by Mark Slouka
“I gotta go,” I said.
“How tall? Six? Six-one? Maybe one fifty-five? It’s not a test, Mosher, you can’t fail this one.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You know what I’m asking.”
“You’re asking me how tall I am.”
“Don’t be stupid, Mosher, it doesn’t suit you. I want you to try out for the track team. The brooding demeanor, the chip on your shoulder—you could be perfect.”
“I really …”
“Four o’clock, Mosher. Legs and balls are required, the brain is optional—may in fact be a hindrance. You’ve got the legs, we’ll see about the rest—I’m not expecting much.”
“I don’t really do sports,” I said.
“This is America, Mosher—don’t put that in writing.” He lowered his voice. “In any case, foot racing is not a sport. Gladiatorial combat with the mace and the trident was not a sport. The Sun Dance of the Plains Indians was not a sport. Foot racing is a conviction, a calling. You think Geronimo would have joined the basketball team? You think Thomas Jefferson would be doing layups? No! Jefferson would have been a miler!”
He’d been scribbling something with his left hand while he talked, and now he handed me a folded note.
“For your next inquisitor. By the way, that last paper wasn’t entirely hopeless though I’m still considering what grade to give it, and yes, in case you’re wondering, it’s completely unethical for me to blackmail you this way so if you tell anyone I’ll be forced, as the tape recording says to that constipated-looking blond man in Mission Impossible, to disavow all knowledge of your existence.” He grinned. “Dismissed, Mosher.”
I WAS ALREADY WALKING HOME that afternoon when I turned around. I don’t know why. Half the things we do we do by accident.
I found them in the old gym that always smelled of sweat and wood and heat rub, an unimpressive-looking group of twenty or thirty whose faces I vaguely recognized from the hallways and the parking lot, stretching in a loose circle around a guy with long brown hair and a red headband. To the left, carefully lacing up his sneakers, was the kid from lunch—Frank. Nobody noticed me. They were bullshitting quietly, reaching for their toes or bicycling in the air, and I was about to leave when Falvo rushed in carrying a boxful of gray sweat pants and a clipboard which he held pinned to his chest with his shriveled right hand.
“Mr. Jefferson,” he called, “I see you’ve abandoned your principles and listened to the voice of reason. Shoe size?”
I told him.
“Back room. Pick a pair. And put these on.” A few faces looked over lazily, not smiling.
I HAD NO IDEA I was going to do what I did. Looking back, I can see the two roads dividing like in the poem but I never stopped, never considered, never looked back. I just went—and it was like opening something. Kids these days cut themselves. My way was better, but it was the same thing.
He stood propping the metal door, the stopwatch in his good hand—Let’s go, gentlemen, let’s go, Mr. Jefferson, and we jogged out into the wind which smelled like mud, across the football field and up a small rise to the dirt track. This was a time trial, he said—a one-mile time trial, four laps—not a race. It was meant to give an idea of where we stood, no more.
We’d gathered around the middle of the long side of the track, just ten or twelve of us, including three others who seemed new like me, jogging back and forth in the wind, loosening up. The rest, including Frank, had walked over to the other side of the field.
Falvo took me aside. “Warmed up? How’re the shoes?”
“Fine.” In the distance I could see kids walking toward the parking lot. The sun stabbed out from under the clouds, glancing off the windshields.
He raised his voice over the wind. “All right, I want you all to stay contained, stay smooth. I don’t want to see anybody draining the well today—that means you, Mr. McCann.” A tall, tough-looking kid with red hair and a tight face smiled like a gunslinger.
He turned to me. “I don’t want you doing anything stupid, Mosher. Some of these boys have been at it for a while. Don’t think about them, think about yourself.”
I shrugged.
“Pace yourself. Let them do what they do. They’ll be about thirty yards ahead after the first lap. Don’t worry about them. Go out slow, feel your way, then bring it home as best you can. OK?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Remember, it’s a time trial. Not a race.”
THERE WAS NO GUN. We lined up in the gusty wind, Falvo standing in the soggy infield in his dress shoes holding his clipboard like a small high table against his chest with his left hand and his stopwatch in his right and then he barked, “Runners … marks? Go!”
They didn’t run, they flowed—the kid in the headband, the redheaded kid, and two or three others in particular—with a quiet, aggressive, sustained power that looked like nothing but felt like murder and I was with them and then halfway through the third turn they were moving away smooth as water and I could hear them talking among themselves, joking, Bullshit—Lisa Arrone? I swear to God, she just reaches in and I’m—and I was slowing, burning, leaning back like there was a rope around my neck. “Too fast, Mosher, too fast,” I heard Falvo yelling, and his ax-sharp face came out of nowhere looking almost frantic and then it was gone and there was just the sound of my breathing and the crunch of my sneakers slapping the dirt. The group, still in a tight cluster, wasn’t all that far ahead of me.
By the end of the second lap I heard someone far away yelling “Stop, Mosher, that’s enough,” and then at some point someone else calling “Coming through—inside,” and they passed me like a single mass, all business now, and I remember staggering after them, gasping, drowning, my chest, my legs, my throat filling with lead and looking up through a fog of pain just in time to see the kid with the headband, halfway down the backstretch, accelerating into a sustained, powerful sprint.
I don’t know why. I can’t explain it. By the end of the third lap I was barely moving, clawing at the air, oblivious to everything except the dirt unfolding endlessly in front of me. “Let him go,” I heard somebody say. They’d all finished by then, recovered, and now stood watching as I staggered past them like something shot. “C’mon …” I heard someone start to call out uneasily, and then, “What’s his name?” and then, louder, “C’mon, Jefferson.” A small crowd, I found out later, sensing something going on, had gathered by the fence to the parking lot. The last of the newcomers had passed me long ago.
I remember seeing him appear in front of me like I was coming up from underwater and trying to swerve but I was barely standing and I walked right into him and he caught me as I fell, his one good arm around my back, saying over and over, “All right, easy now, easy, you’re done, keep walking, walk it off,” like he was gentling a horse. I threw up on the infield grass. I could barely see. “Fuckin’ Sloppy Joes, man,” I heard someone say, almost respectfully.
“They look better now.”
“Shit, I think I see the bun.”
“Somebody go help Coach.”
“Fuck you, I’m not gettin’ that shit on my shoes.”
“That was like On the Waterfront, man.”
“You see him on that last hundred? Jesus!”
“Hey, Terry don’t work, we don’t work.” A couple of people laughed.
“Keep walking, Mosher,” Falvo was saying, “if you lie down it’ll be twice as bad.” I could feel him holding me around my waist, his arm like a steel belt above my hip. I didn’t want it there. I couldn’t see. I could hear myself sobbing, trying to rake air into my chest. My head felt like it was cracking from inside. I didn’t know that I’d put my arm around his shoulders.
“What we have here,” he was saying, “is a failure to communicate. Stay within yourself, I said. Don’t drain the well, I said.”
“What did I get?” I couldn’t seem to hold my head up, or open my eyes—the pain kept coming in waves.
“What?”
He laughed—that bitter Falvo laugh—ha!—like he’d just been vindicated. “He wants to know what he got,” he said, like there was somebody with us. “You want to know what you got? I’ll tell you what you got: proof you could beat yourself senseless—something I very much doubt you needed. If I was a better man I’d report you for assault. OK, turn. And for what? Nothing. Tiny Tim could have tiptoed a faster mile. Tiny Tim, Mosher. With his ukulele. Singing.”
I could feel the wind now, chilling the sweat. He was walking me back and forth like a drunk in the movies.
“Two more. No, you’re an idiot, Mosher, there’s no point denying it. Unfortunately for me, you may also be a miler. This won’t mean anything to you, but you ran the first six hundred yards, before you died like a dog, at sixty-seven-second pace; truth is, you shouldn’t have finished at all.”
THE NEXT DAY my calves, my thighs, my shins—my shins most of all—felt like they’d been replaced with steel plates. I winced my way up the stairs, lowered myself to my desk with my arms. Even my father noticed. “Was ist los?—You have a problem with the shoes?” he said.
“You’re going to be very unhappy with yourself, my boy,” Falvo had told me. “I mean more than usual. You’ve paid the piper—you know the piper I’m talking about, the piper of pain, Mosher—and now he’s going to play whether you like it or not.”
Two days later he gave me my paper back—an A–.
“Seems you’re only selectively stupid,” he said, and walked back to his desk, cowlick bobbing, ridiculous as ever.
I WAS SITTING AT LUNCH with Frank later that same week—we’d started talking a bit—when I heard the cafeteria monitor yell and looked up to see Cappicciano, just past the register, shove some senior in the chest, then duck something I couldn’t see, then flick something off the fingers of his right hand. He was wearing that long coat, as always—dressed to leave. From a distance he looked like a magician releasing a very small dove.
“I said knock it off,” the monitor bellowed.
He ducked again, laughing, and started toward our side of the cafeteria. “Cut it out, Ray,” a girl I couldn’t see said as he passed behind her.
When he dropped his tray with a clatter of silverware next to Frank, he was still clowning around with her, pissing her off. I didn’t know what he was doing at our table. I thought it was some kind of mistake.
“Mind if I join you two lovebirds?”
“Fuck you,” said Frank.
“Not me, fella—but hey, I’m open-minded.”
He started shaking his chocolate milk, singing Dusty Springfield’s “Wishin’ and Hopin’ ” under his breath: “Show him that you care, ba-ba, ba-ba …”
I must have smiled.
“I seen you somewhere,” he said.
I didn’t say anything.
“Up on the track. Couple a weeks ago. You were like Night of the Livin’ Dead.”
I didn’t say anything.
“On the Waterfront,” Frank said.
“That’s what they’re callin’ it?” He took a drink, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, smiling. “That’s fucked up.” He looked at me for a few seconds. “Why didn’t you just stop?”
I shrugged.
He took another drink of milk. “You got a test?”
“No.”
I was reading Nietzsche, or pretending to.
“That’s one fucked-up mustache on that dude.”
I shrugged.
IT WAS NOT LONG AFTER that he began showing up at practice, sprawled out on the bleachers in that long black coat and a sweatshirt, sometimes with a girl in a miniskirt who’d sit there freezing next to him, sometimes not. I’d look up and he’d be there, leaning on one elbow, smoking. I’d look again, he’d be gone.
Nobody said anything until McCann, who didn’t give a shit and liked to prove it, walked past the bleachers with his group. “Fuck you doin’ here, man?”
“Hey, fuck you, I can sit where I want. What’re you, the bleacher cops?”
“Yeah, you’d know about them,” McCann said.
“That’s right, pencil dick, I would.” He took a drag of his cigarette, confident, arrogant. “Tell ya what. I’ll polish up your VIP box here with my ass. Leave it nice and shiny for ya.”
The next day he was back. I was nowhere then, stuck in the slowest group, burning to climb the ladder. I’d have to earn it, Falvo said.
I’d gone to see him, still hobbling, two days after the time trial. I wanted to run another, I said. I knew what I was doing now.
He didn’t look up from the clipboard. “It’s not that I don’t admire your eagerness to throw yourself on the pyre, Mosher, and for all I know immolation is the sincerest form of flattery—but it won’t make you a better runner.”
I had no idea what he was talking about.
He looked up. “No,” he said.
There were five groups, he said, slowest to fastest, divided by their times. I’d be starting with the slowest group, like everyone else.
“I’m better than that,” I said.
“We’ll see.”
“I am.”
“This will come as a shock to you, but sometimes we do more by doing less.”
“What’re we running today?”
“We are doing quarters. You’re going for a light, ten-minute jog.”
“But—”
“On the track, where I can see you.”
“I—”
He held up his left hand like an Indian—a gesture I’d come to know well. It took me a second to realize he was actually angry.
The lesson was clear: I’d move up when he said so.
IT WASN’T A TEAM so much as a sect—a cult of individuals. Which shouldn’t make sense, except it does. We had one thing in common, at least the runners did: we believed in time, pledged allegiance to it—one nation, utterly fair, under the second-hand god on Falvo’s watch. You couldn’t lie or talk or cheat your way in. It didn’t matter if you were cool, if you looked good in a pair of jeans, if you were popular. You could be all of those or none—it didn’t matter. You either covered ground or you didn’t.
We’d be running quarters, he announced—what he called bread and butter—twelve quarter-mile runs with a quarter walk between each to recover. He introduced me to the group. One or two, stretching on the mats, mumbled hello, a few nodded, most didn’t hear him or didn’t care. McCann kept talking to the guy next to him. I went back to trying to touch my toes. I was as loose as a brick.
“What’s his name again?” It was the kid with the headband—Kennedy. A dozen faces looked up, then over at me.
When Falvo told him, he nodded like he had to think about this information now that he had it, and went back to stretching.
I remember that first day. The fifth group was a sickly-looking bunch of nerds—when I walked up they were standing around awkwardly, their skinny white legs sticking out of their oversized shorts, hugging themselves in the wind and arguing about old episodes of Time Tunnel. They seemed nice enough. They talked to me a bit after the first interval as we walked around the outside of the track, then went back to arguing about whether by rescuing Dr. Newman from being killed at Pearl Harbor the show had broken something called the Novikov self-consistency principle. I couldn’t believe it. By the time we’d finished the third interval I had bigger problems.
By the sixth I was hurting. They were still arguing. They’d run the quarter, then pick up where they’d left off. “So the Novikov self-consistency principle means you’re changing recorded history.” “Yeah, so?” “So ‘Time Tunnel’ means the past, present and future are all happening at the same time—duh!”
By the time I’d done eight I was wondering if I’d make it at all. I could still hear them, like static in my head: “They have to get a fix on the past.” “No they don’t.” “Yes they do. If he’s killed, you moron, then the adult Tony can’t exist.” “Sure he can.” “Don’t you remember
what Dr. Swain says to Senator Clark when he’s looking at the Titanic?” “Yeah? So?” “So he’s seeing the living past, dufus. Ready?”
I finished last, dragging in five yards after the others. As I stood there with my hands on my knees, trying to keep my legs from buckling, a pasty-looking kid with a caved-in chest and a feathery mustache came up and patted me on the back. “Nice job,” he said.
It was my answer for a while, the combination to whatever it was I’d locked inside. I liked the details, the rituals, the numbers; I liked the hot smell of the weeds in the infield, the six-mile runs in the rain around the Middle Branch Reservoir, the peepers in the muddy woods a hundred yards behind the track screaming in the spring. You could be who you were, would be who you were, whether you liked it or not. First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win. I’d climb the chain, link by link. I’d show them all.
I wasn’t the only one who brought to it more than it could bear. It had a way of doing that, of convincing you it was more than it was—not a stage but the world, not war by other means but war itself. That it mattered.
IN JANUARY 1968, just three months after I joined the team, we climbed into a bus and got out at the 168th Street Armory in New York—a great cavernous hall with a flat wooden indoor track at the center of it. I’d never been before. Down below in the huge cave-like basement where the food venders were, you could hear the runners pounding by over your head, then the roar of the crowd, and making your way through the mass of runners shoving up the stairs sticky with soda and Cracker Jacks, the air thick with heat rub and hot dogs, you’d hear the roar growing with every step and then the whole thing would burst like a multicolored shell, thunderous and overwhelming: fifty teams, six hundred runners camped out in patches of yellow and blue and maroon on the dark wooden bleachers over the track, stretching, sleeping, listening to their transistor radios, warming up, and there, only yards away, another heat ready to go, eight runners at the end of the straight shaking it out then kicking into the blocks, “Runners, set …” the gun like the crack of a whip, jump-starting your heart. It was like entering the Coliseum.
