“They also call Darlington ‘the track too tough to tame,’ which means that a lot of drivers can’t handle it. Earnhardt himself said something to the effect that every so often the Lady in Black slaps you down if you get too fresh with her. Anybody know the top three drivers having the most wins of the Southern 500? Wanna guess, Cayle?”
“Is that a hint?” She smiled. “One of them must be my namesake.”
“That’s right. Cale Yarborough has five wins. David Pearson has the most, and then Earnhardt. By the way, the last Winston Cup race Pearson ever won was on this track-the 1980 Rebel 500. Darlington can be tricky, because it’s lopsided on account of the ponds.”
“Ponds? It has ponds?” said Bekasu.
“Well, no. Not like Lake Lloyd at Daytona. People don’t wear life jackets to race here.”
“Do they at Daytona?” asked Bill.
Harley smiled. “Well, Tom Pistone used to. He worried about going in the water. What I mean about ponds here is that when Harold Brasington was trying to build this track back in 1950, the farmer who owned the adjoining land wouldn’t sell him the portion that his pond was on, so Mr. Brasington had to work around that obstacle to build his speedway, and he ended up with a track shaped like an egg. Wider on one side than the other. Because of that, it has tighter, steeper turns on one end. Keeps you on your toes. If you’re not mindful of which turn you’re going into, you end up going into the wall. Ever heard of the Darlington Stripe?”
“Paint mark along the side of your car that you get from scraping against the wall as you race,” said Jim Powell. “Badge of honor.”
“Are we going to the Stock Car Hall of Fame?” asked Justine. “It’s right there in front of the Speedway.”
“No,” said Harley. “Not with the crowds we’d have to fight to get in there on race day.”
“Speaking of the race,” said Jesse Franklin, “are we going to bet on the winner again? Dibs on Mark Martin, and five bucks says he wins. Unless one of the rest of you folks want him.”
Cayle waved away Mark Martin. “Bill Elliott,” she said. “I promised Sarah Nash I’d cheer him on.”
“Well, I’ll take Dale Junior,” said Justine. “He’s better on the super speedways, and he’s never even made the top ten here, but it just wouldn’t feel right to root for anybody except an Earnhardt. Here’s my five bucks.”
“What about you, Harley?” asked Jim Powell, who had taken off his hat to collect the wager money. “I was thinking of taking Rusty Wallace, just because I want him to break that losing streak, but if you were going to pick him, I’ll plump for Dale Jarrett. This track calls for old-style racing, and he’s good at that.”
“Jeff Gordon,” said Harley. “I’ll stick with Jeff Gordon-masochist’s choice.”
“Didn’t he just win on Sunday at Bristol?” said Bekasu.
“Yeah,” said Harley. “Well, with my luck he’ll win every race I ever attend for the rest of my life just to depress me.”
“Harley’s being a gentleman,” Cayle told them. “He’s picking the least likely driver to win. Gordon’s been on a thirty-one-race losing streak before Bristol. Take Matt Kenseth, Bekasu. You have sweaters older than he is, but he’s got real promise. And he’s from Wisconsin, just like Alan Kulwicki.”
“Whatever,” said Bekasu, going back to her book.
In the back of the bus, Ray Reeve cleared his throat. “I’d like to get into the pool,” he said.
The others turned and stared at him.
“Well, sure, Ray,” said Jesse Franklin. “Anybody you like, but I thought you stopped caring who won after Dale passed away.”
“I know, and I’ve been agonizing about it. I thought about what Earnhardt did after Neil Bonnett died. He went back to the track and practiced an hour after Neil crashed. So I thought he’d think I was soft if I didn’t move on. Well, last night in the hotel room, I took that Gideon Bible out of the nightstand, and I Bible-cracked.”
“But you’re from Nebraska,” said Justine. “I thought Bible-cracking was a Southern thing.”
“I expect they do some form of it everywhere,” said Bill Knight.
“So you opened the Bible and pointed at random to a verse, and now you want to get into the betting pool?” said Bekasu in cross-examining mode.
Ray Reeve reddened. “Well, the thing is I got Matthew seventeen, verse five. Knew exactly what it meant. Justine already picked him, but I’d like to go half with her.”
“Glad to have you!” said Justine. “I hope we split the pot!”
Jim Powell smiled. “Okay, then. Ray is backing Little E. in the Southern 500.”
“You know, Ray, Dale Junior isn’t all that good on short tracks,” said Harley. “He’s a restrictor-plate racer.”
“Don’t care if he wins or not,” said Junior’s new supporter. “I just decided to root for him. I can cheer him on. He’s Dale’s boy.”
The Darlington traffic was just as bad as it had been in Bristol-both races took place in small towns overwhelmed by an extra fifty thousand people for the weekend. Harley thought it was just his luck that the tour finale occurred at a track that wasn’t out in the middle of nowhere. Because it had been built in the early days before NASCAR became a major attraction, the Darlington Motor Speedway wasn’t a rural Pompeii, set amidst acres of empty fields that turned into parking lots a few days a year. This track filled a Wal-Mart-sized hole on a commercial road, with rows of small stores and houses all up and down the road around it. It wasn’t even a four-lane thoroughfare. No wonder people keep spreading rumors that NASCAR was going to move the Labor Day race to California, Harley thought. Now that racing was a billion-dollar enterprise, this track, with no fancy skyboxes or modern amenities, must look pretty poky to the corporate moguls, but he for one hoped the relocation wouldn’t happen. Darlington was a tradition that went all the way back to the days when Petty and Earnhardt meant Lee and Ralph, not Richard and Dale. He’d hate to lose that just for glitz.
His greatest concern at the moment was not the traffic but the weather. A misting rain fell out of a sky the color of pewter. That could spoil everything. You could play football in the rain, but motor sports was different. Driving out there was dangerous enough without factoring in a slick track from a mix of oil and rainwater. If it started raining, they’d stop the race. Sometimes drivers sat for hours waiting for the go-ahead to resume. Harley filled a few more miles with chatter by explaining that if more than half the designated laps of a race were completed during the afternoon, the winner would be whoever was ahead when the weather finally forced them to cancel it.
“Okay, the race is at one o’clock,” he said into the microphone. “So we don’t have time to go somewhere for lunch. Actually, Columbia would be favorite, because anyplace closer than that is going to be wall-to-wall people. We’re going straight to the track, and those of you who are young enough or brave enough can try the Darlington culinary specialty: hamburger steak smothered with onions. Take each other’s pictures in front of the palm tree there at the entrance.”
“It’s raining,” Cayle pointed out.
“I know,” said Harley. “I hope it quits, because if it doesn’t, there won’t be a race.”
By a stroke of luck, which despite Justine’s insistence, Harley refused to chalk up as a miracle to St. Dale, the rain stopped, the track was dried off, and the 53rd Mountain Dew Southern 500 roared to life.
“There are still so many terms I don’t understand,” said Bekasu plaintively. “What is a Biffle?”
Justine groaned. “In your case, Bekasu, it is a cross between baffled and bewildered.”
The green flag went down, and Bill Elliott’s number 9 Dodge took the early lead. When he still had it forty-three laps later, Harley was thinking that Sarah Nash would be sorry she missed this one, but after that Sterling Marlin led the pack, and Harley began to feel like a kid at a window watching a party he hadn’t been invited to. He had fully intended to worm his way onto pit road again before this
race, still trying to make connections, but then he’d made the mistake of talking about Neil Bonnett at Daytona, and the memories wouldn’t leave him alone. Now common sense, a rare but unwelcome visitor, had dropped by to urge him to reconsider.
Darlington was the track that gave you fair warning to call it quits, but nobody ever listened. In 1997, Earnhardt had passed out here in the first lap of the race, and he had ended up in the hospital with a million people scared to death over his condition, but within days he was back in the driver’s seat as if nothing had ever happened. A few years earlier the Black Lady was also the scene of Neil Bonnett’s first serious crash-the one that left him with amnesia for many months. He had gone headfirst into the wall-a warning from Fate perhaps, but if so it had gone unheeded. Like Neil, Harley was forty-something and out of the sport after a wreck that any sane person would take as a divine message to call it quits. But also like Neil, he couldn’t walk away. What else was there in life that compared to this? He didn’t want to be a car dealer or a sportscaster while the show roared on without him. His thoughts seemed to go around in laps, too, always ending up back where they began: got to get back out there.
Nobody tried to talk to him during the race, or if they did he was oblivious to the interruption. He stared at the track with the glazed look of someone who was filtering this race through a dozen past ones. Halfway through the afternoon, a tap on his arm broke his reverie. It was Jim Powell, whose anguished expression said that he wasn’t thinking about the race.
“I think Arlene is sick.”
Harley hated hospitals. He’d been in too many emergency rooms after one wreck or another, and even worse was having to go there as a visitor, when some other driver had pushed his luck too far. He sat alone in the hallway now, staring at a pamphlet on heart disease, reading the same line over and over without absorbing a word of it, and cursing the sadists who had outlawed smoking in here.
It was a good thing that the race was still going on, so that traffic had not become a nightmare, because the ambulance had to go from Darlington to Florence.
“Aren’t you going to Wilson on Cashua Ferry Road?” Harley had asked the ambulance guy. He’d remembered the place from his racing days.
“No ER, buddy. Have to take her to McLeod in Florence. You gonna come in your car?”
Harley nodded. Most of the Number Three Pilgrims had insisted on leaving the race to accompany the Powells. Reverend Knight was going to ride in the ambulance with Jim and Arlene, while Harley, whose car was parked at Darlington in preparation for the end of the tour, had agreed to bring Matthew, Jesse Franklin, Justine, Cayle, and Bekasu. It was all the car would hold, but the one remaining passenger, Ray Reeve, hadn’t really wanted to go anyhow. He hated hospitals as much as Harley did, and besides, he didn’t want to leave in case Little E. won the race. He took Cayle’s cell phone so that they could call him from the hospital and tell him how Arlene was doing and how to find them. Meanwhile, he would stay by himself and finish watching the race. When it was over, he’d go back to the bus, find Ratty, and direct him to the hospital.
The ambulance attendant had looked doubtful at Harley’s proposal to follow them. “Well,” he said, “you can try, but we’ll be burning rubber-lights, siren and all. Doubt you could keep up.”
Harley Claymore smiled and smiled.
“Oh, good. You’re still here.” Bill Knight had come around the corner, looking tired but composed. He was in professional mode now, Harley supposed.
“Of course I’m still here,” said Harley. “How is she?”
“Well, she’s in and out of consciousness. We don’t really know anything yet. Except that it was a heart attack, of course.”
“Knew that before we got here.”
“Yes. At her age, it can go either way. At least we got her to a hospital in good time.”
“Where’s everybody else?”
“Well, Jim wanted Bekasu and me to stay with him, and with Arlene when we’re allowed to see her. We’ve sent Matthew off with Justine.”
Harley nodded. “That’s good. Get the children out of the way.”
“Er-something like that. Cayle has gone to call the Powells’ daughter in Seattle, and then she’s calling the airline about their flight tomorrow, and so on. And Jesse Franklin is wrangling over Medicare forms or some such red tape with a hospital administrator.”
“Jesse? I thought he wouldn’t say boo to a goose.”
“Well, when it counts, he can assert with the best of them. He said he asked himself ‘What would Dale do?’ and there’s been no stopping him since then. You should have heard him giving orders to the doctors. There is one more thing that needs to be done, though. Harley, the thing is…Arlene is asking for Dale.”
“She what?”
Bill Knight sighed. “I think she’s forgotten that he’s dead. She’s a bit agitated. I don’t know. Anyhow, she keeps saying she wants to see Dale Earnhardt. And we thought-that is, Jim suggested that if we were to bring in that fellow who impersonates Earnhardt, she wouldn’t know any different, and it might calm her.”
“Okay.”
“Oh, good. We’d really appreciate it.”
“What do you-you mean you want me to go find him? Go back to Darlington now?”
“Jim said that maybe the race isn’t over yet, and the Impersonator might be around. He usually shows up near the end of the race, doesn’t he?”
Harley stared. “So you want me to drive back to the Speedway-do you have any idea what post-race traffic is like?”
“Well, yes,” said Bill. “Bristol was only last Saturday. Seems longer, doesn’t it?”
“And you expect me to find that-that imposter, and bring him back here? You think I can do that? What if he didn’t show up at this race?”
Bill Knight smiled. “Oh, I think he will. By now I’m beginning to believe that Dale will help us out with a miracle.”
He hauled himself to his feet. “Don’t you start.”
“And Harley, get this done quickly, if you can. Drive quickly.”
Harley sighed as he got to his feet. “Oh, I can drive quickly,” he said. “I can do that.”
Justine held Matthew’s hand as they walked down the corridor of the hospital. “I thought about taking you to the cafeteria,” she said. “I’ll bet the food is pretty good. I had a boyfriend one time who was so cheap he used to take me to dinner there.”
“Was he a doctor?”
“No. That’s just it. He was an electrician, but he’d found that hospital food is the cheapest meal around, and it’s always pretty good food, so he’d just go there and eat. Nobody ever asked him why he was there.”
“So what happened to him?” asked Matthew.
“I don’t know,” said Justine. “I dumped him. Maybe he found some girl who admired his thriftiness. Or else a nurse.”
“Where are we going then?”
Justine stopped at a nurse’s station. “Good evening,” she said to the woman behind the counter. “Could you please page Dr. Toby Jankin for me? Tell him it’s Justine. He’s expecting me, but he didn’t know I’d have a patient for him. Matthew, honey, if you’ll sit over there on that bench for a minute while I talk to old Toby, I promise we’ll hit the cafeteria before we’re done.”
When the Impersonator turned up near the end of the race, Ray Reeve was glad of the distraction. By this time Jeff Gordon had begun to dominate the race, and Ray had a feeling of dread that told him Wonderboy was going to win. Two races in a row? He wondered if Gordon was having extraordinarily good luck or if Harley was cursed. He wished this could have been Junior’s day, a sign perhaps that he was right to transfer his allegiance from father to son. He stopped watching the blur of cars whipping around the mile-and-a-third track and rested his gaze on the man in the white firesuit at the base of the Colvin Grandstand, accepting hugs and solemnly posing for photos with Earnhardt fans. Funny how the sight of the red-outlined number three or even the Goodwrench logo whizzing past on Kevin Harvick’s
car could bring a lump to the throat. He could understand why people didn’t want to let go. He was tempted to go down there himself and shake the man’s hand, just for the hell of it. A gesture of goodwill, perhaps.
Every so often the Impersonator would surreptitiously glance around, on the lookout for track security or maybe DEI people-whoever was after him. Ray wondered whether the problem was copyright infringement or trespassing or what. He didn’t think the guy was any worse than an Elvis impersonator. Or all the people on Halloween who dress up as ex-presidents. But he could see how it might upset Little E. to think that people would rather watch an imitation of his dad than see him out there trying to win an actual race. We can’t forget him, he said silently to Junior, no more than you can, but we’ll all move forward, because he’d expect us to. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw men in suits striding toward the Impersonator, and with a few more handshakes, the man in the white firesuit had eased through the crowd, picking up speed as he went, heading for an exit.
Ray Reeve turned his attention back to the race, but much to his chagrin the rainbow-colored 24 car was still out in front.
Cayle found Bill Knight and Bekasu in plastic chairs in the waiting room, leafing through old copies of health magazines. “Any word yet?” she asked.
Bill shook his head. “Not that we’ve heard. Did you get in touch with the Powells’ daughter in Seattle?”
“Yeah. Jean. She’s very concerned about her mother, of course. Wants her dad to call as soon as he can leave the bedside. She wants to apologize, she said.” Cayle smiled, remembering the conversation. “Apparently she gave her dad a hard time about going on a NASCAR tour. You know the type.” She studiously avoided looking at Bekasu as she said this. “Well, it turns out that she mentioned it as a joke to some of her snooty wine-and-cheese friends and got told in no uncertain terms that Greg Biffle was the pride of Washington State. He was last year’s Busch Series Rookie of the Year, Bekasu-before you ask. He’s from Vancouver, Washington, and apparently he has a bit of a following out there. Now I think Jean is hoping to sweet-talk her dad into getting her a tote bag from Darlington so she can impress her architect.”
St. Dale Page 31
