Flanagan's Run

by Tom McNab

  Doc wiped the sweat from his face, looked up at the sun and checked his watch. Kate was now far in the distance out of sight and he was alone, lying in about four hundredth position. Again his thoughts drifted back . . .

  Dorando, Longboat, Shrubb, Appleby, all those great runners of the past, where were they now? Jesus, he must have trotted through three generations of runners. They had come, taken their share of notoriety and applause, made their mark on the history of athletics, and vanished. But who would ever remember Doc Cole? Perhaps the Trans-America was the last opportunity to prove himself. Perhaps now was the real test. The next couple of days would tell. Doc ended the day’s stint in the crowded, dusty main street of Abilene, having preserved a sturdy six miles an hour over the two twenty-mile stages. His hips were stiff from the unaccustomed action of walking, but he was still in the race.

  Topeka Chief of Police Wilbur T. Fiske took off his silver badge and placed it on the table in front of him. Forty years on the force, thirty of them under that amiable shamrock, O’Brien, and ten of them free and clear on his own as chief.

  Free and clear. For there had not been a single major decision that he had taken for himself in all those ten years. When a businessman’s son had been found drink-sodden, having driven a car through Stacey’s Department Store window, it was Chief Fiske who had smoothed things over and arranged the pay-off. After all, he and Stacey were both masons. When the order had come for the department to stay out when the meat packers brought in hoodlums to break the strike of 1929, he had let his men stand idly by, while thugs made bloody gargoyles out of decent, hard-working men.

  Free and clear. In only three days he would indeed be free and clear, his pension assured. And now the order had come from Mayor Matson to keep the Trans-Americans out of the city until way after midnight, to allow them only to run through dark, unlit streets. He had checked on the race, and he could see no reason for the Mayor’s decision. Knowing Mayor Matson, it was bound to be something political, something rotten. Still, it was no skin off his nose, not after ten years of cleaning up Matson’s dirt.

  And then the call had come. At first he could not believe it, that Miss McAllister herself had actually telephoned him, addressed him by his first name, was asking his help, in the doing of God’s work. He had listened dumbstruck as she had told him what she wanted of him, of what his brothers and sisters all over America, indeed all over the world, required of him, of Wilbur T. Fiske. He dimly remembered kneeling by the telephone, sobbing, begging that his sins be washed away. Yes, she had said, do only this and your sins will indeed be washed away, as if in the River Jordan.

  Free and clear. Free and clear and clean on the evening of 2 May the stroke of midnight. For the call had come, and this time Wilbur T. Fiske was not going to be found wanting.

  1 May 1931: It was getting better. Slowly, but it was getting better. Doc had long since become aware of every nuance of his muscular system, every good and bad message it sent him. This third day would therefore be the last day of walking and trotting in boots across the soft Kansas roads, the thin veins that criss-crossed the waving seas of supple May wheat.

  Even five miles an hour was hard walking, but Doc went back to the vigorous hip-swivel which he had used as a race-walker, pumping his arms across his lean body. After he had warmed up he moved to a faster jog-trot, his speed limited only by his boots, and this took him cutting through the middle of the sluggish field. He was again on the move.

  Now, back at two hundred and twentieth position and still holding twenty-sixth place on aggregate time, Doc had time to study the men with whom he was running. Kovak, the gimpy Czech, carrying one leg shorter than the other, because of a polio infection in his youth. The Czech had limped and hobbled nearly two thousand miles on a leg not fit to support a chair, let alone 140 pounds, hitting the ground ten thousand times a day, six days a week. But Kovak had never stopped running, and was now closing in on Topeka, the State Capital of Kansas, groaning every step of his lop-sided way. With him was Carl Blake, the young Kansas farmer, whose land had blown away in one week in 1930, and who was running only a few miles from the same stricken fields which he had once tilled and cherished. Blake, bowed, skeletal, black with sun, his feet hardly leaving the ground, shuffled through Kansas at a steady five miles an hour. Every stride looked to be his last, but still somehow he kept on going, sweat streaming from a body that looked drained of all fluid.

  Just ahead of Doc was the little Irishman, Matt O’Carrol, his sweat-sodden green vest sticking to his back. O’Carrol ran with teeth tightly clenched, foaming slightly at the mouth. For him, too, every stride looked an agony as he and Blake ran side by side, the gaunt Kansan and the tiny, bandy-legged Irishman.

  Blake, Kovak, O’Carrol and at least a thousand others, none of whom had the slightest chance of being in the money in New York: why did they keep running? Doc was surprised that the question had ever even occurred to him. They ran because this was the moment which no landlord, no employer, no politician, could take from them. They had stood in dole queues, taken hand-outs and pay cuts, watched while plump politicians had pursued their whirligig of conferences. They had watched, impotent. It had not taken them long to realize that others were going to win the Trans-America, nor had it taken them long to reach their personal decisions to continue. They had come to run across America and no one on earth was going to stop them. No, there was no need to ask why these men kept running.

  The fields were endless, rolling seas of green wheat, billowing and flowing into the horizon. Occasionally the houses of rich farmers would rise up above the wheat like crusaders’ castles: gaunt, white-slatted wooden houses, cool and still as they had been in that hot autumn of 1914 when Doc and his road-show assistant Lily Hudson had worked in the Kansas harvest. He remembered the chanting, white-robed priests and the smell of incense before they had started the harvesting. The harvesters were horse-drawn and Lily and the women had scampered behind them, throwing the bales to the side for the men to stack. Then came the back-breaking job of pitch-forking the wheat on to the carts. Doc had watched the fluid movements of men twice his age forking high and easy and had tried to copy them – fruitlessly. Within minutes the pain in his arms and shoulders forced him to rest on his pitchfork. He was soon abruptly reminded by the foreman that no work meant no pay.

  Doc’s distance-training had served him well in those first painful days. True, distance-running had done nothing to prepare the specific muscles required for this type of work. What it had taught him was that he could suffer almost any amount of muscular discomfort. He had run through it, so he could harvest through it.

  Each night Lily had rubbed Chickamauga into his stiff arms and shoulders, as they listened to the strains of a crazy fiddle or peasant camp-fire songs from all over the world. In the mornings, before work, he had talked to the gnarled peasants who had been brought by cattle truck from Chicago to the East to bring in the Kansas harvest. They had shown him how to place the bales relative to his legs, how to keep the pitchfork close to the body, how to swing the bales upward in a single, economical, flowing movement. They had taught him the rhythm of rural labour.

  Doc had been a quick learner. Within a day he was keeping up with the best of them, feeding the greedy trucks with their supply of wheat. In the evenings he lay with Lily out of the light of the camp-fires, exploring her firm sunburnt body beneath the coolness of her cotton dress.

  Concordia, autumn 1914. It had been hard; but those had been good days. Lily was now in far-off Chicago, the owner of her very own hairdressing parlour. And he was running through that same land, with the same kind of men as those with whom he had harvested in those far-off days.

  Two miles ahead, at the front of the pack, where Doc longed to be, Lord Peter Thurleigh was racing for real. He now daily ran stride for stride with Stock; but he ran in a panic. In the past, whatever the stress of studies or athletics competition, there had always been in the background the certainty, the comfort of his wealth. He h
ad not realized how much he had depended on that background.

  Until he had arrived in Los Angeles he had been unable to take the Trans-America completely seriously. Indeed, until he had seen the Los Angeles hotels and boarding-houses choked with Trans-Americans and journalists and had read newspaper reports of Flanagan’s first press conference he had half-suspected that the Trans-America might be some gigantic hoax and that Flanagan, whoever he was, was safely established with the competition entry fees in some far-off Mexican hacienda.

  The reality of the first days on the road had ended all such thoughts. This was indeed real. The disappearance of his butler and Rolls-Royce in the Mojave had only underlined the fact that he was going to have to tap every resource if he was to take the smiles from the faces of his adversaries back at the club in London; the disappearance of his family fortunes even more so.

  Thurleigh had soon realized, too, that the world of Oxford and of genteel amateur athletics had done nothing to prepare him for the Trans-America. For this was not a race of a few minutes of pain or discomfort like the Olympic five thousand metres. Here, in the Trans-America, it hurt all day and every day. And each day there was some new problem, a blister to be lanced, a stomach upset to be treated, a tendon to be nursed, sunburned ankles to be salved. Peter Thurleigh had got used to calves and thighs from which a dull soreness never retreated, but had never become accustomed to the permanent pain in his joints and bones.

  After only two hundred miles he had thought he would have to give up, that there was no way he could stand three months of pounding on the dirt roads of America, living nightly in the reek of liniment, sweat and human excrement. But slowly the Trans-America had both infected and absorbed him. It was nothing to do with the wager he had made, even though now his financial future depended on it. Rather, like Kate Sheridan and the others, Thurleigh had become engaged in a battle with himself. It was a battle which he was never quite certain of winning, but one which he grew to relish.

  The receipt of his father’s telegram informing him of the loss of the family fortunes in some strange way freed Peter Thurleigh. Now there were no buffers, no cozy retreat if things went wrong. Like all the other competitors he was on his own, with no safety net to catch him if he failed. That knowledge gave him the daily jolt of adrenalin which took him through the hard miles.

  He had asked to join Doc’s group, not out of any sense of weakness but rather because he could sense the camaraderie which had developed between Doc, Hugh, Morgan and Martinez; even the frail childlike Martinez seemed to have drawn strength from the group. He felt, too, that in their company he could only learn and grow and absorb something of a world which, up till then, had been as remote to him as the surface of the moon. But Doc had prevaricated and had asked Thurleigh to wait till the conclusion of the race against Silver Star in St Louis.

  Behind him, Martinez, Morgan and McPhail ran as a unit. Martinez and Morgan had joined Doc and Hugh’s “co-operative” back in Abilene. Henceforth they all would share whatever the Trans-America brought them, working under Doc’s guidance. Their orders were to keep Stock in sight, but not to become involved in racing with him. For the first ten miles they had run behind Stock and Thurleigh, and watched the back of Thurleigh’s silk vest gradually darken as it absorbed his sweat.

  Directly behind them pressed Eskola, Bouin and Capaldi, themselves tracked by the Jap, Son, and the sinewy Australian, Mullins. The race was telescoping, as the first two thousand miles loomed ahead in St Louis, now only four hundred miles away.

  Kate was finding it difficult to think of anything but Morgan, of his body pressed against hers in the darkness of the strange room. Daily, as she cut through the green Kansas fields, she recalled each moment, from the first tentative touch to her final cry. She found it impossible to believe that he felt as she did: so much of Morgan was hidden from view. Gradually, however, she had learned about his past. She sensed his guilt, his feeling that in being with her he had betrayed his dead wife.

  “Look, Mike,” she had said, “from what you say I think I would have loved her too. I haven’t taken you over from her. I’ve taken you on. So don’t ever forget her.”

  Morgan looked straight at her. “You would have liked each other,” he said.

  Her running had become automatic, freeing her mind to think of him as she continued to pass man after man. With the Rockies behind her, she at least was relishing the flat roads of Kansas.

  Doc picked up and passed Kate early that morning, and started to cut easily through the field. By the end of the day, at Wamego, he would be two hours down on Stock, an hour down on the others. That would mean that he would have to battle with Stock for at least a week even to regain his second position. Beyond that he could not think, for he could see no way of actually catching Stock if the young German maintained his present form. Such a performance by a young athlete was outside Doc’s experience, for distance-running had always been the province of men in their thirties and forties, men race-hardened with thousands of miles of running.

  Doc took his food on the run now, thus gaining half a minute at each feeding-station. Flanagan had, mercifully, given up the peanut butter sandwiches back in the Mojave, providing instead light, easily digestible snacks of fruit, chocolate and water, milk and saline lemon drinks.

  Doc poured the remains of his drinking water over his head as he trotted down the main street of McFarland, and waved at the cheering crowds as he picked up another carton of water from the feeding-station. As he did so a little boy in brown corduroys pushed his way out of the crowds and stood in front of him. The boy, who could not have been more than nine or ten, held in his hands a grubby school exercise book and a short, stubby pencil.

  He looked back anxiously at what Doc guessed were his classmates in the crowd. “Could I have your autograph, sir?” he asked, finally.

  It was the first time Doc had been asked for his autograph by a child since the London Olympics.

  “Have you any idea of my name, sonny?” he asked, wiping the sweat from his hands.

  “Yes, sir,” replied the boy. “We see movies of the race at the Roxy every week. You’re Doc Cole the runner, and me and my buddies have a dollar on you getting first to New York.”

  “Doc Cole the runner,” whispered Doc under his breath. To the boy he said, “I’ll try to help you hang on to that dollar.”

  He laid down the carton of water on the table beside him and slowly wrote on the first page of the boy’s exercise book.

  “Alexander (Doc) Cole, with best wishes to . . .” he wrote, then looked at the boy.

  “Just put ‘the boys of McFarland’, sir,” said the boy, standing on tiptoe to look over Doc’s shoulder as Doc completed the autograph.

  Doc closed the exercise book and handed it back to the boy. He leant down and kissed him on the cheek, to the applause of the crowd. A tear trickled down his own cheek. Doc drew the back of his hand across his eyes and trotted down the main street, waving at the crowds as he did so. Tomorrow he would start to catch up, all the way to St Louis. Doc Cole would show them some fancy running.

  As usual, Peter Stock had led all the way, and now, at one in the morning, three miles outside Topeka he chugged behind the brightly-lit Trans-America truck, which blared Rudy Vallee and The Whiffenpoof Song from its loudspeaker system. A quarter of a mile behind followed Eskola, Thurleigh, McPhail, Martinez and Morgan, followed in turn by Mullins and Son. The rest of the field was strung out for six miles along the road, with a rejuvenated Doc moving up into the low thirties now, well ahead of Kate, who was running close to three hundredth position.

  Peter Stock trotted wearily across the unlit Kansas Avenue in the residential area of the town, followed by the purring black Mercedes containing the German team staff. There was not a streetlight in town, for the mayor had acted on his instructions from Toffler.

  Flanagan turned on all the Trans-America caravan lights and beamed the searchlight on top of the caravan on Stock.

  The Trans-Am
erica trundled quietly into the darkness of Main Street, passing the Capitol Building on its right. The shopping precinct was completely still.

  “Like a graveyard,” Flanagan said, chewing on his cigar at the window of his caravan.

  Suddenly there was the shrill hoot of a policeman’s whistle. The lights of every shop in the street flooded on, blinding Stock and the stream of runners behind him. At the same time the headlights of hundreds of cars, lined for half a mile on each side of the street, sprang to life. It was like daytime, and the runners cruised through the street bathed in a sea of light.

  The whistle shrilled again and the street reverberated to the noise of a thousand car hooters, working in unison. A third whistle brought waves of sustained applause, for there were at least five thousand people lining the main street. A fourth whistle signalled a brass band at the finish to start up with “See the Conquering Hero Comes”.

  Once again Flanagan’s men were amongst friends as men, women and children from the crowd came out to shake their hands and give them sweets and drinks. The runners were engulfed in a sea of Topekans.

  Willard Clay stopped the Trans-America caravan beyond the finish. A portly figure in dress uniform stood facing Flanagan as he left the caravan. The man pumped Flanagan’s hand warmly.

  “I’m chief of police, Wilbur T. Fiske,” he said. “You’ll be Mr Flanagan. My apologies for the lack of streetlights, but I hope our little welcome made up for it. Our ladies are along at your camp now fixing up some special victuals for your boys. Miss McAllister can’t be here herself but she asks to be reminded to you kindly.”