Sharyn McCrumb - Once Around the Track

With a puzzled frown, Badger looked around at the empty studio. “But there’s no car here,” he said.

Sark rolled her eyes. “ Duh. I’ll take the shots of you first, and then digitally I’ll paste in shots of the race car behind you. That way I can fudge a little. Put you in at one hunderd percent, maybe paste the car in at eighty.”

“Why?”

“So you’ll look bigger.” She peered at him through the lens. Assuming the eager-to-please expression of a Westminster show dog, Badger faced the camera with a pasted-on smile. Sark sighed and lowered the camera. “Lose the smile, sunshine,” she said. “You’re supposed to look tough, aren’t you?”

Badger nodded, relaxing his features into a solemn, slightly baffled expression.

“ The light in his eyes is the sun shining through the back of his head,” muttered Sark, supplying the caption to the imaginary photo. This would be a perfect episode to include in her notes for the secret article. Height fraud in NASCAR. Or the art of illusion in sports photography. She would jot down a few particulars later, but now she had to get on with a more pressing assignment: making Badger Jenkins look imposing.

“You look about as scary as cottage cheese,” she told him. “Try again.”

As she knelt on the floor a few feet in front of him and lined up his image in the viewfinder, the transformation took place. Badger put on his dark sunglasses, sat down on a stack of tires, and assumed his characteristic pose-leaning forward slightly; legs spread wide apart; tapered, sinewy hands clasped at belt level; with an expression of stern intensity ennobling that chiseled, perfect face. He had the calm of one who knows he is the most dangerous thing around and the stillness of a coiled spring.

Sark blinked. Where the hell did he come from? The diffident and affable Badger Jenkins had vanished, and in his place was a warrior angel, beautiful and terrible to behold. He took your breath away. And he looked a foot taller than Badger really was.

“Da-amn,” she whispered, looking up over the camera, half expecting to see the real Badger standing off to the side of the room, but no, it was him sitting there on the stack of tires, like Hollywood’s idea of a combat general-handsome, strong, and damn near irresistible.

He had enough sense not to move or speak or break the pose. Without a word, Sark clicked the shutter, adjusted the angle, snapped again. Scarcely daring to breathe, she spent the whole roll on that one pose, at slightly varying heights, angles, distances, chasing the play of light across the planes of his face, and trying to imagine an expression in the blank stare behind those shaded eyes. After a few minutes she almost forgot who he was, or that he was an ordinary and pleasant young man who drove cars for a living. She usually spoke to her subjects as she photographed them, offering up encouraging pleasantries to make them hold the pose or to elicit a more confident expression, but this time she was silent. What could you possibly say to him ?

At first she had considered telling him to alter the pose, thinking there was something improper in his spread-eagled stance, and resolving that if he insisted on flaunting his “package,” then at any rate she wouldn’t look. She looked.

Boy, it was hot in that room. Must be the studio lights, she thought, wiping the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand. Badger didn’t seem to be affected, though.

He tilted his head back. “Are we about done? They want me to practice a couple of laps.”

The spell was broken, or almost. Badger pulled off the sunglasses, waiting to see what else she wanted, and once again he was an ordinary guy, impatient to get back to work.

“Uh…I need to talk to you to get some material for the press release.” Sark’s voice sounded hoarse even to her. She took a deep breath and set the camera down on the floor. “Just a couple of questions…” But not the questions that had been uppermost in her mind, she thought.

Badger said, “Really? You want to talk to me for the press release?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Well, nobody ever has before. They just tell me to get lost, and then they write whatever they feel like saying.”

Sark frowned. “Well, how would they know what the facts were?”

“Facts?” said Badger. He shrugged. “One of ’em told me once that I was the blank screen that everybody ran their own movie on. It didn’t matter what I was really like. What does that mean?”

Sark thought it over. It wasn’t Badger people believed in. It was the guy she had seen in the camera lens. The one who didn’t exist. “Well,” she said. “I guess there are a lot of people out there who think you’re the guy they see in the photographs. They think you’re tall and wise and wonderful, and that you’d be the best friend in the world. Like a guardian angel, I suppose. If you ever called them, they’d buy a new answering machine tape and save the one with your voice on it forever. Maybe some of them imagine you telling the boss to get off their case, or showing up at their house for a backyard cookout so that the neighbors will fall dead from envy.”

He got the idea, so she didn’t say the rest of it. Women want you to beat up their abusive boyfriends, or take them away from a humdrum life, or just point to them in a hotel lobby and say, “You.” That’s all it would take. And some people would be happy just to shake your hand, and they’d treasure that memory forever.

Badger sighed. “They shouldn’t put me on a pedestal,” he said.

“You could use the extra height,” muttered Sark.

“I wish I was that guy. I wish I had the kind of power they think I have.”

“Maybe you don’t have to be, Badger. Maybe it’s enough that people have something to believe in. Anyhow, let’s do the best we can on this interview, so that we don’t disappoint them.” She motioned for him to sit down in the plastic chair near the work table.

“I’m not too good at quizzes,” said Badger. “What do you want to know?”

“Well, I suppose I can get all the basic stuff from NASCAR.com or by Googling you. Previous racing stats, for example.”

“I wouldn’t know them off the top of my head,” said Badger. “Fans often do. Amazing what they can reel off at the drop of a hat when I can’t even do it myself.”

Sark consulted her notes. “Height. Weight. I can fake-er- look those up , too. Marital status. Says here you’re married to…um…a Miss Georgia… Desiree …”

Badger shook his head. “Not anymore. Dessy was an ambitious girl. She was headed for the big time, and she decided I wasn’t it. She was right about that. She has her heart set on being a spokesmodel, or maybe a letter-turner on one of those daytime quiz shows. Too rich for my blood. So we sold the big house, and she took most of the money and moved to Florida. I wish her the best.” He brightened. “I’m okay, though. I kept my fishin’ shack on the lake. I like it there.”

Sark made a note: Dumped by Gold Digger . She gave him an encouraging smile. “Hobbies. Fishing?”

“Animal rescue,” said Badger. “I don’t have any formal training or nothing, but I just never could stand to see anything suffer. When I was a kid my daddy hit a doe with his truck, and we found the fawn standing there by the side of the road, so I bundled it up in my coat, took it home, and bottle-fed it ’til it was big enough to be turned loose again. I guess that’s what got me started. And I had an owl that had got a wing shot off by some hunter who was either careless, drunk, or mean as hell. Kept him in the house.” He grinned. “Dessy wasn’t any too happy about that. You ever try to get owl shit out of a Persian rug?”