Harley had hoped that the long afternoon at the Speedway would have given him a couple of hours to ditch the tour and hunt up some of his old friends on the pit crews before the race. The stock car circuit was like a small town: everybody knew one another and many of the participants had grown up together. Bill Elliott’s brothers had been his pit crew in the early days, and even now Dale Earnhardt Junior had one of his Eury cousins as crew chief. With the influx of new talent from California and the Midwest, this was not as true as it had been in the old days, but in many ways stock car racing was still a closed world where you felt that you could dial a wrong number and still talk.
To get back in, he needed to pick up the current gossip on the circuit: Who might need a relief driver sometime during the season? Who was looking to field another car? Which of his old friends was in a position to do him a favor? Unfortunately, his Number Three Pilgrims required more personal attention than he had anticipated. Between them they had a hundred questions about the Bristol track, about the drivers he’d raced against, the rules and strategies of stock car racing, and about the details of the bus tour.
Finally, hoping to distract them, he led them out of the Speedway for a walking tour of the souvenir stalls in the outer parking lot and then in the camping area across Beaver Creek. The rows of vendor trailers, each dedicated to a different driver, distracted them for a good forty minutes, as they wandered from stall to stall examining caps and die-cast cars, tote bags and posters. The Earnhardt souvenir trailer was at the track, still doing a brisk business in coffee mugs and decals; there were some people who still wanted to be Dale fans, even a year after his death. Heck, there were some people who had quit the sport cold turkey on the day he died-for them it was Dale or nothing. Harley thought Ray Reeve might be one of those.
The current custom of mourning was to write messages of remembrance on the side of the black trailer itself.
The unofficial vendors across the highway from Speedway property were the group’s favorites, because the homemade goods offered by the mom-and-pop sellers were more irreverent and whimsical than the officially licensed merchandise. Technically, some of it was illegal, too, since drivers’ likenesses and car designs were trademarked by the companies they drove for. He wondered if corporate killjoys ever raided the little flea market in search of such violations. Many of the current offerings, tee shirts and bumper stickers with current in-jokes and catchphrases geared to true racing aficionados, elicited more questions from Harley’s charges.
“Look at this!” said Jesse Franklin, laughing as he held up a white tee shirt with the hand-lettered slogan:
Harley was saved from having to devise a diplomatic explanation by a grinning Jim Powell, who was eager to share the joke. “That happened last February at the Daytona 500,” he told her. “It was just half a dozen laps or so from the finish, and Marlin and Jeff Gordon tangled and spun out into the grass of the infield. Okay-long story short- the officials red-flagged the whole bunch of them there on the backstretch. So they’re supposed to sit there and wait for the go-ahead, but Sterling Marlin got out of his Coors Dodge and started messing with the fender. It had been bent in one of the melees, and he must have thought it would cut his tire if he didn’t see to it.”
“Okay,” said Bekasu, with an expression suggesting that Her Honor was trying to follow expert testimony. “Is that frowned upon?”
“They were under a red flag,” said Jim. “NASCAR says nobody does anything under a red flag. A couple of other drivers reported him, but I reckon the officials had spotted it anyhow.”
“So what’s the penalty?’
“They send you to the back of the line at the restart, which means he lost a lot of ground. Never did catch up.”
“Did he think he could get away with it?”
Sarah Nash who had been listening to this explanation with an expression of solemn disapproval, interrupted. “Sterling Marlin admitted that he had pulled the fender away from the tire to stop the rubbing, but don’t forget what else he said.”
“What was that?” asked Jim.
“He said that he had once seen Earnhardt do exactly the same thing at the race in Richmond, and that NASCAR had not penalized Dale for it.” She gave him a sour smile. “Sterling said he supposed the rules must have changed since then. Of course, he didn’t suppose anything of the kind. All the drivers will tell you that Earnhardt got away with things that the rest of them would be slapped down for trying.”
“Bekasu always says the same thing about me,” said Justine. “I used to break curfew and every other rule Daddy handed down, and he just couldn’t bear to punish me for it. I guess some people just get to go through life in the express lane.”
“Poor old Sterling. He lost the Daytona 500. Think how he must feel,” said Cayle.
“I know exactly how he feels,” said Bekasu.
At the next vendor table Matthew, who knew all the facts and foibles of the NASCAR crowd, had happily explained to Bill Knight what Marlin and Stewart had done that season to become the butt of tee shirt jokes. Next year it would be somebody else’s turn. Now he was naming the driver and make of car that went with each of the racing bumper stickers on display.
One of the vendors had NASCAR-related badges in the shape of race cars or drivers’ numbers. Harley found the red and blue emblem of the Bristol Motor Speedway and held it up. “Y’all ought to get you one of these!” he called out over the din of the crowd. “You can get one pin for every speedway we go to.” In the mad scramble that followed, Harley reflected that he ought to have asked the guy how many Bristol pins he had on hand, but fortunately the item was not in short supply and, by checking with other merchants in the same tent, they managed to round up a Bristol badge for each pilgrim.
“Should we put them on our hats?” asked Cayle.
Bill Knight smiled.
“Was that a yes?” asked Justine.
“It works,” he said. “I’ve always pinned mine to my hat. I have a cockle shell and a bell and a badge of keys.”
If he had been hoping to use this remark as a springboard to discussing his retracing of medieval pilgrimages, the gambit did not succeed. With a collective shrug, his fellow travelers surged forth to the next table of goods- Earnhardt memorial tee shirts. The one that pictured a dove in a rainbow and the caption
Justine, yawning broadly, noted that the race would not start for another six hours, and she suggested that they all go to the bed-and-breakfast to rest before it began. Harley, spotting his chance to get off the leash, immediately offered to sprint back to the bus and ask Ratty to take them away.
“He’d be glad to do it!” he assured them with a straight face, hustling them back across the footbridge to the parking area.
Ratty had not been glad to do it in the least. Harley had found him curled up in the driver’s seat, his Winged Three cap over his face, and the bus door closed to keep in the air conditioning. A few determined thumps on the window brought him back to consciousness, and he cranked open the door with a sleepy scowl. “What?”
“Can you take the folks over to the bed-and-breakfast?” said Harley. “They want to rest up until race time. It’s been a long day already for some of them.”
Ratty stared at him openmouthed. “Have you seen this traffic?”
“Well, it’s not far is it? It’s not downtown. The place is on a country road according to my notes here.”
“Might as well be Memphis, this traffic.”
Harley assumed his most sympathetic expression. “Well, I told them that,” he said. “But it’s awful hot out here,
