Once Around the Track

worked his way back to his own property, pointing out items of interest along the way. At first Sark thought she would go to sleep and fall in the water, while murmuring, “Nice tree. Nice rock. Nice shrub.” But dutifully she took pictures along the way, most of them incorporating Badger into the foreground of the shot. She thought she might have taken some good feature-story portraits: Badger in his natural habitat, looking at ease and princely on his beloved lake.

By the time they had wended their way to the end of the lake and were halfway back to where they started, an odd transformation had taken place. The lake really was beautiful. At first she had thought that it was a glorified mud puddle in the middle of nowhere, but she had resolved to be polite about it. However, somewhere along the way, his enthusiasm had infected her, and she had begun to see the land as Badger himself must be seeing it. Suddenly, without quite knowing how or why, she got it.

The landscape was a tapestry of the brilliant blues of sky and marsh and lake water, the sere browns of dry grass and leafless shrubs, of tall dark pines, and the silver-tipped branches of the maples in arabesques at the water’s edge. She saw it as a protected place where wild things could find peace and refuge. She looked over at Badger, who was guiding the boat as effortlessly as he had maneuvered the curves of that country road.

And for now, thought Sark, one of them has.

While Badger tied up the motorboat at the dock, Sark took more photos of the lake, the cabin, Badger and the boat, Badger framed against the surrounding hills. She had decided to start a team archive in case any publications needed informal shots for feature articles about Badger’s life away from the track.

“Where’s the turtle?” she asked when he had finished securing the boat.

Badger pointed to a fenced-in enclosure near the woods. “In there asleep. His shell is still healing up. Fixing him up was a lot more complicated than we thought. Once I got him to the body shop, Jesse called the local vet, who is a fishing buddy of his, to make sure we did it right. The vet came over and checked out the turtle to make sure the membrane thing under the shell wasn’t broken, which it wasn’t. That was good-less chance of infection and all. Then he cleaned the wound and put on a wet dressing to keep it from getting infected. Gave him some antibiotics, too, every day for a month, which I paid for. Good thing I’m working again.”

Sark felt a pang of journalistic disappointment. Turtle surgery in the body shop would have made a great human interest story. “So you didn’t use fiberglass in the body shop to fix the turtle?”

“Oh, we did. Just not until a couple of weeks later, after the wound had healed up pretty good and the layer above it had started to harden. Then we took him back down to the shop and fixed him a patch with fiberglass boat materials and waterproof epoxy.”

“Can I see him?” asked Sark, peering into the shady enclosure through the camera viewfinder. Just visible in the shrubbery was the shell of an enormous turtle.

“Just don’t get too near him. You wouldn’t like him much close up. He is a humongous snapping turtle, and he’s got the disposition of Kevin Harvick. He lunges at you, and he’s faster than you’d think a turtle could be. He could take your finger off in a heartbeat.”

Sark grinned. “The turtle or Harvick?”

“Either one, I reckon,” said Badger.

“If the turtle is so fierce, then how do you handle him?”

Badger shrugged. “I get along with most animals,” he said. “I guess they know I’m on their side. Anyhow, animals are easy. You can mostly figure out what they want. Sometimes with people it’s hard to tell.”

As they walked back toward the cabin, Sark said, “I was in a grocery store the other day and I saw a sign that reminded me of you.”

“That doesn’t sound too good,” said Badger. “Ham? Or vegetable section, maybe?”

She laughed. “Well, not quite the vegetable section. It was the flower and plant department. The store had a bonsai tree on display, and in front of it was a sign that said: PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH! I’M REAL! From what I’ve seen of your adoring public, I thought that the team ought to have a sign like that made for you.” She looked at him appraisingly. “Do you mind being hugged?”

“Well, it’s okay when little kids do it.”

Sark tried to keep her astonishment from showing. She had been expecting the typical macho answer, something to the effect of “I don’t mind being hugged by pretty girls or movie starlets.” But children? Go figure.

“I suppose that people feel they know you,” she said. “They’ve followed you in racing for years, and seen you on TV in their living rooms so many times. I guess that they care so much about you that they forget that to you they are strangers. To them you are one of the family.”

Badger nodded sadly. “They don’t mean any harm. It’s nice of them to take an interest.”

Sark’s cynical soul recoiled in disbelief. Could he really be so disingenuous? She said, “What about the ones who take too much of an interest, Badger?”

He hesitated, and she thought he might be considering feigning ignorance, but she forestalled that response with a no-nonsense glare that said he’d better not try playing dumb. He might not be able to quote Shakespeare (or even spell Shakespeare), but since he had been a handsome man for a couple of decades now, she was pretty sure he’d know the difference between admiration and lust when he saw it.

“Well, okay,” he sighed. “Off the record. If I think that a woman has”-he grinned to show he was being facetious-“designs on my honor, I have this one-armed hug that I use. It keeps them from…um…”

“I get it,” said Sark, repressing a shudder. “How strange that you should have to worry about things like that instead of being able to concentrate on driving the car.”

Badger nodded. “Don’t forget, though, that there are a lot of people who can drive a race car. The Busch guys are good, and most of the truck guys would do just fine in Cup. There are even some fellas on local tracks who just never got the right breaks, and they could do my job, too, some of ’em. So the forty-three of us in Cup are pretty damn lucky to be where we are. Some of that success is due to popularity with the fans. Best not to forget that.”

He’s not as dumb as he’d have us believe, thought Sark. Maybe innocent is just part of the act. He’s shrewd about business and probably about charming people, too. She decided that she’d think over all that later for the article she’d be writing about the real Badger Jenkins in her expose of Cup racing.

Still, she had to concede that he was right in his assessment, and she was grudgingly pleased that he wasn’t being an arrogant jerk about the public adulation he received. He did realize that to some people anybody in a Cup ride was a hero. Some of his success came as much from luck as from talent. But his humility did not change the fact that people routinely invaded his personal space without a qualm, and no matter how kind he appeared to be, she still couldn’t believe that the intrusiveness of it didn’t bother him.

“But fans putting moves on me, or being pushy, it doesn’t happen as much as you’d think,” he said quickly, as if reading her thoughts.

“No?”

“No. You learn how to deal with it. At the track, you know, when I’m in my firesuit and sunglasses, I can project an attitude of leave me alone. I don’t smile at people, and I walk quickly, without slowing down for people waiting for autographs. Then people just know to keep their distance. I learned that trick from Dale Earnhardt himself.”

Sark blinked. “You didn’t try to hug him, did you?”

“‘No, I did not try to hug Dale Earnhardt,” said Badger, scowling. “I mean that I watched how the Intimidator carried himself, that’s all. I noticed that nobody ever approached him unless he allowed them to. He had an attitude that was bulletproof. I watched how he did that, and I started trying to do it myself.”

Sark gave him an appraising stare. There was nothing remotely intimidating about Badger. He had a perfect profile and cameras practically melted when you took his picture, but in real life he was small and cute, and above all harmless-looking. “I can’t see how that tactic would work for you, Badger,” she told him. “You look like a lost puppy dog. Now, Dale Earnhardt, from the pictures I’ve seen of him, could come across as truly fierce, but-no offense-you could not possibly pull that off.”

With a sigh of resignation, Badger pulled his sunglasses out of his pocket, slid them on, and stood up. In an instant, his perfect features hardened into a blank-eyed, tight-lipped mask of cold rejection. He folded his arms, raised his chin a little, and stared at her, waiting.

Sark’s objections stuck in a dry throat. The affable country boy had vanished and in his place stood a stern and