Once a Runner

by John L Parker

  When Cassidy had nearly finished packing, he sat down on a trunk and looked out the window at oak leaves that glistened with the dusty orange glow of sundown. But even as the room grew dim he did not bother to get up to switch on the light. Most of the others were soon downstairs at dinner, but he didn’t feel like joining them. He took down his beloved posters. One showed Jim Ryun in agonizing full color running his world record mile at Bakersfield in 1966; another was a black-and-white blowup that Cassidy had had specially made, showing the classic moment in 1954 when Roger Bannister, his long hair flying straight against a gray August sky, passed John Landy as Landy looked to the inside to see how far back the Englishman might be, thereby losing in the final straight. I wonder how often Landy thinks about that moment, Cassidy mused. Maybe once a day?

  The third poster had a sunflower on one side and a flowery message down the other: WAR IS HARMFUL TO CHILDREN AND OTHER LIVING THINGS. By asterisk it contained a typical Cassidy addendum: *Not to Mention Young Draft-Aged Males.

  There was a slim profile shot of Kip Keino at full stride somewhere in his native Kenya, looking right into the camera and just grinning outrageously. Cassidy loved that one.

  On the floor were various cardboard boxes and suitcases containing the effluvia of several years spent in a type of vortex; one box contained several fright wigs, a rubber chicken named Cletus, an Ella Fitzgerald mask, and a disappearing cane. A mesh bag held a diver’s mask and snorkel, heavy jet fins, Hawaiian sling handle (the stainless steel shaft leaned in a corner), and several large conch shells with the hinges knocked out. There was a rolled-up WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE poster containing mug shots of the former president and attorney general of these United States; there was an eight-by-ten glossy of seer Jeane Dixon, a speaker on campus during his sophomore year, that contained in suspicious-looking handwriting the message: “Quenton, someday you will meet a tall, rich, and well-dressed stranger. He will put on a lab coat and replace your blood with embalming fluid. I practically guarantee it. Love, Jeane.”

  There was a cigar box full of cards, letters, and mementos of his time with Andrea, a box he did not have the gumption right now to go poking through. There was a brace of Frisbees and a collection of various-sized noses. One box held his record collection, which included The Buttoned-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, some early Shelley Berman, Mort Sahl, Vaughn Meader, et al. There was a sound-effects record offering exploding dynamite, grinding winches, breaking dishes, and assorted animals in varying stages of distress (a popular cut was the turkey section). There were antiwar crooners, and Kingston Trios gone cloudy with the scratches of time. A scrapbook was fat and sloppy with plane tickets, pages ripped out of meet programs, newspaper clippings. The photographs were mostly of Denton or some California sprinter or vaulter; Cassidy’s appearances were generally in agate type. Though there were two large cardboard boxes filled with trophies, medals, and meet watches that did not run well, most of his race booty had been sent home. There were stacks of paperbacks by Vonnegut, Mailer, Roth, and the little-known Richard Stein. There was a collection of columns by one Ron Wiggins entitled The X-Rated Hen Suit. A shoe box held the entire output of Harry Crews in paper.

  One suitcase contained practically nothing but T-shirts: DRAKE RELAYS, RUN FOR FUN, PUMA, SPEED KILLS, I’M WITH STUPID, and THIN POWER.

  There were two large boxes full of track shoes of every description; there were Adidas Gazelles in varying stages of decomposition, Puma interval trainers, several pairs of Tiger’s Cortez, one pair of indoor pin spikes, an old pair of long spikes still dark with petroleum jelly and the mud of Chicago, road racing flats, nylon mesh Tigers for the steeplechase (still brand-new), and beach hack-arounds with no real mileage left in them. He thought: I have measured out my life in worn-out rubber.

  He sat for a long time studying a pair of Adidas 9.9s that he had worn winning the conference mile the year before. Denton had given them to him one day in the locker room. He had tossed them over casually and said: “You might like to have these, seeing as how we’re the same size and all. But I want you to know these shoes have never been second.” Then he had winked at Cassidy.

  Three days later at the exact moment of truth, Cassidy had thrown up his fingers in the victory sign and made himself grin right at Denton, who was standing by the finish line. Not at all like himself, Denton had jumped in the air and whooped. The shoes still had not been second.

  Cassidy sighed, tossed the 9.9s into the box with the others. They had all seen a lot, had their own decrepit personalities. He sighed again; the Trial of Miles, Miles of Trials. Sometimes it seemed sad to him and he really didn’t know why.

  A timid little tap at the door turned out mercifully to be Mizner, who was now living on campus. He plopped down on the bed and quietly helped observe the sentimentality of the moment. It finally made Cassidy nervous.

  “How do you like civilian dorm life?” Cassidy asked.

  “Three major water fights in four days if that tells you anything. I try to stay away as much as possible.”

  Cassidy nodded. He was sitting in his usual chair, feet propped up in the windowsill.

  “Are you really going to do this hermit thing?” Mizner asked.

  “I suppose. You know how we were always saying, what if a guy were to really shut everything out…”

  “Yeah, well, when the nearest civilization is the town of Newberry, I don’t think you have to worry about shutting out much of anything, except watermelon farmers, and I understand they’re not all that rowdy. The question is, is this some kind of big push, for Pan Am, or maybe the, uh, Games?”

  “Who the hell knows? It sounds silly to even talk about, doesn’t it? You might as well say you’re building a rocket ship to go to Mars but it won’t be ready for a few years.”

  “And when it is, it may not fly.”

  “Right now I’m selecting the upholstery. Say, how have you been feeling anyway? Will they let you do anything yet?”

  Mizner gave him chapter and verse of his medical situation. They talked on until it was nearly dark in the room and both of them began to realize it wasn’t going to get any better. Mizner stood and held out his fine brown hand. Cassidy took it self-consciously.

  “It has all turned out so differently,” Mizner said. Cassidy lowered his eyes.

  “Really something, isn’t it? Last summer we were talking about going to Drake this year and how maybe we’d both try to learn to hurdle so we could run the steeple together, and then later in the summer for the hell of it we’d jump in a marathon somewhere…”

  Mizner took a deep breath, slowly let it out. “I guess I’d better be going. Listen, you hang in there. And you better be tough next cross-country season because I believe we have some old business.”

  “I knew it! I knew Chicago really got to you, but you didn’t let it show!”

  “Nah,” Mizner said, laughing. “Well, I guess I’ve had that coming for a long time. You don’t know how many bad dreams I’ve had about Quenton Cassidy being with me with a quarter to go.” He shook his head, smiling sadly.

  “Yeah, well…”

  “Hey, listen, Quenton—I never call you that, do I?—anyway, Cass, there’s something I want to say that I guess I wouldn’t get around to except for a deal like this…”

  “Hey, Mize, you don’t need to…”

  “Oh, yes I do. What I want to say is that, well, I know we joke around a lot, what with Bruce the way he is and all. But we both know that when you get right down to it, the guy is pretty damned intimidating. It’s only because we know him that…” Mizner swallowed.

  “And Cass, we’ve been friends for a long time now…” He lowered his head, as if too weary to go on. Cassidy looked out the window.

  “Listen, Mize,” he said.

  “Quenton, you know how sometimes on a really bad one when you realize how it’s going to be real early, like the second lap, and there’s just nothing you can do about it except tuck in and gut it out? And how hard it is for the oth
er two who are not running to sit and watch and know what is happening and not be able to do anything about it? Christ, Cass, I’ve seen you go through it so many times and every time just when I think it has finally gotten to you for once and you are going to slack off on yourself a little bit, you…just come blowing out of that last turn like some goddamn maniac and I just…” His voice cracked and he turned away slightly. Cassidy was distressed.

  “Jerry, it’s the same with you. You know how it’s been. The same for all three of us. Bruce too.”

  “Yeah,” Mizner said, “but with him there’s no mystery left in it.”

  Cassidy considered that.

  “Not as much,” he admitted.

  “And it’s gotten so there’s not much left with you either, Cass, is what I’m trying to say. I guess I’ve gotten so I’m not really afraid for you that much anymore.”

  Cassidy studied his bare feet. He never in his life expected to hear such a confession and he couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “Aw, who the hell knows?” Mizner laughed. “I just wanted you to know I’ve become kind of a fan, that’s all. Hey, don’t let it get to you out in the boonies. One of these days this mess will settle down and it will be just like it always was.” He had almost closed the door when he stuck his head back in and gave Cassidy the old smile, white teeth flashing against the dark background of his face.

  “Miles of Trials,” he said.

  “Yes.” Cassidy smiled back. “Yes, indeed.”

  The door closed softly. Cassidy sat alone on the sheetless mattress in the eerie gloom, staring at the barren room which was even now growing cold to his mind. Finally he heard the horn of Denton’s car down below. He exhaled deeply and stood up. Quenton Cassidy was a believer in all manner of Comebacks and Second Chances, but whatever happened, it would not be like it always was.

  Never, ever again.

  25.

  The Woods

  LIFE IN THE CABIN had an unusual effect on Cassidy. The runners had always leavened the unavoidable solitude of their sport with the social atmosphere of the team, but now that Cassidy’s isolation was geographical as well as physical, he slipped toward goofiness. He read massively. When that didn’t do it and his natural gregariousness boiled over, he began to carry on conversations with inanimate objects.

  “Why do you do this to me?” he would ask of a broken shoelace.

  “Getting a little grubby, aren’t we?” he suggested to the coffeepot one morning.

  These one-sided conversations had begun, naturally enough, during the first few days when he had tried watching television (Denton brought a little portable, thinking the diversion might help).

  “Oh, let’s the fuck not!” he had cried to the silver-haired uncle type who had implored: “Let’s talk for just a moment about constipation.” And when the prim and proper lard ass Aunt Nell walked into the young bride’s new house, turned up her little snout, and made a just barely overheard remark about “house-i-tosis,” Cassidy got up from his chair, muttering softly: that, really, will not do. He unplugged the set, wrapped the cord around the handle, and placed it in the oven (which he used only for heating the kitchen).

  “You’re going to stay in there until you goddamn well learn some manners,” he informed Aunt Nell, and then promptly forgot about her. And not just her. He also forgot about the legions of thrombosed bridge partners, impotent husbands, adorably precocious children, and finicky pets. Cassidy thought: Descendants of spelling bee champions and fellers of giant trees are harangued about the slings and arrows of lower tract distress. A monk sets himself afire in the street and folks run for the marshmallows. Or am I being picky?

  After that, when he wasn’t running or sleeping, he just read.

  When his eyes tired, he tried just sitting.

  He began to feel like the lama on a mountaintop who is so finely tuned he senses the very food moving through his body, the air molecules penetrating lung sacs and being dispersed to the far-flung cells. He treated such newfound sensitivity not with pride but suspicion; Eastern religious gimmickry was endorsed enthusiastically by any number of dorm-bound adolescents but Quenton Cassidy abjured the crowd.

  He quickly settled into a mesmerizing pattern of hard training, reading, eating his simple fare, sleeping like a wintering bear, and talking to the pots and pans.

  “I’m going nuts,” he informed himself happily in the mirror one morning.

  DENTON CAME OUT on weekends, and after training together they worked on the greenhouses in back. Once he had the idea, Cassidy was able to hammer away by himself during the week, but when the February rains started, he was deprived even of this activity for the most part.

  Denton, however, was crafty, and understood all too well the logistics of single-minded effort. He often brought fresh reading material for the hermit, books that zeroed in on a subject of a mutual interest. Cassidy devoured them all: Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Roger Bannister’s urbane The Four-Minute Mile, Peter Snell’s No Bugles, No Drums, a novel called The Olympian by Brian Glanville (not bad at all), another called The Games by Hugh Atkinson (pretty awful). Soon Cassidy felt he had read everything ever written about running. He pored over Fred Wilt’s How They Train, a compilation of the training schedules of the elite and near-elite. It was helpful to him, this little library, for it kept him focused on his task. The novels, while generally flawed technically in one way or another (sometimes tragically so), occasionally clumsily captured certain elements of his own striving; he found them comforting. The biographies were more esoteric, suffered no attempt at art, and delighted him no end. From them he learned he was not really alone. He especially loved A Clean Pair of Heels, the story of the great New Zealand distance man Murray Halberg.

  Often the day after a late-night reading jag, he took to the country roads and wooded trails with renewed energy, comparing his impressions to his historical or fictional counterparts. He decided that no one had quite captured the strained satisfaction of tooling through the middle miles of a hard fifteen-mile run; but then he thought, some experiences do not easily lend themselves to descriptions by mere word butchers.

  It was a good thing, he decided, not to have everything available in capsule form. Few others mentioned how wonderful, delicious, and life-giving it was just to stop sometimes, at the end of a run, with such a pitiful thirst (with swollen tongue and all) that the runner is convinced he knows what it would be like to die in the desert; when that first beer won’t be like liquid at all but just a kind of wonderful fire burning down a viscous throat.

  But all the books helped him in some way or another. Quenton Cassidy was not enthusiastically going about the heady business of breaking world records or capturing some coveted prize; such ideas would have been laughable to him in the bland grind of his daily routine. He was merely trying to slip into a lifestyle that he could live with, strenuous but not unendurable by any means, out of which, if the corpuscles and the capillaries and the electrolytes were properly aligned in their own mysterious configurations, he might do even better something that he had already done quite well.

  He was trying to switch gears; at least that is how he thought of it. And though it was a somewhat frightful thing to contemplate for very long, he really was pulling out all the stops. After this he would have no excuses, ever again.

  This here train, he thought, she’s boun’ for glory.

  Ain’t she?

  26.

  Recon Work

  FORAYS: he liked the sound of the word, implying as it did woodsy recon work. Illicit after-hours excitement for the young rogue about town. What the hell, he thought, I’m getting twenty-three blooming miles a day. Thus he found himself for the first time in Newberry’s only bar, which was thankfully not called the Dew Drop Inn, being more or less alternately ignored and scowled at by any number of local good old boys who figured this bird was looking for trouble.

  But then they also noticed that he looked a little on the, well, wiry
side. They kept their distance.

  The jukebox twanged away in the corner, evoking the bucolic muse. Cassidy picked up a napkin and began a soggy composition, a surefire country song sensation entitled: “Don’t Send No Form Letter to Your Sweetheart After You Done Mass-mailed Your Love All over Town.” About halfway through, right after a line that said: “This is where the teardrops dry up for me, buster…” he tired of the theme, started a new one with more appeal perhaps for the short-term credit community called: “Go Put Your Love on Master Charge, You Got No Credit Line with Me.”

  Down at the end of the bar, an old-timer engaged the proprietor in a loud, showy mock-argument in order to demonstrate his status as a regular:

  “Leroy, I swear if you don’t cut this Wild Turkey…”

  “Now, James Lee, I’ll run you ass right on outa here…”

  I am back in real life again, Cassidy thought, in the dank ambience of a Panhandle bar amid a group of drivers of real pickup trucks. And that barmaid has got herself a fairly decent chassis packed in them Levi’s.

  “Real pretty hair,” he told her with what he still thought of as his impish grin, as she brought his third dizzy Pearl beer.

  “You barkin’ up the wrong sleeve, honey,” she told him.

  27.

  A Too Early Death

  THE RAINS OF FEBRUARY CAME, bloating the pine forests and capturing all of life in the gray rumble of its clouds and the wetness of its seepage; all life except the unsmiling hermit who reluctantly left his dry nest in the same manner twice a day: standing on the small porch, savoring the last vestige of the eave’s shelter, he surveyed the swollen clouds, the drenched colorless trees, the red mud seeping up through the pine needles like thin dirty blood, and with a sigh stepped gingerly into the first puddle like a cautious water bird. Then he struck out.