Once Around the Track (7 page)

“But he’d have to be nearly eighty!” said Rosalind, blurting out her last thought instead of all the reverent ones that preceded it.

Tuggle nodded. “He is, but he still knows more about race car engines than all the diploma jockeys in the world. And I didn’t say he was the chief engineer. He’s strictly around to advise us in an informal capacity—and we’re damned lucky to get him.”

“Yes, of course you are. How
did
you get him?”

“He’s Julie Carmichael’s godfather. Courtesy title, you understand. Neither one of them is the type to go to christenings, but he was her dad’s best friend, so he’s been like family to her all her life. Hell, on the strength of that I’d have hired her if she didn’t know a socket wrench from a nail file.”

There was no arguing with the logic of that. Rosalind thought she would have done the same, but she still wanted a job with Team Vagenya. “Okay,” she said, “Carmichael is going to be your chief engineer. I don’t blame you for that, but I still want to come on board. Just because I’m overqualified doesn’t mean you shouldn’t hire me in some other capacity.”

“Like what?”

“Engine builder? Engine specialist? I know my way around motors. I know how to read spark plugs. I know the gear ratios for most of the tracks. You’ll need a different setup every week, and your chief engineer might appreciate some expert assistance in other areas as well.”

Tuggle balanced a pencil lengthwise on the end of her forefinger. Rosalind wondered if the job hung in that balance. She willed herself not to breathe as the silence lengthened and the pencil wobbled. Finally, Tuggle said, “We can’t pay the fancy salaries that engineers would get in industry. I suppose you know that?”

Rosalind said, “Money is not the deciding factor.”

“Figured it wasn’t.” Tuggle wouldn’t have known a designer handbag if it bit her on the arm, but without even intending to, Rosalind exuded an unmistakable aura of
expensive.
She let the pencil fall from her outstretched finger to the desk; then she looked up. “Engine specialist, then,” she said. “You talk to Julie and Jay Bird. See if y’all get along. See if your skills mesh with theirs, and if you have the same sort of thoughts about what kinds of setups we need for each race. If you think you could be a productive part of that team, then come back and tell me, and we’ll put you on the payroll.”

Rosalind did not quite trust herself to speak. She nodded her thanks. Fortunately, she was not into personal power or ego trips about titles. She would be content to let Julie Carmichael oversee the shop dogs and do the interviews with sports journalists. Crew chiefs were celebrities in their own right in today’s NASCAR. Chad Knaus and Tony Eury, Jr. probably had more fans than some of the drivers. Rosalind didn’t want that kind of notoriety. She liked machines better than people anyhow. It was better this way.

On her way out, she remembered to thank Tuggle and to shake her hand. She was proud of that.

A couple of days later, Rosalind went to meet with Team Vagenya’s chief engineer and with the legendary Jay Bird Thomas, who had forgotten more about race car engines than most people would ever know. Working with him would be an honor. Rosalind hoped they would like her; in her experience, people mostly didn’t, but she intended to do her best to be agreeable. She did Google Julie Carmichael and Jay Bird, looking for some clues about their backgrounds and interests. How did people talk to strangers in the days before Googling?

They were expecting her. Rosalind walked into Julie Carmichael’s office at team headquarters with a brittle smile and ice water in the pit of her stomach. Julie Carmichael was a lanky woman about her own age, with horn-rimmed glasses and a hank of brown hair bound in a long braid. She wore designer running shoes, faded jeans, and a plaid flannel shirt over a vintage Davey Allison tee shirt. Beside her, with his nose buried in a technical manual, was a sweet-faced old man with jug ears and a fringe of white curls around a shiny bald pate. He peered up at Rosalind through rimless bifocals and twinkled a welcoming smile.

The small office, which had beige cinderblock walls, a tiled floor, and a curtainless metal window, looked as if it were a converted classroom, furnished from the Used Office Furniture Depot without much regard for style or ambiance: a faux wood and steel desk and table half buried under books and piles of paper, a large black-rimmed clock, and a collection of die-cast race cars from previous years in NASCAR. On a white erasable bulletin board was a photo of the 86 car (without Badger) and a computer-generated banner that read
VAGENYA TECH
.

Rosalind shook hands, belatedly remembered to smile, and nodded toward the sign. “Cute,” she said. “This is the engineering headquarters for Team Vagenya, but the sign is also a pun on your alma mater, isn’t it?”

Julie nodded. “Virginia Tech. Right. And Tuggle tells me that you graduated from MIT.”

Jay Bird Thomas looked up from the manual he had been reading, and said, “How do you spell that?”

Rosalind felt a ridiculous urge to curtsey, but she didn’t. “Same way they spelled it when you guest lectured there, sir.”

The old man looked pleased. “That was back before your time up there,” he said. “Nice bunch of fellas. After my lecture a bunch of us spent half the night in a bar trying to figure out an alternative to restrictor plates. Wore out the batteries on my calculator.”

“Wish I’d been there to hear that discussion,” said Rosalind.

“What would your solution be?” asked Julie. She pulled out a chair and indicated that Rosalind should sit down.

An alternative to restrictor plates.
Rosalind had given some thought to that question already. Everybody in racing groused about restrictor plates, the metal plates that restricted the air flow to the carburetor preventing the car from going over 200 mph, in an attempt to keep the cars from going airborne. It was a safety precaution, enacted in the 80s after Bobby Allison’s car achieved lift-off at Talladega and nearly took out a grandstand full of spectators. The plates served their purpose of restricting speed on super speedways of Talladega and Daytona, but they also prevented cars from pulling away from the rest of the field, so that a race tended to be a clump of closely packed cars all going about 190 mph: If any driver lost control or tapped another car, the result could be a chain reaction wreck that could take out half the competitors. Finding a safe, workable alternative to restrictor plates was the holy grail of racing engineering.

“What would I propose as an alternative to restrictor plates?” said Rosalind. “Well, there are a lot of alternatives that would produce the same results. You could mandate a smaller carburetor, or an engine with less horsepower, but those changes wouldn’t solve the problems. I might go to the speedway package they’re using on Busch cars. The blade across the top of the car, and then set the spoiler at about seventy degrees instead of the fifty-something setting that Cup is running. It makes the car more stable and knocks the engine down about twenty-five horsepower.”
Too much information.
Rosalind stopped short and tried to gauge their expressions. Was she being a knowledgeable professional or a hopeless geek? “Er—what would you do?” she asked Julie.

“I might reduce tire size,” said the team’s chief engineer. “Cup, Busch, and Truck all run on twelve-inch wide slicks that are normally pretty sticky. It seems to me that if you reduced the tire size to eight or ten inches, then the cars could not negotiate the turns at two hundred miles per hour. That would make driver skill a greater factor in super speedway racing again.”

“Yeah, but it would be easy to overdrive the tires,” said Rosalind. “Might even increase wrecks.”

Jay Bird shook his head. “If they go to smaller tires, the teams would have to put more downforce in the cars. Plus, drivers would have to brake going into the turns. I’m not saying it wouldn’t work, I’m just saying it would tee-totally change the way they race those super speedways, and I’m not sure that’s what anybody wants. Seems to me, if you do all that, you’re just duplicating the truck series—big heavy clunkers with no restrictor plates—’cause they can’t go fast enough in the first place to need ’em. Neutering the cars.”

Julie nodded. “Well, there are no easy answers. So what would you do, Jay Bird?”

The old man didn’t bat an eye. “Considering the current crop of Cup drivers? I believe I would sedate every driver whose last name starts with
B
. That ought’a do it.”

Julie shrugged. “Couldn’t hurt.” She grinned at Rosalind. “So what do you think? Do you want to join this wacko team?”

“Yeah, I do,” said Rosalind.

Jay Bird peered at her over the top of his bifocals. “Why? Start-up team full of amateurs. You’re not one of those Badger groupies, are you?”

“No, sir. He’s a decent driver, and I respect him for that, but personally? No. Handsome jocks are not my thing. I want to join this team because I want the experience, and to be honest with you, NASCAR is still largely an old boys’ club, so it’s hard for a newcomer to break in. And if the newcomer is a woman, then breaking in is next to impossible. I thought this team was my best shot. I didn’t care who your driver was. I just figured this is the one place that my gender would be an asset rather than a liability.”

“Fair enough,” said Julie.

“But it’s really an honor to be able to work with Jay Bird Thomas, too.”

The old man waggled his eyebrows. “So you’ll work for free then, will you?”

“No. But it’s not your money anyway, so I doubt if you care,” said Rosalind.

“You’re right, he doesn’t,” said Julie. “He just wants us to pull at least one victory out of the hat to show that old boys’ club what we can do. Now how do you suggest we do that?”

Rosalind shrugged. “Same way the old boys do it. Cheat.”

W
ell, it would probably be better than working for the food page of
The Charlotte Observer.
Probably.
Too bad the pay wasn’t better, but at least the hours were.

Melanie Sark knew that there were lots of people in the world—70 million, in fact, if you believed
Sports Illustrated
—who would clutch their hearts and faint with envy at the thought of getting a job as a publicist to a NASCAR team. To get paid to attend races. To get up close and personal with an actual Cup driver—as part of your job. Oh, sure, a dream come true. But not to her it wasn’t, because she wasn’t a NASCAR fan, and neither were any of her colleagues in journalism, as far as she knew. The glamour of this line of work would be lost on them, which meant that gloating would not be among the perks of her new job.

Her fellow journalists would ask her the same questions they’d pose if she had just taken over the editorship of
Shoppers Weekly
: How much does it pay?
(Not a lot);
What are the hours?
(Erratic, as far as she could tell, but less arduous than that of a newspaper reporter);
What are the perks?
(Well, attending NASCAR races, if that happened to appeal to you, but she couldn’t suddenly start pretending that it did.)

Sark had already thought out her response to the polite cynicism of her acquaintances:
plausible enthusiasm
. No, she wasn’t doing it because she wanted to go to stock car races, and no, she didn’t have a jones for runty little guys in firesuits. The point, she would tell them, was that the job would offer valuable experience in public relations, and it might lead to a more prestigious gig—Hollywood, perhaps, or a corporate position in industry, which would really pay well. Making something look good was the name of the game, whether you hyped a car, a new movie, or a race car driver, so it didn’t matter where she started out, as long as she performed the task with skill and creativity.

The NASCAR job would be a hoot, she would tell her colleagues. Surely she’d soon be able to regale the gang with tales of excess on the Redneck Riviera (aka Lake Norman), and stories about Thunder Road prima donnas behaving badly.
Stay tuned,
she would tell them, leering.

She took the job. There was never any doubt that she would. Diversification looked great on a résumé, and she was still young enough to get away with it and pretty enough to have a good shot at any job she really wanted. She had a good academic record, a modest legacy from her grandmother to use as a safety net, and two older sisters to deflect her mother’s lust for wedding planning and grandchildren. Sark was out to see the world before age, career demands, or Mr. Right put an Invisible Fence around her life.

She had already worked in the publications office of her university, spent the obligatory year in New York working for a fashion photographer, and worked as a publicist for a minor music company, whose main claim to fame had been a group called “The Okay Chorale.” Then she’d tried her hand at newspaper reporting, but the “assigned beat” system of a metropolitan daily had soon bored her, especially since the reporters with the least seniority got the most mind-numbing assignments. The zoning board.
Oh, please
. Taking a job as a NASCAR publicist was a small price to pay to escape that; during some of the interminable board meetings she thought she might have gnawed off her own foot to get away.

She had seen the story about the all-woman NASCAR team before it had even made headlines. One of the guys in the sports department had been bruiting the news about as his current favorite joke, but Sark had not been amused. NASCAR was a notoriously all-male enterprise, and on principle she applauded an injection of diversity into the mix. It had been easy enough to get the sports guy to give her the contact people, once she’d managed to convince him that her interest was opportunistic rather than journalistic.

She had e-mailed her résumé to the team, and by the time they called her for an interview three days later, she had put together an impressive portfolio of fashion photographs, zoning board stories, and record company press releases.

Christine Berenson had studied the work samples with clinical interest, and then she’d taken a long look at the slender girl with long cognac-colored hair and an expression of impish intelligence. At last she said, “And just what experience do you have with stock car racing?”

There it was. Sark knew she couldn’t bluff her way through that one. She had done some reading on the subject—at least enough to know that Jeff Gordon and Robby Gordon were not brothers—but she thought it best not to feign an interest or an expertise that she did not have.

“I’m eager to learn,” she said, with what she hoped was an enthusiastic smile.

Christine Berenson’s expression was noncommittal. “Well, your credentials seem satisfactory, and your photography is quite good. How exactly would you suggest we promote Badger Jenkins?”

Sark’s smile wavered. The name of the driver had not been made public, and while she had tried to memorize as much as she could about forty-three race car drivers who were just names on a page to her, she did not recognize this name, and not a single fact about him surfaced in her consciousness. She pretended to weigh the options, while she grasped at what few generalizations she had gathered about the mystique of stock car racing. “Well,” she said at last, “I think that race car drivers are the modern equivalent of…of…knights in shining armor. People see them as brave warriors, risking their lives in a kind of mechanized jousting tournament. I think I would focus on that nobility of spirit.”

Her prospective employer’s eyes widened, and for an instant her lips twitched. “Ah. Badger Jenkins as knight in shining armor. How very unexpected. But our researchers tell us that there are some thirty million female fans of NASCAR, and perhaps that is exactly the image that would appeal to them. Interesting.”

They talked a bit more, and Sark continued to be fortunate in her answers, so that by the time the interview was over, she felt confident of having landed the job. She left with Christine Berenson’s promise that she would hear from them soon.

That evening, Sark had a dinner date with Ed Blair, a freelance writer who specialized in articles for local magazines and occasionally even scored big with a national publication. Over dessert she told him about her new job prospect, careful to keep her tone light and ironic, displaying the elitism of a journalist, certainly of a sophisticated person well beyond the lure of stock car racing.

“It should be a hoot,” she said, toying with her crème brûlée.

Her companion stared into his coffee cup for a moment, deep in thought. “You know,” he said, “it could be quite an opportunity as well. You’ll have the inside track on a NASCAR team. And a notorious one at that. The all-female team. Who knows what goings-on you’ll get to see? It should be a satirist’s dream. I doubt you’d even have to exaggerate. You ought to keep a diary.”

“Why?”

“Well, so that you can write it all up at the end of the season. Surely this ladies’ team won’t last more than one season, so you’ll be out of a job by December anyhow. Then you can shop this article to a national magazine like
Vanity Fair
and make good money. You might even get a book deal out of it.”

“Vanity Fair?”
Sark blinked. “What kind of article?”

“Oh, you know, something hip and sarcastic. Knights of the round track, or redneck cowboys, or something like that. Get the tone right and it would be a great story. It should almost write itself. How hard can it be to make fun of stock car racing?”

No argument there, she thought. “But how would I get a national magazine to look at it?”

Ed Blair smiled. “Keep in touch, Sark. When you’re ready to shop the piece, I’ll make a few calls. I’m sure we can convince somebody to take it. NASCAR is becoming quite a cultural phenomenon, you know. They’ve just purchased some land on Staten Island to build a speedway in New York. That will put the sport on the national radar more than ever.”

Sark thought it over for a few moments. “All right,” she said, “I suppose it couldn’t hurt anything to keep notes, if I get the job. And if I get a good offer for an article, why not? Especially if I’m unemployed at the end of the season. Just don’t forget you promised to help me shop it.”

He raised his coffee cup in a mock toast. “Here’s hoping you get the job, and lots of dirt along the way.”

When the job offer came a day or so later, Sark accepted it with more enthusiasm than she had expected. She didn’t even mind that the pay was not astronomical. After all, she told herself, in a way she would be working two jobs at once.

Laraine set a pile of clean shirts on the bed next to the old brown suitcase. “Fresh out of the dryer, hon,” she said. “But I still don’t see why you have to move up there. I thought you hated Mooresville. You said the air feels like cotton candy in the summertime.”

Badger Jenkins was sitting on the floor, cradling his helmet in his lap, seemingly oblivious to the process of packing. He nodded sadly. “It does,” he said, without looking up. “But they’ll expect me to be around, and I figured I ought to go. Help set up the team.”

She nodded. That was a good sign. Impress his new employers with his dedication before fishing season or apple harvest or some other local distraction lured him away again.

Laraine set the shirts in the suitcase, next to several pairs of patched and faded Levis that she thought would be better off in the rubbish bin than in the suitcase. She looked around the sparsely furnished cabin, wondering what else he would want to take, but he seemed so lost in thought that she hated to ask him.
Not the dramatic Badger Jenkins racing poster taped to the refrigerator.
She’d always suspected he kept it there as a joke.
Not the old racing trophies on the mantelpiece, surely. Not the shotgun or the fishing rods. Not the eight-by-ten color picture of the former Miss Georgia-USA, who was also the former Mrs. Badger Jenkins—
speaking of things that should go in the rubbish bin, if you asked her.

She paused for a moment, with a dingy pair of socks in her hand, and looked at him, marveling as she always did at the difference between the stud on the NASCAR poster and the slight, earnest fellow on the floor, hugging the helmet.
Pictures don’t lie,
she thought, but those firesuit shots of Badger certainly weren’t within hailing distance of the truth. A collection of Badger’s racing posters graced the wall of the diner, and sometimes when Laraine hadn’t seen Badger in person for a week or so, even
she’d
start believing that the fellow in the picture was real—tall, wise, and powerful, and sexy as hell.

Then one day he’d turn up for lunch, looking like a lost Boy Scout in ratty old jeans and a tee shirt two sizes too large, and in two heartbeats she’d forget all the impure thoughts she’d had about him that wouldn’t bear repeating even on Confession Sunday, and she’d feed him a double helping of everything, and then forget to charge him for the meal.

He put her in mind of a stray puppy sometimes—lost and helpless, and so intent on his own concerns that he barely noticed all the times loving hands rescued him from one mishap or another. It wasn’t that he was ungrateful, exactly. Just oblivious. Whenever life seemed ready to flush Badger Jenkins down the toilet, something or someone always did turn up to save him, and he never seemed to wonder about his charmed life. Maybe you couldn’t if you were a race car driver. Maybe you had to believe in a luck that was stronger than steel and more reliable than gravity. How could you go out there and risk your life on a race track if you didn’t believe that?

She folded another tee shirt
(This one said, “No Fear!” Laraine thought they ought to make one that said, “No Common Sense!”)
and stole another glance at him, but he was still taking no interest in the preparations for his own departure. Like a child being sent off to camp. He’d thank her when she was done and hug her good-bye with all the sexless abandon of a little kid, but she wasn’t sure if that constituted gratitude as the rest of the world understood it or not. If she hadn’t done his laundry and the packing, somebody else would have. That’s the way the world worked for Badger, fair or not. Somebody would always look out for him; a dozen self-appointed crew chiefs steered him through life, just as the real ones had kept him on-track in the race car.

Another thought occurred to her. “Have you got somebody looking out for the cabin while you’re gone, hon?”

He nodded absently. “Yeah, Paul down at the Bait and Beer said he needs a place to stay while they’re rebuilding his house. Wood stove caught fire, you remember.”

Laraine nodded. She did remember. Someone else’s disaster turned into Badger Jenkins’s luck, just like on the track, when Johnny Benson or somebody had cut a tire, and the resulting caution had allowed Badger to pit just before he would have run out of fuel. His whole life was like that, it seemed to Laraine.

“I’m only charging him four hundred dollars a month,” said Badger, brightening at the thought.

For house-sitting?
thought Laraine. But she didn’t say anything. That was another thing about Badger. Just when you thought he had no more sense of self-preservation than a baby bird, he’d come out with something so shrewd and calculating that you found yourself wondering if the whole innocent thing was just an act. She never could figure it out. Maybe Badger wasn’t that macho robot from the racing posters, but that didn’t mean the real guy was any easier to understand.

And why do we love him so much?
she wondered. He is handsome enough, but no more than a hundred other guys anywhere you look. He’s kind when he remembers to be, but he can break your heart, too, by forgetting a promise or letting you down at the last minute. What is there about him that makes everybody stick to him like bugs on a windshield? There was a saying around Marengo, generations old: “Nobody ever got anywhere by loving a Jenkins.” Lord, that was true. But it didn’t stop people from trying, anyhow.