The Journey Prize Stories 21 (15 page)

The voice said, “Eric Dawson is heading for home early.”

Graham and Bourque and I hooked up a couple steps back and it felt like we were breaking free of the others. I never turn around when I race and everybody knows it's not a good idea to look back, but I was sure Burner must have been close by. Even then it was clear that Dawson didn't have a chance. He'd given it a pretty fierce try and the rest of us probably owed
him something for being brave enough to go, but he didn't have enough left and I could see he was starting to break down.

People in the crowd always wonder why the guy with the lead heading into the last lap almost never wins. They wonder why he can't hold on and why he can't look as good as he did just a minute earlier when he came flying by. Some people believe that myth about Roger Bannister and John Landy back when they ran the Miracle Mile in Vancouver in 1954. That was probably the only time in history when the whole world actually cared about two guys who could run a mile in under four minutes. Bannister was the first to do it, everybody knows that, but by the time they met in Vancouver, Landy had gone even faster. He was the new world record holder and most people were betting on him to win. You can look it up if you want. The Miracle Mile was pure craziness, like the Tyson/ Holyfield of its time. Every country sent their reporters to cover the story and more than a hundred million people listened to the call on the radio. It was the first time
CBC
Television ever broadcasted live from the west coast. If you go to Vancouver today, the famous statue is still there, the one where Landy is looking over his left shoulder as Bannister comes by him on the right. The press and people who don't know anything always say that if Landy had looked the other way – if only he'd looked to the right – he would have seen Bannister coming and he never would have let him go by. They call it the phantom pass, as if Landy was just a victim of bad luck and bad timing. As if Bannister was like some ghost, slipping past unseen.

That's the story they tell, but it's not true. If you ever watch a tape of that race you'll see that poor Landy is dead before he
even starts the last lap. It's one of those things you recognize if you've been through it yourself. When a guy is done, he's just done and no amount of fighting can save him. The exercise physiology people will explain that it's all about lactic acid fermentation and how when you push beyond your limit your legs run out of oxygen and the tissue starts to fill up with this burning liquid waste. We called it “rigging,” short for rigor mortis. When your body started to constrict, to tighten up involuntarily, first in your arms and your calves and then your quads and your hamstrings and your brain – when parts of you gave out like that, dying right underneath you at exactly the moment you needed something more – we called that rigging. At the end of a mile, everybody is rigging, everybody is dying, just at different speeds. Dawson was dying in front of us that day and we could see it in every broken down step he took. Just like Landy was dying in front of Bannister fifty years before and he knew it too. Look back at the grainy black and white video of the Miracle Mile. You'll see it. Landy wasn't taken by surprise. He knew exactly where Bannister was coming from – he just couldn't do anything to stop it. For that whole last lap Bannister is right behind, tall and gangly and awkward and just waiting, deciding when to go. When Landy looked to his left – in that moment they made into a statue – he wasn't trying to hold on for the win. That possibility was gone and he knew it. No, Landy was looking out for the next guy; he was trying to hold on to second and not to fall even farther back. People forget that Richard Ferguson, a Canadian, finished third in the Miracle Mile. He's the important missing character, the one who didn't make it into the statue. Ferguson was the threat coming up from behind; he was the guy Landy
feared. It's always like that. The most interesting stories in most races don't have anything to do with winning.

Dawson was almost shaking when we came by him. The last lap was going to be a death march for him. Graham and Bourque and I went past in a single step and there was nothing left in Dawson to go with us.

The voice said, “Graham, Bourque, Campbell. It will be decided by these three.”

I couldn't believe I was still in it and feeling
OK.
Graham looked like he was getting ready to drop the hammer and put an end to this, but as we headed down the final back stretch Bourque seemed a little wobbly, and for about five seconds I thought I had a real shot at bringing him down and getting myself in there for second and a spot on the team. I was just about to release my own kick, trying to gauge how much I had left and deciding how I could fit it into that last 250 metres. I got up on my toes and I was getting ready to charge when I felt this hand reach out and touch the middle of my back, kind of gently, just a tap so I'd know he was there. I looked to my right and Burner came roaring by with his tongue hanging out and that enraged look in his eyes.

The voice said, “Look at that. Burns is making a very strong move.”

I understand that sometimes people get their priorities mixed up. And I know that when you give yourself over completely to just one thing, you can lose perspective on the rest of the world. That's a feeling I know. I think it's what happens to those old ladies who donate their life savings to corrupt televangelists
or to those pilgrims in the Philippines who compete for the honour of being nailed, actually hammered, to a cross for their Easter celebrations. We have to scrounge for meaning wherever we can find it and there's no way to separate our faith from our desperation. You see it everywhere. Football hooligans, scholars of Renaissance poetry, fans of heavy metal music, car buffs, sexual perverts, collectors of all kinds, extreme bungee jumpers, lonely physicists, long distance runners, and tightly wound suburban housewives who want to make sure they entertain in just the right way. All of us. We can only value what we yearn for and it really does not matter what others think.

This is why I cannot expect you to understand that when Jamie Burns came past me and started up that now infamous kick which won him the national title in the 1500 metres – his wild, chased-by-the-train sprint that carried him around me, past Bourque and all the way up to Graham – I cannot expect you to understand that when this happened, I was caught up, caught up for the first and only time in my life, in one of those pure ecstatic surges that I believed only religious people ever experienced. Even as it unfolded in front of me and I watched Graham hopelessly trying to hold him off, I knew I had never wanted anything more than this, just to see Burner come up even and then edge his way forward in those last few steps and come sailing across the line with both his hands in the air. I did not care that this was such a small thing or that it could be shared with so few. I knew only that this event, this little victory mattered to me in some serious way that was probably impossible to communicate. I didn't pray for it to happen, because there would be nobody to receive a prayer like that. But I did wish for it and even the wish told me something I had
never known about myself before. We are what we want most and there are no miracles without desire. That's why a mom can lift a car off her child after the accident and a guy can survive a plane crash and live in the woods for a week drinking only the sweat wrung from his socks. That's how Burner won that race, by miraculous desperation.

If you are not the person who wins, then the finish line of a 1500 can be a crowded place. There are bodies collapsing and legs giving out and people wandering around with dazed and exhausted looks on their faces. Burner's kick caught everybody by surprise. Even the announcer lost control of the story. For the last fifty metres he just kept shouting, “Will you look at that. Look. It's Burns at the end. Look.”

I'd been so busy watching that nothing changed for me. I ended up exactly where I was before and never got past Bourque. I finished fourth, the worst place to be, but it was still more than I expected. People from the paper were taking pictures as I walked over to Burner. When he turned around we both just started laughing and shaking our heads.

“You bastard,” I said, and I pounded both my fists against his shoulders. “Where did that come from? How in the hell…”

“No idea,” he said. “I thought I was out of it, but I decided to go in the end and everything else just happened.”

Other people, strangers I had never seen before, were coming around slapping him on the back and giving their congratulations. The whole place was still kind of quivering because no one had ever seen a guy come back from being that far down. Every eye was on Burner and everyone was talking about that last stretch and trying to find a place for it in their own personal histories.

One of the drug officials came over and took Burner away to go pee in his cup and prove that everything was natural. As he was being led off, he turned back and told me to wait for him.

“You're going to be busy,” I said. “Forget it.”

“Just wait,” he said.

For those next fifteen minutes, I was kind of stuck between two different versions of myself. I wandered back over to my bag and started to get dressed again. I looked around the track and it seemed like this big chunk of my past was kind of crystallizing behind me and freezing into permanence. Whatever the next thing would be was still way ahead, indistinct and foggy, and I had no idea what it would look like. I pulled off those ugly spikes and in a mock-dramatic moment I tossed them into a garbage can.

“Good riddance,” I said, and I just stood there for a while feeling the cool grass on my bare feet.

Burner came jogging back from his test soon after that, but every step he took there was somebody else there shaking his hand and patting the top of his bald head. All around him people were smiling and a couple of younger kids asked for his autograph and wanted to get their pictures taken with him. Burner drank it in like one of those actors standing on the red carpet before the Oscars begin, and even though it took him a while to make it across the track, he kept looking up at me every couple of seconds, letting me know that I was still the final destination and our planned warm-down was still going to take place.

When he finally made it over he had this ridiculously huge grin on his face and he kind of shrugged his shoulders.

“What can you do?” he said. “It's all crazy.”

“Did they get your pee?” I asked. “Everything okay in that department?”

“No problem,” he said.

He pulled on a dry T-shirt and his own pair of high-tech sweatpants and said he was ready to go.

When we made it out of the stadium everything quieted down very quickly. The announcer's voice had moved on to the final of the women's 400 hurdles and we could just barely hear him as we turned away and went backwards along the same streets we had run earlier. Whenever you do that – go back along the same course, but in the opposite direction – it's strange how some scenes are so familiar while others look so completely different you wonder how you missed them the first time around. It's just the change in perspective, but sometimes, especially when you're in a foreign city, you can get yourself pretty disoriented and lost. Then you have to slow down and look around and try to locate a recognizable landmark before you can be sure you're on the right track.

Burner and I fell into a nice rhythm right away and our feet clipped along almost in unison. We went back past all those houses where nobody cared and it felt fine and comfortable. Our breathing was the only conversation and it said that we were both relaxed and taking it easy. Some of the neighbourhood kids were still out shooting baskets in their driveways and practising tricks with their skateboards.

We just floated down those anonymous sidewalks and carved our way though the maze of minivans and garbage cans. We made a turn and were just about to head back to the stadium when a bunch of kids came streaking past us on their bikes.
There were four or five of them, a couple of boys and a couple of girls, probably between the ages of seven and nine. Real kids, not yet teenagers. One of the boys almost hit us as he went by and another one kept trying to jump his
BMX
up and down over the driveway cut-outs of the curb. There was a girl on a
My Little Pony
bike. She had multicoloured beads on all her spokes and red and white streamers trailing back from her handlebars. Her hair was wispy and blond. As she came by, she turned around and yelled, “I'm faster than you are.” She sort of sang it in a mean, bratty way, using the same up-and-down teasing music that accompanies every “nah, nah, nah, nah, nah.”

“You can't catch me,” she said, and she stuck her tongue out and pedalled harder. Her pink shoes swivelled around in circles.

One of the boys, a kid wearing a tough-looking camouflage T-shirt, zipped around us and swerved in tight to cut me off. As he pulled away, he shot us the finger and said, “Nice tights, loser.”

I glanced over at Burner and said “Let it go,” but it was too late. His face was tightening up and that angry stare was coming back into his eyes. He wasn't looking at me.

“Hey,” he yelled, and you could feel the edges hardening around that one little syllable. He pulled ahead of me and started tracking them down. I was caught unprepared and a step behind and I couldn't figure out how we had managed to arrive at this point. Burner was charging again and the kids were running. They didn't know. There was no way on earth they could have known. The little girl was pedalling as fast as she could and there was this strange, high-pitched, wheezing
sound coming out of her, but there was nothing she could do. Burner had already closed the gap and his hand was already there, reaching out for the thin strands of her hair. It all disintegrated after that. He must have been a foot taller than the oldest one.