Once a Runner (21 page)

"Oh, yes I do. What I want to say is that, well, I know we joke around a lot, what with Bruce the way he is and all. But we both know that when you get right down to it, the guy is pretty damned intimidating. It's only because we
know
him that..." Mizner swallowed.

"...and Cass, we've been friends for a long time now..." He lowered his head, as if too weary to go on. Cassidy looked out the window.

"Listen Mize," he said.

"Quenton, you know how sometimes on a really bad one when you realize how it's going to be real early, like the second lap, and there's just nothing you can do about it except tuck in and gut it out? And how hard it is for the other two who are not running to sit and watch and know what is happening and not be able to do anything about it? Christ, Cass, I've seen you go through it so many times and every timejust when I think it has finally gotten to you for once and you are going to slack off on yourself a little bit, you ...just come blowing out of that last turn like some godamned maniac and I just..." His voice cracked and he turned away slightly. Cassidy was distressed.

"Jerry, it's the same with you. You know how it's been. The same for all three of us. Bruce, too."

"Yeah, Mizner said, "but with him there's no mystery left in it."

Cassidy considered that. "Not as much," he admitted.

"And it's gotten so there's not much left with you either, Cass, is what I'm trying to say, I guess I've gotten so I'm not really afraid for you that much anymore."

Cassidy studied his bare feet. He never in
hjjs life expected to hear such a confession and he couldn't think of anything to say.

"Aw, who the hell knows?" Mizner laughed. "I just wanted you to know I've become kind of a fan, that's all. Hey, don't let it get to you out in the boonies. One of these days this mess will settle down and it will be just like it always was." He had almost closed the door when he stuck his head in and gave Cassidy the old smile, white teeth flashing against the dark background of his face.

"Miles of Trials," he said.

"Yes," Cassidy smiled back, "Yes, indeed."

The door closed sofdy, Cassidy sat alone on the sheetless mattress in the eerie gloom, staring at the barren room which was even now growing cold to his mind. Finally he heard the horn of Denton's car down below. He exhaled deeply and stood up. Quenton Cassidy was a believer in all manner of Comebacks and Second Chances, but whatever happened, it would
not
be like it always was.

Never, ever again.

25. The Woods

Life in the cabin had an unusual effect on Cassidy. The runners had always leavened the unavoidable solitude of their sport with the social atmosphere of the team, but now that Cassidy's isolation was geographical as well as physical, he slipped towards goofmess. He read massively. When that didn't do it and his natural gregariousness boiled over, he began to carry on conversations with inanimate objects.

"Why do you do this to me?" he would ask of a broken shoelace.

"Getting a little grubby, aren't we?" he suggested to the coffee pot one morning.

These one-sided conversations had begun, naturally enough, during the first few days when he had tried watching television (Denton brought a litde portable, thinking the diversion might help).

"Oh, let's the fuck notl" he had cried to the silver-haired uncle type who had implored: "Let's talk for just a moment about constipation." And when the prim and proper lard ass Aunt Nell walked into the young bride's new house, turned up her litde snoot and made a just barely overheard remark about "house-i-tosis," Cassidy got up from his chair, muttering sofdy: that, really will not do. He unplugged the set, wrapped the cord around the handle and placed it in the oven (which he used only for heating the kitchen.)

"You're going to stay in there until you godamn well learn some manners," he informed Aunt Nell, and then promptly forgot about her. And not just her. He also forgot about all the rest, all the legions of thrombosed bridge partners, impotent husbands, adorably precocious children and finicky pets. Cassidy thought: descendants of spelling bee champions and fellers of giant trees are cooed to by pill-crazed thespians acting out the slings and arrows of lower tract distress; a monk sets himself afire in the street and folks run for the marshmal-lows. Or am I being picky?

After that when he wasn't running or sleeping, he read. When his eyes tired, he tried just sitting. He began to feel like the lama on a mountain top who is so finely tuned he senses the very food moving through his body, the air molecules penetrating lung sacs and being dispersed to the far flung cells. He treated such newfound sensitivity not with pride but suspicion; Eastern religious gimmickry was endorsed enthusiastically by any number of dorm-bound adolescents and Quenton Cassidy had always treated such trends with the same respectful distance he might a ripe mule carcass.

He quickly settled into a mesmerizing pattern of hard training, reading, eating simple fare, sleeping like a wintering bear, and talking to the pots and pans.

"I'm going nuts," he informed himself happily in the mirror one morning.

Denton came out on weekends and after training together they worked on the greenhouses in back. Once he had the idea, Cassidy was able to hammer away by himself during the week, but when the February rains started, he was deprived even of this activity for the most part.

Denton however was crafty and understood all too well the logistics of single-minded effort. He often brought fresh reading material for the hermit, books that zeroed in on a subject of a mutual interest. Cassidy devoured them all: Sillitoe's
Loneliness of a Long Distance Runner,
Roger Bannister's urbane
The Four Minute Mile,
Peter Snell's
No Bugles, No Drums,
a novel called
The Olympian
by Brian Granville (not bad at all), another called
The Games
by Hugh Atkinson (pretty awful). Soon Cassidy felt he had read everything ever written about running. He poured over Fred Wilt's
How They Train,
a compilation of the bare training schedules of the elite and near-elite. It was helpful to him, this little library, for it kept him focused on his task. The novels, while generally flawed technically in one way or another (sometimes tragically so) occasionally clumsily captured certain elements of his own striving; he found them comforting. The biographies were more esoteric, suffered no attempt at art, and delighted him no end. From them he learned he was not really alone in many ways. He especially loved
A Clean Pair of Heels,
the story of the great New Zealand distance man, Murray Halberg.

Often after a late-night readingjag, he took to the country roads and wooded trails with renewed energy, comparing his impressions to his historical or fictional counterparts. He decided that no one had quite captured the strained satisfaction of tooling through the middle miles of a hard fifteen mile run; but then he thought some experiences do not easily lend themselves to descriptions of mere word butchers. It was a good thing, he decided, not to have everything available in capsule form. Few others mentioned how wonderful, delicious and life-giving it was just to
stop
sometimes, at the end of a run, with such a pitiful thirst (with swollen tongue and all) that the runner is convinced he knows what it would be like to die of thirst in the desert; when the first beer is not like liquid at all but just a kind of wonderful fire burning down a viscous throat.

But all the books helped him in some way or another. Quenton Cassidy was not enthusiastically going about the heady business of breaking world records or capturing some coveted prize; such ideas would have been laughable to him in the bland grind of his daily routine. He was merely trying to slip into a lifestyle that he could live with, strenuous but not unendurable by any means, out of which if the corpuscles and the capillaries and the electrolytes were properly aligned in their own mysterious configurations, he might do even better something that he had already done quite well.

He was trying to switch gears; at least that is how he thought of it. And though it was a somewhat frightful thing to contemplate for very long, he really
was
pulling out all the stops. After this he would have no excuses, ever again. This here train, he thought,
she's boun'for glory.

Ain't she?

26. Recon Work

Forays; he liked the sound of the word, implying as it did woodsy recon work. Illicit after-hours excitement for the young rogue about town. What the hell, he thought, I'm getting 23 blooming miles a day.

Thus he found himself for the first time in Newberry's only bar, which was thankfully not called the Dew Drop Inn, being more or less alternately ignored and scowled at by any number of local good old boys who figured this bird was looking for trouble.

But then they also noticed that he looked a little on the, well,
wiry,
side. They kept their distance.

The juke box twanged away in the corner, evoking the bucolic muse. Cassidy picked up a napkin and began a soggy composition, a sure-fire country song sensation entitled:
Don't Send No Form Letter To Your Sweetheart After You Done Mass-Mailed Your Love All Over Town.
About halfway through, right after a line that said: "This is where the teardrops dry up for me,
buster
..." he tired of the theme, started a new one with more appeal perhaps for the short-term credit community called:
Go Put Your Love On MasterCard, You Got No Credit Line With Me.

Down at the end of the bar, an obvious regular engaged the proprietor in a loud, showy mock-argument in order to demonstrate his status:

"Leroy, I swear if you don't cut this Wild Turkey..."

"Now James Lee I'll run you ass right on outa here ..."

I am back in real life again, Cassidy thought, in the dank ambience of a panhandle bar amidst a group of drivers of real pick-up trucks. And that barmaid has got herself a fairly decent chassis packed in them Levis.

"Real pretty hair," he told her with what he still thought of as his impish grin, as she brought his third dizzy Pearl beer.

"You barkin' up the wrong sleeve, honey," she told him.

27. A Too Early Death

The rains of February came, bloating the pine forests and capturing all of life in the gray rumble of its clouds and the wetness of its seepage; all life except the unsmiling hermit who reluctantly left his dry nest in the same manner twice a day: standing on the small porch, savoring the last vestige of the eave's shelter, he surveyed the swollen clouds, the drenched colorless trees, the red mud seeping up through the pine needles like thin dirty blood, and with a sigh stepped gingerly into the first puddle like a cautious water bird. Then he struck out.

He had four pairs of training shoes, each of which remained wet all the dme. If he could, by propping a pair up against the small electric heater, get them to a stage you might call "damp," he slipped them on with the greatest of pleasure. At one time there was a good deal of confusion about the use of spiked shoes. Cassidy rarely wore them in training; thin on the bottom and affording little protection to the heel and arch, he considered them risky for nearly all training. He had suffered for years wearing shoes made of kangaroo leather. He was grateful for the recent switch to nylon, but his thick-bottomed trainers still seemed to soak up a great deal of water; after a time he felt as if he were running with soggy pillows on the feet.

Some mornings he rose to find the huge mass of clouds rolled back, exposing a most brilliant, newly-washed blue sky. He would pull on his slick shoes without a grumble and lope off along the soggy trail with his bounciest stride, wondering how he could have ever gotten himself into such a state. This, now
this,
he thought, was wonderful. All color and life had merely been disguised by a film of water. Birdies sang, moo-cows mooed, and Quenton Cassidy, a man with only the vaguest sort of plan, would sometimes laugh right out loud.

By the next afternoon, however, the clouds would have resumed their sentry and it would be pouring or sprinkling or at least threatening.

Such a winter, Cassidy thought bitterly,
is
always getting your hopes up. And he would resolve then to scowl through the next sunny day just by way of not being taken in. But it was a resolution quickly forgotten, such are the surges of a young heart given promise.

Were he completely honest with himself, he would have perhaps admitted that he didn't mind it so much, this rain that furnished the same kind of isolation as the dark of night. Snell used to say he didn't mind running in the rain because he always felt his opponents would have to be quite insane to be out in such weather, and while they were somewhere dry and cozy, he was gaining yet another few tenths of a second on them.

But occasionally at night Cassidy would sit over his training calendar and the full weight of it would descend on him as he stared at the figures. At those times he dared to wonder if it really was too much. He would think of the comradeship of Doobey Hall, the horseplay, the unpredictable silliness. His world now had too many sharp corners; he craved the soft contours of the feminine. Surely such longings were natural enough, he thought. Even the buffoonery of Jack Nubbins seemed a far-off entertainment that he had too lightly regarded in happier times.

But out on the trails he slipped along in the soggy warm envelope of his own fierce body heat and needed precisely nothing. At these times, moving silently against the washed-out backdrop of countryside, his mind unfettered except for monitoring the steady 6:00 pace, he went back to his childhood, back to the time of his too early death. He pondered what it meant, if anything; if anything at all.