The Bambi Motel was south of Kernsville on state road 441, unpretentious and tiny, a little cartoonlike fawn on the marquee just above the NO VACANCY sign.
Demski’s snoring had driven Cassidy outside to one of the concrete tables in the courtyard, but he couldn’t sleep anyway. He liked Kernsville. It was cooler in this part of the state, with a lot more trees and seemingly more oxygen in the air. Distance runners, he thought, have an understandable affinity for oxygen.
The preliminary round had been anticlimactic. He almost wished he had had to run harder so that he’d be sleepier. Stiggs didn’t need to qualify in his event, but Ed had a tough round, needing a PR 1:58.9 to make it to the final. But at least he was able to sleep. Hell, he sounded like a cement mixer.
In retrospect, all the trouble with Trapper had been a kind of strange blessing. It had kept his attention diverted enough to make those last few days bearable. It was hard to get overly excited about a race you were sure you were not going to run.
But then one little trip to the jail and all of that went away. And now here they were in Kernsville. Mr. Kamrad showed them around the campus—he had taken summer courses there—and their eyes got steadily wider as they took it all in. Southeastern had started in the 1800s as a theological seminary with a tiny student body. Now twenty-five thousand students walked to classes under the moss-draped live oaks scattered around the two-thousand-acre campus. As Mr. Kamrad pointed out the hundred-year-old brick building where he had taken psychology courses, then the cavernous gymnasium, then the awe-inspiring seventy-five-thousand-seat football stadium, the boys got steadily quieter. When they pulled out of Citrus City Thursday they had been something of a big deal in their own minds, regional qualifiers for the state track meet. Now that they were here, they were looking around at a place that could absorb thousands of high school track and field athletes without even noticing them. Stiggs had clammed up completely. They were all feeling pretty insignificant.
Mr. Kamrad noticed and cut the tour short.
“We need to grab some lunch and get checked in to the motel. We’ll continue the tour later,” he had said.
Now here he was the night before the race, and he had tried everything he could think of to distract himself. Mr. San Romani had counseled him that there would be plenty of time to get his mind in gear when he started his warm-up—they always did a lengthy warm-up. He understood the concept—keep your powder dry and all that—but it wasn’t easy to put into practice. In the station wagon on the way up he would willfully put it out of his mind and go back to The Catcher in the Rye, but after five minutes of Holden’s bitching he would catch himself mentally right back in the thick of the race in his head, pulling up to the leader as they were going into the gun lap, or fighting out of a box before the last turn. His mind was like a puppy, easily distracted but always returning quickly to the toy. Now he longed for sleep just to put an end to his misery.
It should have been a perfect night for sleeping. The pastoral quiet on this side of town was interrupted only by the occasional car hightailing it down 441 to Ocala, and by the ever-present buzz of the motel air conditioners. The place was filled with track guys and coaches, but Cassidy was apparently the only insomniac among them.
He heard a room door opening and figured Demski had awakened to find him gone. But it was Mr. Kamrad, dressed in an Edgewater crew sweat suit and an incongruous pair of flip-flops. He sat down in the lawn chair across from Cassidy.
“How bad is it?”
“Oh, I just can’t sleep, is all. I’m not worried or anything.”
Mr. Kamrad nodded.
“You know, I remember the first time my little college rowing team went to nationals. Here we were, a bunch of athletes in an obscure sport that no one even knew existed back where we came from. All of a sudden we’re surrounded by hundreds of guys like us, except the names on their singlets were famous: Harvard, Yale, Boston College, Cornell. We looked around at these guys and every single one of them looked like an Olympic contender. Nobody said anything, but you could just feel the air going out of us. It didn’t matter that we had come through the prelims just fine. We just kept ogling everyone, and by the time we backed into the starting dock, we had convinced ourselves that we didn’t belong there.”
“Wow. What happened?”
“We finished third. But I’ve thought about that race pretty much every day of my life since then, and although I’m not a what-if kind of guy, I’m pretty sure we could have won that race. All we had to do is pull from the start like we thought we had a chance. Instead, we hung back, surprised that we were doing as well as we were, not wanting to push our luck. We came on like gangbusters at the end, but we had let ourselves get too far out of it. If the race had been ten meters longer we would have passed both those boats. As it was, they had to look at the photographs, it was so close. But there was no doubt about it. There it was, obvious even in the negatives: we were third. We were third then and we will always be third. You can look it up in the record books right now and there we will be, third.”
“Wow.”
“But that’s what it means to be an athlete, Quenton. All the civilians see is the triumphant moment, the victory lap, the fulfillment of the dream. They don’t pay much attention to the also-rans and the missed-by-inches, the great majority of us who go on with the rest of our lives drawing whatever comfort we can from the fact that we were close. That we were among those who at least tried, were willing to put ourselves at risk. That we would live with the results, whatever they were. But always to try. That is what makes an endurance athlete, Quenton, the contract you make with yourself that you will try and not give up. And if you are lucky enough to be among those that finish at the top, that’s a great thing that you get to live with for a long time.”
“I never thought—”
“But there’s something else.”
Cassidy looked at Mr. Kamrad, his familiar horn-rimmed glasses, his sad, empathetic smile.
“There’s winning. Don’t ever forget that!” he said with a laugh, aware he had gotten pretty solemn. “Hey, wait here a second. There’s something I want to show you.”
He came back from his room carrying something in his right hand. Sitting on the same bench with Cassidy, he placed it on the table between them. It was his stopwatch.
“I didn’t clear it after your time trial. Look at what it says.”
“I know what it says.”
“It says 3:07.2., Quenton”
“I’m aware—”
“It says more than that, Quenton. It says that—if by some miracle of persistence or training or luck—if you could somehow extend that one lap farther, if you could possibly add a sixty-second quarter to the end of a time like that, you would be a 4:07 miler. You would be as fast as Archie San Romani was at the height of his career, and less than a second from the world record at that time.”
“There is no way in the world . . .”
“I know, it’s crazy to think such things. That was an all-out time trial, and a sixty-second quarter on top of that is ridiculous to think about. But it’s not ridiculous to dream. A little crazy extrapolation like that makes for the best kind of dream.”
Cassidy waited. He wasn’t really sure what Mr. Kamrad was saying.
“But that 3:07 tells you something else. It tells you that you belong out there, Quenton. Right now, at this moment in time, you belong on the track with Mizner and Hosford and all the rest. You haven’t run the times they have, maybe, but you’ve got those times inside you. You’re not some weird accident, some dreamy guy who wandered into a situation he can’t handle. It’s your race tomorrow. It’s yours as much as it is anyone else’s.”
Cassidy nodded. He had not thought of it that way. He had been more like Mr. Kamrad’s poor crew teammates, happy to be tagging along with the real players.
“All right, enough of this pep talk business. This is exactly what Archie didn’t want me doing to you before the race. Time to get some sleep. We have a surprise visitor coming in the morning—several, in fact. And then we’re going to do a little jog and some striders at the P.K. Yonge high school track after breakfast.
“Who’s . . .”
“Don’t worry about it. Go back to trying not to think about the race and get some sleep now. Tomorrow, to put it mildly, is a big day, my friend.”
“Yes, sir.”
Strangely enough, he actually felt a little sleepy.