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.
Was he trying to lose her? The little turkey. She gritted her teeth and peeled out after him. Fortunately, there was no traffic on the road, because Badger’s truck was now a red dot receding into the distance. She couldn’t afford to lose him. She didn’t know where she was going. If he made a turn up ahead past a curve where she couldn’t see him, she’d never find him again. Why had she not thought to obtain a county map? Or at least verbal directions from the waitress.
Because she had not expected her host to be such a macho jerk, she answered herself.
Well, he could be as difficult as he chose, she was sticking with him. Grimly, she hunched over the steering wheel and mashed the accelerator into the carpet, not trying to overtake him, but at least determined to keep him in her line of sight.
Once she glanced down at the CD player, deciding that music might calm her nerves; although at their current speed, The Ride of the Valkyries would be the logical choice. When she looked up again an instant later, she saw that Badger’s red truck was even farther ahead, so she had to accelerate again to close the distance. After that, she kept both hands firmly on the steering wheel in the “ten o’clock and two o’clock” position, and she didn’t take her eyes off the road for an instant. In fact, she decided that blinking was not even a good idea. Badger knew the road, every curve, every rise-but she didn’t. She also noticed that he seemed to accelerate going out of a curve, while she slowed down well before she reached it and did not resume her normal speed until she was back on the straightaway. Maybe she should try it his way, she thought.
She kept both hands on the wheel and hung on for dear life, but she stayed with him.
A few miles farther on, when she discovered that Badger didn’t bother with turn signals, either, she gave up taking unnecessary breaths, so intent was she upon following the road at the greatest possible speed. He was turning left. Ah, his specialty. Fortunately, when he made that course change, he was far enough ahead to allow her time to slow down and to make the turn in relative safety. She had thought that she might try to remember the route just in case she did become lost, but after that first turn, she lost track of the road changes they took, and at some point she realized that she couldn’t possibly find her way back to Marengo on her own. They had been going too fast for her to read the route numbers or to memorize the left and right turns. She must not lose him.
Finally, after what seemed like hours, but was actually only twenty minutes or so, Badger’s red truck made one last left turn and headed up a dirt road, churning up clouds of red dust in its wake.
Almost there, thought Sark, easing her grip on the steering wheel so that her knuckles no longer showed white. She knew that later on her arms would ache and probably her head as well from the tension, but just now she was able to ignore any physical symptoms by focusing on exactly what names she was going to call Badger as soon as she was on solid ground again. And while she was at it, how would he like a face full of mosquito repellant?
After another jarring mile or so up the dirt road, dodging ruts and washed out places, the brake lights on the truck glowed red, her cue to slow down, although the expanse of greenish brown lake up ahead would have tipped her off that they were coming to the end of the ordeal. She eased the car to a stop a little way away from Badger’s truck, let out a sigh of relief, and rested her head for a moment against the top of the steering wheel. Anybody who followed Badger Jenkins down a country road ought to have St. Christopher’s medals for hub caps.
The red truck had pulled up in front of a glass and cedar A-framed house that most NASCAR fans would have recognized as Badger Jenkins’s fishing cabin. Although not large by celebrity standards (Sark was no expert, but she thought it might run to 3,000 or 4,000 square feet), it was well-maintained and even stylish. She had been half-expecting something thrown together by Badger himself out of recycled chicken coops, but this place looked as if an architect, or at the very least a local construction company with a set of plans from a magazine, had constructed it.
The cedar cabin, surrounded by a vast multilevel deck with benches and geranium-filled planters at each corner, sat on a little knoll facing the lake, where an equally well-constructed boat dock sported Badger’s motorboat, a canoe, and a little green rowboat, that last vessel presumably for duck-hunting expeditions.
Sark got out of her car and slammed the door, with blistering words hovering on her tongue, but before she could utter a single withering syllable, Badger had run up and enveloped her in an exuberant hug. “You did good!” he said. “You kept up with me. I thought for sure I’d have to pull over and wait for you.”
Sark stared at him in momentary disbelief, and then she felt her annoyance melt away in a glow of pride. I did good? she thought. And then she realized that she had indeed performed well; he had not managed to lose her in the Georgia outback. If the drive out to the lake had been a test, she had passed it.
I kept up with a NASCAR driver, she thought with an inward smirk of satisfaction. She must write up this episode for the exposé article that she would write at the end of the season. Perhaps the adventure was a bit upbeat for an otherwise critical piece, but she wanted to be able to boast of her accomplishment to the world at large. Besides, she thought that with the proper slant she could use the anecdote as a criticism. Maybe the incident would serve to point out that fast driving wasn’t really all that difficult-that any reasonably coordinated person could do what Cup drivers did if only they put their minds to it.
Her good humor restored, she studied the landscape with a more benevolent eye. The lake was quite large; it curved past a tree-lined peninsula and went on for several miles, as far as she could tell. There was no one else in sight, perhaps even no one for miles.
“So this is your fortress of solitude,” she said to Badger, sighting the lake through the viewfinder of her camera.
“This is it,” said Badger. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”
Wet, anyhow, thought Sark, who preferred her bodies of water to be encircling Caribbean islands. It was a greenish brown lake encircled by pine trees, hardly Yellowstone. Why was Badger so crazy about this place? Most of the other NASCAR drivers lived on an even bigger lake near Charlotte-Lake Norman. Why not just move there?
“It’s nice to have this place to come back to,” he said.
“Do you own the whole lake?” she asked with a note of surprise in her voice. It wasn’t that NASCAR drivers didn’t make good money-heck, Jeff Gordon could probably have bought Lake Erie if he’d wanted it, but Badger was not in the top tier of Cup drivers.
“Oh, no,” said Badger. “It’s a man-made lake, you know. I own most of what you see here, but the rest-around the bend, half a mile or so away-belongs to a couple of local landowners. And there’s a state game preserve adjoining it, too, at the far end.”