Running

by Cara Hoffman

  Then a whole crowd—maybe fifteen other drivers—came from the back gate, moved in on us, laughing, shoving, and grabbing runners who were trying to stay away from the edge of the tracks. Bouzouki music played over the loudspeaker.

  I couldn’t see far down the platform and couldn’t hear well over the music and shouting. I crouched lower behind a bench, pulled out a cigarette, and smoked it lying low, staring into the tangle of rushing legs and fists. I knew there was no crawling around the corner into the station without getting stomped.

  Directly in front of me, a driver grabbed a kid I didn’t know by the hair and was pulling his head back. The kid was screaming in a way I hated, his eyes strained, like a frightened deer, bulging, whites showing, searching for any way out. Another runner tried to pull the driver away from behind, but he turned and punched that boy hard in the nose. I was surprised it made such a loud noise, and that the driver’d managed to keep hold of the other kid’s hair while doing it. The boy with the broken nose was trying to push his way through the crowd. But I knew he would end up falling before he reached the gate.

  Bottles were smashed on the ground. To my left a puddle of blood was forming, streaming darkly across the platform toward the tracks. Everywhere there was cursing and angry panicked yells for the station cop who would never come. I watched Stephan getting trampled by sandaled and booted feet on the cement. He rolled over and covered his head with his arms, raised his knees to protect his stomach. I watched while two men kicked him in the back and stomped his legs. Candy was nowhere to be seen.

  Declan came in at the northern edge of the platform, took in the scene, then pushed quickly through the crowd, weaving easily around bodies.

  A brief hush fell as he walked up behind Takis and punched him square in the back of the head, knocking him off balance and sending him to the concrete with a flat smack. No one moved.

  The train rolled in with a wrenching squeal of brakes, bringing tourists and commuters. A conductor leaned out one of the doors, blowing his whistle and calling for the station cops. Several people ventured off the train, running clumsily for the shelter of the station. A tall, gangly kid got elbowed in the neck and fell to the ground beneath the weight of his heavy pack. A few runners tripped over him and scrambled to get up. The conductor continued to blow his whistle from the door of the train. A few yards away from me, another runner got knocked into the bricks, leaving the wall wet with his blood.

  Declan had Takis on the ground.

  He stepped back quickly and kicked him several times in the gut and ribs, pausing slightly each time as if he were thinking about stopping but couldn’t. Finally he walked away, sat back down and sighed, looked at his watch. His face settled into a patient disappointed scowl.

  Takis didn’t move. Drivers came over to see if they could pull him up, got him to a kneeling position. His face was red and puffy and streaked with sweat and blood; the other drivers waited for him to stand before strutting awkwardly to the gate, hurt but with shoulders thrown back, bearing the weight of Takis. One of them was cut badly, a dark stain blooming on the front of his shirt.

  Greek music still playing inside the station and out on the platform, which was covered with glass and bloody footprints and leaflets, runners sitting on the ground or standing exhilarated and bewildered.

  “You’re cut,” Declan said.

  I shook my head.

  “Here,” Declan said. “Let me look at that.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Don’t be a fucking muppet. There’s blood all over your arm. Let me look at it.”

  I checked to see if I might have a nosebleed, then saw it covering my T-shirt and shoulder, dripping down my arm into my hand. “It’s not mine,” I said.

  He grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me along the platform into the men’s room, ran water over my arm. It felt good and exposed no cut. The shirt was soaked and spattered red and I took it off and threw it in the wire garbage can near the sink.

  He said, “God, you’re skinny, lass. You’re a little bone.” The words echoed off the tile, reverberated farther than the confines of the room.

  “Sterious said I gained weight.”

  “Man’s a gobshite, isn’t he?”

  I glanced at my reflection in the warped steel plate bolted to the bricks, then looked away. Declan squinted, leaned forward, his face close to my body.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  I folded my arms over my chest. “My tits.”

  I watched his eyes follow the line of my body, watched him find the outline of the lighter fluid canister tucked into the front pocket of my shorts. Then he looked into my eyes for a gleaming frozen second. There’s a way you’re supposed to act around certain animals, making sure they know you’re not afraid, holding your hand out for them to smell. I dropped my arms, relaxed my shoulders, stood before him in the dank stench of the tiled room, until he tossed me his jean jacket to wear.

  “Thanks,” I said, rolling up the sleeves.

  He nodded. “It’ll save you the embarrassment of your mates finding out you’re really a fourteen-year-old boy.”

  Runners were getting on the train to Elefsina. I could see them through the windows, crowding the aisles. I ran along the platform as the train lurched into motion, caught the bar, and jumped onto the step as it gained speed. Declan hopped up after me with ease.

  “Watch your step, Bridey,” he said.

  My uncle’s voice said: “Bone.”

  It said: “Hey, Bone. Wake up. Wake up, Bone, let’s get going.”

  His hands lifted my foot into the air, straightened the toe of my sock, then jammed my sneaker on. A stab of pain at my Achilles tendon where the blisters were said it was really morning.

  “C’mon, Little Sullivan. Wake the fuck up.” He snapped on a light.

  “I’m awake,” I said.

  “Open your eyes, then.”

  He pulled me into a sitting position, shook me. Dare was wearing sweats and a tight gray T-shirt. And so was I, dressed that way for bed so I wouldn’t have to get up ten minutes earlier. He knelt before me, brusquely tying my sneakers, then stood and stretched. It was still dark outside, silent, shadows of tall trees against the window. My glow-in-the-dark monster models gave off a fading green light from on top of the bookcase.

  In the bathroom I hunched and drank water and tried to rest my feet by leaning against the sink. I opened the medicine cabinet, got out rubber bands for my hair and white tape for my blisters. My ankles hurt when I touched them.

  The lights were bright in the living room and his helmet and gear were in a pile by the door next to his go bag.

  “Is there a fire?” I asked.

  Dare didn’t answer. He said, “Get it together,” clapped his hands sharply. “Let’s go. Move on out.”

  We stepped off the sloping wooden porch and ran along the narrow path beside the house, past the pond and out on to the hard dirt road. The forest loomed, crested blue and deep in the distance, a fading moon was still in the sky and the pale light of morning rose silvery pink against the trees. The birds were beginning to wake and sing. The air was sweet and clear with the smell of pine and grass from our meadow.

  Our sneakers crunched along toward the turnoff that would lead to the track behind school. It didn’t matter if I kept up with him or not, but I still had to finish five miles. The temperature was cool and perfect and the sky brighter every minute, and I ran fast because when you got going there was no more pain, even when your feet were bleeding.

  “Is there a fire?” I asked again, my heart pounding, beginning to sweat in the cool air, my body feeling fine and strong like I could lift off the ground, like I could fly. Dare ran with an easy cadence like he weighed nothing, and I tried to catch up to him, to beat him.

  When I got close he grabbed me up, spun me around, ran backwards holding me like a training weigh
t, then dropped me down to run beside him, holding my hand for a moment so I had to sprint to keep up.

  “There is always a fire, little Bone,” he called to me over his shoulder. “Nothing in this world is put here to stay.”

  * * *

  Summer months and fall he was away all the time. In winter we would hole up and light the woodstove. He went to the jump base nearly every day while I was at school. In the early days when I was living there he’d be waiting when I got home, or sometimes down in the basement making sure things were in order.

  There were kids at school I talked with but most of them didn’t live nearby. I did homework out of boredom. Practiced throwing darts, built card houses, read. When I was younger I hunkered down on the rug and drove Matchbox cars through the yellowed landscape of nuclear holocaust and crumbs beneath the couch. Imagined being the only person left alive, wandering through an empty city. You have to be strong to be one of the last people on earth. Strong enough to see if there are other survivors. Strong enough to live alone for years, looking.

  Dare and I went snowshoeing and skiing in the Methow Valley, skated on the frozen pond. Ate deer and rabbit and salmon that he cooked on the narrow gas stove in the low-ceilinged kitchen. When I was older we went hunting. And in the evenings he talked about the government. What they’re going to do. And about the forest, the mountainside, about defending the life of trees and earth and ocean from the stupid things people did. But I knew it wasn’t really about the earth. The earth was fine no matter what, would be even better when we were gone—that was obvious. The things he talked about were only considered wrong because they made it bad for people, made the world uglier or poisoned the water and made them sick. Or made them feel bad about the dead animals that they had loved killing in the first place. The people who cared were just like the people who didn’t. Afraid to die, and pretending they never would. Whether you fought that fear by destroying a forest or preserving it didn’t really matter. Once we were gone, all the pretty views would be restored.

  Some of Dare’s stories I knew by heart: the campers they hoisted from a blaze with a helicopter, their son already unconscious from smoke; the way the fire looks at night, and the way the forest looks after—like a haunted world, a painting of hell—trees transformed to black, gnarled stones.

  By the time I began high school—or attended the minimum days required to be considered a student—I was a different girl. Strong and strange from living in the country; raised on tales of survival, running, and hunting. Watching Dare turn the basement into a second home where we’d live after the missiles rained down.

  The kids at school feathered their hair back and wore turtlenecks with little pictures of spouting whales on them; bought different-colored rubber bands for their braces. They played on teams. Ordered things from the L.L.Bean catalog. Talked about their family lineages like being dead was some big honor. Other kids lived in trailers or new one-story HUD houses. Some of those boys ran and hunted like I did. But nobody had a bunker under their house. Nobody liked being alone as much as I did. Nobody was as interested in fire.

  One did not observe Bridey, Milo thought. She observed you. Something inside her did, a regal solitary thing that compelled you to act on its behalf. She’d an air of resignation about her, like she was abiding the real world and might decide to get rid of it altogether.

  At night or early in the morning when Jasper’d fallen asleep, Bridey and Milo would stay up and talk; the balcony door open and the sound of the street echoing in the high-ceilinged room, Jasper’s pale body lying sated between them.

  Shouts echoed up from the street, then a woman’s angry voice. Far away the minor notes of an ambulance siren stretched past like the bridge of “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” then faded into the distance. Bridey laid her head on Jasper’s chest while he slept.

  “That’s the sound of them taking Jasper away,” she said, smiling faintly, hair matted from being ground into the mattress.

  “To where?” Milo asked.

  “Anywhere,” she said, her eyes closed. “Where is good?”

  Milo slid his thigh over Jasper’s and propped himself up on an elbow to look at her. It was getting cooler. The shape of her collarbone was set shining against the hollow shadows.

  “The sea.”

  “Where he can live with the other mermen.” She ran her short, dirty nails over Jasper’s skin and he stirred, breathed heavily in his sleep. Then she reached across and found Milo’s hand, wove her fingers between his.

  “Why are you here?” she asked.

  The question startled him. There were many reasons and he was sure she knew them all. Jasper’s voice, her strange face. The heat of day. The warm sustained painlessness of drink. The music on the platform. The feeling that everything had already ended and this was the place you go after it’s over. He was there for the sound of Jasper’s breathing, his mouth, his cock. Her eyes upon them. Everything a symbol, a shape replacing the thought that created it. All the words they’d swallowed, the words they couldn’t say. He knew it was the drug of their bodies had him thinking like that night after night. The nearly invisible down on the back of Jasper’s neck had poisoned him. Why was he here? Who would look after Jasper, he thought, if he wasn’t?

  The crowd on the train was louder than usual. People were excited, recounting the fight. I walked down the aisle with Declan and continued on through the connecting cars to the bar, ordered a pint, drank it in a few long gulps, and gave the bottle back to the bartender, asking for another, then pulled a pack of crushed cigarettes from my back pocket, tried to straighten them for a few seconds before tearing the filters off and throwing them to the sticky floor. I smoked with loose tobacco on my tongue while the countryside flew by. On the outskirts of Athens a golden-white light emanated from a foundry, briefly illuminating the industrial landscape and the twisted silhouettes of olive trees in the distance, then there was nothing but darkness. Behind me a crush of runners, some with blood-streaked faces, were singing a footballers’ song. I looked over and saw that one of them was wearing a pair of Jasper’s shorts.

  No one was sober by the time we reached Elefsina. Close to twenty runners were already waiting for the 309 outside a little shack that served as the station house, passing around bottles of retsina and Metaxa and talking. I sat down next to some British kids who said the train would be half an hour late.

  One of the drunk boys I’d talked to in Drinks Time just that morning asked when I’d gotten back to town, then handed me a bottle and rolled the screw cap back and forth in his hands nervously.

  “Today,” I told the blond-haired oaf, drinking from his Metaxa.

  “You hear about Jasper and that black kid?”

  “No,” I said, to see if his story had changed. “What happened?”

  “They were your mates, weren’t they?”

  “No.”

  “They were poofs, you know?” he laughed.

  I looked at him, took another drink.

  “Jasper y’could see, but that other kid a bender? Jesus fuck, nah. Th’man’s huge.”

  “So what happened?”

  “They were queers.”

  “Did something happen to them?”

  “I told you,” he said. “They were fucking each other in the arse.”

  I rested the back of my head on the bench.

  I could hear Declan’s voice saying, “We had to mutilate them. After we saw what they did to those nuns, we couldn’t let . . .” Could be the punch line to a joke, could be something he did last week.

  “When are you going back to London?” the kid beside me asked.

  “I’m not,” I said. “I’m not from London. Why can’t people hear my accent?”

  “Maybe you haven’t got one,” he said.

  I squinted down the tracks.

  “He starved to death,” the boy said suddenly. “That’s r
ight, that was it, I remember that. But it was probably AIDS, right? Died after they found that Muslim piker hiding in one of the hotels. Or just before, maybe. Someone called his parents and they came and got him.”

  I felt I might gag. Stood up quickly. The liquor was blazing through me, making me numb, and I stumbled closer to the station house and leaned against it.

  In the dim light, the little platform and shack and the gawky blond vagrants passing bottles looked like a painting from a century ago, or documentary footage of migrant workers: ragged people sitting together, thin, drunk, and fed on crumbs, smiling in the lamplight.

  The strong smell of Turkish coffee drifted out from the station house. Someone passed me a fifth of Mastika, and I had no intention of sharing it. Then Declan came out of nowhere to block my view of the pretty scene.

  “A bunch of fucking clowns here tonight,” he said. “We’ll kill this train ourselves.”

  “To killing”—I raised the bottle—“and to Elefsina,” I said. “Home of the lesser mysteries.” I took a long drink, then poured some drops on the ground in case everyone I loved was dead and couldn’t get their hands on ethanol in the afterlife. I was in the middle of my second toast when Declan grabbed the bottle from me and threw it onto the tracks.

  “Keep it together,” he said.

  A German kid from Hotel Larissia started the third verse of “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles” but was dropped by a hard punch to the gut, then kneed in the face when he hunched over. More blood, more laughter.

  A Scottish boy named Mike jumped onto a bench and sang in a fussy staccato: “My. Name. Is Joseph. Gunnar. And. I work. For. Connection. I won’t. Drink. Your. Metaxa. For I’m. A pro-fes-sional. Run-ner.”