If Badger had paid more attention to the vampire movie he saw once at the county drive-in, instead of trying to exchange bodily fluids with his date of the evening, he might have found one of Miss Albigre’s questions quite familiar. “What don’t you want me involved in?” According to folklore, you had to invite a vampire into your residence or else they could not cross the threshold. And while Melodie Albigre was certainly not a vampire, whatever she was, he had just invited her in. But at the time he was not apprehensive about the arrangement. He had someone to run his life and make money for him, practically for free.
He began to scribble all his phone numbers on the paper lining of the Wendy’s tray, and for the first time in their brief acquaintance, Melodie Albigre smiled.
CHAPTER X
ENGINE NOISE
Your Online Source for NASCAR News & Views
Hearts Like a Wheel? Look out, Badger. We hear you’re going back into a Cup car, and your car number will be 86. We don’t know who your primary sponsor is, but it ought to be Amazon.com, because that’s who your team is going to be: all Amazons. Yep, you heard it here first, folks: The “adorable” Badger Jenkins has been captured by an all-woman racing team. Woo hoo! Looks like he’s going to be the “lucky dog” in every race. Pit crew tryouts are this week at the team headquarters in Mooresville. Hot pass, anyone?
“Are you nervous? I am!” Taran Stiles whispered to the burly woman beside her.
The big woman shrugged. She was wearing an extra-extra large Darlington tee shirt, and she had used red yarn to tie her greasy blond hair into a limp pony tail. She didn’t look like fear played a big part in her life. “Nothing to stew about,” she said. “Either you make it or you don’t. There’s plenty of other teams, you know. Plenty of better paying jobs, for that matter.”
Well, that was true, thought Taran. She had investigated the matter online for several weeks now, and she had learned that some of the Busch pit crew members even worked for free, or for expenses, anyhow. Cup racing at least paid pit crew a salary; less than she had been making in her corporate cubicle, but she reasoned that she ought to go out and have adventures while she was still young. The cubicle would still be there when she was too old for wilder endeavors.
She still couldn’t believe that she was actually in Mooresville. It was only a small town north of Charlotte but to true racing fans, Mooresville, North Carolina, was the center of the universe: headquarters of many of the race shops, home to some of the Cup drivers, and the site of the Dale Earnhardt Incorporated building, the legendary Garage Mahal of the Intimidator himself. It was also the current residence of Badger Jenkins. According to Engine Noise, he had left his fishing shack at the lake in Georgia and moved to Mooresville to be close to his new team. He might even be here today. Taran shivered. And all she had to do to be allowed to stay here was to do well on the pit crew audition.
At first glance the race shop yard looked like the setting for cheerleader tryouts: fifty women in shorts and tee shirts milling around or chatting in small groups, waiting to be told what to do. Closer inspection, though, would definitely rule out cheerleader tryouts. Some of these women could have been linebackers, and several of them looked old enough to have daughters in high school.
There was no doubt about who was in charge, though. The stern-looking woman in an official team wind-breaker with the word “Tuggle” embroidered on it was stalking around the yard, eying the prospective crew members as if they were horses and she was the buyer for Alpo. Judging by her scowl, she didn’t seem unduly impressed by what she saw. Occasionally, though, she would stop and talk to one of the women, and then make a notation on her clipboard for future reference.
This is it, thought Taran. My one chance to work with him. For luck today she had worn her best Badger Jenkins tee shirt, the one from his former team, commemorating his winning of the Southern 500. The one he had actually signed for her one blazing afternoon in Atlanta, when she had waited in a sweltering line for what seemed like forever just to get thirty seconds of his time.
He had been sitting at a metal card table in front of the souvenir trailer, looking much less formidable in jeans and a polo shirt than he did in his firesuit. When at last it was her turn to enter The Presence, he had glanced up at her through opaque sunglasses, Sharpie marker poised for signing, his expression as solemn as that of a child.
She had set the gray tee shirt down on the table next to a stack of eight-by-ten team photo cards and the half dozen brightly feathered fishing lures, which had been gifts to him from other people in the autograph line. Fans liked to bring drivers tokens of their affection, except, of course, that they had no idea what to give their idols. Who knew what drivers were really like? You mostly relied on what it said in the team-generated press releases. So, for lack of better information, fans tended to believe the clichés in the driver biographies published in motorsports magazines or on team Web sites. Civil War buff Sterling Marlin was given military books and old bullets; Tony Stewart, the animal lover, received toy tigers; and handsome bachelors like Kasey Kahne probably got a lot of phone numbers, perfume-soaked fan letters, and more intimate offerings that wouldn’t bear thinking about. The fan gifts of choice for Badger Jenkins were items related to freshwater fishing, since everybody knew that he was a country boy who lived on a lake in north Georgia. Hence, the fishing lures-small, portable, inexpensive, but appropriate tokens of a stranger’s affection. No one ever seemed to realize that the cliché present was the one everybody else had thought of, too, and that Badger was likely to have drawers full of fishing lures. Still, yet another fishing lure was probably better than the other typical fan offerings: homemade clothing, badly drawn amateur portraits based on sports card photos, or pictures of the pet that was named after him (Badger the cat, Badger the gerbil). Some guy had a Web site featuring a NASCAR cartoon in which Badger really was a badger.
When Taran finally reached the front of the line she had taken a deep breath, hardly trusting herself to speak to him, and said, “Could you sign this for me, please?”
He had nodded. That was one good thing about NASCAR drivers. They pretty much would sign anything. Your shirt (sometimes with you in it), a photo, a die-cast car, your arm. Whatever. It was all the same to them. She’d heard that some drivers would only sign sanctioned items produced by the companies with which they had merchandising deals, but for the most part, the guys were really nice and would autograph anything you handed them. Word went around among the fans about who was difficult and who wasn’t. By all accounts, Badger wasn’t.
He had spread out her gray tee shirt on the table in front of him, and with a fine-point Sharpie marker, he had begun to inscribe his name on the fabric above the transfer image of his face. Taran wondered what it would be like to see people walking around wearing pictures of yourself on their shirts. Possibly creepy, she thought. He was probably used to it, though. Anyhow, he didn’t seem to mind.
Taran had spent the half hour in line trying to think up just the right thing to say to him. Should she ask him about fishing, or wish him luck in the race, or tell him how wonderful she thought he was? What could she say that he hadn’t heard a dozen times in the past thirty minutes? She watched the letters of his name seep into the gray cotton shirt, thinking that she had only seven letters left to say what would have taken her a day to fully express.