“Look at this!” said Jesse Franklin, laughing as he held up a white tee shirt with the hand-lettered slogan: Don’t Hit Me, Tony! “I need one of these. I could wear it to the office.”
“Stay in the car Sterling?” said Bekasu, reading aloud the slogan of another one. “What on earth does that mean?”
Harley was saved from having to devise a diplomatic explanation by a grinning Jim Powell, who was eager to share the joke. “That happened last February at the Daytona 500,” he told her. “It was just half a dozen laps or so from the finish, and Marlin and Jeff Gordon tangled and spun out into the grass of the infield. Okay-long story short-the officials red-flagged the whole bunch of them there on the backstretch. So they’re supposed to sit there and wait for the go-ahead, but Sterling Marlin got out of his Coors Dodge and started messing with the fender. It had been bent in one of the melees, and he must have thought it would cut his tire if he didn’t see to it.”
“Okay,” said Bekasu, with an expression suggesting that Her Honor was trying to follow expert testimony. “Is that frowned upon?”
“They were under a red flag,” said Jim. “NASCAR says nobody does anything under a red flag. A couple of other drivers reported him, but I reckon the officials had spotted it anyhow.”
“So what’s the penalty?’
“They send you to the back of the line at the restart, which means he lost a lot of ground. Never did catch up.”
“Did he think he could get away with it?”
Sarah Nash who had been listening to this explanation with an expression of solemn disapproval, interrupted. “Sterling Marlin admitted that he had pulled the fender away from the tire to stop the rubbing, but don’t forget what else he said.”
“What was that?” asked Jim.
“He said that he had once seen Earnhardt do exactly the same thing at the race in Richmond, and that NASCAR had not penalized Dale for it.” She gave him a sour smile. “Sterling said he supposed the rules must have changed since then. Of course, he didn’t suppose anything of the kind. All the drivers will tell you that Earnhardt got away with things that the rest of them would be slapped down for trying.”
“Bekasu always says the same thing about me,” said Justine. “I used to break curfew and every other rule Daddy handed down, and he just couldn’t bear to punish me for it. I guess some people just get to go through life in the express lane.”
“Poor old Sterling. He lost the Daytona 500. Think how he must feel,” said Cayle.
“I know exactly how he feels,” said Bekasu.
At the next vendor table Matthew, who knew all the facts and foibles of the NASCAR crowd, had happily explained to Bill Knight what Marlin and Stewart had done that season to become the butt of tee shirt jokes. Next year it would be somebody else’s turn. Now he was naming the driver and make of car that went with each of the racing bumper stickers on display.
One of the vendors had NASCAR-related badges in the shape of race cars or drivers’ numbers. Harley found the red and blue emblem of the Bristol Motor Speedway and held it up. “Y’all ought to get you one of these!” he called out over the din of the crowd. “You can get one pin for every speedway we go to.” In the mad scramble that followed, Harley reflected that he ought to have asked the guy how many Bristol pins he had on hand, but fortunately the item was not in short supply and, by checking with other merchants in the same tent, they managed to round up a Bristol badge for each pilgrim.
“Should we put them on our hats?” asked Cayle.
Bill Knight smiled. “On his hat seten Signes of Synay,” he said.
“Was that a yes?” asked Justine.
“It works,” he said. “I’ve always pinned mine to my hat. I have a cockle shell and a bell and a badge of keys.”
If he had been hoping to use this remark as a springboard to discussing his retracing of medieval pilgrimages, the gambit did not succeed. With a collective shrug, his fellow travelers surged forth to the next table of goods-Earnhardt memorial tee shirts. The one that pictured a dove in a rainbow and the caption Dale Got His Wings-Feb. 18, 2001 was much admired, but no one bought it.
Justine, yawning broadly, noted that the race would not start for another six hours, and she suggested that they all go to the bed-and-breakfast to rest before it began. Harley, spotting his chance to get off the leash, immediately offered to sprint back to the bus and ask Ratty to take them away.
“He’d be glad to do it!” he assured them with a straight face, hustling them back across the footbridge to the parking area.
Ratty had not been glad to do it in the least. Harley had found him curled up in the driver’s seat, his Winged Three cap over his face, and the bus door closed to keep in the air conditioning. A few determined thumps on the window brought him back to consciousness, and he cranked open the door with a sleepy scowl. “What?”
“Can you take the folks over to the bed-and-breakfast?” said Harley. “They want to rest up until race time. It’s been a long day already for some of them.”
Ratty stared at him openmouthed. “Have you seen this traffic?”
“Well, it’s not far is it? It’s not downtown. The place is on a country road according to my notes here.”
“Might as well be Memphis, this traffic.”
Harley assumed his most sympathetic expression. “Well, I told them that,” he said. “But it’s awful hot out here, and some of them are pretty well up in age. And there’s the little sick boy, of course…”
Still scowling, Ratty switched on the ignition. “Have ’em here in five minutes,” he said. “Probably take us an hour to go three damn miles.”
Harley nodded his thanks and sped away. Fifteen minutes later, he had settled all the passengers on the bus, with promises to be waiting for them at precisely 5:30 under the giant banner photo of Alan Kulwicki.
Then, with sweat pouring down his face, Harley went back inside, hoping to run into somebody from the old days who could get him onto pit road. This wasn’t going to be easy. Security was tight these days, now that NASCAR drivers had a following like rock stars. Hell, some of them, like Gordon and Little E., had a following of rock stars. But that wasn’t going to be the hard part as far as Harley was concerned. The hard part was going to be putting on a big happy grin, going hat in hand to people who had once been his peers, and asking them for a favor. Networking didn’t come naturally to the likes of Harley Claymore. It felt like taking charity and the thought of it made him cringe.
To make the process even harder, an old family story rose unbidden to his mind. Harley’s daddy had been a nine-year-old boy back up in Wilkes County. Young Willie Moore had lived on a farm with a passel of brothers and sisters, and his folks had raised tobacco and run some hogs-subsistence farmers, they’d call them nowadays-but they never went hungry and, until television came along in the fifties to show them a different world, they never knew they were poor. But one morning when the Moores went to school, a social worker or some such do-gooder was waiting there outside the principal’s office with a big old box of shoes. Somebody somewhere had decided that everybody in school was going to get a new pair of shoes. Maybe the shoes weren’t exactly new. Maybe they were castoffs from some town down state, but anyhow, each child was to be given a pair that more or less fit his feet. Willie Moore had tried to explain to his teacher and the do-gooder lady in the tweed suit that they weren’t allowed to take charity. It was an unspoken rule in the Moore clan, but clearly understood by the children nonetheless. Doing without was better than being “beholden” to strangers. Willie, the oldest of the school-going Moores, had attempted to explain this principle to the shoe lady, but his objections were met with scorn. What needy child wouldn’t be glad to have a fine new pair of shoes, she had told him. At last he had given up, since sassing teacher ladies was also on the list of activities forbidden to Moore children. Reluctantly he had given in, accepting the new brown oxford shoes in exchange for his scuffed and worn old pair. The younger ones followed suit and that afternoon they had all walked home, a little self-consciously, in their new footwear. The teachers and the charity folks must have congratulated themselves on a job well done. Every time he ever told this story, Willie Moore would say that he wished those school people had been there to see what happened when the children got home. The next day, all the children came back to school in worn-out shoes or barefoot, and some of them had to eat their lunch standing up.