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I had been the team's chief mechanic a long time—since Earnhardt Sr.'s rookie year—and I still knew a few tricks of the trade, but it would have taken a miracle to compete with those million-dollar golden boys down in Mooresville.
"I don't see us finishing out the year," J. P. Trampas told me that afternoon at the shop. He was a tall, gaunt fellow who looked older and grayer than he should have, but watching a hundred grand a week spiral down the drain will do that to a man, I reckon. His grandfather had been the original Trampas in racing, and I knew that it hurt J.P. to watch the family business sink into oblivion. He had to be wondering if there was something he could have done differently to have prevented that. His grandfather had been a tough old moonshiner who parlayed his expertise in outru
"Indeed they are." He reached for a rag to wipe the sweat off his face, saw the gleam of motor oil on it, and put it down again. "It used to be, almost every car qualified to make a race, which would have guaranteed us a few thousand dollars participation money anyhow, but now with fifty six teams trying out each week for only forty-three slots—well, we're just throwing good money after bad. We spend thousands to get to the track; we fail to qualify by a few tenths of a second; and we then come home with nothing. Half the time we don't even get to race. What sponsor is going to pay us a hundred K a week when we don't even make the show?"
I shook my head sadly. He'd get no argument from me there. Facts is facts.
J.P.'s frown deepened into a furrow. "We're a week or so from laying people off, Rattler. I hate to say that, but I don't know what else we can do."
"We could make the race for once," I said, and he managed to laugh and still sound sad at the same time.
"Make the race," he said. "Well, that would take a miracle."
A miracle would have come in handy, but I don't hold with accepting charity from anybody—not even from folks wearing halos—so I didn't figure on going to the nearest church, lighting a candle, and asking for a handout. I figured if there were miracles needed, I'd best see about devising one on my own.
Now, my people have been in these hills a long time, and we don't run to saints and such, but I do have a streak of Cherokee blood in my veins wider than the Holston River, and I had learned a thing or two besides engine mechanics from those bootlegging, full-blood great-uncles of mine. I can do a deal of things that don't have anything to do with racing: heal wounds with a white quartz stone; talk the fire out of a burn; find water with a fork of willow branch. But I had never tried anything as big and scary as what I proposed to do now. This was messing with serious magic, and I didn't do it lightly.
No point in me trying to tell you the particulars of it. Like my granddaddy used to say, "You can't explain what you don't know any more than you can come back from where you ain't been." And likely it only worked because of my bloodlines, anyhow. But in the light of the full moon I gathered the plants I needed from a little mountain meadow near my people's healing lake, and then I , took them along to the funeral home in Kingsport.
The fact that a local dirt-track driver named Eddie Taylor had just got killed last night wouldn't make the national news and didn't deserve to, but if he'd had the right breaks and a few more years to hone his skills, he might have rated a raft of tributes around the country. Eddie had wanted to be a big-time NASCAR driver, and while he had the nerves and the skills for it, he never got the chance to prove it. Last night on Highway 23, Eddie crashed into a tree, swerving to avoid a deer in the road. Now, aside from his racing prowess, Eddie was known around these parts as a keen and skillful deer hunter. It struck me as ironic that Eddie would die trying to spare the life of a critter that he would have proudly blown to Kingdom Come under different circumstances, but maybe the universe likes a joke as much as anybody. Just shy of Eddie's twentieth birthday, it was all over for him. A damn shame, I thought, him never having a chance. It sorta justified what I was doing, I told myself.
Funeral homes are not all that closely guarded, because most people would rather get rid of a corpse than acquire one. Anyhow, at 2:00 a.m. nobody was on the premises, and I managed to get what-was-left-of-Eddie off the steel table and out to my truck, because we had somewhere else to go.
Exit 67. The road to the Tri-Cities Airport, where all the drivers fly in when they race at Bristol. One icy April night about fifteen years ago, one of those planes hadn't made it to the runway. It had crashed in an open field a mile away, killing the pilot and one of the best NASCAR drivers I'd ever seen race. Oh, maybe you haven't heard of him: He didn't have a chance to win seven championships like Earnhardt did, but maybe he would have if he'd lived. He'd never really had his chance, either.
So I dragged Eddie Taylor's body out to the middle of that field—just where I'd seen the wreckage of that plane—and I laid it down in the moonlight, sprinkled my herbs, and I called life back into the dead. It's like a door opens somewhere, maybe in your mind, and you can talk through it to someone you can't see.
I said, "I know you're here, Champ. I can feel it. You died here. I came to offer you another chance to race. Over here. Where it counts" For all I knew, the Champ was spending eternity racing against the likes of Dale Earnhardt, Davy Allison, and all the Flock brothers over there, but that wouldn't get him into the record books here. Even if only he and I knew it was him back doing the racing, it would mean something to him. I figured he still had something to prove.
The night breeze blew cold on the back of my neck, while I waited for him to consider the offer.
Then just as a silvery cloud swallowed the moon, the late Eddie Taylor sat up and said, "Deal."
He looked okay. Eddie was a handsome kid in that chicken hawk, redneck way that puts you in mind of Steve McQueen, and he hadn't been messed up in the wreck. Just took a whack in the chest that stopped his heart. People in NASCAR might have recognized the Champ, even after fifteen years, but nobody would be looking for the face of Eddie Taylor in a Cup car. I gave him a new name just to make sure. Victor Northstar. I pla
He looked all right, by the way. Eddie Taylor had only been dead a few hours, so there had been no real deterioration, and once you put the life force back into a corpse, all the internal systems start working again, so the body doesn't decay or get a beard of moss, or any of that horror movie stuff. It just picks up living right where it left off. He just looked like a regular guy, which was kind of a shame because these days NASCAR likes its drivers to look like soap opera stars or male models. Eddie was just average. Hendricks wouldn't have hired him, but I was betting that Trampas-LeFay would take what they could get.
It wasn't hard to talk J. P. Trampas into hiring him, and it wasn't a moment too soon, either. The current Trampas-LeFay driver was a pretty-boy NASCAR star who had stooped to driving for us, because he was on the wrong side of forty and because in accent and temperament, he was a stubborn throwback to the old days. After we'd missed enough races to embarrass him, and he'd started to worry that his paychecks might bounce, he did us all a favor and quit. J.P. was about to pack it in when I introduced him to my cousin Victor.