for DEI. He’ll be drinking champagne out of the trophy with ’em in the winner’s circle by the next commercial.”
“Blue tarp,” said Shane, like he didn’t even hear me. He slid off the couch and sat shivering there on the rug about a foot from the television, like he wanted to crawl through the screen and look in the car for himself.
I tried to talk him into going out for pizza-my treat, I said, the race is over-but nothing would budge him. “My whole life,” he said. “I’ve been pulling for Dale my whole life.”
“I know,” I said. The first Christmas present Shane ever gave me was a little gold number 3 to wear around my neck. It matched his.
I always thought that Shane had elected Dale Earnhardt to be his substitute dad, because his real dad wasn’t good for much, and in fact Shane hadn’t seen him in quite a few years. There’s some of Earnhardt’s kids who could have said the same once, I think, but Shane wasn’t interested in the personal details of his hero’s private life. Men mostly aren’t. I think he just looked up to Dale Earnhardt so much that he didn’t care a bit what the man was really like. As far as Shane was concerned, Big Dale was a knight in a shining Chevy, a place to channel all those feelings you’re supposed to have for your dad, and somebody you’d be proud to be kin to, whereas his own dad wasn’t much to brag about, by all accounts. Believing in Dale got Shane through childhood anyhow, but when it all ended on February 18, 2001, he wasn’t ready to let go.
So we never did eat dinner that night. I don’t remember what came on after the race, because we weren’t really watching the show. We were just waiting for the program to be interrupted with more news about the wreck, which finally came about seven, and then Shane started to cry, and I was crying because it scared me so bad to see him like that. I didn’t know what to say to somebody in that much grief. I haven’t had much experience with people dying. Mostly it’s friends of our grandparents who pass away, and they’re usually so sick or senile that people go around talking about what a blessed release it is, though I’ve always suspected that they mean for the family instead of for the dead person.
Now Dale Earnhardt was pushing fifty, not exactly young by high school standards, but no way was he some broken-down senior citizen ready to kick the bucket for want of anything better to do.
“It’s not fair,” said Shane.
Well, it kinda was, I thought, but I didn’t say so. Dale Earnhardt was known as the Intimidator, because his trademark was to tap some other car with his bumper when he wanted them to get out of his way in a race. In 1987 at Pocono, Dale won by bumping his way past Alan Kulwicki just half a lap from the finish line. And in the first Winston Shootout in Charlotte, he crashed into Bill Elliott and Geoff Bodine, and then went on to win the race, and Old Awesome Bill from Dawsonville and Bodine got so mad at Dale that they crashed into him during the cool-down lap
Still, the way that wreck happened at Daytona, it looked like somebody had tapped Dale’s bumper, giving him a taste of his own medicine, maybe, only things went terribly wrong after that. It was fair, I guess, but that wasn’t going to make it right to all the Earnhardt folks who were out there brokenhearted that night, especially not to the one I was trying to comfort.
“Shane, look at it this way,” I said. “What if some angel had appeared to Dale this morning before the race and had said to him, ‘Mr. Earnhardt, you can either live thirty more years and die old and bypassed in some Charlotte hospital, or you can go out today in a blaze of glory on the last lap of the Daytona 500 with two of your own DEI drivers coming in first and second, and be a legend forever after…’ Well, what do you think he would have said?”
Shane clenched his jaw. “He had a little girl,” he said.
There was a smart comeback to that about how much time his older kids had seen him while they were growing up, but I let it go. “But what do you think he would have said, Shane?”
He wouldn’t look at me, but finally he said, “I guess he’d have picked to go today.”
“Well, all right then.”
Shane sat there for a while rubbing his chin, and mulling over what I said about the angel, which I know for a fact he believes in because he was raised Baptist and he reads Billy Graham’s column, too, since our paper puts it on the comics page right under “Dear Abby.”
“Maybe he was even living on borrowed time as it was,” I said. “Remember 1990?”
Shane finally took his eyes off the screen and stared at me. Slowly, he nodded.
“It was right about there, wasn’t it? Dale was the favorite to win the Daytona 500 that year. Didn’t Rusty Wallace say that the only way for Dale to lose that time would be if somebody shot out his tires?”
“Wasn’t Rusty. Somebody on his crew said it, I think.”
“Whatever. The back stretch of the last lap, and he’s way out in front, and he runs over a bell housing that fell off somebody’s car on the lap before, and blows a tire. And Derrike Cope shoots past him to win, probably wondering if he had two more wishes coming.
“Borrowed time,” muttered Shane, and he kind of shivered.
“And don’t forget about Neil,” I said. Neil Bonnett was just about Dale Earnhardt’s best friend in the world, and he was killed at Daytona in a practice race just a few yards up the track from where Dale himself got killed seven years later. It’s spooky when you think about it: like Neil might have been waiting to walk him through to eternity. “Maybe Neil was there for him.”
Shane nodded. “Okay,” he said at last. “If that’s the way it was-God’s will and all that, then I want God to show me a sign. Show me that Dale wanted to go and that he’s okay with how it all went down.”
“I don’t think God does signs anymore,” I said.
Well, okay, maybe He does.
A whole year went by, and we graduated. On the top of his black mortarboard, Shane put a number 3 in adhesive tape, and he made sure to bow his head when he got his diploma so that the people in the audience could see it. They started cheering and hollering, and Mr. Watkins looked out across the footlights, completely bewildered by the crowd’s enthusiasm for a mediocre student like Shane. He must have figured that Shane had a slew of relatives packing the house, but all the cheering was for Dale, because nobody was there for Shane except his mom, like always. Later Shane said he hoped Dale Earnhardt had been there in spirit to see it happen, and I smiled and hugged him, but I didn’t say anything back. I was thinking that Dale hadn’t even gone to Junior’s high school graduation, so why would he bother with some stranger’s, and besides, he was probably busy in the Hereafter.
Racing on tracks of gold, if you believe that country song by David Alan Coe, which personally I don’t. But Shane found it very comforting.
That summer Shane started working full time at the garage, which means he sometimes gets to work on a Busch-circuit car for a local guy. Shane is hoping that the garage work will lead to a job on somebody’s pit crew someday. He got his own place, too, which looks like a shrine to Dale Earnhardt, with the posters, the black number 3 couch throw, the Dale Earnhardt calendar, the race car lamp, the shelf of die-cast cars representing every ride Earnhardt had ever driven in NASCAR, even the pink one, and so on. I told Shane I hoped he didn’t think that this decor was going to carry over into our married life, and he just smiled and wiggled his eyebrows at me. He was still mourning for Dale, but he didn’t talk about it much after the first couple of weeks.
I had asked him at the time did he want to go to Charlotte and stand outside the church for the funeral, but he said no. Race people didn’t hold with funerals, he said. So I suggested sending flowers, but he didn’t even dignify that with an answer. I guess Shane thought it over by himself for a couple of weeks, because one day he announced that he couldn’t go to the mall with me on Saturday morning because he was taking some senior citizens grocery shopping. I almost dropped the phone. It turned out that Shane had thought up a volunteer program for his church. “Driving for Dale” he called it. People who had cars would volunteer to take old folks or handicapped people to doctor’s appointments or shopping, wherever they needed to go-as a sort of way to honor the memory of Dale Earnhardt. The way Shane explained it: the best way to honor a driver was-to drive. I don’t know if Dale would have been proud of Shane, but I was. A reporter from the local newspaper even did a story about the “Driving for Dale” project, and he told Shane that somebody ought to send a letter to Dale Junior, at DEI telling him about the program. “I’ll bet you’d get a thank-you note,” the reporter said, but Shane just shook his head, and said he wasn’t doing it to impress Junior, that this was between him and the Intimidator.
For Christmas that year, I gave Shane a quilt that I pieced together myself, with a patchwork silhouette of Dale standing beside his black Monte Carlo on a white background, and a big number 3 with wings and a halo for a
