for a quarter apiece.
“Hon, what do you think of this dress?” I’d said, shoving the magazine under his nose during a commercial.
Shane glanced at it for maybe two seconds, and then he said like, “Fine, if I can wear my white Earnhardt Goodwrench coveralls.”
And he’d grinned when he said it, so I laughed and went back to turning pages.
’Cause I thought he was kidding. Well, maybe he was. I had already looked into tuxedo rentals at the mall, and Shane was okay with that. The Goodwrench overalls remark was just something he’d said to try to get a rise out of me that Sunday afternoon before the race started. The Daytona 500. February 18, 2001.
Well, you know how that ended, I guess. The whole world must know that, I reckon. But nobody coulda been hit any harder by it than Shane McKee. He was tore up worse than that black Monte Carlo. In fact, it wasn’t hardly torn up at all, which was why I had such trouble believing it at first.
I’d never seen Shane cry before—not even that time in eighth grade when Bo got hit by a Kenworth. He loved that dog—still keeps a picture of him in his wallet to this day—but when Dale Earnhardt hit that wall in the last little bit of the 2001 Daytona 500, I thought we’d have to call the rescue squad for Shane.
He had been looking forward to the Daytona 500 since Christmas, and I can’t say that I had, but I was determined to be a good sport and watch it with him. I know it’s the Super Bowl of auto racing and all, but I didn’t exactly find it riveting, just watching a bunch of cars with numbers painted on the side, going around in a circle, turning left for three solid hours. Not at first anyhow, but after spending years with Shane McKee, I did begin to get the hang of it. I didn’t know all the drivers by number and sponsor the way he did, but I could recognize most of the important ones, though I tended to get all the Bodines mixed up. Mostly I spent the afternoon paging through my fashion magazines, and glancing at the screen every now and again, especially when Shane yelled at somebody. By the last lap, he was about yelled out, and he was sitting on the edge of the sofa cushion, saying, “Come on Mike,” as if his voice was going straight into Mike Waltrip’s headset. Then he just froze and stopped making any sound altogether, and that’s when I looked up to see what the matter was, and saw the replay.
“It’s not that bad,” I said when we first saw the black car up against the wall, within hollering distance of the finish line. “He’s always doing stuff like that.”
Shane didn’t even look away from the television screen. He started shaking his head.
Then trying to cheer him up, I said, “It was an unusual wreck, though, wasn’t it? Not a Bodine in sight.”
Shane never took his eyes off the screen. “It’s bad, Karen,” he said, real quiet, like he was talking to himself.
“No. They’re just playing it up for the suspense,” I said. “He can’t be hurt. They wear helmets and harnesses and all kinds of safety equipment. And the car’s not stove in too much and it’s not on fire. They’ll cut him out or something and he’ll be fine. Look, Mike Waltrip won the race and Dale Junior came in second, both of them driving for DEI. He’ll be drinking champagne out of the trophy with ’em in the winner’s circle by the next commercial.”
“Blue tarp,” said Shane, like he didn’t even hear me. He slid off the couch and sat shivering there on the rug about a foot from the television, like he wanted to crawl through the screen and look in the car for himself.
I tried to talk him into going out for pizza—my treat, I said, the race is over—but nothing would budge him. “My whole life,” he said. “I’ve been pulling for Dale my whole life.”
“I know,” I said. The first Christmas present Shane ever gave me was a little gold number 3 to wear around my neck. It matched his.
I always thought that Shane had elected Dale Earnhardt to be his substitute dad, because his real dad wasn’t good for much, and in fact Shane hadn’t seen him in quite a few years. There’s some of Earnhardt’s kids who could have said the same once, I think, but Shane wasn’t interested in the personal details of his hero’s private life. Men mostly aren’t. I think he just looked up to Dale Earnhardt so much that he didn’t care a bit what the man was really like. As far as Shane was concerned, Big Dale was a knight in a shining Chevy, a place to channel all those feelings you’re supposed to have for your dad, and somebody you’d be proud to be kin to, whereas his own dad wasn’t much to brag about, by all accounts. Believing in Dale got Shane through childhood anyhow, but when it all ended on February 18, 2001, he wasn’t ready to let go.
So we never did eat dinner that night. I don’t remember what came on after the race, because we weren’t really watching the show. We were just waiting for the program to be interrupted with more news about the wreck, which finally came about seven, and then Shane started to cry, and I was crying because it scared me so bad to see him like that. I didn’t know what to say to somebody in that much grief. I haven’t had much experience with people dying. Mostly it’s friends of our grandparents who pass away, and they’re usually so sick or senile that people go around talking about what a blessed release it is, though I’ve always suspected that they mean for the family instead of for the dead person.
Now Dale Earnhardt was pushing fifty, not exactly young by high school standards, but no way was he some broken-down senior citizen ready to kick the bucket for want of anything better to do.
“It’s not fair,” said Shane.
Well, it kinda was, I thought, but I didn’t say so. Dale Earnhardt was known as the Intimidator, because his trademark was to tap some other car with his bumper when he wanted them to get out of his way in a race. In 1987 at Pocono, Dale won by bumping his way past Alan Kulwicki just half a lap from the finish line. And in the first Winston Shootout in Charlotte, he crashed into Bill Elliott and Geoff Bodine, and then went on to win the race, and Old Awesome Bill from Dawsonville and Bodine got so mad at Dale that they crashed into him during the cool-down lap after the race. So I know for a fact that Dale had caused a bunch of wrecks his own self, not that he ever got anybody hurt bad that I know of, unlike poor Ricky Rudd who once ran over a pit crew guy coming off the track too fast, which is why they have speed limits now in the pits.
Still, the way that wreck happened at Daytona, it looked like somebody had tapped Dale’s bumper, giving him a taste of his own medicine, maybe, only things went terribly wrong after that. It was fair, I guess, but that wasn’t going to make it right to all the Earnhardt folks who were out there brokenhearted that night, especially not to the one I was trying to comfort.
“Shane, look at it this way,” I said. “What if some angel had appeared to Dale this morning before the race and had said to him, ‘Mr. Earnhardt, you can either live thirty more years and die old and bypassed in some Charlotte hospital, or you can go out today in a blaze of glory on the last lap of the Daytona 500 with two of your own DEI drivers coming in first and second, and be a legend forever after…’ Well, what do you think he would have said?”
Shane clenched his jaw. “He had a little girl,” he said.
There was a smart comeback to that about how much time his older kids had seen him while they were growing up, but I let it go. “But what do you think he would have said, Shane?”
He wouldn’t look at me, but finally he said, “I guess he’d have picked to go today.”
“Well, all right then.”
Shane sat there for a while rubbing his chin, and mulling over what
