St. Dale

“Your mother?”

“It’s the sort of thing she’d do. One year-I think I was nine or ten-they sent me off to camp for two weeks, and I had a pet hamster. I wasn’t allowed to have a messy cat or a smelly dog.” He did a passable imitation of his mother’s Tidewater Brahmin accent. “The only reason I had the hamster was that we’d had it in the classroom at school, and the teacher asked for a volunteer to take it home over the summer. So every day from camp I called home to ask about Chip, the hamster, and Mother always said he was fine. Was she feeding him? I’d ask. Giving him a little lettuce or a peanut? Oh, yes, all taken care of. So-two weeks later I get home from camp-”

“And the hamster is dead?”

“Gone, anyway,” said Terence. “I don’t know if she let it go, gave it away, or forgot to feed it. Anyhow, it was gone. The cage was gone. Like it had never happened. And when I started to cry, she said, ‘I did it for your own good, dear. You really didn’t need any bad news to make you sad while you were at camp.’” He shrugged. “You know how that made me feel?”

Karen shook her head.

“Enraged, of course. But insulted, too. Who was she to decide what I was capable of handling? Who was she to lie to me and then expect me to be grateful?”

She studied him for a moment. This was the longest speech she’d ever heard Terence make. His voice shook with anger. “You’re still mad about that hamster after all these years, aren’t you?” she said.

He shrugged. “I don’t think about it.”

“But you wish she’d told you the truth, even if it hurt you at the time?”

“Look, don’t try to solve your problem based on a dead hamster. I don’t know what you did or how upset Shane would be about it, so my advice would be useless.”

Karen leaned over and whispered a few words into his ear.

Terence’s eyes widened. “You told him what? You’d never get away with that.”

“If he ever heard any different, it didn’t sink in. It’s what he wanted to hear.”

“Well, if it matters that much to him, I hope I’m not around when he finds out,” said Terence.

Karen, looking shaken, went back to her novel about the princess of Ireland. She didn’t notice Terence staring at the book cover, lost in thought.

Harley thought there was something a little depressing about entering Florida via the Interstate. Maybe it was all the tourist-trap exits, luring motorists to buy fresh oranges or come and see the real fifteen-foot alligator (deceased and leathery, displayed on a ledge surrounded by knickknacks and more oranges). It made him want to get away from there as fast as he could. He could forgive some drivers for hoping that the “95” signs posted along the way meant the speed limit.

Daytona International Speedway was within sight of I-95, at least from the overpass at the U.S. 92 exit. International Speedway Boulevard was as urban a setting as you could imagine for a noisy, traffic-spawning speedway. A Holiday Inn and a Hilton stood across the road, and the sprawling Volusia Mall took up much of the next block. Harley had a spiel written out on yellow index cards: the Daytona 500 is the Superbowl of NASCAR, the first Cup race of the season; the highest paying win and the event that makes you a celebrity. (In these days of David Letterman and Good Morning, America, anyhow, he reminded himself. Sorry, Bodine.) A 2.5 mile super speedway, restrictor-plate track…Daytona is where NASCAR began, back in the forties when drivers raced along the hard-packed sandy beaches, racing tide as well as time. Harley nearly had the hang of this lecture business now, and he thought he could do a good twenty minutes of Daytona stories without too many slipups, but nobody wanted to hear it. Not the folks on this bus.

Oh, maybe Bill Knight would have been all courteous attention, because he would be anyway, even if the lecture was on Sanskrit…in Sanskrit. But the folks who really cared about Daytona probably knew the note card trivia as well as he did and, judging from their expressions at the moment, they didn’t give a damn about any of it.

Maybe someday the excitement would return, and the thrill of Speed Week would matter again, but right now, row upon row of somber faces said it all. This was where he died. Just now, for Earnhardt’s supporters, a visit to Daytona evoked not the excitement of seeing, say, Yankee Stadium, but the somber reflection one might feel at the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor.

“Park anywhere in the front lot, Ratty,” said Harley. “You know where we’re going first.”

As he turned into the parking lot, Ratty looked over the facade of the Speedway with its adjoining museums, and then he saw what Harley was talking about. “Right,” he said. “I’ll get as close as I can.”

The solemn little group assembled on the sidewalk a few yards from the entrance to the building labeled “Daytona USA.” Beside the white building was a raised flower bed encircled by a knee-high white cement wall. In the center of the circular garden stood Dale Earnhardt on a bronze pedestal, trophy in one hand, and the other arm upraised in a gesture of triumph.

There he was. So many hundred miles they’d come, all the way from Bristol, where he’d won his first race back in ’79, to here, where it all ended twenty-two years later. But the moment frozen in time in that bronze statue was a happier one: February 15, 1998, the day he finally won the big one.

“That’s the Harley Earl Trophy,” said Harley. “My dad had high hopes, I guess, naming me that. Anyhow, that’s what you get when you win the Daytona 500.”

“It was the only race he won that year,” said Jim Powell, nodding to the man in bronze.

“I’ll bet he didn’t care,” said Sarah Nash with a fond smile. “It took him so long to finally win this race, I’ll bet he felt like getting dipped in bronze right on the spot, so that he’d never have to put that trophy down.”

“This is where we ought to put the wreath,” said Cayle.

“That’s what we decided,” said Harley. “But I thought we’d look around first. We’re taking the tour of the Speedway here. They put you on a little tram and drive you around the track. There’s so much history connected with this place we couldn’t cover it in a week. Who won the first Daytona 500?”

“Petty!” said Cayle.

“Lee Petty,” Jim Powell corrected her. “That was the year after young Richard started racing.”

“Okay, that was a hard one. Now for the younger crowd,” said Harley, putting a hand on Matthew’s shoulder. “Who won the last Daytona 500, back in February?”

“Ward Burton,” said Matthew.

Shane shook his head. “Sorry, Matthew,” he said. “It was Little E. Last year Mike Waltrip, and this year Dale Junior.” He looked around for confirmation, but no one met his eyes, except Karen whose stricken look puzzled him. “What?”

“Sorry, Shane,” said Harley, sounding puzzled. “Matthew’s right. Little E. won the July race here in 2001. I expect that’s the race you were thinking of, but Ward Burton did win the 2002 Daytona 500.”

“No! He couldn’t have!” Shane reddened at the looks of pity and confusion on the faces of the others. Were they teasing him? It wasn’t funny. “Junior won,” he said again. “It’s part of the miracle.”

Bill Knight patted Karen’s arm. As soon as he’d heard the name “Ward Burton,” he had remembered his conversation with Pvt. Alvarez back at DEI and he had known what was coming.

“What miracle?” said Jim Powell.

“Overcoming the curse. You know how the Intimidator tried twenty times to win this race and lost from ’79 to ’97, right?”

Nods from the Number Three Pilgrims.

“Ran out of gas. Cut a tire. Hit a seagull, for God’s sake. And then the little girl in the wheelchair gave him the lucky penny in ’98 and he won the race.”

“And he lived three years and three days after that,” said Bill. “We know, Shane.”

“Okay, but since he died he hasn’t lost the Daytona500. Because the drivers of his company DEI have won every year. And they’ll win next year, too. Three times. That’s the miracle.”

A bewildered Jesse Franklin stared at Shane for a moment, as if waiting for a punch line or for someone else to speak up. When no one did, he said, “But, hold on there, son. Ward Burton doesn’t drive for DEI.”

“Ward Burton didn’t win!” Shane said it so loudly that passersby turned to stare at them.

The others looked at him in awkward silence.