Return to Oakpin(4)

            Craig Ralston regarded his son in the dark doorway. “Fall of 1969. We won every game, and Frank broke his leg. And you ran all of this because . . . ?”

            Larry stood from leaning against the wall and held out his hands, which were suddenly this year huge. “Because I’m alive, Father.” He turned and went up to his room on the thick stairway carpet, now hearing the thump thump of music coming from the huge bedroom wing, his mother suddenly playing music too loud everywhere, and he called once more: “I’m alive!”

            • • •

            He had started running at the high school, two laps after football practice with his buddy Wade, the cinders in the old track crunching as they jogged. Wade was quarterback and the coach’s son, and Larry had known him since preschool. They’d jettisoned their helmets and pads into the end zone grass and were running in the gray team T-shirt and white gym shorts, and they felt light, and running was impossibly easy. When they came to the field gate on the second lap, Larry said, “Come on,” and led Wade out across the parking lot and the street and up along the new roads leading to the new neighborhoods on Oakpine Mountain.

            “You running home?” Wade said.

            “No, let’s circle out and come back through town.”

            “That’s three miles.”

            “It’s seven.”

            They’d run through the town all summer, meeting at dusk and pacing each other through the twilight streets of the village for forty minutes, sometimes up and down the lanes of the two new developments, sometimes running out along the railroad trestle, nothing ahead of them but sage flats and antelope, and they’d run on each side of the railroad track for half an hour until Wade stopped and called at Larry’s back. After Wade halted and clutched his hands to his knees, bent and breathing, Larry closed his eyes, and he could feel how strong he was, running in the wilderness. “I think I’ll run to South Dakota,” he said. “North Dakota. Canada.”

            He heard Wade call and turned to see that the dark had taken everything but the lights of town in a blister at the end of the silver rails, and he saw the dotted yard lights on Oakpine Mountain, one of them his house. It looked like it was on another planet. He’d run back then and found Wade exactly where he had stopped, and he approached Wade’s pained face and ran by until he heard his friend running behind him. “You’re overdoing it, Ralston. We’re already in shape.” Wade called this way for three or four minutes, falling farther behind. It was the way all their runs ended. Tonight Larry had followed the railroad back to the river and crossed at the trestle.

            Wade slowed his pace precisely to short-step across on the ties, and he said, “See you later, Larry. I’m going to stop and see Wendy.” It was what Wade said every night they went out. He’d run twenty minutes and then detour to his girlfriend’s house. Wendy was in their class. Tonight Larry had crossed the river alone, smelling the rich clay before the reflection of the water appeared, and he dropped onto the new bike path, which drifted toward the park.

            “I think I’ll stop and see her too,” Larry said, running in the middle of the unnamed road that marked the south edge of town. “For you are not worthy to touch her fair hand. Her little finger. Oh you could touch her little finger, say, if she were wearing protective gloves and you were giving her back a book that you’d borrowed, not that you’d borrow a book, unless it was just full of pictures . . .” And with a start Larry suddenly passed a couple walking their Irish wolfhound, a dog he and everyone else knew very well, Shamrock, known as Rocky, the largest dog in the county, four feet tall, but he didn’t know the dog’s owners except that they were the Drapers and they were older than his parents, and he had scared them by approaching at a run, a young man apparently yelling at someone. The large gray dog and the two people stood still while he drifted by, his long silent strides giving him just a chance to whisper a hoarse “Hello,” in such a different tone than he’d been talking that it stilled them even more.