Once a Runner Read online

  He had four pairs of training shoes, each of which remained wet all the time. If he could—by propping a pair up against the small electric heater—get them to a stage one might call “damp,” he slipped them on with the greatest of pleasure. In some circles, there was some debate about training in spiked shoes. Cassidy rarely used them except to race in. They were thin on the bottom and afforded little protection to the heel and arch; he thought them risky. He had suffered in wet weather for years in shoes made of kangaroo leather and was grateful for the recent switch to nylon. But his thick-bottomed trainers still seemed to soak up a great deal of water; after a time he felt as if he were running with soggy pillows on his feet.

  Some mornings he rose to find the huge mass of clouds rolled back, exposing a most brilliant, newly washed blue sky. He would pull on his slick shoes without a grumble and lope off along the soggy trail with his bounciest stride, wondering how he could have ever gotten himself into such a state. This, now this, he thought, was wonderful. All color and life had merely been disguised by a film of water. Birdies sang, moo-cows mooed, and Quenton Cassidy, a man with only the vaguest sort of plan, would sometimes laugh out loud in the middle of a run.

  By the next afternoon, however, the clouds would have resumed their sentry and it would be pouring or sprinkling or at least threatening.

  Such a winter, Cassidy thought bitterly, is always getting your hopes up. And he would resolve then to scowl through the next sunny day just by way of not being taken in. But it was a resolution quickly forgotten, such are the surges of a young heart given promise.

  Were he completely honest with himself, he would have perhaps admitted that he didn’t mind it so much, this rain that furnished the same kind of isolation as the dark of night. Snell used to say he didn’t mind running in the rain because he always felt his opponents would have to be quite insane to be out in such weather, and while they were somewhere dry and cozy, he was gaining yet another few tenths of a second on them.

  But occasionally at night Cassidy would sit over his training calendar and the full weight of it would descend on him as he stared at the figures. At those times he dared to wonder if it really was too much. He would think of the comradeship of Doobey Hall, the horseplay, the unpredictable silliness. His world now had too many sharp corners; he craved the soft contours of the feminine. Surely such longings were natural enough, he thought. Even the buffoonery of Jack Nubbins seemed a far-off entertainment taken too much for granted in happier times.

  But out on the trails he slipped along in the soggy warm envelope of his own fierce body heat and needed precisely nothing. At these times, moving silently against the washed-out backdrop of countryside, his mind unfettered except for monitoring the steady six-minute pace, he went back to his childhood, back to the time of his too early death. He pondered what it meant, if anything; if anything at all.

  Such a significant event as dying in childhood must take on some meaning in the end, he reasoned, if only a simple safety message, grade-school style: this is the Watch Bird saying look both ways before crossing the Santa Monica Freeway. But his death seemed to mean nothing.

  On one of those rain-lashed afternoon runs, Cassidy finally decided that there was a great deal of vanity tied up in his demise, and in this respect perhaps Andrea had been right about his obsession. Perhaps it was not excellence he sought at all, but something else entirely. That part he would work on later. It had taken him a long time to arrive at the vanity part.

  I used to frolic in the salt salt sea, he thought, and now my toes wrinkle white in this hillbilly mud.

  WHEN HE WAS VERY YOUNG he had learned to slip into the sea and plummet like a stone to fifty, sixty feet, there to look around leisurely before floating back, calm and haughty in his control of the pale green waters. On rough, sunny days he would ride his bicycle across the Singer Island bridge and out to the inlet and scamper among the giant slippery boulders, at ease among the skittering crabs.

  “What’s he doing?” the white-kneed tourists would ask, seeing the waves crashing against jagged rocks so slick no one could even walk on them.

  “Where are his parents? He’ll be drowned!”

  The child would spit into his mask, lean over and rinse it out in the sea, then grip the spear and wait for the right wave to come bashing frothily among the deadly crags and barnacles. Then, like a spirit, he would slip easily into the receding swell and, with a shiver, be gone.

  Below, in the sudden quiet, he felt at once peaceful and serene in a terrain he knew better than his own room. The formation of rocks below was home for a school of big red snapper, skittish and crafty, which might let you get off one shot from a distance before disappearing for the day. At the cable crossing there would be sheepshead (easy marks—he ignored them) and schoolmaster snapper. Out toward the tip, closer to the open ocean, the real ocean, one could find just about anything; some days the sea would be literally alive. Quenton Cassidy had cavorted there like a young seal, sometimes actually feeling an illogical resentment at his addiction to air, a dependence that forced him regularly to make his way wanly to the top where he endured the noise and neon of an altogether different world.

  The fishermen, wrinkled cigar-chomping retirees, cursed him for “scaring the fish” as they dangled their silly bait randomly in the sea. He felt the hunter’s ancient disdain for the trapper. They almost never knew where he was.

  The other kids were fascinated; they knew the waters too, but only he was known to go places they would never try, and bring back a handful of sand, a rusty nail, a little lump of coral and show them, laughing, the simple evidence of his prowess. Quenton Cassidy at ten already had his lungs.

  The others wanted to know the secret. “Vitamin Z,” he told them, laughing.

  One time, though, his best friend had pleaded until, when they were alone on the end of the jetty late one afternoon, Cassidy told him: “You’ve got to make yourself calm, right down to the little blood veins in your fingertips, and when you are as calm as you can make yourself, then you make yourself like a rock and start sinking, and the most important thing is that you’ve got to not care. That’s the hard part, the not-caring part. And the deeper you go and the colder it gets the more you have got to not care. And then when you start back up, back toward real life…then you’ve got to start caring again. A lot.”

  His father had a twenty-two-foot open fisherman that they took to the islands every summer and it was Quenton’s job to fetch the anchor when it got stuck, silent and unmoving, on some ramp or drop-off far below.

  “Now, Quentie, it’s deep, you’d best put on a tank this time,” the old man would say. The old man wore a pipe. He worked in photoengraving at the newspaper.

  “It’s okay, Pop.” This as he flipped out of the boat with his mask and snorkel. If his heart raced with excitement of the challenge he would have to make it slow again, like he always did, calming himself, making himself into a rock and then slipping, slowly at first, then more rapidly as he went along, down into the darkening green, down to the cold depths where all the mysteries were. When he reached the bottom he would quickly work the anchor loose, then plant his feet in the sand and shoot upward, streaming bubbles all the way, wondering if he would make it this time.

  One time he didn’t make it and died there in the cool green waters.

  There was a man from another boat on this trip, a lawyer his father knew and a good diver who had a grouper speared and holed up about forty feet down. The fellow was too tired to go back down and pull him out.

  “Hey, Mr. C,” he had called, “shame to waste those fillets. Whyn’t you send that boy of yours down for a try?”

  They had all heard as much as they wanted to about this little twerp, this little Quentie-fish and there was a distinct challenge in the invitation. His father looked at him resting there on the front platform and said: “Now, Quenton, you’re very tired. You’ve been up and down in thirty feet all day long so if you don’t feel like doing it, you don’t have to
.”

  But he was poking around for his gear already; the idea of leaving a dying fish tucked up under a coral head to suffer for days nearly made him weep. And he had always made it before no matter how bad it seemed, and the worse it seemed the sweeter the air was at the top when he finally broke through and got at it.

  As he floated on the top, though, looking down to the coral head miniaturized below, he absentmindedly hyperventilated, thinking how far down it was, how tired he had become; by the time he took his last big gulp of air his system was all oxygen.

  He was still peering around under the coral head and taking his time when he realized something was wrong. But by then it was too late; he just barely managed to trip the spring buckle on his weight belt and let the seven pounds of lead fall to the sandy bottom as he streaked toward the top. He was still twenty feet under when the blackness thundered in.

  The limp body floated serenely to the top, and there bobbed gaily in the wind chop, looking for all the world like a lazy snorkeler, tracking his game. It took awhile before the elder Cassidy noticed how remarkably corpselike little Quenton looked, before he noticed the absence of any motion whatsoever; no little flips for forward motion, no play of the hands to turn or stop.

  He was saying Jesus Jesus Jesus as he slashed the anchor rope with the fillet knife (and cut his own thumb down to white bone at the same time) and then roared over to pull the little gray body from the water, draining seawater from every orifice. There was seaweed in his teeth.

  It was too much for the old man, it was too final-looking. The bottom of the boat was becoming slick with his own blood as he slid down onto the deck mumbling. But the others were more efficient. They had seen drownings before and were not so overcome with grief. They began blowing into the fouled little mouth and crushing the rib cage with strong hands. After half an hour there was some vomiting. He vomited and then they vomited. But color was coming back, and there was a faint pulse; finally some wild thrashing.

  He had been floating around on the top for perhaps ten minutes, possibly more, and they had not held out a great deal of hope even as they frantically worked over him.

  Then as he started coming back, although no one said anything, the big fear was that they were rejuvenating a mindless blob that would henceforth sit in some white-walled institution and drool contentedly.

  But they did not know, could not know that the cardiovascular system they were priming with their frenzied efforts was capable of withstanding even greater shocks than it had that day. The lungs, the veins and vessels, the resilient throbbing heart; he had them all, even back then.

  The next day they flew him back across the deep purple Gulf Stream at an altitude of one hundred feet; his blood was still so blue they feared to go higher. When he awoke finally in Good Samaritan Hospital in West Palm Beach he wanted to know what had happened to him. His father told him the story again. But every time Quenton went to sleep, he would forget it completely.

  “Don’t you remember, son? Don’t you remember diving and…”

  “I remember one time. I remember this day I was in the inlet working my way along the rocks at about thirty feet. And this little bull shark about four feet long was coming in from the real ocean; he was right in my path but I didn’t move over, just kept swimming straight ahead. When he saw me he acted like he didn’t care but he moved over a little to let me pass by. I was so ferocious with my sling, Dad, I wasn’t afraid. I laughed because he was going so far in and I knew the hunting was better out near the tip.”

  Then he held his father, grabbed him and buried his head in the old man’s chest and cried. His father had not seen him do anything like that for a long time.

  This one, he thought, what is it with this one?

  Nearly ten years later a land-bound Quenton Cassidy flew along on the soggy February trails and wondered the same thing.

  28.

  Time…

  OUTSIDE THE AFTERNOON RAINED ON.

  Cassidy leaned forward and placed all four legs of his chair on the floor carefully. He sighed heavily. The books were stacked up all around, finished and bleak-looking. He was tired of reading. He set his mug down on the table with a grunt. He was tired of tea.

  He hauled himself to his feet, walked stiffly over to the picture window, a fogged square of chilled gray. He was tired of walking around with his joints creaking like an old man. He had a sudden passing desire for broccoli.

  Afternoon workout was an hour and a half away; time to begin thinking about it. He was tired of psyching himself for workouts.

  He was tired of being tired.

  In reverse mirror script he wrote on the pane of cold glass: HELP! IMPRISONED IN FEBRUARY.

  Little drops of excess moisture cried down from his letters as he looked out through them and waited for time to pass.

  He stared out for a long time…

  29.

  Twenty-four in the Rain

  IT HAD NOT BEEN so awfully hard on Andrea Cleland, as she was beginning to tell herself lately. She had ended a few difficult relationships in the past but she was a very mature young lady and she managed. It was her maturity in fact that probably caused some of the distress. She was often a little too far ahead of the game to really take it seriously; though she had believed herself in love several times, it did not take her long to assay the true metal of the relationship. Before Cassidy she had begun to have some confidence in her ability to judge that most complex and shifty element in human dealings: motive.

  It was not as if she had not had experience with ambitious men (or more accurately, ambitious boys); she knew very well when she was being sized up as a future charming hostess by the president of some fraternity, some bright, good-looking fellow who was easy to like and whose father owned an office supply outfit in Orlando. She chafed a little, but played the role. It was her sensitivity that made her more mature, gave her an edge over her hapless pursuers, and allowed her to set the boundaries. When it was over, she knew it first. And though she might grieve truly, it was a bittersweet emotion because though sorry, she was always sure of herself. She played hearts like fiddles.

  And now this had to happen. She realized finally that she had never really understood Quenton Cassidy very well, that she had tried to use her past experience to take his measure and it didn’t work. “His circuitry is all different,” she told her twin sister. His ambition differed in essence as well as degree. Whereas with others she could tell the point at which she might assert certain proprietary rights (the very first hints of nesting behavior), with this runner there was never any question about her rearranging his priorities. This rankled her from the start. She might have the ability to make him miserable, perhaps, but she swayed him not an inch from his path. He told her as much, and she found out quickly he meant it. There was something in the ferocity of his dedication that challenged the formula of her femininity. She responded to the challenge without even realizing she was doing so.

  To Quenton Cassidy, who knew little about women in general and less about Andrea in particular, their meandering, halfhearted breakup was a thing without reason. It would not abate with discussion, not be cured by soul-searching, not be resolved by agreement. They both recognized certain deep feelings that couldn’t be denied, so why, Cassidy asked again and again, all these problems? She found it impossible to tell him that this simply wasn’t the way she had imagined it would be. She was not experienced enough to know that it rarely is.

  Cassidy thought that it was entirely fitting that all the underpinnings of his world should collapse at one time. When he took to the woods and his first nearly total solitude, it was almost with relief. At first it was.

  THE HUGE OAK in front of Andrea’s sorority house was over three hundred years old, had been an arm’s thickness when Seminole Indians camped in the spot where the sorority house now stood, had shaded weary Spanish cowboys who kept herds on Payne’s Prairie not five miles from there. This was at a time when a muddy, mosquito-infested fort named St. Augu
stine was a fledgling mission.

  Now this old tree kept the steady rain off Quenton Cassidy, standing there in the night, heat-mist rising from his body, feeling anything but historic. He loved this old tree, and as he leaned against the incredibly gnarled trunk he thought: What does this old fellow care about it all? The strength of the ancient tree somehow soothed his misery.

  The body heat from his run would keep him warm for a while longer, then he would start to get chilled and have to get moving again to stay warm. His bright nylon shorts and yellow T-shirt hung on him like colorful mud. He was drenched clear through to his childhood. At last he saw them drive up. They were laughing about something as they shared an umbrella to the porch. When the guy kissed her, Cassidy felt a stab of pain that was close to physical, and therefore within the penumbra of hurts he told himself he could bear. As she turned to go inside, Cassidy called to her. The fellow, peering out from under his umbrella, stopped halfway down the sidewalk and squinted toward Cassidy in the shadows of the old tree. The umbrella man looked grim. It appeared his duty was not yet finished; at first unsure of himself, he finally opted to return to the porch. Cassidy stepped out of the gloom and the porch light fell on him, gleaming in the rain. He called again.

  “Quenton!” She was afraid she sounded a little too excited to see him. Then she remembered umbrella man, who was still coming. “It’s all right, George. I’ll see you Saturday.” Still looking grim, he stalked back to his car and drove off. He had seen the way she ran out there in the rain like that, up to that crazy galoot in the gym shorts, who was supposed to be out of the picture.