The Runner

by Cynthia Voigt

  The two-mile course made a big circle. It covered no hills, neither were there any ditches, but it crossed some fields and a couple of creeks. It wasn’t much of a course. But people were more interested in football, basketball and baseball—that was where the money for fields, coaches and equipment went. And cheerleaders and uniforms. It didn’t hurt Bullet any; it just pissed him off to have to run on such a rinkydink course. He ran the practice the same way he ran every race: he took up an immediate lead and pulled farther ahead with every step. He ran alone.

  Up rises, leaping shallow gulleys, splashing through the creeks where muddy bottoms caught at his shoes—he ran beside a tomato field with just a few fat globules ripening on the vines now, the bright greeny red of late-season tomatoes. He couldn’t hear anything, nobody. His legs stretched out, the pace fast and steady. He picked up his pace a beat after the first half mile, held the new pace for a quarter mile and then, rounding a big cornfield to head back for the mile, picked his pace up again. He breathed steadily through his nose. He never got out of breath. A real runner never did, because it wasn’t lungs that took the strain, but muscles. The hardest thing for Bullet about the daily practices was to keep driving his pace. He knew the course so well he didn’t even have to think about where to put his feet or how to take an obstacle—even the section through overgrown woods had a path trampled through it, and all you did was scratch your legs as you went through. So Bullet used the practice times for his own purpose: he ran three-quarters of it at top speed and worked during the last quarter to improve that.

  Back at the starting point, his legs feeling good, the sweat running over him feeling good, he waited around for the others to come in. The two underclassmen had been running the course for a week and a half now; they should begin to come in at a jog at least. The first couple of times around, he’d had to wait twenty minutes or half an hour for them to come walking and groaning in, trying to pick up their knees to a shambling gait when they saw him watching. By now, they should be able to get some kind of pace over the two-mile course. If they would do any practicing at home, of course, it would be different. But nobody ever did. For the first two or three meets, Bullet could be sure he’d be the only Crisfield runner to finish out a course. Somehow, these guys seemed to think if they could run two miles they could automatically run the three or four of a race. He had no sympathy for them. He kind of liked watching them creep across the finish lines of the meets and bend over to vomit.

  But it was the Negro who came first into view, after a long wait. His T-shirt was soaked with sweat, his chest heaved, he jogged steadily. As Bullet watched, he stumbled over a buried stone and fell flat. You had to be pretty tired to let a stumble like that knock you flat. Bullet watched as he brought himself back up to his knees, then up to his feet, then—leaning forward, barely running at all—start jogging again, stubbornly. Light brown dust caked his legs and arms in splotches. His thighs and arms and face shone with a coating of sweat that ran in rivulets through the dust. He breathed through his open mouth, breathed hard. When he came up to Bullet, just over the finish, he fell full length onto his hands, like a reverse push-up. He lowered himself onto the ground and lay there, facedown. His back heaved. His hair was beaded with water. His eyes were closed.

  The other two jogged sedately into sight. Bullet looked at them. They hadn’t changed their pace for the last stretch, and they talked as they jogged. He looked down at the Negro. Then he turned and went to take a shower.

  Negroes did well in the marathon; it seemed like it was always some guy from Ethiopia or Africa who won it. So it wasn’t surprising that this Tamer had come in ahead. It didn’t worry Bullet, it barely interested him—it showed up how worthless those other two were. Somebody should go behind them with a bullwhip, he thought; get their asses going. Bullet grinned to himself. He could do it; he could make them, but he wasn’t interested. He wanted a shower, then he was going downtown to see Billy-O. Nobody ever ran cross-country more than one season, nobody except Bullet. It was just too hard.

  * * *

  Bullet slid into his chair at the center of a long side of the wooden table. At one end his father sat—a platter of fried ham slices in front of him, a bowl of rice, and a plate of corn-on-the-cob beside him—wearing a tie and jacket. Three plates were stacked up in front of him. A bowl of sliced tomatoes was in front of Bullet. Bullet had a glass of milk. His parents had water. His father’s hands were under the table, folded in his lap; the eyes were fixed on the hands. Bullet’s mother sat straight and still at the other end. As soon as he heard Bullet’s chair scrape into place, the old man started reciting grace, the same every evening: “For what we are about to receive, the Lord make us truly thankful,” he said.

  He served the plates, Bullet’s mother first, then Bullet, then himself; a slice of fried ham, a spoonful of rice, an ear of corn. “There’s no reason to eat in an uncivilized manner just because we’re poor,” his father had said so often Bullet used to believe that was what he meant, that was why he required them all to dress for each dinner. But he’d figured out, finally, what the old man was really up to, that it was just another order he was giving. Bullet passed his mother’s plate down to her and caught her speculative glance. He pulled the knitted watchcap down further over his ears and waited.

  It wasn’t until everybody had been served that Bullet’s father looked at him. “Pass the butter,” he said and then, his eyes having slid over Bullet, “Take off that hat.”

  Bullet obeyed. He reached up and removed the woollen hat, dropping it onto the floor beside his chair. His mother looked up at him, then quickly away. Her dark hazel eyes flashed briefly, Bullet saw, and her mouth twitched, before she settled her face into expressionlessness. She picked up her knife and made a quick cut into the slab of meat.

  Bullet waited for what his father would say and ate his dinner while he waited, ate slowly and methodically.

  “I’ll take some mustard,” his father said.

  “There’s none,” his mother answered.

  After a while his father said, “We’ll need more butter.”

  “We’re almost out,” his mother answered. “It’s time to do a shopping.”

  “I won’t be going into town for another week. Or more.”

  Bullet’s mother looked down the table, then nodded, her mouth still. She’d have to sail in, then, two to four hours, depending on how the wind lay; and if a wind was whipping up waves or it rained, the bags would get wet and disintegrate carrying them up from the dock. Too bad.

  “I’ll need some money,” was all she said.

  “I can spare fifteen dollars,” his father answered. Bullet reached out to take two more ears of corn—at fifteen dollars for a week’s food, they’d be eating hungry. His father wouldn’t touch crabs and never had, wouldn’t have the smell of them in the kitchen. Too bad, because crabs were free for the trapping. Any fish she could get cheap downtown could only be eaten the same day, with the long sail to spoil it; chicken, too, was likely to turn in this hot weather, with the long midday calms when sails flapped uselessly and the tide carried you where it was going.

  “I said cut”—the old man spoke to him now—“not shaved.”

  Bullet shrugged. And what are you going to do about it?

  “There’s long precedent for adolescent rebelliousness.” His father spoke to his plate. The man had pale eyes and white hair in a crew cut. He was a big, spare man, like Johnny. “Aristotle refers to it. You won’t know who he is.”

  Oh yeah?

  “Just because there’s precedent doesn’t mean I find it tolerable.”

  Tough on you.

  “I don’t want to lay eyes on you until it’s grown out.”

  Bullet shrugged. Then keep ’em closed, old man. Billy-O had told him it needed shaving every day or so.

  “He won’t be eating with us now.”

  Bullet’s mother nodded. Her hair was getting long streaks of gray in it, woven down through the braid.

&nbs
p; “You needn’t bother fixing anything for him, he can see to himself. You’ll eat with me.”

  She nodded again, not saying anything.

  “Since he’s determined to have his own way, he can have his way all to himself.”

  Fair enough. He could run before he ate now.

  Without looking at him, his father asked: “Do you hear, Samuel?”

  “Yes, sir,” Bullet answered. And if you think I care, you can think again.

  “Then why are you still sitting here?”

  CHAPTER 5

  Bullet watched the trotline rise up out of the dark water. The thick pieces of eel with which it was baited had white underbellies, so that up until nearly the surface, in the dim light, it looked like there was a crab on every piece. This was the first run and most of the bait came up empty. He kept his net poised just above the surface of the water; he kept his eyes on the moving line. Behind him, Patrice ran the motor, holding the boat on course and on speed. One after the other, the chunks of bait thumped against the plastic roller. The big engine chugged away.

  Finally a crab rose, holding onto the eel with one claw while ripping at it with the other. Bullet dipped, netted it, dumped it into the waiting basket. As he had expected, this crab was the vanguard for a cluster—he netted three in a row, one after the other, dropped them into the basket and waited again.

  The surface of the water lay still, dull silver. A low, flat wash of clouds covered the rising sun. The motor hummed.

  They were alone on the bay. No other professionals worked Sundays, and the amateurs seemed to think that Labor Day marked the end for crabs as well as people. This was the way Bullet liked it best. They set the line out across the mouth of a creek and had everything the way they wanted it. As they progressed along the line’s length, crabs appeared in bunches. Bullet got them on board, into the basket. When they came to the end of the line, Patrice flicked the line free from the roller, turned the big boat in a broad circle, and headed back for another run.

  After the second run, Patrice shut down the motor. They had almost a full bushel—not a bad showing, not a particularly good one. Most of the crabs in the basket had settled down, but the newest ones still moved restlessly, snapping their pincers at each other, establishing their territory on the pile of crabs. Their beady eyes barely showed up against the grimy blue of their shells. Some had foamy spittle coming out of their mouths, blown out in impersonal hostility. They waved their claws up in the air, threatening. Bullet put the lid on top of the basket. A couple of swimmer claws stuck out between the vertical slats.

  “We will have started too early, I think,” Patrice said.

  Bullet leaned back against the gunwales and nodded at his employer. Patrice had short, tightly curled hair, graying irregularly. He wore, as always, khaki trousers, heavy workboots, and no shirt. His face and torso were tanned a permanent deep brown; even his potbelly, swelling out over his belt, shone brown. He was a couple of inches shorter than Bullet, and barrel-chested, with big muscles in his shoulders and arms. He had about the ugliest face Bullet had ever seen, little dark eyes and a short nose, big flat teeth and skin marked with deep lines.

  “Well, so we have erred,” Patrice said cheerfully. Nothing bothered him. In the more than four years Bullet had been working for him, he’d never seen Patrice bothered, not by people, not by weather, not by bad luck or good luck. “That makes it a good time to eat. I’ll put on the water for the coffee.” Before he went up to the little three-sided cabin near the bow of the long workboat, he leaned over the side to call up the opaque water of the creek: “Crabs, awake! Arise! Breakfast is now being served! Good, salted eel marinated in a rich brine! Come to the table, crabs!”

  Bullet had baited that line: it took ten solid minutes of washing, first with salt and then with lemon, to get the smell off his hands. “They’re not that stupid,” he said.

  Patrice turned to look at him, squinting into the glare of the sun, which was emerging from the cloud cover. “You think not? See now, I give you an analogy. You are sitting at your dinner table. You are eating—perhaps fried chicken, perhaps a beef stew with biscuits. You notice that your plate rises from the table. Slowly, it rises up, up, through an open window, toward the top of the sky. Do you then hold tightly to your plate, so that you attend it, yourself rising to the sky? Do you then continue to eat, as you and your plate soar up, up, higher and still higher? No, I will tell you, you do not. You say to yourself, ‘Bullet, old friend, something is not right.’ You let go of the plate. And do you know why you act so? Because you are smart.”

  “Nope,” Bullet said, shaking his head, grinning. “It’s because I’m not a crab. Because my instinct for self-preservation is stronger than my instinct to feed.”

  Patrice studied him sadly. “I don’t know why I waste myself on you. You have no speculative thought. I don’t know why I hire you.”

  “I do,” Bullet answered. “Because I work.”

  Patrice went up to the cabin. Bullet rested against the gunwales, with the boat rocking gently under his feet as it drifted with the tide out toward the red road the sun made on the silver water. The temperature rose. It had taken him a while to figure out Patrice. In fact, the first time Patrice had offered him a permanent job he had refused. Skippers who hired kids did it because they could give them much less of the take, and Bullet was then just thirteen. He didn’t mind working for Patrice, even then, but he’d learned how things were: Skippers thought they could bully kids around more, because kids were so glad of any job. Kids got all the scut work, too.

  Not Bullet, though, he’d never go out more than once with a skipper who kept him busy cleaning up, more than his fair share. He didn’t mind being yelled at, up to a point, or blamed because the wind was up and the crabs weren’t biting, or the engine broke down. Up to a point. He’d learned, too, just how much talking back he could do, just how far he could go. He kind of enjoyed that, pushing a man just to the exact point and then, when the guy was dying to have you go one step farther so he could really explode at you, stop. He always paced himself, too, in the work; how fast he’d move. These guys, all the guys on the crew, whoever they were, they thought because they were bigger, older, stronger, in command, they could tell him everything and use him as a yelling board when something else went wrong on them.

  Patrice had made no sense to Bullet at first. He never got riled, and Bullet couldn’t push him at all. He’d shrug things off. When he felt like talking, he’d talk; Bullet could listen or not, depending. When he talked, it wasn’t the usual stuff, women or hard luck or boasting. He didn’t ask questions either, he’d just start in, about someplace he’d been, or something he liked to eat, or even some old story he’d thought of. Bullet figured, at first, that the guy was a little weird and he steered clear. But after a while, he figured it out: Patrice had nothing to prove, nothing to prove on Bullet, nothing to prove to him. He let Bullet be. So the second time, the summer between seventh and eighth grade, that Patrice asked him to work regularly, Bullet agreed. If nothing else, Patrice always did a fair split of the take, so Bullet could give him a fair day’s work without getting cheated, whether he was a kid or not. Patrice worked him like a man, paid him like a man, treated him like a man. From the first.

  When Patrice came back, he carried a metal tray on which were a tin coffeepot, two thick white mugs, a slab of butter, and a straw basket covered with a white cloth. Patrice ground his coffee beans the last thing before they left the dock, because the fresher the grind the better the coffee. The crusty rolls under the cloth had been in the oven when Bullet arrived at five that morning. The missing fingers on Patrice’s hand, which made it difficult for him to tie bait onto the line and tiring for him to net crabs, didn’t impede him in the kitchen.

  They sat down facing one another, cross-legged on the wooden deck. Bullet’s stomach felt hollow with a hunger he hadn’t felt until just then. He broke a roll apart with his hands and spread it with butter. Patrice poured coffee.


  Patrice was missing the thumb on his right hand and the first two joints on the index finger on his left hand. He’d never told Bullet how that happened, but Bullet assumed from the thick, calloused stumps that it must have been long ago, and Patrice no longer remembered that he had lost anything. He never mentioned it, never had.

  “Good,” Patrice said, swigging coffee.

  “Good,” Bullet agreed, his mouth full of chewy white bread, the mug ready to hand.

  Patrice looked at him, his little eyes bright and clever. “Now that your scalp is tanned you don’t look so appalling.”

  “Did I look appalling?” Bullet hadn’t thought about it.

  “You didn’t think so? You looked like . . . you were wearing a helmet, a leprous helmet. You looked savage, a barbarian.” The eyes studied him. “You still do.”

  “I like it,” Bullet said. He didn’t think about what he was going to say to Patrice, he just said what he felt like.

  “How do you keep the growth down?”

  “Shave it every other day.”

  “Troublesome, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, but it’s worth it.”

  “To annoy your father?” Patrice guessed.

  Bullet smiled. “Besides, what’s wrong with being a barbarian?”

  “Of course, there’s something splended about that. And you do have a good head, my friend, well-shaped. But when you consider the centuries that have gone into the civilizing of the world . . .”

  “Yeah, but has that worked?” Bullet asked. He drained the last of his coffee.

  “No, perhaps not. Ah, well.” Patrice poured him another half cup and refilled his own. “But you are young, and there is hope for you yet.”