Racing the Rain (6 page)

“I'll run.”

Everyone turned to look. Bickerstaff smiled. Of course. The skinny kid who kept trying out for the basketball team. Everyone was craning around to look, and the laughter was starting already.

“All right, fair enough, Mr. Kissam Building Supply,” he said, referring to Cassidy's T-shirt, a freebie from last weekend's Bargain Days Lumber Sale his father had taken him to. “The rest of you, shut up. At least he has some gumption. Now, up and at 'em. Two lines at the start. Coach Burke will arrange you into pairs if you haven't already found somebody. I'll be in the middle of the field so I can give you the split at the 220 mark. Coach Burke will give you a three command start. He'll say ‘Ready, set . . . ,' and then the whistle. Okay, that's it. Start lining up. Chip, you and your opponent go first so you can get changed and go meet your mom.” Most were already clambering to their feet.

“And boys, one more thing. The 440 is a long race. I repeat, a
long
race,” Bickerstaff said. “It's a whole lap, one quarter of a mile around. Do yourselves a favor and pace yourselves. Do not, I repeat, do
not
blast out and think you can run full speed the whole way. I promise you that you can't do it.” He began walking toward the middle of the field.

As they were all milling around the white starting post at the middle of the straightaway, Cassidy noticed that Chip Newspickle—who had hardly even looked at him—was about his same height, not very tall, and though he was a bit more muscular and moved with an athlete's slightly pigeon-toed grace, there didn't seem to be anything special about him, nothing to hint at the 5.8 that he was supposedly capable of.

Maybe I'm crazy
, Cassidy thought. Certainly his friends told him he was. But Cassidy knew something the rest of them didn't. Most days after school he and Stiggs and Randleman had been biking or running over to their old elementary school, Fern Creek. There they played basketball and did fifty-yard dashes until they got bored. Stiggs and Randleman always got bored before Cassidy did, so he would do a few more while they horsed around on the jungle bars. After a while, Cassidy noticed a pattern. On the first sprint, he would finish five yards ahead of Randleman, who would be a yard or two ahead of the gangly Stiggs.

By their fourth or fifth repeat, when the other two would usually quit, Cassidy was finishing ten or fifteen yards in front. Cassidy accused them of goldbricking, which just made them mad.

And after several weeks, when they would jog the mile and a half to Fern Creek, Cassidy would have to stop several times to wait for them. This would tick them off, particularly when Cassidy called them “lard asses” or “Mother Hubbards.”

One Friday afternoon as they were huffing and puffing to keep up, he began to literally run circles around them, which he kept up all the rest of the way to the school. He ended up regretting it because it was much harder to do than he thought it would be, and also because after they arrived at the playground and rested a few minutes they pounced on him and administered a red belly.

It finally dawned on Cassidy that the longer the distance, the better he did and the worse everyone else did. In gym class he got killed in the 50 by the fastest guys, but he was at least among the top handful in the 220.

He had never raced a 440 before, but the prospect didn't intimidate him in the least.

Still, it was a long way around. Even now as they lined up he had a hard time taking in the entire quarter-mile oval at once.

Coach Bickerstaff stood in the middle of the field, his red brush cut visible beneath a battered Red Sox baseball cap. He held up his clipboard to signal to Coach Burke that he was ready.

“Go get him, skinny,” someone called. More laughs.

“Eat me,” Cassidy muttered. Hell, they were all skinny except for Billy Parish. What did that have to do with anything?

Coach Burke smiled sympathetically at Cassidy and told them to get ready. Chip Newspickle dropped down to his hands and knees, digging the beautiful spikes into the clay, right foot slightly in front of the left, fingertips spread flat against the chalk line. He looked like he knew exactly what he was doing. Cassidy didn't have a clue about a sprinter's crouch, so when Coach Burke rather sharply reminded him again to get ready, he nervously toed the line with his left canvas tennis shoe, leaning forward loosely from the waist, the way he always did. Chip Newspickle, he saw, was poised like a cat.

“Get ready . . . set . . .” The blast of the whistle was so shrill Cassidy actually flinched. When he gathered himself and pushed off from the starting line, his left tennis shoe slipped and his first three strides were so off balance he thought he was going to go right down on his face. More hoots from the crowd.

Getting control of his panic, he concentrated on the ground a few yards in front of him and finally felt his familiar stride settling in beneath him. But when he looked up, he saw Chip Newspickle's backside all but disappearing up the track.

He could hear the growing glee behind him as the knot of humiliation grew in the pit of his stomach. He now understood that the 5.8 was no myth and that Chip Newspickle was in fact some kind of freak of nature. And this also occurred to him: most likely, Quenton Cassidy was an ordinary fool with some very silly ideas.

He tried to put Chip Newspickle out of his mind and simply concentrate on running smoothly. He didn't have anywhere near that amazing leg speed, but he was still running well. His stride was longer than Chip's and the ground was passing quickly beneath him. More than that, he was feeling comfortable despite running almost flat out. It occurred to him that he was merely doing something he was used to and that he in fact enjoyed.

He consciously loosened his shoulders and relaxed the rest of his body and noticed that he actually began to go a little faster.

Something else was odd. As they neared the middle of the turn at the 110 post, Chip Newspickle was no farther ahead than he had been at the end of the first fifty yards. He had fifteen yards on Cassidy, which seemed like a very long way, but at least he was not gaining anymore. Was the laughter from the crowd subsiding a little?

When Chip hit the straightaway at the end of the first curve, Cassidy was now matching him stride for stride, though still far behind. For the first time it seemed to Cassidy that he was not really flat out yet. He was probably at ninety percent, but that felt reasonable. He was keenly aware of how much ground his strides were eating up.

At the 220 mark, halfway through the back straightaway, Bickerstaff called out, “Twenty-
seven
! Twenty-
eight
! Twenty-
nine
! Thirty
flat
, thirty-
one
, thirty-
two
. . .
”

Chip Newspickle was just under twenty-eight seconds, Cassidy three seconds back, but he had gained five yards. And he could see something familiar happening up ahead. Chip Newspickle's back and shoulders were slightly arched and he was carrying his arms wider and more stiffly, like he saw Stiggs and especially Randleman do. Chip was still moving fast but no longer looked invincible. A shiver ran up Cassidy's spine and tingled the hair on the back of his neck, and he thought,
I can beat him.

He concentrated on his stride and tried to imagine himself floating over the track, eating up the yards as effortlessly as he could. At the 330 post, Cassidy had gained back another five yards. It was obvious to everyone now that they were watching a real race. There was no laughter from the crowd, just a single pleading call: “Come
on
, Chip!”

But Chip's form continued to degenerate; he began to arch backward and his arms and shoulders were now moving as a solid unit, rotating awkwardly around his trunk instead of pumping up and down like pistons.

Sensing the other boy's vulnerability, Cassidy bore down around the final curve, pulling him back with every stride. He kept his eyes fixed on those beautiful spiked shoes flashing in front of him and concentrated on relaxing and extending his stride.

As they came out of the turn with fifty-five yards to go, he was just off Chip's shoulder and Cassidy saw his quick, panic-stricken glance. Chip turned grimly back to his task, bore down as he had been trained to do. At the finish line he willed himself into a lean.

That lean saved Chip Newspickle from the ignominy of losing a race to a skinny nobody in second-period gym class.

“Sixty flat point three!” shouted Coach Bickerstaff, hurrying over in his stiff-legged gait. “Dead heat!” He looked at Burke, who nodded, a tight smile on his face.

A stunned group milled around the finish line, looking at each other and at the runners in disbelief. The laws of the universe had been turned upside down before their eyes, and they were still trying to make sense of it.

Bickerstaff and Burke began shooing them back onto the track, trying to get them organized.

“All right, all right, knock it off!” said Bickerstaff. “Get ready, the rest of you. And let's see more of the kind of effort we just saw there!” But no one was paying much attention. They were still wandering around and gawking at the two red-faced, completely blown-out runners.

Bickerstaff walked back to the infield where Cassidy and Chip Newspickle were still wobbling, bent over at the waist, hands on knees, elbows touching in a kind of sympathetic camaraderie, rasping in the air with a desperation that bordered on panic.

“What's your name, son?” he asked.

“Cass . . .” he said. “Cass . . . Cassidy.”

“After you've changed, come on by my office.”

T
he office was a fascinating hodgepodge of sporting paraphernalia and coachly miscellany.

There was a diploma on the wall from Eastern Kentucky State College, dated June 6, 1949, awarded to one Robert Leroy Bickerstaff, a bachelor of science degree in physical education. There was a basketball team photo with the legend “Maroons Basketball—1947.” In the photo, second from the far right, standing next to the slightly taller equipment manager, was a crew-cut sprite of a boy wearing number 13. If it hadn't been for the Dumbo ears, Cassidy would not have recognized Coach Bickerstaff at all. The telltale red hair did not register in black and white. It was a strange thing to contemplate, that Coach Bickerstaff had played sports in his youth, that he had had an actual boyhood of his own.

Cassidy sat, hair damp, books in lap, taking it all in: the pair of nested low hurdles needing repair in the corner, the shelves filled with books on basketball, football, weight lifting, calisthenics. There was one called
Doc Counsilman on Swimming
and another called
Modern Interval Training
by someone named Mihály Iglói. There were stacks of correspondence from other coaches and athletic directors seeking to schedule games and meets. There were stopwatches and coaching whistles hanging from hooks on the side of the bookcase, along with baseball caps, clipboards, sunglasses, and windbreakers. There was a dusty glass-fronted case filled with trophies from days gone by.

He noticed one small black-and-white photograph on the wall, almost hidden among the rest. It showed a group of eight young boys squinting into the sun from the steps of an old-timey brick schoolhouse, accompanied by an older gentleman in a three-piece suit. Their names were listed below the photograph, along with the caption: “Cynthiana Junior High track team, 1940.” It didn't take Cassidy long to spot the telltale ears of the elf-boy standing next to one Oley Fightmaster, a young brute holding a shot.

“We were undefeated that year,” said Coach Bickerstaff, hurrying through the door. Cassidy jumped back in his chair. The coach tossed his clipboard on top of the messy desk and sat down heavily in the ancient swivel chair.

“Of course, size of our school, everybody did practically every event. A couple of those boys were pretty fast, including yours truly,” said Bickerstaff, putting his ripple-soled coaching shoes up on the corner of the desk. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes with the momentary relief of a man who spent most of his day on his feet. “And Oley there was third in the state in the shot. But the competition wasn't all that tough back then, at least not in north-central Kentucky.”

“Yes, sir,” Cassidy said. Coach Bickerstaff had played basketball in college! He was from Kentucky! It never occurred to Cassidy that coaches and teachers were
from
anywhere.

“It's okay, Quenton, relax. I just wanted to talk to you for a minute. Coach Burke says you've tried out for the basketball team . . .”

“Yes, sir, I practice a lot. And I'm growing.”

Bickerstaff's smile was sympathetic.

“Well, son, lots of boys are after those twelve spots. You've surely noticed that most of them are a lot bigger than you.”

“Yes, sir,” said Cassidy glumly. This was not new information. Stiggs and Randleman were constantly reminding him what a shrimp he was.

“Have you ever considered track?”

“No, sir.”

“Why not?”

“Too slow, I guess.”

“Well, there's more to track than the fifty and the hundred. It takes a lot of stamina to run a good quarter. And it takes even more to run the 880.”

Cassidy looked puzzled.

“Yes, that's right. In track there are races longer than the one you ran this morning. The 880—a half mile—is two laps around. It's a tough race.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now, I don't want to mislead you. You tied in a race with a very good sprinter today. But Chip's no quarter-miler. In fact, he's not as good in the 220 as he is in the 100 and the 50.”

Cassidy wondered what motive Bickerstaff could possibly have for downplaying the greatest near triumph of his life.

“But still, he's no slouch,” Bickerstaff said, taking his feet off the desk and sitting up straight. “He's full of fight and he wouldn't have let you get anywhere near him if he could have helped it.”