I said.
“Yes, but listen to this: the goat has a number three in white hair on its side! A number three.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t you get it? It’s got Dale’s racing number and it was born in Florida—which is where he died.”
“Shane, you’re not buying a goat on eBay, are you?”
“Don’t you get it? A goat! Now what are goats always doing?”
Well, to humor him I thought about it. Goats…Dale Earnhardt…Goats…“Butting!” I said. “Dale Earnhardt used to butt other cars with his front bumper just like billy goats ram people’s backsides with their horns.”
“Exactly,” said Shane. “And that’s my sign.”
Well, it sort of is. Shane is a Capricorn, but if he thought that nanny goat was a sign from NASCAR heaven, then he was getting weirder than the Wiccans, and I was pretty sure that Billy Graham would agree with me.
“I want to see that goat,” said Shane.
“Yeah, but it’s in Florida.”
“Well, I have to get there somehow. Maybe we could honeymoon in Florida.”
So that’s what set him off, I think. Our perfectly ordinary plan to go to Myrtle Beach for three days after the wedding, which is what people from here mostly do, got sidelined, and all of a sudden Shane was on the Internet scheming for ways to get to Florida.
“It’s not just the goat,” he said. “I want to see Daytona, too. Pay my respects.”
“Sure. And maybe I could lay my bridal wreath on the Speedway,” I said.
Never use sarcasm when you are dealing with a devout fool, because they will take you up on it in a heartbeat.
He found this bus tour advertised: “The Number Three Pilgrimage, a ten-day tour of East Coast Winston Cup Speedways,” starting near us, in Bristol and going down through the Carolinas and Georgia, scooting over to Talladega, and ending up at Daytona, with a wreath left in honor of Dale at every speedway.
Shane figured that was a sign, too, because the time the tour was being offered coincided exactly with when he had signed up for his two weeks off from work so that we could get married. Without even talking it over with me, Shane called the number in the ad, and told the travel agent how he was just about the biggest Earnhardt fan in the whole world, and how we wanted to take the Memorial Bus tour for our honeymoon. Well, to hear him tell it, the organizers got so excited about having newlyweds on the tour, for the publicity of the thing, that they offered him a two-for-the-price-of-one deal to sign up for the tour, which just put it within our budget. The condition, though, was that they wanted us to get married at the start of the tour, right there at the Bristol Speedway before the start of the Sharpie 500 Race, which is the first stop on the bus tour. Well, Shane was so excited about the prospect of getting to go on the Dale tour that he agreed to the whole thing right there on the phone, even gave them his Visa card number, though the deposit just about maxed out the credit limit.
Then he had to break the news to the other half of the bus ticket, which was me. He bought a rose at the Speedy Mart, and took me out to dinner that night. He told me the whole thing over steak kabobs at Logan’s, with Dale Earnhardt glowering down on us from his shrine on the pine-paneled wall. Shane knew that this was a radical departure from our previous wedding plans and he was scared that I was going to start crying right there in the booth, but he kept bouncing in his seat, too, like he wanted to get up and shout out the good news to everybody in the restaurant. After that, I didn’t have the heart to say no, and like I said, the alternative wasn’t Westminster Abbey anyhow, or even the First Methodist Church, which would have been just as good to me. No—the alternative was Mama’s Wiccan fellowship with their vegetarian whatevers and their Cherokee-Druid priestess from Knoxville, so I figured that whatever the Bristol Speedway came up with couldn’t be much worse than that.
And that’s the Brooks and Dunn truth.
Chapter VII
An F-14 in a Clothes Dryer
Bristol Motor Speedway
Like a flying saucer on scaffolding, it loomed on a hill across an expanse of grass near the four-lane Volunteer Parkway. Harley Claymore wasn’t used to seeing the outside of the Bristol Motor Speedway from that perspective—that is, from the ground. On race day, most NASCAR drivers traveled to the track by helicopter, ferried over from the nearby Tri-Cities Airport, where drivers flew in for the Saturday evening race.
Some of the prominent drivers owned helicopters which met them at each airport on the racing circuit and transported them trackside in style, but Harley had never been a member of that exalted circle. Once, when he’d had a couple of good finishes in a row and it looked like he might be somebody someday, he’d been given a ride to BMS in Bill Elliott’s private bird. Harley remembered sailing over green Tennessee hillsides, spiraling in on the cordoned-off patch of blacktop that was the fenced-in drivers’ area of the vast parking lot. He had stepped out onto the Speedway helipad, still feeling like he was walking on air from the honor of being flown to the track by Awesome Bill himself. But that high ride had been only one fleeting moment in Harley’s lackluster career. His customary arrival for race day was glamorous only when compared to the world of the average fan: his racing team simply shelled out the $75 for the helicopter shuttle service from Tri-Cities, just as any skybox tycoon could do, but, hey, it was better than crawling along the Volunteer Parkway at five miles per hour with the rest of middle America.
From the bus window, he looked down on the snails’ procession of Fords and Chevys, and even a few non-Detroit models driven by those who did not put their money where their hearts were. Becalmed in this tide of spectators, Harley was surprised by the cold hollow in his chest that told him he cared more than he realized about his fall from glory. It had taken all his life to break into that charmed circle of famous drivers, but only a season or two to be eased out again. It had happened so fast that he’d hardly realized it. Out in a heartbeat. But he was wiser now. He had grown up a lot in these lean years: he was going to find a way back in, and when he did, the only way they’d get him out again would be under the blue tarp.
It was a sweltering, cloudless mid-morning in east Tennessee. Race time was set for 7:30 P.M., but—knowing that the county’s roads were not equal to a one-day influx of 160,000 people all heading for the same place—the crowd had already begun to arrive. The roads to the Speedway were jammed with a succession of cars and pick-up trucks, whose back windows and bumpers proclaimed allegiance to a chosen driver. Some of the more alert Number Three Pilgrims pressed their noses to the bus windows to enjoy the first moments of the spectacle. Terence Palmer, his Winged Three cap pulled over his eyes, was making up for the sleep he’d lost on the red-eye flight from LaGuardia, while beside him, Sarah Nash read his rumpled New York Times.
“Look! A mixed marriage!” Justine called out, pointing to an old white Bonneville with two circular decals at opposite corners of the back windshield. The driver’s side of the window sported a white number 8 in a red circle, offset on the opposite side by a yellow 24.
“So the family favors two different drivers?” asked Bill Knight, leaning over Matthew to see the car in question.
“That’s not it,” said Justine. “It means the couple doesn’t agree on who to root for. See, that 8 on the driver’s side means he’s a Dale Earnhardt, Jr. fan, while over on the passenger
