Race Across the Sky

by Derek Sherman

  And then, next to him, he heard a different voice, softer, gentler.

  “Blend with the air, Caley.”

  A bluebird’s voice. June had not stopped back at the pass; she had been out here behind him this whole time. He had given up on her, but she had not on him. He stared up at her, amazed.

  And the two of them began to run together though the dark terrain. Caleb wanted to hold her, but there was nothing left in him now except this putting of one foot in front of the other, this breathing in of air, the lifting of his legs.

  The course wound down to the Tabor boat lake. The mist was stunning in the light of the half moon, swirling around their ankles, whispering toward the water. Just before eleven o’clock, they jogged on smooth pavement, passing parked cars, toward the distant lights of Leadville.

  A few people stood in front of the old, solid houses, clapping. A few filmed them on phones and video cameras. A thin red neon tape, he saw, had already been broken and lay crumpled across the street. June stepped aside, applauding, and Caleb crossed under the gray finish banner, and it was done.

  He fell into the arms of his housemates.

  “What’s my . . .” He panted, unable to force the words out. He shook his head roughly.

  Hank Gutterson, a smaller, buzz-cut kid of military bearing, ruffled his hair.

  “You’re eighth,” he laughed.

  Someone pulled off his tank and handed him water. He grinned. It was incomparable, Caleb thought, being so complete. He sat on the curb, watching the next runners jog, stumble, and crawl across the line.

  Juan finished nineteenth, Leigh twenty-sixth overall, eleventh among women. Alice, Kevin, and Makailah all placed in the top forty. As they had each of the previous fifteen years, the Happy Trails Running Club owned Leadville. Caleb pulled off his shoes and limped barefoot down the dark street to a parking lot. The license plates rose and waved like banners. They shouldn’t be doing that, he knew. He needed fluids.

  Mack was waiting for him by his dusty black Jeep, standing with his ankles crossed. The first time Caleb had ever seen him, at the Rocking Horse Tavern a decade ago, he had experienced this same sensation of running into a wall of solid energy. Mack was a small man. Black hair curled around his ears and tufts of black beard were spaced sporadically around his sunken cheeks. His face was a riverbed of wrinkles. With his tie-dye, he had the appearance of an aged roadie. His teeth, long stripped of enamel from decades of running these mountains, were the gray of tombstones. His eyes were a blue so brilliant they seemed not to belong to him at all.

  “Ride with me, buddy.”

  Inside the Jeep, Caleb was overwhelmed by the scent of sweat and pine. The leather seat irritated his raw thighs as he pulled Band-Aids from his nipples and set them in the ash-tray. His body spasmed violently. Mack handed him an old sweatshirt, and Caleb pulled the green hood tight around his head. For all of the rocks, creeks, ascents, dehydration, snakes, and hallucinations, the biggest danger he faced was right now. The total demolition of his endocrine system from the constant exertion, stress, and the chemicals in the sports drinks had left his body defenseless. Any inconsequential virus that happened to be wandering through the Colorado air would find its way in without resistance.

  Mack spoke in an animated manner, waving his hands. He preferred to drive off-road, even when a highway presented itself, and so they bounced roughly between firs and black-eyed aspens, a blur of hieroglyphic eyes dancing around them.

  “You know Anne Luchamp?” he asked in his nasal voice.

  Caleb shook his head.

  “She finished third in Women’s. She’ll join us next year. I didn’t speak with her, but I felt her energy,” Mack stated matter-of-factly. “Let’s bring her to a party at the house.”

  Reading the waves of kinetic energy that propelled all living things was not a unique gift, but Mack possessed it as strongly as anyone Caleb had ever seen. It was how he healed them, helped them push past any barrier, physical or emotional. As a coach it made him, Caleb understood, a genius.

  “I saw June pacing you there at the end,” Mack turned, a wry grin across his small mouth. “She giving you some special training these days?”

  Caleb tried to shake his head no, a trembling taking over his entire body.

  Mack laughed and sang out, “‘I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love.’ You are bequeathed to the dirt, right Caley?”

  Caleb nodded. Yes, he thought, he was bequeathed. This was the pledge he had made, all of those years ago.

  When they passed Superior, Mack turned back onto the old dirt road. They drove for some time, and then he pushed the Jeep around a cluster of oaks, their long roots intermingled as the fingers of lovers, and a simple house made of planks and beams appeared in the distance. It lay just two hundred open yards from the base of South Boulder Peak. Safe, hidden from the toxic world, and plugged directly into the real one.

  Mack shut the engine off and looked at him. “I got a surprise for you. It’s crazy good.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a secret. I’m announcing it Sunday night. You’re gonna love it. Let’s get you iced.”

  He opened the door. Inside, a warm smell of root stew filled the open room. They climbed up creaking oak stairs to the second floor. In the bathroom was an old ceramic tub, which Mack filled with ice. Caleb felt a need to go to his room, sweep his hand under his futon on the floor, and determine if his memory of mailing the letter was a hallucination.

  But Mack took his arm and led him into his bath. Ice water rose to his waist. Time revved forward violently, then stopped like a navy jet landing on a carrier, and a seizure rose through him all the way to his lungs. Caleb lost his breath and sank into the tub. Mack leaned over and held him under his arms. And then Caleb blinked, and shuddered gently, and smiled.

  He had placed eighth at Leadville. At forty-three years old, after eleven years of work, he was ready to win a major ultramarathon. His next one would be the Hardrock 100, up and down thirteen peaks of the San Juan Mountains. His next months would be devoted to training for its dangers. He could have no distractions, nothing could threaten his focus.

  Somewhere outside, he heard June’s voice.

  2

  • • • • • • • • • • • •

  When Caleb’s letter came, Shane was out selling drugs.

  It was a stunning San Francisco afternoon. He could see the city behind the gleaming bay from his parking spot in Larkspur. Blue sparks fluttered between the shoreline trees like fairies, beckoning him someplace, he wasn’t sure where, perhaps to drown.

  Shane opened his trunk and peered down at the white cardboard boxes full of pills. Purple ones, blue ones, annular and elliptic. He balanced a stack on one knee, shut the trunk, and walked toward a flat, single-story building baking in the sun.

  He carried samples of two new drugs: Epherex, for anxiety, was in high demand. Solistan, for otolyrangological infection, however, was a dismal failure. The drug was under-performing in its clinical trials, with scripts running 20 percent below estimates. His mandate from Saint Louis was to reverse this trend, this quarter.

  There were four doctors in residence at Larkspur Internists. Three men and one woman; two Asian, two Caucasian. Pulling open the door, Shane went over his calculations. Male Caucasians were the most amenable, he had found, and female Asians were the toughest sell. It was telling that he had married one.

  Inside, the air was accented with redwoods.

  “How’s the puppy, Anne?”

  The receptionist’s face lit up, pleased he had remembered. “Ate a box of Claritin last night. Have a seat, sweetheart, I’ll get you in.”

  As Shane waited beside three patients to see the doctor, he studied the Solistan logo, which had been created at great expense. Some of Shane’s high school friends had possessed a talent for band names; now he knew
what they had done with their lives.

  These names and logos were worth the cost, because they worked. Patients walked into practices asking for them. In fact, sometimes Orco would develop a drug just to fit a particularly sticky name. “Confilox” had tested so well with adolescents that the company had reformulated a failing antidepressant by one molecule and created a thirty-million-dollar-a-year brand. Drugs, names, sales: for years Shane had felt that this cycle was a thing of beauty.

  Twenty minutes later, Shane followed a nurse down the hall. The air felt stuffy; germs, it seemed, might thrive. He passed examination rooms with color-coded charts on the doors. What was blue, versus red? Was his own chart colored in any specific code? Was Janelle’s?

  Shane possessed a round face; his eyes, the color of amber ale, were alive and welcoming. And yet their warmth was betrayed by the sly curve of his mouth, which produced an unintended air of superiority. A college girlfriend had suggested that this was simply the muscle makeup of his face, but from birth, an almost ethereal self-confidence had bloomed inside of Shane. He had never known a time when it had not been there, prodding him forth.

  So it was really no surprise that life had led Shane right up to sales and introduced them with a knowing wink. After only a few years at Orco Pharmaceuticals, he had been handed the prized Bay Area territory as incentive to stay with them. He had spent the last decade driving through Marin County farmland like an Old West medicine man, stopping to display his potions. For years, he had felt content and unrepining.

  But recently, his sense that all was right in the world had begun slipping. Frenzied mandates were coming from headquarters to grow scripts by 12 percent, an astonishing number. The sales reps he saw now seemed more desperate than the patients they passed in the waiting rooms. They had shifted to seamier tactics: spreading online falsities about competing medicines, hiring ghost writers to write glowing articles about ineffective drugs, and paying editors at esteemed medical journals to run them. This new breed handled their expense accounts like investment bankers, taking doctors on lavish trips. Orco raised prices accordingly, and the insurance companies did the same. This new cycle made Shane uneasy.

  He found Doctor Felger at a spartan metal desk, his narrow back hunched, writing with a sharply turned left hand, the posture, Shane thought, of a schoolboy. Felger was a fifty-five-year-old Caucasian, right in the top spot in Shane’s target, but he had never been easy to sell. When he looked up, his eyes were tired. Dots of black and gray stubble sprinkled his jaw in irregular patterns.

  “What have you got?” he asked wearily.

  “Solistan,” Shane offered. “And Epherex.”

  “Leave the Epherex. Can’t use the Solistan.”

  “I saw a patient out there who was holding her ears.”

  “Doesn’t work.”

  “The Swedish Institute of Otolyrangological Studies said that—”

  “The Swedish what?” the doctor looked up in angry disbelief.

  Shane continued gently. “Doctor Felger, you write fewer scripts for Orco brands than any doctor at this practice. May I ask if there’s a reason why?”

  Felger’s eyes filled with an expression of amazement. “How do you know that?”

  Shane had purchased this data from a national chain drugstore data retailer. He smiled peaceably.

  “That’s very powerful information and I want to know where . . .”

  “What could we do to up your participation level?”

  Clenching his jaw, Felger muttered nearly silently, “We need a laptop.”

  Shane nodded. “Mac or PC?”

  He placed his boxes of Solistan samples on the edge of the doctor’s desk and walked out feeling unwell. Ahead he saw his dusty, ten-year-old Civic. It had become a joke among his friends; clearly he could have bought a new car anytime he wanted to. But there was something in Shane that clung stubbornly to the things he loved.

  • • • • • • •

  That afternoon, he went for a five-mile run through the Marina.

  On his way home he had stopped at the corner grocery and carried back a collection of pink plastic bags filled with produce. Sautéing Chinese eggplant and garlic for Janelle, he still felt the sensation of soft earth against his falling feet.

  “How’s the camel’s back?” she asked him as he brought their plates to the dining room table.

  “Hanging by a ligament.”

  “The Russian Hill Starbucks,” she told him, “is looking for baristas.”

  Over dinner they discussed his options. Pfizer and Bayer would be no different, he knew. He could take time off, she suggested. The baby weighed in on that with a sudden kick to Janelle’s abdomen. She laughed loudly.

  His wife was the most astonishing woman he had ever known. Her father Liu had been a mechanical engineer in Anhui when something fearful had sent him and his wife, Hua, onto a rat-filled ship over the endless ocean to restart life as American peasants. Liu had gone to work in a distant cousin’s tofu plant, which he now managed. Liu and Hua had named their only child Janelle, because it sounded to them like an Americanized form of Jinsong—sturdy pine. And sturdy pine she proved to be. Janelle worked her way through the uncertain North Beach public school system to UCSF and joined the biotech giant Helixia just after their late-nineties surge.

  Janelle possessed a beauty that could shift forms. She could exchange her sleek biotech persona for hiking shoes and a sleeping bag in the time it took to change shirts. Shane loved her as completely as he might have loved anyone. Time with her was his only real concern in life.

  “We don’t work like that at Helixia,” Janelle said when he had explained his meeting with Dr. Felger.

  “Because you guys are biotech.”

  “Because,” she explained, pushing excess garlic away with her fork, “we’re Helixia.”

  “Are there any more places like you?”

  “Dennis knows about every pharma and biotech company here. He could tell you who the good guys are. You should see what he thinks.”

  Shane raised his eyes. “Will you run into him before maternity leave?”

  “Sure, I can ask him. Or talk to him yourself.” Janelle touched her belly and looked down frowning. “I don’t think our boy’s a garlic lover.”

  She stood up. Shane watched her move through their narrow hallway and open the front door. He felt the salt-swollen air pour in. Their narrow blue house was possessed of chocolate wood floors and rounded archways. They had kept it minimalist but were trying to brighten it for the baby. Janelle had found a cheerful cerulean for the nursery walls, which Shane had painted on a breezy Sunday. They had hung a copper wire mobile he had picked up in Berkeley above the empty crib, abstract shapes to lull anyone into slumber.

  When Janelle came back in, she was staring at him.

  “You got a letter.”

  He saw a blue envelope between her elegant fingers. Who sends letters, he wondered? Shane extended his hand and recognized the handwriting instantly: Caleb’s impossibly small block letters.

  His brother had recently touched this; something of his DNA remained on it. When it brushed against his fingers, Shane felt himself fighting a childlike impulse to store the envelope away unopened, to save it for later.

  He felt Janelle watching him. Inside of her, their little boy was spiraling and twisting, testing out appendages, luxuriating in warm amniotic fluid. How was he to know that soon he would enter a world in which hundred-foot redwoods dappled against a buoyant blue sky, companies created drugs capable of fighting disease, and his uncle chose to live in an antiworld, running an endless marathon into himself?

  Then he tore the envelope open. There was just one small sheet of paper. Handwritten, of course.

  “Hello, Caleb,” Shane muttered casually. “What’s going on?”

  He read aloud. “Dear Shane, I hope you’re well. I need to ta
lk to you about something important. Do you want to come out here for a weekend? You can write me at my job. Love to Janelle.”

  “Love to me,” Janelle said merrily.

  “And he’s never even met you. You’re that loveable.”

  “What job?” she asked.

  The concept of Caleb working again filled him with hope. There were consultants in Boulder. Perhaps he had rejoined the world? Shane flipped the small envelope around.

  “O’Neil’s Copies,” he whispered. He pushed his hand roughly through his short black hair. “Jesus.”

  “Go this weekend.”

  “This weekend?” He pointed at his letter. “He said a weekend.”

  “That’s not what he means.”

  “The baby . . .”

  “The baby will be here in two weeks. You should go now.”

  Janelle walked to the kitchen. Somewhere far away Shane was aware of the sound of a refrigerator opening and closing. The whir of its motor, the hum of its light.

  Ten years ago, Shane’s older brother had unexpectedly quit his high-salaried consulting job and gone to live with a running club in a cabin near Boulder. No phones, no Internet. Neither he nor his parents had seen him since.

  Over the years, Shane and Janelle would google him and find his name listed among the entrants of races through a hundred miles of wilderness. They read other ultrarunners’ online musings about what went on in the Happy Trails house under a man called Mack’s direction, which were profoundly disturbing. Occasionally, Shane would send a letter to Caleb care of Happy Trails. He was careful never to demean his lifestyle; instead, he wrote about their parents, Fred and Julie, who lived outside of Seattle in Issaquah. About meeting Janelle. Inviting him to their wedding, which Caleb had not attended, crushing them all.

  These letters were never answered, but once or twice a year he would receive a blue envelope with a two-line, small print note. Thanks for your letter. Western States was insane. Finished twenty-second.