Once a Runner

1. Once...

The night joggers were out as usual. The young man could see dim figures on the track even in this pale light, slowly pounding round and round on the most infinite of footpaths. There would be, he knew, plump, determined-looking women slogging along while fleshy knees quivered. They would occasionally brush damp half fiercely from their eyes and dream of certain cruel and Willing emcees: bikinis, tennis with white-toothed males, wild tangos in the moonlight.

And men too of various ages and levels of dilapidation, perhaps also grinding out secret fantasies (did they picture themselves a Peter Snell held back only by fat or fear as they turned their 90-second quarters?).

The young man stood outside the fence for a few moments while moths attacked the streetlight dustily, leaving him in a dim spotlight of swirling shadows. He loved early fall in Florida's panhandle. Leaves would be turning elsewhere but here the hot breath of summer still held forth. In the moist warmth there was a slight edge, though, a faint promise of cool air hanging in the treetops and close to the moss. He picked up his small travel bag and went in the gate, walking clockwise on the track towards the white starting post at the head of the first turn. The joggers ignored the stranger in street clothes and he likewise paid them not the slightest attention. They would always be there.

The high jump pit had been rearranged, a new section of bleachers had been added, a water jump installed for the steeplechase. But mostly it looked the same as it did four years ago, the same as a four hundred and forty yard oval probably will always look to one who knows a quarter of a mile by the inches.

The Games were over for this time around. He knew quite well that for him they were over for good. Four years is a very long time in some circles; in actual time—real-world time, as that of shopkeepers, insurance sellers, compounders of interest and so on—it is perhaps not long at all. But in his own mind Time reposed in peculiar receptacles; to him the passing of one minute took on all manner of rare meaning. A minute was one fourth of a four-minute mile, a coffee spoon of his days and ways.

As with many of the others, he had no idea what he would be doing now that Montreal was over. It was such a demanding thing, so final, so cathartic, that most of them simply never thought beyond it. They were scattered around the world now, he supposed, doing pretty much what he was doing at this moment: tallying gains and losses.

He was going to have to pick up the thread of a normal life again and although he did not exactly know why, he had to start by coming back here, back to the greenhouse warmth of the Panhandle, back to this very quarter-mile oval that still held his long-dried sweat. Back to September, the month of promises. He put his bag down by the pole vault pit, looked uptrack to make sure no one was coming, and then walked up to the starting line. God, he thought, one more time on the line.

In lane one he stood very still, looking down at his street shoes (joggers now going around him with curious glances) and tried to conjure up the feeling. After a moment a trace of it came to him and he knew that was all there would be. You can remember it, he told himself, but you cannot experience it again this way. You have to be satisfied with the shadows. Then he thought of the second and third laps and decided with a little twist of a smile that shadows were sometimes quite enough.

He was 26 years, five months and two days old and though as he stood there on the starting line he felt quite a bit older than that, the muscles that rippled up and down inside his trouser leg could have only been the result, biologically speaking, of more thousands of miles than he cared to think about all at one time.

He tried to focus blurred emotions, a metaphysical photographer zeroing in on hard edges to align in the center square. What was this, nostalgia? Regret? His mind double-clutched, asked the musical question: am... I... buh loooo?

He could not tell. He realized again how adept he had become at not being able to tell such things. His emotions had calluses like feet.

The starter would tell them to stand tall, so he stood tall for a moment there in the night. There would be the set command and then the gun. He took a deep breath and began walking into the turn in the familiar counterclockwise direction, the way of all races, and thought: The first lap is lost in a flash of adrenaline and pounding hooves ...

2. Doobey Hall

Doobey Hall was one of those ancient resonant wooden buildings that seemed to hold the oils and essences of those who had lived there. Like an old cloth easy chair, it was musty but comfortable.

As with many structures that had at one time been someone's home, it managed to retain a certain familial warmth amidst the current institutional clamor. It thumped and boomed hollowly rather than clicking in the bony staccato manner of more modern, more efficient dwellings.

Having once housed Kernsville Mayor Hiram "Sidecar" Doobey and his various clamoring kindred, during recent years the large friendly house had been used to shelter 30-some odd members of Southeastern University's grateful track team. Located a merciful two blocks from the campus proper, the edifice emitted from morning to night a steady if unpredictable cacophony of barely human yelps, primordial shrieks, righteous bellows, and off-key fragments of current hit songs, all courtesy of a singular group of young
sapiens
whose main function in life was to run, jump, and toss heavy objects about. And hopefully to do so far better than, well, ordinary mortals. The net available energy required to produce a 70-foot shot put or a seven-foot high jump just occasionally would not be contained by mere wood and plaster.

Walls trembled and there were eerie goings on.

Old Sidecar Doobey himself would have been tickled pink. Dead since 1959, his nickname derived from those carefree Depression days of yesteryear when on a Saturday night for pure diversion Hiram would sample about three quarters of ajar of the local untaxed stock, let loose a mighty wail, scoop up his tiny startled wife—a pretty, round-eyed thing named Emma Lee—deposit her in the sidecar of his 1932 Harley Davidson 74-inch flathead, and proceed to more or less terrorize many of the large herds of local grazing cattle.

"Woman," he would tell her, "we fixin' to do some
night ridin'!
" His wild green eyes held her for a moment like a light.

"Eeeeee!" she said.

This is not to imply that Sidecar was an oudaw exactly, since he owned most of the cows in Kalhoun County (and a good deal of the land, and several very sensitive mortgages for that matter). He was just what some folks might call loose. Sidecar was one of those raw, energetic men who understand very early in life which levers and pulleys really work and which are just for show. And he also understood that the whole shebang was most certainly going to come to a shrieking, grinding halt one fine day. Irretrievably, he suspected.

The only time he found himself in any kind of trouble worthy of the name was on one of the nights when he got particularly rowdy, broke down some fences and (Emma Lee squeaking like a wounded bat) went roaring into downtown Kernsville to "strafe the golldanged pigeons" while sad-eyed old negroes around the courthouse square watched in wrinkled amusement. Sidecar made his own fun.

"Lawd, Sheriff, I su
wan
wee ... I
lawd
don't know why I get so mean sometimes," he said with true regret the morning after his actual arrest. He held his shaggy, throbbing head in his hands.

"Well, Daddy," said the sheriff, "people is beginning to talk, and that's a fack." Sheriff William "Boots" Doobey was his eldest.

"What I cain't quite figure out," continued the lawman, "is why you always want to go and take mama with you."

Sidecar perked up suddenly. "Why," he cackled savagely, "she enjoys the
pure T hell out of it!

It was perhaps a tribute to the university town's collective sense of humor when it elected Sidecar mayor a year later. He had run on a platform of throw the bastards out, interesting only because the bastards were without exception his own blood kin. True to form, he threw the bastards out.

Sidecar's election had been like much of his life, a prize thrust upon him almost without the asking. The old man's one deep hurt came when his youngest boy, born when Sidecar was 52 and Emma Lee nearly 40, turned out to be something of an ordinary klutz. Boots could have had a West Point appointment, Sheryl Ann was Georgia Tech homecoming queen (before dropping out to marry a pulling guard). It touched a deep, painful place in his breast when Sidecar moistly watched the youngster, more like a grandson really, trying to master the elementary gear shift configuration of the big John Deere. When the child was stymied at a simple card game by a cousin half his age, Sidecar wandered out into his fields and wept with rage.

At that moment Sidecar decided, being a man of large concepts and a true patron of irony, to get for this slightly addled child that which his other children lacked (and didn't want for that matter): academic status. Years later, this curious task would be accomplished in the way that difficult/impossible objectives are generally accomplished amongst men of great power and integrity; which is to say on the sly. He deeded over to Southeastern University (which desperately needed space for an entomology laboratory) the house he had occupied for seven years as mayor "in exchange for ten dollars and other good and lawful consideration ... " The nature of the other good and lawful consideration was known only to Sidecar himself, his lawyer, and the prospective president of the school, the Honorable Stephen C. Prigman. At that time Emma Lee was five years in her grave and old Sidecar wanted to get away from "downgodamntown politics" and back to his ranch where he said he could "at least godamned well die with the honest smell of fresh dung in my nostrils." Actually he was toying with the idea of reincarnating the ancient and beloved Harley, then rusting under a paint-spattered canvas tarp in the barn.

His youngest would have to go through the motions of attending the university, so the formal conferring of the degree did not take place until four years after the house was donated.

Meanwhile Sidecar mucked around the ranch, got in his foreman's hair, was finally persuaded to purchase a package tour deal to several Mexican cities of interest. He returned raving about the regenerative properties of certain cactus distillates and hinting darkly about the "im-and-ex port bid-ness." On the scholastic scene things went without a hitch and the old man lived to see his boy, dazed, in cap and gown.

Entomology outgrew Doobey Hall and in 1958 the track team, delighted to a man, inherited it. Sidecar passed on soon thereafter but it was said he tried to kick his way out of the coffin on the way to Jesus Walks Among Us Acres.

A good bit of Doobey folklore was known in and around Kernsville and accounted for no small amount of graffiti scattered about the campus. Bold red letters on the side of the women's gym warned ominously:
SIDECAR LIVES AND WILL NAIL YOU YET!
And his youngest son, he of the dim wit, bogus degree and unaccountable penchant for hurting insects, his youngest son, Dick Doobey, ended up as the head football coach.

3. The Morning Run

On the third floor of Doobey Hall was the room in which Richard Doobey had slept as a child. Now, in 1972, its battered oak door held two three-by-five index cards neatly thumbtacked one atop the other. The top one said in Smith Corona pica:

If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds'worth of distance run-Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, And-which is more-you '11 be a Man, my son!

-Rudyard Kipling, 1892

The other card read:

Rudyard Kipling was a 4:30 miler.

-Quenton Cassidy, 1969

Inside the room, the one true Quenton Cassidy slept fitfully as dawn approached. In a damp orb of his own worst fears, he nightmared with a certain grace. It was an old and familiar theme with him: The last lap of a footrace found him being methodically passed by every runner in the Western Hemisphere. He was running in peanut butter as they all glided by easily. What was wrong here? Was his training inadequate? Where was his kick?

Mercifully, he awoke. Before the alarm, moist from his fretting, but forgetting the dream quickly. He sat on the edge of the bed wiggling his toes thoughtfully as the cobwebs of anxiety melted away in his shaggy head. In the waking world his whole being centered around covering ground quickly without benefit of Detroit technology. At this he really had no equals save a few dozen others scattered about the country and world who also woke to such disquieting dreams. Quenton Cassidy knew every one of them by name.