Once a Runner Read online

  Also by John L. Parker, Jr.

  Again to Carthage

  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)

  Heart Monitor Training for the Compleat Idiot

  SCRIBNER

  A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  New York, NY 10020

  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 © 1978, 1990 by John L. Parker

  Originally published by Cedarwinds Publishing Company

  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.

  SCRIBNER and design are registered trademarks of

  The Gale Group, Inc., used under license

  by Simon & Schuster, Inc., the publisher of this work.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Parker, John L., Jr.

  Once a runner: a novel / John L. Parker, Jr.—1st Scribner hardcover

  ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Running—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3566.A679O53 2009

  813'.54—dc22 2008024255

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-9791-9

  ISBN-10: 1-4165-9791-3

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  This book is for Jack Bacheler and Frank Shorter,

  old friends, great runners. In fond remembrance, fellows,

  of many Trials and many Miles…

  How did I know you ran the mile in 4:30 in high school? That’s easy. Everyone ran the mile in 4:30 in high school.

  —Frank Shorter, out running somewhere, circa 1969

  Once a Runner

  Contents

  1. Once…

  2. Doobey Hall

  3. The Morning Run

  4. Cross-country

  5. Bowling for Dollars

  6. Bruce Denton

  7. Andrea

  8. Dick Doobey

  9. An Afternoon

  10. Demons

  11. A Fan’s Notes

  12. The Indictment

  13. The Trial

  14. Indoors

  15. Casualty

  16. New Territory

  17. Breaking Down

  18. Meetings

  19. The Awesome Midnight Raid

  20. Night Run

  21. Steven C. Prigman

  22. Brady Grapehouse

  23. More Horse Than Rider

  24. Moving Out

  25. The Woods

  26. Recon Work

  27. A Too Early Death

  28. Time…

  29. Twenty-four in the Rain

  30. Whirlpool

  31. Irish Highs

  32. The Interval Workout

  33. Orchids

  34. Pause…

  35. The Orb

  36. The Race

  37. A Stiller Town

  38. …A Runner

  About the Author

  1.

  Once…

  THE NIGHT JOGGERS were out as usual.

  The young man could see dim figures on the track even in this pale light, slowly pounding round and round the most infinite of footpaths. There would be, he knew, plump, determined-looking women slogging along while fleshy knees quivered. They would occasionally brush damp hair fiercely from their eyes and dream of certain cruel and smiling emcees: bikinis, ribbon-cuttings, and the like. And then, of course, tennis with white-toothed males, wild tangos in the moonlight.

  And men too of various ages and levels of dilapidation, perhaps also grinding out secret fantasies (did they picture themselves a Peter Snell held back only by fat or fear as they turned their ninety-second quarters?).

  The young man stood outside the fence for a few moments while moths attacked the streetlight dustily, leaving him in a dim spotlight of swirling shadows. He loved early fall in Florida’s Panhandle. Leaves would be turning elsewhere but here the hot breath of summer held forth. In the moist warmth there was a slight edge, though, a faint promise of cooler air hanging in the treetops and close to the Spanish moss. He picked up his small travel bag and went in the gate, walking clockwise on the track toward the white starting post at the head of the first turn. The joggers ignored the stranger in street clothes and he likewise paid them no attention. They would always be there.

  The high-jump pit had been rearranged, a new section of bleachers added, a water jump installed for the steeplechase. But mostly it looked the same as it did four years ago, the same as a four-hundred-and-forty-yard oval probably will always look to one who knows a quarter of a mile by the inches.

  The Games were over for this time around. He knew quite well that for him they were over for good. Four years is a very long time in some circles; in actual time—real-world time, as that of shopkeepers, insurance sellers, compounders of interest, and so on—it is perhaps not long at all. But in his own mind Time reposed in peculiar receptacles; to him the passing of one minute took on all manner of rare meaning. A minute was one fourth of a four-minute mile, a coffee spoon of his days and ways.

  As with many of the others, he had no idea what he would be doing now that it was all over. It was such a demanding thing, so final, so cathartic, that most of them simply never thought beyond it. They were scattered around the world now, he supposed, doing pretty much what he was doing at this moment: thinking everything over, tallying gains and losses.

  He was going to have to pick up the thread of a normal life again and although he did not exactly know why, he had to start by coming back here, back to the greenhouse warmth of the Panhandle, back to this very quarter-mile oval that still held his long-dried sweat. Back to September, the month of promises.

  He put his bag down by the pole-vault pit, looked uptrack to make sure no one was coming, and then walked up to the starting line. God, he thought, one more time on the line.

  In lane one he stood very still, looking down at his street shoes (joggers now going around him with curious glances) and tried to conjure up the feeling. After a moment a trace of it came to him and he knew that was all there would be. You can remember it, he told himself, but you cannot experience it again like this. You have to be satisfied with the shadows. Then he thought about how it was in the second and third laps and decided that the shadows were sometimes quite enough.

  He was twenty-six years, five months, and two days old, and though as he stood there on the starting line he felt quite a bit older than that, the muscles that rippled up and down inside his trouser leg could have only been the result, biologically speaking, of more thousands of miles than he cared to think about all at one time.

  He tried to focus blurred emotions, a metaphysical photographer zeroing in on hard edges to align in the center square. What was this he was feeling now, nostalgia? Regret? His mind double-clutched, asked the musical question: Am…I…buhloooo?

  He could not tell. He realized again how adept he had become at not being able to tell such things. His emotions had calluses like feet.

  The starter would tell them to stand tall, so he stood tall for a moment there in the night. There would be the set command and then the gun. He took a deep breath and began walking into the turn in the familiar counterclockwise direction, the way of all races, and thought: the first lap is lost in a flash of adrenaline and pounding hooves�
�

  2.

  Doobey Hall

  DOOBEY HALL was one of those ancient resonant wooden buildings that seemed to hold the oils and essences of those who had lived there over the years. Like an old cloth easy chair, it was musty but comfortable.

  As with many structures that had at one time been someone’s home, it managed to retain a certain familial warmth amid the current institutional clamor. It thumped and boomed hollowly rather than clicking in the bony staccato manner of more modern, more efficient dwellings.

  Having once housed Kernsville mayor Hiram “Sidecar” Doobey and his various clamoring kindred, the large friendly house had been used during recent years to shelter thirty-some members of Southeastern University’s grateful track team. Located a merciful two blocks from the campus proper, the edifice emitted from morning to night a steady but unpredictable cacophony of barely human yelps, primordial shrieks, and off-key fragments of current hit songs, all courtesy of a singular group of young sapiens whose main function in life was to run, jump, and toss heavy objects about. And to do so far better than, well, ordinary mortals. The net available energy required to produce a seventy-foot shot put or a seven-foot high jump just occasionally would not be contained by mere wood and plaster.

  Walls trembled and there were eerie goings-on.

  OLD SIDECAR DOOBEY—deceased for years now—would have been tickled pink. His nickname was an artifact of those carefree Depression days of yesteryear when on a Saturday night for pure diversion Doobey would down about three quarters of a jar of the local untaxed beverage, scoop up his tiny startled wife—a pretty, round-eyed thing named Emma Lee—deposit her in the sidecar of his 1932 Harley Davidson seventy-four-inch flathead, and proceed to more or less terrorize nearby herds of grazing cattle.

  “Woman,” he would tell her, “we fixin’ to do some night ridin’!” His wild green eyes held her for a moment like a light.

  “Eeeeee!” she said.

  This is not to imply that Sidecar was an outlaw exactly, since he owned most of the cows in Kalhoun County (and a good deal of the land and several sensitive mortgages for that matter). He was just what some folks called “lively.” Sidecar was one of those raw, energetic men who understand very early in life which levers and pulleys really worked and which were just for show. And he also understood that the whole shebang was most certainly going to come to a grinding halt one fine day. Irretrievably, he suspected.

  The only time he found himself in any kind of trouble worthy of the name was one night when he got particularly rowdy, broke down some fences, and (Emma Lee squeaking like a wounded bat) went roaring into downtown Kernsville to “strafe the golldanged pigeons” while sad-eyed old codgers sat around the courthouse square watching in wrinkled amusement.

  “Lawd, Sheriff, I suwanee…I lawd don’t know why I get so mean sometimes,” he said with true regret the morning after his actual arrest. He held his shaggy, throbbing head in his hands.

  “Well, Daddy,” said the sheriff, “people is beginning to talk, and that’s a fack.” Sheriff William “Boots” Doobey was his eldest.

  “What I cain’t quite figure out,” continued the lawman, “is why you always want to go and take Mama with you.”

  Sidecar perked up suddenly. “Why,” he cackled savagely, “she enjoys the pure T hell out of it!”

  It was perhaps reflective of the university town’s collective sense of humor when it elected Sidecar mayor a year later. He had run on a platform of throw the bastards out, interesting only because the bastards were, nearly without exception, his own blood kin. True to form, he threw the bastards out.

  Sidecar’s election had been like much of his life, a prize thrust upon him almost without the asking. The old man’s one deep hurt came when his youngest boy, born when Sidecar was fifty-two and Emma Lee nearly forty, turned out to be something of an ordinary klutz. Boots could have had a West Point appointment, Sheryl Ann was a Georgia Tech homecoming queen (before dropping out to marry a middle linebacker). It touched a deep, painful place in his breast when Sidecar anxiously watched the youngster, more like a grandson really, trying to master the elementary gearshift configuration of the big John Deere tractor. When the child was stymied by a cousin half his age at a simple card game, Sidecar wandered out into his fields and wept with rage.

  At that moment Sidecar decided, being a man of large concepts as well as a patron of irony, to get for this slightly addled child that which his other children lacked (and didn’t want for that matter): academic status. Years later, this curious task would be accomplished in the way that difficult or impossible objectives are generally accomplished by men of great power and lesser scruples, which is to say on the sly. He deeded over to Southeastern University (which desperately needed space for a nascent entomology department) the house he had occupied for seven years as mayor. The deed contained the usual boilerplate: “In exchange for ten dollars and other good and lawful consideration…” The nature of the other good and lawful consideration was known only to Sidecar himself, his lawyer, and the president-designate of the school, the Honorable Steven C. Prigman, late of Florida’s august supreme court. At that time Emma Lee was five years in her grave and old Sidecar wanted to get away from “downgoddamntown politics” and back to his ranch where he could “at least goddamn well die with the honest smell of fresh dung and hay in my nostrils.” He didn’t mention that he was actually toying with the notion of reviving the ancient and beloved Harley, then rusting under a paint-spattered canvas tarp in the barn.

  His youngest would have to go through the motions of attending the university, so the formal conferring of the degree would not take place for another four years. Sidecar mucked around the ranch, got in his foreman’s hair, bought a fifty-five-acre pecan grove, and was finally persuaded to purchase a package tour deal to several Mexican cities of interest. He returned raving about the regenerative properties of certain cactus distillates and hinting darkly about the “im-and-ex port bidness.”

  On the scholastic scene things went without a hitch and the old man lived to see his boy, dazed and sweating like a field hand in his cap and gown, marching numbly to “Pomp and Circumstance.” Entomology outgrew Doobey Hall in a few years and the track team, delighted to a man, inherited it. Sidecar passed on soon thereafter but it was said he tried to kick his way out of the coffin on the way to Jesus Walks Among Us Acres.

  A good bit of Doobey folklore was known in and around Kernsville and accounted for no small amount of graffiti scattered about the campus. Bold red letters on the side of the old field house one semester warned ominously: SIDECAR LIVES!

  Hiram Sidecar Doobey, lusty gallivanter, bovine terrorist, and ball twister par excellence, ended up as kind of a regional backwoods Kilroy.

  And the last male heir of his body, he of the dim wit, bogus degree, and unaccountable penchant for hurting insects, his youngest son, Dick Doobey, ended up as the head football coach.

  3.

  The Morning Run

  ON THE THIRD FLOOR of Doobey Hall was the room in which Dick Doobey had slept as a child. Now its battered oak door held two three-by-five index cards neatly thumbtacked one atop the other.

  The top one said in Smith Corona pica:

  If you can fill the unforgiving minute

  With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run—

  Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

  And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

  —Rudyard Kipling, 1892

  The other card read:

  Rudyard Kipling was a 4:30 miler.

  —Quenton Cassidy, 1969

  Inside the room, the one true Quenton Cassidy slept fitfully as dawn approached. In a damp orb of his own worst fears, he nightmared with a certain grace. It was an old and familiar theme with him: the last lap of a footrace found him being soundly thrashed by every man on the track. He was running in peanut butter up to his waist as they all glided by easily. He tried to use his hands to grab something to propel hi
mself along, but it was useless. What was wrong here? Was his training inadequate? Where was his kick?

  Mercifully, he awoke. Before the alarm, moist from his fretting, but forgetting the dream quickly. He sat on the edge of the bed wiggling his toes thoughtfully as the cobwebs of anxiety slowly melted away in his shaggy head. In the waking world his whole being centered around covering ground quickly on foot. At this he really had no equals save a few dozen others scattered about the country and world who also woke to such disquieting dreams. Quenton Cassidy knew every one of them by name.