Once Around the Track (17 page)

“Creative engineering” went all the way back to the beginnings of the sport, and it ranged from something as simple as fabricating the car’s bumpers out of Styrofoam to reduce its weight to something as complicated as restructuring the entire chassis slightly off-kilter in order to minimize wind resistance.

The patron saint of creative engineering was Smokey Yunick, the legendary racer and mechanic from Tennessee, who back in the sixties tried all sorts of gimmicks to circumvent NASCAR’s racing regulations. Once he drove his Chevelle at Daytona with an eleven-foot fuel line snaking its way back and forth in an intricate maze between its fuel cell and the engine. That illegal gas line held six gallons of gasoline in addition to what was in the fuel cell itself, which would have given him an incredible advantage in the race—nearly an extra hundred miles of racing before he needed a pit stop. The second helping of gas might have won the race for him, except that he got caught. A new NASCAR rule about gas lines followed immediately.

Since then it had become more difficult to bend the rules. Stock car parts had to conform to templates—molds that specified the exact size and dimensions of a given part or piece of hardware down to a thousandth of an inch. Cars had been penalized for having the wrong size screw on a part in the engine. Getting caught with a nonstandard modification could cost you in fines, result in the suspension of the crew chief, and get the car sent to the back of the line for the start of a race. NASCAR was trying to close all the rat holes it could. They inspected the race cars each week, impounded them at some tracks between the last practice and the start of the race, and then at the end of each race, NASCAR officials inspected the top five finishers and then another car from the race chosen at random. The inspectors looked at the engine, the ignition, the fuel tank, the body of the car, and they even inspected the fuel for additives. The game of cat and mouse was becoming increasingly harder for racers to win, but that didn’t mean that anybody had stopped trying.

Julie threw a crumpled ball of notepaper at the shelf of die-cast race cars. “We are a one-car team,” she said. “We do not have the benefit of multicar testing at various tracks and pooling the results. We do not have five hundred shop dogs to build cars from scratch. We do not have a wind tunnel.”

“Well, that’s not exactly news,” said Jay Bird. “You knew that when you took the job.”

“That doesn’t make me feel better,” said Julie. “You were supposed to come up with a miracle, Jay Bird.”

The old man chuckled. “How about we dress you two up in spandex and fishnet tights and send you out to bars to pick up crew chiefs?”

“Only if Tuggle needs a ride home,” said Rosalind. “I’m not into the bar scene.”

“Neither are the crew chiefs, I bet,” said Julie. “Come on, you guys. Stop kidding around. We need to think up a miracle here.”

“An
affordable
miracle,” said Jay Bird. “That makes it harder.”

Rosalind sighed. “How’s this for cheap? We reduce the size of the mesh on the window net. That will let less air into the cockpit and cut wind resistance. Not much, but in qualifying a hundredth of a second makes a difference.”

“How about an air dam under the car to channel the air straight back?” said Julie. “The bottom of the car isn’t covered by template, so it isn’t even illegal.”

“Doesn’t have to be,” said Jay Bird. “You let an extra blast of air hit that spoiler from underneath, and your boy will be an astronaut instead of a race car driver.
Liftoff!”

“He’s right,” said Rosalind. “And we can’t modify the spoiler, because it
is
covered by template, but maybe we don’t have to channel all the air straight back. Maybe we could fiddle a compromise between the need for downforce and the channeled air. It doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing proposition.”

They both looked at Jay Bird.

“It’s worth a shot,” he said. “But just so you know, this idea has been tried before.”

“By whom?” said Rosalind.

Jay Bird sighed. “By everybody who can spell NASCAR. But let’s give it a shot anyhow. We have to start somewhere.”

T
he diner wasn’t hard to find, provided that you didn’t blink between the sign that said W
ELCOME TO
M
ARENGO
and the one that said Y’
ALL
C
OME
B
ACK
N
OW
, Y’H
EAR
. After the three-hour drive from Charlotte, Sark was glad that the designated meeting place served coffee and came equipped with an indoor toilet. She was in need of both.

She wondered why Badger had told her to meet him at the diner. Probably because even with directions, you couldn’t find the way to his house without a trail of breadcrumbs. Badger’s fortress of solitude in the Georgia outback was the stuff of legends in NASCAR. By meeting him in town she could simply follow him out to wherever it was that they were going. He had not yet arrived. She knew what his car looked like from having seen it parked at the race shop—a silver Chrysler Crossfire with a Georgia vanity plate that read “Badger 1.” (Probably his idea of a play on words
Badger won,
get it? ) But “Badger 1” was not parked in front of the diner, and Sark wondered what she ought to do if he had forgotten his promise to show her around on his home turf. Hunt him down, she supposed. After making the three-hour drive from Charlotte, she wasn’t about to give up without a fight.

She pushed open the door to the diner, and found herself staring right into the calf brown eyes of Badger Jenkins; but in this case, it was simply because the life-sized poster of him had been placed on the wall facing the door. The place was empty except for a blond waitress behind the counter, presumably the curator of this shrine to Marengo’s one celebrity.

The walls were plastered with NASCAR photos of Badger Jenkins, all dutifully signed in Badger’s loopy scrawl, and a glass display case sported a collection of die-cast cars, all presumably former rides of Badger dating back to his salad days in the Busch series. On the wall behind the cash register were the non-Badger photos, a collection of publicity stills from former customers who had been passing through fame and Marengo simultaneously. A couple of minor country singers were represented, as well as a pro football player, the weather girl from an Atlanta television station, and several other NASCAR drivers, looking menacing in their firesuits and sunglasses, presumably friends of Badger who had come to town to go fishing with him and to have their visits forever commemorated by a signed eight-by-ten glossy on the pine-paneled wall of the diner. In one of the photos, a younger, curvier version of the waitress snuggled up to an unshaven, shaggy-haired Badger, and they both smiled happily at the camera—not posed smiles, but two really happy people caught in a golden moment.

“Excuse me,” Sark said to the waitress, whose plastic name tag said “Laraine.” “I’m here to meet Badger Jenkins. Have you seen him?”

Laraine smiled and went on putting sugar packets into little plastic containers. “Sure. Every inch of him.”

“I mean today. I’m the publicist for Team Vagenya. He was supposed to meet me here for an interview.” Sark looked at her watch for effect. “I drove down from Charlotte.”

Laraine began to wipe down the countertop with a wet rag. “I expect he’ll turn up,” she said. “Did he promise you? Did he give you his
word
?”

Sark hesitated. “He agreed to the time and date,” she said at last.

“Oh,
agree.
” Laraine had finished with the sugar packets and was now scrubbing the counter. “Badger will agree to anything to get women to stop hassling him. You ought to know that by now. But he sets a store by giving his
word
. If you actually want him to do something for you, you need to make him give you his word. Then he’s bound to go through with it.”

“He had better go through with it,” said Sark through clenched teeth. “I take the team photos, and I wasted a whole day to do this. If he doesn’t want to look like the Creature from the Black Lagoon in every publicity shot for the rest of the season, he’d better haul his ass in here real soon.”

Laraine eyed her suspiciously. “Don’t you have his cell number?”

“Of course, I have it! But my cell phone doesn’t get any reception out here. I suppose I could use a pay phone. If there is one.”

Laraine sighed and picked up the telephone, punching in one number. “There’s only one provider within range of here,” she said. “I guess that’s not the one you’ve got. Well, seeing as how you’re with the team, I guess I can call him for you. I got him on speed dial,” she explained to the testy visitor. “Of course, if he happens to be out on the lake where his cell phone won’t work, then you’d just better hope he remembers, because nobody can reach him when he’s out there.”

“Yeah, but he has to come to shore sometime, and then he’ll wish he hadn’t,” said Sark.

“Everybody says that,” said Laraine. “It’s water off a duck’s back.”

Sark had a sinking feeling that she had made a three-hour drive for nothing. “Does he do that to people a lot? Stand them up?”

Laraine went on wiping the counter with a rag. “He doesn’t mean to,” she said at last. “He’s good-hearted, just a little impractical. When people ask him for things, he just hates to say no, and when it comes to his time, he’s liable to promise more hours in the day than there actually are. Plus, he really wants to spend most of his time alone out there on the lake. I think he’ll turn up for you, though, what with you being with the team and all. It’s mostly journalists who slip his mind. He honestly does not see the point of bragging about himself for public consumption. He’d be a much richer man if anybody could make him see the value in publicity.”

“I have tried,” said Sark grimly.

Laraine nodded. “Like trying to teach a pig to sing, isn’t it? Look, why don’t you pick a place and sit down while I phone him, and then I’ll bring you some coffee.”

Sark kept studying the racing posters of Badger that adorned the diner’s walls until she decided which one that she hated the least.
(Badger minus the sunglasses, wearing a goofy smile, and holding up a can of motor oil as if he had found it quite delicious. Sark always liked the Vagenya driver better when he wasn’t pretending to be a comic book hero, and in her current mood, the more ridiculous he looked, the more it pleased her.)

She slid into the booth beneath that goofy motor oil photo, musing again on how strange it was that images of someone she actually knew could constitute a
décor.
Badger posters. Badger clocks. Badger sofa throws. Of course, there were certainly worse examples of human commercialization. The real merchandise monsters were NASCAR’s two most popular drivers, Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhardt, Jr. The range of products bearing their names and likenesses was downright frightening. Toothbrushes. Shot glasses. Valentine candy. Christmas ornaments. Mouse pads. Bath mats. She supposed that there were actually people who decorated their houses in NASCAR driver motif—there was rumored to be a Badger bathroom somewhere in Ohio—but from her outsider perspective, the resulting décor didn’t bear thinking about. If she’d had to live amidst such a theme decoration, she would have felt that she was trapped inside a TV commercial.

To his credit, Badger himself seemed oblivious to these commercial tokens of fan loyalty. If he turned up at the shop and you happened to be wearing, say, a Badger Jenkins tee shirt, he affected not to notice. She thought that was a good strategy. It avoided embarrassment for everybody. Any other reaction on his part would have been asking for trouble. If he had acted pleased to have people sporting his likeness on their chests, he would have seemed conceited, and if he made fun of it, he would come off as an arrogant ingrate. Ignoring all Badger-themed merchandise was by far the most diplomatic way to handle the situation.

While she waited for Marengo’s favorite son to arrive, Sark sipped her coffee and looked over her notes, so that she would know what sort of questions to ask him. In her experience, the more you knew about somebody, the better the interview was likely to be.

According to the biographical material, Badger was a lifelong resident of the county, and he had grown up on a farm that had been in his family for five or six generations. He was an only child whose mother had died when he was born. According to the articles, he had been part Cherokee, which gave Badger a Native American heritage in which he took great pride. He’d been raised by his father on that family farm in the hills north of town, where he had spent a seemingly idyllic childhood in country pursuits, most notably hunting and fishing on his beloved lake. He sounded like Tom Sawyer, Sark thought. Or possibly Conan the Barbarian. She wondered what a typical day with him would constitute. Nothing likely to appeal to a city girl, she supposed. Fortunately, anticipating this, she had worn an outfit that would have served her well on a hike in Yellowstone: khaki pants, hiking boots, and a tan wind-breaker over a Team Vagenya tee shirt. In the trunk of her car she had stashed a snake bite kit, mosquito repellent, and bottled water.

She was making notes on her list of possible interview questions when Badger turned up, about twenty minutes late, with his usual nonchalant grin. “Sorry about that,” he said.

She gave him a bitter smile. “Oh, don’t mention it. I’ve just been enjoying myself here in the shrine of St. Badger.” She indicated the phalanx of posters bearing his likeness that surrounded them. “And here you are in the flesh. Should I kneel?”

He pursed his lips and did that little head jerk that meant the remark had stung. “Laraine put those things back up when I got this new ride. She says it’s good for business. Anyhow, I didn’t mean to be late. I didn’t forget. I got stuck behind a logging truck going over the hill where you can’t pass.”

Sark raised her eyebrows. “Safe driving? From
you
?”

He nodded. “If you get a speeding ticket, all it costs
you
is a hundred bucks or so, but if I get a speeding ticket, all hell breaks loose, and the press never lets me hear the end of it. You ready?”

Sark gathered up the pile of press releases and scribbled index cards and stuffed them back into the large purse that served as her briefcase. “Where are we going?”

“Figured I’d take you out to my fishing cabin on the lake. Let you see my natural habitat.”

“Okay,” said Sark, who had been expecting this. “Shall I ride with you? Let me get my camera gear out of my car.”
And my change of clothes and my snake bite kit,
she added silently. You couldn’t be too careful around lakes.

“Well, we’ll be headed west from here, and there’s a shortcut back to the interstate north from there, so it would save you time if you just took your car, instead of having to come all the way back down here. Why don’t you just follow me?”

Sark stared at him. He was serious. “Because you won the
Southern 500
at Darlington,” she said.

“Not in that old pick-up truck, I didn’t,” said Badger.

“Yeah, well…driving is driving. I’ve heard that Dale Earnhardt, Jr. and Jeff Gordon have sometimes tried without notable success to keep up with
you
.”

He grinned. “Aw, I told you, I try to be a good boy off the track. Come on.” He jingled his keys and headed for the door, stopping to give Laraine a bear hug on his way out; then he strolled out to the parking lot.

“Well, how hard can it be to follow him?” Sark wondered aloud. “It’s just a two-lane blacktop country road.”

Laraine nodded. “That road sure has a lot of curves, though. Some steep hills, too, every now and again.”

“Exactly,” said Sark. “That ought to slow him down. Badger will probably be the perfect person to follow. Where driving is concerned, his ego must be rock solid. I don’t suppose he feels the need to show off by speeding down ordinary roads to prove how macho he is.
I’m sure I’ll be fine.”

“That’s what everybody says,” muttered Laraine, but Sark was already scurrying out the door, fishing in her purse for her sunglasses.

Badger was waiting in his truck revving the engine when she emerged from the diner. As Sark walked to her car, she took a precautionary look at Badger’s license plate, just in case they got separated by traffic.
(In Marengo?)
Oh well, it still wouldn’t hurt to know the license number. Red trucks were certainly not at a premium in north Georgia, and it would be reassuring to know for a fact that you were following the correct one.

It took her a moment to realize that the Georgia truck tag was a vanity plate, because it consisted of a series of numbers, much as standard-issue plates did. But to someone who had been studying Badger Jenkins’s biography for several days now in preparation for this interview, the numbers were indeed significant. They were the numbers of cars he had driven in the early days of his career.

She was sitting there behind the wheel thinking how endearing that license plate was—sentimental without being too boastful. (He could have had one that said “Champ” or “NASCAR 1” or some such slogan of self-importance. Well, he did have such a slogan on his Crossfire, but she supposed that was in keeping with his celebrity image around Charlotte. Here among the home folks he’d probably be given no end of grief for such pretensions. Besides, such a tag would be a dead giveaway to fans that the truck belonged to Badger, but she didn’t suppose that there were all that many Badger Jenkins groupies roaming around in the vicinity of Marengo. Except, perhaps, Laraine.)

Sark was so intent upon her meditation on the tasteful vanity plate that she was completely unprepared for the abrupt takeoff of the truck she was supposed to be following. Badger screeched out of the diner parking lot in a red blur, headed north on the two-lane blacktop that was only “Main Street” for about a hundred yards, before it became a country road again, at which point they would probably make the jump to light speed, Sark thought wryly.