Once Around the Track

“Oh, I’ll be all right,” he said, giving her his aw-shucks grin. “Never been hurt bad out there.”

She opened her mouth to say something and then thought better of it. At last she murmured, “It only takes once.”

There didn’t seem to be any point in saying what she had been thinking: But you have been hurt out there. Lots of times. Bruises, sore muscles, cracked ribs-a whole catalogue of minor injuries, but I wonder if someday they’ll come back to haunt you in the form of arthritis. That isn’t the worst of it, though. It’s the concussions I worry about. All the times you slammed into the wall and lost an hour or a day, and walked around for two weeks afterward with a splitting headache and a tiny chunk of your life missing. Sometimes you even got past the doctors by pretending you were all right, and they let you drive a few days later. What’s that going to cost you down the road? Parkinson’s? Dementia? Nobody knows what repeated head injuries do long term. When you’re old. When you’re not famous anymore. When all those people who loved him have forgotten about you. Who will take care of you then?

She didn’t say any of it, though, and as much as she wanted to hug him, she didn’t do that, either. He was too immured in his own fame-sometimes he even mistook himself for the Dark Angel, she thought. Badger would have thought she was hitting on him, and she’d have had to let him think that, because she couldn’t bear to tell him that she was simply afraid for him, that someday it was all going to come crashing down, and she didn’t know what would become of him after that. Anyhow, she told herself, holding someone doesn’t really protect him from anything, no matter how much you wish it could.

Suddenly, and with a look of infinite sadness, Badger held out his arms, and Taran stumbled forward and put her head on his shoulder. She wouldn’t exactly remember this embrace, because it lasted only a few seconds, while the duration of all her fantasies of hugging Badger Jenkins added up to hours and hours. There wasn’t much similarity between the fantasy and the reality. For starters, it wasn’t a passionate embrace. It was the sort of hug you would get from your grandfather if you fell off your bike. And she had to bend her knees a little in order to rest her head on his shoulder, which certainly hadn’t happened in any of the thousand scenarios in her head. He felt as bony and insubstantial as a bird, she thought. Somehow she had assumed that underneath the firesuit his body would be muscular and solid, but now through the thin tee shirt she thought she might be able to count his ribs. He wasn’t the Dark Angel, not even close. She had known that intellectually, of course, but now she could even feel it.

What was odd was what she didn’t feel. In the thousand practice laps in her head, this moment would be the starting point… And then I tilt my head up and kiss him… And then I put one hand in the small of his back, and the other hand on his…

But she didn’t feel like doing any of that. It was like hugging your brother. He’s just being kind, she thought. She barely had time to register these observations before he gently released her and stepped back peering at her with that earnest Badger expression that people called his “retriever look.”

“You’re a great teammate, sweetie,” he said. “You try real hard, and I thank you for all the worrying you do about me. I know about all that luck stuff you’ve been puttin’ on the car, and you’re a sweet girl. But don’t put me on a pedestal.”

Taran blinked at him. “What?”

“I’m just an ordinary guy. I’m not perfect. I’m not special. I’m just real good at driving a car. Don’t make too much of that. Don’t believe I’m more than I am.”

Taran opened her mouth to remind him that she already knew all that. Hadn’t she just said so? But before she could utter a word, her brain registered two salient points: he had barely heard a word of what she’d just said, and this speech of his sounded very well-rehearsed. As if he had said it hundreds of times. Maybe thousands. To the starlets and stewardesses who wanted to bag a race car driver. To all the adoring fans who thought they loved him when they didn’t even know him. To the pit lizards.

“I won’t,” she said in a hoarse whisper, which was all she could manage.

“That’s good. You take care now, and I’ll see you tomorrow at practice.”

She never thought she’d be glad to see Badger Jenkins walk away, but she was. She wanted to make sure he was out of earshot before she started to cry.

Fifteen minutes later, she was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the garage throwing lug nuts into a coffee can when Rosalind Manning found her. She had come back to see if she’d left her cell phone on the workbench, but one look at Taran’s blotched and puffy face made her temporarily abandon that errand. Rosalind had seen Badger’s Crossfire pulling out of the parking lot as she was coming in, so she knew that Taran’s current emotional state had to do with him.

Inwardly, Rosalind cursed herself for being the one to find her. She avoided people whenever she could, and she hated emotional scenes. This had been a cataclysm waiting to happen. Everybody knew it. Little Taran with her Gatorade shrine for Badger and her magic amulets to protect him out there. Taran made her think of those paintings of the Virgin Mary that depicted her with her heart on the outside of her dress. That was Taran, all right. Everybody knew it-even Badger, thanks to Kathy Erwin, who, being a slightly malicious Good Samaritan, had made sure that Badger noticed. Kathy had told him, “You know, you ought to take care of Taran. She’s dying for it, Badger. Hell, you could nail her and she’d pay for the room.”

A spectrum of emotions-none of them good-had passed over Badger’s handsome face like clouds across a landscape, but finally he settled on mournful sincerity. “I can’t do it,” he said. “She’s what the guys call a scary girl. She wouldn’t look twice at anybody else in the world, but I could have her if I snapped my fingers. Thing is, though, then she’d never go away. Yeah. The Scary Girl. You don’t ever want to mess with her.”

When she told the story to some of the team, Kathy had ended it with, “And then just because he is an arrogant, spoiled typical male jerk, he had to add, ‘Besides, she’s not all that hot, anyhow.’” But nobody was ever going to tell Taran he’d said that. They all took a solemn vow. And she was pretty sure that Badger would never tell her, either, because he might be a jerk in sexual matters, but there was a gentle side to him, too, which Rosalind had never expected to find in a race car driver. Go figure. Oh, she wouldn’t have wanted him if his kisses cured cancer, but at least she could still manage a grudging respect for him.

Now what was she going to say to poor Taran, crying her eyes out for somebody who didn’t exactly exist?

Rosalind decided to go with the one recurring image she’d been having about the two of them. She sat down on the workbench next to Taran, and without preamble, she said, “Do you know anything about horses?”

Taran raised a tear-stained face and stared in bewilderment at Rosalind. “About h-horses?”

“Yes. Specifically about how they breed thoroughbreds.”

Taran shook her head. “No. And if you’re trying to take my mind off Badger, it won’t work.”

“No, I’m still on the original topic,” said Rosalind. “See my mother’s family was mad for horses. When I got interested in cars instead of show jumpers, they were all bitterly disappointed. So, horses are not my thing, but I couldn’t help knowing about them, growing up in the family I had.”

“Okay, but what do horses have to do with anything?”

Rosalind shrugged. “You just reminded me of something, that’s all. When they’re getting ready to breed a mare, they need to get her aroused so she’ll be ready to be mounted by the stallion they want her to mate with. So they put her in a fenced paddock next to one that holds the teaser stud.”

“The what?”

“Teaser stud.” Rosalind smiled. “A sexy stallion to put her in the mood. She can see him and smell him, but she can’t reach him, because there’s a fence between them. Oh, but he’s a good-looking little stud.”

“A good-looking little stud,” echoed Taran.

“Sexy as hell. Thinks he’s God’s gifts to mares. But-get this- the teaser stud is almost always a Shetland pony! He’s beautiful. He’s passionate. He’s hot. But he’s soooo tiny. One time I saw an aged Tennessee Walker brood mare back up to the fence separating her from a darling little miniature horse stud. It was hilarious because she was so hot for him and he was all for it, too, but even had they been in the same pasture, he literally would not have been up to the job. Now to anybody watching this, the little teaser stud is so ridiculous because he takes himself so seriously, and everyone can see how absurd it is-everyone, that is, except the mare who is the object of his attention.”

Taran thought about it. “I’m the mare, aren’t I?”