Once a Runner Read Online Free PDF

Cassidy forcing his eyes open finally and seeing Denton through the white haze and seeing that he is crying too. Oh Bruce I'm listening please let me go jesus it hurts and Denton lets him go hand to knees to pray to the runner's finish line god but Denton leans over and whispers: three fifty two five, Cass. He kicked from 500 yards out but it was you, Quenton Cassidy, it was YOU all the way. You know you beat him don't you, Quenton godamn it?

But Cassidy can't do anything but hold his knees and make his little gagging noises and nod, wishing everyone would just leave him the hell alone so he could see if he was going to live or not.

Walton walks by and they touch hands; Walton regards Cassidy with curiosity but no fear. He nods to Denton. "Bruce," he says. "John."

This is no game for upstarts or big surprises and Walton's look is clearly more of curiosity than anything else. There will be time, his eyes say, time for decisions and revisions.

"Later mate," he says to Quenton Cassidy. A respectful nod to Denton and he is gone.

Later, Cassidy says to himself.

When, after the countless flashes of cameras and the rude pushing, the well-wishing and the endless questions (still wanting to know the Secret), after all of that he finally got away from them and talked with Bruce Denton quietly for a few moments, he pulled the zipper up all the way on the sweat top against the evening chill and stepped out onto the track as those remaining in the bleachers roared. Quenton Cassidy looked up, gave a little smile and wave and thought: / have nowhere to go.

It was then that Bruce Denton turned with a sigh and walked alone towards the gate, thinking that Quenton Cassidy's smile was sad indeed.

38.... A Runner

The young man walked steadily through the far turn, the darkest part of the track, and entered the final straightaway. Here, he thought, it is usually all over; just a matter of throwing what is left into it. It would be exciting to the onlookers perhaps, but the runners would be calmly playing it out.

During the second and third laps he had tried to conjure up the old feeling of despair and pain, but as always could not quite get it. It had to be experienced, not remembered.

Now he was walking the last 50 yards, unconsciously swinging his arms a little more vigorously, trying to conjure up some of that helpless frozen broth of the last few yards, when the arms and shoulders, legs, and hips seem to bind themselves up together and the jaw locks into the tight grimace as if in supplication, and all of life is reduced to a simple desperation, a pleading for the last pathetic twitch from simple clay. How well he knew these things.

Then he was by the post, telling himself for the last five yards: go through it, go all the way through it. He stopped and looked around. The pain would catch you here, of course, the orb would shatter as soon as you crossed the line and it would overwhelm you for those first few seconds. That, of all the feelings, was the one that your mind protected you from the most; later you wouldn't even be able to get a hint of it.

But he supposed that even as bad as it was then, there must be some kind of pleasure mixed in with it, some desperate relief. Joy, perhaps, in knowing that it was over, one more time, with nothing held back.

He took several deep breaths of the warm September air and then walked to the infield to get his travel bag. He looked around once more at the vaulting pits, the oblong sandbox of the horizontal jumpers, the concrete rings for the weight men, and finally back at the starting post. His eyes then took in the track, slowly following the rubberized surface all the way around the first turn, down the long lonely back straight past the 220 post, around the far turn, and then back up the final straight to the finish post where he had long ago beaten the great John Walton. Uncomplicated dimensions that had for some years now defined his life.

A quarter of a mile that he knew by the