Safe Passage (16 page)
Authors: Ellyn Bache
He ran as close behind his brother as he could, once their mother drove off. He had a hard time keeping up, but he was afraid to let Percival get too far in front, leaving him behind in a neighborhood he didn't know. To keep from thinking how out of breath he was and how his chest ached, he counted the trees along the road. They were mostly sugar maples, orange and gold in the autumn sunlight. With the light coming from behind them, the leaves looked as if they glowed. Finally, they reached their yard. Gideon started coughing because his lungs were so tired. He didn't want Percival to hear him cough. But Percival said, "I used to cough all the time after I ran. It's because you re not in shape. When you get into shape it'll stop." Percival did not hold him in contempt for coughing. Gideon was glad. After he got used to running the mile or two miles from where his mother threw them out, the coughing
did
stop. Then he discovered
a lightness
in his body and was able to rely on his legs to carry him as fast as he wanted to go. It seemed to him that Percival was responsible for the joy he had discovered.
Later, there were other Maryland autumns, which he would remember because of cross-country season. In middle school, he and Percival shared their paper route, meeting at the 7-Eleven for doughnuts when they were finished. But on one particular Sunday there was a cross-country meet in
So they got up at four-thirty that morning, earlier than they ever had before. Their father drove them to pick up their papers at the
Freestate
Sentinel
loading dock, because it was too early even for the delivery trucks to be out. The air was dark but not very cold, and the streets were deserted. Gideon had never been out at that hour. Piling the papers into the station wagon in the electric-light glare of the loading dock, he and Percival had looked at each other and broken into grins, thinking how urgent and important their mission was, if they were up so early.
They didn't deliver the papers on their bikes as they normally did. Instead, their father drove them. Usually if someone helped, it was their mother. But that day Patrick opened the tailgate of the station wagon and drove very slowly through the dark streets of their neighborhood while Percival and Gideon ran back and forth from the car, grabbing papers from the tailgate and flinging them onto porches. They did not see a single other person, and even the dogs were not out yet—even the shaggy English sheepdog that always brought them pinecones and followed them for blocks. Gideon thought that if the sheepdog was asleep, then in all the world just two paperboys and their father must be out just then, under such a black sky.
It was still dark when they finished, and Patrick took them to the Big Boy for breakfast. They almost never went to restaurants. It was too expensive to feed seven boys, and their parents did not think it fair to take just one or two of them. But that morning Patrick said, "Carbohydrate loading," winking at them and ordering stacks of pancakes. Gideon remembered coming out of the Big Boy with his belly full, into a sober gray dawn. Later the rest of the family piled into the station wagon for the two-hour drive to Harford County. He could not remember the details of the actual race or how either of them had done.
This morning, running long slow distance in the too-chilly mountain air of Utah, he'd thought how far away those times seemed, when his performance in a race had not mattered as much as the memory of a long night fading into dawn and the special, heady feeling of delivering papers with Percival and his father in the dark. He hadn't liked thinking that. He had forced himself to think instead about yesterday's race, which was what he intended to do all along.
Yesterday they'd gone to the Idaho State Invitational, a five-mile run on a hilly golf course, up and down. Gideon had felt good, but he'd made some mistakes and—as usual—hadn't beaten Farley. When they got back, his coach was more pleased with Gideon than Gideon was with himself. "You're looking strong," the coach said. "And that's good, because right now is when you should be starting to peak. Big Sky Conference is just a couple of weeks from now—fifteen miles up in those mountains." He pointed to the mountains beyond the campus, just outside of Ogden. "So if you don't feel good now, I don't know when the hell you will."
Gideon couldn't understand the coach's complacency. He hadn't, after all, caught up with Farley. He knew his father wouldn't have been pleased. His father would have expected more.
Typically, Gideon had run just behind Farley almost the whole way yesterday. He'd come in exactly four seconds behind him. It was always like that: He'd run four seconds behind Farley, or eight seconds or five. "You don't want to look too far ahead," his father used to say to Percival. "If you're running seventh, you don't want to think about beating the guy in first. You want to think about picking off number six, and then after that number five—think about picking them off one by one." But Gideon had nobody in front of him but Farley, and he knew his father would expect him to get closer, race by race. And so far, no matter how hard he tried, he had not been able to do it.
He had run easy this morning even as he thought about all that—which seemed odd now, sitting in the airport feeling like he was carrying weights in his arms and legs. This morning there had been a high sky, and the road was smooth under his feet. It had been years since he'd lost the childhood feeling of being able to go on forever without pain, but still his Sunday road work was easier than the Saturday races, and he was relaxed. He knew that later he would go home, shower, eat, study for a while,
then
lift weights. But again an unexpected memory had intruded when, thinking about weight-training, his mind had turned once more to Percival.
During that same period back in middle school, when Percival had already won several AAU and TAC events, their father spent endless hours helping Percival with his workouts. At first, Gideon just went along to be a part of it, racing when he could and taking in all of his father's advice. Patrick had said to Percival, "At the higher levels of competition, the difference isn't in your legs or your endurance, it's in your upper-body strength." Patrick had bought a bench press for Percival and put it in the basement, along with barbells and a chinning bar. But after a couple of months of working out, Percival decided his arms were as skinny as ever, so he quit. Later he worked out sporadically—every day for a week or two and then not at all for months. He never lifted on a regular basis until he went into the Marines. Gideon understood. The basement was
cold,
the floor was concrete and forbidding. The weights were in the exact spot where
Izzy
had once put his pet garter snake, to see if it would hibernate. Gideon never went down to the weight room himself unless Percival was there to keep him company.
Then Percival went into high school in ninth grade and came home with such stories about the cross-country course there that Gideon began to worry. He was a year behind Percival, still in middle school, and wouldn't get to run it for another year.
"The course isn't bad except for this one hill—Killer Mountain," Percival would tell him, holding his hand absolutely vertical to the ground. "Some kids say you can only climb it with a rope, but we have to run up it every day."
Gideon couldn't imagine himself running up Killer Mountain. He hated thinking of Percival running up it every day—a hill steep enough to climb with a rope!—and knowing he was too weak to do such a thing himself. He thought Percival would look down on him for not being able to run it, and his father would hold him in contempt. Of course at the first home meet Gideon saw for himself that the hill wasn't vertical, just very steep, but by then it had become vertical in his mind. He made himself go down to the basement and lift the weights twice a week. His father had taped
Percival's
weight-lifting schedule to the cinder-block basement wall. Percival ignored the schedule, but Gideon made himself do the whole workout each time. Occasionally Percival came down and did it with him, and then it seemed easier. But later, when Percival didn't want to be in the basement or anywhere else with Gideon, Gideon kept lifting weights anyway. His body was strong, and he could rely on it, and if that was all he was going to have, if Percival were going to hate him, then he would lift as many weights as he had to. But he hated weight-training, even now. He wouldn't think about it until he got back to the apartment; pick them off one at a time.
He had begun sweating. He pulled open the Velcro seams of his
RipOff
sweatpants and refastened the Velcro around his waist so he could carry the pants until he stopped.
Too cold at this time of year to start out with nothing over his shorts.
People thought Patrick had designed the
RipOffs
for Gideon, but that wasn't true. Percival had been the inspiration—not because of
Percival's
dedication to running, but because of the obnoxious way he acted when it was cold. Either he wouldn't run at all in winter or if he did he'd bundle up like Santa Claus and then get mad because he'd soon be too hot. He'd start sweating and want to be stripped down to shorts and tank top, that moment, right then. "God, I hate having to stop to pull these sweats over my shoes," he'd yell. "First you warm up and then you stop to undress and first thing you know you're freezing your ass.
When the weather got really cold, Percival would stay inside. "Jesus Christ, Percival!" their father would yell. "If you want to be any kind of serious runner, then you have to run all year."
"Yeah, I know," Percival would say, but he wouldn't do it. He'd go once or twice to the indoor track above the gym at the Y, but then he'd quit. The track was banked, it made him dizzy,
it
made him feel like one of those hamsters on a treadmill. Finally Patrick sat down at the sewing machine and said, "Okay, Percival, after today you're going to have no excuse." He ripped the two outer seams of
Percival's
sweatpants open from ankle to waist, and replaced the stitching with Velcro. The Velcro held the seams together but was easy to pull apart. You could yank the seams open and take the pants off without pulling them down over your shoes.
His father had stood up at the machine looking as sweaty and red in the face as if he'd just run the mile. "And this, fool," he said, holding the product up for Percival to see, "is why all young men should learn to sew." He reminded everyone that he had fashioned his disposable diaper on this same sewing machine eighteen years ago, to preserve the shitty little butts of his sons. He reminded them that
Izzy
had been named after Isaac Singer, who had invented the sewing machine
in.the
first place. He shamed Percival into running in the cold all that winter. Later he made pairs of
RipOffs
for Gideon and the twins and Simon, and still later for the entire high school cross-country team. But by then people had forgotten that Percival was the inspiration.
Gideon did not intend to think about that. Percival had run well his freshman and sophomore years in high school. Then everything began to change. Or rather, it changed all at once, during the race at Brunswick when Percival was a junior. After that he and Percival still ran cross-country and track together for the high school, but Percival hardly spoke to him. For two years, he spent every waking moment with Tim O'Neal. In the spring of his senior year, he even quit the track team. But Gideon kept running. He won the state cross-country championship two years in a row. Sometimes it seemed to him that running was all he had left.
When he was a senior, the
Freestate
Sentinel
ran a picture of Gideon holding his trophies, with the rest of the high school team standing behind him. They were all wearing
RipOffs
. That was when people began assuming the
RipOffs
had been made for Gideon. Not long afterward, Percival dropped out of the community college to join the Marines, and Gideon decided to come to Utah.
But now, after more than a year here, he usually felt at home. He was a sophomore. He rarely thought about Percival anymore, especially on these Sunday-morning runs. Mostly he thought about Farley and the strategies he would follow to beat him. Or at least that's what he
had
thought about, until his legs started feeling like weights were attached to all the bones.
Yesterday, in his desk drawer, he had come across the slip of paper on which he'd written a quote from Brendan Foster, who received the bronze medal in the 1976 Olympics ten-thousand meter run. It was in his drawer and not on his wall with the other quotes, because he didn't want anybody else to see it. "It seems to me that about six or so athletes at the Olympic starting line have good chances," Foster had said, "but out of those six, one knows he is going to win. And there's a big difference between wanting to win and knowing you will win."
He supposed that before his limbs had gotten heavy, that was the real difference between him and Farley right now. They were both talented, but Farley had the edge. He was older, stronger, and more experienced, and he knew he was going to win. But sometime—Gideon had played this over and over in his mind—all that would change. A day would come when he would pass Farley. His father expected it, and Gideon expected it, too. It might happen when Farley was tired, or Farley tripped; it didn't matter why. Gideon didn't kid himself that it would happen because he was so much faster than Farley. He knew he wasn't; their abilities were very close. It would happen because for one race, for whatever reason, Gideon would get the edge. And afterward Gideon, instead of Farley, would be the one who knew he was going to win.