St. Dale. Sharyn McCrumb
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be McKee by the time you play this, I guess. Or almost…Anyhow…um…I just wanted to say that we’re getting married at the Bristol Speedway, me and Shane…
“Well, of course it wasn’t my idea. People keep asking me that—like they think I’d planned it that way back when I was a little girl, staging those under-the-porch weddings with Malibu Barbie and Dream Date Ken (Kleenex veil and clover flower bouquet).
Oh, sure. Me in a white organdy dress and a straw picture hat, carrying a bouquet of wild multiflora roses, tripping toward the minister in the infield of the Bristol Motor Speedway, wedding march on the PA system, fifty thousand total strangers looking on, and a passel of media types smirking like possums every which way I looked. Not to mention Dale Earnhardt serving as best man, even though he would have been dead for sixteen months by then.
The wedding of my girlish dreams? Not hardly.
I just wanted to marry Shane McKee, that’s all. The rest of it was his idea.
When I told Shane’s wedding plans to the waitstaff on my shift at the Wolf Laurel Inn, they said I ought to be glad that my fiancé was taking any interest in the ceremony at all. They said most men get about as involved in weddings as a convict does in an execution: just dreading it while everybody else makes the arrangements.
Mama’s friends took a different view, of course. They pride themselves on it. After she and Daddy called it quits when I was twelve, Mama joined the local Wiccan Friends of the Goddess and Book Discussion Group, which is sort of a Junior League for the counterculture around here. The members of the coven are mostly divorcées over forty or unmarried college professors, and so they are all prime candidates for a religion that puts men in the back pew instead of in the pulpit. I’m not a member—Mama says it will take another fifteen years and a few stretch marks to make me see the point—but of course I have to attend the gatherings that are family events, which means the vegetarian picnics and the Winter Solstice party, which is just like a Christmas party, except that the presents are given out by a lady in white robes instead of by Santa Claus. At the Solstice party once I asked Mom if she believed in the virgin birth, and she said it wouldn’t surprise her one bit, because she had yet to see any man lift one finger to help with any of the Christmas preparations, so she figured that must be the precedent for it.
The Wiccan Friends of the Goddess position on marriage is that it is a submission to the patriarchal oppressor—well, in theory anyhow; some of the members are married or have been—although they try to be supportive of any member who is dating somebody, which gives them both the appearance of being broad-minded and the opportunity to say I-told-you-so when the relationship crashes and burns. But despite their misgivings about the male of the species, they did throw me a bridal shower. I was worried about that when they told me about it, because Wiccans are supposed to perform their rituals sky-clad, which is goddess-speak for naked, and the thought of spending an afternoon playing toilet paper bride with a roomful of naked ladies just made my head hurt. Mrs. Tickle, the librarian and coven leader, told me not to worry about that, though. “We will all wear long loose robes,” she told me, “because if you’re over forty-five and sky-clad, the sky had better be overcast.”
Of course after they found out about Shane’s idea for the ceremony, the Wiccans said that a NASCAR wedding was just the sort of tomfool thing a man would dream up. But since I had been hearing them go on about their ideas for a traditional pagan ceremony for weeks by then, I began to get relieved that all I had to worry about was motor oil puddles and the Associated Press, instead of a Cherokee-Druid priestess from Knoxville and a wedding night in the neighbor’s corn field.
Shane was all fired up about the wedding, I’ll give him that. I think he always figured on marrying me, but he’d never given a second thought to the ceremony itself until February 18—you know, when it happened.
Shane hasn’t been the same since.
We had been dating since seventh grade, so the idea of us getting married wasn’t really a surprise. It was more inevitable, like getting the license when your learner’s permit is about to expire. We were juniors that year, fixing to graduate the next June. Next year, I was figuring on applying to the local college, which is all we could afford, and Shane was hoping to switch over to full time at Williams’ Body Shop and get a place of his own, so the subject of marriage was coming up more and more. Shane was driving dirt track on the weekends, and last summer he’d done some work on an ARCA car for a guy over near Charlotte. I’d go to the race track to watch him, and he’d ask me if I was ready to be a driver’s wife. “You have to be a size eight or smaller,” he’d say, and I’d laugh, but even if he was kidding, he was right about that.
We’d kid about it as we waited in line for movie tickets or sat on the couch in the basement, him in his red-and-black number 3 hat watching NASCAR on TV and me looking through old copies of Modern Bride that I had bought from the Goodwill for a quarter apiece.
“Hon, what do you think of this dress?” I’d said, shoving the magazine under his nose during a commercial.
Shane glanced at it for maybe two seconds, and then he said like, “Fine, if I can wear my white Earnhardt Goodwrench coveralls.”
And he’d grinned when he said it, so I laughed and went back to turning pages.
’Cause I thought he was kidding. Well, maybe he was. I had already looked into tuxedo rentals at the mall, and Shane was okay with that. The Goodwrench overalls remark was just something he’d said to try to get a rise out of me that Sunday afternoon before the race started. The Daytona 500. February 18, 2001.
Well, you know how that ended, I guess. The whole world must know that, I reckon. But nobody coulda been hit any harder by it than Shane McKee. He was tore up worse than that black Monte Carlo. In fact, it wasn’t hardly torn up at all, which was why I had such trouble believing it at first.
I’d never seen Shane cry before—not even that time in eighth grade when Bo got hit by a Kenworth. He loved that dog—still keeps a picture of him in his wallet to this day—but when Dale Earnhardt hit that wall in the last little bit of the 2001 Daytona 500, I thought we’d have to call the rescue squad for Shane.
He had been looking forward to the Daytona 500 since Christmas, and I can’t say that I had, but I was determined to be a good sport and watch it with him. I know it’s the Super Bowl of auto racing and all, but I didn’t exactly find it riveting, just watching a bunch of cars with numbers painted on the side, going around in a circle, turning left for three solid hours. Not at first anyhow, but after spending years with Shane McKee, I did begin to get the hang of it. I didn’t know all the drivers by number and sponsor the way he did, but I could recognize most of the important ones, though I tended to get all the Bodines mixed up. Mostly I spent the afternoon paging through my fashion magazines, and glancing at the screen every now and again, especially when Shane yelled at somebody. By the last lap, he was about yelled out, and he was sitting on the edge of the sofa cushion, saying, “Come on Mike,” as if his voice was going straight into Mike Waltrip’s headset. Then he just froze and stopped making any sound altogether, and that’s when I looked up to see what the matter was, and saw the replay.
“It’s not that bad,” I said when we first saw the black car up against the wall, within hollering distance of the finish line. “He’s always doing stuff like that.”
Shane didn’t even look away from the television screen. He started shaking his head.
Then trying to cheer him up, I said, “It was an unusual wreck, though, wasn’t it? Not a Bodine in sight.”
Shane never took his eyes off the screen. “It’s bad, Karen,” he said, real quiet, like he was talking to himself.
“No. They’re just playing it up for the suspense,” I said. “He can’t be hurt. They wear helmets and harnesses and all kinds of safety equipment. And the car’s not stove in too much and it’s not on fire. They’ll cut him out or something and he’ll be fine. Look, Mike Waltrip won the race and Dale Junior came in second, both of them driving for DEI. He’ll be drinking champagne out of the trophy with ’em in the winner’s circle by the next