Once Around the Track (23 page)

“Yeah, and he’s backing away,” said Sigur, stifling a giggle. “He must have heard of Vagenya, and he wants to keep on his Cingular jacket instead. Can he do that?”

“He’s doing us a big favor,” said Kathy. “As long as he keeps Badger out of the wrecks out there, I think he can do anything he wants.”

In their purple Team Vagenya uniforms they stood on the pit stall, waiting for the madness to begin.

“Taran had better snap out of it,” muttered Sigur. “Look at her standing there in a trance. You’d think we hadn’t practiced this a zillion times. She’s like a racehorse that can’t focus because of all the distractions at the track. We ought to put blinders on her.”

“She’ll get used to it,” said Reve. “It is rather overwhelming at first.”

“But she’s a race fan. She’s a trained member of this pit crew. She ought to have known what to expect. More than I did.”

“It’s different in person,” said Kathy Erwin, who had grown up on speedways. “Bigger. Louder. It’s always daunting to people their first time. This track is huge. Give her a couple of minutes. She’ll settle.”

The countdown until the start of the race was certainly different from the practice days at the shop, and even later on the speedway itself when all you had to think about was doing your job as quickly and efficiently as you could. That had been difficult enough, but now the challenge was to perform with that same calm proficiency in the eye of a festive hurricane of color and noise.

The pageantry of race day was impressive enough viewed in miniature on a television screen, but when the full blast of it rolled over you in waves of team colors, engine roars, and the smell of leaded gas, the effect was numbing. More than one hundred thousand people were staring down at you, watching you work, while engines thundered. Air Force jets swooped low over the speedway in the flyover at the beginning of the race, and then all the pit crews lined up on the track, like spokes in a giant wheel, in a rainbow of team colors, to stand at attention while a famous singer—someone whose CDs you actually owned—sang the National Anthem.

“Who’s that walking Badger to the 86?” asked Cindy, as she watched the procession of drivers heading for their cars. “I thought the wives escorted them. That doesn’t look like a Miss Georgia to me.”

“No, he divorced that one,” said Jeanne. “Is it a dumpy scarecrow-looking woman? I think that’s his manager. I hear they don’t like her much around the front office.”

“Did she kiss him?” asked Taran in a stricken voice.

“Nope. He barely looked at her,” said Jeanne.

“Badger focuses,” Kathy informed them. “A lot of drivers do that. Before the race even starts, he’ll begin to block out everything but the driving. In his mind he is already on the track. He wouldn’t know it if he had been walked to the car by the Bride of Frankenstein.”

“He just was,” said Tuggle, who had caught the tail end of the conversation.

All the fanfare of race day would have been distracting enough for the first few minutes, no matter which team you were with, but for Taran there was one extra element that she hadn’t considered, and for a moment of fleeting panic, she found herself wishing that she had been hired on the pit crew of, say, Greg Biffle or Joe Nemechek, where this particular problem would not arise. But, oh no,
she
had to be the catch can for Badger Jenkins.
Her
driver. And to stand right there while he walked to the car…

Except it wasn’t Badger.

Taran had got used to seeing Badger around by now—the little chicken hawk guy with the aw-shucks grin and the wave-on-a-slop-bucket walk, strolling around the shop in his baggy jeans and faded tee shirt. She had even had a couple of casual
(nice-day-isn’t-it? How-you-doin’?
) conversations with him, and while it was true that when he tossed away his empty bottle of blue Gatorade, she had fished it out of the trash and kept it, she told herself that she could throw it away any time she wanted to. It was just that the plastic bottle looked rather nice with ribbons tied around the neck, holding a fistful of flowers or feathers collected on her morning walks. She had brought it with her to Daytona. For luck, she told herself. In the hotel room she had set it in front of her signed and framed eight-by-ten photo of…
Photo of whom
?

A stern-looking man in dark glasses and a purple and white fire suit standing in front of the race car.

It was one of the formal shots Sark had taken for team press releases, and in the photo a tall and handsome man stared at the camera. Embroidered on the chest of his firesuit, right beneath “NASCAR Nextel Cup,” were the words Badger Jenkins, but the man in the photo certainly wasn’t the affable little guy who wandered around the shop, eating beef jerky while he passed the time of day with the mechanics.

The man in the photo wasn’t Badger: It was
him.
The guy she had watched in televised races and cried over when he wrecked and fantasized about for more nights than she cared to count.
The Dark Angel.

And just as the race was about to begin that’s who had walked past her and swung himself with practiced ease through the driver’s side window of the race car. Taran froze, staring at this apparition, while the few remaining brain cells still on duty tried to assure her that the guy in the firesuit really was just little old Badger—only
gift-wrapped
. It didn’t help, though.

“Will you snap out of it?” hissed Reve, nudging her in the side. “It’s just Badger, for God’s sake. He gets into his car through the driver’s side window—just like everybody else from Georgia. Now we have work to do. Get over him!”

Taran nodded, still frozen, staring fixedly at the car, which was now proceeding around the track in those preliminary laps before the green flag signaled the start of the race.

“I’d advise you to get a grip on yourself,” said Sigur. “Because, you know, if you do a lousy job on the pit stops, you could cost him the race. Would you want to have to explain that to
him
?”

Taran shivered, picturing herself cowering before the menacing presence of the Dark Angel in the purple firesuit. He wouldn’t even have to scold her if she cost him the race. She would probably throw herself off the top tier of the grandstand in sheer mortification at the thought of failing Him. Somehow, the thought of laid-back little Badger telling her that her mistake was forgiven did not make her feel any better. She was pretty sure that when it came to winning races, the Dark Angel was always the being you would be dealing with.

Of course, his wrath wasn’t really the point, was it? What really had Taran frozen in her tracks was abject terror. Suppose he got hurt out there? She was the one who had worried about him when he was just a face on a coffee mug, a stranger whose fate was completely beyond her control. She was the fan who sometimes cried during the National Anthem in sheer apprehension over what would happen to
her driver
once the race began.

This was worse.

Now that she actually knew Badger as a person, she was so afraid for him that she could hardly breathe.

She had thought that joining the team would lessen her anxiety because now at least she could keep an eye on things for him. In a small way she could even control aspects of the race car so that she could be sure that he was safe. When no one was paying any attention to her in the garage, she would check everything she could understand, which was nothing under the hood, unfortunately, but she checked tires for bubbles, lug nuts for cracks, harness fastenings for breakage. Surreptitiously, she also rubbed a thimbleful of dirt on the hood of the car. This was not illegal. She had checked the NASCAR rules. Nowhere did they mention dirt-rubbing. She just didn’t want to have to explain to anyone who caught her that the dry brown substance in the plastic bag was sacred dirt from Chimayo, New Mexico, bought off a “shaman” site on the Web. The holy dust might protect Badger from harm out there—at least if any Navajo deities were officiating over motorsports rituals today.

Taran thought it was too bad that windshields were covered with tear-off plastic sheets, because a little holy water in the cleaning fluid couldn’t have hurt, either. Later, it cheered her up immensely to learn that sometimes they did have to clean the Lexan windshield with spray and a towel, if they ran out of the tear-off sheets or if the tear-offs blew off during the race.

Some of the guys on other pit crews laughed at the idea of good luck charms—taping Bible verses to steering columns, or putting lucky talismans somewhere in the car—but as far as Taran was concerned, there were no atheists in the pits. If there were any omnipotent racing fans out there in the firmament, she wanted to take every chance there was of currying favor with one of them. All race fans knew that the one time Dale Earnhardt had won the Daytona 500 was in 1998 when a little girl had given him a penny for luck on race day, and he had glued the coin to the dashboard of his Monte Carlo. If such a ritual was good enough for the Intimidator, why shouldn’t she use a little white magic to protect Badger? She didn’t really care if he won or not. She just wanted him to be safe.

And as long as she was cultivating New Age spiritual pursuits, Taran wished she knew of some way to get the hang of astral projection, because an out-of-body experience would definitely have been an asset on race day. Taran had seen many races on television and half a dozen in person at various speedways in the Southeast, but until she joined the pit crew, it had never occurred to her that the one place from which it was impossible to view the race was trackside. And Daytona was probably the worst of the lot.

Daytona, a two-and-a-half mile track with thirty-one-degree banking in the turns, encircled an infield so large that it contained enough buildings to constitute a small town, even boasting a lake within its boundaries. In order to tell what was going on in the race, you needed a bird’s-eye view of the action, afforded by a seat in a skybox or high up in the grandstands, or else the perspective of a battery of television cameras strategically positioned at the very top of the structure in order to capture a vista of the entire track at once.

Each team had a spotter positioned up there on the roof of the grandstand, giving the driver a bird’s-eye view of the whole track. The spotter would warn the driver if another car was coming up on him. In the case of a wreck in which smoke might reduce visibility to a few feet beyond the hood of the race car, the spotter would tell the driver whether to go high or low to avoid any obstacles ahead. Sometimes the driver was running blind—at 180 mph—and then his life was in the hands of the spotter. If you were on pit crew, you could hear the spotter on a channel in your headset, and he was your eyes for the race, too.

The view of the pit crew, while immediate and thrilling, lacked in scope what it made up for in excitement. Cars roared by, and then vanished around Turn One, so that half the race went on behind them, on the far side of the infield, past a veritable village of buildings, crowds, trucks, and haulers, so that even if you turned around you would catch only brief glimpses of the race. All the pit crew could see was the few seconds of the race that played out as the cars swept past the pit stall.

Taran supposed that battles must be like that for infantrymen. All they can do is fight their little corner of the war, and then wait until the skirmish is over to find out the particulars of the conflict—who won and who lost and why. She felt rather like a soldier herself. Surely a Cup race was as loud as a battle, and the same pressures were brought to bear on the participants: the tension, the feeling that you might fail your comrades through panic or inexperience or simply a lack of skill.

You were less alone than an infantryman, though. Always there were the voices in your headset, drowning out, for the most part, the roar of engine noise. The driver would relay his questions and comments back to the team, although Badger wasn’t a particularly talkative driver. Tuggle talked to various team members to ask about the fuel situation, for example. Someone behind the wall was keeping track of fuel consumption; races had been lost at the finish line on the last lap when the car ran out of gas. It had happened to Dale Earnhardt once in the Daytona 500. Nobody wanted it to happen to Badger.

Hurry up and wait.
If she’d had to sum up the feeling of being on a pit crew, that would cover it. There were the urgent voices, the pressure to be fast and accurate with millions of people all over the country watching you, and the noise and danger all combining to make the race feel like a three-hour reenactment of D-day. And above it all there was the fierce desire to be victorious, not for yourself, but for those who served with you, so that you could seal your bond of brotherhood in a struggle crowned with success. You would know that you did your part to ensure the win, and that your teammates valued you for your efforts. There would be more money paid to the winning team, but during the race itself, she doubted if anybody gave much thought to that. For the duration of that three-hour race, they were soldiers, wielding jacks and drills instead of rifles, to be sure, but soldiers nonetheless. Badger’s life might well depend upon their skill, as much as if he had been a brother in arms. She felt that nothing she had ever done had mattered as much as this.

So for Taran the first Daytona 500 in years that she had not seen was the one in which she took part. The next day she would watch a recording of the television broadcast of the event, and from that she could piece together what had been happening at a given time in the race, and then she would try to summon up her own confused memories so that she could fit together the two perspectives into one coherent experience: what really happened, and what it felt like to live through it as it happened.

One thing that she was sure of, though. It had not looked or felt like the report of it that appeared on
Badger’s Din.