Tentatively, Taran raised her hand. “Who’s driving the car?” she asked.
Tuggle glared at her, took an exasperated breath, and then snapped, “Our driver is Badger Jenkins, a veteran Cup driver who has won the Southern 500. Any other questions?”
Taran’s hand went up again. “Who…is…driving…the…car… now?”
This time Tuggle’s look of annoyance turned to a thoughtful appraisal of the meek but persistent young woman. After a few moments, she said, “I told you. Badger Jenkins.”
“Yeah, but that’s not him,” said Taran.
There were a few gasps from the other applicants, but only a silent stare from Grace Tuggle herself. At last with a grudging smile, she said, “You can’t see nothing but his eyes, and you had less than a minute to see them, and you weren’t close. What makes you think it wasn’t Badger?”
Because I know those eyes. They’ve stared at me from my screensaver, from my coffee mug…from every NASCAR Nation program I ever Tivoed…from a hundred daydreams…I know his eyes.
Aloud, she said, “The helmet is higher above the steering wheel than it ought to be. Guy’s too tall to be Badger.”
Tuggle squinted at her for a long minute while nobody moved. “What’s your name?” she said.
“Taran Stiles.” She could feel the other women edging away from her, in case a blast of wrath was forthcoming from the crew chief.
Tuggle nodded, and made a note on her clipboard. “Well, Taran Stiles,” she said, “as it happens, you are correct. The driver for today’s exercise is Tony Lafon, one of our shop dogs, and he is indeed taller than Badger. You’re not. Generally, we want big people on pit crew, but occasionally it helps to have a runt around. So if your physical skills are as good as your powers of observation, you might make the team. Now get going, you seven!”
Afterward, Taran marveled at how nervous she had been for a job that paid only a fraction of what she had been making in the corporate world. She had never thought of herself as a particularly athletic person, and heretofore her competitive instincts had been confined to making the highest score on the exam, but during the tryouts she found herself trying harder than she ever had in any physical activity. The girl who had been content to coast through required courses in physical education suddenly demanded that her body respond like a well-oiled machine, because she wanted this job.
And she got it.
Someone from the team had called her the next day to tell her that she was now a member of Badger Jenkins’s pit crew. Well, they didn’t put it like that, of course. They thought of themselves by number and sponsor and owner. The 86 car; Team Vagenya. To the front office, Badger was just a cog in a money-making machine, but he was what mattered to her. For a fleeting moment she wondered who else had made the cut. Well, she would find out soon enough. There was a team meeting at the end of the week, the beginning of the long process of getting a bunch of novices ready for competition at the highest level of motorsports. First, though, she had to call Matt Troxler back at the old office and tell him that his worst fear had been realized: He had talked someone into a NASCAR career!
Taran went in that Friday to meet her new teammates. Later, she wondered if all randomly assembled groups of people constituted an assortment of types resembling the cast of old war movies. There was Taran herself, the dreamy romantic, who was the catch-can person. Reve Galloway, the gruff crusading fitness worker from California, was the gasman, because she was strong enough to lift a seventy-pound container of fuel.
The hockey playing student reading Paradise Lost at tryouts turned out to be a Texan named Cass Jordan-she also brought a book to the team meeting. It turned out that she had been on her high school wrestling team, and she could still bench-press calves. She was Team Vagenya’s new jackman.
The front tire carrier, Jeanne Mowbray, was the only girl in a family of construction workers from Ohio, so carrying a heavy tire was not a novelty to her, or to her counterpart, rear tire carrier Sigur Nelson, a flaxen-haired farm girl from Minnesota, who looked as though she was only working in Cup racing until her application to be a Valkyrie was approved.
The two tire changers were less striking physical specimens, because they did not have to lift the tires. The skill they had was not strength, but the dexterity to manipulate the lug nuts and the drill. The oldest of the over-the-wall gang was forty-one-year-old Kathy Erwin, granddaughter of a Carolina racing family. She knew both Tuggle and the team’s chief engineer Julie Carmichael, so there was some talk that she got the job through her connections, but even if that were the case, she was exceptionally fast at tire changing, so it hardly mattered.
The second tire changer, Cindy Corlett, was a small, serious girl with a pixie face and long, tapering fingers.
“Are you a mechanic?” Taran had asked her in disbelief.
The dark-haired girl had smiled and shook her head. “Musician,” she said. “Bluegrass fiddle. I’m good with my hands, you see.”
“But why on earth would you want to change tires on a race car then?”
“I guess I come by it naturally,” said Cindy. “Back in Ozark, Arkansas, my family was always about two things: picking and racing. I decided I’d like to try both. My daddy is just thrilled to death about this. I promised to get him a hot pass to Bristol.”
So there they were, with a spectrum of backgrounds and home states, each with a different reason for being on board, and each with a second skill to benefit the team. When they weren’t needed on pit crew, they would drive the hauler, work as a mechanic, serve as the computer technician, assist the fabricators-there were many talents needed to field a stock car. It made sense to hire people who could serve in more than one capacity. Taran would be the computer person.
She hoped that she would become friends as well as coworkers with this collection of strangers, and that she would be a valuable member of the team. Taran had never been much of a joiner, and she tended to be shy around new people, but she thought that having a common goal might make it easier for her to connect with the rest of the crew. She didn’t think she’d ever get over being intimidated by Tuggle, but she did hope that sooner or later she could find the courage to say something to Badger Jenkins. Something besides “I love you.” Surely he had forgotten about that.
CHAPTER XI
Get Shorty
“I’m supposed to do sports card shots of him?” Melanie Sark lowered her camera and peered at the young man in the purple firesuit who had just entered the studio door.
“We don’t call them that in motorsports,” said Tuggle. “Folks say hero cards.”
Hero cards? Sark stared at her. “I would rather swallow my tongue,” she said.
Tuggle shrugged. “Just a figure of speech. ’Course you might want to remember that it is a dangerous sport.”
“Yeah, we could call them idiot cards.”
“How about autograph cards?”
“Fine. Autograph cards.” She glanced again at the young man loitering out of earshot in the doorway, talking on his cell phone. “All right, how do you expect me to do an autograph card for him? He’s the size of a mailbox!”
Tuggle shrugged. You could tell that this girl hadn’t been in motorsports very long. What was she used to? NBA players? Badger wasn’t even unusual for a Cup driver.
“This is NASCAR,” she reminded the new team publicist. “At Speedways, you always want to watch where you step.”
Sark wrinkled her nose. “Dog poo?”
“Jeff Gordon.” Tuggle held out her hand at about shoulder height to illustrate the point. “Now on the autograph cards, we’ll say Badger is five foot seven.”
Sark smirked. “Why don’t you say he’s the Emperor of Japan while you’re at it?”
“Well, they might be about the same height,” Tuggle conceded. “He’s got a beautiful nose, though, Badger does. He ought to write his Welsh ancestors a thank-you note for that perfect bone structure. You should see some of his old autograph cards. He photographs well.
And it’s all in the camera angles. You can make him look tall.”
“Yeah, if I stand in a drainage ditch. Okay, thanks for bringing him over. You can have him back in an hour.” She peered doubtfully at the young man in the doorway, who seemed to be waiting for permission to enter. “Will I need an interpreter?”
Tuggle smirked. “Just listen slowly-he’s from Georgia.”
Badger Jenkins turned around and around, surveying the empty building lit with studio lights. “How you doin’?” he said, extending his hand and summoning his brightest smile.
Sark lifted the camera and took a step backward. “Save it, Frodo, I’m not into this sport. I just needed a job, all right? And apparently my job is to make you look good, so that you come across as a combination of Superman and Tom Hanks.” Her tone of voice indicated the magnitude of that task. “Let’s do the photos first, okay? We can work on the interview after that. Five minutes ought to suffice for it. Stand there with your arms folded. That’ll be the car shot.”
With a puzzled frown, Badger looked around at the empty studio. “But there’s no car here,” he said.
Sark rolled her eyes. “Duh. I’ll take the shots of you first, and then digitally I’ll paste in shots of the race car behind you. That way I can fudge a little. Put you in at one hunderd percent, maybe paste the car in at eighty.”
“Why?”
“So you’ll look bigger.” She peered at him through the lens. Assuming the eager-to-please expression of a Westminster show dog, Badger faced the camera with a pasted-on smile. Sark sighed and lowered the camera. “Lose the smile, sunshine,” she said. “You’re supposed to look tough, aren’t you?”
Badger nodded, relaxing his features into a solemn, slightly baffled expression.
“The light in his eyes is the sun shining through the back of his head,” muttered Sark, supplying the caption to the imaginary photo. This would be a perfect episode to include in her notes for the secret article. Height fraud in NASCAR. Or the art of illusion in sports photography. She would jot down a few particulars later, but now she had to get on with a more pressing assignment: making Badger Jenkins look imposing.
“You look about as scary as cottage cheese,” she told him. “Try again.”
As she knelt on the floor a few feet in front of him and lined up his image in the viewfinder, the transformation took place. Badger put on his dark sunglasses, sat down on a stack of tires, and assumed his characteristic pose-leaning forward slightly; legs spread wide apart; tapered, sinewy hands clasped at belt level; with an expression of stern intensity ennobling that chiseled, perfect face. He had the calm of one who knows he is the most dangerous thing around and the stillness of a coiled spring.
Sark blinked. Where the hell did he come from? The diffident and affable Badger Jenkins had vanished, and in his place was a warrior angel, beautiful and terrible to behold. He took your breath away. And he looked a foot taller than Badger really was.
“Da-amn,” she whispered, looking up over the camera, half expecting to see the real Badger standing off to the side of the room, but no, it was him sitting there on the stack of tires, like Hollywood’s idea of a combat general-handsome, strong, and damn near irresistible.
He had enough sense not to move or speak or break the pose. Without a word, Sark clicked the shutter, adjusted the angle, snapped again. Scarcely daring to breathe, she spent the whole roll on that one pose, at slightly varying heights, angles, distances, chasing the play of light across the planes of his face, and trying to imagine an expression in the blank stare behind those shaded eyes. After a few minutes she almost forgot who he was, or that he was an ordinary and pleasant young man who drove cars for a living. She usually spoke to her subjects as she photographed them, offering up encouraging pleasantries to make them hold the pose or to elicit a more confident expression, but this time she was silent. What could you possibly say to him?
At first she had considered telling him to alter the pose, thinking there was something improper in his spread-eagled stance, and resolving that if he insisted on flaunting his “package,” then at any rate she wouldn’t look. She looked.
Boy, it was hot in that room. Must be the studio lights, she thought, wiping the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand. Badger didn’t seem to be affected, though.
He tilted his head back. “Are we about done? They want me to practice a couple of laps.”
The spell was broken, or almost. Badger pulled off the sunglasses, waiting to see what else she wanted, and once again he was an ordinary guy, impatient to get back to work.
“Uh…I need to talk to you to get some material for the press release.” Sark’s voice sounded hoarse even to her. She took a deep breath and set the camera down on the floor. “Just a couple of questions…” But not the questions that had been uppermost in her mind, she thought.
Badger said, “Really? You want to talk to me for the press release?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Well, nobody ever has before. They just tell me to get lost, and then they write whatever they feel like saying.”
Sark frowned. “Well, how would they know what the facts were?”
“Facts?” said Badger. He shrugged. “One of ’em told me once that I was the blank screen that everybody ran their own movie on. It didn’t matter what I was really like. What does that mean?”
Sark thought it over. It wasn’t Badger people believed in. It was the guy she had seen in the camera lens. The one who didn’t exist. “Well,” she said. “I guess there are a lot of people out there who think you’re the guy they see in the photographs. They think you’re tall and wise and wonderful, and that you’d be the best friend in the world. Like a guardian angel, I suppose. If you ever called them, they’d buy a new answering machine tape and save the one with your voice on it forever. Maybe some of them imagine you telling the boss to get off their case, or showing up at their house for a backyard cookout so that the neighbors will fall dead from envy.”
He got the idea, so she didn’t say the rest of it. Women want you to beat up their abusive boyfriends, or take them away from a humdrum life, or just point to them in a hotel lobby and say, “You.” That’s all it would take. And some people would be happy just to shake your hand, and they’d treasure that memory forever.
Badger sighed. “They shouldn’t put me on a pedestal,” he said.
“You could use the extra height,” muttered Sark.
“I wish I was that guy. I wish I had the kind of power they think I have.”
“Maybe you don’t have to be, Badger. Maybe it’s enough that people have something to believe in. Anyhow, let’s do the best we can on this interview, so that we don’t disappoint them.” She motioned for him to sit down in the plastic chair near the work table.
“I’m not too good at quizzes,” said Badger. “What do you want to know?”
“Well, I suppose I can get all the basic stuff from NASCAR.com or by Googling you. Previous racing stats, for example.”
“I wouldn’t know them off the top of my head,” said Badger. “Fans often do. Amazing what they can reel off at the drop of a hat when I can’t even do it myself.”
Sark consulted her notes. “Height. Weight. I can fake-er-look those up, too. Marital status. Says here you’re married to…um…a Miss Georgia…Desiree…”
Badger shook his head. “Not anymore. Dessy was an ambitious girl. She was headed for the big time, and she decided I wasn’t it. She was right about that. She has her heart set on being a spokesmodel, or maybe a letter-turner on one of those daytime quiz shows. Too rich for my blood. So we sold the big house, and she took most of the money and moved to Florida. I wish her the best.” He brightened. “I’m okay, though. I kept my fishin’ shack on the lake. I like it there.”
Sark made a note: Dumped by Gold Digger. She gave him an encouraging smile. “Hobbies. Fishing?”
“Animal rescue,” said Badger. “I don’t have any formal training or nothing, but I just never could sta
nd to see anything suffer. When I was a kid my daddy hit a doe with his truck, and we found the fawn standing there by the side of the road, so I bundled it up in my coat, took it home, and bottle-fed it ’til it was big enough to be turned loose again. I guess that’s what got me started. And I had an owl that had got a wing shot off by some hunter who was either careless, drunk, or mean as hell. Kept him in the house.” He grinned. “Dessy wasn’t any too happy about that. You ever try to get owl shit out of a Persian rug?”
“No,” said Sark. She drew a line through Dumped by Gold Digger and wrote beside it Ideological Differences. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s get to the silly stuff. What’s your favorite song?”
“‘Georgia on My Mind’,” said Badger without a second’s hesitation.
“Oh. The Ray Charles version?”
“Who?”
A glimmer of suspicion flickered in Sark’s brain. “‘Georgia on My Mind’.” How do the words go again?”
Badger sighed. “I’m from Georgia, okay? That’s supposed to be my favorite song.”
“Whereas your actual favorite song is?”
He shrugged. “Can I say the National Anthem, then? When they sing it before the race, I swear I tear up every time.”
“Okay, forget music. Favorite food?”
Badger looked uneasy. “What am I supposed to say?”
Sark shuddered, considering the possibilities. God knows, she thought. You’re from the rural South. Aloud, she said, “Grits?”
“Well, not my favorite. But I do like ’em every now and again. One time in New York I ordered them, and they charged me fifteen dollars for them as a side dish. Called it polenta.”
Sark considered writing down “polenta,” but thought better of it. “Don’t you know what your favorite food is?” she asked.
“Yeah, but that’s not the point, is it? That’s one of those gimmick questions that’s supposed to tell fans what kind of guy you are. For your image. Like maybe if you’re from Wisconsin, you say cheese, or if you’re sponsored by a cereal company, you name the cereal. Or maybe if you want people to think you’re macho, you say buffalo in bourbon sauce.”
Once Around the Track Page 12
