Runner

by Carl Deuker

  I wanted to hit Miller. For a moment, I wanted to hit him more than I wanted anything in the world. But I was afraid of him too. So I let Melissa pull me away.

  "You're a coward," he called after me. "Always were and always will be. Just like your old man."

  CHAPTER SIX

  "Let's just skip this," I said once we'd crossed the street and were standing in front of Java John's.

  Melissa shook her head. "I'm not going to let those morons ruin my day." She pulled the door open, and there wasn't much else for me to do but follow her in.

  At the counter stood a dark-haired guy with a little goatee. Melissa looked at the menu board and ordered a latte and an almond biscotti. "You can pick it up at the end of the counter," the guy said after she paid. "What can I get you?" he asked as I stepped up to the cash register.

  I felt in my pocket for change. I had three quarters and some dimes and nickels—enough for a coffee but nothing more.

  "Size?"

  "Small."

  "Anything to eat?"

  I shook my head. He pushed a button on the register. "That'll be a dollar eight."

  I'd forgotten about tax. I pulled the change out of my pocket and laid it on the counter. I was three cents short. He reached to a little plate with pennies on it, took three, and added it to my coins.

  Melissa was sitting at the only window table. I carried my coffee there and sat down. "Don't let him get to you," she said. "You're not the coward. He's the coward."

  I took a sip of the coffee. It was bitter, and I wanted to get away from her. "I need to get some sugar," I said, and I went back up to the counter.

  When I returned, she fiddled with her cup a little, and then looked at me again. "You were brave in class today, Chance. You were the only one who was. Fighting isn't the only way to be brave, you know."

  "Could we talk about something else?"

  For a long time we both sat, neither of us saying anything. Then she smiled. "Let's talk about the Lincoln Light."

  I wasn't sure I'd heard right. "You mean the school newspaper?"

  "Yeah. I'm the editor, you know."

  I shook my head. "No, I didn't know."

  "Well, I am. And I'm looking for writers. People who are willing to take on controversial topics. I think you'd be great."

  So that was it—that's why she'd wanted to talk to me. "I can't write for the Lincoln Light, Melissa."

  "Why not?"

  "I've got nothing to say."

  "Everybody has something to say. You write about things you care about."

  "I don't care about anything."

  "Yes, you do," she said, her voice angry. "Otherwise you wouldn't have said what you said in class today. You care about the truth." She paused. "At least think about it, OK? We meet every other Friday night at the Blue Note Café. It's up on Thirty-second Avenue, at the top of the stairwell that leads down to the beach. Even if you didn't write, you could help with proofreading and stuff like that. We need new people, Chance. Besides, what else are you doing?"

  I looked into her eyes. They were open and honest. She wasn't pretending—she really did want me to join her newspaper staff.

  "I'll think about it," I said.

  "OK," she said. She took a sip of her latte, finished her biscotti, and then stood. "I've got to get going. See you tomorrow."

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I sat at the table and finished my coffee. With a couple of packets of sugar added to it, it was OK. Besides, I'd paid for it, so I was going to drink it. When the cup was empty, I stayed where I was, looking out the window. The door opened and a couple of older women came in. They placed their orders and then glanced over at me. They wanted the window table. I stood up, pushed in the chair, tossed my cup into the trash, and headed for the door. "Come again," the guy behind the counter called out as I left.

  Usually I walk down to the sailboat along Sixty-fifth Street, but that day I went three blocks south to Sixty-second. Just past the community center is the little house where I used to live.

  It had been a long time since I'd walked by that house. All over Seattle, new owners have rebuilt older homes, making them so big it's hard to recognize the original house. But other than the bushes being a little taller and a fresh coat of yellow paint, my old house looked the same as it had on the day I'd left it.

  I stopped across the street from it and raised my eyes to the second story. Behind a tall, thin window was my bedroom—or what had been my bedroom. It was small, with steeply pitched walls. I had a dartboard on the door and a Star Wars poster tacked to the wall. Hidden beneath that poster was a hole in the wallboard about the size of an orange. My dad always said he was going to fix it, but he never did. I wondered if the new owners had done anything about it. For some reason, I hoped they hadn't.

  It didn't seem as if anyone was home, so I crossed the street, walked down the driveway, and peered over the chain-link fence into the back yard. The yard looked the same, too, though it was smaller than I'd remembered. The laurel bushes where I'd built my forts were still there. So were the plum tree and the patch of grass where on hot days I'd run through the sprinkler.

  It was on that patch of grass that my mom had told me. I didn't understand what she was saying at first. "I'm dying here," she said, and I thought she was sick with cancer or something like that. I guess my fear showed in my face, because she pulled me close to her then, held my head against her chest. "Not my body, Chance. My heart. My soul. I'm dying. I've got to start my life over. Away from your father. You understand why, don't you?"

  I shook my head no, but I did understand. I'd heard them arguing at night. I knew my dad drank way too much and worked way too little. "You won't leave me too, will you?" I said.

  "No, Chance. I won't ever leave you. I promise."

  I was still staring into the yard when the front door of the house opened and a little red-haired girl about nine years old stepped out, her mother right behind her. The little girl's eyes caught mine, and she immediately smiled, but her mother didn't.

  "I used to live here," I said quickly. "I was just curious about the house and the yard."

  The woman reached out and grabbed her daughter's hand. I backed away from the yard, then turned and walked quickly down the street. I didn't have to turn back to know the woman's eyes were on me.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A few minutes later I was heading down the steep ramp that leads from the Shilshole Bay Marina parking lot to Pier B, where my dad's sailboat is moored. At the bottom of the ramp is a locked gate that keeps the snoops and the thieves out. I stuck my key in the lock, turned the handle, and stepped onto the pier, making sure the gate closed and locked behind me. Then I walked past a couple dozen sailboats until I reached the Tiny Dancer.

  I was home.

  When kids hear I live on a boat, they picture a floating mansion outlined with strings of white Christmas lights like the one in the old movie Sleepless in Seattle. They think I sit on the deck under an umbrella while waves gently lap up against the sides, foghorns sound in the distance, and exotic seabirds fly overhead. But I don't live on any floating mansion; the Tiny Dancer is an old, weather-beaten thirty-foot sailboat. The paint is blistered and peeling. Barnacles and seaweed cling fore and aft. Before she could sail anywhere, she'd need to be hauled out and completely gone over, but that costs money and lots of it.

  Which is another way of saying that even though I live on a sailboat, I'm not a sailor. Mainmast, capstan, jib, boom, tiller, rudder, port, starboard, bow, stern—I know what most of that nautical crap means. But nobody learns how to tack into the wind by sitting on a sailboat, and sitting is all I've ever done. My dad hasn't taken the boat out into Puget Sound for five years. I know as much about sailing as some guy living in a mobile home knows about driving in the Indianapolis 500.

  Mr. Kovich and Mr. Nelson and other guys with boats on our pier tell me the Tiny Dancer is a decent sailboat, so I guess it is, but it's a lousy place to live. It's so small that my dad and I c
an hardly turn around without bumping into each other. All our belongings have to fit into the little nooks and crannies in the cramped cabin below deck. The galley has a tiny oven, a tiny sink, and a couple of tiny shelves for food. The refrigerator isn't really a refrigerator—it's an icebox about the size of an old stereo speaker. The table in the galley barely holds two plates and two glasses. In the main part of the cabin are two side benches. Above them are small storage areas and then a pair of narrow, rectangular windows. I sleep up front in the V berth; my dad sleeps aft. When I first slept on the boat, I sat up quickly in the mornings a couple of times, cracking my head pretty good. Since then, I've always remembered to crawl in and crawl out.

  We're moored at slip 45, which puts us about halfway down the pier. When I came even with slip 31, I saw my dad sitting on deck. He was smoking a cigarette and staring at the million-dollar yachts a couple of piers away.

  He shouldn't have been there.

  All summer, he'd worked from noon to nine at the Sunset West Condominiums, a two-hundred-unit waterfront retirement apartment complex just down the road from the marina. He unclogged toilets, washed windows, cleaned the laundry room, vacuumed the halls, moved sofas—whatever the old people wanted done, he did. It was a crappy job, but it was a job, the first steady job he'd had for as long as I can remember. It kept him from drinking at all during the day, and maybe kept him from drinking as much as he used to at night, though I'm not sure about that.

  "What's going on, Dad?" I said as I stepped up onto the boat.

  "Nothing's going on," he said, not even looking at me.

  I settled onto the bench across from him. "Shouldn't you be at work?"

  He leaned down and picked up a brown paper bag by his feet. I didn't have to look to know that inside was a pint of vodka. He took a sip, and then looked out across the water again.

  "Why aren't you at work?"

  He turned to face me. "Because I got fired."

  "What happened?

  He stubbed out his cigarette, stuffed his bottle of vodka into the pocket of his jacket, and stood. "I'm going down to Little Coney. Get some coffee and see if Frank Fisher's there. I'll be back late."

  Once he was gone, I sat on the bench and looked at nothing. We were in trouble. Again.

  My dad owned the sailboat outright. He bought it with the money he'd gotten from selling the house after the divorce. But there was still the monthly moorage fee and the sewage fee and the electricity bill and the heat bill and food and soap and toilet paper and toothpaste and a hundred other things. He'd want his cigarettes and his booze. Where was the money going to come from? He'd used up all his welfare eligibility. I made some money washing pots on weekends at Ray's restaurant, but I already gave my dad most of what I earned to pay for food. The money I kept I used to buy my clothes and my shoes and stuff I needed for school like notebooks and paper. But even if I gave him every single penny I earned, it wouldn't be enough to pay all the bills. It wouldn't even be close.

  I looked out at the water. Four ducks were swimming in the oily gunk between Pier B and Pier C. All they had to do was spread their wings and fly away, but they stayed. How stupid can you get?

  CHAPTER NINE

  The joke is that according to the divorce papers, I'm supposed to be living with my mom. For a while, I did. After the divorce, she landed a job at Dakota Art Store in the Roosevelt district. We lived in an apartment right above the store. Sometimes at night we'd go back down into the store after dinner. I'd sit and watch as she'd stand before a big easel and paint using stuff customers had returned. "This is crap," she told me, even though all her paintings looked great to me. "When I get enough money, I'm going to art school. Then you'll see what I can do. The whole world will see what I can do."

  I stayed with her during the week, and then went to stay with my dad on the sailboat Saturday, Saturday night, and Sunday. He was drinking, and after the first time the boat was no fun. I couldn't wait for Sunday night when my mom would pick me up.

  Only one Sunday she didn't show. Dad called her from the phone booth outside the marina office, but her phone just rang and rang. We took the bus to the apartment and knocked on the door. No answer. Dad tried the doorknob. It opened, and we stepped inside.

  The apartment was bare except for three boxes by the front door. Dad opened them one at a time. Inside were my clothes, a football, an old school binder, some baseball cards, and a couple of books. From behind us came a voice. "Are you looking for Marlene?"

  We turned around. Standing outside the door was Bill, the man who lived in the apartment across the hall from Mom and me.

  "Yeah," Dad said. "We are."

  "She moved out yesterday." Bill looked at me. "I thought that you..." He stopped.

  "Did she say where she was going?" Dad asked.

  "Some town along the Oregon coast. Not Cannon Beach, but somewhere near there." He stopped. "I'm sorry. I didn't pay attention to the name."

  My dad didn't say anything to me on the bus ride back to the marina, but when we got to the sailboat he ruffled my hair. "It'll be OK, Chance. She'll call. You'll see her real soon."

  Mom's letter arrived a couple weeks later. Dad read it, and then handed it to me. I didn't understand most of it, but there was one sentence that I read over and over: It will only be for a little while.

  Those days Dad was full of plans. At night, after we ate, he drank his vodka and read me passages from Sailing Alone around the World, his favorite book. "We'll be like Joshua Slocum. We'll sail someplace special. No school for you; no crummy jobs for me. How's that sound?"

  "Sounds great," I said, but all the time I kept waiting for Mom to come back and get me. The weeks turned into months, and all I did was slop around in the marina, watch my dad drink, and listen to his stories about the sailing trips we were going to take.

  One night, when Mom had been gone for five months, he pulled out his nautical charts for what had to be the fiftieth time. "I was talking to Frank Fisher today," he said, his words slurred. "The way Frank figures it, the way to sail around the world is to do it in stages. First we'd go to Hawaii. I'd get a job there for a while, and then—"

  "We're never going anywhere," I said, interrupting him.

  "Sure, we are," he said.

  "No, we're not," I said, my voice rising with every word, all the anger spilling out. "And Mom's never coming back either. You're a drunk and that's all you are. So just shut up! OK? Just shut up and leave me alone!"

  He looked at me for a long time. Then he folded up his charts and put them away.

  That was years ago. He has never mentioned sailing around the world to me since that day. But every once in a while he'll put out his charts and pore over them as if he really is going somewhere someday. And sometimes, when I get the mail from the woman at the marina office, there will be a letter with handwriting that reminds me of my mom's. My whole body will go tense, and then I'll see that it's from Green-lake Golf or Funtasia, and I'll feel like a fool.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I sat on the deck of the Tiny Dancer watching the stupid ducks for about fifteen minutes, and then I did what I always do when I feel like my head is about to explode: I ran.

  Running is the only thing I've ever really liked to do. Sometimes at Lincoln I look at the kids on the track team or the cross-country team on the day of a meet. They've got their hundred-dollar running shoes, their fifty-dollar running shorts, their bottles of Gatorade, and their energy bars. But I'd beaten all of them in elementary school, and I still figured I could beat them. They had a softness to them, in their eyes, a softness that made me believe I could gut it out at the end against them, and take them, if I ever got the chance. "Finish strong," my dad always told me. "Finish strong."

  That day I ran my normal route. I started by heading east on Seaview Avenue toward the Ballard Locks. For the first mile or so, my mind was buzzing like a chainsaw. I had conversations with Melissa Watts and Brent Miller and Mr. Arnold and my dad. But by the time I'd reached the loc
ks, my mind shut off just like it always does. Instead of thinking while I ran, I was just running. Through the locks, up the hill, and over the footbridge to Magnolia—one foot after the other.

  At the end of the footbridge, I stopped for a minute and looked out. A Coast Guard cutter was going through the locks, headed from Lake Union toward Puget Sound. Some herons were flying from their nests above the railroad tracks out toward the water.

  I watched for a couple of minutes and then I ran back the same way I'd come: through the locks, then along Seaview Avenue to Pier B. I kept going, past the marina offices and out to Golden Gardens Park. At Meadow Point, I cut over to the beach and ran in the sand toward North Beach.

  At the spot where the beach turns north is a weather-beaten maple tree that seems to grow sideways right out of the rocks. My mom always said it had to be the toughest tree in the world. I don't know how it gets the nutrients to stay alive, or why it doesn't blow over in the windstorms that come every winter, but somehow it survives. I kept going until I reached that maple, touched it for luck, and then headed back.

  When I reached Pier B, I looked at my watch. I'd run seven miles in a little over forty minutes. I went onto the boat, grabbed some clean clothes and a towel from the cabin, and headed back up the ramp.

  In the parking lot across from Pier B is an L-shaped utility room with lockers, a washer and a dryer, toilets, and some shower stalls. It's open only to people who have a boat in the marina. I stuck my key into the lock, turned the handle, and stepped inside.

  As usual, it was empty. I walked past the lockers and the washing machines, turned right, and entered the shower area. There are three stalls; I took the one farthest back. For the next twenty minutes, I let the water wash away the sweat and dirt of the day. After twenty minutes, the water slowly changed from hot to warm. Before it turned cold, I stepped out, toweled myself dry, and put on clean clothes. Then I went back to the boat.