Once Around the Track

CHAPTER XIV

The diner wasn’t hard to find, provided that you didn’t blink between the sign that said WELCOME TO MARENGO and the one that said Y’ALL COME BACK NOW, Y’HEAR. After the three-hour drive from Charlotte, Sark was glad that the designated meeting place served coffee and came equipped with an indoor toilet. She was in need of both.

She wondered why Badger had told her to meet him at the diner. Probably because even with directions, you couldn’t find the way to his house without a trail of breadcrumbs. Badger’s fortress of solitude in the Georgia outback was the stuff of legends in NASCAR. By meeting him in town she could simply follow him out to wherever it was that they were going. He had not yet arrived. She knew what his car looked like from having seen it parked at the race shop-a silver Chrysler Crossfire with a Georgia vanity plate that read “Badger 1.” (Probably his idea of a play on words Badger won, get it?) But “Badger 1” was not parked in front of the diner, and Sark wondered what she ought to do if he had forgotten his promise to show her around on his home turf. Hunt him down, she supposed. After making the three-hour drive from Charlotte, she wasn’t about to give up without a fight.

She pushed open the door to the diner, and found herself staring right into the calf brown eyes of Badger Jenkins; but in this case, it was simply because the life-sized poster of him had been placed on the wall facing the door. The place was empty except for a blond waitress behind the counter, presumably the curator of this shrine to Marengo’s one celebrity.

The walls were plastered with NASCAR photos of Badger Jenkins, all dutifully signed in Badger’s loopy scrawl, and a glass display case sported a collection of die-cast cars, all presumably former rides of Badger dating back to his salad days in the Busch series. On the wall behind the cash register were the non-Badger photos, a collection of publicity stills from former customers who had been passing through fame and Marengo simultaneously. A couple of minor country singers were represented, as well as a pro football player, the weather girl from an Atlanta television station, and several other NASCAR drivers, looking menacing in their firesuits and sunglasses, presumably friends of Badger who had come to town to go fishing with him and to have their visits forever commemorated by a signed eight-by-ten glossy on the pine-paneled wall of the diner. In one of the photos, a younger, curvier version of the waitress snuggled up to an unshaven, shaggy-haired Badger, and they both smiled happily at the camera-not posed smiles, but two really happy people caught in a golden moment.

“Excuse me,” Sark said to the waitress, whose plastic name tag said “Laraine.” “I’m here to meet Badger Jenkins. Have you seen him?”

Laraine smiled and went on putting sugar packets into little plastic containers. “Sure. Every inch of him.”

“I mean today. I’m the publicist for Team Vagenya. He was supposed to meet me here for an interview.” Sark looked at her watch for effect. “I drove down from Charlotte.”

Laraine began to wipe down the countertop with a wet rag. “I expect he’ll turn up,” she said. “Did he promise you? Did he give you his word?”

Sark hesitated. “He agreed to the time and date,” she said at last.

“Oh, agree.” Laraine had finished with the sugar packets and was now scrubbing the counter. “Badger will agree to anything to get women to stop hassling him. You ought to know that by now. But he sets a store by giving his word. If you actually want him to do something for you, you need to make him give you his word. Then he’s bound to go through with it.”

“He had better go through with it,” said Sark through clenched teeth. “I take the team photos, and I wasted a whole day to do this. If he doesn’t want to look like the Creature from the Black Lagoon in every publicity shot for the rest of the season, he’d better haul his ass in here real soon.”

Laraine eyed her suspiciously. “Don’t you have his cell number?”

“Of course, I have it! But my cell phone doesn’t get any reception out here. I suppose I could use a pay phone. If there is one.”

Laraine sighed and picked up the telephone, punching in one number. “There’s only one provider within range of here,” she said. “I guess that’s not the one you’ve got. Well, seeing as how you’re with the team, I guess I can call him for you. I got him on speed dial,” she explained to the testy visitor. “Of course, if he happens to be out on the lake where his cell phone won’t work, then you’d just better hope he remembers, because nobody can reach him when he’s out there.”

“Yeah, but he has to come to shore sometime, and then he’ll wish he hadn’t,” said Sark.

“Everybody says that,” said Laraine. “It’s water off a duck’s back.”

Sark had a sinking feeling that she had made a three-hour drive for nothing. “Does he do that to people a lot? Stand them up?”

Laraine went on wiping the counter with a rag. “He doesn’t mean to,” she said at last. “He’s good-hearted, just a little impractical. When people ask him for things, he just hates to say no, and when it comes to his time, he’s liable to promise more hours in the day than there actually are. Plus, he really wants to spend most of his time alone out there on the lake. I think he’ll turn up for you, though, what with you being with the team and all. It’s mostly journalists who slip his mind. He honestly does not see the point of bragging about himself for public consumption. He’d be a much richer man if anybody could make him see the value in publicity.”

“I have tried,” said Sark grimly.

Laraine nodded. “Like trying to teach a pig to sing, isn’t it? Look, why don’t you pick a place and sit down while I phone him, and then I’ll bring you some coffee.”

Sark kept studying the racing posters of Badger that adorned the diner’s walls until she decided which one that she hated the least. (Badger minus the sunglasses, wearing a goofy smile, and holding up a can of motor oil as if he had found it quite delicious. Sark always liked the Vagenya driver better when he wasn’t pretending to be a comic book hero, and in her current mood, the more ridiculous he looked, the more it pleased her.)

She slid into the booth beneath that goofy motor oil photo, musing again on how strange it was that images of someone she actually knew could constitute a décor. Badger posters. Badger clocks. Badger sofa throws. Of course, there were certainly worse examples of human commercialization. The real merchandise monsters were NASCAR’s two most popular drivers, Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhardt, Jr. The range of products bearing their names and likenesses was downright frightening. Toothbrushes. Shot glasses. Valentine candy. Christmas ornaments. Mouse pads. Bath mats. She supposed that there were actually people who decorated their houses in NASCAR driver motif-there was rumored to be a Badger bathroom somewhere in Ohio-but from her outsider perspective, the resulting décor didn’t bear thinking about. If she’d had to live amidst such a theme decoration, she would have felt that she was trapped inside a TV commercial.

To his credit, Badger himself seemed oblivious to these commercial tokens of fan loyalty. If he turned up at the shop and you happened to be wearing, say, a Badger Jenkins tee shirt, he affected not to notice. She thought that was a good strategy. It avoided embarrassment for everybody. Any other reaction on his part would have been asking for trouble. If he had acted pleased to have people sporting his likeness on their chests, he would have seemed conceited, and if he made fun of it, he would come off as an arrogant ingrate. Ignoring all Badger-themed merchandise was by far the most diplomatic way to handle the situation.

While she waited for Marengo’s favorite son to arrive, Sark sipped her coffee and looked over her notes, so that she would know what sort of questions to ask him. In her experience, the more you knew about somebody, the better the interview was likely to be.

According to the biographical material, Badger was a lifelong resident of the county, and he had grown up on a farm that had been in his family for five or six generations. He was an only child whose mother had died when he was born. According to the articles, he had been part Cherokee, which gave Badger a Native American heritage in which he took great pride. He’d been raised by his father on that family farm in the hills north of town, where he had spent a seemingly idyllic childhood in country pursuits, most notably hunting and fishing on his beloved lake. He sounded like Tom Sawyer, Sark thought. Or possibly Conan the Barbarian. She wondered what a typical day with him would constitute. Nothing likely to appeal to a city girl, she supposed. Fortunately, anticipating this, she had worn an outfit that would have served her well on a hike in Yellowstone: khaki pants, hiking boots, and a tan wind-breaker over a Team Vagenya tee shirt. In the trunk of her car she had stashed a snake bite kit, mosquito repellent, and bottled water.

She was making notes on her list of possible interview questions when Badger turned up, about twenty minutes late, with his usual nonchalant grin. “Sorry about that,” he said.

She gave him a bitter smile. “Oh, don’t mention it. I’ve just been enjoying myself here in the shrine of St. Badger.” She indicated the phalanx of posters bearing his likeness that surrounded them. “And here you are in the flesh. Should I kneel?”

He pursed his lips and did that little head jerk that meant the remark had stung. “Laraine put those things back up when I got this new ride. She says it’s good for business. Anyhow, I didn’t mean to be late. I didn’t forget. I got stuck behind a logging truck going over the hill where you can’t pass.”

Sark raised her eyebrows. “Safe driving? From you?”

He nodded. “If you get a speeding ticket, all it costs you is a hundred bucks or so, but if I get a speeding ticket, all hell breaks loose, and the press never lets me hear the end of it. You ready?”

Sark gathered up the pile of press releases and scribbled index cards and stuffed them back into the large purse that served as her briefcase. “Where are we going?”

“Figured I’d take you out to my fishing cabin on the lake. Let you see my natural habitat.”

“Okay,” said Sark, who had been expecting this. “Shall I ride with you? Let me get my camera gear out of my car.” And my change of clothes and my snake bite kit, she added silently. You couldn’t be too careful around lakes.

“Well, we’ll be headed west from here, and there’s a shortcut back to the interstate north from there, so it would save you time if you just took your car, instead of having to come all the way back down here. Why don’t you just follow me?”

Sark stared at him. He was serious. “Because you won the Southern 500 at Darlington,” she said.

“Not in that old pick-up truck, I didn’t,” said Badger.

“Yeah, well…driving is driving. I’ve heard that Dale Earnhardt, Jr. and Jeff Gordon have sometimes tried without notable success to keep up with you.”

He grinned. “Aw, I told you, I try to be a good boy off the track. Come on.” He jingled his keys and headed for the door, stopping to give Laraine a bear hug on his way out; then he strolled out to the parking lot.

“Well, how hard can it be to follow him?” Sark wondered aloud. “It’s just a two-lane blacktop country road.”

Laraine nodded. “That road sure has a lot of curves, though. Some steep hills, too, every now and again.”

“Exactly,” said Sark. “That ought to slow him down. Badger will probably be the perfect person to follow. Where driving is concerned, his ego must be rock solid. I don’t suppose he feels the need to show off by speeding down ordinary roads to prove how macho he is. I’m sure I’ll be fine.”

“That’s what everybody says,” muttered Laraine, but Sark was already scurrying out the door, fishing in her purse for her sunglasses.

Badger was waiting in his truck revving the engine when she emerged from the diner. As Sark walked to her car, she took a precautionary look at Badger’s license plate, just in case they got separated by traffic. (In Marengo?) Oh well, it still wouldn’t hurt to know the license number. Red trucks were certainly not at a premium in north Georgia, and it would be reassuring to know for a fact that you were following the correct one.

It took her a moment to realize that the Georgia truck tag was a vanity plate, because it consisted of a series of numbers, much as standard-issue plates did. But to someone who had been studying Badger Jenkins’s biography for several days now in preparation for this interview, the numbers were indeed significant. They were the numbers of cars he had driven in the early days of his career.

She was sitting there behind the wheel thinking how endearing that license plate was-sentimental without being too boastful. (He could have had one that said “Champ” or “NASCAR 1” or some such slogan of self-importance. Well, he did have such a slogan on his Crossfire, but she supposed that was in keeping with his celebrity image around Charlotte. Here among the home folks he’d probably be given no end of grief for such pretensions. Besides, such a tag would be a dead giveaway to fans that the truck belonged to Badger, but she didn’t suppose that there were all that many Badger Jenkins groupies roaming around in the vicinity of Marengo. Except, perhaps, Laraine.)

Sark was so intent upon her meditation on the tasteful vanity plate that she was completely unprepared for the abrupt takeoff of the truck she was supposed to be following. Badger screeched out of the diner parking lot in a red blur, headed north on the two-lane blacktop that was only “Main Street” for about a hundred yards, before it became a country road again, at which point they would probably make the jump to light speed, Sark thought wryly.

Was he trying to lose her? The little turkey. She gritted her teeth and peeled out after him. Fortunately, there was no traffic on the road, because Badger’s truck was now a red dot receding into the distance. She couldn’t afford to lose him. She didn’t know where she was going. If he made a turn up ahead past a curve where she couldn’t see him, she’d never find him again. Why had she not thought to obtain a county map? Or at least verbal directions from the waitress.

Because she had not expected her host to be such a macho jerk, she answered herself.

Well, he could be as difficult as he chose, she was sticking with him. Grimly, she hunched over the steering wheel and mashed the accelerator into the carpet, not trying to overtake him, but at least determined to keep him in her line of sight.

Once she glanced down at the CD player, deciding that music might calm her nerves; although at their current speed, The Ride of the Valkyries would be the logical choice. When she looked up again an instant later, she saw that Badger’s red truck was even farther ahead, so she had to accelerate again to close the distance. After that, she kept both hands firmly on the steering wheel in the “ten o’clock and two o’clock” position, and she didn’t take her eyes off the road for an instant. In fact, she decided that blinking was not even a good idea. Badger knew the road, every curve, every rise-but she didn’t. She also noticed that he seemed to accelerate going out of a curve, while she slowed down well before she reached it and did not resume her normal speed until she was back on the straightaway. Maybe she should try it his way, she thought.

She kept both hands on the wheel and hung on for dear life, but she stayed with him.

A few miles farther on, when she discovered that Badger didn’t bother with turn signals, either, she gave up taking unnecessary breaths, so intent was she upon following the road at the greatest possible speed. He was turning left. Ah, his specialty. Fortunately, when he made that course change, he was far enough ahead to allow her time to slow down and to make the turn in relative safety. She had thought that she might try to remember the route just in case she did become lost, but after that first turn, she lost track of the road changes they took, and at some point she realized that she couldn’t possibly find her way back to Marengo on her own. They had been going too fast for her to read the route numbers or to memorize the left and right turns. She must not lose him.

Finally, after what seemed like hours, but was actually only twenty minutes or so, Badger’s red truck made one last left turn and headed up a dirt road, churning up clouds of red dust in its wake.

Almost there, thought Sark, easing her grip on the steering wheel so that her knuckles no longer showed white. She knew that later on her arms would ache and probably her head as well from the tension, but just now she was able to ignore any physical symptoms by focusing on exactly what names she was going to call Badger as soon as she was on solid ground again. And while she was at it, how would he like a face full of mosquito repellant?

After another jarring mile or so up the dirt road, dodging ruts and washed out places, the brake lights on the truck glowed red, her cue to slow down, although the expanse of greenish brown lake up ahead would have tipped her off that they were coming to the end of the ordeal. She eased the car to a stop a little way away from Badger’s truck, let out a sigh of relief, and rested her head for a moment against the top of the steering wheel. Anybody who followed Badger Jenkins down a country road ought to have St. Christopher’s medals for hub caps.

The red truck had pulled up in front of a glass and cedar A-framed house that most NASCAR fans would have recognized as Badger Jenkins’s fishing cabin. Although not large by celebrity standards (Sark was no expert, but she thought it might run to 3,000 or 4,000 square feet), it was well-maintained and even stylish. She had been half-expecting something thrown together by Badger himself out of recycled chicken coops, but this place looked as if an architect, or at the very least a local construction company with a set of plans from a magazine, had constructed it.

The cedar cabin, surrounded by a vast multilevel deck with benches and geranium-filled planters at each corner, sat on a little knoll facing the lake, where an equally well-constructed boat dock sported Badger’s motorboat, a canoe, and a little green rowboat, that last vessel presumably for duck-hunting expeditions.

Sark got out of her car and slammed the door, with blistering words hovering on her tongue, but before she could utter a single withering syllable, Badger had run up and enveloped her in an exuberant hug. “You did good!” he said. “You kept up with me. I thought for sure I’d have to pull over and wait for you.”

Sark stared at him in momentary disbelief, and then she felt her annoyance melt away in a glow of pride. I did good? she thought. And then she realized that she had indeed performed well; he had not managed to lose her in the Georgia outback. If the drive out to the lake had been a test, she had passed it.

I kept up with a NASCAR driver, she thought with an inward smirk of satisfaction. She must write up this episode for the exposé article that she would write at the end of the season. Perhaps the adventure was a bit upbeat for an otherwise critical piece, but she wanted to be able to boast of her accomplishment to the world at large. Besides, she thought that with the proper slant she could use the anecdote as a criticism. Maybe the incident would serve to point out that fast driving wasn’t really all that difficult-that any reasonably coordinated person could do what Cup drivers did if only they put their minds to it.

Her good humor restored, she studied the landscape with a more benevolent eye. The lake was quite large; it curved past a tree-lined peninsula and went on for several miles, as far as she could tell. There was no one else in sight, perhaps even no one for miles.

“So this is your fortress of solitude,” she said to Badger, sighting the lake through the viewfinder of her camera.

“This is it,” said Badger. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

Wet, anyhow, thought Sark, who preferred her bodies of water to be encircling Caribbean islands. It was a greenish brown lake encircled by pine trees, hardly Yellowstone. Why was Badger so crazy about this place? Most of the other NASCAR drivers lived on an even bigger lake near Charlotte-Lake Norman. Why not just move there?

“It’s nice to have this place to come back to,” he said.

“Do you own the whole lake?” she asked with a note of surprise in her voice. It wasn’t that NASCAR drivers didn’t make good money-heck, Jeff Gordon could probably have bought Lake Erie if he’d wanted it, but Badger was not in the top tier of Cup drivers.

“Oh, no,” said Badger. “It’s a man-made lake, you know. I own most of what you see here, but the rest-around the bend, half a mile or so away-belongs to a couple of local landowners. And there’s a state game preserve adjoining it, too, at the far end.”

“So no close neighbors. I suppose it’s peaceful here,” said Sark.

“That’s it,” said Badger happily. “Peaceful. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the interest that people take in me and my racing career, but sometimes I just need time to be by myself, you know?”

Sark nodded. “I imagine things can get pretty hectic for you,” she said.

“It sure can,” said Badger. “Sometimes the clamor seems to be nonstop. Why, just now on the drive out here, I got four calls on my cell phone.”

She snapped a picture of the lake, framed by a stand of pines at the water’s edge. “Well, I suppose that’s the price that-You what? You got four calls…You mean just now, driving out here?”

“Yeah.”

She took a deep breath, in lieu of shouting, and lowered the camera so that she could glare at him directly. “Do you mean to tell me that while I was following you out here-at a pace, I might add, that prevented me from taking deep breaths or even blinking…at a speed that no sane person could possibly maintain on the Bonneville Salt Flats, much less on a two-lane country road with curves and hills…And for the duration of that absurdly dangerous drive, you are telling me that you were talking on a cell phone?”

“Well, yeah,” said Badger, serenely unconscious of self-incrimination. “But you gotta remember that I grew up here. I know these roads pretty well.”

“But I don’t!”

“I know,” he said happily. “That’s why I was so tickled that you kept up with me. And in that cheap little car, too. You were great. Now, come on. I’ll show you around.”

Deciding not to press the point, Sark trailed after him. So much for her triumphant feat of driving skill. She had been hanging on for dear life, scarcely daring to breathe, and he had been talking on his damned cell phone. Okay, maybe race car driving was a little more difficult than she had been willing to admit. Mentally, she excised that section from her article.

She still wondered if he had driven so fast to test her, or if he was simply oblivious to high speeds through years of racing at two or three times those speeds. She decided that she was reserving judgment on whether or not he was a jerk.

Badger seemed to have a standard routine for hosting visitors, probably a habit born of having to entertain so many journalists and TV crews over the years. First came the tour of the lake, when Badger, at the helm of his motorboat, with the life-jacketed guest installed in the prow, buzzed off to the far end of the lake, and then slowly worked his way back to his own property, pointing out items of interest along the way. At first Sark thought she would go to sleep and fall in the water, while murmuring, “Nice tree. Nice rock. Nice shrub.” But dutifully she took pictures along the way, most of them incorporating Badger into the foreground of the shot. She thought she might have taken some good feature-story portraits: Badger in his natural habitat, looking at ease and princely on his beloved lake.

By the time they had wended their way to the end of the lake and were halfway back to where they started, an odd transformation had taken place. The lake really was beautiful. At first she had thought that it was a glorified mud puddle in the middle of nowhere, but she had resolved to be polite about it. However, somewhere along the way, his enthusiasm had infected her, and she had begun to see the land as Badger himself must be seeing it. Suddenly, without quite knowing how or why, she got it.

The landscape was a tapestry of the brilliant blues of sky and marsh and lake water, the sere browns of dry grass and leafless shrubs, of tall dark pines, and the silver-tipped branches of the maples in arabesques at the water’s edge. She saw it as a protected place where wild things could find peace and refuge. She looked over at Badger, who was guiding the boat as effortlessly as he had maneuvered the curves of that country road.

And for now, thought Sark, one of them has.

While Badger tied up the motorboat at the dock, Sark took more photos of the lake, the cabin, Badger and the boat, Badger framed against the surrounding hills. She had decided to start a team archive in case any publications needed informal shots for feature articles about Badger’s life away from the track.

“Where’s the turtle?” she asked when he had finished securing the boat.

Badger pointed to a fenced-in enclosure near the woods. “In there asleep. His shell is still healing up. Fixing him up was a lot more complicated than we thought. Once I got him to the body shop, Jesse called the local vet, who is a fishing buddy of his, to make sure we did it right. The vet came over and checked out the turtle to make sure the membrane thing under the shell wasn’t broken, which it wasn’t. That was good-less chance of infection and all. Then he cleaned the wound and put on a wet dressing to keep it from getting infected. Gave him some antibiotics, too, every day for a month, which I paid for. Good thing I’m working again.”

Sark felt a pang of journalistic disappointment. Turtle surgery in the body shop would have made a great human interest story. “So you didn’t use fiberglass in the body shop to fix the turtle?”

“Oh, we did. Just not until a couple of weeks later, after the wound had healed up pretty good and the layer above it had started to harden. Then we took him back down to the shop and fixed him a patch with fiberglass boat materials and waterproof epoxy.”

“Can I see him?” asked Sark, peering into the shady enclosure through the camera viewfinder. Just visible in the shrubbery was the shell of an enormous turtle.

“Just don’t get too near him. You wouldn’t like him much close up. He is a humongous snapping turtle, and he’s got the disposition of Kevin Harvick. He lunges at you, and he’s faster than you’d think a turtle could be. He could take your finger off in a heartbeat.”

Sark grinned. “The turtle or Harvick?”

“Either one, I reckon,” said Badger.

“If the turtle is so fierce, then how do you handle him?”

Badger shrugged. “I get along with most animals,” he said. “I guess they know I’m on their side. Anyhow, animals are easy. You can mostly figure out what they want. Sometimes with people it’s hard to tell.”

As they walked back toward the cabin, Sark said, “I was in a grocery store the other day and I saw a sign that reminded me of you.”

“That doesn’t sound too good,” said Badger. “Ham? Or vegetable section, maybe?”

She laughed. “Well, not quite the vegetable section. It was the flower and plant department. The store had a bonsai tree on display, and in front of it was a sign that said: PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH! I’M REAL! From what I’ve seen of your adoring public, I thought that the team ought to have a sign like that made for you.” She looked at him appraisingly. “Do you mind being hugged?”

“Well, it’s okay when little kids do it.”

Sark tried to keep her astonishment from showing. She had been expecting the typical macho answer, something to the effect of “I don’t mind being hugged by pretty girls or movie starlets.” But children? Go figure.

“I suppose that people feel they know you,” she said. “They’ve followed you in racing for years, and seen you on TV in their living rooms so many times. I guess that they care so much about you that they forget that to you they are strangers. To them you are one of the family.”

Badger nodded sadly. “They don’t mean any harm. It’s nice of them to take an interest.”

Sark’s cynical soul recoiled in disbelief. Could he really be so disingenuous? She said, “What about the ones who take too much of an interest, Badger?”

He hesitated, and she thought he might be considering feigning ignorance, but she forestalled that response with a no-nonsense glare that said he’d better not try playing dumb. He might not be able to quote Shakespeare (or even spell Shakespeare), but since he had been a handsome man for a couple of decades now, she was pretty sure he’d know the difference between admiration and lust when he saw it.

“Well, okay,” he sighed. “Off the record. If I think that a woman has”-he grinned to show he was being facetious-“designs on my honor, I have this one-armed hug that I use. It keeps them from…um…”

“I get it,” said Sark, repressing a shudder. “How strange that you should have to worry about things like that instead of being able to concentrate on driving the car.”

Badger nodded. “Don’t forget, though, that there are a lot of people who can drive a race car. The Busch guys are good, and most of the truck guys would do just fine in Cup. There are even some fellas on local tracks who just never got the right breaks, and they could do my job, too, some of ’em. So the forty-three of us in Cup are pretty damn lucky to be where we are. Some of that success is due to popularity with the fans. Best not to forget that.”

He’s not as dumb as he’d have us believe, thought Sark. Maybe innocent is just part of the act. He’s shrewd about business and probably about charming people, too. She decided that she’d think over all that later for the article she’d be writing about the real Badger Jenkins in her exposé of Cup racing.

Still, she had to concede that he was right in his assessment, and she was grudgingly pleased that he wasn’t being an arrogant jerk about the public adulation he received. He did realize that to some people anybody in a Cup ride was a hero. Some of his success came as much from luck as from talent. But his humility did not change the fact that people routinely invaded his personal space without a qualm, and no matter how kind he appeared to be, she still couldn’t believe that the intrusiveness of it didn’t bother him.

“But fans putting moves on me, or being pushy, it doesn’t happen as much as you’d think,” he said quickly, as if reading her thoughts.

“No?”

“No. You learn how to deal with it. At the track, you know, when I’m in my firesuit and sunglasses, I can project an attitude of leave me alone. I don’t smile at people, and I walk quickly, without slowing down for people waiting for autographs. Then people just know to keep their distance. I learned that trick from Dale Earnhardt himself.”

Sark blinked. “You didn’t try to hug him, did you?”

“‘No, I did not try to hug Dale Earnhardt,” said Badger, scowling. “I mean that I watched how the Intimidator carried himself, that’s all. I noticed that nobody ever approached him unless he allowed them to. He had an attitude that was bulletproof. I watched how he did that, and I started trying to do it myself.”

Sark gave him an appraising stare. There was nothing remotely intimidating about Badger. He had a perfect profile and cameras practically melted when you took his picture, but in real life he was small and cute, and above all harmless-looking. “I can’t see how that tactic would work for you, Badger,” she told him. “You look like a lost puppy dog. Now, Dale Earnhardt, from the pictures I’ve seen of him, could come across as truly fierce, but-no offense-you could not possibly pull that off.”

With a sigh of resignation, Badger pulled his sunglasses out of his pocket, slid them on, and stood up. In an instant, his perfect features hardened into a blank-eyed, tight-lipped mask of cold rejection. He folded his arms, raised his chin a little, and stared at her, waiting.

Sark’s objections stuck in a dry throat. The affable country boy had vanished and in his place stood a stern and powerful stranger whom nobody would argue with. She wasn’t going to, anyhow. He might as well have been shouting, “Get the hell away from me.” She remembered that first time she had done a photo session with him. He had looked formidable then when he posed, but this was leagues beyond that; now, he radiated an icy grandeur that would stop you in your tracks. How the hell did he do that?

“Oh,” she said, and it came out hardly more than a squeak.

Badger nodded. “And I’m not even wearing the firesuit. You add that to the sunglasses, and people generally don’t mess with me.”

“Well, that was certainly educational,” said Sark briskly. “Take them off again, please.”

They walked up the steps of the deck toward the front door of his cabin. “I had a guy renting this,” he told her, fishing in his pocket for the key. “But he got his place fixed up, so it’s all mine again. I don’t get to come back as much as I’d like to, though.”

He pushed open the door and waved her inside.

Having seen the outside of the fabled “fishing shack,” Sark was not surprised to find that the pine-paneled interior was equally well-kept and nicely furnished with Shaker-style furniture in oak and cherry wood and overstuffed sofas flanking a large stone fireplace. The walls held an assortment of trophies-but not the sort that Sark had been expecting. Instead of racing memorabilia, there were fishing rods, mounted game fish and deer heads, and framed art prints of ducks and deer in woodland settings.

“Where’s all your NASCAR stuff?” asked Sark.

“My daddy’s got most of it,” said Badger. “He’s got boxes full of stuff in the basement. My Darlington trophy was in the middle of his dining room table last time I looked.”

“That must make for interesting dinner conversations,” said Sark.

“I guess,” said Badger. “We don’t talk much. And I gave a lot of my old posters and a couple of old trophies to Laraine for the diner.” It suddenly seemed to occur to him that she might be asking for a reason. “Do you want anything? I think I have some die-cast cars in a drawer here.”

Sark smiled. “All I want is your time, Badger.” She felt a small pang of guilt, because she knew that wasn’t true. This interview would be grist for two articles: the feature story for the team and the exposé she planned to write at the end of the season. Well, she told herself, he probably is a jerk. I just haven’t found out how yet.

When Sark got back to Charlotte that night, she found an e-mail from her journalist pal Ed Blair, asking her to report on her progress with Team Vagenya.

How is Project Badger coming along? Didn’t you have an interview with him this week? Learn anything interesting?

I went down to visit him in his natural habitat today. Whatever it is that Alexander the Great and Moses and, for all I know, the Lone Ranger…whatever they had, he’s got it. And I’m not talking about sex appeal (for a change.) Spent five hours alone in the woods with him and felt absolutely no vibrations on that frequency, either way. But what is magical is the focus-that quality that makes him an incredible race car driver, I guess… He’s there. Absolutely, perfectly, 110% THERE. The world is a desert island, you and him. He’ll talk about anything. He’ll listen. No games, no bragging, no ego. I think all of us were like that when we were about twelve, before we started caring about social status, and appearance, and all the facades of the adult world.

If it is possible to be twelve at heart but fully adult in intelligence and understanding, he’s it. What Peter Pan might have really been like, or maybe Siddharta en route to becoming the Buddha.

He’s not dumb, either. He just lives in his body, and I live in my head, so there’s a different frequency. But he’s really nice. Wish I knew how he managed to grow up and not be a jerk.

So you spent the day with the Buddha in the wilds of Georgia, did you? What exactly does that entail? How does his engine feel? Surely you’ve found out by now!

Got a tour of the lake and his lake house, and met the turtle. I don’t know how his “engine feels.” Nothing happened. Probably because I do not own a tiara and a sash proclaiming me Miss Something-or-Other. Beauty queens are more his speed. He’s not a jerk about it. He was just raised to think that women should be high-maintenance trophies, and that as long as other guys envy you, compatibility doesn’t matter. Poor guy. He’s really very sweet, though. I was surprised. Of course, the problem with not being a teenager anymore is that one has no second gear anymore, so I’m quite afraid that some day he will hold that sexless hug of his for a heartbeat too long, and I’ll instinctively reach for the stick shift and find out “how his engine feels,” as you so colorfully put it.

You seem to be using a lot of automotive metaphors lately. Is the job getting to you?

Possibly, Ed. I am very susceptible to atmosphere. The lake was rather picturesque, and he certainly cares about the place. His fishing shack is not exactly a hovel, either. It’s a nice A-frame, furnished with clean, modern pieces in natural wood.

Decorator?

Ex-wife, perhaps. But it is possible that he has taste, you know. I enjoyed having an uninterrupted afternoon to talk to him. By the way, I got him to talk for ten minutes about “Do they know how much we love them?”

About what?

You know…the adoring fans that NASCAR drivers have. He steadfastly ignored (and I did not bring up) the pit lizard sign in the equation. He talked about how no matter how rushed or mad he was, he would never ignore a child. How he came to the sport from humbler beginnings than most guys, and that he had vowed never to lose his head over the money or the fame. Says he never thought he was better than anybody else.

Someday I’ll get a couple of Heinekens down his pretty little throat, and then I’ll ask him about the dark side of the Force. Wonder if he has ever succumbed. The way he looks, I’d put money on a bet that he has given it up to somebody, somewhere, but I don’t think it’s a regular sport with him. He has to know that there are people who salivate at seeing the number 86… He chooses not to notice. I suppose it saves awkwardness…

If I were him, I’d notice if pretty ladies were hot for my bod! I’d have a basket at the track to collect hotel room keys.

I’ll bet you would, thought Sark, logging off. Maybe most guys would. But she was pretty sure that whatever Badger’s vices were, lust was not among them.