The Runner (10 page)

Walker shook his head solemnly. “Mr. Tillerman?” he asked.

Bullet stared at him.
What do you want with me?

“Can you narrow it down? Do you think he was educated?”

“Sure,” Bullet said.

“Why?” Walker insisted.

“Teachers always do that, use educated men as examples,” Bullet answered. It wasn't what Walker wanted him to say. He knew what Walker wanted him to say, about the way you had to have worked on your mind to be able to do that, like you had to work on your muscles to bring your stride down exactly right.

Walker seemed unoffended. But he told the class, briefly, that Housman was a college professor who taught classics, in England,
and then that they could leave the room. “But it's five minutes,” they told him. He dismissed them anyway, “Except Mr. Tillerman. Could I have a word with you?”

Bullet stayed in his seat. Walker came over close to him.
Now what.

“You liked it, didn't you.” Walker indicated the board behind him. Bullet shrugged. “I want to talk to you,” Walker said, “because I don't seem to be able to . . . make any connection with you. The other students don't seem to . . . like you. Although they don't dislike you. In fact, they respect you.”

None of this made any difference to Bullet. But you had to look out for guys like Walker, they kept looking for ways to get inside you. And they weren't dumb. He kept his face deadpan, his eyes fixed on Walker's little pale eyes. Walker stood there.

“How did you get a name like Bullet?” Walker asked.

I named myself, which is none of your business.

A pale, foolish smile moved Walker's mouth. “Have it your way, but if there's anything you want to talk to me about—well, I just want you to know I'm here, if you need to talk.”

Bullet stood up, impatient with this. He didn't have to stay and listen.

“Because you don't strike me as happy,” Walker said, “and—”

“I've got a class to get to,” Bullet interrupted. He left the room before Walker could see that he was about to burst out laughing. The guy was a jerk, a smart jerk, but still—not smart, educated. Him and his beard and trying to get people to think: a few years of teaching would show him what was what.

The cafeteria that day was quiet, but it hummed with the intensity of subdued conversations. Bullet sat down with the wimps, who shifted over to give him lots of room. They didn't know what to say, after hello, and they were smart enough to keep quiet, keep their eyes down. Bullet ate, and looked
around. The usual, he thought: tables of whites, tables of Negroes—the wimps occupying the no-man's-land in between. Bullet noted missing faces among the whites. He scanned the tables to see if the big figure of Tamer Shipp was there. He thought he'd recognize the guy. He couldn't be sure, but he didn't think Tamer was in the room. That made sense, if he couldn't even move out of the cops' way, but he wondered about the whites—there were a few possibles among the absentees. Lying low, probably.

Bullet chewed, taking in the tension that filled the whole big room, just like the light from overhead fluorescent bulbs filled it, getting into every corner, flowing under the tables and showing the way feet were planted on the floor, ready to run, tense. Guys ate hunched over their trays, their eyes not on the people they were eating with, but scanning the room. Girls kept their eyes down, not looking at anyone, not talking much.

“Gee,” said one of the wimps, a scrawny tenth grader with thick glasses and a madras shirt, “I'm staying home for a few days.”

“How can you get away with that?”

“My mom'll get my dad to let me, when I tell her. I'm not coming back
here
until this cools down.”

Chicken.

“When things—blow up—it's people like us who really get trampled. If I were you I'd have an asthma attack.”

They looked like they were having heart attacks right then, pale and rabbitty. Bullet just ate his sandwiches, biting, chewing, swallowing. Part of the tension in the room was fear. You could taste it—dank and metallic—colored fear and white fear. Bullet slowly emptied the two pints of milk he'd gotten, slowly got up, slowly left the room.

*   *   *

The next day the lunchroom jingled with heightened tension as Bullet moved unremarked to the wimps' table. Only a couple of ninth grade girls there, he noticed, and a half-dozen little eighth graders. He was early, to watch the room fill up, the long line by the service counter moving along smoothly, the people carrying their trays over to tables. Voices rang louder than usual. Ted Bayson had a gap in his mouth where a couple of teeth used to be and was chewing cautiously; there were a couple of limping guys, a couple of black eyes. They'd gotten a little trouble, then.

A big colored guy stood, looking around the noisy room—that was Tamer, Bullet recognized him, he'd remember him now. The guy had really heavy eyebrows. His face looked swollen and he was moving as if it hurt, but his glance all over the room was cool enough. The room was quiet, too quiet. Then it got noisy, but too noisy. Bullet shifted his feet under the table: as if school wasn't bad enough the way it ordinarily was; he didn't need to spend his days in a war zone. But everybody was ready to panic. The whole room was ready to blow up around him.

Tamer moved down the center of the room, heading for the back where some friends waved to him. He was nodding his head in greeting and going between two tables, when he tripped and fell. The plate and silverware and metal tray rang on the cement floor. The milk carton fell under him and squooshed milk out, over his shirt. The room was so silent you could hear the bowl that held Jell-O ringing round and round and round until finally it rang around belly up and was quiet.

Bullet watched, his hands relaxed on the table. Nobody spoke. The silence rang around the room. Most people hunched over their lunches like nothing had happened and nobody had noticed, except nobody was eating anything.

Tamer got up slowly. His face had a gray-green undertone. Ketchup from the hamburgers was on his shirt front, mixed with milk. Jell-O hung off his cheek.

Laughter—low, muffled—started on Bullet's side of the room. Bullet didn't move his eyes to see who it was.

“D'jew see that?”

“Who got him?”

Bullet shifted his legs out from under the confining table.

For a minute, nobody moved. But there was a kind of growling noise, somewhere.

Then a bunch of blacks flashed into action, and from a nearby table whites stood up to match them. Wooden benches scraped back on the floor. Voices cursed, called. People headed for the door, crowding and pushing. People closed in around the fight, pushing.

Bullet caught a glimpse of silver and moved—the whites were vocational track and he knew how they liked to fight, he knew who their leader would be. He brought the leader down with a tackle that put the guy's wrist under Bullet's hand: he wrapped his fingers around the wrist while his shoulders pinned the guy to the floor; he closed his finger around the wrist until he felt the bones in there rubbing up against one another. The knife fell onto the floor, a black-handled switchblade. Bullet got up and dragged the guy after him, whipping his arm up behind his back and pushing, hard.

“What're you doing?” the guy asked. “Leggo of me.”

Bullet didn't answer. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a hand reach down for the blade on the floor. He slammed his foot down on the fingers, then covered the knife with his shoe. He spoke into his man's ear, loud so everyone could hear him. “Not in here.” The last thing he wanted to put up with was a riot. That wasn't even clean fighting. There was a way to get
your fighting in, if you wanted to. These people just—didn't know anything, he thought to himself in disgust.

“What the—”

Bullet jerked up, sharp up, on the arm.

“You hear me?” he asked. The head nodded. Bullet looked around at the rest of them—just staring at him. He looked across and saw only Tamer's back, where he faced a bunch of coloreds. Dark eyes glared at the boys among whom Bullet stood.

“Sit down,” Tamer said. Ordered. Muttering, they obeyed him.

Bullet let his man's arm down and spun him around to look into his sweating face. He didn't say anything, just stared into the guy's eyes until he was sure the message had gotten through, past the anger, and past the fear pain brought. Then he turned and left the room.

“Thanks, man,” low voices murmured at his back.

T
he sun had risen into a clear sky when the coach stopped for Bullet by his mailbox at six forty-five. They drove on down to the town dock, where the school bus waited. Bullet climbed into the yellow bus and took his usual seat, right front, by the window. The rest of the team trickled in, one after the other, waiting until the last minute before climbing onto the bus. The coach checked them in, calling out names and making marks on his clipboard.

They were down to three Negroes, Bullet noticed; one of them Tamer, of course. The Negroes moved on to the back of the bus, where all three could sit together. The meet was at a school three hours north, up in Queen Anne's County. Bullet slouched down in his seat, relaxed.

He could hear nerves in the rest of the team, sitting behind him. He could see nerves in the coach's body, hunched by the opposite window. Bullet wasn't tense. He was going to run, there was nothing to make him tense about that. He didn't remember the course. He never remembered a course from one year to the next. He didn't want to. He wouldn't jog it either, although that was how you prepared for a cross-country run—you were supposed to jog over the course an hour or more before you ran it and plan your approaches and learn the obstacles. Bullet never tried to study a course. That was no way to train your reflexes, or find out how your quick judgments were. That was the way if what you wanted to do was win.

As time passed, the bus behind him alternated between uneasy silences, quick low conversation, and loud nervous joking. Bullet never turned around, didn't measure the distance by passing towns or intersecting highways, didn't think, didn't look out the window, didn't do anything. When they arrived, the bus pulled into a big parking lot behind a low, modern school building, stretched out along the top of a hill, with windows along most of the walls. The building was locked for the weekend, but the gym was open. The opposing team poured out through the broad doors as the Crisfield Warriors went in to change. This was a private school, The Acorn School. It had a team of coaches, a head of Track and two assistants. All of the competitors looked alike, except for the colors of their shorts. The Warriors wore red, the Acorn team blue. All had on white tank tops with numbers.

Bullet followed the mass of moving bodies to the field, hanging back. The oval track lay in a kind of meadow between two gentle hills. A white board fence surrounded it. From the top of a rise of land, watching people spread out over and around the field, Bullet picked out the brown rectangle that was the long jump pit, the circle from which the javelin would be thrown, the tall pole vault posts and the shorter high jump posts. A pile of white hurdles lay piled up beside the gateway to the track. A couple of long white benches were set out for spectators and equipment. The cross-country path led up through mown grass, over the opposite hill, to disappear into the sky. The sky shone deep blue. White clouds, broad and lazy, drifted across it.

Bullet stood watching. The mass broke up into smaller groups, bending and stretching in exercises. The coaches, three blue windbreakers and one red one, moved among the groups. Two officials stood by the starting line on the track, in black-and-white striped shirts and black shorts. From a distance, the competitors looked like animals turned loose into a field, guided by
herdsmen into positions on the lush meadow while the officials oversaw the whole operation. From a distance, the whole scene looked ordered, designed, completed.

If he could paint, Bullet thought, this was something that would make a painting, in oil to catch the quality of color the clear air brought out. The rich green of the grass; the brown of track and pits so perfectly brown it looked like it had to be some other substance, not really earth at all, maybe gold; and the figures of the young men, lying on the grass with their fingers locked behind their necks, muscles pulling effortlessly up, or running in place with high-lifted knees: but he didn't paint, couldn't even draw, and didn't want to.

He went down the slope to find out when his events were.

The coach moved around, checking up, checking in, encouraging and advising. He handed Bullet the clipboard. On the top of the papers was a mimeographed sheet listing the order of events. Cross-country, as usual, came near the end. As always, the relay race came last. When he was a ninth grader, Bullet ran with the relay team. The coach had tried to get him to run sprints too, but he refused—he was fast enough but he didn't like running on the track, in the lines. After one season, Bullet could decide what events he would enter, and he refused to run in the relay anymore.

“Tillerman, you time the sprints,” the coach told him. Bullet hung the stopwatch around his neck and moved on along the fence to stand at the hundred-meter mark. After a while, the finish tape was set up across the eight lanes of track, and he saw eight runners move into position—four pairs of blue shorts, four red. They crouched, bodies coiled into position, heads down. In unison, they raised their bodies up to rest on fingertips and toes and then—a split second later, at the sound of a blank being fired—they sprang off their marks. Bullet started the stopwatch at the same time.

Fifteen seconds later it was all over, and the eight runners were going back to their coaches to check times and hear advice. Bullet filled in the places and times for their runners: four, six, seven, eight; the times ranged from 13.1 to 14.8 seconds. The winning time was 11.9, a little kid, probably a ninth grader, skinny and fast, who headed for the finish line as if that was his only hope in the whole world.