Race Across the Sky

by Derek Sherman

  “Around six hours.”

  “You’ll need to contact your local police when it’s been twenty-four hours.”

  “Hold on, I’m sorry.” He kept his eyes on June, she kept shaking her head no. “Okay, I’ll do that. Thank you, Officer.”

  Hanging up, he looked quizzically at her.

  “We have to avoid the police,” she told him, loud and exasperated.

  “Why,” he asked, stunned, “would we do that? They’ll help us find them. They have cars, radios.”

  June explained what she had heard at the store, what Mack had told the rangers, what Caleb had explained would happen to Lily should the police take them in. Shane looked at her. It did not seem like a preposterous fear.

  They would see Caleb after thirty-six hours of running, and Lily, pale and undersized and wheezing. They would find out that they were not father and daughter. They would listen to Caleb explain that he was running to San Francisco. And they would call in Child and Family Services without a second thought.

  “Okay, so you think he’s in the next rest area?”

  “Well, either that or he kept going.”

  “Kept going? To where?”

  “You.”

  “To my house?” Shane asked incredulously.

  She nodded yes.

  His frustration overflowed. “Caleb’s not a superhero, okay? He can’t run two hundred miles with a baby.”

  “Yes he can,” she explained. “This is what he does.”

  “But things go wrong in these ultramarathons, don’t they? Everyone who starts plans on finishing, but sometimes they don’t.”

  “Please,” she whispered, “he has my daughter.”

  Shane looked out the dark window, shaking his head. “I didn’t see them on the highway.”

  “He wouldn’t be on a highway.”

  “That’s the shortest route.”

  “He’d be where he feels safe.”

  “Where is that?”

  “In the mountains.”

  “Well, we’re not going to drive through there,” Shane gestured at the wilderness frustratedly.

  “On the small roads,” June nodded. “That’s where they are.”

  Shane left the diner lot and pulled onto a smaller road that seemed to run parallel to the highway. This seemed to be what Caleb would have done. He moved slowly, thinking how senseless it was to imagine that they would just stumble upon them.

  For the next hours they scoured the pitch-black road. Two hours turned to three, four. He found his way back to the highway and drove to another strip of fast food for coffee, but it was his fear that kept him awake. Next to him June’s eyes strained, finding hope in every shadow, seizing it with an audible intake of breath, and then dropping it in pain.

  They spoke very little; somehow the silence felt necessary. But somewhere near Stockton he felt a desperate need to connect, to stay awake if nothing else.

  “So what’s it like?” he asked her.

  “What?” she replied, the exhaustion leaking from her voice.

  “To run like this?”

  An unexpected blissful expression took over her eyes. “It’s beautiful.”

  “But you put yourself through all this pain?”

  “Pain’s not a problem. I mean, physical pain.” She looked out her side window, speaking to herself. “The other kind of pain hurts more.”

  “What kind?”

  “Being a mom.”

  Shane nodded.

  “No one ever tells you how much it’s going to hurt. They make it seem so perfect in those books,” she said, her voice rising. “But when I’m listening to her try to breathe, watching her just try so hard to crawl, and laugh, and she smiles anyway? I’ve never respected anyone like that. She looks at me wheezing and I can’t make her better. I’d rather run a thousand miles. I’d rather run Yosemite and break my back than go through one more second of not being able to help her.” She turned her head from side to side in the manner, he thought, of an injured bird.

  “I have a son,” Shane reminded her by way of commiseration.

  “Is he healthy?”

  Shane put a hand on her shoulder. It felt to him like bone, and he pulled away. Embarrassed, he stared ahead at the amethyst sky, looking for shapes on the shoulders that might be his brother and her baby.

  5

  • • • • • • • • • • • •

  Light rain slipped from a crimson sun.

  Caleb pushed himself across a road. Russet-colored cows speckled the hillsides, but none seemed to notice them. The rain refreshed him, though he worried the road would become slippery. He felt it ascending, felt his quads begin to burn. He noted with great relief that he needed to pee.

  He stopped by a tree and pulled aside his begrimed shorts. The pain that came next made him shriek. An explosion of fire in his back and sides. What was this, he cried? He glanced down and saw that his urine was nearly solid. Chunks of matter pushed from him. He fell to his knees, swaying, Lily hovering in the pack above him. His kidneys were not functioning, he understood. If he did not drink water now, then his bladder would become infected. And this time there would not be Mack to heal him.

  He opened his mouth desperately to drink in the light rain; in the distance a cluster of gray clouds promised more. But as he moved forward, he saw that these were not clouds at all, but mountains. He stared at the distant range in awe; with a shudder, he understood that he would have to run through them.

  “Should we drop?” he whispered to Lily.

  In seeming response, she slapped the top of his head.

  More cars started to pass them along the road. A sign informed him that they were approaching a small city called Dublin. There would be motels there, he realized. He could call Shane, bathe them both in a cool tub, lay Lily out on a bed for a proper sleep. But fever awaited him there, he knew; his body would shut down completely, and he might not awaken for days. There was nothing but to keep going.

  The light rain kept steady. As he ran, one of Mack’s passages of Whitman came to him. He had always liked it, and so he recited it, but whether aloud or to himself he did not know.

  “‘Over the white and brown buckwheat, over the dusky green of the rye. Scaling mountains, pulling myself cautiously up, holding on by low scragged limbs. Carrying the crescent child. Storming, enjoying, planning, loving, cautioning, appearing and disappearing, I tread day and night such roads.’”

  He whispered it again, and again, catching on the line about carrying the child, until the words lost meaning and only their sounds were left. He reached the final gas station before the mountains just before sunset. Pulling open its door, every smell was accentuated; the fake bread inside its plastic, the chemical Hefty bags, the detergents and the overripe fruit, overwhelmed him. A heavy-bellied man in a stained pine green golf shirt behind a counter stared over his glasses at him, his mouth opening.

  By the microwave Caleb crouched down and used the sharp edge of a can opener to slice the outer sides of his sneakers. Immediately his swollen feet spilled out, a tremendous release.

  He chugged a Powerade in the aisle, but his body responded too rapidly to the salt and corn syrup; his head spun, he went hypoglycemic. He rummaged through his backpack, trying to determine how much money he had left, but it all went blurry in his hands. It was difficult to grip any thought firmly in his mind now, other than his finish line, 122 Bay Street, San Francisco.

  The man was watching him as if encountering something unholy.

  “What you doing with that baby, man?”

  “Please,” Caleb rasped, dropping canned ravioli, milk, doughnuts, a pear, and two brownish bananas onto the counter.

  “They’s a shelter up on Conway.” The man raised his eyes to Lily. Looking away, he said angrily, “You ain’t need these doughnuts, man.”

 
; Then he swept his forearm over the rest of the goods, pushing them into a thin black plastic bag, and slid it across the counter to him, along with the money.

  Caleb tried to thank him, backing out of his store to a bench. Outside he balanced the Kelty on its metal tripod legs, and sat Lily on his lap. He handed the pear to Lily by its stem, his fingers far too disgusting to touch it, and she held it and nibbled happily. When she was done, he ate its last bites, and turned and vomited it all onto the pavement.

  Caleb glanced down at his infected shoulders. They bubbled wiht green pus where the pack’s straps pressed into the skin. He saw what was left of his squalid sneakers. A nasty rash, scarlet blotches with white pinpricks, encircled Lily’s upper legs like red ants. It would not be safe, he thought, to venture into any human contact from this point onward. When they had eaten, he changed Lily, deposited their waste into a trash can, and carried her across the street, into the trees. It would be wise to stay here in the shade. As he kissed Lily’s cool forehead, his eyes were drawn up to the dusk sky. Soon the stars would come. They saw the whole field of play. They knew if Mack was still in Yosemite, or getting nearer to them, or back in Boulder, if there were police around them, if June was all right, if he was going in the right direction. Standing against an oak, he looked down. Kinetic energy was pouring from his body in long, golden lines. Dripping from his chakras, his forehead, the center of his chest, his groin, all over the ground.

  When he looked up again, it was pitch night.

  • • • • • • •

  Shane woke to dirty sunlight.

  It poured through the smeared windows of the room, filled with grease and dust. He rubbed his pounding temples.

  On a single bed across from him, June lay face down. For a moment he thought she might be dead. She had not disturbed a single sheet. He forced himself to watch, and to his relief he saw her back rising and falling.

  He went to the bathroom to wash out his mouth and use the shower. He returned feeling not much refreshed and shook June’s shoulder. She sat up grimacing and touched her side. Her straw hair had gone crazy.

  “Do you want some Advil?”

  She shook her head. “I haven’t taken anything toxic in a year.”

  “Some toxicity,” he suggested, “may be necessary for survival in this world.”

  At a gas station, Shane stepped away from her and phoned Janelle. She answered on the first ring.

  “I’ve called every shelter, hospital, and motel in between here and Yosemite,” she told him, sounding exhausted. “They’re not there.”

  “Caleb will call the house again.”

  “I’ve got the phone in my hand everywhere I go.”

  “Jesus,” he yawned. “I slept for shit.”

  “Come home,” she told him. “You’re too tired to drive.”

  “I’m not,” he lied.

  “You’ll get into an accident.”

  “I’ve been stopping to rest. I have to keep looking.”

  There was a long pause. “I know,” Janelle told him.

  The day seemed to promise haze. They drove silently near Modesto, its outlying farmland, straining their eyes for anything in the far distance resembling a human being.

  “Can I ask you something personal?”

  “Sure,” June answered, “of course.”

  “What Caleb’s doing, it seems like something you would only do for, you know.”

  He left his words dangling, but June did not respond.

  “Is she his? Lily?”

  June’s face slipped gently into a smile, and she looked off wistfully into the distance. “I wish she was. I really do. He would be a great father. No, her dad is a bartender in Taos. He’s not interested in her. But if you asked Lily who her dad is, she’d say Caley. When I came to Happy Trails, she was three weeks old, and he just took care of her from the first second.”

  “I’ve never seen Caleb take care of other people.”

  June watched him. She could see how much Caleb had grown to mean in his life, through his absence from it.

  “How old is your son?”

  Shane smiled. “Ten and a half months.”

  “Lily’s almost fourteen. They can be friends.”

  He thought about this as he drove. This image of Caleb living down the block, his adopted daughter and Nicholas growing up together as cousins, the family eating together every Sunday. It was a dream, he considered, realized by a nightmare.

  “This kinetic energy?” he asked quietly.

  “What about it?”

  “Are Lily and Caleb giving it off right now?”

  “Sure.”

  He gestured toward the windshield. “Can you focus on them? Like, pick it up?”

  June frowned and shook her head. “That’s what I’ve been trying, all this time. Every second.” Her voice broke. “I can’t feel them.”

  “It’s okay,” he replied quickly, sensing his question had pushed her someplace he did not want her to go. “Every car he sees has a cell phone, and he can stop any one of them.”

  She turned to him, nodding assuredly. “He’s not stopping anyone. We’re just on the wrong road.”

  Shane connected with her confidence. No matter how irrational, it gave him a certain degree of comfort. He noticed a sub shop across the street.

  “Hungry?” he asked. “We’re not going to find any perfectly balanced stew or anything. But you need to find something you can eat.”

  He took her inside and ordered for them both. He ate a sandwich and June picked at a salad, and they walked back toward the car. He stared at his Civic, which had accompanied him along his journey up the ladder at Orco, throughout the northern swath of the state, to thousands of medical practices, conferences, sales conventions.

  If only, he prayed, it would only get him to his brother.

  6

  • • • • • • • • • • • •

  Bracketed by lights, the dark highway ascended straight up the mountain like a runway.

  It possessed a wide shoulder; clearly it had been constructed to allow drivers some room to correct before plummeting to their deaths. This would provide them a little safe space, so long as a sleepy trucker did not run them off the edge.

  “Okay. Lulu,” he shouted, “lift off.”

  And he started up the steep incline under the flutter of a billion stars.

  In the darkness 4x4s exploded past them like fireflies, small quick cars like lightning bugs. A large truck groaned by; from below them it had sounded like a wounded wolf. Caleb pushed a smile onto his face and forced himself upward. His quads and calves were engorged with blood to nearly twice their normal size. When he stopped and removed the backpack and reached for Lily, she pushed him away. She had never done anything like this before. He stood confused in the total blackness. Then he understood: it was his smell. It must be a baby’s instinct to squirm away from a failing body.

  His pain reached some new peak. Immediately he recognized it as different from any he had known before; he possessed no idea what to make of it.

  As he moved forward, each step was its own war. His skin was so raw that the barest movement of his shorts and shirt felt like sandpaper. His shoulders bled where the straps tightened. His dry eyes ached from running against the air for three days. Everything from his feet to the tip of his nose was torn asunder. He felt frighteningly cold. Possibly his body had stopped producing rhodopsin; if that was the case, he thought, then he would soon go blind.

  He felt as if he were being punished. But, he wondered, for what? For forcing himself off of his proper path, his father’s voice explained. Fred appeared then beside him, it was just as it had been in those Issaquah days of his childhood. Only this time, he spoke.

  “You have made a life that was not yours.”

  Caleb nodded. He understood. It was the truth,
he knew. If he had never seen Mack’s book, if he had just stayed in New York and continued with his life like most everybody else had, then certainly he would not be in the midst of this outrageous torture. Fred agreed.

  Instead, he would have attended the 2001 InterFinancial Holiday Party at the Whitney Museum. There he would have been introduced to a colleague’s roommate, Dania, a brunette psychology student. He would have felt an instant spark as their fingers brushed by the bar. A year later, he would have given up his apartment with the untouched Wolf stove and moved into her one-bedroom. And the following Christmas, at a Vermont inn filled with firelight, he would have proposed.

  Shane and his new girlfriend Janelle would have been in their wedding. As the city recovered, and his bonuses exploded, Caleb would have bought a house in New Jersey. And they would have had two girls, with his thin brown hair and long, loping legs.

  As he ran, these images pummeled him. No, he agreed, tear ducts swelling, he should not be running up this mountain in the dark; he should be in that warm house with his wife and their daughters. Look how happy they were, how they filled him each evening with awe. Oh God, he sobbed, what had he given up?

  A new pain electrified him. It came from no muscle or joint, but it was worse than any he had ever known. It came from very deep inside and burned him as if his nerves were being set aflame. But he had been taught to never succumb to agony, to confront it, and so Caleb forced himself back to that peaceful house. He studied himself.

  He had gained some weight. His body full of antibiotics for his recurring sinus infections. He watched himself put on some expensive but rarely used sneakers and begin to jog through the planned curves of his town. Three pathetic miles later, he was bent over, his lungs burning with lactic acid, tugging at his shorts. He felt that something had gone wrong, that some crucial thing had gone unnoticed, but he would never understand what it was. And he burst into tears, that would not stop, no matter how long he stayed hunched over on the street.

  And watching this vision of himself, Caleb broke through the wall. With a rush of joy, he knew that had he stayed in this life that Fred had meant him to live, he would have died never understanding the source of his suffering. It would have been not the tearing of his tendons but of his being which would have tormented him to his last hours.