The Runner (27 page)

“It makes sense,” she said.

He hunkered down until his eyes were level with hers.
Nobody said it wasn't going to hurt.
He was willing to bet it had hurt Liza too. “Listen,” he said, “you wanna come with me?”

“What would I do in the army?”

Bullet shrugged. She was right, it would just be another box. It was going to be just another box for him, too, but he'd figured it out. You didn't get out of one box without getting into another, and you didn't get out without it costing you. For himself, he was just looking for a box that fit him. For her—what he was hoping to do was just loosen a board or two for her. It was up to her what she did about that.

Something was squeezing at his heart, and words were strangling in his throat. “I've been thinking,” he said. “You remember that birthday party?”

“Eleanor Brown's? I remember. I remember you not wanting to go. I remember driving all the way back along the highway, to pick up the clothes you took off.” A reluctant smile moved across her face. “How you got them out of the back of the truck without us noticing, I never knew.”

“One at a time,” he told her. “I leaned way over, so they wouldn't blow up into view in the mirror.”

“And I remember how you looked when we came around to get you out and you were just . . .”

Bullet waited.

“. . . bare naked, and laughing . . .” She laughed then, and he joined in.

“Anyway,” he said, “I owe you an apology. And Liza, too, because she was looking forward to that party, but she's not around to hear it. I shouldn't have done that.”

“Oh, I dunno,” his mother said. “It always seemed to me there wasn't anything else you could have done. Being you.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. She could read him and he could read her. He leaned forward and kissed her cheek.

“So,” she said, after a minute, looking at him while he got up, “what can I do for you before you go?”

That was her way of saying good-bye.

His way, he had thought hard about. He knew she wouldn't take the boat, or the hundred dollars he'd left in the top drawer of his bureau for gas and oil—she wouldn't take them just like that, like presents. He knew if he tried to give them to her while he was leaving, that would be hard on her. After he was gone . . . Well, his father would do what he always did, pretend nobody had ever been here, and that would at least be easier on her. But
he'd thought about how to make sure she knew he wanted her to have that boat.

“I'm all packed and everything. I've taken everything I want. Whatever I've left behind is for you, okay?” He was thinking of the boat, the hundred dollars—and the farm.

“What would I do with what you've left behind?” she demanded.

“Maybe you'll think of something, maybe not. But it's for you, you hear me?”

“I hear you, boy,” she said, getting back to her bucket of water.

His carryall in his hand, Bullet jogged down the driveway. He'd need to find Tamer at lunch, then he'd get the one o'clock bus. The fields stretched away on either side of him, and he stopped at the end of the driveway to look back at them. He'd new-harrowed the fields, and they were ready now to take the crops he wouldn't harvest from them. Tough luck, and he had known what it would cost. But he let his eyes run over them, over the lumpy surface of them. He wanted to keep connected to himself as much as he could; he wanted to be sure he could take with him whatever memory could carry.

Today, the road all runners come,

Shoulder high we bring you home.

T
he phone rang, filling the empty rooms with its clamor. She picked it up, and the ringing stopped.

“Abigail Tillerman?” a man's voice asked. “Hello, am I speaking to Abigail Tillerman?”

“You are.”

“This is Captain Charles Lockridge, and I'm sorry to tell you that your son, Samuel, has been killed in action.”

She didn't say anything.

“Mrs. Tillerman?”

What was she supposed to say?

“We have recovered the body and can send him home to you—”

“No,” she said.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“As you wish, of course. I'm calling you myself—he was under my command—because”—and here, for the first time, the voice lost its smooth practiced flow of words—“he was such a fine soldier. A letter will follow, but I was there, and I thought you might want to hear . . .”

He waited for what she would say. She didn't say anything.

“He almost made it, he was coming back, he was running
and they—got him. We were covering him and at first we thought he was just—taking an obstacle, the way he did when he was moving fast but—”

She laid down the receiver beside the phone and walked out of the room. The voice went on talking. She came back into the room with a cleaver in her hand. With the cleaver she sliced through the connection, where the wires came out from the wall. The voice ceased.

She put on a sweater and picked up the phone, putting the receiver back in its cradle to make it easier to carry, coiling the long wire up neatly. She left the house through the back door and made her way down through the barren vegetable garden, between the fields of marsh grasses, to the water. At the end of the dock, the little red boat rode choppy waves. She climbed down into it, lowered the outboard, untied the lines and headed out.

The wind bit at her face and her ears, stung her bare hands. Spray hit her skin, like needles. At the town dock, she looped the line in a clove hitch and climbed up onto the wooden boards. Carrying the phone, she marched up the street to the telephone company. She stood for a minute in front of the big plate-glass window, as if studying the display of telephone models. Behind the display, people sat at desks.

She lifted her hand and heaved the phone into the window. The glass cracked, shattered. Fragments sprayed out into the bitter air—diamond bright, diamond sharp. They flew up and around, like particles of firecrackers exploding.

Abigail Tillerman didn't stand there long. Her chin high, her skirt blown by the wind to tangle her legs, she turned and walked away.

The boat's motor came to immediate life. As she headed out
of the narrow harbor, she thought,
What was that song Liza sang? “The water is wide, I cannot get o'er.”
Liza's voice was in her ear, beyond where the motor noise could reach. The wind was behind her now, and the boat bounced along the wave tops.
“The water is wide, I cannot get o'er,”
the voice in her head sang.
“And neither have I wings to fly. Bring me a boat—”
The long, high note lingered.

Well, she had the boat. And the wide water ran, she knew, around the whole world, ringing it around, the encircling oceans that somehow contained and connected all the lands within.

The wind blew at her back, and the wet spume blew onto her shoulders. She lifted her shoulders and squared them, to take up again the burden of long life.

CYNTHIA VOIGT
won the Newbery Medal for
Dicey's Song
and a Newbery Honor for
A Solitary Blue
, both part of the beloved Tillerman Cycle. She is also the author of many other celebrated books for middle-grade and teen readers, including the Bad Girls series;
Izzy, Willy-Nilly
; and
Jackaroo
. She was awarded the Margaret A. Edwards Award in 1995 for her work in literature, and the Katahdin Award in 2003. She lives in Maine. You can visit her at
cynthiavoigt.com
.

Books by Cynthia Voigt

THE BAD GIRLS SERIES

Bad Girls

Bad, Badder, Baddest

It's Not Easy Being Bad

Bad Girls in Love

Bad Girls, Bad Girls, Whatcha Gonna Do?

THE TILLERMAN SERIES

Homecoming

Dicey's Song

A Solitary Blue

The Runner

Come a Stranger

Sons from Afar

Seventeen Against the Dealer

THE KINGDOM SERIES

Jackaroo

On Fortune's Wheel

The Wings of a Falcon

Elske

OTHER BOOKS

Building Blocks

The Callender Papers

David and Jonathan

Izzy, Willy-Nilly

Orfe

Tell Me if the Lovers Are Losers

Tree by Leaf

The Vandemark Mummy

When She Hollers

ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing Division

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1985 by Cynthia Voigt

Lines from “A Shropshire Lad” are from
The Collected Poems of A. E. Housman
. Copyright 1939, 1940 © 1965 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Copyright © 1967, 1968 by Robert E. Simmons. Reprinted by permission of Holt, Rinehart and Winston and of The Society of Authors as literary representative of the Estate of A. E. Housman and Jonathan Cape Ltd., publishers of A. E. Housman's
Collected Poems
.

Lines from “Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries” are from
The Collected Poems of A. E. Housman
. Copyright 1922 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Copyright 1950 by Barclays Bank. Reprinted by permission of Holt, Rinehart and Winston and of The Society of Authors as literary representative of the Estate of A. E. Housman and Jonathan Cape Ltd., publishers of A. E. Housman's
Collected Poems
.

Lines from “Will There Be Any Stars in My Crown” are reprinted by permission of Zap Publishing Company.

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Also available in an Atheneum Books for Young Readers hardcover edition

Book design by Debra Sfetsios-Conover

The text for this book is set in Baskerville.

First Atheneum Books for Young Readers paperback edition July 2012

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Voigt, Cynthia.

The runner.

Summary: As a dedicated runner, a teenage boy has always managed to distance himself from other people until the experience of coaching one of his teammates on the track team gradually helps him see the value of giving and receiving.

ISBN 978-0-689-31069-0

[1. Runners (Sports)—Fiction. 2. Interpersonal relations—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.V874Ru 1985

[Fic] 84-21663

ISBN 978-1-4424-5066-0 (hc)

ISBN 978-1-4424-2881-2 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-4424-8916-5 (eBook)