“Where are Dad and Caleb?” I asked.
“Your father took him to the pool.”
I sat down beside her and stared at the porch floor in silence for a moment before being startled by the loud sounds of shaking branches. We spotted two gray squirrels chasing Al, the white squirrel, up the large oak tree at the edge of our yard. Al leaped from branch to branch creating commotion and chaos before finally eluding the gray squirrels.
“Those squirrels sure do give Al a hard time,” she said.
“I think it’s the other way around, Mom. I think Al is a little-shit disturber.”
“Maybe so.” She laughed.
“They’ll never catch him.” I said, smiling.
The sun turned a deep crimson as it began its descent below the treetops. Now it was downright cold and I was shivering. “Leo, look at me,” she whispered. “I saw you at the Esquire last night,” she confessed. “And the look in your eyes and your little comment this morning told me you saw me as well.”
“What are you talking about, Mom?” I answered, doing my best to appear clueless, but Mom wasn’t buying my act.
“His name is Carl,” she told me. “He works at the hospital with me. In fact, your father met him a couple of months ago at a party.”
“So Dad knows you hang out with this guy?”
“Not exactly,” she answered, wincing. “It’s a little more complicated than that.”
“Is that why you told him you went to see Grandma?”
“We’re just friends, I promise you.”
“Friends that hold hands?” I pressed. “Isn’t that an affair?”
“Friends can hold hands,” she protested.
“In places like France friends hold hands,” I protested. “In America friends who hold hands are more than friends.”
“That’s not true,” she said. “But just so you know, your father has his confidante too.”
I’d never heard that word before, but I had a pretty good idea what she meant.
“It’s that woman named—”
“Too much information, Mom!” I said, cupping my hands over my ears.
She was beginning to make it sound like this was all normal adult behavior. I didn’t know what to say at that moment, because suddenly I wasn’t angry at all. I was now on overload.
“Life is so complicated, Leo,” Mom sighed. “Your father and I should never have gotten married.”
I didn’t know how to respond to Mom’s depressing statement. I wanted desperately for this bleak conversation to end, but Mom felt the need to elaborate. “We met when I was in nursing school. Your father was working at the Steinberg Skating Rink during college, and I would figure skate in the mornings, when the ice was free between early-morning hockey practices. He let me skate in the middle of the rink an extra few minutes while he drove the Zamboni,” she told me, looking out into the yard. “He must have driven a thousand circles around me before he finally asked me out.”
For the second time that day, a car pulled into our driveway and rescued me from an uncomfortable situation. This time it was Dad and Caleb returning from the pool.
“It’s a long story, Leo,” Mom said sadly as she stood up. “Just don’t rush to be a grown-up like I did. I guess that’s what I’m trying to say.”
We walked inside the house, and Mom insisted on a hug. “Do you mind not mentioning this conversation to your father, Leo?”
“My lips are sealed,” I promised as I headed downstairs for a much-deserved shower.
—
Mary made things even more muddled and confusing when I told her about my conversation with Mom. “I think your mother might be having an emotional affair,” she suggested to me over the phone that night. “I’ve read about them in some of my mother’s self-help magazines.”
“What the hell is an emotional affair?”
“It’s like being friends, but being more than just friends. Does that make sense?”
“Eww!” I fought hard to block the images forming in my mind. “Like ‘friends with benefits’ friends?”
“No, it’s not like that,” she said, giggling. “It’s like having some huge crush on someone but not really acting on it. I don’t think you have to worry. It’s not like it’s one of those affairs where people are running around sneaking into sleazy hotel rooms. I think it’s more like an escape.”
Maybe Mary was right, but thinking about all this crap made my stomach turn. Maybe it was just an escape for Mom, but I still couldn’t wrap my head around the whole concept. “Technically, it’s still cheating, isn’t it?” I asked.
There was a long pause before she answered. “That’s the big question,” she finally said.
20.
I GOT ON MY BIKE Monday morning actually eager to get to school. Running gave me something to look forward to at the end of the day, but knowing that I might see Mary for five minutes between classes gave me something else to look forward to every eighty minutes.
The first true signs of autumn were in the sky. The green leaves of the trees were starting to curl inward, faint yellow veins beginning to appear. Soon our house would be blanketed in red and gold. As I headed down the driveway, I spotted Al scurrying around the yard, taking advantage of a brief opportunity to gather a few fallen acorns before Caleb confiscated them.
Despite my regular run-ins with Caleb, I liked the new house. I liked that the neighbors were mostly older people with children long gone. They were a lot nicer to Caleb than our old neighbors had been, and he was even picking up odd jobs from some of them, like Mr. Hunker. Caleb raked his lawn once a week, and Hunker paid him with a ten-dollar bill that Dad promptly converted to ones. The neat stack of bills Caleb kept in his dresser was growing taller by the week.
All this open space meant it was less likely Caleb would do something inappropriate, like walk into a neighbor’s house uninvited, or plant a cat inside a mailbox. I didn’t have to worry about kids getting their kicks by making Caleb do something stupid. He could skip and talk to himself in the driveway without calling attention to himself. The only thing I had to worry about here was my own business with Caleb. All things considered, I’d take that over the old neighborhood any day.
Gorsky was inhaling an entire roast chicken when Curtis and I barged into his office during his lunch break. With a drumstick in one hand and his newspaper in his other, he barely looked up to acknowledge us. “Gentlemen, what do you need?” he grumbled.
Curtis grabbed a marker and began diagramming the course and race strategy on the board. He rambled off names, locations, descriptions of terrain, turns, splits, and surge points. Curtis went over the plan for the district race, and Gorsky simply listened, nodding occasionally with interest. When Curtis finished, Gorsky took another bite from the chicken leg, gnawed on it slowly, and mulled the idea over in his head.
“I’m intrigued, Kaufman,” he finally said. “By the way, how’s the body holding up for you at the moment? You a hundred percent?”
“Never felt better,” Curtis assured him.
“Then is there another reason you’ve been running like a wuss all season?”
“I’m staying under the radar,” he told him.
“Duly accomplished, Kaufman. I think you’ve got your fellow competitors fully convinced you’re a has-been. Or that you’re too chickenshit to go for it.”
Curtis laughed. “I know what I’m doing. You’re the one who always told me, ‘Run within yourself.’ Besides, you and I know the only race that counts is state.”
Gorsky nodded and laughed.
“You know that I can dominate on that course, old man,” Curtis assured him. “You said it yourself last year.”
Gorsky took a sip of coffee from his thermos and studied the grand scribble Curtis had mapped on the whiteboard. “That state course is certainly designed for a runner like you, Kaufman,” he finally agreed. “At least the Kaufman I think I know.”
“Damn right it is, but I’m going to need some help.”
“Well, according to him I can,” I said, nodding toward Curtis.
“It’s simple, Coach,” Curtis assured him. “I press the pace and waste them. Coughlin just locks in, runs solid, and plucks them off one by one at the end with his speed.”
“Your plan might be simple, but if we’re going to pull this off, we’re going to need to step it up,” Gorsky said as he glanced at his watch. “Now why don’t you two go and get yourselves back to class and try to learn something. This ol’ geezer needs to make some adjustments to your workouts.”
Except for Monday’s meeting with Gorsky, I spent my lunch periods with Mary. We’d grab something edible from the cafeteria and head out behind the school to the baseball fields, sprawl out on the grass, and set up a little picnic. We spent most of our time just making small talk, bitching about homework, or assessing some teacher’s fashion sense or nervous tics. It was the best part of the day. By Wednesday, I had progressed to lying on my back, head in her lap, just soaking up sun and loving life.
That’s when she nudged me.
“Hey, Leo. Check it out.” She pointed across the field, toward the back of the gym. I sat up, rubbed my eyes, and saw eight guys from the football team lifting a red Ford Escort. Two guys stood on each side of the car, their hands gripping the bumpers and frame. They were shuffling the car toward the handball courts.
“What the hell?”
She started laughing. “It happens every year. A group of guys wedge a teacher’s car inside one of the handball courts.” She pointed out four other guys connected to the scene stationed at different points around the building. “Those guys are on lookout.”
The guys still had a good fifty yards to carry the car and they moved slowly. “Whose car is it?”
“I think it’s Stickler’s,” she told me. “He’s such an ass. The guy derives a perverse pleasure from making kids feel stupid. This should have happened long ago.”
We were both laughing as one of the guys holding the front bumper stumbled and almost caused the other guys to drop the car. Then I felt Mary’s finger tickling my neckline just below my collar.
“What’s that, Leo?” She began to pull at the collar of my shirt.
“What’s what?”
“Is that a bruise?” she asked.
I pulled her hand away. “It’s nothing,” I told her. I wasn’t about to tell her about Caleb coming after me the other night.
She laughed. “I don’t remember giving you a hickey.”
“It’s not a hickey,” I told her.
“I know that, Leo.” She began to press me. “Seriously, what happened to you?”
I put my hand over my neck and did my best to wrinkle my brow and pretend to be puzzled as well. “I don’t know, and I don’t remember. It probably happened when I was doing lawn work last weekend. Probably bumped it on something.”
“Let me take a look at it.” She reached for my collar again, and I brushed her arm away.
“It’s not a big deal,” I assured her.
“It’s a bruise, Leo. I would think you would remember it.”
The bell rang and lunch was over. Mary stood up and stared at me a moment. “I have to get to class. Call me tonight.”
She left me sitting there in the field, thinking about the damn bruise on my neck. The truth was I didn’t want to remember it. I felt this flood of shame rush through me as I thought about my older brother straddling me in the middle of the night and beating the crap out of me. It made me want to crawl into a corner. Only running made the shame go away.
I stood up slowly and found my way to class. Those guys now had Stickler’s car fully wedged inside the handball court. The way they had it positioned, he was going to have one hell of a time getting it out.
I didn’t call Mary that night, or the next night either. At school I didn’t try to avoid her, but I didn’t go out of my way to see her, which was pretty easy given we didn’t take any classes together. When our paths crossed, I pretended everything was cool and that I was just busy with stuff. She asked me about what was up over the weekend, and I made up some lousy excuse about having to get together with some relatives.
I directed all my energy into running. After our meeting with Gorsky, the intensity and focus of our workouts began to shift and heighten. I began to see why Curtis thought the guy was brilliant. Into almost every workout, Gorsky incorporated elements structured like potential race scenarios. In some I was set off with a head start over a hilly terrain and Curtis had to pursue me, catch me at a predetermined point, stay with me, and then accelerate in the final stretch. In other workouts I pursued him over flat terrain, then pounced on him in the final stretch. Gorsky pushed us. We did more hills and strides at the completion of each workout. We ran on legs not fully recovered. There was no more tapering for any races before the district meet, because the races between now and then were the workouts.
We were tired, but we felt our bodies become stronger. We remained competitive, but we also held back and kept something in our tanks. We looked forward to unleashing ourselves when the moment really counted.
21.
A THICK MORNING FOG CREPT over the bluffs from the Missouri River and blanketed Macklin. As our bus pulled into the park, we passed a steady stream of runners moving through the gray mist like ghosts. Bundled in sweats, they jogged slowly, shaking off the stiffness of sleep, cold weather, and long bus rides.
I couldn’t believe it when I spotted Dad’s car already parked next to a playground. He was behind the wheel, sipping from a cup of coffee and reading the paper, and Mom was sitting at a picnic table nearby, texting on her phone. Caleb was on the swing set laughing his ass off about something, going so high, the chains went slack at the height of each arc.
“Isn’t that your brother?” Curtis asked.
“Yep.”
“Man, he sure is testing the limits of physics.”
“Yes, he is, and he’ll go even higher.”
The bus finally came to a halt in the parking lot, and Gorsky stood for his customary pep talk, but this morning he kept it brief. “Young men, need I remind you that this is the district state qualifying meet? In other words, it’s do or die!” he announced, his voice booming, and waking Rosenthal and Stuper from their deep sleep. They shook their heads and looked out the bus windows, disoriented.
“Stuper!” Gorsky yelled, trying to rouse him. “Is this going to be your last race of the season?”
Stuper yawned and scratched his head, contemplating Gorsky’s question. “More than likely,” he finally decided.
Gorsky slammed his clipboard down on the bus seat. “Wrong answer!” He surveyed the team, shook his head, and let out a sad sigh. “Unfortunately, for some of you this might be your last race of the year. And for some of you,” he said, glancing at Stuper, “this probably is the last cross-country race of your entire life.”
I looked around the bus at my teammates. Rosenthal and Burpee had some serious bed head going down, Rasmussen’s chin was beginning to droop as he dozed off again, and the rest of the guys on the team looked dazed and groggy.
Gorsky rambled on about tenacity, intestinal fortitude, and some other stuff I was too nervous to take in, before making his final point. “All I’m trying to say, gentlemen, is give this race an honest effort, so when you leave here today you can say to yourself that you gave it your best. You’ve got about an hour before you step on that starting line. Use that time to set a goal for yourself: a time, a place, a guy from another school you’ve never beaten. Challenge yourself, and leave here today knowing that you took a risk, tested your limits, and gave everything you had out there,” he concluded, pointing toward the course. He took a moment and scanned the bus, looking each of us in the eye. “That’s all I have to say.”
The guys on the team slogged down the aisle off the bus like the
y were headed toward their execution, and Gorsky shook hands with each of them and grumbled a few words of encouragement. As I approached him he tapped me on the shoulder and motioned for Curtis and me to take a seat and wait until the bus emptied.
He looked first at Curtis. “Kaufman, is this going to be the last race of your high school career?”
“Are you joking, old man?” Curtis laughed. “Hell no.”
“Just checking,” Gorsky said, patting him on the shoulder. “But do you have a strategy in mind if this little game plan of yours doesn’t work?”
“Not going to happen, Coach,” Curtis scoffed. “And the last thing I need right now is you planting seeds of doubt in Coughlin.”
Gorsky then looked at me. “How about you, Coughlin? You good to go?”
“I hope so,” I said.
“Hope?” Gorsky asked. “It’s going to take a lot more than hope, Leo,” he said, laughing. “It’s going to require guts, talent, and brains,” he said. “You can do this, son, but you’re going to need to use your head as much as your body.”
Gorsky turned to Curtis. “Kaufman, you’re going to have to run smart as well. If you’re going to take over this race early, you’d better know your threshold. You cross it, and you might not have anything left for the finish.”
“I’ve got it,” Curtis said.
Gorsky gathered his clipboard, zipped up his jacket, and looked over his shoulder at us as he stepped from the bus. “Gentlemen, it’s as cold as a well-digger’s ass out here,” he told us. “Get yourselves a good warm-up in and I’ll meet you at the starting line.”
“Ready?” Curtis asked me.
“Yeah,” I lied. “I’m ready. By the way, any theories on why a well-digger’s ass would be cold?”
“No idea.”
Twenty schools were participating in the district race, with the top four teams advancing to the state meet. We’d competed against most already this season in duals and invitationals, so I was familiar with the majority of the field. As Curtis and I jogged the course, threading our way through competing teams warming up in tight packs, he pointed out some of the major competition.
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