Once a Runner

by John L Parker

  “But Ron Don Giordante?”

  “One of the half milers, Benny Vaughn, started that. Everyone on the team now has some foreignized version of his own name. It’s a kind of fantasy thing they all get a kick out of.”

  “Do you have one?”

  “Of course. I am Quintus Cassadamius, the famous Greek miler. I’m also somewhat renowned on an imaginary pro bowling tour, but that’s another story.”

  “How about Jerry, does he have a funny name?”

  “Sure. Mizerelli, another famous Italian athlete. I was responsible for that one, I guess.”

  “And how about Bruce Denton?”

  “That, my dear, shows how much you know. Bruce Denton is Bruce Denton, the famous American clock cleaner.”

  11.

  A Fan’s Notes

  THE TREMORS WOKE ANDREA.

  She blinked, startled by the unfamiliar surroundings. The tremors continued, rhythmically, far-off, yet deep and powerful, shaking the whole bed. She peered around in the thin yellow dawn light, alarmed but still drowsy, trying to figure out where she was and whether she was in danger. Her hand fell on something warm. It was Quenton Cassidy; she was in his room.

  But what was going on? Did they have earthquakes up here in north Florida? She stayed very still, scared, trying to make her sleepy mind work.

  Then she figured it out and got really scared.

  “Quenton.” She shook him gently, urgently. He didn’t stir.

  “Quenton.”

  “Hmmmff?”

  “Is there something wrong? Baby, wake up, please, Quenton, your heartbeat is shaking the bed…”

  One bluish-green eye opened and studied her carefully. This was his morning to sleep late. The team would be driving to Jacksonville to catch a plane; the morning run would be just a token.

  “Shhh,” he murmured softly. “Go back to sleep.” She did. The little tremors continued rhythmically; steady liquid drumbeats at precisely thirty-two to the minute.

  They did indeed shake the bed.

  NOW THAT SOME of the questionable side effects of the lifestyle had actually befallen her, Andrea was far from pleased. For one thing, she wasn’t crazy about the idea of staying home on a Saturday night, Mary Tyler Moore or no Mary Tyler Moore.

  The team had left at noon and would be gone for days. The USTFF meet was Monday at Penn State, the AAU championships the following Saturday in Chicago. She fretted around her room like a cat on diet pills.

  Some of her dateless sorority sisters came by, full of goodwill, not at all unhappy with their plight, and made a pitch for pizza and some tentative prowling around. Andrea demurred as pleasantly as she could.

  She was actually pretty miserable, but what really annoyed her was that she didn’t know exactly why. She got out a pair of scissors and some old jeans and began to make cut-offs, but tired after one leg and threw the stuff in a corner in a heap. This wasn’t like her; not at all. If this was what it was all about, she wanted no part of it.

  She cast about her room, distastefully taking in the cute pastel artifacts that had always been her joy. The giant stuffed Snoopy seemed pretty stupid when she thought about it. She felt like giving it a swift kick right in its smiling kisser. Why hadn’t she gone with the girls? She knew why. It would have been worse.

  Finally she wandered down the hall to the drink machine, came back with a Fresca, sat down at her neat white desk, and took out a legal pad. She had never liked normal girl-type stationery; perhaps because she wrote rambling, philosophical letters rather than bright, quick, newsy ones, and it was embarrassing to stuff twenty or thirty of the little sheets into a small envelope.

  In her flowery, nearly illegible handwriting, she wrote:

  Dear Alicia,

  How are things at horny old Randolph-Macon? If you get this during the middle of the week and don’t like to be reminded that the nearest boys are thirty-five miles away, sorry about that.

  But don’t feel too deprived because here it is Saturday night and little Andrea is sitting in her room at the university voted by Playboy magazine last year as the number one party school in the country, drinking a Fresca, barely able to hear several nearby live bands and feeling like (excuse the expression) crap.

  And would you like to know where the sports hero is? Okay, but I’m going to tell you anyway because you’ve probably already figured out this letter is a bitch session. Well, right now he is at the Nittany Lion Inn at Penn State probably trying to charm some Yankee girl with his ridiculous fake Southern accent. Whoever heard of a West Palm Beach drawl? Well, he’s got one, but he only trots it out every now and then. He says he got it during summers at his grandparents’ in North Carolina. Oh well, he tells me there is really not much fooling around on these trips and why would I have reason to doubt anything said with such sincerity?

  He also told me he hated cross-country meets like a plague of boils, but you’ve never SEEN such a happy traveler packing for a sojourn. Singing, whistling, trying to decide which of those strange little spiked shoes he will take (he has about fifty pairs of them and they all have little stories). Oh yes, he was really upset about leaving, all right.

  Leece, what’s wrong with me? I’ve never acted like this before, have I? I wish you were here now. Why did we ever decide to go to different schools?

  When he’s around I’m not really even conscious of being particularly happy. It just seems kind of normal. But when he has to go off somewhere it’s like I cease to do anything but exist until he’s back. And it’s not like we see each other all that much during the week either. We’re both taking a lot of hours this semester and we agreed awhile back that it could really get silly if we let it. So we usually study apart. Still, there’s just something about knowing he’s not far away.

  He says it is going to be worse during the indoor season. He could be gone every weekend if he’s running well. And right now he is.

  I can’t figure it out. It’s not that he’s beautiful. Sometimes he looks so thin it seems he must be sick or something. And if I say anything, he comes out with these smart-ass comments, like, “It’s the lean wolf that leads the pack, baby.” Honestly, he can be so condescending I want to just slap him. But then I look in his eyes, and Leece, he’s always so tired, so frail looking, it just breaks my heart. Sometimes he catches me looking at him and says, “What?” I say, “Nothing, just thinking.”

  He says he’s “smitten” with me, and I guess he means it. But if there’s ever a question of a running thing or an Andrea thing, guess who’s second fiddle? Have I ever put up with a boy like this that you can remember?

  I wish I could drag him home over Thanksgiving so you could get a look at him, but as usual he’s going to be gone. Can’t you just see him with Daddy? What if they got into the war or something like that? But I guess they could talk about fishing—Quenton knows all about fish from skin diving in West Palm.

  Leece, am I sounding like a little lovesick puppy? Me, the Ice Maiden of Coral Gables High? Brother.

  One thing I’ll say about him, he didn’t flinch when I told him about medical school. Most of the guys I’ve ever mentioned it to just give me this weak little smile. They’re right on the verge of saying something like, oh, you’re much too attractive to blah blah blah and if I had a gun right then I would shoot to kill.

  I must say Quenton took it right in stride. But then, I guess delusions of grandeur don’t startle someone whose real goal in life is to set a world’s record (he told me not to EVER EVER tell a soul about that, but telling your twin is not really like telling someone else, is it?).

  I don’t know, maybe I’m crazy too. I just don’t seem to be able to do much of anything about it. Imagine what you’d do if your date wandered around the dance floor at a disco place with a five-dollar bill in his hand telling people he wanted to tip the band but he couldn’t find them?

  Leece, I was paralyzed. I was the only one, but I couldn’t speak, I was laughing so hard. And he didn’t care about the weird looks he g
ot, not at all. What is it about this one?

  Am I in love, Leece? For true this time, for real?

  Love, Andy

  12.

  The Indictment

  IT WAS A DO-NOTHING Thursday afternoon. With a junior college meet coming up the freshmen and sophomores were constrained to playfully jogging five miles. Cassidy and Mizner elected to go the ten-mile course with a few others. The pace would be brisk, around fifty-eight minutes, so extended conversation was necessarily restricted to the first three or four miles. The group headed out on a loop they called “Tobacco Road” because the unpaved road wound through a wooded section south of town replete with shacks, wincing dogs, and barefoot children; it was rumored that the course had been named by Marty Liquori when he was down for the Southeastern Relays. It was like running back in time forty years. But the runners waved to the locals and the locals waved right back. There was a friendliness born of familiarity, and although two entirely different worlds eclipsed each other at that point, by some process of emotional osmosis each had come to respect the other’s struggles; there was the homey aroma of country foods in preparation—greens, fritters, and such.

  Someone wanted to know what was to be done about Nubbins.

  “What about him?” Cassidy asked. “I thought he had become a pillar of the community.” They spoke in quick bursts on the exhale.

  “Old wine, new bottle,” said Hosford, a pale, literary type.

  “Haven’t you heard the latest?” asked Mizner. “Oh, this is too good. Last Tuesday night, after he won that freshman meet against Auburn, he was feeling pretty full of himself and he goes on a High Plains Drifter kick. He dolls himself up in his goddamn Roy Rogers shirt and his shit-kicking boots—”

  “I don’t see anything so wrong—”

  “Wait a minute, let me tell it.” Mizner was starting to snicker breathlessly, remembering. “And he had this blanket that he stole from the plane when we went to Atlanta. No lie, this is the honest-to-God truth. He had cut a hole in this piece of Eastern Airlines property to make himself a poncho, see, and then he proceeds to the State Theatre with that birdbrained girlfriend of his, that Betty Sue…”

  “Aw, come on…” Cassidy was not averse to certain brands of extemporaneous craziness.

  “Well, trying to be objective, now,” Hosford interrupted, “he was making even more of an ass of himself than usual. There was a big crowd in the lobby waiting for the first show to get out. Nubbins kept cavorting around doing his Clint Eastwood material—which is pretty silly considering the little shit is only five eight. Anyway, someone in the crowd would get nervous and giggle, like, you know, from sheer embarrassment. So then Nubbins would get even more loud and rambunctious, thinking he was, you know, entertaining them. I mean, I was there. I wanted to hide, man…”

  “I think I get the picture,” said Cassidy. “Let’s pick this pace up a little bit.”

  THE SHOWER ROOM was a fine place for deep, conspiratorial thinking. Cassidy slumped in the weariness that was his chosen mantle, lost in the hot torrent of water. Mizner, more chipper, sang a gurgling aria at the next nozzle.

  “Are you still doing the Honor Court thing?” Cassidy asked from inside his waterfall. His left knee was tormenting him.

  “Yeah. Clerk of the Court. That means I get to man the tape recorder and perform other taxing duties. Sure looks good on the résumé, though.”

  “But you have physical access to the courtroom itself, right? I mean, can you get in whenever you want to, get a hold of letterhead, stuff like that?”

  “Sure, that’s the job. What’s the deal?”

  “Oh, just a Classic,” he bubbled, “just an all-time classic is what it is…”

  THE HONOR CODE at Southeastern University followed in that fine old American tradition of overcoming defeat by one, pronouncing some unmitigated disaster a resounding triumph, and then, two, smiling pleasantly in the face of even the most crushing evidence to the contrary.

  Cassidy figured such addlepated stubbornness helped to explain more than a few national lapses like the electoral college, the Eighteenth Amendment, and the current unpleasantness in Indochina. His theory was that it all stemmed from the unrelenting and self-damning refusal of the ruling classes to admit that somebody important fucked up. But rest assured, Cassidy would say, that if things get really squirrely—the meltdown was a possibility after all, the warhead could be armed by accident—some clerk/typist somewhere was definitely going to get the ax.

  If such a construct could sustain a silly-assed war in Indochina or a wacko nuclear energy policy, it could surely sustain a student conduct code at a land-grant university in the deep South. The Southeastern University honor code, in brief, commanded far more in the way of belly laughs than respect from the student body.

  The program was based upon the presumption that the Honest People were the best sentinels for guarding against Evil and generally preserving the System, whose morality was defined broadly by our Christian Ethics, our American sense of Fair Play, and our sincere conviction that Cheaters Are Only Hurting Themselves. After all, who knew when, some five or so years from now at some important cocktail party, your boss from J. Williston Beckman Widget Company might wander over and request the dimensions of the Parthenon? And then where would you be?

  The way it worked was, when you saw someone cribbing, either you were supposed to turn them in or ask them to turn themselves in. There would follow a kind of dollhouse due process in the Student Honor Court, which the law students used to hone their nascent skills.

  It was all in good fun, of course. Good fun for everyone except the few unlucky “defendants” who were actually dragged before the child tribunal, slump-shouldered and apparently highly chastened. Generally, the chancellor, exercising his sound discretion, would sentence the malefactor to something like “fifteen makeup credits,” thus swelling the rolls of courses like GEO 101 (Rocks for Jocks), MUS 101 (Mozart on a Stick), and other cakewalks. The defendant could then graduate on schedule and go to work in the regional purchasing department of Wal-Mart, feeling that not only had he paid his debt to society, but also that in a pinch he could identify a feldspar or hum a few bars of Le Pathétique.

  But just as an aircraft that won’t fly is a failure by definition (no matter how comfortable the seats or snazzy the tail design), so Southeastern’s honor code was a failure for the simple reason that it inspired more criminality than it prevented.

  The wide and airy gulf between ideal and reality was in no instance more clearly demonstrated than the day Cassidy saw an angry student standing hands on hips by an “Honor Fruit Stand,” a failed attempt by student government True Believers to sell apples, bananas, and oranges in convenient bins around campus by attaching containers for bright-eyed students to drop their coins into.

  The student Cassidy saw that day was upset, glaring at the empty fruit bin (the program had been abandoned quickly for lack of, ah, cash flow), for he turned on his heel and stalked away, exclaiming to no one in particular: “Goddamn! No more free fruit!”

  Cassidy was bewildered by the honor system and he generally resented the kind of education he was getting, especially during his first two years at Southeastern, a university large enough to insist on grading humanities examinations by computer.

  The way he saw it, mechanical testing per se was not so bad, but the requirements of binary logic coupled with a faculty wholly devoid of imagination led to exam questions that bordered on high comedy. He would never forget one such question. The second quarter of Humanities had concerned itself with the early Greek philosophers, basic religion, architecture, and art (no one ever accused the department of being unambitious). One nearly senile question writer, an associate professor who kept a ferret and was said to be a hoot on a concertina, in a giddy attempt to syllogistically mix his various marbles, offered this poser: Plato was to Jesus Christ as the Parthenon was to (a) the Appian Way; (b) St. Peter’s Basilica; (c) the Aqueducts; (d) none of the above.

&nbs
p; Cassidy cared little whether he won such contests, left exams in a blind fury, and plotted dark revenge. Time after time he asked instructors about the lunacy of such a system and they were generally sheepish in attempting to defend such vapid academic skullduggery.

  Once he was in a section taught by no less than the head of the department. After the midterm exam, Cassidy angrily pointed out the specific page in Madame Bovary that demonstrated his answer to a very obscure question was just as correct as the one espoused by the department (and, more important, the computer). The department head, a defeated, gray-headed, and somewhat confused old man, looked up from his unkempt notes and, without the grace of any sort of humor, said between thin white lips:

  “No one promised you there would be universal justice, you know.”

  Cassidy thought: this addled old fart has lost the ability or will to teach, perhaps, but he can still impart useful knowledge. Obliquely; always obliquely.

  It was late at night and an unmistakable edge of conspiracy tinged the air in Cassidy’s room as he unfolded the Plan to Mizner and Hosford. Their jobs would be relatively simple for now; coconspirators were to be recruited and casual gossip was to be chummed around the training table.

  But after the scenario was laid out in toto, in spite of Cassidy’s frantic efforts to maintain decorum, his room sounded like a cadre of chihuahuas had parachuted into a pigpen.

  Nowhere on campus was the honor system more stoutly defended than Farley Hall, the main athletic dorm, where football players in particular professed for it nothing less than True Love, spiritual and enduring. Using the vernacular of the horse track, they discussed at great length the opportunities presented them by such a grab bag of situational ethics. They were cheating their asses off, of course, and doing so with the general high spirits of any playful and energetic group of ne’er-do-wells who discover to their great merriment that someone has wandered off and left the tap unguarded.