“Well, at least it will give me something to talk about when I get my car serviced,” she muttered.
Justine sneered. “It’ll give you something to talk about to the governor.”
“Did Davey crash in that race?” asked Jesse Franklin, trying to remember a competition that had ended a decade before.
Harley nodded. “With Ernie Irvan. Wasn’t serious. Just took him out of the running.”
“So Kulwicki must have won,” said Matthew, “because I know he was the defending champ in ’93 when his plane crashed at Bristol.”
“He won the championship, but he lost that race,” said Harley. “Elliott finished first, with Kulwicki right behind him. This is where it gets complicated.” He turned to Bill Knight and Bekasu. “You two might want to tune out here. Kulwicki’s second-place finish left him five ahead in overall points. So the championship came down to who led for the most laps, not to who won the race. Elliott led for 102 laps during the race, and Kulwicki led for 103. If it had been the other way around, they would have been tied for points for the championship, because the person who leads the most laps in the race gets five bonus points.”
“Then what? Toss a coin?”
“Nope. Then Elliott would have been declared the champion. Rule says in case of a tie, you look to number of races won during the season. Bill had five victories, while Alan Kulwicki had only two. So although Bill won the race, he lost the 1992 championship by one lap.”
“Oh, poor Bill!” said Justine. “To be so close and still lose. I’ll bet he took it hard.”
Harley clenched his teeth. “I am not going to the S &S Food Mart to buy a money order for Bill Elliott,” he said.
“No,” said Justine. “I’m sure he’s okay with it, and I think even he’d say now that it was for the best. Alan won the championship, and three months later he died in that plane crash at Bristol. But at least he had the championship. Bill is too much of a gentleman to begrudge him that.”
So here I am, thought Terence Palmer, walking along the path to a speedway holding a memorial wreath for someone that most of my friends have never heard of. He had joked that most of the people at the office thought that Dale Earnhardt was the chancellor of Germany. Of course, he didn’t have to tell anybody about this when he got back to Manhattan. He had actually been enjoying himself, as one can if one knows that the experience is simply a vacation from real life. Barbecue. Speedways. People who shopped at Wal-Mart. What an adventure. Maybe it would even give him some insight into how certain companies would do in the future, if he knew what middle America ate and wore. Pork rinds or beef jerky futures? He had actually enjoyed talking racing with Shane McKee, and Jesse Franklin had proved quite knowledgable about the stock market.
It occurred to Terence that this might have been his life for real if his father had ever wanted to fight for custody of him and if by some miracle Tom Palmer had won. He wondered who he would have turned out to be. He wouldn’t have a diploma from Yale. His clothes would be less elegant, his tastes less refined. He wondered if there could be an upside to that different self. If he could have been someone who did not watch himself making every move, who never spoke without gauging what the other person needed to hear. Someone who could make friends instead of contacts, socialize instead of network, accept a friendship without wondering what it would ultimately cost him. Someone who did not hear an endless loop of ironic commentary running inside his head in the voice of his mother. Would he rather be Shane McKee? No. But he doubted if Shane would be so foolish as to envy him, either.
They stopped in the paved area beside the Tara Condos where a bronze Richard Petty stood on his pedestal, in his customary garb of cowboy hat and boots, smiling in perpetual benevolence at a young fan, as he signed an autograph for her.
“Doesn’t he look like himself?” said Justine admiringly, raising the camera to capture the scene.
“It’s funny to see pictures of Richard Petty from the old days, though,” said Cayle. “Remember how he used to look back in the fifties before he got so thin? Kind of like Harrison Ford in American Graffiti.”
“Well, if he ever writes a diet book, put me down for the first copy,” said Bekasu, gazing up at the human heron immortalized in bronze.
“Is this where you want the wreath?” asked Terence, setting the circle of flowers at the base of the pedestal. He turned around to see the circle of his fellow passengers closing in around him and decided that he’d rather face the effigy of Richard Petty than a group of live people. Now he wished he had spent some of the walk over here thinking out what he was going to say. There was some comfort in knowing that he didn’t have to worry about making an impression. He could experience the novel sensation of telling the truth without any agenda at all. Now if he could only work out what the truth was.
He had listened to the speeches of the others, and while he might have shared some of the same emotions as his fellow passengers, it was for different reasons. Some of the others saw Earnhardt as the embodiment of possibility-proof that a poor boy without education or connections could rise to greatness, but since Terence had taken care to cultivate precisely the education and connections that Earnhardt had lacked, he found no inspiration in that. Jesse Franklin seemed to revere the Intimidator for being-well, intimidating-for riding roughshod over his opponents without caring what anyone thought or said about it, but again Terence could not even aspire to such a code of behavior. His world was a spiderweb of obligation and cooperation, and he could not behave otherwise and remain in it. Why antagonize authority figures when you aspired someday to replace them? And yet as far back as he could remember he had rooted for Dale Earnhardt. He had never asked himself why.
He looked up at the smiling bronze face of Richard Petty, larger than life on his pedestal, and seeming to invite the solace of confession. NASCAR’s authority figure: The King himself. Terence could talk to him.
“I never knew my dad. About all I ever heard about him was a passing reference in my mother’s carefully muted tones of disapproval. I knew my dad was a Southerner-from somewhere near Charlotte, North Carolina, more or less…He’d been in the marines, but he was only an enlisted man. Only. She always put it like that. And I tried to imagine what my dad would be like, without having very much to go on. Every now and then I watched movies about the South-Deliverance and The Beverly Hillbillies, that sort of thing-and I didn’t want my dad to be that. I guess I wanted an image that fit the description of him without being demeaning. Not for the sake of my mother-I never intended to discuss it with her, and I never did. But just because I needed an image to carry around in my head, somebody I wasn’t ashamed of, because after all, half my DNA came from my father, I wanted something to represent him, I suppose.
“I’ve been trying to remember when and how I first heard about Dale Earnhardt. I think I was about ten years old-it was the year of one of his early championships anyhow. A guy I knew at church was a racing fan, and I got to go to the Richmond Speedway once with him and his folks. I think we must have told my mother that it was a horse race. She’d never have let me go if she’d known it was stock car racing, but, anyhow, we went, and like most boys that age, I loved cars and danger and speed-anything to freak out the parents. So I was hooked. And Earnhardt was really hot that year-not just winning, but being outrageous. He was the Indiana Jones of sports. So I guess I started out by hoping my real dad was like that, until finally that image just took root in my mind so that I didn’t care if it was true or not. It worked for me. And then last spring when my dad died, and I found out that he had been an Earnhardt fan, too, it just seemed to seal the bond. So I guess I’m here to say thanks.” He stepped back.