He looked again at the travel brochure. “A ticket to Bristol!” he exclaimed. “They’re impossible to come by.”
Sarah Nash nodded. “That’s exactly what Tom said. There’s two tickets there by the way. Tom gave me one for Christmas.”
“Oh. You were an Earnhardt fan, too?”
“Not the way your father was,” she said. “I respected him.” She paused for a moment, as if searching for a diplomatic way of putting it. Then she smiled. “I thought he was a roughneck, if you want the truth. Tom used to enjoy teasing me about that. I’m partial to Bill Elliott myself. But Tom didn’t want to go on the tour alone. Couldn’t, maybe. He was pretty sick by then. So there’s two places booked on the tour, if you’d like to take a friend with you.”
If Terence had thought about it for even ten more seconds, his practicality would have overruled the impulse. He heard the back door open and then the sound of footsteps: the mourners were filing into the kitchen to pay their respects and the moment would be lost. “I want to go,” he said quickly. He could do it. The tour was months away, and he had vacation time coming. “Will you come with me? It’s the one thing I can find in common with my dad. We could talk about him along the way.”
“A memorial tour to Tom Palmer as well as to Dale Earnhardt?” Sarah Nash sighed. “Well, I did promise him that I’d go,” she said. “Me. On a Dale Earnhardt memorial bus tour, God help me. Wherever Tom is, he must be laughing right now.”
Chapter IX
The Wedding at Bristol Motor Speedway
After the obligatory posing for photos of hat waving and three peace salutes against the backdrop of the giant Earnhardt face, the Number Three Pilgrims threaded their way toward the Speedway entrance through a solid mass of race day crowd: spectators, ticket hawkers, photographers, and souvenir vendors. As they walked, Harley pointed out a catwalk bridge shielded with red nylon strips of privacy covering. The elevated walkway snaked its way up from an enclosed area of the parking lot and led down to a private entrance to the building. “Anybody know what that is?” Harley asked, pointing up at it. “You don’t have to raise your hand, Matthew. Lord knows this isn’t school. Okay, then, what?”
Matthew’s eyes grew round with awe as he contemplated the walkway above them. “That’s where they walk,” he whispered. “It leads to the drivers’ entrance.”
“That’s right,” said Harley, remembering the feeling of having several hundred people look up to you even if you’re only five feet eight. You get used to that feeling. He had walked up there once. Up there with Elliott and Earnhardt and everybody. He was glad that there was nobody up there now to see him down here. “Well, come on, folks,” he said to the group. “They’re not here yet. Nothing to see here.”
After a long climb up the stairs, Bekasu led the pack from the interior hallway and out into the sunlight in the Richard Petty section of the grandstand overlooking the center of the oval track. In design and construction, the building resembled a football stadium except that there was no grass on the field of play below. There had been years ago, when football had been played here, but now concrete lined the entire floor of the arena and the brightly painted tractor trailers that transported the race cars to the track were lined up in serried rows within the oval.
“I still say that it’s a wedding no matter where they hold it, and we’re not properly dressed, and-They’re going to race around that?” Bekasu, pausing for breath, looked straight down for the first time. Haloed in sunshine on the top step of the grandstand, she squinted down into the half-mile oval track, dwarfed on all sides by canyons of concrete bleachers. It was like looking the wrong way through a megaphone.
Harley Claymore came up beside her and smiled down at the familiar scene. “Yeah, I told you it was confining. You should see what it’s like when you look up from down there.”
“It looks like the inside of a cement mixer,” murmured Bekasu. “Do they really go 200 miles per hour in that?”
“Nah! ’Course not!-Ninety miles an hour is about average speed. There’s more than forty cars competing, remember, so things get crowded out there, too. Slows things down.”
“On that track?” Bekasu pointed a shaking finger at the narrow strip of concrete. “Impossible. You couldn’t get more than three cars abreast on the width of that track.”
“They don’t race on the flat part of the track,” said Justine. “Don’t you ever listen when I explain things to you? The racing is done up there.” She waved her hand, indicating the concrete embankment that encircled the track as a steep sloping wall.
“But it’s nearly vertical. How could anybody drive on that?”
“Centrifugal force,” said Terence Palmer softly. “I expect it feels like being in a blender.”
Bekasu turned to stare at him. He hadn’t said much so far on the tour, and she had wondered if he were a racing fan at all.
As if he’d heard her thoughts, he said, “I learned that in physics class, not on the SPEED Channel.”
“Well, I can attest to the truth of it,” said Harley. “The race is run there on the embankment, but no matter how crowded it gets, there’s plenty of room for errors.”
Harley, who had been checking their seat numbers, was pleased to find that they had been situated high up in the grandstands, which was good. Unlike most other sports, the high seats in the grandstands are better than the lower ones for stock car racing, because to really see the race, spectators need an overview of the entire course. So did the drivers themselves. Their vista was limited to the short stretch of road in front of them, which is why each team had a spotter, positioned sniper-like on the very top of the structure, relaying information to the crew and driver about the position of other cars and possible trouble on the track ahead. There were times when a driver’s windshield was so clouded with dust or smoke that his visibility was zero, and the only way for him to keep going, even to get off the track, was to drive blind and rely on the spotter’s directions.
“It’s remarkably like the Coliseum,” said Bill Knight, peering over Bekasu’s shoulder. “That oval appears to be about the length of the Circus Maximus, which is where the Romans actually held their chariot race, though of course their track was flat. Ninety miles an hour, did you say? The Essedarii couldn’t get up that much speed in chariots. Surely they can’t drive cars up on those steep embankments?”
“Centrifugal force,” said Harley, trying to look as if he had not just overheard the explanation.
“Just you wait,” said Justine. “It’s quite a sight.”
“But surely it would be suicide!”
“No. Bristol’s pretty safe,” said Harley. “Those are thirty-six-degree angles on the turns, sixteen degrees on the straightaway. Makes it interesting. It’s low speeds, like I said.” He wished the tourists would stay together so that he wouldn’t have to keep answering the same questions over and over.
“Low speeds?”
“Well, relatively speaking. They go about 180 at Daytona. And they have crash helmets and safety harnesses and all. It’s exciting to watch, though. The short tracks call for more driving skills than the long flatter speedways. But it does get hot in there. Sometime back in the seventies, twenty-five out of the thirty racers had to let relief drivers take over for them on account of the heat. That’s probably why they schedule the summer race for the evening these days, but of course we’ll be out in the brunt of the heat for this wedding. Everybody got sunblock?”
Justine smiled. “Already in my moisturizer,” she said. “Anyhow I wouldn’t need it for the race where I’ll be sitting.” She tugged at her sister’s arm. “Right now, we’ve got to get down there and see the wedding.” She beckoned for Bill Knight to follow. “A judge and a preacher-you two can compare notes about the ceremony!”