If you finished high school, you probably had to read it. In the Shirley Jackson tale, a pastoral village of 300 people gathers every June 27 to draw names out of a black box for its lottery. Stock-car racing reminds me of that lottery sometimes.
Death is the undercurrent that seeps through the sport.
The deaths don't come on a certain day every June, but there is a sort of lottery conducted many weekends at 180 mph. And any casual racing fan can name a number of drivers who were killed in crashes before that. Death hides for a while. It seems to lose interest. That's who Earnhardt was.