Brewster (4 page)

By the end of the second lap I heard someone far away yelling “Stop, Mosher, that’s enough,” and then at some point someone else calling “Coming through—inside,” and they passed me like a single mass, all business now, and I remember staggering after them, gasping, drowning, my chest, my legs, my throat filling with lead and looking up through a fog of pain just in time to see the kid with the headband, halfway down the backstretch, accelerating into a sustained, powerful sprint.

I don’t know why. I can’t explain it. By the end of the third lap I was barely moving, clawing at the air, oblivious to everything except the dirt unfolding endlessly in front of me. “Let him go,” I heard somebody say. They’d all finished by then, recovered, and now stood watching as I staggered past them like something shot. “C’mon …” I heard someone start to call out uneasily, and then, “What’s his name?” and then, louder, “C’mon, Jefferson.” A small crowd, I found out later, sensing something going on, had gathered by the fence to the parking lot. The last of the newcomers had passed me long ago.

I remember seeing him appear in front of me like I was coming up from underwater and trying to swerve but I was barely standing and I walked right into him and he caught me as I fell, his one good arm around my back, saying over and over, “All right, easy now, easy, you’re done, keep walking, walk it off,” like he was gentling a horse. I threw up on the infield grass. I could barely see. “Fuckin’ Sloppy Joes, man,” I heard someone say, almost respectfully.

“They look better now.”

“Shit, I think I see the bun.”

“Somebody go help Coach.”

“Fuck you, I’m not gettin’ that shit on my shoes.”

“That was like
On the Waterfront
, man.”

“You see him on that last hundred? Jesus!”

“Hey, Terry don’t work, we don’t work.” A couple of people laughed.

“Keep walking, Mosher,” Falvo was saying, “if you lie down it’ll be twice as bad.” I could feel him holding me around my waist, his arm like a steel belt above my hip. I didn’t want it there. I couldn’t see. I could hear myself sobbing, trying to rake air into my chest. My head felt like it was cracking from inside. I didn’t know that I’d put my arm around his shoulders.

“What we have here,” he was saying, “is a failure to communicate. Stay within yourself, I said. Don’t drain the well, I said.”

“What did I get?” I couldn’t seem to hold my head up, or open my eyes—the pain kept coming in waves.

“What?”

“Time. What time did I get?”

He laughed—that bitter Falvo laugh—ha!—like he’d just been vindicated. “He wants to know what he got,” he said, like there was somebody with us. “You want to know what you got? I’ll tell you what you got: proof you could beat yourself senseless—something I very much doubt you needed. If I was a better man I’d report you for assault. OK, turn. And for what? Nothing. Tiny Tim could have tiptoed a faster mile. Tiny Tim, Mosher. With his ukulele. Singing.”

I could feel the wind now, chilling the sweat. He was walking me back and forth like a drunk in the movies.

“Two more. No, you’re an idiot, Mosher, there’s no point denying it. Unfortunately for me, you may also be a miler. This won’t mean anything to you, but you ran the first six hundred yards, before you died like a dog, at sixty-seven-second pace; truth is, you shouldn’t have finished at all.”

T
HE NEXT DAY
my calves, my thighs, my shins—my shins most of all—felt like they’d been replaced with steel plates. I winced my way up the stairs, lowered myself to my desk with my arms. Even my father noticed. “
Was ist los
?—You have a problem with the shoes?” he said.

“You’re going to be very unhappy with yourself, my boy,” Falvo had told me. “I mean more than usual. You’ve paid the piper—you know the piper I’m talking about, the piper of pain, Mosher—and now he’s going to play whether you like it or not.”

Two days later he gave me my paper back—an A–.

“Seems you’re only selectively stupid,” he said, and walked back to his desk, cowlick bobbing, ridiculous as ever.

I
WAS SITTING AT LUNCH
with Frank later that same week—we’d started talking a bit—when I heard the cafeteria monitor yell and looked up to see Cappicciano, just past the register, shove some senior in the chest, then duck something I couldn’t see, then flick something off the fingers of his right hand. He was wearing that long coat, as always—dressed to leave. From a distance he looked like a magician releasing a very small dove.

“I said knock it off,” the monitor bellowed.

He ducked again, laughing, and started toward our side of the cafeteria. “Cut it out, Ray,” a girl I couldn’t see said as he passed behind her.

When he dropped his tray with a clatter of silverware next to Frank, he was still clowning around with her, pissing her off. I didn’t know what he was doing at our table. I thought it was some kind of mistake.

“Mind if I join you two lovebirds?”

“Fuck you,” said Frank.

“Not me, fella—but hey, I’m open-minded.”

He started shaking his chocolate milk, singing Dusty Springfield’s “Wishin’ and Hopin’ ” under his breath:
“Show him that you care, ba-ba, ba-ba …”

I must have smiled.

“I seen you somewhere,” he said.

I didn’t say anything.

“Up on the track. Couple a weeks ago. You were like
Night of the Livin’ Dead
.”

I didn’t say anything.

“
On the Waterfront
,” Frank said.

“That’s what they’re callin’ it?” He took a drink, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, smiling. “That’s fucked up.” He looked at me for a few seconds. “Why didn’t you just stop?”

I shrugged.

He took another drink of milk. “You got a test?”

“No.”

I was reading Nietzsche, or pretending to.

“That’s one fucked-up mustache on that dude.”

I shrugged.

I
T WAS NOT LONG AFTER
that he began showing up at practice, sprawled out on the bleachers in that long black coat and a sweatshirt, sometimes with a girl in a miniskirt who’d sit there freezing next to him, sometimes not. I’d look up and he’d be there, leaning on one elbow, smoking. I’d look again, he’d be gone.

Nobody said anything until McCann, who didn’t give a shit and liked to prove it, walked past the bleachers with his group. “Fuck
you
doin’ here, man?”

“Hey, fuck you, I can sit where I want. What’re you, the bleacher cops?”

“Yeah, you’d know about them,” McCann said.

“That’s right, pencil dick, I would.” He took a drag of his cigarette, confident, arrogant. “Tell ya what. I’ll polish up your VIP box here with my ass. Leave it nice and shiny for ya.”

The next day he was back. I was nowhere then, stuck in the slowest group, burning to climb the ladder. I’d have to earn it, Falvo said.

I’d gone to see him, still hobbling, two days after the time trial. I wanted to run another, I said. I knew what I was doing now.

He didn’t look up from the clipboard. “It’s not that I don’t admire your eagerness to throw yourself on the pyre, Mosher, and for all I know immolation
is
the sincerest form of flattery—but it won’t make you a better runner.”

I had no idea what he was talking about.

He looked up. “No,” he said.

There were five groups, he said, slowest to fastest, divided by their times. I’d be starting with the slowest group, like everyone else.

“I’m better than that,” I said.

“We’ll see.”

“I am.”

“This will come as a shock to you, but sometimes we do more by doing less.”

“What’re we running today?”

“
We
are doing quarters. You’re going for a light, ten-minute jog.”

“But—”

“On the track, where I can see you.”

“I—”

He held up his left hand like an Indian—a gesture I’d come to know well. It took me a second to realize he was actually angry.

The lesson was clear: I’d move up when he said so.

I
T WASN’T A TEAM
so much as a sect—a cult of individuals. Which shouldn’t make sense, except it does. We had one thing in common, at least the runners did: we believed in time, pledged allegiance to it—one nation, utterly fair, under the second-hand god on Falvo’s watch. You couldn’t lie or talk or cheat your way in. It didn’t matter if you were cool, if you looked good in a pair of jeans, if you were popular. You could be all of those or none—it didn’t matter. You either covered ground or you didn’t.

We’d be running quarters, he announced—what he called bread and butter—twelve quarter-mile runs with a quarter walk between each to recover. He introduced me to the group. One or two, stretching on the mats, mumbled hello, a few nodded, most didn’t hear him or didn’t care. McCann kept talking to the guy next to him. I went back to trying to touch my toes. I was as loose as a brick.

“What’s his name again?” It was the kid with the headband—Kennedy. A dozen faces looked up, then over at me.

When Falvo told him, he nodded like he had to think about this information now that he had it, and went back to stretching.

I remember that first day. The fifth group was a sickly-looking bunch of nerds—when I walked up they were standing around awkwardly, their skinny white legs sticking out of their oversized shorts, hugging themselves in the wind and arguing about old episodes of
Time Tunnel
. They seemed nice enough. They talked to me a bit after the first interval as we walked around the outside of the track, then went back to arguing about whether by rescuing Dr. Newman from being killed at Pearl Harbor the show had broken something called the Novikov self-consistency principle. I couldn’t believe it. By the time we’d finished the third interval I had bigger problems.

By the sixth I was hurting. They were still arguing. They’d run the quarter, then pick up where they’d left off. “So the Novikov self-consistency principle means you’re changing recorded history.” “Yeah, so?” “So ‘Time Tunnel’ means the past, present and future are all happening at the same time—duh!”

By the time I’d done eight I was wondering if I’d make it at all. I could still hear them, like static in my head: “They have to get a
fix
on the past.” “No they don’t.” “Yes they do. If he’s killed, you moron, then the adult Tony can’t exist.” “Sure he can.” “Don’t you remember what Dr. Swain says to Senator Clark when he’s looking at the
Titanic
?” “Yeah? So?” “So he’s seeing
the living past
, dufus. Ready?”

I finished last, dragging in five yards after the others. As I stood there with my hands on my knees, trying to keep my legs from buckling, a pasty-looking kid with a caved-in chest and a feathery mustache came up and patted me on the back. “Nice job,” he said.

It was my answer for a while, the combination to whatever it was I’d locked inside. I liked the details, the rituals, the numbers; I liked the hot smell of the weeds in the infield, the six-mile runs in the rain around the Middle Branch Reservoir, the peepers in the muddy woods a hundred yards behind the track screaming in the spring. You could be who you were,
would
be who you were, whether you liked it or not.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win.
I’d climb the chain, link by link. I’d show them all.

I wasn’t the only one who brought to it more than it could bear. It had a way of doing that, of convincing you it was more than it was—not a stage but the world, not war by other means but war itself. That it mattered.

I
N JANUARY
1968, just three months after I joined the team, we climbed into a bus and got out at the 168th Street Armory in New York—a great cavernous hall with a flat wooden indoor track at the center of it. I’d never been before. Down below in the huge cave-like basement where the food venders were, you could hear the runners pounding by over your head, then the roar of the crowd, and making your way through the mass of runners shoving up the stairs sticky with soda and Cracker Jacks, the air thick with heat rub and hot dogs, you’d hear the roar growing with every step and then the whole thing would burst like a multicolored shell, thunderous and overwhelming: fifty teams, six hundred runners camped out in patches of yellow and blue and maroon on the dark wooden bleachers over the track, stretching, sleeping, listening to their transistor radios, warming up, and there, only yards away, another heat ready to go, eight runners at the end of the straight shaking it out then kicking into the blocks, “Runners, set …” the gun like the crack of a whip, jump-starting your heart. It was like entering the Coliseum.

The Bishop Loughlin Games, the Cardinal Hayes Invitational, these were our Olympics, but nothing I saw there those three years came close to what I saw that first time.

They may have been from Boys’ High—I don’t remember. It doesn’t matter. What I remember is the attitude, the stance. The concentration, the focus, the four of them exchanging a few words at the beginning of each heat, then the lead-off climbing into the blocks. Fifty yards away you could feel it: black, ghetto, just off the subway in mismatched sweats, they didn’t own shit but by God they owned this. The mile relay. It was theirs. Six years in a row they’d beaten every team in the city: teams with money, teams with facilities, teams five times their size. Nobody else in any event had a record like it. Nobody even came close.

When the mile relay final was announced, the great hall quieted, the transistors were turned down, the crowd—two, maybe three thousand—moved as close to the rail above the track as they could. I was jammed in with Frank, Falvo, the mustached kid from my group. Kennedy and McCann were a short way down, leaning over the rail. I could see the muscles in McCann’s face jumping like he was chewing something; when Kennedy looked up our eyes met over the backs of the others for a second and he nodded, barely seeing me, as if to say, “Here we go.”

They said a few words, heads bent, then the lead-off walked to the blocks. Big Afro, bouncy stride, he was the last to take off his sweats. We watched him shake out the muscles in his legs, not looking at the others, then fold himself like a supple jackknife into the blocks, the neon-green baton between the palm and forefinger of his right hand. Everything was critical, each leg a full-out quarter-mile sprint through the track’s flat, tight wooden curves where elbows flew and tangled legs regularly sent runners sprawling across the splinter-filled boards. The lead-off runners would keep their lane through the first curve, then break for the inside as best they could.

“Runners, there will be two commands, then the gun.”

The place was silent. Reverent. Substitute the smell of heat rub for incense and you’ve got it. On the opposite side of the bleachers a tiny voice was singing something from a radio someone hadn’t turned down enough.

“Marks. Set.”

He rose, balanced on the thumb and three fingers of his right hand.

T
HREE THOUSAND RUNNERS
jumped at the gun. I remember being hypnotized by the controlled fury of it, swept up in the brutal, beautiful momentum of it, and then he was down, hard, his head actually banging on the boards, the green baton ricocheting off the guard wall like a hockey puck and a groan of shock and disbelief went up from the stands. It was over. This was a mile relay. Another runner was lying on his back in the outer lane, stunned.

I don’t think he ever thought of not going. We saw him roll, scrabble onto all fours, already searching for the baton, snatch it and go. A few people laughed, embarrassed for him: There was something almost clownish in his desperation; in the first few seconds, disoriented, he’d looked the wrong way as the baton skittered across the track behind him. Then a polite ripple of applause rose from the stands: It was the right move, the admirable move—the reigning champions making the most of the disaster, finishing in style. All the runners in that hall knew it was over. All except four.

More than in him, alone an entire backstretch behind the pack, you could see it in the others: the second man already in position, tensed in a sprinter’s half crouch, his receiving arm out, willing the baton to him still forty yards away, his teammates screaming in his ears. They’d never considered lying down; what was possible had nothing to do with it.

Nothing happened at first. He ran all alone, as if in a different race altogether. Thirty yards back in a relay usually decided by inches or feet, he gained six yards on the strongest sprinters in the city, handed off and fell to the track. By then it had begun: a growing roar like an approaching army, a thousand fists beating in unison on the metal signs that hung down from the rails circling the track. It didn’t matter that it couldn’t be.

Turn, straight, turn—it was like the pack was a magnet drawing him slowly back to them, shrinking the gap. Six runners, spread out now, handed off like well-oiled machines; he passed the baton, ran into the arms of some man who held him up like a limp doll—he’d closed to under twenty and the hall was in pandemonium, roaring like a shell, pounding with a single pulse.

On the third leg something changed, some magic distance was crossed: the impossible had become conceivable. Thirteen yards, eleven, ten, and he passed the sixth man, handed off, and fell like the others. I hadn’t seen him. I’d been watching the anchor leg. In that sounding chamber—deafening, overwhelming—he was as still as a candle flame in a closed room. And I saw him receive the baton and go, a full eight yards down in fifth place, and he was like a scythe going through grass—gorgeous, ruthless—smooth as a razor cutting into the curves, passing the fourth, the third, out of the last turn edging into second, closing on the leader who seemed to be slowing, tying up because he had to, because by now it wasn’t up to him but the gods themselves, and then he threw himself through the tape.

I
’VE THOUGHT OF IT SINCE
—more than once. And I’ve thought of Ray looking at my picture of Tommie Smith and John Carlos with their fists raised on the medal stand in Mexico City, saying, “Yeah? So what?” and I know he was right. So what? This was what they gave you—what they wanted you to have. Go ahead, boy, take it. It’s yours. Take your two-fifty chunk of metal on the purple ribbon and hang it in your room and grow old; you can have the salt shaker—the pepper shaker too—’cause I own the house, the block, your dime-a-dozen soul if you really want to know.