Sharyn McCrumb - St. Dale

Karen sighed. “I wanted to go to the beach,” she said. But she was too worried to make small talk. With a tentative smile she said in her smallest voice, “I need to ask you a question. I mean, since you’re a guy. I need some advice. Before we get to Daytona.”

Terence Palmer closed his magazine with no apparent enthusiasm. “I hope it’s about your stock portfolio,” he murmured.

“No.” She glanced around to make sure that no one was listening. “But it is kind of an ethical question.”

Terence blinked with alarm. “Why ask me then? There’s a minister on board.”

Karen wrinkled her nose. “He’s nice, but he has to be older than Mark Martin. You’re the only guy on this bus who’s anywhere near Shane’s age.”

Terence turned away, rattling his magazine. “I can’t help you.”

“Well, you could listen,” said Karen. “You don’t have anything better to do. Maybe it would help me just to talk about it.”

Terence closed his eyes and sighed deeply, which was what his family did instead of shouting and throwing plates, but meant the same thing. “All right,” he said. “Talk about it.”

“Okay, suppose you tell somebody a lie because you love them and you don’t want them to feel bad, but now you think they might find out the truth and be mad at you for keeping it from them.”

“Okay,” said Terence.

“Oh, good, so you think it’s all right?”

“No. I thought you just wanted to think out loud. Now you’re asking me to say what I think?” His eyes drifted back to the open magazine.

Karen snatched his copy of Fortune and stuffed it into the seat pocket.

Terence reached for the magazine, but he succeeded only in pulling out the letter that had been the bookmark in Karen’s book about the Irish princess. He opened it before she could snatch it back.

“I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t mention that to anybody,” she said. “Especially Shane.”

“Why would I?”

“Well, you might not realize it was a secret. He doesn’t know. Listen, I need some help here. I’ve only been married six days, and I’m afraid I’ve ruined things already. Or I will have, when Shane finds out.”

“About the letter?”

She shook her head. “Something else.”

“Something else? What-no-don’t tell me. Doesn’t matter. You sound like my mother.”

“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.