No one on the Salvador High School cross-country team believed Camo Salinas when he said he saw a half-naked woman on Poplar Street.
“You’re nuts,” Lucas Vera told him. “You were probably thinking about some woman to take your mind off the burn, and you started hallucinating, man.”
“I’m telling you, I saw her—she had a robe on, but it was down around her waist. She was showing off her sandías, Lucas—big ones, too.” Camo wiped the sweat off his face and smeared it down the top of his shirt. “I’m telling you, Joe, there’s a naked woman waiting for us on Poplar Street.”
“Okay, man.” Joe Morales pressed his locker closed and turned around. “After we change, we’ll get back in your truck and look for her.”
The three guys had been friends since they got cut from the freshmen football team last year. The track coach took them in, but they had no idea that all track athletes had to also run cross country in the fall. Camo, Lucas and Joe were lousy distance runners, but with so few members, no one got cut from the team. Finding a naked woman on the running route could give the three of them bragging rights, and earn a little respect from the seniors who had named them Stumblers from the very first practice.
So they showered and hauled it out to Camo’s Ford pick-up in record speed. And so the search began.
Camo had to drive a few miles before he got to the corner of Poplar Street and Evergreen that was part of their run every afternoon. By now, traffic was thick with rush hour and each boy in the truck cruising slowly down Poplar felt a thick pool in his gut. Camo slowed down to follow the street where they had run two hours before, but the neighborhood was different with kids riding bikes, old men watering the grass, and a few men sharing beers and stories at work trucks parked in their driveways.
“Which house was it?” Lucas asked. He rode shotgun. As soon as they turned the corner, he rolled down the window, slung his arm out and gave each house an avid stare. “Do you remember?”
“Not sure,” Camo answered. He cursed under his breath. “One minute I slow down and I’m rolling a cramp out of my neck, and boom—there she is, right behind a screen door, showing me her stuff.”
Joe, who was squeezed between them in the front cab, shifted his knees against the dashboard. “So did you stop and talk to her, man?”
“Naw, I just kept running—I was already a block behind the rest of the team, and Coach’s already on my case for being a slacker, so I took off.”
The guys drove up and down Poplar Street for twenty minutes, but no one spotted anyone naked anywhere.
The next day after school the sophomores agreed to run as a pack, but even with everyone looking, nobody spotted the woman. They broke into their own patterns as they ran around Elm Street Ditch, especially when it started raining, and no one cared about anything but getting back to the gym and out of cold clothes. Before they made the second loop through Poplar Street, Camo dropped back with a painful stitch under his ribs and fell behind. He jogged in place a few moments, rubbing his ribs. He took a deep cleansing breath and glanced at a nearby house.
There she stood—only this time, there was no robe. He could see a naked woman as if she was covered by a gray mist—but it was really only a dirty screen.
Camo’s mouth dropped open in a gasp that almost choked him. The rain hit his tongue, making him gag on saliva, shock and wow. He started to yell out at Lucas and Joe at the end of the block, but a rumble of thunder made him realize he needed to get off the street or lightning could fry him like a chicken leg.
By the time he ran and caught up to the others, they were all running in heavy, cold rain.
Once inside the locker room Camo exclaimed, “I saw her again.”
Lucas whipped a towel in his direction. “Camo, how stupid do you think we are?”
But Joe did a quick turn. “You saw the woman again? Naked?”
“Yeah, this time there was no robe. She stood behind a dirty screen. I could tell she had long hair,” Camo told them.
Lucas frowned. “I think lightning cracked your brain.”
“I swear! On the sacred head of my dead abuelo!” Camo’s fingers crossed over his heart for dramatic effect. “I’m telling the truth about a naked woman on Poplar Street.”
Once again the sophomores piled into Camo’s truck and drove back to Poplar. This time, Camo swore he could recognize the house by its screen door. Who would have guessed that every house on Poplar Street had dirty screen doors?
The following day as practice started, the three guys promised to work together to spot the woman. They let the rest of the team get a couple of blocks ahead and then the three of them slowed down, despite the chewing out they faced from Coach for lousy times.
Once they reached Poplar Street, Lucas said, “Camo, you go first, since you’ve seen her before. And if you don’t see her, maybe one of us will get lucky!”
Camo ran solo down Poplar Street hoping to spot her. He didn’t, so he jogged in place at the corner and motioned Joe to run down next.
Once Joe reached him, Camo asked, “Did you see her?”
“Don’t you think I would have stopped and asked her name, Idiot? Why would I run to you when I could stare at her?” Joe’s anger was easy to ignore. Of all of them, Joe was always the horniest.
Both guys gestured to Lucas to run toward them, but no woman appeared. Each of them took a turn running back and forth on the street until they knew they needed to run to the ditch before the upperclassmen figured out the sophomores never ran the full length of the trail Coach had set up for training.
But Coach was waiting outside the gym for the Stumblers. “The past two days you three have been coming back long after everyone else. What’s up?”
Joe mumbled something about cramps. Lucas blamed it on his dad refusing to buy him new shoes. Camo shrugged and played dumb. Coach didn’t buy it.
“You stay up with the team, or they’ll be hell to pay,” he told them and walked toward the coaches’ office, munching on a bag of chicharrones.
Lucas and Joe stared hard at Camo. He decided to play dumb a while longer.
They saw nothing the next two weeks, so Camo decided it was some optical illusion or maybe just a head dream from pushing himself to run harder. The others eventually forgot about it too. The three sophomores were still at the end of the pack in running the route, but their times improved a little, so at least Coach left them alone.
On a Wednesday, a week or so after grades came out and the team lost two of the best runners to no-pass no-play, Camo ran ahead of his two friends down Poplar Street. He found a comfortable stride, when he glanced at a faded wooden house with a chunky front porch, and saw the woman once more.
He had finally found the house again. Hard as it was, he took his eyes off the woman for just an instant to look at the house number above the door. He mouthed the numbers 7-2-7. Now he had proof for the guys, and then the three of them would be the envy of the track team. The older runners would be so jealous.
7-2-7.
7-2-7.
Camo played it cool, and ran around a small circle on the front sidewalk, until he slowed to a jog and ran back to meet Lucas and Joe puffing up the road. He merely said, “There she is,” jogged a circle around them, and said, “7-2-7.”
Camo said the numbers again and again until Lucas and Joe started chanting with him. And like a pack of horny dogs, they ran toward the house, slowing down, jogging in place, staring at the woman on the porch.
They saw big breasts, the fleshy middle and her bare legs from under the door slat covering her most private parts. Sweat rolled down their backs, cooling their sizzling skin. Each boy stared passionately at the wisps of long hair, hanging over her bare shoulders. A curtain of shadows from the afternoon sun was keeping her face hidden, but they still got an eyeful of skin and dark curves.
Slowly she stepped from behind the door. The boys kept jogging in place, their legs heavy and throbbing. Who would be the first to speak?
Then she opened her brown arms wide to the boys. A second later, every lustful thought shattered hard in grim reality: an old woman’s face! An old woman’s body! Like somebody’s grandma, and who wanted to see their grandma naked?
The boys stumbled blindly into each other. They raced away from the house, running fast toward the ditch.
Together they decided not to run back through Poplar, but take another route back to the school. They would face Coach’s wrath like a team—probably two weeks of 5:00 am runs in addition to the afternoon runs they had every day but Sunday. It felt like a fair penalty after staring at a naked old lady.
They chose silence and punishment—stoic and proud—but really there was no pride in what they knew. And before they reached the gym, they all agreed to tell Coach there were just too many loose dogs on Poplar Street, and he should find the team another practice route for the rest of the season.