Once a Runner (13 page)

"Whatz wrong wid yer buddy?" the driver asked.

"Wannamaker's Syndrome," Denton said. "Sub-clinical. Real pity is the guy used to be a fine athlete."

"Too bad," clucked the driver.

"Hey Rip! Time for grub. Let's get it on." It was Denton again.

Cassidy thought: he's enjoying himself, there's no doubt about it.

"I don't think I'm going to live," he told Denton.

"They've got great clam chowder at this place only a couple of blocks away," said Denton, as he dressed. "Also a nice little rib-eye steak that I, for one, would not miss on a bet."

"What the hell is that?" Cassidy pointed out the window.

"That my boy is snow. White stuff that falls from God. It won't hurt you actually, as long as you don't swallow any or carry it in your pocket. Some people claim it has magical powers. Try to put on long wooden planks and slide on it. Personally I don't think it will catch on. Come ON! Get your ass in gear, I'm starving."

Despite himself, once they were out in the cold air walking to the restaurant Cassidy started to feel better. After he had some tea, he tried to snap out of it altogether.

"I don't understand how I can have jet lag in my own dme zone. How do you do this all winter?"

"This?" Denton crumbled some crackers into his chowder. "This, my boy, is fine. This is your reward for getting into good shape early, cause these northern sharpies won't fly you in from the coast or Florida to run in their shows unless they know you can produce. Hell, they could get a fairly respectable field in the mile or deuce from the New York-Boston area if they had to. We furnish an element of the exotic. You'd best get used to the idea if you keep winning. A 4:01.3 is not a bad time, indoors. Especially on that sponge cake track in the Garden. That might be worth, oh ..."

"Come on, Bruce..."

"That might be worth a three ..."

"Cut it out, Bruce!"

"A 3:58 or so, Cass." He looked up seriously from his chowder.

Cassidy sipped his tea morosely. These things were not to be bantered about lightly. It was bad luck to put your mouth on dmes your feet couldn't reach. Denton got up to talk to someone paying his check.

"Who was that?" Cassidy asked.

"Someone who is going to make your evening interestng.

"Come on ..."

"Just don't try any of that last straightaway kicking crap like last night or you'll hear someone behind you distinctly laughing his ass off."

"Bruce, who ..."

"Sammy Bair."

"Shit."

The Philadelphia meet was a classic second-meet-of-the-weekend letdown, Denton won in 8:44 from an undistinguished field and Cassidy ran 4:05.2 for second. Sam Bair didn't laugh at him but he might as well have.

By the time they were seated on the plane the next morning, Cassidy was back in his walking coma.

"You gonna have breakfast?" chirped Denton as they strapped in. "I mean if you don't want her to wake you..."

"Bruce, you can have my godamned breakfast. Why don't you just try to cheer up a litde?" He dropped off into a sleep that didn't abate in the slightest until they reached Atlanta where they changed planes.

He didn't dream.

15. Casualty

The splenetic fireplug of a nurse turned the page of her
Cosmo
juicily, saw it was going to get pretty good, and elected to take a pit stop before going on. The article was entided: "Your S[exual] Q[uotient]: Rating Yourself in the Boudoir." As soon as she toddled off, the vigilant Quenton Cassidy tossed aside his
National Geographic
("I Lived With The Bagharack Mountain Apes" by Dr. Jane Tully-Wells, one for the neo-Freudians, he thought), grabbed the aromatic flat box and sprinted for the stairwell. This was past visiting hours. This was illegal. This was keeno neato fun.

He sashayed into Mizner's room with the box on his upturned fingers, singing in a lusty though muted voice: "Cara mia whaaay..." Mizner: "Shhhh!"

Cassidy moaned: "There's a village called Surrentohhh..." Mizner: "That godamned old bat of a..." "In the can." "Oh."

Mizner sat up in bed, pale in his old sweatshirt, a faded dusty purple job with the traditional winged foot and the nearly illegible legend: POMPANO BEACH TRACK. Cassidy scurried around setting up. He stuffed a towel in the crack under the door. He pulled up a chair and produced with considerable flourish the two cans of beer, one from each pocket. Mizner applauded quiedy. Had Cassidy stood still for just a moment and really looked at his friend, real tears might have slid down over his fleshless cheekbones. Mizner was what they called a Hurtin' Swamp Dawg. But he told Cassidy: "You brang sich joy into mah hort." In a dreamy, nearly dopey voice this was.

They attacked the disk, which—although containing mosdy squashed tomatoes and fermented animal parts—the Italians will scarcely claim. Even after Mizner threw in his napkin, Cassidy kept on eating, primarily because he wanted something to do. He was still unstable here.

"So tell me about Milrose, dammit. Every detail. Do not stint. Do not leave out a spike hole or a careless elbow," Mizner said impatiently.

"The
Kernsville Sun
captured it quite well actually," Cassidy said, "following their normal tradition of printing straight wire copy, despite the fact two local heroes did good. Let's see, Liquori scratched, bless his little heart. No furriners, for some reason—maybe immigration rounded 'em all up or something-Just me and Ellison in the last lap. I kind of slipped up on him after the bell and when we got to the last straight I pulled the trigger. For a second I didn't think anything was going to happen. Then it caught and I blew by him. I actually ended up getting him by seven, but he probably eased off when he saw he wasn't going to come back. Bruce was beside himself. I think he has decided that he, you know,
discovered
me or something. Despite the fact that I had to run a 4:00.3 last year before he hardly said more than hello."

"How did his race go?"

"Oh, he just blew them right off the track. Art Dulong, Drayton, and that guy from Minnesota. They were never even in it. He ran 8:32 like it was a workout."

Mizner shook his head. "It would have been great to see. Both of you." But Cassidy knew what he was saying.

"So what is the word here? Is it confirmed?"

"Shit yes. They think maybe three, four months of no training. Even then it's touch and go because of the possibility of relapses. But at least I get out of here pretty soon."

"Well, hey, at least you didn't blow your eligibility. Except for cross country." Very quietly, this last.

"Hey, listen. I already have a complete list of the silver linings. It's the godamn cloud that's killing me."

"Yeah." Cassidy looked at his feet. There were no good words for this one, he thought. A runner who could not run was out of his element. He would not even think of himself as an athlete; ridiculously there would be a kind of guilt about it; that was the worst part. He would begin to feel uncomfortable around his training comrades and the feeling would be mutual, like a newly wounded soldier among the embarrassed whole ones, who would not wish to be reminded of certain crap game aspects of life. Cassidy was not surprised when Mizner told him he was going to move out of Doobey Hall for the next quarter. This was getting them both down. Mizner sensed it and changed the subject.

"What's happening with all the yelling and screaming on the haircut rules?"

"Hmmm. I wish I knew. It seems they are really serious about the thing. I hear they've been cracking down around Farley Hall, measuring sideburns with little rulers, making guys change shirts before they let them eat, stuff like that. Real, you know, brilliant stuff from the football minds over there. Even the football players are mad as hell. Nothing has happened at Doobey yet, but everyone figures they just haven't quite gotten around to us."

"Jeez. And me stuck in the infirmary."

"Consider yourself lucky. Thatgodamned Hosford volunteered my room for some kind of rabble rousing meeting tonight." He looked at his watch irritably.

"I guess I'd better go. They might set fire to my Kip Keino poster or something." He tossed his beer can into the trash can and winced as it clanged. He had forgotten.

"Is there anything I can ...

"Naw. I've got everything; the guys brought my books and stuff. You better take off. Thanks for the pizza; I'd kiss you but..."

Cassidy laughed. "Then I'd get the thing and we could be roommates in here. Look you take care of yourself, yuh hear? I know ... I know this is a pretty rough deal..."

"Well, the tour was getting to me a little, you know? I mean Akron one night, Utica the next. Now at least I can take the time to work on my steps and followthrough."

"And coming over the ball, don't forget to come
over
the ball..."

Mizner laughed. "No doubt. Hey Cass, really, congratulations on Milrose. I think it's just great. You should have heard me when I read the paper Saturday morning. They thought I had slipped and broken my ass on the way to the John or something." Cassidy nodded, smiled at him, and turned for the door just as it was shoved open bruskly. The white stock' inged fireplug stood glaring at him.

"You!" she cried. Cassidy leaned over and solemnly kissed her on the forehead, then sprinted out the door dodging a relatively serious swat with her rolled up
Cosmo.

On the way back to Doobey, walking along with his hands jammed in his pockets away from the chilly evening, he was filled with loss and an off-brand of nostalgia for events that were supposed to become part of his past but now wouldn't at all. In the mind's special processes, a ten-mile run takes far longer than the 60 minutes reported by a grandfather clock. Such time, in fact, hardly exists at all in the real world; it is all out on the trail somewhere, and you only go back to it when you are out there.

He and Mize had been through two solid years of such regular time-warp escapes together. There was something different about that, something beyond friendship; they had a way of transferring hurt back and forth, without the banality of words.

But now in the vague recesses of his mind, Cassidy detected deep and sinister rumblings; storm clouds that chilled the air but were not yet visible on the horizon.

And too, he did not do well with hospitals and infirmaries; repositories of laboratory smells, lethal looking silverware; launching pads for flagging hopes ...

16. New Territory

Quenton Cassidy returned from his afternoon visit to Mizner and now sat in his darkening room feeling not so much despair as nerve-jangling emptiness. The scenery was closing in on him. Low blood ph, he thought; the trick is to keep from getting nervous in the pack, like Bruce says. Think of how anchovies must swim a thousand to a square yard with a perfect twin on either side and a tiny bung flitting up ahead.

The
Kernsville Sun
lay in a heap at the foot of the bed. He had stopped trying to read when the sun got too low and he realized he was too tired to get up and turn on the light. So he just sat, staring out the window. It was slim pickings in the limp little sheet anyway; warmed over wire stories, a hard-hitting editorial on sewage bonds, an irate letter from a lady complaining about a neighbor's dog shitting in her azaleas, and sports editor Jack Hairlepp's column urging full support for Dick Doobey's next season. There was a quote from the coach about "... some fine junior college transfers who are going to be a real great help to us out there next year." At that point Cassidy had tossed the paper, idly wondering if Hairlepp drew his salary from the newspaper or just picked up his check on Friday from the athletic department's publicity office.

Perhaps he was too hard on the local gazette. There was, after all, real news in the human interest vein on page 2A under the
Smile For The Day
logo. It seems that somewhere out in the great American night a felonious ebony hand had skillfully slid a flat piece of steel down a car window, allowing a hopped-up connoisseur of spot remover to become the temporary (if illegal) bailee of a Ford Fairlane with transmission problems; thrown into the deal were the contents of a dark green garbage bag in the back seat, which contents were exactly: someone's dead mother-in-law.

Cassidy had thought:
Oh, this is a fun-loving citizenry.

"Hey, how come it's so dark in here?" Hosford wandered in, cracking his knee on the edge of the dresser.

"I'm afraid if I turn on a light I'll look in the mirror and see that I look as bad as I feel," Cassidy said, but not un-cheerfully.

"Ah, well. Mind if I sit down? Hey, the
Sun.
Anything in here?"

"As usual the only important message is contained in Doonesbury."

"Well, as it happens, I bring news myself. I hope it's not bad. Western Union guy just brought it a few minutes ago. I thought you were asleep, so I signed for it."

"Telegram? Thanks, Hoss ..."

"I'll mosey along, I guess. Hey, listen ..."

"Hey, this is open ..."

"... congratulations, Cass, all the guys think it's just great."

"All the ... Hosford! Come back here you nosey son of a bitch..."

"Bruce? Sorry to call during dinner, but you'll never guess..."