a cloud of black smoke. I got to see the finish from pit road, though. It was almost worth it.”
They were silent for a couple of minutes, in deference to Harley and the loss of his engine. Then Justine brightened and called out, “So tell us about this speedway wedding. I might want one someday.”
Harley was ready for this one. “The folks at Bailey Travel figured you’d want to know about that. How are we fixed for time, Mr. Laine?”
At the steering wheel, Ratty Laine gave a grunt of disgust and said out of the corner of his mouth, “Take all the time you want. This road is a parking lot. Volunteer Parkway traffic’s flowing like molasses in January.”
Harley nodded. “I’ll bet the locals know a shortcut or two. Wish I’d thought to ask about one at the airport.”
“But you’ve driven here,” said Matthew.
“Inside the Speedway, not out here,” said Harley, repressing a shudder. “Took a helicopter right to the Speedway parking lot. Wish we could do that today. Anyhow, as I told you before, our first event of the tour is a wedding to be held smack-dab in the middle of the Bristol Motor Speedway. Now you might not think BMS is a romantic kind of place, but as a matter of fact Mike Waltrip proposed to his wife Buffy in Victory Lane after he won the Busch Grand National event here in 1993, so I guess that sets a precedent.”
“I saw that race,” said Jim Powell. “It was two days after Alan Kulwicki died here—the reigning champion he was—and people were still in shock after the plane crash. So when Mike took the checkered flag in the Busch race, he turned that car around and did a Polish victory lap in honor of Alan. And then in Victory Lane, there was Benny Parsons trying to interview him, and Mike went and popped the question to his young lady right on the air. It was quite a moment. Happy and sad all at once. I swear Arlene must have cried for two days after that. Didn’t you, hon?”
His wife gave him a vacant smile and he patted her hand.
Harley noticed that Justine’s face had clouded over at hearing the name Waltrip again, so he hurried to change the subject. “While we’re crawling through this traffic, we have a little something to pass the time here on the bus.” He held up a cassette tape. “One of the couples getting married today is taking their honeymoon with us on this tour, and, as part of their deal with the company, the bride-to-be agreed to send us a homemade tape, talking about how they came to do this. I’m going to play it for you now, so that when the newlyweds come on board, you’ll feel like you’re already acquainted with them. Here goes…”
Chapter VI
The Bride’s Tale
“Honky Tonk Truth”
Tap…tap…testing…I wonder if this thing is working—Oh, I guess it is…
Hello. My name is Karen…um…Well, it’ll be McKee by the time you play this, I guess. Or almost…Anyhow…um…I just wanted to say that we’re getting married at the Bristol Speedway, me and Shane…
“Well, of course it wasn’t my idea. People keep asking me that—like they think I’d planned it that way back when I was a little girl, staging those under-the-porch weddings with Malibu Barbie and Dream Date Ken (Kleenex veil and clover flower bouquet).
Oh, sure. Me in a white organdy dress and a straw picture hat, carrying a bouquet of wild multiflora roses, tripping toward the minister in the infield of the Bristol Motor Speedway, wedding march on the PA system, fifty thousand total strangers looking on, and a passel of media types smirking like possums every which way I looked. Not to mention Dale Earnhardt serving as best man, even though he would have been dead for sixteen months by then.
The wedding of my girlish dreams? Not hardly.
I just wanted to marry Shane McKee, that’s all. The rest of it was his idea.
When I told Shane’s wedding plans to the waitstaff on my shift at the Wolf Laurel Inn, they said I ought to be glad that my fiancé was taking any interest in the ceremony at all. They said most men get about as involved in weddings as a convict does in an execution: just dreading it while everybody else makes the arrangements.
Mama’s friends took a different view, of course. They pride themselves on it. After she and Daddy called it quits when I was twelve, Mama joined the local Wiccan Friends of the Goddess and Book Discussion Group, which is sort of a Junior League for the counterculture around here. The members of the coven are mostly divorcées over forty or unmarried college professors, and so they are all prime candidates for a religion that puts men in the back pew instead of in the pulpit. I’m not a member—Mama says it will take another fifteen years and a few stretch marks to make me see the point—but of course I have to attend the gatherings that are family events, which means the vegetarian picnics and the Winter Solstice party, which is just like a Christmas party, except that the presents are given out by a lady in white robes instead of by Santa Claus. At the Solstice party once I asked Mom if she believed in the virgin birth, and she said it wouldn’t surprise her one bit, because she had yet to see any man lift one finger to help with any of the Christmas preparations, so she figured that must be the precedent for it.
The Wiccan Friends of the Goddess position on marriage is that it is a submission to the patriarchal oppressor—well, in theory anyhow; some of the members are married or have been—although they try to be supportive of any member who is dating somebody, which gives them both the appearance of being broad-minded and the opportunity to say I-told-you-so when the relationship crashes and burns. But despite their misgivings about the male of the species, they did throw me a bridal shower. I was worried about that when they told me about it, because Wiccans are supposed to perform their rituals sky-clad, which is goddess-speak for naked, and the thought of spending an afternoon playing toilet paper bride with a roomful of naked ladies just made my head hurt. Mrs. Tickle, the librarian and coven leader, told me not to worry about that, though. “We will all wear long loose robes,” she told me, “because if you’re over forty-five and sky-clad, the sky had better be overcast.”
Of course after they found out about Shane’s idea for the ceremony, the Wiccans said that a NASCAR wedding was just the sort of tomfool thing a man would dream up. But since I had been hearing them go on about their ideas for a traditional pagan ceremony for weeks by then, I began to get relieved that all I had to worry about was motor oil puddles and the Associated Press, instead of a Cherokee-Druid priestess from Knoxville and a wedding night in the neighbor’s corn field.
Shane was all fired up about the wedding, I’ll give him that. I think he always figured on marrying me, but he’d never given a second thought to the ceremony itself until February 18—you know, when it happened.
Shane hasn’t been the same since.
We had been dating since seventh grade, so the idea of us getting married wasn’t really a surprise. It was more inevitable, like getting the license when your learner’s permit is about to expire. We were juniors that year, fixing to graduate the next June. Next year, I was figuring on applying to the local college, which is all we could afford, and Shane was hoping to switch over to full time at Williams’ Body Shop and get a place of his own, so the subject of marriage was coming up more and more. Shane was driving dirt track on the weekends, and last summer he’d done some work on an ARCA car for a guy over near Charlotte. I’d go to the race track to watch him, and he’d ask me if I was ready to be a driver’s wife. “You have to be a size eight or smaller,” he’d say, and I’d laugh, but even if he was kidding, he was right about that.
We’d kid about it as we waited in
