Once a Runner Page 3

  “Quenton Cassidy, cross-country champion…”

  “It was a two-point-five-mile race and the competition was fierce, lads. Several local entries could have been real trouble if the race had only been two and a quarter miles shorter. They were the kind of guys who yell and scream for the first hundred yards, you know, like they are having a good time and all…”

  “But they couldn’t hold the pace, eh?”

  “It kills me when they yell and scream like that, or talk back and forth to each other real nonchalant like it’s not bothering them at all.” Cassidy looked genuinely puzzled.

  “But tough cookies nonetheless?” Denton wouldn’t let him off the hook.

  “To a man.” Cassidy grinned at Mizner. “I leaned at the tape and nipped second place by about half a mile. Maybe they sent the wrestling team by accident. Anyway, Palm Beach County is not noted for its cross-country strength.”

  “Half a mile is what Mize usually gets you by, isn’t it?”

  Cassidy feigned hurt. “You don’t need to rub it in. I told you I don’t like it. You distance animals can have it. Milers are too fine-tuned to enjoy that pastoral crap.”

  “So are road runners, race walkers, orienteering nuts, and a bunch of other folks looking to avoid real confrontation,” Denton said.

  “Right,” Mizner said. He liked watching Cassidy having to take it for a while.

  “Real confrontation is four laps and a cloud of…Tartan dust,” Cassidy said.

  “That’s clever.”

  “Tartan dust?” Mizner asked.

  “Oh yes, that’s really clever.” Denton shook his head.

  “You guys can just blow it out your—”

  “Steady, big fellow,” Denton said in his mock-deep voice, the Lone Ranger calming old Silver down after a hard day of chasing desperadoes. Cassidy laughed and threw a halfhearted elbow at Denton, who dodged and rolled his eyes.

  Coach Benjamin Cornwall was getting into his car when he saw the three of them jostling one another at the door of the field house. Weary from his own work, he never could figure out what it was about a twenty-mile day that made some people so playful.

  “THREE MORE?” Cassidy asked.

  “At least.”

  He and Mizner did hundred-yard striders in the grass, trying to build up some lactic acid resistance and get the systems moving. They wanted to be well into what some people call “the second wind” before the race started. The runners usually referred to it by the physiologists’ term, “homeostasis.” Whatever it is called, it entails a good hard warm-up. They had already run three miles at an easy pace.

  Dual meets were not at all hectic and Cassidy didn’t really mind this miniature version of cross-country. A single team would not usually have enough talent to present much of a challenge, even to Cassidy. Neither he nor Mizner considered this particular Saturday important enough to slack off their training in the slightest. They had both run sixteen miles the day before, a gambit known as “running through” a meet. When you are beaten by an athlete running through, it means you are owned by him body and soul. The Fixed Order will have been established in a most definitive way, to be altered only by some kind of felonious conduct, possibly involving antipersonnel mines.

  Bruce Denton ran up from behind them and fell in with their strides. Even at this quick pace his legs moved with a ghostly lack of effort. Runners from the other team stole glances at him. Cassidy thought: the little sons of bitches are experiencing awe.

  “You doing your morning?” Mizner asked.

  “Yep. Thought I’d come over and watch the fun.”

  “I hate racing in the morning like this,” Cassidy offered.

  “There’s not a whole lot about this deal you do like, is there, sport?” Denton smiled at him.

  “Not much, I guess,” Cassidy admitted gloomily. “My gut goes crazy…”

  “Do these guys have any horses?” Denton asked.

  “The redheaded fellow,” said Mizner, gesturing. “The one so very obviously not looking at us. That’s Eammon O’Rork, a genuine imported Irishman. Guess they couldn’t afford themselves an African.” Mizner was unconsciously mimicking Cassidy.

  “Gave you a scare last year indoors, didn’t he, sport?” Denton turned to Cassidy.

  “‘Scare’ isn’t the word. It was the Mason-Dixon Games in Louisville. The score was, the Kid: four oh three point two; the Irish Upstart: four oh three point two. But it was closer than it sounds.”

  Denton laughed as they started another strider. O’Rork’s freckled face was clouded with concentration as he did his own warm-up. He glanced constantly at his watch, timing it to the minute. They had about eight minutes before assembling for the starting instructions.

  O’RORK WAS OLDER than the rest of his team; older and far more mature. His talent and courage had delivered him from the rigors of life in Northern Ireland and he went at distance running with the uncomplicated ardor of the truly hungry. Denton appraised the Irishman’s stride as he went by and thought: There is always something behind it, isn’t there, fellow? With us and prizefighters, the wounded and the fleet…

  O’Rork was thinking about Cassidy’s cloth-thin victory the previous season. It still rankled him. The American was all right, he supposed, just too blithe a spirit to suit O’Rork. A few weeks after the Louisville meet O’Rork had picked up an intestinal flu and was all but incapacitated during much of the outdoor season. It had been a bad December: a telegram (hanging in a serious-looking plastic envelope on his dormitory-room door) brought the bad news from home. He had sat quietly for five minutes looking at the sad little yellow message, then he pulled on his training shoes and went out to run himself into a blubbering mush in the hills surrounding his Tennessee campus. Then he was in bed for two weeks and really wouldn’t have minded dying. Cold Decembers, he thought, watching the carefree American. I have known too many of them.

  THEY WERE LESS THAN a half mile from the finish; Cassidy ran slightly behind O’Rork off his left shoulder, eyes fixed on the freckled neck. He was drafting without malice or humor. If O’Rork minded being used in this manner he gave no sign.

  Somewhere up ahead Jerry Mizner was sauntering into the finish chute with the more tolerable fatigue of victory on his face. He had employed the simple expedient of running away from everyone. Similarly isolated from the rest of the runners, the two milers bruised each other in the tensionless grind of those who struggle for second place.

  Cassidy was in extremis. They had gone through the first mile in 4:37 and Cassidy thought with alarm: Godamighty that hurt. The heavy training of the past several weeks had sapped him; when he reached down for an extra surge just to hold pace, he found only a searing strained feeling with which he was intimately familiar: redline city. He was not enjoying his weekend.

  Hanging on to O’Rork these past two miles had been possible through a dreary combination of willpower and wishful thinking. Coast, you bastard, Cassidy told himself. Then he put his mind into neutral, locked on to the freckled shoulder, and obtained his mental abstracts: gliding, floating, covering ground. He balked unashamedly at the remarkable discomfort he was living through at the moment. He even thought of tossing it in, not an unusual sentiment, but knew it wouldn’t happen. He also kept telling himself that they wouldn’t all be this bad because if they were he surely couldn’t live with it. He didn’t consider himself particularly courageous.

  A long path led up the hill through Beta Woods and onto the track for the finish. The hill was steep; it numbed the legs and discouraged fast finishes. O’Rork intentionally worked Cassidy hard on this hill, surgically removing the sting from a kick he remembered quite clearly. Pumping hard, he pulled away. With great distress, Cassidy reeled him back in. This isn’t so bad, Cassidy thought, I’m just dying is all. But hang on, asshole, and maybe you can be a hero at the end. The self-loathing was genuine and when he thought about it later it always mystified him.

  Every stride now caused him the most profound regret. S
pitting fluffy wads of congealed saliva, his thinking soon came only in staccato bursts: two hundred yards…keep him near…keep him near…

  Within sight of the finish he could vaguely see Mizner doing a silly bounce and yelling something as Cassidy began to lock up. Andrea would be there somewhere but he didn’t see her. A white haze—a normal phenomenon—clouded everything, like looking through the dirty window of a long-abandoned house. Funny how your mind works at the end like this, he thought. The excitement was all outside as he watched quietly from inside his raging skull.

  A hundred yards to go, he thought oh christ and threw the remainder of what was left into it; now that really cost him.

  O’Rork burst away from him quickly and won by ten yards.

  CASSIDY WAS BENT OVER at the waist, hands on knees, doing a little circle stagger that in other circumstances might have passed for amusing. The other runners were noisily starting to come in. Mizner stood with his arm around Cassidy’s waist, providing balance.

  “Easy, easy,” he said in calm, empathetic tones. Cassidy could not speak; his eyes bulged insanely, breaths came in greedy rasps, and his face was a splotchy violet color.

  “Yack!” he said, trying to straighten up. It was too soon; dizziness forced him back to the hands-on-knees death grip, the fetal rest position of the totally done-in runner. The white haze had thickened into a heavy fog; he felt faint but knew his conditioning would protect him from everything but extreme heat. These were the worst few seconds and he understood better than anything else that like the tail fin, the Nehru jacket, and the republic itself, they too would pass. The drained elation, special property and reward of those who have been to the edge and back, would come later. But for now he had awhile longer to hurt.

  Andrea, who had never seen such things, stood close by, almost afraid to touch him, hands fluttering around each other and over to his wet singlet. The rasping, dripping, violet-shaded runner studied the moist earth between his spiked toes and seemed unaware of her presence. Was he all right?

  “Sure hell, he’s all right,” Mizner said, surprised by her question. “He’s just run himself a race is all.”

  Seeing that Cassidy had his own balance, Mizner went off gaily to check the team scores. Finally straightening up enough to stumble for a few steps, the runner looked at her and said again: “Yack.” But this time there was something that could have passed for a smile on his hot face. To her he looked near death—not a mysterious wan passing, but a demise culminating in hot bouts of fever and hallucination, fearful and soul-wrenching. The smile brought her considerable cheer. “Yack?” She smiled back.

  “Gee, that was uncomfortable,” he said seriously, as he began to make himself walk; he was unaccustomed to long spikes, one caught, he stumbled as he gripped her hand. “What did you think?”

  “I thought you were going to die there for a second. I was afraid.”

  “Well,” he said jovially, “that’s the cross-country biz.”

  Denton stood twenty yards away, chatting with the coaches. But his eyes followed Quenton Cassidy closely.

  Half an hour later he gathered up Mizner and Cassidy and the three of them trotted off, laughing, on the eight-mile course to get in some miles for the day.

  5.

  Bowling for Dollars

  JERRY MIZNER was an admitted obsessive-compulsive, probably a necessity for a true distance man; his mind adapted well to the distance runner’s daily toil. Cassidy was far more impulsive by nature and had to painfully teach himself the record-keeping, ritualistic, never-miss-a-mile mentality of a dedicated runner. Mizner and Denton, like Jim Ryun or Gerry Lindgren, were natural runners who had never even attempted other sports seriously. Cassidy had good speed, and like Peter Snell had done well in other sports before concentrating on middle distances. At times he felt like a spiritual interloper with the other two; occasionally he was actually jealous of the way they casually handled the workload. Slowly, for survival’s sake, he learned the lifestyle of the compulsive personality. But when he occasionally wavered, Mizner felt sorry for him and tried to help him through the bouts of blue funk and strange behavior. Cassidy would say:

  “The Kid is largely unhappy.”

  “There there.”

  “Got caught in the rain and muh green stamps got all plastered to muh Sweet’N Low.”

  “It’ll be okay…”

  “Bet muh money on the bob-tail nag…”

  The friction caused by superimposing alien psychological traits on his own personality occasionally burst forth in interesting manifestations: Cassidy arranging a quadruple moon shot (the famous Four Way Pressed Ham) out of the tailgate of a duly licensed state vehicle; Cassidy presenting a series of unauthorized awards at the cross-country banquet in mixed company (“…and now a very special presentation, the Zazu Pitts Memorial Plaque to the runner who most infrequently committed flatus on the morning run…”); Cassidy, as Nubbins put it one night in bewilderment, “just plain walkin’ around talkin’ funny.”

  Whatever outward form his inner disquietudes took, his odd energies held Doobey Hall like a spell. In this tiny society where the extreme was commonplace, Cassidy’s mystique affected everyone. He was often sought out for counsel and his apparent reluctance to render it only added to his aura. His opinion was solicited on matters scholastic, financial, romantic, and mechanical, though he disavowed expertise in all these areas.

  He had the gifted athlete’s innate sense of timing, a sense of providence, of fantasy, an intuition into the art of the Proper Moment, where the escape velocity of frivolous lunacy triumphs over the mean gravity of everyday life.

  By way of example, the doldrums of summer were approaching at the end of his junior year when Cassidy, bored with the hot, ennui-stilled Sunday lunch, posed a general question to the drowsy dining room: “I wonder if Spider can jump over a Volkswagen.”

  Spider Gordon looked up sleepily from his vegetable soup.

  “Of course he can jump over a Volkswagen,” said the giant Mobley, his mouth full as usual. “You ought to know that.”

  “Yes. Yes, of course he can. Spider can easily jump over a Volkswagen,” Cassidy said.

  Mumbling, everyone turned back to the unexciting lunch, clearly disappointed. What had gotten into Cassidy?

  “The real question,” Cassidy continued after a proper pause, “the real question here is whether Spider can jump over two Volkswagens!”

  The philosophical extensions of this problem became quickly evident and the dining room emptied like a barroom shooting. The neighborhood was scoured for a certain make of foreign car and the entire affair went down in Doobey Hall folklore as “The Day Spider Gordon Busted His Ass on the Fourth Volkswagen.”

  New members of the team, freshmen or transfer students, were given no special warning about Cassidy. They found out, as everyone else did, in the best way they could.

  “Gentlemen,” Cassidy would say, rising at dinner and tapping his glass for silence, “we have got to have a plan. We must have a plan even if it is wrong.” There would come scattered, polite applause.

  Chairs scraped as everyone turned their attention to Cassidy’s table. Some veterans muttered approval at these odd sentiments while the new guys looked around in stark confusion. After waiting for the buzz to die down, Cassidy continued:

  “I realize World Team Bowling is a relatively new concept. But, gentlemen”—a small chuckle here—“as our attendance figures indicate, it is a concept…whose time has come!” Cheers from the veterans, new guys aghast.

  “Now, we have made some mistakes. No one denies that.” Negative mumbling; certainly no one was going to deny that. “When our Eye-talian all-star here, Jerry Mizerelli, split his pants on network teevee going for that spare in the sixth frame against Akron, well, gentlemen, it was a bleak moment for our fledgling organization as well as for sports in general. Certainly no one is faulting Jerry for that one, but I’ll tell you that all of us, players and management alike, were keeping our fingers cros
sed. All of us except Jerry, of course, who was doing a medium-slow crab walk with a new Brunswick double ball bag jammed in his crotch…”

  Well, it was just old crazy Cassidy of course, and maybe the moon was full or something. But he had eaten their bread and salt (and was always walking over exhausted from his race to inquire just how was the pole vault going anyway?) and to put it simply he could get away with just about anything with them.

  At times he swiveled the spotlight and its harsh glare fell on those not quite so ready for wholesale craziness; it was in this way Mizner had been “discovered.” As a new distance man, Mizner had sat around with a dour expression through his first of Cassidy’s Bowling Banquets, and had generally been marked off as an old maid until Cassidy suddenly presented him with some mythical honor one night. Mizner stood timidly as Cassidy handed him a Dr Pepper can fashioned into a ridiculous trophy with a scrap of tinfoil. The new runner stared with wide eyes at the bemused, expectant faces around the room. He cleared his throat. A few veterans looked at one another; this was going to be good.

  “I, uh, would like to thank Mr. Cassadamius for this here award and I’d like to say something else while I’m standing here. You know, I wasn’t really nobody at all when Mr. Cassadamius found me in that little three-lane alley in Pittsburgh. Sure, I mean, I was a local hotshot and all, rolling 210, 215, and just, you know, getting along. But I wasn’t no serious contender is what I’m trying to tell ya. Never made the cut or nothin’ like that. And then one day Mr. Cassadamius comes in and he watches me roll a few frames, no more’n that, just a few frames, and then he comes over big as day and says, ‘Son,’ he says, ‘Son, if you get rid of that limp wrist of yours and learn to come over the ball on your follow-through, you just might knock yourself over a few a’ them pins.’ I mark that as the turnin’ point in my career which has led me to the point at which I am at today.” He started to sit down, changed his mind and stood back up, clearing his throat.