Spikes

retired sprinter trains a bunch of kids

Jack was clearing out his apartment after breaking up with Marie. He wanted her crap gone and along with it anything of his that she had given him. He was kneeling on a green plaid shirt she bought him the previous Christmas, gutting the closet. Behind him were two piles; one by the door which was stacked with her clothes and make up and political science textbooks, all destined for the trash. The second pile was the one he would keep; his albums, business journals, law textbooks, manila envelopes stuffed with papers. He was immersed in this when he came across a shoebox stuffed at the back of his closet beneath a foldaway ironing board. He reached to the back of the closet and opened it. He had not seen the spikes in nearly fifteen years. They were folded and looked like they had been forced into the box. Torn to s**t. He turned and threw them carelessly into the trash pile. He was picking up a print of a sail boat her mother had given them when he thought about the old man. He realized at almost the same time that he must be dead by now. The thought came to him naturally and with no emotion, like a fact.

The old man had trained him to sprint when he was young. He was a retired sprinter and lived a few doors down from Jack’s house. In the fall when the ground was hard and winds picked up he would drive Jack and two other boys out to the field by the community centre and teach them how to run. He had them circle the flat topped hill with the oak trees and the steep sides to warm their legs and they ran hundreds on the uneven dry ground by the rugby posts kicking up dust that blew across the field in the wind. To cool down they ran up the hill and through the quiet open clearing that passed through the trees and came out on the other side by the field, then rounded the field and came back through the clearing. Jack must have been around fourteen.
Jack was small and weaker than the other two. He was teased by them because he was always straight-laced and he was adored the old man. On one of the first days when the man had them line up and run the hundred he had called them back in a circle and had shown them one by one what it meant to run with their arms. Jack walked the hundred swinging his arms like a soldier and the other two laughed at him, and the old man told them that if they were not interested in learning they could wait in the goddamn car. But once they understood that the man knew the sport inside and out, and that he had paid for his knowledge with time and effort, they began to listen to him more carefully when he talked. He paid particular attention to Jack.

     Jack’s mother lived alone. She was reluctant to talk to the man. She was not close to him and his wife had recently passed, which made it more difficult for her to talk to him. She also told herself that it was Jack’s business and she should stay out of it. Besides, she thought, justifying her aloofness, he has his religious friends.
     The old man had been a great runner in his day. For five months when he was at his peak, long before any of the boys were born and perhaps before their fathers were born too, he held the national record for the hundred and for the hundred and twenty. He had travelled in those days and he competed against some great runners and many who were mediocre. He did not make much money but each morning when he woke up he was able to commit himself honestly and fully to what he did and he lived with purpose because of it. He was forty years into his retirement from running and twenty from carpentry. He spent most of his time back then training talent passed to him by an old friend who was a scout of sorts, and training boys from the estate who were not talents but who did not yet know it. On Sunday he went to church and in the evenings he drank.
     When Jack and the boys had settled into the regime and were training regularly he gave them each an old pair of spikes, sad tattered things so worn the boys could wrap them around their wrists or twist them entirely so that the heel touched the toe. Some were from runners he’d once trained. One pair he had once worn. These were brown and faded leather shoes, with thin leather laces and cross stitched with emerald green thread on the front. He gave this pair to Jack.
     Jack remembered that the first time they wore the spikes one of the boys stepped on the other’s hand while he was tying his laces and the third boy nicked open the skin on his calf while he ran. After a few weeks as they got used to wearing the spikes there was less blood and they felt queer without them.
     In winter it rained and bitter winds from the mountains to the north turned the days fierce and the nights dangerous. On most nights the tiled roofs that capped the houses were slashed and drummed hard with sleet which could shift in the wind like a swarm. On such nights while the boys slept he would picture the old man sitting listening to the irregular tinny patter of the rain on the corrugated roof of the hut in the yard, sipping whisky and soda with the television on with the sound turned down. He was an avid reader once; he told Jack that his own father had pushed Carlyle and Connolly and Lansbury on him when he was young, and he read London and Sinclair and Orwell when he grew up.
     During the winter it was too wet and cold to train outdoors, so they used the Church where the old man had a back room full of equipment. He was well liked by the priest.

The church was set in a concrete yard on the corner of a housing estate nearby. It was grey and had an asymmetrical roof that sloped and did not drain and let the damp in. A dented metal cross was perched beneath the eave on the front just above the entrance. The first time the used the church they pulled up by the side door they followed the old man along the path by the side of the church where a high metal fence ran and stopped where a gate must have once stood. They passed through the gate into an alley, where broken glass covered the ground. He opened the door with the key and they stepped into the hall. It was cramped and smelled of dampness, with a low ceiling. The hall was lighted by a painfully bright bulb and led to the back room. It had high ceilings and was surrounded by high wide windows on all sides. The floorboards were mahogany, and black dirt and wax filled the gaps between them and clogged the lines and scrapes that ran along their surface. The walls were breeze blocks painted white and the ceiling was plaster-boarded over and sank in the spots where the water had seeped through. In the corner there was a treadmill and jack recalled that the oldest boy went straight to it and said that it didn’t have no power cord. The man told him it was manual.
In the middle of the floor where the light was good there was a bench and a set of dumbells and a rack for barbells. There were no barbells. On the wall on the opposite side there was a black and white poster of a sprinter crossing the line with his head ducked down. The man told them that this was a station and that in this station they would skip. There were five stations; push-ups, squats, sit-ups, and a metal bar wedged in the door-frame for pull-ups.

     In a closet by the rear door there was a speed bag hanging from a flat circular cut of timber. He taught them how to hit it without skinning their hands, and to time each hit with the bag so that it thudded three times on the wood.
     Always while they trained the old man would smoke in the hall with the door open listening to the rain slap on the concrete path in the alley. In between cigarettes he’d pull on his rain cape and sweep up the glass. There was always broken glass.

     Jack was a sickly boy and shorter than the others. When he trained they made fun of him because he had to use the light set of weights and they derided him for running distance. They were proud that they were stronger and they focused more on him because they were acutely aware of how the old man favored him. They joked that if he tried too hard and managed to force the heavy bag a few feet from where it hanged with a flurry of taps he had better run before it falls and knocks him to the floor. He took it well though and concentrated on his sets. The old man would stand with the two while they worked but he was often watching the shadow on the wall outside the closet where the boy was working the speedbag and listening to the irregular drumming of it on the wood. He was struck at how the boy would lose the rhythm often and yet never get frustrated. He felt there was something in that. The old man told him early that he couldn’t compete in the hundred with the other two because they were stronger, but that he could be a decent distance man if he put his heart into it. Of course the old man said this as a kindness as the boy would never be a decent runner. And at some level the boy knew it.

Often the old man would wander over to the closet where the boy worked and he would lean on the frame of the door looking at the two in the larger room, and without looking at Jack he would talk to him. And a few times if the two were busy he would walk into the room and tell him, ‘stop, before you break your hand,’ and he would work the bag himself for a minute or so, almost lazily with short, deft jabs with the back of his closed old hands, going three left to two right then two for two then one on each, mixing it up to show off to the boy and ending it with a hook or a straight. He dragged in a bench one day and had the boy hit the bag while standing on it and in time he had a steady rhythm going. Jack remembered how after the heavy bag, hitting the speed bag was like drumming a weightless balloon. And even now when he has a chance to hit one it comes back effortlessly like a skill loyal to him because of the time he spent earning it, as though the regular bur-a-boom bur-a-boom, bur-a-boom is etched in the memory of his muscles and mind. It was the one thing he could do that the other two could not and they pretended to be unimpressed with it.

***

     Jack had stopped taking things from the closet. His memory of the days spent training was followed by the memory of when it started to end. For a year the boys met the old man at his front door and he’d have them in for a minute before they went to the park or the Church. Jack would stand in the house bashful and awkward looking at the trophy cabinet reading the inscriptions, each a recognition of the man’s past greatness. He went there sometimes without the others to watch football or to talk about track, and years later to talk about books, and when there was gout, to bring the old man his medication and his pension. He always felt that he needed an excuse to be there and the man was conscious of this.
     The following summer something changed. One day they were sitting in the old man’s house talking about an upcoming race. When the old man walked out to the hut to dig out some tape to strap up an ankle, the other two boys started talking about how the place smelled of piss and they’d laugh at the picture of the old man and his wife who had died the year before. Jack laughed too and he could not meet the old man’s eyes when he came in from the hut. He went along with the talk about the old man behind his back and unlike the others he paid for it dearly because he was a kind, sensitive boy.
     It went like this for a while. The old man noticed and was often brusque with the boys. With two weeks before the winter sprint the oldest boy’s hamstring went. He had been training hard and the old man knew that he had a good shot of making the first three and losing his handicap for the New Year hundred. The boy was determined that he was going to run and the man told him that he would rub the leg down and knead the hamstring during their next session, and see how it went from there.
     On the day of the race Jack woke early. His room was cold and he could see snow had settled on the window ledge. He looked out the window and the tops of the rows of houses were capped with snow and only the hollow frame of the pylon stood out black against the white sky. He ate a quick breakfast of porridge and dressed warmly, and shouldered the sports bag with his spikes and his water bottle. He left the house and walked crunching through the snow, thinking about the race. He stopped at the house of the oldest boy and rang the doorbell. Both of them were there. They set off together.
     ‘Ready for that rub down?’ he said to the oldest.
     ‘I aint doin’ it.’ He said it without looking at Jack.
     ‘How come?’
     ‘I’m done with it.’
     They walked, he remembered, without talking, and the only sound was of the snow packing and tightening under their feet. Jack was acutely aware of a change in the older boy who was limping, flattening the snow with one boot and brushing through it with the other. His jaw was set and he scowled, and every response was curt. The other boy was aware of it too and he was quiet.

     When they rounded the corner the old man was scraping snow off the windshield. The trunk was still open and he had been loading up the car. In the front garden the branches of the maple tree were coated with frost and a robin sat in its midst. The old man turned when he heard the crunch of the snow and he waved. He pulled a towel out of the bag and raised it. The oldest boy stopped and looked straight at him.
     ‘I aint going.’
     ‘Hell you mean you aint?’ said the other boy.
     The old man was watching them and he whistled once sharply and the robin broke from the tree and disappeared into the conifers in the garden next door. The sound pierced the crisp silent morning. He cupped his mouth and said to them, ‘get movin’.’
     They did not move.
     The other two looked at him. His face was hard and he was scowling.
     ‘Christ hurry up,’ said the old man.
     ‘F**k you I aint comin’, the boy shouted.
      And he slung his backpack off his shoulder and opened it and threw the spikes to the ground and they hit the concrete sidewalk and rested in the snow. He turned and limped off and his breath rose in the air in clouds as he dragged his lame leg through the powdery snow.

The old man watched him.

Jack and the other boy stood in silence, watching the boy limp away.

‘Comin’ or not?’ he asked them flatly. He was not looking at the oldest boy.

Jack remembered walking up to the spikes and picking them up, and handing them to the old man. He never forgot the look on his face. He could tell he was deeply hurt.

They got in the car silently and he drove them to the track. They never mentioned what happened.

***

Jack made it a third of the way around the three thousand race, running through the snow on the horse track that they used for the distance races. When he gave up he turned to the right and marched with his head down straight through the middle of the course to the club house, where the old man was waiting for him with a hot drink and an overcoat. The other boy came in third in his race. It was his last.

The two older boys never went to the old man’s house again. It was a phase, or something, they told Jack later. Jack still saw the old man regularly back then but what they said about the thing being just a phase moiled in his mind. He had always wanted to be like the old man. He was well educated and content to be a runner and a carpenter. He once found something simple and dignified in this, but he grew unsure.

He got into the local college. He was the first in his family to do it, and he got a scholarship because of his ‘economic status.’ He told the old man he was thinking about studying literature and the old man was eager know the syllabus so he could tell him that was he studied was tripe and that he would give him some real literature. And though the old man no longer took pleasure in reading, he talked about what he had once read when he was a boy until he became embarrassed at how much he had talked.

And Jack grew weary of the old man. When he visited he was no longer awed by the medals and trophies and he began to see the old man’s house as squalid and he decided that he could smell piss after all. He just stopped going to his house.

***

Jack was deep in the corner of the closet still but sifting through the clutter with less fervor. Something was nagging at him. He gave up for the time being and turned on his knees hoping to rip the damned shirt and he stood up and walked over to the pile by the door. He picked up the spikes. They were heavier than the spikes the other two got, he thought. No wonder I was slower. He held one of them up in front of the light to look more closely at the sole. The heel was loose on one and a few of the spikes were missing. He turned it over and noticed that the laces were missing but the leather was still in good condition and the emerald green stitching across the front of both shoes was still intact. He tested one of the spikes with his thumb, long since worn down to a blunt nub. He undid the laces and loosened the tongue. On the back of it his initials were etched in faded blue ink in the old man’s hand. He ran his thumb over the letters. He placed the spikes carefully back into the shoebox and put the lid on and stooped, and standing next to the pile by the door he slid the box across the wooden floor where they bumped gently against the coffee table to rest, and continued looking through the closet.