“You’re strong!” Rachel shouts. “Stick on him!”
Without thinking I respond by pulling alongside Putin.
“Two fifteen,” the starter yells our half as we pass him simultaneously. Seven seconds slower that lap. At this rate we’d log a 4:40 mile, the masters’ standard of excellence. This is probably about his normal pace. His stride is smooth, his breathing controlled, his face emotionless. Forty yards later, still shoulder-to-shoulder at the end of the straight, Putin glances over at me.
“I have a dream!” I try to sound like Martin Luther King.
Looking slightly alarmed, he speeds up and I stay with him.
“I want to be the first man over forty to break the four-minute barrier!”
He smiles, thinking I’m joking. Or crazy.
In the curve I drop behind him to draft down the back straight. The fire has filled my lungs with smoke. I try to switch off the pain by concentrating on the pounding of my heart and the billowing of my lungs. I turn up the volume until I am inside the sound, striding long down a roaring wind tunnel. I lean into the next curve as if gravity will slingshot me out onto the straight. I can’t hear Putin through my private windstorm. The flames jump to my shoulders and neck.
Rachel waves her cell phone and yells something. I only catch the word “uncle.” You’re a monkey’s uncle? Man from U.N.C.L.E.?
“Three twenty-five!” the starter calls. “Last lap!” I feel the momentary jolt of relief starting the last quarter mile that used to come with the shot of the timer’s little pistol.
“Go, Cage!” Rachel yells.
I nod my eyes at her and lean to the inside and strangely hear myself mutter, “Hang in my wind shadow, Nick.”
Putin accelerates as I pull in front, keeping me wide through the endless curve. When we hit the straight, I slip behind him out of the headwind and he slows. He’s hurting, wounded. I’m the hyena. I can take him. I am dizzy. From hunger. From the long pursuit. Again I have the strange feeling that Nick is right behind me. Looking back, I see the other runners in a cluster a half a lap behind. I focus back into the roaring tunnel, down the long straight, nearly clipping his right shoe with each stride. The magnitude of agony invading my body all at once is off the scale of training pain . . . yet paltry next to the psychic suffering of my past. As I go into the last curve, my exhalations sound like howls.
Kick, Cage. Kick! You can take him
, Nick yells.
Start your kick now!
I step outside and pull even with Putin, who looks straight ahead, his skin tight against his skull. Shortening my stride, raising my knees higher, I lean forward and sprint past him, moved by the perspective beyond the physical pain down the hundred strides of the final straight, kicking with perfect form. I figure I’m too old for the rebel yell, realize that there is no tape across the line. Rachel has her hands high over her head.
The timer says, “Four thirty-two. Hats off to you, partner.”
“My champion!” Rachel yells, then speaks into her phone and cuts it off.
Momentum carries me a few yards and I hear Putin’s time called six seconds slower as I stumble onto the field and roll onto my back.
“You crushed ’em,” Rachel says. “Are you okay?”
Too stunned to speak, I’m a fish in dry air, opening and closing my mouth pointlessly.
“You’ll never guess what.” She kneels by my shoulder.
I raise my eyebrows.
“Hey, buddy, way to go.” Putin hangs his head over mine, squatting with his forearms on his thighs. “That was a helluva kick. I was dreading that last straight, just holding on for dear life, and you went blazing past like John Walker. ’Member him?”
“Long hair and a black uniform?” Rachel says.
“Yeah, New Zealand runner. Gold metal in ’76. Held the mile record at 3:49 from August ’75 to July ’79.”
“That’s his hero.” Rachel squeezes my shoulder.
I smile and nod. They are suffocating me. I’m going to die. The pain I shoved aside on the last straight has come back angry in the form of a heart attack. I’m going to die looking up at a clear, balmy spring sky and the face of the woman I love and a sweating, drooling, obsessed master miler. Smiling at Rachel, I try to compose some poignant dying words and remember Thoreau’s last: Moose. Indian.
“My name’s Ronny Renfro.” Putin extends his hand over my sternum.
I cough, spreading my fingers over my pounding heart, then remind myself, Grace under pressure, and raise my hand to his. “Good race.”
“What do you do, Ronny?” Rachel is trying to figure him out.
“I’m a lawyer with the IRS. Did you run in college?”
“I’s ’posed to but I’s depressed,” I splutter earnestly, waiting for my life to flash in front of my eyes, wondering what images will compose the final cut out of all my sins and all the time with those who loved me, everybody who wanted to save me, which moments will count. Or maybe there will be no last montage and my movie will freeze on Ronny Renfro’s Putin face and cut to black.
“Did you?” Rachel asks him.
“Yes, ma’am, East Tennessee State.” Ronny smiles at me. “Have you been running steady all these years?”
“No.” Rachel replies for me. “Not the last twenty-odd years.”
“I thought he was crazy out there.” Ronny laughs madly. “I have a dream!” He looks up at the sky, leaving only his chin against the clouds, then back down at me with an apostolic gleam. “You might do it! You haven’t worn out your legs! You might be the one!”
Rachel leans away from him, frowning.
“Y’all Jehovah’s Witnesses or something?” Ronny says. “Look, Walker ended his career with crippling Achilles tendinosis trying to run a subfour after he turned forty. Of course he had already run over a hundred subfours over the years. But
this
guy.” He pauses and smiles at me conspiratorially. “The runner in him has been dormant, preserving his cartilage, tendons, and skeletal muscles, for two decades! He can withstand the quantity and intensity of the speed work necessary to run a subfour.”
That kind of speed work might make me manic. I have to escape. I roll onto my stomach and crawl away from Renfro for a second until I realize how ridiculous I must look, so I stand up and shake his hand. “Hey. My name’s Cage.”
“You got something.” Ronny smiles bashfully.
“You don’t know.” I sway on my legs, dizzy. “We got to do that again. That chesslike competition and the aggression of rivalry. Be like high school.”
“Or the middle ages,” Ronny jokes, smiling and nodding his head. “You need a coach and a training companion to push you through intervals. I’m just the man.”
Rachel takes my arm before I stumble backward.
Elbow at his waist, Ronny points his finger like a gun. “You don’t have to kill yourself again. You could work out the splits. Get the timing perfect.”
I see that Ronny Renfro is a scientist of the mile and try to smile. Rachel hands me a bottle of my homemade herbal electrolyte drink.
“I have a dream.” Ronny laughs, backing away. “I’ll get my card from my car.”
I put my arm over Rachel’s shoulders and we start to move slowly toward the center of the field. The wind has dropped and it’s suddenly humid and sticky. I nuzzle my face into the curve of her neck and sigh. These are the small ecstasies, all that are granted to mortals. The shots of the final cut. The instants that make you concede the possibility of happiness. Just these little moments. “Are you happy?”
“Very happy.” Rachel squeezes her arm hard around my waist. “What a funny guy. Intense. He’s like a hillbilly version of Putin.”
“That’s what I thought.” I guzzle down half the bottle, wipe my mouth with the back of my hand, then ask, “Guess what?”
“Oh!” Rachel cries with delight.
Then I understand. “Harper and Isabella.”
“A boy. A little redhead.”
I let out a weak whoop of joy, then cough.
“Isabella’s great. Harper said the hypno-bullshit was bulletproof. Isabella was so tranced out the kid was born asleep.” Rachel chatters on, a childless woman excited by the idea of a baby. “They still can’t agree on a name. Harper wants Morgan.”
“A new life. I hope they pick Nicholas,” I say. “A little redheaded Nick would be nice.”
Rachel gives my waist another hard squeeze. “I told Harper your time. He wants to send the whole family to the European masters. I told him your plan to run a subfour.” Rachel laughs. “He said that sounds manic.”
On the track a handful of gray-haired men leap over hurdles. A couple of cheers drift across the still air. I stop walking and gaze at Rachel, take in her calm hazel eyes, the exquisite sharpness of her nose, the white stripe that runs from her widow’s peak through her raven hair, the fullness of her body beneath a loose cotton dress. Tilting my head back, I drain the last dark green rivulets from the bottle and watch a lone cloud, driven by a strong high-altitude wind, scudding quickly across the empty sky.
Much love & gratitude to:
Saskia
for happiness and some damn good editorial advice.
Cleopatra Mary
for lighting a fire under me.
My Father
for his strength and steadiness.
My Brothers
for being there, mostly, when I needed them.
My Grandmother, Margarette Barnette Dorris Hughes,
the paradigm of a Southern gentlewoman.
The Dream Team—Larry Kirshbaum, Jamie Raab
& Lynn Nesbit—for their infinite patience.
My Readers—Scott Noland, Sheba Phombeah, Beth O’Donnell,
Bret Ellis, Jeff Hobbs, Claire Taylor, Mary Hall—for their light
down the dark passage.
George & Betty Johnson, Allen & Joanie Penniman and
Sean & Jennifer Reilly, whose support of the African Rainforest
Conservancy kept the wolves from my door.
Paul Wender, MD
Technical Advisor
George Plimpton,
for sixteen years of generosity and counsel.