The McGillicuddy Book of Personal Records (5 page)

Several other runners went past, looking exhausted but still in one piece. Others stumbled as they passed, clearly using every ounce of energy to take just one more step, and then another.

“Look at that,” said Lee, pointing to one man who had obviously pulled a muscle along the way and was now wincing with every painful half-hop-half-limp. “Suffer like that, and you know you're alive,” said Lee.

“Or half dead,” muttered Rhonda. Lee took a sideways glance at her. He could see she was uncomfortable, as if, for her, witnessing people with their pain showing was too much like seeing them run by in their underwear. Like it was none of her business, and she wanted no part of it. Lee knew it was his business, though. He craved the intensity, the rawness of it all, and if that made him a wacko sadist, so be it. He liked to think that his own blood and guts would be put to the test one day and that, like these aching, sweating winners flying and limping past him, he'd pass with flying colors. No C-minuses then. A-plus, all the way. If that day ever came.

“Oh, man,” said Rhonda, looking through her fingers at a runner coming straight toward them. Well, “straight” wouldn't exactly be the word. The young muscular guy was weaving and meandering like a drunk on a bender. His long wavy hair hung in his eyes, but Lee could see that this guy didn't need his sense of sight any more—he was running purely on instinct. When he stumbled onto the boulevard and just about knocked Rhonda over, she clung to Lee's arm as if only he could save her. Then she realized how it looked and shoved his arm away as if it were Lee, not she, who had placed her hand on his skinny arm. Lee was already too busy being irritated to be irritated. Some bozo on a bike rode slowly along the sidelines, yelling stupid things at the delirious runner, like,
“You can do it, you're looking great, you're looking great!”
The poor guy
wasn't
looking great, not by a long shot, and Lee wanted to slap that biker's trap shut with a wide piece of duct tape.

As the runner passed them, Lee could hear him mumbling something half-familiar. Holy Ronald McDonald, thought Lee, when he recognized the runner's slurred chant:
“Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bum.”

He turned to Rhonda. “The guy's starving. He needs something to eat.” For the first time in his life, Lee wished he'd listened to Agnes and brought along a bleepin' banana. He grabbed Rhonda's sleeve. “You got anything on you?”

Rhonda's hand went protectively to her back pocket and she shook her head. “Nope.”

“Come on,” said Lee, “this is important—what've you got?”

“It's a Mars Bar, if you must know,” said Rhonda, “and you're not getting your hands on it.”

Lee screwed up his eyes and gave her a piercing, “you greedy little scum” look.

Rhonda sighed and handed over the half-melted Mars Bar. “There goes my allowance,” she moaned. Lee snatched it and ripped the wrapper with his teeth. He ran a few steps next to the delirious runner who hadn't given up the chant: “…
pickles onions on a sesame seed bum
…”

“It's
bun
, bro, not bum,” whispered Lee into the runner's ear, hoping to save the guy some embarrassment. Gad, wasn't it bad enough that he was staggering around like a zombie after one too many martinis? Lee shoved the Mars Bar into the guy's limp hand. “Here. You need this, dude. Go on, eat it. It might give you the strength you need to finish.”

Although Lee's asthma was already acting up, he stayed with the runner long enough to recognize a change in his chant. At first the words weren't clear, but with every step the runner's voice became stronger. “
I think I can, I think I can
…”

Lee's face opened into a broad smile. “I
know
you can, buddy,” he whispered.

Whether you think you can or think you can't—you are right.

– Henry Ford

CHAPTER SIX

“Put your tongue back in your head, Lee,” said Gertrude. It was the second time in two days someone had told him that.

Lee had the habit of licking a spot just above the upper left corner of his lip whenever he was concentrating hard. And he was concentrating hard now. Gertrude stepped away from the frying pan and tried to take a peek at what he was writing. Lee covered the page with his hands. “Just homework,” he said. Gertrude gave a disbelieving grunt and went back to frying eggs.

“Why are you up so early, anyway?” she asked over her shoulder.

“Project due,” said Lee. “Have to use the school library.” He looked at her to see if she'd swallowed that one. The teddy bears on her backside stared blankly at him. That was his mother all over—hard as nails in most respects, but crazy enough to wear a huge pink bathrobe covered in fuzzy pooh-bears.

Lee went back to practicing his mother's signature, copied from an old canceled check lying on the kitchen table. When he had it just right, he scrawled it at the bottom of the note he'd already printed:

Please excuse Lee from school today. He isn't well.

– Gertrude McGillicuddy

He'd get Rhonda (well,
bribe
Rhonda) to hand it in to his teacher this morning. Figured a Mars Bar would about do it. He folded the note carefully in half, and then into thirds (the way mothers are prone to do), and tucked it into his bathrobe pocket. Then he bolted down the fried eggs and toast that Gertrude set in front of him. “Thanks, Mom,” he said, spraying toast crumbs, and he hurried to his bedroom, wiping the corners of his eggy mouth on his bathrobe sleeve.

Once inside, Lee locked his bedroom door, pulled a box out from under his bed, dumped the items on the floor and surveyed them: one baseball cap, four granola bars, three water bottles, full, one cap gun, one empty margarine container with a string through a hole near its rim, a baggie full of fruit-and-nut trail mix (he thought about picking out those disgusting little dried papaya chunks, then decided he could always feed them to Santiago along the way), five dog biscuits, one dog leash, one collapsible white metal pole from his pup tent, one digital watch, one asthma inhaler, one Mars Bar, and one banana.

Lee sighed now as he looked at the huge pile of stuff on the floor. He lifted an invisible microphone to his mouth. “Note to self,” he said aloud. “Wear cargo pants with big pockets.” He already had his T-shirt picked out. He would have liked one with a marathon number written across the chest but settled instead for his Theory of Relativity shirt:
E=mc squared
. Which reminded him! Lee pounced onto his bed and scanned the Einstein quotes scrawled on bits of paper in his messy handwriting. Last week he'd chosen:
Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.
THAT'S
relativity
. (Not that Lee had ever had the pleasure, or even the
hope
of sitting with a pretty girl—gorgeous Charlotte Bailey, maybe? In your dreams, Lee—but he liked the quote anyway.) The week before that—around the time of a killer math exam, he'd chosen:
Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.
Of course Lee didn't believe this of Einstein for a second, but it gave him heart to think that maybe genius didn't have
everything
to do with brain cells.

Today Lee stood before his wall of quotes, rubbing his chin: “Lemme see …”—then—“Bingo!” He peeled one of the Albert quotes from the wall, jumped off his bed, and stuck it to the corner of Einstein's cardboard mouth. He stepped back and read the words:
Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can be a true master. For this reason, mastery demands all of a person.

“Mastery.” Lee liked the sound of that word. After repeating it a couple of times, his feet took charge and led him instinctively to the living room, where he paused in front of a framed photograph on the wall. He sighed with awe at the clarity and perfection of the blue marlin breaking the water's surface with pure grace—the arch of sparkling water droplets dancing over its head, the joyful freedom of the moment caught so expertly by his father's camera. Lee fingered the first-place ribbon stuck to the picture's glass. “Mastery,” he whispered. Then he ran back to his room and dove into his closet in search of his cargo pants.

If you wanna catch a big fish, you need maniac desire and a truckload of stubborn determination. You'll be sitting in your boat with your focused camera glued to your face, waiting for a marlin to come bustin' out of the water—the sun dancin' on her slick skin, drops of water flying like diamonds. Can't even take the time to shoo a skeeter from the end of your nose—sure as shootin', that's when she'll come leapin' out of the water and you've missed her. Come the fourth or fifth hour of waiting, you start to kinda wonder if you're nuts. You're not, though, and I've got the picture to prove it!

– Frankindaddy McGillicuddy

CHAPTER SEVEN

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

Mark Twain

“So what'll you give me if I do it?” asked Rhonda, snatching the folded note to Lee's teacher from his hand. Lee pulled the Mars Bar from one of his overstuffed pockets. Rhonda narrowed her eyes. “What are you up to?” she asked, “and what's
that
?” She was pointing to the margarine container hanging from his belt on a string.

Lee waved the candy bar in front of her face. “No questions. Either do it or don't. What'll it be?” Rhonda shook her head and grabbed the bar from his hand. Lee let the screen door slam and took off down Rhonda's front steps.

He whistled for Santiago, who leapt over the fence and joined Lee, a frenzied blur of flying slobber, lunatic tail whacking, and over-excited piddling. Santiago always seemed able to sense a good adventure when it was about to happen. “Calm down, girl,” said Lee, struggling to get the leash attached to Santiago's collar. “You're going to have to be calm if you expect anyone to believe you're a real seeing-eye dog; try for a little
dig
nity, cryin' out loud.” Lee took the white collapsible tent pole from a side pocket and extended it. He put on his dark glasses. Then he tapped his white stick on the pavement in front of him all the way to the bus stop. It was the only way he could think to get Santiago onto a city bus.

When the bus finally arrived and the doors opened, Santiago went berserk with excitement; clearly she didn't understand the meaning of “dignity.” Lee looked somewhere above the bus driver's head and said, “This the number 29?”

The driver stifled a laugh and said, “Get on, kid.”

Lee made an elaborate show of trying to feel his way to the fare box. The bus driver held up a transfer and said, “Need this?”

“Yeah, thanks,” said Lee, making a grab for it, but she wouldn't let go.

“Caught ya!” she sang.

“Shoot.” Lee took off his glasses. “This mean we have to get off?”

“Sit down, kid. I give you an A-plus for originality. So happens I like a kid with some spunk.” Lee sank into a seat. He supposed he should be thankful. It was the one and only A-plus he'd ever received in his life.

“What's the mutt's name?” asked the driver.

“Santiago.”

“
Old Man and the Sea
?”

Lee's mouth dropped. “You're the first person who ever figured that out. How'd you
know
?”

“Fell in love with Hemingway as a teen,” she said with a wink and a grin. “Where you headed?”

“University.”

“That so?” The bus driver looked hard at Lee, then back at the road. “You one of those child geniuses going for his PhD at the age of eleven?”

“I'm thir
teen
,” muttered Lee, insulted.

The driver came to a stop and opened the doors. Lee wondered if she was about to tell him to get off. Instead, an old man got on and clomped heavily up the steps.

“Yer six and a half minutes late,” he barked at the driver. The guy was dripping with crankiness—and other things as well. He wiped his drippy nose on the back of his hand. Then he waved a crumpled bus schedule two inches from the driver's nose. “It says right here in black and white that you were supposed to be here six and a ha—”

He never did finish the sentence. Santiago, who must have smelled the ten-day-old hamburger grease on the guy's pants leaped up for a harmless sniff. The guy went ballistic. “What the … This here's public
transit
, lady,” he yelled at the driver, “and that there's a
mutt
, in case you didn't notice.” He clutched his leg. “Dang ugly thing took a chunk outta my leg …”

Lee was about to defend Santiago—not only was she nowhere
near
ugly—any old fool could see that—but she wouldn't bite a flea, even if it was dancing on her butt, that's how gentle she was. The bus driver saved him the trouble. “Sir!” she said to the geezer, “have you no re
spect
?!”—she pretty much spat the word at him—“The ‘mutt' to which you refer is a
seeing-eye
dog,” she said, “and this young man happens to be blind.” Lee slipped his dark glasses back on.

“Not only that,” continued the driver, “but the lad is only ten years of age and already working on a PhD in …” she looked at Lee's
E=mc squared
T-shirt, “… in Quantum Physics at the University of Manitoba.”
Thir
teen! Lee wanted to interject, but resisted. “Now, if you'd move to the back of the bus, I'd be obliged. You're in the ‘Special Needs' section and I'm quite sure,”—she eyed the old crankpot icily—“that there is very little
special
about you, sir.”Lee loved her instantly.