The Runner Read online

  Chicken.

  “When things—blow up—it’s people like us who really get trampled. If I were you I’d have an asthma attack.”

  They looked like they were having heart attacks right then, pale and rabbitty. Bullet just ate his sandwiches, biting, chewing, swallowing. Part of the tension in the room was fear. You could taste it—dank and metallic—colored fear and white fear. Bullet slowly emptied the two pints of milk he’d gotten, slowly got up, slowly left the room.

  * * *

  The next day the lunchroom jingled with heightened tension as Bullet moved unremarked to the wimps’ table. Only a couple of ninth grade girls there, he noticed, and a half-dozen little eighth graders. He was early, to watch the room fill up, the long line by the service counter moving along smoothly, the people carrying their trays over to tables. Voices rang louder than usual. Ted Bayson had a gap in his mouth where a couple of teeth used to be and was chewing cautiously; there were a couple of limping guys, a couple of black eyes. They’d gotten a little trouble, then.

  A big colored guy stood, looking around the noisy room—that was Tamer, Bullet recognized him, he’d remember him now. The guy had really heavy eyebrows. His face looked swollen and he was moving as if it hurt, but his glance all over the room was cool enough. The room was quiet, too quiet. Then it got noisy, but too noisy. Bullet shifted his feet under the table: as if school wasn’t bad enough the way it ordinarily was; he didn’t need to spend his days in a war zone. But everybody was ready to panic. The whole room was ready to blow up around him.

  Tamer moved down the center of the room, heading for the back where some friends waved to him. He was nodding his head in greeting and going between two tables, when he tripped and fell. The plate and silverware and metal tray rang on the cement floor. The milk carton fell under him and squooshed milk out, over his shirt. The room was so silent you could hear the bowl that held Jell-O ringing round and round and round until finally it rang around belly up and was quiet.

  Bullet watched, his hands relaxed on the table. Nobody spoke. The silence rang around the room. Most people hunched over their lunches like nothing had happened and nobody had noticed, except nobody was eating anything.

  Tamer got up slowly. His face had a gray-green undertone. Ketchup from the hamburgers was on his shirt front, mixed with milk. Jell-O hung off his cheek.

  Laughter—low, muffled—started on Bullet’s side of the room. Bullet didn’t move his eyes to see who it was.

  “D’jew see that?”

  “Who got him?”

  Bullet shifted his legs out from under the confining table.

  For a minute, nobody moved. But there was a kind of growling noise, somewhere.

  Then a bunch of blacks flashed into action, and from a nearby table whites stood up to match them. Wooden benches scraped back on the floor. Voices cursed, called. People headed for the door, crowding and pushing. People closed in around the fight, pushing.

  Bullet caught a glimpse of silver and moved—the whites were vocational track and he knew how they liked to fight, he knew who their leader would be. He brought the leader down with a tackle that put the guy’s wrist under Bullet’s hand: he wrapped his fingers around the wrist while his shoulders pinned the guy to the floor; he closed his finger around the wrist until he felt the bones in there rubbing up against one another. The knife fell onto the floor, a black-handled switchblade. Bullet got up and dragged the guy after him, whipping his arm up behind his back and pushing, hard.

  “What’re you doing?” the guy asked. “Leggo of me.”

  Bullet didn’t answer. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a hand reach down for the blade on the floor. He slammed his foot down on the fingers, then covered the knife with his shoe. He spoke into his man’s ear, loud so everyone could hear him. “Not in here.” The last thing he wanted to put up with was a riot. That wasn’t even clean fighting. There was a way to get your fighting in, if you wanted to. These people just—didn’t know anything, he thought to himself in disgust.

  “What the—”

  Bullet jerked up, sharp up, on the arm.

  “You hear me?” he asked. The head nodded. Bullet looked around at the rest of them—just staring at him. He looked across and saw only Tamer’s back, where he faced a bunch of coloreds. Dark eyes glared at the boys among whom Bullet stood.

  “Sit down,” Tamer said. Ordered. Muttering, they obeyed him.

  Bullet let his man’s arm down and spun him around to look into his sweating face. He didn’t say anything, just stared into the guy’s eyes until he was sure the message had gotten through, past the anger, and past the fear pain brought. Then he turned and left the room.

  “Thanks, man,” low voices murmured at his back.

  CHAPTER 9

  The sun had risen into a clear sky when the coach stopped for Bullet by his mailbox at six forty-five. They drove on down to the town dock, where the school bus waited. Bullet climbed into the yellow bus and took his usual seat, right front, by the window. The rest of the team trickled in, one after the other, waiting until the last minute before climbing onto the bus. The coach checked them in, calling out names and making marks on his clipboard.

  They were down to three Negroes, Bullet noticed; one of them Tamer, of course. The Negroes moved on to the back of the bus, where all three could sit together. The meet was at a school three hours north, up in Queen Anne’s County. Bullet slouched down in his seat, relaxed.

  He could hear nerves in the rest of the team, sitting behind him. He could see nerves in the coach’s body, hunched by the opposite window. Bullet wasn’t tense. He was going to run, there was nothing to make him tense about that. He didn’t remember the course. He never remembered a course from one year to the next. He didn’t want to. He wouldn’t jog it either, although that was how you prepared for a cross-country run—you were supposed to jog over the course an hour or more before you ran it and plan your approaches and learn the obstacles. Bullet never tried to study a course. That was no way to train your reflexes, or find out how your quick judgments were. That was the way if what you wanted to do was win.

  As time passed, the bus behind him alternated between uneasy silences, quick low conversation, and loud nervous joking. Bullet never turned around, didn’t measure the distance by passing towns or intersecting highways, didn’t think, didn’t look out the window, didn’t do anything. When they arrived, the bus pulled into a big parking lot behind a low, modern school building, stretched out along the top of a hill, with windows along most of the walls. The building was locked for the weekend, but the gym was open. The opposing team poured out through the broad doors as the Crisfield Warriors went in to change. This was a private school, The Acorn School. It had a team of coaches, a head of Track and two assistants. All of the competitors looked alike, except for the colors of their shorts. The Warriors wore red, the Acorn team blue. All had on white tank tops with numbers.

  Bullet followed the mass of moving bodies to the field, hanging back. The oval track lay in a kind of meadow between two gentle hills. A white board fence surrounded it. From the top of a rise of land, watching people spread out over and around the field, Bullet picked out the brown rectangle that was the long jump pit, the circle from which the javelin would be thrown, the tall pole vault posts and the shorter high jump posts. A pile of white hurdles lay piled up beside the gateway to the track. A couple of long white benches were set out for spectators and equipment. The cross-country path led up through mown grass, over the opposite hill, to disappear into the sky. The sky shone deep blue. White clouds, broad and lazy, drifted across it.

  Bullet stood watching. The mass broke up into smaller groups, bending and stretching in exercises. The coaches, three blue windbreakers and one red one, moved among the groups. Two officials stood by the starting line on the track, in black-and-white striped shirts and black shorts. From a distance, the competitors looked like animals turned loose into a field, guided by herdsmen into positions on the lush meadow while the o
fficials oversaw the whole operation. From a distance, the whole scene looked ordered, designed, completed.

  If he could paint, Bullet thought, this was something that would make a painting, in oil to catch the quality of color the clear air brought out. The rich green of the grass; the brown of track and pits so perfectly brown it looked like it had to be some other substance, not really earth at all, maybe gold; and the figures of the young men, lying on the grass with their fingers locked behind their necks, muscles pulling effortlessly up, or running in place with high-lifted knees: but he didn’t paint, couldn’t even draw, and didn’t want to.

  He went down the slope to find out when his events were.

  The coach moved around, checking up, checking in, encouraging and advising. He handed Bullet the clipboard. On the top of the papers was a mimeographed sheet listing the order of events. Cross-country, as usual, came near the end. As always, the relay race came last. When he was a ninth grader, Bullet ran with the relay team. The coach had tried to get him to run sprints too, but he refused—he was fast enough but he didn’t like running on the track, in the lines. After one season, Bullet could decide what events he would enter, and he refused to run in the relay anymore.

  “Tillerman, you time the sprints,” the coach told him. Bullet hung the stopwatch around his neck and moved on along the fence to stand at the hundred-meter mark. After a while, the finish tape was set up across the eight lanes of track, and he saw eight runners move into position—four pairs of blue shorts, four red. They crouched, bodies coiled into position, heads down. In unison, they raised their bodies up to rest on fingertips and toes and then—a split second later, at the sound of a blank being fired—they sprang off their marks. Bullet started the stopwatch at the same time.

  Fifteen seconds later it was all over, and the eight runners were going back to their coaches to check times and hear advice. Bullet filled in the places and times for their runners: four, six, seven, eight; the times ranged from 13.1 to 14.8 seconds. The winning time was 11.9, a little kid, probably a ninth grader, skinny and fast, who headed for the finish line as if that was his only hope in the whole world.

  Bullet moved up to the two hundred meter mark, halfway around the track. Two members of the Crisfield team were running both of these races, which put them at a disadvantage. But they were strong starters, which gave them some chance—in those leagues—of competing: not that day, though, the Acorn runners had been well-coached, had trained hard. Crisfield took the bottom four positions in the two hundred. Bullet wrote down the results, then moved to stand near the group by the starting line, to time the four hundred meter, once around the track. There, waiting for the gun to sound, his finger poised over the stopper, he could watch the start close up. Eight tense bodies, each in position at the far right edge of the lane, waited. The gun went, he pushed down. The runners were away.

  Into the first straight they were bunched. Acorn was running that little guy again, and he pulled out ahead, legs pumping, head slewing as his shoulders swung, setting the pace fast. At the turn, about halfway around, he fell apart, dropping rapidly back, his legs loose and awkward. The three other Acorn runners started to move forward at that time. The field stretched way out. Bullet watched. Only one Crisfield runner could stay near the leading pack, and he trailed them by increasing distances. Watching, noting the strategy employed by the opponents, Bullet wondered why the Crisfield runner couldn’t keep up—his legs were strong enough, he had the shoulders and chest to go with them. He marked the time across the line, 55 seconds, and then, several seconds later, the three remaining Warriors. The little guy stumbled last across the line, his face furious, ashamed.

  Acorn’s timer, whose long arms and legs marked him as probably a vaulter, looked over at Bullet. His eyes sparkled, then he muted his enthusiasm. “They finally decided to put some money into track,” he said. “Our youngest coach—with the blond crew cut?—he ran for West Point. The eight hundred. He knows what he’s doing. Tactics too.” He waited for Bullet’s reply.

  Bullet didn’t say anything, just moved off to report in. He couldn’t stand these good sports types. The team had been well-trained and they ran better—why apologize? The other boy fell into step with him. “You’re S. Tillerman, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “My name’s Hurley, George Hurley.”

  So what.

  “I’ve heard about you. I’m pleased to meet you. I don’t run cross-country.”

  Buzz off. Why don’t you.

  “You’ve been state champion for two years, haven’t you?”

  Bullet nodded, wishing the guy would get off his heels. He walked faster. He couldn’t stand these guys, with their good-sport faces and rich-kid haircuts and professional quality track shoes.

  “Are you going to try the Nationals this year?” Hurley asked.

  “No,” Bullet said, letting all of the anger that was building up out in his voice. The kid finally got the message.

  Bullet entered the times and returned the stopwatch. The coach moved to the center of the track, where the long jump pitch had been dug. Bullet stayed back, at his distance.

  Long jump always took a while, as jumpers were eliminated after a couple of rounds. Bullet watched the jumpers—the near sprint up the approach, the spring into the air, the midair kick to gain distance, then the heels digging into the sand to land at farthest extension. You could see in the long jump how the body worked, muscles and bones together, how the machinery was put together. You could see the muscles tense for the spring, then hang loose for a second before gathering themselves up around the bones to push forward; and finally, stretch out—extended along the length of the leg bones, and the arm bones too. All the bones with their weight and length worked with the muscles to pull the jumper’s body forward. Tamer was their best long-jumper, but he was landing with his feet tucked under his knees, using his ankles to take the shock of landing. He only got a fourth and Bullet saw the coach move up to talk at him.

  Bullet threw the javelin, which he didn’t mind. It gave his chest and arms some warm-up, and he liked the dead stop feeling all along his skeleton as he landed on his brake foot and swung the throwing arm around, picking up the shock of the stop to add to the force behind his throw. A couple of the Crisfield throwers were disqualified for overstepping the throwing line, but Bullet never made that mistake. His reflexes were too good. He got a second with 115 feet. He guessed that none of Acorn’s hot-shot coaches was a javelin man. One fifteen wouldn’t even place you in most meets.

  The morning went on. They ran two middle-distance races, then the four hundred meter hurdles. Bullet watched the hurdle race with some interest, leaning on the top rail of the fence, the sun warm on his head and shoulders. The Acorn team took the hurdles higher than they had to, almost doing a split in midair over the bar. They were awkward about it, and sometimes even came down on top of the hurdle, but they got height that way. The Warriors, except for Tamer, just ran over the fences, which were so low in these leagues that they looked all right. Tamer, however, approached each jump as the opponents did, but with more coordination, as if he knew what he was doing. He took a good lead, his heavy thighs moving him well for the thirty-odd yards between jumps, always taking off from his right foot with no break in stride. Bullet watched the way the left leg lifted and extended, the right leg got pulled up and folded in, but held horizontal. You landed on your left foot into a full run. Bullet could feel along his muscles how to do that. When he came to fences or obstacles in cross-country, he took them like the high jump essentially: slowing down to get into position, lifting his body up and over, then getting back into stride as quickly as possible. The hurdlers got a forward lift, really a part of the run, and their landings moved right back into stride. Leaning against the wooden rails, Bullet felt his leg muscles trying it. His legs wanted to land on the right foot; he’d have to push off with his left—that felt right.

  He skipped the pole vault, sitting aside on the grassy hillside
watching the sky instead. It was past noon, but nobody would be hungry until the meet was finished. They’d stop at the Dairy Queen on the way back, to stoke up on hamburgers and milkshakes. Bullet let the feeling of the hurdlers’ jumps run down his legs, trying to get from his arms what they would be doing. He’d seen hurdlers like this before, he thought, but he’d never connected how he might use their approach. He wondered why, but only in passing. The only way to see if it worked was to try it, and it was a waste of time to think about why he hadn’t thought to try it before.

  The cross-country started off flat, then went up a long, slow rise. Bullet took the hill smoothly, steadily, every stride increasing the lead he’d gotten at the start. Over the top of the hill, taking the down-slope as steadily and smoothly, he smiled to himself: it promised to be a lovely run, all three miles of it, and whoever thought to start it off with a hill would surely have some interesting ideas about how to continue it. The course branched off to the right, for its two-and-a-half-mile loop. Bullet ran, fast. He kept his eyes on the path ahead. They’d mark the course if it diverged. Fields and a tumbled-down rail fence—he had to do some quick shuffling to get his left foot in position for the jump, and he whanged that ankle against the top rail of the fence landing; but when he came down onto his right foot and strode off without hesitation, he knew the technique would suit him. Splashing through a broad shallow creek, the water icy, his foot slipped along the side of a buried rock and he went down. He turned the fall into a start, pushed himself up off his ankles, came dripping and muddy out of the water and ran. The markers took him straight across a field of tomatoes. The dessicated vines hung on tipi-shaped skeletons. He dodged around those that came into his straight line, feeling his weight shift, shoulder to ankle, as he cut them as close as possible. Running fast. Arms pumping. Eyes on the path ahead.

  He slid down into a gulley, scrambled up the far side over fallen tree limbs and emerged into a stand of pines, an island of trees between pastures. A few milk cows grazed in the field he ran past, beyond a barbed wire fence. The uneven ground rolled under his feet. The muscles across his back pulled and released, smooth as waves on the water. Another stand of pines and an unexpected fence, the red ribbons tied on either end. The tumbled wood stuck up at odd angles with a few nails coming out. It was low enough to run over, almost, without any change of pace, but he wanted to work on the hurdling jump. He approached the low obstacle at a dead run, pushing himself off with his left foot, reaching out with the right, remembering how the hurdlers had looked. He almost cleared it; something hooked his left calf, down to the ankle. Landing, he absorbed his forward motion with his right leg and brought his left knee up, forward, into the steady pace of running fast.