Once a Runner (19 page)

"Riderless horses in the fog," Cassidy said mysteriously. "Do you suppose it's an omen of some kind?"

"Mountless riders in the mist," Denton said just as mysteriously. "That's what we are to them. Do you suppose
we
are omens?"

Cassidy sucked on his lower lip and said nothing. There are times, he thought, when you can't get away with anything.

Denton drove out State Road 26 towards Newberry. It was a beautiful day, a crystal day with a shocking blue sky; a day for mock heroics and knowing smiles.

"I can't wait to hear The Plan," Cassidy said.

"And I can't wait to tell you. Meanwhile let's not look to horsies and moo-cows for auguries. Let us, as they say, keep our eye on the ball."

"Okay."

"And I have a little story to tell you," he gave a litde Uncle Remus kind of chuckle, "that I think you will find real entertaining." Cassidy clapped his hands stiffly, child-like.

"But first, I'd like to know some things. Like, has anyone around campus called to offer help of any kind?"

"Oh, sure, I guess so. Hosford said there have been calls from a bunch of student government honchos, Father Granely at the Catholic Student Center, the ACLU guy in town, Feldman. And, of course, all the guys want to march, boycott, demonstrate, etcetera, etcetera. Hell, for all I know, they're getting up another petition."

"Well, at least they're on your side."

"Hell
everyone
seems to be on my side. Even old Doobey said he was doing it for my own good. I get a few more people on my side and my side is going to sink."

Denton said nothing.

"And the worst is not even out yet. They have this statement—Prigman and Doobey—I mean, that they are releasing to the press this afternoon. It accuses certain spring sports athletes, of which I am singled out as the quote ringleader unquote of fomenting a veritable rebellion among the various athletes and of infecting the football team with radical-type thinking. They claim this process has been going on right under their unsuspecting noses since football and they casually mention those close games with Tennessee and Auburn right there at the end of the season. Jesus!"

Denton rolled his window all the way down, letting the air blast in, forcing him to talk above the roar.

"Well, let me tell you my little story before you get all worked up. We had a black half-miler at my college in Ohio, a very talented kid who managed to run 1:47.5 as a junior. And that looked like he was just warming up. Beautiful runner. This kid was a writer also; took it seriously and all, and actually he wasn't too bad. I read some of his stuff in the school quarterly—don't give me that look, I know what you think of my literary judgment. Anyway, this guy had a story in the magazine that had the word 'fuck' in it. It wasn't a particularly dirty story. Matter of fact, it was about some athletes and the word was used in some locker room dialogue. It wasn't even his best story. But anyway, the administration got a collective heart flutter; they confiscated all the issues of the thing right off the presses and fired everybody they could think of who didn't have their asses covered. As you can gather, our school was not exactly a bastion of libertarian thinking.

"Our 880 man was a whale of a celebrity," Denton continued. "A suit was filed and some federal judge informed the administration that as far as he knew the First Amendment was still on the books. It was a fine day for the good guys."

They rode in silence for awhile. Cassidy turned to Denton.

"And?"

"And the kid ran 1:56 that year and then disappeared altogether."

The little A-frame cabin was back up in a thicket of tall straight pines and waist-thick live oak and looked like it belonged. There were stacks of paneling and other wood lying around inside along with other signs of on-going construction; the whole place had the clean, chewing gum sweet smell of cut wood. Cassidy kicked and poked around, trying to act like a man who knew his way around a construction site.

"It's great," Cassidy said, taking the mug of coffee Denton held out, "Whose is it?" "It's mine." "Yours?"

"Right. Come on over here and sit down where it's not so dusty. I guess this will be a day of revelations, in a manner of speaking, and I'm telling you right now, it's all in the strictest of confidence. Also I don't want you to go drawing any conclusions or moralizing on me until you have heard me out."

"All right," Cassidy said. What next, he wondered.

"The place is mine, along with 15 acres, lock, stock and septic tank. I've had my brother-in-law working on it for nearly a year, but now he's gone back to school in Boston. We've done it all ourselves. It's still a little rough around the edges, but when I finish my doctorate, I plan to move Jeannie and myself out here and grow some of the godamndest exotic plants you have ever laid eyes on. There are two greenhouses in skeletal stages in the back right now ..."

"Yes, but..."

"Let me tell you and then you can handle it any way you want to. This is partly about money, as you probably guessed. I don't know how much you know about this kind of thing, but here it is: I was paid $25,000 in cash to wear blank brand of track shoes in the Olympic 5000 meter final. I have no personal knowledge, but I suspect that everyone in that race had some kind of deal. Myself, I had a signed and witnessed contract that probably would have stood up in a court of law, though I would have never run again as an amateur if it had ever gone that far."

"They gave you $25,000 ..."

"Cashier's check. Negotiated in a bank in Luxembourg." "But what if..."

"They
found out?
They
don't want to know. I suppose if they had their noses rubbed in it, they would go huffing and puffing around and start suspending people. But, if you haven't figured it out yet, the guys that run sports are lightweights; old jocks that didn't make it or couldn't leave it behind. They don't want any trouble, they just want their blazer patches and their freebie trips. And see, all the shoe contracts have a clause guaranteeing a legal defense against any attack on an athlete's amateur status caused by the payment. But like I say, the federations don't want to know about it. The communist bloc countries have been supporting their athletes completely, the Europeans have blatantly been getting paid for years, even the American sprinters have been raking it in when they go over there. Only in the past few years have our distance runners been, uh, taken care of."

"Twenty five
grand..."

"Oh, that's not all, of course. There were bonus clauses built in for various highly unlikely potentialities, such as my winning the race or setting a world record. The amounts rather reflected the starding odds against me, of course, and big numbers are just so much fun for businessmen to throw around when they're just so many paper zeroes."

Denton looked at Cassidy, who seem a little shocked.

"So, I don't want to bore you with the details, but to make a long story short, I find myself quite pleasantly, uh,
situated.
Remember, now, this is still in the strictest of confidence."

Cassidy nodded, solemn.

"And something else, Quenton, this is not to be considered the view from the top of the mountain, either. I am not trying to get you pumped up for that great bonanza waiting behind door number three ..."

"What is this to be considered, Bruce?"

"In the first place, I don't appreciate that tone. But I guess it is probably to be expected, at least until you get used to the idea. But let us just call this a modest proposal. I want you to understand a little bit of what it's all about out there, I suppose, before you go making any big decisions about your future. In a way, what has happened to you
is
a part of what it's like out there."

Denton stretched his legs out on a stack of paneling, leaned back against the wall, and gestured to Cassidy to make himself comfortable before continuing.

"I was pretty much like you at one time—and I'm going to do my best to avoid melodramatics here—I busted my hump for six years for a chance to stand on that platform and have some old fart in a blazer and straw hat put that medal around my neck. That's really all I was up to, Quenton. I wanted to stand up there and let a little tear toll down my cheek while they played the Mouseketeer Club song and the old glad rag climbed the pole. I wanted to look into the camera while old Howard interviewed me and say: Hey Ma! Look at me! I'm the King Beel"

"And?"

"And that's what I did. It was just great, Quenton, greatest experience of my life, no question about it. But then I found out that everything in the land of the free is not exactly free, but negotiable. Which doesn't mean much really, unless you let it."

"I'm not sure exactly that I follow."

"Oh, it's an all-weather loonie bin out there, Quenton, you know that. They're up to their assholes in fried chicken and non-dairy creamer; they're running around selling each other life insurance and trading wives at Tupperware parties. Their children are slack jawed and aspire to drive stereophonic vans, and everyone expects their stars—of whatever category—to be modest and well-paid."

"I don't believe I am as naive as ..."

"And before they got around to finding out I
was
a star, I couldn't get myself a bus ticket to the Kansas Relays, much less make a fortune for running a race. Would you like to know how I got to the Drake Relays that first year when I ran that 27:22?"

"They didn't invite you?"

"Hell no, they didn't invite me. Cornwall called them and said he had a graduate runner doing 28 minutes in time trials and they laughed and asked him did he time the guy with an alarm clock. So I called them back myself and asked if they would enter me if I got there on my own. They said sure. Good old American business, right? Never turn down the freebie. So I went out and borrowed enough from a small loan company for a one-way ticket. This is how your basic free enterprise system develops its Olympic champions of tomorrow."

"One way?"

"And Frank Shorter sent me an unused portion of a ticket he had from San Francisco to Atlanta; I had it changed and got back on that."

"Shorter did that? So you could go out and run against him?"

"Not for that. He just wanted me to have a chance. He had been through the same thing himself. Right after he got out of Yale and was just bumming around, training and trying to get into meets, he lived on the floor of my dorm room. This was before Jeannie and I got married. Frank and I trained, slept, cooked on a hot plate and dreamed about becoming stars. I tell you, I would have done well in that race if I had had to crawl across the finish line on my hands and knees. So that's it. Beforehand I had these people more or less laughing at me. But after that race, it was oh Bruce this and gosh Bruce that. I told Shorter I couldn't believe it. He just laughed; he knew. He had been through it all himself."

"I recall a song about too many TV dinners, about how everyone loves a winner..."

Denton smiled. "You're getting the picture." He stood, stretched mightily, sat again.

"But more to the point," Denton said, "What I'm getting at is, I'm advising that you practice a certain amount of discretion. I am advising regrouping, getting some country air, thumping some soft trails ..."

"Out here?" Cassidy looked around. "What about school, the Athletic Department thing. What about
girls,
for crying out..."

"The vertical smile? The old furry bivalve? Well, the prospects are limited. Also graduate-level bull sessions, extended beer swilling, elaborate practical, uh, jokes of a legal nature. All limited."

"I see your point."

"All of this may be, you understand, a form of whacking off. I don't know for sure, I just..." Denton looked Cassidy in the eye.

"For a long time I didn't believe you could make it, Quenton. I still don't know, really. You seemed to have almost too much going for you, if you know what I mean. It's a very intangible thing that allows maybe a boxing champion from the ghetto to express himself quite nicely with a left cross. But in your case, to put it very simply, you never seemed quite hungry enough." Denton stood, walked back to refill his coffee mug.

"To be brutally honest with you, Quenton," he said, "I always figured that once you did four minutes, that would have been about it for you." He said this very quietly, almost sadly.

It was deadly quiet in the little house. Cassidy swallowed. Denton just looked at him, waiting for some kind of response. But all Cassidy could think was,
My god, you 're right, you 're right! How could I have not known?

Finally, Cassidy said very softly: "I seem to have solved that problem. I don't exactly have anything going for me now. They've taken away..."

Denton slammed his mug down.
"They
have taken away
nothing! THEY
are irrelevant! That's what I want you to understand!"

"I must be slow or something..."

"Move out here, Quenton, and train. Train your guts out. Drop out of school, forget that mess for a while, it's nothing but trouble. They are all a bunch of small men with weak minds and tiny little goals for themselves; they'll cause you nothing but grief. There are great trails out here and a little grassy field for intervals. You can run barefoot on it the way you like to. It'd be ideal, a runner's paradise."