St. Dale

“Send it back,” said Shane.

He shook his head. “No. It’s no big deal. I’ll just drink it. I hate to make a fuss.”

“We were just saying how much we’re enjoying the tour, Harley,” said Cayle. “You’re doing a great job.”

Harley’s bourbon arrived and he took a fortifying gulp. “I appreciate that,” he said. “Hope you all are having a good time.”

“Well, it has been enlightening,” said Bekasu. “At least now I’ll be able to decipher some of the hats and jackets that people wear into my courtroom. I used to think all those 8 and 24 tattoos were gang symbols.”

Justine gasped. “Somebody has a 24 tattoo-in Charlotte? What were they in court for? Shoplifting at the health food store?”

Harley wasn’t about to step into that one. He focused his attention on his drink while the conversation ebbed and flowed around him. They drifted away from talking racing after a while, because all these people had other lives, other interests. Cayle talked about her garden ornament craft projects, and Justine passed around pictures of her two dogs, which, surprisingly enough, were not yappy lap pooches, but a couple of sad-eyed blue tick hounds who looked like they ought to be living under a sagging porch instead of in a big stone-and-glass house in a toney Charlotte neighborhood. Their names were Holly and Edelbrock, a reference that had to be explained to Bill Knight, the only one who did not smile when he heard it. Even Shane managed to almost get off the subject of racing. He talked about his job back home, working as a mechanic, and getting to put in some time on an ARCA car. Harley tried to think of something to say that didn’t involve a steering wheel, but nothing came to mind.

“So you’re working on a race car?” he said to Shane.

Shane nodded. “Not a Cup car, though. Maybe someday.”

Harley nodded over his drink. He knew about somedays.

“How did you break into the big time?” asked Shane.

“That was a different era.” Harley didn’t believe in telling long stories in roadhouses. “That was before rookie drivers had engineering degrees from Purdue. If you’re looking to get the family together and build a race car in your garage in Dawsonville, Georgia, or Stuart, Virginia, you are tough out of luck, son, because those days will not come again.”

“I know that. I just don’t know how to break in.”

“Told you. Engineering degree.”

Shane shook his head. “That’s not happening.”

“Grades?”

“Money.”

Karen, who had been listening to this conversation, leaned across and touched Shane’s arm. “Tell him about that program you started, Shane. Driving for Dale.”

“Oh, he doesn’t want to hear about that.”

Which was true, but Karen told him anyway, and even pulled a well-creased newspaper clipping out of her purse and insisted that Harley hang on to it until he had time to read the whole thing.

Back in his hotel room, Matthew was glad of a little time to himself away from the grown-ups. He was often more tired than he let on-or at least, he would gallop through the day, fueled by the novelty and excitement of the excursion, and then after dinner, when the excitement wore off, he would tumble into bed with hardly any interval between lights off and sleep. Now he could make an early night of it, perhaps write a few postcards to some of his friends back in Canterbury. He had flipped through the channels on the television. He would have loved to see Fast and Furious on a hotel movie channel, but it wasn’t offered. Child services children were only allowed to see movies rated “G” or “PG,” so all of them longed to see forbidden films, especially car chases and horror films.

Since there weren’t any interesting movies offered on the hotel television, Matthew searched for some version of Star Trek to watch. He had briefly considered watching the SPEED Channel instead, but they weren’t showing Cup racing just now, so he decided to hang out with old friends instead: that is, the characters on the U.S.S. Enterprise. Maybe if they were still filming Star Trek: The Next Generation, he’d have considered asking to visit there for his trip, but probably not, because the crew of the Enterprise were only acting, but Dale Earnhardt was real.

To boldly go where no one has gone before. Those actors hadn’t done that. But Dale had.

“Why you wanna go on an Earnhardt tour, man?” asked Nick, who was one of his roommates, twelve going on forty. “Earnhardt is dead, dude. You’re not gonna meet him.”

But that was just it.

Maybe he was.

Matthew didn’t talk about it, because mentioning death upset grown-ups. Nobody had come right out and said that he was going to die, but being a kid without parents taught you to pay close attention to the adults who had control of your life: whether or not they smiled or looked you in the eye; what they didn’t say, and whether they were suddenly nice to you for no reason. So, he knew. Back in the winter he had been feeling tired and weak, falling asleep in school and going to bed before lights out, and finally somebody noticed and took him to the clinic for tests. Nobody told him what he had, but the staff member who took him to the doctor had insisted on stopping for ice cream on the way back to the Children’s Home. That was a bad sign, he thought. He didn’t ask any questions, though. The thing about being a kid is that you have no control over anything, anyhow. If the grown-ups say you’re going to die, that’s the way it is. He watched the word about his condition spread through the staff of the home: one by one the counselors and the office workers started acting funny around him, giving him pitying smiles and extra helpings at dinner. He contrived not to notice, because he didn’t want to talk about it, but he had started thinking about it. Dying.

He didn’t think it was going to hurt. Hospitals nowadays had all sorts of medicines to keep you from feeling anything, so the only thing to worry about was what came after. He thought that if dying just meant going to sleep and never waking up, then there was nothing to worry about. He wasn’t looking forward to it, but at least he wouldn’t have to deal with it.

If there was an afterlife, though, he didn’t want to walk into it by himself. He’d barely known his grandmother, and he wasn’t entirely sure that he could count on his dad even making it to heaven. His mom was sleeping on life support back in a white room in New Hampshire. But Dale Earnhardt was in heaven. Everybody said so. Just after the wreck, Mike Waltrip himself had said that in the twinkling of an eye Dale went into the presence of the Lord.

Matthew thought that if he stayed faithful to Dale as a fan, then Dale would stick up for him in heaven. One of his fantasies was of stepping out onto a cloud in front of the pearly gates, where the bearded old angel sat at a desk with a roll book. And there in front of the gates stood Dale Earnhardt in his dark shades and his white Goodwrench firesuit, holding up a cardboard sign that said “Matthew Hinshaw.” Then he’d be safe.

At the Concord restaurant the evening wore on, but no one left. Harley’s sense of self-preservation kicked in and he switched from bourbon to beer.

Bill Knight looked thoughtfully at his shotglass full of Jack Daniels. “I’m a scotch drinker, myself,” he remarked to no one in particular. “Still, I suppose that except for the change of grain from corn to barley, the recipe is basically the same as Glenfiddich. Hmm…I wonder if they make bourbon in Scotland? Surely they have corn over there. I wonder what you would call a Scottish bourbon?”

“Glen Campbell,” said Bekasu.

“What’s your room number, Cayle?” asked Justine. “I need to get my nail polish remover back from you tonight.”

Cayle looked nervously around the bar, and then she leaned forward and said in conspiratorial tones, “Rusty Wallace and Mike Waltrip.”

“Must be crowded in there,” said the waitress, who was removing the empty glasses. She smiled to show that she was teasing, and then she pointed to the full-length Dale Earnhardt poster on the far wall.

“It’s a code,” Justine said, mouthing the words so that no one could overhear.

The waitress nodded, unsurprised. “Yeah, I figured,” she said. “Room two-fifteen. Y’all might want to come up with a more obscure code to use around these parts. Driver numbers are no secret here. Darrell Waltrip swears he used to open his prayers by saying, ‘Hello, God, this is number 17.’”

“She’s right,” said Karen. “That’s how I taught the numbers to the little boy I babysat: with die-cast race cars.