Again to Carthage, page 14
He pulled on a sweatshirt and limped out to the front porch.
“Morning,” Cassidy said. “With that hat and those snakeskin boots, you sort of look like a large economy-sized Gene Autry.”
“Can’t sing a lick, though. Probably wouldn’t let me in the cowboy union. And they’re ostrich, by the way.”
“If you’ll set a minute I’ll put some coffee on.”
“Sounds good to me. Didn’t have any before we set out at first light.”
“Where’ve you been to?”
“Up Feedrock and down and around Thunder Lake and back.”
“How’s the lake?”
“Still there.”
“Isn’t it? I ran down there yesterday and I’ve never seen it so high.”
“All the rain last month.”
He followed Cassidy into the cabin and sat down at the battered table while Cassidy pumped some water into the blackened pot and lit the little propane camp stove. After he put the pot on to perk, he excused himself.
“How’s everyone down there doing?” he called from the bedroom.
“About like you’d expect. Patsy’s a mess. Most of ’em are about half numb.”
“Yeah, well, that would be me, I guess,” Cassidy said, coming back from the bedroom dressed.
“Me too,” said Leroy. “They’re going to do the funeral on Friday, but nobody seems to quite believe it.”
“Can you make any sense of it?”
“Not hardly,” he said, studying the burbling coffeepot. “Few years back this neighbor of Gloria’s mama over in Roxboro came home from her own mama’s funeral. She was in her forties, this lady. It come up a blow and she went out to the yard to get some lawn chairs in when a big old lightning bolt hit a tree. Knocked off a limb and it fell and killed her dead right there where she stood. Not hardly middle-aged and just back from burying her mama. People still talk about that over there.”
“I guess that’s why the preachers are always talking about God and His mysterious ways, like there’s some really complicated master plan that we all just don’t get.”
“That is the master plan.”
“What’s that?”
“We’re all gonna get it.”
“What was Henry, thirty-eight?”
“Thirty-seven.”
Cassidy shook his head, pouring the coffee.
His uncle was a big man, as tall as Big Jim had been, but leaner. He was deeply tanned from years of hard outdoor work and play. Leaning back slightly in his chair, denimed legs sprawled in front of him for balance, he took up fully half the kitchen. Well into his sixties, but for his steel-rimmed bifocals, he really did look to Cassidy like a movie cowboy.
“How are you making it up here?” he asked, wrapping rough hands around the heavy mug, blowing steam off the top.
“Not bad. Like living in a different century, though.”
Lee nodded, still blowing on his coffee. “We thought about running electricity out here a while back, but then the tenant moved out. Man worked for your grandpa we thought might stay a while. Had a wife and a little boy.”
“What happened?”
His uncle sipped his coffee and smiled at him.
“Can’t say. One morning they were gone without so much as a kiss my foot.”
“Well, don’t worry, I’ll at least leave a note to that effect.”
His uncle rocked back in the chair, chuckling. “So it hasn’t been too quiet for you up here, city boy like you?”
“It’s okay. It’s like camping indoors. I don’t even mind the outhouse.”
“Gives you some appreciation for the way folks used to have to do.”
“There were a few critters, but I set some traps out and got most of them. Can’t blame them, though. They had a good thing going for years and then I show up …”
Leroy set his cup on the table and settled the chair on all fours.
“Well, I told Bea I’d ride by. You know how she is.”
“Indeed I do, Uncle Lee. I was meaning all day yesterday to get down the hill to visit, but then I just didn’t.”
His uncle laughed.
“You’re welcome as long as you like of course. Or there’s our house, or Mama’s, or any of them. All the comforts of home and no one would bother you.”
“I appreciate it. I’m fine, really. Right now this is just my speed. They’re going to give me some time off from down there and this quiet here is about the only thing that seems to help. I know folks probably think I’m about half nuts …”
“Half?”
Cassidy laughed.
“Don’t matter what they think. They call it nerves around here. When Betsy died I got so I didn’t know if I was going to make it or not. I got so I just couldn’t think straight, and I didn’t care about a thing. There wasn’t one thing in this world that held any interest for me. Not one thing.”
“What did you do?”
“Well, I came out here for a while. It was before Gloria and I got married. They said, ‘It’s his nerves. He’ll be all right.’ I always wondered what nerves had to do with it.”
“How long did you stay?”
“Almost a month. I worked around the place, one of the reasons it’s in as good a shape as it is. Put glass back in those front windows, got the pump working again. We still kept hay in here then and I used some of the bales for furniture. I still tell people they don’t know what a good night’s sleep is until they sleep on hay bales.”
“It still smells pretty good in here. And the cot isn’t bad, but I may try that hay bale thing.”
“Henry brought the cot and some other things in. He lived here for a while when he got back from Korea and he and Patsy had a rough patch. That mighta been when they started calling it the Poutin’ House.”
“It’s a good name,” Cassidy said. “Maybe that’s what I’m doing, pouting.”
“Naw,” said Leroy, standing and putting his cup in the sink. “It’s your nerves.”
19
Mexican Cuisine
CASSIDY WAS ALMOST on time as he banked the Vincent Black Shadow into the La Fiesta parking lot on the outskirts of Raleigh. Assistant Professor Bruce Denton, ever the scientist, had given very precise directions.
Within a very few minutes they were holed up in a comfortable booth and equipped with a pitcher of margaritas and a hot oily basket of chips, Cassidy munching happily, still buzzed from the ride down the interstate.
“You’re looking pretty darned fit for a guy can’t run,” Cassidy said, redundantly salting a handful of chips.
Denton looked chagrined.
“I bet I haven’t gone more than three miles in five years,” he said. “It’s this thing they call pseudogout. It’s this buildup of calcium pyrophosphate in the joints. Took forever to figure it out. Finally an orthopod whiz at Duke nailed it. It sounds kind of silly, but when I’d try to run the pain would wake me up at night.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. They told me I don’t behave, pretty soon I’ll have titanium hips,” Denton said.
“Seriously?”
“Damn right seriously. I do the stair machine and this rowing thing that’s pretty good. And I eat an amount of food that would barely keep a starling aloft.”
“That can’t be easy for someone like you. You were a garbage disposal.”
“You don’t know.”
“Remember the all-you-can-eat fried-chicken things at Morrison’s on Tuesdays and Thursdays? We’d have three or four skinny guys down there …”
“Pile the bones up in a heap in the middle of the table like a bunch of Vikings?”
“People walking by staring. The waiters thought it was hilarious and would keep hauling out these platters …”
“Yeah, the managers were kind of nervous though. Sure I remember it. I have dreams about it,” Denton said.
“Night after Callaway Gardens that one fall you and Jerry Slavin went one-on-one at one of those Red Lobster crab-claw deals, shells and melted butter all over the place. And after all the carnage Slavin throws down his napkin, says, ‘That’s it. One more, my eyes are gonna grow out on stalks.’”
“He was a pretty big boy for a runner,” Denton said. “He could put it away.”
“And then on the way out you casually buy a Three Musketeers bar at the counter.”
“Rub it in a little.” Denton grinned.
“Jerry still talks about it. Saw him not too long ago at the federal courthouse in Miami. He’s a parole officer in Tampa, had a case. Looked good though, still running a lot.”
“I know. We do Christmas cards. I’ve also run across him at a couple of road races when I’ve taken some kids. Jacksonville River Run last year he was there. He’s hanging tough. Finished in the age-group money.”
“I bet he still goes to all-you-can-eat places. Probably does some serious damage,” Cassidy said.
“Probably. But have you noticed how they’ve changed the wording? It’s a subtle thing, but nowadays the signs say ALL YOU CARE TO EAT.”
“Yeah, like they’re trying to take the challenge out of the thing. ‘Hey, Bozo, it’s not a competition. It’s dinner!’”
“Yeah, but to a five-foot-ten one-hundred-thirty-five-pound kid with three percent body fat who’s just put in a twenty-two-mile day, it’s pretty much the same thing.”
“Was for me. Used to finish all the leftovers on the table. Not anymore,” Cassidy said. “Nowadays I eat an orange I look like a snake swallowed a golf ball.”
Denton laughed. “All that can change pretty fast. It can catch up with guys who don’t figure it out quick enough. Stop running and turn into little butterballs. Remember Chris Holman?”
“Pale literary type?”
“No, that was Chris Hosford. Holman was the nine-flat two-miler from Indiana.”
“Oh yeah! Cornwall called him Hoosier. Nice kid. Went to this dinky little high school with no program. He got his workouts by mail from Fred Wilt, also a Hoosier,” said Cassidy.
“Right, the FBI agent who went to the Olympics in the forties. Steeple or something. He became a student of training techniques before there were any physiologists. Did all those books where he wrote to guys and got their workouts and published them. Everyone sent in their most ungodly sessions and said they were just typical days. Tried to psych everybody out. Anyway, a few years back Holman did graduate work up here, civil engineering or something. I guess he got hurt and stopped running. Had really bad bunions and had to get them cut off or something. Never really came back from it. Anyway, I saw him on campus one day and walked right by him.”
“Put on a few, did he?”
“He was about five-six if you remember. And Quenton, he was about a ham sandwich short of three hundred pounds.”
Cassidy whistled, unironically reaching for chips from a freshly delivered basket, salting them again while gazing thoughtfully into the middle distance.
“All this salt tells me you’re getting in some miles,” Denton said.
“Mmmm?”
Denton knew he was probably in a reverie of old teammates, friends once as familiar as family members, now rarely thought of. Cassidy came back to earth when Denton pointedly cleared his throat.
“Sorry.” Cassidy smiled. “Brain just took a little sabbatical.”
“No kidding.”
Cassidy looked at his old friend and decided that he did look pretty good. The still-boyish face was etched a bit by time, but was tan and taut. There were flecks of gray at the temples, but the eyes still shone with amusement and irony.
“So what’s it like being a professor?”
“Quenton, I still keep Mad magazines under my bed, if that tells you anything. Most of the guys in the department are like that. Once your geek self-image is formed, all the degrees and Olympic medals in the world won’t change it.”
Cassidy knew that there were probably people in Denton’s department who had worked with him for years before they found out he had been an athlete, much less an Olympic gold medalist.
“But all in all the academy is not a bad place, if you don’t let the politics get you down.”
“Politics?”
“You have no idea. You get a bunch of nerds together with too much time on their hands and you’re going to get politics coming out of your eye sockets.”
“You doing much teaching?” Cassidy asked.
“Hardly any. This semester none. Half my time is research, genetically induced pest resistance, which is the latest rage. The other half is extension work, out in the field with the growers and other ag specialists, so I’m usually on the road several days a week. Cotton is king around here, and the boll weevil is my sworn enemy.”
“That explains the tan, I guess. And you have a pretty good group in the afternoons?”
Bruce brightened, refilling their salt-rimmed glasses.
“You’ll meet them tomorrow. Yes, when I was still running, they’d just do my stuff, kind of like the old days in Kernsville. Now I’m more of a typical clipboard kind of guy. I head to the stair machine when they’re out on the roads. Sometimes I mountain-bike with them just for grins.”
“Pretty good group, talentwise?”
“Hmmm. Not bad. Some grad students trying to stretch it out, maybe make the trials. One kid, Endris, getting his Ph.D. in Kernsville, is taking a semester off to train with us. He’s a miler type. Some marathoners. A few older age-groupers and outright joggers who just like the organization of the thing. Oh, and a handful of kids from the school team that Henderson turned over to me. You’ve heard of the Shea sisters?”
“Sure. They still have eligibility?”
“Julie’s a senior, Mary’s a year back. They could go one–two in cross-country this year. In track we’ll probably split them up. Lots of talent, great kids.”
The waitress had been back several times so they really tried to concentrate on the menus.
“What’s good here?” Cassidy asked.
“Well, it’s a Mexican restaurant in North Carolina, so it doesn’t really matter what you order, you’re going to get basically the same meal. The different combination platters just designate the way the items are arranged on the plate. But what you can count on is your guacamole, your Spanish rice, your refried beans, and some kind of grilled meat rolled up in some kind of starchy shell.”
“Bruce, you picked the restaurant,” Cassidy said.
“You misunderstand me, señor. I like guacamole, Spanish rice, et cetera. It’s the number six combination dinner for me,” he said, snapping the menu shut with a flourish. “On special occasions I will order number seven. That gets you your refried beans at three o’clock on the plate.”
“But with number six?”
“High noon.”
They hadn’t really seen each other in person in several years and Cassidy noticed how easily they had fallen into the worn groove of their friendship.
“I haven’t even asked about the family unit,” Cassidy said, setting his menu aside.
“They’re great. Jean does computers in the math department, staff type. Matt’s getting to be a bruiser, God help us, maybe a football player. Terry’s leaning toward ballerina. Some of the kids from the team are around the house a lot. It can get to be quite a zoo around there. You’ll see.”
“Looking forward to it.”
“So you’ve been up here for a while? I was sorry to hear about your grandfather, by the way. There was an article in the paper even over here.”
“Yeah, thanks. We’ve had more troubles too. I’ll tell you about it. I’ve been staying in this old house they have up the hill on the farm. It’s good and quiet up there. Good place to run. Good place to think. I’ve been up there for a couple of weeks now. But I guess the fun’s about over. The real world is calling.”
“Mmm.”
“You remember how at Mize’s funeral we were saying that it was hard to be sad when you just plain didn’t believe it?”
Denton smiled.
“Hard as it was, I don’t think it really hit me about Mize until just a little while ago, that I really wouldn’t ever see him again, not in this life. We wouldn’t ever go out for a ten-miler and then hit the Red Lion to drink a few beers and play bumper pool,” Cassidy said.
“I know.”
Cassidy idly traced figure eights in the frost of his glass.
“For the last few years my grandfather cut less and less of a swath. One summer when I was in high school I was sitting with him on the porch one afternoon and one of his old cronies dropped by. Old farmer in bib overalls—‘overhauls’ they call them—doesn’t even shake hands, just pulls up a chair like he’s done a thousand times, gets out a red bandanna to wipe his forehead, and he’s going, ‘Lawdy, Mr. Jim, it’s a hot one,’ and all that. Then he says, ‘Mr. Jim, how you been gettin’ along?’”
“Mmm, yeah.” In his extension work, Denton spent a lot of time with farmers.
“My grandfather looked at him and—I’ll never forget this—he looks at the guy and he says: ‘Gettin’ old!’”
“Hah.”
“But I mostly remember the way he said it. He wasn’t trying to be ironic. He had this tone of voice that I didn’t get for a long time.”
“Yeah? What was it?”
“Surprise. My grandfather was surprised.”
Denton nodded, waiting while the waitress distributed their plates.
“Runners are much more in tune with the winding-down process,” Denton said.
“You think?” Cassidy was digging in.
“Oh, yeah. Your average citizen these days isn’t that connected to the physical realm. Some still are. Builders, farmers, folks like your grandfather. In an older time, with, say, manual agriculture or hunting-gathering, you always knew how much less you could carry than a year ago. Or how less far you could ride or walk. Believe me, when dinner depends on running game to ground, you notice pretty quick when it starts to get harder. You probably haven’t begun to deal with it that much yet. It happens with all athletes, but with us, with the endurance sports, everything is just too damned quantifiable.”
