The Runner Page 20

  I don’t run on the track, Bullet said to himself. Or really in races. The high and windy thought frightened him a little, as if he had been blown up among the clouds where he didn’t belong. But he didn’t belong on any track either. He didn’t mind not belonging, that wasn’t it. And he wasn’t frightened scared. He wasn’t even really frightened—it was as if he had just swallowed air too clear, too gold with sunlight, for his lungs. It felt good in his lungs, good beyond any imagining, so good it was frightening. It wasn’t his own differences that got to him; he’d always known his own differences. And it wasn’t as if he’d really swallowed that cloud high air—he’d just gotten a taste of it. Wow, he thought.

  The runners went up to their marks. They crouched down into starting position. Tamer had the third inside lane and Mr. Baltimore the fourth. Tamer’s head was down but the other guy was looking over across at him, measuring him. The gun went and they took off.

  It was clear from the first that the race was between these two. They were both fast, and both took the hurdles smoothly. Tamer had the edge in weight and muscle power; Mr. Baltimore had his length of leg and lighter weight. For the first quarter they stayed together, almost in perfect step.

  You’re gonna have to run yourself, not him. Bullet wondered if the black could figure that out. He wondered if the black could run his own pace, taking it from nobody else, taking it from himself and forcing it on himself. Physically he could, Bullet knew that. But whether he had the brain and the heart for it, Bullet couldn’t be sure. So that—when Tamer’s arms came almost imperceptibly up and his stride between the hurdles took him steadily, foot by foot ahead—Bullet sat nodding to himself and smiling in satisfaction. Mr. Baltimore, trying to keep up to Tamer’s pace, threw himself slightly out of rhythm and lost a little more distance. Tamer seemed unaware of him as he paced himself up another notch. Because he could do it. Good for you, Tamer.

  Bullet didn’t say anything to Tamer about the race. He figured he didn’t need to. Tamer knew what he’d done, and for himself. Bullet didn’t go over to join the team members, either, while the first two exhibition events were held. He drifted with the crowd to the ringside to wait through a middle distance run, then stuck around for the high jump exhibition. The sun came out warm whenever it wasn’t blocked by clouds. He could feel how sharp the difference in air was on the top of his head, cool shadow and warm light. A dozen girls stood waiting to jump. He was just waiting through the time until the events and ceremonies were over, until they took the long ride back south, until school tomorrow. Next weekend, he’d put in two full days of oystering, and that he looked forward to.

  She caught his eye first by the stillness of her waiting. She held his eye by her slender height and the proud way she moved into position. The symmetry of her face, the strength of her stride, the calm and concentrated expression of her eyes as brown as velvet: he didn’t know if she was beautiful. He only knew her beauty hit him like an explosion. He watched the rhythm and strength of her approach, the high lifting control of her jump and the dancer’s grace of her landing. Her shoulders rose—the only acknowledgment of applause. She got into line to wait for her second jump, fell still. Her silky skin shone the color of the black earth where the bay ate away at the marshgrass. Beautiful.

  * * *

  The last event of the championships, preceding the presentation luncheon, was the relay race, held in three heats, two elimination and then the final. The coach waved Bullet over to join the team. “How’d you like to be number ten?” he asked.

  “Fine,” Bullet said.

  “I mean, from nowhere to number ten in the state, how does that sound to you, Tillerman?”

  Bullet didn’t bother repeating himself.

  “So I want you to run in the relay. You and Shipp, Johnson and Landry—” He indicated the two blacks who regularly ran the relay.

  I don’t run on the track.

  “If we can just get a sixth in this—and we can’t with our regulars—then we’ll have the ten-slot. I been figuring out the points. Get ten for sure, and depending on how the rest do in the relays maybe nine. So—will you?”

  “No.”

  The coach was angry. But all he said was, “Shipp, you talk to him.”

  Tamer’s eyebrows flew up. Bullet could have laughed.

  “C’mon, guys,” the coach said to the other members of the team. “Let’s leave them alone to see if anyone can persuade the great man to do something for the rest of us.” He shot one last angry and frustrated look at Bullet before leaving.

  “No,” Bullet said to Tamer.

  Tamer unwrapped a piece of gum slowly, put it into his mouth and chewed. Bullet waited.

  “So, you don’t want to be our token white?” Tamer finally asked.

  Bullet grinned. “You got it.”

  Tamer chewed and thought some more. “The way I figure it, the rest of us can hold them for sure. If you’re running anchor then we might do something.”

  “Sounds about right,” Bullet said.

  “But you don’t run on the track,” Tamer added. “And I can’t see the other teams being willing to join you out among the fields and flowers.”

  “Neither can I,” Bullet agreed.

  Tamer thought and chewed. Bullet waited. The black guy was too smart not to see it, and when he’d given up trying all the possibilities, he’d accept Bullet’s decision.

  “I have an idea,” Tamer said. “Tell me what you think of it. I have an idea that the whole slavery thing was just as bad for whites as it was for blacks. What do you think?”

  What?

  Bullet shrugged, troubled. “I don’t think anything. People are just what they are, and that’s not much as a rule.”

  “That’s not what I mean, that’s not what I meant a-tall,” Tamer pointed out.

  “I know what you meant,” Bullet snapped.

  Tamer waited.

  “Nobody can make me,” Bullet said, getting angry.

  “Brother, even when you’re on the track you aren’t running on the track, don’t you know that yet?”

  This time it was Bullet taking time to think. “Okay,” Bullet said finally.

  “Good,” Tamer said, turning away.

  “On a deal,” Bullet halted him.

  “You don’t make deals,” Tamer said, turning.

  “Just this once.” Bullet was glad he’d nettled the black guy. “If you’ll give me your word to stay out of Vietnam. Don’t tell me”—He cut off Tamer’s protests—“because you can, you know it. Have another kid. Stay in school. Be a teacher. Get religion, whatever it takes. That one’s not your war.”

  “What, you got a patent on it?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “How can I give my word about something that has nothing to do with me?”

  “Give it. You’ll keep it.”

  Bullet waited.

  “Okay,” Tamer said. “But I don’t know why you feel like you have to get even with me. What difference does it make to you if I figure out what makes you tick.”

  “You haven’t.” Bullet denied it.

  “Yeah? I told you, brother, I’m a civilized man—I know something about other people. That’s what civilization is about.”

  Bullet walked away, to get his directions for the relay. “You remember how to take the baton?” the coach asked him, still angry, too angry to praise Bullet’s good sportsmanship, for which Bullet was grateful.

  “I hope so,” Bullet said.

  On the track, waiting in position, he didn’t know what to think of himself for being there. He wasn’t at all concerned about how he’d do. How he did had nothing to do with him, however he did. He’d run, that was all. And if they came in among the top three of these teams, he’d have to do the same thing again.

  When the baton came into his hand, he sprinted—sudden and fast. It wasn’t until he got over the finish line that he learned he’d overtaken two runners to bring them in third. After the second eliminating heat had bee
n held and an exhibition of girls’ pole vaulters, they ran the finals.

  I can’t believe you’re doing this, Bullet said to himself, looking around again at the track. But as if his body wanted nothing to do with his opinion, when he felt the baton come into his hand again he took off, running.

  The whole team was gathered at the end of that race. Among the incoherent noises, Bullet ascertained that they had again come in third. Hands grabbed Bullet and hoisted him up onto shoulders. “Hey, put me down!” he yelled. Nobody paid any attention to him. They held him on their shoulders, their hands firm on his legs so he couldn’t clamber free.

  Tamer stood back, watching this, amused. “Let me go!” Bullet demanded. They carried him on around to the starting line. “Put me down, you hear me?” He struggled to get free, but hands reached up to hold him steady. He looked down at all the faces. All right, have it your way, he thought, relaxing. After all, he figured they must be feeling pretty good right now, pretty good about him, pretty good about themselves. He wasn’t sure how he was feeling, but he was pretty sure about them. And he didn’t mind.

  They were back at the starting line before he had finally struggled free and gotten his feet back on the ground.

  CHAPTER 23

  On the twenty-first of March, 1968, Bullet turned eighteen. He officially withdrew from school, first thing. Then he went down to Patrice’s. There, drinking coffee and eating a freshly baked roll, he told Patrice what he wanted. “I’ve got seven hundred dollars and I want to buy the fourteen-footer. With the motor.”

  “You think I didn’t know this? You think there was any other reason for me to paint her red? But I will give her to you, my friend—with the motor.”

  Bullet shook his head. He took out his wallet and pulled out bills.

  Patrice’s ugly face looked worried. “I hoped you would let it be a gift.”

  “It’s not for me,” Bullet said. “It’s for my mother. And—if I buy it for her with money I’ve earned, then I can really give it to her.”

  “Well, of course, if that is how you understand it. You won’t need the money yourself?”

  “In the army? Naw.”

  “May I ask you a question?”

  Bullet shrugged. He slathered butter onto a roll and bit into it, crunching the crust.

  “Your hair—or your head—” Patrice started to say.

  Bullet laughed. “They’re gonna make me grow it.”

  That amused Patrice.

  “One other thing,” Bullet said. “There’s someone you could hire, if you need someone to work with—”

  “You know I need someone. He is a friend?”

  Bullet shook his head. “No. I haven’t talked to the guy since before Thanksgiving. Not a friend, he’s just . . . he’s a runner. He’s black.”

  “I am not prejudiced. It is you who are prejudiced, my friend, not I.”

  Bullet got up to pour himself more coffee. “Not the way I used to be.”

  “Bring the pot to the table,” Patrice told him, then he asked, “How then?”

  Bullet shrugged.

  “The idea is too speculative?”

  “Yeah. Maybe.” He did, however, want to try to say it. “You are what you are, and it’s what you are that counts.”

  Patrice couldn’t puzzle that out. “But that is no change. That is how you always felt.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t know it,” Bullet admitted. He set the coffeepot on the table and sat down.

  “So, you will send this black man to me?”

  “I’ll give him your name. If he wants to, he’ll come talk to you. He can work. He needs a good job.”

  “This is not a good job. There is no future in it, and little amusement.”

  “It’s a good job,” Bullet said.

  * * *

  He rode the little boat around and tied it up at the end of the dock, cocking the motor forward to keep the blades out of the water. He didn’t know how long it would ride unnoticed there. Nobody had said anything to him about the clumsy cradle he’d built in the barn last December, nor about the way he’d hauled Johnny’s boat up to the barn, dismasted it, stowed the sails under the deck. He had even, knowing that it needed only a rough hand, scraped off the barnacles that the years in the water had grown. Some of them were as big as his thumb.

  Bullet jogged up the path through the marsh grass, heading for the house. He almost expected OD to appear out of the grasses, almost turned his head to see her, almost listened for her. It was funny what you remembered.

  The old man wasn’t in the house at that hour, and his mother was washing the kitchen floor. She used a scrub brush and worked on her hands and knees, her skirt soggy at the hem where it got in her way.

  “Momma?”

  She wasn’t surprised to see him. Her face was quiet as she put the brush back into the bucket, sat back onto her heels and looked at him.

  “I’m going.”

  “I thought so,” she said. Her eyes were dark and unreadable, and her voice flat. “Happy birthday. Did you enlist?”

  “How’d you know?”

  “It makes sense,” she said.

  He hunkered down until his eyes were level with hers. Nobody said it wasn’t going to hurt. He was willing to bet it had hurt Liza too. “Listen,” he said, “you wanna come with me?”

  “What would I do in the army?”

  Bullet shrugged. She was right, it would just be another box. It was going to be just another box for him, too, but he’d figured it out. You didn’t get out of one box without getting into another, and you didn’t get out without it costing you. For himself, he was just looking for a box that fit him. For her—what he was hoping to do was just loosen a board or two for her. It was up to her what she did about that.

  Something was squeezing at his heart, and words were strangling in his throat. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “You remember that birthday party?”

  “Eleanor Brown’s? I remember. I remember you not wanting to go. I remember driving all the way back along the highway, to pick up the clothes you took off.” A reluctant smile moved across her face. “How you got them out of the back of the truck without us noticing, I never knew.”

  “One at a time,” he told her. “I leaned way over, so they wouldn’t blow up into view in the mirror.”

  “And I remember how you looked when we came around to get you out and you were just . . .”

  Bullet waited.

  “. . . bare naked, and laughing . . .” She laughed then, and he joined in.

  “Anyway,” he said, “I owe you an apology. And Liza, too, because she was looking forward to that party, but she’s not around to hear it. I shouldn’t have done that.”

  “Oh, I dunno,” his mother said. “It always seemed to me there wasn’t anything else you could have done. Being you.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed. She could read him and he could read her. He leaned forward and kissed her cheek.

  “So,” she said, after a minute, looking at him while he got up, “what can I do for you before you go?”

  That was her way of saying good-bye.

  His way, he had thought hard about. He knew she wouldn’t take the boat, or the hundred dollars he’d left in the top drawer of his bureau for gas and oil—she wouldn’t take them just like that, like presents. He knew if he tried to give them to her while he was leaving, that would be hard on her. After he was gone . . . Well, his father would do what he always did, pretend nobody had ever been here, and that would at least be easier on her. But he’d thought about how to make sure she knew he wanted her to have that boat.

  “I’m all packed and everything. I’ve taken everything I want. Whatever I’ve left behind is for you, okay?” He was thinking of the boat, the hundred dollars—and the farm.

  “What would I do with what you’ve left behind?” she demanded.

  “Maybe you’ll think of something, maybe not. But it’s for you, you hear me?”

  “I hear you, boy,” she said, getting bac
k to her bucket of water.

  His carryall in his hand, Bullet jogged down the driveway. He’d need to find Tamer at lunch, then he’d get the one o’clock bus. The fields stretched away on either side of him, and he stopped at the end of the driveway to look back at them. He’d new-harrowed the fields, and they were ready now to take the crops he wouldn’t harvest from them. Tough luck, and he had known what it would cost. But he let his eyes run over them, over the lumpy surface of them. He wanted to keep connected to himself as much as he could; he wanted to be sure he could take with him whatever memory could carry.

  DECEMBER 1969

  Today, the road all runners come,

  Shoulder high we bring you home.

  CHAPTER 24

  The phone rang, filling the empty rooms with its clamor. She picked it up, and the ringing stopped.

  “Abigail Tillerman?” a man’s voice asked. “Hello, am I speaking to Abigail Tillerman?”

  “You are.”

  “This is Captain Charles Lockridge, and I’m sorry to tell you that your son, Samuel, has been killed in action.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Mrs. Tillerman?”

  What was she supposed to say?

  “We have recovered the body and can send him home to you—”

  “No,” she said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “As you wish, of course. I’m calling you myself—he was under my command—because”—and here, for the first time, the voice lost its smooth practiced flow of words—“he was such a fine soldier. A letter will follow, but I was there, and I thought you might want to hear . . .”