Once a Runner (16 page)

When Cassidy got to the second floor it was all over. Everyone was talking at once and no one was making any sense. Once he got the story pieced together it occurred to him that some truly dark forces, ignorant of their own madness, were at work.

And fate, of course, swings to and fro on tiny hinges; a cable is misplaced and a king assassinated; a vacuum tube blinks and a ship is lost with all hands; a general fails to get laid and thousands are firebombed ...

20. Night Run

Cassidy raced along to a night rhythm, pocketa pocketa, a steady tatoo of pleasant solitary effort that starred him under many streetlights, rendered him anonymous in dark neighborhoods, sent him smoothly up and down the gentle hills of Kernsville while dogs howled and Mom and Pop passed the mashed potatoes.

A passerby might have thought him in a trance, but he missed nothing in his darkling backdrop: the smells of winter blooming flowers, clean coolness of blackjack oak, damp pepper of Spanish moss. The sounds were of early evening teevee silliness, dinner, children's squabbles. He was a shaded meteor plumbing a twinkling universe. The night made even more acute the runner's senses, lent more poignancy to his aloneness, made his fast pace seem even faster, generated an urgency, a subdued excitement in the act of solitary motion.

The seamless sphere of his reverie was occasionally marred by some missing link in a Chevrolet who would yell: "Hey Runner Runner!" Cassidy would flip a finger reflexively and otherwise indicate his considerable displeasure by some base epithet. For years he had tried ignoring them to no effect. Now his policy was to lash back. They were surprised when the runner (a gentle creature, no?) would exhibit such aggressiveness. What it was in human nature that generated this irresistible urge to bait the runner, he did not know. But he knew by now that it was deep, formidable, and nearly universal. An English writer of a different era recorded the taunts of street urchins: "Hey, looke at the runner, ee's got nae clothes on!" At Cassidy some would yell "hut, two, three, four ..." and laugh at their own preposterous wit, in some cretinous confusion unable to disassociate running from the military experience.

Cassidy resented the ignorance of their intrusion. And, too, he had had things thrown at him. Too many people seemed to think the runner would have no spunk (after all, running itself is the act of a coward, is it not?), thus he found automatic belligerence a healthy and effective response: They shut their sorry yaps up in an almost hurt shock. Once, by sprinting nearly 200 yards, he caught up to a particularly obnoxious carload of rowdies who, panic stricken now, were halted at an uncooperative redlight. Thinking themselves safe after rolling up the windows and locking the doors, they watched in horror as Cassidy ran up the trunk and over the top of the car without breaking stride.

In training he was fearless, felt himself too easily capable of violence. He often contemplated what he would do if someone stopped and challenged him. He figured he would put them through a little of what his life was all about first; taunt them into giving chase. He would stay just a little out of their grasp, egg them on and on. Perhaps they would make half a mile or so, depending on how well he could lead them on, perhaps their own sense of pride might surface, a byproduct of a terrible misconception about what was actually happening. Shorter had once run the legs off an entire gang of hooligans in the hills of New Mexico, despite already being tired from a 15-mile run. You would watch for the signs, Cassidy thought, the ones you knew so very well; the pain, the bewilderment, the blankness that would eventually come close to despair. He would make it a challenge, so they would forget their original purpose and keep on going just to show this bastard, this ... this ... (then it would dawn)
runner.

Then he would simply turn and face them. He would take on anyone like that, he thought. He would take on Muhammad Ali, so long as he could direct the preliminaries.

Cassidy knew very well that he could take men, otherwise strong and brave men, to places they had never been before. Places where life and death overlapped in surreal valleys of muscle gloom and heart despair, where one begins to realize once more that nothing really matters at all and that stopping (death?) is all; where all men can finally get the slick skin of civilization off and see that soft pink glow inside that tells you—in both cunnilingus and bullet wounds—
that there are no secrets.

A visitor's taste, in short, of the distance runner's daily fare. He would fight them then, if they still wanted to, after they knew. But they wouldn't want to, he was sure of that.

They would walk away with nothing more than a hard-won understanding.

This night no one stopped. No one gave form to verbal menace. No one did any more than add his simple-minded bleating to the dark background of the runner's ritual.

Cassidy flew through the night.

"Bruce." he said into the telephone, "I need to talk to you. I'm at Doobey now but I can't talk on this hall phone. Can you meet me at the Nineties or something."

"Sure. Where have you been? I thought you were going to do quarters with me this afternoon. Did you run?"

"Of course, I ran. I just did ten hard. Listen, I had to go see Dick Doobey in his office this afternoon. Something's up. Can you meet me there in 15 minutes or so?"

"Okay. But I'm not going to sit there drinking beer all night like you guys. I'll have a couple and .,."

"Okay, okay. No problem. I gotta take a shower, just got in. See you there."

The Nineties was not crowded during the middle of the week; Fat Fred, the owner, was so exultant having Bruce Denton in his place that he bought him a pitcher of beer. It was an enthusiasm he felt he could afford, there being a relative dearth of gold medal winners in Kernsville. The two runners retreated to a corner booth.

"So what is the crisis?" Denton was pouring as thejukebox maintained: "...
.and time... washes clean ... lu-huvs wounds unseen..."

"You've seen the stuff in the papers this morning?" "Who hasn't?"

"Well, they have decided that since I was the one who typed up the petition and also the one who delivered the signatures to the A.D., that this whole little number was conceived and, uh, 'perpetrated' as they say, by myself and one or two other unnamed conspirators."

"How do they figure? Every jock in this school is so pissed off..."

"Basically I'm convinced they really are as fucking stupid as they make out. When they couldn't find themselves an outside agitator ..."

"I noticed you carefully disassociated yourselves from the Yippie element."

"Lot of good it did. Bruce, do you know that Doobey sat there and told me he didn't really blame me for all this fuss, he figures the real blame should be levelled at all the communist and left-leaning professors on the other side of the campus who have been working on my poor litde brain all these years."

"Good god. Do you suppose he's serious?"

"Oh he's serious all right. He isn't a humorous man. He kept coming up with all these military analogies. 'In the Army, by God, you did what you were told, or they broke your plate—over your head.' That kind of thing. And then he goes into this stuff about my professors. Christ! Here I've been taught by fuel-injected right-wing loonies and closet Nazis for three years and that idiot thinks I've been brainwashed by some leftist academic conspiracy. My godamned econ teacher thinks Milton Friedman is a liberal! Hell, if this campus got a decent teacher, they'd have the son of a bitch re-binding books behind the stacks somewhere ..."

"All right, calm down. What happened exactly?"

Cassidy finished his second glass with a grimace. He was still dehydrated from the run.

"They're taking a hard line. Apparently what's got everyone all stirred up is the fact that a bunch of football players signed the damned thing. Apparently Doobey was called on the carpet by Prigman himself about it. I guess if it weren't for the football players involved, they could probably just write the thing off by saying the spring sports guys have gone commie on us. You know, we're all in individual events anyway, not part of, you know, a team effort..."

"Oh say, that makes sense..."

"And I think I'm beginning to get wind of a little gambit that smells something like the bottom of somebody's locker."

"Lively analogy." The jukebox played: "...
has anybody here seen sweet thang..."

"Doobey said something to the effect that he figured something like this was going on during the season, otherwise with the talent they had, they would have never gone four and six. Get the drift?"

"What!" Denton was incredulous. "They're gonna try and pin..."

Cassidy let the air out of his lungs. Physically he was keen, immensely strong at this point in his life; he could run a hundred miles. Yet he was starting to feel some smothering weight descending over him, a pale shroud he was helpless to evade.

I feel old, he thought. I have been dead once, I guess you can't get any older than that. But that was long ago, in the salt salt sea.

To Denton, still sitting looking unbelieving at the ceiling, he said: "Bruce, I'm so close. It seems so stupid to have something like this..."

"Yes. I know. Hang tough, don't get nervous in the pack

Three days later, a befuddled Coach Cornwall called Cassidy into his office and told him that due to circumstances over which he, as track coach, had no control, Quenton Cassidy would be henceforth suspended from participation in intercollegiate athletics.

21. Steven C. Prigman

Southeastern University President Steven C. Prig-man had once sat on the Florida Supreme Court bench and during his seven-year tenure had taken part in several illustrious decisions that stood as landmarks in jurisprudential comedy. The most famous of these much-read cases involved a young black man who had the audacity to request admission to Southeastern University's law school. He wasn't exactly turned down, they just lost his application. The third time they lost it, he filed suit and was quickly hooted out of circuit court. From there he took his appeal to the august tribunal upon which sat his Honor Justice Prigman and six of his cronies. Taking scant time to deliberate after oral arguments, they came down with a decision that said, in so many words, that if God Almighty had wanted all races to go to white law schools, Negroes would have been born with perfect LSAT scores and calfskin briefcases. Some months later, the United States Supreme Court, ignoring entirely the interesting logic used to arrive at the lower court decision, overturned the case at the same time it issued its
Brown vs. Board of Education
ruling, and sent it back to Justice Prigman and company without so much as a "nice try."

At this point the justices showed some real imagination. Declaring that the U.S. Supreme Court had made its determination on "constitutional grounds" alone, they decided that if there were other considerations for keeping the black out, then the decision wouldn't apply. Therefore, they decided to appoint a local circuit judge to be a "special master" to make a study of the situation and find out what would happen were a black man to enter the law school. The "special master" quickly found out that all hell would, of course, break loose; this would take the form of mass student withdrawals and attendant financial collapse. There would be great pandemonium in the school itself: riots, vandalism, even food fights. The "special master" was able to determine these dire consequences by the tried and true interview method ("Are you going to riot?" "Of course!" "Okay.").

And so it was that the Honorable Florida Supreme Court was able, in all good conscience, to blatantly disobey a direct mandate of the United States Supreme Court by saying that their new ruling denied admission to the black not on constitutional grounds, but on the inherent police power of the government to prevent violence. That the said violence would be caused by law breaking (and perhaps imaginary) whites, concerned them not a whit. The young black man, out of money and patience, disgustedly threw in the towel and went North to procure his degree.

Steven C. Prigman had always been a charter member of the Florida Panhandle good old boy school. Sipping 15-year-old bourbon, his handsome ruddy face aglow with good humor, he could and did charm the fangs off water moccasins. Although Sidecar Doobey often referred to him as a "snub-nose litde twerp," the two men understood each other very well. Doobey was very influential in helping Prigman relocate to an academic setting when the jurist decided to step down from the bench.

And when he finally did so, he left Tallahassee with no small measure of pride that he and his associates had been able, for even a short period of time, to staunch the flow of the 20th Century. Their golden moment still preserved in Volume 93 of the second Southern Reporter series, to this day provides many fascinating hours of comic relief for law students all across the country.

Dick Doobey had felt a trifle ill at ease the day before on his way to Prigman's office. His squishy, rippled-soled coaching shoes squeaked embarrassingly as he walked up the marble steps to the president's office.

"Hello, Roberta," he winked at the middle-aged and not unattractive brunette, wondering if the old man was getting any. She looked up pleasantly, greeted him and then ushered him into the quiet office. She was a charming woman, but Doobey knew she did not like him. Her smile was that of a head waiter.