by Rich Wallace
So Devin carried the smaller girl and the other one took her mother’s hand, and we carefully walked the six hundred yards to the exit. “What’s your name, honey?” Devin said to the girl in his arms, and she said, “Mandy.” “We’ll be okay, Mandy. We’ll get you warm.”
The road was empty ahead of us, of course; nothing could get past that pileup. I walked behind; Devin’s strong skinny arms carrying that child, his hair matted to his head and his T-shirt frozen to his skin. I caught up to the woman and said, “We’ll be all right,” and she nodded and I took the girl’s other hand.
There was a gas station/convenience store just off the exit, and the woman called her husband and gave him the story. The clerk gave us some paper towels to wipe off our heads and Devin got a coffee and blew on his fingers. He stripped off his T-shirt and the clerk gave him a Texaco shirt.
An older guy paying for his gas said, “A mess up there, huh?” He told us there was a motel up the road on Main Street in Stroudsburg. We waited a half hour until the husband came by for the mother and daughters, then the guy dropped us off at the motel. He had a heavy pickup, but even that was sliding around.
The lady at the front desk of the Best Western had a blue blazer and a nameplate that said KIM W. She looked up and said, “May I help you?”
“Well,” Devin said, “we kind of need a room. We were in that wreck out on Route 80.”
“Oh my. You’re all right?”
“Yeah.”
“You must be frozen.”
“We’re okay. Do you have any rooms?”
“Yes, of course. Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Definitely.”
“We don’t have much money on us,” I said.
“Do you have a credit card?”
Devin shook his head. “No. We could call my dad.”
She dialed for us and I took the phone.
“Dad?”
“Yeah.”
“Listen,” I said. “We were in an accident. A big one.”
“Shit. You wreck the car?”
“I think so. There was like fifteen cars involved. We got sandwiched.”
“Jesus. Where are you?”
“Um, in Stroudsburg somewhere. We were on 80. It was a sheet of ice all of a sudden. We couldn’t stop.”
“What’d the cops say?”
“We didn’t talk to them.”
“Oh, Christ. You just left the car? Where are you calling from?”
“A motel. They need a credit card.”
“What the hell for?”
“So we can stay here. We can’t go anywhere.”
“My ass. I’ll drive down and get you.”
“Dad, the roads are ridiculous. We should stay put.”
“Jesus.… Are you guys all right?”
“Yeah, we are.”
“Let me talk to Devin.”
I smirked at Devin and handed him the phone.
“Hey,” Devin said. “Yeah, it’s bad.… Ronny was.… It wouldn’t have made any difference. I probably would have got us killed.… I don’t think so. We were sliding all over the place trying to walk here.… We were freezing our asses off. And there were these little girls … Screw the cops.… By Stroudsburg.… You call them. Find out how we can get my stuff.… No, it’s totaled.”
Then he listened for a long time, like a minute. He turned away from me and I heard him sniffle. “I know,” he finally said. “You, too.…”
“Ma’am,” Devin said, speaking to the woman at the desk, “can you talk to my father?”
She took the phone. Devin wiped his eyes and squeezed my shoulder. “Let’s ask if they have any toothbrushes,” he said.
We got to the room and ordered hamburgers from room service and hung our socks and pants up to dry in the bathroom. We turned the heat way up and turned on the TV and climbed into the beds. We were both sort of beat, so after the hamburgers we nodded off for a couple of hours.
The phone woke us up and we talked to our mom and told her ten times that we were okay. “I’m so grateful,” she kept saying. “It could have been so much worse. We saw it on the news. Route 80 was closed for three hours.”
That evening Devin said we should go out and find a bar. “I’d kill for a beer,” he said. “Come on.”
The freezing rain had changed over to snow and the plows were out. There was a sports bar right around the corner from the motel, and it was surprisingly crowded. Devin got himself a mug of Rolling Rock—twelve beers on tap, I counted, but most of the guys were drinking bottles of Budweiser or Yuengling—and a glass of Coke for me. There was a band scheduled to play, but I figured no way with the weather.
“Hey,” I said as we took a table near the front window.
“What?”
“You think the cops’ll look in your duffel bag?”
He scrunched up his mouth and looked at the ceiling. “Nah,” he said. “Why would they?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they’ll smell it.”
“It’s sealed up. I ain’t worried.” He should have been. He was still on probation.
Devin lit a cigarette. He was wearing the borrowed shirt—a blue cotton button-down with a Texaco patch on the pocket. He had his hair down, stringy blondish hair parted in the middle and hanging down to his shoulders.
The bar itself was horseshoe shaped and opened into the kitchen. There was a pool table and dartboards in a room off to the side and there was a square smaller bar in there, and the walls were covered with Penn State and Eagles and Penguins memorabilia. Four TVs were on, two of them to a UCLA-Indiana basketball game, one to the NHL, and the fourth, above our heads, to a sumo wrestling tournament.
“You really think they’ll get divorced?” I asked.
He stared at his beer for a few seconds, blew out some smoke. “I don’t know,” he said. “It doesn’t matter, does it? We’re both out of there by summer. I’m already gone, aren’t I?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
He shook his head. “I came back because I missed them, you know? I mean, I always missed Mom. But I even started missing him a little. I wanted something more. You know, so I wouldn’t just carry that with me all my life.”
He took a swig of beer, draining it. “Wasn’t quite what I planned, but I guess I closed the gap a bit. He was okay today once he got over losing the car.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I suppose you could say that.”
Devin smirked, then let out a short laugh. “We had to come close to dying for him to begin to crack, but he did seem relieved that we survived it.”
I noticed that two guys were in the corner of the bar with a couple of guitars and some amps, and one of them was testing the microphone. Looked like we’d have entertainment after all.
At least two-thirds of the people in the bar were men, and from the conversations it sounded as if a lot of them had been stranded by the accident, too. Unlike in Sturbridge, about a third of the people were black.
Devin went up to the bar for another beer. “Kitchen open?” he asked.
“Sure,” said the bartender, a guy in his twenties with sandy hair combed over a bald spot.
Devin turned to me. “Want wings?”
“Yeah. Definitely.”
“Order of wings and a pizza,” he said. “Another Coke, too.”
The college-age guy with the acoustic guitar up on the little stage tapped the microphone and said, “Hey, out there. We’re … well, we would be Bruised, but so far it’s just me and the beast from the East, Kenny Oshiro. We should be all right. The others might get here later.”
Kenny was a very skinny Asian guy with long black hair and about six harmonicas tucked into his belt. The other guy was short and wearing an ESU Wrestling T-shirt.
“Two, three …,” and they started in on a Van Morrison song.
“You really think Dad cares about what happened today aside from what it’ll do to his insurance payments?” I asked.
Devin laughed. “He said some things after you got o
ff the phone. They’ll be down in the morning. Yeah, he was relieved, you know, that nothing really bad happened.”
“I guess. You know that he never comes to see me run? I got third place in the whole friggin’ state of Pennsylvania and all he said when I got home was ‘There’s a cord of wood that needs stacking.’ ”
Devin shook his head, but he smiled a little. “You write poetry and run cross-country, boy. You want Dad’s respect, you have to play football and drive a tractor.”
I rolled my eyes and smiled. Devin laughed. “He cares. He just never learned how to show it. Cold life growing up on the farm, you know. His father was a prick.”
“I’ve heard.”
Kenny Oshiro was doing the harmonica intro of Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” and the crowd was starting to take notice. He was good. The other guy had said Kenny was from Japan and just came over a year before “to make it big on MTV.”
The pizza arrived and it was huge, plus we had the wings, so we shared some slices with other guys at the bar. Then they bought us a round of drinks and two other band members showed up—the drummer and another guitarist—and the TV basketball game ended and another one came on and more people arrived, including some older couples and a lot of students from East Stroudsburg U.
People learn that you’re kids who got stranded on the way home for the holiday and they kind of take you in. We stayed until way after midnight and didn’t spend any more money, which was good because we were down to about ten bucks between us. And when we left, the sidewalk was covered in about four inches of fresh white snow and the traffic light at the corner was blinking yellow. Snow was still falling but there was no wind, and I took a good look up and down Main Street, which was almost exactly like the main street in Sturbridge.
“Time to get some sleep,” Devin said as we turned toward the motel. “Big day tomorrow. Thanksgiving.”
Losing Is Not
an Option
Thirty-seven thousand people going nuts at Franklin Field in Philadelphia for the best track-and-field meet in America. Sixteen lean high school kids toeing the line for the 3,200 meters; eight laps of the track. Not just Pennsylvanians in this race: The favorite is from Virginia; a Jamaican kid is expected to challenge; even the Irish guy who anchored the winning distance-medley relay team earlier in the day is trying to double back under brilliant blue skies.
Ron is scared but wired; his mouth feels dry but his armpits and crotch are damp with nervous perspiration. He burps and tastes this morning’s Egg McMuffin and shuts his eyes and listens: Caribbean drums in the bleachers and coaches shouting down to the runners; college relay teams packed into the paddock area next to the track, waiting for the race that will follow this one; the deep inhalation of the guy poised to his left, THE ROCK on his purple jersey. The runner to Ron’s right is crossing himself; a guy from Quebec trots forward a few yards and bounces up and down, then jogs back to the starting line. The official starter with the yellow sleeve says, “Runners, take your marks.” They lean forward and bring back a fist and get ready to pounce at the gun.
This is no dual meet against Scranton.
This is the Penn Relays, and it does not get more exciting than this.
The race is viciously contested, a ridiculously quick 61-second first 400 meters divides the pack in two, with Ron in second place in the second group about six yards behind the leaders. There’s elbowing and hands to the back for balance and some spikes to the shins that draw little scratches of blood.
He hangs in there, moves up gradually over the next few laps, and reaches the midpoint in sixth place, a couple of strides off the pace of the kid from Ireland, who takes them through 1,600 meters at 4:25. Ron’s lifetime best for 3,200 meters is 9:28, set two weeks ago in winning an invitational down in Allentown; just barely fast enough to get him a call for this race. He’d passed the midpoint at 4:42 in that one.
All week in practice he’d been supremely confident, ripping through 300-meter intervals and ready to step up and kick some butt. Then this morning, the tightening of the stomach with the reality of being here, warming up on the same turf as runners from Villanova, Ohio State, Arizona; the Santa Monica Track Club; the D.C. Striders; NCAA champions—hell, Olympic champions; and the high school teams from up and down the East Coast, plus the studs they’d invited in from elsewhere.
Outside the stadium, jogging through the street fair with the cheap jewelry and racks and racks of Penn Relays T-shirts and pretzel vendors and musicians, he’d imagined the race as something like this; survive the torrid early pace, maybe throw in a spurt or two of his own in lap six or seven, winnow it down to a handful of contenders, and hope that his kick would sustain him. Be this year’s unknown who stole a major title. The Penn Relays history books are filled with such stories.
With two laps to go the Irish runner is struggling, and the kid from Fairfax, Virginia, moves into the lead. He won the Eastern regional cross-country title last November and is headed for Georgetown on a full scholarship, more muscular than anyone in the field, more a man. The two other Pennsylvanians in the lead pack are just ahead of Ron—guys from Council Rock and Lancaster Catholic. He knows them well—they’d both burst past him near the end of last fall’s state cross-country championships, leaving Ron to struggle home in third.
The Virginian extends his lead to five meters while the three Pennsylvanians pass the Irishman and the bell sounds for the final lap. Ron sucks it up, sticking with the others. On the backstretch the Jamaican comes up on his shoulder and darts past, going wide on the turn in an attempt to move into second. Every muscle is in play now, every step an agony and every voice in the stadium at its loudest.
Off the final turn, Ron is fifth but gaining, driving with everything left in his body. He goes wide to pass them—way out to lane four, nearly even now with the others, sprinting down the homestretch, groaning, clawing across the line in 9:11 for fourth place, less than a second behind the winner.
If he’d been a tiny bit smarter the race would have been his. An earlier kick; a little more faith in his endurance; a little less memory of that cross-country collapse and he’d have won it.
Ron was walking up Main Street a few nights after Penn with a couple of guys, headed toward his old friend Gene’s house to play some poker. They were passing O’Hara’s Bar and Grill when a voice called out.
“Hey,” Ron said, turning. “Guys, I’ll catch up.”
Ron’s father was in the doorway of the bar. He stepped out and gave his son a clumsy, unexpected hug. “Worked late; I was just getting a hamburger and a beer. Come on in.”
Ron’s parents had separated just after Christmas, and his father was living with Ron’s grandmother in an apartment above a pizza place. Just for a while; just until he figures things out.
“What are you up to?” the father asked, motioning with his head toward a booth in the corner. O’Hara’s isn’t really much of an after-work bar. More an all-day, linger over a beer and have an occasional shot kind of place. But Ron’s father did have a plate of food, and he grabbed it and his beer from the bar and walked over.
“Going to play some cards,” Ron answered. “Over at Gene’s.”
“Been a while since I saw him.”
Gene and Ron had been as close as brothers through elementary school, playing stickball and basketball and street hockey and whatever else was in season. Summers they’d play Monopoly or chess to kill the mornings, walk to the community swimming pool, maybe get in a water polo game, then walk to the diner and get french fries. They grew apart when Gene’s hormones kicked in about a year ahead of Ron’s. Now that Gene is out for track they’ve found some new common ground.
“So,” Ron said, “how you doin’, Dad?”
“Pretty good,” he said. “Not too bad.” He looked at his kid and nodded a bit, the slightest smile on his lips. He was balding and going soft in the face, but he was still the person Ron saw when looking through his father’s high school yearbook, the tall gawky defensive en
d and first baseman on the sports pages. “Mad Stork” to his teammates.
“You want something?” Dad asked. “A soda?”
“Not really. I’m holding up the game, actually.”
“Yeah. It’s good to see you, though. Come by.”
“I will,” Ron said. “I told Grandma I’d be by for dinner on Friday.”
“Great. I’ll be sure to get home on time.” He reached over and grabbed Ron’s shoulder. “I read about that race in Philadelphia. Close one, huh?”
“Real close,” Ron said, frowning a bit. “So friggin’ close I don’t know how I didn’t win it.”
Thursday Ron was cooling down after a hard set of 600-meter intervals, jogging on the backstretch in the second lane. It had hurt; it hurt good. He knew he had to make that pain a part of himself, to welcome it, to thrive on it, to insure that when he went for it all at the state championship, when he unleashed that final kick, there would be more than enough to get him to the finish.
“Beep, beep,” came a tense but friendly voice. Ron looked back and shuffled into lane three as Darby O’Neill and Ellie Jacobsen came flying past, leading a pack of girls and a few freshman boys. Ellie is tall and dark and angular; Darby is compact and has a long braided ponytail flopping on her neck. Very different runners, very similar results. Both juniors. Two of the best in the area at 400 and 800 meters.
Darby glanced back and smirked at Ron. “I’ll run you down, man.”
He laughed. “Not hardly.”
Ron stopped at the turn and gently stretched, reaching for the track, palms flat, hair hanging into his eyes. He held that position, feeling the pull in his hamstrings, then sat down in lane five and did a set of sixteen crunches followed by sixteen push-ups.
By then Darby was approaching again, taking it hard on the final interval of the day. Ron stood and watched her, twenty yards ahead of Ellie, efficiently pumping her arms. “Looking good,” he said.
“Push me,” she answered, puffing out the words. So he followed her on the turn, taking the second lane and saying, “Work it, Darby. All the way.”
