Racing the Rain (37 page)

“Oh, if you knew the half of it, my friend,” said Lucky, suddenly looking morose.

Trapper still had two fingers of bourbon in his glass, but he poured another splash in and took a tiny sip.

“What about that judge?” said Trapper. “What was it you were saying about taking care of that judge?”

* * *

“People think I got no feelings,” Lucky said. He was all but lying on the table, his arm stretched across it, hand on Trapper's elbow. With a major effort of willpower, Trapper left his arm where it was.

“I got feelings, just like other people.” Lucky's eyes, bloodshot and yellow, were moistening again. He patted Trapper's elbow. “Where was I?”

“Goddamn engine kept conking out,” said Trapper.

“Yeah. Somethin' in the impeller, I guess. Kept overheating. Sumbitch sold it to me musta known about it. We had to stop about a dozen times to let it cool off. And the whole time they're laying there trussed up, staring all wide-eyed at us, knowing what's going to happen.”

“That's pretty rough,” said Trapper. One of the bottles was sitting empty on top of the air conditioner, the other was between them, one quarter left.

“But I never ever ever woulda made any jokes at a time like that the way Bobby did. Never.”

“What'd he say?”

“Mrs. Chillingworth had these weight belts wrapped around her—you know, the cartridge belts we use for diving, lead weights in the pouches—so she's got about forty pounds on her, and Bobby picks her up and says, ‘Ladies first,' and throws her overboard.” Lucky rubbed his eyes, then giggled. “I guess it mighta been amusin' in other circumstances, but it seemed like it shoulda been a more solemn occasion, if you know what I mean.”

He was holding his face in his hands now, half blubbering, half giggling, his tears and saliva puddling on the table. Trapper was relieved Lucky had let go of his arm.

“But before, the judge, he says to her, ‘Don't forget, I love you, Margie.' And she says she loved him, too. That got to me a little, I guess. See? I got feelings.”

“You saw her go down?”

“Oh, yeah, straight down in the Gulf Stream.”

“What about the judge?”

“Oh, we didn't have to do nothin' with him. He sees her going over and he up and jumps in after her. At first it's like he's trying to swim down to her, then he's just treading water beside the boat. God, I don't know how many pounds of lead weights he's got on and there he is, treading water. Tough old bird, I'll say that for him.”

“What'd you do?”

“Bobby was gonna shoot him but I said, ‘No, Bobby, the sound of the shot could be heard.' By now he's starting to swim away, so I started the boat and chased after him. Bobby grabbed the shotgun and reached out over the side of the boat and hit him over the head with it. I think he broke the stock, but still the old goat didn't go down.”

“Tough old guy.”

“You can't imagine.”

“Yes I can.”

“So, finally Bobby grabs him and pulls him next to the boat and I get some rope and tie the anchor around his neck. Bobby lets a go of him, and he went down down down.”

Lucky started blubbering again.

“Whatcha cryin' about? Tough man like you,” said Trapper.

“It was his eyes. I was shinin' the flashlight down into the water and watching him sinking in those pink pajamas. His eyes just stared up at me the whole way down.”

Lucky looked around the room like he couldn't remember where he was. He slumped back in the cheap motel chair, exhausted.

“How'd you let Joe Peel know it was done?” said Trapper.

“Called him when we got back to the dock. Goddamn engine kept overheating all the way back, so we kept having to stop. It wasn't till about dawn we finally made it back through the Palm Beach inlet and over to the dock. Joe wanted us to throw away our clothes, so I had him to bring us something to wear.”

“So then you told him all about it.”

“Yeah.”

“What'd he say?”

“He didn't know Mrs. Chillingworth was going to be there, or so he said. He thought the judge would be alone. But he told us in the beginning that if we found anybody else there, they had to go too, or we'd all get the chair. So that's what we did. So be it.”

Lucky got up from the table, swaying, and staggered to the bed.

“Man, I hardly slept a wink in the slammer. I'm going to sleep forever tonight,” he said.

“I doubt that,” said Trapper Nelson.

Then the door exploded off its hinges, and before it hit the ground seven armed men were in the room.

T
he Bambi Motel was south of Kernsville on state road 441, unpretentious and tiny, a little cartoonlike fawn on the marquee just above the
NO VACANCY
sign.

Demski's snoring had driven Cassidy outside to one of the concrete tables in the courtyard, but he couldn't sleep anyway. He liked Kernsville. It was cooler in this part of the state, with a lot more trees and seemingly more oxygen in the air.
Distance runners,
he thought,
have an understandable affinity for oxygen.

The preliminary round had been anticlimactic. He almost wished he had had to run harder so that he'd be sleepier. Stiggs didn't need to qualify in his event, but Ed had a tough round, needing a PR 1:58.9 to make it to the final. But at least he was able to sleep. Hell, he sounded like a cement mixer.

In retrospect, all the trouble with Trapper had been a kind of strange blessing. It had kept his attention diverted enough to make those last few days bearable. It was hard to get overly excited about a race you were sure you were not going to run.

But then one little trip to the jail and all of that went away. And now here they were in Kernsville. Mr. Kamrad showed them around the campus—he had taken summer courses there—and their eyes got steadily wider as they took it all in. Southeastern had started in the 1800s as a theological seminary with a tiny student body. Now twenty-five thousand students walked to classes under the moss-draped live oaks scattered around the two-thousand-acre campus. As Mr. Kamrad pointed out the hundred-year-old brick building where he had taken psychology courses, then the cavernous gymnasium, then the awe-inspiring seventy-five-thousand-seat football stadium, the boys got steadily quieter. When they pulled out of Citrus City Thursday they had been something of a big deal in their own minds, regional qualifiers for the state track meet. Now that they were here, they were looking around at a place that could absorb thousands of high school track and field athletes without even noticing them. Stiggs had clammed up completely. They were all feeling pretty insignificant.

Mr. Kamrad noticed and cut the tour short.

“We need to grab some lunch and get checked in to the motel. We'll continue the tour later,” he had said.

Now here he was the night before the race, and he had tried everything he could think of to distract himself. Mr. San Romani had counseled him that there would be plenty of time to get his mind in gear when he started his warm-up—they always did a lengthy warm-up. He understood the concept—keep your powder dry and all that—but it wasn't easy to put into practice. In the station wagon on the way up he would willfully put it out of his mind and go back to
The Catcher in the Rye
, but after five minutes of Holden's bitching he would catch himself mentally right back in the thick of the race in his head, pulling up to the leader as they were going into the gun lap, or fighting out of a box before the last turn. His mind was like a puppy, easily distracted but always returning quickly to the toy. Now he longed for sleep just to put an end to his misery.

It should have been a perfect night for sleeping. The pastoral quiet on this side of town was interrupted only by the occasional car hightailing it down 441 to Ocala, and by the ever-present buzz of the motel air conditioners. The place was filled with track guys and coaches, but Cassidy was apparently the only insomniac among them.

He heard a room door opening and figured Demski had awakened to find him gone. But it was Mr. Kamrad, dressed in an Edgewater crew sweat suit and an incongruous pair of flip-flops. He sat down in the lawn chair across from Cassidy.

“How bad is it?”

“Oh, I just can't sleep, is all. I'm not worried or anything.”

Mr. Kamrad nodded.

“You know, I remember the first time my little college rowing team went to nationals. Here we were, a bunch of athletes in an obscure sport that no one even knew existed back where we came from. All of a sudden we're surrounded by hundreds of guys like us, except the names on their singlets were famous: Harvard, Yale, Boston College, Cornell. We looked around at these guys and every single one of them looked like an Olympic contender. Nobody said anything, but you could just feel the air going out of us. It didn't matter that we had come through the prelims just fine. We just kept ogling everyone, and by the time we backed into the starting dock, we had convinced ourselves that we didn't belong there.”

“Wow. What happened?”

“We finished third. But I've thought about that race pretty much every day of my life since then, and although I'm not a what-if kind of guy, I'm pretty sure we could have won that race. All we had to do is pull from the start like we thought we had a chance. Instead, we hung back, surprised that we were doing as well as we were, not wanting to push our luck. We came on like gangbusters at the end, but we had let ourselves get too far out of it. If the race had been ten meters longer we would have passed both those boats. As it was, they had to look at the photographs, it was so close. But there was no doubt about it. There it was, obvious even in the negatives: we were third. We were third then and we will always be third. You can look it up in the record books right now and there we will be, third.”

“Wow.”

“But that's what it means to be an athlete, Quenton. All the civilians see is the triumphant moment, the victory lap, the fulfillment of the dream. They don't pay much attention to the also-rans and the missed-by-inches, the great majority of us who go on with the rest of our lives drawing whatever comfort we can from the fact that we were close. That we were among those who at least tried, were willing to put ourselves at risk. That we would live with the results, whatever they were. But always to try. That is what makes an endurance athlete, Quenton, the contract you make with yourself that you will try and not give up. And if you are lucky enough to be among those that finish at the top, that's a great thing that you get to live with for a long time.”

“I never thought—”

“But there's something else.”

Cassidy looked at Mr. Kamrad, his familiar horn-rimmed glasses, his sad, empathetic smile.

“There's winning. Don't ever forget that!” he said with a laugh, aware he had gotten pretty solemn. “Hey, wait here a second. There's something I want to show you.”

He came back from his room carrying something in his right hand. Sitting on the same bench with Cassidy, he placed it on the table between them. It was his stopwatch.

“I didn't clear it after your time trial. Look at what it says.”

“I know what it says.”

“It says 3:07.2., Quenton”

“I'm aware—”

“It says more than that, Quenton. It says that—if by some miracle of persistence or training or luck—if you could somehow extend that one lap farther, if you could possibly add a sixty-second quarter to the end of a time like that, you would be a 4:07 miler. You would be as fast as Archie San Romani was at the height of his career, and less than a second from the world record at that time.”

“There is no way in the world . . .”

“I know, it's crazy to think such things. That was an all-out time trial, and a sixty-second quarter on top of that is ridiculous to think about. But it's not ridiculous to dream. A little crazy extrapolation like that makes for the best kind of dream.”

Cassidy waited. He wasn't really sure what Mr. Kamrad was saying.

“But that 3:07 tells you something else. It tells you that you belong out there, Quenton. Right now, at this moment in time, you belong on the track with Mizner and Hosford and all the rest. You haven't run the times they have, maybe, but you've got those times inside you. You're not some weird accident, some dreamy guy who wandered into a situation he can't handle. It's your race tomorrow. It's yours as much as it is anyone else's.”

Cassidy nodded. He had not thought of it that way. He had been more like Mr. Kamrad's poor crew teammates, happy to be tagging along with the real players.

“All right, enough of this pep talk business. This is exactly what Archie didn't want me doing to you before the race. Time to get some sleep. We have a surprise visitor coming in the morning—several, in fact. And then we're going to do a little jog and some striders at the P.K. Yonge high school track after breakfast.

“Who's . . .”

“Don't worry about it. Go back to trying not to think about the race and get some sleep now. Tomorrow, to put it mildly, is a big day, my friend.”

“Yes, sir.”

Strangely enough, he actually felt a little sleepy.

T
he phone blasted them awake at eight the next morning. Demski answered in a voice that seemed to belong to someone else, someone older and less healthy.

“Okay, I'll tell him,” Demski said, sounding a little more like himself. He hung up and dove back under the covers.

“Tell him what?” Cassidy was fully awake now.

“Report out front. We have v-v-visitors. And we're gathering for the breakfast expedition. I think I'd rather sleep, but I'm pretty darned hungry.”

Trapper Nelson was sitting at Cassidy's table in the courtyard.