“Well, like I said, I’m used to it. Can I smoke?”
Rosalind resisted the urge to brake or to take her eyes off the road to gape at her passenger. “You
Badger shrugged. “Trying to quit. It’s hard, though. Got started when I was twelve or so. I get real edgy when I try to stop. It keeps my weight down. So-can I?”
“Sure,” said Rosalind, pulling out the ashtray for him. “I don’t treat my car like a temple.” She thought of a couple of smart remarks she might have made about the fact that he didn’t treat his body like one either, but she decided not to say them. He had been harassed enough for one day. Instead, she said, “I’m sorry about the car.”
“What?” said Badger. “It’s nice. I like BMWs.”
“No, I mean the race. I think the engine was okay, but that doesn’t help if they can’t get the rest of the package right.”
Badger was holding his Bic to a Marlboro Light. He smoked for a while without speaking, and Rosalind thought that smoking might be Badger’s way of tempering his speech, to avoid hurting anyone’s feelings with a hasty remark. She waited, concentrating on the traffic funneled into one lane by construction work on that section of road.
Finally, he said, “Almost everybody on the team is new at this. It takes time to get it right. Besides, NASCAR isn’t like it was in the old days. Now a driver can’t make all that much of a difference. Now it’s all about multicar teams pooling their research and about testing time in the wind tunnel. Engineering tricks.”
“Well, we could use some engineering tricks,” said Rosalind. “I wish I had some.”
“Don’t beat yourself up about it,” said Badger. “Even if you get a great car, and the pit crew performs perfectly, we’ll never be able to compete with the big dogs. Not to the championship. They have five hundred employees. What do we have? Thirty, maybe? And they have money to burn.”
“Yeah,” said Rosalind. “But if we could come up with some kind of an edge, we might be able to win one race, at least. Maybe on a track where driver experience still does count for something. What track would that be?”
Badger answered in a plume of smoke. “Darlington.”
They didn’t talk much for the rest of the ride. Badger asked where she was from and where she’d studied engineering, but when she told him MIT, he didn’t even know where it was. Rosalind’s shyness made her answers short and not very informative, and he didn’t seem overly interested in her personal information, anyhow. She wasn’t pretty enough to matter, and she had never been any good at keeping a conversation going, because she couldn’t think of much to ask him in return. The biographical facts of Badger’s life were posted on half a dozen Web sites, in varying degrees of adulation, and his life in 200 words was featured in slick racing magazines, accompanied by glamorous pictures of him in the firesuit and shades. If you wanted to know how the real person differed from the media image, asking questions wouldn’t do much good. By now all his answers were well-rehearsed sound bites. It had probably been years since he’d heard an original question.
The only way to get to know Badger was by observation. Rosalind wasn’t all that interested in him personally, anyhow. She thought motors were much more fascinating than drivers. As long as he handled her creation with reasonable skill and brought it back in one piece, he could be a werewolf for all she cared. And yet, because he wore a glamorous firesuit and looked like a catalogue model, people wanted him to sign pieces of paper, which they would treasure forever-or until they moved on to another obsession and unloaded their autograph collection on eBay. She thought it was a curious phenomenon, but since the fans’ obsession with the sport and its stars had created a job for her, she wasn’t complaining.
She took the highway exit for the hospital. “Last cigarette,” she said to Badger, tapping the ashtray. “Want a breath mint?”
“Got some,” said Badger, rummaging in the duffel bag he’d brought with him.
“I hope you’ve got a change of clothes in there, too, because you’ll probably expect me to take you to lunch after this, and I’m not walking into a restaurant with Spiderman.”
He looked down at his firesuit and nodded mournfully. “I hear you. Brought my jeans and a sweatshirt.”
She gave him an appraising look. “So you don’t want to run around in public wearing that getup, either.”
“Well, it’s kinda hot. Besides, I wouldn’t get to eat if I went out somewhere like this. I’d be signing napkins the whole time.”
“It must be tiresome.”
“No, it’s great to see little kids get excited when they see you. To make people happy for a couple of minutes. And, you know, for most of us celebrity doesn’t last all that long. For Richard Petty and Dale Earnhardt, maybe, but for most guys…fifteen minutes of fame.”
Rosalind pulled up at the hospital entrance. “Well, it’s time for you to go make some kids happy. I’ll park the car and be right in. As they say in show business,
Badger looked out at the hospital sign. “This would be the place to do it.”
Ten minutes and a dozen photographs later, they were in the elevator heading up to the children’s wing, accompanied by a cadre of hospital administrators, who were either NASCAR fans or gamely hospitable to the celebrity du jour. Rosalind, whose longing in life was to be invisible to her fellow human beings, felt that she had never been so close to getting her wish. People almost stepped on her, so oblivious were they to her existence. Everybody wanted to get close to Badger. Shake his hand. Hug him. Get his autograph. Give him trinkets for luck. Tell him a story about their reaction to a race he’d been in, or about the time some friend of theirs had met him. Since it was a hospital, one enterprising female staffer even had an empty box of Vagenya, which she insisted on holding up when she posed for a photo with Badger. She had held up the box with one hand and grabbed him tight around the waist with the other.
“I hope you didn’t take that stuff,” he muttered to her behind the plaster smile.
“Don’t need to with you around, sugar,” she purred, inching closer.
As they walked down the corridor to the children’s ward, Rosalind, who had overheard the exchange with the avid female fan, said, “I guess you’re getting pretty tired of that remark about you being more arousing than Vagenya.”
Badger winced. “Everybody thinks they’re the first person who ever said that to me. I guess they don’t mean any harm. Sark says people don’t quite believe that I’m real.”
Rosalind took a step back to look at the apparition in dark shades and a purple and white firesuit. “I can’t imagine why,” she said.
He shrugged. “Me neither. I just try to be polite and keep moving.”
“Good, because I’ve never been a handler before, so don’t expect me to fight off women for you.”
Badger brightened. “No problem. Today is kids. Kids are great.”
He grabbed a stack of autograph cards from Rosalind and rushed into the room ahead of the trailing hospital entourage. The shrieks of delight from many little voices billowed out into the hall, and Rosalind smiled. Badger had given up a $5,000 appearance to do this, and that had impressed her, but now she figured it would have been a bargain for him at twice the price just to feel that much love and admiration. She would never know what that felt like, but it was fascinating to watch it happen. She just hoped she’d brought enough autograph cards.
The children’s ward was large and airy with a painted mural of a forest scene on the wall. If you looked closely enough, you could find rabbits, raccoons, and a fawn within the foliage, invisible until you looked closely. A banner taped across the top welcomed the NASCAR guest, but the name of the Roush driver had been covered over with tape and typing paper and Badger’s name had been inscribed in black magic marker.
He went from bed to bed, shaking hands or letting himself be hugged, and he was smiling in genuine delight at seeing these kids. By now Rosalind could tell a polite Badger smile from the real thing, and this was genuine. Some of the parents had heard about the visit from a NASCAR driver, and they had come, too, armed with everything from videos to disposable cameras, so that the entire scene was bathed in the glow of flashbulbs and camera lights, giving Badger a celestial aura. Rosalind knew that some of the crew called him the Dark Angel, but today, she thought, he was an angel of light.
For an instant, Rosalind wished she had borrowed one of Sark’s cameras, because a photo of Badger surrounded by smiling children would have been a publicist’s dream shot, but then she realized that Badger himself wouldn’t have permitted the taking of such a photo, anyhow. It would have embarrassed him. He would pose all day with a kid whose mom had a disposable camera, but he would never let his visit be exploited for commercial purposes. Rosalind almost smiled. The Team Vagenya driver might be a scrawny little redneck, but at least he
