St. Dale

Chapter X

The Sharpie 500

Harley had hoped that the long afternoon at the Speedway would have given him a couple of hours to ditch the tour and hunt up some of his old friends on the pit crews before the race. The stock car circuit was like a small town: everybody knew one another and many of the participants had grown up together. Bill Elliott’s brothers had been his pit crew in the early days, and even now Dale Earnhardt Junior had one of his Eury cousins as crew chief. With the influx of new talent from California and the Midwest, this was not as true as it had been in the old days, but in many ways stock car racing was still a closed world where you felt that you could dial a wrong number and still talk.

To get back in, he needed to pick up the current gossip on the circuit: Who might need a relief driver sometime during the season? Who was looking to field another car? Which of his old friends was in a position to do him a favor? Unfortunately, his Number Three Pilgrims required more personal attention than he had anticipated. Between them they had a hundred questions about the Bristol track, about the drivers he’d raced against, the rules and strategies of stock car racing, and about the details of the bus tour. And, no, Terry Labonte was indeed a kindly fellow, and he probably would recognize Harley on sight-well, he might, anyhow-but he would be far too busy to give anybody a ride around the track today. And, no, Harley could not arrange for the group to meet Dale Junior. What with one thing and another, Harley didn’t even have time to drink his lunch.

Finally, hoping to distract them, he led them out of the Speedway for a walking tour of the souvenir stalls in the outer parking lot and then in the camping area across Beaver Creek. The rows of vendor trailers, each dedicated to a different driver, distracted them for a good forty minutes, as they wandered from stall to stall examining caps and die-cast cars, tote bags and posters. The Earnhardt souvenir trailer was at the track, still doing a brisk business in coffee mugs and decals; there were some people who still wanted to be Dale fans, even a year after his death. Heck, there were some people who had quit the sport cold turkey on the day he died-for them it was Dale or nothing. Harley thought Ray Reeve might be one of those.

The current custom of mourning was to write messages of remembrance on the side of the black trailer itself. You’ll always be my driver, Dale! one fan had written in black marker across some white space. Another inscription read: Number Three: The fastest angel in heaven. One of the messages on the trailer had been written by Bobby Labonte himself. Everybody wanted to say goodbye. The messages were simple, but heartfelt, bearing an undertone of bewilderment that the universe would allow someone so rich and famous and beloved to be taken away.

The unofficial vendors across the highway from Speedway property were the group’s favorites, because the homemade goods offered by the mom-and-pop sellers were more irreverent and whimsical than the officially licensed merchandise. Technically, some of it was illegal, too, since drivers’ likenesses and car designs were trademarked by the companies they drove for. He wondered if corporate killjoys ever raided the little flea market in search of such violations. Many of the current offerings, tee shirts and bumper stickers with current in-jokes and catchphrases geared to true racing aficionados, elicited more questions from Harley’s charges.

“Look at this!” said Jesse Franklin, laughing as he held up a white tee shirt with the hand-lettered slogan: Don’t Hit Me, Tony! “I need one of these. I could wear it to the office.”

“Stay in the car Sterling?” said Bekasu, reading aloud the slogan of another one. “What on earth does that mean?”

Harley was saved from having to devise a diplomatic explanation by a grinning Jim Powell, who was eager to share the joke. “That happened last February at the Daytona 500,” he told her. “It was just half a dozen laps or so from the finish, and Marlin and Jeff Gordon tangled and spun out into the grass of the infield. Okay-long story short-the officials red-flagged the whole bunch of them there on the backstretch. So they’re supposed to sit there and wait for the go-ahead, but Sterling Marlin got out of his Coors Dodge and started messing with the fender. It had been bent in one of the melees, and he must have thought it would cut his tire if he didn’t see to it.”

“Okay,” said Bekasu, with an expression suggesting that Her Honor was trying to follow expert testimony. “Is that frowned upon?”

“They were under a red flag,” said Jim. “NASCAR says nobody does anything under a red flag. A couple of other drivers reported him, but I reckon the officials had spotted it anyhow.”

“So what’s the penalty?’

“They send you to the back of the line at the restart, which means he lost a lot of ground. Never did catch up.”

“Did he think he could get away with it?”

Sarah Nash who had been listening to this explanation with an expression of solemn disapproval, interrupted. “Sterling Marlin admitted that he had pulled the fender away from the tire to stop the rubbing, but don’t forget what else he said.”

“What was that?” asked Jim.

“He said that he had once seen Earnhardt do exactly the same thing at the race in Richmond, and that NASCAR had not penalized Dale for it.” She gave him a sour smile. “Sterling said he supposed the rules must have changed since then. Of course, he didn’t suppose anything of the kind. All the drivers will tell you that Earnhardt got away with things that the rest of them would be slapped down for trying.”

“Bekasu always says the same thing about me,” said Justine. “I used to break curfew and every other rule Daddy handed down, and he just couldn’t bear to punish me for it. I guess some people just get to go through life in the express lane.”

“Poor old Sterling. He lost the Daytona 500. Think how he must feel,” said Cayle.

“I know exactly how he feels,” said Bekasu.

At the next vendor table Matthew, who knew all the facts and foibles of the NASCAR crowd, had happily explained to Bill Knight what Marlin and Stewart had done that season to become the butt of tee shirt jokes. Next year it would be somebody else’s turn. Now he was naming the driver and make of car that went with each of the racing bumper stickers on display.

One of the vendors had NASCAR-related badges in the shape of race cars or drivers’ numbers. Harley found the red and blue emblem of the Bristol Motor Speedway and held it up. “Y’all ought to get you one of these!” he called out over the din of the crowd. “You can get one pin for every speedway we go to.” In the mad scramble that followed, Harley reflected that he ought to have asked the guy how many Bristol pins he had on hand, but fortunately the item was not in short supply and, by checking with other merchants in the same tent, they managed to round up a Bristol badge for each pilgrim.

“Should we put them on our hats?” asked Cayle.

Bill Knight smiled. “On his hat seten Signes of Synay,” he said.

“Was that a yes?” asked Justine.

“It works,” he said. “I’ve always pinned mine to my hat. I have a cockle shell and a bell and a badge of keys.”

If he had been hoping to use this remark as a springboard to discussing his retracing of medieval pilgrimages, the gambit did not succeed. With a collective shrug, his fellow travelers surged forth to the next table of goods-Earnhardt memorial tee shirts. The one that pictured a dove in a rainbow and the caption Dale Got His Wings-Feb. 18, 2001 was much admired, but no one bought it.

Justine, yawning broadly, noted that the race would not start for another six hours, and she suggested that they all go to the bed-and-breakfast to rest before it began. Harley, spotting his chance to get off the leash, immediately offered to sprint back to the bus and ask Ratty to take them away.

“He’d be glad to do it!” he assured them with a straight face, hustling them back across the footbridge to the parking area.

Ratty had not been glad to do it in the least. Harley had found him curled up in the driver’s seat, his Winged Three cap over his face, and the bus door closed to keep in the air conditioning. A few determined thumps on the window brought him back to consciousness, and he cranked open the door with a sleepy scowl. “What?”

“Can you take the folks over to the bed-and-breakfast?” said Harley. “They want to rest up until race time. It’s been a long day already for some of them.”

Ratty stared at him openmouthed. “Have you seen this traffic?”

“Well, it’s not far is it? It’s not downtown. The place is on a country road according to my notes here.”

“Might as well be Memphis, this traffic.”

Harley assumed his most sympathetic expression. “Well, I told them that,” he said. “But it’s awful hot out here, and some of them are pretty well up in age. And there’s the little sick boy, of course…”

Still scowling, Ratty switched on the ignition. “Have ’em here in five minutes,” he said. “Probably take us an hour to go three damn miles.”

Harley nodded his thanks and sped away. Fifteen minutes later, he had settled all the passengers on the bus, with promises to be waiting for them at precisely 5:30 under the giant banner photo of Alan Kulwicki.

Then, with sweat pouring down his face, Harley went back inside, hoping to run into somebody from the old days who could get him onto pit road. This wasn’t going to be easy. Security was tight these days, now that NASCAR drivers had a following like rock stars. Hell, some of them, like Gordon and Little E., had a following of rock stars. But that wasn’t going to be the hard part as far as Harley was concerned. The hard part was going to be putting on a big happy grin, going hat in hand to people who had once been his peers, and asking them for a favor. Networking didn’t come naturally to the likes of Harley Claymore. It felt like taking charity and the thought of it made him cringe.

To make the process even harder, an old family story rose unbidden to his mind. Harley’s daddy had been a nine-year-old boy back up in Wilkes County. Young Willie Moore had lived on a farm with a passel of brothers and sisters, and his folks had raised tobacco and run some hogs-subsistence farmers, they’d call them nowadays-but they never went hungry and, until television came along in the fifties to show them a different world, they never knew they were poor. But one morning when the Moores went to school, a social worker or some such do-gooder was waiting there outside the principal’s office with a big old box of shoes. Somebody somewhere had decided that everybody in school was going to get a new pair of shoes. Maybe the shoes weren’t exactly new. Maybe they were castoffs from some town down state, but anyhow, each child was to be given a pair that more or less fit his feet. Willie Moore had tried to explain to his teacher and the do-gooder lady in the tweed suit that they weren’t allowed to take charity. It was an unspoken rule in the Moore clan, but clearly understood by the children nonetheless. Doing without was better than being “beholden” to strangers. Willie, the oldest of the school-going Moores, had attempted to explain this principle to the shoe lady, but his objections were met with scorn. What needy child wouldn’t be glad to have a fine new pair of shoes, she had told him. At last he had given up, since sassing teacher ladies was also on the list of activities forbidden to Moore children. Reluctantly he had given in, accepting the new brown oxford shoes in exchange for his scuffed and worn old pair. The younger ones followed suit and that afternoon they had all walked home, a little self-consciously, in their new footwear. The teachers and the charity folks must have congratulated themselves on a job well done. Every time he ever told this story, Willie Moore would say that he wished those school people had been there to see what happened when the children got home. The next day, all the children came back to school in worn-out shoes or barefoot, and some of them had to eat their lunch standing up.

You don’t take charity. That lesson had been drummed into Harley six ways from Sunday. Where he came from, one way or the other, you learned that lesson. Later he had learned that it wasn’t how the world worked at all, and that sucking up took some people further than talent took others, but that didn’t make it any easier for him to attempt it.

Swallowing his shame, Harley walked up to the drivers’ entrance. He didn’t have a pass to get onto pit road, but the Cup circuit was like a small town where everybody knew one another and Harley had been around long enough to be acquainted with a lot of people. Not just drivers, but owners, haulers, mechanics, spotters. All he needed was for one of them to remember him and to be in a benevolent mood that afternoon. He just hoped that the old acquaintance would be somebody he genuinely liked, so that it wouldn’t feel so much like begging when he had to ask for help.

Just in time he remembered to stuff the embarrassing Winged Three hat in his back pocket. He’d never live that down.

There was always a gaggle of people standing beyond the barrier, cameras in hand, pens and autograph pads at the ready, waiting for a celebrity to walk by. Harley eased his way into the crowd, close enough to the walkway to make himself heard without shouting, waiting for his chance. At least he had kept his license up to date-his NASCAR license, that is, the one that qualified him to drive in any NASCAR competition. Flashing that card ought to get him past the gatekeepers if somebody vouched for him. He tried to remember if he’d got in anybody’s way in his last few races, because being snubbed by a driver holding a grudge was just about more than his pride would take cold sober.

It was still too early for most of the drivers to be going in, but some of them did opt to enter by mid afternoon, either from nerves or from an obsessive need to observe the team’s last minute preparations. There were still some drivers who knew their way around an engine. Ryan Newman, for instance. Harley wiped his brow in the hot sun, and listened to the conversations around him while he waited for his chance.

“Which one is Ryan Newman?” asked a young girl nearby.

“The one that looks like Prince Andrew,” said the older woman next to her.

Harley filed that remark away in case he needed to make small talk with Ryan Newman anytime soon. The woman went on to make other driver celebrity comparisons, some of them quite astute. She said that Ricky Rudd looked like former President Clinton, but Harley couldn’t detect any resemblance there. His fans were the best dressed, though. Whatever that meant. Instead of the tee shirts worn by most other race fans, the Rudd supporters wore snazzy black sweaters, emblazoned with the word Rudd in red, and matching racing pants. But a resemblance to the former president? He couldn’t see it. Kurt Busch and the Keebler Elf, though-now that one registered. He didn’t plan on mentioning it, but Harley figured his chances of being able to talk Kurt Busch into getting him past the guards were even more remote than his chances of winning the race from the grandstand.

Finally, after half an hour of eavesdropping in the breathless heat, a rabbity young man in coveralls headed past. Harley recognized the guy as a former CART driver, who had given up the steering wheel for a job on the pit crew of a Winston Cup driver. Now what was the guy’s name?

Tony Something. That was it. Harley edged up to the restraining rope, with very little resistance from the rest of the crowd. This guy wasn’t a driver, and he wasn’t famous, so no one wanted a picture with him and only the diehards and the anal-retentive would request his autograph. Everybody else had rushed to a spot farther back, because someone claimed to have spotted Rusty Wallace on his way in.

“Hey, Tony!” Harley stuck out his hand, and tried to look casual about the encounter. Desperation wouldn’t get you in. “Harley Claymore,” he said, by way of reminder. “How you doing, man?”

“Can’t complain,” said Tony, glancing about nervously. “Guess I’d better get in there and work, though.”

“How ’bout I come with you?” said Harley. “I’d like to say hello to the boys while I’m here.”

Tony gave him a long appraising stare. “You got a hot pass, Harley?”

Harley’s smile never wavered. “Not on me, Hoss. But you know me. I’m no tourist. I just need to talk to some people.”

The mechanic hesitated, embarrassed by the exchange. Finally, he shrugged and said, “Come on in, then. But if Security throws you out, don’t blame me.” He nodded to the guard and jerked his thumb toward Harley. “Ex-driver,” he said by way of explanation.

The guard, young enough to be just out of high school, looked doubtful, but Harley had already crawled under the plastic rope and was striding past the checkpoint, feigning a deep interest in what Tony had been up to for the past couple of years.

“So how are you feeling these days?” Tony asked him, when he had run out of team and family news of his own. “You wrecked pretty bad a while back, didn’t you?”

“Oh, I’m a hundred per cent again now,” said Harley. “Can’t wait to get back in the game.”

Tony looked at him for just two beats too long, the politest expression of disbelief. Finally he said, “Yeah, well…I reckon you know best, Harley, but, I gotta say, sometimes when a man gets hurt while he’s racing, he loses that killer instinct that a driver has to have in order to win.”

“I’m as good as I ever was. All I need is a chance to prove it.”

“Well, good luck, man. Long as you’re not after my job, I wish you the best.” Tony hurried away then, ready to start his day’s work in preparation for the evening race, and maybe anxious not to be seen with someone down on his luck. Nobody wants to be jinxed on race day. He remembered the story about a driver’s lucky underpants-a winning streak lost because he left them behind in the truck after one race, and the Wood Brothers did the laundry.

The Wood Brothers…the legendary team owners out of Stuart, Virginia…Their list of drivers read like a Who’s Who in NASCAR, and stretched all the way back to the fifties. Harley wondered if it would be any use talking to them…He must take care to be nonchalant in his visiting this afternoon. Any whiff of desperation would doom his chances from the outset.

He began by strolling up and down pit road, making a mental note of who he saw that he knew, so when he had decided which one of them constituted his best ally in getting taken back into the charmed circle, he could work his way back along pit road and then make his pitch to the most sympathetic ear.

He wandered from one team to another, and although a few old acquaintances looked up and muttered hellos, they were busy getting ready for the evening race and nobody had the time or the inclination to socialize with an outsider. Harley kept walking.

“I ’member you!”

Harley turned, hoping to see a crew chief or an owner, but the stout fellow with the scraggly gray ponytail, the turquoise track suit, and the matching squash blossom necklaces was not part of anybody’s race team. He was a fixture at the Speedway, though. Harley summoned a smile and stuck out his hand. “Hello, Hector,” he said. “Long time no see. How’s it going?-And, by the way, that was just a standard greeting. I don’t really want to know.”

Hector Sanders, NASCAR fan and self-proclaimed Indian shaman, had appointed himself the prophet of the Bristol Motor Speedway. The consensus was that Hector was (a) harmless, and (b) probably not a powerful wizard, despite the fact that, during a Winston Cup race, it was his custom to stand in the infield or some other prominent spot and hex the drivers of his choice. He would strike a theatrical pose, make a series of hand signals, and chant as he spun round (although, this may have been an attempt to follow the progress of the race at a track in which a lap took fifteen seconds). Everybody in racing knew him and they put up with his antics because, in a profession in which you risked your life on a regular basis, it was nice to find somebody who made you look sane by comparison. (Besides, what if he really could put a curse on your tires?)

“You’re not back driving tonight, are you, Harley?” Hector shut his eyes for a moment, as if he had the day’s roster inscribed on a chalkboard in his head.

Harley stared. Hector was wearing a red cap sporting a white number 9 and a Dodge emblem. Bill Elliott. He wondered if this was a good sign for Bill or an impending curse. Aloud he said, “No, Hector. I’m not driving in the race. I’m just here as a spectator, same as you are.”

Hector struck a pose. “I am not a spectator. I channel the luck. I decide who gets blessed this evening.”

Harley nodded. Hector played favorites. Some of the drivers humored him-gave him caps and signed photos. He repaid these favors with spells of protection or, perhaps, by hexing the competition. Nobody was sure what the rigmarole of chants and hand signals represented, but they looked impressive, and in a sport where dying was always an option, it didn’t hurt to play it safe with purveyors of good fortune.

Hector fingered one of his turquoise necklaces and peered at Harley from beneath caterpillar eyebrows. “You’re out here a-trying to get you another ride ain’tcha, boy?”

“Guess I wouldn’t say no to one,” Harley admitted. “Why? Have you heard anything?”

“I don’t gossip,” said Hector. “I know things.”

“Anything about me?”

Hector closed his eyes again, reading his internal message board. A moment later he opened them wide. “Dale Earnhardt’s going to help you out, Harley.”

“Junior?”

“Did I say Junior?”

“Uh-huh. Well, it’s great to see you again, Hector. Who are you zapping tonight?”

“Rusty Wallace. I’m partial to old Rusty.”

Harley nodded. “Rusty’s going to win, huh?”

Hector shrugged. “No. I can’t let him win, but I’m going to protect him. He’ll come through this race without a scratch on him.”

“Well, I expect he’ll appreciate that.”

Hector nodded majestically, accepting his due as a maker of miracles. “And would you like me to speak to somebody about getting you hired on?”

Harley shook his head. That was all he needed, the local space cadet to champion his cause. With help like that, he’d be lucky to get the night shift in a car wash. “I think I’ll just do it the hard way,” he said, walking away.

Hector Sanders called after him, “Okay, suit yourself. I’ll give your good luck spell to Jeff Gordon, then.”

Harley nodded. “Yeah, good idea,” he said to himself. “Give Jeff Gordon a little more luck. He can’t walk on water yet.”

The rest of the hot and noisy afternoon went by in a succession of shouted conversations and sweaty handshakes. People promised to keep Harley in mind, but nobody came out with a firm offer. He scribbled his post office box address and a cell phone number on a succession of napkins and autograph cards, but nobody had made him any promises to get in touch. By five o’clock, Harley figured he had done all the networking his constitution could stand, so he left pit road in search of a cold drink and wet washcloth before it was time to meet the tour group for the race.

Half an hour before race time, he settled the tour members into their assigned seats, did a head count, and handed out the earplugs that would enable them to watch the race without suffering through the deafening roar of forty-three engines without mufflers reverberating in a giant concrete bowl.

“Oh, thanks, but I won’t need those,” said Justine, handing back the purple plastic capsule that contained the earplugs. “I’m going up there.” She pointed to a glassed-in enclosure at the top of the grandstand.

“To a skybox?”

“Uh-huh,” she said, rummaging in her purse for her pass. “A friend of mine owns a company that has one here at Bristol, and when I told her I was going to be here, she invited me to come up there and watch the race.”

“Lucky you,” said Harley, squinting up at the glass windows far above the Richard Petty seating section.

“Well, it’ll be comfortable, and there’s a bathroom and all, but for Bonnie the race is as much a business occasion as a sports event, so she’s always letting VIPs into the suite to mix networking with pleasure. I’ll probably have to make small talk with the governor or somebody, when I’d really rather be watching the track.” She gave him a bright smile. “It’ll be fun, though. I’ll see you back here after the race. Don’t y’all leave me!”

Harley promised to wait and, with a wave and a wink, she hurried up the steps to the skyboxes. Skyboxes were for the patrician spectators of the sport. Usually leased by corporations for their executives and business clients, the apartment-size rooms were furnished with kitchenettes and bathrooms, and offered a buffet spread to fortify the well-heeled guests. The media had its own skybox where the Sports Illustrated guy, the stringers for various newspaper syndicates, and other journalists from all over the world watched the race in air-conditioned comfort. Afterward, the winning driver was escorted up to that skybox so that he could be interviewed by the press corps without their even having to get up. Harley had been the driver of the moment in the press skybox one autumn Sunday in Martinsville, but he couldn’t remember a single question that any reporter had asked him. That fifteen minutes of fame had been a blur of sore muscles, thirst, and an attempt to downshift his brain from 100 miles per hour.

He could remember only two things from the experience. The first was looking out the press box window at the panoramic view of the Martinsville Speedway and seeing a grandstand that wasn’t there. There it was on the right side of the press box, an enormous upper tier, filled with cheering crowds, against a backdrop of dark hills similar to the ones that encircled the speedway at Bristol. But in Martinsville those distant mountains were cloud banks and the right upper tier of seats was equally ephemeral. By moving his head a little to alter the angle of reflection, Harley had satisfied himself that what he had actually seen was a mirror image of the grandstand on the left of the press box projected onto the skybox glass to create the mirage of a grandstand on the right where there was just sky and clouds. He never forgot that phantom grandstand at Martinsville and he sometimes wondered who might be sitting there to watch the race. Tim? Neil? Davey? Dale himself, now? The other thing he never forgot was the remark he had overheard as he walked to the podium in front of the press box picture window for his winner’s interview: “Aw, I was hoping Earnhardt would win. Who wants to talk to this guy?”

Bill Knight had settled young Matthew on the seat beside him, making sure that he was fortified with his medication, a Diet Coke, and was wearing his earplugs. The boy seemed to tire easily, but his excitement had borne him up through the heat and noise of race day, and now he was bouncing up and down on his seat, trying to follow everything at once.

As a preliminary to the race, there was a drivers’ parade: a patriotic convoy of pick-up trucks, solid red, solid white, and solid blue, each one carrying a fire-suited driver standing in the flatbed, waving to the roaring crowd for one turn around the track. Matthew stood up on the seat and waved his number 3 cap at the procession, and Bill Knight muttered something in Latin.

“You rooting for anybody?” Terence asked Ray Reeve, who was seated next to him.

“Not anymore,” growled the old man, not taking his eyes off the track.

“Who do you want to win, Matthew?” asked Cayle.

Matthew shrugged. “I don’t really care,” he said. “I just wish I could have been here when Earnhardt was racing.”

Bill Knight wondered why it would have mattered. The race would consist of a cluster of cars speeding past. Except for the numbers, how could anyone tell them apart, he thought. Still, he made an effort to get into the spirit of things. “At least they have an electronic scoreboard,” he said. “So that we can tell what lap they’re on.”

“I wonder how the Romans kept track of laps during chariot races?” asked Bekasu, already in need of distraction.

“Ah,” said Knight. “I know that one. Eggs and dolphins.”

“Dolphins?”

“Yes. Poseidon was considered one of the patron deities of the game. Because of the horses, I believe.”

“Not actual dolphins?” said Cayle, who had been listening.

He laughed. “No. Stone ones. You see, inside the oval of the Circus Maximus was a wall called the Spina, and at the end of it were two columns, each topped by a crosspiece. One crosspiece held a row of marble eggs, and the other, a row of dolphin statues. Each time the chariots circled the course, the erectores ran out and removed an egg and a dolphin, so the crowd could keep track of how many laps were left.”

“Did those guys ever get run over by chariots?” asked Matthew.

“Well…possibly,” Bill Knight conceded. “I expect electronic scoreboards are an improvement.” He wasn’t so sure about the cars, though.

Sitting at the end of the row, Harley stuck in his earplugs because he didn’t want to hear the voices of the Number Three Pilgrims asking him any more silly questions. He wanted to remember the other voices-the ones from the times he raced here. Stock car drivers wear headsets, so that even though they drive alone for five hundred laps in a monotonous circle, they have as much company in their heads as they do on the track: a Babel of voices, issuing instructions, assessing the car, cheering them on. High above the track, the team’s spotter was positioned, relaying information about conditions on the track ahead-who had wrecked, where a bottleneck had developed, whether to go high or low as you passed. The mechanics chimed in from time to time, concerned about the condition of the car. Was it time to pit for new tires? More fuel? Or should they wait and hope for a yellow flag? The crew chief offered strategy, encouragement, and a sounding board for whatever ideas the driver might have. You might be alone in the car, but you didn’t feel that way, with all those voices shouting in your head. And a goodly number of spectators owned receivers that tuned to the frequency of the radio communications between the drivers and crews. They would tune the set to the frequency of their favorite driver, and listen to his own private race-his comments, his voices. There was nothing like having a couple of thousand people eavesdropping on your conversation to make you watch your language.

Harley missed it, though. Not just the racing, but the voices. It had been like being in a big, close family-not that he was an expert on that feeling, really. But the idea of having a dozen people rooting for you, ready to do whatever they could to help you-that was a rush. Okay, their salaries were inextricably linked to your performance, which gave them a good reason to wish for your success, but still the support was good. Sure it was conditional, but, hey, what wasn’t? He wished just once he could have felt as sustained in life as he had on the track. In life or in his marriage. And most of all he wished he didn’t have to be sitting here in the cheap seats wearing earplugs, with no voices in his head to guide him around the oval.

He felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Bill Knight, looking politely inquisitive. “I’m new to all this,” he said. “What exactly should I look for?”

Harley thought about it, and decided that he wasn’t annoyed at the question. At least the man knew that the sport did have its complexities, which made a nice change from all the idiots who thought NASCAR stood for Non Athletic Sport Centered Around Rednecks. Why did women always say things like that? Well, yeah, he had told a local news anchor chick once at one of those wine and cheese do’s. And modern art is just slapping paint on canvas. So what does that make simple-the art or you? It had felt good to say that-almost worth the drink in the face and going home alone.

“Okay,” he said. “The human element here is that you’ve got two experienced drivers trying to put an end to very long losing streaks. One of them is Rusty Wallace, who has lost forty-nine races in a row. He always used to complain about Earnhardt getting away with murder, spinning him out to get past and all.”

“Ah. So now he has a chance to see if he can succeed without Earnhardt to contend with.”

“Well, technically, there is a Dale Earnhardt in the race. Little E. Dale Junior, that is. He’ll be out there, going strong in the 8 car.”

“Ah. Yes, of course.”

“Rusty complains a lot. He got mad about a black flag call at the Hanes 500 in Martinsville a few years back, so during the post-race interviews, he cut loose with some swear words. NASCAR takes a dim view of such behavior, and they fined his ass five thousand bucks. Know what he did?”

“What?”

“He paid it.” Harley grinned. “Sent half a million pennies over to Bill France in an armored car.”

“Ah. Well, sometimes rage can work wonders. I knew a fellow once who could only write sermons about things he was mad about. You mentioned another driver with a losing streak?”

“The other fellow trying to outrun his bad luck is Wonderboy. That’s what Earnhardt called him anyhow. Jeff Gordon.”

“Now I have heard of him. I think he’s the one Justine called the California Ken doll.”

“People do,” said Harley. “He’s in the 24 car. He’s got the movie star face, all right. He started young, and he looks even younger, which is why he got tagged with that nickname, but he’s a natural. Gordon’s marriage to a beauty queen is falling apart, though, and people think it might be affecting his concentration or something.” Harley shrugged. “I don’t know. I never could think about women when I was driving, but I suppose it’s possible.”

“Have you picked the winner?”

“Hard to say,” said Harley. “Too many variables. This race will take a couple of hours, and that’s a lot of time to screw up in. Who’s going to wreck? Who’s going to have mechanical problems? People don’t realize how much strategy is involved in motor sports. It isn’t just who has the fastest car, because every time a team gets a faster car than the competition, NASCAR thinks up more rules to even things up again.”

“So, if all the cars are about the same, what determines who wins?”

“I said. Strategy. Races have been won or lost on the decision to take two tires instead of four at a pit stop. Do you stop for gas and lose your lead or keep going and hope for a caution flag? Earnhardt lost at Daytona once because he ran out of gas.”

Bill Knight digested this information. “Okay,” he said. “But other things being equal, who would you expect to win today?”

Harley considered it. “If wanting was getting, then I’d put my money on Jeff Gordon, I think. He has gone thirty-one races without a win. That’s got to be killing him.”

“But I thought you said that Wallace had a longer losing streak than that?”

“Well, but Rusty’s used to it,” said Harley. “He’s been around a while. But Gordon, now, he’s the Tiger Woods of motor sports. A child prodigy. He was younger than Matthew there when he started winning championships in go-carts. He just kept moving up to bigger and faster rides. This losing streak must be hard to take after all that early success.” Whereas I’d give my eyeteeth to be Rusty Wallace, he finished silently.

“So you want Jeff Gordon to win?”

Harley sighed. The new bland, non-Southern face of NASCAR, all vanilla all the time. “Let’s just say that with my luck, Gordon is the one who will end up in Victory Lane.”

Sitting next to Bill Knight had given Harley a new perspective on watching races. He looked out across the grandstands at the blur of spectators. One hundred and sixty thousand people, each one seeing a different race. He glanced at the old couple, Jim and Arlene, sitting there holding hands in their matching Dale Earnhardt tee shirts and vests, and he thought, Some people are even seeing cars that aren’t running here tonight.

The pregame show at Bristol was always a thrill to watch. First came the parachutist floating down out of the sky, hauling a gigantic American flag in his wake. Harley always waited for the skydiver to get blown off course and come down outside in the creek, but he never did. Smack on the track in front of the grandstand, same as always. And then, while all the pit crews in their bright matching jumpsuits stood on the track, a spectrum of respectful attention, the event began with a Bristol tradition: the National Anthem, sung by the children of the drivers: winsome blondes in pinafores and sturdy little boys waiting for their turn at the wheel.

At the end of the row Ray Reeve was the first one to his feet when the chords of the anthem were struck. He was the old soldier salutes the colors, straight out of Norman Rockwell, even to the trickle of a tear across his cheek.

Cayle Warrenby touched Harley’s arm. “I don’t see Dale Junior up there,” she said, peering at the crowded grandstand.

Harley actually stood up to point out the position of the Number 8 car at the pit before he realized what she was getting at. Drivers’ kids. “No,” he said with a weak grin. “I reckon Junior won’t be singing the National Anthem tonight. And neither will CooCoo Marlin’s boy Sterling nor Kyle Petty.”

“Voices changed,” said Bekasu.

“Well, that, and the fact that they’re driving in the race themselves tonight,” said Cayle, who was never sure how much Bekasu knew and pretended not to.

The cars sped past, wobbling to warm up their tires, the green flag went down, and with a roar that shook the bleachers the race began: a blur of brightly colored cars spinning around a steep, tight circle like marbles in a blender. You’d have to be traveling at a high rate of speed just to stay up on that high-banked track-centrifugal force trumped gravity.

The third lap came within a minute after the start of the race, and when the scoreboard indicated that the cars were indeed on lap 3, many of the spectators stood up, one arm upraised, with three fingers held up in tribute to their fallen hero. Harley, remembering his current assignment and his promise to Mr. Bailey, got to his feet and made the sign of the three, though he could not escape the image of a transparent man in sunglasses and a white Goodwrench firesuit pointing at him and laughing.

“It’s the three-peace salute,” he shouted to Bill Knight, before the question could be asked. He noticed, however, that young Matthew was already on his feet, making the sign on his own, so he knew.

“In memory of Dale Earnhardt?”

Before he could answer, the third lap was over. Harley was the first to sit down. “Yeah,” he said. “All last year, everybody did it on the third lap. Even the sportscasters up in the box, they tell me.”

“It seems such a solitary sport,” said Bill, putting his lips close to Harley’s ear to make himself heard over the noise of the race.

“We’ll talk after the race!” Harley yelled back, replacing his ear plug.

It wasn’t a solitary sport, though. It might look that way to Bill Knight’s untutored eye, but Harley knew better. It wasn’t just the teamwork between crew and driver, it was the feeling of the fans as well. Talk to any dedicated race fan, ask him to describe his favorite driver’s progress in the race, and chances are good that he’ll use the pronoun “we.” As in: “We had a little trouble with the left front tire after turn four…” or “We thought the car was a little loose on that last lap, so we decided to pit early…” We. As if the spectator were sitting in the passenger seat of the race car. If you knew enough about the sport, it felt that way. You tuned your scanner to your driver’s frequency, and you heard his voice, every lap of the race, guiding you through the experience, as if you were riding along beside him. Maybe pro football was a spectator sport, but motor sports was a virtual ride-along. No other sports fans could get so close to the participants while the event was taking place.

For the rest of this race, though, Harley was the most solitary person in the Bristol Motor Speedway. Without a scanner he was cut off from the voices of the participants, and without a ride, he was shut out of the sport altogether. One part of his mind followed the intricacies of the race, but beneath that was the undercurrent of worry: replaying this afternoon’s conversations with the owners and crew chiefs, wondering what he was going to do when the tour ended, if he didn’t have a job lined up by then. And in his head, the musical accompaniment for the Sharpie 500 was an old James Taylor song, called “Carolina in My Mind.” He wasn’t sure why his mental soundtrack kept looping that song, until he focused on the words to the chorus, the line after the sunshine and the moonshine. The part about the friend who hits you from behind. Oh, yeah. That was Carolina, all right. If they ever did a music video of that tune, they ought to run footage of Earnhardt racing. Ain’t it just like that old Carolina boy to hit you from behind?

The race went on, punctuated occasionally by caution flags, and sometimes by Speedway-sponsored diversions, like an air cannon shooting tee shirts into the stands to the scrambling spectators. Harley wondered if there had been an equivalent to that in ancient Rome, but it was too noisy in the stands to ask the reverend about it.

The laps mounted up while the song cycled around in his head. Yeah, ain’t it just like a lot of those Tarheel boys to hit you from behind? In the course of the race Dale Junior smacked Ward Burton out of the way, parking him for the rest of the night. Of course, Carolina didn’t have the monopoly on roughhousing. Jeremy Mayfield, a newcomer from the Waltrips’ hometown of Owensboro, Kentucky, took Hut Stricklin out of the race, and Robby Gordon drew a penalty for wrecking Jimmie Johnson, whose car then bumped Mark Martin’s, so they were all about equally furious, he figured. Nothing out of the ordinary for a Bristol race, though. A series of wrecks punctuated by fast laps.

As he watched, Harley began to wish again that he had left the Bodines a message of encouragement on the graffiti walls, after all. Poor Todd, who had crashed early on, finished dead last. On the other hand, a last place finish paid $76,634, which is more than Harley would make in a year of leading speedway bus tours, so he couldn’t feel too sorry for the Bodines.

At one point, Bekasu leaned over and tapped his arm. “This is a long event!” she shouted above the roar.

Pointless to try to converse, so he smiled and nodded. Even at 90 miles per hour it takes a while to go 500 laps. He wondered if the lady judge had prepared for the bus tour by renting a racing movie like Days of Thunder. If he remembered rightly, that film covered the whole Daytona 500 in five minutes of screen time. Anybody who expected motor sports to be run in horse-race time was in for a long evening of disillusionment.

Fifty laps to go.

Harley felt someone grab his arm. He turned to see a stricken Jesse Franklin, round-eyed with shock. Without a word he pointed toward the walkway at the bottom of the grandstand. Harley leaned forward, scanning the crowd, and suddenly he saw what had upset the man. Dale Earnhardt was standing there with his back to the fence. Sunglasses. White Goodwrench firesuit. He just stood there, waiting-but not for long. A woman in a black number 3 jacket approached him, waited until he nodded for her to come ahead, and then threw her arms around him and hugged him for dear life. People in the lower seats, those nearest where he stood, came forward a few at a time to shake his hand or to pose for pictures with him. They seemed to forget the race, and the fact that Dale Junior was out there trying to win. The Intimidator was back.

Sarah Nash had seen Mr. Franklin’s reaction, and she leaned over and said above the roar of the engines, “It’s the Impersonator. Dresses up like Earnhardt and goes to races.”

He still looked blank, his gaze wavering from Sarah Nash to the familiar figure now walking toward an exit.

“An imposter,” said Sarah, carefully mouthing the word. “He’s been to a number of races this year.”

Harley nodded. He’d heard about the Impersonator. Funny how people seemed more interested in the pale imitation of Earnhardt than they did in the real drivers out there in an actual race. The imposter’s resemblance to Dale was striking, but if DEI caught him, he’d be impersonating chopped liver.

Forty laps to go.

Forty-three drivers had started the Sharpie 500 and only thirty-six finished the race, par for the course at Bristol where the banking and the short track made collisions inevitable. Nobody got hurt, though. Harley was glad, partly because he wouldn’t wish an injury on any of the drivers-not even if it meant a chance at their ride-and partly because he figured a wreck might upset some of the people on the bus.

The final “hit you from behind” came on the very last lap of the race, with Rusty Wallace in the lead, barreling for the finish line, when the colorful number 24 car-Jeff Gordon, the Wonderboy-smacked Rusty out of the way to win. Wallace managed to keep control of his car, and took second place, followed by the number 8 car, Dale Earnhardt, Jr., running third.

Bill Knight tapped Harley on the arm, and motioned for him to take out his earplugs.

“What?”

“You were right! You predicted the outcome of the race. You said Gordon and Wallace were the drivers who wanted to win the most, and that Jeff Gordon probably would win. And he did. So I guess there must be more than pure chance and speed involved in racing. Well done!”

Harley nodded. Gordon had won. Just his luck. He felt a little cheap taking the credit for the gift of prophecy, when all he had been doing was indulging in a little pessimism with his prediction. Who had he not wanted to win the most? Bingo!

The crowd was beginning to push its way out of the grandstands now, though why anybody bothered to hurry was more than Harley could fathom. Fifty-plus thousand cars all trying to leave an area at once to proceed on just two lanes of blacktop in each direction would result in a traffic jam of biblical proportions. (Exodus, to be exact.) You could live five miles from the Speedway and not make it home for two hours in that logjam of vehicles. He signaled for his group to stay put. “No hurry,” he said. “We’ll be here a while.”

Justine must have left the corporate skybox the minute the race ended, because she fought against the tide of departing spectators, made it down the steps to their row, and rushed up to Harley, big-eyed with some new revelation. “Did you notice that Little E. finished third?” she said. “Get it? Third-like the number three. Do you think that means anything?”

Harley sighed. “Well, it means about $131,000 to Junior,” he said. “And there’s another three in that sum for you. I wouldn’t read any more into it than that.”

Justine rolled her eyes. “Well, I think it means something,” she said. “All those threes.”

He sighed again, but it was useless to argue with a mystic. Maybe he ought to introduce the group to Hector the Shaman. Come to think of it, Hector’s prophecy had been right on the money. Harley was glad he hadn’t asked the Speedway mystic about Earnhardt, though. He was afraid of what Hector might have said.