Daddy grew up twenty minutes from where Junior Johnson learned to drive, which in Wilkes County makes you practically kin. Everybody up there claims a piece of him. Half of it is true and the other half is better than true, and nobody has ever bothered to sort which is which.
The story everybody tells is the one about the still. Junior ran liquor all over these hills for years and the law never once caught him on the road. Not one time. He would hit a bootleg turn on a dirt road in the dark, whip the car a hundred and eighty degrees around, and be gone before the headlights behind him understood what had happened. They only ever got him standing still, lighting his daddy's furnace one morning in '56, and only then because somebody told. A man like that, and the single way to catch him was to wait where he was not moving.
He did eleven months in Ohio for it. Came home, went back to racing, won near everything. Years later a writer from up north drove down 421 and called him the last American hero, and Reagan gave him a pardon the day after Christmas, and Junior said it was the best gift he ever got. All of it true. All of it Wilkes County.
Daddy tells it better than I do. He was a boy when Junior was already a legend, and he raced the tail end of the thing Junior started, back when the tracks were still full and the men in them still remembered what the driving was for. He never ran a drop of liquor in his life. But he learned to drive from men who had, and you could see it in how he took a corner, like the corner was something to get away from.
Here is what I did not understand until I was grown. The racing did not come from the racing. It came from the running. Those men got fast because getting caught meant prison, and they got good on the back roads in the dark long before anybody built a grandstand to watch them do it on a Sunday. The sport put a fence around it and sold tickets. The thing itself was already old.
Daddy never made himself out to be any of that. He was mid-pack on a good night and he will tell you so before you can. But he came up out of the same county, off the same roads, and when he talks about Junior there is a thing in his voice that is not quite bragging and not quite not.
We drove through there last month, the long way, and he pointed at things that are not there anymore. A road that used to matter. A spot where a still had been. A curve he said you had to know or it would have you. I have driven past all of it my whole life and never once seen it until he put his finger to the glass.
Not sure any of it makes us special. Half of Wilkes County can tell you a version of the same story. But that is close to the point. The famous one was ours the way he was everybody's, and the un-famous ones, the mid-pack ones, the ones nobody ever wrote down, they were ours in the only way that counts for anything.
They never caught Junior on the road. My daddy never got caught by much of anything either. Some of it you inherit. Some of it you just come by, growing up where the roads already know how to run.