The Runner

by Cynthia Voigt

  “I see,” the voice said. “What is it then?”

  You know exactly what it is.

  The principal misunderstood Bullet’s silence. “Sit down, Samuel,” he ordered.

  Bullet just stood there, for a while, then turned around again. He didn’t hurry up the aisle, didn’t go slow; he moved along at his usual pace.

  “Samuel? I think your days among us are numbered,” the voice threatened him.

  The really big gun—expulsion.

  Bullet turned at the door to answer. “Yes, I expect they are.” With one hundred eighty school days in a year, they were always numbered. He waited, to see if the guy had anything else he wanted to say, not nervous, not uncomfortable, just waiting. He didn’t care, and that seemed to sink in after a while—he didn’t care about the principal up on the stage, or about Tommy up there blowing it, or about the students sitting turned in their seats to watch him. None of them could make him do anything, and he knew it. After a while that seemed to sink in. So he left the auditorium.

  Nobody said anything to him about walking out. Everybody was too wrapped up in discussions of the results of the vote. Once these were announced in the cafeteria, everybody started talking about who the new editor would be. Nobody seemed to notice that the next editor was going to be appointed by the faculty committee instead of elected. Everybody was just busy deciding whether or not to try for the job. “Well, it looks so good on your college applications,” Cheryl apologized to Tommy. “And I know I’m not popular, but the faculty likes me.”

  “Go ahead,” Tommy told her. “You’re welcome to it. You’ll look good with a brown nose.”

  Cheryl walked away.

  “I can’t believe they did this to me,” Tommy said to Bullet, waving his hand to indicate the people all over the lunchroom. “Jerks. I looked bad though.”

  Bullet didn’t disagree. He wondered if Tommy realized that his editorial had been no more favorable to the students than to the administration—a truly unbiased piece. What did Tommy expect?

  “He outmaneuvered me.”

  And how.

  “I seriously underestimated the man. Oh hell, who cares anyway. I’ve got better things to do with my time than try to make a rinky-ding school newspaper look good. But I wish I had your guts, Bullet.”

  You wish you had won the vote.

  Somebody came over and put a hand on Tommy’s shoulder. “Tough luck.”

  “Yeah, it’s a pisser,” Tommy said, without heat.

  * * *

  Only two people said anything to Bullet about what he’d done. The first was the coach, who came hustling over at the start of practice, his windbreaker zipped to his throat against the cold. Bullet knew what was bugging him, the state championships.

  “Do us a favor, Tillerman, don’t get yourself thrown out of school before December. Will you do that? Will you just try to do that?”

  “Sure,” Bullet said. The team has worked so hard, he predicted.

  “Because the rest of the guys have all worked so hard,” the coach said.

  You owe it to the team.

  “It wouldn’t be fair for you to let them down now.”

  The second person was Tamer, which surprised Bullet. Tamer didn’t even wait until after they had worked out. “You lost it,” he said, angry.

  Hunh?

  “Why’d you do that, Bullet? You could have said just about anything, and everybody in that auditorium would have gotten up to follow you out. They were just looking for a reason. Just waiting to be shown what they suspected. What’s wrong with you?”

  Not a thing. Not anything you mean anyway. “Are we going to work or not?” Bullet demanded. It was nothing to do with Tamer.

  “Don’t give me that. You were standing there, and there was nothing, but nothing, he could do to you. You had the whole place right in your hand. You saw right through him, you got right to the real point—if you’d explained anything, just to make it clear. You can’t expect people to think for themselves. And there’s your real equality, neither blacks nor whites are doing much thinking. But someone like you, all you’ve got to do is show them how you see things. I would have been the first one up myself—I thought about doing it anyway, but until you explained what he was up to it would have been just a black activist gesture, it wouldn’t have counted for anything. What did you want, Bullet?”

  “I wanted to get out of there.”

  “Don’t you care that you could have had everybody behind you?”

  “No.”

  Tamer stared at him, studying his face.

  “Are we going to do any work? I am, whether you do or not.”

  “You really don’t care, do you? You don’t make any connections, you haven’t got any.” Tamer didn’t expect an answer, didn’t wait for one. “I don’t understand you, Tillerman. You’re not cut out for ordinary life—you know that? I’m not putting you down, I’m just figuring something out. I don’t know what’s going to happen to you. You’re either going to end up really great or dead.”

  “Everybody ends up dead,” Bullet pointed out.

  “No, you know what I mean. Dead young, dead with your life wasted—because you’re going to drop out, aren’t you?”

  No need to answer that.

  “And they’ll draft you, which you won’t mind—and if you survive you’ll be some kind of five-star general, chief of staff. With your potential. How can you waste that potential, Bullet? Think of what you could achieve.”

  Coloreds—and all the liberal types too—always thinking about making the world a better place.

  “Or destroy,” Tamer continued. “I don’t know what you are. Some kind of loner. I never met anyone at all like you. I’d like to have you on our side though. If you ever decide to connect up with anything.”

  Coloreds, always making it one side or the other.

  “Say it.”

  “You coloreds, you always turn it into taking sides.”

  “Blacks,” Tamer snapped.

  “And why do you always do that anyway, what’s it matter?” Bullet demanded.

  “Blacks is our name for ourselves. Not something laid on us by anybody else. Of anyone, you should understand that.”

  I never thought, Bullet thought.

  CHAPTER 19

  Walker was reciting another Housman poem to them. He was doing it because they had ten minutes to spare, and this was a poem about history, he told them. Bullet was willing to listen—chances were that Housman might be worth listening to. There had only been one jerkwater remark; most of the class had learned its lesson that last time he started talking poetry. But somebody had to say, “This isn’t English class.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Walker agreed pleasantly. Nothing got his goat. “See if you can make the connection,” he asked them.

  The poem was full of names nobody knew, Wenlock and Wrekin, Uricon the city; about Romans and Englishmen and at the end the Roman was dead, had been dead for a long time, and the city was ashes.

  “Okay,” Walker said to the puzzled class. “Do you know about the Roman occupation of England?” They didn’t. “It was about the time of Caesar, about nineteen hundred years ago. The Roman legions conquered Britain. They stayed there, occupying it, for a couple of hundred years, occupying troops. Housman wrote this poem in the early years of this century. Now, listen again.”

  Bullet listened: There was a storm blowing around the woods. Housman was saying that it was just like the storms that blew hundreds of years ago, “the old wind in the old anger.” Bullet liked that line. Housman talked about a young Roman and said they were alike. He meant, although he didn’t say it straight out, that the same storm was blowing through him, right then. Then he said the storm in the woods would soon be done, would blow away.

  Walker let it sink in for a minute, then told them: “Historical lesson number one. While events change, the human creature doesn’t. Because the gale of life blows through you, doesn’t it? Your blood warms you, you have thoughts that h
urt.” Nobody wanted to talk about that, although nobody disagreed. They didn’t want to talk just because they didn’t disagree.

  Walker didn’t make them, didn’t seem to want to make them. “Lesson number two—a great abstraction—all that really lasts of history is—I hate to use this word but there’s nothing better: art. Song and story, picture and statue. The mosaic floor of a Roman villa in England. This poem. The golden death mask of Agamemnon. Thomas Jefferson’s home, Monticello. These are the real fruits of history, these are the enduring fruits.

  “And lesson number three, which is the tough one. You have to live in some connection between these two irreconcilable ideas.” He looked around and apparently saw the confusion. “Okay, don’t worry about that one. Just worry about gathering the fruits, do that, and the rest will follow. Wait, maybe the rest will follow. If you even just try to remember, it’s effectively the same thing.”

  “What are you telling us? Why are you talking like this?” Cheryl asked him.

  “Because I think you are young at a difficult time in time,” he said.

  Nobody argued with that.

  “I’m trying to give you . . .” Walker smiled, pale and as wimpy as his beard. “. . . the benefit of my vast years of education, passing on to you the ancient wisdom.” His tone was self-mocking and the class responded with mock groans.

  “Besides,” Walker added, “it’s worth making a fool of myself to see Mr. Tillerman wake up during class.”

  Bullet didn’t respond to that. Besides, the bell was ringing. Besides he liked that line, “the old wind in the old anger.” He didn’t give two hoots about Romans or art, but he liked that old wind and old anger. He didn’t even mind Walker using him to get people smiling; it was nothing but the truth after all.

  * * *

  The meet that Saturday was the second to last. This one was held over near the Delaware line, against another high school pretty much like theirs. The Warriors cleaned up on that one, taking seconds in high jump and the one hundred meter, but first in everything else. Bullet even took a first in the javelin with one hundred and sixteen feet. It wasn’t much of a match. There were a couple of interesting points, though. Tamer came in within one and a half seconds of the present high school record on the hurdles, and the coach’s eyes lit up like he was about to explode. For a while he just paced incoherently around in a small circle, hitting at his thigh with his fist. “You look good, Shipp,” he said. He slapped Tamer on the back. “You look good.” They were all standing around together, waiting for the relay race to begin. Their runners were on the track, the four of them, two black and two white, spread around the oval. “I’m beginning to believe in this,” the coach said. “How’s it feel, Shipp? Tillerman? How’s it feel to collect the fruits of your labors.” He didn’t wait for any answer. “We have got ourselves a team that can compete,” he rejoiced.

  They took the relay, too.

  * * *

  On the next Thursday, Bullet made his way through the lunch tables to find one that was empty. Except for a couple of wimps engaged in a game of chess on a tiny little board they had set up between their lunch trays. The pieces were so little they knocked them over whenever they moved one. They looked up at him with big eyes and shifted down a little to give him all the room he wanted.

  Pete, with Ted Bayson, nodding and smiling behind him, and Lou with her arm draped over Ted’s shoulder, called across to Bullet: “You guys gonna look as good this week?”

  “If we had a meet we would,” Bullet told them. He unwrapped his peanut butter sandwiches and drank down some milk. Tommy put his tray down across from him. “Hey, Bullet,” he said. “Hey, Larry, Zach.” The chess players nodded abstractedly.

  “So, what’s new?” Tommy asked Bullet.

  Bullet chewed, swallowed.

  “See who’s with Ted now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I guess she goes for you strong, silent types. You think? Only she likes them with hair.” Bullet grinned. Tommy always did like lipping off. “But that means Meredith’s available—and in need of comfort. You want to comfort her? Naw, you never looked twice at any female. So it’s up to me. Women, who needs ’em, right? Cheryl stole my material, did you see? About the draft, my crab metaphor idea. Did you read this week’s Blade?”

  “No.”

  “That’s my man,” Tommy approved. He picked up the plastic knife and fork to start on his slices of turkey, swimming in the same gravy that covered the scoop of mashed potatoes, the scoop of stuffing and the scoop of corn. “I almost didn’t read it either, but I couldn’t resist the temptation to see what the twerps were up to. The more I think about it, the better off I think I am, out of it. My God, the hours of work. And for what? What does a lousy school paper matter. It’s not going to make any difference at all to the fate of the world—right?”

  True enough.

  “And that’s not sour grapes,” Tommy told him.

  Bullet didn’t exactly believe that. He hoped Tommy didn’t either.

  “Because I never knew, until I had the time, how much better I could use my time. Listen, Bullet.” He glanced quickly at the chess players, who were entirely absorbed in their game. “How would you feel if you had a chance to really do something?”

  I do. I have. I did.

  “I was talking to some people—I can’t tell you who, but it would surprise you—and we think it’s time for some action. Not any of this peaceable mass movement stuff, that’s what they want us to do because then nothing changes. But—

  “Can you keep a secret? What am I asking, I know you can. Torture wouldn’t get something out of you you didn’t want to say. But, for example, there are files and records in the office, on everybody. Which students can’t see. I don’t even know if teachers can see theirs. They’re a little branch of the damned FBI in there.”

  Tommy talked on, but Bullet stopped listening. He was looking at Tommy, seeing a little kid with curly red hair and white skin that sunburned so bad he had to spend all summer in an undershirt. When you shot marbles with Tommy and you won, you could be sure he would win them back the next day, playing with grim concentration, not talking or messing around, until he counted the pile in front of him and looked up, satisfied that he was ahead again.

  “And they don’t even lock the door. A couple of guys, a little kerosene, and whoosh—”

  Losing ate away at Tommy, like rot eating away at some vine, until he figured out how to get even. If he’d been the one to walk out of that assembly, Tommy would have felt all right about himself, but he never fought back openly. And now he was talking about incendiaries.

  “What are you after, Tommy?” Bullet asked.

  “Two things, really,” Tommy answered eagerly. “First to get rid of their records . . .” And he was off, about the kinds of records and the kinds of uses they were put to. Bullet looked at him, at the way his long bright hair straggled around his face and his cheeks looked bony and his eyes were bitter. What had happened to Tommy?

  Growing up. What happened to all of them. Tough luck. Bullet wanted to lean across to Tommy, lean across the years, really, and yell at him. “You don’t have to be like this, you’ve got other choices; at least tell yourself the truth, nobody can make you lie to yourself.” He jammed the wax paper back into the brown bag, angry, ready to move away.

  “. . . including their suspicions, if they think you’re on dope or anything . . .” Tommy talked on.

  But why should Bullet be angry? Because he knew Tommy wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t hear. So what? What did Tommy matter anyway; he’d known for years how different they were, how different they’d gotten. What did he want from Tommy? He wanted— He stopped himself, then moved his brain slowly forward again. No compromising, he reminded himself. Because Patrice was right about him. He wanted Tommy to be as good as he could. And Tommy wasn’t going to do that, not by a long shot. So Bullet wanted—not to care.

  “. . . in a court and it gets treated like holy writ and none of
it’s been investigated, just rumors written . . .”

  And he couldn’t do anything about it, not just Tommy, couldn’t change anything, couldn’t not care, but everybody—he couldn’t make those runners want to practice as hard as they could. He couldn’t make any difference, however hard he ran himself. Not to Liza, especially. She was so far away he couldn’t reach far enough to connect even if he tried to. She was just out there, probably singing some song where he couldn’t even hear her. He’d lost her. Okay, he could take the truth. He minded losing her, dumb old Liza with her hair like honey and her songs like spun gold. He guessed he’d have to take that truth too.

  “Hey, man, are you listening to me?”

  Bullet was listening to Liza, singing an old song, “. . . any stars in my crown, When at evening the sun goeth down . . .” in her molten voice.

  “I don’t know why I bother trying to connect with you,” Tommy said. “You’ve been screwed up for years, Bullet. You don’t care about anything.”

  That got Bullet’s attention. Don’t I wish, he almost wished.

  “But listen to me. The other reason is, if we do that, then the blacks will know we’re really on their side. Really committed . . .”

  Because Tommy, and everybody in the room, was going to go out and be about a quarter of what they could be. They’d say it was because life was so tough, that was the lie they’d tell themselves. Liza wasn’t so different, wasn’t so bad—and Tommy couldn’t even sing. They’d get old and wrinkled up like raisins and they’d think it was life’s fault they’d never done what they could.

  “. . . white society that destroys them, gives them a second-rate education then gets on their backs for not being better educated. Makes it impossible for them to get good jobs and sometimes any job at all, then complains because they’re on welfare. Did you know there are as many whites as blacks on welfare? You never hear about that, do you?”

  Because they didn’t like what the choices cost them. Who did? Like Tommy, he’d said he knew what it would cost printing that editorial, but when it cost that, here he was, getting even. Just the way he always had, getting back all the marbles. Bullet listened to Tommy now, because he was too sad to do anything else.