St. Dale

Chapter III

“Wake up, Bekasu! We’re coming into Tri-Cities, and Stewardess Barbie wants your tray table put back before we land.”

Rebekah Sue Holifield squinted one eye long enough to close the tray table, and then resumed her former upright and locked position.

From the window seat Cayle said, “She’s not asleep, Justine. She’s just being passive-aggressive again.”

“Being a spoilsport is what it is,” said Justine. “A deal’s a deal. Last year she made us go to Toronto and sit through a whole week of operas that sounded like they were neutering the pigs, and this year was my turn to choose.” She lunged across her sister’s lap to peer out the window. “Wake up, Bekasu! You’re going to miss seeing where Alan Kulwicki’s plane went down!”

Cayle stopped scanning the fast-approaching ground, shut her eyes, and turned away from the window.

“Who?” Bekasu’s sigh meant she didn’t much care.

“You remember Alan Kulwicki,” said Cayle, carefully not looking. “First Winston Cup champion from up north? Wisconsin. Degree in chemical engineering?”

“Okay-Get off me, Justine!-Unless the crash was yesterday, I’m sure there’s nothing to see down there now.”

“Just a field,” said Cayle. “Same as it was back in 1993. He was the reigning champion, flying in for the Bristol race one cold, wet night. April the first, it was. Anyhow, his private plane was right ahead of Earnhardt’s, on the descent, maybe two minutes out when it went down in a field a few miles out on approach.”

“Yeah,” said Justine, “and about a minute later, Earnhardt’s plane touched down at the airport. You know, I always figured Dale traded paint with him, trying to land first.”

Cayle shivered. “Dale wasn’t even flying his own plane, Justine. Of course he wasn’t. You know that. She’s putting you on, Bekasu.”

Bekasu closed her eyes again. “Justine, you know that I would rather participate in a reenactment of the Bataan Death March than go on a NASCAR tour, so would you please not make it any worse with your tasteless commentary?”

“Oh, don’t be a pill, Bekasu. If I’d wanted to vacation with a killjoy, I’d a brought an ex-husband. Now hand me my carry-on, will you? I want to put on my Dale hat before we land.”

“We could be on St. Lucia right now,” said Bekasu. “In that mountaintop hotel where one wall of your suite is just a wide open space facing the Caribbean, but no…”

“Well, I’m sorry that we’re not having a vacation you can brag about to all your friends down at the courthouse, Your Honor, but I need to say good-bye to Dale.”

“Justine, you never said hello to Dale.”

“I did so. One time at Talladega when that guy who owned a Chevy dealership took me on to pit road, we went right up to Dale and shook his hand, and I wished him luck in the race. “

“Which he lost.”

“Yes, but that’s not the point. The point is that I have been a Dale Earnhardt fan through five presidents and two husbands, and this tour is part of my grief process, and I think as my sister you ought to respect that. Not to mention Cayle. After what happened to her, how can you even argue?”

Cayle winced. They’d promised they wouldn’t talk about it.

“I’m here, aren’t I?” said Bekasu. “But I am not going to wear that stupid black tee shirt with the Winged Three. And another thing, Justine: if your luggage takes up so much room on the bus that they have to get rid of a passenger, I will be the first volunteer to stay behind.”

“Can you finish this argument in the terminal?” said Cayle. “I think they want us to get off now so they can clean the plane.”

“Okay, let me just ask them if they have any extra little bottles of Jack Daniels, in case the bus doesn’t stop near any liquor stores. Y’all want some of those pretzel things, too?”

Bekasu rolled her eyes at Cayle. “I still say we should have drugged her and carried her on to the flight to St. Lucia.”

Near the baggage carousel, a lanky dark-haired man in a leather jacket with checkered sleeves stood holding a Winged-Three placard. As people retrieved their suitcases, they began to congregate around him.

“Do you recognize him?” Cayle whispered to Justine. It was no use asking Bekasu. “They said a real race driver was going to host the tour. Is he one of the Bodines?”

Justine narrowed her eyes, sizing him up. “Well, I can’t recognize all the young ones, but he’s not one of them. I don’t think he’s a Bodine, but we’ll find out when he opens his mouth. They’re from New York, so if this guy sounds normal, he’s not one.”

“Welcome to the Tri-Cities Airport, folks,” said Harley Claymore.

Justine and Cayle looked at each other and shook their heads.

Harley Claymore found that he was more nervous about meeting this group of tourists than he had ever been about driving 180 miles per hour with Bill Elliott on his bumper and Earnhardt closing fast.

Glad-handing people was not one of his more conspicuous talents. He was not afraid of coming up against a question he couldn’t answer. He was more nervous about the prospect of facing a question he had heard so many times that a rude retort would escape his lips before he could stop himself. Candor was his besetting sin.

He remembered an unfortunate encounter with a lady reporter during his racing days. She hadn’t been a sports reporter, he knew that. Maybe she had been down to collect recipes from the wives or some such meringue assignment, but he had encountered her at one of the pre-race appearances that sponsors liked to host in hopes of getting their driver more publicity.

The woman in black, swizzle-stick thin and improbably blonde, had tottered up to him on stiletto heels and announced that she was a writer. She named a magazine he’d never heard of, but he nodded and smiled as if she’d said Newsweek. Then she wanted to know if he was a driver. Harley said that he was, and asked politely if she followed the sport.

The woman had attempted to wrinkle her botoxed forehead, and then-with the air of someone making a startlingly original observation-she smirked and said, “But it isn’t really a sport, is it? Just a bunch of cars going around in a circle for three hours.”

“Yes,” said Harley. “Yes, it is.” He tapped her little green notebook. “And writing isn’t very hard, either, is it? Just juggling those same old twenty-six letters over and over again in various combinations?”

In retrospect, he conceded that the remark had not been designed to convert the lady to an appreciation of NASCAR. She had stalked off in a huff, with the word “redneck” hovering on her lips, which Harley didn’t mind, because if people are going to think it, they might as well say it, and then you know where you are. He’d ended up going home alone. Maybe the reporter had found someone more willing to humor her. Thinking it over later, Harley supposed that he could have found a more diplomatic answer to the woman’s tiresome display of ignorance. Maybe for future reference he should have asked Alan Kulwicki, who had an engineering degree, what technical explanation you ought to give to people who didn’t realize that the “simplicity” of the sport was merely their own incomprehension, just as-to the uninitiated-opera was noise and modern art a paint spill. The difference was that people felt embarrassed about not understanding music or art, but they seemed almost smug about being ignorant on the subject of motor sports. Stupidity as a status symbol. He never did understand it, but it had long ago ceased to surprise him.

What did surprise him was that people seemed to think of NASCAR as a Southern sport, despite ample evidence of “continental drift” in recent years. Jeff Gordon was from California; Kurt Busch from Vegas; Ryan Newman had an engineering degree from Purdue; and Ricky Craven was from Maine. There were races now in Phoenix, Vegas, and all over California; one in Texas, one out in Michigan, another in New England, one at the Brickyard in Indy where the Indianapolis 500 was run-and still undernourished women thought it was a redneck pastime that couldn’t really be called a sport. Fortunately, Harley believed that ignorance was a constitutional right, so he did not feel called upon to show people the error of their ways.

What worried him was the idea that NASCAR might not be Southern enough anymore. Harley thought of all those clean-cut college-educated guys with their flat broadcast accents, and he felt like a unicorn watching the Ark set sail. Was driving no longer enough? The thought of speech lessons and plastic surgery made him shudder. Such things hadn’t been an issue when Dale started driving in ’79, but times had changed. It cost a quarter of a million dollars to field a stock car-and the car was good for only one race. Then you needed another quarter of a million to compete the next Sunday somewhere else. That’s why an advertisement in the form of a small decal pasted on the hood of the race car could cost that sponsor $80,000 per race. The days of the independent owner-driver-as the Bodine and the Elliott teams had been-were past praying for. Now you needed a principal sponsor with deep pockets. A beer company. A detergent manufacturer. A cereal maker. And in return for millions of dollars to fund your racing team, the sponsor would feature you in their TV commercials, and put life-size cardboard cutouts of you in the aisles of grocery stores all over the country. So you’d better be good-looking and you’d better be good at glad-handing with the corporate types, and you’d better be a pussycat with the press and the fans. Because winning races was nice, but public relations was everything.

Harley figured that the ten-day tour would be good practice for his affability.

On the appointed day for the tour to begin, he had arranged to meet the bus driver in the airport parking lot so that the two of them could compare notes before the arrival of the tour group. Harley had flown into Tri-Cities on the last flight the night before, and planned to spend the night in the Sleep Inn a mile from the airport, but since Bailey Travel had neglected to make a reservation for him many months in advance, no accommodations were available for that night, so he had spent the night sleeping in a chair in the airport waiting room. He’d shaved and changed in the men’s room an hour before the passengers’ flight was due in from Charlotte.

To prepare himself to guide the tour, Harley had driven part of the route on his own that week, traveling from Martinsville to Darlington, covering all the tour stops north of Georgia, anyhow. Since the tour would end after the Southern 500 in Darlington the following Saturday, Harley had ended his practice journey there, leaving his car at the speedway, so that he could just drive away at the end of the tour-hopefully with a new job in racing to go to.

At least it was going to be a small tour. Only thirteen people instead of the fifty or so that Mr. Bailey said they usually tried to book. “How come it’s so few people?” Harley had asked. “I’d have thought people would be falling all over themselves to do an Earnhardt tour.”

“Well, they were,” Mr. Bailey admitted. “We were inundated with applications. But since we have never driven this route before and since you’re an inexperienced guide, we thought we’d make this a test run.”

Harley thought about it. “This tour includes race tickets,” he said. “And you didn’t plan far enough ahead to get enough tickets for Bristol, did you?”

Harry Bailey reddened. “We could only get fourteen,” he said. “We thought three months in advance was a gracious plenty.”

Harley smirked. “Try three years.”

The tour bus was easy to spot: a full-size silver cruiser with the Winged Three emblazoned on the side and the slogan “The Number Three Pilgrimage.” Harley shook his head at the sight of it, wondering if the driver would be expected to knock cars off the road while trying to pass them. He didn’t plan to suggest it.

He rapped on the glass of the passenger door, and waited while the driver cranked it open.

“Harley Claymore,” he said, shoving his leather duffel bag into an overhead bin. “I’m the NASCAR guide.”

The man behind the wheel was red-faced and barrel-shaped. Not a former racer judging by the look of him. Good thing this bus has a door, Harley thought, picturing the fellow trying to get in and out of a stock car through the window as drivers always did since race car doors are welded shut for safety.

“Ratty Laine,” said the driver, making no attempt to stir from his seat. “Bailey Travel. Here to drive this bus and help you out with the touring bits any way I can.”

“Are you connected to racing?”

Ratty Laine rubbed his chin while he considered this. “I can be,” he said at last. “Cousin of the Pettys, maybe, or a former member of somebody’s whatchacallit-pit crew, maybe?”

Harley blinked. “What do you mean ‘I can be’? Don’t you know?”

“Well, it’s up to you, really. If you think this tour group will have a more rewarding experience thinking that I’m an old racing guy, then that’s what we’ll tell them.”

“But are you really?”

“Oh, really. I never talk about really. That’s why they call it private life, you know. ’Cos it’s private. Like I said, I’ll drive the bus and get you where you want to go, but the way I see it back story is your job. Just tell me who you want me to be.” He stretched and yawned. “Sorry. Long drive in this morning.”

“Where from?” asked Harley.

“Home,” said the driver.

“Where’s that?”

“Where do you want it to be?”

“Can’t you just be yourself?” asked Harley.

The driver shrugged. “No percentage in that. Well, you think it over. You’ve got an hour or so before the plane lands. My schedule says they all met up in Charlotte and took the same connecting flight up here.”

“But what am I supposed to tell them about you?”

“Look,” said Ratty Laine, “I’ve been driving for Bailey Travel for umpteen years now. When we go to Opryland, I’m the ex-mandolin player for the Del McCoury Band; on Civil War tours, my great-great-grandaddy fought at Gettysburg-which side he was on depends on the home states of the people on the tour; at Disney World, I was the voice of Goofy or a talking teapot in the latest movie, or something; then at-”

“Okay. I get it.” Harley shook his head. “Look, I really was a race car driver, so why don’t we forget the fake identity for you this time, and tell the folks you’re the bus driver, all right?”

Ratty shrugged. “Whatever. But I could say that I was the guy who changed Richard Petty’s mufflers.”

Harley sank down in the front seat next to the driver. It was going to be a long trip. “Stock cars don’t have mufflers, Ratty,” he said. “Now, where can I put this?” Harley held up a bulky canvas bag. “Won’t fit in the overhead. I won’t be needing it very often.”

“What is it?”

“My firesuit. Driving boots. Helmet.”

The driver raised his eyebrows and looked from the canvas sack to Harley’s face, now tinged pink with embarrassment. “What and where will you be driving?” he asked.

“Well,” said Harley. “I just thought I’d come prepared. You know, in case somebody gets food poisoning or something and they need a replacement driver toot sweet. Drivers carry their own gear. It’s like jockeys with saddles, I guess.”

“You mean you brought gear to drive a stock car? On the off chance?”

“Well, yeah. I mean, just in case. You never know.”

Ratty gave him a look that mixed pity with scorn, but he made no comment except to haul himself out of the driver’s seat and amble down the steps to the pavement. “Help me open the hold,” he said, tugging at the door to the outside luggage compartment. “It ought to fit in there. Way toward the back.” ’Cause you won’t be needing it. The unspoken words hung in the air.

“Thanks,” said Harley, shoving the bag into the hold. He never went anywhere without it.

Ratty slammed the door to the luggage compartment, and wiped his hands on his khaki trousers. “You sure you don’t want me to have a racing connection?”

Harley shook his head. All they needed was to get caught in a lie and lose the trust of the tour group. Mr. Bailey would probably dock their pay back to lunch money. “Look, Ratty,” he said. “I’ll handle all the NASCAR patter. You just worry about getting these folks from one place to the next, and feeding them, and scheduling pit stops.”

“What?”

“You know-trips to the toilet.”

“Oh, sure. No problem. And, you know, that reminds me, if race car drivers go for three straight hours without ever getting out of the car, how do they-?”

Harley sighed. Sooner or later everybody asked that question. “It’s hot in a stock car,” he said. “If you sweat enough, you don’t have to pee.”

The airborne contingent of the tour, eleven people as diverse as any other group of airline passengers, wore expressions that ranged from barely contained excitement to a polite wariness that might have been shyness. The exception was one well-dressed woman who looked as if she had been brought there at gunpoint.

Justine elbowed her sister in the ribs. “Stop looking like a duchess at a cockfight!” she whispered. “There’s some perfectly nice people here. I told you there would be. Check out that hot young guy in the yellow Brooks Brothers sport shirt with the little dead sheep emblem-bet you ten bucks he’s Ivy League. And look at that distinguished fellow in the clerical collar. Oh, isn’t that sweet? He has a little boy with him. Oh, Lord, I hope they’re not on their honeymoon!”

“Shut up, Justine,” Bekasu hissed back, edging away.

Spotting their fellow tour members had been easy. Along with the tour itineraries the Bailey Tour Company had sent Winged Three caps to match the one worn by the guide and the driver. Several of the travelers had dutifully worn the headgear on the flight, in addition to various other items of Dale-bilia currently displayed about their persons: Intimidator tee shirts, sew-on patches featuring a replica of Earnhardt’s signature, and, in the case of one enterprising matron, a hip-length cotton vest featuring a montage of black Monte Carlos, made of the special Dale Earnhardt fabric sold at Wal-Mart.

There were more women than one might expect to find on a NASCAR-themed tour. At least on a tour that wasn’t dedicated to Jeff Gordon. Funny that so many women liked Earnhardt, Harley Claymore was thinking. You’d think he’d remind them of their ex-husbands. You’d think women would see Earnhardt as the weasely redneck version of the Type-A executive: the man who puts his career first, his hobbies and his buddies second, and his family a distant third. Except for all that money and fame, Earnhardt seemed to Harley an unlikely sex symbol. Wonder if he’d even managed to snag a date for the high school prom. Ah, no. Scratch that. Dale had dropped out in junior high, before the social pressures of adolescence became much of an issue. The glad-handing imperatives of his future success must have come as an unpleasant surprise for him, but he had made the transition as gracefully as he took the turns on the track. If he hadn’t, he’d have been left in the dust years ago.

Harley would like to have mused on the whole charisma aspect of the Earnhardt mystique in a group discussion on the bus, but he half suspected that the driver was under orders to report any heresies to Bailey Travel, so if he wanted his paycheck, he had better not get caught letting in daylight on the magic.

Most of the men looked like normal sports fans in a spectrum of ages, except for the preppy and the minister, who were both dutifully wearing their Winged Three caps, but with the air of generals in camouflage. And he hadn’t expected the little boy. The kid was the color of chalk, and he didn’t seem to have any eyelashes, but he seemed chipper enough. The man with him wore a priest’s collar-so probably not the boy’s father. He wondered what the story was. Harley held out his hand to the boy. “Hello, Sport,” he said. “I’m your guide. You a big Dale fan?”

The boy glanced up at his companion and received an encouraging nod. “Yep.”

Well, there was a precedent for that, thought Harley. He wondered if the sick kid was hoping for a miracle from Dale. As he recalled it had been the other way around. “How old are you, Sport?”

The kid gave him an owlish look. “Name’s Matthew. I was born the year Sterling Marlin won the Daytona 500,” he said.

Harley let out a sigh of mock exasperation. “Well, that’s no help. Sterling won in both ’94 and ’95, so I still don’t know your age.”

The kid grinned. “Okay. The first time. So, who won Daytona the year you were born?”

“Ben Hur,” said Harley. He wondered how long it would take him to match names and faces. He glanced again at his tour notes, raising a hand to indicate that a speech was forthcoming.

The tour members clustered around him and the chattering subsided.

“Tri-Cities,” he said, savoring the word. “Now you know we didn’t choose this airport just because it has a three in its name.” He’d had four months to work on his NASCAR patter for the tour and to bone up on Earnhardt connections to any place they might visit. Now he thought he could recite Earnhardt trivia without clenching his teeth. If he didn’t run out of nicotine patches, he might even survive the tour.

“Of course, this is the closest airport to the Bristol Speedway, our first stop. It was at the Bristol Motor Speedway that the young Dale Earnhardt won his first ever Winston Cup race. April 1, 1979, to be exact. Bobby Allison came in second in that race. This evening we’ll be attending the Sharpie 500 there.” To identify the race’s sponsor, Harley waved the Sharpie fine point permanent marker with which he had been taking roll. “Dale Earnhardt himself used to fly into this very airport for the race.”

For a moment everyone paused, picturing an Earnhardt wraith walking past the baggage carousel, but Harley, who had been warned not to let the tour turn into a death march, changed the subject. “Did everybody’s luggage make it? Okay, good. Then let’s get started. This is the very first Dale Earnhardt Memorial tour, and my first tour of any kind, so there ought to be a yellow stripe painted on the bumper of the bus. Just go easy on us, folks. Over there hauling your suitcases onto the baggage cart is our bus driver, Mr. Ratty Laine. I’m your guide-Harley Claymore, NASCAR driver…”

A hand waved in the air. “Do you do those hair growth commercials on television?”

“Hair growth?” Harley caught the reference. “Ah, no. That would be Derrike Cope. The way you can tell us apart is: Derrike sort of accidentally won the Daytona 500 in 1990, and I didn’t lose my hair. Hard to say which of us got the better deal.” He looked down at his notes. “Okay, speaking of Derrike, let me do a head count. We’ll get acquainted later. Right now the bus is waiting for us in the parking lot, and we have a wedding to get to.”

Justine waved her sunglasses. “I thought we were going to the Bristol Speedway.”

“Yes, ma’am, we are. The race is this evening. The Sharpie 500. After the weddings. Didn’t they put that in the brochure?”

“Heck, no. If they’d told us about a wedding, I would have brought somebody besides my sister.”

“I don’t think they’re taking volunteers, ma’am. We’re just going to watch. Oh, but two members of our party are getting married there by pre-arrangement. You’ll meet them shortly.”

“Well, if you need somebody to marry them, my sister’s a judge. Hey, Bekasu, can you marry people in Tennessee?”

While Justine scanned the crowd for her, Bekasu edged her way toward the silver-haired minister. She wanted to make allies before people figured out that she was with Justine. “Hello,” she said with an after-church smile. “I’m Rebekah Sue Holifield, and I am a hostage on this tour. How are you…Father…?”

“Just Bill,” he said quickly. “Bill Knight. I’m Episcopalian, but not that High Church.” He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “And this young fellow is Matthew Hinshaw, who is the real racing fan. He’s promised to help me along, because I’m new to all this.”

“Well, how do you do, Matthew,” said Bekasu, shaking his small hand. “You may have to help me along, too. I came with my sister, who is the real fan, and our cousin Cayle, who had a most extraordinary experience. She-well, never mind. Anyhow, I’m the novice in our party. To me, stock car racing looks like rush hour in Charlotte.”

“Except they’re going 180 miles an hour,” said Matthew solemnly. “And sometimes they hit each other on purpose.”

“Matthew, why did our guide say there ought to be a yellow stripe painted on the bumper of the bus?”

The boy grinned. “That’s easy! In NASCAR rookie drivers have a yellow stripe so that people will know to cut them some slack. Hey, Bill, do you mind if I get a drink before we leave the airport? It’s time for the white pill.”

Bill Knight fished a dollar out of his pocket. “Need any help, Matthew?”

The boy shook his head and ambled away.

“Your…nephew?” asked Bekasu.

“No. Matthew lives in the children’s home affiliated with the parish. This is what he wanted to do more than anything else in the world. He’s…ill.”

Bekasu watched the little boy saunter away clutching his dollar. “Yes, I thought he must be,” she said. “I’m so sorry. Is this one of those wish tours for him?”

“Yes. He’s such a great little guy. He’s had a rough year. He lost his parents in a wreck, and a few months after that he was diagnosed with his illness. I suppose a tour is hardly enough compensation for all that tragedy, but it’s all we could do. I’m accompanying him, because the tour coincided with my vacation-not because I share his passion for NASCAR. He’s a bright little fellow, though. His doctors assure me that he’ll be all right for the duration. I worry, of course.”

“It’s an interesting choice,” said Bekasu. “He did choose this tour himself, I suppose?”

Bill Knight sighed. “Oh, yes. I think everybody was a little surprised about that, but he was adamant.”

“I’d have thought that most children would have picked Disney World,” said Bekasu.

“Matthew is an unusual boy. Very-focused. It occurred to me that perhaps an intense interest in one subject keeps him from thinking about all the things in his life that he can’t control, which is nearly everything. And I suspect that his parents were race fans, but he’s never really said. I can’t say I’d have preferred Disney World over this, but I wish I could have got him interested in my hobbyhorse, which is the medieval pilgrimages of the Church. Santiago de Compostela…Canterbury…But, I suppose a trip abroad would have been too risky for his condition. And perhaps too expensive. Anyhow, young Matthew preferred this pilgrimage. Insisted on it, in fact.”

“I didn’t know what to expect on this tour. Most tour passengers are middle-aged married couples, but I was afraid that a NASCAR tour might be a busload of drunken good old boys. This one seems to be neither.”

“Did your husband not want to come along?”

Bekasu hesitated. It was still hard to say it casually. “He died a few years ago. A few months after that Cayle got divorced, and that’s when we decided that the three of us would make a tradition of vacationing together.”

“That sounds like fun.”

“It has its moments. But I didn’t bargain for a racing tour. What about you? Are you from-” Bekasu cast about for a city associated with racing. “Umm-Indianapolis?”

“Rural New Hampshire. Our town is just north of Concord, about eight miles from the New Hampshire International Speedway. It’s called Canterbury, so you can imagine my delight when I was posted there, but, much to my chagrin, I have since discovered that Thomas Becket takes a backseat to Ricky Craven there. I keep trying, though. Slide shows, lectures at church functions. To no avail-racing fever is rampant. Still, the drivers are very good about coming to the Children’s Home and signing photos for the kids. One of them played Santa Claus for us a few years ago, they tell me. I’m new to the parish, so I’m still getting used to all this. I didn’t really know much about Earnhardt until the day he died.”

“I think we’re being rounded up,” said Bekasu, glancing back at the cluster of travelers. “And here comes Matthew with his drink.”

Cayle appeared beside them. “You’d better come on, Bekasu. Justine is asking whether they have a P.A. system on the bus, and I’m pretty sure she’s going to try to sing Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Earnhardt…”

Bill Knight laughed. “Must be a Southern hymn,” he said. “Not in our hymnal in New Hampshire.”

“Excuse me while I go and rain on my sister’s parade,” said Bekasu.