Free Once a Runner by John L Parker Page B

had told him, there is not much you can do about it. Heart has nothing to do with it. In the final straight, everyone has heart.

Cassidy walked on past the finish line, across which someone would hold the taut yarn and blink as the runners flashed by. It was still more than 24 hours away, but standing there in the calm anonymous night five yards past the familiar white post, Quenton Cassidy knew at that instant the depth of his frenzied yearning to feel the soft white strand weaken and separate against his heaving chest.

The demons were in control; it no longer made him afraid.

36. The Race

The noise from the stadium carried out here but Cassidy didn't pay much attention. He liked doing most of the warmup ritual out on the cross-country course where he could think. The routine itself was automatic: four miles easy; then long, flowing striders, another mile easy, faster striders, then on with the spikes, some sprints on the track, then jog undl time. It was the roar in his head he had to fight.

It had to be contained, suppressed, released only in that slow crescendo of calculated frenzy that would crest when the pistol cracked and he unleashed it all. The orb now floated gently in his mind, glistening, peaceful, hard as spun steel. It would hold all grief, all despair, all the race-woes of a body going to the edge; it would allow him to do what he had to do until there was nothing left.

Yes, he had decided long ago it was better to get ready out here, where things were quieter, more normal, more like his everyday routine. Trying to warm up in the stadium, being close to the crowd, would make him jittery, causing the roar in his head to build in spurts, getting him there too early. It might upset the orb and when the despair descended he would have no place to put it. Or he might be in such a lunatic state as to turn the first 220 in 25 seconds out of sheer screaming hysteria. No, it was better out here, where it was quiet, where he could get ready in the same way he had done all the rest; it gave some comfort, this last bit of quietude.

He jogged slowly by the married student housing area, watching little children play under the trees. It was the eerie, almost magic, post-dinner hour when time stands still for a child, when all existence floats in a cool gray bath of dying day and Order is mercifully drawn from a chaotic infinity by a mother's come-home call.

"Erica! Jeremy!'* Two litde figures scuttled away in the shadows. He was getting farther and farther from the stadium, but he had plenty of time. Some other runners passed in pairs and threes, but no one spoke. One nodded at Cassidy but looked puzzled. What would they be thinking about this bearded Finn with the ragged blond hair?

Would they think they recognized him from some Track and Field News photo?

Cassidy jogged on. It was early May warm and subtropical flowers ruled the air dizzily: the kind of evening so heavy with promise as to make him wonder if his life could ever be quite the same again as it was now, while he was so vital, so quick, so nearly immortal; while his speed and strength was such that he could be called by only a handful of men on earth. Surely there could not be that many of us walking around like this, he thought.

He felt a strange brand of nostalgia now that it was so close; a nostalgia for this moment, for this next hour. The present was so poignant he had begun to reminisce already. He thought of Michelangelo's David pondering the stone: David, too, wondering if life would ever be the same.

Quenton Cassidy could be forgiven the solemnity of his mood. He was a young man about to go to the edge, a young man with every bit of the wherewithal to get to the edge. The inevitability of his journey there was never very far from his mind; he knew that before too very long he would be in mortal distress.

The time you won your town the race, we chaired you through the marketplace, he thought. Then a burst for twenty yards just to enjoy the