St. Dale

Chapter XVII

Atlanta Motor Speedway

The journey from Talladega to the Atlanta Motor Speedway would take only a couple of hours, mostly backtracking I-20 to Atlanta and then south on I-75 to Henry County. Since they had passed this way the day before, there was a monotony to the landscape now, and Karen McKee took the paperback out of her purse, because she felt like reading another chapter in the novel about the princess in ancient Ireland. I am reading a book on my honeymoon, she thought. How weird is that. If anybody had told her six months ago that a few days after the wedding she would want to read a book or write a postcard to her mother instead of hanging on Shane’s every word, or holding his hand hour after hour, she would have laughed in disbelief. But it was true. It wasn’t that she loved Shane any less. She couldn’t imagine life without him. It was just that having got the wedding out of the way, there were new things to worry about, and reading was a good way to keep from worrying about them for a while, as long as she ignored the fact that her bookmark was an acceptance letter from East Tennessee State University.

Well, at least they’d be in Florida tomorrow. People actually did go to Florida on honeymoons. Maybe there’d be time to spend a couple of hours on the beach. She wished she could talk Shane out of visiting Daytona-skip the Speedway and come to the beach instead. That wasn’t going to happen, though. Shane had come to pay his respects to Dale, and in his view the holy of holies was the track where he’d died. There was no getting away from it. Maybe it would be all right. So far Harley and the other passengers had been telling stories about races that happened ages ago. They’d hardly said a word about NASCAR-A.D. After Dale. Maybe it wouldn’t come up. She knew she should sit Shane down and talk to him about it. Time he knew. What kind of a world was it when you had to choose between lying to somebody you loved or breaking their heart? Dale had been dead eighteen months now. Time to move on. Start watching racing again, instead of watching old videos of Dale’s old races when the new season was on television. Why couldn’t he just pick a new driver to root for-Matt Kenseth maybe, or Jamie McMurray, who looked like Hollywood’s idea of a really nice guy. She had a feeling that they would never get to the future until Shane let go of the past.

So far, so good, Harley Claymore was thinking. He had managed to get through this much of the tour without losing any passengers to heatstroke, making any egregious mistakes in his racing trivia, or pissing anybody off by voicing his opinions on the new face of NASCAR. He had been trying to decide what to say about the Atlanta Motor Speedway-beyond remarking on the obvious-that it wasn’t actually in Atlanta, but about thirty miles south of the city in Hampton, Georgia. Of course, at the rate Atlanta was spreading-like architectural kudzu-it wouldn’t be long before the city sprawl engulfed the rural areas between city and Speedway, so that it would indeed be in the suburbs. He noticed that a new development-something called “Liberty Square Park” was going up across the road from the Speedway.

The track was located on Tara Road. Harley had thought up half a dozen sardonic remarks to make about that, but discarded them all not only for the sake of harmony but also because he realized that the old NASCAR with its strictly Southern tracks and its mostly Southern drivers had been a low-rent sport, forcing its competitors to work day jobs just to stay in the game. He had to admit: if he ever got a ride again, he’d be grateful enough for the new NASCAR glory days and the chance to make a million dollars in one season.

“Okay, folks,” he said, seeing the S &S Food Mart across from the Speedway-his cue to begin his spiel. “We’re here. Sorry, Bill, but I have this note card that says I have to spout a few stats at you.”

Justine rolled her eyes. “This is like when the stewardess goes through the safety rigmarole. Let us do it. Size of track, somebody!”

“Mile and a half!” said Jim Powell and Ray Reeve in unison.

“Banking? Anybody?”

“Ummm…Almost flat on the straightaways, maybe 25 degrees in the turns,” said Shane McKee. “They can go really fast on this track. They repaved it about five years ago, and the new surface really helped speeds.”

“Anybody want to guess who holds the track qualifying record?” asked Harley.

“Petty!” said Cayle and Sarah Nash.

“Earnhardt!” said a chorus of male voices.

“Geoff Bodine!” said Bekasu.

Harley stared at her. “I thought you didn’t know anything about racing.”

“No, I’ve been observing you,” she said. “And you’re partial to Geoff Bodine.”

Harley sighed. “He is my brother in adversity,” he said. “All work and no damn breaks.”

They turned in at the house-shaped Atlanta Motor Speedway sign, which bore an enormous Coca-Cola sign on its right side-a fitting display, as Justine noted, because Coca-Cola was headquartered in Atlanta.

“This is another speedway with condos,” said Harley, pointing to a soaring modern building that put him in mind of Star Wars. “Tara Place Condos. So if you have a couple of hundred thousand dollars to spare, you can watch the Georgia 500 in style, come October. Some serious money here, I don’t have to tell you.”

The bus came to a stop in the parking lot, and Harley raised a hand to stop his stampeding troops. “Okay, we’re going to be a little rushed on this stop, just because it’s so damn far to Daytona from here. Wreath first. Then tour. Then gift shop. Got it?”

They nodded.

“Whose turn is it?” asked Cayle.

“For the wreath? I’m not keeping track,” said Harley. “Ever who wants to, far as I’m concerned.” He remembered that the newlyweds had not yet had a turn, and he smiled at Shane, inviting him to volunteer.

Shane McKee shook his head. “Daytona,” he said.

“Okay. Ratty. Where is he?”

“Opening the baggage compartment,” said Cayle.

They turned and watched the little man scramble headfirst into the storage area beneath the bus. A moment later, he wriggled out again, like a terrier with a rat, and handed off the cardboard wreath box to Bill Knight, who happened to be standing closest to the bus.

The group gathered around while Bill Knight lifted the lid. White silk lilies, red rosebuds, and a black ribbon which bore the message, “Gone to Race in a Better Place” in white lettering.

“I’ll do it,” said Terence.

“I know just the place,” said Justine. “There’s a wonderful statue of Richard Petty on a pedestal erected over near the condo. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if we put a wreath to Dale at the base of that.”

Betcha he would, thought Harley, but since Mr. Petty was unlikely to find out about this bit of memorial favoritism-or at least not to catch him in the middle of it-he voiced no objection to Justine’s plan.

The little procession marched toward the track, with Terence carrying the wreath as if there were a fuse attached.

Harley, shepherding his troops along the road, got back into gear as a tour guide. “Fancy place, isn’t it?” he said, waving a hand toward the sumptuous condominium and the state-of-the-art grandstand and skybox complex. “But never mind the trappings here. When you’re talking about the Atlanta Speedway, there’s one race that stands out above all the rest,” he said.

“Oh, God,” said Bekasu. “Who got killed at this one?”

“No. That’s not what I’m getting at.”

Jim Powell turned to Ray Reeve. “Which race did Dale win here?”

“Well, he didn’t win the one I’m talking about,” said Harley. “But he was in it. And it was a landmark race. The Hooters 400 in 1992.”

“You drove in it, right?” said Justine quickly, before Bekasu could make any scathing remarks on the subject of Hooters Restaurants’ dress code for waitresses.

“I didn’t win it, either,” said Harley, as if that didn’t go without saying.

“Atlanta 1992.” Sarah Nash turned the idea over in her mind. “That would be about the time Richard Petty retired.”

“You nailed it. The Hooters 400 was his last race. Maybe that’s why the statue is here. And it was the very first Cup race for somebody else.”

Ray Reeve’s expression suggested that he had stepped in something. “Not Wonderboy?”

“It sure was,” said Harley. “Very symbolic, don’t you think? The end of the old era of Southern good old boys in a regional sport, and the beginning of the new world of NASCAR as a national pastime with media-savvy golden boys at the wheel.”

“Should’a called that race the Armageddon 500,” said Ray Reeve.

“Well, I agree with Harley about the Hooters 500 being a landmark,” said Jim Powell. He was leading Arlene along by the hand, slowing his steps so that she could keep up. “But not just because of Petty and Gordon. That race decided the championship that year, too, didn’t it?”

“It was a three-way tie going into the race,” said Harley. “Davey Allison was the front-runner, thirty points ahead of Alan Kulwicki and forty points ahead of Awesome Bill.”

“My God,” murmured Bekasu. “I know who all of them are.”

Justine beamed and patted her sister’s arm. “See? I told you this tour would be educational!”

“Well, at least it will give me something to talk about when I get my car serviced,” she muttered.

Justine sneered. “It’ll give you something to talk about to the governor.”

“Did Davey crash in that race?” asked Jesse Franklin, trying to remember a competition that had ended a decade before.

Harley nodded. “With Ernie Irvan. Wasn’t serious. Just took him out of the running.”

“So Kulwicki must have won,” said Matthew, “because I know he was the defending champ in ’93 when his plane crashed at Bristol.”

“He won the championship, but he lost that race,” said Harley. “Elliott finished first, with Kulwicki right behind him. This is where it gets complicated.” He turned to Bill Knight and Bekasu. “You two might want to tune out here. Kulwicki’s second-place finish left him five ahead in overall points. So the championship came down to who led for the most laps, not to who won the race. Elliott led for 102 laps during the race, and Kulwicki led for 103. If it had been the other way around, they would have been tied for points for the championship, because the person who leads the most laps in the race gets five bonus points.”

“Then what? Toss a coin?”

“Nope. Then Elliott would have been declared the champion. Rule says in case of a tie, you look to number of races won during the season. Bill had five victories, while Alan Kulwicki had only two. So although Bill won the race, he lost the 1992 championship by one lap.”

“Oh, poor Bill!” said Justine. “To be so close and still lose. I’ll bet he took it hard.”

Harley clenched his teeth. “I am not going to the S &S Food Mart to buy a money order for Bill Elliott,” he said.

“No,” said Justine. “I’m sure he’s okay with it, and I think even he’d say now that it was for the best. Alan won the championship, and three months later he died in that plane crash at Bristol. But at least he had the championship. Bill is too much of a gentleman to begrudge him that.”

So here I am, thought Terence Palmer, walking along the path to a speedway holding a memorial wreath for someone that most of my friends have never heard of. He had joked that most of the people at the office thought that Dale Earnhardt was the chancellor of Germany. Of course, he didn’t have to tell anybody about this when he got back to Manhattan. He had actually been enjoying himself, as one can if one knows that the experience is simply a vacation from real life. Barbecue. Speedways. People who shopped at Wal-Mart. What an adventure. Maybe it would even give him some insight into how certain companies would do in the future, if he knew what middle America ate and wore. Pork rinds or beef jerky futures? He had actually enjoyed talking racing with Shane McKee, and Jesse Franklin had proved quite knowledgable about the stock market.

It occurred to Terence that this might have been his life for real if his father had ever wanted to fight for custody of him and if by some miracle Tom Palmer had won. He wondered who he would have turned out to be. He wouldn’t have a diploma from Yale. His clothes would be less elegant, his tastes less refined. He wondered if there could be an upside to that different self. If he could have been someone who did not watch himself making every move, who never spoke without gauging what the other person needed to hear. Someone who could make friends instead of contacts, socialize instead of network, accept a friendship without wondering what it would ultimately cost him. Someone who did not hear an endless loop of ironic commentary running inside his head in the voice of his mother. Would he rather be Shane McKee? No. But he doubted if Shane would be so foolish as to envy him, either.

They stopped in the paved area beside the Tara Condos where a bronze Richard Petty stood on his pedestal, in his customary garb of cowboy hat and boots, smiling in perpetual benevolence at a young fan, as he signed an autograph for her.

“Doesn’t he look like himself?” said Justine admiringly, raising the camera to capture the scene.

“It’s funny to see pictures of Richard Petty from the old days, though,” said Cayle. “Remember how he used to look back in the fifties before he got so thin? Kind of like Harrison Ford in American Graffiti.”

“Well, if he ever writes a diet book, put me down for the first copy,” said Bekasu, gazing up at the human heron immortalized in bronze.

“Is this where you want the wreath?” asked Terence, setting the circle of flowers at the base of the pedestal. He turned around to see the circle of his fellow passengers closing in around him and decided that he’d rather face the effigy of Richard Petty than a group of live people. Now he wished he had spent some of the walk over here thinking out what he was going to say. There was some comfort in knowing that he didn’t have to worry about making an impression. He could experience the novel sensation of telling the truth without any agenda at all. Now if he could only work out what the truth was.

He had listened to the speeches of the others, and while he might have shared some of the same emotions as his fellow passengers, it was for different reasons. Some of the others saw Earnhardt as the embodiment of possibility-proof that a poor boy without education or connections could rise to greatness, but since Terence had taken care to cultivate precisely the education and connections that Earnhardt had lacked, he found no inspiration in that. Jesse Franklin seemed to revere the Intimidator for being-well, intimidating-for riding roughshod over his opponents without caring what anyone thought or said about it, but again Terence could not even aspire to such a code of behavior. His world was a spiderweb of obligation and cooperation, and he could not behave otherwise and remain in it. Why antagonize authority figures when you aspired someday to replace them? And yet as far back as he could remember he had rooted for Dale Earnhardt. He had never asked himself why.

He looked up at the smiling bronze face of Richard Petty, larger than life on his pedestal, and seeming to invite the solace of confession. NASCAR’s authority figure: The King himself. Terence could talk to him.

“I never knew my dad. About all I ever heard about him was a passing reference in my mother’s carefully muted tones of disapproval. I knew my dad was a Southerner-from somewhere near Charlotte, North Carolina, more or less…He’d been in the marines, but he was only an enlisted man. Only. She always put it like that. And I tried to imagine what my dad would be like, without having very much to go on. Every now and then I watched movies about the South-Deliverance and The Beverly Hillbillies, that sort of thing-and I didn’t want my dad to be that. I guess I wanted an image that fit the description of him without being demeaning. Not for the sake of my mother-I never intended to discuss it with her, and I never did. But just because I needed an image to carry around in my head, somebody I wasn’t ashamed of, because after all, half my DNA came from my father, I wanted something to represent him, I suppose.

“I’ve been trying to remember when and how I first heard about Dale Earnhardt. I think I was about ten years old-it was the year of one of his early championships anyhow. A guy I knew at church was a racing fan, and I got to go to the Richmond Speedway once with him and his folks. I think we must have told my mother that it was a horse race. She’d never have let me go if she’d known it was stock car racing, but, anyhow, we went, and like most boys that age, I loved cars and danger and speed-anything to freak out the parents. So I was hooked. And Earnhardt was really hot that year-not just winning, but being outrageous. He was the Indiana Jones of sports. So I guess I started out by hoping my real dad was like that, until finally that image just took root in my mind so that I didn’t care if it was true or not. It worked for me. And then last spring when my dad died, and I found out that he had been an Earnhardt fan, too, it just seemed to seal the bond. So I guess I’m here to say thanks.” He stepped back.

Justine touched his arm. “Terence, aren’t you going to say anything? You’ve just been standing there staring at that wreath for ages.”

He hadn’t said any of it. Terence looked around at the circle of politely puzzled faces. At last he mumbled, “I leave this wreath in memory of Dale Earnhardt, Sr., a great man.”

“Well put,” said Harley Claymore. Then he glanced at his watch and clapped for the attention of the group. “Take an hour or so to examine the track and raid the gift shop for Speedway pins, folks. And don’t forget to go to the bathroom. In fact, flush twice. It’s a long way to Florida.”