Once a Runner Read online

  “Are you going to run Boston Garden this weekend? Cornwall says that if you want to double, he might take a two-mile relay.”

  “I’m not even sure I can run the mile. The way I’ve been drag-assing around here for two weeks, I may have to take up triple jumping or something.”

  “Well, just a thought. I suppose you heard about Pospicil?”

  “Hosford, I’ve been underwater for two weeks. What about Pospicil?”

  “That asshole Slattery gave him a pretty hard time yesterday. Came up to him at the training table at Farley and started flipping at his hair, you know, real nasty like, saying stuff like, ‘Don’t you know this is the training table, deary? Where the athletes eat—men athletes, honey, not girls…’ That kind of stuff. About as bad as it could be.”

  “Aw, Christ. Poss probably didn’t understand their idiot rules in the first place. He doesn’t even speak much regular English, much less grit English.”

  “I don’t think he knew anything about it. How would you like to be the number three player in your country, get a big recruiting come-on, show up in the wonderful United States of America with your tennis racket and a big smile, and then run into an asshole like Slattery with his haircut rules? I bet Poss has never even seen a redneck before. Jeez, poor guy.”

  “When you think of the crap that Slattery pulled when he was an undergraduate here…” Cassidy shook his head.

  “Uh, look, what I really wanted to tell you was that some of the tennis guys got pretty hot about the whole thing. And they got some of the track guys stirred up again. I mean, they all respect your opinion and all, especially that stuff about living well being the best revenge, but I think maybe it’s gone too far now.”

  “And?”

  “Bottom line is there’s another meeting in your room tonight.”

  “My room?”

  “I guess that was my fault. I told them you probably wouldn’t mind. Plus everyone knows that you’re planning to go to law school and all that. They listen to you, Cass.”

  Cassidy said nothing, rubbed his eyes painfully.

  “Cass, somebody has got to do something. This Pospicil thing is not the first. People are starting to get pretty upset, even a bunch of football guys. I mean, you being a team captain and all, it’s really kind of your job—”

  “Okay, okay, Hosford! Christ, one hundred thirty-two miles last week, Mize flat on his ass, Andrea in some kind of snit, Denton’s intervals got me walking around bumping into walls, and now suddenly the entire football staff is on the warpath.” He rubbed his eyes again, and Hosford for a horrifying moment thought he was going to blubber.

  “Look, Hos, I’ll come and listen,” Cassidy said. “Maybe there is some reasonable course of action to take. But I get this gut feeling…”

  “Not too hopeful, huh?”

  “Hosford, you’re talking Southern football mentality now. People who covered five thousand square yards of beautiful cool stadium grass with a green plastic death mat that scrapes big hunks of skin off your ass if you so much as sit down on it wrong. People who think Joe Paterno is a dangerous intellectual. People who think Vietnam is a…an opportunity. I mean, how are you gonna…” This was just making him tired. Hosford didn’t really understand what they were dealing with yet. Cassidy tossed his sandwich on the tray like a blackjack dealer disinterestedly busting himself.

  Hosford would have liked to have snickered at the death mat stuff, but knew better. Cassidy picked up his tray, deposited it on the cart with a clatter, and wandered out of the dining room feeling perhaps as bleak a child of America as the tots on the Appalachia posters. Quenton Cassidy reflected upon the fact that at least he was well fed.

  He knew though that had a single germ strolled up and surveyed the premises, it could have moved in without even a damage deposit. This is definitely a low ebb, he thought. He stood at the bottom of the stairs, looking tiredly out through the living room to the front yard where two dogs fought without enthusiasm for a small patch of shade. At times like this he felt weary and land-bound, and soothed himself by thinking of the ocean. He pictured translucent pink anemones, floating like ladies with deadly long skirts. Then: a cero mackerel somewhere on the pale turquoise of the Bahama Bank working a school of greenies with unemotional fervor; a guide poles the flats soundlessly, turns wrinkled black cheeks to the burning sun, and smiles to visions of Canadian schoolteachers “on holiday.”

  Cassidy did not look forward to this gathering of irate citizens in his room, but tomorrow night he was taking Andrea to the Winjammer and that, along with his sea thoughts, would get him through another day. Still, it became in the end a little difficult making it up the three flights of stairs back to the musky womb of his bed.

  19.

  The Awesome Midnight Raid

  THE WINJAMMER would have at one time been called “camp,” with multicolored lights and unlikely looking plastic fruit hanging about. There was a pleasant little trio that sounded not unlike the Pozo-Seco Singers, but for Cassidy the real allure was the raw Apalachicola oysters, offered at $1.50 per dozen and, of course, the draft beer, which was very cold.

  They were due for a “talk” of some kind, he and Andrea, but Cassidy was not very good at “talks” and could not remember one that did not end in some kind of confusing nastiness; abstract dialogue from a Woody Allen screenplay without enough detachment to make it funny.

  Instead, he made much over the oysters, mixing horseradish in his cocktail sauce and adding a dash of Tabasco. And he told her of the dire rumblings around Doobey Hall.

  “It seems I have become the official draftsman. It was my own fault, of course. I told them that their petition was too prolix. That impressed them so much that I found myself at the typewriter with everyone talking at once.”

  “So what happens now?”

  “Well, nothing maybe. We got something whipped into shape, but we sat around talking for a while and everyone agreed to hold off again and see if maybe the thing won’t just blow over. Hell, we’re athletes; we don’t need this kind of aggravation. But if things keep up, they will take the petitions around and see how many signatures they can get on them. If we have enough support among the rest of the teams, they will take them to the athletic department and then it’s their move.”

  “Do you think it will do any good?”

  “Oh, yes, petitioning Dick Doobey and the athletic department will be like going down to the Kissimmee Zoo and formally debating the cotton-top marmoset. It will win the day, I’m sure of it.”

  “Quenton.”

  “Wanta dance?”

  “If you do.”

  Cassidy had a helpless affinity for places like the Winjammer. In a room off to the side, two long-haired construction workers clomped around the pool table in their heavy boots, obviously stoned into yesterday, laughing at each other’s ineptness.

  “Goddamn, Harlan,” said one as a ball jumped the rail and hit the wall with a crack, “put some power to it. You ain’t got a black hair on your ass ’less you dent some paneling.” They both keeled over, helpless in the face of each other’s wit.

  Cassidy thought: oh, to be blue collar in America in the seventies. Real life, such as it is, is being committed here.

  “Andrea, do you know this is the first time I have touched your body with any sort of lust in mind in four days?”

  “I know.” Of course she knew, Cassidy thought, such timetables are a lady’s tea and scones.

  “I wonder why that might be.”

  “Well, there was the organic test on Monday, there was that awful computer program that wouldn’t run, there is the fact that you are becoming a very difficult person to get along with…”

  “Ah…”

  “Quenton, I’m trying very hard to understand, really, but what can possibly justify what you are doing to yourself? You’ve started cutting classes, you can’t eat dinner because you’re still tied up in knots, you fall asleep over your books after fifteen minutes of studying…”

&n
bsp; “Andrea, this is not a permanent condition you are seeing here. Bruce says—”

  “Bruce says, Bruce says.”

  “Isn’t this getting a little obvious now?”

  “Oh, Quenton, I wonder sometimes if you know how I really feel about you. How much I’d like for it to work out. If there was only some compromise, some—”

  “Well, there you have touched upon something, Andrea, because that’s it right there: the thing itself is the absence of compromise. There are no…deals available. I wish there was some way to explain that. The thing…doesn’t dilute.”

  He shrugged and held her closer. Just trying to explain was tiring. You can either do it or not do it, he thought, but you can’t talk about it worth a damn. “Let’s not discuss it anymore,” she said. “The more we talk the more it slips away.” The music stopped but they lingered, still holding each other closely. It was true; he did not have the ability to give that which she most needed, and she did not have the ability to understand that eerie dimension to him that even he did not know well. These fundamental imbalances led them into concentric circles of ever decreasing size: a nautilus shell of their discontent.

  THE AWESOME MIDNIGHT RAID took place that night. It started as a low rumble on the first floor, as if a group of rowdies were just getting in from their rounds. But instead of gradually calming down, the rumble soon became a roar. Cassidy awoke dreamlike to the racket. There seemed to be loud arguments, much scuffling about, objects hitting walls, random bellows in the night. When he was finally completely awake, he sat up and listened carefully. There was no laughter or mirth of any kind in the tumult, but there were definite traces of panic and anger. The resident counselor had gone early for the weekend, leaving the three team captains technically in charge, so Cassidy jumped up and pulled on some clothes.

  What was happening below was that Harold Slattery and two other assistant football coaches were, very simply, raiding the dormitory. They were aware that members of the opposite sex occasionally spent the night at Doobey, and it was their intent to ferret out the transgressors and perhaps have some fun in the bargain. They were going through the rooms, one by one, knocking once loudly and then barging in with their flashlights, invoking their unassailable authority:

  “Coaches! Coming in!” Then they rushed into the room. Those athletes who fortuitously found themselves sleeping alone heard them say something like: “This one’s clean. Mark ’im off.” Then they tromped off to the next room, hoping for some kind of action. Soon they had an entourage of irate athletes following along behind them, grumbling, shouting, and perhaps on the verge of forming a lynching party, authority or no.

  Cassidy was almost out the door when he heard the tumult come to a sudden halt below. The coaches had reached room 207 and, self-righteousness and bravado running high, had decided to forgo the knock as being too polite and simply barge in. When they got inside, they found themselves staring into the small, dark, and very genuine-looking hole which was the muzzle of Jack Nubbins’s .45. In the dim light it barked deafeningly and the doorknob, only a few inches from Harold Slattery’s hand, disappeared with a sharp metallic clang.

  Nubbins switched on the light sleepily, the gun still trained on the wide-eyed Slattery. Betty Sue huddled up under the blanket, her tiny frightened green eyes peering out.

  “I’m not that good a shot,” Nubbins said, yawning. “I might have blowed your dinner away!” Slattery stood still as a snapshot, his upper lip white with that most absolute brand of fear you get right before your life flashes in front of your eyes. It was probably the yawn that made the little fuzzy hairs stand up on the back of his thick neck.

  “Now I will generally hit a shot like that, mind, but right about now I am sleepy-eyed. Lot of good shots will wake up from a sound sleep and not be able to hit a blessed thing…”

  “We’re uh…”

  “Yeah, I know what you are,” Nubbins said calmly. “But be goddamned if I didn’t think you was a ordinary burglar. Didn’t you think so, Betty Sue?” He looked over at the frightened girl, who didn’t so much as blink. “Yeah, I did too, honey. Matter of fact, he might still be a burglar for all I know. I can’t see real well in this here light.”

  “Now look here, Nubbins…” Slattery was regaining some of his composure and did not like the idea of this anecdote getting around. It was time to recoup himself a little dignity and he took one nearly imperceptible step forward as he spoke. The gun exploded again and the molding on the opposite side of the door frame splattered.

  “There I go again,” said Nubbins. “I was actually aiming about three inches higher than that.” By the time the plaster and wood chips had settled, Slattery and his gang had formally abandoned the hunt.

  When Cassidy got to the second floor it was all over. Everyone was talking at once and no one was making any sense. Once he got the story pieced together it occurred to him that some truly dark forces, ignorant of their own madness, were at work.

  And fate, of course, swings to and fro on tiny hinges; a cable is misplaced and a king assassinated; a vacuum tube blinks and a ship is lost with all hands; a general fails to get laid and thousands are firebombed…

  20.

  Night Run

  CASSIDY RACED ALONG to a night rhythm, pocketa-pocketa, a steady tattoo of pleasant solitary effort that starred him under many streetlights, rendered him anonymous in dark neighborhoods, sent him smoothly up and down the gentle hills of Kernsville while dogs howled and Mom and Pop passed the mashed potatoes.

  A passerby might have thought him in a trance, but he missed nothing in his darkling backdrop: the smells of winter-blooming flowers, clean coolness of blackjack oak, damp pepper of Spanish moss. The sounds were of early-evening TV silliness, dinner, children’s squabbles. He was a shaded meteor plumbing a twinkling universe. The night made even more acute the runner’s senses, lent more poignancy to his aloneness, made his fast pace seem even faster, generated an urgency, a subdued excitement in the act of solitary motion.

  The seamless sphere of his reverie was occasionally marred by some cretin in a Chevrolet who would yell: “Hey Runner Runner!” Cassidy would flip a finger reflexively and otherwise indicate his displeasure by some epithet. For years he had tried ignoring them to no effect. Now his policy was to lash back. They were surprised when the runner (a gentle creature, no?) would exhibit such aggressiveness. What it was in human nature that generated this irresistible urge to bait a runner, he did not know. But he knew by now that it was deep, formidable, and nearly universal. An English writer of a different era recorded the taunts of street urchins: “Hey, looke at the runner, ee’s got nae clothes on!” Some threw things. At Cassidy some would yell “hut, two, three, four…” and laugh at their own preposterous wit, unable to disassociate running from the military experience.

  Once, by sprinting nearly two hundred yards, he caught up to a particularly obnoxious carload of rowdies who, panic-stricken now, were halted at an uncooperative red light. Thinking themselves safe after rolling up the windows and locking the doors, they watched in horror as Cassidy ran up the trunk and over the top of the car without breaking stride.

  In training he was fearless, felt himself too easily capable of violence. He often contemplated what he would do if someone stopped and challenged him. He figured he would put them through a little of what his life was all about first; taunt them into giving chase. He would stay just a little out of their grasp, egg them on and on. Perhaps they would make half a mile or so, depending on how well he could lure them; perhaps their own sense of pride might surface, a by-product of a terrible misconception about what was actually happening. Shorter had once run the legs off an entire gang of hooligans in the hills of New Mexico, despite already being tired from a fifteen-mile run. You would watch for the signs, Cassidy thought, the ones you knew so well; the pain, the bewilderment, the blankness that would eventually come close to despair. He would make it a challenge, so they would forget their original purpose and keep on going just to
show this bastard, this…this…(then it would dawn on them) runner.

  Then he would simply turn and face them. He would take on anyone like that, he thought. He would take on Muhammad Ali, so long as he could direct the preliminaries.

  Cassidy knew very well that he could take men, otherwise strong and brave men, to places they had never been before. Places where life and death overlapped in surreal valleys of muscle gloom and heart despair, where one begins to realize once more that nothing really matters at all and that stopping (death?) is all; where all men finally get the slick skin of civilization off and see that soft pink glow inside that tells you—in both cunnilingus and bullet wounds—that there are no secrets.

  A visitor’s taste, in short, of the distance runner’s daily fare. He would fight them then, if they still wanted to, after they knew. But they wouldn’t want to, he was sure of that. They would walk away with nothing more than a hard-won understanding.

  This night no one stopped. No one gave form to verbal menace. No one did any more than add his simpleminded bleating to the dark background of the runner’s ritual.

  Cassidy flew through the night.

  “BRUCE,” he said into the telephone, “I need to talk to you. I’m at Doobey now and I can’t talk on this hall phone. Can you meet me at the Nineties or something?”

  “Sure. Where have you been? I thought you were going to do quarters with me this afternoon. Did you run?”

  “Of course I ran. I just did ten hard. Listen, I had to go see Dick Doobey in his office this afternoon. Something’s up. Can you meet me there in fifteen minutes or so?”

  “Okay. But I’m not going to sit there drinking beer all night like you guys. I’ll have a couple and—”

  “Okay, okay. No problem. I gotta take a shower, just got in. See you there.”