Once Around the Track

have-back when he was just my driver, but now-” Her eyes welled up with tears, and she covered her mouth to hold back the sobs.

Tony looked away. “You’re really torn up over him, aren’t you?” he said at last.

Taran nodded. “That is exactly the right phrase to use,” she said. If she had to put it into words-how she felt about him-the simile that came to her mind would be, appropriately enough, an image of torture from medieval times. She had found a description of it in Henry V. Fluellen had said of the robber Bardolph: His nose is executed and his fire’s out.

The phrase was a reference to the one final indignity inflicted upon the prisoner before a medieval execution: the nose was slit with a sharp knife, opened, severing the cartilage between the nostrils and removing the anchorage that affixed the nose to the victim’s face. The incision was not fatal, but it was cruel- both painful and disfiguring, resulting in fountains of blood gushing uselessly from the wound.

Over the years the term for that punishment “his nose is open” began to be used metaphorically to describe hopeless infatuation, when feelings spill out, causing a scene that is agony to the sufferer, distasteful to witness, and completely without purpose. And so it was with her feelings for him. She felt an overpowering wave of emotion, so strong as to cancel out everything else, and yet, painful, useless, and unpleasant to watch. It hardly felt like love, because it was so one-sided, so hopeless, and hardly voluntary.

“Do you want me to take you to the hospital to see him?”

The words were out of her mouth almost before she thought them. “Oh, no!” she said. “I don’t really know him.”

Several hours later Tuggle pushed open the door to the hospital room, knowing that Badger wouldn’t care-and might not even know-that she had come empty-handed, but a strict sense of propriety inherited from an iron-willed grandmother made her feel guilty about it anyhow. But she’d be damned if she’d bring him flowers. Some sports reporters were sure to be loitering around in the hall somewhere, and a story about the “lady crew chief” bringing flowers to the handsome race car driver would be too good for them to pass up. No way in hell. Knowing Badger Jenkins, she thought he might have been grateful for a six-pack of Corona and a pack of Marlboro Lights, but she was pretty sure that his doctors wouldn’t thank her for showing up with them, and she knew better than to give him a novel, so she ended up bringing him nothing-except some bad news she was in no hurry to give him.

Badger was looking even smaller and paler than usual, tucked under the white sheets of the hospital bed and surrounded by vases of flowers covering almost every flat surface, sent in by fans and by well-wishers who lacked Tuggle’s horror of sentimental gestures. God knows where they had obtained them at that hour on such short notice. Wal-Mart, maybe.

He looked gaunt and weak, but at least he wasn’t bandaged up. The one good thing you could say about smoke inhalation and a head injury was that they weren’t messy conditions.

An article on one of the motorsports Web sites had likened the brain in a high-speed car crash to “putting a tomato in a cocktail shaker.” The brain bounced around hitting the inside of the skull, and it got badly bruised and swollen, but with luck and care, it would revert to normal in a few days or a week. Now all they could do was wait to see how badly he was hurt-and how permanently.

Laraine was sitting in a straight chair at his bedside. Tuggle remembered her from the Atlanta race, but now she was looking exhausted and disheveled, as if she had been there for days without leaving, instead of only a few hours. Her clothes were rumpled, and there were dark circles under her eyes, but she had managed to smile when Tuggle came in. Then she touched Badger gently on the shoulder and nodded toward the door.

Badger’s eyes lit up when he saw his crew chief standing there. That was good, Tuggle thought. At least he knew who she was.

“Hey, Tuggle!” he called out. “What the hell happened?”

Tuggle sighed. “Well, you were running second behind the 38 car-”

He brightened. “I was running second?”

“Yeah, it was looking good, but then you came up on a lapped car right after Turn Two, and the Weapon was running with you on the inside, and he got into you…”

Badger scowled. “The Weapon, huh?”

Tuggle nodded. “And you both went into the wall. Hard. How are you feeling?”

“I’m okay,” said Badger. “Just a headache. I’ll be fine. Ready to race next week.”

Tuggle said nothing. She had noticed the stricken look on the face of Laraine, who was shaking her head very slightly, perhaps to forestall wherever the conversation was going next. Tuggle wondered what there was that she didn’t know, and if it could possibly be worse than what Badger didn’t know.

Which was that he had been fired.

They weren’t going to announce it just yet. In fact, Tuggle suspected that the team owners had been relieved when Badger ended up in the hospital, because then they could get rid of him without seeming heartless. “Let go for health reasons.” It wasn’t true, though. They had been planning to fire him before he ever got in the car for the All-Star race.

Christine Berenson and a group of her fellow dilettantes had summoned Tuggle to a meeting in the skybox at nearly midnight. The race, which had begun at 7:40, was over, but the traffic jam of departing spectators would take almost as long as the race, so perhaps having nothing better to do, they decided to hold an impromptu business meeting.

Tuggle went in, feeling scruffy but morally superior, in her grimy purple coveralls and dusty Vagenya-86 cap. In skyboxes, the aristocratic fans sipped champagne and ate nouvelle cuisine from laden buffet tables, while beyond the plateglass window forty-three men played hit and run with Death. The Roman games must have been like this, she thought, and it made her shudder. Of course, the drivers these days were rich people, too, so maybe it wasn’t quite as unequal as it looked, but it still felt wrong to her to sip champagne while you watched people risking their lives.

Badger could be dying for all they knew. Maybe they didn’t care, but she sure as hell did. She thought of her first husband-the one who had taught her to put a restrictor plate on her heart. Maybe if they’d had a son together he would have been like Badger, who was a weasel, but so brave and beautiful that you couldn’t help but love him. She was his crew chief. That made him her weasel, and she would fight for him. Because these people were up to no good.

“You wanted to see me?” she said to the assembly of elegant women.

“Grace Tuggle, so good of you to come!” murmured Christine, using her name for the benefit of the assembled partners. “We wanted to know if you’d heard how Badger is doing?”

“They’ve transferred him from the infield care center to University Hospital,” said Tuggle, using the locals’ name for the Carolinas Medical Center-University. “I’ll go down there in the morning. It’s too late to see him tonight, but I’ll let you know as soon as I hear anything.”

Christine Berenson motioned her to a chair. “Sit down, Grace. That isn’t actually the reason we called you here, although, of course, we are all terribly concerned about Badger.”

Tuggle sat down in the chair, taking care not to get too comfortable, and eyed her employers warily.

“We have a situation,” said Christine, dropping her voice to a steely purr.

“We may need a relief driver next week,” Tuggle conceded. “Badger may well insist on driving with a concussion, but I’ll be damned if I’ll let him.”

The women exchanged glances. Christine said, “You’ll be glad to know that we already have a relief driver. A talented young woman who has been doing well on some local speedways in Virginia. Rookie of the Year at one of them.”

Tuggle frowned. “Judith Burks? “She made it her business to know who was up and coming in motor sports.

“Oh, good. You’ve heard of her. And she’s a lovely little blonde, too. Very photogenic.”

“Nobody’s prettier than Badger,” said Tuggle.

“If you like the over-thirty-five redneck type,” sniffed Diane Hodges. “He’s no Rusty Wallace.”

“Fans love Badger. He’s kind to people,” said Tuggle. “Besides, he may not need a relief driver.” The race has just ended and they already have a replacement lined up?

The owners exchanged glances. “We’ve decided to let Badger go,” said Christine.

Tuggle’s jaw dropped. “But he just won Darlington!”

“Oh, nobody remembers who actually wins these races. There are so many of them. We think a woman driver