by Leo Furey
“Fuck off, I said. Get away from me. Leave me alone.” He stops and walks to a fence and leans against it with both hands, his shoulders rising and falling. We watch as he crouches there, shaking and hugging himself around his knees.
We all fall back and watch him jog along at a pace that is sure to give him a lousy finish.
“What’s got into him?” Murphy asks.
“Dunno. Blackie leaving, I guess.” I stare at the lopsided 117 on his back.
“Or Bug squealing,” Kavanagh says.
“Or dying,” Brookes says.
“Dying,” Father Cross repeats.
“One thing’s for sure,” Murphy says. “You can forget about a medal at that pace.”
Murphy roars ahead, with Brookes and Kavanagh on his heels, to one of our shortcuts to check with Kelly on how Richardson is doing. Father Cross and I stay with Ryan, jogging behind him.
“Look, Blackie’s gonna be fine,” I blurt out. “He’s gonna make it to the ferry. And he’s gonna make it to New York. He’ll find his mother too. I know it.”
That seems to perk him up a bit, and he picks up speed. But when Cross says he’s gotta move faster because Bug is up above, rooting against us, he falls back to his slower pace. After a while, Father Cross and I give up and race on ahead.
The peashooters do their best the last few miles, but it’s all for naught. Ryan fades far behind Shorty and the leads. With a mile to go, we know he’ll be lucky to finish in the top ten. And we’re right. He crosses the finish line in twelfth place, almost fifteen minutes behind Shorty, who runs toward him with his gold medal.
Ryan is dazed and exhausted. He limps past Shorty, ignoring him, and looks around for us. When he spots Oberstein, he starts to cry and lets out an ungodly yell and falls down on all fours, pounding the ground with both fists and cursing, “Jesus, Bug . . . Jesus, Blackie.” We run to him and stand him up and tell him it’s okay, he did just fine. Shorty Richardson runs in our direction, dodging chanting peashooters jumping toward him: “Shorty won the gold . . .” But their words are hollow. Ryan feels he’s let everyone down. He stumbles, bends double and sobs uncontrollably. After he stops crying, he shivers for a long time. Then he gathers strength and pushes us away and wanders off to the side of the road and throws up his guts.
When they split up at Kenmount Road, Blackie instructed Ryan to be at the pay phone outside Parkdale Pharmacy on Sunday at five o’clock. Everyone knew the spot. It was a ratty old phone booth we robbed quarters from every weekend. Once, on a dare from Blackie, the Klub packed fifteen guys inside it. Ryan was to be there at five o’clock to listen for three rings. Blackie told him not to answer, just to listen for three rings. That would be the signal that he’d made it to Nova Scotia. Three rings would mean that Blackie had performed the impossible trick.
I was with Ryan that Sunday outside Parkdale, waiting by the phone booth. Ryan waited for that phone to ring like a guy losing his mind. When the phone didn’t ring at five, he started cursing. At five after five, he was karate-kicking the phone box, punching the walls and yelling and swearing. “Ring, you mother-fucken sonofabitch. Ring, you bastard.” People passing by thought he was crazy.
After twenty minutes of kicking and slamming and swearing, he fell to the phone booth floor, exhausted, and wept. His tiny face was as white as a sheet. “Don’t come back, Blackie. Please don’t come back . . . Please . . .” he cried over and over. “I can see McCann leading him through the cafeteria on a rope.” He looked up at me pathetically and cried, “Like they did with me. Only it’ll be worse for Blackie. They’ll crucify him. They’ll shun him for a year.” He was beside himself. And the tears wouldn’t stop rolling down his baby face. I tried to lift him up, but he just cursed at me and told me to get lost. He didn’t move. I was so sad for him and for Blackie that I didn’t even care if we made it back to the Mount in time to sign the Doomsday Book.
Then, suddenly, out of the blue, the telephone rang—three times. Ryan jumped to his feet. He listened to the three rings, then grabbed me by the wrist and stared at my Mickey: five-thirty. Then it dawned on us. The time zone. There’s half an hour difference between Newfoundland and Nova Scotia time. Newfoundland’s always half an hour ahead. Blackie’s five o’clock was our five-thirty. Ryan raced out of the phone booth and ran inside Parkdale Pharmacy, screaming his foolish head off that Blackie had made it, that he’d performed the impossible trick. Crotchety old Mr. Noonan, the gray-haired pharmacist, thought he’d gone mad. And he had, in a way. Ryan had gone mad, mad with joy. He raced up and down the aisles, screaming and hooting and repeating over and over, “He did it. The impossible trick. He made it. He’s New York–bound. The sonofabitch did it. The sonofabitch made it.”
Epilogue
* * *
FOR AS LONG AS I LIVE, I’ll never forget our last contact with Blackie. It was the closest we’d ever been to him, even though he wasn’t physically present. And the closest we’d been to each other in all our time together at the Mount. It was so real. As real as Oberstein shouting, “Give them wings, Lord, that they may fly.” As real as the homemade bread and bog juice we’d have every day at every meal. As real as the Bat Cave. Our canteen cards. Bug’s wheelchair. The Raffle. More real and more powerful than most of my dreams. Blackie wasn’t really there, but he really was there.
Rags always said the world of the imagination is a more real world than the one we wake up to every day. Like Oberstein’s world of dreams. I didn’t know what he was trying to tell us back then. But I do now. It’s hard to explain. Like the feeling I get sometimes when I’m out running, and I know with certainty that Blackie and the other night runners are there beside me. Even though they’re not. They’re not there . . . but they really are. They’re just as real as they were when we’d loaf around the Bat Cave, smoking and joshing and humming along to Oberstein’s renditions of songs we did in choir.
The gull are squawking madly as the big ferry moves towards the dock in Argentia. The foghorn drowns them out, and the memory of Bug’s squeaky voice fades. Standing at the stern, I watch the wide wake the boat cuts in the clear blue water. It’s a beautiful day. Surprisingly, I am alone. Well, as Rags used to say, we are never alone. Not as long as we can remember the past. Was it Faulkner who said, “the past is never past”?
I’ve been crying. A long, tearless cry. The kind that can only come with age. It’s my first visit to Newfoundland in many years. I live in Cape Breton now, in an old farmhouse in a small town near a community college, where I teach English literature. I have returned to St. John’s to teach a summer-school course at the university.
I drive the long distance that Blackie ran and hiked so many years ago, and I’m amazed at the distance. It’s so much farther than he and Oberstein figured. Much farther than a Comrades. Arriving in the oldest city in North America, I stop for a bite to eat at the Golden Eagle Gas Station. The chips and gravy are as good as they always were. I ask the tiny waitress for a spruce beer. She screws up her face and shrugs. “A root beer will be fine,” I say.
The new highway to Stavanger Drive takes me to Major’s Path. I park the car on the side of the road and walk the few hundred yards to the Bat Cave. It’s still there, but the heavy equipment parked nearby means that it’s not long for this world. Some developer, I suspect, will destroy it soon to make way for another supermarket.
I walk over the dry earth to the ashes scattered near the opening. The rusty bars are gone, and the heavy steel door is down. I step inside and squint until my eyes adapt to the dimness. The air is musty, and the cave smells of urine. I close my eyes and remember Blackie sitting in his log chair, passing sentence. I hear the roll call and picture the Bank of Newfoundland. I open my eyes and wander about. There is a hole where the bank used to be, and someone has recently built a fire there.
I search the back wall for Father Cross’s bat. Only a few faded letters from the Magna Carta remain. The black bat is gone, and in its place someone has scrawled an odd-shaped heart.
Inside it is written “Kathy loves Kevin” and “Debbie loves Rob.” Beneath the heart is a mattress. I wander toward the entrance, happy that someone besides Father Cross has found love in the cave.
I stand at the opening, close my eyes, lower my head and think of the Dare Klub. Such beautiful memories. I open my eyes and stare at my trouser cuffs and my shoes, my favorite shoes, heavy oxblood brogues. The kind Gene Kelly wore, with wingtips. Wingies, the store clerk called them. And I think of Richardson’s run to town the day he was wearing penny loafers.
I walk toward the evergreens. Something catches my eye. A tiny metal disk peeks through the soil. I pick it up and rub it between my fingers, thinking about all the slugs we put in pop machines. After the Golden Eagle, we moved the operation, as Oberstein called it, to Bugden’s, a small corner store near Memorial Stadium. How often did Blackie send sprinters from the soccer field to Bugden’s Store, to return each time with a bottle of pop and fifteen cents? Blackie knew how to make money more than any of us. He just didn’t have the law on his side.
Remembering those runs, I walk toward my car, breathing in the clear Newfoundland air. The fresh air invigorates me. Without realizing it, I am jogging past my car, moving along Major’s Path toward Torbay Road and Mount Kildare. A car horn blows, and the bald driver smiles and waves. I must look crazy, running along the highway in my shoes, suit pants, and Arrow shirt. I wave and pick up speed. Feeling light, I think of Nicky. As I pass the Mount, I hear the night runners yelling that they’ve come to join me. Believe, believe . . . I love that about running, the way thoughts jump at you out of nowhere. I don’t want to stop. I want to run forever. I fly past the soccer field to Logy Bay Road and Fort Pepperrell and the turnoff to Sugar Loaf Pond before stopping to rest.
I stand in the sunlight and look at the trees and the calm water, listening to memory again. So many great times. Holy, Oberstein might say. But the most sacred of all, the one I’ll remember long after the bloodred flickering of the sanctuary lamp, the rosaries and Benedictions, the stations of the cross, the Panis Angelicus, and the Veni Creator Spiritus, the most sacred of all: returning from a long run, the great stone buildings looming in the distance, all of us drenched in sweat, our feet blistered, our throats parched, our thighs chafed, our bodies aching, like tired soldiers finally coming home.
Acknowledgments
MANY PEOPLE HELPED me in the writing of The Long Run. I was encouraged and supported by R.J. MacSween, longtime editor of the Antigonish Review, and by his successor in that post, George Sanderson, and by Sheldon Currie, one-time fiction editor. The Antigonish Review published a number of stories that later became parts of the book. Gert and George Sanderson and Dawn and Sheldon Currie discussed every aspect of the novel with me over a two-year period. Jeanette Lynes, now coeditor of TAR, gave the manuscript a detailed and sympathetic reading at a crucial phase in its publication history. Anne Simpson, then fiction editor of TAR, read an early version of the book and offered good advice.
Thanks to friends and colleagues who read and/or discussed the manuscript: New Brunswick poet Michael Oliver, novelist Jean Dohaney, Bev and Gavin Matthews, Sarah and Gary Chang, Donna and Robin MacNeil. The memory of Jodean and Brian Tobin’s enthusiastic remarks still lingers. Newfoundland poet David Hickey contributed many insightful criticisms, as did novelist Derek Yetman. Special thanks to Dean MacDonald for his encouragement. Also, many thanks to Joyce and Geoff Stirling for their constant support. To Judith and Al Title, Janet McDonald, and Susan and John Venn, many thanks.
Special thanks to Key Porter, the publisher of the Canadian edition. Thanks also to my good friend, Rick Butler, for his constant encouragement and for the opportunity to work as the writer-in-residence at the Hotel California in Los Angeles and the Savoy Hotel in San Francisco. I am also in debt to my agent, Anne McDermid, who, once she started reading the manuscript, became one of its keenest supporters.
Deepest thanks to my family: my mother, many of whose proverbs and Newfoundland expressions found a home in my book, and my brothers and sisters, always supportive and kind. Jean Chisholm and her Cape Breton family encouraged me in my early literary aspirations. My wonderful children, Rachel, Beth, John-Paul, and Sarah, are constantly supportive and full of praise.
Most of all, thanks to Fluff Cole, whose perfect ear and keen eye guided me through the writing of this book.
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