He studied her for a moment, and Karen squirmed, wishing she had worn something dressier than jeans. “Not really,” he said. “You got married at the Speedway. I figure this is your thing.”
Something in the way he said it made Karen want to deny all interest in motor sports, but she thought that doing so might be disloyal to Shane, who hadn’t a trace of irony in his soul, and who had been so proud and happy to make this pilgrimage. “Yes,” she said. “Our thing. I guess it is. I’m just trying to figure out what comes next.”
Again, the silence. Terence was looking over at Shane, who was sleeping with his mouth open and his head thrown back against the seat.
Karen squirmed in her seat. “Don’t sell us short,” she said. “We may be young, and we didn’t get a fancy education, either one of us, but neither did Dale, and he did all right.” But Dale knew where he was going, she thought. And she didn’t.
Dale Earnhardt, Incorporated was on the schedule for the early afternoon, but the first stop of the day would be a location farther north than Mooresville: the museum of North Carolina’s other seven-time champion, Richard Petty.
Highway 220 south of Greensboro was a four-lane corridor cut through forests of longleaf pines. Once they crossed into Randolph County, official state highway signs directed motorists to Exit 113, which led to the small town of Randleman, home of the Richard Petty Museum, a newly constructed one-story brick building fronted by a white arched portico. The place looked as if it had been designed by a firm of architects who specialized in branch banks. It sat back from Academy Street behind a bank-sized visitor parking lot with only a decorous sign to identify the building as a museum.
Terence Palmer peered out the window, studying the scene with a puzzled frown. “Odd,” he said to Sarah Nash. “It looks so dignified. I was expecting an outside display of cars, checkered flags, neon displays, sort of a circus atmosphere.”
She sighed. “That’s Manhattan talking,” she said. “I don’t know a single driver in NASCAR who wouldn’t crawl under his car and not come out if you tried to show him off in the outlandish way you imagined. They’re not showy people. Mostly not, anyhow.”
Justine, camera in hand, was the first one off the bus. “Anybody who wants to pose outside the Richard Petty Museum, put your caps on, and bunch up over by the door,” she said, waving the other passengers into place, while Ratty parked the bus, and Harley headed inside to arrange admittance for the bus tour.
Cayle obligingly joined the posing group under the white covered porch at the glass-fronted doors of the building. It was an unassuming place, she thought, considering that the museum was dedicated to a man whose nickname was “The King.” It looked like a museum that had come into being by popular demand; not to make money-admission was a nominal five bucks-but to accommodate the kindness of strangers. Cayle imagined a steady stream of Richard Petty fans over the years, arriving in the little North Carolina village in search of their idol, because after years of watching him race, they felt like family. They would be wanting to see something in commemoration of the legendary driver, and hoping to leave with a picture of the 43 car, a tee shirt, a postcard, or Richard Petty’s name scrawled on a napkin. Anything. They would have wanted to pose for pictures of themselves with the most famous face in racing: Richard Petty, whippet-thin, with his big cowboy hat and boots, his palm-sized belt buckle, and the sunglasses obscuring that hawk-billed face. And always a smile like winter sunshine. Cayle pictured an endless procession of shy, but determined race fans.
So, finally, a kind but busy man with an empire to run had despaired of getting any work done with the endless stream of visitors, and he arranged for the fans to have a place to go. He converted an old furniture store into a showroom to house some stuff he thought visitors would like to see-like seven championship trophies, Chrysler Hemi engines, a selection of his race cars from over the years, and pictures of the man himself, posing with movie stars and presidents. He hired some local people to run it. Five bucks to get in-that ought to cover the light bill and the clerks’ wages, and whatnot. Then The King went back to all the other million things that clamored for his time.
The Number Three Pilgrims filed into the museum, which on a weekday morning wasn’t crowded, and Cayle’s impression of a homey and unassuming visitor center was confirmed. Here, she thought, was the museum equivalent of making your mashed potatoes and pork chops stretch to feed a crowd of unexpected dinner guests. A line of race cars, each surrounded by a knee-high picket fence led the visitor down memory lane, a reminder that Richard Petty was truly a king in the dynastic sense: that is, he was just one cog in a long succession. Four generations of Pettys had driven the NASCAR circuit, an amazing achievement in a sport just over fifty years old.
Bekasu studied the framed photographs that lined the walls. “Here’s a picture of Lee Petty, when he was racing back in the fifties,” she remarked to Harley, who was reading over her shoulder. “Having a father in the business must have helped young Richard get started.”
“I guess it did,” said Harley. “It’s just-” He shook his head and started to walk away.
“Just what?” said Bekasu, hurrying to keep up with him. “Nobody else is listening. What were you going to say?”
Harley turned back to study Lee Petty’s old race car from the fifties-truly a stock car, one that its owner could have driven to the race track, on the race track, and then to the grocery store afterward. Not like today’s seven- hundred-horsepower monsters with the paste-on headlights, the treadless tires and glassless windows, and the doors permanently welded shut. Seeing that old car reminded Harley of his own father’s obsession with racing. The self-made man back in the early days before engineers and wind tunnels and product placement-those old-time drivers had done it all, and all the money they’d spent on those cars wouldn’t buy you a fist-sized decal’s worth of advertisement on the last-place driver’s trunk in today’s sport.
“Racing was almost a one-man operation in the old days,” he told her. “Lee Petty would have worked on this car himself. Modified it. Tested it. Driven it in races in whatever time he could steal from a day job and a wife and kids. And Lee Petty won the first
“Oh, men always want to win,” said Bekasu, still looking at the genial face of Lee Petty. The determination must have been buried beneath that affable exterior. “Men can’t even lose jurisdiction over the remote control for the television. I don’t see why racing should be any more cutthroat than, say, a law practice, which is my family’s profession.”
“Well, maybe it isn’t,” said Harley. “We don’t have any lawyers in my family and I try to avoid them, myself. But I do know about fathers and sons in the racing business. It would put you in mind of a deer herd. The young buck may have been sired by the old stag, but that doesn’t mean the father is going to step down to his successor without a fight. I’ll tell you a story about the young Richard Petty. When he was first starting out, summer of 1958 that would have been, he drove up to Canada to compete in his first Grand National race. So there’s Richard, a few pounds heavier back then, but short on experience, whizzing around the track but a lap back from the front runners, when all of a sudden two cars come up on him-Cotton Owens is driving one, and Lee Petty is driving the other. Slam! Two old pros battling it out, and young Richard can’t get out of their way fast enough, so he gets knocked aside as they go past, and he goes into the wall. Guess who put him there?”
“Not his father?”
“None other. The old man won the championship that year, and flat nobody was going to stand in his way.”
“But that’s terrible!-Maybe he didn’t realize it was his son that he hit.”
Harley shrugged. “I’d have an easier time believing that if there wasn’t an even better story about them. Richard Petty’s first NASCAR win came the next summer, 1959, at the old Lakewood Speedway in Atlanta. But the victory was taken away from him when one of the other drivers, upset about some infraction or other, protested the outcome of the race. Guess who cost Richard his first win.”
Bekasu stared. “His
Harley nodded.
“Well…maybe there was a good reason for it,” she said. She couldn’t think of one. “Maybe he wanted Richard to learn racing the hard way.”
