St. Dale

by Sharyn McCrumb

  “Dale Earnhardt’s farm had been hit hard by Hugo and he wanted to be on hand to supervise the cleanup. His people called the Speedway up here and said that Dale would be able to come up for the race, but that he couldn’t make it to Martinsville to qualify. Dale was driving a Chevy Lumina back in ’89, and the crew could get the car there, no problem. But not the driver.”

  “Can you have pinch hitters in racing?” asked Terence.

  “Sure, you can,” said Justine. “Besides, it was Dale. You think the Speedway would let a hurricane cost them a chance to have him in the race?”

  “It’s legal to have someone else qualify for you,” said Harley, sidestepping the rest of Justine’s remark. “If you can let go of being a control freak long enough to accept whatever spot the assigned driver manages to get for you, you can use a substitute. The problem that time was finding somebody capable of doing the qualifying who would be able to make it to Martinsville in time. They got Jimmy Hensley, a Grand National driver, who lives up here near the Speedway, and who knew the track as well as anybody. So when Richard Childress calls and asks him to drive Earnhardt’s Chevy in qualifying, Hensley is ready, willing, and able.”

  “How did it turn out?” asked Ratty.

  Harley smiled. “Hensley put Dale’s car in the pole position,” he said. “He topped out at 91.9 miles an hour. How about that? The poor guy ran the fastest time in qualifying and then he personally has to sit out the race. Has to give the car back to its rightful driver. Sounds like my luck.”

  “So did Earnhardt win the race?”

  “Nope,” said Harley. “He had a good shot at it, of course, starting on the pole. That was important, because on a short track like this one, there’s not a lot of room to pass, so you might not have much of a chance to make your way up to the front of the pack during the race. But, no, Earnhardt didn’t win. Not even his luck was that good. The car had an off day-I don’t remember what the problem was, if I ever knew. Anyhow, it was all Dale could do to keep up with Darrell Waltrip and Rusty Wallace. On the final laps, Wallace was in the lead and Dale was trying to get around him, which at a little track like this one means there’s going to be some bashing and banging in the bargain. ‘Rubbin’ is racin’,’ he always said.

  “Well, Earnhardt and Wallace, concentrating on this high speed duel of theirs, started drifting high toward the wall on Turn Two. Darrell Waltrip, who was running right behind them, figured that was his chance. All he had to do was snake past the two of them on the inside while they were concentrating on each other, and then hope that his Chevy had enough power to slip by them before they slid back down in his path. Waltrip said later he figured when he made his move that he’d have either a heck of a pass or a heck of a mess.”

  “And Waltrip won?” asked Cayle.

  “He sure did,” said Harley. “The big surprise is that Rusty came in fourth and Dale ninth. Their duel hadn’t done either one of them any good. They were really contending for points toward winning the championship that year, so that last-ditch battle really cost them.”

  “Be careful what you wish for,” said Cayle.

  “What do you mean?” asked Bill from across the aisle.

  “Well, I was thinking that maybe Rusty wished to keep Earnhardt from getting past him, thinking that would be synonymous with winning the race, but it wasn’t.”

  “I did that once,” said Bill.

  She looked at him as if to say Did what? But this wasn’t the time to talk about it.

  “Where should we leave the wreath?”

  “The Infield Gate,” said Harley. “It leads directly onto the track. But Ratty will need some time to get the wreath out of the luggage compartment, so let’s get the feel of the place first. I think it would be all right if we went in and walked around it. You get a different perspective on the race from the track level than you do from watching it on television, or even sitting in the stands. Come on-you’ll see what I mean.”

  “Those front row seats are really close,” said Karen. “If you were going 60 miles an hour coming out of a turn, it would look like you were going to plow straight into the seats. Can the drivers actually see the spectators at that speed?”

  “Oh, they can,” said Harley. “If somebody is cheering you on or giving you the finger every time you loop past his seat, it can really affect your mood. Tony Stewart swears he won a race here one time just to spite a guy on the front row who pissed him off.”

  “This looks very different from Bristol,” said Bekasu.

  “Drives different, too,” said Harley.

  When they got back to the Infield Gate, Ratty was waiting for them, dwarfed by a giant horseshoe of yellow silk roses. The black satin ribbon stretched across it said “In Memory of The Intimidator” in white stick-on letters.

  “Photo opportunity,” said Bekasu without noticeable enthusiasm.

  “We ought to take pictures of the laying of the wreath as well,” said Cayle. “Who’s going to do the honors this time?”

  Jesse Franklin stepped forward with his customary cherubic smile. “Well, this might be a good time,” he said. “I don’t want to have a lot of hard acts to follow in the eloquence department. Ray, what do you say we team up on this?”

  The older man’s scowl did not waver, but he said, “Suits me,” as he took the wreath from Ratty. He knelt down and leaned the wreath against the metal gate. “Do I say something now?” he asked. “Okay. Well…I hereby lay this wreath to honor the memory of the greatest driver NASCAR ever had. Dale Earnhardt, the Intimidator. Gone but not forgotten.”

  “Not all that gone,” muttered Justine, who was immediately shushed by her sister.

  “Racing’s not the same without you, Dale. Back in Nebraska, I plowed my alfalfa field with a giant number 3 last season. That was my farewell to you. I still root for the Big Red in football, but I just don’t give a damn who wins in NASCAR anymore,” Ray Reeve went on. “I’m done. Your turn, Jesse.”

  Jesse Franklin spent a few moments looking out at the bare track, the rows of empty bleachers, and then down at the horseshoe of yellow roses. He summoned a tremulous smile. “I’ve come a long way to see these places,” he said. “Saw him race one time at our speedway in Michigan. It was the 1999 IROC. The time he raced against Dale Junior, the two of them beating and banging their way toward the finish line, and then Dale edging past his boy at the end by a whisker. Oh, that was a heart-stopper, that race.

  “But you know, I thought about him more during the week than I did on race days. I work for the county, you know. Auditor. That may sound pretty impressive if you don’t know any better, but I’ll tell you it can be frustrating as all get-out sometimes. Local politics: being nice to idiots who hold a higher job rank than you do. You don’t know how many times I’ve watched the qualifying races and wished we could do that in real life: reshuffle everybody’s ranking every single week. But, no! My supervisor is always my supervisor-he outranks me every darned week, and I have to smile when he yells, and laugh when he calls me Doofus, and just take everything he dishes out. You may think they can’t fire a government employee, but there’s ways to get it done. Layoffs. Reassignment. Job restructuring. Oh, they can do anything they want, and you could take them to court, but you’d never prove it. And I’m not too many years from retirement-too old to start over, too young to quit working. I need this job, and the pension that comes with it. So I’m determined to be agreeable if it kills me, and I put up with whatever those fool bureaucrats dish out.

  “But, you know, Dale didn’t have to do that. When he raced he was in that car all by himself-no supervisor, no coordinator, no committees. And if somebody was going too slow, or got in his way-bam! He just tapped them aside and kept on going. Lord, it was better than tranquilizers, watching him race. I just wish you could be like that in real life. Do it your way, and tell people to like it or lump it. Thump them if they won’t step aside. And that was his real life. I don’t suppose I could be like that, even on the track and certainl
y not in the courthouse, but, oh, my! It did my heart good just to watch him work.”

  “Amen,” said Ray Reeve.

  After a few moments of uncomfortable silence, which Harley feared would be broken by a disapproving Rev. Knight, Ratty Laine said, “Well, it’s hot enough out here to poach golf balls. Why don’t you hit the souvenir shop for your Martinsville pins, and then we’ll get back into the air-conditioned bus. We’re putting up in the Days Inn down the road tonight.”

  The awkwardness was broken, and the group surged back toward the parking lot, all talking at once. Bill Knight caught up with Harley. “What an odd speech,” he murmured. “Were you surprised?”

  Harley shook his head. “That old boy is practically a poster child of an Earnhardt fan. He was loved by the roughnecks, people who have trouble with authority, or else folks who were slumming.” He nodded toward Terence as he said that last word.

  Chapter XIII

  The Garage Mahal

  The Richard Petty Museum and DEI

  “North Carolina loved Dale Earnhardt so much they even named a county after him.” Harley Claymore had been saving up this joke for more than three hundred miles. “And here we are-in Our Dale County.”

  The sign at the side of the highway welcomed travelers to Iredell County, but given Harley’s accent, there was a good chance he’d have pronounced it “our dale” even if it wasn’t a play on words. Bekasu looked up sharply, and Harley could see her gearing up to explain to her fellow passengers that, in fact, the county had been named after some prominent North Carolina family in colonial times, but Justine must have also anticipated that speech, because she elbowed her sister in the ribs, all the while smiling sweet encouragement for Harley to go on.

  “It’s odd, isn’t it, that two of the most legendary drivers in motor sports are commemorated less than forty miles apart? We visited Richard Petty’s museum this morning in Randleman, and now we’re headed southwest to Mooresville, headquarters of DEI, and shrine to the man himself. Anybody know what they call Earnhardt’s building?”

  In a burble of laughter, Jesse Franklin called out-“The Garage Mahal!”-but most of the other passengers had said it softly in unison with him.

  “Why do they call it that?” asked Bill Knight, whose voice had been conspicuously absent in the reply.

  Harley sighed. “Wait’ll you see it.”

  After a pancake breakfast that morning in Martinsville, Virginia, they had set off, taking highway 220 past Greensboro, and into the heart of Carolina racing country. As they’d headed south toward the North Carolina border, the mountains fell away behind them, dwindling to foothills, and finally to the rolling country of the North Carolina piedmont with its red clay and pine forests. This was the land of textile mills and furniture factories, of tobacco fields and hog farms-and race tracks. Before Bill France had organized the informal beach races of Daytona into an empire back in the forties, North Carolina had been the home of fast cars and daredevil drivers. But at the very beginning, it wasn’t a sport. It was a living.

  Up on the mountain farms that straddled the high peaks of the Smokies west of Morganton, economic necessity coupled with inclination inspired the making of moonshine. The tradition and the recipes for whiskey-making had come over from Scotland and Ireland in the eighteenth century with the settlers who homesteaded Carolina’s wild mountain region. In the twentieth century, the pioneers’ descendants found themselves on the losing end of an agricultural equation, in which steep mountain land couldn’t produce enough crops to support the family farm-at least the crops in their traditional form weren’t profitable. But if you took a few acres of corn, dirt cheap by the bushel, and distilled it through copper tubing, turning it into high-proof whiskey sold by the gallon, then the corn would yield the farmer a living wage. Such subsistence innovation was illegal, of course. The country had passed a whiskey tax in 1792, and bootleggers, who didn’t feel like letting the government siphon off their profits, had been dodging the law ever since. Faced with a choice between accepting charity in order to survive and breaking the federal tax law to take care of themselves, they chose the latter without a qualm.

  Fast driving came into the picture when it became necessary to get mountain-made moonshine to the big city markets in the Carolina piedmont-to Charlotte, Raleigh, Fayetteville, Durham-without getting stopped by the law and having the cargo confiscated. Those routes and their east Tennessee counterparts were the original Thunder Road, and a generation of drivers in the early days got their start on back country roads instead of at race tracks, when outrunning another car meant more than just a trophy and a kiss from a beauty queen: it meant food on the table, and not going to jail.

  By the time Richard Petty took the wheel in the late fifties, those days were over, but the love of fast driving in a motorized battle of wits had seized the Tarheel imagination, and dirt tracks were built to cater to that obsession: Rockingham, Wilkesboro, Hickory, Asheville. Only Rockingham retained its place on the NASCAR circuit these days, but all those tracks loomed large in the history of Carolina motor sports.

  There wasn’t time to crisscross the piedmont to visit all those legendary tracks, so as far as the tour was concerned the Monday afternoon trip to Rockingham would have to represent all the early days of the sport. First, though, the bus would stop in Randleman and Mooresville so that the group could pay its respects to the only two seven-time champions in the history of the sport: both sons of the North Carolina piedmont.

  As the bus rolled down the highway from Martinsville, Harley consulted his notes while most of the passengers read or dozed, sleeping off the effects of the pancake breakfast.

  “Two seven-time champions-both Tarheels,” he said into the microphone. “Petty and Earnhardt. They’re alike in a lot of ways, and totally different in almost as many others. So let’s compare these two NASCAR legends. First of all they were both sons of well-known race car drivers on the circuit-that would be Lee Petty and Ralph Earnhardt. But Richard Petty won 200 races in his career, while Dale only won a total of 76.”

  “Apples and oranges,” said Sarah Nash, looking up from her newspaper. “They raced in different eras. Things were a lot more competitive by the time Earnhardt came along-and the NASCAR rules on modifications were stricter, too.”

  “No argument there,” said Harley. “I’m just spouting numbers, is all.”

  Karen McKee sighed and leaned back in her seat with her eyes closed, but she wasn’t asleep. The wedding had gone off as planned-at least as Shane had planned-and now that the milestone was passed, she had an empty feeling as if someone had forgotten to write The End across the sky. Mrs. Shane McKee. That phrase, which had seemed so complete in itself in all the months leading up to the ceremony, was unfailingly followed by “Now what?” in the unending conversation she had with herself inside her head.

  Because there would have to be a Now What. Maybe in Karen’s grandmother’s time, a woman could get married and that was it-a permanent job with long hours and no pay, maybe, but still an identity and a profession entirely unto itself. But those days were past praying for, and even if you did marry somebody who could afford to support you (which she hadn’t), there was no guarantee that you’d stay married to him forever, so you’d better not risk your future on his account. Karen had derailed that topic of conversation every time her mother or one of the Friends of the Goddess had tried to bring it up, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t heard them.

  Shane had his headphones on, listening to his new Linkin Park CD-she made a mental note to get more batteries out of her suitcase when they stopped for the night. First wifely duty: Keeper of the Batteries. Karen wasn’t sleepy, and she’d finished the magazine Cayle had passed on to her. Across the aisle, Terence Palmer was also awake and restless. Karen watched him for a few minutes. She’d never seen anybody as young as he was who actually looked comfortable in a necktie. He looked like he forgot he had it on, while Shane, who could seldom be persuaded to wear one, even for church, would pull c
onstantly at his collar, wriggling like a chained-up dog. “He looks like you had to throw him on his back to get his shoes on,” one of the Friends of the Goddess had remarked once, but she hadn’t said it to be mean. The Friends were all in favor of flouting conventional social customs.

  There was no use trying to get Shane to look like a preppy, though, because even if you got him in a necktie and a tailored suit, Shane would still lack that carved-in-marble look that Terence Palmer was born with: a small, straight nose and light brown hair like a cap of loose curls that made you think that’s what Michelangelo had been trying to depict when he carved the head of David. Karen thought he put her in mind of that poem she’d read in senior English, the one about Richard Cory: “He glittered when he walked.”

  She felt shy around him, and she realized that she had been carefully avoiding him, sitting at a different table at each meal stop, and keeping her distance when they had walked around the track at Martinsville. She told herself that she was being overly sensitive. It was a NASCAR tour, for heaven’s sake-if Terence Palmer was such a prince, what was he doing here?

  She was still looking at him, thinking all this, when he turned back from the monotonous sweep of pines, and met her gaze. Flustered, she said the first thing that came to mind.

  “I bet Dale Earnhardt himself would be surprised to see you on this bus.”

  He looked puzzled for a moment, maybe trying to decide if she’d meant to be insulting, but then he said, “I don’t believe he would have been surprised. Not by the end of his career, anyhow.”