Once Around the Track

CHAPTER XXI

“You got a lotta sand,” said Badger.

Instinctively, Taran reached down to brush off her jeans, before she realized that this expression was Badger-speak for possessing gumption and courage. “Thank you,” she said meekly.

Badger grinned. “Bouncing around in the car back at Bristol. And you didn’t scream once.” He patted her arm. “Good job.”

Wednesday night in Mooresville: Taran had been the last one left in the garage. She was working late because Tony had asked her to check out the wiring on the fans for his Late Model Stock race car to see if she could figure out why they weren’t working. When Badger stopped by about eight on his way back from dinner, just to see what was going on, or to refute the accusation that he was never around between races, he had found her there alone at the workbench, peering at a tangle of colored wires.

She wasn’t finished, but when Badger snared a blue Gatorade out of the refrigerator (Taran herself made sure they never ran out) and started to leave, Taran had walked outside with him. It was a clear, cool night with a quarter moon and the usual measly complement of stars visible in the haze of greater Charlotte. Taran’s heart was pounding to the beat of “I am alone with Badger Jenkins.” Unfortunately, it is difficult to think up any small talk when you have to keep reminding yourself to breathe.

“Thank you for paying my fine,” she said.

He smiled. “You’ve already thanked me about six times for that, sweetie. Are you gonna thank me one time for every dollar of the fine?”

“It was so kind of you to do it, though,” she said. “I’m so glad you turned out to be a nice guy. Before I joined the team, I was a Badger Jenkins fan.”

He tilted his head back and peered at her, surprised. “Was?”

“Oh, I still am. It’s just that sometimes I forget that you’re him.”

She could see his face in the glow of the shop’s outdoor security light. Badger looked bewildered, and Taran thought, I may never have another chance to tell him. Let me just say it and hope I can make him understand. Nobody should be loved so much and not know it.

Aloud, she said, “Do you know why I went to work on this team, Badger? Because I loved you.” She waved away whatever reply he had been about to make. “Oh, not you, really, Badger. I didn’t even know you. But I once stood in line for an hour in the hot sun at Atlanta to have you scrawl your name across a tee shirt, and you barely looked up when you signed it. It didn’t matter, though. I loved you so much. Do you guys understand that? How much we care about you? That we cry when you wreck? That we know your dog’s name. That every October there are birthday parties in your honor that you don’t even know about, given by people you’ve never even heard of-celebrating your birthday.”

Badger looked embarrassed. “Wa-all, thank you,” he said softly.

She sighed. “No. Don’t thank me. I didn’t do it on purpose-care about you, I mean. One day I was watching NASCAR races without particularly caring who won, and the next moment you were all that mattered.”

He tilted his head back and narrowed his eyes, the way he did when he was paying closer attention. “Which win was that?” he asked.

“You didn’t win that day. You wrecked. Fourteen cars slammed into you broadside at Talladega, and I started crying, and after that I guess I never stopped, because you were having one lousy season that year. I was so scared that you were hurt, and I stayed scared for every single race after that. Sometimes I’d start crying during the National Anthem.

“But don’t thank me, Badger. If I could have fallen in love with Tony Stewart, believe me, I would have. He had a great year, and being his fan would have been a much less painful experience, but fandom doesn’t work that way. It just happens.” She shrugged. “It’s like a cross between falling in love and typhoid fever. We can’t help it. Do you understand?”

Badger shook his head. “It’s just me,” he said. “There’s the firesuit and the dark sunglasses, so I guess I look different, but underneath all that, it’s just me.”

She looked at him appraisingly, marveling as she always did at the difference between Badger Jenkins in person and the Dark Angel who turned up on every autograph card, tee shirt, and coffee mug that featured him. “No,” she said at last. “I don’t think you are just you when you’re out there. Not to your fans, anyhow.” She managed a misty smile. “For one thing, you’re taller.”

“Well, those pictures make me look good, I guess. Better than I really look.”

“It’s more than that, Badger. It’s as if ten thousand strangers loved you so much-loved the idea of you, anyhow-that they built you a soul, and the force of that collective belief made him more real than you are. If reality is a consensus of opinion, then he is more real than you are. How many friends do you have? A dozen, maybe? Well, there are ten thousand women who would sleep with him if he simply nodded in their direction. And a thousand people would die for him.”

He shivered. “That doesn’t have anything to do with me,” he said. “Not really.”

“No, I suppose not, but people like their dreams to be tangible, and so three hundred people wait in line to shake your hand…and they take your picture…and trembling women hug you…because it’s the closest that any of us can come to touching him.”

“I try to be nice to people,” he said simply. “I’m not anything special. I was just lucky.”

She stared at him as if he were a stranger. It was like having a conversation about some absent third person. “I loved you so much,” she said, wonderingly, as if she couldn’t quite remember why. “Do you know why I took this job on your pit crew?”

He shifted uneasily, as if he expected her to lunge at him. Women did, sometimes, and this whole line of discussion was making him sweat. “Uh…To get to know me?”

“No. To protect you. I just couldn’t sit there staring at a TV screen any longer, worrying about whether your tires were bad, or if your safety harness had been fastened right. So I decided to join the team for my own peace of mind, because I figured it was better to do something than to sit home and worry.”

“Oh, I’ll be all right,” he said, giving her his aw-shucks grin. “Never been hurt bad out there.”

She opened her mouth to say something and then thought better of it. At last she murmured, “It only takes once.”

There didn’t seem to be any point in saying what she had been thinking: But you have been hurt out there. Lots of times. Bruises, sore muscles, cracked ribs-a whole catalogue of minor injuries, but I wonder if someday they’ll come back to haunt you in the form of arthritis. That isn’t the worst of it, though. It’s the concussions I worry about. All the times you slammed into the wall and lost an hour or a day, and walked around for two weeks afterward with a splitting headache and a tiny chunk of your life missing. Sometimes you even got past the doctors by pretending you were all right, and they let you drive a few days later. What’s that going to cost you down the road? Parkinson’s? Dementia? Nobody knows what repeated head injuries do long term. When you’re old. When you’re not famous anymore. When all those people who loved him have forgotten about you. Who will take care of you then?

She didn’t say any of it, though, and as much as she wanted to hug him, she didn’t do that, either. He was too immured in his own fame-sometimes he even mistook himself for the Dark Angel, she thought. Badger would have thought she was hitting on him, and she’d have had to let him think that, because she couldn’t bear to tell him that she was simply afraid for him, that someday it was all going to come crashing down, and she didn’t know what would become of him after that. Anyhow, she told herself, holding someone doesn’t really protect him from anything, no matter how much you wish it could.

Suddenly, and with a look of infinite sadness, Badger held out his arms, and Taran stumbled forward and put her head on his shoulder. She wouldn’t exactly remember this embrace, because it lasted only a few seconds, while the duration of all her fantasies of hugging Badger Jenkins added up to hours and hours. There wasn’t much similarity between the fantasy and the reality. For starters, it wasn’t a passionate embrace. It was the sort of hug you would get from your grandfather if you fell off your bike. And she had to bend her knees a little in order to rest her head on his shoulder, which certainly hadn’t happened in any of the thousand scenarios in her head. He felt as bony and insubstantial as a bird, she thought. Somehow she had assumed that underneath the firesuit his body would be muscular and solid, but now through the thin tee shirt she thought she might be able to count his ribs. He wasn’t the Dark Angel, not even close. She had known that intellectually, of course, but now she could even feel it.

What was odd was what she didn’t feel. In the thousand practice laps in her head, this moment would be the starting point… And then I tilt my head up and kiss him… And then I put one hand in the small of his back, and the other hand on his…

But she didn’t feel like doing any of that. It was like hugging your brother. He’s just being kind, she thought. She barely had time to register these observations before he gently released her and stepped back peering at her with that earnest Badger expression that people called his “retriever look.”

“You’re a great teammate, sweetie,” he said. “You try real hard, and I thank you for all the worrying you do about me. I know about all that luck stuff you’ve been puttin’ on the car, and you’re a sweet girl. But don’t put me on a pedestal.”

Taran blinked at him. “What?”

“I’m just an ordinary guy. I’m not perfect. I’m not special. I’m just real good at driving a car. Don’t make too much of that. Don’t believe I’m more than I am.”

Taran opened her mouth to remind him that she already knew all that. Hadn’t she just said so? But before she could utter a word, her brain registered two salient points: he had barely heard a word of what she’d just said, and this speech of his sounded very well-rehearsed. As if he had said it hundreds of times. Maybe thousands. To the starlets and stewardesses who wanted to bag a race car driver. To all the adoring fans who thought they loved him when they didn’t even know him. To the pit lizards.

“I won’t,” she said in a hoarse whisper, which was all she could manage.

“That’s good. You take care now, and I’ll see you tomorrow at practice.”

She never thought she’d be glad to see Badger Jenkins walk away, but she was. She wanted to make sure he was out of earshot before she started to cry.

Fifteen minutes later, she was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the garage throwing lug nuts into a coffee can when Rosalind Manning found her. She had come back to see if she’d left her cell phone on the workbench, but one look at Taran’s blotched and puffy face made her temporarily abandon that errand. Rosalind had seen Badger’s Crossfire pulling out of the parking lot as she was coming in, so she knew that Taran’s current emotional state had to do with him.

Inwardly, Rosalind cursed herself for being the one to find her. She avoided people whenever she could, and she hated emotional scenes. This had been a cataclysm waiting to happen. Everybody knew it. Little Taran with her Gatorade shrine for Badger and her magic amulets to protect him out there. Taran made her think of those paintings of the Virgin Mary that depicted her with her heart on the outside of her dress. That was Taran, all right. Everybody knew it-even Badger, thanks to Kathy Erwin, who, being a slightly malicious Good Samaritan, had made sure that Badger noticed. Kathy had told him, “You know, you ought to take care of Taran. She’s dying for it, Badger. Hell, you could nail her and she’d pay for the room.”

A spectrum of emotions-none of them good-had passed over Badger’s handsome face like clouds across a landscape, but finally he settled on mournful sincerity. “I can’t do it,” he said. “She’s what the guys call a scary girl. She wouldn’t look twice at anybody else in the world, but I could have her if I snapped my fingers. Thing is, though, then she’d never go away. Yeah. The Scary Girl. You don’t ever want to mess with her.”

When she told the story to some of the team, Kathy had ended it with, “And then just because he is an arrogant, spoiled typical male jerk, he had to add, ‘Besides, she’s not all that hot, anyhow.’” But nobody was ever going to tell Taran he’d said that. They all took a solemn vow. And she was pretty sure that Badger would never tell her, either, because he might be a jerk in sexual matters, but there was a gentle side to him, too, which Rosalind had never expected to find in a race car driver. Go figure. Oh, she wouldn’t have wanted him if his kisses cured cancer, but at least she could still manage a grudging respect for him.

Now what was she going to say to poor Taran, crying her eyes out for somebody who didn’t exactly exist?

Rosalind decided to go with the one recurring image she’d been having about the two of them. She sat down on the workbench next to Taran, and without preamble, she said, “Do you know anything about horses?”

Taran raised a tear-stained face and stared in bewilderment at Rosalind. “About h-horses?”

“Yes. Specifically about how they breed thoroughbreds.”

Taran shook her head. “No. And if you’re trying to take my mind off Badger, it won’t work.”

“No, I’m still on the original topic,” said Rosalind. “See my mother’s family was mad for horses. When I got interested in cars instead of show jumpers, they were all bitterly disappointed. So, horses are not my thing, but I couldn’t help knowing about them, growing up in the family I had.”

“Okay, but what do horses have to do with anything?”

Rosalind shrugged. “You just reminded me of something, that’s all. When they’re getting ready to breed a mare, they need to get her aroused so she’ll be ready to be mounted by the stallion they want her to mate with. So they put her in a fenced paddock next to one that holds the teaser stud.”

“The what?”

“Teaser stud.” Rosalind smiled. “A sexy stallion to put her in the mood. She can see him and smell him, but she can’t reach him, because there’s a fence between them. Oh, but he’s a good-looking little stud.”

“A good-looking little stud,” echoed Taran.

“Sexy as hell. Thinks he’s God’s gifts to mares. But-get this- the teaser stud is almost always a Shetland pony! He’s beautiful. He’s passionate. He’s hot. But he’s soooo tiny. One time I saw an aged Tennessee Walker brood mare back up to the fence separating her from a darling little miniature horse stud. It was hilarious because she was so hot for him and he was all for it, too, but even had they been in the same pasture, he literally would not have been up to the job. Now to anybody watching this, the little teaser stud is so ridiculous because he takes himself so seriously, and everyone can see how absurd it is-everyone, that is, except the mare who is the object of his attention.”

Taran thought about it. “I’m the mare, aren’t I?”

“I think so. And I see Badger as your teaser stud. You’re hot for him, all right, but everyone except you can see that it just wouldn’t work.”

Taran’s eyes welled with tears again. “Okay, but does the mare ever get to mate with the teaser stud? Ever? Just once?”

“Nope,” said Rosalind cheerfully. “He’s strictly there to do the prep work. But he’s probably not as good as he looks, anyhow.”

“Why are you telling me this? Are people laughing at me because of how I feel about him?”

“No,” said Rosalind. “I don’t see any of that, Taran. Okay, maybe some of us feel sorry for you, because we can all see how hopeless it is, but you’re so sincere, and it’s obvious that you care about him so much that only a heartless person would mock you for it. Badger is walking on eggshells trying not to hurt you. He’s a little oblivious sometimes, but he’s not heartless. I told you about teaser studs because we don’t want you to lose the real thing while you’re pursuing the illusion.”

Taran wiped her eyes. “Have you ever noticed that Badger is always saying things to people like ‘Don’t like me too much,’ or ‘Don’t put me on a pedestal.’ It’s strange, isn’t it? Everybody else in the world is worried that nobody will ever love them enough, and here’s Badger turning down offers of affection right and left. ‘Sorry. I have enough love already, thanks anyway.’ I cannot even imagine what that would feel like. To have too much love.”

“Don’t look at me,” said Rosalind. “I couldn’t win a popularity contest even if nobody else entered. Fortunately, I don’t like people enough to care. But in Badger’s case, maybe he does have a point. Maybe you really shouldn’t like him too much.”

“I don’t have a chance with him, anyhow,” said Taran. “I’d be competing with models and movie stars.”

Only until they got a good long look at Marengo, Georgia, thought Rosalind. She said, “I’ll bet there’s somebody you have more in common with.”

Taran was silent for a few moments. At last she said, “There’s Tony Lafon from the shop. I’ve been going to the track to watch him race for a couple of months, and sometimes we go out to dinner or to the movies. Not dating really.”

Rosalind thought the smart remark, but managed not to utter it aloud. Instead, she said, “Tony is a great guy. He’s about your age too. When I first came to North Carolina, I worked at one of the local speedways to learn about racing, and I got to know Tony there. He’s a nice guy. Smart, too. He’s got a real future, I think. At least a romance with him wouldn’t feel like convoy duty. Being the significant other of a Cup driver is probably a species of martyrdom, if you ask me.”

“Tony is my friend,” said Taran.

“Exactly my point,” said Rosalind. “Nobody ever sleeps with the Dark Angel, Taran. Nobody. He’s either your friend or he’s an air-brushed poster on the wall. There’s no in-between.”

“But Badger…I love him so much,” whispered Taran.

“I’ll bet you like him better when he’s not around,” said Rosalind. “Tell me something. What songs make you think of him?”

Like most people who spend a lot of time in their heads, Taran knew her own soundtrack pretty well. “‘My Sweet Lord’ by George Harrison,” she said. “And-well, it’s a pretty mixed bag. ‘I Don’t Know How to Love Him’ from Jesus Christ Superstar. Ummm…Some old ones my grandma used to sing to me…‘Abide with Me’…‘In the Garden’…‘Precious Lord, Take My Hand’…Let’s see, what else?”

“Never mind,” said Rosalind grimly. “Those will do. Taran, think about it. Those songs are all hymns.”

“What?”

“Hymns. They’re not sexy love songs; they are expressions of religious devotion. Think about that.” She laughed. “Oh, boy, the ultimate teaser stud. Badger Jenkins is not a guy to you. He’s the Impossible Dream.”

“That’s another one of my songs,” said Taran.

“Of course it is. If anyone ever loved purely and chastely from afar, it is definitely you.”

“How did you know?”

Rosalind sighed. “Oh, it takes one to know one, Taran. I’m not very good with people, either. I’m not beautiful, which makes me shy, and I have an engineer’s brain, which makes me stand back and examine everything critically, even my own emotions.”

“No happy ending, huh?” said Taran, wiping her eyes.

“No, this is the happy ending,” said Rosalind. “You walk away and the dream never dies. If you ever got him, even for just one night, that would be the tragedy, because you might get Badger, but you’d lose the Dark Angel forever-and that’s who you really wanted, kiddo. The Dream. The Dark Angel.”