Once a Runner Page 4

  “That, uh, and going to the twenty-five-pound composite ball. Thank you.”

  They sat stunned for several seconds, finally breaking into rowdy applause that quickly became a standing ovation. Mizner looked around the room with a faint smile on his dark face, making little bows with his head.

  Cassidy, sitting across from him all moony-eyed, fell smack in love.

  6.

  Bruce Denton

  QUENTON CASSIDY would have thought it amusing had someone called him a great runner. He wasn’t even the best in the neighborhood. Nor was Jerry Mizner, who could claim all-American honors at the six-mile distance. It wasn’t even close: the best runner around Kernsville was Bruce Denton, a methodical, dryly humorous doctoral candidate in botany. While both younger runners were formidable talents in collegiate circles, Denton’s place in the hierarchy of distance running was lofty and secure. The others held him in secret awe and reported his words to comrades with the solemnity of one reading from the Dead Sea Scrolls: “Well, now, Denton says you should warm-down like blah blah…” Such pronouncements could halt the most vociferous arguments.

  As an undergraduate at a small school in Ohio, Denton had been a good but not spectacular performer, running the mile in 4:08. But as with many runners he began to improve with age. He moved to Florida and took up graduate studies at Southeastern, where he began training again with a scientifically precise vengeance. On the altar of Consistency he offered up no less than two portions of his life per day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. His neatly filled calendar diary told no lies and the symbolism of the unmissed workout became ritualistic to him, taking on an importance in his life he did not like to admit, even to himself.

  On a rainy day in November he was so sick with the flu that his wife, Jeannie, felt constrained to stay home from work to look after him. He threw up regularly and had diarrhea so badly his stomach muscles began cramping. Nonetheless, he arose and ran two eerie miles at a stumbling pace, pale and shivering the whole way. His wife was aghast. Again in the afternoon he repeated the process, this time nearly fainting as he staggered back into the apartment. Dr. Stavius—whose claim to fame was that he had once punctured a blister on the foot of Roger Bannister—stormed into Denton’s sickroom and pronounced him a madman.

  “What crazy?” Denton asked, trying to make his parched lips form a smile. “After today I’m sixteen miles behind for the week.”

  Over the course of several years at Southeastern, as Denton’s reputation grew, a number of undergraduate runners decided they would train with him, thinking to pick up on the Secret. A new man would show up the first day expecting all manner of horrific exertion, and would be stunned and giddy to find he could so easily make it through one of Denton’s calendar days. Showing up the second morning at 6:30 he would be of good cheer, perhaps trying to imagine how he would handle the pressure of his inevitable fame. That day would also go well enough, but he would begin to notice something peculiar. There was no letup. The tempo was always moderate but steady. If a new guy decided to pick up the pace, that’s where it stayed, whether he finished with the group or not. You showed off at your peril.

  On the third day (assuming the new man made it that far) his outlook would begin to darken. For one thing, he was getting very, very tired. No particular day wore him out, but the accumulation of steady mileage began to take its toll. He never quite recovered fully between workouts and soon found himself walking around in a more or less constant state of fatigue-depression, a phase Denton called “breaking down.” The new runner would find it more tedious than he could bear. The awful truth would begin to dawn on him: there was no Secret! His days would have to be spent in exactly this manner, give or take a mile or two, for longer than he cared to think about, if he really wanted to see the olive wreath up close. It would simply be the most difficult, heartrending process he would endure in the course of his life.

  At that point most of them would drift away. They would search within themselves somewhere along a dusty ten-mile trail or during the bad part of a really gut-churning 440 on the track, and find some key element missing. Sheepishly they would begin to miss workouts, then stop showing up altogether. They would convince themselves: there must be another way, there has to be. The attrition rate was nearly a hundred percent.

  Only Cassidy and Mizner made it through the process and finally accepted the Trial of Miles. When Denton saw that they were different, he opened up to them and they discovered for the first time that the silently gliding machine at their sides all those months actually had a personality. Accustomed as they were to the flamboyance of their teammates, they were amused by Denton’s penchant for understatement. Once, when he returned from the large international road race at Springbank, Canada, they gathered around his locker, waiting for details. Well, they wanted to know, how did it go?

  “Not too badly, I guess,” said Denton, dressing in his quick, methodical way. “I got in a token mile in the morning and then ran a few after the race so the week’s total won’t suffer too much. Jogged around the Atlanta airport too.” He added the last thoughtfully, scratching his chin.

  “Well, goddamn, Bruce, all the Europeans are usually there, Aussies, even some Africans. Who the hell won?” Cassidy was impatient.

  “Oh, I won it,” Denton said breezily, apparently still thinking about the coup of getting a couple of extra miles at the airport.

  “Christ, you won it! Ron Hill, Dave Bedford, Frank Shorter, all those guys usually—”

  “Yeah…” Denton said, pausing in the middle of tying his shoelace as if remembering something pleasant from his childhood. “Nicest bunch of guys you’d ever want to meet.”

  WHEN DURING HIS FIRST POSTGRADUATE YEAR Denton came from relative obscurity to run 27:10 for six miles at the Drake Relays, knowledgeable distance buffs were mildly surprised that such an undistinguished performer could run an international-caliber race out of the blue. However unlikely it seemed in retrospect, at the time the phrase “flash in the pan” was bandied about. There are scoffers, it seems, in every field. Later that spring when Denton made the U.S. Olympic team, nearly everyone professed surprise. Everyone except Dr. Stavius and a promising young miler named Quenton Cassidy, who watched the U.S. trials on television. True to form, Denton powered across the finish line in the 5000 meters and simply jogged past the cameras over to his sweats and departed the stadium. Everyone had ignored him for so long, it seemed to Cassidy a delicious gesture.

  Now two years after that Olympiad, though they had survived the Trial of Miles and knew his “Secret,” and though they were championship collegiate runners, Cassidy and Mizner knew better than anyone that Denton played the game on an entirely different level. He was unencumbered by such things as team standings, dual meets, conference titles; as a graduate student he ran for himself (nominally for the Southeastern University “Track Club,” of which he was the sole member). His fare was paid to large meets all over the country by promoters who wanted his name for their posters. During the indoor season he would likely be found in nearly any large city in the country on a given weekend, running either a two-mile (which he called a “deuce”) or a three-mile race.

  He knew or had run against most of the top runners in the world; he had raced Ron Clarke on the grass in Australia (winning with a big kick); he had suffered through a high-altitude two-mile against the smiling, fierce Kip Keino (losing to a big kick). He had spent several weeks in Eugene with The Pre, listening thoughtfully to the Bowerman/Dellinger theorems (tempering his awe with miler Roscoe Divine’s confession that he snuck out and ran extra workouts when the assigned ones were too easy). He had listened to Gerry Lindgren say “bad berries” about three thousand times during a hot twenty-miler outside Spokane. He had had a long, pleasant argument with Kenny Moore as to the real value of the Mileage Ethic as opposed to the hard/easy theory, which ended when he told the great marathoner: “You may not believe in mileage, but you sure as hell run mileage.”

  There
was little wonder Bruce Denton had more quiet confidence than Cassidy or Mizner in the distance runner’s little rigid hierarchy of black-and-white numbers, and little wonder why they held him in awe. In his apartment there was an overburdened second bedroom that served as a guest room, study, and trophy room. In the corner was an ancient filing cabinet with locking drawers. In the bottom drawer, the only one that still locked, was a flat oblong leather box.

  In that box was an Olympic gold medal.

  7.

  Andrea

  I’M IN LOVE with her, I tell you,” Cassidy said.

  “You don’t even know her.”

  “I don’t care. If I knew her it might spoil it. Did you see her little forehead, how it was all wrinkled and sweaty?”

  “Come on…”

  “She was concentrating on her pace fer chrissakes…”

  “Awww…”

  This was how it all began, back at the very start of the school year. The scrap of red yarn she carelessly tied her hair up with might have had something to do with it. Or perhaps it was the very sincere look on her face as they trundled by her on the warm-up course that day. Even Mizner commented on how pretty she was.

  The typical fetching Southeastern University coed was a lovely pharmacist’s daughter with a hard little body, dairymaid complexion, and the soul of a robber baron. Cassidy had no idea what made Andrea so different, but he could sense that she had somehow survived twenty years as an attractive female in the republic without having had her mind reamed out by mama, the Junior League, or Helen Gurley Brown.

  Several days later on the three-mile warm-up they saw her again.

  “Try to smooth it out a little,” Cassidy suggested as they passed. He demonstrated with an exaggerated version of the classical running stride (a stride that he did not use himself when the chips were down).

  She looked up, her damp forehead wrinkled with concentration, and stared at Cassidy as if he were some aquatic parasite that had attached itself to her ankle while she was wading in a creek. Cassidy nearly swooned.

  “You’re crazy,” Mizner told him.

  “She appreciated the advice,” Cassidy decided.

  “She thinks you’re crazy too.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “What would you do if some guy out of the blue just up and starts critiquing your stride?”

  “Challenge him to a race.”

  “If his T-shirt said PITTSBURGH HOLY ROLLERS and he started prancing around like this…you’d think he was crazy too. And you’d be right.”

  “Mize, the girl was clearly grateful. She appreciated the advice,” Cassidy repeated, troubled.

  “The girl,”—Mizner was annoyed—“has a gimpy leg. I saw it yesterday when she was stretching up at the track. She probably not only didn’t appreciate the advice, she probably thinks you’re an asshole.”

  “Oh.”

  BUT GIVING UP QUICKLY was not in Quenton Cassidy’s nature. A week later he saw her at the Gay Nineties, a rather unfortunately named and remarkably heterosexual tavern. Her blond hair was down, but there was no mistaking her. Her white cotton blouse made her thin arms look very tanned and for some reason that sight of her made his heart hurt. He waited around until her two girlfriends got up to play foosball, then made his slew-footed entrance. She saw him coming.

  “Well, well. The coach,” she said. It was only faintly sarcastic. She even smiled a little, he thought.

  “Ah yes, well, I…” He spilled a trickle of beer as he started to make some expansive gesture. Idiotically, he began licking foam off his wrist.

  “Don’t do that,” she said.

  “Right. Uh, look, I’m sorry if I—”

  “That’s all right. I was a little annoyed, but then I figured you might have taken a class or something and maybe even knew what you were talking about.”

  “Not really,” he said happily, sliding into the booth across from her. “But I know a bunch of guys who are really good.”

  “Are you on the track team or something?”

  “Yes, indeed,” he said, feeling slightly loony watching her green flame eyes in the pale tavern light.

  “Oh my. What event do you do?”

  “Decathlon,” he said.

  “Really?” she asked. “How far do you throw it?”

  THEY DRIFTED. Dappled by the hard cypress shadows, out into the burning September sun, they drifted. In one of those pleasant cool eddies life sometimes affords the young in fall or spring, they drifted, quite unaware of the not-so-far-off rattle of bones…

  “I didn’t ask to go see the movie,” she said. “I thought the book was sophomoric. Baroque and sophomoric. The movie was your idea.”

  “It was my fault. But your friends were just asking—”

  “My friends think Love Story is the finest literature to come down the pike since…The Prophet. You should have eased up on them. Someday they will be producing babies and not causing anyone any trouble at all.”

  “All I meant was that such cornpone has a way of co-opting real life. I mean, it’s fun to talk snazzy and run around and play in the snow with yur girl, for chrissakes, but I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to throw a dog a Frisbee without thinking I should be in slow motion or something.”

  “Tear ducts raped. ‘I resent having my tear ducts raped’ I believe is what you said.”

  “Awww.”

  “And were following up with something about the teensy-weensy sexual members of dope-crazed screenwriters or something…”

  “Well…”

  “Mary Ellen Conastee was close to having a stroke. She’s a harmless girl, Quenton. You’re going to have to break in a little slower with some people.”

  He looked over and gave her what he thought of as his pixie grin.

  “Don’t give me that pixie-grin crap,” she told him.

  They drifted. Cassidy was plopped without grace in his inner tube, his white bottom now thoroughly chilled by the icy waters of the Ichetucknee River. Andrea somehow accomplished a similar position without the same loss of dignity: on her it looked sultry. When she leaned back to take the sun he looked carefully at the two brown legs draped over the edge of her tube, but could hardly detect the difference between them that would forever put a little catch in her walk.

  Of course there would be something like that; he lacked interest in the perfect item. Quenton Cassidy, unmoved by kittens, sonnets, and sunsets, was nonetheless given to tragic flaws.

  IN ORDER TO ARRANGE THIS DAY of perfect drifting, an entirely traditional local pastime, he and Mizner—now floating up ahead with his date—had arisen at 7:30 and run seventeen miles. It was the only way they could spend their day in the sweet haze of Boone’s Farm apple wine and still appease the great white Calendar God whose slighted or empty squares would surely turn up someday to torment the guilt-ridden runner. They went through such contortions occasionally to prove to themselves that their lives didn’t have to be so abnormal, but the process usually just ended up accentuating the fact. There were several ways it could be done. If they were going to the beach, they might put it off and run when they got there, but contrary to popular opinion, beach running is only jolly fun for the first five miles or so. After that, the cute little waves become redundant, the sand reflects the sun up into the eyes blindingly, grains of sand slip annoyingly into the heel of the shoe or flip up on the back of the leg. Fifteen hot miles on a long, flat beach sounds like good sport only to those who haven’t actually done it. Also, the ocean is too infinite; the run seems as if it will never end.

  They could always put training off until they got back in the evening, but that just made things worse. No beer! None of the sticky wine! Their friends would slyly try to tempt them, see if they really took all that training stuff seriously. It was too much to ask. Better to get it all over with and then be able to enjoy the day like any other citizen.

  Though he hated running long in the morning more than anything he could think of, Cassidy was ecstatic to have
his whole day’s training behind him. The oversized tubes floated along on the gin-clear river, meandering slowly under the spooky cypress stands and pleasantly out into splotches of sun. Even though it was Florida, it was north Florida and, as winter approached, tubing would be forgotten until spring.

  Cassidy paddled over awkwardly to Andrea’s tube and invited her to double up. Flirting with disaster for several seconds, she finally accomplished the maneuver.

  “Next time you do the transfer at sea, please,” she said. Her warmth beside him was searing; she smelled of summer, youth, Sea & Ski, and moist, slightly sweet sex. Clearly edible. His head spun from the wine and sun. Muscles along the top of his thighs trembled from his morning exertion. In a month or so he knew they would carry him screaming around the track. He had the power.

  “Ouch!” she said. “What’s that all about?”

  8.

  Dick Doobey

  THE HEAD FOOTBALL COACH pushed the sweaty baseball cap back on his bristly crew-cut head, leaned way back in his $1,495 Execu-Kliner, plopped his ripple-soled coaching shoes up on his gigantic gleaming desk and wondered what in the world was becoming of him.

  With mournful pride he surveyed the wide expanse of lush maroon and silver carpeting that displayed in the very center a custom-woven and very savage-looking Daryl the Swamp Dawg; the office was so large as to invite speculation as to which indoor sports might be accommodated.

  The Rotarians had been most unkind. Whereas several years ago he would have been treated with the unbridled respect and admiration due a United States senator or even a big-money media evangelist, this day’s luncheon had been laced with a certain ill-concealed nastiness that now knitted Dick Doobey’s brow like a ten-dollar pot holder.