Distances

MEMOIR

by John Picard

          My legs were leaden, elephantine. My vision was blurred. I struggled for every searing breath. I was well acquainted with the pain of long-distance running, but this was different. Not that I’d let that stop me. I’d completed more than half of the three-mile course—a serpentine path through woods that wound back to an oval track—and I was determined to finish, even though everyone had passed me except a teammate who, judging by his pounding footfall, was about to overtake me.

          I ran twice a day that summer preparing for the cross country season. I’d read that serious runners did twice-a-day workouts and I was a serious runner. Tryouts began the first week of school and I intended to be in tip-top shape by day one. I’d made the varsity team last year but I’d gotten sick and been demoted to the junior squad. I was determined to redeem myself.
          Every morning I’d drive to my high school and run up and down the steep hill that overlooked the baseball diamond, a half hour of full-out wind sprints. In the evening I’d jog across the field that led to the highway, run on the shoulder until I reached a service road, turn right, and head down to the railroad tracks. Proceeding along the tracks for fifteen or twenty minutes, I’d turn around and run back to where I started, then do the same in other direction, and then repeat the process. By the time I returned home I’d been gone for an hour.
          It was challenging. It was made more challenging because I was running in the heat and humidity of the Washington Metropolitan area in sweatpants made of heavy cotton. Not because I’d read that the added drag increased muscle strength but because I would have felt exposed if I’d been wearing shorts, flashing motorists and train passengers with my bare legs. By the end of the summer my sweats were gummy in the seat and inner thighs, but I never considered running without them.

          My father worked as a route manager for The Washington Post; my mother was a homemaker, as they used to call wives who didn’t work. We lived in one of ninety-nine identical split-level houses in a working-class neighborhood in the Maryland suburbs.
          “I ran for over an hour,” I announced to my parents after my evening run.
          “I’m not sure I like you running after dark,” my mother said. We’d assumed our customary places in the living room for TV watching, my mother and I on the sectional sofa, my father directly across from the screen in the recliner.
          “It’s not after dark,” I said. “There’s lots of light.”
          “I don’t like you running next to the highway either,” she said. “It’s dangerous.”
          “There’s hardly any traffic when I run.”
          My father was listening intently to Walter Cronkite going on about the Vietnam War and filling the room with smoke from a filterless Camel. I waited until a commercial break to ask him, “Did you do any running when you were on the track team, Daddy?” Raised by Southerners, my father would be “Daddy” til my dying day.
          “No,” he said and tapped his cigarette over the floor ashtray.
          “Not even to warm up before a meet?”
          He shook his bald head.
          “You had to run when you were training for football, though, didn’t you?”
          “They didn’t do all that running back then,” he said.
          “I don’t know why you’re doing all that running,” my mother said. “You’re just going to get sick again.”
          “But you did a lot of running in the Marines, right?” I went on. “Like in boot camp?” My father had gone straight into the Marine Corps after high school.
          My mother said, “That was a long time ago,” reminding me that my father, the most unsentimental of men, did not like to talk about the past.
          Walter Cronkite was back but I made another attempt. “I’m going to try running for an hour from now on. To build up my endurance.”
          My father dragged on his cigarette, as if he hadn’t heard me and maybe he hadn’t.
          “Let your father watch the news,” my mother said, knowing I might as well save my breath.
          Along with subpar communication, there was a lack of physical affection in my family. No one touched anyone except my mother when I “backsassed” her and she got after me with a rolled-up magazine or a flyswatter. Corporal punishment was the norm in those days. My father once laid into me with a belt but I guess he didn’t take to it because he never hit me again. He didn’t even shake my hand until I was an adult and living on my own. He would greet me at the door when I arrived for my annual summer and Christmas visits with his arm outstretched, his handshake so weak it felt like his hand would slip out of mine if I didn’t tighten my grip.

          When I started high school I was too unsure of my abilities to try out for baseball or basketball and too afraid of getting hurt to risk playing football. That left running. My father had been a standout high school athlete. His sister, my favorite aunt, had shown me a beat-up yearbook with pictures of her brother playing football, basketball, putting the shot. By my early teens I began to notice that my father was quieter and more subdued than the other fathers in the neighborhood. My mother told me he’d wanted to be a doctor, a surgeon, but they didn’t have athletic scholarships back then and a farm boy growing up in the 1930s didn’t have much chance of getting into medical school. Eventually I learned that my father’s low spirits were about more than missing out on his desired career path. When my mother thought I was old enough to hear it she told me about The Accident. I knew I had a sister who died before I was born but I didn’t know the exact circumstances or that my father blamed himself for her death. He’d been driving my mother and eight-year-old sister to Louisiana for the annual summer get-together with relatives. It had just gotten dark when my father went to pass a truck on a two-lane highway and collided with a car that didn’t have its lights on. This was way before seat belts, and my sister, who happened to be in the front seat (my mother and sister had traded places only minutes before), was thrown through the windshield, dying instantly. My father never talked about it. The closest he came was one Christmas when I was discussing with my mother someone she knew who was in a bad way and my father suddenly blurted, “That’s nothing. I’ve been depressed for forty-seven years.”
          In retrospect, he seemed to cope with a life blighted by tragedy by keeping busy. He worked 365 nights a year driving a truck full of bundled newspapers that he picked up in Washington, D.C., and distributed to his paper carriers in suburban Maryland. During the day he occupied himself with projects such as turning the sub-basement into a recreation room. It took him years to remove all the hard-packed earth before laying the concrete floor and putting up the knotty pine walls. He was literally digging a cave under the house. I’d squat outside the crawl space in the garage and watch him shovel dirt into a wheelbarrow under a single light bulb. When he wasn’t single-handedly moving tons of earth he was maintaining his truck, refurbishing late-model cars, repairing the TV and clocks and anything else that needed it. All of the manual dexterity that might have gone into resetting bones and repairing hearts was applied to fixing inanimate objects. He was always doing something, in other words, but seldom with his son. This was also not that unusual for the time. Children were often left to their own devices then, which gave them more freedom but less parental support; praise was virtually unheard of, the fear of spoiling your children an overriding concern. Better not to say anything positive than start a child down the road of thinking they were better than anyone else. Also in play, I suspect, in my father’s case, was his reluctance to become too close to someone else he could so easily lose.

          The first day of school was fast approaching and I was doing my usual evening run, the railroad tracks sliding by, the gravel crunching under my sneakers, when I became aware that instead of straining for every breath, instead of having to force one heavy leg in front of the other, I was floating. There was no pain, no struggle. Running was effortless, almost fun. I was stronger than I’d been a year ago at this time.
          “Guess what?” I said at dinner. “I can run farther and faster than ever.” We had very few mealtime conversations but I was eager to share the news of my breakthrough. Normally, except for the clatter of flatware, silence reigned throughout the evening meal. My mother forbade boisterous laughter and loud talking at the table. Speaking only to ask that something be passed to him, my father wolfed down my mother’s cooking in ten minutes flat before leaving for the living room.
          “I don’t like you running next to those railroad tracks,” my mother said. “You could get yourself killed.”
          “Hardly any trains come by and when they do I can see them coming.”
          My father was moving green peas onto his fork with a piece of bread.
          “That ever happen to you, Daddy?”
          “What?” he said, without looking up.
          “When you played sports? Did you ever feel like you were in this zone or groove or something? Like all your hard work was paying off?”
          “Your mother’s right,” he said. “You shouldn’t be running next to any railroad tracks.”

          Cross country was so unpopular in our high school, as it is in most high schools, that nearly everyone who tried out for the team made it; the junior varsity, anyway. The goal was to become one of the seven members of the varsity team. Our coach, Joe Smith, was a math teacher who wore horn-rimmed glasses and a black raincoat. During workouts, he’d pace back and forth at the top of the hill, gazing down at his charges with his hands deep in his coat pockets. I made varsity with no trouble and over the three weeks of training leading up to the beginning of competition I showed myself to be one of the top two or three runners on the squad.
          Our first meet was at home. I was full of dread. The truth was, I disliked competitive running. When we gathered at the starting line in our blue and gold shorts and shirts (race day being the only time you would catch me in short pants, revealing my white, hairy legs), all I could think about was the suffering to come.
          We were competing that day against two other schools, which made a total of twenty-one runners. A chilly day in mid-October, we were hugging ourselves and breathing into our cupped hands as we waited for the race to start.
          “Who’s the old guy?” Mike Abrahamson asked.
          A tall man in a business suit was standing off to one side with Larry Jefferson.
          “Can’t you tell?” said Jim McGovern, a senior who ran on the balls of his feet. “That’s Larry’s father.”
          “Gotta be,” Tom Huffman said. Larry was almost as tall as the man who had an arm around his shoulders. They had the same blond hair, long face, gangly frame. We didn’t normally have spectators, especially fathers who took time off from work. My own father wouldn’t even have to take off work to attend one of our meets. He worked nights. He was home all day.
          “You wouldn’t catch my old man out here in this weather,” John Ruckert said.
          A sophomore, John had come out of nowhere to become the potential star of the team. He ran with a speed and fluency none of the rest of us could match. I asked him once how much running he’d done over the summer to prepare for the season.
          “None,” he said.
          It had taken me three months of twice-a-day workouts to become as good as I was. John hadn’t run a single mile and he was better than I’d ever be. That day he easily beat out the other twenty runners. I came in seventh overall, third for the team. Not a bad start to the season. Larry, who finished last, shuffled dejectedly over to his father who walked him around, one hand resting on the back of his neck, giving Larry what looked like a pep talk. Teasing was routine in the locker room after a race, but the extraordinary father/son interaction we’d all just witnessed made us forget to humor Larry out of his poor showing. Not that he seemed to need it.

          A few days later I felt the first symptoms of a cold. I’d been prone to colds and flus my whole life. My mother thought I had allergies. Whatever it was, I never failed to get sick as soon as the weather turned cool. It had hit me at this same time last year which led to my being demoted to junior varsity. I’d been hoping against hope that for once my immune system would hold up, but here it was again—the runny nose, the sneezing, the tiredness. My mother always gave me the same potent over-the-counter decongestant for my colds, a twelve-hour time-release capsule I took first thing in the morning and the last thing at night. There were side effects—especially dehydration—but I was happy to take anything that spared me blowing my nose for a few hours.

          Our second meet of the season was a major contest with five schools competing, scheduled for a Thursday on the other side of the county. The race was rained out but the host school rescheduled it for the following Saturday morning for anyone who was interested. Only our school agreed to take on the home team, Coach Smith feeling we could use the work.
          I set my alarm for six a.m. My cold was going strong but I didn’t have a fever and I saw no reason not to compete. I wasn’t going to let my body defeat me like it had last year. I decided to skip my morning cold capsule so that I wouldn’t be so dried out. When I came downstairs I found my father reading the newspaper at the kitchen table in his dark-green slacks, shirt, and ball cap. He’d just returned from dropping off newspapers to his sixty-six paper carriers and was waiting to drive me to school. “You ready?” he said.
          It was still dark when we left the house. After we got in the Dodge Charger my father cracked the window and pushed the cigarette lighter. When it didn’t pop back out he reached past me and removed a book of matches from the glove compartment. As we rode in silence I thought of Larry’s father walking side by side with his son, his hand resting on Larry’s neck. I appreciated that my father was driving me to school when he could have been sleeping. He’d always been good about taking me where I needed to go—baseball games when I was in Little League, after-school activities as long as they occurred before his bedtime, doctors’ appointments—but I couldn’t help envying Larry, who had a father who took time off from work to watch him finish last on a frigid afternoon.
          My father turned into the school’s parking lot and stopped opposite the entrance to the gym. “How you getting home?”
          “Tom’s dad’s giving me a lift.”
          “Okay,” he said and crushed what was left of his cigarette in the ashtray.
          I didn’t move.
          “What?” he said.
          “Nothing,” I said. “Thanks for the ride.”
          In the locker room I changed into my running clothes and sweats with the rest of the team. We filed out of the building and climbed onto the bus. The sky was uniformly gray, the temperature in the low fifties. Coach Smith sat in the front bent over his clipboard. John was slumped in his seat and seemed to have dozed off. The rest of the team stared out their windows in that somber, anxious state before a race. I blew my nose. It was running like crazy because I hadn’t taken my morning cold tablet, but I comforted myself by the fact I was less dehydrated than I would have been otherwise, although I couldn’t deny I had a raging thirst.
          Arriving at the host school, we warmed up by doing jumping jacks and wind sprints. At ten sharp we took off our sweats and lined up on the quarter mile track, seven of us in blue and gold, seven in red and black. Following the start signal we ran once around the track and then veered off down a path into the woods. We wended our way around trees, skipped over exposed roots, and jumped across shallow streams. Up ahead I could see that John had already taken the lead. I had retreated to the middle of the pack and was content to stay there for the time being, conserving my energy, what there was of it. I already felt depleted. After a mile or so I began drifting farther and farther back, members of both teams passing me. Soon, only Larry was faring worse. I felt heavy-limbed, weighed down. Rather than a steady inhale/exhale, I was gasping for every painful breath. Soon Larry and I were so far behind the others we might have been running a separate race. But I refused to let up, even after Larry went around me. Emerging from the woods, I trudged up the hill and back to the cinder track. I had an eighth of a mile to go, halfway around. Everyone else had completed the course. All at once I pitched forward, falling hard on the track’s rough surface. I managed to get back up but after a couple more steps I fell again. I was trying to rise a second time when I felt myself being lifted up, Jim and Tom on either side of me. Everything was spinning. My legs were wobbly. I felt sick to my stomach. “Easy, man,” Jim said. I stumbled along as they hauled me around the rest of the track and across the finish line.
          My sole desire was to sit but Coach Smith insisted I be kept upright and moving. The palms of my hands and my right knee were scraped but not bloodied. When it was time to board the bus I sat next to a window behind the driver. The last thing I wanted to do was throw up but only minutes into the ride Coach Smith asked the driver to pull over. Someone opened my window for me and I stuck my head out. I hated holding up the bus, everyone watching what shameful thing my body would do next. The nausea abated and I flopped back onto my seat. By the time we returned to the school I was feeling somewhat better. In the locker room Coach Smith brought me a large cup of water. Light-headed, I had to be reminded to take a shower. After drying off I was pulling on my jeans when, escorted by Coach Smith, my father walked into the locker room. The coach had apparently gotten my phone number from somewhere and called home. It was as incongruous a scene as I could imagine, my father in his natty Eisenhower jacket and straw fedora standing uncomfortably, awkwardly, in that dank, sour-smelling place, surrounded by my half-dressed teammates.
          “You okay?” he asked me.
          I nodded.
          “He gave us quite a scare,” Coach Smith said. “We think it was dehydration.”
          Apparently, skipping one desiccating cold capsule wasn’t sufficient to restore the fluids needed to withstand sweating profusely for twenty-five minutes.
          As if ignoring the coach, my father asked again, “You sure you’re okay?”
          “Yes,” I said.
          “I’ll be waiting in the car.” He turned and strode up the hallway toward the exit. Coach Smith watched him go.
          “That’s your dad, huh?” Tom said.
          “Yeah. I guess I won’t be needing that ride.”
          I finished dressing and hurried out to the parking lot. When I got in the Charger my father was trying to work a Camel out of a fresh pack, smacking it repeatedly against the heel of his hand. Giving up, he pinched one out and placed it in the corner of his mouth. Then, slapping his pockets, he produced the matchbook, tore one off, and struck it. When he moved the flame to the cigarette his hand was shaking.
          He’d just put the car in gear when I sneezed. He gave me the handkerchief he always kept in his left back pants pocket. “Blow your nose.”
          Back home I took the jug of ice water out of the fridge and poured myself a tall glass. My mother was leaning against the doorway with her arms crossed over her chest. As soon as my father disappeared upstairs she said, “It was your father who talked to your coach when he called.”
          “What did he say? Was he mad?”
          “No,” she said. “He was scared.” I couldn’t imagine my father being scared.
          “Why was he scared?”
          “Why do you think?”
          I didn’t know what she meant at first, but then I did. It was the thing my father could never forget, the thing for which he could never forgive himself. No time was a long time between tragedies.
          That night at dinner my father ate his fried chicken and mashed potatoes with his usual silent vigor. Likewise his slice of coconut pie. But after draining his glass of milk, instead of rushing off, he remained seated. My mother and I exchanged glances. After another moment, he said, lifting his eyes to me, “I don’t think you should do any more running. You’ve worried your mother long enough.” He got up and left the table. We heard him turn the TV on in the living room, then sink into the recliner and raise the footrest. In a few minutes we would join him.