“It’s odd, isn’t it, that two of the most legendary drivers in motor sports are commemorated less than forty miles apart? We visited Richard Petty’s museum this morning in Randleman, and now we’re headed southwest to Mooresville, headquarters of DEI, and shrine to the man himself. Anybody know what they call Earnhardt’s building?”
In a burble of laughter, Jesse Franklin called out-“The Garage Mahal!”-but most of the other passengers had said it softly in unison with him.
“Why do they call it that?” asked Bill Knight, whose voice had been conspicuously absent in the reply.
Harley sighed. “Wait’ll you see it.”
After a pancake breakfast that morning in Martinsville, Virginia, they had set off, taking highway 220 past Greensboro, and into the heart of Carolina racing country. As they’d headed south toward the North Carolina border, the mountains fell away behind them, dwindling to foothills, and finally to the rolling country of the North Carolina piedmont with its red clay and pine forests. This was the land of textile mills and furniture factories, of tobacco fields and hog farms-and race tracks. Before Bill France had organized the informal beach races of Daytona into an empire back in the forties, North Carolina had been the home of fast cars and daredevil drivers. But at the very beginning, it wasn’t a sport. It was a living.
Up on the mountain farms that straddled the high peaks of the Smokies west of Morganton, economic necessity coupled with inclination inspired the making of moonshine. The tradition and the recipes for whiskey-making had come over from Scotland and Ireland in the eighteenth century with the settlers who homesteaded Carolina’s wild mountain region. In the twentieth century, the pioneers’ descendants found themselves on the losing end of an agricultural equation, in which steep mountain land couldn’t produce enough crops to support the family farm-at least the crops in their traditional form weren’t profitable. But if you took a few acres of corn, dirt cheap by the bushel, and distilled it through copper tubing, turning it into high-proof whiskey sold by the gallon, then the corn would yield the farmer a living wage. Such subsistence innovation was illegal, of course. The country had passed a whiskey tax in 1792, and bootleggers, who didn’t feel like letting the government siphon off their profits, had been dodging the law ever since. Faced with a choice between accepting charity in order to survive and breaking the federal tax law to take care of themselves, they chose the latter without a qualm.
Fast driving came into the picture when it became necessary to get mountain-made moonshine to the big city markets in the Carolina piedmont-to Charlotte, Raleigh, Fayetteville, Durham-without getting stopped by the law and having the cargo confiscated. Those routes and their east Tennessee counterparts were the original Thunder Road, and a generation of drivers in the early days got their start on back country roads instead of at race tracks, when outrunning another car meant more than just a trophy and a kiss from a beauty queen: it meant food on the table, and not going to jail.
By the time Richard Petty took the wheel in the late fifties, those days were over, but the love of fast driving in a motorized battle of wits had seized the Tarheel imagination, and dirt tracks were built to cater to that obsession: Rockingham, Wilkesboro, Hickory, Asheville. Only Rockingham retained its place on the NASCAR circuit these days, but all those tracks loomed large in the history of Carolina motor sports.
There wasn’t time to crisscross the piedmont to visit all those legendary tracks, so as far as the tour was concerned the Monday afternoon trip to Rockingham would have to represent all the early days of the sport. First, though, the bus would stop in Randleman and Mooresville so that the group could pay its respects to the only two seven-time champions in the history of the sport: both sons of the North Carolina piedmont.
As the bus rolled down the highway from Martinsville, Harley consulted his notes while most of the passengers read or dozed, sleeping off the effects of the pancake breakfast.
“Two seven-time champions-both Tarheels,” he said into the microphone. “Petty and Earnhardt. They’re alike in a lot of ways, and totally different in almost as many others. So let’s compare these two NASCAR legends. First of all they were both sons of well-known race car drivers on the circuit-that would be Lee Petty and Ralph Earnhardt. But Richard Petty won 200 races in his career, while Dale only won a total of 76.”
“Apples and oranges,” said Sarah Nash, looking up from her newspaper. “They raced in different eras. Things were a lot more competitive by the time Earnhardt came along-and the NASCAR rules on modifications were stricter, too.”
“No argument there,” said Harley. “I’m just spouting numbers, is all.”
Karen McKee sighed and leaned back in her seat with her eyes closed, but she wasn’t asleep. The wedding had gone off as planned-at least as Shane had planned-and now that the milestone was passed, she had an empty feeling as if someone had forgotten to write The End across the sky.
Because there would have to be a Now What. Maybe in Karen’s grandmother’s time, a woman could get married and that was it-a permanent job with long hours and no pay, maybe, but still an identity and a profession entirely unto itself. But those days were past praying for, and even if you did marry somebody who could afford to support you (which she hadn’t), there was no guarantee that you’d stay married to him forever, so you’d better not risk your future on his account. Karen had derailed that topic of conversation every time her mother or one of the Friends of the Goddess had tried to bring it up, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t heard them.
Shane had his headphones on, listening to his new Linkin Park CD-she made a mental note to get more batteries out of her suitcase when they stopped for the night. First wifely duty: Keeper of the Batteries. Karen wasn’t sleepy, and she’d finished the magazine Cayle had passed on to her. Across the aisle, Terence Palmer was also awake and restless. Karen watched him for a few minutes. She’d never seen anybody as young as he was who actually looked comfortable in a necktie. He looked like he forgot he had it on, while Shane, who could seldom be persuaded to wear one, even for church, would pull constantly at his collar, wriggling like a chained-up dog. “He looks like you had to throw him on his back to get his shoes on,” one of the Friends of the Goddess had remarked once, but she hadn’t said it to be mean. The Friends were all in favor of flouting conventional social customs.
There was no use trying to get Shane to look like a preppy, though, because even if you got him in a necktie and a tailored suit, Shane would still lack that carved-in-marble look that Terence Palmer was born with: a small, straight nose and light brown hair like a cap of loose curls that made you think that’s what Michelangelo had been trying to depict when he carved the head of David. Karen thought he put her in mind of that poem she’d read in senior English, the one about Richard Cory: “He glittered when he walked.”
She felt shy around him, and she realized that she had been carefully avoiding him, sitting at a different table at each meal stop, and keeping her distance when they had walked around the track at Martinsville. She told herself that she was being overly sensitive. It was a NASCAR tour, for heaven’s sake-if Terence Palmer was such a prince, what was he doing here?
She was still looking at him, thinking all this, when he turned back from the monotonous sweep of pines, and met her gaze. Flustered, she said the first thing that came to mind.
“I bet Dale Earnhardt himself would be surprised to see you on this bus.”
He looked puzzled for a moment, maybe trying to decide if she’d meant to be insulting, but then he said, “I don’t believe he would have been surprised. Not by the end of his career, anyhow.”
Karen nodded. He was probably right about that. Maybe in the beginning, when he was still a raw high school dropout from a mill town, maybe then Earnhardt would have been surprised to have fans among the wine-and- cheese people. But not later. President Reagan was in the stands when he won the Daytona 500. And the year Earnhardt died, he was on a list of the country’s richest people. Compared to that level of success, Terence Palmer, for all his airs and graces, was a shoe-shine boy.
“So, how come you’re here then?” she said.
He was silent for a few moments. Karen thought that maybe they didn’t ask personal questions in his crowd. At last though, he said, “My dad died.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“Well, I am, too, but only because I missed the chance to know him. My folks split up when I was a baby.”
Karen nodded. There was a lot of that going around. Then she smiled. “For a second there, I thought maybe you were Kerry Earnhardt.”
Terence considered it. “No,” he said. “He looks a lot like his dad-at least in the photos. I think I’m probably taller. My dad bought tickets for this tour, and I came in his place.”
“I guess you want to know why I’m here,” said Karen.
