Brother Richard looked so much like Richard Petty you’d have thought he’d get arrested for impersonating a hero. He had that befeathered, straw cowboy hat pulled low over his ears, the tip and tail of its rakishly cantilevered brim cranked beneath eye level, its Indian festival of secretly meaningful charms and amulets flopping insouciantly in the breeze. His eyes were shielded behind glasses that would have looked equally good on the authentic King Richard or Jacqueline Onassis. He had Richard’s scrawny, twisty, muscular body and he wore a NASCAR T-shirt with a pack of Marlboros rolled up in the sleeve. He wore tight jeans and comfortable Luchese boots.

The reason he didn’t get arrested or beaten up or mobbed by teenage white gals was that where he was, every other man looked just the same. It was like a carnival of Richard Petty look-alikes, that being but one category. Others chose the Kurt Bush paradigm, and still others the Dale Jr. Huck Finn, the Tony Stewart, the Juan Montoya, the Mike Martin, the Matt MacReady, and there were even, hard to believe, a few Jeff Gordons, though they had to be from California. This was the crowd at NASCAR Village, that gridwork of cult and retail sites just outside the mighty Bristol speedway, which towered above them all, while providing a steady deafening roar as the weekend’s cars whizzed about it a few last times to run the engines at speed for a final checkout.

It was Friday, the start of racing weekend, under a hot August sky, in a Shenandoah Valley that at this moment was plastered with cars, tents, Rec-Vs, SUVs, everything short of armored personnel carriers. The vehicles rode the gentle hills like a gigantic carpet, as the hundreds of thousands came to worship, live, experience glory and fear vicariously, drink, smoke, shove, fuck, hoot, and have a hell of a good time. Most of them were beyond bliss; there was so much happiness in the meandering beast of the crowd you couldn’t but crack a smile at the heat of the joy. It turned you a little red in fact.

But none of them were as happy as Brother Richard, as he let the crowd push him this way and that through what really amounted to a NASCAR Casbah. The streets weren’t lined with gold, not, that is, if you were buying, though maybe if you were selling. For NASCAR people were spenders. They had to take something of the great Night of Thunder home with them. They bought pendants and T-shirts and cup-holders and beer caddies and hats and thick leather jackets and sweat shirts and polo shirts and pictures and die-cast models and bottled water, beer and bourbon and corporate propaganda. Chevy, Ford, Toyota, and Dodge, the four sanctioned automobile suppliers, had gigantic pavilions, and all four had a pedestal inside. Atop each pedestal was a street shell of the hand-made, custom machine that would, tonight and especially tomorrow night, roar four hundred then five hundred times around the stiffly tilted half-mile where dreams could die in seconds, sometimes in flames, sometimes in the crunch of collapsing metal. The track where guts and grit and luck played against each other at 140 per until one boy was smarter, tougher, braver, and luckier than all the others, and crossed the line first and tasted, however briefly, godhood.

Each of the boss drivers had a long-haul trailer set up in the village, which they’d converted to a dedicated sales outlet. There the hero’s image or number or both had been imprinted on everything, books and videos were added to the swag, hats in a hundred variations were on display-and for sale-and a crew of cashiers lined up to take your bucks. The cash flow must have been amazing; the twenty-dollar bill was the new one-dollar bill, and although the modern cash registers didn’t ka-ching like the old mechanical marvels from Dayton, you could tell yourself that you heard a heavenly choir of ka-chinging, even if it weren’t necessarily true. Brother Richard looked at all that money flowing one way and one way only and briefly considered what might have been but never was, and stifling a choking sound, he took another hard blast on the Bud he carried (like everybody else) in a bright red foam caddie.

You could tell who was hot by the crowds. Both Kyles were doing swell and of course everybody had a thing in their heart for the wonderful Dale Jr., inheritor of the mantle and now driving for the beloved football genius Joe Gibbs; there was little business at Jeff’s, the eternal outsider’s unit, where only malcontents and self-proclaimed mavericks gathered. But the hot one just now was the young redhead, Matt MacReady, just twenty-two, already with a handful of major wins at Sprint venues, in the hunt for the big cup itself still this late in the season.

Somehow, Richard felt himself pulled by torrents of enthusiasm, even love, toward the MacReady locality. In a second he realized why there had been such a current in the crowd. Good Lord, the boy himself was there.

Brother Richard halted and held back. He considered it for a second, then realized that after his surgery and in his currently repackaged King Petty mode, he would stir no old memories, not to the boy, not to Red, not to any of them. So he ambled close, slipping in and out of the whirls and eddies of pilgrims, and by not pushing it too hard, he got pretty close. No, he wouldn’t get in the line, where Matt was dutifully signing posters, hats, T’s, anything, with a Magic Marker, accepting goodwill wishes and even love-horsepowered thumps on the back with grace and ease and charm.

Richard didn’t want to halt, for motion was the law of the crowd. He let it sweep him on by and saw Matt’s calmness-Matt always had that-and his decency-Matt really had that-and it made him realize with surprising bitterness that Matt was really the beneficiary of all the madness of eleven years ago, though nobody could have known it then, for Matt was just a boy from the second, the trophy wife. He was good-natured and unassertive, all eyes and ears to the excellent adventure the fates had decreed would be his life.

“Yes ma’am,” Richard heard Matt say in that soft voice of his. “Be happy to.” And he took a three-year-old upon his lap and smiled for a pic. Then it was time to go and the thousand still in line had to be disappointed. Matt rose and said into a mic, “Folks, I have to get my beauty rest and keep my arm loosey-goosey for all them left-hand turns!” And of course everybody laughed.

Matt waved. Then he and Red left the venue as a golf cart arrived, and Richard saw how thin and muscular the young man was, how lean and graceful. He had the racer’s perfect body, the body that the great ones had, short and slender so there was no crowding in the driver’s seat, with muscular forearms and a longish neck, which gave him eerie pivoting ability for peripheral vision left and right, legs able to reach pedals without cramping, in short, the whole package.

The golf cart speedily vanished behind the cyclone fence that marked off the driver’s compound, that is, the fence that marked off the aristocracy from the peasantry.

Richard watched it go until it disappeared, and he imagined where it took Matt: to a luxury Rec-V customized for travel, a beautiful woman or four or six, a crew of adoring hangers-on, an accountant, maybe rock or movie star pals, the big life as imagined by America at this moment in history.

Again, melancholy came across him, a fleeting image of the eternal What Might Have Been. He’d steeled himself to believe to the contrary that, given certain behavioral dynamics within himself, there was no What Might Have Been, there was only a What Never Could Happen. It wasn’t in the cards; he didn’t have Matt’s go-along-to-get-alongness, his mellow ways, his charm. He was too fucking outlaw, he had to have it his way. He was also too smart, too self-aware. Like all athletic and warrior enterprises, NASCAR tended to reward unconscious genius. If you had irony, had read a book or two, had a taste for surrealism and grotesquerie, if you hated structure and had a natural guerrilla’s heart, it could never be for you. You saw through it too easily. It was like a church, and you were born with a non-believer’s heart. And even if you felt tremendous nostalgia for it, the honest, bitter goddamned truth was that it was never going to be and could never have been for you. For Matt it was maybe just perfect, given his perfect blend of talents and limits. For Richard it was too much, given his blend of talents and limitlessness. No matter what, he would have destroyed his inheritance, crapped in the church, and gone his own outlaw way.