They were silent for a few moments. The tour was over. The last wreath placed. Now what?
“You did good,” Harley told Bekasu. “You listened, and you took part, and you didn’t make everybody miserable. That’s good.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I’ll make you a promise. Next time I hear one of my friends make some condescending remark about racing, I’ll call them on it. I will.”
Harley nodded. He didn’t much care what smug, dumb yuppies thought, but he knew that the gesture was kindly meant. “Do you want me to take you back now?” he asked her.
“Not especially,” she said. “It’s not very late. That is, if you have nothing better to do.”
Harley shook his head. “Nowhere to go,” he said. “Why?”
She shrugged. “There’s one thing Dale Earnhardt has made me realize. I’ve been on a short leash all my life, Harley. I was the honor student in high school, too uptight to run with the fast crowd, but always wondering what I missed out on while I was home studying. All this has made me face the fact that life doesn’t go on forever.”
“Well, life’s too short for restrictor plates, anyhow,” said Harley.
“I feel like I want more out of this trip than sitting in a bus or watching a couple of races.”
“Uh-huh.” Harley was beginning to detect the family resemblance between Bekasu and Justine. The family madness was simply better camouflaged in the judge. And it took you longer to realize that she was pretty, while Justine practically hit you over the head with pheromones.
Bekasu was taking deep breaths of the moist summer air and shaking her head like a horse getting ready to bolt. “Can we do some laps out there on the track?” she said. “I want to see what it feels like to go that fast.”
“Uh-I can go ask the guard. If he’s an old-timer here, he’ll remember me.”
“Good. Can we do a yard?”
“’Scuse me?”
“That’s what the gang kids say sometimes in traffic cases. It means to go a hundred miles an hour. Doing a yard.”
“I think I can manage that. And then would you like to go get some dinner?”
Bekasu was on a roll. “How about we find a beer joint somewhere? Live music and sawdust on the floor!”
“One lap at a time,” said Harley.
She smiled. “You remind me of this I guy I knew back in high school. I was always scared of him, because he was so remote. Like he was encased in ice, and the rest of us were beneath his notice. I always wondered what he did when he wasn’t slouched in the back row of class, reading Popular Mechanics.”
“What ever happened to him?”
“God knows,” said Bekasu. “But nothing ever happened to me. So let’s fix that.”
Well, it would be a hell of a week, thought Harley, but sooner or later she’d start talking about getting an associates degree in automotive whatever, and then he’d start checking out. Or maybe not. She was right about one thing: if you don’t start, you can’t win.
Bekasu’s eyes were shining. “You go ask if we can use the track. I just have to tell Justine not to wait up.” She walked out toward the road, wondering what on earth she would say to Justine.
Harley started to walk toward the guard’s hut to the right of Gate Six, hoping that whoever was on duty tonight was old enough to remember when “Junior” meant “Johnson.” He had his NASCAR license on him, though, and that ought to count for something.
In the halo of the parking lot streetlight, Bekasu opened her purse and reached for her cell phone. Tucked in its case was the one souvenir she had bought on the Number Three pilgrimage: a 1995 sports card photo of a young Winston Cup driver.
That first day she had found it among the homemade T-shirts and unauthorized fan items in a souvenir tent at the Bristol Motor Speedway. She’d bought it as a joke, really, an ironic gesture: pretend to get into the spirit of the tour, but really have a private laugh at the sham heroics of it all. The card had only cost a dollar. At first it had amused her to see the absurdly dramatic photo radiating sullen macho glamour.
On the front of the card a driver in a blue and white firesuit glared into the camera, eyes shielded by dark glasses, mouth a tight-lipped slit, the planes of his face as smooth and perfect as polished steel. But the expression was not angry. As the days passed, she’d be rummaging through her purse and catch a glimpse of that face on the card, and she’d find herself staring at it in puzzled fascination, thinking that he looked vulnerable…lost…despite all that power.
Behold the man. He was beautiful…dangerous…sexy. Like an archangel whose alien perfection was nonetheless captivating. You felt that you could not speak in that presence, and yet…if only you could stand behind him, you’d be safe from anything. Six feet tall. Wise, commanding, fearless, powerful, inhumanly beautiful.
Except that the man on the sports card wasn’t any of those things, really.
He was Harley Claymore.
It said so in gold foil letters stamped on the edge of the card. Harley Claymore, Winston Cup Driver, 1995. So this was the media image of their tour guide from his NASCAR days-little chicken hawk Harley Claymore, weather-beaten by sun and nicotine, brown hair silvering to gray, and smiling that possum grin of the eternal good old boy, past educating, past sophisticating, occasionally sober. The only power he radiated now was a coruscating unhappiness.
Bekasu held the card up to the light. Had he ever been this? This archangel of power and terrible beauty-before the Fall, before he lost his ride-Had he been this?
Nah.
It was the gloss of camera magic. All a trick of light, conjuring for the subject strength, wisdom, height-an image for the credulous fans who wanted to believe that larger than life heroes drove “stock” cars just like theirs in the Sunday races. None of that was true, but the fantasy was comforting. You wanted to believe it.
She wanted to believe it.
She thought of all the men in the periphery of her life…the Country Club acquaintances who turned up occasionally as dinner dates or bridge partners. All the stuffy old lawyers, the self-important medical types, the reedy accountants and the portly stockbrokers. All of whom she forgot about as soon as a tedious evening in their company had ended.
And here was something else again. Something…she groped for a word…primal. One hundred and eighty miles per hour. Reflexes like a tiger. Courage bordering on idiocy. And the passionate intensity of one who lived entirely in the present because to do otherwise would be to die out there. But what could you possibly talk about with him? Oh, who wanted to talk?
Bekasu took a deep breath. She hadn’t felt this way in a long time. It was an Indian Summer of the heart-an unexpected rush of warmth that might last a day or a month, but it might never come again, and now that she had it, she didn’t want to lose it.
The phone was ringing. What was Justine’s room number again?-Oh, yes, Ward Burton and Terry Labonte: 225-(This had been an educational week.)
“What do you mean you won’t be coming back to the hotel?” Justine cradled the receiver between her shoulder and her ear. Nail polish still wet. “You’re where?”