The Memory of Running

by Ron McLarty

Lemon juice

  Lemon rind (grated)

  Butter

  Dry mustard (tsp.)

  ½ cup currant jelly

  Paprika (tsp.)

  Heat the oven to 350°.

  Boil the potatoes.

  Dip the chops in flour and brown.

  Arrange chops and potatoes in baking dish.

  Cover with sauce made from boiling other ingredients.

  Cook 15 minutes.

  We never ate it, because Mom never cooked it, but it is a very special and clear memory that Jeff Greene had of his honeymoon.

  On the third evening, after a dinner of haddock with cucumber mayonnaise, Jeff and Bethany sat on the porch and watched the first stars twinkle over the Presidential Mountain Range. They held hands, and Jeff felt a contentment he had never known. He was so happy to be on that porch with my wonderful sister that for the first time in a long time, he wasn’t worried about the auto shop or his future. Bethany shivered a little, so Jeff went inside to get something to put around her shoulders. When he came back out on the porch, Bethany was gone.

  “Just like that,” he said, over and over, “just like that.”

  Jeff called for her, then looked around the lodge, and finally alerted the Thatchers to the possibility that Bethany was missing. By morning the police had been called, and around noon Jeff called my pop, who called me at Goddard.

  “Hello?”

  “Smithy?”

  “Is it Bethany?”

  “Come home.”

  Pop had gone to Woody’s Gas Station and gotten a road map of New England. He had it spread across the kitchen table by the time I arrived from work.

  “Your mother’s by the phone in the den. Look here.”

  Pop took a red crayon and made a large circle around North Conway, New Hampshire. The red circle also took in parts of Maine. He looked up at me, standing there in my uniform jumpsuit.

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” he said.

  “I was thinking about Bethany. What happened?”

  “She walked off. It’s got her again. Jeff called about twelve this afternoon. She walked off last night.”

  “From here?” I said, pointing inside Pop’s circle.

  “Look close here. Here’s North Conway, East Conway, Kearsarge, and little tiny Echo Lake, where the Level Wind Lodge is. But look in Maine. Look how close Bridgton is. That’s Highland Lake. That’s our summer lake.”

  “You think she went to Bridgton, Pop?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s a lead.”

  Mom packed us a lunch, and Pop threw some of his stuff into a small blue American Tourister suitcase. It was decided that Mom had better hold down the fort and be close to the phone. After stopping by my terrible apartment in Pawtucket for some clothing, we drove up to the Level Wind Lodge, alternating the driving duties.

  Pop wasn’t a small-talking kind of man, and so for the most part it was a quiet drive, except for a couple of minutes before we ate the lunch Mom had made for us, when my pop said, “You ask yourself . . . I mean, it’s only natural, I guess, you grow older and wonder at the steps you took along the way. But your mother and I . . . so hard . . . what do you do? How . . . I don’t know. How does a man know what to do? Your perfect daughter, beautiful, dear child, and then the years all pile up. I’ll tell you this much that it took getting to be an old fart to learn, I’ll tell you this much: It’s been rain on the base paths. . . . It’s been a headfirst dive into muddy second. I wish to Christ I never was born.”

  I was riding passenger, so I gave him half a bologna and cheese and coffee from the thermos. I ate the other half and shared the coffee. We took 495 around Boston, then 93 into New Hampshire. I switched to driver, and we shared another of Mom’s bologna and cheeses.

  “I didn’t mean that about wishing I was never born. I wouldn’t have had you guys then. You and Bethany.”

  “I know, Pop,” I said. He didn’t hear me. He turned his crying head to the side.

  73

  San Gabriel was hot. I was tuned for a different end of October, for some chill, for some damp. It was stale and windless and hot. I pulled off onto the sidewalk of Valley Boulevard and took off my sweats, down to a blue T-shirt and baggy running shorts. My socks felt wet, and I took them off, too, and aired out the dogs, I finished the last banana and bottled water. I sat on the curb between two cars and enjoyed the food.

  When I rode again, I followed Valley into Mission Road and, like a miracle, came onto the fat beginning of Sunset Boulevard. Again, it’s amazing to be a man doing a boy’s ride or something. I only know there is no way on earth that Smithy Ide could go where he was going, to Venice, to Cheng Ho Funeral Home, any other way. The two thin tires took more than my disappearing body to Bethany. It took whatever me was. Not new or old, but just me. I knew I would be able to see her, and I knew she would let me.

  At first my ride was easy and secure and reassured. I told myself over and over that there was no hurry. Starting so early had given me a jump, and even with the two flats, I could be in Venice by four or five. But my pace picked up when Bethany passed me on the back of a low and sleek Mercedes-Benz. She smiled and laughed and called my name.

  “Hook’s here!” I shouted, and pushed my bike harder onto the flat plain of Sunset at West Hollywood.

  I ran a red light, another. I glided smoothly away from restaurants and office buildings, past huge homes and hotels. At the mouth of Coldwater Canyon, I heard brakes squeal in my wake. I was flying. Ahead, Bethany smiled and shouted and leaped in her wedding dress from car to car.

  “Hook’s here!” I screamed, the dry air pinching my hairy face.

  I rode that last part of Sunset like a cartoon. I still imagine a line of fire behind me. Miles and miles of speed and shouts. And then I was standing against a rail, in a long, thin parking lot, looking out at the ocean. I had never seen a beach so wide and so empty. A tall man in a three-piece suit leaned stomach first against the rail and worked a kite out over the beach and over the highway. He worked it with string in both hands, and, really, you could say he was piloting it.

  “Is that Venice?” I said, pointing down to the beach.

  “That?”

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  The kite soared almost straight up, then stopped and swerved to the left. It was red, but it was so high I couldn’t tell if there was a design on it.

  “See that cement road on the beach?”

  I looked. “Okay.”

  “Get on the road. It’s a bike road. Joggers. Go left, and that goes into Venice.”

  In ten minutes I was walking my bike down the bike road. A cool breeze came off the Pacific. I didn’t care. I took my T-shirt off and let the sun hit me. I had not walked on a beach since I could remember. I started an easy pedal.

  I moved my heart around, because now I was afraid. Looking back, I was more than likely afraid of an ending, because an ending usually meant a beginning. But it was a real fear, and so I pedaled slow and moved my heartbeat as completely as I could.

  I have never been in a place like where the bike road came to. I remember it, and I’m pretty sure most of what I remember was real. Of course, I understood my vision of Bethany for what it was. She was in Pop’s baseball uniform and walked a little ahead of me, pointing with delicate fingers at the street bands and jugglers and mimes and dancers and speakers and weightlifters and people getting outdoor massages from a seven-foot blond man in a Superman suit. Behind a basketball court, I found a men’s room. I looked at myself in the mirror. I needed a sink bath and to neaten my beard. I walked to my bike and took a towel and shaving supplies back into the bathroom. There is something so nice about water, that’s all. I fixed myself, rolled the razor neatly in the towel, and walked back to my bike. Or where my bike had been.

  “Hey!” I shouted. “Hey! My bike!” I looked around in every direction and ran to the main bike road.

  “Anybody seen my bike?”

  I waited as if somebod
y was going to say something, but nobody did. I saw a tall, thin black girl looking at me.

  “Somebody . . . somebody stole my bike.”

  She smiled at me, and I guess I smiled at her. “Want your hair in a ponytail? Beads and wire?”

  “A ponytail?”

  “Free, ’cause somebody stole your bike.”

  Somebody steals bikes and there’s ponytails. I don’t get it.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Sit.”

  I sat in a short director’s chair she had set on the sand just off the bike road. She combed my hair back.

  “I . . . don’t have a lot of hair.”

  I looked down. She had a hand-painted sign stuck in the sand. It said HAIRBEADSBYSHABBA.

  “What color beads?” she asked.

  “Red? You think?”

  “Red’s nice.”

  Shabba went to work and hummed a little song, and every now and then somebody went by and shouted to her and laughed, and she shouted, too, and laughed. In a few minutes, I had a small ponytail and red beads. She held a hand mirror off to the side so I could see.

  “That’s nice,” I said.

  “ ’Cause somebody stole your bike. Lots of people, though. Most don’t steal.”

  “Most people are really nice,” I said.

  “Most people are the best,” she said, with a wonderful smile.

  “Do you know where the colonnades are?”

  She pointed. “You see the old tile roof?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Colonnades.”

  I moved through the crowd and across a tiny walkway, and then I was standing in front of a circular roadway with the old building facing me. I pulled my T-shirt back on. I could smell chicken somewhere, and the chicken was frying. And then I could smell the Pacific Ocean and things that were in it. And then I walked across the roadway and behind the colonnade.

  74

  For a few years after the honeymoon, whenever we needed anything that Jeff’s store carried, we’d drive out on a Saturday and visit and buy. Then one day Jeff told us that his feelings wouldn’t be hurt if we wanted to buy from somewhere else. It all just got too hard for Jeff. He met another woman. It was very difficult, I know, with the Ides around, even though it was only out of our concern for him that we came to the store. So Jeff Greene drifted out of our lives, and Pop became a Bethany detective, and Mom sat by the phone, and I became a mountain. People separated by grief. Sharing the unshareable. But in the first days following her leaving of the Level Wind Lodge, what was shared was a hope.

  Jeff was on the porch when we pulled up. He was sitting with a young Conway policeman and was angry. He met us at the steps.

  “You will not believe what this guy is asking me,” Jeff said, thumbing in the direction of the cop.

  “Sir, I was only—”

  “He asked me if we’d been fighting. God!”

  “Sir, often in a domestic—”

  “Domestic! God!”

  Pop went past Jeff and took the officer aside.

  “She just walked away,” Jeff continued. “She just said good riddance and walked away. We were having a great time. The food . . . I mean . . . well, she planned it. Jesus! God!”

  “It’s the voice. We’ll find her.”

  “She just walked away.”

  “It’s not her, Jeff. I know that sounds stupid, but it’s not Bethany. It’s the voice.”

  “The Thatchers have a room for you and your father.”

  “We’ll find her.”

  “I don’t know. God.”

  I put our stuff in the room. Pop got all the dope from the cop. She’d been missing now for twenty-four hours. The Mountain Club had done a thorough search of White Horse Trail, which was connected up to the small path she must have taken off the porch. They had fanned out and covered Red Bridge Link Trail, White Horse Ledge Summit, Bryce Path Junction, Bryce Path Link Trail, and the Echo Lake parking area. The police were going to get their drag boat into the lake in the morning, but there were a lot of people around and nobody had seen anyone in the lake or even heard any splashing or anything, so Pop was assured that this was only precautionary.

  The next morning we drove slowly for three or four hours, in and out of North Conway and Conway and the small, hilly roads around the town. In the afternoon we moved through Freyburg, over the viaduct at Moosepond, and into Bridgton, Maine, on Highland Lake, where the Ides vacationed until the car accident.

  New buds came out late in Maine. New leaves were only now beginning to unravel. The lake looked ice cold. We untied the rope strung across the dirt road down to the cabin. The NOTRESPASSING sign clanged on the ground. “Pop, I don’t know.”

  “See, she could have gotten a ride or something. You just don’t know. We don’t know.”

  We always came in August. Pop’s friend rented it out June to August in two-week blocks. It looked sad and cold and lonely coming out of the winter. We got out of the car.

  “Bethany!” Pop called.

  “Bethany!” I called, too.

  “Honey, it’s me. It’s Jeff.”

  We stood still and quiet and listened. It seemed very cold. Heavy, gray clouds passed over us. Pop walked down to the waterfront. Jeff followed him, and I walked around the cabin to the side door. It was open. Someone had smashed the bolt lock that was secured with a combination lock.

  “Bethany?”

  I walked into the kitchen and then the small living room.

  “Hook’s here,” I said like a stupe, and walked into the first bedroom where Mom and Pop slept. The bed had a clear plastic covering to help keep out the moisture, and it smelled musty. I lit a smoke and looked into the bunk room.

  “Smithy?”

  “In here, Pop. Somebody banged off that lock.”

  “Nothing down at the waterfront.”

  “Nothing here either.”

  We closed the door behind us. Jeff found a sturdy stick that he propped under the knob, and we walked up the path to the car. When we heard the engine turn over, it froze us in our tracks. It revved loud and hot in the spring woods. High in the new branches, birds squawked.

  We ran in a line onto the dirt road directly behind the wagon. It jerked forward. The driver scrunched down in the seat and revved hotter and hotter. We stepped to it, and it jerked forward again. We moved faster, its jerk faster and longer. Finally Jeff and I broke into a full run behind Pop’s station wagon and were engulfed in a storm of tire-thrown rocks and dirt. The car roared up the camp road, past the rope fence and beyond. We stood again in our line, hearing Pop’s car slice through the cold.

  “Was that her, son?”

  “Bethany?” Jeff asked. “My Bethany? Stealing a goddamn car? God! No!”

  “Was it?”

  “I don’t think so, Pop,” I said.

  But I had heard it, if only between the revs, heard that scratch of a voice I had heard all my life. In the cold. Under the dangerous clouds.

  75

  The Cheng Ho Funeral Home was a two-story, square white stucco house with an orange tile roof. The front door faced a parking lot, which was chained off and empty. Lights were on in the second floor even though it wasn’t dark yet. I stepped over the chain and walked up to the front door. There was a sign with an arrow taped under the bell that read OFFICEINREAR. I walked around to the back of the building where the driveway was curved and where two limousines and a white hearse were parked. On the other side of an open garage, I could hear the crowd from the bike road. I listened for a second, and then I knocked on the office door.

  A voice came over the intercom box. “Hello.”

  “Hello,” I said, and waited.

  “Yes?”

  “Oh, uh, . . . I’m Smithy . . . Smithson Ide, and you’ve got my sister.”

  “One moment, please.”

  A balding, middle-aged Chinese man unlocked the door and let me in. “I’m very sorry. Mr. Ide. Yes?”

  “Yes, I’m Smithson Ide.”

  “
Yes, yes. We have the Linn funeral at six, and I thought the family might have arrived early. Sorry. I’m Larry Ho. Please follow me.” Larry Ho wore blue suit slacks, a white shirt, and a deep maroon tie. I followed him down a narrow corridor into a bright, cheerful office.

  “Sit, please.”

  He walked behind his desk. Before he sat, he took the blue suit jacket that hung behind his desk chair and slipped it on. He had a file on top of his desk.

  “We received a call that you would be coming perhaps today,” he said as he opened the folder.

  I felt achy in my stomach. I tried to be calm myself.

  “My brother Al,” Larry said, “my partner, made the transfer quite a while ago. I think it’s a lovely thing that you have made this journey. Often—”

  “Somebody stole my bike,” I said. Stupidness never lets up.

  “Your bike?”

  “See, I’m not a bum or anything. I’ve just been riding. I mean . . .”

  “We never judge anyone,” he said, with a serious smile that I could believe. “Often people make very general suppositions about Al and myself. Undertakers? Funeral directors? Ghoulish suppositions. We cannot live lives and worry what others think. Our father taught us that.”

  “Cheng Ho?” I asked.

  “Archie.”

  “Oh.”

  “Cheng Ho was our granddad. Judge not, lest ye be judged. Good advice.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Larry’s smile left, and his eyes became pensive and even more serious. He stood and walked around the corner of his desk. His eyes narrowed on me. “Will you allow me to offer a thought?”

  “Sure.”

  “I understand your sister was a street person.”

  I had never heard it. I had known it and dreamed it, but I had never heard another human say it.

  “That it is a hard and unforgiving life is clear to you, I’m sure, but the aspect of physical deterioration is often alarming. Al has worked quite hard on Bethany, but I must tell you, Mr. Ide, the life of a street person is difficult.”

  I took a deep breath. The office smelled flowery and nice. “I know. I’m very thankful that you and your brother took care of my sister.”