Once Around the Track

doin’, sweetie?”), and practice went on without Team Vagenya’s official driver. One of the shop dogs was again subbing for Badger, and the pit crew drilled on tire changing while Tuggle timed them with a stopwatch and shouted instructions. After half an hour of precision drill, the crew chief turned them loose for a break while she went to talk to a journalist. The hot and sweaty crew headed for the shop where there were apples and granola bars on the counter and an ice-filled cooler stocked with a selection of soft drinks and bottled water.

The tall young man who had been Badger’s stand-in for the practice dug a Diet Snapple out of the cooler ice and looked at it appreciatively. “This is way better than the guys’ teams,” he said. “They mostly just put out a loaf of Wonder bread and a package of bologna. And regular cola, if they think of it.”

Taran smiled. “That would suit Badger,” she said. “I think that’s what he lives on, anyhow.”

The substitute driver shrugged. “Yeah, but he works out. And that junk food jones of his may be an act for all we know. In private, he may eat plain salad and scrape the butter off his fish. Most Cup drivers are pretty fanatical about their health-or at least about their looks.”

“Well, whatever he does, it works,” sighed Taran, glancing at the poster of Badger taped to the wall of the shop.

Tony shrugged. “He’s a talented guy,” he said. “But he’s lucky. They all are.”

Taran looked at him more closely. “You’re the one who drove the car for our pit stop practices on the day of tryouts, aren’t you?” she said. The name tag sewn on his firesuit said “Tony.” It wasn’t a Vagenya firesuit, though. It was an old one, probably from a time when he’d raced at local speedways somewhere. Almost everybody in racing started out that way.

The dark young man nodded. “I’m just a mechanic, so that was kind of a thrill. Me driving Badger Jenkins’s car. Even if it was just fifty yards to a pit stop. They told me somebody spotted the difference.”

“Yes. That was me.”

He looked disappointed. “How’d you know it wasn’t him?”

“Oh, not because of the driving,” said Taran quickly. “You did a great job. Really. It was the eyes. Badger has very dark, sad eyes. You can’t mistake them. Anyhow, yours are blue.”

Her explanation did not seem to comfort him much. Tony said, “Plus, he’s rich and famous, and I’m just a shop dog.”

Taran thought it would be both impolite and insincere to agree with the patent truth of this statement. Besides, he wasn’t so bad. Tony Lafon was a good three inches taller than she was, and therefore that much taller than Badger himself. He had dark straight hair offset by the fair skin and blue eyes that people associated with Ireland. Tony didn’t have Badger’s perfectly chiseled features, but he looked like a nice, bright guy, and he was certainly easier to talk to.

Taran said, “Well, maybe Badger is more successful than you are, but you look about ten years younger than he is. Are you? Yeah, I thought so. You still have time to make it as a driver. If that’s what you want. Is it?”

Tony looked up at the handsome, stern face of Badger Jenkins staring down at him in air-brushed perfection from the Team Vagenya poster. Some guys got all the breaks. “It’s all I’ve ever wanted,” he said. “Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been watching racing, and working as a mechanic anywhere I could, and driving at the local tracks in southwest Virginia. You know, the little Saturday night tracks where they raced trucks or Late Model Stocks, and you had to go door to door to the local businesses to get your own sponsors.” He sighed. “You want to believe that working so hard on the local level will someday get you into Cup-and sometimes it does.”

“Of course it does,” said Taran. “That’s how Badger got started.”

Taran knew every detail of Badger’s rise to the exalted ranks of Nextel Cup. She could recite the date and place of every victory Badger had ever achieved in Cup racing (there hadn’t been that many of them to date). Although she had not memorized the string of little Saturday night triumphs he had amassed in the lower echelons of stock car racing, she could probably name more of them than Badger himself could, and she did know every racing category, every track, and every number under which he had competed. Her own car’s license plate was a vanity plate, but people seldom realized it, because it was just his initials, BJ, followed by 7781, 77 being the number of the car he had once driven in local Late Model Stock racing, and 81, his number in his first season in the NASCAR Busch series.

“Badger was lucky,” Tony said again. “There was a guy at his local track who was getting too old to do any racing himself, but he still wanted to be in the game, so he sold the equipment to Badger and stayed on to help him learn the ropes. Badger was a natural-I’m not saying he wasn’t good-but there are a heck of a lot of guys who are good that never get past Late Model Stocks.”

“So you decided to work for a Cup team instead?”

Tony nodded. “I figured it would be a good way to make connections within the sport. Racing is in many ways just a small town. What about you?”

Taran sighed. “You’ll laugh,” she said.

“Try me.”

“I’m the team flake. Everybody else is doing it for the experience, or for a feminist cause, or because they’re just crazy about stock car racing. But not me. I’m the fool who is crazy about Badger Jenkins.” When she said it, she was watching him carefully to see if he was having trouble wiping a smirk off his face, but he had simply nodded and given her a look that might have been sympathetic.

“Guys in firesuits,” he said, unwrapping another Granola bar. “A lot of people mistake them for Superman, I guess. I’ve seen it dozens of times. But why Badger in particular?”

“It sounds ridiculous,” she sighed. “I was dating a guy who got me interested in NASCAR, and he was a Mark Martin fan. He kept telling me to pick a driver, so that it would be more interesting when we watched the races together.” She stopped for a moment, remembering Rob, one of the company’s electrical engineers. A nice enough guy, she supposed, if you liked Italian food and watching Stargate on the Sci-Fi Channel, which was okay. She just couldn’t see doing that for the rest of her life. Besides, Rob looked like a mild-mannered frog in steel-rimmed glasses, and Taran thought that a permanent relationship with him would put you in the fast lane for old age. She decided that Rob himself had probably been born forty. But she’d always be grateful to him for introducing her to motorsports. He liked to watch the races with a clipboard of statistics at hand: Which driver had previously won at this track? Whose team seemed to be consistently good lately? Who had done well in practice and qualifying? As an engineer herself, she found this sort of scientific approach interesting, but since racing was, after all, a form of entertainment, she felt that Rob’s joyless method of analyzing the race left much to be desired. She wanted to care who won: to hope for his success, rather than to coldly predict it with an assortment of dispassionate statistics.

“He wanted you to pick a driver so that watching racing with you would be a competiton,” said Tony. “I’ll bet he thought you’d go for Jeff Gordon. He’s really popular with women and kids.”

“No,” said Taran. “He knew better than that. I’m an electrical engineer. He figured I’d go for the intellectual type.”

“Ryan Newman, then. Engineering degree from Purdue.”

“Right. And I do like Newman, but I don’t think choosing a driver is necessarily a matter of logic. You don’t cry over somebody just because he is the mathematical favorite.”

“Well, some people might,” said Tony. “But mostly not, I guess. People usually choose a driver who reflects their interests or their background. Home state, sponsor identification, looks-something. And then there are the people who won’t root for a Ford driver, or who hate anybody in a Chevrolet. There are a lot of sides to take in this sport.”

“I know,” said Taran. “Every week is like a football game with forty-three teams on the field.”

“So how did you come to pick Badger instead of Newman or Kenseth? Was it when he won at Darlington?”

Taran sighed a little, remembering. “No. It wasn’t when he won at all. I remember they interviewed him before the race, and he looked kind of shy and self-deprecating, and-Well, I know this is going to sound strange, but his accent reminded me of my grandfather. He died when I was seven, and he wasn’t real old. It was a car wreck. But anyhow, I heard Badger’s voice, and it was like hearing my granddad, I just felt like I knew him.”

“How did he do in the race that day?”

“He wrecked. Well, somebody wrecked him. And I just lost it. I was so terrified that I had jinxed him by liking him. He had a concussion, and I remember I kept checking Engine Noise all week to see how he was doing. Anyhow, by the time he got well and was back in the car-he missed one race, I think-I had gone online and bought a tee shirt, a coffee mug, and two key chains. I was hooked.