We made a big loop out and around the stadium, winding our way up and down the quiet little side streets, past houses full of people who couldn’t care less about what was happening just down the road. Burner and I had probably run thousands of miles together, but I was pretty sure these would be the last ones. I’d been thinking about it for a while, but I decided it there, during that last little warm-up jog. I think all those houses where nobody cared kind of forced themselves into my head.
“This is going to be it for me,” I told him, after about fifteen minutes.
“What do you mean ‘it’?”
“This is it. The last real ball-buster race for me. I think it’s over. Time to get on with everything else.”
It was easier than I thought it would be. All you had to do was say it. As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I felt better and calmer, but Burner didn’t take it the same way.
“What?” he said and he looked at me with this kind of confused sneer.
“Come on, Mikey. What else is there for you to do? You can’t be finished. You’ve got lots more in the tank. You can’t be one of those guys who gives it up and sits on the couch for a year eating chips and dip. You’ll never be the guy in the fun run, the guy with a walkman, the loser who wants to win his age-group. You can’t just turn it off like that.”
I felt bad for springing this on him at such a bad time. It hadn’t been part of my big plan, but it’s hard to hide it when something that used to be important suddenly isn’t important anymore. I felt like I was kind of abandoning him, dumping him out there in the middle of those empty houses and it was difficult and sad and correct all at the same time. Like when my mother and father finally broke up: difficult and sad, yes, but correct too, the right thing to do. Burner should have seen this coming from me. He could read the results sheets as well as I could and he knew where my name fit in.
“I’ve gone as far as I can,” I told him. “You know you can’t do this if you don’t have the feel for it.”
“Come on,” he said, “you’re kidding me.”
He reached over without breaking stride and gave me a little shot in the arm like he was trying to wake me up and bring me back to the real world.
“Give your head a shake,” he said. “Think about next year. You’ll heal up and be back good as new.”
We turned the corner and I could see the stadium coming back to us, getting bigger all the time. The stiffness was gone from my legs and I was rolling now, back to my old self, purring along. I felt fine, better than I had in months. The taper was giving something back to me too. But I was sure about this.
“Sorry, buddy,” I kidded him. “You’re going to have to find somebody else to kick down in the last hundred.”
“Stop it,” Burner said. He was looking at me hard. His lips pressed together and his mouth made a tight straight line across the middle of his face.
“Seriously. Stop it. You can’t quit now. You and I do this together. That’s our deal.”
“No,” I said, “it’s not.” I thought he already knew about this part of it.
“We have never done this together. It’s one of those things that can’t be done together. In the end we have to be by ourselves.”
I didn’t want it to sound as bad as it did.
“Think about it,” I was smiling now, trying to show him that everything would be fine.
“Think about it. When you come around that turn today, you’ll be alone and when you head down the stretch by yourself you are going to surprise a lot of people.”
“Fuck you, Mikey,” he said. “I don’t need a cheerleader.”
His face was a little flush and he turned on me quickly.
“You’re just covering your own ass. In about twenty minutes, I’m going to rip you apart and you can’t stand it. You can’t stand to lose to me and now you’re making excuses. Fuck you and your retirement party.”
I wanted to laugh if off and make it slide away, but before I could even get to him, before I could say anything, he took off. Burner put his head down and shifted gears. In ten seconds, he had pulled away and opened up a gap that couldn’t be closed. I had to save everything I had left and I couldn’t go chasing after him so I let him go. It was just jitters, just nerves. That’s what I told myself. After it was over, everything would be fine again.
When we got back to the field we split for good. He grabbed his spikes and his bag and went under the bleachers by himself. The last fifteen minutes is the most important. You want everything to feel easy. I put him out of my mind and lay on my back for a while, feeling the air coming in and going out of my body. I pulled my knees up close to my chest and wrapped my arms around my legs. I held it all in like that for about fifteen seconds before letting everything go as slowly as possible. I rolled over on my stomach and did a few easy push-ups and when I got back on my feet, I put my hands flat against the wall and tried to get my calves and my goddamn Achilles to go out as far as they could. I didn’t want to push it because you can only take as much as your body can give you on the day. I took off my socks and put on the ugly fluorescent spikes I’d been wearing all season. They were another Adidas freebee, and I was expected to wear them, but I didn’t like them much. It had taken months to break them in and the red blood stains were still there around the toe and heel from all the broken blisters I had to go through before my feet finally hardened up in the right places.
When the announcer’s voice called us out, I took off my sweats and did a couple short sprints down the back stretch, trying to keep it all quick and smooth and under control. All the rest of the guys were there too and we did our usual nervous hellos and our cautious smiles as we passed one another. When they called us to the line, I came up behind Burner and put my hand on his back, just kind of gently, so he’d know I was there.
“Have a good one, buddy, you little psycho,” I said and I smiled at him. The officials made us stand there, side by side, each of us in our pre-selected spot along the curved white start line while the announcer read out our names and listed all our best times and our biggest wins. He said this was shaping up to be one of the best 1,500 metre finals of the last decade. When the voice got to my name, he said I had the fastest personal best in this group and he named all the different times I’d made the national team. He said Burner was always dangerous and that he had put together a great season and was rounding into top form at the right time. Then the rest of them each got their turns and their compliments, Marcotte and Graham and Bourque and the others.
Burner stood still through all of this and didn’t even acknowledge his own name. Instead, he closed his eyes and made this big production out of rolling his head all the way around in a big circle. He went very slowly — first down, with his chin touching his chest, and then way over to the side and then straight up and back again. I could hear the bones in his neck crackling as he made the loop. He kept his mouth wide open and when he looked up, it seemed almost like he was waiting to catch a snowflake or a raindrop on his tongue. They called us to our marks and we crouched down, bending our knees just a bit and holding our arms away from our bodies. When they fired the gun, you could see the smoke before you heard the bang.