St. Dale

by Sharyn McCrumb

  “Well, because that was the number painted on the top of his race car.”

  “No,” said Harley. “I meant why should I explain that? Will there be people from other planets coming along on this tour?”

  “Ah-hah. Most amusing,” said Mr. Bailey. “And one last thing-for the duration of the tour you must say and think that Dale Earnhardt was the greatest driver who ever lived.”

  “Oh, sweet Nelly.”

  So Harley Clay Moore had taken the job. What choice did he have, really? What choice would any of them have had? Dale Earnhardt with his ninth-grade education had worked in the mills in the lean years and back in Alabama Neil Bonnett had been a pipe fitter. Their educations mostly took place out of school, hanging out in local garages or watching their fathers tinker with stock cars. Cars were what mattered; everything else was a distraction.

  He sat on the sagging bed in the cheapest motel room he could find and watched the SPEED channel on the television, but it was showing drag racing. Nobody he knew. The brown polyester bedspread was patterned with stains and cigarette burns. He’d lived better than this once, but those days were getting more distant all the time and now he was used to rundown places like this. Why spend good beer money on fancy digs?

  All Harley had ever wanted to do was race. The new face of NASCAR-the sponsors, the autographs, the hat and tee shirt sales were all necessary evils-the cost of the ride. Money buys speed, and the only way to get enough money to race these days was to cozy up to the national sponsors. Forget swearing, or chewing, or fighting off-track. Hell, you even had to knock the corners off your accent these days, because NASCAR was national now, and vanilla was the flavor of the month-every month.

  He had mugged it up in Bailey’s office because showing your desperation never gets you anywhere, but he couldn’t fool himself. He had to find a way back in.

  Chapter III

  Tri-Cities

  “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 b
unch 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 r
ace 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.”