Runner in Red

by Tom Murphy

  A guard waved us through the gate at Haverford as the van’s squawk box reported the news on Priscilla Brown, that she was DOA at Pennsylvania Hospital. Bridget motioned to me to drive up a winding, tree-lined path, to a building where the sign read, “Day School.”

  “Park here,” she said. “I’ll call the station.”

  A bell rang inside the school and I removed my camera as a dozen small children, seven or eight years old, came running out to play for recess.

  “What’s our story?” I said to Bridget.

  I could hear Junior as she got him on speaker: “Brown’s kid goes to school there,” he said. “Get him on tape for an exclusive before the other stations get there.”

  I grabbed the phone out of Bridget’s hand. “Are you out of your fucking mind, asshole?!?”

  “Give Bridget the pictures she needs for this story or you can pick up your money, son,” he said loud enough for both of us to hear.

  “I don’t need your goddamn money,” I shouted into the phone, and I set my camera on the ground.

  “Colin,” Bridget called, but I walked fast along the path to the gate. “Where you going?”

  “Screw Junior and the horse that brought him,” I shouted over my shoulder as I picked up speed heading to the gate, but she jogged after me and caught me quick.

  “Three stations, right? And this will make four you burned bridges at.”

  “The boy lost his mother, for chrissakes, Bridget, and Junior wants us to put him on the six o’clock news.”

  She grabbed my arm. “Junior’s a termite. Why throw your life away again?”

  I felt my heart pounding. The only sound was the laughter of the children playing on the hill.

  “Because I had this happen to me,” I said looking her straight in the eye.

  “What?” she said, and she let go of my arm. “What are you talking about? Happened to you? What happened to you?”

  “Never mind,” I said, but she chased me again and caught me at the front gate.

  “Wait,” she said, as she spun in front of me and blocked me with her slender frame. I could feel her breast against my arm and I could smell her perfume.

  “I don’t have a lot left, Bridget. But what I do have I want to hold onto.”

  She looked deep into my eyes, then she pulled out a pad of paper and scratched a name and a number. She tore the page from its sheath and pressed the paper into my palm.

  “What’s this?”

  “A number.”

  “For what?”

  “For a guy at a station in Boston.”

  “Boston?”

  “Stan’s the news director there, tell him he owes me one,” she said, and she tapped my hand with the note. “I’m building you a new bridge, kid.”

  “I don’t need your bridge.”

  “Oh yes, you do,” she said, and she kissed her fingertips before pressing them to my cheek ever so gently, then she smiled.

  “Trust me, sweetie.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  It was an 0 and 2 count I recall vividly as I toed the infield clay at Fenway Park waiting for the pitch that night in September, 1990. A cold drizzle leaked from the charcoal sky as Roger Clemens, our pitcher, looked in for the sign and I tapped my glove thinking: hit it here!

  I had passed up a scholarship to Notre Dame for the chance to sign with the Boston Red Sox in June after high school, but the bet looked like a smart one as I hit .356 in twenty-one games following my September call-up, and already the front office had dubbed me, at 19, their “shortstop of the future.”

  “This is the preview, the coming attraction,” the general manager told the Boston Globe in 1990. “We put the kid in the middle of the action, but he plays like he’s been up here his whole life.”

  How long ago since the fly ball that cut my career short with the Red Sox?

  Ken Griffey, Jr. of the Seattle Mariners waved his bat, as I shaded him toward third base—an eon ago—expecting Griffey to slap the pitch.

  But he popped it up.

  I remember the arch of the ball as I scooted on the grass behind the bag at third, and I glanced away one second to gauge my distance from the spectators’ rail. When I looked up again, searching the black sky illuminated by lights, I found the ball dropping fast and I raised my glove. But my ankle did not follow the pirouette with the rest of my body. Instead, my cleat locked under a brace that fastened the rail to the field, and a moment later I felt the crunch from my hip down, like a bat splintering, as I tumbled into the laps of scattering fans.

  Torn ligaments, broken fibula, decimated ankle: the doctor’s report testified that my leg looked like it had passed through a butcher’s shop.

  Nine years ago, almost ten. An eternity!

  I played in Puerto Rico the next winter and the Red Sox gave me three seasons in the minors to find my quick bat again, but the soft tissue in my ankle never healed and that was it—my life had ended in foul territory in the rain in Boston at nineteen.

  My mother had a favorite saying when I was growing up: “Everyone has a diamond inside them,” she said. Though most people cake their diamonds with bitterness, pride, and regrets, their diamond is still there, shining at the center, waiting for them to discover it, she believed.

  Challenging words, but the box score on my life was showing “E” for “Error.”

  I bounced around the country for six years after the Sox let me go, searching without success for a passion to replace my love for the game. I worked at a series of jobs, including stints as a television news cameraman, a trade I had learned from my dad who had been one of the best news shooters at NBC in New York.

  “If you want to be an eagle, you’ve got to fly like one,” my mom had always told me, so I kept going, pushing ahead, because I wanted to be an eagle.

  She had great energy and a wonderful laugh. That’s what I remember most about my mom, the way she would throw her blonde head back and laugh in response to the ladies who sat with her at my little league games when I was a boy. They would chide her for giving up Europe and Asia and other places she had trekked as a foreign correspondent for UPI to be a mother in Hicksville, New York, editing the community weekly.

  “You don’t understand,” she would tell the ladies. “This is what I’ve chosen. Family is everything to me.”

  I was nine when she died. My father, who had survived a bullet in the Korean War, barely survived the loss, and I doubt I have yet.

  I don’t know why women’s ambitions fascinate me more than men’s, but they do. Male posturing, designed as it is to gain an advantage, has always bored me. But a woman with a mind of her own and the kick to back it up, I will surrender to every time. Maybe that’s why as the days in Boston turned to weeks without producing traction, still I couldn’t get Bridget Maloney out of my mind, and I wondered: did I make the right choice leaving her?

  I found an apartment over a tavern in Revere, north of downtown, when I arrived in Boston. The place had 35-cent beers and a portrait of JFK on the top shelf. The room was cheap, which was good, but the ladies who came out at night in hairnets to shout their husbands off the barstools (and their husbands who resisted) got to me. I clung to a loftier view of relationships, so I found another place—this one over a tavern in Dorchester, south of downtown—where they let me tend bar for extra cash. The floors of the apartment tilted higher at one end than the other, same as the first apartment, but at least it was quiet at night.

  The luxury came at a premium, however, so I had to take a second job with a temp agency, one of those Work-Today/Get-Paid-Today outfits, to make the higher rent. The temp manager, Friar Tuck with a nose ring, gave me the address of a storefront in the South End with instructions to create a mailing list for a celebration of women runners planned for the 2000 Boston Marathon next April.

  “The clock doesn’t start till you get there,”
barked Tuck, and off I went.

  The sun broke through the clouds as I descended into the subway that wet October morning. I decided to get off the T at Park Street and walk across Boston Commons for some fresh air, and that’s when I said aloud, to no one in particular, “What am I doing here?”

  I knew all about the need to “uncake” our diamonds. But Boston, why did I come back to Boston? I knew the answer. It’s not the troubles we experience in life that shape us, it’s our response to the bitterness, pride, and regrets that consume us that determines whether we will “uncake” our diamonds.

  I came back, I knew, because this is where I had lost my way.

  And this is where I needed to uncake my diamond.

  At the South End storefront, a dank, cluttered room, my boss, a guy with Thom McAn shoes and a lime green suit, waved me in.

  “What’s your name, kid?”

  “Colin Patrick.”

  “Sit over there, Pat, while I find the Yellow Pages.”

  “The temp manager said you needed me to create a mailing list for a video on women runners.”

  “Bigger than that. I want a list of all the companies in Boston that do business with women.”

  “Who are we looking for?”

  “We’re not looking for anybody. We’re making a mailing list. It’s the Boston Marathon that’s looking for the first girl.”

  “First girl?”

  “Yeah, the ‘Runner in Red’ who ran the Boston Marathon in 1951. People think a girl snuck into the race back then. Some girl in a red hood. A sponsor paid the B.A.A. a ton of bucks for the right to promote the ‘Runner in Red’ when he finds her.”

  “What’s the B.A.A.?”

  “The Boston Athletic Association, which conducts the race,” he said, as he found the phone book propping up a leg of the couch and gave a pull. “Until 1972 the B.A.A. didn’t let girls into the Marathon. That’s when old guys headed up the race committee. But the girls got tired of the old guys’ crap and by the 1970s, they started fighting the sod busters.”

  “I thought you said a woman ran in 1951?”

  “They don’t know if one ran that early. That’s why a sponsor, some bigwig business guy, paid the B.A.A. a ton of bucks for a sponsorship so he can make a big deal out of the ‘Runner in Red.’ He shelled out enough smackeroons, he must think he can find her.”

  “What do I do?”

  “You make the mailing list so I can get the bigwig business guy to make a big deal out of me.”

  “Sounds to me like the bigwig business guy wants to bait women. What’s his real deal?”

  “Look, pal, I don’t pay you to think, I pay you to stuff. So get working, OK? I got to go to a meeting.”

  With that he was gone, and I was leafing through the Yellow Pages trying to gauge which firms sold to women, when “Miracles” by Jefferson Starship played on the radio, and I thought of Bridget again, the idea of miracles, and it hit me how a song can pierce our shell of consciosness, when my boss banged his way through the door. “Shit,” he said, and I watched him stand sideways against the window, shielding himself as he followed the movements of a man in a raincoat and a policeman across the street.

  “Oh, Christ! My fuckin’ luck,” he said, as the man in the raincoat checked the addresses of storefronts.

  “What?”

  “Nothin.’ Look, you never saw me, OK?”

  With that he ran to the back of the room, searching for a way out, as across the street, the policeman and the man in the raincoat walked our way.

  A moment later, the two were forced to pause to let a limo pass as a line of cars trailing the limo beeped their horns, and news vans and trucks with placards reading, “Finn for Governor,” created an additional obstacle.

  “Where’s Sylvester?” the man in the raincoat asked me as he stepped through our door a moment later, while the policeman, a burly sort, stood behind him.

  “Are you the B.A.A.?”

  “DEA,” he said, and my brain tried to sort it out, but all I could come up with was Drug Enforcement Administration.

  “The DEA?”

  “That’s right. Who are you? Can I see some identification?”

  I handed him my wallet, but as he studied the picture on my license I realized Sylvester—or whoever had disappeared out the back door—had more important worries than getting the mail out.

  Before the man in the raincoat could ask another question, however, things got really strange, as a tiny, beady-eyed guy in a tattered coat walked up to our door whistling. The instant the dirty little guy saw the cop he turned and ran, while the cop—responding like a ball off a bat—bolted out the door behind him. Raincoat flapping, the DEA man chased after them, and I stepped out onto the sidewalk to watch, confused as hell.

  It was the shots that got everyone’s attention.

  Two shots rang out as pedestrians ducked behind mailboxes, mothers with carriages screamed, and the press hopped from their TV vans with cameras and a new focus greater than covering the governor’s campaign. Meanwhile, up the street in the center of the intersection, the dirty little guy lay spread-eagle in the street while the cop, whom he had fired off a round at, stood over him with a gun to his head.

  “What was that all about?” I asked several men in business suits who rushed down from their offices to join the throng on the street, held back now by police reinforcements.

  “Drugs,” said a thin man.

  “Must be that new ring from Central America. Did you see the big story in the paper Sunday?”

  “No, what story?” said a guy with a snub nose. “I didn’t see the paper.”

  I listened as the thin man told how some government officials in El Salvador, former army generals, were working in partnership with a drug cartel to expand their operation into the US.

  “How do you know this is that?” said Snub Nose.

  “I overheard him talking,” the thin one said, and he pointed to the DEA leader who stood in the middle of the street coordinating the local police as they frisked the dirty little guy and hustled him into a cop car.

  “Unbelievable,” said Snub Nose. “No sooner do the Feds shut down Florida than up pops Central America.”

  Suddenly the DEA leader walked toward me, motioning for me to join him in a tan sedan sitting at the curb.

  “Me?” I said, mouthing the word, and he nodded.

  Bald, muscular, in his 40s, he said his name was Clinton (“like the President, but different party, different worldview”). He questioned me for more than an hour, taking notes about my whole life, but it was the baseball that finally convinced him I was straight.

  “I saw you play. At Fenway. You could go in the hole and get ’em, couldn’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What happened?”

  I told him about my ankle.

  “Damn poor luck, ain’t it?” he said, as his partner—the cop who had ducked the shot—held up a cell phone. Clinton looked at me, his face very serious. “Word to the wise. Don’t go poking your nose into this kinda business, I don’t care how down you think you might get.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said, but before he climbed out of the car to take the call, he said, “You’re Kenny Patrick’s kid brother, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I remember Kenny had a brother in baseball.”

  “Yeah,” I said, surprised that someone from Boston knew Kenny who was a New York cop, a good one.

  “I palled with Kenny in the Marines. He’s a solid citizen, your brother.”

  “The best.”

  “I’m sure you miss being in the action. But keep your nose clean, kid, ya hear?”

  I continued to hang around and watch after he drove off. In fact, I was the last to leave before police cleared the intersection. Most of all I couldn’t take my eyes off the TV
van and the cameraman. Clinton had nailed it!

  Oh, to be in the middle of the action again!

  It was then that I reached into my pocket for my wallet and found the scrap of paper Bridget had given me.

  The one with Stan the news director’s phone number.

  CHAPTER THREE

  It was a bright blue spring day on Long Island, New York, the day of the accident.

  I was nine and I had a ball game that evening. My mother had chores for me to do after school, make-work kind of stuff, things that would make me late for my game. I complained, but she insisted I do every last task before leaving for the ballpark on my bike.

  I blamed her, saying it was her fault I was going to miss batting practice. I kept pestering her for a ride until finally, she relented, and I grabbed my cleats. They were muddy from a game earlier that week, and I set them on the dashboard to show her how mad I was that she had made me late.

  As we drove she asked me nicely to take my dirty shoes off the dash, but I said I had no place to put them, and that’s when she leaned over to slap them off.

  “I told you to do something, young man,” she said, as we passed through an intersection at Old Country Road and Jerusalem Avenue. An airline mechanic returning home from JFK had fallen asleep at the wheel, and he ran the light. He barreled into us, hitting us hard on my mom’s side at 50 mph, according to the police report later.

  I saw my mom’s face one last instant as the car on her side crumbled like a kid balling foil from a pack of baseball cards.

  For three months after that I didn’t talk, even after I came out of a coma, since there was nothing I could do to make it better, to undo what I had done, and I didn’t want to talk to anyone again, ever.

  “It was an accident,” Kenny said, and I was grateful that he never blamed me for shattering our family. He even gave up his wrestling scholarship at Villanova in Pennsylvania to come home and be close for me.

  But I didn’t believe him that it wasn’t my fault, and I have never believed anyone that I wasn’t to blame for putting my goddamn shoes on the dash.