The Runner

by Cynthia Voigt

  “Who does?” Honey asked, sliding in close beside Frank.

  “Time for another round, don’t you think?” Frank asked, taking her hand.

  “Sure, but you’re not going to change the subject on me like that. I know you weren’t talking about me, on account of I do not have a heart of gold. That’s not my big attraction.”

  “The kid’s sister.” Frank waved at the bartender.

  “She’s the one you’re married to?”

  “Well,” Frank said, “what can I say?” He grinned at Bullet.

  You can say yes or no, Bullet thought, then he shrugged. Nothing to do with him.

  “Hey, handsome, how about a dance?” Honey asked him. “Would you do that?”

  “I don’t know how.”

  “No kidding? Really? I guess it’s time you learned then, hunh? Or how you going to show the girls your stuff. Come on, I’ll teach you.”

  He followed her out onto the dance floor. She led him into the center, winding among couples, making sure he stayed with her by holding on to his hand. She knew he didn’t much want to dance, knew he would have slipped away if he could have. In the midst of the slowly moving couples, she turned to look up at him. She told him where to put his right hand and held out her right hand for him to take with his left. “Then you just kind of move your feet to the rhythm, and I follow your lead.” Her face laughed up at him. Bullet tried a couple of steps, feeling clumsy because of having to move her body around too. She giggled. He let her go.

  “Hey, don’t get angry,” she said, opening her eyes big and wide and looking up at him to make him feel taller than he was. “Look, it’s like this—” She demonstrated a sliding step, holding on to his left hand. She had, he saw, green powder on her eyelids, and her eyebrows had been painted into an arc they didn’t naturally grow in: this close, he could see how she had layered on her makeup, he could almost pick off the coatings of mascara on her eyelashes. Liza’s hair flowed like a river down her back, a honey-colored river; her eyes were hazel but her lashes were thick and dark; he could almost hear her, deep inside his head, singing in her honey-colored voice, “Will there be any stars, any stars in my crown.” Bullet looked down at Honey’s bright hair, smelled her dusty perfume and leaned back, away.

  The metallic voice on the jukebox continued singing, “. . . and while they were dancing, my friend stole my darling from me.”

  Step, slide, step, slide. Bullet looked around at the other couples, some so close to each other they were just rocking from side to side, not moving around at all: How long does this last?

  “You’re Frankie’s old friend,” Honey teased him. “You going to steal me away?”

  “No,” Bullet said quickly. A flicker of anger went across her face, but she giggled at him as if he had said something funny.

  “Tell me about your sister,” she said. “You know, what she’s like and all.”

  Why.

  “Is she pretty? I guess probably, or she was, anyway; that’s the kind of girl Frankie goes for. He told me how she won’t give him a divorce, even though he hasn’t been near her for three years or more . . . but you’re her brother, you know all that already. I guess she’s the homebody type, is she? Or is afraid to try it on her own so she needs the security of the wedding band on her finger.”

  I wouldn’t know.

  “But you ought to tell her— Oh, not about me, he’s come around a few times on shore leave but he won’t be coming back again, I bet. And if he does, I don’t think I’ll want to see him.”

  Why are you talking to me about this.

  “Frankie’s fun . . . for a while . . . but not what a girl wants to attach herself to, if you take my meaning.”

  And I don’t want to.

  “Fun is okay—and he really is fun—but—” She laughed happily, remembering. Bullet was waiting for the record to end. “He asked me if I was married. He told me right away that he was. I don’t know, how could I resist him?”

  Bullet didn’t know, or care.

  “But she shouldn’t try to keep him tied down, she’ll never be able to do it. And it’s not as if there are any children. Speaking as a woman, I don’t think I’d like to be married to him. I don’t think he’d make much of a husband . . .” She leaned her head back and looked at Bullet’s face. She decided to change the subject. “How about you, do you have a girlfriend?”

  Bullet just looked at her. Step, slide, and the woman on the record wailing away behind him.

  Then Frank was there beside him, the record ended, and Bullet stepped back, relieved. But Frank caught him by the wrist and caught Honey by the wrist. “I just invested my last two quarters. They’ve got everything on this jukebox, wait’ll you hear—”

  The couples waited around them, and then a drawling voice announced a square dance. “Pick your partners, podnuhs, and get yourselves ready,” a hearty nasal voice announced. Voices around the dance floor groaned, laughed. Frank maneuvered five people into a group around them. He picked out a plump, middle-aged woman for Bullet to dance with, telling her, “He’s never done this, but you look like you know how to enjoy yourself.”

  “You’re right about that, young man,” she told him, pleased.

  Bullet stood where he was supposed to. “Stamp your feet, kid,” Frank called across to him. “Clap your hands. Look alive.”

  The dance floor was made of squares of red linoleum, with brands painted on them. It held two other squares of dancers as well as their own and was encircled by a crowd that watched and clapped in time to the music. Fiddles and banjos played away on the jukebox. “Allemande left,” the caller sang out, and their square began a hand-over-hand circling, which the other squares were doing too. After a couple of false starts, Bullet got the hang of it. This was more like it, this was dancing that used your whole body, where you moved with the music. He went around the circle and then, a few seconds after everybody else, turned around to go hand-over-hand in the opposite direction. All the faces he passed were smiling at him. Behind him he could hear the rhythmic clapping of the people watching, and an occasional “Waa-hoo!” They did do-si-do’s, and a step where you crossed to the middle of the square, backed three times around the girl opposite, then skipped backward to your own place. While the other couples were crossing you stood stamping your foot, clapping your hands. People sometimes backed into each other and laughed.

  The record ended with a promenade, where all the squares lined up by couples, clasped hands overhead to form an arch and then—one after the other, like a snake turning inside out in its skin—each couple ran through the tunnel of raised arms, becoming part of the archway at the end. Everybody stood clapping and waa-hooing and smiling.

  “Now that’s the way it’s supposed to be,” Bullet’s partner said. “I thank you for the dance, young man.” She was red in the face and her cheeks got round as apples when she smiled.

  “I liked it,” Bullet told her, telling the truth. She had danced nimbly on her round legs, skipping, kicking up her heels. “I enjoyed that.” They shook hands and parted.

  Somebody had claimed Honey for the next dance, and Frank led Bullet back to the booth. There he began on another glass of beer. “That old jukebox hasn’t changed, not one single record, since I first put money into it. That was ten years, can you believe it?”

  Bullet was feeling pretty good. He always did enjoy himself with Frank.

  “What do you think, kid, isn’t this a great place? I mean, where else can you get a square dance going, just by dropping a couple of quarters into a slot. You know”—his eyes were pointing at Bullet, but they weren’t seeing him—“the first dance floor was built by a Greek. Daedalus, and he’s the same guy who made wings to get out of prison, him and his kid, they were both locked up. In Crete, at Knossos, that’s where.” Frank listened to himself speaking. “Now why do I remember that? Isn’t it incredible, what your brain remembers? Where would I run across a useless fact like that?”

  “You’re asking me?” Bullet
asked.

  Frank grinned and combed his hair back with his fingers. “Naw. Come over here, kid. Or I’ll come over there—I’m getting a little sloshed. You don’t mind—it makes a pleasant change from your old man’s orders, right? That may be one of the best things I’ve done in my life, getting your sister away from him. I always wondered—I did, you know, a lot, a lot for me anyway—how you’d do. How you’d hold up. To see if they’d get you. They get you, kid?”

  “Naw,” Bullet said, feeling the muscles across his shoulders.

  “You were such a tough little bastard, I couldn’t predict how things would turn out for you.” Frank pushed his glass across the table and moved over to sit beside Bullet. “I got something to show you.”

  He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and removed a picture. It was a photograph of a kid, a little kid. The kid was wearing just diapers and sitting on somebody’s lap, but the grownup was mostly cut out of the picture, only her tanned arm showed, hugging the kid. The kid was tanned too, had a headful of dark baby hair, straight, and dark eyes looking right into the camera, serious. It was like the kid was looking right at Bullet and could see him.

  “What is it?” Bullet asked.

  “It is my kid,” Frank told him. “More than a year ago. She’ll be bigger now. What do you think?”

  What am I supposed to think. What was Frank up to?

  “And that’s old Liza,” Frank said.

  Bullet turned his face to stare at Frank. The man was enjoying the joke.

  “You’re an uncle, kid. Whadda you think of that?”

  Bullet didn’t think anything.

  “Maybe even twice by now. I don’t know, I haven’t heard anything from Liza for a year. She never was much at writing. And I’ve been out of touch. It’s not easy to find a ship going to Boston these days. But she said, last letter that got to me, she thought she was pregnant again.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Out on Cape Cod—unless she’s moved. But Liza doesn’t move, you know Liza. I got them a house, her and Dicey—that’s the kid’s name—a little rancher outside of town, three bedrooms, big picture windows for the view, wall-to-wall carpeting, the works. Her and Dicey and little whoever it turned out to be. I ought to go up and see them, don’t you think?”

  Bullet felt like his whole torso was squeezing in around his spine. He didn’t know what to think. He wrapped his hand around the glass of ginger ale, half full and watery with melted ice. Frank was such a liar. He made such a point about the house, it had to be a lie. Bullet knew that, but he didn’t know what the truth was. How bad it was. Stupid Liza, just like her, finding someone like Frank and having a kid. If he had her there he’d shake her, he’d shake some sense into her, shake her until her brains rattled—what there was of them. He wished . . . he wished he’d taken a flying tackle at her when she came running down the stairs that night to go off with Frank, he wished he’d brought her down and held her so she couldn’t . . . He wished. Wishes were wishes and facts were facts. People did what they did, whether it was stupid or smart. Mostly it was stupid. And Bullet wasn’t going to stupidly try to wish away what Liza had done, he wasn’t going to let himself box himself in that way, wishing.

  Frank just sat staring at the photograph, getting morose. “She’s a good kid, spunky, you know? I never thought I’d like having a kid.” Bullet looked at the photograph, too, and the muscles around his ribcage tightened.

  He looked at Frank, who was just staring into the picture. Frank’s mouth drooped down a little at the ends. “If I had the fare, I’d go up there right now, tonight; I could use a dose of Liza. She loves me—you know how she is—she really does love me, just me. I mean, I’m okay and all that, but I’m not such a great guy, you know?”

  Yeah, Bullet agreed. He wanted to get out of there, but Frank blocked his way. He was about to bust Frank one in the face and he wanted to get out.

  “I’m terrific, you know, but not much of a friend—sort of . . . Oh, hell, it doesn’t matter. What’s it matter, anyway—right, kid? The stupid cow loves me. It doesn’t matter to her, whatever I do.” He looked at Bullet without seeing him. “Or don’t do. I got something to tell you, kid. You listening to me?”

  Bullet’s jaw ached, and the eyes suddenly focused on him.

  “I wouldn’t try it, kid. You don’t last as long as I have without knowing how to take care of yourself. And you don’t know anything, not anything. You hear me?”

  Bullet heard, and he believed Frank, and he was angry—there was nothing he could do, there was never anything you could do, but he wanted to do something: he wanted to take Frank Verricker’s teeth out.

  “She won’t marry me. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t much mind not being married. I told her I’d marry her, when she was pregnant. But not Liza. She even gave the kid her name, because I wasn’t at the hospital to stop her. Tillerman, like I had nothing to do with it. She wouldn’t have done that if I’d been there, I wouldn’t have let her, you can believe me. It’s not my fault—I told her I was willing. But not Liza. Just like her, too, stupid. If we were married they’d send her half my wages, more than half with a kid or two.” At that he grinned again, and his voice got sentimental. “Old Liza,” he said. “I wonder if . . . do you think Honey’d give me the money to get to Boston?”

  Bullet shoved Frank out of his way and got out of the booth. Just like Liza—stupid, he thought, between waves of anger. He shoved his way out of the room, not caring who he plowed into.

  Outside, it was growing dark. He stood in the crowded parking lot, trying to force air into his lungs. The cars were lined up, nose to nose. The long silver nose of Honey’s car hung up over the cement curbing.

  Bullet went around beside the roadhouse, seeing what there was lying around on the ground, until he found himself a long, thick pipe. He came back with it to Honey’s car. He lifted it back and swung it, down, onto the hood of the car. Metal rang on metal, echoing itself. He swung again, and again. The hood bent, dented, clanged—its smooth line got pocked. Breathing heavily from the effort—but it wasn’t hard work, Bullet thought—he threw the pipe down on the ground.

  Damn Frank Verricker.

  He kicked at the front tire and strode out of the parking lot. At the road he turned toward town and ran. He ran tight and hard, his fists clenched as his arms swung up close to his chest.

  * * *

  It was after six when he got back. They were eating. They heard him come up the back porch, and his mother’s eyes watched him enter the kitchen. His father did not look at him, but reached his fork out to the platter in front of him and speared another pork chop. His father wore a jacket and tie, his mother wore her fancy red blouse. Bullet stood by the sink in his jeans and T-shirt. At least he didn’t have to change for dinner anymore.

  He stared at the two of them. He had half a mind to tell them about Frank Verricker, he had half a mind to just sit down and grab a pork chop. And eat it with his fingers. What could the old man do, after all? Pick him up and tote him away from the table? The old man couldn’t do anything to Bullet. As if Bullet wanted to sit down and eat with them.

  They’d sit up and listen if I told them. I could tell them something that would make them sit up, if I felt like it.

  The words burned their way up from his stomach. He took a breath, to start letting them out.

  “Your father is wondering when those barn doors are going to be fixed,” his mother said. Her eyes were fixed on his face, and they had no expression he could read.

  His mouth clamped shut. Right now. Her head nodded at him, once, as if she had heard him. Getting her to do his dirty work, always getting her to do it.

  Bullet went back outside. The evening light added to the light oozing out of the kitchen windows was enough to work by. He stood by the open barn doors, considering. He shoved with his shoulder against the one on the right. Either it would be fixed at the top, where the hinge hung askew, or it would be fixed at the bottom, where the wood bit into th
e uneven ground.

  Bullet went into the barn, making his way into the darkness where the tools were kept. He felt around for the sledgehammer on the wall. Holding it over his shoulder, he went back to work on the doors.

  The old wood gave way easily, with crackling sounds. He assumed they could hear the noise in the house, but nobody came out to watch him at work. Fixing the barn doors.

  CHAPTER 13

  Bullet hooked school the next day: he just got off the bus and went his own way. The thick, triple story of brick waited like a prison, and he didn’t go in. Nobody could make him. They could, he guessed, capture him and drag him inside, if they could get a rope onto him—which he doubted.

  Anyway, the question never arose. Hanging onto his lunch bag, he moved around the building and down to the playing fields. A couple of first-period gym classes were doing calisthenics, but he went on by them. Nobody asked him any questions. If anybody had, he wouldn’t have answered, and if they’d come chasing after him he wouldn’t have run. Nobody was going to make him run.

  At the oval track he put down his lunch bag and stripped off his sweater and jeans. He folded them into a little pile, the bright red sweater on the brown earth. It was chilly, but the sun was already burning off the morning mist, and the day would grow warm. He ran the cross-country course, ran it five times, ran it hard. Nobody was going to stop him from running.

  When the sweat on his chest had dried, he put on his shirt and tied the sweater around his waist by its arms. He walked along down into town, following the main street right up to where it ended at the water. Then he followed the water around to Patrice’s, going through shallows when there was no public pathway. By the time he got out there, his sneakers were sodden and muddy and his jeans clung to his calves.