Sharyn McCrumb - St. Dale

“ Harley ?”

“Harley. Look, Bekasu, maybe he’s no prince charming, but he’s a good man, and he’s been hurt about as bad as he can take. NASCAR chewed him up and spit him out. Don’t you make it worse.”

A little gasp and a pause at the other end of the phone. “All right, Justine,” said Bekasu. “I’ll…take care. I like him. I really do. I have to go now. But thanks.”

Justine slammed down the receiver. “Bekasu in a one-night stand.” She sighed. “She has fallen in love with a square of cardboard. The real guy is not going to live up to that fantasy stud in her head, that’s for sure.”

Cayle looked up from her book. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe compared to all those boring desk jockeys she’s had before, Harley will seem sexy and dangerous to her. But that’s beside the point. I think something else is going to happen. I think Bekasu is going to find out that Harley actually needs her. Now Bekasu is one of nature’s protectors. I’ll bet she’ll find out that she loves a guy who needs her more than she would have loved the macho stud she thought he was.”

Justine scowled at one smudged pink fingernail. “Well, she’d just better not hurt him, that’s all.”

“That was a nice thing you did back there.”

Harley spun around wondering who the hell else had decided to turn up tonight. Louis Chevrolet, for God’s sake? Harley Earl? But the man in the straw hat who had fallen into step with him was very much alive, and more powerful than a 1988 Elliott engine. He was somebody Harley had wanted very much to talk to-just not in a deserted parking lot with a runaway judge on his hands.

“Saw you all leaving some flowers back there under Dale’s picture,” the man said. “Some kind of memorial?”

“That’s right,” said Harley. “Wanted to say good-bye. Wish him well.”

The man nodded. “That’s a nice thing you did. I like that.”

“Well,” said Harley, “he’s sorely missed.”

The straw hat bobbed in agreement. “I was in the museum there with some of the guys. They let us look around after the race. Couple of cars in there for sale. I was thinking about getting one to put on display back at the shop, you know? That’s how I happened to notice you outside. Good to see you around again, Harley. You back to speed after that crash you had?”

“Right as rain.”

They walked on a few more paces, with Harley almost afraid to breathe for fear of jinxing himself. Then the man, who was so rich and powerful that his ordinary middle-aged appearance was practically a secret identity, said, “Speaking of the shop…you know, I could use a test driver. If you feel like you’re up to it, why don’t you come see me when you get back?”

Harley nodded. “I’ll do that, sir,” he said. “I’d be honored.” Suddenly he remembered a scrap of newspaper that had been riding around in his wallet since the night in the bar in Concord. He fished it out and handed it to the man in the hat. “Speaking of Dale, sir, this article’s about a young man who started a program called Driving for Dale to help senior citizens get to doctors’ appointments and so on. The fellow is going to take automotive courses at Northeast State in Tennessee, and since he’s a newlywed, I think he might need a little financial aid or an internship at Bristol. Can you see that the right people get to see this write-up?”

“I’ll do that,” said the man, pocketing the clipping. “And I’ll see you at the shop-when?”

Harley hesitated. “Would Wednesday be okay? I have something to finish up.”

Well, she worked in Charlotte. If she didn’t start screaming at a hundred miles an hour, and if she didn’t order anything with fruit in it at the roadhouse, and if she hadn’t said anything about a community college by Wednesday, then…then they’d have to see.

“Hope to see you down the road,” said Harley as the man walked away. But he was talking to the sky.

Dale Earnhardt deserved a book not just for his excellence on the speedway, but also for the extraordinary effect he had on thousands of people he never even met-the people who mourned him by leaving flowers at the nearest speedway that February night, or by writing memorial poems in his honor and posting them on the Web, or by displaying the number 3 with sentiments like “God needed a driver.” I’m sure that Dale would be the first to tell you he wasn’t a saint, but I think the outpouring of grief that followed his death would have moved him.

For years, I have been fascinated by the idea of secular sainthood. When I was in graduate school, I cornered Dr. Charles Kennedy, who was then chair of the religion department at Virginia Tech, and asked him why Elvis had become the new saint, rather than, say, John Lennon, who seemed much more spiritual to me. Dr. Kennedy said that perhaps Lennon was too avant-garde for the general population, but that Elvis, who had served his country, loved his momma, and given away Cadillacs, exemplified a level of righteousness that ordinary people could grasp. We talked about the qualities in the twelfth-century saint Thomas Becket that we could recognize in his twentieth-century counterparts: a rise from humble beginnings to a position of wealth and influence; a pattern of remaining true to one’s roots and not losing touch with the common man; an untimely death that dashed the hopes of admirers who lived vicariously through the hero’s exploits.

I wanted to do a book on the canonization of a secular figure-a Canterbury Tales with a modern saint-but I lacked the proper inspiration to do justice to the idea.

Then on February 18, 2001 a new saint entered the pantheon.

Dale Earnhardt, who was from my home state and my generation, was deeply mourned, even by people who had not been his supporters in life. When the memorial number 3s began appearing everywhere I looked (even in Christmas lights on a neighbor’s roof), I thought I could understand the substance and the underlying sorrow of his loss, and that I could at last write about this theme. Perhaps because my dad was a football coach, I had not grown up as a fan of motor sports, but I knew the time and place of Dale’s story. So I began to study racing, and now I get it.

Since this is a novel, I have taken small liberties with chronology, most notably: the Earnhardt Tower was completed at the Bristol Motor Speedway a few days after the 2002 Sharpie 500; the Richard Petty Museum moved to its present quarters on Academy Street a few months after the Number Three Pilgrims’s visit in the fall of 2002; and Route 136 in Iredell County became Route 3 six months after Cayle’s car trouble. In each case, since the time discrepancy involved was only a matter of days or months, I have described the place as you will find it now if you visit.

My friend Jane Hicks, a published poet with two master’s degrees, has been a lifelong fan of stock car racing, so in the early days of my research-back when I thought that Kurt Busch was the governor of Florida-she took me in hand and introduced me to the world of NASCAR. I could not have done it without her. Now she has to put up with e-mails from me raging over the points standings or the outcome of the last race.

Michaela Hamilton, my wise and fearless editor, took on this project when more timid souls at other publishing houses assured us that no one would buy a novel about stock car racing. Her encouragement and willingness to back this book has been a miracle in itself.

My thanks to Junior Johnson and to Leonard Wood of Wood Brothers Racing for their wisdom and patience; to East Tennessee State University and Bristol Motor Speedway for offering the NASCAR Experience course, which I took, and to Mark Martin, whose book NASCAR for Dummies was my starting point; step one of a long journey.