Race Across the Sky

by Derek Sherman

  Ten years of this. Shane tossed the blue paper onto the coffee table.

  “I’m not going to Boulder just because he asks,” he announced to the room.

  Janelle placed her hand against the back of his neck, calming him somewhat. He could feel the warmth from whoever it was inside of her, like a ghost trying to make its presence known.

  After Janelle went to bed, Shane nursed a glass of pinot in the darkening house. In the stillness he could hear the beeps of plastic toys, Janelle running after a toddler, like ghosts from the future. He wondered how much he would miss this quiet. His thoughts turned again to his brother.

  Running had been an Oberest family sacrament, a fact of how one lived, like brushing your teeth. Their father Fred had been a paunchy thirty-six-year-old lawyer when the jogging craze hit Seattle in 1975. He had been converted by a senior partner one Saturday morning along the road to Lake Washington. When he saw the effects of his new hobby upon his clarity of mind, he decided to pass this gift along to his children.

  And so on weekend mornings, regardless of weather, Fred would stretch in his nylon red shorts and white headband, and guide Julie, Caleb, and Shane onto the misty Issaquah roads, where they would follow in his wake like Mrs. Mallard and her Ducklings.

  Shane imagined them the way a passing motorist would have seen them. A thin middle-aged man running with his hands held limply in front of his chest in late-seventies style. His wife behind him, wearing a white terry-cloth headband. Behind her, a six-year-old boy keeping up as best as he could. And in front of them all, a tall, thin eleven-year-old, clear plastic running goggles strapped around his head with a thick black band, loping effortlessly like a palomino.

  In a decade, Shane’s letters had not provoked a single invitation to speak, let alone visit. Caleb had to know what reaching out like this meant. Didn’t he? He sat there, wondering, until Janelle was asleep, and the wine was empty.

  3

  • • • • • • • • • • • •

  Caleb woke up coughing.

  A thick yellow phlegm came up from his mouth as he blinked. His room was dark, the mattress on the other side of the floor was empty. It was his roommate Kevin Yu’s morning to make breakfast. It was, he figured, around four in the morning.

  Caleb took note of his body. Turning forty, he realized, had done something to his systems. For years, he had gone running the mornings after an ultramarathon. But for two days following Leadville he had been unable to do more than walk, and the expected after-race virus had hit his sinuses harder than usual. He’d lain in the house taking Mack’s reiki healing and mugs of goldenseal tea. It was only this morning that he would finally force himself to jog up the mountain.

  Caleb began a Lying Meditation. He visualized healing energy flowing into each organ of his body: liver, marrow, kidneys, heart. When he was finished, he moved on to his muscles. Bones. Blood. This took him over an hour. Afterward, he moved slowly downstairs and found Kevin in the kitchen, standing over a large Crock-Pot of multigrain. The recipe was balanced to contain 40 percent fat, 20 percent protein, 40 percent carbs, a proportion which Mack had determined encouraged the body’s most efficient fuel consumption. They ate this every morning, and a root stew of similar composition at dusk, and no more.

  “You’re looking alive, Caley,” Aviva yawned. She was tall and large-boned, covered in bright tattoos of ghosts and stars.

  It’s a good look,” Caleb smiled. He filled a bowl, shuffled back to the main room, and sat on the floor next to an abandoned Monopoly game and a dozen empty beer bottles. He brushed brown hair away from his eyes. The rest of the Happy Trails Running Club emerged from upstairs and joined him. He looked around the big room for June but didn’t see her; still he was sure he smelled her skin in the molecules of the air.

  He felt a hand on his shoulder and glanced up.

  “Coming?” Juan asked him.

  Each member of Happy Trails worked a few days a week in nearby towns and handed their checks to Mack to cover their share of house expenses. Since these jobs had to accommodate long midday training runs and could not exceed three days per week, they tended to be of a minimum wage variety.

  “Absolutely.”

  Aviva heard him and squeezed his shoulder admiringly as they joined Juan and Makailah outside on the porch.

  Mack walked over to them, his beard parted by a wide and jubilant grin. “‘Who has gone farthest? For I would go farther. And who has been happiest? O I think it is I.’” He took a step closer, raised his voice louder. “‘And who possesses a perfect and enamour’d body? For I do not believe any one possesses a more perfect or enamour’d body than mine. And who has made hymns fit for the earth? For I am mad with devouring ecstasy to make joyous hymns for the whole earth.’”

  Whitman was his favorite poet; he never seemed to tire of calling verses out to them. Makailah waved to him, Caleb nodded happily, and the four of them began their run up the mountain.

  Under the pale sky Caleb’s quads came alive. The road was a sixty-degree incline. In its early valley stretch it was unpaved; cars were less likely to pass them than canyon wrens. Tangerine butterflies fluttered between the aspens, their flares of orange threatening to set the trees aflame. Dragonflies came and disappeared like dreams. In their wake he felt part of something wondrous.

  Soon after the dirt turned to pavement an SUV passed them loudly, full of a heavyset family on their way up to the city. A child seemed to stare at them from the rear window. Aviva laughed, waving madly at him.

  She and Juan worked at Pedestrian Shoes, selling 150-dollar footwear to college kids who never dreamed that these weather-beaten clerks kneeling at their feet could execute feats of physical endurance beyond their wildest imaginings. Aviva had finished fifth in the 24 Hour Run Championship, running 240 miles around an oval track.

  “You sure these shoes won’t fall apart after a year? I run five miles a day,” a lacrosse player would ask her haughtily.

  “Pretty sure,” Aviva would yawn.

  They leveled off into Rocky Mountain National Park as the May sun broke over the Front Range and then jogged into the city. Caleb rarely saw more of Boulder than these downtown blocks, but he could discern the almost daily changes. The excavators like prehistoric predators prowling new avenues each month, the pale newly transplanted faces, wearing shiny running clothes and making overeager strides. The mountains almost visibly recoiled from them.

  Aviva and Juan peeled off for Pedestrian, Makailah toward the tea shop where she worked as a barista, and Caleb slowed to a walk, letting the light sweat on his body disappear into the pine-accented air as he moved toward O’Neil’s.

  Caleb unlocked the door. O’Neil’s possessed two old beige copiers beside the window for customer use. A few yards of old blue carpet led to a counter, behind which stood two more powerful laser printers, work space for cutting, mounting, and laminating, and a small office. The shop had been opened in the seventies by Ed O’Neil, who had fended off the onslaught of Kinko’s and OfficeMaxes with a relatively successful campaign to support local small businesses. Ed was fascinated by Caleb’s consulting days, and happy to have someone older than a sophomore in the store, even one who required a four-hour break in the middle of the day to run.

  Caleb found his blue apron and waited patiently. These wasted hours under the fluorescent lights irritated him, but over the years he had learned to not stand in idle stasis, but constantly engage himself in slow movements. He powered up the machines, made sure their trays were stocked. He turned to a wall of small metal postboxes. The top row contained Ed’s box for store mail. He retrieved the small key from a hook and checked to see if his brother had sent a response. He took its emptiness with a healthy detachment.

  An hour passed, for which he was paid six dollars and fifty-five cents. It amused Caleb how much he had once been paid for an identical hour. Before moving to Boulder, he had been
a consultant for InterFinancial, in Manhattan. It had been tedious work, and the company of his strip-club and vodka-obsessed colleagues had depressed him. His final project had been for the Phoenix Suns. He had lived in a Fairmont Hotel by the US Airways Center for three months and watched the season from a luxury box stocked with prime rib and beer. For this reason, his father Fred had considered the job glamorous. But studying contracts with food service companies and practice facilities in beige offices had left him exhausted. Afterward he had flown home to his Upper West Side apartment and bought a top-of-the-line Wolf stove, which he used only to make popcorn. Now Caleb stood in his blue apron, for a fiftieth of that salary. He felt far wealthier.

  At noon a young college student relieved him, and he folded his faded blue apron considerately, and jogged toward the park. For four hours he covered its least-traveled trails, weaving through filberts and blanketflowers, thinking of nothing but the hundreds of scents in the air. When the sky grew violet he jogged back to O’Neil’s to close up.

  June walked in as dusk filled the front room. She wore a long green dress and sandals, and carried a plastic yellow bucket of cleaning supplies. Her face was thin and flushed, her dry hair like shoots of straw, her eyes enormous and blue. She possessed a mouth as small as a drop of rain. He knew she was not beautiful, but in his forty-three years, he had never felt this way upon seeing another human being.

  “I’m done early,” she announced.

  She walked around the counter and touched him lightly. Her fingers slid in between his like the thighs of lovers. Breathlessly, Caleb opened the door to the small office that Ed maintained in a back room. It was just a metal desk pushed against a wall, surrounded by stacks of boxed paper.

  She fumbled with his apron and sat on the metal desk. As he kissed her the phone fell loudly from the table. She undid his belt and crossed her ankles behind his back. The hard edges of the desk chafed the front of his thighs.

  These moments made him feel lost and weightless; afterward he had no idea how much time had passed. When she went to the bathroom, he felt a fissure inside which frightened him. He had moved to Boulder to immerse within himself, had lived this way successfully for ten years. And now, here he was, immersed in someone else.

  Caleb powered down the machines, sprayed disinfectant over their buttons, turned off the lights. Then he held the door for June and locked it behind them. A warm breeze blew down from the range onto Broadway. Their sky was a sweet plum. Around them graduate school couples carried groceries, long-haired kids spun strange silver orbs for tips, young women sped by on bicycles.

  They turned onto the Mall, where the streetlights glowed like the cheeks of excited children. A long-haired brunette with a hula hoop executed yoga poses in the midst of the open promenade. What could have been a father-son duo created Renaissance Faire music, and the spring tulips bloomed in a thousand shades. They roamed slowly through the warm glow coming from the redbrick streets.

  “Did your brother write back?” June was trying her best to be offhand, but her squeezing fingers told him otherwise.

  Any of their housemates could walk past, finished with their own jobs. Makailah’s tea shop was just a block away, Kyle could be picking up supplies. Just one sighting of them holding hands would bring problems he was not prepared to handle.

  Caleb let out a dry cough and shook his head and let her hand go.

  • • • • • • •

  “An announcement,” Mack cried, “of earthshaking proportions.”

  The Happy Trails Running Club assembled on the wood floor of the large open room. Waves of heat and crackling cherrywood swept over Caleb from the fireplace.

  Mack sat cross-legged on the floor. In the flickering flames the dark circles under his wrinkled eyes were accentuated; Caleb thought he could see each of his forty-five years in them. His blue irises seemed to dance with some inner light.

  “Y’all ready for something?”

  Caleb straightened. Was this what Mack had been talking about after Leadville? He sat in a circle between Aviva and Gigi, a new girl from Winter Park. On the other side of the circle, June was sitting between Hank and John, their oldest housemate, a close-cropped white-haired survivor of Vietnam-era excursions. John had finished the Badwater ultra five times. One hundred thirty-five miles through Death Valley, at temperatures exceeding 110 degrees. He told tales of his sneakers melting into the blacktop, and once leaving his body for nearly an hour. Caleb sensed June trying to look away from him, which, he felt, was wise.

  “Ready!” Alice shouted, and the others laughed.

  Mack nodded. “Okay. For fifteen years, we’ve owned the hardest ultras in the country. Yes?”

  With wide smiles the group responded, “Yes!”

  “We are the premier ultrarunning club in these United States. Even if the running magazines won’t talk about us. And we’ll continue to rock them all. But you know what? What’s next for Happy Trails?”

  Mack paused, letting his bright eyes roam the circle. An energy was building. Caleb saw it materializing like a ring around them.

  “Because there is a next. There has to be. What happens here is too good to be hidden away by the running establishment motherfuckers. We can be a beacon for people seeking rescue from the sadness of the world. I want to have Happy Trails houses all over the country, in every state. Think what would happen, right?” His eyes beamed. “The more people live our way, the more kinetic energy will be created, and flow out into the world. And the better the world will become. But people can’t join us if they don’t hear about us. Several of you came here because of my book. But we need something bigger than a book to get the country’s attention.”

  Mack took a swig from a white bottle of Beam; with a nod he passed it to Makailah.

  “I’ve been working with Barry Strong out in California. You guys heard of Barry? He’s Desert Masai. They do the Peru jungles.”

  A sense of excitement swept the circle. Barry’s group was well known. They were cousins in endurance.

  “Barry’s been feeling the same way. We were talking about how we could create an event to get people’s attention. We decided to make one, that combines endurance and distance. The killer blend.”

  Juan asked, “Isn’t Western States that?”

  “Western’s a tough challenge for sure. But they’ve been running it forever and nobody outside of the ultra world gives a shit. We need something bigger. So Barry and me, we made a decision. We’re relaunching the Yosemite Slam.”

  The impact of this hit them. They all stared at Mack, as the bottle moved around the circle. Aviva raised her hand. Mack nodded to her.

  “But they shut that down,” she said, confused.

  “They did?” asked Ryan. “Why?”

  Ryan had been with them only a year. He had been jailed twice in his early twenties for crushing oxycodone into powder, adding various forms of laxative powder, and selling it to high school football players outside of his local Walmart. A twelve-step counselor had introduced him to the runner’s high, and two years later he’d won his first Fat Race. Mack had met him at the Rocky Raccoon in Vermont, where Ryan had been running unsupported, carrying thirty pounds of water and food in a backpack. Three months later, he had moved into the house.

  “They shut it down,” Rae explained softly, “after Steve Brzenski died there.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “He was a great runner.”

  “The Yosemite Slam was crazy dangerous,” Hank picked up. “A hundred and ten through the park, in summer. The hardest climb came at the end, when everyone was exhausted. Steve was climbing near Taft when he fell. He broke his back.”

  Rae added, “The year before that, Pete Fresciente had a heart attack the day he finished. They found him in his motel room. That was two in a row, there was police involved, and the owners shut it down.”

  Mack spoke rough
ly. “I can’t tell you why those people died. I can tell you they did not train with me.”

  He had everyone’s attention.

  “We are not just bringing back the most challenging physical event in the country, we are amplifying it. And the whole country is going to fucking watch it.” He beamed. “I already talked with a gal at ESPN. She says the country is ready. Because it ain’t no bullshit Iron Man, watching dudes jog down a highway.

  “This is going to be like watching a war. Seventy-two straight hours on old mining trails, up twelve thousand feet and back a dozen times. In complete darkness, in brutal sun, over waterfalls, through mines, Half Dome, up El Capitan. Rescue can’t even get to eighty percent of the course. Stunning shit to look at on a plasma screen. But the most stunning things will be you. People want to watch people who believe in themselves.”

  “ESPN?” Rae frowned.

  “This event is going to be the spark for our whole movement. ESPN is the wind. People are going to watch this in bars, at home, at the gym.”

  “That’ll bring out all the hacks,” Rae suggested anxiously. “Clogging the trails, puking all over the place.”

  Mack shot her a riley look. “A hack golfer can buy expensive clubs and clog up a pro course. But no fancy sneakers can force you up El Capitan in your sixty-sixth hour. It’ll make pretty amusing television to watch poseurs try. People can place bets on when they’ll drop and beg for ambulances.”

  “I just don’t get it. What’s wrong with—”

  “Go upstairs please.”

  Caleb watched Rae stand solemnly, heard her callused feet shuffle up the wood steps behind him.

  Mack turned to the group. “We have a great world here, but I feel stasis. We run, we work, we travel, we enter events, and we kick their asses. But what’s forward? I want kinetic energy in this group, not just in our individual bodies. A new event, the hardest event in the country, that’s motion.”