X-COUNTRY

  by Robert Reed

  Our stories often need to bear “Don’t try this at home” warnings. In this case, however, we’re happy to encourage readers to take up cross-country running. But if you find yourself facing a course like the one described in this story, well, don’t say we didn’t warn you...

  * * * *

  The new fellow never talked about himself much, and details came out in little dribbles. But he mentioned having once been a teenager in the hill country—a stretch of poor farms and limestone bluffs about an hour north of town. He had a favorite few tales about running cross-country for the local high school: His Phys Ed teacher first saw his potential and egged him into running competitively. Without training and with a naturally lousy sense of pace, the recruit managed to finish dead last for a desperately weak team. But after another year of growth and three thousand miles underfoot, he became a powerful Senior. Laughing at his own misfortunes, our new friend claimed that he could have enjoyed a spectacular year, except that on the eve of the season’s first race he got a wicked case of shin splints and he didn’t run another two steps until after the State Championship was in the books.

  Kip Logan was his name, as far as anybody can tell. A few of us—our most imaginative/paranoid citizens—still liked to dwell on the gaps and little question marks in his personal history. For instance, nobody felt quite sure where Kip was before he came to live with us, or what he did, or how he made his money. Nobody could remember him mentioning parents or any siblings of consequence, and nobody ever stepped forward to say yes, they knew him as a boy. But then again, doesn’t everybody have gaps and incongruities in their life story? Think about it: You would be hard-pressed to write the definitive biography of your very best friend. And Kip was never more than a close acquaintance to any of us. Besides, his hometown nearly died when its quarries were shut down, and a year later, the county consolidated its schools, boarding up his old high school in the process.

  Whoever Kip was, he always acted like a genuinely friendly fellow, throwing out big smiles while speaking to us with slow, pleasant tones. As a general rule, people didn’t consider him particularly bright. But everybody has to wonder now. When we talk about him, we always seem to mention how careful he was. The man never boasted about his successes, and he never lectured to us, and I am the only person who can remember him knowing anything that you wouldn’t think he would know. Even after a lifetime spent running, he happily claimed to be helpless when it came to calculating a reliable pace time.

  Talking about himself, Kip Logan always used excessively humble tones. And frankly, his physical appearance helped this illusion of simplicity: He was tall and pretty-boy handsome, with long legs that carried a muscled body and a pair of shoulders far broader than typical for a quality distance runner. A lifetime of wind and sun had barely abused his skin, which was gold in the summer and ruddy-chalk in the depths of winter. His hair was thick and exceptionally blond. Yet he openly admitted that a portion of that rich mane was artificial. Male-pattern baldness had cropped up a few years ago, and he’d patched the gaps with an implanted carpet. As for his age, I think it’s safe to say that Kip looked like a youthful man-child of forty or forty-one. In other words, he was a spectacularly well-preserved creature greatly enjoying his middle fifties.

  I’ve spoken to a few local race directors about old Kip. Entry forms have certain mandatory details: You supply your name and address, phone numbers and T-shirt size. And you have to admit your age on race day, plus give your date of birth. Why both figures are necessary, I’m not sure. Maybe it’s to keep clumsy liars out of the mix. But I’ve studied a few of Kip’s old entry forms, and in every case, the man was precisely twenty-three days younger than me.

  Whenever we raced, Kip beat me, and not just by a little bit. Which meant that he had a chokehold on our age group, plus all of the gift certificates and little gold-painted medals that come with that rarified distinction.

  Waivers are another common feature in race entries. And there is always a single line at the bottom where you supply your signature and the date. To what degree a waiver matters, I don’t know. I’ve endured in some horrendously organized events, and if somebody had died because of the lousy traffic control or the lack of paramedics, I’m sure somebody else’s ass would have been sued, regardless of any name scribbled as an afterthought.

  For thirty-some years, I have run competitive races, and easily, Kip’s waiver was the best that I’ve ever read:

  “Cross country is a brutal sport meant for self-abusive personalities,” he wrote, “and I, the undersigned, am a major-league idiot for trying this damned thing. If anything bad should happen to me, and it probably will, I have nobody to blame but my stupid self. And with that in mind, I promise to expect the unexpected, and I will tolerate the miserable, and if I die on the course, I would prefer to be buried exactly where I fall....”

  * * * *

  Kip told it this way: After thirty-five years spent in other places, he came home again. By home, he didn’t mean the town where he grew up, since that tiny crossroads had just about expired. No, he moved to our city, purchasing a baby mansion on the rich-person’s boulevard. Paying for it in cash, one persistent rumor would claim. Where that money came from was always a puzzler. On occasion, Kip mentioned working overseas for some obscure Dutch corporation. Malaysia and Brazil played roles in the occasional aside. And more than once, he muttered a few words about investments in real estate and stocks, smiling in a beguiling fashion whenever he admitted, “My guesses did a little bit better than average.”

  Kip was an immediate force in the local running scene. He entered every race at our end of the state, always placing among the top ten or fifteen males—a tremendous achievement for a citizen who could see Social Security looming. He worked out with the fast groups as well as linking up with a few notable talents who usually trained by themselves. And he began showing up at track club meetings and our various social functions. During that first year, he simultaneously dated two young women—gazelles nearly as fast on their feet as he was. As for employment, Kip seemed to lack both the time and the need. He wasn’t retired so much as he was incredibly busy with the disciplined life of an eternal athlete. Hard runs were woven around sessions in the weight room, plus he was a regular in both yoga and pilates classes. His diet was rich with nuts and green leaves, and he never drank more than half a beer. And where our local twenty-five-year-old stallions were a grim, brutally competitive lot, Kip seemed utterly at ease with himself. Wearing his boyish zest along with a killer wardrobe, he liked to drive around town in a BMW—a convertible, of course—waving at his many good acquaintances while the blond hair rippled in the wind.

  I would confess to feeling envious of Kip, but “envy” doesn’t do my complicated feelings justice.

  And I liked the man. Always.

  So far as I know, I was first to hear about Kip’s cross-country race. He’d been living with us for nearly fourteen months. On Thursdays, half a dozen old dogs would meet up at Calley Lake to run tempos. It was two miles to the lap, and a good tempo is supposed to be twenty seconds a mile slower than your honest 10K pace. Kip and I decided to do three miles. A lap and a half. He finished at least ninety seconds ahead of me. By the time I reached the mark, he was breathing normally, smiling happily, offering me a buoyant “Good job” as I staggered to a halt beside him.

  It was a hot afternoon in May. I needed water, and he drank a little sip from the fountain, as if to be polite. Then we started trotting that last mile around the lake, heading back for the starting line and the younger forty-something runners who were already finishing their four miles.

  Kip was capable of an innocent, almost goofy smile.

  Something about the blue eyes and that endless grin made people believe there wasn’t much inside his pretty-boy head. “A blond with implants,” was the often-heard joke. And his voice was usually slow and careful, as if his words needed to be examined, singly and together, before any sentence could be shown to the world.

  “Don,” he said to me. “I’m thinking about holding a race.”

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “An X-country race.”

  He said it that way. “X” as in the letter, and then “country.”

  “Cross-country?” I asked.

  He didn’t say yes or no. Instead, he let his big smile get bigger and the blue eyes dreamier, and staring off into the watery distance, he told me, “At my old stomping grounds. On the trails outside Enderville. What do you think?”

  “When?”

  “This October,” he said. “If there’s a free weekend.”

  Our local marathon was at the beginning of November, and there was a tune-up 15K four weeks earlier. But those other weekends were probably available.

  “Sounds like fun,” I allowed.

  “I hope it sounds fun.” Then he glanced at me. “You know, I just had an idea. Just this minute.”

  I didn’t believe him. Something about his manner felt false. Although why that was and why I remember a detail like that, I don’t know. And besides, what did it matter when he actually dreamed up anything?

  “I’ll have to map out a course,” he said.

  I didn’t know the hill country. But I’d driven past it on occasion, and from the highway, those bluffs seemed brutally rough.

  “Prize money,” he said. “What do you think?”

  “It’s up to you.”

  “As an incentive,” he explained.

  “Are you going to run the race yourself?” I a

sked.

  “I shouldn’t, no.” Laughing quietly, he pointed out, “I’ll have too much to do just running the finish line.”

  That was welcome news. I told Kip, “Prize money would be an exceptionally good thing.”

  “How much?”

  “As much as you can afford,” I suggested, working hard to sound as if I might, just might, be kidding.

  * * * *

  Kip had a huge box of entry forms printed up, and he asked some of the quicker runners to help put them on windshields after the Sassafras 5K. I agreed, but as it happened, my right hip—my touchy hip—started hurting during the second mile, pulling me back into the middle of the pack. By the time I finished, I was limping, and by the time I found Kip, the chore was done.

  “Ice,” Kip suggested, noting my rocking gait.

  I nodded and then consciously ignored his advice. My little Hyundai had a piece of gold paper tucked under one wiper. “First Annual Hill-Hell Run,” it read. Unfolding it, I found the disclaimer and had a good laugh. Then I noticed the prize money, and my first thought was that my slow-witted buddy was an exceptionally bad proofreader.

  “Oh, no,” he told me. “The amounts are correct.”

  We were standing among the other finishers, watching the Sassafras Awards being handed out. Smacking the entry form with a fingertip, I asked, “Do you mean this? Two hundred dollars cash for an age-group winner?”

  He shrugged. “I want runners at my starting line.”

  “Oh, you’re going to have them,” I said. “And two thousand dollars for winning the whole show?”

  He flashed a big smile my way. Maybe I’m remembering it wrong, but something was lurking in those eyes—a sharpness revealed for a half-instant—and then his expression instantly turned back to beach-boy simple.

  “Two grand?” I repeated. “With prize money to tenth place?”

  Shrugging, Kip pointed out, “There won’t be any double awards, so the wealth’s going to be shared.”

  In other words, the top ten finishers, male and female, would be yanked from age-group consideration. Of course two hundred dollars wouldn’t make any difference in my life. But the idea of winning that tidy sum for being the fastest fifty-something ... well, it was a delicious promise. I was still grinning when the Sassafras race director called out Kip’s name. Once again, he had won our age-group, and for his achievement, Kip earned the privilege of walking up front to receive a coin-sized medal dangling on the end of a cheap ribbon, plus a gift certificate for fifteen dollars off his next pair of running shoes.

  What made the moment memorable was the audience: A sudden silence descended, followed by a few quiet whispers. Then the applause came, but it wasn’t the light, polite applause that follows pleasantly contrived moments like these. What I heard was hard clapping accompanied by shouts, one of the young stallions throwing his arms high in the air, calling out, “Kipper! Kip, my man! My buddy! Kip, Kipper!”

  * * * *

  My hip improved, and I started building my mileage again. But old bodies don’t relish sudden change or too much ambition. I sputtered in early September, and then managed a brief recovery. But my comeback collapsed during the fifth mile of the Classic 15K. My hip was screaming, and for the first time in thirty years, I gave up, accepting a humiliating ride back to the finish line. The next morning, I saw the first in a series of increasingly expensive doctors, ending up sitting on the end of an exam table while an expert on joint disease—a young woman barely in her thirties—calmly explained what was wrong with me and what she proposed to do about it.

  “Titanium,” I heard, followed by the words, “You are a lucky man.”

  “Lucky? How?” I asked.

  “Our new hips are quite reliable,” she promised. “Under normal conditions, you can expect twenty or thirty years of use. And of course there’s always the chance that new materials will come onto the market. Bioceramics. Or perhaps, living hips grown from your own bone tissue.”

  “I’m fifty-three.”

  But she didn’t understand my point. With a professional grin and minimal charm, she explained, “We don’t need to operate in the near-future. Anti-inflammatories and a change of habits should delay surgery for a year, perhaps eighteen months. Depending on your personal tolerances, of course.”

  “I am fifty-three years old,” I repeated.

  She blinked. “Pardon—?”

  “I’ll never run again,” I blurted. “That’s what you’re telling me. Maybe we’ll be growing hips like corn in another twenty years, but by then, I’ll be in my seventies and desperately out of shape.”

  “Oh, but you’ll still be able to ride a bike and swim, and you can use a low-impact exercise machinery, within limits.”

  “I know old runners with artificial joints,” I said. “They always try to bike and swim. But they gain weight anyway, and they lose their fitness, and regardless of age, they become fat old people.”

  The doctor had no canned answers at the ready. She looked at the bright screen before her, studying an assortment of images of naked bones and a single decaying socket. Then with fingers to her lips, she added, “You know, Don ... other than this one sad hip, you’re in excellent condition for a gentleman of your age....”

  * * * *

  Upon hearing my news, runners had a standard reaction. Surprise and uncamouflaged horror swept across their faces, and probably feeling aches inside their own hips, they would blurt the same reflexive words.

  “You’ll be back.”

  Their hope was delivered with an identical tone of voice, reflexively optimistic and minimally informed. The only exception was Kip. Watching my limping approach, he pointed out, “You’ve got a hitch in your giddy-up.” And when he heard my plight, he didn’t wince or even touch his own hip. He was immune to my pain, nodding while assuring me, “It could be worse news, of course.”

  “Worse how?” I asked.

  But that was too obvious to say. Putting on his pretty-boy smile, Kip said, “But then again, who knows what the future holds?”

  * * * *

  I had already entered Kip’s race. But as a rule, I hate standing by, watching runners in action. I’ve always been a creature of motion; at least that’s what my personal mythology claims. And several times, Kip assured me that he didn’t need help. He’d already laid out his course through the forested bluffs, painting the trails with orange arrows and setting up stations at four key points. Runners would search for coolers of water and buckets full of numbered Popsicle sticks. Four sticks had to be retrieved, brought back in order to prove that the full route had been conquered. Everyone would carry a map, and since he’d closed off entries at five hundred, he still had plenty of time left to make race bibs and see to any other last-minute details.

  “So you don’t want my help?” I asked.

  The smile was bright and imbecilic. Quietly, he conceded, “I don’t need it. But I suppose you could pull race tags, if too many bodies come in too fast.”

 

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