“Figure it out,” I said. I went downstairs and out of the house.
I took the box with the turtle to Webb’s. I left it on the back steps. I knocked on the door and ran.
My father went to mow the grass, but the spark plug was gone from the mower.
43
APRIL 16
Scooter came home today!
44
APRIL 18
It’s Penn Relays week. They go from Tuesday to Saturday. Middle schools run on Friday.
The coach ended practice early today. He took us to a classroom and showed us movies of Penn Relays of the past.
The coach says the Penn Relays are the oldest, biggest, and best relay track meet in the world. Over fifteen thousand people compete. That’s bigger than the Olympics and more than the population of Springfield. There are races for four-year-olds, eighty-year-olds, and people in wheelchairs.
I’ll tell you, I was surprised. I thought only pro football and baseball games get crowds like that. For our meet with Donner last week, there were two people in the stands. (You guessed it: Webb’s parents.)
The Relays are held in a big double-decker stadium called Franklin Field. As the runners tear around the track, the sound from the stand goes with them, a kind of low, windy sound at first—“oouuuuuuu”—that gets louder and louder like a hurricane coming—“oouuuuuuuuuuUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU”—until the runners bust off the last turn and head for the tape. Then the whole joint goes bonkers. Along the first row they’re groping at the runners and practically hanging from the rail by their feet. In the upper deck they spill over and dance on top of the scoreboard. It’s like a hundred touchdowns scoring at once.
And that’s just one race. As soon as the last runner crosses the finish line, they start another. And another. All day long. By the time the film was over, I could see why Henry Wilhide Webb III wanted to come back.
The coach turned on the lights, but instead of dismissing us he started to talk.
“Boys, we have our own little Penn Relays tradition here at Springfield. I don’t especially care whether we win or not. I’ve been taking teams to the Penn Relays for sixteen years now, and we’ve never won the suburban middle school race, not once—and I intend to continue that perfect record.”
Everybody laughed.
“To me, running in the Relays is a reward. It’s my way of saying thank you to those who have stayed with the program and put up with me for three years.”
More laughing.
“In other words, the eighth-grade sprinters automatically make the team. Now, we need four sprinters for the four-by-one-hundred-meter relay team. We’ve got three eighth graders: Huber, Noles, and Caruso. That means there’s one spot open. On Wednesday, sixth and seventh graders will race off to see who gets that spot.”
He let it sink in. I could feel the eyes. I knew what everybody was thinking. I knew what I was thinking: The spot is mine.
He clapped his hands. “Okay, go home.”
I stayed in my seat. Half of me wanted to look at Webb, the other half was afraid. When I finally did look, he was gone.
Scooter lives downstairs now. The den is up in his old bedroom. His sea chest was waiting for him. My father got it out of storage.
He uses a walker. It’s a four-legged thing that he pushes ahead, steps into, pushes ahead, steps into, like that. It takes him five minutes to cross the living room, but nobody’s complaining.
He gets tired a lot. Abby and I are still allowed to climb on the bed with him, but we have to do it early and we can’t stay too long.
We did it for the first time last night. For some reason, I sort of thought that once the three of us were back in the bed boat, everything would be the same again, but it wasn’t. Scooter still only says, “A-bye, a-bye.”
I’m trying to get back the old safe-in-the-bed-boat feeling. I can’t quite make it. Before, it was like Scooter was captain and we were the mates. Now it’s turned around. We’re the captains. You don’t feel so safe being captain.
45
APRIL 19
Big surprise when I got home from school today. My mother was there.
“You sick?” I said.
“No,” she said, “just home.”
“You got fired?”
She chuckled. “I quit. Actually, I half quit. I’ll still do it part-time, but only on my schedule. The mall can get along without me.”
“Why?” I said.
She shrugged. “Well, with Scooter home now—” She squeezed my shoulder, stared into my eyes. “Now really, would you rather have my money or my time?”
“Your money.”
“I knew I shouldn’t have asked.”
“What about Mrs. Linfont?”
“She did get fired.”
“Good.”
“So I’ll be making dinner tonight.”
“Not good.”
She laughed.
The dinner wasn’t bad, for my mother anyway. She’s got possibilities.
There were four of us: me, Abby, Mom, and Scooter.
“Maybe you can do your painting again now,” said Abby. “I don’t like that one you did of me as a baby. I want you to paint me like I am now.” She posed. “Gorgeous.”
My mother made a frame of her fingers and peered through. “We’ll see.”
“Is Daddy quitting his job, too?” Her face showed what she wanted the answer to be.
“No,” said my mom, “not unless you want to live in a hut.”
Abby piped, “Yeah!”
My mother wagged her head. “I keep saying things I shouldn’t. Well, there’s one thing you’ll be glad about. I really will be buying some of your clothes at Second Time Around from now on.”
Abby clapped. “Goody!”
My mother turned to me. “Oh, no,” I said.
She looked half sad. “You can live without thirty-dollar shirts. We’re all going to have to give up something. I’m selling my car.”
“I ain’t wearing no used underwear,” I told her.
“No used underwear,” she said. “Just some things. And look on the bright side. Now you won’t have to waste so much time comparing price tags with your friends.”
Abby laughed.
I stuck my face in my food. I felt like punching a wall. Scooter was silent the whole time, turning his head to each person who talked, his smile tilting, his whole body tilting in his chair.
“No sneakers,” I said. I thought of my money in my dresser drawer. I almost had enough saved for a new pair I saw, better than Mike’s. “You can’t make me spend my own money at a thrift shop.”
She patted my hand. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”
She came into my room when I went to bed.
“You’re not gonna tuck me in like some baby every night now, are you?”
She laughed. “No, just tonight.”
As she was heading out, I said, “Just one thing.”
She stopped. She was like a shadow against the hallway light. “What’s that?”
“If you buy me stuff from the thrift shop?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t tell me.”
I can’t get to sleep. I keep thinking about the race-off tomorrow. I know there’s no way I can lose, but I still feel nervous. I want to be on the bed boat.
Ever since Webb came dorking and whistling up the street that first day, he never saw me without saying hi. Until today. Not at school. Not on the track.
Tonight, even though the coach ran us ragged at practice, I heard Webb sprinting past the house.
My father bought a new spark plug for the mower. Now the gas cap has disappeared.
46
APRIL 20
I hardly ate breakfast. I didn’t pay attention in class. I kept thinking of the race-off today, and the Relays Friday.
The four-by-one-hundred-meter relay means four runners each run a hundred meters. Each runner passes the baton to the next runner. The baton looks like a foot-long pipe, but it’s light, it’s m
ade of aluminum.
Since I’m the fastest, I’ll probably run the anchor leg. The anchor gets the baton last. The anchor crosses the finish line. The anchor is your chance to win. The anchor gets the glory.
All day long I pictured Friday’s race: Huber leads off, he hands the baton to Noles halfway through the first turn, Noles tears down the backstretch, hands to Caruso. I crouch. I look back past my shoulder. They’re all coming, eight sprinters sprinting. I pick out Caruso. He’s leaning into the final turn, he’s fifteen meters from me … ten meters … I take off, I drag my left hand behind me, palm open, fingers spread (Hit it! Hit it! Now!). I feel the baton smack into my left hand, I curl my fingers around it, I switch it to my right hand and take off down the chalk-striped brick-colored lane. I’m dead last, ten meters behind everybody. It’s hopeless. By the time I hit the straightaway I’m passing the next-to-last runner, then the next, and the next. Forty thousand people leap to their feet. Eighty thousand eyes slide from the leader to the kid who’s coming out of nowhere. “Who is he?” they ask, and the answer comes, “It’s Coogan! Crash Coogan of Springfield!” I pass another, and now there are only three ahead of me, but there’s not enough time. “He can’t do it!” they scream, and now there are two ahead of me and the red ribbon across the finish line seems close enough to be a blindfold and they’re hanging from the railing and stomping on the scoreboard and there’s only one ahead of me now and the human hurricane is chasing me around the track, blowing at my back, and I’m on the leader’s shoulder and for an instant the world freezes because we’re dead even—seeing us sideways we look like one—and I remember the coach saying in a close race the one who leans will win, so now with one last gasp I throw my arms back and my chest forward and the red ribbon breaks like a butterfly across my shirt. I slow down, I stop. I stand on the brick-colored track. I heave the baton into the air high as the pennants wave over the stadium, and the hurricane finally catches me and I close my eyes and let it wash over me: “OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOGAN!”
I kept rerunning the dream all day until the coach’s whistle blew and he called “Race-off!” and there I was, heading across the field to the starting line. The others trotted. I walked. I wasn’t in a hurry.
The stands were empty. A school bus moved in the distance beyond the football goalpost. Under the crossbar and between the uprights, like in a framed picture, stood three people.
For once, Webb’s parents didn’t look so old, not compared to the man standing between them. He was shorter than them, and real skinny, like the prairie winds were eroding him away. But he was standing straight and by himself—no cane, no walker, just two legs. Ninety-three years old. Maybe it was the Missouri River mud.
The thought came to me: they would have liked each other, Scooter and Henry Wilhide Webb III. Two storytellers. Both from the great flat open spaces, one a prairie of grass, one of water. Both came to watch when no one else was there.
Why exactly was he here? Did he know about me? Did he know his great-grandson could not win the race-off, and so would not run in the Penn Relays?
I wondered if Webb felt safe in his great-grandfather’s bed.
The cinder track crunched under my feet. There were five of us in the race: me, Webb, two other seventh graders, and a sixth grader. The coach put us in lanes. Me and Webb were side by side.
Again, he hadn’t said a word to me all day. We milled around behind the starting blocks, nervous, shaking out our arms and legs, everything as quiet as if the coach had already said, “Ready.”
The other team members—jumpers, throwers, distance runners—had all stopped their practicing to watch. A single hawk, its wingtips spread like black fingers, kited over the school, and suddenly I saw something: a gift. A gift for a great-grandfather from North Dakota, maybe for all great-grandfathers. But the thing was, only one person could give the gift, and it wasn’t the great-grandson, not on his fastest day alive. It was me.
I hated it being me. I tried not to see, but everywhere I looked, there it was.
The gift.
“Let’s go, boys,” said the coach.
A voice closer to me said, “Good luck.”
It was Webb, sticking out his dorky hand, smiling that old dorky smile of his. No button. I shook his hand, and it occurred to me that because he was always eating my dust, the dumb fishcake had never won a real race and probably didn’t know how. And now there wasn’t time.
“Don’t forget to lean,” I told him. His face went blank.
The coach called, “Ready.”
I got down, feet in the blocks, right knee on the track, thumbs and forefingers on the chalk, eyes straight down—and right then, for the first time in my life, I didn’t know if I wanted to win.
“Set.”
Knee up, rear up, eyes up.
The coach says the most important thing here is to focus your mind. You are a coiled steel spring, ready to dart out at the sound of the gun. So what comes into my head? Ollie the one-armed octopus. He didn’t disappear till the gun went off.
I was behind—not only Webb, but everybody. No problem. Within ten strides I picked up three of them. That left Webb. He was farther ahead of me than usual, but that was because of my rotten start.
At the halfway mark, where I usually passed him, he was still ahead, and I still didn’t know if I wanted to win. I gassed it. The gap closed. I could hear him puffing, like a second set of footsteps. Cinder flecks from his feet pecked at my shins. I was still behind. The finish line was closing. I kicked in the afterburners. Ten meters from the white string we were shoulder to shoulder, breath to breath, grandson to great-grandson, and it felt new, it felt good, not being behind, not being ahead, but being even, and just like that, a half breath from the white string, I knew. There was no time to turn to him. I just barked it out: “Lean!” He leaned, he threw his chest out, he broke the string. He won.
47
APRIL 25
I feel strange.
I’ve been feeling this way since last Wednesday, since I lost the race-off. Lost. If I say the word aloud, it makes me shiver.
At first it was a strange-bad feeling. The instant Webb broke the string, I regretted what I had done. As we slowed down, he turned to me. He was confused. I knew what he was going to say. “Did you let me win?” But then the team was mobbing him, and I jogged off the track. The three people still stood under the crossbar, smiling their faces off.
Thursday, I didn’t go to practice. On the walk home I looked once back at the track. The four relay runners were practicing baton handoffs. I felt sick.
No practice on Friday. The coach took the four relay runners to Franklin Field in his car. Their race was scheduled at 2:20 P.M. At 2:20 P.M. I was sitting in math class. I tried to picture the race at Franklin Field, but—funny thing—it kept being shoved aside by another picture. This one showed Henry Wilhide Webb III, standing, pumping his arms, shouting, cheering.
This morning the announcement came on the PA: the Springfield team had come in second at the Penn Relays, our best finish ever. The principal gave the names of the three eighth graders; then he said, “And the anchor leg was run by Penn Webb, who brought the team from last place to second.”
I could hear cheers from his homeroom down the hall. Inside, I cheered too.
48
APRIL 30
I was in the kitchen doing my new job—cutting food coupons out of magazines and newspapers—when I heard my mother yelp. I ran to the living room. She was staring at Scooter’s walker. It was lying at the foot of the stairs.
She glanced into his room. “Not there.” She dashed up the stairs. I followed. I heard her say, “Scooter.”
He was in the hallway, staring at the picture of himself in his Navy uniform, the picture painted by his daughter, my mother.
She stood behind him. She put her arms around him. “How long have you been here?”
“A-bye,” he said.
“And you came up without your walker?”
“A-by
e.”
We looked at the picture with him.
“You know,” my mom said to me, “there’s one way this painting is different from the others.”
“What’s that?” I said.
“He never posed for it.”
“He didn’t?”
“No. And I didn’t paint it from a photograph, either.”
“How did you?”
She snuggled closer to him. “From memory. He wasn’t home very much in those days, so when I did see him, I looked and looked at him until he was locked into my mind’s eye. I was terrified I’d forget what he looked like when he went away again. When I painted this, he was as clear in my head as if he were standing there.” She kissed his ear. “Right, Scoot?”
“A-bye.”
“And you see how he looks like he’s saying something?”
“Yeah.”
“He is. He’s saying, ‘I’ll be home soon, Lorraine.’”
“A-bye.”
Back downstairs, she joined me at the kitchen table, clipping coupons. “It’s funny,” she said. “A while ago I was remembering all that. And I was thinking how little I saw you kids and how little you saw me. And there was a minute back then when I actually was afraid you might forget what I look like.”
“No such luck,” I said.
She laughed. “I know it sounds silly. But that was just before I told my boss I was going part-time.”
About Scooter making it up the stairs—I was surprised, but I wasn’t. Two nights before, I had mixed up some Missouri River mud. I took it into Scooter’s room and made up a story about a school science project. Then I dipped his big toe in it.
49
JULY 2
I still get that strange feeling. Like, is this really me? Am I dreaming? But it’s not a strange-bad feeling anymore. It’s sometimes just different, sometimes even good.
So much has changed from a year ago.