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.
Chapter XI
Paycheck to Paycheck
April 1982
Three miles back on Bear Creek Road-just about the only flat, straight stretch in the whole county. At least one without oncoming cars to worry about. The perfect Thirteen-Twenty: Just over a quarter mile of straightaway, creek on one side, woods on the other; a fine and private place. It was late April, the first time since winter that the narrow road was dry, and by now most of the potholes would have been filled in with gravel by the farmer who lived at the end of the lane. Newly minted leaves ruffled in the night breeze, and moonlight silvered the tree branches, turning the dirt road into a white river shadowed by the blackness of Bear Creek rippling alongside it.
Harley Clay Moore had been the first to arrive that night. He had skipped baseball practice (which he wasn’t much good at anyway) to get home early and tinker with the engine, and now it was as ready as it would ever be. He had to leave before his dad got home, though. If the old man saw him working under the hood, he’d be bound to guess what was going on and then Harley wouldn’t have had a cat’s chance in hell of getting out that night. So he had taken a package of Twinkies for dinner and driven out to Bear Creek Road before it was even dark. He was too nervous to wait anywhere else, half afraid that if he delayed his arrival, he would chicken out and not show up at all. Taking advantage of the solitude before the others arrived, he had walked up and down the Thirteen-Twenty, the quarter-mile straightaway, checking for rough patches, noting where the edge of the road was clear of logs and boulders. In a drag race that lasted only a couple of heartbeats, there was no use trying to figure out the best place to make his move. There wasn’t time for strategy in a drag race. Later on, though, if he was good enough, there’d be real races when tactics did matter. Finally he might reach the big leagues of NASCAR: three-hour campaigns that played out like battles, where supplies and strategy counted for as much as skill and courage.
As a last resort for killing time, he’d brought his English book, more as a distraction than out of dedication. Harley was nobody’s idea of a scholar. He passed the time until sunset trying to finish the reading assignment in the gathering twilight, but he found that he was reading the same sentence over and over. Too keyed up to focus on a page full of long, peculiar words. Wann that aprille…Well, it was April, all right. That’s about all he could relate to in that moldy old story. He opened the glove compartment and took out a picture of his favorite NASCAR driver, Darrell Waltrip, last year’s champion. He had torn the photo out of the sports page of the Charlotte Observer and he stashed it in the car for luck, like a St. Christopher’s medal, but better.
He looked at his watch. Half an hour until the appointed time-still too early, but he’d have first choice of a starting position. Meanwhile, he would find ways to pass the time. Walk the course again. Maybe take another look at the engine
. His driver’s license was so new that the clothes he wore in the photo hadn’t even been twice through the wash yet, but that didn’t mean he was new to driving. He had been behind a steering wheel ever since his feet could touch the pedals. That was one of the advantages of living on a farm. There were plenty of places to drive without getting on a state road. But this was a far cry from mowing the hayfield with the tractor, and Daddy had never let him do much more than steer the race car out of the barn. He had spent most of his childhood washing wrenches and sweeping up the garage, waiting his turn in the driver’s seat, but his father seemed to think that sixteen was about half the age you ought to be before he’d trust you with his race car, which was ridiculous. Why, the old man hadn’t been much more than sixteen himself when he first started spending his weekends driving dirt track. He hadn’t cared what his parents thought about the matter, but nowadays he seemed to think that inflation applied to age as well as to money. So Harley burned with impatience, knowing that he’d be a better driver than the old man if only he had half a chance to prove it.
He knew the theory. He understood the moves, the tactics. He’d watched racing scenarios play out in everything from toy cars to local dirt tracks, to the occasional race on television-Formula One stuff, mostly, but some of the techniques were the same. And he listened to the NASCAR races on the radio. Sometimes he could see those races better in his head than he could see the ones broadcast on television. He argued about them with his friends, guys like Mike Gibbs, who was so car-crazed that he didn’t have car magazines on his bedside table, car magazines were his bedside table. And Connie Koeppen, another aspiring racer, who was a rabid fan of a surly young driver named Dale Earnhardt.
Connie had been teased mercilessly about his idol’s fall from grace in the past season, ’81. Earnhardt had started his career in a blaze of glory, being named Rookie of the Year and then winning the championship itself the next year, but in ’81 Earnhardt had not won a single race. Connie would argue that he would have won at Charlotte if his ignition hadn’t cut out, and he was looking like a contender in Atlanta, too, before engine failure took him out of the race.
Harley’s favorite was Darrell Waltrip, who had won the championship last year and now was driving for the legendary Junior Johnson. Waltrip was brash and confident, earning himself the nickname “Jaws,” but he had the skill to back up his bravado. Harley thought he wouldn’t care what people called him as long as they respected him-or, even better, envied him.
A race. Finally, after an apprenticeship that had seemed to last his whole life, he was going to see if he really could measure up. Tonight he would be driving for real. A challenge. A taunt really, made by a couple of the school’s older daredevils, ready to cut a new driver down to size.
Connie Koeppen and his buddy Lorne Lupton, a couple of car-crazed seniors, had heard about Harley’s souped-up Trans-Am, and they dared him to pit it against their machine. “Paycheck to paycheck,” Connie had said, thrusting his hatchet face close to Harley’s nose. This wasn’t strictly accurate, since Connie was a rich kid who had an allowance instead of a job, but Harley took his meaning and the challenge.
Koeppen and Lupton thought their joint effort was unbeatable, and they were itching to prove it. Ever since they had pooled their skills and their savings to put together the fastest car they could afford, they had been trying to test their creation against anybody else’s set of wheels, but since they preferred to race for cash instead of bragging rights, nobody wanted to take them on. Until Harley, who had more guts than sense. He knew they would be tough competition. Connie claimed that he had even driven a few dirt track races at the local speedway-without his parents’ knowledge, of course. Doctors’ kids weren’t supposed to be hanging out with the riffraff at the racetrack.
“Bear Creek Road tonight at seven,” Connie had said in the hall after algebra. “Put up or shut up.”
Midnight would have been better. More fitting somehow for such a momentous showdown, but, hey, it was a school night. Lupton and Koeppen might think they were kings of the road, but they had curfews, same as Harley did. So he would be racing against their best shot at a race car, just at dark, for a week’s salary, winner take all.
Harley couldn’t afford to lose. His wages from a weekend job at the sawmill didn’t amount to much, a little less than fifty dollars after they took the taxes out, but it kept his gas tank filled, and sometimes when Daddy ended up a little short from needing a new part for the race car or when he didn’t place in the money in the Saturday race, Harley’s check might mean meat instead of beans for supper that week or paying the overdue light bill. He supposed that he was a fool to risk that money on one minute of hell-bent driving up the darkness of Bear Creek Road, but Daddy could hardly object, could he? Well, he would object, of course, if he knew. He’d raise Cain if he ever found out, but Harley figured that racing was in his blood, so Daddy had nobody to blame but himself.
Racing. Pouring money down a gas tank. Wasn’t that what Daddy was doing at Hickory or Asheville or Wilkesboro most every weekend? It took a chunk of money to run a stock car, even if you did every lick of the mechanic work yourself. You still had to buy parts and gas and tires. Every week. You were lucky if a set of tires got you all the way through one race, which meant that for the next meet, you’d need enough cash to buy a whole new set. Whoever said polo was a rich man’s game ought to try fielding a stock car.
So between the parts and the entry fees and all, a good bit of Daddy’s factory salary went to feed his racing habit, and Harley had never begrudged him a cent of it, even when it meant going through the winter with holes in his shoes. Racing was important. He just wanted to be a part of it-not just cleaning up around the shop, but really in the middle of it, clashing fenders in a red-dirt arena in piedmont North Carolina. Daddy wasn’t too keen on sharing that part of the experience, though. As far as he was concerned, Harley could jockey the wrenches and leave the driving to the old man.
Being the race car driver’s apprentice was getting old now, though. At sixteen Harley thought it was time he found out if he had the knack for it. Even if he lost the race tonight, the run would be worth the money he’d lose just to find out if he could out-drag the brainchild of Lorne Lupton and Connie Koeppen. Maybe if he could hold his own out here, it would be time to ask Daddy if he could go along to the dirt track, too. Or figure out a way to get there on his own.
Lorne Lupton didn’t come from a family with money, so he couldn’t manage a car of his own, but Lorne was one of Nature’s born mechanics. He could probably soup up a lawn mower. Knew his way around an engine blindfolded. That’s where Connie came in. Constantine Koeppen-Connie for short-was no great shakes as a mechanic but he was a daredevil, mad for fast cars and the thrill of a race. His dad was a surgeon at the county hospital, which meant that he could afford the basics of a good ride. Money buys speed-it was the first article of faith in the racing bible.
For his sixteenth birthday, Connie’s dad had bought him a new red Camaro. Within three months he had blown up the Camaro’s engine drag racing, and his cutthroat driving had left the car with more dents than a golf ball, but instead of asking his dad to get him a new ride from the dealership, Connie had gone into partnership with Lorne, who told him what he needed to make the car a contender, and what all of it would cost. After Connie ponied up the repair money, Lorne went to work, replacing the original engine with a 454 out of a wrecked ’70 Impala wagon they’d found at the local junkyard. That heart transplant from seventies’ iron made the Camaro faster than the Chevrolet people had intended for a street rod to go.
Their partnership had made for one formidable opponent. Lorne was the mechanic. Connie Koeppen did the driving. Besides his lust for speed, Connie had a mean streak that would do justice to a tusk hog, coupled with a complete absence of fear, which probably explained his devotion to Dale Earnhardt. Like Dale, Connie Koeppen would do flat-out anything to keep from coming in second. The Camaro had probably cost more than
Harley made in a year, between the purchase price and the cost of the parts that Lorne used to soup it up, but Connie didn’t seem to care if he wrecked it or not. He figured that as long as he was careful not to get any speeding tickets, he could always get his dad to finance a replacement. Besides, Connie Koeppen was crazy. Give him an inch, and he’d put you into the river. If you found yourself on a narrow lane, barely wide enough to hold two cars abreast, and if Connie Koeppen was driving the other car, he was bound to take his half of the road right out of the middle-even if he had to bash in his own car in the process-and leave you scrambling along on what was left.
Lorne, a quiet, methodical soul who probably pretended he was the engineer on the Starship Enterprise, had given the Camaro’s engine a high-tech advantage, and Connie had the killer instinct to make the most of it. Harley wasn’t sure what his own special gift was. Desperation, maybe. Nobody could have wanted to win more than he did.
It had taken Harley more than a year of sawmill wages and odd jobs to scrape up enough cash to make his own shopping trip to the junkyard. Before he went, he’d asked for advice from one of his dad’s racing friends, a hurried conversation at the track while his dad was making a test run. The old fellow, a jackleg mechanic, had scribbled a wish list on the back of his pay envelope. After a few weeks of scratching around Harley had managed to locate most of the items he’d recommended.
First, Harley had used his savings and his little bit of Christmas money to buy an old Trans-Am. He’d paid a local farmer to tow the heap to his tobacco barn, where Harley had proceeded to rip out the motor, which he swapped back to the scrap yard for more small parts. In place of the regulation motor, he had installed the 455 out of a wrecked ’70 Bonneville. Then he jazzed it up with a set of Holly four-barrels on an Edelbrock manifold so fine that the result was an uber-motor that could practically pass you in neutral. The old Pontiac was a lot faster than it looked, that was certain.
St. Dale Page 15
