The Runner (8 page)

“Okay, okay, I never laid claim to brains,” Pete said. He twirled spaghetti around his fork and ate a mouthful, sucking in the strands that hung out. He held his fork like a hammer in his huge fist. “How're you guys going to do in the meet Saturday?”

“I'll win,” Bullet told him.

“We
know
that,” Jim said. “That doesn't interest me. I might be interested if you lost one. But how about the rest of you. Anyone any good?”

Bullet shook his head, chewing.

“You should play football,” they told him, once again. “We win sometimes.”

“Bullet doesn't play team sports,” Pete told them.

“That's the ticket,” Bullet agreed.

“Why should you, if you're a potential Olympic contender?” Jim needled.

Bullet shrugged. “I'm not contending.”

“Your coach thinks you are.”

“That's his problem,” Bullet said. “What about you, when's your first game?”

They groaned. “Man, we already played it. Saturday. Don't you read your school paper?
The Crimson Blade
?”

“Bullet doesn't read, doesn't write—he's a tribute to the school system.”

“How'd he get to eleventh grade?”

“He just ripples his muscles at the teachers. Women faint. Men get terrorized. He used to run his fingers through his hair—” They laughed.

Their laughter was swept away in a silence that brushed over the entire cafeteria, from one end to the other. Bullet finally turned around to see what had attracted so much attention.

A big Negro stood at the cash register, his eyes scanning the room. As he moved toward the tables of Negroes, low conversations started up again.

“That guy—,” Jim muttered.

“If there's one thing I can't tolerate,” Pete agreed, “it's an uppity nigger. He thought”—Pete grinned at Bullet—“he'd play football.”

“He's big enough,” Bullet said.

“Maybe,” Jim agreed. “But he's not quite white enough. We had a little talk with him. Have they integrated you guys?”

“Yeah.”

They digested this fact.

“Don't you care?”

“It's got nothing to do with me.”

“Just because nobody keeps up with you personally,” Jim argued, “you've still got to think about the principle of the thing. Whose side are you on, anyway?”

Bullet just looked at him.

“On his own, Dumbo,” Pete answered for Bullet.

Bullet didn't much care to have anyone answer for him.

“You know, man, sometimes,” Jim told Bullet, “that's not good enough. Times like these. Where's he come from, anyway, this guy? Anybody know? He's not one of ours, ours know better. This nigger is trouble, capital T, trouble. You can smell it on him,” he told the listening table. “What's his name? Tamer? The names they give their kids, it's a joke. But you watch, he'll turn out to be some organizer from up North. Five'll get you ten he'll be walking into the student lounge one day. Black as the ace of spades and cool as a cucumber.”

“Let him try it,” they growled. “Can't be too soon for me.”

Bullet crumpled up the wax paper and brown bag.

“Has anybody seen that trig test yet?” Pete asked.

“It's not a test, it's a quiz.”

“Anything that takes a whole period is a test. I need to get the answers. If I don't pass that course with a C the University won't look twice at me. On account of me not being an Olympic contender.”

“So what?”

“So I'd rather not be drafted next summer.”

“Oh, I dunno,” Jim said. “It'd get you out of Crisfield. You know, see the world. Kill off a few of the little yellow guys.”

“Even I know how dumb that is,” Pete answered.

“Why freak yourself out about it, it's not even October yet.”

“We got bigger problems right here. Bigger, browner ones.”

“Yeah, well, I still want to see that test. Quiz. Whatever you wanna call it. Pass the word around, okay?”

“What is it, you scared of the army? You chicken?” Jim asked.

“You looking to get your face messed up? Then I wouldn't say that, buddy. I wouldn't even think it, if I was you.”

Bullet rose, tossed his garbage into the overflowing trash can and moved away. “See you,” they called after him.

He drifted through the corridors, not even wondering anymore about their inability to face up to facts, just because, when they were together they made themselves feel that they were okay, because they all didn't face facts together. He went past the student lounge, a big room down by the principal's office. It had been a classroom until two years ago, when a bunch of seniors had gotten up a petition to have a student center. Nothing happened until the parents got into it, and then things happened fast. The principal always folded under parent pressure. He gave the students the room. They filled it with any furniture they could find—old sofas, chairs, tables nobody else could use and ashtrays. The place was a mess, always smoky, papers all over the floor and chairs, people sitting around. Bullet looked in the open door and walked past, through a cloud of cigarette smoke and loud voices. By unspoken agreement it was whites only.

He went on down the hall and up two flights of stairs to algebra. All around him, locker doors clanged shut. Bullet never took anything to class: they could make him show up; they could make him sit there; but they couldn't make him carry things around with him. If he needed paper or pencil, the teacher
could supply it. If he needed a book, he'd look over someone's shoulder—or do without. He didn't care. The teachers pretty much ignored him once they figured it out. He passed the courses and that was all that mattered to them, getting the kids through the courses and out.

As that week went on, Bullet became aware of some mounting tension, in the halls, in the lunchroom, even in classes. It was like the tension in a bus going to a meet where you didn't know how you'd do, some team you'd never run against before. Muttered remarks, too low for a teacher to pin down, got made across a classroom. Everybody was touchy, or too quiet. Everybody looked around a lot, watching everybody else. “A little experiment in escalation,” Jackson called it, over lunch on Wednesday, his eyes glittering, looking nervy, looking pleased with himself.

“Bullet's not interested,” Cheryl said, warning Jackson to keep his mouth closed.

“I think you underestimate Bullet,” Jackson said. “He's smart enough, and he can't be as hard-hearted as he acts. Nobody could be. Is that right, Bullet?”

“You tell me,” Bullet answered.

“Okay, I will. We've agreed, at last, that maybe the Civil War is over, and maybe the South will not rise again. Now it's time to bring this place into the twentieth century. So we've been doing a little talking, making an encouraging remark here and there, a discouraging remark there and here.”

Bullet asked, “Why?”

“Didn't I tell you?” Cheryl asked.

Jackson groaned. “Because you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs,” he told Bullet, angry now.

“It's not an omelette you're making,” Bullet pointed out.

“Sounds like you're afraid to rock the boat,” Cheryl challenged him.

Bullet didn't bother answering.

“C'mon, Bullet, you know that sometimes things have to blow up before any kind of progress can be made,” Tommy said.

Bullet looked around at them. They were too smart to let themselves act like such jerks, but they still did. They thought that just because they were smashing eggs they must be making an omelette. He shrugged: too bad.

“I'd like you on our side,” Tommy said to him.

Cheryl saved him the trouble of answering: “He's not on anybody's side, except his own.”

Bullet looked up out the high windows, where rain sluiced down, then back at his plate. He was eating a cafeteria lunch. They'd finally run out of everything at home, and he wasn't about to eat plain slices of bread for lunch.

Later, practice was called because of the rain, but Bullet ran the course anyway. There was no law guaranteeing that it wouldn't rain during a meet, and maybe even rain just like this, hard and cold, an autumnal rain, pelting down where the wind blew it. He took a long hot shower in the gym before he went into town.

At Tydings' Grocery, he asked Millie to cut him three steaks. He always fed himself steak for the three nights before a meet. “About ten dollars worth,” he told her. At the front of the store, he picked up a jar of peanut butter and a dozen eggs, plus a gallon of milk. These he placed on the counter where Herb Tydings sat looking out at the pouring rain. Herb ran the store. His wife, Millie, was the butcher. Herb had pale soft skin that always looked freshly shaved, and round, rimless glasses. “Looks like the weather's finally going to turn,” he remarked. “So I guess it's about winter, wouldn't you say?” Bullet didn't answer. “Your mother was in earlier—like a drowned rat she looked. I told her so. She said she couldn't speak to the rat part, but she knew she wasn't drowned.” He chuckled. “She's sharp, Ab is. I could do with seeing more of her.”

Bullet looked to the back of the store where Millie slowly weighed in his steaks. It didn't do any good to get impatient with Millie. She never hurried anything, not her big body, not her hands, not her mind. But she could cut a steak to within twenty-five cents of the price you asked her for, every time.

“You know, I never see your father,” Herb continued. “I'd think maybe he was dead, except then I'd have read about it in the paper.”

Bullet snorted.
Me too,
he almost said.

“Will you be running on Saturday?” Herb asked him.

“Yeah.”

“Good luck to you,” Herb said. He always knew what was going on, he always talked to the people who came in, asking about their families, the crops or the catch, health, news, something. Herb Tydings kept up with everybody. “Though you don't need luck, do you?”

“Nope,” Bullet said.

“You will though, everybody does, sooner or later,” Herb advised him. Herb talked, whether his customer wanted conversation or not. “Everybody needs good luck, everybody gets some bad luck. It's not the luck, is it?” He didn't wait for Bullet to answer. “It's how you take the luck you get. I mean, we all of us our age went through the Depression. Talk about bad luck. Your father isn't the only man who got his plans changed by the Depression. Or the war.”

“He wasn't in the army.”

“Because he had the farm, they didn't draft farmers. Me, I got into the Quartermaster Corps, and that was good luck. Life always surprised you, and I guess some people don't take to surprises. What about you?” he asked.

Bullet didn't answer. It had been a long time since anything had surprised him, good surprise or bad surprise. But Herb
didn't expect an answer, he didn't wait to hear one. He reached out to take the wrapped meat from Millie and calculated the price on a pad. “Nine eighty, that okay?”

“Fine.” Herb totaled the bill. Bullet paid, thanked Herb, waved to Millie and left. He stood a minute on the covered porch, while the rain pounded down onto the road. He put his grocery bag under the poncho he wore.

It would have taken her a couple of hours to sail back, Bullet knew—she should have let the old man go hungry for a day. They had bread, and he didn't know why she didn't just wait for the weather to clear, or the old man to give in and drive her. After a dinner of plain bread he'd have found something urgent to do in town, Bullet would put money on that. They both of them made him angry.

He splashed through puddles, going out of the town center and down to Tommy's house, next to the long cinderblock building where Mr. Leeds had his seafood plant. Tommy was alone at home, working on layout in the dining room. He had spread articles and pictures all over the table and he looked glad to take some time off from the job, to drive Bullet home. “They vetoed my editorial with the crab metaphor,” Tommy told him, as soon as Bullet pulled the car door closed behind him. “I dunno, Bullet, I'm thinking of resigning in protest. We can't talk about Vietnam, or the draft, can't even hint at integration. I didn't sign up to work on a mouthpiece for the establishment; that isn't how I want to spend my time. What would you do?”

“Quit,” Bullet said.

“Agreed,” Tommy said, then sighed. They drove slowly, the wipers flipping back and forth across the windshield. “But you always did have the guts to do what you wanted. I wish I was like you.”

Bullet didn't bother answering that. He knew as well as Tommy
did that that wasn't the truth. Tommy enjoyed being Tommy Leeds, editor of
The Crimson Blade;
he'd fought a hard campaign to be elected to the position and he took pride in the paper he brought out, he took pride in the editorial work he did.

“But if I quit they'll have won, don't you see?”

“No, I don't see that. It's not a matter of whether they win, but of whether you lose,” Bullet pointed out.

Tommy smiled at that. “If I thought you cared enough to tell lies, I'd accuse you of logic chopping,” he said. “But since you don't—”

“I don't,” Bullet assured him.

“Unless I could maybe start up an underground newspaper. A real student newspaper. What do you think? Would you like to have a real student newspaper?”

Bullet didn't say anything.

Tommy laughed. “Okay, it was a dumb question, I know you don't read. I wish you were a senior, man, I'd like to sit in some classes with you. You're a good influence. No, I'm serious. But how you stay smart beats me. You're weird, Bullet, an absolute weirdo. Even before you shaved your head to look the part. You're absolutely unconnected. Why else do you think I listen to you?”

“You don't listen to me,” Bullet pointed out.