Once a Runner (9 page)

He says he's "smitten" with me, and I guess he means it. But if there's ever a question of a running thing or Andrea, guess who's second fiddle? Have I ever put up with a boy like this that you can remember?

I wish I could drag him home over Thanksgiving so you could get a look at him, but as usual he's going to be gone. Can't you just see him with Daddy? What if they got into the war or something like that? But I guess they could talk about fishing-Quenton knows all about fish from skin diving in West Palm.

Leece, am I sounding like a little lovesick puppy? Me, the Ice Maiden of Coral Gables High? Brother.

One thing I'll say about him, he didn't flinch when I told him about medical school. Most of the guys I've ever mentioned it to just give me this weak little smile. They're right on the verge of saying something like, oh, you're much too attractive to blah blah blah and if I had a gun right then I would shoot to kill.

I must say Quenton took it right in stride. But then, I guess delusions of grandeur don't startle someone whose real goal in life is to set a world's record (he told me not to EVER EVER tell a soul in the world about that, but telling your twin is not really like telling someone else, is it?)

I don't know, maybe I'm crazy, too. I just don't seem to be able to do much of anything about it. Has your date ever wandered around the dance floor at a disco place with a five-dollar bill in his hand telling people he wanted to tip the band but he couldn't find them?

Leece, I was paralyzed. I was the only one, but I couldn't speak, I was laughing so hard. And he didn't care about the weird looks he got, not at all. What is it about this one?

Am I in love, Leece? For true this time, for real?

Love, Andy

12. The Indictment

It was a do-nothing Thursday afternoon. With a junior college meet coming up the freshmen and sophomores were constrained to playfullyjog five miles. Cassidy and Mizner elected to go the ten-mile course with a few others. The pace would be brisk, around 58 minutes, so extended conversation was necessarily restricted to the first three or four miles. The group headed out on a loop they called "Tobacco Road" because the unpaved road wound through a wooded section south of town replete with shacks, wincing dogs and barefoot children; it was rumored that the course had been named by Marty Liquori years earlier when he was down for the Southeastern Relays. It was like running back in time 40 years. But the runners waved to the locals and the locals waved right back. There was a friendliness born of familiarity and although two entirely different worlds eclipsed each other at that point, by some process of emotional osmosis each had come to respect the other's struggles; there was the homey aroma of inexpensive foods in preparation; greens, fritters and such.

Someone wanted to know what was to be done about Nubbins.

"What about him?" Cassidy asked. "I thought he had become a pillar of the community." They spoke in quick bursts on the exhale.

"Old wine, new bottle," said Hosford, a pale, literary type.

"Haven't you heard the latest?" asked Mizner. "Oh, this is too good. Last Tuesday night, after he won that freshman meet against Old Miss, he got to feeling pretty full of himself. He got on his High Plains Drifter kick. He dolls himself up in his godamn Roy Rogers shirt and his shit-kicking boots ..."

"I don't see anything so wrong ..."

"Wait a minute, let me tell it," Mizner was starting to snicker breathlessly, remembering. "And he had this blanket that he stole from the plane when we went to Atlanta. No lie, this is the honest-to-god truth. He cut a godamn hole in this piece of Eastern Airlines property to make himself a poncho, see, and then he proceeds to the State Theatre with that birdbrained girlfriend of his, that Betty Sue ..."

"Aw, come on ..." Cassidy was not averse to certain brands of extemporaneous craziness.

"Well, trying to be objective, now," Hosford interrupted, "he was making even more of an ass of himself than usual. There was a big crowd in the lobby waiting for the first show to get out. Nubbins kept cavorting around doing his Clint Eastwood material—which is pretty silly considering the little shit is only 5-8. Anyway, someone in the crowd would get nervous and giggle, like, you know, from sheer embarrassment. So then Nubbins would get even more loud and rambunctious, thinking he was, you know,
entertaining.
I mean, I was
there.
I wanted to
hide,
man ..."

"I think I get the picture," said Cassidy. "Let's pick this pace up a little bit."

The shower room was a fine place for deep, conspiratorial thinking. Cassidy slumped in the weariness that was his chosen mantle, lost in the hot torrent of water. Mizner, more chipper, sang a gurgling aria at the next nozzle.

"Are you still doing the Honor Court thing?" Cassidy asked from inside his waterfall. His left knee was tormenting him.

"Yeah. Clerk of the Court. That means I get to man the tape recorder and perform other taxing duties. Sure looks good on the resume, though."

"But you have physical access to the courtroom itself, right? I mean, can you get in whenever you want to, get ahold of letterhead, stuff like that?"

"Sure, that's the job. What's the deal?"

"Oh, just a Classic," he bubbled, "just an All Time Classic is what it is..."

The Honor Code at Southeastern University followed in that fine old American tradition of overcoming defeat by 1) pronouncing some unmitigated disaster a resounding triumph and then 2) smiling pleasantly in the face of even the most crushing contrary evidence.

Cassidy figured such addlepate stubbornness helped to explain more than a few of such amusing collective national lapses as the electoral college, the Eighteenth Amendment, and "our efforts" in Vietnam. This curious process is necessitated by the perversely unrelenting and self-damning refusal of the ruling classes to admit that somebody important fucked up. But rest assured, Cassidy would say, that if things get really squirrely—the meltdown
was
a possibility after all, the warhead
could be
armed by accident—some clerk/typist somewhere is definitely going to lose his or her job.

If such a principle can sustain a war or a nuclear energy policy, it could surely sustain a student conduct code in a land-grant university in the deep south. The Southeastern University Honor Code, in brief, commanded far more in the way of belly laughs than respect from the student body.

The program was based upon the presumption that the Honest People were the best sentinels for guarding against Evil and generally preserving The System, whose morality was defined broadly by our Christian Ethics, our American sense of Fair Play, and our sincere conviction that Cheaters Are Only Hurting Themselves. After all, who knew when, some five or so years from now at some important cocktail party, your boss from J. Williston Beckman Widget Co. might wander over and request the dimensions of the Parthenon? And then where would you be?

The way it worked was, when you saw someone cribbing, you were supposed to turn them in. There would follow a kind of doll house due process, which the law students used as a kind of practice court.

It was all in good fun, of course. Good fun for everyone except the few unlucky "defendants" who were actually dragged before the child-tribunal, slump-shouldered and highly chastened. Generally, however, the Chancellor, exercising his sound discretion, would order something like "15 make-up credits," thus swelling the rolls of courses like GEO 101 (Rocks for Jocks), MUS 101 (Mozart on a Stick) and other cake walks. The defendant could then graduate on schedule and go to work in the regional purchasing depaitment of Wal-Mart, feeling not only had he paid his debt to society, but also that in a pinch he could identify a feldspar or hum a few bars of
Le Pathetique.

But just as an aircraft that won't fly is a failure by definition (no matter how soft the seats or snazzy the tail design), so Southeastern's Honor Code was a failure for the simple reason that it inspired more criminality than it prevented.

The wide and airy gulf between ideal and reality was in no instance more clearly demonstrated than the day Cassidy saw an angry student standing, hands on hips, by an "Honor Fruit Stand," an instantaneously bankrupt attempt by student government True Believers to sell apples, bananas, and oranges in convenient bins around campus by attaching containers for bright-eyed students to drop their coins into.

The stunned student Cassidy saw that day was upset, glaring at the empty fruit bin (the program had been abandoned quickly for lack of, ah, cash flow), for he turned on his heel and stalked away, exclaiming to no one in particular: "Godamn! No more free fruit!"

Cassidy was bewildered by the honor system and he generally resented the kind of education he was getting, especially during his first two years at Southeastern, a university large enough to insist on grading humanities examinations by computer.

The way he saw it, mechanical testing per se was not so bad, but the requirements of binary logic coupled with a faculty wholly devoid of imagination led to exam questions that bordered on high comedy. He would never forget one such question. The second quarter of Humanities had concerned itself with the early Greek philosophers, basic religion, architecture, and art (no one ever accused the department of being unambitious). One nearly senile question writer, an associate professor who lived with several cats and was said to be a hoot on a concertina, in a giddy attempt to syllogisti-cally mix his various marbles, offered this poser:
Plato was to Jesus Christ as the Parthenon was to: A. The Appian Way, B. St. Peters Basilica; C. The Aqueducts, D. None of the above.

Cassidy cared little whether he won such contests, left exams in a blind fury, and plotted dark revenge. Time after time he asked instructors about the lunacy of such a system and they were generally sheepish in attempting to defend such vapid academic skullduggery.

Once he was in a section taught by no less than the head of the department. After the midterm exam, Cassidy angrily pointed out the specific page in
Madame Bovary
that demonstrated his answer to a very obscure question was just as correct as the one espoused by the department (and, more importantly, the computer). The department head, a defeated, grey-headed and somewhat confused old man, looked up from his unkempt notes and, without the grace of any sort of humor, said between thin white lips:

"No one promised you there would be universal justice, you know."

Cassidy thought: This addled old fart has lost the ability or will to teach, perhaps, but he can still impart useful knowledge. Obliquely; always
obliquely.

It was late at night and an unmistakable edge of conspiracy excited the air in Cassidy's room as he unfolded The Plan to Mizner and Hosford. Their jobs would be relatively simple for the now; help to be recruited and casual gossip to be chummed around the training table.

But after the scenario was laid out
in toto,
in spite of Cassidy's frantic efforts to maintain control, his room sounded like a loosely muzzled chihuahua paratrooping into a pack of highly vocal piglets.

Nowhere on campus was the Honor System more stoutly defended than Farley Hall, the main athletic dorm, where football players in particular professed for it nothing less than True Love, spiritual and enduring. Using the vernacular of the horse track, they discussed at great length the opportunities presented them by such a grab-bag of situation ethics. They were cheating their asses off, of course, and doing so with the general high spirits of any playful and energetic group of n'er do wells who discover to their great merriment that someone has wandered off and left the tap unguarded.

The term they used was "riding," which is to say that if one were going to copy from someone else's paper, one would be "riding" that person through the exam. Such a technique was not hard to perfect in the crowded rooms where tests were given. One would, yawning immensely from the strain of all that heavy
pondering,
easily turn one's body this way or that (just trying to loosen up, you understand) and return to one's answer sheet with a string of pure knowledge: 3,2,2,2,1,4,2,4,1. Or was it 2,4,2?

Whether the answers were right or not was entirely the rider's responsibility. One was on one's own in selecting one's "mount." On occasion the mount was a predetermined matter. Generally though, the selection process was impromptu. A nervous footballer would study appearances carefully as students wandered into the exam room.

"A fat ugly girl is the only horse for me," insisted Harold Sloate, a pig-eyed maniac left guard who eventually made the Atlanta Falcon suicide squad. "Some folks swear by skinny guys with slide rules in they belts, but give me a ugly girl and I'll win the fuggin' Kentucky Derby. One with acne's even better..."

The whole process had become more or less a culturally ingrained institution that the athletic department looked upon with a kind of confused admiration (how could the boys, on their own, have come up with this grand way of eliminating expensive tutors?) It reached a point of outright hilarity when some of the more imaginative players showed up at the Farley training table on exam nights with cowboy boots and sterling silver spurs and waited in line for their feed yelling
^u
Yippeeyi 0 Kiyaaaay! We gone Riiiide ta-night!"

Old pig-eyed Sloate topped them all one night by bringing in a 45-pound hand-tooled imported brass-horn western working saddle, complete with fittings and reigns. Dragging it up on the coat rack, he ripped off his 10-gallon Stetson and exclaimed to the silently waiting multitudes paused mid-bite: "Make way you varmints, there's an EN 201 final tonight and the Pony Express is
comin' through!"
He received a rather nice round of applause, but the next day Dick Doobey called the head dorm counselor and told him in no uncertain terms that although he thought the, uhm, horsing around was in its own way quite humorous, it was about time to call off the shenanigans. Word was getting around, and some of the more shall we say unathletically inclined faculty members were beginning to make references to measures which, if allowed to gather momentum, just might represent the hatchet that would separate from the body politic the head of the proverbial golden goose. In short, it was time to quit pissing in the soup.