let me just ask them if they have any extra little bottles of Jack Daniels, in case the bus doesn’t stop near any liquor stores. Y’all want some of those pretzel things, too?”
Bekasu rolled her eyes at Cayle. “I still say we should have drugged her and carried her on to the flight to St. Lucia.”
Near the baggage carousel, a lanky dark-haired man in a leather jacket with checkered sleeves stood holding a Winged-Three placard. As people retrieved their suitcases, they began to congregate around him.
“Do you recognize him?” Cayle whispered to Justine. It was no use asking Bekasu. “They said a real race driver was going to host the tour. Is he one of the Bodines?”
Justine narrowed her eyes, sizing him up. “Well, I can’t recognize all the young ones, but he’s not one of them. I don’t think he’s a Bodine, but we’ll find out when he opens his mouth. They’re from New York, so if this guy sounds normal, he’s not one.”
“Welcome to the Tri-Cities Airport, folks,” said Harley Claymore.
Justine and Cayle looked at each other and shook their heads.
Harley Claymore found that he was more nervous about meeting this group of tourists than he had ever been about driving 180 miles per hour with Bill Elliott on his bumper and Earnhardt closing fast.
Glad-handing people was not one of his more conspicuous talents. He was not afraid of coming up against a question he couldn’t answer. He was more nervous about the prospect of facing a question he had heard so many times that a rude retort would escape his lips before he could stop himself. Candor was his besetting sin.
He remembered an unfortunate encounter with a lady reporter during his racing days. She hadn’t been a sports reporter, he knew that. Maybe she had been down to collect recipes from the wives or some such meringue assignment, but he had encountered her at one of the pre-race appearances that sponsors liked to host in hopes of getting their driver more publicity.
The woman in black, swizzle-stick thin and improbably blonde, had tottered up to him on stiletto heels and announced that she was a writer. She named a magazine he’d never heard of, but he nodded and smiled as if she’d said Newsweek. Then she wanted to know if he was a driver. Harley said that he was, and asked politely if she followed the sport.
The woman had attempted to wrinkle her botoxed forehead, and then—with the air of someone making a startlingly original observation—she smirked and said, “But it isn’t really a sport, is it? Just a bunch of cars going around in a circle for three hours.”
“Yes,” said Harley. “Yes, it is.” He tapped her little green notebook. “And writing isn’t very hard, either, is it? Just juggling those same old twenty-six letters over and over again in various combinations?”
In retrospect, he conceded that the remark had not been designed to convert the lady to an appreciation of NASCAR. She had stalked off in a huff, with the word “redneck” hovering on her lips, which Harley didn’t mind, because if people are going to think it, they might as well say it, and then you know where you are. He’d ended up going home alone. Maybe the reporter had found someone more willing to humor her. Thinking it over later, Harley supposed that he could have found a more diplomatic answer to the woman’s tiresome display of ignorance. Maybe for future reference he should have asked Alan Kulwicki, who had an engineering degree, what technical explanation you ought to give to people who didn’t realize that the “simplicity” of the sport was merely their own incomprehension, just as—to the uninitiated—opera was noise and modern art a paint spill. The difference was that people felt embarrassed about not understanding music or art, but they seemed almost smug about being ignorant on the subject of motor sports. Stupidity as a status symbol. He never did understand it, but it had long ago ceased to surprise him.
What did surprise him was that people seemed to think of NASCAR as a Southern sport, despite ample evidence of “continental drift” in recent years. Jeff Gordon was from California; Kurt Busch from Vegas; Ryan Newman had an engineering degree from Purdue; and Ricky Craven was from Maine. There were races now in Phoenix, Vegas, and all over California; one in Texas, one out in Michigan, another in New England, one at the Brickyard in Indy where the Indianapolis 500 was run—and still undernourished women thought it was a redneck pastime that couldn’t really be called a sport. Fortunately, Harley believed that ignorance was a constitutional right, so he did not feel called upon to show people the error of their ways.
What worried him was the idea that NASCAR might not be Southern enough anymore. Harley thought of all those clean-cut college-educated guys with their flat broadcast accents, and he felt like a unicorn watching the Ark set sail. Was driving no longer enough? The thought of speech lessons and plastic surgery made him shudder. Such things hadn’t been an issue when Dale started driving in ’79, but times had changed. It cost a quarter of a million dollars to field a stock car—and the car was good for only one race. Then you needed another quarter of a million to compete the next Sunday somewhere else. That’s why an advertisement in the form of a small decal pasted on the hood of the race car could cost that sponsor $80,000 per race. The days of the independent owner-driver—as the Bodine and the Elliott teams had been—were past praying for. Now you needed a principal sponsor with deep pockets. A beer company. A detergent manufacturer. A cereal maker. And in return for millions of dollars to fund your racing team, the sponsor would feature you in their TV commercials, and put life-size cardboard cutouts of you in the aisles of grocery stores all over the country. So you’d better be good-looking and you’d better be good at glad-handing with the corporate types, and you’d better be a pussycat with the press and the fans. Because winning races was nice, but public relations was everything.
Harley figured that the ten-day tour would be good practice for his affability.
On the appointed day for the tour to begin, he had arranged to meet the bus driver in the airport parking lot so that the two of them could compare notes before the arrival of the tour group. Harley had flown into Tri-Cities on the last flight the night before, and planned to spend the night in the Sleep Inn a mile from the airport, but since Bailey Travel had neglected to make a reservation for him many months in advance, no accommodations were available for that night, so he had spent the night sleeping in a chair in the airport waiting room. He’d shaved and changed in the men’s room an hour before the passengers’ flight was due in from Charlotte.
To prepare himself to guide the tour, Harley had driven part of the route on his own that week, traveling from Martinsville to Darlington, covering all the tour stops north of Georgia, anyhow. Since the tour would end after the Southern 500 in Darlington the following Saturday, Harley had ended his practice journey there, leaving his car at the speedway, so that he could just drive away at the end of the tour—hopefully with a new job in racing to go to.
At least it was going to be a small tour. Only thirteen people instead of the fifty or so that Mr. Bailey said they usually tried to book. “How come it’s so few people?” Harley had asked. “I’d have thought people would be falling all over themselves to do an Earnhardt tour.”
“Well, they were,” Mr. Bailey admitted. “We were inundated with applications. But since we have never driven this route before and since you’re an inexperienced guide, we thought we’d make this a test run.”
Harley thought about it. “This tour includes race tickets,” he said. “And you didn’t plan far enough ahead to get enough tickets for Bristol, did you?”
Harry Bailey reddened. “We could only get fourteen,” he said. “We thought three months in advance was a gracious plenty.”
Harley smirked. “Try
