St. Dale

by Sharyn McCrumb

  Ireland. Arlene couldn’t even recognize their own home some of the time. He’d explained to Jean that going to a foreign country would be a little more difficult than he could manage. Suppose Arlene became ill while they were abroad. Would they be able to get medical treatment? He didn’t want to risk it.

  “Or you could come out and see us,” Jean had said. “It’s lovely here in Seattle in August.”

  He thought, but did not say, that Jean was unprepared for a visit from them, given her roseate picture of her mother. Let her keep her memories intact, at least. Or perhaps he was being selfish. Visiting grown children was not the holiday he had in mind. He loved his daughter, but he wasn’t altogether sure that he liked her anymore. These days she seemed to talk like one of those upscale lifestyle magazines. When she and her husband were building their house, it seemed like every other sentence out of her mouth was our architect says this and our architect says that, as if he were a priest of Yuppiedom issuing commandments.

  Besides, seeing their little Jean, now an exercise-trim matron with reading glasses perpetually perched on top of her head, would only remind him how old they were and how little time was left. He wanted to escape the narrowing present. To go back to a happier time.

  “But-a Dale Earnhardt tour, Dad?” Jean had said in tones of icy condescension. “I thought racing was your thing. Did mother even care about auto racing?” Jean wasn’t worried about her mother’s interests. She never could see the world from any point of view except her own, and now she was thinking How will this affect me? He suspected that she was a little embarrassed by her parents’ interest in motor sports. Jean had been on the West Coast nearly a decade now, and she had managed to get rid of any lingering trace of a Southern accent. He imagined her making slighting references to her friends about her down-home parents, but he doubted that she would mention the NASCAR tour to anyone she knew. She would think that she could never live that down. Useless for him to point out that there are more NASCAR drivers from California than from anywhere else. He had ignored Jean’s self-serving concern for her mother’s interests, and had promised to send her a copy of the itinerary with the telephone numbers of the hotels in case she needed to reach them. That would satisfy Jean’s sense of duty. She wouldn’t call, but she’d be able to tell herself that she was “on top of things,” one of her pet phrases. Jim resolved to send her a postcard of a speedway or a stock car from somewhere along the way, just for the pleasure it would afford him to picture her dismay at receiving it.

  Jim looked again at Arlene. Soon it would be time to wake her up and find out if this would be a good day or a bad day. The people on the tour had been nice about it, though. He was glad of that. The other ladies all took turns making sure that Arlene did all right at the rest areas, and they’d talk to her over meals-better still, they listened, no matter how much she rambled or got tangled up trying to tell them something. He was glad that they’d come. Whether she remembered or not, Arlene had come to say good-bye to Dale, but he had come to say good-bye to Arlene.

  “So,” said Harley, “next stop Martinsville, right?”

  Ratty nodded. “I-81 east to Roanoke and then south on 220. All four-lane. With this bus, I’d say maybe five hours, not counting lunch.”

  “Let’s eat fast food for lunch along the way,” said Harley. “For dinner we can go to Clarence’s Steak House near the Speedway. It’s a landmark. All the drivers used to eat there, and it can’t be too far from where we’re staying. Where are we staying, by the way?’

  “Days Inn on 220, a mile or two from the track,” said Ratty. “Since we’ve got the place to ourselves, there’s no problem. We can eat anywhere you want.”

  “Good,” said Harley. “This will be an easy day. We ought to be done by four o’clock.”

  “Enjoy it while you can,” said Ratty. “ ’Cause once we get south of Charlotte, there’s so many miles between tracks that you’ll get saddle sores from riding on this bus two to three hundred miles a day.”

  “I know,” said Harley. “Atlanta to Daytona takes forever.”

  Too drowsy to bother with talking or even to play his Game Boy, Matthew Hinshaw pressed his cheek against the cool glass of the window to watch the gray pavement of the Interstate slide past. The bus was traveling east on a broad highway called I-81, and he thought they might already have crossed into Virginia, but he wasn’t sure. He might have closed his eyes for a few moments and missed the road sign. The land looked the same as it had in Tennessee-a wide green valley bordered on either side by darker green mountains. He had never been in either state before, and he had hoped for some dramatic changes in the scenery to mark the boundary. The silver expanse of a tractor trailer pulled alongside the bus for a moment, obscuring his view, and for an instant he thought it was his father’s rig keeping pace with their journey, and that any moment now the bus would pull level with the cab of the truck and he would find himself looking into his father’s dead eyes.

  He blinked a few times to clear the smoke from his thoughts, careful not to let any tears fall on his cheeks. All he had to do was turn around and start talking to Mr. Knight or to any of the other passengers, and the spell would be broken, but he remembered something the counselors had said in one of their sessions: that he would not be able to move on until he faced what was bothering him. So he held his peace.

  Maybe his father had driven this highway before, but he wasn’t here now. His 18-wheeler, its cab so high that Matthew had to stand on a stool to get in, had ended up on I-93 north of Concord, like a giant metal frog in a puddle of oil and broken glass. The image was clear in his mind, but he realized now that he probably had never seen it. In the hospital, they had told him over and over that he had been unconscious when the rescue squad pulled him out through the window of the cab. The doctors thought that Matthew would stop remembering it if they could convince him that he had not actually seen it, but it hadn’t worked that way. His imagination, fed on a lifetime of TV car chases and movie collisions, was more than equal to the task of fashioning an image of the wreck. He dreamed it every night for weeks after the accident, but the nurses never knew it, because he neither screamed nor cried when the images jolted him awake.

  His father was dead. Okay. And his mother-might as well be. She wasn’t going to wake up. They hadn’t wanted to tell him that for a long time, but finally they took him to see her, and a tall man in a white coat had explained it all very carefully. The man kept looking around nervously, as if he wanted somebody to come quickly in case Matthew started to scream, but he hadn’t. The first time he saw his mother lying in that hospital bed, white and shrunken amidst all the tubes, he had been so numb that he couldn’t have made a noise if they’d asked him to.

  He just kept staring at the wax doll that had been his mother, while the man in the white coat showed him a chart and explained that his mother wasn’t going to die, but that she wasn’t going to wake up, either.

  “But who’s going to stay with me?” he had finally asked.

  At that, the hospital people had brightened as if he’d just answered a particularly hard question. You tell us, they’d more or less said. Who else have you got?

  He had explained to them that he didn’t even belong in New Hampshire. Not really. His dad was a long-haul trucker, so he hadn’t been around much, but this one time he had got some days off in July, and he’d been taking Matthew and his mom to the New Hampshire Speedway to see the July race. They hadn’t made it, though. They were riding over from upstate New York (As near as dammit to Canada, his dad always said), and Matthew had been dozing off in the back of the cab, so he couldn’t say for sure what had happened on I-93. Somebody said that maybe a car had tried to pass and cut it too close, and that Matthew’s dad turned the truck over trying to avoid a wreck. By the time Matthew was aware again, he was in an ambulance, and a guy was asking him if he was all right, and trying to make him hold a teddy bear. It wasn’t his, though. Later he’d learned that cops keep toy bears in their patr
ol cars, in case they meet any little kid whose life has just gone down the tubes, which his certainly had.

  And there wasn’t anybody else. Dad was an orphan, and his mother’s mother had just died of a heart attack the winter before. Maybe there were distant relatives, but nobody he knew. Nobody who wanted him.

  They explained that New Hampshire would take care of him, since the wreck happened there. So he was never going to get to go home, back to his school and his friends. His dad had turned the stupid truck over-maybe he had been arguing with Mom and not watching the road. That wouldn’t be anything new. It was all his dad’s fault for having the wreck, but Matthew and his mom were the ones being punished for it. She wasn’t going to see or hear anything ever again, and Matthew was now a prisoner in New Hampshire.

  It turns out that they didn’t have orphanages anymore. Not like the kind you see in old movies around Christmastime. Nowadays, kids without parents went to group homes for a few months while the state scurried around trying to find them a new set of parents. He didn’t have any say in the matter. Whoever wanted him could have him-like the dog pound, he thought.

  They kept him for a couple of weeks in the hospital, because he’d had some broken bones and various injuries from the wreck. Later, he had to spend a couple of hours a week talking to a marshmallow of a woman who was forever dabbing at her own moist nose with the tissues meant for her patients. “How does that make you feel?” she would ask him, leaning toward him until her black plastic glasses almost touched his nose.

  He didn’t feel anything, but he knew that was the wrong answer. If he said that, he might have to come even more times a week to see the marshmallow woman. He tried to work out what she wanted him to say. “Sad,” he said at last. “I feel sad.”

  Most of the time he sat through the counseling sessions playing Eminem in his head. “Cleaning Out My Closet.” That said it all. Matthew thought they should have played that at his father’s funeral. Every time he thought he might cry in counseling, he’d crank up Eminem’s voice in his mind until the numbness came back. The marshmallow woman didn’t try too hard to get him to open up, though. It hadn’t taken him long to figure out that in Child Services, if you were quiet and did what they told you to, they forgot about you. There were too many kids with problems on the outside; the kids with problems on the inside were easy to overlook.

  I feel sad.

  His bruises from the accident had nearly faded away before he figured out what it was he really did feel, which was that “I feel sad” had been the truth, but the rest of the sentence would be, “…sad that Dad wasn’t alone in the truck when he wrecked it, but not sad that he’s dead, because he was never around much anyhow.”

  He had breezed in from one of his long hauls with speedway tickets, and announced that they were going to have a family outing. He had a short run in the truck that weekend in the vicinity of Concord, so they’d ride along with him, and go on to the track after he made the delivery. Matthew’s mother had been doubtful about the idea. Would he get into trouble taking them along as passengers on his run? Matthew knew that she’d have been just as happy to watch the race on television. She didn’t like the noise and the crowds of the speedway itself, and she was always worried that things cost too much. But she had allowed herself to be persuaded to go along. After all, Matthew didn’t get to spend a lot of time with his dad, and both of them were so excited at the prospect of going. They never made it to the race, though. The wreck happened on the Interstate just a few miles from Loudon. The last lap, Matthew thought to himself. Just like Earnhardt-almost home free, but not quite. He had never cried for his father, but sometimes even now he would bury his face in the fur of the teddy bear that the highway patrolman had brought him in the hospital, and he would cry for Dale.

  The Martinsville Speedway was almost within sight of Highway 220, less than a minute’s diversion on a sunny weekday afternoon with no Winston Cup race scheduled until October, but try it on a race day, and you’d better have a full tank of gas to compensate for the time you’d spend idling in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

  They had stopped for lunch a few miles up the road at the McDonald’s in the village of Rocky Mount. To the pilgrims’ great delight, the place was decorated with a NASCAR theme. Between bites of French fries they studied the stock car wallpaper and took turns identifying the cars featured in the design. Earnhardt was there, of course, in the black number 3. Harley was summoned to identify the red and yellow number 17 car with the Tide detergent logo. Darrell Waltrip, of course, from days gone by.

  “That bronze-looking job-the number 6-that’s Mark Martin. The Viagra car,” said Ray Reeve.

  Jesse Franklin chuckled. “That Viagra car runs great all right, but they have trouble keeping the hood down.”

  “That last car, the bright yellow number 4 car. I believe that’s Ernie Irvan,” said Jim Powell. “His dad builds big old monster toolboxes for race teams. Nice folks.”

  The identification complete, they took turns posing for group snapshots with the wallpaper as a backdrop, and finally Ratty had to announce that they were welcome to stay as long as they liked, but he and the bus would be departing in five minutes.

  “This is both the oldest and the smallest of the tracks in the NASCAR Winston Cup circuit,” said Harley, a few miles down the road. “In fact, Martinsville is even older than NASCAR. It was founded by Mr. Clay Earles back in 1947. The track is a point-five-two-six oval-but the banking isn’t steep like Bristol. The odd thing about this track is the paving.”

  “Two drag strips connected by U-turns!” said Jim Powell. “We love this track. Short track racing is the best!”

  “I guess I ought to translate Mr. Powell’s comment,” said Harley. “What he means is that the track here at Martinsville is paved with asphalt on the straightaways and concrete in the turns. It makes for a tricky racing surface-takes some getting used to. Power steering was first used in Winston Cup racing here in Martinsville in 1981. Anybody know who the driver was?”

  Obviously they didn’t, because they guessed Petty, Waltrip, Yarborough, Allison, and Earnhardt.

  “Geoff Bodine,” said Harley.

  “That some pretty deep trivia, Harley,” said Justine. “Can’t you ask us something easier?”

  “Okay. Who holds the record for the most wins at Martinsville?”

  “Earnhardt!” cried a chorus of voices.

  “Richard Petty,” said Sarah Nash.

  Harley nodded. “How’d you know?” he asked her.

  “Stands to reason,” she said. “Petty has more wins overall.”

  “Well, you’re right. It was indeed King Richard. We’ll be dropping in on him tomorrow morning, in a manner of speaking.”

  The Martinsville Speedway was not perched on the summit of a hill, posing, like the Bristol Motor Speedway. In Martinsville, unless you knew to slow down on the four-lane and look to the south, you might only catch sight of the structure as you were driving past, too late to make the turn. Ratty, who had been well-briefed on the routes for his driving assignment, was going slow enough to make the turn, so that the passengers first saw the track as a backdrop for a neighborhood of small, neat brick homes.

  “It must be a nightmare to live there on race weekends,” said Bekasu with a little shudder.

  “Don’t you believe it,” Jesse Franklin called out. “Those folks can make good money renting out parking spots!”

  “There’s a railroad track that runs right behind the Speedway,” said Harley. “Sometimes during a race you can watch the train go by.”

  “It must seem strange to you to see all these parking lots so empty,” said Cayle.

  “Well, we’d come for practice runs a few days before the race,” said Harley. “The place wasn’t always crowded then, but, yeah, it does look unnaturally peaceful right now.”

  “That’s why it’s going to take us two minutes to get there instead of two hours,” said Ratty without turning around.

  Justine waved a
heavily braceleted arm. “Hey, Harley! I got another trivia question for y’all!”

  “Fire away, Justine,” he said, deciding that with two minutes until arrival he could afford to be generous.

  “Okay, everybody. What piece of furniture do Richard Petty, Dale Earnhardt, Darrell Waltrip, and Bobby Allison all definitely own?”

  Jim Powell laughed. “Well, I’m sure they all own a sofa, a bed, a table-but I believe the answer you’re looking for, Justine, is a grandfather clock. Right?”

  “Trick question,” said Harley to a collection of bewildered expressions. “When you win the race at Martinsville, they don’t give you a trophy. They give you a grandfather clock, which seems fitting since it’s the oldest NASCAR track, but it’s a tough one.”

  Ratty parked the bus next to the little house that served as the offices for the Speedway, and Harley led the Number Three Pilgrims out into the parking lot. He motioned for them to crowd around, so that he could speak his piece before they wandered off to use up more rolls of film.

  “I have a favorite story about this track,” said Harley. “It dates from the time when I was racing. I’ll bet the North Carolinians in the group remember Hurricane Hugo.” He saw a few solemn nods-Sarah Nash, Jim Powell, Bekasu and Cayle. “It was the fall of 1989. Every twenty years or so, it seems like North Carolina gets broadsided by a monster hurricane. My folks used to talk about Hurricane Hazel in the early fifties, and then there was Camille. The one I remember best is Hurricane Hugo. It cut inland through the piedmont North Carolina, and even made it up into the Virginia Blue Ridge, ripping out oak trees as if they were staples. It finally blew itself out and ended up a soggy tropical storm, but it left millions of dollars’ worth of damage in its wake. And the bad weather played havoc with everybody’s travel schedules.

  “Well, the next race after the hurricane was here in Martinsville. In fact, the day of the qualifying in Martinsville, the Charlotte area, where a lot of the teams and drivers are based, was digging out from under all the damage left by Hugo. A lot of people assumed that Martinsville would postpone the qualifying trials on account of the hurricane, but they didn’t. By the time Sunday rolled around for the race itself, the weather would be sunny and warm as if nothing had ever happened, but the drivers had to be here well before then, for the qualifying.