The Memory of Running

by Ron McLarty

  13

  After a couple of hours, my ass got numb and the terrible pain went away. My legs were still stiff, but the more I pedaled the Raleigh and sweated, I felt actually soothed. I wasn’t ready to stop by the time the turnpike led me into East Providence, so I cut over by the high school, through Six Corners, and crossed the old George Washington Bridge into Providence. I got off 95 on the other side of the bridge and followed the east-side route to Elmwood Avenue. Then, feeling light-headed, I mostly coasted down into Cranston. Cranston is an interesting place. It’s loaded with Italians. It makes you wish you were Italian. In Cranston a kid could probably be ashamed not to be Italian. It’s good, and I stopped by a ball field and ate another banana and watched some girls play softball. Big girls, throwing fast underhand curves that blurred by. I had another banana.

  I got through Warwick about early afternoon. I didn’t have a watch, and I didn’t miss it, but there’s something about time and responsibility. I don’t know. Something. The highway always stayed to my right, and for the most part the roads I chose were poorly maintained and poorly traveled.

  “A waste of a good road,” I said out loud. But on a road where nobody travels, there’s a great feeling of not being judged. Does that make any sense at all? When you’re 279 pounds and you’re wearing a tight blue suit and somebody coming up behind you on your bike could not see the seat, then you think about that. It becomes a distraction. You sweat even more. Your personal chest pain gets even worse. It’s another defeat.

  I remember quite a bit about this part. The ride part. People I talked to and who were mostly nice and the country. It surprises me how memory goes. I have whole years I can’t remember, but this part . . . well, I’m surprised.

  I walked my bike up the big Exeter hill and snuck onto Route 95 for a coast down toward Hope Valley. Wood River is in Hope Valley, and Yawgoog, too. That’s the Boy Scout camp I went to. The big coast scared me. I was daydreaming, and by the time I realized the air was slapping me so hard I couldn’t breathe, I was going about as fast as the cars. Like a jerk I hadn’t been checking the tires, and they were almost on the rim again, and they made a high whine against the shoulder of the road. I tried to gently pump the hand brakes, but the tires smoked. I held my breath. My chest hurt, and my fat heart jumped around like a jumping bean.

  There did not appear to be a bottom to the big hill, although I do remember one. I coasted on, steadily gaining speed, even though I squeezed the brakes with all my strength. Smoke changed from white to black. I smelled fire.

  It is at moments like this, pivotal moments, that I had always failed. Sometimes there are moments when a person has to make a decision, as opposed to letting things just happen. A person then has to happen himself. I had never done this. Life bounced off me, and bounced me, and now it was going to bounce me to death. My fat ass, my blue suit. And so I turned my sizzling Raleigh off the 95 hill onto the Hope Valley exit ramp at approximately sixty-five miles per hour.

  My sorry strands of hair stood straight back, and my bike careened into traffic. I headed for the yellow divider, which came over me like color wash. There had been some gas stations and a Howard Johnson’s on this route to the Boy Scout camp, but at my speed I simply could not make out signs or landmarks. I zoomed on, and I noticed as I flew through the main intersections of Hope Valley that not only was I not slowing down, I was approaching another hill. This is the way luck goes and goes. My berserk luck. My blindly out-of-control luck. But at least this time I would decide, like I decided to exit into Hope Valley at miraculous speed. What could possibly happen to a load on a sparking Raleigh? For the first time in a long time, life was not just coming at me, I was coming at life. I thought this when I turned the bike toward a small dirt road, and as the tight lines of oaks and maples and fir trees whizzed by, I thought how odd to think this stuff about life. To ruminate at the speed of light.

  The dirt road ended in a grassy field. A Little League baseball game was going on, with kids in red shirts up and blue shirts in the field. I exploded onto the field between first base and right. In a split second, I cut between the left and center fielders and charged toward a blurry patch of woods.

  “Trees,” I said out loud.

  Even the slap of birch branches and tiny maples didn’t slow me much, so when I began the deep slide down the ravine to where Wood River slowly rolled through Hope Valley, the drop seemed almost nothing. And the water, warmed up by the summer, strangely refreshed me for the instant before I passed out.

  Above me, although I didn’t know it at the time, the teams and parents of Holy Ghost the Redeemer and Third Reform Baptists ran across the field and down the tricky slope to help. My luck was changing.

  The current had apparently rolled me onto my back, and although I did swallow some water, I also swallowed some good, clean Hope Valley air. A Catholic priest, Father Benny Gallo, still wearing his umpire hat, led two burly Baptists waist deep in the river. They reached for me, but because I had picked up speed in a rapid section of the river, they missed me, just before I rolled over the nine-foot Anthony Falls.

  My pop and me, on the opening days of the trout season and after sometimes, usually fished a few miles above Hope Valley, where the pools spread out and were a little deeper, but sometimes we’d fish this stretch. It was about twenty-five miles or more from East Providence, and even though it ran right through this little town, you wouldn’t know it. I’d like to throw a dry fly into the small rifts, but Pop loved taking a weighted woolly worm and popping it up into the white bubbles of Anthony Falls. He could fish there all day and always did well. Now his fat boy was there, and the tiny bubbles ran over him and kissed him, and the trout had all flipped downstream.

  Somehow the thump of the falls shook me awake, or I think I was awake. I remember being in a narrow flume of water and hearing voices around the slam of the waterfall. I was moving again, and I tried to kick my legs, but they were like legs in a dream that aren’t really yours. Along the bank I think I glimpsed a man in black who would be the umpire priest, but I can’t be sure, because just as I thought of raising my arms for help, I went over Jenner Falls and apparently blacked out again.

  It’s scary, waking up with a plastic oxygen mask on. In a lot of ways, claustrophobic. Confining. When I got so hurt in the army, I didn’t feel it was so scary. One of the other soldiers, Bill Butler, a black guy from St. Louis, leaned me against a tree, took out his little morphine bag we all had with us, stuck the needle into my stomach, and squeezed the whole thing in. I couldn’t move, but you know what? I couldn’t feel any of those twenty-one holes either. It hurt more being this fat-ass than it hurt then.

  “Hello? Hello?” this umpire yelled, kneeling over me while I lay there in the skunk cabbage, by the side of Wood River.

  Other faces loomed over me. Two Little League teams, moms and dads, sisters, some grandparents, people from the Hope Valley Rescue Squad. They had cut off my shirt and pants, and I wanted to pretend I was dead rather than spread this blubber out in front of them.

  “Thank you,” I said quietly to the priest, my words muffled by the oxygen mask. A huge roar went out from the crowd. One of the rescue-squad men made a victory sign, and everyone began to applaud.

  They carried me up the slope behind an elementary school, where I had ended my float, and loaded me into the rescue wagon. Two medics, the umpire, and the two Little League baseball captains climbed in and rode with me to the community hospital.

  My clothes were wet and cut, so the hospital gave me a papery pair of pajamas to wear. My nose was broken, and I had a little bruise over my right eye. Also two hip pointers and a bruised kidney. The priest stayed with me. I was embarrassed to be so much trouble, but I was grateful he was there. I gave one of the nurses my name and told her I had insurance, but I wasn’t sure what it was. I’d never needed it before. She kept looking up at Father Benny like she didn’t believe me.

  After about two hours, a young lady doctor with a kind of permanent sneer
gave me two prescriptions and an instruction sheet on kidneys. It said to drink lots of water and not to lie on the kidney for a while. Then they released me from the emergency room. I walked with Father Benny, still in my paper pajamas, to the hospital entrance, and we took a cab to Holy Ghost Catholic Church. It was set back from the main street in Hope Valley, and we turned down a narrow paved road to the small white clapboard church.

  It was getting dark by now. It might have been six or seven when we walked around the back of the church to an even smaller white cottage. I followed the priest into the house and then into the kitchen. He pulled out a blue kitchen chair for me, and I sat at the table.

  “Can I get you a sandwich or anything?” Father Benny Gallo asked.

  “A sandwich would be good.”

  “Tuna,” he said. “You’ll love this.”

  I sat in his tiny kitchen while he quickly and expertly put the sandwich together. I had cold bottled water, too.

  “Good?”

  “Very good. Thank you.”

  I chewed slowly. Father Benny’s tuna salad topped my pop’s by about a mile. In fact, since my pop’s awful fishing sandwiches, cut too solid with too much mayo, I don’t remember the last time I’d had a tuna.

  The priest tinkered around the kitchen, so as not to stare at me while I ate. I appreciated that. I could not bear to be watched while I ate. I felt I should apologize for feeding my mountain of flesh.

  “You’re on the road,” he said over his shoulder. “You’re on the road like the fifties. Hard times. Bad times, really. But we do go on, don’t we? The human spirit. We go on.”

  I didn’t understand, but I nodded at him, even though he was at the sink and his back was turned.

  “The emergency-room doctor told me those were bullet wounds—No, sorry, forget that, I promised myself I wouldn’t ask.”

  “Vietnam,” I said, with my mouth full of his wonderful sandwich.

  “Awful. Horrible.”

  “No, no, really. This is the best tuna-fish sandwich I have ever had.”

  “Really?”

  “The best.”

  “I squeeze a little lemon. Not much mayonnaise. Celery. Very healthy.”

  “Good, too.”

  “The doctor said there were fourteen wounds . . . holes.”

  “Twenty-one. I’m fine.”

  “Horrible.”

  “No, really.”

  “Horrible, horrible.”

  I finished the sandwich and the water.

  “Another one?”

  Strangely, I was full. Father Benny dried his hands and sat across from me at the small kitchen table.

  “Bitterness over such an old war is not good, my friend. It’s time to put it behind you.”

  “I’m not bitter at all. I don’t think about it.”

  The priest looked at me with understanding and smiled sadly.

  “Well, if twenty-one bullets didn’t pull you into bitterness, then whatever did must have been horrible.”

  “I’m not bitter.”

  “Look . . .”

  “Smithy,” I said, shaking his hand, “Smithy Ide.”

  “Father Benny Gallo.”

  “I know.”

  “Look, Smithy. I’m a little younger than you. You’re about what? Fifty? Fifty-five?”

  I was forty-three. I ran my fingers over my mouth.

  “I know I may seem out of line, but I’d feel remiss if I didn’t point out to you that homelessness is not a thing that simply happens. It’s a result of a great many factors, and there are many people and agencies that understand this and want to help. I probably could name you twenty different people active in the greater Providence area alone.”

  “A lot of people are nice,” I said.

  “They are. They are nice. So before we throw our hands up and go ‘on the road,’ we should reach out to them.”

  Father Benny Gallo took my hands in his. They were the hands you’d expect from an outdoor kind of priest who umpired Little League games.

  “Don’t give up, Smithy Ide. Fight it. Fight it. I have to fight myself, too. Every day. I want to stand up and say, ‘I’ve had it.’ But I don’t. I go on. I push on through, you see. I push. An archaic church, an unappreciative little town, an empty rectory. I don’t know. I had envisioned a kind of pastor-and-flock situation, a Bing Crosby thing. An amazed congregation, but . . . well, I just don’t know. Are you Catholic?”

  “Sure,” I said. Actually not, but they use the word “Catholic” all the time in the Episcopal Church.

  “Three,” he said, holding up three fingers with an edge in his voice, “count them, three guys made monsignor this year, and every one of them graduated seminary with me and took vows with Bishop Fuget with me, and now they’re monsignor. I’ve had Holy Ghost in Hope Valley for eleven years, and still I’m only an assistant pastor and there’s no damn pastor here at all. See? What I’m . . . what I’m trying to say here is, you can’t give up.”

  “Okay.”

  “Poverty, homelessness, a simple bicycle—”

  “My bike,” I said. “Is it . . . ?”

  “One of the boys said he and his dad would take it home and see if they could fix it. The pitcher, I think. Baptist. And it’s not, by the way, that I feel any resentment whatsoever toward the good bishop, but one would have to ask about the blatant effeminacy shared by all three brand-spanking-new monsignors and Queenie Fuget. You see what it is, is the absolute inability of the diocese to forgive and forget.”

  Father Benny paused and rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand. Suddenly I was as tired as I’d ever been. I could feel my heart slowing.

  “Nineteen eighty-six. Nineteen eighty-six. Things were going fine. Great. I was working mass and confession at the Scout camp up the road, maintaining Holy Ghost here. Church school. Commissioner of girls’ softball, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Then, well . . . I don’t know. Well, to be honest, Jeneen Dovrance. Jeneen Dovrance. God!”

  Father Benny stood up and slapped his chest. “This was a woman—not, no, not a married woman, no, just a mother of one of the Scouts, and she cornered me after mass at the camp to ask me about her boy’s God and Country Award. Jeneen was a divorced mother with two boys and this little beauty spot, here, on her cheek, and violet eyes. I swear to God. Violet. Lashes this long. You know, a priest trains himself to look away. Not unlike a married man, to look away. And I looked away, even though, as I said, the eyes seemed to me almost an aberration of beauty. Violet.

  “Later that evening she . . . called again. Providence. East side. Family money and all. She said she needed to ask a couple of questions about the God and Country. The Catholic award is called Ad Altare Dei. I explained that although it’s given in conjunction with Scouts, it’s not really a Scouting award. It’s bestowed by a religious leader. It involves special service and so forth. She was extremely keen on the idea of her Scout earning the award and asked me if I thought her priest, the guy over at Immaculate Conception, was up to helping the boy earn the award.”

  He paced a little. I felt tired. Sleepy.

  “I don’t know why, but I said I’d come over and maybe we could set up an independent course of study and he could essentially earn the award independently. Well, it was one of those grand houses. Thayer Street. Actual Tiffany stained glass above the front door. Elegant. It was Saturday afternoon. April. There was a light drizzle, and the damn old Volkswagen of mine with the bald tires . . . I mean . . . I slipped all over the place, but I finally made it. She met me at the front door in these, oh, simple yet stylish yellow linen slacks with a rose-colored blouse. Her hair, her fine brown hair, was pulled high, and a few strands waved carelessly in the breeze of her walk when she took me around to the living room. There was a fire, and it drove the chill completely from the room.”

  He paused for a moment and remembered. I worked to keep my eyes open. Bethany stood by the watercooler.

  “Her son was out, but I sat on this leather couch, and it was c
ool, and she sat next to me. She smelled like lemons and lilac. This really has nothing to do with anything, but later that evening, in my little sitting room upstairs, I wrote a poem entitled ‘Lemons and Lilacs’:

  A woman resplendent

  of smells repentant

  to run tormented

  on legs cemented.

  I can smell the lemons, the lilacs whenever I recite that. It’s a prayer. It’s a mantra. Jeneen Dovrance had this young skin, pink like a schoolgirl’s, even though she was in her mid-thirties, and her lovely full breasts pressed against the rose blouse.”

  He stopped and bit his lower lip, and his mouth trembled a little. I woke up. Bethany disappeared.

  “They pressed against the blouse?” I asked, needing to say something.

  “Like they were, somehow, captive. They yearned, actually. I gave her the packet for the Ad Altare Dei, and beside each requirement I noted how other boys had accomplished them, and at the bottom of the set of papers I included my name and address. Jeneen put her hand—her pink, almost translucent hand—onto my knee and thanked me, over and over, for making the trip and being so attentive. I got up, but as I did, my own hand brushed ever so reassuringly on hers. It was a small moment, but of such intensity I can’t begin to say. Anyway I . . . called her the very next day under the pretense of concern over the Scouting thing, but I’ll say it right out: I simply had to hear her voice and imagine her ensemble. Is that so wrong?”

  He looked at me and seemed angry.

  “No,” I said.

  “It’s not a human vow. Historically it’s not grounded in anything. Property, money, I don’t know, but I don’t believe that the church can justify it.”

  He looked out the window at the dark.

  “I had sex a few times in high school,” he sort of mumbled.

  I had been with three women. Been with them in bed, sexually I mean. They were all in-country and prostitutes. I paid them ten dollars in American money, and they were very happy, even though I could feel how much they hated me, months after. Like they put a curse on me so I would remember how they felt. I was the beast Bethany used to say I’d be. My fat ass, my hopeless self. Even when I smiled at a woman, I felt I was inflicting myself into her nice life. Sex.