WHEN EDGAR WAS in high school, a popular if cumbersome method of fund-raising for charity was to collect per-mile pledges for athletic events. Though direct donations would have accomplished the same benevolence with a fraction of the fuss, Yardley students had learned the drill from raising money for the school’s construction of three extra tennis courts during Edgar’s sophomore year. The walk-athon involved door-to-dooring with a clipboard and getting the odd pledge of ten cents a mile promised largely to get rid of you; then pairing up with some pimply cretin assigned to be your “buddy” and trudging about the lake with your sandwich decomposing in your daypack; then doing the rounds with the clipboard again, when pledge-makers would often be short of cash or conveniently out. Still, anything beat freshman year, when Edgar house-to-housed in Stonington selling chocolate bars for the Debate Club. Kindly June Cleavers at screen doors never failed to remark on how much of his product Edgar appeared to have sampled himself.
February of junior year, Toby Falconer proposed a fresh fund-raising approach to his doting inner circle. This time the noble cause would be the group’s private community chest. Thus, with much hilarity late night in the dorm, Falconer and his merry men, of whom Edgar had only recently counted himself a member, concocted phoquefartic shytosis—“a wasting disease of young adults”—along with the Society in Aid of P.S. Sufferers (SAPSS).
Edgar gave Falconer a hand in the print shop, drafting a letter of introduction and lined pledge sheets, in whose logo a gaunt teenage boy was fainting off the last S. That afternoon the printing instructor barged in unexpectedly, and Falconer didn’t turn a hair. Oh Mr. Galveston, we’re so happy you turned up. We were having a little trouble centering this letterhead. See, we’re running a charity marathon for the Society in Aid of P.S. Sufferers—What’s that? Oh, Mr. Galveston, my brother has it, which is why I got involved. It’s really debilitating and everything and he can’t play football anymore—
Galveston offered to help out. As a consequence, the SAPSS three-color stationery looked spectacularly official.
For soliciting pledges, Falconer coached his crew on the pitch. He insisted they practice saying phoquefartic shytosis without cracking up, and be able to rattle off a portentous pathology. Falconer claimed that the average adult vocabulary shrank by 6 percent a year; considering what he got away with reciting on Stonington’s front stoops, he was probably right. Young men stricken with PS in their prime suffered from priapism, ultimogeniture (inheritance by the youngest son), and helminthophobia (fear of worms). House to house, Falconer improvised juvenile disorders as he went along: rectal infarction, nasal globulus, and cerebral smegmatism.
Doubtless contributing to a reputation for being “clingy,” Edgar had lobbied to accompany Falconer himself as he rang doorbells in the suburban neighborhoods bordering the school. Toby’s pledges were always twice the amount of anyone else’s. The guy could really work a mark. Never oily, but often touching. The kid brother with PS became a regular feature in Falconer’s rap, a brave little fellow who never cried when his legs hurt or he couldn’t play Frisbee with his friends. When Falconer described the feisty, good-natured twelve-year-old who was now confined to bed, even Edgar began to believe in the wretched squirt. Falconer, of course, didn’t have a brother at all.
It seemed uncanny at the time that Falconer could say rectal infarction to middle-aged housewives and not get chased off the porch with a broom. In retrospect, Falconer’s success was less mysterious. All those women apprehended was that an angelic apparition with chiseled cheekbones had miraculously materialized on their doorstep. Though it was winter, Falconer always wore his greatcoat agape and his shirt unbuttoned to the sternum, alabaster pectorals swelling at his open collar. Winter suited those glacial green eyes, splintering like ice and glistening with the very mischief these women indulged by pledging three dollars for every fictitious mile.
The SAPSS scam flowered during Edgar’s honeymoon with Falconer, a period Edgar liked to recall as an uncomplicated, typically terminal infatuation. But when Edgar pressed himself, he remembered the experience as discomfiting. The more Edgar revered the flawless Falconer, the more he resented the enslavement, and fantasized about being on the receiving end of his own devotion. Humiliatingly at another boy’s beck, Edgar struggled as he would later struggle against his love for women.
One afternoon in the Yardley locker room Edgar battled his adoration more viciously than usual. They’d nearly finished canvassing the immediate Stonington neighborhoods, and Falconer announced it was time to stop. Best not to push their luck by getting greedy, and besides the joke had worn thin. If even half the pledges came across, the sting would net over $2,500. After they fabricated a few convincing anecdotes from the “marathon,” collection would commence the following week.
“Shit, Falconer,” Edgar slurred, back flat on the bench, “this is supposed to be for kicks, and I feel like some hunchbacked old bag volunteering for the United Way.”
“No sweat, Kellogg,” said Falconer coolly. “Quit. But if you don’t help collect, you don’t share the pot.”
“Just a little sick of your calling all the shots, Falconer,” Edgar griped. “Time to do this, time to do that. Yes, sir, no, sir. Reporting for duty, sir. Yes, I’ve cleaned the latrines, sir. Will that be all, sir. Certainly I’ll kiss your ass, sir. Requesting permission to yank my tongue out of your butt, sir. Christ.”
One of Falconer’s secrets was he didn’t rattle. Maybe over his father’s death senior year, but not over boy stuff. His other minions stood in his defense, muscles stiffening, but Falconer waved a hand to call off the dogs. “Oh-kay!” he announced musically, bouncing gracefully off the tall tennis umpire’s stool, kept inside off-season. “We’ve got two hours before dinner. We’ll do what you say, Kellogg. Go ahead.”
“Go ahead and what?” asked Edgar warily, raising his head off the bench.
“Come up with some diversion to keep us entertained. Think I like having to keep the program moving? Think it isn’t a little irritating that you slobs just lie there and expect me to call another fucking ‘shot’? Go ahead. We’re at your disposal. Anything you say.”
As his neck strained, Edgar’s mind went blank. Offered the initiative he’d always craved, Edgar considered that maybe he deserved no better than lieutenancy. He needed Falconer. They all did. Falconer got ideas.
Later as an attorney Edgar had a similar epiphany. Ruled by precedent, a lawyer’s job was to ensure that the past recurred in the present, and an attorney’s only fleeting originality was to disguise the new as the same. It was Edgar’s realization that he was perfectly suited to this task that disenchanted him with the profession.
Edgar thumped his crown back on the bench with finality. “Let’s run it.”
“Come again?” snarled a henchman.
“The marathon,” said Edgar. “Let’s actually run it. It’ll take some training, delay cashing in for two or three weeks. But you said yourself, Falconer, we need diversion. And what better way to convince those ladies we’re legit than to really run the course?”
Following a hailstorm of Come on! and Give us a break! Falconer announced dryly, “I think a marathon sounds fab.” And that was that.
Thereon, Edgar took over. He led cross-country runs every afternoon for a fortnight, the course a little longer each day. Privately he luxuriated in his new body, fleet and featherweight. All through elementary school Edgar had lumbered after classmates, trailing a hundred yards behind as they streaked the playground’s perimeter. For years, he’d submitted to shrieks of laughter when a relay baton was palmed into his moist, sausage fingers. So Edgar was powered for the first couple of miles by sheer amazement. His athletic equals, the others may have lagged behind because they regarded the ability to run as ordinary.
When they ran the marathon itself on a Saturday afternoon, most of the SAPSS team dropped out after about five miles. Only Falconer himself stayed in the race and kept pace. Edgar had measured out the distance with the odometer on his bike—a good workout in itself. They hadn’t trained nearly hard enough for this distance, and around mile ten Edgar hit a wall; Falconer faltered on his heels. They stumbled on at a geriatric jog, in too much distress to find each other funny. At around mile thirteen, both bent over double, their eyes met. Heaving, they keeled under a tree. Minutes passed before they could speak.
Though they’d quit well shy of twenty-six miles, Edgar always treasured the memory of that run. The SAPSS marathon constituted the acme of their short, electric friendship: a rare fortnight of chugging shoulder-to-shoulder in a relationship otherwise narrowed into the single-file formation of an idol and his pursuant disciple.
As it happened, the choice to run the marathon for real was propitious. One of the marks—signed up by Gerald, a kid with both an unfortunate smirk and a distinguishing red afro that made him easy to finger—called Yardley’s administration to check if the appeal was aboveboard. When collared by the headmaster, Gerald was able to claim that the marathon had indeed been run, and a teacher confirmed sighting Edgar Kellogg and Toby Falconer limping back to the parking lot in drenched sweats on Saturday at dusk. Falconer soft-soaped as usual that yeah, they had made up the organization and the disease just for laughs, but that they were definitely donating the money to a proper nonprofit, honest. The headmaster was skeptical, and they were required not only to collect on the pledges but to show him all the paperwork and a receipt from the Multiple Sclerosis Society for the total, or face expulsion. Not one of the boys made a dime.
The upshot? They cynically fake a marathon for charity, and at the end of the day what do they do but run a fucking marathon for charity. Like Edgar’s later invocation of Saddler’s pestilent company, the moral seemed to run: be careful what you make up.