Marathon

by Brian Freeman

  The day after he’d asked her to marry him—the day after she’d said yes—she’d told him of her plans to run the marathon the following year. He thought that it was her way of binding herself to the life she’d made there in Duluth. Marathons defined every kind of human commitment. Physical. Emotional. Spiritual. That same day, she’d started training.

  “Can I head down there and wait for her to come out near the finish line?” Cat asked.

  “Sure, go ahead.”

  Stride watched Cat disappear into the crowd at a run, and that was when he heard Maggie in his headset again. Her voice had turned dark.

  “Hey, boss? We may have a problem.”

  “What’s up, Mags?”

  “We’ve got a report of an unattended backpack,” Maggie replied.

  It was 12:09 p.m.

  2

  The brace on Michael Malville’s foot made it uncomfortable for him to stand for long periods of time. He and his son, Evan, had staked out their place on Superior Street three hours earlier, and he now found himself favoring his good leg. He was ready to go home, but Evan was entranced by the marathon. They’d been here to see the wheelers speed by in low-slung wheelchairs as sleek and aerodynamic as a Corvette. They’d seen the lead runners keeping an unimaginable pace at mile twenty-four. Now the heart of the pack jogged past them dozens at a time.

  “Those girls are wearing bikinis!” Evan shouted with the amazement of a twelve-year-old boy who couldn’t decide if the sight of women in sports bras and short-shorts was interesting or gross.

  “They’re not really bikinis,” Michael told his son. “But you do see runners wearing some strange things.”

  That was true. They’d seen tutus, leopard skins, superhero costumes. Even a wedding dress. If you were willing to run twenty-six miles in the rain, you could wear whatever you wanted.

  Michael and Evan watched the marathon from the sidewalk outside the Electric Fetus music store. He was annoyed to be on the sidelines of the race, not running it. After years as a swimmer, he’d decided on his fortieth birthday to train for the Duluth Marathon, and whenever Michael Malville set his mind to something, he did it with one-hundred-percent intensity. His plan had been to break four hours, and he’d been on track to meet his goal. He’d run a half marathon in Milwaukee in April in one hour, forty-eight minutes, and he was confident that he could meet or exceed that pace in Duluth.

  Then, a week earlier, his wife, Alison, had asked him to take a laundry basket down to the basement of their Cloquet home. He’d set one foot wrong on the last step and fractured two metatarsal bones. His marathon dreams were done for the year and, depending on how the bones healed, possibly for good. He’d been angry about it ever since.

  Michael was a big man. He was six-foot-one with a broad build. He’d had curly blond hair for most of his life, but when his hair started to thin in his mid-thirties, he’d shaved his head and kept it that way ever since. He wore narrow, rectangular Prada glasses. He was dressed well, in chinos, a burgundy golf shirt, and one tan loafer on his uninjured foot, with a long, open, seersucker trench coat to stave off the rain. Anyone who looked at him could tell he had money, but his life had never been about wealth. He was an adrenaline junkie, and right now, being a marathon spectator rather than a runner was making him restless.

  His cell phone rang. It was Alison. “How’s it going up there?” his wife asked.

  “Evan loves it,” Michael told her. “One of the runners was dressed like some kind of zombie. That was his favorite.”

  “Dad, he was a character from The Walking Dead,” Evan explained to him impatiently. The boy pointed at his own T-shirt, which showed an actor with a crossbow and the words KILLIN’ IT in red letters. Michael had no idea what the slogan meant, but the shirt apparently had something to do with the television show Evan was obsessed with.

  “Are you coming home for lunch?” Alison asked.

  “No, we already grabbed hot dogs at Coney Island.”

  “How’s the foot?”

  “It sucks,” Michael said.

  “Well, don’t kill yourself, okay?”

  “We’ll only stay a little longer.”

  He hung up the phone. Runners flooded past them on the street, and the spectators kept up a loud chorus of cheers, regardless of how much time or how many people had already passed. A woman sitting in a canvas chair shouted over and over, “You’ve got this! Less than two miles to go!” Michael knew her heart was in the right place, but he wanted to tell her that runners hated being reminded of how far they had to go. They all knew, and most of the time they didn’t want to think about it.

  “Hey!” a runner shouted from the street. He was big, like Michael, but at least fifteen years younger, with long, wet brown hair and a bushy beard. “Hey, no exceptions, man! No exceptions!”

  It took Michael a moment to realize the runner was talking to him. The younger man wore a #noexceptions bandana tied around his head, and he’d spotted the large red button on Michael’s trench coat that said the same thing.

  “No exceptions!” Michael called out, giving the man a thumbs-up. He was always pleased to find other conservatives here, because he didn’t meet too many kindred spirits in the “People’s Republic of Duluth.”

  “What does that mean, Dad?” Evan asked, looking up at him. “No exceptions?”

  Michael squatted to stare the boy in the eyes. “It means we live in America, and nobody can tell us what to say or what to think. It says so in the Bill of Rights, in the First Amendment to the Constitution.”

  “Oh.”

  “That’s something to be proud of,” Michael added. “Always remember that.”

  “Okay.”

  Michael straightened up with difficulty, because his foot was bothering him, and that was the exact moment when a pedestrian pushing quickly along the sidewalk collided hard with his shoulder. Michael lost his balance. Pain, like a lightning bolt, jolted through his leg. He staggered into Evan, and his son stumbled into the street, where a pack of runners had to dodge around him. Michael grabbed Evan’s wrist and yanked the boy back to the safety of the sidewalk.

  Furious, he spotted the man who’d struck his shoulder, walking away as if nothing had happened between them. “What the hell!” Michael shouted after him. “Watch where you’re going!”

  The man didn’t break his fast stride, but he glanced back and caught Michael’s eye. It lasted a split second, no more. Michael had an impression of someone younger than himself but similarly tall and solid. In that instant, Michael saw one thick eyebrow and one cold, hostile eye in a bronze-skinned face. A waft of musky cologne lingered in Michael’s nose, and he knew it came from the man on the sidewalk. The man wore black jeans and a loose, untucked, button-down shirt.

  A navy-blue backpack hung from one of the man’s shoulders. It sank low on his back, as if weighed down by something heavy.

  Michael felt the animosity across the distance. He was sure the collision had been deliberate. The angry moment was there, and then it was gone. The crowd swallowed the man with the backpack as he marched toward the Lake Avenue overpass leading to Canal Park. Michael tried to fix the details of the man’s face in his mind, but the image was already growing blurry, like a photograph you weren’t fast enough to snap. The man was just another immigrant on a busy city street.

  Michael made sure Evan was okay.

  It was 12:17 p.m.

  * * *

  Crowds made Khan nervous. He didn’t like them.

  This was a happy crowd, but it didn’t matter. As he came out of the doorway of the Duluth Outdoor Company shop, his senses rebelled at the loud music, the laughter, the clapping, the clanging of bells, and the cheering. He felt an urge to cover his ears to drown out the noise. The squirming closeness of so many bodies made it hard for him to breathe, and they all smelled of rain, sweat, perfume, and tobacco. It overwhelmed him, as if he were fourteen years old again in the streets of Lahore. He trembled in agitation, wanting to run away, wanting to g
o back to the empty alley behind the shop, but he had work to do.

  Behind the silver frames of his glasses, his eyes darted from face to face. It was hard to find one particular man among the hundreds squeezed along the cobblestoned sidewalk. This was where everyone wanted to be. The finish line. It was such an American place: confident, pushy, full of dreams, full of ambition. All the shops were open, hungry for business. Posters lined the street for banks, car dealers, gas stations, and cell phone companies. Runners with flushed faces mingled with their friends, their finisher medals proudly hung around their necks. The beating heart of the marathon was in this place.

  Khan thought: If Malik is here, this is where he will be.

  His phone rang in the pocket of his black jeans. He dug it out from under his flowered batik shirt and saw that it was Ahdia calling. Even the sight of her name made him smile. His wife, his beautiful wife, who had given him their beautiful son. Khan lived for the two of them.

  “Have you found Malik?” Ahdia asked.

  “No.”

  “So maybe he’s not there.”

  “I hope that’s true, but I can’t reach him, and he won’t answer his phone.”

  “Are others searching, too?”

  “Yes, but no one has seen him.”

  “How are you?” she asked.

  “You know how I feel about crowds.”

  “I do. Come home, Khan. There is nothing more you can do. Pak misses you. So do I.”

  He lowered his voice to avoid drawing attention to himself. He was as skinny as a street sign, but he was also tall and handsome, with a mane of jet-black hair and a neat beard. His dark, Arabic features were enough to attract suspicion on the street, especially today. He didn’t really blame people for that. Evolution had programmed the human heart to fear what was different. When he saw a muscled, tattooed man eyeing him, he turned around to hide his face.

  “If Malik is here, I have to find him,” Khan whispered.

  “Then be careful.”

  “I will.”

  He didn’t want to tell Ahdia that if he found Malik, it was possible that neither one of them would come home alive.

  Malik was one of his closest friends, but he’d crossed to the wrong side. The side of violence. Online recruiters and angry radicals in the Cedar-Riverside coffee shops of Minneapolis had poisoned him with talk of jihad. All of it was so foolish, so pointless. A deadly game played by stupid boys. It made Khan want to tear out his hair, because if he lost Malik, it would be like losing his own brother all over again. Another brother dying in a crowd for nothing.

  He wanted to shout: Where are you?

  Because he was sure that Malik was close by. Somewhere. Khan needed to find him before the police did. Find him and stop him before he threw away his life, along with the lives of others.

  Khan left the spectators packed in front of the Duluth Outdoor Company shop and walked quickly toward the other end of Canal Park.

  It was 12:26 p.m.

  * * *

  “I am so sorry,” Max Guppo told Stride and Maggie. His round white face was even paler than usual, and his mustache drooped. Next to him, his youngest daughter, Gloria—eight years old—clutched her Barbie backpack to her chest. Her wide eyes and white bubble coat made her look like a snowy owl.

  “Well, I think we can call off the SWAT team,” Stride said, struggling not to laugh. He knew Guppo and his daughter both felt bad. At least a dozen officers had surrounded the bag before the girl wandered between them and casually grabbed her backpack from the ground.

  “Honestly, boss, I had no idea Gloria left it behind,” Guppo went on. “And then when the call came in . . . I didn’t realize—”

  “It’s all right, Max.” Stride bent down to Gloria’s level and smiled. “You okay there, Glo?”

  The girl nodded without saying a word.

  “Good. Now you keep your backpack with you from now on, okay? You don’t want somebody walking off with it, do you?”

  She shook her head silently.

  “Okay.” Stride tweaked her pudgy cheeks and straightened up. He patted Max on the back. “Go on, Max, get back to your mac-and-cheese balls. You’ve still got a lot of hungry runners coming through here.”

  “Thanks, boss.”

  Guppo took Gloria by the hand and led the little girl away. Stride and Maggie watched them go. When father and daughter were out of earshot, smiles broke across both of their faces, and the laughter they’d been holding back bubbled out of them. The other cops around them laughed, too. Stride shook his head.

  “A Barbie backpack,” he said. “That’s one for the record books.”

  “Needless to say, the woman who called 911 didn’t mention that,” Maggie told him.

  “Well, we tell people, if you see something, say something. And she did.”

  Maggie zipped up her red jacket against the rain. Her bowl-cut black hair was soaked. She pointed at her yellow Avalanche, which was pebbled with dents in the doors and fenders. She was a terrible driver. “You want a ride back down to Canal Park, boss?”

  “I’m not that brave, Mags.”

  “Hey, I got the airbags replaced,” she pointed out.

  “Still no.”

  “Okay, suit yourself.” She chuckled again, her hands in her pockets. “I guess we’ve had our excitement for this year’s marathon.”

  “I guess so,” Stride said.

  It was 12:29 p.m.

  * * *

  Wade Ralston checked the rubber fitness tracker on his wrist. Despite the rain and the perspiration on his skin, it was working fine. Even so, he was upset with himself, because he was way behind the schedule he’d mapped out. He’d pulled his right hamstring at mile sixteen and had to walk off and on since then to shake off the pain. What should have been a three-and-a-half-hour pace—bringing him to the finish line at 11:15 a.m., his record time—was now a frustrating four-hour-and-forty-five-minute jog. He’d never fallen so far behind in a marathon, and he’d run twelve races in ten years.

  Other runners passed him, because he was limping. The finish line wasn’t even a hundred yards away, but the distance loomed like ten more miles. The race clock on a banner stretched across Canal Park Drive ticked off the seconds, reminding him of his failure.

  Someone shouted at him, “You’re bleeding!”

  Wade looked down at his white tank top, which had been specially printed to advertise his business: RALSTON EXTERMINATION: THE BUG ZAPPERS. Where cartoon ants and cockroaches marched across his chest toward two men carrying foggers, his nipples had begun to bleed from the friction with his shirt. The bugs appeared to be walking into two crimson pools for a swim.

  A volunteer medic on the street offered help, but Wade waved him off. A little blood didn’t matter. He’d developed a blister while running the Chicago marathon four years earlier, and by the time he reached the finish line, his left sneaker had turned cherry red.

  He jogged another step and then another step. That was what it was all about. One foot in front of the other, one step at a time, adding up to 26.2 miles.

  Thanks to his running regimen, Wade didn’t have an ounce of fat on his body. He was a compact package, no more than five-foot-five and a rock-hard 120 pounds. In school, as a child, his small size had worked against him. Girls had teased him and bigger kids bullied him mercilessly, but as an adult, he had always been determined to outrun everyone else, outwork them, outsmart them, and out-earn them. He’d had the last laugh. If you were willing to do things that no one else had the guts to do, you could always get what you wanted. Not many people wanted to deal with bugs and rodents.

  He found himself getting dizzy, but he had to keep moving. Nothing else mattered. Just keep moving forward.

  The finish line was fifty yards away.

  He looked for his cheering section. They’d promised him they would be here, but he was so late that he wondered if they’d given up on him and gone for a beer. It wouldn’t mean a thing if he couldn’t see their faces. He peered t
hrough the crowd lining the street—and there they were, all three of them, in front of the Duluth Outdoor Company shop, exactly as they’d promised, so they could watch him take the last steps across the finish line.

  Travis Baker was there, in front of a tree and built like a tree. They’d worked in the bug business together for five years, ever since Travis’s sister, Shelly, had introduced them. Wade and Travis went down into the places no one else would go, taking out cockroaches from building basements by the shovelful. Travis spotted him first and cheered wildly, as if Wade were a football player scoring the winning touchdown.

  “Wade! Wade! Wade!”

  Shelly stood next to Travis. She took up the cheer, too.

  And so did Joni. Wade’s wife. Ex-cheerleader. Joni had always been the ultimate proof of what life could bring a short, scrawny, C-average kid who knew how to work his butt off. She waved at him and whistled, and her blond hair bounced, and so did everything else. He couldn’t take his eyes off her.

  “Wade! Wade! Wade!”

  “Cross the line! Cross the line!”

  That was all he had to do, but Wade wasn’t moving. He’d stopped. His limbs became rubber. He bent over, his hands on his thighs. Mouth open, panting, he stared at the finish line. He stared at Joni, Travis, and Shelly, wildly waving him on. Dozens of others in the crowd took up the cheer.

  “Cross the line! Cross the line!”

  But he couldn’t move. His heart beat crazily. His chest heaved as he tried to suck in a breath, but tightness grabbed his ribs in a choke hold. He swayed and crumpled to one knee. He grabbed his wrist. The world spun.

  The finish line teased him, with the race clock ticking off second after second after second. He was so close.