Crash (15 page)

Tonight, even though the coach ran us ragged at practice, I heard Webb sprinting past the house.

My father bought a new spark plug for the mower. Now the gas cap has disappeared.

A
PRIL
20

I hardly ate breakfast. I didn’t pay attention in class. I kept thinking of the race-off today, and the Relays Friday.

The four-by-one-hundred-meter relay means four runners each run a hundred meters. Each runner passes the baton to the next runner. The baton looks like a foot-long pipe, but it’s light, it’s made of aluminum.

Since I’m the fastest, I’ll probably run the anchor leg. The anchor gets the baton last. The anchor crosses the finish line. The anchor is your chance to win. The anchor gets the glory.

All day long I pictured Friday’s race: Huber leads off, he hands the baton to Noles halfway through the first turn, Noles tears down the backstretch, hands to Caruso. I crouch. I look back past my shoulder. They’re all coming, eight sprinters sprinting. I pick out Caruso. He’s leaning into the final turn, he’s fifteen meters from me … ten meters … I take off, I drag my left hand behind me, palm open, fingers spread (Hit it! Hit it! Now!). I feel the baton smack into my left hand, I curl my fingers around it, I switch it to my right hand and take off
down the chalk-striped brick-colored lane. I’m dead last, ten meters behind everybody. It’s hopeless. By the time I hit the straightaway I’m passing the next-to-last runner, then the next, and the next. Forty thousand people leap to their feet. Eighty thousand eyes slide from the leader to the kid who’s coming out of nowhere. “Who is he?” they ask, and the answer comes, “It’s Coogan! Crash Coogan of Springfield!” I pass another, and now there are only three ahead of me, but there’s not enough time. “He can’t do it!” they scream, and now there are two ahead of me and the red ribbon across the finish line seems close enough to be a blindfold and they’re hanging from the railing and stomping on the scoreboard and there’s only one ahead of me now and the human hurricane is chasing me around the track, blowing at my back, and I’m on the leader’s shoulder and for an instant the world freezes because we’re dead even—seeing us sideways we look like one—and I remember the coach saying in a close race the one who leans will win, so now with one last gasp I throw my arms back and my chest forward and the red ribbon breaks like a butterfly across my shirt. I slow down, I stop. I stand on the brick-colored track. I heave the baton into the air high as the pennants wave over the stadium, and the hurricane finally catches me and I close my eyes and let it wash over me: “OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOGAN!”

I kept rerunning the dream all day until the coach’s whistle blew and he called “Race-off!” and there I was, heading across
the field to the starting line. The others trotted. I walked. I wasn’t in a hurry.

The stands were empty. A school bus moved in the distance beyond the football goalpost. Under the crossbar and between the uprights, like in a framed picture, stood three people.

For once, Webb’s parents didn’t look so old, not compared to the man standing between them. He was shorter than them, and real skinny, like the prairie winds were eroding him away. But he was standing straight and by himself—no cane, no walker, just two legs. Ninety-three years old. Maybe it was the Missouri River mud.

The thought came to me: they would have liked each other, Scooter and Henry Wilhide Webb III. Two storytellers. Both from the great flat open spaces, one a prairie of grass, one of water. Both came to watch when no one else was there.

Why exactly was he here? Did he know about me? Did he know his great-grandson could not win the race-off, and so would not run in the Penn Relays?

I wondered if Webb felt safe in his great-grandfather’s bed.

The cinder track crunched under my feet. There were five of us in the race: me, Webb, two other seventh graders, and a sixth grader. The coach put us in lanes. Me and Webb were side by side.

Again, he hadn’t said a word to me all day. We milled around behind the starting blocks, nervous, shaking out our arms and legs, everything as quiet as if the coach had already said, “Ready.”

The other team members—jumpers, throwers, distance runners—had all stopped their practicing to watch. A single hawk, its wingtips spread like black fingers, kited over the school, and suddenly I saw something: a gift. A gift for a great-grandfather from North Dakota, maybe for all great-grandfathers. But the thing was, only one person could give the gift, and it wasn’t the great-grandson, not on his fastest day alive. It was me.

I hated it being me. I tried not to see, but everywhere I looked, there it was.

The gift.

“Let’s go, boys,” said the coach.

A voice closer to me said, “Good luck.”

It was Webb, sticking out his dorky hand, smiling that old dorky smile of his. No button. I shook his hand, and it occurred to me that because he was always eating my dust, the dumb fishcake had never won a real race and probably didn’t know how. And now there wasn’t time.

“Don’t forget to lean,” I told him. His face went blank.

The coach called,
“Ready.”

I got down, feet in the blocks, right knee on the track, thumbs and forefingers on the chalk, eyes straight down—and right then, for the first time in my life, I didn’t know if I wanted to win.

“
Set.
”

Knee up, rear up, eyes up.

The coach says the most important thing here is to focus your mind. You are a coiled steel spring, ready to dart out at the
sound of the gun. So what comes into my head? Ollie the one-armed octopus. He didn’t disappear till the gun went off.

I was behind—not only Webb, but everybody. No problem. Within ten strides I picked up three of them. That left Webb. He was farther ahead of me than usual, but that was because of my rotten start.

At the halfway mark, where I usually passed him, he was still ahead, and I still didn’t know if I wanted to win. I gassed it. The gap closed. I could hear him puffing, like a second set of footsteps. Cinder flecks from his feet pecked at my shins. I was still behind. The finish line was closing. I kicked in the afterburners. Ten meters from the white string we were shoulder to shoulder, breath to breath, grandson to great-grandson, and it felt new, it felt good, not being behind, not being ahead, but being even, and just like that, a half breath from the white string, I knew. There was no time to turn to him. I just barked it out: “Lean!” He leaned, he threw his chest out, he broke the string. He won.

A
PRIL
25

I feel strange.

I’ve been feeling this way since last Wednesday, since I lost the race-off. Lost. If I say the word aloud, it makes me shiver.

At first it was a strange-bad feeling. The instant Webb broke the string, I regretted what I had done. As we slowed down, he turned to me. He was confused. I knew what he was going to say. “Did you let me win?” But then the team was mobbing him, and I jogged off the track. The three people still stood under the crossbar, smiling their faces off.

Thursday, I didn’t go to practice. On the walk home I looked once back at the track. The four relay runners were practicing baton handoffs. I felt sick.

No practice on Friday. The coach took the four relay runners to Franklin Field in his car. Their race was scheduled at 2:20 P.M. At 2:20 P.M. I was sitting in math class. I tried to picture the race at Franklin Field, but—funny thing—it kept being shoved aside by another picture. This one showed Henry
Wilhide Webb III, standing, pumping his arms, shouting, cheering.

This morning the announcement came on the PA: the Springfield team had come in second at the Penn Relays, our best finish ever. The principal gave the names of the three eighth graders; then he said, “And the anchor leg was run by Penn Webb, who brought the team from last place to second.”

I could hear cheers from his homeroom down the hall. Inside, I cheered too.

A
PRIL
30

I was in the kitchen doing my new job—cutting food coupons out of magazines and newspapers—when I heard my mother yelp. I ran to the living room. She was staring at Scooter’s walker. It was lying at the foot of the stairs.

She glanced into his room. “Not there.” She dashed up the stairs. I followed. I heard her say, “Scooter.”

He was in the hallway, staring at the picture of himself in his Navy uniform, the picture painted by his daughter, my mother.

She stood behind him. She put her arms around him. “How long have you been here?”

“A-bye,” he said.

“And you came up without your walker?”

“A-bye.”

We looked at the picture with him.

“You know,” my mom said to me, “there’s one way this painting is different from the others.”

“What’s that?” I said.

“He never posed for it.”

“He didn’t?”

“No. And I didn’t paint it from a photograph, either.”

“How did you?”

She snuggled closer to him. “From memory. He wasn’t home very much in those days, so when I did see him, I looked and looked at him until he was locked into my mind’s eye. I was terrified I’d forget what he looked like when he went away again. When I painted this, he was as clear in my head as if he were standing there.” She kissed his ear. “Right, Scoot?”

“A-bye.”

“And you see how he looks like he’s saying something?”

“Yeah.”

“He is. He’s saying, ‘I’ll be home soon, Lorraine.’”

“A-bye.”

Back downstairs, she joined me at the kitchen table, clipping coupons. “It’s funny,” she said. “A while ago I was remembering all that. And I was thinking how little I saw you kids and how little you saw me. And there was a minute back then when I actually was afraid you might forget what I look like.”

“No such luck,” I said.

She laughed. “I know it sounds silly. But that was just before I told my boss I was going part-time.”

About Scooter making it up the stairs—I was surprised, but I wasn’t. Two nights before, I had mixed up some Missouri River mud. I took it into Scooter’s room and made up a story about a school science project. Then I dipped his big toe in it.