Racing the Rain

by John L Parker

  “What happened to her?”

  “Oh, I went off to basic training and left her running the camp. She got bored, I guess. She up and took off. Place was a mess when I got back. I didn’t know where she had gone, so I got a lawyer and published a notice in the newspaper and divorced her. I still don’t know where she is.”

  Cassidy was surprised to see him looking wistful for a moment. His name had been associated with a number of young ladies over the years, but if he ever mentioned one, it was always lightheartedly. Lucille must have been different. Several seconds went by before Trapper snapped out of it.

  “Hey, so about this job. Can I count on you?” Trapper said.

  Cassidy pretended to ponder it for a few moments.

  “Do nuns wear sensible shoes?” he said.

  * * *

  The footwear choices of various postulants aside, Cassidy was delighted to be heading out to Trapper’s camp first thing the next morning.

  On the way over he was thinking about how he was going to deal with his friends’ reaction to this. He had already taken a lot of grief over the years, with some people dubbing him “Little Trapper” and “Trapper Nelson, Jr.” This was considered quite an insult by a few people around town who still believed Trapper Nelson was some kind of shady character, but Cassidy considered it a compliment.

  He couldn’t believe how much there was to do around the place. As elaborate as the camp had grown over the years, Trapper had been managing it single-handedly, except for a few weeks during the summers when relatives came down from New Jersey to stay in his “guest cabins,” primitive log structures he had built to rent out to hardy souls willing to rough it for a few nights.

  This was familiar work for Cassidy. He had often “volunteered” around the place in the past, but money rarely changed hands. He was usually rewarded with gopher tortoise stew, fried gator tail, or some smoked sailfish or barracuda.

  Cassidy got to work hosing out the cages of the various creatures. Robert, the bobcat, who looked like a peaceful tabby until he was approached too closely, was content to cower in the back of his cage while Cassidy worked. After cleaning, he filled Robert’s bowl with scraps of mullet and turtle from the cleaning tables. Then he fed whole mullets to Stumpy, a ten-foot alligator who would have been twelve feet except part of his tail and most of one foot had been bitten off in battles with rivals. There were a pair of raccoons in separate cages who hadn’t been named yet. Fastidious creatures, they cracked freshwater mussels and rinsed them off in the large water bowl Cassidy refilled for them. Trapper arrived as Cassidy was finishing emptying the traps of mice and rats that had been caught overnight, dumping the little carcasses into a zinc bucket for the delectation of the numerous snakes currently in residence.

  “Good morning’s work, Youngblood. Come on up for some lunch,” Trapper called.

  Cassidy washed off at the hose by the cleaning station and sat down at one of the picnic tables under the chickee hut, where Trapper had laid out sandwiches, a citrus fruit salad, and iced tea.

  “Wow,” said Cassidy. “Store-bought! What gives?”

  “I splurge on occasion,” said Trapper through a mouthful of ham sandwich.

  “I guess so. Somebody told me you sold a bunch of land to some developer. It was even in the paper. Is that true?”

  Trapper shrugged. “You can’t believe everything you read,” he said with a mysterious smile.

  They ate in silence for a while until Willie the parrot flew over. If he didn’t see anything worth begging for, he would fly back up to his limb and scream “cracker!” at them, so Trapper broke off a piece of crust from his sandwich and held it out.

  “Cracker?” Willie said.

  “Well, it’s food, if that’s what you’re asking. And if you take it and drop it on the ground, that’s all you’re getting,” said Trapper.

  Willie snatched the crust greedily and flew back to his limb, where he stood on one foot, holding the bread with the other.

  “You’re welcome,” said Trapper.

  “His manners don’t seem to have improved much,” said Cassidy.

  “I’ve read that mentally they’re like two-year-olds. That seems about right to me. And no two-year-old I’ve known ever read Emily Post.”

  Cassidy finished his second sandwich while Trapper was on his third. There was one more left and Cassidy was pleasantly stuffed, but with Trapper around no food ever went to waste.

  “Hey, Trap, did you ever get a chance to talk to Mr. San Romani about the training stuff?”

  “Glad you reminded me. Be right back.” Trapper went to his cabin and returned with a handwritten envelope, which he handed to Cassidy. The top flap had been neatly sliced, probably by one of Trapper’s fillet knives.

  Cassidy took out the two sheets of lined paper. The handwriting was small and very neat:

  Dear Vince,

  How are things on the Loxahatchee? Sounds like the trapping business is finally beginning to wind down. I hope your other ventures can take up the slack.

  I can’t believe you actually had Gary Cooper come to visit! Mr. “High Noon” himself! My mom and dad are big fans of his and I sure am, too. I would have given anything to be there!

  How did the visit go with Connie and Phil and little Flip? Bet they had a great time, as usual. The new improvements to the irrigation system sound terrific. Bet it’s nice to have a real engineer-type guy like Phil Sr. around to help out once in a while.

  To change the subject, I’ve looked over the suggested workouts the coach gave our young friend. As you and I have discussed before, almost any training program can produce results compared to doing nothing, so I want to say first of all that there is nothing particularly “wrong” with anything I saw.

  But here’s the thing: there is an awful lot of really slow running in there, three- and four-mile jogs and such. It seems like to me if our friend is trying to get ready for basketball, after an initial conditioning phase he’d want to be doing some moderate to long intervals several times a week, then add wind sprints as the season approaches. And it doesn’t seem like there’s nearly enough weight lifting in there, particularly half-squats. All the jumpers and most of the basketball players I know do tons of them, and your guy hardly has them spending any time in the weight room.

  Well, that’s my take on it, anyway. I suspect that young Quenton already understands much of this after the program we put him through back in junior high.

  I hope he’s able to run some cross-country in the fall. It shouldn’t interfere too much with basketball. Plus, I’d really like to see him run track in the spring. He might be surprised at what he can do if he sets his mind to it.

  Well, that’s it from the Midwest. Best of luck with your projects, and let us know if you ever get out this way.

  Your friend,

  Arch

  “Well, that’s kinda what I was thinking,” said Cassidy, rubbing his eyes. “You know, after last season we all figured this year would be just amazing. Now, I don’t know.”

  “Yeah? Why’s that?”

  “Bickerstaff hasn’t had much to do with basketball since his college days in the forties. He still thinks a jump shot is a show-offy kind of trick shot. Plus he doesn’t like the point guard system we had last year. He wants to go back to using two guards, which means I’ll be playing with Carroll Morgan in the back court.”

  “I thought he was pretty good.”

  “He is good, but he gets in the way when I’m trying to bring the ball up court. That’s one of the reasons Coach Cinnamon made me the point guard in the first place. I didn’t need the help handling the ball, and it opened another slot for a big man. Plus, poor Carroll can’t throw the ball into the ocean.”

  “Hmm. So what are you going to do?”

  “Right now”—Cassidy stood up and gathered plates and glasses—“right now I’m going to go throw a bunch of snake heads and turtle shells into the formaldehyde vat so you can have them ready to foist off on a bunch of peopl
e from Wisconsin next week.”

  “And don’t forget . . .”

  “I know, stretch the hides, catch some mullet, irrigate the garden, and feed the turtles. Got it. But I gotta be out of here by four so I can meet Stiggs and Randleman at the base gym. I’ve got to let them know about the new workout schedule I just made up.”

  CHAPTER 38

  * * *

  ENDLESS SUMMER

  Everyone at one time or another should have such a glorious summer.

  Stiggs had saved up enough to buy a 1951 Nash Rambler, a little brute of a car that was as unattractive and ungainly as it was underpowered. Much was made, however, of the fact that the front seats reclined all the way back. Stiggs slyly implied that this feature sealed the deal for him, though the $125 price tag undoubtedly had something to do with it. In it, the three of them, with occasional consorts, ranged far and wide. With a few cents’ worth of gasoline, no place on Florida’s Gold Coast was out of range of the little beast.

  It was a good thing that Stiggs and his high-paying construction job had come through because bike riding was all but socially proscribed, and Randleman’s parents didn’t think he was responsible enough to drive much of anywhere on his own despite what the state of Florida might technically allow. Cassidy was no help. He was rarely able to talk his mother out of her Ford Falcon for anything other than church activities. And there certainly wasn’t much chance of playing hooky from God because this was one supreme being with plenty of churchgoing tattletales on His side.

  But with Stiggs’s intrepid vehicle, they were, as Randleman put it, “Ag-ile, mo-bile, and hos-tile, to quote the great Jake Gaither.”

  And so they were. They triple-dated to the drive-in to see Steve McQueen battle a giant flesh-devouring rolling bowl of Jell-O in The Blob. They bit the bullet and paid first-run prices to see Dr. Strangelove downtown at the Beacham theater. They congratulated each other on their thrift by watching Blood Feast from the rear parking lot of a vacuum cleaner repair store near the drive-in, where somebody had rigged up a bootleg speaker with a buried wire that went under the fence and hooked up inside to a real speaker post. (The angle was such that you could barely make out what was going on up on the screen, however, so the biggest thrill came from the mere act of filching entertainment.)

  In the rare event that girls were involved in their activities, they always wanted to do dumb kid stuff like roller skate, so they’d head out to the Roll-a-Rama on Dixie Highway and awkwardly stagger around to ridiculously old-fashioned organ music while the really good skaters—the ones you could tell owned their own skates because they didn’t have numbers written on the heels—would repeatedly zip by backward, sideways, on one skate, squatting on their haunches, whatever, but barely paying attention and always with exquisitely bored expressions.

  Or they’d go all the way down to West Palm Beach, where there was miniature golf, batting cages, driving ranges, and many more movie theaters. Or to a go-cart place outside Stuart where they’d get in trouble for playing Thunder Road.

  They sometimes hung out at Frazier Ravencraft III’s house on Lake Silver, where they water-skied, listened to Frazier’s own personal jukebox in a “rec room” converted from his old man’s 1950s bomb shelter, played Ping-Pong on the back patio, and tried to decide if they wanted to swim in the lake or the screened-in pool. (Sitting in chaise longues by the pool one day, Cassidy threatened to strangle the next person who wondered aloud what the poor people were doing.)

  They went downtown to the telethon at the armory at three in the morning to watch Jerry Lewis blubbering to the TV cameras in front of a line of kids in wheelchairs and a bank of pretty young women answering telephones. Stiggs was hoping to be interviewed on live TV by Jerry himself as he turned over the $52.84 they had collected that night, but the comedian was taking a bathroom break and Stiggs had to settle for a local celebrity, “Uncle Walt” Sickles, host of an afternoon kids’ show.

  “Sheesh,” said Stiggs, “I was on TV with him on my birthday back in the fifth grade.”

  “I still think we should have kept ten bucks for burgers,” said Randleman.

  They drove out to Singer Island and dove for lobsters on the reef off Air Force beach, occasionally actually catching one. That was the summer Stiggs taught them how to get them out from crevices using the business end of a plain old floor mop, which, although entirely legal and really quite effective, was nonetheless a pain in the ass because of the hassle of untangling the prickly creatures from the mop’s strands.

  Mostly, though, they trained. They met at the base gymnasium every day except Sunday, when it was closed. Even on Sunday they were often able to find a set of doors that the corporal who ran the place had chained too loosely, and Cassidy, the skinniest, could squeeze through and open a window for the other two. Then they tried to play basketball “quietly,” fearful that any second the MPs would bust in to “haul their narrow asses to the brig,” as Stiggs put it.

  Usually wearing lead-shot vests and weighted shoes, they would do their stretching, drills, and weights, and play pickup games with the servicemen. They also ran, though Stiggs and Randleman would no longer run with Cassidy at all. Three days a week Cassidy would go home for a quick dinner and, after an hour of “settling,” head out to do one of the workouts prescribed by San Romani. At first it was too much, even for him. Stiggs and Randleman pronounced him certifiable. But after a few weeks, he found that he was not only adapting to but thriving under the regimen. It was clever the way the running program alternated between hard days and easy days, and just when he felt he was reaching some kind of breaking point, he would be blessed with a lovely day of respite: light jogging, a couple of wind sprints, and done.

  One Saturday afternoon he watched a rebroadcast of a track meet when Jim Beatty ran the first indoor four-minute mile. It was a revelation. There was a guy running a mile at a faster pace than Demski could run a half mile, and doing it on an eleven-laps-to-the-mile indoor track. That night as Cassidy was doing intervals around the playground of the elementary school, he replayed images of that race in his head. He concentrated on Beatty’s stride, his determination, his focus, and willed himself not to falter when it got really tough at the end.

  Jogging home in the muggy night air while moths worried the streetlights of his neighborhood, Cassidy thought it was the best interval workout he’d ever done. Maybe this is what it’s like, what Jim Beatty feels like when he’s running a four-minute mile, he thought.

  He told Trapper Nelson about it the next day, after the last tourist boat left and they were sitting around in the chickee hut drinking iced tea.

  “I almost wish track season was going on right now,” Cassidy said. “I just feel like I could go out there and run forever. It’s like when I got in shape for that half mile, but better. It’s not every night, but when it happens like it did last night, it’s the most amazing feeling.”

  Trapper nodded, smiling.

  “I wonder how you can really tell,” Cassidy said. “I wonder how Mr. San Romani could tell when he was really getting in shape.”

  “I think I can help you there,” Trapper said. “We used to talk about it all the time that summer we worked together. I couldn’t really run with him much, of course, but we’d talk about training ideas. This was when he was still trying to break the four-minute mile himself, before Bannister did it. He said it was a whole different world when you get below 4:10 in the mile, a different feeling altogether.”

  “Yeah?”

  “He said he could tell something different was going on because for the first time in his life, in both training and racing, he didn’t want runs to end. Before, he couldn’t wait to get to the finish line, to stop, but now he just wanted to keep running.”

  “Jeez. Why?”

  “He said it gave him more time to leave everyone else farther behind.”

  CHAPTER 39

  * * *

  AT LONG LAST

  The Rolling Stones rolled into America and caused
a few riots, just like the Beatles had earlier. The Republicans nominated a curmudgeon from Arizona for president (it seemed that after the Kennedy era, politics was reverting back to the same group of old white guys). A handful of college students burned their draft cards and said they wouldn’t go to a place called Indochina, wherever that was. President Johnson signed a law saying you had to be nice to colored people, which apparently still didn’t include letting them into white schools, certainly not Edgewater.

  Football two-a-days started in mid-August and Cassidy wound up his job at Trapper Nelson’s. Then he and Stiggs and Randleman went shopping for school supplies, and the next thing he knew, it was September 3rd and Cassidy was sitting in Miss Waldron’s homeroom, sweating like a field hand despite being allowed to wear Bermuda shorts for the first time, thanks to a directive from no less an authority than the Palm Beach County School Board.

  His senior year had begun.

  CHAPTER 40

  * * *

  CROSS-COUNTRY INTERLUDE

  In the first assembly of the year, Billy Parish handed Cassidy a thick paperback book called Catch-22.

  “Read this,” he said.

  “What’s it about?”

  “Just read it. You won’t believe it.”

  It was the first grown-up book he read voluntarily. At the time, Cassidy was boycotting anything remotely resembling literature after suffering through Silas Marner the year before. It had pretty much extinguished the small spark of interest struck by his summer reading of Moby-Dick. But this thick blue paperback with a bomber pilot on the cover rotated his world on heretofore unknown axes.

  Right now, though, in fifth-period study hall, he was back to hating literature. He was trying to bear down on The Scarlet Letter for a rumored quiz the next day. It was hot in the cafeteria and he was battling the dropsies when Mr. Kamrad appeared at his table. He gestured toward the door with his head. Cassidy followed him out and they sat at one of the concrete tables in the courtyard.