Blood Lite

To actually sever the brake line would have been a has­sle. Fluid spills everywhere, and you can't repair it quickly, but it is possible to put a kink in the brake line, or to put vise grip pliers on it. Technically, there are four brake lines on a race car, and tampering with any one of them would only affect the brakes to that wheel, but since any reduc­tion in braking force is enough to cause a problem on the racetrack, the driver would be forced to compensate for his loss of braking power, which is exactly what I wanted.

Thirteen seconds later, the car roared back onto the track, and forty-two other NASCAR drivers were unaware that we had just sent a loose ca

Caution laps run as sedately as Sunday afternoon free­way traffic, so nobody noticed anything amiss until they dropped the green flag again to restart the high-speed rac­ing. The Champ worked his way past 160 mph in a couple of heartbeats, and then Turn One was looming in front of him. Poor Eddie, whose body was understandably a little confused about whether or not it was dead, tried hard to keep that car away from everybody else on the track, but going into a turn at 200 mph without brakes didn't give him too many options. He could either go into the wall, or he could use another car as a crutch to get him out of that corner. Maybe he froze from the terror of the situation or maybe the Champ just overruled the body's reflexes, but when the car started to get loose, the driver swung it a little to the right, where one of the sport's golden boys just happened to be trying to pass on the outside. Eight wheels are better than four. That twenty-million-dollar set of training wheels carried us through the turn and into the straightaway slick as goose grease. Unfortunately for the golden boy, the weight of our car unbalanced him and sent him sliding toward the wall, where he ended up with a crumpled right front panel, and he collected a couple of other cars in the wreck. As always when wrecked cars are cluttering up the track, they threw a caution so they could clean up the mess, and when they did, we took the opportunity to bring the Champ back in, and we fixed the brakes. I figured he had the hang of it again now, and I was right.

We didn't win, of course. In a three-hour stock-car race, the difference between first place and fifteenth place is less than a second, and as I said, it takes a few million dollars to buy you every tenth of a second, which we still didn't have, but at least we made the race and finished in the middle of the pack. That's more than we had accomplished in a long time. But, while I might have been happy just to have a half-decent season, it wasn't enough for the Champ—or for J. P. Trampas, who was still pouring fifty grand a week into this racing operation. Sand down a rat hole.

"He's a good enough driver, Rattler," J.P. told me as we were loading the car back into the hauler. "But he still can't make enough of a difference in our standings unless we can afford to provide him with decent equipment."

"I wish I could conjure up a sponsor," I said. "But there are limits even to Cherokee magic."

"I think I have an idea about that," said J.P. "Let me see what I can do."

By the time I heard the details of J.P.'s brilliant idea, it was too late to do anything about it, except hope that it wouldn't blow up in our faces.

NASCAR has changed a lot since the Champ last took the checkered flag. Back in those days, drivers were ordinary-looking fellows who knew their way around an engine, but now the sport is an international multibillion dollar behemoth, and the drivers are expected to be movie stars in firesuits. If you are a corporation looking to pay a race team ten million dollars a year to advertise your product, then you want a lot of charisma for your money. J.P.'s idea was to turn our driver into a celebrity. After all, "Victor" was supposed to be my Cherokee cousin, and NASCAR was all about diversity these days. The Ganassi team's new Hispanic driver had brought a whole new set of fans into NASCAR, and J.P. figured he could do the same with his Native American phenomenon. So he wrote up some press release, giving the sports journalists Victor's bio, which consisted of the pack of lies I had given our official team publicist, who was also the wife of the jackman. Then, since the next race was Martinsville, relatively close to home, J.P. arranged for our driver to do a bunch of local appearances the week of the race. He'd be doing a signing in a local auto parts store, meeting with NASCAR fans at a charity event at the Roanoke coliseum, and doing local TV and radio interviews. It was a helluva schedule, but the big-time NASCAR drivers do it every week of the season, each week in a different city. It's part of the job. Didn't use to be, in the Champ's day, but it was now.

I was worried. The Champ knew how to drive, but he had never been known as Mr. Sunshine, and from what I could see, death hadn't made him any more outgoing.

"Media celebrity is part of the job now," I told him. "Making you famous is our best hope of getting a sponsor. Just give it a shot, Champ. And keep your sunglasses on."

He didn't like it much, but they assigned the jackman's wife to go along as his minder, and all week she walked him through that exhausting round of silly media ques­tions and avid racing fans. The Champ spent, a couple of hours a day in appearances, autographing a few hun­dred "Victor Northstar" hero cards for folks who thought that wearing a NASCAR firesuit made you somebody. He answered all the reporters' questions politely, but in as few words as possible, and when avid fans insisted on hugging him and getting him to pose for pictures with them, he put up with that, too, but his cardboard smile looked like he had put it on with a staple gun. He seemed a little baffled by the questions relating to his Cherokee heritage, as well he might be, but he would just say something vague, and everybody just nodded and went on, because I don't think TV interviewers really listen to people's answers anyhow. When the jackman's wife dropped him off at the hotel after the last day's round of appearances, the Champ flopped down on the chair next to the window, closed his eyes, and let out a bone-weary sigh. "I'm glad that's over," he said.

"Until next week it is," I told him. "J.P. intends to keep up this publicity blitz until you build up enough of a fan base to land us a sponsor. And after that, of course, you'll be in even more demand for these kinds of appearances, because the sponsor will expect you to keep their potential customers happy. So get used to it, Champ. This is a way of life. It's the new NASCAR."

He didn't say anything for the rest of the evening, and when I went down for supper, he was still sitting there in the chair by the window, staring at nothing.

Martinsville is a short track where a driver's skill can actually make a difference, so we had high hopes of a good showing in Sunday's race. He qualified well, because he knew the track and he'd always been good at it, so we thought this race was our best shot at reviving our hopes for the team.

Sure enough, in Sunday's race everything went well for about seventy-eight laps, and then all of a sudden the Champ went into a spin all by himself in Turn Four, and slammed the car against the outside wall with two more cars piling into him from behind. Those wrecked cars slid down the apron next to the infield wall, and the drivers climbed out, but the Champ's car stayed where it was. I looked over that infield wall in time to see little tongues of flame begin to spiral up from the underside of the car. The fuel line must have broken, gas was spilling all over the pavement.

"It's okay," said the crew chief, seeing my expression. "See? He put his window net down."

That's what drivers do after a wreck to signal that they are conscious and functioning: they unfasten the window netting on the driver's-side window. When they do that, you expect them to climb out of the car unassisted within a couple of seconds. But he didn't.