Once Around the Track

wheel and mashed the accelerator into the carpet, not trying to overtake him, but at least determined to keep him in her line of sight.

Once she glanced down at the CD player, deciding that music might calm her nerves; although at their current speed, The Ride of the Valkyries would be the logical choice. When she looked up again an instant later, she saw that Badger’s red truck was even farther ahead, so she had to accelerate again to close the distance. After that, she kept both hands firmly on the steering wheel in the “ten o’clock and two o’clock” position, and she didn’t take her eyes off the road for an instant. In fact, she decided that blinking was not even a good idea. Badger knew the road, every curve, every rise-but she didn’t. She also noticed that he seemed to accelerate going out of a curve, while she slowed down well before she reached it and did not resume her normal speed until she was back on the straightaway. Maybe she should try it his way, she thought.

She kept both hands on the wheel and hung on for dear life, but she stayed with him.

A few miles farther on, when she discovered that Badger didn’t bother with turn signals, either, she gave up taking unnecessary breaths, so intent was she upon following the road at the greatest possible speed. He was turning left. Ah, his specialty. Fortunately, when he made that course change, he was far enough ahead to allow her time to slow down and to make the turn in relative safety. She had thought that she might try to remember the route just in case she did become lost, but after that first turn, she lost track of the road changes they took, and at some point she realized that she couldn’t possibly find her way back to Marengo on her own. They had been going too fast for her to read the route numbers or to memorize the left and right turns. She must not lose him.

Finally, after what seemed like hours, but was actually only twenty minutes or so, Badger’s red truck made one last left turn and headed up a dirt road, churning up clouds of red dust in its wake.

Almost there, thought Sark, easing her grip on the steering wheel so that her knuckles no longer showed white. She knew that later on her arms would ache and probably her head as well from the tension, but just now she was able to ignore any physical symptoms by focusing on exactly what names she was going to call Badger as soon as she was on solid ground again. And while she was at it, how would he like a face full of mosquito repellant?

After another jarring mile or so up the dirt road, dodging ruts and washed out places, the brake lights on the truck glowed red, her cue to slow down, although the expanse of greenish brown lake up ahead would have tipped her off that they were coming to the end of the ordeal. She eased the car to a stop a little way away from Badger’s truck, let out a sigh of relief, and rested her head for a moment against the top of the steering wheel. Anybody who followed Badger Jenkins down a country road ought to have St. Christopher’s medals for hub caps.

The red truck had pulled up in front of a glass and cedar A-framed house that most NASCAR fans would have recognized as Badger Jenkins’s fishing cabin. Although not large by celebrity standards (Sark was no expert, but she thought it might run to 3,000 or 4,000 square feet), it was well-maintained and even stylish. She had been half- expecting something thrown together by Badger himself out of recycled chicken coops, but this place looked as if an architect, or at the very least a local construction company with a set of plans from a magazine, had constructed it.

The cedar cabin, surrounded by a vast multilevel deck with benches and geranium-filled planters at each corner, sat on a little knoll facing the lake, where an equally well-constructed boat dock sported Badger’s motorboat, a canoe, and a little green rowboat, that last vessel presumably for duck-hunting expeditions.

Sark got out of her car and slammed the door, with blistering words hovering on her tongue, but before she could utter a single withering syllable, Badger had run up and enveloped her in an exuberant hug. “You did good!” he said. “You kept up with me. I thought for sure I’d have to pull over and wait for you.”

Sark stared at him in momentary disbelief, and then she felt her annoyance melt away in a glow of pride. I did good? she thought. And then she realized that she had indeed performed well; he had not managed to lose her in the Georgia outback. If the drive out to the lake had been a test, she had passed it.

I kept up with a NASCAR driver, she thought with an inward smirk of satisfaction. She must write up this episode for the expose article that she would write at the end of the season. Perhaps the adventure was a bit upbeat for an otherwise critical piece, but she wanted to be able to boast of her accomplishment to the world at large. Besides, she thought that with the proper slant she could use the anecdote as a criticism. Maybe the incident would serve to point out that fast driving wasn’t really all that difficult-that any reasonably coordinated person could do what Cup drivers did if only they put their minds to it.

Her good humor restored, she studied the landscape with a more benevolent eye. The lake was quite large; it curved past a tree-lined peninsula and went on for several miles, as far as she could tell. There was no one else in sight, perhaps even no one for miles.

“So this is your fortress of solitude,” she said to Badger, sighting the lake through the viewfinder of her camera.

“This is it,” said Badger. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

Wet, anyhow, thought Sark, who preferred her bodies of water to be encircling Caribbean islands. It was a greenish brown lake encircled by pine trees, hardly Yellowstone. Why was Badger so crazy about this place? Most of the other NASCAR drivers lived on an even bigger lake near Charlotte-Lake Norman. Why not just move there?

“It’s nice to have this place to come back to,” he said.

“Do you own the whole lake?” she asked with a note of surprise in her voice. It wasn’t that NASCAR drivers didn’t make good money-heck, Jeff Gordon could probably have bought Lake Erie if he’d wanted it, but Badger was not in the top tier of Cup drivers.

“Oh, no,” said Badger. “It’s a man-made lake, you know. I own most of what you see here, but the rest-around the bend, half a mile or so away-belongs to a couple of local landowners. And there’s a state game preserve adjoining it, too, at the far end.”

“So no close neighbors. I suppose it’s peaceful here,” said Sark.

“That’s it,” said Badger happily. “Peaceful. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the interest that people take in me and my racing career, but sometimes I just need time to be by myself, you know?”

Sark nodded. “I imagine things can get pretty hectic for you,” she said.

“It sure can,” said Badger. “Sometimes the clamor seems to be nonstop. Why, just now on the drive out here, I got four calls on my cell phone.”

She snapped a picture of the lake, framed by a stand of pines at the water’s edge. “Well, I suppose that’s the price that-You what? You got four calls…You mean just now, driving out here?”

“Yeah.”

She took a deep breath, in lieu of shouting, and lowered the camera so that she could glare at him directly. “Do you mean to tell me that while I was following you out here-at a pace, I might add, that prevented me from taking deep breaths or even blinking…at a speed that no sane person could possibly maintain on the Bonneville Salt Flats, much less on a two-lane country road with curves and hills…And for the duration of that absurdly dangerous drive, you are telling me that you were talking on a cell phone?”

“Well, yeah,” said Badger, serenely unconscious of self-incrimination. “But you gotta remember that I grew up here. I know these roads pretty well.”

“But I don’t!”

“I know,” he said happily. “That’s why I was so tickled that you kept up with me. And in that cheap little car, too. You were great. Now, come on. I’ll show you around.”

Deciding not to press the point, Sark trailed after him. So much for her triumphant feat of driving skill. She had been hanging on for dear life, scarcely daring to breathe, and he had been talking on his damned cell phone. Okay, maybe race car driving was a little more difficult than she had been willing to admit. Mentally, she excised that section from her article.

She still wondered if he had driven so fast to test her, or if he was simply oblivious to high speeds through years of racing at two or three times those speeds. She decided that she was reserving judgment on whether or not he was a jerk.

Badger seemed to have a standard routine for hosting visitors, probably a habit born of having to entertain so many journalists and TV crews over the years. First came the tour of the lake, when Badger, at the helm of his motorboat, with the life-jacketed guest installed in the prow, buzzed off to the far end of the lake, and then slowly