Flanagan's Run

by Tom McNab

  Daily, the mountain’s icy tableaux had been repeated, with Doc, Hugh, Morgan and Martinez hanging on grimly at the Germans’ heels. Behind, Bouin and Capaldi closed in, with Thurleigh also up with the leaders, but behind them new faces began to appear, with the lanky Australian, Mullins, the squat Jap, Tajuma, and the skinny Pole, Komar, now featuring in the top dozen at each stage. The field was telescoping, as the specialist hill runners, men with legs of steel, sucked in the leaders.

  It was at Gypsum that they began to run into the really high country, and forty miles later they laboured painfully in dropping temperatures through the Shrine Pass, eleven thousand feet above sea level. They camped just beyond the Pass, on the central spine of the Rockies, some sixty-odd miles short of Denver.

  Willard Clay had excelled himself in these testing conditions, and each of the athletes’ tents was, every night, warmed by dozens of paraffin stoves. The atmosphere was muggy and smelly but it was also warm, and Doc and Hugh listened contentedly as the winds swept by outside, screaming through the mountain passes.

  “Cross my heart, he used to run backwards,” Doc was saying, as he squatted with Hugh and Morgan on the dirt floor of the tent.

  “His name was Edmund Payson Weston,” he went on, “and he walked from New York to Los Angeles about fifty years ago, covering about the same daily mileages we do. He travelled the world in a velvet jacket and pants, walking fifty-five miles in twelve hours round running tracks for big money. For the last mile or so he would play a trumpet or walk backwards. Then afterwards, for good measure, he would talk for an hour on the value of walking and exercise for good health.”

  “But what has this to do with hill running?” asked Hugh.

  “I’ll tell you what,” said Doc. “We’re coming to some really steep ones now . . .”

  “You can say that again!” said Hugh. “They can’t come any tougher than what we’ve been through.”

  “Well, Payson Weston had this theory that going down steep hills was best done by running backwards, so that the fronts of the thighs weren’t damaged.”

  “Your Weston guy may not have been too far out,” said Morgan. “The long downhill stretches are tough. All that paying out of muscles to keep you from falling forward.”

  “Exactly,” said Doc.

  “Well, why don’t you follow his theory?” asked Hugh.

  “The way I reckon it, if I’m going to run three thousand-odd miles I sure as hell want to see where I’m going,” grinned Doc. “Still, one thing we do need from now on is a few pairs of these.” He turned to his knapsack and drew out a pair of red long-johns.

  “The forecast for tomorrow is snow. What with snow and winds, we’re going to be running uphill into sub-zero temperatures for the next few days. Your legs never get warm, no matter how far you run. Tomorrow morning we get you both a pair of long-johns in Leadville. I reckon the stores at Leadville will be sold out of warm clothing soon, so we’d best be up early.”

  “Wow,” said Willard Clay to Dixie, both hands on the wheel of the Ford pickup. “lt’s colder than Alaska out there.” Willard’s plump face creased into a frown as he tried to focus through the slow snow-clogged windscreen wipers. They drove south towards Leadville, Colorado, their mission – to purchase warm clothing for over eight hundred ill-equipped Trans-Americans, huddled five miles back in tents whipped by wind and snow.

  “Will Mr Flanagan cancel tomorrow’s stage, do you think?” asked Dixie, face close to the misty windscreen.

  “Impossible,” said Willard, moving down a gear to negotiate a steep incline.

  “Mr Flanagan and me, we got a tight schedule to keep. Sure, we’ve got a little slack, but come hell or high water, tomorrow we got to run.”

  Dixie peered out into the thick, fluffy snow at the towering white mountains through which the Trans-Americans would tomorrow have to pass. Up till now, the weather in the Rockies had been unusually mild, and the runners’ main problem had been running up the steep, uneven roads in the oxygen-starved atmosphere. Now they were to face snow and sub-zero temperatures.

  Dixie looked to her left at Willard. She had now been with Clay for almost two months, yet she knew virtually nothing about him. But in the first days of the Trans-America, when she had faced the problem of logging the positions of two thousand finishers in the heat of the Mojave, it had been little Willard who had found the time to stand for a moment by her side and point out more effective ways of completing the task. Willard was everywhere, yet it was difficult to imagine him as a person with a life independent of the Trans-America and its needs.

  Certainly he was no ladies’ man, and generally presented a complete contrast to his employer. It was the first time that they had been alone together, and Dixie decided to seize the initiative, in the only way she knew how, by asking questions.

  “How did you first come to meet Mr Flanagan?” she asked.

  Willard’s eyes remained fixed on the road ahead.

  “Back in New York, in 1923. Me, I was a smart nobody selling bootleg in Hell’s Kitchen. Mr Flanagan, well, I had known him from way back in his old YMCA days. But he sure had to do some sweet talking to drag me away from my bootleg business!”

  “Were you making a lot of money?”

  “I’ll say,” smiled Willard, sweat beginning to roll down his bulbous neck. “Three hundred bucks a week. Then Mr Flanagan comes to me with this crazy idea for indoor horse-racing. The scheme was to bring in horses and cowboys from out West and race them round a dirt track in armories in New York and New Jersey.”

  “And did it all work out?”

  Willard grinned and shook his head.

  “I went in with Mr Flanagan, and gave up my bootlegging. Don’t ask me why – I even had to grubstake him five hundred bucks just to get him started. A week later the cops busted my old bootleg operation and my buddies all spent two years in the pen.”

  “And the horse-racing?”

  “Mr Flanagan paid out a couple of thousand bucks to some operator out West for a herd of wild horses. We waited for two months for those horses. That was the last Flanagan ever saw of his two grand – so our horse-racing business never ever got to first base.”

  “So what did you do then?”

  “Me and Mr Flanagan picked up some loose change scouting for the Brooklyn Dodgers, out in the bush leagues. In between we set up poker games for guys looking for some action. Then, in 1925, Mr Flanagan started to manage a pro tennis player, a French girl name of Suzanne Lamarr. I worked as her road manager. Mr Flanagan and Miss Lamarr spent most of their time fogging up windscreens from the inside. Then she beat it to Brazil with an Italian waiter in 1928 and in 1929 Mr Flanagan got the idea for the Trans-America.”

  Dixie fumbled in her handbag for her cosmetic bag.

  “And what did you think of the idea?”

  “At first, not much. Then I thought to myself – when is a little guy like me ever going to get the chance to get two thousand guys across America? It was the chance of a lifetime. Heck, I’d spent most of my life grafting in toytown – here I could do something real big, something nobody had ever done.”

  “And can you and Mr Flanagan do it?”

  Willard’s smile faded.

  “Ma’am, we’ve got to do it. I came from nowhere – no family, no education, half way to the pen – when Mr Flanagan picked me up. Now I’m fixing the greatest foot-race in the world.”

  Dixie withdrew a lipstick from her bag, looked into her compact mirror and carefully etched her lips.

  “But what about all the towns that won’t pay, or are pulling out?”

  Willard reached for a pack of cigarettes and flipped one of them into his mouth.

  “I leave all that to Mr Flanagan,” he said, flicking his lighter into life. “He fixes that part of the operation. I just get us from one place to the next.” He lit his cigarette. “Mr Flanagan’s half Houdini, half Holy Ghost. With that kind of combination we could get these guys to the moon.”

  Dixie was silent
. They were approaching the outskirts of Leadville. Together, Flanagan and this plump, rumpled little man were dragging a thousand runners, a circus, a press corps and a hundred-odd staff across the winding roads of America, through every possible adversity. And somehow she was involved, and daily grew more involved, as she came to understand and become directly involved in the logistics which were a matter of instinct to Willard Clay. From being a passive spectator, a decoration, she was becoming a part of the Trans-America, part not only of its administrative machinery, but also of its heart and will.

  Willard drew the pickup into the brown slush of the sidewalk, alongside the general store.

  “Leadville, Colorado,” he said, pulling on the handbrake. “And by the way, Miss Williams, Mr Flanagan says to tell you you’re doing a good job. Thought you’d like to know.”

  It had been Hugh’s idea that they take a trip to the movies, and he who had prompted Doc to put it to the rest of the group, in the hope that Dixie could be persuaded to join them. To his relief she had accepted, and he had sat uneasily beside her on the rough floor of the truck, their bodies occasionally touching as the vehicle made its bumpy way into town.

  That night they crowded into the Electric Picture Palace, Main Street, Leadville. The cinema was undoubtedly electric, but with its patched screen and dingy mock-velvet seats it was equally no palace: hard to believe that the Douglas Fairbanks that they were watching leap across the screen as Sinbad the Sailor was the same stocky little man who had sent them on their way from Los Angeles only six weeks before.

  Kate and Morgan, Hugh and Dixie, Doc and Martinez blinked and looked around them as the lights came on for the interval. The cinema was crammed with Trans-Americans, munching popcorn and gulping down root beer, their sun-blackened faces setting them apart from the rest of the audience.

  Soon the lights dimmed again, and the trailers for the next week’s show filled the screen. It was The Public Enemy, starring James Cagney and Jean Harlow. For a few moments the cinema resounded with the blarney of the trailer – “her kiss was as deadly as his gun” – before it was replaced by a Laurel and Hardy one-reeler.

  Despite the roars of laughter around him, Hugh was aware only of Dixie’s presence just a few inches away, of her brown arms against her light cotton dress. He imagined her smooth brown body glowing beneath the coolness of the dress, and wondered if she was even remotely aware of him and of his longing. Slowly he placed his left arm on the arm-rest closest to her. To his right Morgan and Kate sat, fingers entwined, their eyes streaming with laughter. On his left Dixie seemed similarly caught up in the picture, as on the screen Stan Laurel settled down in bed for the night with a gorilla. Hugh felt totally alone, burning helplessly in a sea of laughter. He could feel himself trembling, just as he had years before when he had raced against Lord Featherstone. Then he had prepared for months for the race. Now there was no knowing. In a second, total failure, complete rejection and the longing of two months and countless dreams would count for nothing. Why should she have anything to do with him, a nobody from the black bowels of Glasgow? The distance between the left arm-rest and Dixie’s slim right hand could not have been more than eight inches. It might have been the Grand Canyon. In Hugh’s imagination he saw himself not merely touching her but grasping her hand in his, and of her firm and passionate response. He ached to bridge those few dark inches, but felt paralyzed. In only a few minutes the lights would return and the moment would be lost for ever.

  He moved his arm a few inches. It felt as if he had stretched it several feet, but there was still no contact. Hugh’s whole body was wet with sweat. He moved his left hand further. Still no contact. Perhaps Dixie was aware of his movement. Perhaps she was even moving away from him. He dared not look to find out.

  He stretched the little finger of his left hand. Still no contact. Further. Suddenly, it touched hers. For a moment he froze as he felt the warm, moist flesh of Dixie’s little finger. Then slowly, but with purpose, it overlapped his.

  Hugh prayed that the darkness would never end. When the lights finally came on they stood up, looked at each other and smiled.

  At I0 a.m. next morning, 15 April 1931, one thousand one hundred and eleven runners jogged in place in the biting wind in front of the Trans-America caravan, the snow matting and freezing in their hair and eyebrows. The athletes were dwarfed by the sharp, snow-topped mountains that surrounded them, etched against the cold blue sky. The wind shrieked across the flat, icebound field to which their tented camp had clung precariously throughout the night. Behind them, Flanagan’s tent crew struggled with numb fingers against stiff icebound canvas and frozen tent pegs, as the camp was again dismantled.

  “Today’s stage . . . forty-two miles to Silver Plume.” Flanagan’s words were lost in the screaming wind. He repeated his announcement, to no greater effect. “Food stop at twenty miles for two hours,” he continued, bellowing into the microphone. He felt ice form in his nostrils as he sniffed in the sharp mountain air. He raised aloft his pearl-handled six gun and the report of the gun sent the Trans-Americans trundling slowly through the snow towards Silver Plume.

  Doc, Hugh McPhail and Morgan all wore gloves, balaclavas and red long-johns, and Morgan noted that Kate now wore black dancing tights. Of the others, only the Finns, the Germans, the All-Americans and perhaps six hundred others wore any leg-covering. Many of the runners had no covering at all, and their brown legs were goose-pimpled by the sub-zero temperature.

  Luckily the first sixteen miles were relatively flat, and Doc and Hugh settled into a steady six-miles-an-hour trot, in twentieth position, with Muller and Stock leading a pack of a dozen others about half a mile ahead. It provided Hugh with time to look round.

  What he saw was a land of granite cliffs dropping thousands of feet into blue water lakes, of snow peaks and clinging glaciers. As they began to climb he spied below, through the light snow, lakes of green water with tiny icebergs bobbing on their surface. Above and ahead lay dense pine forest and high flower meadows.

  “Mother of Mercy,” said Doc, pointing ahead. About half a mile in front the road rose steeply, winding round the mountains like a ribbon. It was Caribou Pass, elevation 11,050 feet.

  The runners dropped to a crawl and Hugh again felt the pounding of his heart and the quickening of his breathing which had come on their earlier, more gradual climbs at altitude. Ahead, Stock and Muller had already dropped the leading group of a dozen, now strung out behind them on the white mountain road, and Hugh caught a glimpse of Stock driving steadily on upwards, alone, about a hundred yards ahead of Muller.

  The snow became steadily more dense, swirling down in thick, fluffy flakes, landing on their hair and eyebrows and freezing immediately, while, in contrast, the heat of their bodies melted it on contact. For Kate Sheridan, back in four hundred and twentieth position in a pack of eight runners, the race had again become a nightmare as legs, tuned to the sidewalks of New York, met steep, winding gradients at seven thousand feet, often in driving snow. On the toughest hills she was forced to drop to an inside fourteen-minutes-per-mile walk, moving up to over ten-minute miles downhill. At first she had wept at the pain in her thighs, her sobs echoing through the mountains, her tears freezing on her cheeks. But now she no longer cried. Kate had become two persons. In the first person was the meek, weak Kate Sheridan who got tired and breathless, the Kate Sheridan who kept wanting to stop. The other was a tough, vicious Kate Sheridan, constantly driving “Kate the meek” to keep moving, keep running, keep passing broken men, for fifty miles every day. And every hour the two Kates did battle, the fierce keeping the meek at bay.

  Up near the leaders, in eighth and ninth places, Doc and Hugh ran as if driven by a common heart, their strides exactly matched, their breathing synchronized – heavy, but controlled. After only two miles up the mountain they had come upon the first broken stragglers of the leading group, walking or plodding desperately through the snow.

  Their own stride-length had now dropped, their breathing
changed to a metronomic groan. Hugh could feel his thighs become steadily heavier and more painful – first the flickering muscles of the front and side of his thighs, then the hamstrings and groin, finally the whole of his buttocks.

  “Lean in,” Doc urged. “Put your hands on your legs, like this.”

  He put his hands on the front of his thighs, the way he had seen English fell-runners do. Hugh did as he was bid and soon felt his leg muscles relax. Thankfully they were almost at a crest of the mountain, with half a mile or so of white, flat, winding road ahead of them, giving them a chance to recover.

  They grunted and sobbed their way on passing another four runners. A few hundred yards later they picked up Martinez and Morgan running in unison, just before the next climb began, and they ran together. Again it was a steep, winding slope, into the slap of wind-driven snow, hitting their red, sweating faces, sodden jerseys and long-johns.

  Caribou Pass had shattered the Trans-America as even the deserts had previously failed to do. The desert had been hot, but there had been no hills, no lack of the oxygen essential to running. The mountains demanded more of the runners, but gave back less.

  The mountain road, thick with powdery new snow, had become slippery and soon all four were reduced to a broken, gasping slither up the treacherous slope. For a few hundred yards Doc and Hugh repeated their fell-running technique, but even that was little use. Fluid running was impossible and they were all forced to adopt a walking version of the same technique, pressing on their thighs as they struggled upwards.

  Eventually the snow started to thin, and as they reached the brow of the next hill a thin, bleak sun broke through. It revealed a white table land four thousand feet below, and above the sharp snow cap of Mount Teat, set against a turquoise blue sky.

  They stopped at the brow of the hill, brows and hair furred with ice and snow.

  “Look,” said Doc, pointing ahead. A runner was lying face down in the snowy road, about a hundred yards ahead. When they got closer they saw that it was Muller. The young German lay inert, face down on the road, arms by his side, a thin trickle of blood from his mouth staining the snow.