Once a Runner (23 page)

The body heat from his run would keep him warm for a while longer, then he would start to get chilled and have to get moving again to stay warm. His bright nylon shorts and yellow t-shirt hung on him like colorful mud. He was drenched clear through to his childhood. At last he saw them drive up. They were laughing about something as they shared an umbrella to the porch. When the guy kissed her, Cassidy felt a stab of pain that was close to physical, and therefore within the penumbra of hurts he told himself he could bear. As she turned to go inside, Cassidy called to her. The fellow, peering out from under his umbrella, stopped halfway down the sidewalk and squinted towards Cassidy in the shadows of the old tree. The umbrella man looked grim. It appeared his duty was not yet finished; at first unsure of himself, he finally opted to return to the porch. Cassidy stepped out of the gloom and the porch light fell on him, gleaming in the rain. He called again.

"Quenton!" she was afraid she sounded a litde too excited to see him. Then she remembered umbrella man, who was still coming. "It's all right, George. I'll see you Saturday." Still looking grim, he stalked back to his car and drove off. He had seen the way she ran out there in the rain like that, up to that crazy galoot in the gym shorts. And he was
supposed
to be out of the picture.

"Cass, what in the world are you doing?" she gestured in a general manner, taking in the rain, the night, the silliness of it all. She seemed amused.

"Thought I would come to see you."

"But, you're drenched. You've been standing...**

"I saw your light wasn't on, so I decided to wait for a while, at least until I got too cold." She tilted her head in amusement, like she used to all the time, and finally put her arms around him. He seemed not to know what to do. She was getting wet now, too, but seemed not to notice. She thought: He's harder now, even than before, all cartilage and bone and skin. She wondered if he was eating right; perhaps he would make himself sick. Something moved deep inside her and she had to stifle it willfully.

"I, uh, guess I was missing you," he said with his chin on her wet forehead, "and I suppose I got sick and tired of it all and just bolted on in here ..." Something occurred to her and she leaned back away from him,

"You ran here!" It sounded like an accusation. He was puzzled.

"Yeah, I..."

"You ran into town from out there, twelve miles. And it's been raining like crazy all..."

"I don't have a car out there and ..."

"Cass, you ran twelve miles in the rain to get here and you're going to have to run twelve miles back unless you call a cab or something ..." He appeared unconcerned.

"It's my overdistance day anyway. Listen Andrea, I wanted to talk to you because.,. are you listening?" She was shaking her head.

"Yes," she said softly.

"The last time we seemed to be like strangers. I've been feeling so horrible about the whole thing, I just get so frustrated that we can't seem to get anything straight..."

"Cass, I thought we had been all through that."

"I just keep thinking there must be some way to put it, some way that would allow you to understand."

"I think I understand." She looked into his eyes and thought that though once they seemed to balance the hardness of the rest of him, now they added to it.

"I think I've always understood," she said. "I just don't think I can live with it. Sometimes it seems too much for you, too." He looked down, shook the rain from his forehead. She was nearly drenched now too.

"Don't you want to come in?" she asked.

"No. I'll be going, I guess, I'm starting to get chilled."

"Cass," she said, pulling him to her again. "What is this all going to get you? You've dropped out of school, you're not going to graduate with your class, you ..."

"I ran a 3:58.6 mile the other night."

"What?"

"No race or anything. Just Bruce out there with a stopwatch and me, at ten o'clock at night. I had to go around the joggers even. Funny, I always dreamed how it would be going under four the first time, lining up, the pace, how the crowd would get excited when we came through the three quarters under three minutes ..." He looked at her with a sad litde smile. "But there it was, just me and Bruce-and a bunch of joggers wondering what in the hell was going on. Just another godamned workout..." There was something that sounded vaguely like satisfaction in his voice.

"Quenton, why don't you come back into town? Where does it say you have to live like this, make yourself miserable like this?"

"It will all be over soon anyway. I'll be running Walton next month."

"And then what? You've already said you can't win. Even your exalted Bruce Denton says that. So then what do you do? Go back to your litde cave and keep driving yourself until you are the one they talk about, the one they are afraid of like you're afraid of Walton? Is that what's important to you? Or maybe you'd be content to just go crazy trying? Then no one could say you compromised, could they? If something inside you just snapped?"

He looked down. She knew then he would not fight with her.

Then she did something that was not quite her and that did not work very well. It was a mistake and she knew it right away but it was such a precisely feminine gesture that it was perhaps dictated by some ancient genetic pattern she was helpless to control. With a pained little toss of the head she wrenched free and ran towards the porch; it was one of those shabby you'd-better-come-after-me-now gestures and she knew by the time she got to the porch that it was a bad show all the way around.

She turned to call, to try to take it back, perhaps.

But the runner had disappeared in the darkening rain.

30. Whirlpool

Mary Lou Hunsinger sat in the gurgling whirlpool, her beehive slumping somewhat; outside it still rained like a bitch. At that very moment somewhere out in the glistening night, a homeward bound Quenton Cassidy came upon, was startled by, and hopped over a poor black snake trying to keep from drowning by crawling up to the high ground represented by State Road 26. Cassidy was just about halfway home.

Mary Lou's frown, of late an almost permanent fixture on her otherwise attractive face, was now a pouty badge of impatience at Dick Doobey, whom she thought rather a clod. On the home front her mother would be getting dinner for her two slope-headed sons, which meant that by the time she finally arrived, they would be as mean as a pack of starving blue jays (Mary Lou knew very well that as evil as the boys were, her mother was a shrew in her own right; she didn't even mean well).

She considered these bubbly interludes more or less in the line of duty. Not that she didn't take some basic carnal pleasure in them, but they required massive revetting of her expensively maintained hairdo. For all of its architectural integrity her beehive tended to sag in this steamy sanctum in much the same way as Mary Lou's own flagging hopes.

In this surreal chamber he brought her all manner of world weariness, from his cold, church-crazed wife to the latest technical esoterica of his chosen profession. She bore it all with good will and no small effort to comfort and counsel. But what, after all was she supposed to know about the weakside linebacker's responsibility in defensing the quarterback roll-out option out of the wishbone? As to the other, she had no difficulty whatever in flatly recommending that Doobey drop his "dry-hole little bitch" in order to fake up with Mary Lou herself in some kind of more widely sanctioned arrangement. It was a scenario she had come to think of as the only non-felonious way she would ever get out from under those killing monthly payments to five trusting department and clothing stores, two "friendly" small loan companies, and "the Mastercharge," all of which her former mate—a two-fisted, bourbon-crazed paint and body man—had been so thoughtless as to leave as his only enduring legacy.

"Paint and body men's like a nationwide brotherhood, hon," he would warn ominously, "I could be in Tucson on Wednesday pulling down a hunnert and fifty dollars a day like that!" He would snap his stained fingers cockily. "Like doctors," he would say, "always in demand." When he finally did take off, he had sense enough not to go to Tucson.

The powdery pink flamingo on the front lawn now seemed a mocking reminder of more opulent days when she had nothing better to do than to hop in the station wagon and go shoppin' to her heart's content. She never looked at the sun-faded litde plaster bird standing forlornly on its rusting pipestem leg without wondering where it was exactly she had gone so wrong. They never mentioned this in Home Ec.

Wrestling with the viscous mathematical intricacies of 18% per annum interest, compounded monthly in accordance with federal statutes, she was driven first to secretarial work (she hated waitressing) and thence to Dick Doobey's private whirlpool.

The head coach finally arrived and let himself in with his own key. The strain of his staff meeting was still on his face. He apologized with the profuse sincerity of a man unquestionably willing to debase himself in order to maintain a good thing.

"That's all right, honey," she said. "I got nothin' better to do but sit here and get my little love button parboiled."

A flash of uncomplicated lust shot through Dick Doobey's loins as she giggled at her own line. Doobey noticed that she had brought a quart bottle of Southern Comfort, which now sat on the moist floor beside an open can of ginger ale. He made a grimace.

She watched him undress with contained distaste. He had long ago lost the trimness that was a by-product of his athletic days; his arms and neck were unattractively sunburned to the edges of his short-sleeved shirt, much in the manner of a gas station attendant.

His stomach rolled around loosely, the result of his long afternoons on the high pyramidal coaching tower, looking stern while drinking Budweiser (hidden in a styrofoam Gator-ade holder!), ostensibly surveying his minions scattered about the 25 acre practice fields—a general watching his field commanders through powerful binoculars—but in actuality keeping a rather dutiful eye on Simmons Hall, the nursing school dormitory, where one could (were one extremely diligent) catch an occasional flash of nubile young breast or mouth watering young thigh.

Dick Doobey loved his work.

He simply couldn't understand why some critics would wish to cause him anguish by suggesting that he was not doing a good job and should go away. He sincerely suspected communist influence of some kind.

When he had finally shed his damp garments and was settling his white bottom slowly into the scalding water opposite Mary Lou, he had managed to put out of his mind the distress of his latest staff meeting, where he had unhappily discovered once more that his staff was almost as much in the dark as he was. Football was becoming a damned complicated game and Doobey figured there was probably some foreign influence behind that as well.

"How did it go, hon?" she asked, shifting around to allow room for his considerable bulk. He was almost setded now, leaning back and heaving a sigh of relief.

"Aw shit honey, I don't know. I wanted that stumpfucker Erickson to read up some on this new wishbone formation— 'member the one I tole you about where they can shift from weakside to strongside and run a option off the... no? Honey I just tole you about it last week."

"Well godamn angel you know I don't remember that kinda stuff very well."

"Oh, well, it don't matter anyway," he said, sinking now to his neck in the roiling water, "I'll just have to do it myself, like everything else." He smiled at that, and began probing for her with his big toe.

"Now honey don't you want a drink or somethin'?" she asked.

"Of that sweet horse piss?" He continued probing. She dodged with precision, as her sex learns to do at an early age in the republic. A thought struck her.

"Hon, I finished typing that talk for tomorrow, it's on your desk if you want to take it home tonight."

"Christamighty. I forgot about that altogether." The misery he had almost shed now settled on him again and Mary Lou was sorry she said anything.

"I wish I had some way to get outa that thing," he said mournfully.

"Why do you have to do it?"

"Old Man Prigman, uh, required it. Told me I'd never make conductor until I could face my own music. But lord, standing up there in the Plaza while a bunch of them snippy long-haired twats ask a bunch of asshole questions. Most of 'em
don't even go to football games!"

"I thought that stuff was over."

"Over hell. They still got that whatever they call it, Conscription of Athletes or whatever the hell they call themselves. Prigman said it wasn't a godamn thing we could do about it except ignore it. Can you beat that? Here in America, and you can't do anything about people getting together to bad-mouth football!"

"Why can't you get rid of 'em?"

"Prigman said if we didn't nip it in the bud with that damn track guy, we would have to learn to live with it. Said we couldn't start throwing all of 'em out, it'd look too bad in the press. But boy, if I was runnin' the show ..."

He rubbed his hands over his bristly head as if in some deep pain. "They keep issuing these mother lovin' press releases, Jeezus!"

"Aw honey," she said, taking his left foot, massaging gently. Slowly she worked her way up the hairy calf.