Once Around the Track (3 page)

We got him.

Christine Berenson held up the photo in front of her as if it were a mirror.

So this is Badger Jenkins.

As always with Christine Berenson, the professional reaction came before the personal one. She acknowledged that whatever his shortcomings educationally and socially, the camera obviously loved Badger Jenkins, definitely an asset in a world where money buys speed, because sponsors provide the money. Win or lose, a pretty boy in the driver’s seat could bring in corporate sponsors, not to mention selling a million tee shirts, coffee mugs, and other assorted ritual items to his besotted admirers. Her advisors said that Badger Jenkins was a good driver—a
seat-of-the-pants
driver, all nerves and instinct—but she was more pleased that the other end of him was marketable. For business reasons.

Well, mostly for business reasons.

The face that looked back at her from the photo looked nothing like hers. It was a strong, masculine face that seemed composed of sharp edges—prominent cheekbones, a blade of a nose, a jutting jaw—even the brown eyes were piercing. It wasn’t an angry face, though. Focused, perhaps. Determined.

Struggling to have a thought,
Christine told herself with a wry smile, fighting the attraction of that face. He was, after all, just a race car driver. Imagine trying to make him sit through an opera.

She sighed. If their genders were reversed, she could keep him as a pet and no one would think twice about it, but women were denied that luxury. They were expected to marry someone even more powerful than themselves, and that usually meant someone older and more sharklike. This little one-trick pony would probably end his career in half a dozen years with two million dollars in the bank and four concussions, and think himself both rich and lucky. No, you couldn’t ally yourself with him on any formal basis. Idly, she ran her forefinger along the perfect jawline in the photo.

But he was undeniably handsome, in the same way that a thoroughbred or a Harrier jet is beautiful: perfection of design with no conscious desire to please. The man was looking away from the camera, absorbed in some private reverie of his own, indifferent to the effect those perfect features might have on the observer. He was too busy being himself to care what anybody thought about him—exactly like a stallion.

That’s what he reminded her of: her first horse. That little bundle of nerves that was so beautiful and so much stronger than she was. She had to learn, by sheer force of will, to get the better of him by out-thinking him. It was a lesson that had served her well, and one worth remembering now.

This man looked as if he didn’t care what anyone thought about him as long as he could do whatever it was he was determined to do. Win races, she supposed.

She wondered what it would feel like to be so unencumbered of the feelings of others. Certainly she had never known such self-possession. As far back as she could remember, the pressure had been there to be pretty, to be smart, to be pleasing to others. First Mummy had instilled in her the message that people only liked pretty girls, slender girls, smiling girls. And if she had doubted the truth of those early lessons, then half a dozen years of adolescence would have shown her the light, because to be an ugly duckling in the world of private schools and debutante parties was to experience hell on earth. The poor, chubby, frizzy-haired beast on her hall had swallowed a bottle of aspirin, had her stomach pumped, and then went away forever, giggling with relief and joy.

What would it feel like to exercise just because you enjoyed it, rather than in social self-defense? To befriend people because they were interesting, and not because they were useful? To live without second-guessing yourself every waking moment?

One might as well ask a thoroughbred. Certainly this pretty boy was not up to philosophical discussions. But that was all right. She would do the thinking for the team, and she would see that he was treated well and kept happy. Just as she would have looked after a thoroughbred had the other form of racing appealed to her instead.

“But why would you want to invest in a stock car?” Tate had asked her, in mild bewilderment, as if she’d ordered oysters in May.

She had given him a vague smile and a little shrug, trying to formulate a polite response. It wasn’t as if he actually
cared.
It was, after all,
her
money. “I don’t know,” she said. “Horses are so passé, I suppose.”

He nodded, not really interested in anything she did, but as unfailingly polite as six generations of inbreeding could possibly make him. “Yes, one does feel that the sport is somewhat quaint in this age of lasers and space shuttles.”

She nodded. They vaguely knew of people in northern Virginia who kept polo teams, and certainly Indy racing was fashionably daring in their social circle, but she rather fancied the idea of cars that looked like actual street vehicles and the reverse snob appeal of stock car racing. NASCAR was indeed a millionaire’s sport, even if few people realized that fact. It was different. Christine liked being different, as long as she did not incur any social punishment for it. Stock car racing promised not to be boring. The other women with whom she had formed this venture all sounded so idealistic, talking about opportunities for women and automotive safety research, and she had murmured agreement with all these lofty goals, but really her motives were much more basic than that.

And it was
her
money.

Tate, making a noble effort to keep the conversational ball rolling, said, “Well, I suppose cars are easier to repair than horses.”

She nodded, as if this had been a consideration. Then, amusing herself by coming as close to the truth as she dared, Christine had said, “And after all, darling, what is the point of owning a horse if you can’t ride it?”

Badger Jenkins. Oh, yes.

Christine Berenson looked at the stack of reports on her desk and sighed. Who knew that starting a sports venture could be so…well…corporate?

She supposed that it made sense, really. Everyone knew that NASCAR was a multibillion-dollar business. The only family-owned sport in the world. But somehow the idea of investing in a form of entertainment obscured the fact that it was simply a business like anything else. With a grimace, she pictured the operators of the Roman Colosseum toting up their expenses for lion upkeep and arena personnel against the projected gate receipts of the games.

First, they’d had to line up sponsors, because you couldn’t even play the game without twenty million dollars or so to bankroll the operation. It was amazing how many months of planning and meeting and schmoozing had to take place before the gentleman could start his engine. The race may go at 180 mph, but the preliminary phase went at a snail’s pace. So much to plan and negotiate.

Find a suitable property to use as a race shop. They had decided to rent one in the vicinity of Mooresville rather than go to the extra expense of new construction, because, after all, one never knew whether the venture would turn out to be successful or not. Most of the race shops were within hailing distance of Mooresville anyhow, which meant that finding some suitable but vacant garage space was a feasible plan, and the personnel to run the operation would also be available locally.

She sighed, looking at the morass of papers on her desk. Stacks of job applications and résumés and letters of recommendation. Who knew how many people were required to run even a one-car racing team? She marveled at the figures before her. Anyone who thought that stock car racing was one man driving one car was decades out of the loop. The venture was beginning to remind her of the space program: a few people going up in high-tech machines, backed by a small army of engineers and technicians on the ground. Same with racing, apparently. The race shop, once established and outfitted, would house dozens of support personnel who would never even go to the speedways themselves. These “shop dogs” built the cars, refurbished old or damaged ones, engineered the motors, tinkered with body design to gain the best advantage for a given track, and did a dozen other things to ensure that the driver had the best car the team could afford to field. Engineers…fabricators…mechanics…secretaries…janitors…publicists…It added up to a lot of salaries. Who knew?

She had been vaguely aware of the need for a pit crew for the race itself—people to change tires and put fuel in the car—but this behind-the-scenes infrastructure of personnel had taken her by surprise, although she didn’t know why it should have. Everything was complex these days. How naive they had been back when they had thought that securing the services of Badger Jenkins was the answer to all their problems. Now, she sometimes found herself thinking that he hardly mattered at all. Certainly his talent could not compensate for poor engineering, bad equipment, or a lack of research and development. That face would sell a lot of tee shirts, though. And it ought to lure in a fair number of sponsors that wanted a good-looking athlete to personify their products.

Every day she was finding out that she needed answers to questions that had never even occurred to her when the project began. Fortunately, she had seasoned advisors on board to answer those questions, but still it gave her pause to think of how little they had known about the logistics of it all when they began. There were questions that had never even occurred to them at the outset.

How does the pit crew get to far-flung race tracks like Sonoma or Phoenix or New Hampshire? And most of the races these days were well beyond driving distance from the greater Charlotte area, home of the majority of race teams. Where do you house them for race weekends, and who feeds them?

None of these minor problems of logistics had occurred to them when they began the team, but little by little, practicality had intruded upon the daydream of owning a human racehorse, and one by one, questions were asked and answered, often by courtly old gentlemen who seemed within a syllable of using the term “little lady” in their discourse. But however antiquated the men’s world views, their advice had been eminently practical, and little by little, the answers fell into place, so that now, many months later, they could actually say that the team existed; that it was housed in adequate, if not luxurious, quarters, in Cabarrus County; and that it was staffed by competent professional engineers, mechanics, and other support persons necessary to the running of a race team.

This behind-the-scenes crew was, necessarily, predominantly male. This gender bias was unfortunate but essential, Christine thought with a sigh. Fielding an all-female team sounded charming and democratic on the face of it, but the truth was: one simply could not fill
all
the behind-the-scenes technical positions with women. Racing had for too long been an all-male domain, so that most of the current expertise, the hands-on experience of stock car racing, resided in male brains, and the fact was that one simply could not do without them. After a brief meeting and a careful examination of the cold, hard facts, the investors agreed that there was no choice in the matter. The behind-the-scenes personnel would have to be mostly male, and that’s all there was to it. But the pit crew was the most visible part of the operation, anyhow, aside from the driver, and in that area they did have an element of choice.

She had called a meeting of her fellow investors to, the cliché made her smile,
bring them up to speed
. Technically, they were owners, too, but she was really the one in charge. Some of them just chipped in their money for a lark, believing that her venture was a good investment, and certainly were able to afford the loss if it wasn’t. It was
fun.
A couple of the others were interested in the sport as fans, but they had promised to give her a free hand in the running of the team. But they enjoyed getting together, hearing about her adventures in this brave new world. Sometimes she felt like the star of a private reality show for millionaires:
Survivor: NASCAR.
But she didn’t mind entertaining them, considering how much money they’d entrusted her with. And if she learned the sport well, and if luck was on her side, then in a little while nobody would be laughing at her. That was the important part of the enterprise. Badger was just a side bet with herself. The icing on the cake.

“I’m working on assembling a pit crew,” Christine told the assembled gathering. “How hard can that be? Change the tires, put gas in the car, clean the windshield—”

One of the younger women raised her hand. “Actually, Christine, I read that race car windshields are tear-off sheets of—”

“I know,” said Christine through clenched teeth. After all these months and all this work, how could they think she wouldn’t know that? She forced a smile. “I was simply making a point. Thank you, Faye. But the premise is sound. Anyone of reasonable strength and agility can be trained to perform those tasks in a relatively short time—unlike the intricacies of engineering and mechanics, which take years of study and experience. Fortunately, people at the race and television viewers will see the pit crew and not the shop personnel, so in accordance with our intended goal, to the casual observer, the team will still look all female.”

“Well, except for Badger,” said Diane Hodges, the former Miss Texas who had married into Oil. “He could make my toes curl through a locked door.”

A large framed poster of Badger Jenkins in his firesuit hung on the wall of the office. With one accord, the investors turned to study it. One or two smiled approvingly, and one of them said, “He reminds me of my grandson.”

“Perhaps we should have tried harder to find a female race car driver,” said the investor from Winnetka. “There’s that girl at Indy—”

“We can’t afford her,” Christine replied with the assurance of one who has had this argument so many times that her response was a sound bite. “There are half a dozen women in the lower echelons of stock car racing as well, but either they are under contract to one of the big teams in development programs or they are out of our price range. Or both.”