Again to Carthage Read online

  Praise for Again to Carthage

  “Carthage is a worthy sequel, and could make a runner out of a couch potato. … Carthage becomes a training manual, a nutrition guide, a love story, and a celebration of friendship based on the shared experience of runners training to the very threshold of what the body can endure.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “The last three paragraphs … they’re perfect. You might have seen them coming, but I still think you’ll find yourself breaking into a smile.”

  —Runner’s World

  “The training and racing sequences will resonate with anyone who has pinned on a race number whether for the Olympics or the neighborhood fun run.”

  —Galveston Daily News

  “The author conveys the raw emotions that come with hard workouts and racing in a way that resonates with people devoted to the sport.”

  —Buffalo News

  “One of the best accounts in print of the physical and emotional torments athletes endure in their superhuman efforts.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  Praise for Once a Runner

  “By far the most accurate fictional portrayal of the world of the serious runner … a marvelous description of the way it really is.”

  —Sports Illustrated

  “Time has not taken a toll on this gem. … Runners will find inspirational passages everywhere that they will want to save.”

  —Minneapolis Star Tribune

  “Don’t let twenty years of pent-up anticipation and expectation ruin your run through this book. It’s paced a little like a marathon—controlled start, strong finish. … Don’t think you have to be a world-class athlete to connect with Quenton Cassidy and love this book. If you’ve ever trained and competed at your own highest level, you’ll get this guy.”

  —The Kansas City Star

  “A finely-crafted work of fiction.”

  —St. Petersburg Times

  “Part training manual, part religious tract, part love story, and all about running, Once a Runner is so inspiring it could be banned as a performance-enhancing drug.”

  —Benjamin Cheever, author of Strides: Running Through History with an Unlikely Athlete, in Runner’s World

  “Once a Runner’s famed ability to convey the thrill of the sport leaves its mark.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Inspirational.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  Also by John L. Parker, Jr.

  Once a Runner

  Runners & Other Dreamers

  Marty Liquori’s Guide for the Elite Runner

  (with Marty Liquori)

  Run Down Fired Up and Teed Off

  And Then the Vulture Eats You

  (editor)

  Uncommon Heart

  (with Anne Audain)

  Heart Monitor Training for the Compleat Idiot

  SCRIBNER

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2007 by John L. Parker, Jr.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First Scribner trade paperback edition October 2010

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  Manufactured in the United States of America

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2004106530

  ISBN 978-1-4391-9248-1

  ISBN 978-1-4391-9249-8 (ebook)

  The author gratefully acknowledges permission from the following source to reprint material in its control: Sony/ATV Music Publishing for “Hallelujah,” © 1985 Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC. All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 8 Music Square West, Nashville, TN 37203. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  This is for my brother, Jim,

  owner of two Purple Hearts and one of red,

  still beating, thank God, after all of that

  In such a night

  Stood Dido with a willow in her hand

  Upon the wild sea banks and waft her love

  To come again to Carthage.

  —Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

  You’ve crossed the finish line,

  Won the race but lost your mind.

  Was it worth it after all?

  —Lazlo Bane, “Superman”

  Again to Carthage

  1

  Newberry Redux

  THE CABIN SAT back off the road in the dripping trees like a part of the forest itself, earthy brown and plain, with a skin of cedar shakes, organic but for its giveaway straight edges. In the gloomy afternoon downpour the familiar shape seemed the essence of refuge.

  Could it possibly have been just a year? Yes, and some days.

  The screened-in front porch wasn’t latched and he had already retrieved the front door key from his shaving kit where it had been for more than a year. Cassidy backed in dragging two big canvas equipment bags, disturbing spiders at work, breathing in the familiar scents of raw lumber, mildew, and the pepper and loamy decay of Spanish moss and north Florida piney forest. The place was perpetually unfinished inside, with stacks of building materials lying around and wiring showing in bare stud walls. Bruce wasn’t kidding; he hadn’t been out in a long time.

  He dropped his gear in the chaos of the so-called living room and just stood there with his eyes closed, the cascading scents of an earlier life making him dizzy with nostalgia.

  As the rain deflected slightly off the steep sides of the A-frame, it occurred to him that this was the kind of day that seemed to happen in your life when Something Big had just ended. He flashed on a day from his central Florida childhood, the last day of the school year in junior high; he was waiting for a ride in the tropical downpour under the bus shelter in the empty parking lot. Everyone was gone and he could feel his aloneness settling over him like a damp shroud. There were parties going on somewhere, he thought. Ordinarily, a summer stretching out in front of him like a small infinity of freedom would have filled him with primal kid joy, but he was just plain morose.

  His father was late, but it wasn’t unusual in the days of one-car families for kids to spend a lot of time waiting for grown-ups. His occasional bouts of melancholia made no sense to him. He put his stupid decal-covered three-ring binder on the ground and lay on his back on the concrete bench, contemplating a wasp’s nest buzzing electronically overhead. He had not made any teams and he wasn’t one of the cool kids and most of the teachers couldn’t remember his name. That didn’t bother him, but what really got to him was the sudden revelation that this rainy nothing day was what all of life eventually came to, that everything sooner or later devolved to a point somewhere on the gray horizon where you’re just some sad kid waiting alone in the rain.

  Now, standing alone again in the cabin as a young man, he had experie
nced a number of such rainy End of Something days in his life. But because he was still young and little touched by death, these days often had to do with school years or athletic seasons.

  Back before it all happened, during all those long days, nights, weeks, months, and years of training, he thought of the future as a kind of foggy diorama. If everything turned out the way it was supposed to, his later life would be some kind of stroll with a desirable female into the middle distance, a happy American epilogue befitting the narrative line, inspiring music crescendoing into the Warner Bros. logo, a glad coda for a three-act culture.

  But he had always kept it nebulous in his head, and now that the time had come he found that the girl had actually married someone else and gone away and he had not Won the Big Race and he would not grace any cereal boxes. Also, he didn’t know how to stroll and there was no music except for one eerily chipper Gilbert O’Sullivan ditty he could not turn off in his head, something about climbing a tower and launching yourself into the indifferent void. Standing there in the familiar musty half-light of a late-summer thunderstorm, he thought, It’s just like the lady always said: no bugles, no drums.

  The small television set was where he had left it in the oven, cord wrapped round and round. A bunch of books were still stacked next to the cot in the small bedroom in the back: A Fan’s Notes, The Bushwhacked Piano, Zen and the Art. He had done a lot of reading out here as he lolled around between workouts, trying to coax his body back to life so he could go out and carefully brutalize it again.

  Loll. That was the word for it. Time lolled away napping, thinking, daydreaming, waiting for his damaged corpuscles to rearrange themselves into a more perfect union.

  He went to the plate-glass window at the front of the cabin and, sure enough, down in one corner were the faint dusty outlines of the words he had written in reverse mirror script on the foggy pane one lonely winter afternoon long ago: Help. Imprisoned in February.

  I should unpack, he thought. I should make the bed, get this place organized, something. But there it was: no ambition. At all at all.

  So, he did what he had done so many thousands of times before when his life was at loose ends and he didn’t have a thought in his head: He pulled on his togs and blew out the front door and was hitting right at six-minute pace before the screen door had even finished double-slamming behind him.

  His battered lemon-yellow 914 was still clicking in the cool rain as he splashed down the rutty red-clay drive that always reminded him of North Carolina. He turned at the blacktop and after a quick half mile veered off at the familiar trailhead and disappeared into the forest. He had felt so logy that he was surprised his legs loosened up quickly on the carpet of pine needles, and it wasn’t long before he fell into a miler’s tempo stride and began clipping miles off at not much slower than five-minute pace. It was much too fast for overdistance, he knew, but he wasn’t training anymore. He was just running.

  The trail went deep into the endless stand of blackjack pine and water oak and up by Otter Springs and then almost all the way down upon the Suwannee River, where in fact very few old folks stay. Four miles into the run at the bottom of a gentle rise he called Blackberry Hill he was startled to see his own ghostly footprints at the edge of the trail. He remembered the day he had made them long ago. It was rainy like this and he was skirting a big puddle, trying to keep his shoes dry as long as he could. Strange to think the evidence of his ephemeral passing would still be here hardened into the earth, partially hidden by encroaching weeds, like poor little Lucy’s footprints on that plain in Africa, still there after three million years. Taking the hill with big strides, he thought, We never really know what will happen to the scratches we make in this thin dust.

  Familiarity made the trail go by quickly and he blinked back from a daydream having to do with bill fishing in the Gulf Stream to realize he was almost finished. Good thing too, with the glistening woods now darkening before his eyes. Eight miles and he hadn’t seen a living soul. He had seen a herd of deer, a probable wild turkey—at this distance he couldn’t be sure—a red-tailed hawk, and several mullet evading predators or just jumping for joy.

  He finished, as usual, going hard down the last perfectly straight row of Sidecar Doobey’s pecan grove, the flat grass inviting speed and bringing on the old fantasy of being in the final straight of the Olympic 1500, straining to reach the leader, leaning for the tape and reminding himself over and over: go through the tape, go all the way through it, with nothing held back. Just like the old days when he would be out there with Mizner and the guys, running along the sidewalks of Kernsville in pretend slow motion as the half-miler Benny Vaughn did his mock-serious announcer, giving them all funny foreignized names to make them sound more glamorous, doing the play-by-play as they made agonistic faces and leaned histrionically toward the imaginary finish line. Benny had named him Quintus Cassadamius, the famous Greek miler. It struck him for the first time just now—and with a quick flare of pride—that a new generation of dreamy kids might now accord him his own name. In these mock race scenarios Bruce Denton had no glitzed-up fantasy name, a gold medal being about as glamorous as you could get in their little world. Cassidy wondered now if maybe a near miss was worth something too.

  Funny, he thought, I was there in real life yet running down this lane I go back to the same old fantasy. We few who get to experience both eventually find out that the real thing and the fantasy can coexist in your head. He would love to tell the undergraduates about that. It was the kind of thing they would talk about for hours on training runs. Mize, Nubbins, Burr, Atkinson, Schiller. Old dour Hosford. They were mostly gone now, graduated or otherwise scattered. Off to wars, other schools, wives. Where oh where, he wondered, are my light-foot lads? What has become of the old team?

  He jogged in from the highway using the long driveway as a cooldown and was glad he had left the porch light on, dark as it was getting. He toed off the muddy shoes and left them outside, fetching a dry towel from the bedroom but returning to the porch to continue dripping. It wouldn’t do any good to shower yet, he would just start sweating again, so he plopped down in an aluminum lawn chair and watched the rainy night come on. He had been wet so long his fingertips were wrinkled. Steam rose from his skin.

  He didn’t know if it was bad yet. Bruce said it would get very bad before it got better. That was just part of it. The big buildup and then the really big letdown. Worse than you could ever imagine.

  Truth be told, though, at this moment he was feeling pretty darn good.

  He was through with the Trial of Miles, the quest that had consumed him these past umpteen years. He was wet and hungry and, in a general epistemological sense, adrift. He was sitting on a borrowed porch at the end of the road at the end of the summer at the end of his athletic career, dripping salty rainwater in a perimeter around a cheap aluminum chair. And he was once again staring into the moist gloom of Marjorie’s ancient piney flatwoods.

  But twenty-seven miles away back in Kernsville catty-corner from the campus was a white-columned faux Southern mansion that housed the University City Bank, an establishment founded by Sidecar Doobey’s old man with the obscene profits he made running rum on shrimp boats from Key West up the west coast of Florida to Apalachicola, thence to Tallahassee and Atlanta on the seafood trains, bonded booze disguised by a scant layer of ice and red snapper, but in actuality protected by a well-paid bridge of crooks stretching from Monroe County all the way to Washington, D.C.

  That bank had been his last stop before heading out to Newberry that afternoon. It contained a safe-deposit box, number 1347, newly opened in the name of Quenton Cassidy and paid for a year in advance, the key now dangling from the fresh-air lever of the beat-up Porsche in the front yard. Box 1347 was in the lower left-hand corner of the far wall of the vault. It was the smallest size offered. The slide-out metal drawer held only one item: a flat oblong leather box.

  In that box was an Olympic silver medal.

  2

  Brea
kfast Game

  FRIED GREEN TOMATOES …”

  “Good one.”

  “… with freshly ground red, black, and white pepper in the batter!”

  “Very good one. Some of these Southern delicacies have grown on me and that’s one of them. How about this one: generous hunks of freshly cut pineapple …”

  “Oooooh …” Cassidy’s salivary glands jumped.

  “. . . served on a bed of shaved ice!”

  The midmorning sun was baking the steam out of the glistening landscape, but not unpleasantly so, as they made their way along the trail at an easy pace, playing the Breakfast Game, which meant they would soon be driving around looking for a Shoney’s.

  “Okay, here’s one and this will probably do it for me: cheese grits—”

  “No grits!”

  “Yes, cheese grits, real ones not instant, with salt and pepper and a little melted butter on top, but here’s the kicker: interspersed throughout are chunks of that thick brown-sugar-cured bacon.”

  “Hmmm. Bacon, you say?”

  “Brown-sugar-cured and cooked not too long, just nice and firm.”

  Denton considered this.

  “Okay, as long as you put in the bacon. The grits then become just a transport medium for the cured meat and the dairy product.”

  Such is the guiltless chitchat of rare-as-iridium beings with less than five percent body fat. They ran along in comfortable silence, lost in thoughts of buttery dishes. When they reached the bottom of Blackberry Hill the undergrowth closed in on the trail so that even going single file they both got a good chilly brushing with wet leaves from both sides.