“No,” said Taran, “it’s my other obsession. NASCAR.”
“NASCAR.” Troxler shuddered. “Couldn’t you just chew tobacco, dear?”
They’d had this discussion so many times that each of them could have argued the other’s position, so Taran didn’t bother to respond to his salvo. “A new team is hiring Badger Jenkins to drive for them. I’ll get to see him again!”
Troxler raised his eyebrows to indicate incredulity and nodded toward Taran’s work space, adorned with a Badger Jenkins mouse pad; a poster of him in his blue firesuit; a fierce-looking Badger in dark sunglasses on an official NASCAR coffee mug; and her computer screensaver: a candid shot of Badger Jenkins leaning on his race car with a look of fierce determination on his perfect features. (Troxler called that pose “Badger Erectus.”)
Taran had the grace to blush. “I mean a chance to really see him,” she said. “He has been holed up in that Fortress of Solitude of his in north Georgia, and he hasn’t even been interviewed on the SPEED Channel in months. I miss him. But-oh, I feel so guilty, Matt!”
“Really? Why? Have you been buying his garbage on eBay?”
“No, I feel guilty for wanting to see him back out there. It’s so dangerous. When he was racing I worried about him all the time.”
Troxler sighed. “You could always watch something else on Sunday afternoons,” he said.
She nodded. “Sometimes I did. When he was in that awful car last season, and he kept having mechanical problems and getting so many laps down-you know what I’d do? I’d put Gladiator in the DVD player, paused on the scene where Russell Crowe is in the arena fighting the tigers, and then I’d watch the race. And when it got too painful to watch-when Badger was a couple of laps down, fighting to keep the car out of the wall or having mechanical problems-I’d push PLAY on the DVD and watch the movie instead. Somehow it hurt less to watch Russell Crowe being mauled by tigers than to watch Badger wrestling with that awful car, but I still felt like I was seeing the race. I worried about him so much.”
Troxler sighed. Since his own hobby was an appreciation of modern dance, he couldn’t really relate to this fever pitch of anxiety on behalf of one’s hero, but he knew that Taran was desperately sincere about it. Propped up against the poster of Badger was a ceramic leaf inscribed with a Bible verse: Psalm 91:11: “For He shall give His angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways.” Taran, he knew, was not particularly religious, but just as there are no atheists in foxholes, he supposed that maxim might prove equally true of devotees of race car drivers.
“Taran, you don’t know him,” he reminded her gently.
“I do,” she said. “I got his autograph at the Atlanta Motor Speedway, and then last year he did a signing at an auto parts store. There weren’t many people there, and I shook his hand and he smiled at me, and said, ‘Hey, sweetie.’”
Troxler sighed. “And you didn’t get your name legally changed to that? I marvel at your restraint. Is he married by any chance?”
Taran made a face. “He was,” she said. “To a former Miss Georgia-USA. Very pretty, if you like the type. But she wasn’t a NASCAR fan; she said it was like joining the circus, having to fly somewhere every weekend to sit through a hot, noisy car race. So she dumped poor Badger for a billionaire developer of beachfront condos. Can you imagine?”
“It boggles the mind,” said Troxler solemnly.
“I know. I don’t think he ever got over it, either. Anyhow, I worry about him so much. I hope he’ll be all right with this new team. It can’t be as bad as the last one. Women are more attentive to detail than men.”
“Women?”
“Uh-huh. Did I tell you? The whole team except for the driver is female. The article online said they were looking to hire pit crew personnel.”
Troxler smirked. “Well, I suppose if you really wanted to look out for your precious race car driver, you’d join the team so that you could look out for him personally.”
The look on Taran’s face told him that he should have put more sarcasm into his tone, because her expression had taken on that rapturous look of martyrs and undermedicated saints who are about to give their all for the Cause.
He hastened to add, “Of course, I’m sure it’s very specialized work, pitting. Or crewing. Or whatever they call it. I don’t suppose you can just volunteer.”
“I think you can,” said Taran. “There aren’t many women in the business. They’ll probably train the people they hire.” Idly, she tapped a few letters on the keyboard, making Badger’s face vanish from the screen, to be replaced by an official-looking document: her résumé.
“But you’re an electrical engineer, Taran. Surely the pay cut would be the fiscal equivalent of skydiving.”
“I expect so,” said Taran. “But I do have a parachute. I invested wisely in tech stock and sold them just in time. I could afford a year on minimum wage.”
Troxler sighed, wondering why it was never that easy to persuade people to do things that you actually wanted them to do. “You’re quite sure about this?” he said.
Without looking away from the screen, Taran nodded. “If they accept me, I’m gone.”
“Um, look, Tare…I think it’s great for people to want to follow their dreams and all, but I don’t want to see you throw a good job away for a pipe dream. You don’t think that this job is going to lead to a relationship with this driver guy, do you?”
Taran stiffened. She was staring at her screen saver-that impossibly beautiful photo of the stern man in the firesuit and sunglasses with his cleft chin and his perfect, perfect nose. Reflected in the screen’s shiny surface was a dim image of her own face-with its thin lips, freckled nose, and pale, too-small eyes, that radiated not beauty but intelligence. No, there was nothing about her that would make Badger Jenkins even slow to a walk if he passed her on the street. Unless she could somehow make him realize that no one could ever love him as much as she did.
“No, Troxler,” said Taran softly. “I know nothing will come of this. I’d just like to meet him is all.”
Matt Troxler nodded, pretending to believe her. “Okay,” he said. “Well…that’s good. Umm, then can I have your stapler?”
Taran waved away the stapler. “Sure. Whatever. Take it now. But go away. I have work to do.”
And she did have work to do, but she didn’t do it. Instead, she logged on to the Badger Jenkins unofficial fan Web site (Badger’s Din), the address of all of her best friends, none of whom she had ever met. At least once a day, the several dozen people who constituted Badger Jenkins’s most loyal and hopeless supporters would log on to hash over the latest rumors about their idol’s NASCAR career, or to alert each other to the mention of his name in news articles. Sometimes one of them would have a thirty-second encounter with Badger at a scheduled appearance, and then a breathless account of What He Said to Me (“How you doin’, sweetie…”) would be posted and endlessly discussed. The account was often accompanied by a fuzzy digital photo of Badger gazing pleasantly into the camera lens, flanked by a beaming fan in the transports of religious ecstasy. So you knew what some of your fellow disciples looked like, but not their real names, because the women tended to use aliases, like Lady Badger (wishful thinking), Badgeera, or Short Track Gal, while the male fans called themselves things like FastDrawl or Bonneville Bill.
Some of the guys had an annoying habit of digressing into harangues about pro football or their mostly nonexistent sex lives, and they tended to “flame” any adoring female who dared to make syrupy comments about Badger’s perfect nose or his golden brown eyes, but all in all, the folks at Badger’s Din were the only people in the world willing to discuss day after day, ad nauseum, the fascinating topic of Badger Jenkins.