Sharyn McCrumb - Once Around the Track

Tuggle squinted at her for a long minute while nobody moved. “What’s your name?” she said.

“Taran Stiles.” She could feel the other women edging away from her, in case a blast of wrath was forthcoming from the crew chief.

Tuggle nodded, and made a note on her clipboard. “Well, Taran Stiles,” she said, “as it happens, you are correct. The driver for today’s exercise is Tony Lafon, one of our shop dogs, and he is indeed taller than Badger. You’re not. Generally, we want big people on pit crew, but occasionally it helps to have a runt around. So if your physical skills are as good as your powers of observation, you might make the team. Now get going, you seven!”

Afterward, Taran marveled at how nervous she had been for a job that paid only a fraction of what she had been making in the corporate world. She had never thought of herself as a particularly athletic person, and heretofore her competitive instincts had been confined to making the highest score on the exam, but during the tryouts she found herself trying harder than she ever had in any physical activity. The girl who had been content to coast through required courses in physical education suddenly demanded that her body respond like a well-oiled machine, because she wanted this job.

And she got it.

Someone from the team had called her the next day to tell her that she was now a member of Badger Jenkins’s pit crew. Well, they didn’t put it like that, of course. They thought of themselves by number and sponsor and owner. The 86 car; Team Vagenya. To the front office, Badger was just a cog in a money-making machine, but he was what mattered to her. For a fleeting moment she wondered who else had made the cut. Well, she would find out soon enough. There was a team meeting at the end of the week, the beginning of the long process of getting a bunch of novices ready for competition at the highest level of motorsports. First, though, she had to call Matt Troxler back at the old office and tell him that his worst fear had been realized: He had talked someone into a NASCAR career!

Taran went in that Friday to meet her new teammates. Later, she wondered if all randomly assembled groups of people constituted an assortment of types resembling the cast of old war movies. There was Taran herself, the dreamy romantic, who was the catch-can person. Reve Galloway, the gruff crusading fitness worker from California, was the gasman, because she was strong enough to lift a seventy-pound container of fuel.

The hockey playing student reading Paradise Lost at tryouts turned out to be a Texan named Cass Jordan-she also brought a book to the team meeting. It turned out that she had been on her high school wrestling team, and she could still bench-press calves. She was Team Vagenya’s new jackman.

The front tire carrier, Jeanne Mowbray, was the only girl in a family of construction workers from Ohio, so carrying a heavy tire was not a novelty to her, or to her counterpart, rear tire carrier Sigur Nelson, a flaxen-haired farm girl from Minnesota, who looked as though she was only working in Cup racing until her application to be a Valkyrie was approved.

The two tire changers were less striking physical specimens, because they did not have to lift the tires. The skill they had was not strength, but the dexterity to manipulate the lug nuts and the drill. The oldest of the over-the-wall gang was forty-one-year-old Kathy Erwin, granddaughter of a Carolina racing family. She knew both Tuggle and the team’s chief engineer Julie Carmichael, so there was some talk that she got the job through her connections, but even if that were the case, she was exceptionally fast at tire changing, so it hardly mattered.

The second tire changer, Cindy Corlett, was a small, serious girl with a pixie face and long, tapering fingers.

“Are you a mechanic?” Taran had asked her in disbelief.

The dark-haired girl had smiled and shook her head. “Musician,” she said. “Bluegrass fiddle. I’m good with my hands, you see.”

“But why on earth would you want to change tires on a race car then?”

“I guess I come by it naturally,” said Cindy. “Back in Ozark, Arkansas, my family was always about two things: picking and racing. I decided I’d like to try both. My daddy is just thrilled to death about this. I promised to get him a hot pass to Bristol.”

So there they were, with a spectrum of backgrounds and home states, each with a different reason for being on board, and each with a second skill to benefit the team. When they weren’t needed on pit crew, they would drive the hauler, work as a mechanic, serve as the computer technician, assist the fabricators-there were many talents needed to field a stock car. It made sense to hire people who could serve in more than one capacity. Taran would be the computer person.

She hoped that she would become friends as well as coworkers with this collection of strangers, and that she would be a valuable member of the team. Taran had never been much of a joiner, and she tended to be shy around new people, but she thought that having a common goal might make it easier for her to connect with the rest of the crew. She didn’t think she’d ever get over being intimidated by Tuggle, but she did hope that sooner or later she could find the courage to say something to Badger Jenkins. Something besides “I love you.” Surely he had forgotten about that.

“I’m supposed to do sports card shots of him ?” Melanie Sark lowered her camera and peered at the young man in the purple firesuit who had just entered the studio door.

“We don’t call them that in motorsports,” said Tuggle. “Folks say hero cards .”

Hero cards? Sark stared at her. “I would rather swallow my tongue,” she said.

Tuggle shrugged. “Just a figure of speech. ’Course you might want to remember that it is a dangerous sport.”

“Yeah, we could call them idiot cards.”

“How about autograph cards?”

“Fine. Autograph cards.” She glanced again at the young man loitering out of earshot in the doorway, talking on his cell phone. “All right, how do you expect me to do an autograph card for him ? He’s the size of a mailbox!”

Tuggle shrugged. You could tell that this girl hadn’t been in motorsports very long. What was she used to? NBA players? Badger wasn’t even unusual for a Cup driver.

“This is NASCAR,” she reminded the new team publicist. “At Speedways, you always want to watch where you step.”

Sark wrinkled her nose. “Dog poo?”

“Jeff Gordon.” Tuggle held out her hand at about shoulder height to illustrate the point. “Now on the autograph cards, we’ll say Badger is five foot seven.”

Sark smirked. “Why don’t you say he’s the Emperor of Japan while you’re at it?”

“Well, they might be about the same height,” Tuggle conceded. “He’s got a beautiful nose, though, Badger does. He ought to write his Welsh ancestors a thank-you note for that perfect bone structure. You should see some of his old autograph cards. He photographs well. And it’s all in the camera angles. You can make him look tall.”

“Yeah, if I stand in a drainage ditch. Okay, thanks for bringing him over. You can have him back in an hour.” She peered doubtfully at the young man in the doorway, who seemed to be waiting for permission to enter. “Will I need an interpreter?”

Tuggle smirked. “Just listen slowly-he’s from Georgia.”

Badger Jenkins turned around and around, surveying the empty building lit with studio lights. “How you doin’?” he said, extending his hand and summoning his brightest smile.

Sark lifted the camera and took a step backward. “Save it, Frodo, I’m not into this sport. I just needed a job, all right? And apparently my job is to make you look good, so that you come across as a combination of Superman and Tom Hanks.” Her tone of voice indicated the magnitude of that task. “Let’s do the photos first, okay? We can work on the interview after that. Five minutes ought to suffice for it. Stand there with your arms folded. That’ll be the car shot.”