Once Around the Track

CHAPTER XV

The team was having another pit stop practice at the shop, but Badger was not on hand to help. He wasn’t required to be, of course, but sometimes he had dropped by just to encourage them and to see how things were going. Today, though, his personal manager had commandeered him to make a public appearance at the grand opening of an auto parts store. The team knew about this because Deanna, who had been dispatched by Ms. Albigre to get more of Badger’s autograph cards as a rush job from the printer, was still grumbling about it to anyone within earshot.

“She misspelled the name of the sponsor on the sports card,” Deanna told Sark, who had wandered in to use the fax machine. “I told her, and she said she didn’t care. She said they were in a hurry.”

Sark sighed. “This is all new to me, but her idea of publicity certainly differs from mine. A few days ago I got a call from a turtle rescue program, asking if Badger would film a public service commercial for them, so I relayed the request to Melodie, and she said, ‘What’s in it for Badger?’”

“I think a turtle rescue ad would be great publicity for him,” said Deanna. “Is he going to do it?”

“I don’t think she even bothered to tell him about it. No percentage in it.”

Deanna made a face. “I just hate the way that woman talks to him, Sark. I mean, she may be a genius, for all I know. Although with her spelling…but anyhow, she shouldn’t talk to Badger the ways she does, as if he were a mangy old dog. I wish there was somebody we could report her to.”

Sark nodded. “How about Amnesty International?”

Badger was led away to dazzle the auto parts store customers with his boyish charm (“How ya doin’, sweetie?”), and practice went on without Team Vagenya’s official driver. One of the shop dogs was again subbing for Badger, and the pit crew drilled on tire changing while Tuggle timed them with a stopwatch and shouted instructions. After half an hour of precision drill, the crew chief turned them loose for a break while she went to talk to a journalist. The hot and sweaty crew headed for the shop where there were apples and granola bars on the counter and an ice-filled cooler stocked with a selection of soft drinks and bottled water.

The tall young man who had been Badger’s stand-in for the practice dug a Diet Snapple out of the cooler ice and looked at it appreciatively. “This is way better than the guys’ teams,” he said. “They mostly just put out a loaf of Wonder bread and a package of bologna. And regular cola, if they think of it.”

Taran smiled. “That would suit Badger,” she said. “I think that’s what he lives on, anyhow.”

The substitute driver shrugged. “Yeah, but he works out. And that junk food jones of his may be an act for all we know. In private, he may eat plain salad and scrape the butter off his fish. Most Cup drivers are pretty fanatical about their health-or at least about their looks.”

“Well, whatever he does, it works,” sighed Taran, glancing at the poster of Badger taped to the wall of the shop.

Tony shrugged. “He’s a talented guy,” he said. “But he’s lucky. They all are.”

Taran looked at him more closely. “You’re the one who drove the car for our pit stop practices on the day of tryouts, aren’t you?” she said. The name tag sewn on his firesuit said “Tony.” It wasn’t a Vagenya firesuit, though. It was an old one, probably from a time when he’d raced at local speedways somewhere. Almost everybody in racing started out that way.

The dark young man nodded. “I’m just a mechanic, so that was kind of a thrill. Me driving Badger Jenkins’s car. Even if it was just fifty yards to a pit stop. They told me somebody spotted the difference.”

“Yes. That was me.”

He looked disappointed. “How’d you know it wasn’t him?”

“Oh, not because of the driving,” said Taran quickly. “You did a great job. Really. It was the eyes. Badger has very dark, sad eyes. You can’t mistake them. Anyhow, yours are blue.”

Her explanation did not seem to comfort him much. Tony said, “Plus, he’s rich and famous, and I’m just a shop dog.”

Taran thought it would be both impolite and insincere to agree with the patent truth of this statement. Besides, he wasn’t so bad. Tony Lafon was a good three inches taller than she was, and therefore that much taller than Badger himself. He had dark straight hair offset by the fair skin and blue eyes that people associated with Ireland. Tony didn’t have Badger’s perfectly chiseled features, but he looked like a nice, bright guy, and he was certainly easier to talk to.

Taran said, “Well, maybe Badger is more successful than you are, but you look about ten years younger than he is. Are you? Yeah, I thought so. You still have time to make it as a driver. If that’s what you want. Is it?”

Tony looked up at the handsome, stern face of Badger Jenkins staring down at him in air-brushed perfection from the Team Vagenya poster. Some guys got all the breaks. “It’s all I’ve ever wanted,” he said. “Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been watching racing, and working as a mechanic anywhere I could, and driving at the local tracks in southwest Virginia. You know, the little Saturday night tracks where they raced trucks or Late Model Stocks, and you had to go door to door to the local businesses to get your own sponsors.” He sighed. “You want to believe that working so hard on the local level will someday get you into Cup-and sometimes it does.”

“Of course it does,” said Taran. “That’s how Badger got started.”

Taran knew every detail of Badger’s rise to the exalted ranks of Nextel Cup. She could recite the date and place of every victory Badger had ever achieved in Cup racing (there hadn’t been that many of them to date). Although she had not memorized the string of little Saturday night triumphs he had amassed in the lower echelons of stock car racing, she could probably name more of them than Badger himself could, and she did know every racing category, every track, and every number under which he had competed. Her own car’s license plate was a vanity plate, but people seldom realized it, because it was just his initials, BJ, followed by 7781, 77 being the number of the car he had once driven in local Late Model Stock racing, and 81, his number in his first season in the NASCAR Busch series.

“Badger was lucky,” Tony said again. “There was a guy at his local track who was getting too old to do any racing himself, but he still wanted to be in the game, so he sold the equipment to Badger and stayed on to help him learn the ropes. Badger was a natural-I’m not saying he wasn’t good-but there are a heck of a lot of guys who are good that never get past Late Model Stocks.”

“So you decided to work for a Cup team instead?”

Tony nodded. “I figured it would be a good way to make connections within the sport. Racing is in many ways just a small town. What about you?”

Taran sighed. “You’ll laugh,” she said.

“Try me.”

“I’m the team flake. Everybody else is doing it for the experience, or for a feminist cause, or because they’re just crazy about stock car racing. But not me. I’m the fool who is crazy about Badger Jenkins.” When she said it, she was watching him carefully to see if he was having trouble wiping a smirk off his face, but he had simply nodded and given her a look that might have been sympathetic.

“Guys in firesuits,” he said, unwrapping another Granola bar. “A lot of people mistake them for Superman, I guess. I’ve seen it dozens of times. But why Badger in particular?”

“It sounds ridiculous,” she sighed. “I was dating a guy who got me interested in NASCAR, and he was a Mark Martin fan. He kept telling me to pick a driver, so that it would be more interesting when we watched the races together.” She stopped for a moment, remembering Rob, one of the company’s electrical engineers. A nice enough guy, she supposed, if you liked Italian food and watching Stargate on the Sci-Fi Channel, which was okay. She just couldn’t see doing that for the rest of her life. Besides, Rob looked like a mild-mannered frog in steel-rimmed glasses, and Taran thought that a permanent relationship with him would put you in the fast lane for old age. She decided that Rob himself had probably been born forty. But she’d always be grateful to him for introducing her to motorsports. He liked to watch the races with a clipboard of statistics at hand: Which driver had previously won at this track? Whose team seemed to be consistently good lately? Who had done well in practice and qualifying? As an engineer herself, she found this sort of scientific approach interesting, but since racing was, after all, a form of entertainment, she felt that Rob’s joyless method of analyzing the race left much to be desired. She wanted to care who won: to hope for his success, rather than to coldly predict it with an assortment of dispassionate statistics.

“He wanted you to pick a driver so that watching racing with you would be a competiton,” said Tony. “I’ll bet he thought you’d go for Jeff Gordon. He’s really popular with women and kids.”

“No,” said Taran. “He knew better than that. I’m an electrical engineer. He figured I’d go for the intellectual type.”

“Ryan Newman, then. Engineering degree from Purdue.”

“Right. And I do like Newman, but I don’t think choosing a driver is necessarily a matter of logic. You don’t cry over somebody just because he is the mathematical favorite.”

“Well, some people might,” said Tony. “But mostly not, I guess. People usually choose a driver who reflects their interests or their background. Home state, sponsor identification, looks-something. And then there are the people who won’t root for a Ford driver, or who hate anybody in a Chevrolet. There are a lot of sides to take in this sport.”

“I know,” said Taran. “Every week is like a football game with forty-three teams on the field.”

“So how did you come to pick Badger instead of Newman or Kenseth? Was it when he won at Darlington?”

Taran sighed a little, remembering. “No. It wasn’t when he won at all. I remember they interviewed him before the race, and he looked kind of shy and self-deprecating, and-Well, I know this is going to sound strange, but his accent reminded me of my grandfather. He died when I was seven, and he wasn’t real old. It was a car wreck. But anyhow, I heard Badger’s voice, and it was like hearing my granddad, I just felt like I knew him.”

“How did he do in the race that day?”

“He wrecked. Well, somebody wrecked him. And I just lost it. I was so terrified that I had jinxed him by liking him. He had a concussion, and I remember I kept checking Engine Noise all week to see how he was doing. Anyhow, by the time he got well and was back in the car-he missed one race, I think-I had gone online and bought a tee shirt, a coffee mug, and two key chains. I was hooked. Badger was it.”

Tony nodded. He’d heard similar stories from fans before. “So what happened to Rob?”

Taran shrugged. “We stopped watching racing together. He said I was too emotional. I guess it’s hard to concentrate on your chart of statistics when the person beside you is alternately shrieking and crying. So that was it. I didn’t miss him, though. I had Badger.”

Tony smiled. “It must have been a thrill for you to actually meet him.”

“Oh, no,” said Taran, shuddering at the memory. “It was ghastly.”

It had been a few days after Tuggle had selected the Team Vagenya pit crew, and Badger, having finally finished giving interviews and having his picture made with the sponsors and owners, had finally come along to practice. He went down the line, shaking hands and introducing himself to his new teammates. When he got to Taran, he stuck out his hand, smiled like a movie star, and said, “How you doin’?”

And she had backed away from that outstretched hand as if it had been holding a switchblade. She had just wanted him to go away.

It certainly wasn’t how she had pictured her first meeting with her driver. Once she had been chosen for the team, she had rehearsed the moment in her mind a hundred times, in every possible variation. From “How do you do, sir? Such a pleasure to meet you,” to “I’m sorry? I didn’t catch the name,” to wordlessly throwing herself in his arms, while imaginary violins swelled to a stunning crescendo and the team practice yard dissolved into a field of wildflowers. But nowhere in her wildest imaginings had she pictured herself backing away from her beloved Badger in abject terror.

But she had.

Now why was that?

She had given it a lot of thought since then. She wasn’t sure that Badger had even noticed her confusion. As she was backing away, Reve had put her hand into the small of Taran’s back and gently pushed her forward again. She managed to croak a feeble hello, and Badger shook her hand and moved on.

Since then she had relived that moment another hundred times or so, wishing that you could get instant replays in real life. At least she’d have a second chance. They were teammates. Sooner or later she might calm down enough to actually converse with him.

She had tried to figure out exactly why she had panicked. Well, she told herself, it isn’t every day that you meet your screensaver. Badger was shorter than she’d imagined, but otherwise he looked pretty much like his photographs, so that wasn’t the reason for her dismay. Perhaps it was simply the pressure of that first meeting, because to her, anyway, it mattered so much. With most people you meet you can simply be yourself, and either you hit it off or you don’t, and it’s no big deal either way, but Badger was the SAT and an EKG rolled into one: a human exam, and if she failed it, the chance might never come again.

They had probably chatted for a minute or two, but the voice in her head was chanting “Don’tletmesayanythingstupidDon’tlet mesayanythingstupid” so loudly that she could no longer remember what either of them said.

“He was wearing the firesuit, wasn’t he?” asked Tony.

“And the sunglasses,” said Taran. “It was terrible. I wanted to run.”

“You didn’t, did you? He’s a pretty laid-back guy, you know. One of the nicest drivers in the bunch.”

“I know,” said Taran. “I’m starting to get over it. Lately when he comes around the shop for practice or just to stop by, I can talk to him a little bit without feeling faint.” She smiled to show that she was kidding-almost.

“I wonder what that feels like,” said Tony. “To be so famous that people are afraid to talk to you.”

“I don’t think he knows,” said Taran. “He never seems to notice, anyhow.”

Tony tossed his Snapple bottle into the recycle bin. “I think they want us back out there,” he said. “Reve is waving at us.”

Taran finished the last of her water. “Well, good luck with your driving. I hope you get your chance.”

“Sometimes I do some driving on a week night at the local track. Late Model Stocks. I have a friend who lets me sub for him sometimes, and I’m working on getting a couple of local sponsors so I can have my own ride. Maybe you’d like to come out sometime and watch?”

Taran nodded. “I’d like that,” she said. She was thinking, The more I learn about racing, the more small talk I’ll be able to make with Badger.

In Julie Carmichael’s office, otherwise known as Vagenya Tech, the team engineers were busy as usual, trying to stay one jump ahead of the NASCAR watchdogs.

“In the old days,” said Jay Bird, “there were a lot of tricks we could have used to modify the car.”

“Like what?” asked Rosalind.

“Lighten the roll cage. We used to replace the thick steel bars of the roll cage with lighter-weight exhaust pipe. Can’t do that these days, though. NASCAR checks the roll bar thickness with an ultrasonic tester right there in the pits.”

Julie explained to Rosalind, “They have a little handheld unit and they put a little jelly on the end of the sensor and put it up against the roll bars, and it reads the thickness on the digital display.”

Rosalind was aghast. “But you can’t lighten the roll bars, anyway!” she said. “In a wreck, that roll cage is what protects the driver. You could get Badger killed if you circumvent the safety measures.”

“Badger wants to win as bad as we do,” said Jay Bird. “I’ll bet you wouldn’t catch him complaining.”

“He might be too macho to complain,” said Julie, “but Rosalind is right. We can’t risk him getting hurt.”

Jay Bird was philosophical about it. “They’d probably catch us, anyway. What about having a little panel in the floor board that you can slide open to diffuse some of the air from underneath the car?”

“Everybody does that,” said Julie. “Like lowering the motor mounts. Done that.”

“Okay,” said Rosalind, “here’s an idea. Suppose we attach sensors to the car to transmit information back to us about the fuel mileage, the wheel revolutions per minute, and maybe the transmission gear selection? That would help.”

“It’s called telemetry,” said Julie. “It’s illegal.”

“Oh,” said Rosalind. “I’d better reread the rule book again.”

Jay Bird said, “What about traction control?”

“Now I know that’s illegal,” said Rosalind. “It’s akin to telemetry, really-installing sensors to detect the amount of wheel spin, and then regulating the amount of power being transmitted to the tire. NASCAR outlawed that, didn’t they?”

“Big time,” said Jay Bird. “Get caught with that on your car and they say they’ll ban you from the sport for life.”

Julie closed her notebook. “This isn’t getting us anywhere,” she said. “Let’s just keep on doing all the dull but legal stuff we’ve been doing to make the car better. We’ll keep fine-tuning everything.”