Flanagan's Run

by Tom McNab

  “But you were the only one who knew?”

  Doc grinned and nodded.

  “I reckoned that I was the only one who needed to know, though I seem to remember that I wrote you a few times.”

  Lily smiled wryly. “They sure meant one helluva lot to me, those clockings of yours.” She looked down into her drink, then up at Doc. “You know why I left you?”

  Doc shook his head.

  “It was the running. Sure, at the time I said that I wanted to settle down, get off the medicine-show circuit. But I could have taken that, as long as I was with you. No, it was the running. That was where you lived – in your running – the only place you were really alive. Not with me.”

  Lily sighed and pushed back a wisp of greying blonde hair. She looked across at him.

  “What did you find there, Alex, out on the roads? You used to talk about how you could ‘see inside yourself’ when you ran – hell, I can’t remember the half of it. But what else did you find there? Not me. Not any woman.”

  Doc shrugged. “You’re right, though I didn’t understand it at the time. What I found inside me was that one talent I had, the ability to run long distances, the capacity to push my body to its limits. It’s like a drug, the stretching of your body out to the unknown. And once you get hooked it’s difficult to come off it. As long as I was improving it was great. Then, when I got older, I had to con myself by running over odd distances – do you know I hold the world record for nine and a quarter miles? Then, just when it was all beginning to go sour and I was starting to have doubts, up came Flanagan and the Trans-America.”

  “And that made it all worthwhile?”

  “Just about. It seemed to be what I had been preparing for, only without knowing it.”

  “The Big One?”

  “Yes. And it hasn’t been lonely, as I had expected. It’s been like a sort of Swiss Family Robinson, trekking across the Union. We’ve got a little team, a couple of Englishmen, a Mexican, and a guy called Morgan. I think you’d like them.”

  Lily fingered her glass.

  “You want to know what happened to me?”

  Doc nodded.

  “Like you, I was waiting for the Big One, the knock on the door that was going to change it all. I met my Big One in Chicago in 1922.”

  She looked down at her empty glass.

  “His name was Al Capone.”

  She paused to allow her words to sink in.

  “He seemed a nice little guy at first, quite a gentleman, like most Italians. We had ourself some good times.”

  She finished her drink with a quick gulp.

  “In 1925 he set me up in my own hairdressing shop. A couple of weeks later he set up a speakeasy and a gambling shop at the back. I thought, so what, I was doing what I wanted.”

  Lily nodded again at the waiter.

  “In twenty-eight he threw me over. Since then my job has been to set him up with young broads. So you see I found my Big One, my Wizard with the miraculous hat.”

  Doc drew his lips together tightly and again put his hand on hers.

  “So we’re both still looking, after all these years?”

  “Sure looks that way.”

  Doc looked Lily in the eyes.

  “One thing about never having grown up properly, you’ve still got plenty of stretch left in you. By my age, lots of guys have been married three times and have one foot in the grave. Me, I’m young. Jesus, I’ve got the body of a twenty-year-old and a mind not much older. I’ve got eight hundred miles left to finish this race and win it. With the money, I can set us up in any sort of business you like.”

  Lily shook her head.

  “It’s too late. We’ve come too far.”

  “No,” said Doc. “Not too far. Perhaps not far enough. Wait till after New York. Give it a chance.”

  “If you make New York,” she said suddenly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m still close to Capone and his boys. The Trans-America’s too big for them not to want a piece of it. A couple of his boys,]ake Guzik and Frank Nitti, have set up a syndicate. They’ve put a bundle on one of the local boys, Capaldi, winning the stage into Chicago.”

  “Capaldi could win it on his merits,” said Doc. “He’s coming on strong.”

  Lily grimaced. “Well, just make sure no one tries to head Capaldi into Chicago.”

  AMERICANA DATELINE 22 MAY 1931

  Goose Lake Prairie, Illinois. C. C. Flanagan’s Trans-Americans make the fifty-six-mile run into Chicago tomorrow. The race has now reached a remarkable pitch, with Doc Cole’s group, which has led since Denver, being attacked from behind by the Williams’ All-Americans, led by the Chicago-born Italian, Capaldi, and by a four-man European team led by the Finn, Eskola. Other non-team runners Mullins, Son, and the Irish runner, Brady, are also starting to close in on the leaders.

  The Mexican, Juan Martinez, who now lies thirty-fourth and has been suffering from stomach trouble, looks likely to try to win this fifty-six-mile slog, as Chicago is the home of his brother, Emiliano. This stage bears no prize money, but Chicago bookmakers are giving low odds of 2-1 against the Chicago-born Capaldi, who tells me that he wants to show well in front of newly-appointed Mayor Cermak and his fellow-citizens.

  Also of interest to the sports-loving Chicago public will be the appearance of the now-famous Miss Kate Sheridan, whose last performance in Chicago was on the stage of the Roxy theatre, where she appeared in I929 as a dancer. Miss Sheridan’s legs, though now put to different tasks, are well worth the consideration of the Chicago public. Miss Sheridan still has twenty-three men between her and the ten thousand dollars offered her by a national ladies’ journal. All Chicago will be out to see if this splendid representative of the weaker sex can step still closer to that magic ten grand.

  CARL C. LIEBNITZ

  22

  Meeting Mr Capone

  After Juan Martinez had won his village trial, and so the right to represent them in the Trans-America, it was decided that he would be sent to the mountains of the Sierra Tarahumare to train with a tribe of runners called the Tarahumares. He had taken almost a week to recover from the trial race, during which he had been daily massaged by the village’s medicine man, Carlos. Meat was virtually unknown in Quanto, but an ancient goat was slaughtered to provide Juan with the necessary protein, and daily he had struggled to digest its tough, teaklike flesh, carefully watched by Carlos and his mother and father. Daily, he trotted five miles over dusty broken roads, and with each day he found that running was becoming a little easier. Perhaps, he thought, he might have a talent for this distance-running; or perhaps it was only the goat meat.

  In 1890 a Norwegian naturalist, Carl Lumholtz, had timed the Tarahumares running twenty-one miles in two hours whilst playing rarahipa, a ball-kicking game. His accounts were derided and forgotten. Much later, in 1926, the Mexican government had brought two Tarahumares to the high altitude of Mexico City for an exhibition run. The Indians had amazed sports writers by completing a sixty-five-mile course in nine hours thirty-seven minutes. A year later another Tarahumare had lopped over an hour from the record for the fifty-one mile distance between Kansas City and Austin, Kansas.

  The Mexican government then asked a Tarahumares chief to send three of his runners to compete in a standard marathon. The chief responded by sending three women, one of whom finished in third place. The race organizers expressed surprise that the tribe’s best runners had been women. The chief replied that a short race like twenty-six miles was ideal for women, and that was why he had sent them.

  To the villagers of Quanto, Juan was an investment. If he came back successful from the Trans-America then the subsistence economy of the village would be transformed. The villagers could lose little in this gamble; they had little to lose.

  Juan had staggered home first of nineteen aspirants in the village trial, over a modest twenty-mile course around the village. Every saleable item in Quanto had then been sold to get him to the Tarahumares for trai
ning, and to pay for his onward passage to Los Angeles. Even then there had not been enough, and there had been recourse to the local moneylender for a loan at heavy rates of interest. Letters of introduction had been sent ahead to Manuel, the leader of the Tarahumare tribe, and three weeks later Juan Martinez set off towards the Sierra Tarahumare.

  Juan had taken the train, the Ferrocarril Chihuahua Al Pacifico, to Chihuahua, then travelled by mule to the home of the tribe to which he had been sent at the village of Chogita. Chogita lay in a long, narrow valley and consisted of an avenue of adobe huts, each about half a mile apart.

  When he arrived groups of tribesmen, faces and legs daubed with white paint and wearing coloured head-bands or sombreros, were chanting and dancing outside a hut. Juan realized he had come in the middle of a religious holiday and so he squatted on the other side of the rough road munching his food until the Tarahumares had jogged down the valley to the next hut.

  The Communidad, the town hall where all tribal matters were settled, was in the middle of the village, and it was there that Juan met Manuel. The wiry old man had been a great runner in his youth, and knew well why Martinez had come. He had come to Chogita to be absorbed into a running culture, and he was soon to gain his first direct experience of it, for the chief told him that a forty-mile race was to be held the next day. It was not a rarahipa or a dowerami (hoop race), but a simple foot-race.

  Juan had watched that night as the runners squatted in the flickering lights of their camp fires, oiling their legs with goat-grease and massaging them with boiled juniper branches. This part of their preparation completed, they huddled round the fire, smoking, eating tortilla and drinking coffee.

  The race was a nightmare: forty miles of running over rough stony country at high altitude, at a steady eight miles an hour. The Tarahumare, wearing thonged leather sandals, shuffled evenly over the dry, brown mountains with never a break in their rhythm. Martinez kept up with the leaders for the first ten miles, then gradually felt his breathing become more and more laboured as he battled desperately in the thin air. Soon he was back among the youths and the old men, struggling to maintain even a modest six miles an hour. He finished last out of thirty runners, barely able to lift his feet from the ground as he staggered in the evening gloom towards the Communidad.

  It took him three whole days to recuperate, lying on his back on a wool blanket on the dirt floor of the chief’s hut, as Manuel and his guests sat above him on crude log stools around the primitive, wood-burning stove, drinking coffee and talking in the local dialect. In those three days of recovery he had eaten the last of the cheese and dried goat’s meat which he had brought with him, but on the fourth day he began the Spartan dietary regime of the Tarahumares. This consisted of corn, squash and beans, of which the corn, used for tortillas, ground into pinole, pulped for cornmeal mush or mashed into a thick gruel, was the most important element.

  When he started to run again he did so with the women, slow, daily five to ten-mile stints in the thin mountain air, covering forty miles in his first week. Then he followed the senior men on the forty-mile rarahipa runs in preparation for the competitions between Chogita and her neighbouring villages. The rarahipa runners ran without shoes because this made the kicking of the ball easier, but Juan ran behind them in sandals. He was not allowed to take part in the inter-village competitions but was able to absorb every detail of the runners’ preparations, down to the intricate personal tattooing of the legs, a ritual which each runner considered essential to success.

  Within three months he was able to run over eighty miles a week, though he was never able to copy the low, clipped shuffle of the Tarahumares, his natural action being a prancing, high-stepping one. During this period his only confidant was Manuel, for whom Spanish was a second language. The hundreds of hours spent with the runners of the tribe contained only one language, the unspoken tongue of men linked by miles of running. The old man knew his purpose, though he could only have a dim idea of the great race in Los Angeles for which Martinez was preparing.

  Then, after four months, he repeated his forty-mile race against the runners of the tribe. This time it was different. His body had now adapted, and he was able to stay with the Tarahumares all the way and use his greater basic speed to run away from them over the last three miles.

  In the final two months he lifted his weekly mileage to one hundred and fifty miles and knew, at the end of this period, that he was now ready for the Trans-America. Manuel would accept no money for his stay at Chogita, only a wool blanket made by Martinez’s mother. The whole village came out to see him go, running as always up the steep slopes to gather at the Communidad. The chief said little on his departure. “Distinguish yourself,” he told him. “No man can ask more.”

  The fitness gained by Juan Martinez in the mountains served him well in the first blistering days of the Trans-America and he was able to pick up good money for early stage prizes, which he immediately sent back to a bank in Mexico City for onward transmission to his village. He was also able to handle the altitude of the Rockies because of his mountain experience. Slowly, however, the daily mileages across the Great Plains began to take their toll and like the other runners he began to experience pain, not only in the muscles but in the joints. Some days even his bones seemed to hurt, and Martinez wept dry tears across the dust roads of Kansas.

  As with the Tarahumares the common experience of running daily drew him closer to runners of whose culture and background he knew nothing – men from Glasgow, from Pennsylvania, men like Doc who seemed to have no home. All possessed an inner assurance which at first frightened him, but gradually he was drawn into their company. It was strange. They were, after all, competitors. What bound them was the daily challenge of the miles and behind it all the test of traversing a continent by foot. His responsibility to finish in the prize money to rescue the economy of his village receded. Rather, he tried every day, as Manuel had said, to distinguish himself. He knew that if he could do that then there could be no dishonour, whatever the eventual outcome of the race.

  He had felt himself become steadily weaker after St Louis, particularly on the occasional hilly stretches. However, like McPhail and many others in the race, he had vowed that he would never walk. But this vow had often reduced him to a broken trot no faster than a walk, and more exhausting. Juan Martinez was now paying for years of malnutrition, and there was no way that by will alone he could overcome this handicap.

  Doc and the others in the group could be of little help to him in his daily agonies, for they had to stay up with Capaldi, Mullins, Eskola and Dasriaux, all of whom were beginning to win stages and so creep up on aggregate time. By Wilmington, just over fifty miles from Chicago, Juan Martinez realized that his hopes of winning the Trans-America were dim; he now lay in thirty-fourth place. He knew, as a member of Doc’s group, that he would benefit equally from any share-out in New York, but that was not why he had come. He had come to make his mark, and that he had not yet done.

  There was, however, still Chicago, the Windy City, to be approached in two separate stages, totalling fifty-six miles, with a stage prize for the final section of five hundred dollars. There his brother Emiliano, his wife and two children, lived and worked, and Martinez was determined to be first at the finish at Soldier’s Field stadium. His aim would be to save himself in the first stage, finishing back in the mid-fifties, and on the second stage to hang in with the leaders until the final mile and use his speed to leave them at that point.

  Doc and his group knew that at least one man would be racing flat out on that second stage – Capaldi – who had been primed to win the section by a big money syndicate in Chicago, led by Nitti and Guzik. Capaldi and the All-American team management knew nothing of the syndicate’s connections with Capone’s men. Indeed, they had laid two thousand dollars through the syndicate on Capaldi. There was nothing illegal or underhand in this. Every stage was up for grabs, and it was certain that money had also been laid on other runners for the final st
age into Chicago, as it had been on other stages throughout the Trans-America.

  Doc and Hugh spent most of the night preceding the Chicago stage arguing with Martinez, trying to impress upon him the ruthlessness of men such as Nitti and Guzik, but the little Mexican had been adamant. It was the first time they had ever seen him angry.

  “You say I to run slow? You say I dishonor myself in front of my own brother?” He had looked unbelievingly at Doc, tears in his great brown eyes.

  Try as he might, Doc could not explain to Juan the danger he might face if he beat Capaldi. “I get beat, too bad. But golly Jesus, I run all the way into Chicago. My brother, Emiliano, he loses a whole day’s pay to see me!”

  All they could hope for was that Martinez, now desperately weak, would not be able to hold the tough Italian-American into Chicago, and that the problem would resolve itself.

  It was not for nothing that Chicago had been dubbed jocularly as “the armpit of the world”. As early as the end of the Civil War it had established itself as the world’s leading packer of meat, as Texas cattle drovers rode the herds north through Jayhawkers, pestilence and Indians north to the Chicago stockyards. Then in 1870 the fertile mind of Joseph McCoy had conceived the idea of a railhead town where cattle-herders could sell their herds at a point of intersection with the newly-built Trans-Continental railway, choosing Abilene as his site. Though Abilene faded almost immediately to be overtaken by other western towns such as Ellsworth, and McCoy died in poverty, Chicago went from strength to strength, as a centre for meat-packing. The simple equation, established after the Civil War, that eighty cattle were required to meet the needs of one hundred people made certain of that. It also made certain that Chicago stank of leather and excrement, and its winds made equally certain that the stink swept through the poorest areas of the city.

  Like all-the industrial cities of the north, Chicago had been devastated by the Depression, and its poorer sections had that quality of desolation which was indistinguishable from Glasgow, Frankfurt or any of the other stricken cities of the Western world. On industrial wastelands, billycan soup and Mulligan’s stew endlessly boiled beside packing-case homes, just as they had in the IWW workers’ Camp Stand back in Nevada. Daily the soup-kitchens fed endless lines of shuffling, unshaven men, and daily the same men wandered the windy, broken streets, seeking employment.