Once Around the Track

“Some kinda drug.”

She chose her words carefully and said them slowly to make sure they sank in. “Vagenya is a drug to enhance sexual desire. In women.”

Badger frowned. “I thought that was illegal.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Is that the stuff guys drop in ladies’ drinks to knock ’em out?” He squirmed in his chair. “I sure never needed to do that.”

Suddenly, she had a flash of what a media interview with Badger might be like. She would have to go with him. She would have to devise a signal for shut up. She would make him memorize sound bites. Oh, hell, was it possible simply to hire a Badger impersonator? No, probably not. He was one of a kind, all right. She would have to prepare him for all possible contingencies, and step one was explaining to him just what product his race car would be advertising. Oh, boy.

“No,” she said carefully. “You don’t put Vagenya into a woman’s drink. It’s…um…Do you have Mark Martin’s cell phone number?”

Badger’s eyes widened in bewilderment for an instant, before he realized who had sponsored Mark Martin. “Oh,” he said. “Like Viagra, you mean.”

“Exactly.”

“Oh.” He digested this information for a few anxious moments. “And that’s gonna be my sponsor, huh?”

“Right.”

“So people are gonna give me a hard time about it.”

Sark sighed. “Some of them might.” She repressed a shudder, as she pictured the unauthorized tee shirt slogans. The cartoons on Web sites. Leering woman fans holding up signs at the races: BADGER JENKINS GETS ME HOTTER THAN VAGENYA.

“But I don’t have to say that I use it myself?”

“No. Please, no.”

He brightened at once. “Well, that’s good! Then all I have to say is that it’s a good product and I hope it helps people who need it.” He pulled a box of breath mints out of his pocket and held them up as if posing for the camera. “It’s a good product and I hope it helps people who need it,” he said in tones usually used by finalists in the Miss America pageant. Then he resumed his customarily goofy grin. “Was that okay?”

Slowly, Sark nodded. Now that she thought about it, the combination of Badger and Vagenya might actually work. In interviews, Badger would assume his most earnest guide dog expression and repeat his catchphrase with a worried frown of sincerity every time the subject came up, and only the truly heartless would give him grief about it. Of course, there were a lot of truly heartless people in sports media, but even they would get bored and stop baiting him up after the umpteenth repetition of Badger’s earnest sound bite. If you continue to taunt someone who bears your torment with dignity and grace, eventually the tormenter is the one who looks bad.

Something else might happen, too, she thought: a backlash of sympathy. People said that when Mark Martin first acquired Viagra as a sponsor, the teasing was merciless, but he was so calm and serious about the matter that soon people began to respect him for having the guts to drive for such a potentially embarrassing sponsor and for taking all the taunts with such grace under pressure.

Maybe the same thing would happen to Badger with the Vagenya sponsorship. Maybe this new need for gravitas would reveal a whole new dimension to his personality. She glanced over at Badger, trying to picture him as a dignified elder statesman of Cup racing. He had opened the plastic breath mints box, and now he was tossing a mint into the air and trying to catch it in his mouth.

The dignified elder statesman of Cup racing. Yeah, right.

CHAPTER XII

Once Around the Track

“I don’t think this is a good idea,” said Tuggle, but she could see by the looks on the women’s faces that it would be pointless to argue further. Still, she had to try. “You ladies hired that boy to race. Not to give y’all pony rides.”

One of the socialite types pouted prettily. “But it’s our money,” she said. “And people keep asking me if I’ve gotten to ride in the race car yet, and I’m tired of telling them no.”

“And as you pointed out, Tuggle, we did hire him. It’s our car and our team. I don’t think this little adventure is too much to ask for people who are making all this possible.” Christine Berenson did not raise her voice, but there was stainless steel in every syllable.

Tuggle took a deep breath, swallowing a few sarcastic comments that would have been hazardous to her employment status, and scowled, wondering if further wrangling would be a waste of breath. It probably would be, but she figured she owed it to Badger to try. They were partners, her and him. Crew chief and driver. “It’s like a marriage,” she often said. “Lots of hassling, no sex.” She might be hard on him, in terms of what the team needed from him, and she certainly never cut him any slack, but that didn’t mean she’d let anybody else treat him like a hired hand.

She tried again. “But you see, it’s his day off. He was planning to go home to Georgia. Something about his dad needing him on the farm…”

“Well, we need him here. Anyhow, it won’t take long. There are only ten of us, and at the speeds those cars go, he should be through in an hour at most, surely.”

“So that’s settled,” said Christine. “See about getting a passenger seat fitted in a spare car, and tell Badger that we are so looking forward to this.”

Tuggle sighed. Hell to pay, she thought.

She had been right. Badger Jenkins wasn’t happy about it. “I’m not supposed to hafta be at the track on Thursday,” he said when she told him. “I got things to do.”

“There’s ten of ’em,” Tuggle said. “Every one of them was born with more money than sense, and they’re all spoiled rotten. Do you want to try to tell them why you won’t do it? ’Cause I tried already, and I got nowhere.”

Badger sighed and ran this hand through the bristles of his cropped hair. “You tried to tell them no?”

Tuggle’s voice softened. Sometimes when Badger got that mulish look on his face, he reminded her so much of her long-ago first husband that it made her heart turn over. Maybe if they’d had a son, her and Johnsie. And wouldn’t that have been fresh hell, she told herself, but her voice stayed gentle from the thought of it.

“Did I tell them no? ’Course I did, boy. They paid me no never mind. But, like they said, it wouldn’t take but an hour or so of your day. I guaran-damn-tee you’d spend longer than that trying to talk them out of it.”

Badger turned to look at her, innocence radiating from guileless brown eyes. “They want to ride around the track in the race car wi’me-one at a time.”

“That’s right.” Tuggle smiled. “They said they thought it would be exciting.”

Badger nodded solemnly. “I expect it will be,” he said.

The shop dogs had grumbled about the extra work they had to put in to modify the race car, but after all, it was being done for the big wigs, so there wasn’t much point in complaining about it. Everybody knew that it would have to be done, nuisance or not. You keep the owners and the sponsors happy, or you don’t have a job at all. The racing community is the size of a village, and if you prove difficult to work with, pretty soon you won’t get hired by anybody.

The bosses wanted to take a ride-along with Badger, and that was that. Since race cars are strictly one-man vehicles, they had to make some modifications to accommodate a second rider. Even the bosses wouldn’t want them to waste time and money monkeying around with one of the actual Cup cars, so what they needed for this dog-and-pony show was a car that looked like an actual contender but wasn’t, so they built one. By taking the chassis of an old race car and putting a new body on it, they produced a cargo cult version of a race car that looked good, despite the fact that it didn’t run as fast as a primary car. It would go fast enough for civilians, though. When