Man in the Box

It was halfway through the season Doug started running with us. He just appeared one day after we’d started down the farm road behind the high school, sliding from the tree line between the pastures and the student lot and falling in at the front of the pack, car keys in his fist like something he’d just snatched from a branch. He was six-three and Slavic looking, with a black flattop, acne scars—clearly older than the high-school runners but not as old as Coach Ferrell. He wore these nothing little track shoes and ran like a Kenyan. Coach Ferrell never introduced him, just nodded as Doug appeared next to him on the trail, and we learned to follow Doug over the coming weeks just as we’d learned to follow Coach Ferrell, and nothing was ever said about it.

I was in junior high. I was to pick a sport and I picked cross-country because it seemed the least acutely competitive. The name alone promised something pastoral and aimless. I would disappear into the trees and mist.

________

I about had when Doug arrived. In a year I’d be the age of my brother when he’d peeled out of the high school lot and disappeared into a cantaloupe truck. Five years later, people remembered the cantaloupes more than my brother, and I couldn’t help but feel myself fading out a little each afternoon that fall when the bell rang and the bus shuttled me over to that same high school, where sixteen of us followed Coach Ferrell down eroded red-clay roads like a pack of sensitive dogs, silent and sweetly alert to one another’s panting, leaping through rabbit tobacco and briars and spreading across pastures of ankle-rolling clumpgrass or crowding in close to course through a fall forest, the sound of all those shoes on the leaves and acorn caps thickening in against us, the pulsing perfumes of sweat, our gasps washing almost into utterance among the ashen trunks.

All but me were in high school. We were the gaunt and ghostly, the stooped and reedy, though there were a couple meaty Eagle Scouts and trunky youth ministers who knew what they were there to do and sweated violently. We loped along the outfield fence in boxy Umbros, sexually terrified, and even as the youngest, at thirteen, I felt us thinning toward pretty invisible lives. Doug arrived just in time, it seemed.

Unlike Coach Ferrell, whose lipless simian mouth maintained a gentle grimness—his expressivity hampered apparently by a permanent plug of dip—Doug talked to us. He said everything like it was a question? He was from California and had a rattail in back to throw off the flattop and drive us crazy with mystery. After practice one Thursday, all of us walking out to the lot, he announced, “So, dudes? I’m driving up to Statesville tomorrow? To see some rock? If anyone wants to ride up?” Before anyone could respond, he looked at me—whose status on the team, I figured, he must have mistaken—and said, “Hey, Jason, you want to ride up? You game?”

My name is not Jason, but I shrugged—“Sure”—and felt around me the swelling regard of the rest of my team, who were maybe starting to wish they’d been invited to a rock concert. But we all choose our paths. I was going to a rock concert with Doug.

My father’s Bimmer tore across the empty lot, tooting and slinging up dust. He gaped and swung the wheel like he might wipe us all out.

________

Weekends were different. Night patrols in camo and face paint with fat Heath Deeter were out. Now it was Mel Baker and acid and Alice in Chains. But Mel went to private school in Charlotte, so I still defaulted to Heath Deeter’s lunch table each Monday and blustered at his math-wiz friends how over the weekend Mel and I got so polluted Mel puked on the green—in the cup!—and how then we put a secret trippy...