St. Dale. Sharyn McCrumb

window. “Wake up, Bekasu! You’re going to miss seeing where Alan Kulwicki’s plane went down!”

      Cayle stopped scanning the fast-approaching ground, shut her eyes, and turned away from the window.

      “Who?” Bekasu’s sigh meant she didn’t much care.

      “You remember Alan Kulwicki,” said Cayle, carefully not looking. “First Winston Cup champion from up north? Wisconsin. Degree in chemical engineering?”

      “Okay—Get off me, Justine!—Unless the crash was yesterday, I’m sure there’s nothing to see down there now.”

      “Just a field,” said Cayle. “Same as it was back in 1993. He was the reigning champion, flying in for the Bristol race one cold, wet night. April the first, it was. Anyhow, his private plane was right ahead of Earnhardt’s, on the descent, maybe two minutes out when it went down in a field a few miles out on approach.”

      “Yeah,” said Justine, “and about a minute later, Earnhardt’s plane touched down at the airport. You know, I always figured Dale traded paint with him, trying to land first.”

      Cayle shivered. “Dale wasn’t even flying his own plane, Justine. Of course he wasn’t. You know that. She’s putting you on, Bekasu.”

      Bekasu closed her eyes again. “Justine, you know that I would rather participate in a reenactment of the Bataan Death March than go on a NASCAR tour, so would you please not make it any worse with your tasteless commentary?”

      “Oh, don’t be a pill, Bekasu. If I’d wanted to vacation with a killjoy, I’d a brought an ex-husband. Now hand me my carry-on, will you? I want to put on my Dale hat before we land.”

      “We could be on St. Lucia right now,” said Bekasu. “In that mountaintop hotel where one wall of your suite is just a wide open space facing the Caribbean, but no…”

      “Well, I’m sorry that we’re not having a vacation you can brag about to all your friends down at the courthouse, Your Honor, but I need to say good-bye to Dale.”

      “Justine, you never said hello to Dale.”

      “I did so. One time at Talladega when that guy who owned a Chevy dealership took me on to pit road, we went right up to Dale and shook his hand, and I wished him luck in the race. “

      “Which he lost.”

      “Yes, but that’s not the point. The point is that I have been a Dale Earnhardt fan through five presidents and two husbands, and this tour is part of my grief process, and I think as my sister you ought to respect that. Not to mention Cayle. After what happened to her, how can you even argue?”

      Cayle winced. They’d promised they wouldn’t talk about it.

      “I’m here, aren’t I?” said Bekasu. “But I am not going to wear that stupid black tee shirt with the Winged Three. And another thing, Justine: if your luggage takes up so much room on the bus that they have to get rid of a passenger, I will be the first volunteer to stay behind.”

      “Can you finish this argument in the terminal?” said Cayle. “I think they want us to get off now so they can clean the plane.”

      “Okay, let me just ask them if they have any extra little bottles of Jack Daniels, in case the bus doesn’t stop near any liquor stores. Y’all want some of those pretzel things, too?”

      Bekasu rolled her eyes at Cayle. “I still say we should have drugged her and carried her on to the flight to St. Lucia.”

      Near the baggage carousel, a lanky dark-haired man in a leather jacket with checkered sleeves stood holding a Winged-Three placard. As people retrieved their suitcases, they began to congregate around him.

      “Do you recognize him?” Cayle whispered to Justine. It was no use asking Bekasu. “They said a real race driver was going to host the tour. Is he one of the Bodines?”

      Justine narrowed her eyes, sizing him up. “Well, I can’t recognize all the young ones, but he’s not one of them. I don’t think he’s a Bodine, but we’ll find out when he opens his mouth. They’re from New York, so if this guy sounds normal, he’s not one.”

      “Welcome to the Tri-Cities Airport, folks,” said Harley Claymore.

      Justine and Cayle looked at each other and shook their heads.

      Harley Claymore found that he was more nervous about meeting this group of tourists than he had ever been about driving 180 miles per hour with Bill Elliott on his bumper and Earnhardt closing fast.

      Glad-handing people was not one of his more conspicuous talents. He was not afraid of coming up against a question he couldn’t answer. He was more nervous about the prospect of facing a question he had heard so many times that a rude retort would escape his lips before he could stop himself. Candor was his besetting sin.

      He remembered an unfortunate encounter with a lady reporter during his racing days. She hadn’t been a sports reporter, he knew that. Maybe she had been down to collect recipes from the wives or some such meringue assignment, but he had encountered her at one of the pre-race appearances that sponsors liked to host in hopes of getting their driver more publicity.

      The woman in black, swizzle-stick thin and improbably blonde, had tottered up to him on stiletto heels and announced that she was a writer. She named a magazine he’d never heard of, but he nodded and smiled as if she’d said Newsweek. Then she wanted to know if he was a driver. Harley said that he was, and asked politely if she followed the sport.

      The woman had attempted to wrinkle her botoxed forehead, and then—with the air of someone making a startlingly original observation—she smirked and said, “But it isn’t really a sport, is it? Just a bunch of cars going around in a circle for three hours.”

      “Yes,” said Harley. “Yes, it is.” He tapped her little green notebook. “And writing isn’t very hard, either, is it? Just juggling those same old twenty-six letters over and over again in various combinations?”

      In retrospect, he conceded that the remark had not been designed to convert the lady to an appreciation of NASCAR. She had stalked off in a huff, with the word “redneck” hovering on her lips, which Harley didn’t mind, because if people are going to think it, they might as well say it, and then you know where you are. He’d ended up going home alone. Maybe the reporter had found someone more willing to humor her. Thinking it over later, Harley supposed that he could have found a more diplomatic answer to the woman’s tiresome display of ignorance. Maybe for future reference he should have asked Alan Kulwicki, who had an engineering degree, what technical explanation you ought to give to people who didn’t realize that the “simplicity” of the sport was merely their own incomprehension, just as—to the uninitiated—opera was noise and modern art a paint spill. The difference was that people felt embarrassed about not understanding music or art, but they seemed almost smug about being ignorant on the subject of motor sports. Stupidity as a status symbol. He never did understand it, but it had long ago ceased to surprise him.

      What did surprise him was that people seemed to think of NASCAR as a Southern sport, despite ample evidence of “continental drift” in recent years. Jeff Gordon was from California; Kurt Busch from Vegas; Ryan Newman had an engineering degree from Purdue; and Ricky Craven was from Maine. There were races now in Phoenix, Vegas, and all over California; one in Texas, one out in Michigan, another in New England, one at the Brickyard in Indy where the Indianapolis 500 was run—and still undernourished women thought it was a redneck pastime that couldn’t really be called a sport. Fortunately, Harley believed that ignorance was a constitutional right, so he did not feel called upon to show people the error of their ways.

      What worried him was the idea that NASCAR might not be Southern enough anymore. Harley thought of all those clean-cut college-educated guys with their flat broadcast accents, and he felt like a unicorn watching the Ark set sail. Was driving no longer enough? The thought of speech lessons and plastic surgery made him shudder. Such things hadn’t been an issue when Dale started driving in ’79, but times