The Memory of Running

by Ron McLarty

  So young John Bowen died too, just like his father, the captain, and so, for the second time in three days, Suzanne Bowen had to bury a loved one. It was clear from the very pretty and precise way that Rosalind Clarkson, who wrote the big book, described this burial scene, that it drove poor delicate Suzanne Bowen of Boston absolutely crazy. She sprawled over the grave of her boy and froze up and could not move, so great was her sorrow. For several days and bitter-cold nights, Suzanne lay over her son talking at the mound of dirt, as though she could bring him back by the sheer force of her wish to see him again, running and playing the way he did in the fields and woods around Boston. But finally, with the wagon horses starving and thirsty, she raised her head and realized that John Jr. was not coming back. She led the horses to a grassy hill and let them graze and drink from a pond. She wanted to just die, because her family had died, but something inside her that she never knew was there made her begin to do the things she would need to do to live out in that hard and beautiful part of the Colorado Rockies.

  She hitched up the horses and rode until she came to a gentle rise nestled against a larger hill where below, a small stream rolled down to the valley. She brought her wagon up snug against a large rock on the rise and placed rocks on the wooden spokes to stop them from rolling and began to prepare for some way to get through the winter.

  “Good book?”

  I hadn’t noticed the tent filling up or that 78, 79, and 80 were spreading out their things on the adjacent cots. They all had sweaty dark hair. Two were very hard-looking and athletic. They were shorter than the third one, who was also a little softer-looking. It was this one who asked about the book.

  “I think it is, but I’ve just started it, really.”

  “Cool,” she said.

  They looked pretty tired. Exhausted, maybe. Riding in the cold takes something out of you, although I had to admit I felt great, with a belly full of spaghetti and all. They picked up their bathroom stuff and some clothes and walked off, chatting away. I liked that these three girls were friends and were doing something odd, with hundreds of other odd people. About halfway through the tent, the one that had asked me about the book, 80, turned and waved to me as if she knew I’d be watching.

  Anyway, Suzanne Bowen anchored her wagon and then made a crude but effective corral out of dead branches and wood she found on the ground. She assembled the Franklin stove her husband had brought with them for California, and she bent its pipes out the front opening of the covered wagon so the wagon wouldn’t burn. She collected a huge stack of firewood and even planned how she would ration food for herself to get through this winter, which was obviously almost upon her. Suzanne did not have any idea why she did all this, because she had such a longing to be with her husband and her boy, yet something inside her, deep inside her, insisted on what she called “saving grace.”

  “That’s gotta be great. I mean, you’re really into that.”

  It was 80 again. The other two weren’t back yet. I saw that 80 had changed into a long, heavy green plaid nightshirt, buttoned to the neck, that seemed as big as a sleeping bag itself. Her thick hair was swept back and had comb marks on it. She had very white skin, and the rose in her cheeks from the wind looked painted on.

  “A friend of mine gave me the book. She said it was really about me, but I don’t know.”

  “Girlfriend?”

  “Huh?”

  “The friend who gave you the book.”

  “Oh . . . no, no. She’s married and everything. She makes rugs.”

  “Cool. I’m Chris.”

  “I’m Smithy.”

  “That’s a funny name. Nickname?”

  “Smithson, really.”

  “Smithson. Cool.”

  “My pop named me after Robert Smithson, who was a shortstop on the Cincinnati Redlegs in 1884. He turned the first double play.”

  “Cool.”

  One day I woke up and twenty years or so had gone by, and I realized I never spoke comfortably to anyone unless I had a buzz on. And even then it was always about nothing. So here is another thing. I speak now. I’m interested in people now. I want to know things.

  “We were just talking about how you ride. You ride great for an older guy.”

  I got red. I couldn’t talk. I mean . . . compliments.

  “I mean, older guys are cool. I mean . . . am I dumb or what? You ride great.”

  “You ride great, too.”

  Her friends came back, and I met them both, and they were named Rosie and Joanie. They had a day-care center they owned and operated in Boulder, Colorado. It was called The Company of Three. After a while they shut the big light off, and except for a scattering of flashlights, most of the tent settled in for the night. We’d be off at six forty-five the next morning, and sleep was like food, really. The girls whispered good night to each other. Before Chris got into her sleeping bag, she knelt down at the side of my cot and kissed my fat, balding, scraggy face right on its mouth.

  “Good night, Smithson,” she whispered.

  “Uh-huh,” I choked, like an idiot in a bag.

  54

  Georgina Glass picked up the phone on the second ring. It was night, and I had borrowed the number from Bethany’s private address book.

  “Hello.”

  “Dr. Glass? It’s Smithson Ide,” I said deeply and formally.

  There was a slight pause on the Glass end. “How did you get this number?”

  “I got it from my sister.”

  “Bethany gave it to you?”

  “No, I looked in her address book.”

  “So then it’s not only a violation of my privacy, but it’s a violation of your sister’s as well.”

  It’s true that I was in the early stages of my dissipation, but I was not drunk—in fact, I had not had a drink. Still, being sober could not make my words come any smoother or easier in this difficult challenge of human communication.

  “Wiggy’s gone. I think . . . I think . . . Could my sister start hurting things, Dr. Glass?”

  Another pause. This time I didn’t feel anything. Anger or anything.

  “Who is Wiggy?”

  “Wiggy is Uncle Count’s dog. He’s a beagle. Whenever you go over there, he’s always jumping around. He never gets tired and stuff. Aunt Paula gave Bethany a shower, and Wiggy was all jumping around and things, and after everybody left, Count couldn’t find him.”

  “Maybe he ran away.”

  “Count said in dog years he’s fifty-five. I don’t think old dogs run away.”

  “No, you think your sister murders old dogs.”

  Now it was my turn to go silent. I remembered how I would call for a bedpan in the army hospital and the orderly telling me that I didn’t really need one because he wanted to finish his smoke.

  “I’m just scared that maybe—”

  “Look, Mr. Ide,” she said, sternly cutting me off, “if there is one thing you should know about that lovely and, yes, disturbed young woman you call your sister, it is that she would be incapable of doing anything harmful to anyone or anything.”

  “Good,” I said. Georgina Glass had made me cry again, but she didn’t know it.

  “More important, this telephone number is my private number, and only individuals whom I have given this number are free to call it. I have not given this number to you. Do you understand my meaning?”

  I had driven to Woody’s Gas Station to call from a corner phone booth, because I didn’t want any of the Ides to know I called. I was cold, and every time a car or truck whizzed by, the wet evening got wetter. I needed to have something to drink.

  “Yes,” I said, “I understand your meaning.”

  Dr. Georgina Glass hung the phone up immediately.

  After I had peed myself, the orderly got so angry he made me lie in it for two hours before he changed my sheets. By then I was chapped raw.

  55

  Twenty-three miles out of Winslow, the promised flat road became a hill and then a mountain. The road club ha
d gotten permission, for this big event, to use Interstate 40. Besides the hills and mountains, the hurricane-like truck winds made for a treacherous approach into Flagstaff. Sometimes I could feel the drivers trying to get too close. I don’t know. It was a feeling. But it was another very pretty day and I stayed with 78, 79, and 80 until I saw Bethany on top of a slow-moving oil tanker, and I pushed close behind it as we struggled up one of the steeper climbs. The altitude no longer affected my breathing. It’s a curious thing, as my mom would say, but after you get used to it, the thin, high air gives your whole body a lighter sensation.

  I took my lunch at a Marriott hotel. I pulled off the road, walked my bike into the courtyard pool area, and just sat at a table. No one was outside, because, unless you were moving, it was pretty cold. The Seswan representatives had happily restocked our lunch packs with juice, cookies, and huge hoagie sandwiches. I added the banana, of course. It was good sitting there at a white metal table with the cold pool water, smooth as a morning lake. I had made good time from Winslow to Flagstaff, and Williams was probably only another forty miles or so. I closed my eyes a minute and listened to my easy heart. Sometimes these few silent, eyes-closed moments gave back more than a night’s sleep. I followed the beat of my heart away from my chest and into my head, then down to my sloping shoulders and into each arm. By the time I had moved the beat down to my feet and into the ground, I felt a sort of release. Being away from myself, but being closer at the same time. I’m probably not saying it right. I’m not a lousy packed suitcase anymore, I guess is what I mean. I’m only taking what I need.

  When I opened my eyes, the sun had peeked behind a perfect round cloud for the first time all day, and the pool water, so placid a second ago, now bristled in the breeze. Bethany stood on it, and the lumps of wave licked her feet. She was eighteen, and her prom dress and Mom’s jewelry made her look even younger. She glided at first, as if on skates, and then, turning, she rose above the pool and shimmered in the cooling air.

  “Bethany,” I said evenly and slowly. The word felt good to say, and I said it again.

  56

  The ease with which Georgina Glass could upset me was astounding. When I think about it now, years later, I think that Dr. Glass knew exactly what she was doing. I was a cipher, sort of, in a medical career that was specializing in something that, with all her training, she knew nothing about at all. I think she knew I felt that about psychiatrists, and why not? So she always made a beeline for my tear ducts, no matter how important the subject or how desperate I sounded. I understand her, then, but I don’t understand her. So what else is new?

  I hung up the phone and left Woody’s Gas Station and drove directly to Bovi’s Tavern. Some of the guys I had gone to high school with were usually there, the ones who you always assumed would be there. I sat at the least crowded corner of the bar and ordered some Narragansett. I had four quick glasses, then switched to screwdrivers. I had six or seven, then drove to my apartment on Newport Avenue. I hated this place for the whole twenty-something years I lived there, but I hated it the most those first few months. I never put up a picture or bought furniture that I liked or anything. I always hoped that pretty soon I’d be out of there.

  I fixed myself another screwdriver and loosened my belt and pants because, I guess, of the Bovi’s Tavern beer and pretzels. I sat down at one end of the old sofa Pop had let me have from the basement. I wanted to call someone. I wanted to talk to someone. Not about Bethany or anything, just a conversation where one person says something and you listen and then you say something and that person listens.

  The phone rang, and I picked it up on the second ring.

  “Hello?” I said.

  I thought I heard some breathing, but I couldn’t be sure. Then the phone buzzed. I hung it up and sat back down. A few minutes later, it rang again, and I picked it up again on the second ring.

  “Hello,” I said, as pleasantly as a drunken man can.

  This time I did hear something. Maybe breathing. The phone was connected. No buzz, only an uncomfortable pause.

  “Hello. Hello,” I said.

  In all that silence, I felt some kind of distance, as though this particular call could have been from Russia or Australia or Vietnam. When it spoke, I couldn’t tell if it was a man’s voice or a woman’s voice. It was like a croak from a lily pad or a yell from an escape tunnel.

  “Bow-wow,” it said. “Bow-wow. Bow-wow. Bow-wow.”

  57

  For Suzanne of the Aspens, the coming of that first great Rocky Mountain winter brought amazing hardships. Snows that drove on day after day, herds of elk that actually ate part of her firewood store. If it weren’t for this “state of grace” she claimed she found herself in, there was no way this Boston woman could have survived. Yet every day she trudged out of her wagon dressed in layers of her husband’s clothing and brushed the snow from the wagon’s sagging canvas top. She added to her firewood by pulling down the dry branches of fir and aspen. She boiled the snow to drink. Above her, Indians as strange and fearsome as anything she could have imagined, wearing deer hide and heavily armed, sat watching her. Suzanne Bowen showed no fear. Instead, every day she would walk through the heavy drifts of snow with a small sack of oats, or corn, or dried beans and, without looking up, would leave the sack in plain view. In the morning the offering was always gone. Often in its place was a feather.

  I twined my fingers under my head, leaned back onto my bunched-up sleeping bag, and closed my eyes for a second. Outside Flagstaff, the road seemed to rise in a constant ascent. It wasn’t like I was riding anymore. I was a mountain climber. By Bellemont I had hit the cusp of Bill Williams Mountain, which was ninety-two hundred feet high and seemed to be placed there by rival bicycle clubs. This was a kind of low point for me.

  Many younger riders didn’t seem to have the trouble I was having. At one distinct point, I was balanced on my bike but I couldn’t move it forward as nine or ten happy, orange-and-black–clothed kids shot by. I solved the problem by walking it up the great hill. The twenty-nine miles between Bellemont and Williams were a repeat of my mountain strategy. Walk up. Coast down. It was dark when I glided into Williams and followed the signs to the tennis club where we’d stay the night. The nets had been taken down, with the same deal going that we had in the tent. In fact, the men’s and ladies’ rooms, the trucks parked at either side of the tennis club, were the same ones as in Winslow. I washed up, ate an enormous chicken casserole and salad at my bike, and walked into the court to pick a cot.

  “Smithson! Smithson!”

  I looked in the direction of my name, and Chris, number 80, was frantically waving.

  “We saved you a place! Come on!”

  I made my way through the lines of cots. I noticed there seemed to be fewer people than last night. Chris was standing with her hands on her hips and a big smile. She had on bib overalls with a green sweatshirt underneath. Her hair was combed sort of to the side with a green ribbon bunching a handful of it together. She looked very young and not at all exhausted, which the ride had made me.

  “Hi,” she said, bounding over to me and standing about one inch away from my sweaty old person.

  “Hi,” I said, trying to sound, you know, young.

  Then she kissed me. Like last night. Quickly. And happily sat on the edge of one of the cots. I could taste her lipstick, and it lingered in my beard. She tasted like apples.

  “Sit,” she said, patting the space of cot next to her.

  I put my saddlebags down and sat. I didn’t know what to do, so I started taking my stuff out of the bags.

  “Know how many people made it?” she asked.

  “Made what?”

  “Made it over Bill Williams Mountain? Without help, I mean. Fifty-two. That’s it.”

  “Fifty-two? That’s not many.”

  “We stopped at the rest area where the spring comes out under the picnic table. Know the one?”

  “Yeah. About halfway up the mountain.”

  “
We stopped, had the rest of our lunch, and just couldn’t get going again. Took one of the vans into Williams.”

  “I think that it’s smart to know when to stop something.”

  “Cool.”

  Chris leaned on her elbows and threw her head back. Her small apple breasts held on to my eyes. They were happy breasts. They were the Golden Delicious of breasts. I turned away and pretended to be looking for something in my bag.

  “You made it. You’re in great shape,” she said.

  “I’m tired. I’m very tired, I think.”

  “Yeah, but you made it. How old are you?”

  I looked at my forearms as if I had to consider my age. Actually, I had just noticed I could see veins in my arms and a certain shape to myself.

  “I’m forty-three,” I said, still looking at my arms.

  “You’re in great shape.”

  There was a pause, and I knew it was my turn to fill it, but I didn’t, or I couldn’t. After a few more seconds, she said, “Are you married or anything?”

  “I’m not married.”

  “You don’t seem gay or anything.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You’re just out here. You made it over the mountain. It’s so cool.”

  Bethany stood posed on a cot several rows over. Her eyes were on me. She wore the kilt and the hair of the beautiful girl who had visited me in the Denver hospital. I would have liked to have said her name again, but I didn’t.

  “Do you live in Gallup?”

  “No, I’m not from around here.”

  “Colorado?”

  Chris wanted to know, I guess.

  “East Providence, Rhode Island.”

  “Rhode Island! You came out from Rhode Island? For this?”

  Across the room Bethany danced above her cot and smiled at me.

  “I didn’t know you had these things. No, I saw everybody and sort of joined up. I started riding one night, and here I am. I’m going to Los Angeles. I’m going for my sister.”