Once a Runner

by John L Parker

  An awesome creature—up until recently more myth than mortal—was to assume human form and cross oceans to perform his magic right on the same track that held their sweat. In doing so he would necessarily devastate those who sought to test his power. That this force would be inexorably brought to bear upon one they all knew, one they had come to respect for his own prowess, made everyone at the same time uneasy and strangely elated. They had rarely seen Quenton Cassidy lose a mile race, did not want to see him lose, yet the inevitability of the prospect was somehow exciting, in the manner of an execution.

  Their lion was to be devoured by a greater lion.

  10.

  Demons

  IT’S DEMONS, you see,” Cassidy said seriously. He was on the floor doing his stretching. Andrea was propped on one elbow on his bed, looking up from her organic chemistry book, suppressing amusement, something she often seemed to do. She pushed a wisp of hair back from her glasses and looked entirely scholarly.

  “Do they whisper moral imperatives in your ear?”

  “Lovely. I try to explain the dark forces at work within me, and you amuse yourself.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, please do go on. And on. And on.”

  He caught her by an ankle, the good one, and flipped her neatly onto the floor beside him. The back of her neck smelled like a parakeet’s tummy, sweet hay and fluff.

  “Mmmmm,” he said, lost in the pale corn silk of her hair. She muddled his thought processes, such as they were; he had difficulty studying when she was about. Colors muted and he reached for her without guile or guilt. He adored her and told her so.

  She on the other hand had no handle on Quenton Cassidy. He said things occasionally that brought her up short. She would shake her head and say queer duck. He acted not at all like the many boys who had sought her attentions. This one wore a great weariness about the eyes, yet ironically with an incredible well of silly energy bubbling just beneath the surface. He rambled at times, talking in streaks of lucid prose, then lapsed into deep silences from which he could not be retrieved without great effort. He cavorted. He played with her mind.

  She had watched him race four times now. He had tried to pass off these competitions as inconsequential, but during those times especially he was lost to her. She wondered where he went, leaving her excluded, lonely, and—could she admit this?—jealous.

  She wondered what interior provinces she was not privy to and repeatedly asked him to explain what he was talking about. This she knew: there were times when she drew only polite responses; she could have been for all the world a distant cousin come to visit.

  “What do your demons make you do?” she said softly, holding his head and making curls absently with his ragged blond hair. He sighed.

  “About sixteen, eighteen miles a day.”

  “Um.” She started to push him away, perturbed at not being taken seriously.

  “But sometimes when it is all going good, I mean when it’s early May warm and there’s cut grass in the air and you’ve made it through winter okay, not bad sick or anything, then sometimes you can take a deep breath and feel your own heart jumping—that’s right don’t look at me like that—you can feel your own heart in there jumping around like a goddamn bobcat or something; that’s when you’ve just got to get yourself out somewhere and let them loose.” Her head cocked at this; she watched him closely.

  “Don’t try to make me feel funny about this,” he said. “You were the one who wanted to know. Besides, you’ve never been in four-minute shape, not that many people have, so if you think this is all just a crock…”

  “No,” she said quickly. “Go on. I want to hear it.”

  “They make you want to run through the jungle, baby,” he said happily, “cover countryside at a clip, slide by in the night like a scuttling cloud.” His eyes had the faraway cast, but his voice quavered in mock solemnity like a Southern tent evangelist. Sensing genuine interest, he picked up the tempo.

  “They make you bolt awake in the middle of the night with an involuntary shot of your own true adrenaline, ready to run a hundred miles; we’re talking when you’re there, now, really there, four-minute shape or better. They make you jittery with the smell of forest, ready to hurdle fallen trees, run down game, leave gore in the bushes…”

  Her eyes widened.

  “And then when you get them all reined in”—he looked at her fiercely—“they make you lay back in the pack, coasting three laps on an old melody…and then they make you wail out of the final turn and blow down the last goddamn straightaway like the midnight train to hell!”

  Although he said it humorously in his mock-religious voice, in his eyes she could see but not quite penetrate limpid ethers of a faraway Elysium, where the otherworldly citizens were without exception vessels of nearly pure spirit: heavyweight prize fighters, rare-air mountain climbers, soon-to-be-martyred saints, and other quiet, sadly ironic purveyors of the Difficult Task.

  “You are of course quite mad,” she said softly.

  “Come,” he said, breaking the spell. “We have to meet Mize at the Nineties.”

  “WE ARE SPEAKING of human endeavor and delusional systems,” Cassidy said, punctuating with a steady cracking of pistachio nuts. Their second pitcher was almost gone; Thursday-night foosball and pinball background noise nearly precluded conversation altogether.

  “Everyone likes to think they have their own little corner; it can be anything: needlepoint, lawn bowling, whatever. Some guy may gratify himself by thinking he’s the best goddamn fruit and vegetable manager the A & P ever had. Which is fine. It gives people a sense of worth in a crowded world where everyone feels like part of the scenery. But then mostly they are spared any harrowing glimpses into their own mediocrity. Pillsbury Bake-Off notwithstanding, we’ll never really know who makes the best artichoke soufflé in the world, will we?”

  “Gotcha. Don’t filibuster, tell me Demons,” she said.

  “Right. The thing is that in track we are painfully and constantly aware of how we stack up, not just with our contemporaries but with our historical counterparts as well. In that regard it’s different even from other sports. A basketball player can go out and have a great day and tell himself he’s the greatest rebounding forward to ever hit the hardwood, but he’ll never really be troubled by the actual truth, will he? Maybe he’s just in a weak league. Maybe Jumping Joe Faulks would have eaten him alive thirty years ago. But he’ll never know. He’ll just have to leave such judgments in the sorry hands of the sportswriters, many of whom it has been pointed out can be bought with a steak.” Mizner nodded vigorously from behind a pile of popcorn.

  “In track it’s all there in black-and-white. Lot of people can’t take that kind of pressure; the ego withers in the face of the evidence. We all carry our little credentials around with us; that’s why the numbers are so important to us, why we’re always talking about them. I am, for instance, four flat point three. The numerals might as well be etched on my forehead. This gentleman here, perhaps you’d like to meet him, is 27:42, also known as 13:21, I believe.”

  Mizner bowed graciously, half rising. He seemed to be enjoying this immensely.

  “A knowledgeable observer might ask yards or meters and it is most assuredly yards,” Mizner said. “I’ll not puff.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind,” Cassidy interrupted. “The point is that we know not only whether we are good, bad, or mediocre, but whether we’re first, third, or a hundred and ninety-seventh at any given point. Track & Field News tells us whether we want to know or not.”

  “Assuming we make the lists,” Mizner put in.

  “That’s right. Sometimes it is possible, despite your best efforts and a hundred goddamn miles a week, not to even exist.”

  “That bothers you, does it?”

  “That, my dear, breaks my heart.”

  “But you can beat almost everyone. We know that, right? Isn’t that good? Isn’t that what you want?”

  “Well, sure. But in my ow
n mind, I know that I’m what a sportswriter would call a ‘steady performer.’ And it really doesn’t matter a whit how many races I win. I haven’t even broken four minutes yet. Roger Bannister did that back in 1954. I’ve spent seven years of my life working hard at this thing and so far I’m…average. It happens to others, concert pianists maybe, actors, and the like. But they aren’t subject to the cold cruel numbers like we are.

  “Let’s put it this way,” he continued. “There is a fellow right now in New Haven, one in Kansas, one in Boston, one somewhere in Minnesota of all places, and two—Mize is now indicating three—in Oregon who might very reasonably request that I launder their jocks for them. And that’s just the United States. There happens to be a young man down in New Zealand right now by the name of John Walton who breathes actual air and eats human food and the son of a bitch has run one mile faster than any human being in the history of the world, 3:49.1 to be exact. I don’t believe ol’ John’d let me wash his jock, do you think, Mize?”

  The other runner shook his head solemnly.

  “And is there some kind of final point to all this?” Andrea said.

  “Depends on what you call a point. It’s a simple choice: we can all be good boys and wear our letter sweaters around and get our little degrees and find some nice girl to settle, you know, down with…take up what a friend of ours calls the hearty challenges of lawn care…” Mizner was snickering, but Andrea was solemn. Cassidy stared into his beer.

  “Or what? What’s your alternative?” She leaned over the table, trying to get him back on track. He looked at her, surprised; his eyes lit up as they had earlier and his voice shook again with excitement.

  “Or we can blaze! Become legends in our own time, strike fear in the heart of mediocre talent everywhere! We can scald dogs, put records out of reach! Make the stands gasp as we blow into an unearthly kick from three hundred yards out! We can become God’s own messengers delivering the dreaded scrolls! We can race dark Satan till he wheezes fiery cinders down the back straightaway!” He was full into it now.

  “They’ll speak our names in hushed tones, ‘Those guys are animals,’ they’ll say! We can lay it on the line, bust a gut, show them a clean pair of heels. We can sprint the turn on a spring breeze and feel the winter leave our feet!”

  Andrea leaned back in the booth, wide-eyed, and swallowed.

  “We can, by God, let our demons loose and just wail on!” He threw his head back and let loose a low, eerie cry. Foosball, billiards, and pinballs all stilled suddenly. Mizner, unaware of the sudden quiet, pounded the table in animated agreement.

  “Yes, yes, goddamn, that’s it! Wuhail Owwwwnnnn!!” When he had finished the cry he looked around at the silent blank faces of the various confused fraternity jocks and winced.

  “My Lord in heaven,” she said, her eyes glistening. But she smiled as she said it, a bemused smile that said perhaps now here was something after all, and even though it was an admission against interest, she had to consider the possibility that there was something here a little…out of the ordinary. Later in her life, she would always count that as the moment when she truly fell in love with Quenton Cassidy, a madman vexed and enchanted by ethereal considerations she did not understand, fell in love with him even as he sat, tired from his performance, absently drawing figure eights in the spilled beer.

  They were all a tad drunk.

  “THAT WAS NICE,” Cassidy said. Three days later they were walking back to Doobey Hall in the dark, hand in hand. Though it was November, it was still pleasantly warm out.

  “I don’t know. It was a little eerie at first. But it was nice to look at the stars,” Andrea said.

  “People used to do it outside watching the stars all the time until Alexander Graham Bell invented the motel,” he said. “But I told you no one would bother us. Very few people know that practice pit is out there. The main one gets a lot of use. I wonder what people used to do back in the old days when the jumpers landed in sawdust.”

  “Making love in a pole-vault pit.” She sighed. “If my mother only knew. She’d be sure to come up with something about ‘passion pits’ or some such.”

  “Mothers like those kinds of lines. As if there was guaranteed wisdom in puns and cornpone.”

  “I suppose.”

  They walked as slowly as they could without the whole thing getting silly, both of them having an instinctive sense about preserving good moments. As they neared Doobey Hall, he heard the commotion in back.

  “C’mon.” He grabbed her hand. “If this is what I think it is, it might be fun.”

  In the back of the house was a large garage building that had been turned into a recreation and storage area. There was a battered Ping-Pong table, a very old and inoperable jukebox, and some Sidecar Doobey–vintage furniture. Cassidy led Andrea through the door and they stood in the back of the small crowd. A space had been cleared out on the sandy concrete floor to make room for a miniature high-jump arena. Andrea was puzzled.

  “What are they…” But Cassidy shushed her. Ron “Spider” Gordon was standing at the edge of the open space to their left, his eyes focused on the ridiculous makeshift standards. They had taken two large coatracks and taped coat hangers to hold the horizontal bar, which was an old cane fishing pole. A pile of mattresses made up a comfy-looking landing pit. Cassidy thought of the pole-vault pit, looked down at Andrea with a loud sigh, and was promptly shushed himself. Gordon was going into his routine now, in the manner of all jumpers, clenching and unclenching his fists, mumbling to himself, bending over at the waist and wiggling his hands like gloves with no fingers in them, in general doing the field man’s Dance of High Anxiety. Except now it was overtly histrionic, for he was also doing his own voice-over, sotto voce, like a golf-match commentator:

  “…and so, ladies and gentlemen, the pressure is really on the famous Italian high jumper, Ron Don Giordante, here in the Olympic finals in this beautiful new stadium in Rome, Italy, in front of thousands of hopeful countrymen…”

  Andrea did not understand what was going on. The makeshift bar was far over the head of the six-one jumper, and she knew he didn’t have enough room to take more than two or three steps. She got on tiptoes and whispered to Cassidy, who was watching with a big grin on his face.

  “Quenton, what’s he going to—”

  Cassidy shushed her again and nodded at the jumper. “Just watch,” he told her.

  It was a startling thing to witness, even though most of them had seen it many times. Gordon finished his commentary, leaving off with: “It looks like he’s ready…yes, there he goes now…” The jumper loped in with three casual strides and lifted into the air as if on hidden wings, floating up and over the bar easily, seeming to stay in the air for several seconds before gravity asserted itself. He had cleared the bar by nearly half a foot. Gordon was one of the last to use the western roll, which Cassidy thought far more aesthetically pleasing than the flop, and it was a beautiful thing to watch. Cassidy estimated the bar at 6-5, way over Gordon’s head, and though it was nearly a foot below his true capability, seen from up close and in such casual circumstances, it was mildly shocking. The crowd was still applauding good-naturedly as Gordon wallowed around on the mattresses, paralyzed with laughter.

  Stoned to the gills, Cassidy thought.

  Jim Beale, another jumper, took his place and began going through the antics. Gordon, barely able to control himself, very considerately crawled from the “pit” and began to give the commentary for his colleague. Everyone seemed to be having a wonderful time. Cassidy and Andrea slipped out the back.

  “Isn’t that something?” he said, shaking his head.

  “Weird like everything else around here. I don’t think I get it.”

  “I didn’t either, for a while. I’ve seen the hurdlers, the shot and disc guys doing stuff like that. Never made sense. Then I figured it out. What they’re doing is they’re playing track.”

  “Playing?”

  “Right. See, when you’re doin
g the actual thing itself, it’s so competitive and serious, I don’t think anybody really has much fun at it. Rarely in practice and never in meets. Oh, they like the idea of it all right, they like going to competitions, and they like being on a team and the general hullabaloo of being a jock. But when you get right down to it, while you’re doing the thing itself, it’s not a lot of grins. I can’t remember a mile race in my life that was even mildly amusing.”

  “So what was all that back there about?”

  “Well, sometimes Spider or one of the others will be sitting around here and suddenly realize that he likes doing what he does. He may have turned it into a compulsion or a job, but it was once something he did as a kid just for the neat sensation it gave him. So Spider will have a few tokes and suddenly realize he loves sailing through the air without having to hand someone a boarding pass. I’ve seen Mobley drink three pitchers and go out and heave his goddamn shot around a playground by moonlight all night. Weird stuff like that…”

  “But they do this every afternoon. I don’t see why he would want to go out in some garage…”

  “It’s very simple. Though it looked amazing to us, for him jumping six-five is like strolling around the block. He could do it in his sleep. So, for him to make it into play, all he had to do is drop back several notches off his true capabilities; he puts on a pair of cutoffs, rigs up a stupid cane pole for a bar, and he does…what he does. It would be like me going out and running a 4:20 mile. I don’t know how else to explain it. They do it all the time. Everybody likes to watch, particularly when the high jumpers do it. They make up these fantastic situations, give themselves glamorous foreign names, pretend it’s some great vendetta in the Olympics or something…”