by Eric Walters
“What?” he asked. “Here’s what I can do. I can stop running, I can hop on one leg, or I can just keep going and put up with it…not much of a choice, really, is it?”
“Does Doug know that it hurts?”
“Doug knows everything. He’s the only one who knows…except, I guess, for you now. And you have to promise me you won’t tell anybody.”
“I won’t.”
“Not even your father.”
“Not even anybody.”
“I just don’t want people making it into a big deal. I don’t want them feeling sorry for me.”
“I won’t tell anybody. I promise.”
We continued to run along in silence. I was now much more aware of his artificial leg hitting the ground. With each step, each single step, it caused him pain. How could he keep doing that?
“Does it hurt a lot?” I asked, knowing I should shut up but needing to know.
“It’s more of an ache than a pain,” he said. “Sort of like stubbing your toe…a few thousand times a day.”
Just at the top of the hill I could see the van. Doug was sitting on the back bumper, looking back at us. He waved and I waved back.
“It must be nice to have a friend like that,” I said.
“It is…and even when we’re not talking to each other—I guess you’ve noticed—we’re still best friends. We’ve been friends for a long time and we’ve had fights for a long time. Sometimes he gets on my nerves and sometimes I get on his. Doesn’t mean anything.”
Terry continued to run but I slowed down to a walk about fifty yards from the van. Somehow that just seemed like the thing to do. Doug offered Terry a cup of water and he sat down on the bumper beside him. Doug was holding a plate of cut-up oranges. They were talking. That was nice to see.
Another section was over. Terry was one mile closer to the Pacific. One mile closer to the run being over. One mile closer to being home.
As I came up to the van Terry and Doug were talking and joking around. That brought a smile to my face and—I stopped dead in my tracks. There were red streaks running down Terry’s artificial leg—it looked like blood!
I gasped and brought my hand up to point at Terry’s leg. He looked up at me and then down—there were two little red trickles rolling down the side of his prosthesis. Terry scowled and muttered something under his breath.
“You’re…you’re…”
“I’m bleeding.”
“Bleeding!” I exclaimed. “You’re hurt!”
“I’m bleeding, but I’m not hurt.”
Doug handed me the plate holding the rest of the oranges. “I’ll get you a towel,” he offered, and he climbed into the van. He quickly returned with a white towel that he handed to Terry. Terry took the towel and proceeded to wipe off his leg, removing the blood.
“It’s nothing,” Terry said.
“It’s not nothing. It’s blood,” I insisted.
“It’s nothing serious,” he said.
“How can blood not be serious?”
“You ever had a blister on your foot?” Terry asked.
“Yeah, once, a long time ago when I had new shoes.”
“And when it broke did it bleed?”
“I can’t really remember that much about it but I don’t think it was blood…more like clear stuff, like water.”
“Well, I have things that are like blisters on my stump.”
I tried not to shudder. I’d worked hard at not imagining the end of his leg.
“They’re called cysts. They’re really just sores like blisters and when they break sometimes there’s a little bit of blood.” He took the towel and cleared off the last trace of it. “It’s really nothing.”
“Maybe you should see a doctor,” I said.
“There’s no point,” Terry replied.
“But he could tell you how to stop the sores from happening or stop them from breaking and bleeding,” I suggested.
“I know how to stop them.”
“Then why aren’t you doing it?” I asked.
“Because the answer is that I have to rest.”
“You mean like take a day off?”
“A day or two or maybe a week.”
“A week? That seems like a long time. But maybe you should do that.”
“I can’t do that. Especially now. Things are starting to pick up steam. There’s more notice, we’re raising more money each day. I can’t lose the momentum.”
“But if you’re in pain and you need rest to get healed then you really should stop running for a while.”
“Not going to happen,” Terry said. “If I stopped every time I felt a little bit of pain I’d still be somewhere in Newfoundland. Or probably I’d have given up when I was running laps and I’d still be back home. Pain is just part of it. Tired is just part of it. You have to run through those things.” He paused. “But tell you what, I will take a bit of a break.”
“You will?”
“Sure. I’m going to run for another mile and then I’m going to take at least a five-minute break.” He smiled, got up off the bumper and disappeared around the side of the van.
“He’ll be okay,” Doug said quietly.
“Are you sure?”
Doug nodded. “This has been a problem for a while.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Nobody knows. We’ve been trying to keep it quiet.”
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I knew that this was exactly the sort of thing my father was looking for, an angle, something that nobody else knew.
“Terry thinks that if people knew they might think he should stop, the way you think he should stop.”
“But if I saw the blood…other people will see it too.”
“We try to be careful. Usually the blood doesn’t overflow out of the cup.”
“The cup?”
“The top of the prosthesis—the artificial leg—is like a cup that fits over the end of Terry’s leg.”
I thought back to when I’d held Terry’s leg and tried to picture the cup.
“Usually the cup catches all of the leakage.”
“But it didn’t this time. That must mean that there’s more blood than usual,” I argued.
“This is more than usual, but it’s been like this before.”
“Maybe he really should go and see a doctor,” I suggested again.
“That’s not going to happen,” Doug said. “For one thing, the doctors don’t really know how to deal with Terry’s problems—he’s pretty much the first guy to put so much wear and tear on a leg by running. And anyway, I think Terry’s seen enough doctors to last a lifetime.” Doug paused. “He once told me about going down to the clinic where he was getting the cancer treatment. He told me that he’d get the shivers, and it had nothing to do with being cold.”
“But if he needs to see a doctor he has to. You should make him go.”
Doug smiled. “Do you really think that anybody could make Terry do anything he didn’t want to do? He’s as stubborn as a mule.”
“You must be talking about yourself again,” Terry said as he reappeared around the corner of the van.
“Compared to you I haven’t got a stubborn bone in my whole body!” Doug snapped, and then they both started to laugh.
I must have looked white as a sheet because Terry said, “Winston, you worry too much. I’ll be okay!”
“I just think that it wouldn’t hurt to stop for a while.”
“I will stop.”
“You will?” I asked, and I could see from Doug’s expression that I wasn’t the only one shocked by what he’d just said.
“Yep. I’ll stop as soon as I hit the Pacific Ocean.” Terry flashed a huge smile. “See you in a mile, man,” he said as he gave Doug a slap on the back and started up the road once again.<
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Doug just shook his head and then circled around the van. I hurried around to the other side and climbed in.
“Before we go, there’s something I wanted to ask you,” Doug said. “I feel bad for even mentioning it.”
“Mentioning what?” I asked.
“I know you wouldn’t anyway…but I just…you know…would really appreciate it if you didn’t say anything about the bleeding to anybody. It really isn’t something we want people to know about.”
“I won’t! I already promised Terry!” I’d also already made that decision in my mind.
Doug smiled. “I knew you wouldn’t. Thanks. I appreciate it. Terry appreciates it.” He started the van up. “Now we better get going. Like I’ve said before, it looks bad if the guy with one leg can run a mile faster than I can drive it.”
15
I rode in the van for another mile and then went back out to run with Terry again. I kept trying to catch sideways glances as he ran beside me. I wasn’t looking at his stride this time, I was checking to make sure that there wasn’t any blood leaking down his leg. It looked okay. I didn’t see anything. I just hoped his leg was okay. I hoped he was okay.
“You’re awfully quiet,” Terry said.
“Just thinking.” And trying not to pester him with questions.
“About what?”
“About school,” I lied. I didn’t want him to know what I’d really been thinking about.
“You said you were in grade eight, right?”
“Unfortunately.”
“Not having a great year?”
I wanted to lie to him again, not tell him how things really were, but I just felt like I couldn’t. “It’s been a bad year. Really bad.”
“So bad that you didn’t want to go to school for a few days?” Terry asked.
“So bad that they won’t let me go to school for a few days.”
“Wow, suspended. What did you do?”
“It’s not so much what I did, apparently it’s my attitude.” That was a word I’d been getting pretty sick of hearing. “Were you ever suspended?”
“Never,” he said. “Good thing too. My parents would have killed me. How did your parents take it?”
“My mother was pretty upset. My father didn’t know at first.”
“How did you keep that from him?”
“I live with my mother…remember?” I said.
“Right. I just sort of forgot because you and your father are so close.”
I almost laughed out loud. We weren’t close at all!
“And it’s just you and your mother? No brothers or sisters?” Terry asked.
“I have two brothers—well, step-brothers, or halfbrothers or whatever. They’re from my father’s first marriage. They’re older, grown-ups. Anybody else in your family?”
“An older brother, Fred, he’s twenty-three, a younger brother Darrell who’s seventeen and then my sister Judith. She’s the baby, she’s only fourteen. Your age.”
“Must be nice,” I said.
“It is, most of the time…depends on how many bathrooms you have in your house. Sometimes it would be nice to have less people or more bathrooms.”
We ran along silently, just listening to the gravel crunching under our feet.
“I can’t get over how big you are for grade eight,” Terry said.
“I’m not that big, it’s just that you were really small,” I said, remembering that he’d told me he was only five feet tall. “You must have been one of the shortest kids in the whole grade,” I said.
“Me and Doug.”
“Doug was short too?”
“I always thought I was a hair taller than him.”
“And what did Doug think?”
Terry laughed out loud. “You already know us too well! Me and Doug met on the first day of cross-country try-outs. We were the only grade eights going out for the team. Everybody else was in nine or ten.”
“That must have been hard.”
“Hard for the nines and tens. We finished first and second. I couldn’t catch him, but he couldn’t lose me.”
“Doug won?”
“Doug always won. He’s a really good runner.”
“Yeah, he told me he did some running,” I said.
“He did a little more than some running. In our senior year in high school he got the silver medal for cross-country. He finished second for the whole province of British Columbia. He’s a great runner.”
“He didn’t mention that.”
“Doug wouldn’t. Guy doesn’t like to talk about himself. He’s like that…modest…quiet. And speaking of quiet, it must be awfully quiet at your place with just you and your mom living there.”
“Sometimes it’s too quiet…way too quiet.”
Terry glanced over at me with a questioning look. Part of me didn’t want to tell him anything, but another part knew that he really wanted to hear what I had to say.
“We fight…a lot…and when we fight we don’t talk…sometimes for days at a time.” I knew what I wanted to say next but I didn’t know if I had the nerve to say it. I inhaled even more deeply through my nostrils. “You and Doug fight sometimes.”
“Sometimes. I guess everybody fights sometimes.”
“But you guys shouldn’t fight!” I blurted out.
He didn’t answer right away. “Doug’s my best friend.”
“That’s even more reason why you shouldn’t! Best friends should never fight!”
Terry started to laugh. “Do you have a best friend?”
“I’ve got lots of friends…I just wouldn’t say that any one of them is really my best friend.”
“There’s something about being best friends that means you’re allowed to fight,” Terry said. “I’ve had some of my very best fights with my best friend and my brothers.”
“I don’t understand.”
Again, Terry didn’t answer right away and we just ran along in silence.
“I think the best fights are the ones you have with the people you’re closest to. Me and Doug are together twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, week after week, in either that van or a little motel room. Sooner or later we’re bound to start fighting about something.”
“Like you’re doing now?” I asked.
Terry chuckled. “You’re pretty sharp. We’re not really fighting, though, we’re just sort of not talking too much.”
“Like me and my mother,” I suggested. “I think being silent is worse than fighting with words.”
“Yeah, I think you’re right.”
“You two have to get along. What you’re doing is too important to jeopardize it by fighting,” I said. “The Marathon of Hope is too important.”
“We’re not putting the run at risk. You have to know about the two of us—even if we’re not talking, even if we’re fighting, even if we’re so mad we feel like strangling each other, it doesn’t matter. He’s my best friend. I’m his best friend. Any fight we have will end, we’ll start talking again, and we’ll still be best friends.”
“It’s not going to stop you from running?”
“Not a chance.”
“Doug’s not going to get so ticked off he decides to just get up and leave?”
“Even less than a chance. One thing I know about Doug is that I can depend on him. When he gives his word he’ll stick by it, no matter what. I know he’s somebody who won’t give up.” He paused. “Besides, we both know that you can’t run away from your problems.”
I felt like he’d just poked me with a stick. Did he know about me running away from home?
“I may be running across the entire country, but I’m not running away from anything. I’m running to something. I’m running to my home in Port Coquitlam, running to help all those people, all those kids, who can’t run. I’m run
ning to raise money to find a cure for cancer.” He paused. “And Doug may be driving the van, but he’s actually running every step with me…every step. Does that make sense?”
I nodded. “It makes a lot of sense.”
We continued to run along. I thought that maybe we were both thinking through what Terry had just said.
“So, how many more days are you going to be hanging out with us?” Terry asked.
“I’m here for tomorrow for sure, and maybe a day after that.”
“And then you’ll go back to Toronto.”
“Back home,” I agreed.
“So when we get to Toronto you’ll come and say hello?”
“When will you be in Toronto?”
“Sometime in July.”
“Yeah, I’ll be there for sure,” I said.
“You know, that’s one of the things I like about you.”
“What?”
“You didn’t even hesitate. You don’t have any doubts that I’m going to make it to Toronto, do you?” Terry asked.
“Why would I?” I asked. “Isn’t it between here and the Pacific Ocean?”
Terry’s face broke into a big smile, and I smiled back.
* * *
—
TERRY CLIMBED AWKWARDLY up onto the back of the big flatbed truck that was parked in the middle of the supermarket’s parking lot. Someone had hung banners and bunting along the edge of the truck and it looked like a float in a parade. Up on the back they’d put chairs and a table and a lectern—a sort of podium where somebody might stand and give a speech. Doug had told me that Terry would talk but there might be a whole lot of other people who’d want to say a few things too.
As Terry walked along the length of the truck the dozen or so people up on the platform with him rose to their feet. They offered him their hands, or slapped him on the back or both. One of the women gave him a hug and then pulled him down so she could kiss him on the cheek. Terry sat down on a chair right beside the podium.
“He looks tired,” Doug whispered in my ear.
“He must be. Running all day and then coming here.”
Terry and Doug had checked into the motel, grabbed a meal and driven right over. My father had headed off someplace—he didn’t say where—and I’d asked Doug if I could come along with them. I’d heard Terry speak before but I wanted to come anyway. After all, what was I going to do at the motel, watch TV?