In hindsight, Caleb had sent out plenty of signals even before the move—twirling the stick he always carried with more intensity, curling his fingers into a fist, biting his knuckles. I guess I should have known he was tightly wound and it was only a matter of time before he exploded. I really just didn’t know what to do about it. Mom and Dad didn’t seem to have a clue either, or maybe they were completely in denial.
“I need for you to keep a lid on things around here for a while,” Dad told me at the beginning of the summer.
“What exactly does that mean?” I asked him. It was one of Dad’s signature phrases that could refer to any number of things.
“Just keep an eye on your brother. We’re new in the neighborhood and we don’t need any incidents.”
“I’m on it,” I assured him.
While Caleb was certainly capable of taking care of his basic needs, particularly managing his enormous appetite, Mom and Dad were still a little apprehensive about Caleb’s transition. Basically they wanted an extra set of eyes scoped on him over the summer in case he did anything especially inappropriate to freak out our new neighbors.
Dad had recently started paying Caleb for doing different jobs—sweeping the garage, pulling out the dandelions and crabgrass, or clipping the high grass around the trees and shrubs. When Caleb finished his assignments, he created his own jobs and negotiated a fee that Dad paid him in one-dollar bills. Caleb kept the cash neatly stacked in the top drawer of his dresser next to his socks, and he spent a portion of it on maintaining a stash of candy he kept hidden in a paper bag in the cabinet beneath our bathroom sink.
Lately Caleb had been using the rake to comb and thatch the front yard, a new obsession. One morning when I headed upstairs for breakfast—Mom was working early shifts at the hospital, and Dad liked to be the first one to the office, and I usually got up after they’d left for work—I saw that he’d already created twenty small piles of dead grass, twigs, and dirt clods. He would rake a small patch of grass for a minute or two, pause, and talk to himself, then plop on the ground and arrange the dead blades into neat little mounds. He would leave those piles in the yard until Dad got home, as concrete evidence of his labor. Based upon the number of piles I counted, I figured he’d already been hard at it for a couple of hours that morning.
I was reading the sports section when I glanced up and noticed Caleb really getting riled up—jumping around, his rake and garden fork discarded on the ground. He’d abandoned his piles and was now skipping around the yard, pounding one fist through the air and biting the knuckles on the other. It wasn’t exactly the way I wanted to start my day, but I figured I’d better step outside and try to calm him down.
I approached him cautiously; he was thumping himself hard on the forehead. “Caleb, that can’t feel too good,” I told him. “Why don’t you come inside and take a little break? You’re going to hurt yourself, buddy.”
He sat down, whacked the ground a few times with his fist, and eventually resumed picking through his grass piles. God knew what was making him angry this time, but he seemed steady for the moment, so I went back inside. I scanned the list of jobs Mom had left for me on the fridge. Vacuuming was easiest, so I started in the den.
That’s when Caleb blasted into the room. “HOW MUCH MONEY LEO GET VACUUMING?” he yelled.
“I get an allowance, Caleb,” I told him. “Flat rate. I do whatever I’m told and get my salary on Fridays.”
“HOW MUCH LEO GET?” he shouted. He was talking faster now, and I realized he was really agitated.
“I told you already,” I said calmly.
I had my back to him and was removing the plug from the socket when he smashed into me from behind. I smacked my head against an end table and collided with the wall. The lamp fell over and the bulb shattered. Before I knew it, he’d flipped me on my back and pinned my shoulders with his knees. He slapped my head with one open hand and started pounding the other side of my face with his fist. Then he grasped my throat with his right hand and started trying to jab his left thumb into my eye. I kicked and punched, but Caleb was built like a linebacker. I fought to grab a handful of his hair with one hand and his ear with my other, and I pinched and pulled with everything I had before he finally screamed and released me.
I rolled out from under him, tore through the kitchen, and tipped a chair in his path. I dashed downstairs toward the door to the patio, with Caleb in pursuit. If it wasn’t open, I was screwed. Luck was on my side, though, and I was across the grass and into the next-door neighbor’s backyard before I looked over my shoulder to catch my breath. Caleb was no longer chasing me. He had stopped in our driveway and was jumping and skipping around, hitting himself.
I decided it was best to keep moving. I watched my sneakers disappear under me, and after a while my body found a rhythm, my breathing evened out, and I relaxed a bit. I wondered what I’d done to set Caleb off. Caleb occasionally lost control of himself, but this was new territory as far as I knew. It was the first time he’d actually gone after a person instead of a window or a wall, and that person happened to be me. As mixed up as I was when running that morning, I wondered if it was better me than some other person.
I ran for a long time, making a loop along the major roads before heading back to the house. When I finally got home, Caleb was sitting calmly in the front yard, picking through the dead grass. He smiled and laughed as he talked about God and the Thunderbird Ford. I approached him tentatively.
“Hi, Leo,” he said when he saw me.
“Hi, Caleb.”
“Where Leo go?” he asked me.
“I had to take a little break,” I explained, keeping my distance.
“Caleb good worker. Right!” Whenever my brother followed with “Right!” I understood that the preceding statement was actually a question—one he meant for me to affirm.
“Caleb is a good worker,” I confirmed, wondering if maybe I was really the crazy one.
I studied my eighteen-year-old brother, sitting in the yard in the midst of another obsessive monologue, assembling more piles of dead grass and twigs. Caleb was a good worker all right, but when he lost control it was time to bolt.
“Are we cool?” I finally asked.
“TAKE CALEB SWIMMING!”
Crap. That, of course, was also on my list of duties for that day, and Caleb knew it. There wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell I was going to get out of taking him to the pool.
“Have you calmed down?” I asked him.
“YES! Take Caleb pool!”
I took a moment to consider the possible consequences if I didn’t. “All right,” I decided. “Be ready in fifteen.”
I was still a bit rattled when we got in the car, so I kept silent. I spent the twenty-minute drive listening to Caleb laugh and chatter away about God and rocky road ice cream.
—
The Mid-County Y was Caleb’s home away from home. It had both an indoor and an outdoor pool, which kept Caleb happy all year long. I really didn’t feel too much like swimming; I did a few laps, then sprawled out on a deck chair. Usually I sunk myself into a good book while Caleb swam, but today I couldn’t focus. Instead I watched Caleb in the deep end as he jumped off the high dive, like he did every time we came to the pool. Again and again, he’d bound off the diving board high into the sky, laughing maniacally and screaming nonsense, then midair he’d do this crazy corkscrew spin. He’d hit the water with a tremendous splash and disappear until he finally needed a breath. Some kids laughed, others stared. Caleb’s pool antics mortified me when I was younger, but I no longer gave a rip. It really made him happy.
Usually we’d hang out for only a couple of hours at the pool before I told him we needed to get going, but after the day we’d had I let him swim until he came out on his own terms. I wanted to make good and sure he had calmed down.
—
I told Mom and Dad about what had happened that morning, but Dad pretty much blew it off. “My big brother and I used to fight all the time
,” Dad said, and laughed, casually scooping from the salad bowl. “He used to beat the living daylight out of me sometimes.”
Mom at least casted me a worried glance, but she didn’t say anything. She also seemed kind of checked out.
The next day, Caleb went for a repeat performance. This time I was folding laundry. He took me by surprise when he jumped me, but I managed to pull his hair, knee him in the groin, and take off running. This time I ran even farther. It took me longer to find a running rhythm, to settle down.
It happened again the next day when I was washing the windows.
And the day after that I decided to lay off the chores altogether, since that seemed to be his trigger, but he still came at me. At least this time I saw him coming and had a head start.
Before I knew it these attacks were a regular pattern and I was running every day, sometimes more than once. When Caleb lost control, I had to get away. I really didn’t have much choice but to run, and I had to run far, because I had to give both of us enough time to cool off. When I got home I usually took him to the pool, where he’d unleash his energy and we’d both return to some semblance of normal.
I used to think that all that stuff I heard about a runner’s high was legend, but it’s actually true. I found if I ran far enough and hard enough, I actually got an amazing buzz like I was floating outside myself, looking down on my body running on earth, like a red-tailed hawk soaring high above. When that feeling kicked in, the pain and fear disappeared. Sometimes I felt like I could run forever.
One morning Mom posted a letter from the new high school with information about the upcoming year. She’d circled the information about fall sports: football, soccer, golf, cross-country.
Running seemed to be calling me, so I signed up for the cross-country team.
That’s the part I didn’t mention to Curtis after our first practice. I figured he didn’t need to know that I’d started running because my brother scared the hell out of me.
6.
“GEEZ, MOM. CALEB’S STARTING TO make our front yard look like some kind of ancient burial ground,” I commented as I dove into my third bowl of Cheerios. Those couple of weeks after I joined cross-country, Mom told me I was devouring food like an elephant with a tapeworm.
I was watching Caleb crawl around the front yard on his hands and knees, having an intense discussion with himself. He was obsessed. Bit by bit, he was scalping our lawn, making one mound of debris after another. Caleb labored before and after school, plucking each and every blade of dead grass, little twig, and dirt clod by hand.
“It makes him happy,” she said. “Those little mounds he builds are kind of like your Cheerios.”
“Not quite the same,” I corrected her, before slurping the last soggy bits from the bowl.
As I headed out the door for school, Mom stopped me. “Why don’t you invite one of the guys from the team over for dinner?” she asked.
“Really, Mom? Don’t you think that might be kind of weird with the sacrificial graveyard out front? I’ll think about it. Are we having cheese pizza or fish sticks?”
“Your choice.”
Our family abandoned the church a couple of years ago, but Mom still harbored some residual Catholic guilt and clung to a few traditions like no meat on Fridays.
“You know I’ve never been a big fan of fish sticks. That’s Caleb’s thing.”
“So I’ll doctor up some cheese pizzas and plan on a guest?”
I gazed out at Caleb hacking up the yard and told Mom again that I’d think about it.
—
Curtis believed in a daily dose of intense focus and effort. He called that portion of the workout “red miles.” I called it pain. The first ten minutes of our run were conversational. He would give me the rundown on what I needed to know about life at Ladue: the best-looking girls, a few thugs to avoid at all costs, and a couple of locations on campus where various sordid events had transpired. But after those first ten minutes, he jacked up the pace and things got serious.
By the time we crested the first hill that Friday, I was suffering. I told Curtis to go ahead, and I staggered along until the pack of Rasmussen, Stuper, Rosenthal, and Burpee pulled up beside me.
“So Rasmussen is our winner!” Burpee announced, raising Rasmussen’s arm in victory.
“Winner of what?” I asked.
“We placed a bet the other day on how long it would take before you crashed and burned trying to hang with Kaufman,” Stuper explained.
“The guy hammers,” I gasped.
“No kidding.” Rasmussen laughed.
“Kaufman’s been running twice a day since ninth grade,” Rosenthal offered up.
“He’s a freak,” Burpee said, as if it were widely accepted fact.
“Not to mention he took five APs last year,” Stuper added.
“Kaufman is one intense freak,” Burpee repeated.
“How does he do it?” I asked, suddenly feeling like a fool.
“There is rumor of steroid use,” Rasmussen said with a raised eyebrow. “Or perhaps he’s bionic.”
“Come to think of it, the bionic theory might explain the way he speaks,” Burpee suggested.
“Why does he talk that way?” I asked.
“Kaufman is a man of mystery,” Rosenthal said to me.
The rest of the run was grueling, but when we finally finished, Curtis was waiting in front of the school, stretching under the shade of a tree.
“Look what we found during our run today, Kaufman!” Stuper yelled as he and Rasmussen grabbed my arms and pretended to haul me.
“Another one of your roadkill victims,” Rosenthal said, laughing. “Someday you’re going to be charged with manslaughter.”
I looked at Curtis and shook my head. “I feel like total dog meat.”
He laughed. “You’re doing fine, Coughlin. Third week is the worst. Hang in one more and it’ll get easier.”
We headed onto the track, where Gorsky dictated the final portion of the workout: twelve strides a hundred meters in length.
We began each one slowly and increased the speed in increments, until we were going flat out the last thirty meters. My legs burned, but I could still hang with Curtis, given the short distance. The recovery was short, a ten-meter walk to and from the fence. By the time I’d completed my fourth, I was getting ready to blow chunks.
“Leo!” Gorsky bellowed. He waved me over and pulled a roll of white athletic tape from his equipment bag. “Give me your hands,” he ordered.
I held out my arms, too exhausted, nauseous, and confused to question him.
“Now make fists and place your thumbs outward over your index fingers,” he instructed.
I did like he said, so my thumbs were now pointing outward like some wayward hitchhikers. He taped my thumbs tightly around my fists so I couldn’t move my fingers.
“Your arms flop back and forth like a rag doll when you run,” he explained. “Go on back there and do a few more strides at full strength, but this time pump those arms of yours. Then come back and tell me what you notice.”
I jogged back to the pack, my hands hanging outward, away from my hips. The guys were waiting for me, looking at my hands curiously.
“That’s going to make going to the bathroom very problematic,” Stuper decided.
“What’s up with the bandages?” Rosenthal asked. “You look like a land-mine victim.”
But as we accelerated into our next stride, it did feel different. My arms pumped, drove forward, and provided power. By midway through that stride, I’d moved comfortably ahead of Curtis by five meters.
“What the hell?” he yelled from behind.
“Kaufman is finally getting his butt kicked,” Burpee howled.
We did another, and I exaggerated my new arm swing and went even faster. “It’s just a measly hundred meters, Coughlin. Anything farther, and I’ve got your ass!” Curtis shouted.
We ran the next two together, and I focused on my new arm swing. Gorsky had stop
ped throwing and was now leaning against the fence, studying us. We did four more before we jogged over to him.
“What did you notice, Coughlin?”
“I feel stronger,” I told him. “Like my arms aren’t just dangling from my shoulders.”
“You run with more than just your legs, Leo. You need your arms, too,” he explained. “When they’re all moving in the same direction, and every part of your body is working together in concert, you run faster. It’s that simple. We’ll put that tape on your hands when you run for the next week and see if we can fix this little problem.”
He picked up his shot and rolled it around in his palm. “Focus on your form and believe that what you are attempting to do is good for you, that it will make you a better runner. Learn the patterns, until it’s innate.”
“How come you don’t tape our hands?” Rosenthal asked, offering his hands to Gorsky.
“The only place I’d put tape on your body is over that mouth of yours,” Gorsky answered. He headed back to his shot put ring, but not before scolding Curtis. “You’re pushing it too hard, Kaufman. I can tell by the length of your stride. You’re your own worst enemy. If you don’t back off, you’re going to end up sick again.” He blasted the shot once more. “That means rest, Kaufman,” he said as the shot crashed upon the gravel.
“Relax, old man,” Curtis told him. “I’ve got everything under control.”
“I worry about you, son.”
“No need to fret, Gorsky. I’ve learned my lesson.”
At the bike rack Curtis helped me take off the tape. “What was that all about?” I asked.
“Ran myself into the ground last summer and fall and ended up with mono in October. I was running out of my mind, and then I imploded. Not fun.” He pulled the tape off my hands, wadded it into a ball, and tossed it into the trash. “Hell, maybe I should tape my hands up to help me go faster, or just chop them off,” he said with a chuckle.
I climbed aboard my old bike. “Believe me, you have plenty of speed.”
“It’s got to suck riding that bike home after running,” he said to me. “You want a lift?”
Running Full Tilt Page 3