Bill Knight digested this information. “Okay,” he said. “But other things being equal, who would you expect to win today?”
Harley considered it. “If wanting was getting, then I’d put my money on Jeff Gordon, I think. He has gone thirty-one races without a win. That’s got to be killing him.”
“But I thought you said that Wallace had a longer losing streak than that?”
“Well, but Rusty’s used to it,” said Harley. “He’s been around a while. But Gordon, now, he’s the Tiger Woods of motor sports. A child prodigy. He was younger than Matthew there when he started winning championships in go-carts. He just kept moving up to bigger and faster rides. This losing streak must be hard to take after all that early success.” Whereas I’d give my eyeteeth to be Rusty Wallace, he finished silently.
“So you want Jeff Gordon to win?”
Harley sighed. The new bland, non-Southern face of NASCAR, all vanilla all the time. “Let’s just say that with my luck, Gordon is the one who will end up in Victory Lane.”
Sitting next to Bill Knight had given Harley a new perspective on watching races. He looked out across the grandstands at the blur of spectators. One hundred and sixty thousand people, each one seeing a different race. He glanced at the old couple, Jim and Arlene, sitting there holding hands in their matching Dale Earnhardt tee shirts and vests, and he thought, Some people are even seeing cars that aren’t running here tonight.
The pregame show at Bristol was always a thrill to watch. First came the parachutist floating down out of the sky, hauling a gigantic American flag in his wake. Harley always waited for the skydiver to get blown off course and come down outside in the creek, but he never did. Smack on the track in front of the grandstand, same as always. And then, while all the pit crews in their bright matching jumpsuits stood on the track, a spectrum of respectful attention, the event began with a Bristol tradition: the National Anthem, sung by the children of the drivers: winsome blondes in pinafores and sturdy little boys waiting for their turn at the wheel.
At the end of the row Ray Reeve was the first one to his feet when the chords of the anthem were struck. He was the old soldier salutes the colors, straight out of Norman Rockwell, even to the trickle of a tear across his cheek.
Cayle Warrenby touched Harley’s arm. “I don’t see Dale Junior up there,” she said, peering at the crowded grandstand.
Harley actually stood up to point out the position of the Number 8 car at the pit before he realized what she was getting at. Drivers’ kids. “No,” he said with a weak grin. “I reckon Junior won’t be singing the National Anthem tonight. And neither will CooCoo Marlin’s boy Sterling nor Kyle Petty.”
“Voices changed,” said Bekasu.
“Well, that, and the fact that they’re driving in the race themselves tonight,” said Cayle, who was never sure how much Bekasu knew and pretended not to.
The cars sped past, wobbling to warm up their tires, the green flag went down, and with a roar that shook the bleachers the race began: a blur of brightly colored cars spinning around a steep, tight circle like marbles in a blender. You’d have to be traveling at a high rate of speed just to stay up on that high-banked track-centrifugal force trumped gravity.
The third lap came within a minute after the start of the race, and when the scoreboard indicated that the cars were indeed on lap 3, many of the spectators stood up, one arm upraised, with three fingers held up in tribute to their fallen hero. Harley, remembering his current assignment and his promise to Mr. Bailey, got to his feet and made the sign of the three, though he could not escape the image of a transparent man in sunglasses and a white Goodwrench firesuit pointing at him and laughing.
“It’s the three-peace salute,” he shouted to Bill Knight, before the question could be asked. He noticed, however, that young Matthew was already on his feet, making the sign on his own, so he knew.
“In memory of Dale Earnhardt?”
Before he could answer, the third lap was over. Harley was the first to sit down. “Yeah,” he said. “All last year, everybody did it on the third lap. Even the sportscasters up in the box, they tell me.”
“It seems such a solitary sport,” said Bill, putting his lips close to Harley’s ear to make himself heard over the noise of the race.
“We’ll talk after the race!” Harley yelled back, replacing his ear plug.
It wasn’t a solitary sport, though. It might look that way to Bill Knight’s untutored eye, but Harley knew better. It wasn’t just the teamwork between crew and driver, it was the feeling of the fans as well. Talk to any dedicated race fan, ask him to describe his favorite driver’s progress in the race, and chances are good that he’ll use the pronoun “we.” As in: “We had a little trouble with the left front tire after turn four…” or “We thought the car was a little loose on that last lap, so we decided to pit early…” We. As if the spectator were sitting in the passenger seat of the race car. If you knew enough about the sport, it felt that way. You tuned your scanner to your driver’s frequency, and you heard his voice, every lap of the race, guiding you through the experience, as if you were riding along beside him. Maybe pro football was a spectator sport, but motor sports was a virtual ride-along. No other sports fans could get so close to the participants while the event was taking place.
For the rest of this race, though, Harley was the most solitary person in the Bristol Motor Speedway. Without a scanner he was cut off from the voices of the participants, and without a ride, he was shut out of the sport altogether. One part of his mind followed the intricacies of the race, but beneath that was the undercurrent of worry: replaying this afternoon’s conversations with the owners and crew chiefs, wondering what he was going to do when the tour ended, if he didn’t have a job lined up by then. And in his head, the musical accompaniment for the Sharpie 500 was an old James Taylor song, called “Carolina in My Mind.” He wasn’t sure why his mental soundtrack kept looping that song, until he focused on the words to the chorus, the line after the sunshine and the moonshine. The part about the friend who hits you from behind. Oh, yeah. That was Carolina, all right. If they ever did a music video of that tune, they ought to run footage of Earnhardt racing. Ain’t it just like that old Carolina boy to hit you from behind?
The race went on, punctuated occasionally by caution flags, and sometimes by Speedway-sponsored diversions, like an air cannon shooting tee shirts into the stands to the scrambling spectators. Harley wondered if there had been an equivalent to that in ancient Rome, but it was too noisy in the stands to ask the reverend about it.
The laps mounted up while the song cycled around in his head. Yeah, ain’t it just like a lot of those Tarheel boys to hit you from behind? In the course of the race Dale Junior smacked Ward Burton out of the way, parking him for the rest of the night. Of course, Carolina didn’t have the monopoly on roughhousing. Jeremy Mayfield, a newcomer from the Waltrips’ hometown of Owensboro, Kentucky, took Hut Stricklin out of the race, and Robby Gordon drew a penalty for wrecking Jimmie Johnson, whose car then bumped Mark Martin’s, so they were all about equally furious, he figured. Nothing out of the ordinary for a Bristol race, though. A series of wrecks punctuated by fast laps.
As he watched, Harley began to wish again that he had left the Bodines a message of encouragement on the graffiti walls, after all. Poor Todd, who had crashed early on, finished dead last. On the other hand, a last place finish paid $76,634, which is more than Harley would make in a year of leading speedway bus tours, so he couldn’t feel too sorry for the Bodines.