Sharyn McCrumb - Once Around the Track

Tuggle came quietly into the room and sat down in the other chair. She closed the lounge door with her foot. She hadn’t changed clothes yet. The lines in her face were deeper, and she looked like she hadn’t slept in a week. No matter how many times she told sports journalists-and the team owners-that it took most of a season to pull together a competent team, it was still a frustrating experience to lose and lose and lose. It was always for a different reason: mechanical problems, wrecks, bad setups. There were a thousand ways to get it wrong, and Tuggle was afraid that they’d hit every one of them before they ever came close to winning.

At Texas and Phoenix they had finished in the mid-twenties. At Talladega, the other restrictor plate track besides Daytona, Badger had managed to come in twelfth, with the help of a multicar wreck that had managed to take out most of the big-money competitors. “Doing well by default,” one sports writer had called it.

Now tonight at Richmond it had hurt to watch him out there struggling with a car whose setup was a disaster. On every turn he had fought to keep the car from going into the wall. Given the enormous g-forces working against the left-hand turn anyhow, she knew he must be sore and exhausted. And tired of losing. He hadn’t needed that scarecrow manager of his berating him after that ordeal of a race he’d just endured.

“I’m sorry about the car,” Tuggle said, patting his shoulder. It was as close as she ever came to hugging anybody. “They did their damnedest, you know. Just couldn’t make it work.”

Badger nodded without looking up. “I hope they get the hang of this real soon.”

“We all hope so. They feel like they let you down. I’m sure every one of them would rather have the blisters on your hands than the feeling of guilt they’re carrying right now.”

“Tell them not to take it so hard,” he mumbled. “It’s all part of the game.”

“I did tell them.” She looked bemused. “Never saw a Catch Can cry before.”

He tried to smile at that, but she decided there was more wrong with him than a lousy race. Technically, the rest of it was none of her business, either, and Tuggle was fanatical about minding her own business. She was fond of saying that if she saw someone drowning, she’d ask permission before trying to save him. But Badger was her responsibility for the duration of his contract, anyhow, and she figured that made him her business. An unhappy driver wouldn’t be working at peak performance.

She wished she could just wish him good night and walk out, because she wasn’t looking forward to the discussion, but instead, she said, “Listen, Badger…I heard the conservation that just went on in here. Do you want me to call a team meeting tomorrow?”

“What?”

She spoke slowly and carefully. “I’m saying that if you want me to, I can say I need you at the shop at noon tomorrow. For a team meeting.”

“But tomorrow is Monday.”

“Yes, Badger. I know that.” She sighed. Subtlety was wasted on race car drivers. “You don’t have to show up at the shop. I am offering an excuse to get you out of this gig at the factory if you are in need of a reason not to go.”

He gulped down the last of the water and tossed the bottle at the waste can. Bull’s-eye. Too bad basketball goals weren’t a foot off the ground; Badger could have had a safer athletic career. Without a word, Tuggle dug another water bottle out of the ice in the cooler and passed it over to him.

The silence lengthened as Badger made a ceremony of unscrewing the bottle cap, tossing it into the trash for another bull’s-eye, and taking a long swig of water. He kept sighing and looking away, and she thought for a moment that his eyes glistened. At last he said, “That appearance thing. I have to do it.”

“Have to?”

“Yeah, she said I have to do exactly what she tells me to, or she’ll quit managing me.”

With great effort, Tuggle willed herself not to make the reply that was clawing at the inside of her throat. She contrived to look sympathetic, or at least noncommittal.

“Five thousand dollars,” said Badger, staring at the wall. “My dad was a farmer. When I was a kid, that could have kept us going for a year. Even when I first started racing, that would have been a fortune back when I was racing Late Model Stocks.”

Tuggle was no stranger to hard times, either, but she didn’t think people ought to let the specter of famine intimidate them. “Yeah, I understand about poor,” she said. “But these days five grand wouldn’t buy you enough tires to get through qualifying, much less a race. It wouldn’t get the jet off the ground. Some of your colleagues spend that much on dinner.”

He groaned. “I know. I know that in my head. It just feels wrong to turn down money when I don’t really have anything else to do, I guess. And I don’t have a lot of endorsement deals like some of the younger guys.”

Tuggle agreed with him on principle, except for the fact that if he did this gig at the textile mill, it would constitute a victory for Melodie Albigre, whom the entire team now referred to as his “restrictor plate,” among other less civil epithets. NASCAR had a policy of fining drivers for using foul language in interviews, which prompted Tuggle to remark that expressing her opinion of Melodie Albigre would cost her ten thousand dollars.

“Okay,” she said, “But the offer still stands. If she ever tries to make you do something you don’t want to do, just tell her I’ve called a meeting. I’ll back you up. Anytime. Day or night.”

Badger nodded. “I hear you,” he said.

“Look, Badger. You’re famous. You’re rich by most people’s standards. Why are you letting her push you around?”

“She says this is my last chance. She’s right. These days they’re hiring nineteen-year-olds straight into Cup.”

“Well…Kyle Busch, sure,” said Tuggle. “But one shrub doesn’t make a forest.”

“It’s the way of the world, Tuggle. Times have changed since I started out. And you never know how long a career is going to last if you’re an athlete. I could go into the wall in the next race and never work again.”

Tuggle said nothing. You couldn’t argue with that. She couldn’t even bring herself to say the names of the guys whose careers had ended that way. The thought of them brought a lump to her throat. And he had taken some hard hits in the past, no question about it. That was part of the reason that she wanted to protect him. He had become a celebrity by risking his life, and he had done so with grace and courage. She respected that. As far as she could tell, Melodie Albigre did not.

“Okay, point taken,” she said at last.

“Yeah, so I need to think about my future. You know, you never save enough in your heyday, because you think it’s going to last forever.”

Tuggle grunted. “Tell me about it.” She was a lot closer to retirement age than he was, with a lot less to show for it. That’s why she’d needed this job. “Okay, I understand about the money, but why her ? There are plenty of personal managers for athletes.” Ones that don’t treat you like pond scum, she finished silently.

Badger sighed. “I don’t live up here,” he said. “Well, I mean, I have a place up here, but I go home as much as I can. Between that and my driving schedule, I don’t have a lot of time to be finding people to work for me. She showed up, and she’s been really good. She says it would cost me fifty thousand dollars in salary to get someone to do her job, and she just works on commission.”

But what has she done? thought Tuggle. Oh, there was the press release she sent to the local shoppers’ weekly, with enough misspelled words to make even Tuggle wince. (Deanna had seen the original, which she had been asked to mail along with a team photo of Badger.) And she had got him a few minutes on a local TV sports show that aired at midnight Saturday night. And a few local appearances that paid a few thousand dollars, but, after all, Badger was a Cup driver-and there were only forty-three of them around-so such fees were hardly evidence of great ability on the part of his manager. If she had landed him a write-up in Newsweek, or a segment on 60 Minutes, or a long-term corporate partnership worth millions, that might have made her worth putting up with-but for a shoppers’ weekly and a textile mill gig?