The Runner (3 page)

“Isn't that right, OD?” Bullet asked the dog. She wagged her tail and hesitated, wondering if she should come closer. He ignored her.

Maybe he'd have it cut in a Mohican cut. He'd seen pictures of those. They shaved away all the hair except for a broad band down the center of your head. It looked pretty terrible. Maybe he'd do that.

If it hadn't been so muggy, he'd have jogged back up to the house, for the pleasure of the run. But he walked, unrelaxing himself: tomorrow he'd get up at five to take the tractor out and get started on the front cornfield, which would give him a couple of hours at the job before the school bus came.

The wind rustled the grasses and night gathered around him. There were a lot of things the old man didn't do anymore, even though he wasn't that old, just sixty. He didn't even put in tobacco anymore. The front fields used to be tobacco—hard work, but a cash crop. Now it was corn and tomatoes, easier to grow, easier to harvest. His father wouldn't think about planting anything else, not even soybeans—which made no sense. Except it was new, of course. Bullet could have done the groundwork and legwork on a new crop, but you couldn't work with the old man, you had to work for him. Bullet wasn't having any of that.

The dirt under his feet was packed hard. Night flowed over him. OD sometimes followed behind—he could hear her—or she'd tear off into the grass to flush out something—a muskrat maybe, a possum, something she never caught. You'd think she'd learn.

Bullet didn't know where the idea came from, like a star shooting in a white arc across the sky. But it stopped him in his tracks.

He threw back his head and laughed out loud. Boy, oh boy. He moved quickly up the path, laughing in pure pleasure.

He would have his head shaved. Absolutely bald. Boy, oh boy.

That would be worth the money.

He ran up the back steps and across the screened porch into the kitchen. His mother was still there, still wearing the white
blouse she'd put on for dinner and the blue high-heeled shoes. She looked at him, and he couldn't read her face. She wore her dark hair in a thick braid down her back, the coolest way to wear long hair.

“You've been swimming alone, that's not too smart,” she said.

Bullet shrugged. He wondered if she was going to ask him not to, because he wasn't about to not go swimming if he wanted to.

She shrugged back at him. “Are you going to have your hair cut?” she asked. Her eyes didn't give him any messages, one way or the other.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“I'll hear a yes or a no from you,” she told him.

“Yes,” he said.

“I'll say good night then.” She got up from her chair, slow but not relaxed. She never relaxed.

Bullet jammed his hands down into the pockets of his shorts. Then he said to her straight back, “Good night, Maw.” He heard the teasing in his own voice. There had been some big fights about calling her Maw, which the old man said was common as dirt, as well as illiterate and ill-enunciated.

She hesitated, then turned around to stare at him.

“You,” she said.

He knew what she meant; she used to say that to him, “You, boy,” when he was about to go too far. Then she'd either get after him or burst out laughing, and he never knew which to expect. He wondered if she knew what he was going to ask Billy-O to do, then realized that she couldn't. She just knew he was going to do something. She knew it the same way he knew that she knew. He could read her and she could read him—which was the closest they came to talking.
You might say it wasn't too awful close,
Bullet thought, and grinned.

B
ullet leaned his shoulder against the cinder block wall of the broad corridor leading down to the cafeteria and watched. They moved on past him like a human river, like a herd of cattle heading for the feed troughs.

If you knew how to look you could see the order within the mass. They moved in groups. Jocks announced themselves by their heavy white letter sweaters with the big red W sewn onto the back—even in this heat. He saw Ted Bayson, the football player, with his latest girl. This one was one of the eggheads, he noticed. Eggheads were marked out by their long hair, boys and girls, and the way their girls didn't hang onto them. They were always talking, mostly arguing. Negroes—blacks they wanted to be called now, “Black is beautiful” was the slogan.
Black is black and that's about all there is to say about it,
Bullet thought. They stuck together, heads like a field of black puffballs with afro haircuts, guys and girls, laughing, touching one another with arms around or with punches and slappings, calling out and heehawing. Even the wimps had their own look, rabbitty around the eyes.

When the corridor had emptied, Bullet drifted into the cafeteria. He liked the way the room was divided almost exactly in half between tables of Negroes and tables of whites. They could pass laws and more laws about integration, they could close down the Negro schools and take “White Only” signs off doors, but it didn't
change things. Bullet ran his eyes over the tables, looking for an empty seat. He didn't care where he sat or who he sat with. He sat anywhere he wanted to. Nobody invited him, he was never unwelcome, and that was about exactly the way he wanted things. That day, he slid into the bench beside Jackson and Tommy, across from Cheryl and Lou. They looked up to greet him but went on with their conversation. Bullet pulled his sandwiches out of the paper bag. Tommy he'd known forever. Tommy was a senior now, editor of the paper, with his shoulder-length curly red hair held off his face by a bandana worn like an Indian headband, but Bullet remembered him as a plump boy, back in grade school. They'd been in the same grade until Bullet flunked back a year. Tommy had gotten tiresomely liberal during high school; they were all tiresomely liberal these days, gathering up causes like little kids picking up shells and stones at the beach, all excited and thinking how new and wonderful it was. Waiting to find the stone that was magic, Bullet suspected, the one that would make them brilliant, get their names printed in history books. But they never read the history books and figured out what happened to a lot of people just like them: nothing, at best, and getting wiped out, at worst. Tommy was still okay, he did some thinking. Jackson, Tommy's sidekick for a couple of years now, as well as one of the assistant editors on the paper, was a tall, lean, lazy kid. Bored most of the time and looking for something to stir up; boring all of the time, Bullet thought. Jackson didn't much care for Bullet but didn't have the nerve to do anything about it. The girls—Lou and Cheryl—weren't exactly their girls, weren't exactly not their girls. Lou had a crush on Bullet that she didn't bother to conceal. She was soft, soft wavy hair held back with barrettes, big soft blue eyes. He didn't mind her, much. Cheryl, he respected, for all that most of the time she was around he had the impulse to punch her out. She was the loudest of them, and her opinions came
right from whatever magazine she'd last read, and she wasn't too good to look at with her squared figure and little piggly eyes, but nobody scared her, nobody could shut her up. Much as he often wanted to put her mouth out of commission, little as he enjoyed her company, she wasn't as much of a jerk as most other people.

“I actually like a tough teacher,” Jackson was maintaining, lying through his teeth. Tommy caught Bullet's eye and looked uncomfortable. “As long as he knows what he's talking about.”

“Or her,” Cheryl inserted.

“Burn those bras, baby,” Jackson said.

“My bra for your draft card,” she told him.

“Lay off,” Tommy told them. “Don't you ever get tired? I don't know why you bother, Jackson; you've had McIntyre, you know he can't be accused of knowing what he's talking about, so this student teacher might be an improvement.”

“McIntyre's mind got lost in 1927,” Jackson said. “He's a prime example of a burned-out teacher. If he ever was aflame. Which I doubt seriously. How old is this student teacher, and how did he ever get stuck down here?”

“Do you have him, Bullet?” Tommy asked.

“Bullet wouldn't know, he sleeps through class,” Cheryl reported.

“You don't,” Lou asked him. “Do you?” She looked as if that was something deliciously wicked.

Bullet took a big bite of his sandwich and chewed it, staring right back at her but not saying anything, until she blushed and looked away. He had looked at the student teacher about once; he was a weedy-looking long-hair with pale skin and a little blond beard about ten hairs thick hanging down from his receding chin. “I don't expect any joy of him,” he told them. “But he can't be worse than McIntyre.”

“Don't you just wish,” Cheryl said.

“Come off it, Cher,” Tommy told her. “McIntyre hands out ten dittos a day and then reads them aloud. Aloud. And then you spend the three minutes left at the end of class filling in the blanks he tells you the right answers for, and you hand them in. They're the same dittos he's used for decades. Forty-five minutes a day of screaming boredom. That's what hell must be like,” he concluded.

“‘Hell is other people,'” Cheryl told him. “Sartre,” she informed anyone who might not know, which was, Bullet figured, all of them, including him. Quotes for every occasion, that's what Cheryl had.

“At least McIntyre is always good for a B,” Jackson reminded her. “He doesn't know how to give any other grade, his little fingers can't form any other letters. That looks all right on your record.”

“Some of us are accustomed to A's,” Cheryl said.

“They should fire him,” Lou said. “I don't want to have to take the US History course from him if he's not going to teach us anything.”

“He's got tenure,” Tommy told her. “They'd have to get him on something, to be able to fire him—if they even want to fire him, if they even know how bad he is. Of course, if we could persuade Cheryl here to seduce him . . .”

“Oh wow, can I watch?” Jackson cried.

“Not on your life, you pervert,” Cheryl said. “Besides, I'm saving myself for Ted Bayson, the body beautiful. I don't know if Lou would be willing . . .”

“Cheryl,” Lou protested softly.

But Cheryl's attention had moved on. “I wonder about Meredith—she's a friend of yours, isn't she, Lou? What is she thinking of?”

“Obviously,” Tommy assured her, “she's given up thinking.”

“Who's Meredith?” Bullet asked.

They all rounded on him, enjoying themselves. “This year's Bayson girl,” Jackson told him. “Don't you pay attention to anything, Bullet?” Tommy asked.

“Nope,” Bullet answered. Tommy chuckled, approving and admiring. Even Tommy, who could have figured it out if he'd done any thinking about it, couldn't figure out what had happened to Bullet, to make him so distant. Bullet knew what had happened—he'd grown up. They talked about being grown up and realistic, but they didn't have the first idea about what was really involved in it, so they saw Bullet as some kind of mystery man.

“I never had a student teacher,” Lou said.

“Do you think he's dodging the draft?” Tommy asked Bullet.

“He's pretty young,” Cheryl answered. “He's about the right age.”

“What's his name?” Tommy asked.

“You should have heard McIntyre's introduction of him,” Cheryl went on. “‘Boys and girls,'” she imitated the wheezy voice, “‘we will be privileged this semester to see all the newest methods in education.' I ask you, how can anybody be such a jerk?”

“He probably practices at home,” Jackson suggested. “He probably worked for hours on that introduction, making sure it was perfectly jerky. In front of the mirror. What do you think?”

“Oh, I hope not,” Cheryl answered. “No wonder he's in a perpetual depression.”

“That's stupor,” Tommy corrected her, “as in drunken.”

“Walker,” Bullet said. They looked at him, surprised. “His name's Walker, the student teacher's.”

“Besides, if he's dodging the draft, he's got my support,” Jackson said.

“My guess is he flunked the physical—have you seen him? He looks sickly,” Cheryl told them. “He's probably 4-F.”

“Nobody's 4-F anymore,” Tommy told her. “They're only using one classification, the typewriters in Washington are jammed and they just keep turning out 1-A's.”

“I'll be in Canada before they get a chance at me,” Jackson said.

“They don't want you in Canada, swelling the rosters on dole,” Cheryl told him.

“If I were a boy—” Lou began, but Tommy interrupted her.

“I'll tell you what it's like,” he said. He leaned forward a little, the way he always had when he had an idea that he was excited about. “I've been thinking about this for an editorial. It's like dredging for crabs, the draft. They hang the dredge down off the back of the war machine, right? And they sink it into the mud. Steel teeth grind closed.” He demonstrated with his hands. They paid close attention, Bullet saw. “And we're all caught in it, just like the crabs. Scrabbling around in the steel-toothed cage. Dump it out onboard and watch the cannon fodder scrabble around. Get them into baskets and get those lids on tight. That's just what it is. Ship us out in bushel baskets, ship us back in coffins—what's the difference? We can't do any more about it than the crabs can.”

He waited for a minute, looking from face to face. “What do you think?” he asked, his eyes coming to rest on Bullet's face.

Bullet shrugged, thinking it was okay, as far as it went, thinking it would make a pretty good editorial.

“They'll never let you print it,” Cheryl announced. “You know that. But it's not a bad metaphor.”

“I think it's excellent,” Lou said. “I think it's a really good metaphor for the draft.”