St. Dale

by Sharyn McCrumb

  Chapter XV

  The Pass in the Grass

  Lowes Motor Speedway Concord, NC

  Harley Claymore looked at his watch. Eight forty-five. So far, so good, in terms of the timing for the tour. Harley had been worried about the distances and times allotted between destinations. He knew that Bailey Travel had never done this itinerary before and, as a novice in the guiding business, he had no faith in his own ability to keep them on schedule. But by some miracle-he winced at the word, thinking who Justine would thank-they had managed to make all the stops in a reasonable approximation of the appointed times.

  Ratty’s take-no-prisoners driving style and his knowledge of the back roads had enabled them to complete the trip from Rockingham to Concord in less than two hours. (He said that he had once been the governor’s chauffeur.) Another hour had gone to getting them settled in the hotel within sight of Interstate 85, and just across from a megaoutlet mall called Concord Mills. This was the heart of racing country. Most of the teams had their headquarters within a few miles of here, and although Harley was stranded without a car, he thought there was an outside chance that a couple of phone calls might bring forth someone to talk business with. Besides the two race venues, this was the place to use his connections, if he still had any. For that reason, Harley had hoped to skip the communal dinner by directing the passengers to the many restaurants within walking distance of their lodgings. But Cayle and Justine, locals who knew the mall by heart, had insisted that they make a pilgrimage to the mall itself to see the life-size bronze statue of the Intimidator in his racing gear which stood on a pedestal near the walkway in silent benediction. The patron saint of local commerce and interstate tourism, Harley figured. He had nearly worn out his smile posing for half an hour with various combinations of the Number Three Pilgrims against the backdrop of that solemn statue.

  Laugh, Ironhead, he silently told the bronze effigy. Wait ’til the angels put you to work answering prayers in some celestial version of QVC.

  Harley had skipped dinner, but he let it be known that there was a place nearby that served mixed drinks. If anybody wanted to meet up with him there, he planned to show up around nine, he told them. Then he’d gone to his hotel room with a fist full of tattered business cards and numbers scribbled on beer mats, and started making phone calls.

  “Hello, who is this? Justin? No kidding! How ya doin’? You sound a lot like your dad. I haven’t seen you since before your feet could touch the accelerator. Hey, this is Harley. Harley. Harley Claymore. I used to drive for-well, it’s been a while. Listen, is your dad there? Oh. Oh, right. Of course he is. Well, I’m headed to Darlington myself, end of the week. No. No message. I’ll catch up to him down the road. Good to talk to you again.”

  That conversation multiplied by ten constituted his evening’s worth of free time, an exercise in frustration and futility. He should have tried to set up some meetings before the tour started. Twenty-twenty hindsight, as usual.

  Finally, at quarter to nine, he gave up and headed out to the bar where about half the party had taken over a large table in the corner. The Powells weren’t there, which didn’t surprise him. Neither Sarah Nash, nor Terence, nor Ray Reeve were there, but Jesse Franklin was, and the newlyweds had come up for air. The Charlotte Three were in full force, and Bill Knight was present, though Matthew was not. He wondered what Ratty Laine did with his evenings.

  “Where’s the rookie?” Harley asked Bill Knight.

  “Matthew? He said he was tired, so I told him he could stay in the room. Sarah Nash is looking in on him to make sure he’s all right.”

  They had all finished dinner, except Shane, who was still toying with a basket of onion rings. (Shame to let ’em go to waste.) The others had ordered drinks, and they immediately hailed Harley with an offer to stand him a round. He accepted all offers, thinking as far as optimism and cheerfulness went, he was about a quart low.

  Jesse Franklin took a sip of his drink and made a face. “This iced tea is sweet,” he said. “I’m sure I ordered unsweetened.”

  “Send it back,” said Shane.

  He shook his head. “No. It’s no big deal. I’ll just drink it. I hate to make a fuss.”

  “We were just saying how much we’re enjoying the tour, Harley,” said Cayle. “You’re doing a great job.”

  Harley’s bourbon arrived and he took a fortifying gulp. “I appreciate that,” he said. “Hope you all are having a good time.”

  “Well, it has been enlightening,” said Bekasu. “At least now I’ll be able to decipher some of the hats and jackets that people wear into my courtroom. I used to think all those 8 and 24 tattoos were gang symbols.”

  Justine gasped. “Somebody has a 24 tattoo-in Charlotte? What were they in court for? Shoplifting at the health food store?”

  Harley wasn’t about to step into that one. He focused his attention on his drink while the conversation ebbed and flowed around him. They drifted away from talking racing after a while, because all these people had other lives, other interests. Cayle talked about her garden ornament craft projects, and Justine passed around pictures of her two dogs, which, surprisingly enough, were not yappy lap pooches, but a couple of sad-eyed blue tick hounds who looked like they ought to be living under a sagging porch instead of in a big stone-and-glass house in a toney Charlotte neighborhood. Their names were Holly and Edelbrock, a reference that had to be explained to Bill Knight, the only one who did not smile when he heard it. Even Shane managed to almost get off the subject of racing. He talked about his job back home, working as a mechanic, and getting to put in some time on an ARCA car. Harley tried to think of something to say that didn’t involve a steering wheel, but nothing came to mind.

  “So you’re working on a race car?” he said to Shane.

  Shane nodded. “Not a Cup car, though. Maybe someday.”

  Harley nodded over his drink. He knew about somedays.

  “How did you break into the big time?” asked Shane.

  “That was a different era.” Harley didn’t believe in telling long stories in roadhouses. “That was before rookie drivers had engineering degrees from Purdue. If you’re looking to get the family together and build a race car in your garage in Dawsonville, Georgia, or Stuart, Virginia, you are tough out of luck, son, because those days will not come again.”

  “I know that. I just don’t know how to break in.”

  “Told you. Engineering degree.”

  Shane shook his head. “That’s not happening.”

  “Grades?”

  “Money.”

  Karen, who had been listening to this conversation, leaned across and touched Shane’s arm. “Tell him about that program you started, Shane. Driving for Dale.”

  “Oh, he doesn’t want to hear about that.”

  Which was true, but Karen told him anyway, and even pulled a well-creased newspaper clipping out of her purse and insisted that Harley hang on to it until he had time to read the whole thing.

  Back in his hotel room, Matthew was glad of a little time to himself away from the grown-ups. He was often more tired than he let on-or at least, he would gallop through the day, fueled by the novelty and excitement of the excursion, and then after dinner, when the excitement wore off, he would tumble into bed with hardly any interval between lights off and sleep. Now he could make an early night of it, perhaps write a few postcards to some of his friends back in Canterbury. He had flipped through the channels on the television. He would have loved to see Fast and Furious on a hotel movie channel, but it wasn’t offered. Child services children were only allowed to see movies rated “G” or “PG,” so all of them longed to see forbidden films, especially car chases and horror films.

  Since there weren’t any interesting movies offered on the hotel television, Matthew searched for some version of Star Trek to watch. He had briefly considered watching the SPEED Channel instead, but they weren’t showing Cup racing just now, so he decided to hang out with old friends instead: that is, the characters on
the U.S.S. Enterprise. Maybe if they were still filming Star Trek: The Next Generation, he’d have considered asking to visit there for his trip, but probably not, because the crew of the Enterprise were only acting, but Dale Earnhardt was real.

  To boldly go where no one has gone before. Those actors hadn’t done that. But Dale had.

  “Why you wanna go on an Earnhardt tour, man?” asked Nick, who was one of his roommates, twelve going on forty. “Earnhardt is dead, dude. You’re not gonna meet him.”

  But that was just it.

  Maybe he was.

  Matthew didn’t talk about it, because mentioning death upset grown-ups. Nobody had come right out and said that he was going to die, but being a kid without parents taught you to pay close attention to the adults who had control of your life: whether or not they smiled or looked you in the eye; what they didn’t say, and whether they were suddenly nice to you for no reason. So, he knew. Back in the winter he had been feeling tired and weak, falling asleep in school and going to bed before lights out, and finally somebody noticed and took him to the clinic for tests. Nobody told him what he had, but the staff member who took him to the doctor had insisted on stopping for ice cream on the way back to the Children’s Home. That was a bad sign, he thought. He didn’t ask any questions, though. The thing about being a kid is that you have no control over anything, anyhow. If the grown-ups say you’re going to die, that’s the way it is. He watched the word about his condition spread through the staff of the home: one by one the counselors and the office workers started acting funny around him, giving him pitying smiles and extra helpings at dinner. He contrived not to notice, because he didn’t want to talk about it, but he had started thinking about it. Dying.

  He didn’t think it was going to hurt. Hospitals nowadays had all sorts of medicines to keep you from feeling anything, so the only thing to worry about was what came after. He thought that if dying just meant going to sleep and never waking up, then there was nothing to worry about. He wasn’t looking forward to it, but at least he wouldn’t have to deal with it.

  If there was an afterlife, though, he didn’t want to walk into it by himself. He’d barely known his grandmother, and he wasn’t entirely sure that he could count on his dad even making it to heaven. His mom was sleeping on life support back in a white room in New Hampshire. But Dale Earnhardt was in heaven. Everybody said so. Just after the wreck, Mike Waltrip himself had said that in the twinkling of an eye Dale went into the presence of the Lord.

  Matthew thought that if he stayed faithful to Dale as a fan, then Dale would stick up for him in heaven. One of his fantasies was of stepping out onto a cloud in front of the pearly gates, where the bearded old angel sat at a desk with a roll book. And there in front of the gates stood Dale Earnhardt in his dark shades and his white Goodwrench firesuit, holding up a cardboard sign that said “Matthew Hinshaw.” Then he’d be safe.

  At the Concord restaurant the evening wore on, but no one left. Harley’s sense of self-preservation kicked in and he switched from bourbon to beer.

  Bill Knight looked thoughtfully at his shotglass full of Jack Daniels. “I’m a scotch drinker, myself,” he remarked to no one in particular. “Still, I suppose that except for the change of grain from corn to barley, the recipe is basically the same as Glenfiddich. Hmm…I wonder if they make bourbon in Scotland? Surely they have corn over there. I wonder what you would call a Scottish bourbon?”

  “Glen Campbell,” said Bekasu.

  “What’s your room number, Cayle?” asked Justine. “I need to get my nail polish remover back from you tonight.”

  Cayle looked nervously around the bar, and then she leaned forward and said in conspiratorial tones, “Rusty Wallace and Mike Waltrip.”

  “Must be crowded in there,” said the waitress, who was removing the empty glasses. She smiled to show that she was teasing, and then she pointed to the full-length Dale Earnhardt poster on the far wall.

  “It’s a code,” Justine said, mouthing the words so that no one could overhear.

  The waitress nodded, unsurprised. “Yeah, I figured,” she said. “Room two-fifteen. Y’all might want to come up with a more obscure code to use around these parts. Driver numbers are no secret here. Darrell Waltrip swears he used to open his prayers by saying, ‘Hello, God, this is number 17.’”

  “She’s right,” said Karen. “That’s how I taught the numbers to the little boy I babysat: with die-cast race cars. One, Rusty, Dale, Robby Gordon, T. Labonte, Mark Martin, Rusty’s Little Brother, Little E, Awesome Bill, Ten.”

  “If you want to change codes, you might try using Bible verses,” said Bill Knight. “Oh, wait, they’d probably catch on to that here in Concord, too.”

  “Bible verses?” said Harley.

  He laughed. “Yes. I used to use that code to leave messages for people back in college. We had hall phones in those days, and you couldn’t be sure that whoever answered the communal phone would pass along a message, so the trick was to make it a memorable one.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, the one I used most often was Job 13, verse 22.” He waited with an expectant smile for someone to shout out the verse, but after a few moments of respectful silence, he gave it to them. “‘Call thou, and I will answer.’ It worked every time.”

  Justine giggled. “I think Terence would enjoy hearing about the NASCAR number code,” she said. “Bet you anything that nobody in Manhattan would get it.”

  “Some of them would,” said Harley. “There used to be a NASCAR speedway in Trenton, and I hear they’re looking to build another one somewhere closer to New York City.”

  “The Hoboken 500,” said Bekasu with inebriated solemnity.

  Bill Knight said, “I wonder if they use that code up where I live.”

  “Don’t you know?” asked Justine.

  “It would have gone right over my head,” said Bill.

  “Gotta trivia question for you,” said Harley, downing the last of his most recent beer. “In 1986, when Geoff Bodine won the Daytona 500, what driver sold souvenirs in the nearby K-Mart parking lot that afternoon after the race?”

  “Umm…” Justine considered it. “Must have been one of the young drivers who was a kid back then…not Jeff Gordon, surely. He was probably in Indiana by then. Maybe Jimmie Johnson? Kurt Busch?”

  “Or maybe one of the second generation drivers, who was there in Daytona because his dad or his older brother was racing that year?” said Karen. “How old is Dale Jarrett? Or the younger Wallaces?”

  “How about Sterling Marlin?” said Shane.

  “Not Dale Junior?” said Cayle.

  The other drinkers nodded, exuding beer fumes and solidarity. “Could be him.”

  Harley shook his head sadly. “Naw,” he said, blowing his nose on a cocktail napkin. “None of them. The answer is…Geoff Bodine. ”

  Everybody froze as the name sank in. Then Bill Knight said, “Harley, that can’t be right. You just said he won the race that day.”

  “S’true, though,” said Harley. “He did win. That was the year Earnhardt ran out of gas nearing the finish line and Bodine won it. But in the eighties the 500 wasn’t the big old hype monster it is these days. No flying off in your private jet to the Letterman show. Back then you just did your victory lap, talked to a few sports writers, and went on home. So Geoff Bodine’s parents…s’parents…were selling souvenirs from a little old stand in the Kmart parking lot down the street and he went over…” his voice broke. “And he helped them.” He dabbed at his eyes with his sleeve.

  There was a shocked silence in the bar, and then Cayle began to sniffle too. “Pore old Bodine,” she said.

  There were rumbles of agreement.

  “Well, that’s not fair,” said Shane. “Everybody these days gets a gazillion dollars and their picture on magazine covers, and on the day of his greatest victory Geoff Bodine has to sell keychains! That’s not right.”

  “And now he can’t even keep a sponsor,” said Jesse Franklin, th
umping the table. “Even that old Indian casino in Florida has dumped him…”

  “Poor old Bodine,” whispered Harley, wiping away a tear. “Sometimes I think I must have been a Bodine brother that got stolen away by the gypsies or something, because I sure do have the family curse-you work hard enough for two people, and you’ve got the talent to make it big, but you never, never get a break. And now no ride.”

  But nobody was listening to Harley’s lament.

  Bill Knight shook his head sadly. “The race is not always to the swift…”

  “What number is that?” asked Bekasu.

  “I forget. Ecclesiastes somewhere.”

  “Well, what are we gonna do about it?” Justine demanded. She opened her purse and fished out a twenty. “Let’s pass the hat! Gimme that cap, Jesse!” She snatched off his Winged Three hat and waved it over her head. “Let’s see some greenbacks, y’all. Come on. Toss ’em in there. You can spare it. Anybody got an address for Geoff Bodine?”

  “I’m not usually expected to add to the collection plate,” said Bill Knight, smiling as he tossed in a five-dollar bill.

  “You’re going to send him cash through the mail?” said Karen. “That’s not safe.”

  “We could write him a check,” said Cayle.

  “Not anonymous enough,” said Justine. “We don’t want to hurt his feelings. This isn’t charity. It’s restitution.”

  “I doubt if a few dollars will be much consolation to him,” murmured Bekasu.

  Justine sniffed. “Okay, Miss High-and-Mighty. You call Letterman and Larry King and get Bodine on their shows, but until that great day, I say we make the gesture. Shaking our fists at the fates and all.”

  “Maybe you could buy a money order at a gas station,” said Jesse Franklin, adding a pocketful of crumpled, tobacco-flecked dollar bills to the pot.