Sharyn McCrumb - Once Around the Track

“Yeah.”

She took a deep breath, in lieu of shouting, and lowered the camera so that she could glare at him directly. “Do you mean to tell me that while I was following you out here-at a pace, I might add, that prevented me from taking deep breaths or even blinking…at a speed that no sane person could possibly maintain on the Bonneville Salt Flats, much less on a two-lane country road with curves and hills…And for the duration of that absurdly dangerous drive, you are telling me that you were talking on a cell phone?”

“Well, yeah,” said Badger, serenely unconscious of self-incrimination. “But you gotta remember that I grew up here. I know these roads pretty well.”

“But I don’t!”

“I know,” he said happily. “That’s why I was so tickled that you kept up with me. And in that cheap little car, too. You were great. Now, come on. I’ll show you around.”

Deciding not to press the point, Sark trailed after him. So much for her triumphant feat of driving skill. She had been hanging on for dear life, scarcely daring to breathe, and he had been talking on his damned cell phone. Okay, maybe race car driving was a little more difficult than she had been willing to admit. Mentally, she excised that section from her article.

She still wondered if he had driven so fast to test her, or if he was simply oblivious to high speeds through years of racing at two or three times those speeds. She decided that she was reserving judgment on whether or not he was a jerk.

Badger seemed to have a standard routine for hosting visitors, probably a habit born of having to entertain so many journalists and TV crews over the years. First came the tour of the lake, when Badger, at the helm of his motorboat, with the life-jacketed guest installed in the prow, buzzed off to the far end of the lake, and then slowly worked his way back to his own property, pointing out items of interest along the way. At first Sark thought she would go to sleep and fall in the water, while murmuring, “Nice tree. Nice rock. Nice shrub.” But dutifully she took pictures along the way, most of them incorporating Badger into the foreground of the shot. She thought she might have taken some good feature-story portraits: Badger in his natural habitat, looking at ease and princely on his beloved lake.

By the time they had wended their way to the end of the lake and were halfway back to where they started, an odd transformation had taken place. The lake really was beautiful. At first she had thought that it was a glorified mud puddle in the middle of nowhere, but she had resolved to be polite about it. However, somewhere along the way, his enthusiasm had infected her, and she had begun to see the land as Badger himself must be seeing it. Suddenly, without quite knowing how or why, she got it.

The landscape was a tapestry of the brilliant blues of sky and marsh and lake water, the sere browns of dry grass and leafless shrubs, of tall dark pines, and the silver-tipped branches of the maples in arabesques at the water’s edge. She saw it as a protected place where wild things could find peace and refuge. She looked over at Badger, who was guiding the boat as effortlessly as he had maneuvered the curves of that country road.

And for now, thought Sark, one of them has.

While Badger tied up the motorboat at the dock, Sark took more photos of the lake, the cabin, Badger and the boat, Badger framed against the surrounding hills. She had decided to start a team archive in case any publications needed informal shots for feature articles about Badger’s life away from the track.

“Where’s the turtle?” she asked when he had finished securing the boat.

Badger pointed to a fenced-in enclosure near the woods. “In there asleep. His shell is still healing up. Fixing him up was a lot more complicated than we thought. Once I got him to the body shop, Jesse called the local vet, who is a fishing buddy of his, to make sure we did it right. The vet came over and checked out the turtle to make sure the membrane thing under the shell wasn’t broken, which it wasn’t. That was good-less chance of infection and all. Then he cleaned the wound and put on a wet dressing to keep it from getting infected. Gave him some antibiotics, too, every day for a month, which I paid for. Good thing I’m working again.”

Sark felt a pang of journalistic disappointment. Turtle surgery in the body shop would have made a great human interest story. “So you didn’t use fiberglass in the body shop to fix the turtle?”

“Oh, we did. Just not until a couple of weeks later, after the wound had healed up pretty good and the layer above it had started to harden. Then we took him back down to the shop and fixed him a patch with fiberglass boat materials and waterproof epoxy.”

“Can I see him?” asked Sark, peering into the shady enclosure through the camera viewfinder. Just visible in the shrubbery was the shell of an enormous turtle.

“Just don’t get too near him. You wouldn’t like him much close up. He is a humongous snapping turtle, and he’s got the disposition of Kevin Harvick. He lunges at you, and he’s faster than you’d think a turtle could be. He could take your finger off in a heartbeat.”

Sark grinned. “The turtle or Harvick?”

“Either one, I reckon,” said Badger.

“If the turtle is so fierce, then how do you handle him?”

Badger shrugged. “I get along with most animals,” he said. “I guess they know I’m on their side. Anyhow, animals are easy. You can mostly figure out what they want. Sometimes with people it’s hard to tell.”

As they walked back toward the cabin, Sark said, “I was in a grocery store the other day and I saw a sign that reminded me of you.”

“That doesn’t sound too good,” said Badger. “Ham? Or vegetable section, maybe?”

She laughed. “Well, not quite the vegetable section. It was the flower and plant department. The store had a bonsai tree on display, and in front of it was a sign that said: PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH! I’M REAL! From what I’ve seen of your adoring public, I thought that the team ought to have a sign like that made for you.” She looked at him appraisingly. “Do you mind being hugged?”

“Well, it’s okay when little kids do it.”

Sark tried to keep her astonishment from showing. She had been expecting the typical macho answer, something to the effect of “I don’t mind being hugged by pretty girls or movie starlets.” But children? Go figure.

“I suppose that people feel they know you,” she said. “They’ve followed you in racing for years, and seen you on TV in their living rooms so many times. I guess that they care so much about you that they forget that to you they are strangers. To them you are one of the family.”

Badger nodded sadly. “They don’t mean any harm. It’s nice of them to take an interest.”

Sark’s cynical soul recoiled in disbelief. Could he really be so disingenuous? She said, “What about the ones who take too much of an interest, Badger?”

He hesitated, and she thought he might be considering feigning ignorance, but she forestalled that response with a no-nonsense glare that said he’d better not try playing dumb. He might not be able to quote Shakespeare (or even spell Shakespeare), but since he had been a handsome man for a couple of decades now, she was pretty sure he’d know the difference between admiration and lust when he saw it.

“Well, okay,” he sighed. “Off the record. If I think that a woman has”-he grinned to show he was being facetious-“ designs on my honor , I have this one-armed hug that I use. It keeps them from…um…”

“I get it,” said Sark, repressing a shudder. “How strange that you should have to worry about things like that instead of being able to concentrate on driving the car.”