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Show Blue Run/5 stretched up over our calves, with jaguar running spikes and red batons and pole vault poles and shiny starting blocks. The air smelled of kramergesic the trainers rubbed into our thighs and calves, while honey-breathed cheerleaders thrust hips over the green infield. Are vou satisfied? Are you satisfied? they chanted. Pistol fire announced false starts, twin repeats echoing between the home and visitor-side bleachers, and the asphalt was spongy and burned my knees in the on your mark position in lane three, and the man said, get set and the sun shone on our spikes and the gun was finally fired for real I'd come out low and burn the first forty, then rise and pump the long sprint in-between. In Lonoke County, with boatloads of time to think about who I was and where I was going, and what kind I'd come from. And this one time, I swear to god, at the Panter Relays, in heat two of the hundred, a guy named Bobby Cox-somehow his dick got out of his jock strap about fifty yards into the race he was winning, just flopped out of his jock strap and bounced to beat the band. Everybody got quiet and he just kept on running, through the pink finish ribbon and out of the stadium, out into Honeysuckle Lane, he just kept on running and he's still out there running So runners, I'm trying to say, they're thinkers, and what these Mexicans are thinking, the sand coming up from their feet in white whiffs, is beyond me, a genuine mystery about to happen I draw the knife from my belt scabbard, square feet and face them straight on. Which must look pretty funny to them, this white dude with a piddly four-inch blade Next proves how Stepwell I am to the core, how the great blind spot unites us. The men, brothers I can tell after they pass, pay me no mind. The boys run right on past as well, not even a nod at my knife or a son of a whore. The sand squeaks beneath my feet. Not twenty yards away, just a the point where I, myself, Joey Stepwell Harvell just crawled on hands-and-knees out of the |
