“Well, sure, Ray,” said Jesse Franklin. “Anybody you like, but I thought you stopped caring who won after Dale passed away.”
“I know, and I’ve been agonizing about it. I thought about what Earnhardt did after Neil Bonnett died. He went back to the track and practiced an hour after Neil crashed. So I thought he’d think I was soft if I didn’t move on. Well, last night in the hotel room, I took that Gideon Bible out of the nightstand, and I Bible-cracked.”
“But you’re from Nebraska,” said Justine. “I thought Bible-cracking was a Southern thing.”
“I expect they do some form of it everywhere,” said Bill Knight.
“So you opened the Bible and pointed at random to a verse, and now you want to get into the betting pool?” said Bekasu in cross-examining mode.
Ray Reeve reddened. “Well, the thing is I got Matthew seventeen, verse five. Knew exactly what it meant. Justine already picked him, but I’d like to go half with her.”
“Glad to have you!” said Justine. “I hope we split the pot!”
Jim Powell smiled. “Okay, then. Ray is backing Little E. in the Southern 500.”
“You know, Ray, Dale Junior isn’t all that good on short tracks,” said Harley. “He’s a restrictor-plate racer.”
“Don’t care if he wins or not,” said Junior’s new supporter. “I just decided to root for him. I can cheer him on. He’s Dale’s boy.”
The Darlington traffic was just as bad as it had been in Bristol-both races took place in small towns overwhelmed by an extra fifty thousand people for the weekend. Harley thought it was just his luck that the tour finale occurred at a track that wasn’t out in the middle of nowhere. Because it had been built in the early days before NASCAR became a major attraction, the Darlington Motor Speedway wasn’t a rural Pompeii, set amidst acres of empty fields that turned into parking lots a few days a year. This track filled a Wal-Mart-sized hole on a commercial road, with rows of small stores and houses all up and down the road around it. It wasn’t even a four-lane thoroughfare. No wonder people keep spreading rumors that NASCAR was going to move the Labor Day race to California, Harley thought. Now that racing was a billion-dollar enterprise, this track, with no fancy skyboxes or modern amenities, must look pretty poky to the corporate moguls, but he for one hoped the relocation wouldn’t happen. Darlington was a tradition that went all the way back to the days when Petty and Earnhardt meant Lee and Ralph, not Richard and Dale. He’d hate to lose that just for glitz.
His greatest concern at the moment was not the traffic but the weather. A misting rain fell out of a sky the color of pewter. That could spoil everything. You could play football in the rain, but motor sports was different. Driving out there was dangerous enough without factoring in a slick track from a mix of oil and rainwater. If it started raining, they’d stop the race. Sometimes drivers sat for hours waiting for the go-ahead to resume. Harley filled a few more miles with chatter by explaining that if more than half the designated laps of a race were completed during the afternoon, the winner would be whoever was ahead when the weather finally forced them to cancel it.
“Okay, the race is at one o’clock,” he said into the microphone. “So we don’t have time to go somewhere for lunch. Actually, Columbia would be favorite, because anyplace closer than that is going to be wall-to-wall people. We’re going straight to the track, and those of you who are young enough or brave enough can try the Darlington culinary specialty: hamburger steak smothered with onions. Take each other’s pictures in front of the palm tree there at the entrance.”
“It’s raining,” Cayle pointed out.
“I know,” said Harley. “I hope it quits, because if it doesn’t, there won’t be a race.”
By a stroke of luck, which despite Justine’s insistence, Harley refused to chalk up as a miracle to St. Dale, the rain stopped, the track was dried off, and the 53rd Mountain Dew Southern 500 roared to life.
“There are still so many terms I don’t understand,” said Bekasu plaintively. “What is a Biffle?”
Justine groaned. “In your case, Bekasu, it is a cross between baffled and bewildered.”
The green flag went down, and Bill Elliott’s number 9 Dodge took the early lead. When he still had it forty-three laps later, Harley was thinking that Sarah Nash would be sorry she missed this one, but after that Sterling Marlin led the pack, and Harley began to feel like a kid at a window watching a party he hadn’t been invited to. He had fully intended to worm his way onto pit road again before this race, still trying to make connections, but then he’d made the mistake of talking about Neil Bonnett at Daytona, and the memories wouldn’t leave him alone. Now common sense, a rare but unwelcome visitor, had dropped by to urge him to reconsider.
Darlington was the track that gave you fair warning to call it quits, but nobody ever listened. In 1997, Earnhardt had passed out here in the first lap of the race, and he had ended up in the hospital with a million people scared to death over his condition, but within days he was back in the driver’s seat as if nothing had ever happened. A few years earlier the Black Lady was also the scene of Neil Bonnett’s first serious crash-the one that left him with amnesia for many months. He had gone headfirst into the wall-a warning from Fate perhaps, but if so it had gone unheeded. Like Neil, Harley was forty-something and out of the sport after a wreck that any sane person would take as a divine message to call it quits. But also like Neil, he couldn’t walk away. What else was there in life that compared to this? He didn’t want to be a car dealer or a sportscaster while the show roared on without him. His thoughts seemed to go around in laps, too, always ending up back where they began: got to get back out there.
Nobody tried to talk to him during the race, or if they did he was oblivious to the interruption. He stared at the track with the glazed look of someone who was filtering this race through a dozen past ones. Halfway through the afternoon, a tap on his arm broke his reverie. It was Jim Powell, whose anguished expression said that he wasn’t thinking about the race.
“I think Arlene is sick.”
Harley hated hospitals. He’d been in too many emergency rooms after one wreck or another, and even worse was having to go there as a visitor, when some other driver had pushed his luck too far. He sat alone in the hallway now, staring at a pamphlet on heart disease, reading the same line over and over without absorbing a word of it, and cursing the sadists who had outlawed smoking in here.
It was a good thing that the race was still going on, so that traffic had not become a nightmare, because the ambulance had to go from Darlington to Florence.
“Aren’t you going to Wilson on Cashua Ferry Road?” Harley had asked the ambulance guy. He’d remembered the place from his racing days.
“No ER, buddy. Have to take her to McLeod in Florence. You gonna come in your car?”
Harley nodded. Most of the Number Three Pilgrims had insisted on leaving the race to accompany the Powells. Reverend Knight was going to ride in the ambulance with Jim and Arlene, while Harley, whose car was parked at Darlington in preparation for the end of the tour, had agreed to bring Matthew, Jesse Franklin, Justine, Cayle, and Bekasu. It was all the car would hold, but the one remaining passenger, Ray Reeve, hadn’t really wanted to go anyhow. He hated hospitals as much as Harley did, and besides, he didn’t want to leave in case Little E. won the race. He took Cayle’s cell phone so that they could call him from the hospital and tell him how Arlene was doing and how to find them. Meanwhile, he would stay by himself and finish watching the race. When it was over, he’d go back to the bus, find Ratty, and direct him to the hospital.
The ambulance attendant had looked doubtful at Harley’s proposal to follow them. “Well,” he said, “you can try, but we’ll be burning rubber-lights, siren and all. Doubt you could keep up.”