Sharyn McCrumb - Once Around the Track

He was, indeed, a paragon of animals, but only for the span of perhaps a minute. Just as he pulled the unconscious Weapon out of the burning car, the rescue workers arrived and sprayed both drivers with fire extinguishers. Badger tottered for a moment in the smoke and mist, letting the Weapon slide gently to the ground. He staggered away for a few feet, as if he were heading back for the 86, but before he reached it, he came to a swaying stop, and then his knees buckled and he fell forward onto the track.

For Reve, the scene seemed to unfold in slow motion with the sound on mute, but as soon as Badger’s body hit the pavement, the world went back to fast forward and the soundtrack in her head was scream after scream after scream. It was only the sore throat she had later that told her whose screams they had been.

Taran didn’t know if the race was over or not. She was shaking with cold, although no one else had seemed affected. Badger fell…She couldn’t remember what had happened next… Had she fainted?…Someone had led her to the hauler and wrapped her in a blanket. She had sat there-she didn’t know how long-holding a Styrofoam cup of thermos coffee in both hands. Tuggle, recognizing the signs of shock, had wanted to send her to the infield care center, but she had refused to go, afraid that they would keep her, and then she would not know what had happened to Badger. They had taken him away in an ambulance. Concussion, Kathy Erwin had said. She had seen enough of them to know.

“Is he going to be all right?” someone had asked.

Kathy shrugged. “Probably,” she said. “Head injuries are tricky, though. Sometimes they mess up your sense of balance or something. If it’s bad enough, he’ll never race again.”

More time passed, and the voices faded in and out. The coffee grew cold.

She thought that Sigur had come in for a little while, or perhaps Cindy. And she thought she must have slept for a bit. But then Tony Lafon had appeared, looking worried. He cupped her chin in his hand and peered at her intently. “Are you okay? Reve said you fainted.”

Taran shivered. “Where is everybody?”

“All over the place. Seeing to the car-what’s left of it. Packing up to get out of here. Checking on Badger. He’s going to be okay. Head injury. Smoke inhalation. They took him to the hospital. I think everybody forgot about you in all the chaos, so I figured I’d better come and find you.”

Taran tried to smile. “Thanks. I’m okay. It’s just that I’ve never seen him wreck before. Well, I mean, I have- back when he was just my driver, but now-” Her eyes welled up with tears, and she covered her mouth to hold back the sobs.

Tony looked away. “You’re really torn up over him, aren’t you?” he said at last.

Taran nodded. “That is exactly the right phrase to use,” she said. If she had to put it into words-how she felt about him-the simile that came to her mind would be, appropriately enough, an image of torture from medieval times. She had found a description of it in Henry V. Fluellen had said of the robber Bardolph: His nose is executed and his fire’s out.

The phrase was a reference to the one final indignity inflicted upon the prisoner before a medieval execution: the nose was slit with a sharp knife, opened, severing the cartilage between the nostrils and removing the anchorage that affixed the nose to the victim’s face. The incision was not fatal, but it was cruel-both painful and disfiguring, resulting in fountains of blood gushing uselessly from the wound.

Over the years the term for that punishment “his nose is open” began to be used metaphorically to describe hopeless infatuation, when feelings spill out, causing a scene that is agony to the sufferer, distasteful to witness, and completely without purpose. And so it was with her feelings for him. She felt an overpowering wave of emotion, so strong as to cancel out everything else, and yet, painful, useless, and unpleasant to watch. It hardly felt like love, because it was so one-sided, so hopeless, and hardly voluntary.

“Do you want me to take you to the hospital to see him?”

The words were out of her mouth almost before she thought them. “Oh, no!” she said. “I don’t really know him.”

Several hours later Tuggle pushed open the door to the hospital room, knowing that Badger wouldn’t care-and might not even know-that she had come empty-handed, but a strict sense of propriety inherited from an iron-willed grandmother made her feel guilty about it anyhow. But she’d be damned if she’d bring him flowers. Some sports reporters were sure to be loitering around in the hall somewhere, and a story about the “lady crew chief” bringing flowers to the handsome race car driver would be too good for them to pass up. No way in hell. Knowing Badger Jenkins, she thought he might have been grateful for a six-pack of Corona and a pack of Marlboro Lights, but she was pretty sure that his doctors wouldn’t thank her for showing up with them, and she knew better than to give him a novel, so she ended up bringing him nothing-except some bad news she was in no hurry to give him.

Badger was looking even smaller and paler than usual, tucked under the white sheets of the hospital bed and surrounded by vases of flowers covering almost every flat surface, sent in by fans and by well-wishers who lacked Tuggle’s horror of sentimental gestures. God knows where they had obtained them at that hour on such short notice. Wal-Mart, maybe.

He looked gaunt and weak, but at least he wasn’t bandaged up. The one good thing you could say about smoke inhalation and a head injury was that they weren’t messy conditions.

An article on one of the motorsports Web sites had likened the brain in a high-speed car crash to “putting a tomato in a cocktail shaker.” The brain bounced around hitting the inside of the skull, and it got badly bruised and swollen, but with luck and care, it would revert to normal in a few days or a week. Now all they could do was wait to see how badly he was hurt-and how permanently.

Laraine was sitting in a straight chair at his bedside. Tuggle remembered her from the Atlanta race, but now she was looking exhausted and disheveled, as if she had been there for days without leaving, instead of only a few hours. Her clothes were rumpled, and there were dark circles under her eyes, but she had managed to smile when Tuggle came in. Then she touched Badger gently on the shoulder and nodded toward the door.

Badger’s eyes lit up when he saw his crew chief standing there. That was good, Tuggle thought. At least he knew who she was.

“Hey, Tuggle!” he called out. “What the hell happened?”

Tuggle sighed. “Well, you were running second behind the 38 car-”

He brightened. “I was running second?”

“Yeah, it was looking good, but then you came up on a lapped car right after Turn Two, and the Weapon was running with you on the inside, and he got into you…”

Badger scowled. “The Weapon, huh?”

Tuggle nodded. “And you both went into the wall. Hard. How are you feeling?”

“I’m okay,” said Badger. “Just a headache. I’ll be fine. Ready to race next week.”

Tuggle said nothing. She had noticed the stricken look on the face of Laraine, who was shaking her head very slightly, perhaps to forestall wherever the conversation was going next. Tuggle wondered what there was that she didn’t know, and if it could possibly be worse than what Badger didn’t know.

Which was that he had been fired.

They weren’t going to announce it just yet. In fact, Tuggle suspected that the team owners had been relieved when Badger ended up in the hospital, because then they could get rid of him without seeming heartless. “Let go for health reasons.” It wasn’t true, though. They had been planning to fire him before he ever got in the car for the All-Star race.