Once a Runner Page 21

  “You were not having much fun out there,” she said. It was a statement, not a question. Then he noticed she already had a drink in her hand.

  “I suppose not. Shows, huh?” He cracked the beer, dropped the tab into the ice, took a manly slug, and stuck his left hand into his back pocket to get it warm. He rocked back on his heels, looking about the kitchen as if truly absorbed by its contents. Maybe she’s never seen anyone talk to the cookware, he thought.

  “Would you like to see the orchids in the backyard?” she asked.

  “Orchids? There are orchids in the backyard?”

  “No.” She laughed. “Not a one. Come on.” She took him by the hand and led him back through the living room and out the sliding glass doors. There were no orchids. They sat on the far side of the pool on a child’s swing set and listened to the noise of a party that now seemed somehow distant, faintly ludicrous. Cassidy wondered at first why it seemed so nostalgic, but then remembered, There were grown-up parties long ago, and I sat in swing sets and listened to them.

  She was a psychology instructor, working on her Ph.D., and she did not in the least want to talk about it. He judged her to be twenty-four or twenty-five, not as pretty as Andrea, but with her irony-ridden eyes and the amusement obvious in her forehead and eyebrows she might at any moment—he figured—have him sitting back on his haunches more or less barking like a seal. Maybe I’m too easy, he thought.

  She was clearly a woman who could take care of herself and for some reason that rattled him.

  “You must not go to parties much. At least I’ve never seen you around before,” she said. Cassidy was drawing designs in the frost on his beer can.

  “No, I suppose not. When you get right down to it, I don’t really do much of anything.”

  “Except your running.”

  “Yes, except that.”

  “Doesn’t sound very interesting.”

  “Oh hey”—he sat up straight—“it’s not. Take my word for it.” Deftly he watched her reaction and then in almost perfect sync repeated her next question right along with her:

  “Then why do you do it?”

  She remained unflustered however, laughed, and waited politely for his response.

  “I wish there were some very clever, eminently acceptable answer to that. It’s like when people ask me what I think about when I’m running. I usually say something like ‘quantum mechanics.’ Sometimes I say ‘music.’”

  “Music?”

  “It’s as good as any. Sometimes I do think about music. Actually when you’re training you can think about anything you want, almost. But in a race, everyone thinks about the same thing.”

  “Which is?”

  “The race, oddly enough.”

  “And what do you tell people who keep insisting on knowing why you do it?”

  “I say it keeps me regular. Or I say I’m going out for the Olympics; they can sort of understand that since it’s on the TV.”

  “You say it as if it were a joke.”

  “Oh, it’s no joke, it’s just that it’s such a hard thing, such a slim chance; you have got to be so lucky even after you are so good. The odds are just against you, that’s all. It’s like a little kid landing the part of the carrot in his school play on nutrition, and having it go so well that his mother goes around telling everyone someday he’ll win an Oscar. I mean, he might very well do it, but—”

  “Bruce Denton did it,” she offered.

  “Bruce Denton won an Oscar?”

  She gave him one of those one-knuckle female jobs to the deltoid that brought real tears to his eyes.

  “Bruce Denton doesn’t seem abnormal to you,” he grunted, rubbing the spot painfully, “because he’s walking around this very house munching pretzels and telling off-color jokes. But he’s probably the only Olympic distance runner for a thousand miles. It is not a…normal thing to have one at your party, you know? It is not normal to…ah, never mind. It lacks perspective. And that hurt, by the way.”

  “Hmmm. So you spend all your time doing something admittedly boring that you have no good explanation for, and then when you go out to have a good time, you sit around looking like someone just shot your dog. Interesting.”

  “Think I’m a head case?”

  “No doubt about it. Welcome to the Laughing Academy.” She motioned in the general direction of the party, and as if on cue there was a wild burst of laughter and suddenly a man with his shirttails out went crawling on all fours by the sliding glass door at a startling clip. He was looking back over his shoulder and kind of slinking along. Cassidy recognized him as an ophthalmologist named Caldwell something who had earlier told him to “hang right on in there.”

  “Dr. Hodge,” she said. “Coyote imitation. It’s not too bad, actually. This is what’s known as middle-class stoned.”

  Cassidy turned back, looked at her for several seconds, and really couldn’t think of a thing to say. It occurred to him that he was a pretty dull guy. She reached over and touched his beard. The intimacy of the gesture was incredibly soothing to him.

  “I like the new look. Very Nordic. Much different from those awful crew-cut pictures in the Sun. They must have been taken when you were a freshman. When did this come about?”

  “Last few weeks. Bruce’s harebrained scheme to get me into the relays in two weeks. That was one of the reasons he didn’t want me to come tonight. Supposedly everyone here is sworn to secrecy. Actually, I think it’s all a crock.”

  “Someone said something about it but I didn’t pay much attention.”

  “I have been banned from competing on Southeastern University’s benighted track, now and forevermore.” He held up his hands, a preacher pronouncing benediction; then he burped politely behind his hand. Four beers was about his limit now. But he was beginning to feel pretty good about the evening after all. “Dangerous rabble-rouser that I am,” he added. “Rabble, rabble, rabble.”

  “Let me ask you something,” she said softly.

  “Sure”—he finished the can with a flourish—“anything. Anything at all.” She put her hand on his knee and ran a fingernail along the ridges on the outside of his thigh. It felt to her like nothing so much as a bunch of tightly bound bridge support cables.

  “Did you think I was being brash in there, about the orchids and all?” Softly still.

  “Uh.”

  “Well, did you?”

  His Adam’s apple felt like a soggy tennis ball.

  “Does it surprise you?” She leaned over to capture his downcast eyes, led him back up to look at her. “Well?”

  He hated his idiotic awkwardness, his painful lack of any kind of grace. He was a cloistered monk turned loose among Manhattanites, flap-flapping around in his scrungy sandals high up in the carpeted sky, nervously sipping some strange heady cocktail, preoccupied with his own alarming armpits and responding to the simplest inquiry like this: buh dee buh dee buh dee.

  “You have to try to understand,” he said miserably, still watching her dark serpentine hand, “I have no moves left. You have to try to understand how it is…”

  “Oh.” She smiled that carnivorous smile. “I will.”

  34.

  Pause…

  FOR ME? You shouldn’t have!” Cassidy said when Denton handed over the cardboard box. It was getting close and Denton had announced it was time for brass tacks.

  “You don’t know how unfunny that may be. No telling what kind of fiery crap will fill the air,” Denton said. But his smile indicated his real degree of concern. As Cassidy opened the box Denton thought, He really doesn’t know what he’s done; his lightest day was eight miles when he sprained his ankle that time.

  “Finnish national team sweats! They’re beautiful.” Cassidy held up the robin’s-egg-blue top. The blue and white flag of Finland was in miniature over the left breast.

  “I’d like them back in good condition please, Seppo, as I had to trade them straight up for a pair of USAs.”

  “Zeppo? Zeppo?”

/>   “Seppo, ninny. Here is your contestant’s entrance pass and your number. You are listed as Seppo Kaitainen, a miler from Finland currently competing for Central Ohio Tech. Nobody knows about it but you and me and the guy I got to send in the application and fee from Ohio. Cornwall snapped you right up, Seppo! It appears you have run yourself some outstanding times this year.”

  “I might have known it would be good and kinky.”

  “Kinky, hell! It’s pure genius is what it is. You have no idea how much different you look from the old close-cropped anarchist of yore. You get yourself some wire-rims, garble up your English a little more than usual, ask for some pickled herring, and by God the sunbitches will think you’re Paavo Nurmi.”

  Cassidy was holding the sweat top up to himself and trying to see himself in the window reflection.

  “You honest to God think it’ll work?”

  “Fish tread water? Frog waterproof? Wild dog bay at the—”

  “All right, all right. I sense a little pride of authorship here. What happens if someone catches on? Won’t your man at Central Ohio Whatchamacallit get screwed over?”

  “That illustrious center of higher learning doesn’t exist, to my knowledge. Even if it did, there would be no one there to whom, as my counselor friend says, liability would attach. My buddy was only passing through when he mailed in the application. He is a proud resident of Illinois.”

  “All this to get into a goddamn track meet.”

  “Not just any track meet, Seppo old buddy, not by a long shot. It’s not every day a Finn attending an Ohio school gets to run the world record holder from New Zealand right here in north Florida. You ought to can the skepticism and thank your lucky stars I was able to bring the whole production off.”

  Cassidy smiled. “Hey. I appreciate it, I really do. But since I have apparently made the traveling squad, I’m going to expect Central Ohio to spring for my varsity letter.”

  “Say no more, Seppo, we treat our foreign athletes right,” he said as he stood. “Right now I’ve got to go see if I can salvage what’s left of my marriage. I’ll be out early and we’ll talk strategy.”

  “Mmmm.” Cassidy’s mind was off someplace and Denton hoped it was not out on the track, thrashing himself through it again.

  “Hey…Hey! Leave it alone for a while. Get some sleep; you might want to take some of that mild nerve stuff in the cabinet. Try to keep your mind off it as much as possible. You know all about this stuff.” He started for the door. “Oh, there’s a nondescript racing vest in the box in case you don’t have one. Seppo wouldn’t be racing in his national colors, it’s just a plain—”

  “Bruce, is there any…I mean, could there be any conceivable way I might could win this thing? Seriously, I mean?”

  Denton stopped. “Hells bells, Quenton. You can put the fear of God into him, I know that. But give yourself some time. You don’t have to go out and trounce the best guy in the world just because you’ve done some great training here. Let him pull you along to a super time.” He started for the door again but stopped with his hand on the knob.

  “You know those demons of yours you’re always talking about? Well, Walton’s got armies of them. You can see them in his eyes when he warms up, scrambling around just wailing and carrying on.”

  “Well,” Cassidy said, standing and stretching, “I guess we just let the fiery little bastards loose and at each other.”

  Denton opened the door, looked back before leaving.

  “Was there ever any other way?”

  THE NEXT NIGHT after dinner they sat on the front porch right as the sun was going down, sipping coffee and staring into the darkening oaks; fireflies winked in the deeper woods and a red-tailed hawk circled once high overhead and silently floated away to some far-off haven, leaving the chilled deep blue of the sky to the earlier stars. There was an unmistakable feeling of something large having passed and something large coming: eye of the hurricane.

  Cassidy held his mug with both hands and moved closer to the barbecue grill, where coals glowed pale orange, and thought, The adults would sit on the porch like this while we caught fireflies and played tag on the front lawn. The older of his North Carolina cousins would grow irritable and little Quentie would be counseled not to remain so long uncaught.

  Only children and dogs, it seemed, were supposed to run, and they all shared the sidewalks. Perhaps that accounted for Cassidy’s growing sense of unreality out in the cabin. He no longer could claim his activity was an adjunct to scholastic pursuits, a schoolboy’s preoccupation. He was now beyond that, but where? A professional in a field where there was no profession? The horrendously physical nature of his days and ways occasionally caused him to stir; intellectual grist of late had been confined to mind candy of the Lord of the Rings variety. He had begun to wonder how much of this was really necessary.

  You feel like an animal? Denton had asked. Just what Elliott told Cerutty when he wanted to quit. (As if that were some kind of answer.) But there was a day, Denton said, when Cerutty had been caught in a riptide at Portsea, and Elliott had grabbed the old man by his white hair and just swam. He swam and swam, not going anywhere at all, just there in place, for what seemed like hours, until the fucking ocean just gave up. Animal’s exactly right, Denton had said, but Jesus, what an animal.

  Then Denton had looked over at him and said: “Let’s go run.”

  And Quenton Cassidy, having not a thing else in the world to do, said okay. So ended the great intellectual revolt of March.

  It was shortly after that Cassidy began to notice something very strange in his training: it had become nearly impossible to make himself hurt. His ten miles in the morning left him only flushed and hungry; in the afternoon he thrashed himself through his distance run or interval workout and finished feeling itchy, like something was going on. So he told Denton about this strange sensation of invulnerability and admitted to being puzzled.

  But the Olympian just settled back against the porch step, sipped on his coffee, and smiled warmly at the miler.

  “How nice,” he said, “for you to have arrived right on time.”

  NOW WITHIN FORTY-EIGHT HOURS, he would be lacing very tightly those thin kangaroo-skin slippers with pin spikes and he would attempt to overtake the most locomotively efficient Homo sapiens to yet tread the earth. At the distance of one mile, that is. Among all the swift messengers of the Hellenistic era, among the Masai warriors of the plains of Africa who laughingly run game to the ground, among the mustachioed old professional runners of the lunatic marathon-dance age who ran for large purses, among all these there was not one who even approached this modern, black-suited New Zealander; the first human to run faster—not than four minutes—but than three minutes and fifty seconds, a barrier without quite the symmetrical poetry for mankind perhaps, but one with such a terrible message for other runners—those who knew best how to interpret such messages—that they wobbled. Some gave up in despair, some sought refuge in other events. Liquori, it was said, went to 5000 meters.

  Bruce Denton, sipping his coffee quietly, knew well the carnivorous nature of prerace fears. He sought to relieve what he felt was an ominous silence. The one thing he did not yet know about the miler was his control. Denton feared that during the next few hours the runner, like an aging automobile on a country road, might simply rattle himself to pieces.

  “There was the Englishman Oates,” he said, “on an expedition to one of the poles, I forget which. Out of supplies and fuel, the men were sitting around in a tent while a deadly blizzard raged. Several, I believe, had already frozen to death. Oates, deciding to end it all, rose and announced: ‘I’m going outside. I may be some time.’”

  Cassidy smiled over the top of his mug, the coffee now going lukewarm in the chill of the evening, and counted that as the moment he most loved Bruce Denton.

  “It’s all right, Bruce,” he said. “Really. It’s all right.”

  35.

  The Orb

  SAYING SOMETHING about w
alking off his macaroni and cheese, Cassidy escaped to the evening. There was a bit of marital uneasiness in the air, a strain that he may have had more than a little to do with, but for now all he could think of was closing the glistening, seamless orb, receptacle of his fiercest yearning.

  In the afternoon they had gone to a deserted high school track for the last session, a nearly light-headed tune-up; for the first time in months he was completely rested and strong and when Denton walked over and held up the watch grimly it said 24.8. That was the fourth and final 220. Denton shook his head disgustedly.

  “I couldn’t help it,” Cassidy said.

  “Okay,” Denton replied; he would have liked to have been able to show a little genuine anger at such a reckless display, but he knew how it felt and so remained quiet as they jogged a final slow mile around the battered old asphalt track.

  During dinner there was none of the usual banter and Jeannie, after trying several times to relieve the tension, finally clammed up, allowing everyone to stew in the awful clink-clank, chomp-chomp of nonconversing diners who, when the pressure is on, cannot seem to keep their silverware and their own mastication under control. It was nerve-racking for Denton and his wife, but Cassidy hardly noticed.

  Now he was walking quickly, inexorably, toward the place he would complete the orb, set it gently adrift, and leave it hard and shining until it was time.

  It was one of the early balmy spring evenings in Kernsville when no one wanted to go inside. The campus was bustling; the lighted tennis courts were full and other players sat around waiting patiently, talking and laughing. Groups of three or four made their way on foot to the student union or the nearer taverns, loaded cars roared to and fro, cyclists whirred by like mechanical butterflies, books and Italian sandwiches strapped onto luggage racks.