Running Full Tilt

by Michael Currinder

  “I’ll run beside her and help her out,” I offered again. “It’s going to be a challenge for her to do this by herself.”

  The officials agreed and we got Margaret on the starting line as she continued to chant her mantra: “Margaret does not want to do this.”

  “Yes, Margaret,” I answered, “I’ve heard you, but I know you can do it. You’re just a little nervous, that’s all.”

  That little encouragement perked something in Margaret. When the gun sounded, she actually started to run, albeit very slowly. It took us nearly fifteen minutes to run the four laps around the track, and the entire way she continually asserted, “Margaret does not want to do this.”

  I ran beside her and tried to persuade her otherwise. “You can do this, Margaret.”

  The last lap took an eternity. When we hit the homestretch and I saw the tape stretched across the finish line, I told Margaret, “All you have to do is get across that finish line and you’re done.”

  The crowd was now standing and urging Margaret along. Margaret responded to the situation by changing her mantra. “Way to go, Margaret. Way to go,” she repeated to herself in the same monotone.

  I stopped ten meters from the finish line when I was sure Margaret was going to stay on course. She came to a halt for a moment and looked at the crowd and realized the ovation was for her. Her father was standing on the other side of the finish line with his arms open. Finally, Margaret smiled and ran toward him.

  He put up his hand for a high five, and she slapped his open palm with delight. Her father lifted her up in a giant bear hug. He looked over his shoulder at me and silently mouthed, “Thank you.”

  Caleb had already been marshaled to the starting line and was standing with Kevin and five other boys. I walked over to him and asked him if he was ready.

  “YES!” he shouted.

  “Do you remember what we talked about?”

  “DON’T LISTEN KEVIN!”

  “Good luck, Caleb,” I told him, and I made my way back to the bleachers and my parents. It was now dusk. The field lights came on and gave the atmosphere an eerie glow.

  “How’s your brother doing?” Dad asked. I think Dad was more nervous than Caleb.

  “I think he’s okay,” I told him. “A little wound up at the moment. I gave him a plan, and I think he gets it.”

  The soldiers in camouflage arranged Caleb and his competitors on the starting line like horses at the gate. When the gun fired, Caleb took off in a full sprint—only he added a skip into every few strides and held his arms flush against the side of his body. He was running like he urgently needed a toilet.

  “What the hell is he doing?” Dad said in confusion.

  “That was not the plan,” I assured Dad.

  We watched Caleb take an enormous lead on the rest of the field. When he came through the first lap, I estimated he had two hundred meters on the other runners.

  Mom grabbed my hand and squeezed tightly. “I’m worried he’s going to collapse if he continues at this rate,” she said. Midway through the second lap, that was exactly what happened.

  Dad didn’t say anything. We just watched as Caleb slowly began to implode. First his shoulders tightened, then he no longer lifted his knees, and finally he slowed almost to a crawl.

  “Oh, no,” Dad whispered.

  “He might be all right,” I tried reassuring them. “I’ve been there. If he doesn’t stop, he might recover and be able to pull it off.”

  Caleb struggled, but he continued running and held his lead up until midway through the third lap. Then one boy who started at a sensible pace eventually caught him. They completed the third lap together and then Caleb simply had nothing left in the tank. The boy took over the lead for good and won the race easily. The rest of the pack was too far back, so Caleb was able to hold on for second place.

  We made our way down to the track to take some up-close pictures of Caleb receiving his medal on the podium.

  “DAD VERY PROUD OF YOU!” he shouted. “MOM PROUD OF YOU!”

  “Hell, yes! I’m very proud of you, Caleb,” Dad said.

  “LEO PROUD OF CALEB!” he yelled.

  “I’m proud of you too,” I told him.

  “TAKE LEO TO SIX FLAGS!” he yelled. “MY MONEY! I PAY!”

  “You don’t have to do that, Caleb,” I answered, suddenly having a flashback of the tantrum he had last time we went to Six Flags when he found out that the water park wasn’t open yet.

  “TAKE LEO TO SIX FLAGS!” he repeated.

  I glanced at Dad and Mom. Dad shrugged his shoulders at me like it was my call, but Mom’s eyebrows were raised with hope.

  “That sounds great, Caleb,” I told him.

  Caleb then turned to Dad. “DAD TAKE CALEB OUT TO DINNER!”

  “Your wish is my command,” Dad said. “Where to?”

  “FISH-AND-CHIPS! Long John Silver’s!” Caleb yelled.

  “You bet!” Dad assured him.

  As Caleb climbed into the car, Dad glanced over at Mom and me. “I’ll drive. You two start praying that damn restaurant is still open.”

  “Aye-aye, captain,” I joked, but I started praying.

  38.

  THE NEXT WEEK CALEB MUST have confirmed our plans to go to Six Flags a thousand times. The first thing I did when I rolled out of bed Sunday morning was check the weather on my phone: overcast with a chance of thundershowers.

  Crap.

  Caleb and I went to Six Flags once a year. As kids we went with Mom and Dad, but for the last four years Caleb and I had gone alone. Caleb knew exactly when the place opened, the length of time it took for travel, when the lines would begin to form. The park was a good forty-five-minute drive from the house, so we had to leave early.

  Mom and Dad were practically giddy that Caleb and I were headed out for the day at Caleb’s initiative. When the two of us rolled upstairs that morning, Mom was at the stove making pancakes, Dad at the table with his paper. The day before I’d finally cracked 4:18 in the 1600 at the Clayton invite and was headed to districts the following week.

  “What ride will you go on first?” Mom asked Caleb.

  “RIDE SCREAMIN’ EAGLE!” he said, laughing. The Eagle was this classic roller coaster that went sixty-two miles an hour with three death drops. Caleb loved the thrill rides, the ones that shook and rattled his insides, the ones that plummeted from high distances, the ones with countless loops and twists, the ones that accelerated to blazing speeds, the ones that scared the shit out of most people. But he loved the roller coasters most of all. When my parents used to take us to the park years earlier, we’d sometimes wait in lines for an hour for the two-minute thrill, only to dash back and get in line for another go. Usually Caleb couldn’t deal with long lines, but for some reason at Six Flags he could stand in line forever.

  “And after that?”

  “MR. FREEZE! NINJA! DRAGON’S WING!” he shouted. As he reeled off our agenda for the day, my stomach lurched and I began taking smaller bites of pancake and chewing slowly. While Caleb had a stomach of steel, I was prone to bouts of motion sickness. I once lost it on the Ninja and nearly sprayed partially digested funnel cakes on the man and woman in the car in front of us.

  “WHAT TIME PICK MARY UP?” Caleb suddenly blurted while scraping the syrup from his plate.

  I dropped my fork and looked at Mom and Dad, making a facial expression I hoped clearly communicated that Caleb never mentioned this part of the invitation. He just assumed. When Caleb blasted out of the kitchen to go brush his teeth, I launched into it with Mom and Dad.

  “You know there’s a chance of thunderstorms today,” I told them as I took our plates to the sink.

  “Only a twenty percent chance, according to Sunny Munson on channel four,” Mom said calmly.

  “And late in the day,” Dad reassured me.

  I pressed the issue. “And what if it does rain?”

  “You’re being a pessimist,” Dad said.

  “Why do you always assume that someth
ing is going to go wrong?” Mom asked.

  “I think I have a right to assume that something might go wrong!” I shot back. “What if Mother Nature decides not to cooperate with Caleb’s plans?”

  “So? What if?” Dad asked.

  Their optimism and denial began to piss me off. “I think I have a right to assume that he might want to beat the crap out of me if something doesn’t go his way,” I shot back. “And I don’t want that to happen at Six Flags, especially in front of Mary!”

  “You need to lower your voice with us right now,” Dad said.

  “I’m pissed!” I shouted, rinsing the sticky syrup from our plates before slamming them in the dish rack. I took a deep breath, trying to calm myself.

  “Sit down,” Dad said, motioning toward the table.

  I stood my ground and crossed my arms. “I’m sorry,” I mumbled, with little apology in my tone.

  “I think you need to realize that this day is very important to your brother,” Mom said.

  “I think it’s more like this day is very important to both of you,” I argued.

  “Fine,” Dad huffed, balling up his napkin and tossing it on his plate. “I’ll take your brother to Six Flags.”

  “I hope you’re not trying to be serious,” I told him. “Like that’s an option at this point. I’m already in.”

  “Listen,” Dad said calmly, “if it will make you feel better, I’m willing to drive out there and sit in the parking lot. I’ve got plenty of work I can do. If anything happens, all you have to do is call me.”

  Dad was throwing me a rescue net, but he was also making me feel like a coward. If I took his offer, I was being a pessimist, and I wasn’t upping my game.

  “No, I’m good,” I told him, trying to shake off my frustration. I wanted out of the conversation. “I think you’re right,” I said, glancing at the time on my phone and realizing Caleb would want to get going. “Hopefully everything will be just fine.”

  I stepped into the den and tried to get a grip on myself before calling Mary. With Dad’s line that life is always going to throw you curveballs echoing in my head, I picked up my phone and hit the speed dial. “Hey,” I said when she answered, “this is probably the last call you want to get early on a Sunday morning.”

  “What?” she answered, sounding groggy. “What happened? Is something wrong?”

  “No,” I told her. “It’s nothing like that.”

  Caleb then appeared holding a thick stack of dollar bills in one hand and his black fanny pack in his other. “PAY WITH OWN MONEY!”

  “Caleb would like to ask you something,” I explained, then, in a cowardly move, handed the phone to him.

  “HI, MARY! GO TO SIX FLAGS! TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES. RIGHT! CALEB PAY WITH OWN MONEY!” he ordered before handing me the phone.

  “You gotta be freakin’ kidding me, Leo,” she said, sounding pissed. “I get the feeling this is not a joke. You don’t even have the guts to ask me yourself?”

  “Desperate times call for desperate measures” was all I could think of to say.

  “Give me a few minutes if I’m not ready when you get here,” she said, and hung up.

  Mom was helping Caleb tuck his fanny pack under his shirt when I returned to the kitchen. “You need to hide your money, Caleb,” she reminded him.

  “HIDE MONEY. RIGHT!” he repeated several times as we headed out the door.

  Mary, wearing tight jeans and a smile that wasn’t at all convincing, was out in front of her house waiting, her hair still wet from the shower.

  “It’s an all-expenses-paid trip to Six Flags,” I reminded her as she got in the car. “What could be better?”

  —

  The line was only a few families deep when we arrived. Caleb pulled out a coupon Mom had clipped from the newspaper, and his stack of dollar bills. The whole process of getting tickets took a while as he insisted on counting out the entire $105 cost of the tickets in singles.

  We trailed Caleb into the park. “You’d think he’d hate this place, with the long lines and noise,” I explained to Mary, “but he loves it. We only come once a year, but he has a map of it in his mind and knows it like it was tattooed on his wrist.”

  Caleb’s itinerary was set. So he made a beeline straight for the Screamin’ Eagle, with Mary and me nearly running to keep up. “RIDE WITH MARY!” he said when we’d arrived at the Eagle.

  “This is as far as I go,” she said, stopping at the gate. “I don’t do roller coasters, Caleb. Or any thrill ride, for that matter.” I could tell by the way she glanced at me that she was lying to him, and I was confused. “You and Leo are on your own. I’ll be right here when you’re finished.”

  Unlike the Fireball and Batman rides, the Eagle is one of those old-fashioned wooden roller coasters. When it’s going full speed, the cars shake intensely and you feel like you’re on a runaway train that’s about to derail. It begins with a steep climb toward the sky, pauses at its crest momentarily to give you a view of the entire park, and then makes a steep descent downward and races through a track lined by a forest on both sides. Caleb and I laughed our heads off the entire way. Like during his twist dives at the pool, Caleb screamed out the various wrongs he’d committed in the past. I called this routine his roller-coaster confessions:

  “I POKE LEO IN EYES IN MIDDLE OF NIGHT!”

  “I PUT FIST THROUGH WINDOW ON COLGATE!”

  “I DRAW TRAIN TRACKS ON DINING ROOM FLOOR!”

  “I PUT CAT IN MAILBOX!”

  “I KICK MR. BAIMS’S DESK! MAKE MR. BAIMS VERY ANGRY!”

  After several rides, including my least favorite, the Sky-Screamer, I convinced him I needed a break, so Mary took him for a slice of pizza. While I sat on an empty bench and waited for the vomity feeling to subside in my stomach, I noticed a couple of photos poking out of the backpack Mary had brought with her to the park. One was a picture of Caleb and me side by side on the Screamin’ Eagle. The other was the two of us midway through the descent on the Superman Tower of Power ride, the 230-foot free fall where I involuntarily screamed like a baby the entire descent. Mary must have bought the photos at some souvenir booth while Caleb and I were on a ride. In the first we’re midway through the descent of the first drop, our mouths wide open, screaming with joy, and crazed expressions in our eyes. In the other, Caleb is wearing the same expression, but I appear a little more distraught. The funny thing is that in both photos, Caleb and I have our arms raised, trying to catch more air time, but my left hand is folded inside his right, clutched so tight that it must have hurt. I guess I was so in the moment, I didn’t even realize it.

  When I spotted Mary and Caleb returning with their pizza, laughing and talking, I slipped the photos back into her bag, thinking maybe she wanted to surprise Caleb and me with them at the end of the day.

  It was almost dusk when we finally left the park, but despite that Caleb had gorged himself on funnel cakes, pizza, and burgers and fries over the course of the day, he insisted on one final stop.

  “STOP AT TED DREWES!” he announced.

  “To Ted Drewes!” Mary seconded, leaning slightly toward me. “And what the hell is Ted Drewes?” she whispered.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me—you’ve never heard of Ted Drewes?”

  “I’ve heard of it. I’ve just never been.”

  “You’ve been deprived, Mary. It’s this frozen custard stand on Chippewa. It’s legendary,” I explained. “But it’s always packed, and it’s a pain in the ass in terms of finding parking.”

  —

  The lines were already long when we arrived. “Can you get me chocolate chip and banana concrete?” I asked her as we pulled up. I pulled out my wallet to fish for some cash.

  “I PAY!” Caleb insisted.

  I dropped them off and found a parking place in a neighborhood about a quarter mile away. When I met them a few minutes later, two fat raindrops splashed into my concrete, and seconds later it began to pour. There was no way we’d make it to the car without getting dren
ched.

  Mary and I stood there in a panic as it began to dump, just looking at each other, not knowing what to do.

  “STAND HERE!” Caleb shouted.

  He was already beneath a small overhang on the side of the building, laughing himself silly as Mary and I stood there like losers in the rain. Mary hopped up next to him and I followed.

  When the rain slowed a bit, we made a dash back to the car and ate the rest of our ice cream inside during the downpour. Caleb loved water any which way. He smiled and slurped through the loud drumming of the rain.

  I sighed with relief when we finally dropped Mary off twenty minutes later without an incident.

  “Thank you, Caleb, for a wonderful day,” she said to him, then looked at me, eyebrows raised and smiling.

  “I get this feeling I’m going to owe you an enormous favor,” I told her.

  “No,” she answered slowly. “Why don’t you get that?”

  She dashed from the car through the pouring rain to her front door, carrying her backpack with the pictures of Caleb and me inside.

  When we finally got home, Dad was sprawled out in his recliner reading the newspaper, SportsCenter muted on the television. Caleb said a quick hello and made a mad dash to the kitchen to give Mom a retell of the day’s events, while I collapsed on the couch and zoned out on baseball high-lights.

  “ELEVEN O’CLOCK. DRANK COCA-COLA. TWO ICE CUBES!” Caleb told my mother.

  “Sounds like your brother enjoyed himself,” Dad finally said, lowering his newspaper. Caleb continued shouting his minute-by-minute account over the backdrop of running water and Mom washing dishes.

  “TWELVE FIFTEEN RIDE MR. FREEZE!”

  By the time Caleb reached three o’clock, Dad finally snapped. “Christ, Leo! You know it drives me up the wall when he does this.” Dad sighed, slapping his newspaper on his lap. “Can you at least give me an abbreviated version of the day?”

  I was going to make Dad suffer a few more minutes, but then we both cracked up listening to Caleb. “No incidents,” I finally told him. “I guess if I had to sum it up in a few words, we had a lot of fun.”