Wilson: Runner
by Barrett Hathcock
[ fiction - january 09 ]
Wilson had decided to become unfat. In the fall of his freshman year of high school, he began to run, after school but before the parents came home, and then early on the weekend mornings before lunch or church. He did not know how far he was running. He had picked a nice house two neighborhoods, four stop signs, and one busy street away. At first it took him 40 minutes to run to it and back. He had gotten faster though, and trimmed it down to 32 minutes. Wilson was determined.
He had made this decision the spring before, standing in the line at the diving board, his shirt off and his chalky, gelatin roll of a stomach exposed. It was the eighth-grade retreat. Camp St Mary. Everyone was so excited to swim in the pool. It was the end of April, close to summer and freedom. Wilson had popped over to the pool in his flip-flops and taken off his shirt before he realized what he was doing. Then he stood there, waiting in the line, his arms crossed in between his nipples and his bellybutton, trying very hard not to be so self-conscious.
There was something else. Standing there in the diving line, he saw - and truly appreciated for the first time - Susan Greer. She was floating with her friends near the other end of the pool, where the shallow section declines into the deep. Her friends were practicing summersaults, jumping and spinning and standing up, sneezing the water out of their nostrils, unaware of Wilson's gaze. However, Susan floated alone in the middle of all their activity - tranquil in the center of that circle of splashing and counter-splashing. Perhaps she was practicing the dead man's float, although she was doing it the wrong way, Wilson thought; she was floating face up. Her eyes were closed and her palms and arms were outstretched on the surface of the water, open to the sun. She was wearing a blue two-piece, which looked as if it had some purple swirl design mixed in. This blended parts of her body with the water. As she lay there, unmoved by her giggling, revolving, splashing friends - she looked like she could levitate. Wilson, feet damp on the concrete, moving incrementally closer to the gang plank, his bare chest chilled by the chlorine wind, was so excited he felt sick.
He fell in love in his own eighth-grade way: watching her walk down the strip at school, the windows of the rooms reflecting her in between two gabbing friends, watching her take notes in Astronomy class and how she buried her chin in her right hand when she became bored with all the math, watching the moon's pale fire on her face in the Niskayuna Observatory every Wednesday night at 9:15 when the lecture finally ended and the celestial gazing began, watching her hug her father everyday in the pick-up lane after school, her heels lifting slightly off the ground, her calf muscles small and tight. And after a series of false starts - chores he had forgotten to do, sprained ankles, intermittent crises of hyper-ventilation and phlegm - he finally got into the habit of running. There was only one problem: Buzzbee.
Buzzbee was the local rottweiler. To reach the house that signaled the turn-around-point, Wilson had to run out of his own cul-de-sac, down the street of the neighborhood behind his house, cross the four-laned, traffic-choked Ferryway Street (home to a public school here, a park there, leading north toward the shopping complexes and south toward Lakeland Drive), through another neighborhood, right at the fork, left at the yield sign, over the hill-from-hell, through the rather odd five-way intersection, around the curve with the massive blind spot, take a left and there, finally was the house - always clean and dazzling, with five slender imitation marble columns and the cleanest roof this side of Jackson. Wilson thought the shingles looked like velvet, and as he turned around slowly in front of it, always noticing the window trimming and the shrubs, he imagined that it was Susan's house - that a girl like her must live in a house like this. The house always gave him a second wind, like an encouraging breeze, billowing his shirt into bulges and tickling the sweat rolling down between his pecs and over his belly. Once, after he had only been running a few times and was still figuring out his route, he saw a girl playing tennis by herself in the driveway. He could hear her racket and hear the ball bouncing before he could actually see her. She was young, probably eleven, maybe twelve, he thought. She was whacking a tennis ball up against the brick side of the house and when he came into view, sputtering, doing his own type of shuffle-jog which looked like a kind of perpetual falling, she froze and the tennis ball bounced past her and into the grass. He stopped, heaving, his hands inverted on top of his love handles, and they stared at each other for a moment. Then the girl ran into her backyard, and Wilson smiled and turned to head home. He knew it wasn't Susan, though the girl seemed to look remarkably like her. He thought he remembered somewhere that Susan had a little sister, and as he ran home he imagined this scenario, the young girl pounding up the stairs, oversized racket in hand, into Susan's room, where she sat bored and beautiful and alone, and the little sister told the bigger sister about the strange visitor out front, and they would both bolt to the window and look out but he would be long gone and they would wonder if he would ever run back by.
Typically, Buzzbee was rooting through garbage when Wilson came jogging by, huffing and unaware. At first, their acquaintance was casual. Buzzbee would trot along behind Wilson, sometimes coming up right next to him, and hearing a plastic clicking sound different from the rubber of his sneakers, Wilson would turn his head to see the dog, his tongue wet and wagging along outside his mouth, his ears bent down and brown. Wilson didn't mind this. He thought it was almost cute. Whenever he came up to Ferryway, Wilson would stop to scope out the traffic and Buzzbee would turn around and click back up the road to his own house.
But then Buzzbee started using his teeth to say hello. He was more eager to join Wilson when he came by and would catch up with him quickly. Buzzbee began to lunge and catch on to Wilson's right hand when his arms swished down during his jog. Wilson did not like this. Though Buzzbee wasn't breaking the skin, the feel of his teeth, the slime and jelly-like insides of his jowls bothered Wilson. The dog, he thought, was most definitely being rude. He would snatch his hand back up to his side when this happened and attempt to be harsh, saying such things as, No. Bad Dog. Buzzbee did not mind and repeated the same gesture the next time Wilson came around.
One day, Buzzbee tried to hold Wilson's hand more than once. He lunged up and yipped at his hand three times during the time it took Wilson to get from the beginning of the street down to the STOP sign at Ferryway. Wilson was not pleased. He tried yelling at the dog; he even sped up, but this did no good and only drew up his breath. By the time he came back across the four-lane street on his way home, he was drained more than usual. This shortness of breath combined with the leaden heaviness within Wilson's knees and calves, and he groaned inside when he saw Buzzbee running up to him again. The dog immediately began to jump, and Wilson swatted back at him, knocking the dog just above the eye. Buzzbee raged at this and with a growl and a bark, bit into Wilson's right arm, just above the wrist. They both stumbled to the ground and Wilson kicked and shrieked and Buzzbee snapped and barked. Wilson got up from the pile of leaves into which he had fallen and ran back to his house, leaving the growling dog staring him down at the edge of the road. The only thing he could think about as his face began to twist like a rag into tears was wiping the slobber off his hands and onto his shirt.
Four stitches. Wilson hadn't checked himself out in the mirror as of late. He usually did this before showering in the morning to see how his exercise was coming along. He couldn't notice any improvement. But in the Minor Medical Center, he stood, leaning over the rubber bed, the one with an additional covering of waxy paper, with his shorts pulled down in the back so that his butt was fully exposed. He held his shirt up a few inches so the nurse would have no trouble administering the shot. While he waited, trying not to think of what his butt might look like from that angle and under such conditions, he caught his reflection in one of the full-length mirrors on the sidewall. His belly hung down over the elastic waistline of his shorts, the front part of which was still up. Was that the same amount of loose belly that had always been there? he wondered. He couldn't tell. He did know that it was pale, as white as the waxy paper that it was almost touching. He braced himself for the shot.
A few days later as he was waiting for his mother in the carpool line at school, he spotted Susan. She was waving ecstatically at him and running. He had never seen her this happy. He thought he even heard giggling. His hands began to sweat. Should I wave back? He wanted to reach out, to catch her as she flew towards him, but at the moment he realized her eyes were not looking at him, but just above him, beyond him, to something he couldn't see, he crammed his hands back into his sticky pockets. She was only running to her father, who was standing there, holding a set of car keys. She commenced to hugging him and thanking him and so forth. She had turned fifteen the day before, and as it was now Monday, her father had delivered her present. A new navy blue Saturn. After the hugging, she took the keys from his hand and hopped around to the driver's side. They drove off together, and Wilson turned back around and waited for his ride. He told himself that his arm hurt too much to wave, and when he looked at the stitches, black and barbed and covered with a medicinal, sticky ooze, he thought he did feel a dull pain. He hadn't told his parents that it was the rottweiler from up the street. He said it was just some random mutt whom he hadn't ever seen before and was sure would never be back around. He resisted any suggestions to call the wildlife authorities. For some reason, he felt embarrassed that he had let the dog get to him.
The next Saturday morning Wilson decided that he was ready to start running again. It was an oddly warm November morning, more like the beginning of summer than the beginning of winter. He was happy to be getting outside, proud of himself and determined to re-institute his habit, dog or no dog, and run by the special house.
Of course, as soon as he turned onto the neighborhood street leading up to the busier one, there the dog sat on its haunches, panting, waiting. Wilson tried to ignore him. He ran with his head down, his eyes stuck to the asphalt immediately in front of him. When Wilson passed, Buzzbee stopped panting and sucked his tongue back in his mouth, and the only part of him that moved was his head as he watched Wilson jog past on the other side of the street. And just about the time Wilson thought he had gotten past him for good - fifty yards or so - Buzzbee let out a bark and bolted.
For a moment, Wilson tried to deny what he had heard, but as soon as he turned his head and saw the dog, teeth out, approaching, he quickened to a sprint. Buzzbee caught up quickly. Wilson tried to kick at him and run fast at the same time, but this had little success. Buzzbee would charge and snap at his ankles, dodge one of Wilson's kicks and then pull back and bark. All of this frightened Wilson even more and he tried to speed up. His arm was hurting and he imagined it was bleeding now, though he didn't have time to actually check and see.
He stumbled and he felt Buzzbee's hot breath coming onto the backs of his thighs and he pushed himself back up, pebbles and bits of asphalt stuck to his hands. He turned and saw Buzzbee even closer now, not giving up, barking even louder, only a few inches away from leaving another mark. It was then that Wilson got the idea to lead him into Ferryway. I'll show you, Dog, he thought. Wilson stopped kicking, sped up, and hollered over his shoulder to spurn him on. Come on. Come on, Dog. You can get me.
They reached Ferryway Street. Wilson slowed down, trying to get a glance at the traffic in order to make his sprint. It was close, but clear enough: a mini-van and a Jeep on one side, a convertible and a SUV coming from the other. Just enough room, Wilson thought. He gave one more encouraging, You almost got me, Dog to Buzzbee - then he ran for it.
Wilson's sneakers squeaked on the pavement when he sprinted, and Buzzbee was with him, his clicking claws no longer audible amidst Wilson's panicked breathing, amidst the horns. Wilson shut his eyes - his whole body was in a blind, flying leap.
Then, it was over. Wilson was confused. The driver of the Jeep was confused. The people passing by were confused; they slowed down to gape through their windows, as if the accident were on display in an exhibit, except that they were the ones under glass. The driver was remarkably sympathetic, touching Wilson on the shoulder ever few seconds, though Wilson was not sure why, as he was not weeping or shaking. His knees were bleeding from skidding onto the concrete sidewalk after his fall. But otherwise, he was fine. The man, the boy, and the dog - all were still for minutes. Wilson knew this was important, that for some reason this was a moment that he would remember, that this was the kind of moment that entire lives are bent around, and that he could feel nothing but elation. He could feel the hand of the driver on his shoulder, and the dog's body still warm and lying on the tops of his feet. But the cars swam through Wilson's eyes and the refrain of honkings was like a foreign song he could not interpret and Wilson felt as if he was a balloon that had been cut loose, as if he were launching through the atmosphere, baptized by his own sweat on his way into a new life. He even glanced at his stitched arm, still barbed and sticky, and felt no pain.
He took off his shirt to cover the dog's head, and before he lifted him up into his arms, he checked the name on the tag: Buzzbee. As he walked off with the dog - after exchanging numbers and explanations and forgiveness and condolences with the driver and trying the entire time to show remorse, to feel remorse - he noticed his white belly, illuminated in the morning light, smears of blood as red as lipstick. The dog's carcass was pressing the top of his belly into a fat roll, just under his pecs. He immediately imagined Susan driving by in her Saturn, her hand - a sparkle of a silver ring - tucking a wisp of hair behind her ear, her eyes pricking him through the window. A nervous nausea turned in his stomach and guilt began to sink into him. He paused at the edge of Ferryway at the bottom of the hill. He knew she was not going to drive by but the thought - the image panning in slow motion across his mind - that she would see him as he was - bloody and white and fat and in the middle of the road, made him feel sick. He decided that he would never return to that house - the house he had imagined was hers. And so Wilson carried the covered body in his arms, scraping his heels over the asphalt the entire way home.
