St. Dale

center medallion. Across the top of it, I embroidered a line I found in The Oxford Book of Verse: “Smart lad to slip betimes away…” which is from “To an Athlete Dying Young,” by Mr. A. E. Houseman, and I figured Shane needed to be reminded of that sentiment. He liked it, anyhow. He even asked to see the whole poem, and when he saw that the first line was “The time you won your town the race,” he thought it had been written especially for Dale, so I didn’t tell him any different. He said we ought to put the whole poem on the Web site of memorial verses for Dale, at 3peacesalute.com, but I don’t think he ever got around to it. He put the quilt on his bed and said it was a comforter in more ways than one.

He was pretty much back to normal by that time, although he would still choke up when he heard a Brooks and Dunn song on the radio. Kix Brooks and Dale Earnhardt were friends, and Earnhardt even did a cameo in one of their music videos, “Honky Tonk Truth.”

The first time you see that video on CMT, you might not notice anything out of the ordinary-just Brooks and Dunn singing together as usual, but if you watch real closely you’ll realize that about twenty-five percent of the time they’d switched an identically dressed Dale Earnhardt for Kix Brooks. I must have seen it half a dozen times now, and once you know the gimmick, you can easily tell them apart. Kix Brooks looks like Dale Earnhardt-on-his-best- day, after a week at a spa, with a good hairdresser and makeup artist, and an acting coach. But there are some nice touches, like when Brooks (or possibly Earnhardt himself…no, I think it is Brooks…) nudges Dunn off the set with his butt, just like Dale used to do to other drivers with the bumper of his Monte Carlo. The joke of the song is that in the chorus, he says it isn’t him. The honky tonk truth means it’s a lie. The lyrics are supposed to be a guy telling the girl who dumped him that he doesn’t miss her, and that the pitiful fellow hanging out in the bar all day, drinking and crying, isn’t really him. So they’re singing that it isn’t him and it isn’t. Isn’t Brooks, I mean. It’s Earnhardt. They say that Brooks used to get mistaken for Dale when he went to NASCAR events, too. We thought the music video was a hoot, but now anytime it comes on the television, Shane finds an excuse to leave the room.

Then, more than a year after it happened-the wreck at the Daytona 500, I mean-Shane got his sign.

He called me up while I was on my shift at the Wolf Laurel Inn, which they get very testy about, so I knew it had to be important for him to risk getting me lectured at for receiving personal calls.

“You won’t believe this!” he said, practically shouting into the phone.

“What’s wrong, Shane?” I said, motioning for Tamara to take the iced tea pitcher to my tables.

“I got the sign, Karen! Just like I asked for.”

“What sign?” I was picturing something tacky like an Earnhardt signature in red neon, and I figured the Logan’s Steak House in town must have had a yard sale, because they are the only ones with more NASCAR stuff on the wall than Shane’s got.

“Listen, Karen, I just heard about this, and you won’t believe it: a goat was born in Florida.”

“It happens,” I said.

“Yes, but listen to this: the goat has a number three in white hair on its side! A number three.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t you get it? It’s got Dale’s racing number and it was born in Florida-which is where he died.”

“Shane, you’re not buying a goat on eBay, are you?”

“Don’t you get it? A goat! Now what are goats always doing?”

Well, to humor him I thought about it. Goats…Dale Earnhardt…Goats…“Butting!” I said. “Dale Earnhardt used to butt other cars with his front bumper just like billy goats ram people’s backsides with their horns.”

“Exactly,” said Shane. “And that’s my sign.”

Well, it sort of is. Shane is a Capricorn, but if he thought that nanny goat was a sign from NASCAR heaven, then he was getting weirder than the Wiccans, and I was pretty sure that Billy Graham would agree with me.

“I want to see that goat,” said Shane.

“Yeah, but it’s in Florida.”

“Well, I have to get there somehow. Maybe we could honeymoon in Florida.”

So that’s what set him off, I think. Our perfectly ordinary plan to go to Myrtle Beach for three days after the wedding, which is what people from here mostly do, got sidelined, and all of a sudden Shane was on the Internet scheming for ways to get to Florida.

“It’s not just the goat,” he said. “I want to see Daytona, too. Pay my respects.”

“Sure. And maybe I could lay my bridal wreath on the Speedway,” I said.

Never use sarcasm when you are dealing with a devout fool, because they will take you up on it in a heartbeat.

He found this bus tour advertised: “The Number Three Pilgrimage, a ten-day tour of East Coast Winston Cup Speedways,” starting near us, in Bristol and going down through the Carolinas and Georgia, scooting over to Talladega, and ending up at Daytona, with a wreath left in honor of Dale at every speedway.

Shane figured that was a sign, too, because the time the tour was being offered coincided exactly with when he had signed up for his two weeks off from work so that we could get married. Without even talking it over with me, Shane called the number in the ad, and told the travel agent how he was just about the biggest Earnhardt fan in the whole world, and how we wanted to take the Memorial Bus tour for our honeymoon. Well, to hear him tell it, the organizers got so excited about having newlyweds on the tour, for the publicity of the thing, that they offered him a two-for-the-price-of-one deal to sign up for the tour, which just put it within our budget. The condition, though, was that they wanted us to get married at the start of the tour, right there at the Bristol Speedway before the start of the Sharpie 500 Race, which is the first stop on the bus tour. Well, Shane was so excited about the prospect of getting to go on the Dale tour that he agreed to the whole thing right there on the phone, even gave them his Visa card number, though the deposit just about maxed out the credit limit.

Then he had to break the news to the other half of the bus ticket, which was me. He bought a rose at the Speedy Mart, and took me out to dinner that night. He told me the whole thing over steak kabobs at Logan’s, with Dale Earnhardt glowering down on us from his shrine on the pine-paneled wall. Shane knew that this was a radical departure from our previous wedding plans and he was scared that I was going to start crying right there in the booth, but he kept bouncing in his seat, too, like he wanted to get up and shout out the good news to everybody in the restaurant. After that, I didn’t have the heart to say no, and like I said, the alternative wasn’t Westminster Abbey anyhow, or even the First Methodist Church, which would have been just as good to me. No-the alternative was Mama’s Wiccan fellowship with their vegetarian whatevers and their Cherokee-Druid priestess from Knoxville, so I figured that whatever the Bristol Speedway came up with couldn’t be much worse than that.

And that’s the Brooks and Dunn truth.

Chapter VII

An F-14 in a Clothes Dryer

Bristol Motor Speedway

Like a flying saucer on scaffolding, it loomed on a hill across an expanse of grass near the four-lane Volunteer Parkway. Harley Claymore wasn’t used to seeing the outside of the Bristol Motor Speedway from that perspective-that is, from the ground. On race day, most NASCAR drivers traveled to the track by helicopter, ferried over from the nearby Tri-Cities Airport, where drivers flew in for the Saturday evening race.

Some of the prominent drivers owned helicopters which met them at each airport on the racing circuit and transported them trackside in style, but Harley had never been a member of that exalted circle. Once, when he’d had a couple of good finishes in a row and it looked like he might be somebody someday, he’d been given a ride to BMS in Bill Elliott’s private bird. Harley remembered sailing over green Tennessee hillsides, spiraling in on the cordoned-off patch of blacktop that was the fenced-in drivers’ area of the vast parking lot. He had stepped out onto the Speedway helipad, still feeling like he was walking on air from the honor of being flown to the track by