“Maybe he was even living on borrowed time as it was,” I said. “Remember 1990?”
Shane finally took his eyes off the screen and stared at me. Slowly, he nodded.
“It was right about there, wasn’t it? Dale was the favorite to win the Daytona 500 that year. Didn’t Rusty Wallace say that the only way for Dale to lose that time would be if somebody shot out his tires?”
“Wasn’t Rusty. Somebody on his crew said it, I think.”
“Whatever. The back stretch of the last lap, and he’s way out in front, and he runs over a bell housing that fell off somebody’s car on the lap before, and blows a tire. And Derrike Cope shoots past him to win, probably wondering if he had two more wishes coming. Last lap of the Daytona 500, Shane.”
“Borrowed time,” muttered Shane, and he kind of shivered.
“And don’t forget about Neil,” I said. Neil Bonnett was just about Dale Earnhardt’s best friend in the world, and he was killed at Daytona in a practice race just a few yards up the track from where Dale himself got killed seven years later. It’s spooky when you think about it: like Neil might have been waiting to walk him through to eternity. “Maybe Neil was there for him.”
Shane nodded. “Okay,” he said at last. “If that’s the way it was—God’s will and all that, then I want God to show me a sign. Show me that Dale wanted to go and that he’s okay with how it all went down.”
“I don’t think God does signs anymore,” I said.
Well, okay, maybe He does.
A whole year went by, and we graduated. On the top of his black mortarboard, Shane put a number 3 in adhesive tape, and he made sure to bow his head when he got his diploma so that the people in the audience could see it. They started cheering and hollering, and Mr. Watkins looked out across the footlights, completely bewildered by the crowd’s enthusiasm for a mediocre student like Shane. He must have figured that Shane had a slew of relatives packing the house, but all the cheering was for Dale, because nobody was there for Shane except his mom, like always. Later Shane said he hoped Dale Earnhardt had been there in spirit to see it happen, and I smiled and hugged him, but I didn’t say anything back. I was thinking that Dale hadn’t even gone to Junior’s high school graduation, so why would he bother with some stranger’s, and besides, he was probably busy in the Hereafter.
Racing on tracks of gold, if you believe that country song by David Alan Coe, which personally I don’t. But Shane found it very comforting.
That summer Shane started working full time at the garage, which means he sometimes gets to work on a Busch-circuit car for a local guy. Shane is hoping that the garage work will lead to a job on somebody’s pit crew someday. He got his own place, too, which looks like a shrine to Dale Earnhardt, with the posters, the black number 3 couch throw, the Dale Earnhardt calendar, the race car lamp, the shelf of die-cast cars representing every ride Earnhardt had ever driven in NASCAR, even the pink one, and so on. I told Shane I hoped he didn’t think that this decor was going to carry over into our married life, and he just smiled and wiggled his eyebrows at me. He was still mourning for Dale, but he didn’t talk about it much after the first couple of weeks.
I had asked him at the time did he want to go to Charlotte and stand outside the church for the funeral, but he said no. Race people didn’t hold with funerals, he said. So I suggested sending flowers, but he didn’t even dignify that with an answer. I guess Shane thought it over by himself for a couple of weeks, because one day he announced that he couldn’t go to the mall with me on Saturday morning because he was taking some senior citizens grocery shopping. I almost dropped the phone. It turned out that Shane had thought up a volunteer program for his church. “Driving for Dale” he called it. People who had cars would volunteer to take old folks or handicapped people to doctor’s appointments or shopping, wherever they needed to go—as a sort of way to honor the memory of Dale Earnhardt. The way Shane explained it: the best way to honor a driver was—to drive. I don’t know if Dale would have been proud of Shane, but I was. A reporter from the local newspaper even did a story about the “Driving for Dale” project, and he told Shane that somebody ought to send a letter to Dale Junior, at DEI telling him about the program. “I’ll bet you’d get a thank-you note,” the reporter said, but Shane just shook his head, and said he wasn’t doing it to impress Junior, that this was between him and the Intimidator.
For Christmas that year, I gave Shane a quilt that I pieced together myself, with a patchwork silhouette of Dale standing beside his black Monte Carlo on a white background, and a big number 3 with wings and a halo for a center medallion. Across the top of it, I embroidered a line I found in The Oxford Book of Verse: “Smart lad to slip betimes away…” which is from “To an Athlete Dying Young,” by Mr. A. E. Houseman, and I figured Shane needed to be reminded of that sentiment. He liked it, anyhow. He even asked to see the whole poem, and when he saw that the first line was “The time you won your town the race,” he thought it had been written especially for Dale, so I didn’t tell him any different. He said we ought to put the whole poem on the Web site of memorial verses for Dale, at 3peacesalute.com, but I don’t think he ever got around to it. He put the quilt on his bed and said it was a comforter in more ways than one.
He was pretty much back to normal by that time, although he would still choke up when he heard a Brooks and Dunn song on the radio. Kix Brooks and Dale Earnhardt were friends, and Earnhardt even did a cameo in one of their music videos, “Honky Tonk Truth.”
The first time you see that video on CMT, you might not notice anything out of the ordinary—just Brooks and Dunn singing together as usual, but if you watch real closely you’ll realize that about twenty-five percent of the time they’d switched an identically dressed Dale Earnhardt for Kix Brooks. I must have seen it half a dozen times now, and once you know the gimmick, you can easily tell them apart. Kix Brooks looks like Dale Earnhardt-on-his-best-day, after a week at a spa, with a good hairdresser and makeup artist, and an acting coach. But there are some nice touches, like when Brooks (or possibly Earnhardt himself…no, I think it is Brooks…) nudges Dunn off the set with his butt, just like Dale used to do to other drivers with the bumper of his Monte Carlo. The joke of the song is that in the chorus, he says it isn’t him. The honky tonk truth means it’s a lie. The lyrics are supposed to be a guy telling the girl who dumped him that he doesn’t miss her, and that the pitiful fellow hanging out in the bar all day, drinking and crying, isn’t really him. So they’re singing that it isn’t him and it isn’t. Isn’t Brooks, I mean. It’s Earnhardt. They say that Brooks used to get mistaken for Dale when he went to NASCAR events, too. We thought the music video was a hoot, but now anytime it comes on the television, Shane finds an excuse to leave the room.
Then, more than a year after it happened—the wreck at the Daytona 500, I mean—Shane got his sign.
He called me up while I was on my shift at the Wolf Laurel Inn, which they get very testy about, so I knew it had to be important for him to risk getting me lectured at for receiving personal calls.
“You won’t believe this!” he said, practically shouting into the phone.
“What’s wrong, Shane?” I said, motioning for Tamara to take the iced tea pitcher to my tables.
“I got the sign, Karen! Just like I asked for.”
“What sign?” I was picturing something tacky like an Earnhardt signature in red neon, and I figured the Logan’s Steak House in town must have had a yard sale, because they are the only ones with more NASCAR stuff on the wall than Shane’s got.
“Listen, Karen,
