Once Around the Track

could always eat the pickle, ask for the rest of the order to go, and then give it to some starving pooch with a cast- iron stomach.

Assuming her brightest Junior League smile (the one that said “my teeth and my pearls are both real”), Suzie Terrell stepped inside the cafe and beamed at the dishwater blonde behind the counter. “Are you Laraine? We spoke on the phone.”

Narrowed eyes took in her pastel blue silk suit from Neiman Marcus and her Dolce & Gabbana purse. “Yeah, I remember. Is this about Badger?”

“Yes, it is. I represent a group of women-”

The waitress rolled her eyes and heaved a theatrical sigh. “His DNA’s on file at the courthouse.”

“No, that isn’t it. My clients want to offer him a job. Driving a Cup car.”

A Cup car. Three weeks ago that term would have mystified her, ignorant as she was of all things NASCAR. Just because you were born and bred in Atlanta didn’t mean you acquired knowledge of stock car racing by osmosis. After all, what they called the Atlanta Motor Speedway was, in fact, in Hampton, Georgia, some thirty miles south of the big city. Suzie Terrell had never been there. In fact, where stock car racing was concerned, she had cherished her ignorance. Now here she was in an even more remote and savage place-Marengo, Georgia, teetering on the edge of the world-awaiting the arrival of the town’s one celebrity: Badger Jenkins, race car driver and local satyr.

She cast about in search of small talk that she could make with the creature when he did appear, but quickly abandoned that idea-after all, how many one-syllable words could you string together?

Maybe it would be better just to get right down to business. A group of female investors in Atlanta has secured funding, and-God knows why-they wanted to field a NASCAR team with an all-female crew except for the driver, because there are no woman drivers at Cup level, the “major league” of motorsports. And they had chosen Badger Jenkins as their designated driver. Oh, well, she supposed that if the genders were reversed, no one would question the logic of their choice. Why not get a pretty one? That had been the underlying theme of male employment criteria for millennia.

And if those sports cards were any indication, Badger Jenkins certainly was a pretty one.

His face was a perfect intersection of lines and planes-the straight nose, the cleft chin, eyes the brown of Colombian coffee. The better to drown you in, my dear… Ancient eyes that seemed to hold the sorrows of the world. Saint’s eyes.

Oh, Badger Jenkins had won the gene pool, all right.

In those beautiful eyes it would be easy to read complexity and depth where none might exist. To build him a soul and then proceed to fall in love with it. The oldest of biological traps.

That was exactly why pretty wasn’t a safe commodity. Pretty is coral snakes and lightning bolts and the elegant spirals of plague DNA. She thought that to see such perfection in a human figure ought to trigger a signal in your brain that said: Run!

Well, Suzie told herself, she was only the attorney for the business deal. She wouldn’t have to work with him. All she had to do was make him an offer on behalf of her clients. So what if he was handsome? He probably had an IQ of room temperature and the ego of a Turkish sultan. Spending an hour in conversation with this warrior angel would give her a tale to dine out on in the party circuit for months to come. Since she had to talk to him, she might as well enjoy it.

She had managed to impress Laraine with the magnitude of the offer to Badger-the possibility of another chance to drive in NASCAR, and with some misgivings, the waitress had agreed to phone the news to Badger himself, assuming that his cell phone got any reception out there on the lake.

Suzie accepted a cup of coffee and a week-old copy of the Marengo Herald, and sat down in a booth to await further developments. After a few minutes of muffled conversation, Laraine announced that Badger himself would be along directly, which in the South could mean anything from five minutes to an hour and a half. Suzie nodded and continued to study the Vidalia onion recipes on page six of the paper. She sipped her coffee and wondered what Badger Jenkins would be having to drink if he did show up.

From the look of that menacing photo of him on the Web site, his drink of choice would be vodka and kerosene. She didn’t see it on the beverage menu.

Directly translated to eighteen minutes and one free refill of black coffee before she heard a soft drawling voice say, “I understand you’re looking for me.”

Slowly, she lowered the newspaper-and kept lowering it.

The Angel of Death had apparently sent a cherub in his place. This boy-well, maybe not a boy, exactly; he wasn’t very tall, but apparently he was as tall as he was going to get, because there were touches of gray in his brown hair. Was he thirty-five? Forty, maybe?

She looked into a pair of dark, earnest eyes that made her think that if the werewolf legend ever worked in reverse, so that a golden retriever could become human, he would look just like this sweet-faced boy: slender, handsome, and deeply sincere. In faded jeans, old work boots, and a T-shirt too worn for the logo to be legible, he stood there, as solemn as a guide dog, waiting to hear how he might help the lady. Was this Badger’s younger brother, she wondered. His son, even?

“How do you do?” said Suzie, gearing up to convince yet another Marengo resident that she needed to see their local legend in person. “I am hoping to meet Badger Jenkins.”

Solemnly, the were-retriever offered her his paw…er, his hand, and said, “Yes, ma’am. I’m him.”

“No way!” She turned her exclamation of astonishment into a discreet cough as she struggled to regain her professional composure. Now that she looked at him she could see the resemblance between that fine-featured human face and the symphony of lines and planes that had been transformed into machine-like perfection in the motorsports publicity photos. Amazing what sports cards could imply without actually coming right out and saying it. The scowling six-foot Angel of Death, who looked like he ate kittens for breakfast, was apparently just a well- crafted media image of this angelic-looking kid from the backwoods of Georgia, who looked perfectly capable of giving his own breakfast to those aforementioned kittens. Go figure.

He nodded, still looking serious and deeply sincere, as if worried that his ordinariness had distressed her.

She motioned for him to take a seat opposite her in the booth. “I am Suzanne Terrell. I’m from a law firm in Atlanta, and I’m here on behalf of a group of investors to offer you a proposition.” Business proposition, she corrected herself silently. Business proposition! She sighed. Watch him pounce on that with a leering grin.

But he was still looking at her with that earnest, faintly worried retriever expression, without a flicker of amusement. “Yes, ma’am?”

She stared into his sorrowful brown eyes, searching for some trace of irony or opportunism, but if it was there, it was masquerading as polite sincerity. Boy, he’s good, she thought. He almost has me fooled. And he has the most perfect, regular features. The camera would love him. You could probably sell beachfront property in Kansas with that seraphic face. She kept staring at him for just a few beats too long, before some still-functioning part of her brain called the rest of her body to order, prompting her to return to the business at hand.

“The people who sent me want to form an all-female NASCAR team,” she said. “Well, except for the driver, because there aren’t any women drivers in Cup racing, or so they tell me. So they need one Y chromosome to round out the team, and they want it to be yours.”

Badger Jenkins’s brow furrowed. “What’s that mean?”

“What?”

“That Y-thing?”

“Ah. Chromosome. It means that they need a man to drive the car.”

“Oh. But the rest of the team will be women?” He considered it. “Have to be some big ones then. Some of those pit jobs-like gassing and jacking-call for right much size and strength, you know.”

Suzie didn’t know, but she assumed that the people with the twenty million dollars had taken such things into account. “Well, this is all preliminary,” she told him. “They just wanted to talk to you. To see if you’re interested.”

Badger Jenkins glanced at his watch. “Well, I might be,” he said. “If it isn’t a p.o.s. car.”

“I believe it is a standard stock car,” said Suzie. “A Ford, perhaps, or a Dodge.”