.

  “I’ll have you get in the back when I pick up the guys,” Jeff said.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  They made two stops, and Jeff had to go in and basically drag the guys from their beds. The first guy, Gavin, looked more like a string bean than a human being, and his hair stuck straight up in the back. If Jeff hadn’t introduced him, Tim would have called him Gus, short for Asparagus.

  Pete and Ian climbed in next. Pete had the longest nose in the history of teenagers and wore a #8 hat that looked a hundred years old. Ian bore a striking resemblance to a young Keanu Reeves, with dark hair and a face Tim figured girls swooned over. Somehow he seemed out of place with this group.

  Pete had climbed into the front with a cooler, and it didn’t take him long to open it and pop the top on a can of beer. “Who wants some?”

  Tim shook his head—not because he’d never had beer but because it was so early. In fact, he’d had his first when he was 13, sneaking three from Charlie Hale’s fridge. He’d finished the first one before he got sick. His dad had talked with him and then taken off his belt. “This is going to hurt me more than it will you,” his dad said. Tim didn’t believe it. His dad had a talk with Charlie after that, and he kept the fridge locked. The other guys laughed when they saw Tim the next day, but his dad’s face had remained grim for a week. Tim couldn’t help feeling he’d let him down.

  Pete handed Tim a Coke. “I still can’t believe you’re just giving us tickets.”

  Tim shrugged and opened the red top. It had a black mark on it, as though someone had used a permanent marker to show the price. “It’s a fair trade. Tickets for transportation.”

  Pete wiped beer foam from his mouth. “Hey, have any of you guys actually seen these tickets? He’s probably just pulling our leg. I’ll bet he’s got one ticket, and he’s taking us along for the ride.”

  Tim pulled the tickets out of the same envelope Lisa had given him and handed them over.

  Pete whooped and hollered, waving them around like he was holding a million dollars. “You’re looking at pure gold here, boys. Pure gold.” He winked at the others.

  It took Tim until they passed the Live Oak exit to get up the nerve to ask why there were five of them and only four tickets.

  Tim looked in the rearview mirror and saw Jeff’s eyes locked on his, as though he’d anticipated the question. “Ian’s going to buy one from a scalper outside. His family’s in a different tax bracket than the rest of us.”

  Ian shook his head. “Don’t believe him. My dad doesn’t make any more than your parents. W
e moved here from California, so we got a bigger house. That’s all.”

  Tim checked his watch. He couldn’t remember being on this side of the race—driving to it instead of already being there. He’d always just gone with his dad and been there from the moment the truck parked. He knew it was important to get there early to find a parking place, especially if they were headed to the infield. You wanted time to mingle and actually see some of the drivers.

  They rode with windows down, music blaring, wind whipping through the SUV, and the smell of suntan lotion Ian had slathered all over his arms and face. They took the exit from 10 to the 295, which skirted Jacksonville, and Tim downed the Coke.

  It wasn’t until they reached the exit for National Gardens that Tim felt the pain in his gut. He stuffed the plastic Coke bottle into the mesh holder in front of him and wrapped his arms around his stomach.

  “You okay?” Ian said.

  “Yeah, I’ll be all right.”

  But he wasn’t. His stomach rumbled and churned so much that he had to close his eyes and lean against the door. It felt as if his insides were knotted and wrapped like a water hose just tossed by the corner of a house. He couldn’t listen to anyone talking, and he had to shut his mind off from the music. All he could think of was his stomach and the pain and how he couldn’t wait to get to a bathroom.

  Tim hadn’t had any breakfast, so he couldn’t have gotten food poisoning. He’d eaten some leftover fried chicken for dinner the night before, but that was a long time ago. What could have made him feel this bad?

  “How much farther?” Tim said.

  Pete turned. “Another couple of exits. You don’t look so good, Tim. You feeling okay?”

  The others laughed.

  “I think I need to go to the bathroom.”

  “We need some gas,” Jeff said. “We can get off at the next exit, okay?”

  “Yeah, that’d be good.”

  Tim was well acquainted with gas station bathrooms. He knew there were good ones, bad ones, and ones you just turned around and left no matter how bad you needed to go. This one was the third category. It looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in a year. He’d been in Porta Potties that smelled like a summer field compared with this place. But he couldn’t be choosy. He staggered into a stall.

  A few minutes later he tried to wash his hands, but there was no soap and no paper towels in the dispenser, so he wiped his hands on his pants. When he got to the door, another pain hit, and he had to run back to the stall. He slipped on the wet floor and nearly fell but made it inside.

  He figured one of the guys would check on him, but it was enough that they waited as long as they did. He finally walked out into the sunlight, expecting the guys to clap or hoot and holler.

  A family with every inch of the car stuffed with people or suitcases fought at the first pump. Two girls ran past him to the women’s room. A man covered with dry cement stood by a contractor’s truck, the back filled with tools and buckets. Inside a convertible sports car, the top down, sat a woman with long brown hair and sunglasses that probably cost more than all the money Tim had in his pocket. He saw lots of cars and people but no red SUV.

  He walked all the way around the station, then across the street to check out the McDonald’s, thinking Jeff and the others might be waiting there. He went inside the convenience store, where one cashier tried to keep the line moving.

  “Can I help you?” she snapped when he made it to the front of the line.

  He picked up a Moon Pie and handed it to her, though the thought of a Moon Pie after what he’d just been through turned his stomach. “Did you see a red SUV with four guys in it? In the last half hour or so?”

  She passed the Moon Pie in front of the scanner, and it blipped. Without looking up from the register she said, “Lotta cars came through here in the last half hour. That’s $1.34.”

  He thought of trying to describe Jeff or Asparagus Head, but a guy behind him sighed heavily, and Tim just handed the cashier his $100 bill.

  “Oh, for crying out loud,” the man behind him said.

  “I can’t make change for a hundred,” the woman said, as if he should know it.

  Tim stuffed the bill in his shirt and walked out. He thought of saying, “I didn’t want the Moon Pie anyway,” but he kept quiet, even to the guy who was behind him.

  Then it hit him. The mark on top of the Coke. Someone had probably put something in there that made his stomach writhe like a snake in the cold. They’d planned the whole thing. Even the part where Pete asked to see the tickets, because he hadn’t given them back. Four tickets for four guys—only Tim wasn’t one of them.

  “I hate Christians,” Tim muttered.

  He sat by a Pepsi machine, the concrete littered with cigarette butts. The sun was hot, and he could still smell Ian’s suntan lotion. He looked around and finally found a phone. But who was he kidding? Who could he call?

  Chapter 15

  The Service

  JAMIE AND HER BROTHER filed into the meeting room while most of the drivers exited. The room served as a chapel on Sunday mornings after the drivers’ meeting and was usually about a third full. At just about every race there was some kind of Christian service for drivers, crew members, and their families. Jamie’s mom and dad took this seriously and tried to invite everyone they knew.

  Jamie scanned the crowd and tried to pick out the visitors from the regulars. One of the guys who led the service last year had preached a message about true believers and ones who just knew about God but didn’t do anything about it. The message had offended a few but none more than her.

  She tried hard to do what was right, be a good girl, read the Bible, resist temptation, blah, blah, blah. It seemed like the harder she tried to keep the rules, the more rules she broke. She tried to fit in with her youth group, but every time she thought she was getting closer to God she’d look at Cassie Strower and that smile of hers filled with virtue and goodness and all those white teeth and hardly any makeup, and Jamie wanted to puke. She’d never be anything like Cassie, and if that was the kind of person God loved, then she didn’t have a chance. Maybe, she thought, she could just do her thing and leave God alone and let him do his, and they’d peacefully coexist without hurting each other.

  A guy with a guitar sang a song projected on a screen. Most people didn’t sing or they sang off-key. Especially the men. Maybe all that noise of the engines made them tone-deaf.

  The chaplain got up and introduced the speaker for the day—a pastor from some big church out west who had flown in the night before. Everybody seemed to know him from a book he had written, but Jamie had never heard of him.

  He told a funny story about getting picked up at the airport. The driver of the car thought he was picking up a famous NASCAR driver and was disappointed to find out that he was just a pastor.

  Everybody laughed, but Jamie wasn’t convinced this guy could say anything new.

  “I’m not going to use a lot of NASCAR word pictures because, to be honest, I know just enough to be dangerous. A friend of mine invited me to the Richard Petty Driving Experience, and after three laps around the track at 165 mph, I was ready to toss my cookies.”

  Laughter.

  “I’d have to load up on Dramamine just to watch a whole race, because even that makes me queasy, so you don’t have anything to worry about from me. But I do know something about this—” he held up a Bible—“and I’ve spent enough time in here to be able to tell you with all my heart that God wants a relationship with you, and he wants to take you places you’ve never been before. He wants to deliver you from loneliness and despair. He wants to release you from the power of things and free you up to be an instrument he can use for his glory.”

  The room got quiet as the man paused. Then he told a story about a king in the Old Testament who had everything you could imagine—gold and silver and riches beyond compare. Lots of wives, which made most of the guys in the room laugh for some reason. Then the pastor quoted the king, who had wri
tten, “‘Everything is meaningless,’ says the Teacher, ‘completely meaningless!’”

  “Those of you who have reached the top know that it isn’t enough. A lot of people have climbed the ladder of success and have found that it was against the wrong building.”

  More chuckles, but they were subdued. Something was going on in the room, and Jamie couldn’t quite figure it out.

  “I don’t care how much money you win, how many championships, how many fans would follow you around the Denny’s parking lot asking for autographs. There is a deep need inside each of us to connect with the one who made us. There’s a hole in our soul only one person can fill, and everything else is just meaningless. It’s like trying to catch a handful of wind. One minute you think you have it, and the next minute it’s gone.”

  The pastor looked around the room. “There’s probably no other group of athletes or athletes’ wives and families who understand how fragile life is better than you. And how sweet it is when you give control to the one who has your best interests at heart, who wants to love you with an everlasting love.

  “I used to put my hand in my daddy’s big old paw and walk with him around our farm. He’d point out the different trees and have me stop to watch a big buck deer step out of a thicket. All the time I thought we were just going for a walk, but he was teaching me. And if you’ll slip that hand of yours into your heavenly Father’s hand and walk with him, he’ll teach you and love you and guide you in the steps you need to take. But he won’t force you. He gives you the choice.”

  Jamie heard sniffles around the room. Some people reached for tissues and wiped away tears.

  The man prayed at the end and asked God to keep everyone safe. He asked God to bless the families and to comfort anyone who was lonely.

  Jamie bowed her head and closed her eyes, like she knew she was supposed to. But try as she might, all she could think of was her dream of sitting in this room as a real driver, not a kid listening. Of winning the cup and having enough money to buy whatever she wanted.