“But, you know, Dale didn’t have to do that. When he raced he was in that car all by himself-no supervisor, no coordinator, no committees. And if somebody was going too slow, or got in his way-bam! He just tapped them aside and kept on going. Lord, it was better than tranquilizers, watching him race. I just wish you could be like that in real life. Do it your way, and tell people to like it or lump it. Thump them if they won’t step aside. And that was his real life. I don’t suppose I could be like that, even on the track and certainly not in the courthouse, but, oh, my! It did my heart good just to watch him work.”
“Amen,” said Ray Reeve.
After a few moments of uncomfortable silence, which Harley feared would be broken by a disapproving Rev. Knight, Ratty Laine said, “Well, it’s hot enough out here to poach golf balls. Why don’t you hit the souvenir shop for your Martinsville pins, and then we’ll get back into the air-conditioned bus. We’re putting up in the Days Inn down the road tonight.”
The awkwardness was broken, and the group surged back toward the parking lot, all talking at once. Bill Knight caught up with Harley. “What an odd speech,” he murmured. “Were you surprised?”
Harley shook his head. “That old boy is practically a poster child of an Earnhardt fan. He was loved by the roughnecks, people who have trouble with authority, or else folks who were slumming.” He nodded toward Terence as he said that last word.
Chapter XIII
The Richard Petty Museum and DEI
“North Carolina loved Dale Earnhardt so much they even named a county after him.” Harley Claymore had been saving up this joke for more than three hundred miles. “And here we are-in Our Dale County.”
The sign at the side of the highway welcomed travelers to Iredell County, but given Harley’s accent, there was a good chance he’d have pronounced it “our dale” even if it wasn’t a play on words. Bekasu looked up sharply, and Harley could see her gearing up to explain to her fellow passengers that, in fact, the county had been named after some prominent North Carolina family in colonial times, but Justine must have also anticipated that speech, because she elbowed her sister in the ribs, all the while smiling sweet encouragement for Harley to go on.
“It’s odd, isn’t it, that two of the most legendary drivers in motor sports are commemorated less than forty miles apart? We visited Richard Petty’s museum this morning in Randleman, and now we’re headed southwest to Mooresville, headquarters of DEI, and shrine to the man himself. Anybody know what they call Earnhardt’s building?”
In a burble of laughter, Jesse Franklin called out-“The Garage Mahal!”-but most of the other passengers had said it softly in unison with him.
“Why do they call it that?” asked Bill Knight, whose voice had been conspicuously absent in the reply.
Harley sighed. “Wait’ll you see it.”
After a pancake breakfast that morning in Martinsville, Virginia, they had set off, taking highway 220 past Greensboro, and into the heart of Carolina racing country. As they’d headed south toward the North Carolina border, the mountains fell away behind them, dwindling to foothills, and finally to the rolling country of the North Carolina piedmont with its red clay and pine forests. This was the land of textile mills and furniture factories, of tobacco fields and hog farms-and race tracks. Before Bill France had organized the informal beach races of Daytona into an empire back in the forties, North Carolina had been the home of fast cars and daredevil drivers. But at the very beginning, it wasn’t a sport. It was a living.
Up on the mountain farms that straddled the high peaks of the Smokies west of Morganton, economic necessity coupled with inclination inspired the making of moonshine. The tradition and the recipes for whiskey-making had come over from Scotland and Ireland in the eighteenth century with the settlers who homesteaded Carolina’s wild mountain region. In the twentieth century, the pioneers’ descendants found themselves on the losing end of an agricultural equation, in which steep mountain land couldn’t produce enough crops to support the family farm-at least the crops in their traditional form weren’t profitable. But if you took a few acres of corn, dirt cheap by the bushel, and distilled it through copper tubing, turning it into high-proof whiskey sold by the gallon, then the corn would yield the farmer a living wage. Such subsistence innovation was illegal, of course. The country had passed a whiskey tax in 1792, and bootleggers, who didn’t feel like letting the government siphon off their profits, had been dodging the law ever since. Faced with a choice between accepting charity in order to survive and breaking the federal tax law to take care of themselves, they chose the latter without a qualm.
Fast driving came into the picture when it became necessary to get mountain-made moonshine to the big city markets in the Carolina piedmont-to Charlotte, Raleigh, Fayetteville, Durham-without getting stopped by the law and having the cargo confiscated. Those routes and their east Tennessee counterparts were the original Thunder Road, and a generation of drivers in the early days got their start on back country roads instead of at race tracks, when outrunning another car meant more than just a trophy and a kiss from a beauty queen: it meant food on the table, and not going to jail.
By the time Richard Petty took the wheel in the late fifties, those days were over, but the love of fast driving in a motorized battle of wits had seized the Tarheel imagination, and dirt tracks were built to cater to that obsession: Rockingham, Wilkesboro, Hickory, Asheville. Only Rockingham retained its place on the NASCAR circuit these days, but all those tracks loomed large in the history of Carolina motor sports.
There wasn’t time to crisscross the piedmont to visit all those legendary tracks, so as far as the tour was concerned the Monday afternoon trip to Rockingham would have to represent all the early days of the sport. First, though, the bus would stop in Randleman and Mooresville so that the group could pay its respects to the only two seven-time champions in the history of the sport: both sons of the North Carolina piedmont.
As the bus rolled down the highway from Martinsville, Harley consulted his notes while most of the passengers read or dozed, sleeping off the effects of the pancake breakfast.
“Two seven-time champions-both Tarheels,” he said into the microphone. “Petty and Earnhardt. They’re alike in a lot of ways, and totally different in almost as many others. So let’s compare these two NASCAR legends. First of all they were both sons of well-known race car drivers on the circuit-that would be Lee Petty and Ralph Earnhardt. But Richard Petty won 200 races in his career, while Dale only won a total of 76.”
“Apples and oranges,” said Sarah Nash, looking up from her newspaper. “They raced in different eras. Things were a lot more competitive by the time Earnhardt came along-and the NASCAR rules on modifications were stricter, too.”
“No argument there,” said Harley. “I’m just spouting numbers, is all.”
Karen McKee sighed and leaned back in her seat with her eyes closed, but she wasn’t asleep. The wedding had gone off as planned-at least as Shane had planned-and now that the milestone was passed, she had an empty feeling as if someone had forgotten to write The End across the sky. Mrs. Shane McKee. That phrase, which had seemed so complete in itself in all the months leading up to the ceremony, was unfailingly followed by “Now what?” in the unending conversation she had with herself inside her head.