Once Around the Track

the line for the start of a race. NASCAR was trying to close all the rat holes it could. They inspected the race cars each week, impounded them at some tracks between the last practice and the start of the race, and then at the end of each race, NASCAR officials inspected the top five finishers and then another car from the race chosen at random. The inspectors looked at the engine, the ignition, the fuel tank, the body of the car, and they even inspected the fuel for additives. The game of cat and mouse was becoming increasingly harder for racers to win, but that didn’t mean that anybody had stopped trying.

Julie threw a crumpled ball of notepaper at the shelf of die-cast race cars. “We are a one-car team,” she said. “We do not have the benefit of multicar testing at various tracks and pooling the results. We do not have five hundred shop dogs to build cars from scratch. We do not have a wind tunnel.”

“Well, that’s not exactly news,” said Jay Bird. “You knew that when you took the job.”

“That doesn’t make me feel better,” said Julie. “You were supposed to come up with a miracle, Jay Bird.”

The old man chuckled. “How about we dress you two up in spandex and fishnet tights and send you out to bars to pick up crew chiefs?”

“Only if Tuggle needs a ride home,” said Rosalind. “I’m not into the bar scene.”

“Neither are the crew chiefs, I bet,” said Julie. “Come on, you guys. Stop kidding around. We need to think up a miracle here.”

“An affordable miracle,” said Jay Bird. “That makes it harder.”

Rosalind sighed. “How’s this for cheap? We reduce the size of the mesh on the window net. That will let less air into the cockpit and cut wind resistance. Not much, but in qualifying a hundredth of a second makes a difference.”

“How about an air dam under the car to channel the air straight back?” said Julie. “The bottom of the car isn’t covered by template, so it isn’t even illegal.”

“Doesn’t have to be,” said Jay Bird. “You let an extra blast of air hit that spoiler from underneath, and your boy will be an astronaut instead of a race car driver. Liftoff!”

“He’s right,” said Rosalind. “And we can’t modify the spoiler, because it is covered by template, but maybe we don’t have to channel all the air straight back. Maybe we could fiddle a compromise between the need for downforce and the channeled air. It doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing proposition.”

They both looked at Jay Bird.

“It’s worth a shot,” he said. “But just so you know, this idea has been tried before.”

“By whom?” said Rosalind.

Jay Bird sighed. “By everybody who can spell NASCAR. But let’s give it a shot anyhow. We have to start somewhere.”

CHAPTER XIV

Wild Ride

The diner wasn’t hard to find, provided that you didn’t blink between the sign that said WELCOME TO MARENGO and the one that said Y’ALL COME BACK NOW, Y’HEAR. After the three-hour drive from Charlotte, Sark was glad that the designated meeting place served coffee and came equipped with an indoor toilet. She was in need of both.

She wondered why Badger had told her to meet him at the diner. Probably because even with directions, you couldn’t find the way to his house without a trail of breadcrumbs. Badger’s fortress of solitude in the Georgia outback was the stuff of legends in NASCAR. By meeting him in town she could simply follow him out to wherever it was that they were going. He had not yet arrived. She knew what his car looked like from having seen it parked at the race shop-a silver Chrysler Crossfire with a Georgia vanity plate that read “Badger 1.” (Probably his idea of a play on words Badger won, get it?) But “Badger 1” was not parked in front of the diner, and Sark wondered what she ought to do if he had forgotten his promise to show her around on his home turf. Hunt him down, she supposed. After making the three-hour drive from Charlotte, she wasn’t about to give up without a fight.

She pushed open the door to the diner, and found herself staring right into the calf brown eyes of Badger Jenkins; but in this case, it was simply because the life-sized poster of him had been placed on the wall facing the door. The place was empty except for a blond waitress behind the counter, presumably the curator of this shrine to Marengo’s one celebrity.

The walls were plastered with NASCAR photos of Badger Jenkins, all dutifully signed in Badger’s loopy scrawl, and a glass display case sported a collection of die-cast cars, all presumably former rides of Badger dating back to his salad days in the Busch series. On the wall behind the cash register were the non-Badger photos, a collection of publicity stills from former customers who had been passing through fame and Marengo simultaneously. A couple of minor country singers were represented, as well as a pro football player, the weather girl from an Atlanta television station, and several other NASCAR drivers, looking menacing in their firesuits and sunglasses, presumably friends of Badger who had come to town to go fishing with him and to have their visits forever commemorated by a signed eight-by-ten glossy on the pine-paneled wall of the diner. In one of the photos, a younger, curvier version of the waitress snuggled up to an unshaven, shaggy-haired Badger, and they both smiled happily at the camera-not posed smiles, but two really happy people caught in a golden moment.

“Excuse me,” Sark said to the waitress, whose plastic name tag said “Laraine.” “I’m here to meet Badger Jenkins. Have you seen him?”

Laraine smiled and went on putting sugar packets into little plastic containers. “Sure. Every inch of him.”

“I mean today. I’m the publicist for Team Vagenya. He was supposed to meet me here for an interview.” Sark looked at her watch for effect. “I drove down from Charlotte.”

Laraine began to wipe down the countertop with a wet rag. “I expect he’ll turn up,” she said. “Did he promise you? Did he give you his word?”

Sark hesitated. “He agreed to the time and date,” she said at last.

“Oh, agree.” Laraine had finished with the sugar packets and was now scrubbing the counter. “Badger will agree to anything to get women to stop hassling him. You ought to know that by now. But he sets a store by giving his word. If you actually want him to do something for you, you need to make him give you his word. Then he’s bound to go through with it.”

“He had better go through with it,” said Sark through clenched teeth. “I take the team photos, and I wasted a whole day to do this. If he doesn’t want to look like the Creature from the Black Lagoon in every publicity shot for the rest of the season, he’d better haul his ass in here real soon.”

Laraine eyed her suspiciously. “Don’t you have his cell number?”

“Of course, I have it! But my cell phone doesn’t get any reception out here. I suppose I could use a pay phone. If there is one.”

Laraine sighed and picked up the telephone, punching in one number. “There’s only one provider within range of here,” she said. “I guess that’s not the one you’ve got. Well, seeing as how you’re with the team, I guess I can call him for you. I got him on speed dial,” she explained to the testy visitor. “Of course, if he happens to be out on the lake where his cell phone won’t work, then you’d just better hope he remembers, because nobody can reach him when he’s out there.”

“Yeah, but he has to come to shore sometime, and then he’ll wish he hadn’t,” said Sark.

“Everybody says that,” said Laraine. “It’s water off a duck’s back.”

Sark had a sinking feeling that she had made a three-hour drive for nothing. “Does he do that to people a lot? Stand them up?”

Laraine went on wiping the counter with a rag. “He doesn’t mean to,” she said at last. “He’s good-hearted, just a little impractical. When people ask him for things, he just hates to say no, and when it comes to his time, he’s liable to promise more hours in the day than there actually are. Plus, he really wants to spend most of his time alone out there on the lake. I think he’ll turn up for you, though, what with you being with the team and all. It’s mostly journalists who slip his mind. He honestly does not see the point of bragging about himself for public consumption. He’d be a much richer man if anybody could make him see the value in publicity.”