In the end, it wasn’t as close as it seemed. Burner came up and around the corner and he kind of ran me over as I tried to catch him. We had about ten or fifteen seconds to spare before the train came roaring through and that was enough time for us to take off and scramble through the hole in the fence. We knew they’d be making their calls and trying to track us down so we spent the next half hour running and hiding behind a few dumpsters and trying to make our way back to my car. We never had any time to talk about it until later that night when it became, like everything else in our pasts, a kind of joke. We called it “The night Burner pulled a train out of his ass.”
But that’s the image I keep of him — Burner running in the light and getting away. That’s the one I keep. For those few seconds, he was like one of those fugitives trying to break out of prison and they just couldn’t catch him. The train kept coming down on him like some massive predator and he shouldn’t have had a chance, but he was like that one stupid gazelle on the nature show, the one who somehow gets away even though the cheetahs or lions or hyenas should already be feasting. Burner was one of those fine-limbed lucky bastards, but he was still here and his life, like mine, kept rolling along, filling in all this extra time.
WE GOT OUR STUFF TOGETHER and left the hotel at around four o’clock with our bags slung over our shoulders. We took a shuttle bus, one of those big coaches with dark tinted windows that ferried the athletes back and forth. On the day of any big race, those buses are tough places, crowded with all kinds of people who just want to be alone. The big-shouldered sprinters are the worst. You don’t want to be anywhere near them in the last hours. For them it’s going to be over in ten seconds, good or bad, so they don’t have room to negotiate. You’ve seen them — some of those hundred-metre guys are built up like superheroes or like those stone statues that are supposed to represent the perfect human form, but when the race gets close, every one of them is scared. As Burner and I squeezed our way down the aisle, we passed this big black guy sitting by himself, completely cut off from everything else. He had dark glasses on and big headphones so that nothing could get in or out and he just kept rocking back and forth, slow and silent and always on the beat so you could almost see the music he was listening to. He looked like one of those oriental monks, swaying and praying and perfectly out of it.
Burner was at the jumpy stage now and he was nearly shaking because we were on our way and it seemed like things had already started. We dumped ourselves into an unoccupied row and right away he started drumming his hands on the seat in front of us.
“I am feeling it, feeling it,” he said, almost singing, and he had this big goofy grin on his face. It was impossible for him to be still even for a second and he kept drumming along on the seat, hands blurring.
“It’s the big one today, boys,” he shouted, revving it up.
“Got to bring everything you got.” Again, way too loud.
“No tomorrow.”
The clichés dribbled out of him, but this wasn’t the place for it. There were too many other people around and they all had their own things to take care of. After about a minute, the tall, long-haired javelin guy who’d been sitting in front of us got up and turned around like an angry bear up on his hind legs.
“You touch this chair again,” he said, and he put his finger directly on the spot where Burner had been banging away on the back of his head.
“You touch this chair again, and I swear to God, I will twist that skinny piece of shit neck right off your skinny piece of shit body.”
You could tell this guy wasn’t one of those macho, body builder, roid-raging throwers. He just wanted his quiet and needed his time like everybody else. You wouldn’t know it by looking at them, but most of the throwers are like that, quiet and turned in. They try to make it look easy and some of them can spin a discus on their pinky finger like it’s as light as a basketball, but if you watch you see they never let it go. Some of the others just sit there, rolling the shot from hand to hand, getting the feel for its heaviness as it thuds down into their chalky palms. Those guys are faster and smarter than you think. I heard someone say that all the best throwing performances come from guys with good feet and good heads. I bet the bear in front was one of the good ones. Burner couldn’t retreat fast enough.
“I didn’t think, man,” he sort of stammered.
“I didn’t know you were there. Sorry. Sorry.”
I looked the bear right in the eye, just like you’re supposed to, and I tried to show him that I sympathized and understood. I said “Nerves” as if that single word could explain everything about Burner.
The guy nodded and he said he knew all about that, but come on. He wasn’t happy, but eventually he settled back down, sort of deflating back into his seat.
When it was over, Burner gave me this wide-eyed look of relief and pretended to wipe the sweat off his forehead and fling it to the side. Then he rested his head against the window and just watched the traffic going by.
I looked over at him and thought about all the buses we’d been on together. Almost since the early days as juniors, he’d been on every trip I had ever taken. At first, it was only short hops up to London and back or maybe Toronto, but after a while, as we kept at it and got better and better, we eventually hit the bigger circuits. Now we were only home four or five weekends a year and the rest of the time we were exactly like this, squished up against each other on a bus or on a plane, trying to sleep sitting up or trying to read our books under those little circular lights in the ceiling and always waiting for the next fast-food stop or bathroom break.
I used to think that a bus full of track people on their way to a meet was like one of those old fashioned circus trains, the kind that used to roll into a small town carrying the big top tent and pulling a bunch of different crazy looking cars, each one painted with curly red and gold swirls. You know the one I mean? In the Fisher-Price version of that train, every animal gets his own car and the necks of the giraffes stick out through a hole in the roof. All the freak show people live in that train: the strongman with his curly moustache and Tarzan outfit; the little-girl contortionist who can roll herself into a perfect circle; the guy who can take anybody’s punch and never get hurt. I used to think that’s what we were like, the track people. Each of us had one of those strange bodies designed to do only one thing. The lunatic high jumpers who talked to themselves could leap over their own heads and if you gave the pole vaulters a good, strong stick, they could put themselves through a third story window. The long jumpers could leap over a mid-sized station wagon and the shot putters could bench press it. Even the fragile looking, super-thin girls with their hair tied back in harmless looking ponytails. Those distance girls might be iron deficient and anorexic and maybe none of them have had a regular period in years, but they could all run a hundred and twenty miles in a week, almost a marathon a day. Those girls had pain thresholds that hadn’t been discovered yet and if they tried they could slow their heart rates down so far you’d actually have to wait between the beats. We all had our special skills, our fascinating powers and we just barnstormed from city to city, performing them again and again in front of different people. Back when Burner and I started with this, every trip seemed like it was part of the tour, part of this bigger adventure, but I wasn’t sure anymore. Sometimes I thought it might be better to be able to eat fire, or swallow a sword or hang upside down on the trapeze and catch my cousin as he flung himself through the air.
The hydraulic door hissed open when we got to the stadium and everybody bounced off and split-up into their natural groups. Burner and I blended in with a bunch of distance people we knew from other clubs and we checked the schedule to see if everything was running on time. The air was perfectly still and the temperature was right where we wanted it, just inching its way over toward cool. Burner breathed it in deeply through his nose and I caught the way he smiled his small, secret smile.