Flanagan's Run

by Tom McNab

  “So what should we do about Bernstein?”

  “Nothing,” said Falconer, standing up and placing his empty glass on the table. “Carl Liebnitz has his story and he’ll soon be on to something else for his next piece. Journalists are sprinters, not marathon men. If our friend Bernstein were really interested he’d be down here like a shot with a team of experts – Jesus, this race is a ready-made thesis for a man like him. No, I don’t think we shall hear much more from Professor Bernstein.”

  He opened the caravan door and made to leave.

  “Sorry I blasted off at you like that,” he said, turning. “It’s been a hard day.”

  “Forget it, Maurice,” said Flanagan. “Just get yourself a good night’s sleep.”

  Flanagan poured himself out a long drink and then filled Willard’s glass. He shook his head. “How many crates of booze do we get through every week here?” he asked. Willard realized that he did not have to reply. “Wow,” Flanagan went on, “I never saw Maurice riled up like that before.”

  “Still, he had a good point,” said Willard, gulping down his drink. “The way Bernstein put it, most of our guys would have vanished down cracks in the road by Cedar City.”

  “So we take Maurice’s advice and put in an order for two pints of milk per man per day,” said Flanagan. “They got that many cows in Utah?”

  Willard scribbled the details on a pad. “And another thing,” said Flanagan. “Get a crate of booze over to Maurice Falconer’s tent. We’ve got a good man there. So let’s keep him sweet.”

  In every race, whatever the distance, there is a moment of truth, when one man imposes his will upon the field and stamps his authority upon it, or when he realizes forces within himself whose existence he has not expected. For Hugh, the final twenty miles towards Grand Junction was that moment. It was a long “moment”, lasting for almost three hours, much of it in the harsh Utah sun, and it was a struggle that had nothing to do with the other competitors, though it had everything to do with the eventual outcome of the Trans-America.

  As before, a German had surged into the lead, though this time it was not Muller but his compatriot, the stocky, bronzed Woellke. The initial speed was nothing like Muller’s cracking seven miles an hour of two weeks before, but it was sufficient to leave the field, after just half an hour, stretched for over a mile on the narrow road. He pulled with him a dozen optimists, including the Mojave Indian, Quomawahu.

  Hugh wore a soccer shirt and a trimmed sombrero, the latter a purchase from an Indian back in the Mojave. He had sandpapered his feet, cut his toenails and talcumed his armpits and chest, as he had seen Doc do, and round his wrist he now wore a handkerchief as a sweat-band. If only Stevie and the boys back in the Broo Park could see him now!

  A light breeze blew little whirls of dust in the road ahead as the runners pierced the central desert. Hugh had always thought of the desert as a dead thing. But this was alive and watching. All around the tall saquaro cacti stood like silent spectators, with hedgehog cacti crouching like dogs at their feet. In the distance he could see the soft chocolate brown of the hills through which they would soon have to pass. Everything was bright, sharp, alive.

  Again he was running with Doc, the little man having added sunglasses to his desert equipment. Doc looked at his watch and eased off as the five-mile point was reached. “Forty-five minutes,” he said. “Let’s drink.”

  Hugh drank the warm, bitter desert water, then poured a carton over his face and neck.

  “Heating up,” said Doc, pointing to the rising sun. It was, and all around the pace continued to slow as the heat made its impact. By the next water-point, at ten miles, they were passing sweat-drenched runners who had dropped to a walk. Behind them, Flanagan’s trucks had already begun to pick up non-finishers.

  “I reckon we’re the first people to come here by foot since the eighteen-eighties,” said Doc. “About three thousand came out here from back East with pushcarts – they could move twice as fast as oxen.”

  Hugh pulled down his sombrero and drew his kerchief across his brow. He could feel the sweat build up again on his forehead even as he brushed it off. It poured in rivers down his cheeks and neck and soon he could feel it coursing down the valley between his abdominal muscles.

  At first the sweat was a relief, acting as it was intended to do, as a means of cooling the skin. Slowly, however, the sweat started to encroach upon him. It tickled his temples, drenched his eyebrows, poured its salty tears into his eyes, making them smart and sting. Then he began to sniff the salt sweat up into his nose, making him cough. His light jersey absorbed all the sweat it could, then stuck to his body like a leech. The sweat ran down the inside of his crotch, down his legs, into his feet.

  He looked sideways at Doc. Sweat was running down the channels in the older man’s lined face. Doc shook himself like a dog, spraying out showers.

  “Time for more water,” he said, nodding to the attendant at the water-point, who was serving Bouin, Dasriaux and half a dozen others.

  Hugh’s thirst had started to rage. He had gulped back two cartons of water when Doc laid a hand on his arm. “Easy,” he said. “Let it go down slow. Let the mouth enjoy it.”

  Half past ten, and five miles to go to the end of the first half of the day’s stage. The road shimmered with heat, and Hugh felt as if they were running through a corridor of warm air. He noticed he had stopped sweating. The sun was evaporating his sweat and his skin was hot.

  They completed the twenty miles in just under three hours forty minutes, finishing in tenth and eleventh positions. Flanagan had set the mid-point of the stage by a dried-up river bed, where there was plenty of shade under gnarled and twisted Joshua trees, and had set up two great central refreshment tents as places both for food and for respite from the heat.

  By midday the sun was so hot that the Trans-Americans were confined to tents and caravans. For the moment the Trans-America lay still and dead, twenty miles out from Grand Junction.

  “Can’t figure it,” said Doc, sipping his tenth orange juice in the gloom of the tent. “The way those two Krauts have been burning up the road. Something’s wrong.”

  “What can be wrong?” asked Hugh.

  “For starters” – Doc put down his drink – “those guys are too young to be running these big distances. Hardly out of their teens. It ain’t natural. They haven’t got the miles under their belts. No. Something’s wrong, though I can’t yet figure it out.”

  He turned on to his back and pulled his cap over his eyes.

  “By the way,” he said. “You’re doing good out there. Real good.”

  The runners lay like dead men, like the debris of some great battle. They lay in rows naked on their backs on their blankets, their hands across their chests, bodies gleaming even in the gloom. Now that they were out of the sun the sweat streamed from each pore; the tent stank of the sweat of forty thousand miles of running.

  Outside, the sun hit the tent relentlessly and its surface was impossible to touch. Inside, in the cathedral of the great tent, the Trans-Americans dedicated themselves to the next stage of their race.

  For Hugh it had been his first experience of running under hot conditions. His only flicker of fear had been when he had stopped sweating, for this had been a new experience. The feeling of the body burning itself up stride by stride was an uncomfortable one, and one which he would have to face until they had cleared the desert. Since it had not been accompanied by any noticeable muscular fatigue he was content, but he had become increasingly aware of how little he knew about covering such massive distances daily.

  In his researches back in Glasgow’s sepulchral Mitchell Library he had devoured every book he could find on distance running. Good God, even marathon runners were not advised to run much more than twenty miles a week in training! And now he was trying to cover twice that distance and more a day, six times a week for three months on end, across some of the toughest country in the world. The settlers had had enough on their hands getting ac
ross these dry wastes even without the Indians, he thought.

  Barstow, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Boulder – places he had never even heard of, or if at all only in the darkness of the Carlton Cinema, Townhead, Glasgow, fumbling with some unwilling lass in the back row of the stalls. Hugh had no fear of failure, for somehow he sensed that even getting as far as Las Vegas had been a kind of victory, and that every day since then had been a fresh achievement. In each day’s running he had found, and hoped he would continue to find, new depths and qualities in himself, and that was a victory whatever the outcome of the race.

  His thoughts strayed to Dixie. He had often dreamed of girls like her, but now that he had met her he had not the first idea of how to approach her. She seemed so controlled, so sure of herself. Even the thought of laying his hand on hers made him shiver, not because he did not want to touch her, but out of fear of rejection. What could they talk about? They had so little in common. He would ask Doc to organize something for one of the rest days, he decided: something that would bring them together and spare him the embarrassment of her saying no . . .

  Doc lay back, head cupped in hands, chewing on a straw, and allowed his thoughts to slip back to his first day as a travelling man. He had ranged the Mid-West in summer, the Deep South in fall, for only at harvest time was there money in a farmer’s pockets.

  He would set up a platform near the river and at night, as twilight came, set the kerosene torches ablaze. When, drawn by the lights, the banging of drums and the blare of trumpets, a sufficiently large crowd had drawn round, he would put McGinty the comedian on stage.

  “Why do old maids go to church on Sunday?” McGinty would ask. “So they can be there when the hymns are given out!” Or, “Why did the chicken cross the road? So he could get to the other seed!”

  All good stuff, plundered from Jackson’s On a Slow Train Through Arkansas.

  Then to the pie-eating contest.

  Pies, liberally coated with molasses, were suspended from a beam and the lads of the town, hands behind their backs, would make idiots of themselves trying to consume them.

  Then to the real business of the evening. Doc, in goatee and Prince Albert coat, sporting on his chest a jangle of medals, would stand on stage for some moments, his back to the crowd, silently studying an anatomical chart.

  Then he would turn to face his audience.

  “In life there are only two certainties, ladies and gentlemen,” he would say, grasping his lapels. “Death and the taxman. I cannot do anything about the Department of Inland Revenue, but, ladies and gentlemen, I can change your life.”

  He would then dramatically reveal a bottle of Pinkham’s remedy.

  His spiel would last anything between half an hour and an hour, depending on how the mood took him, and would end with a clamour of hands grasping for Mrs Pinkham’s elixir.

  Lydia Pinkham. Even twenty years after her death she was still offering advice to women by mail – before the government stepped in and stopped it.

  Doc lay cradling his head in his hands. Yes, it had been a great life. But this, the Trans-America, was what he had waited for . . .

  Morgan looked around him. They were certainly a strange bunch. Gabby old Doc, who seemed to have lived ten lives, all of them on the run. That dark, hard Scotsman, McPhail – a decent enough guy, but somehow young for his age. Martinez: Martinez was like a child, springing along gaily and happily, but with an immense responsibility, the life of his village, resting on his slim shoulders. Morgan was glad that the little Mexican had won a few bucks on the second stage, back in the Mojave.

  And Thurleigh. The Englishman was like something out of a school picture book, delicate and remote. Thurleigh had come from some other world, a world of assumptions which Morgan instinctively disliked. Still, as long as he kept out of his way.

  And what of the girl, of Kate? He still had no idea why he had gone out after her. She was as unlike Ruth as it was possible to be. Just the thought of Ruth made him wince. This race was for her, for their child. He had dedicated himself to it completely: no woman must be allowed to divert him.

  Juan Martinez lay on the floor in a corner of the tent, rolled up in a tight ball, engulfed in the folds of his blanket. Already he had won more money than he had dreamed possible and had arranged with Flanagan that it should be forwarded to his village through the agency of the Bank of Mexico. Juan Martinez lived from day to day. In any case, for him New York was simply a dream. He could not conceive of it, could no more imagine its crowded streets and its skyscrapers than a deaf man could imagine a Wagner opera. The Trans-America was proving tougher than he had expected, harder even than his daily runs with the Tarahumares had been. But a thousand-odd miles away in his village life was immeasurably harder, and he daily dedicated himself anew to grinding out fifty more miles on the endless dirt roads, the memory of his people firmly in his mind . . .

  Only a few feet away from him Peter Thurleigh, his brown feet poking beyond the foot of his blanket, started to snore, realized he was doing so, gulped, and settled back again into silent sleep. Though he had still not discarded his blue-lined Oxford shorts he had adopted more practical long-sleeved clothing for his upper body and was now – his body burnt almost black by the desert sun – indistinguishable from the other Trans-Americans, and was still in the top twenty places on every stage. Though his view of the world was incomparably broader than that of Martinez, like Martinez he had never conceived that the Trans-America would be like this. He had never imagined men who could notch up fifty miles a day, day in, day out, over nightmare deserts and crippling hills, in temperatures that would fry an egg. He lay on his bed, listening to the scuffles and snores of the thousand men around him. His Rolls-Royce had ended up in a ditch back in Barstow and now his chauffeur-butler, Hargreaves, was in Barstow hospital with appendicitis. Thurleigh was on his own, with well over two thousand miles still to go. Peter Thurleigh smiled. The butler and the Rolls had really been rather juvenile; a piece of undergraduate showing-off. Hargreaves, an out-of-work American actor, had never been closer to England than Sunset Boulevard, his only experience as a butler having been in Eric von Stroheim’s Foolish Wives in 1922.

  No, thought Peter Thurleigh, a titled parentage counted for little out here. All that mattered was the ability to hold body and mind together for fifty miles a day, six days a week, over country that made even the torrid Paris Olympics cross-country race look like a Sunday-school picnic.

  For the dirt-roads of Utah absorbed titles and professions just as they had absorbed settlers half a century before. In any case, even back in England his peerage had counted for little. For his father, Albert Swindells, had made his money in Luton in the 1880s in the hat trade. It had been his financial support for the Liberals in difficult times that had secured Swindells his peerage. But the “man of straw”, as Swindells the milliner had been called, had never secured the hoped-for respect from the class which he so admired. And neither had his son.

  Thurleigh imagined he was back in the “dorm” at school. The same groans, the same fetid smells, the same creaks as men turned from side to side, or sought furtive sexual relief. For a moment Peter felt that cold shiver of fear and uncertainty he had known as a twelve-year-old on his first night at Eton.

  At school, sport had been the key, for there sport was a religion. Individual sports like track and field athletics or cross-country running could, however, only be tolerated if linked with success in team sports, and his ability on the rugby field provided that essential balance, that team involvement, which made individual prowess in athletics acceptable. It also made almost acceptable the fact that his father, though a peer, was in trade.

  At Cambridge he had never felt at ease, and even his title and his affluence did not allow him to relax. Not for him the spinning of idle days at Fenners, of training that consisted merely of a trot and a massage. While others dined on tea and crumpets, watching him through rainy pavilion windows, he plodded dourly round the Fenners track. Long after th
ey had gone at night and long before they had risen in the morning, he ran mile after mile.

  But they did not care. Indeed, they despised him for it. It was simply not right to show such seriousness, such commitment, for everything had to be accomplished with ease and grace. He was acting like a tradesman, not a gentleman. No, young Thurleigh simply would not do.

  He had tried everything to be accepted. Indeed, he even became an anonymous athletics correspondent to The Times, sometimes commenting at length on his own performances in an attempt to make his fellow undergraduates understand his commitment. But it was no good. Always they, the charmed ones, danced the night with the gossamer girls he so feared while he stood in the shadows, expensively and impeccably dressed, invariably alone.

  At both the Paris and Amsterdam Olympics he had met another kind of athlete, the harriers, working-class men steeped in road and cross-country running. But Peter could no more relate to them than he could to his contemporaries at Cambridge. He was stuck in a sort of limbo, aware all the time of a nagging inadequacy which athletic success seemed unable to assuage.

  It had never occurred to him to enter the Trans-America until that night at the Reform Club. Some members had been discussing the Trans-America race earlier, but now they had moved on to the subject of the sprinter compared with the distance-runner . . .

  “Sprinting,” said Lord Farne loudly. “Nothing to it. Like a bloody greyhound. No guts, no heart.”

  Peter Thurleigh had swung round in his chair immediately.

  “And how, Farne, would you define a sprint?” he asked.

  It was Aubrey Flacke who answered. “How far did you run in Paris at the Olympics?”