“If you want to see yearbook photos of people who did what they thought God wanted them to do, go check out any state’s Department of Corrections file of mugshots,” she told her son often, as she had told her husband, Finis, before he gave up and died of a heart attack in the middle of trying to break the world record for smoking cigarettes in a twenty-four-hour period.
Mack Sloan drives up to Calloustown High and sees Brunson wearing vintage gray drawstring sweatpants down at the cinder track that surrounds what might have been a football field. There isn’t but one goalpost, for the Calloustown Ostriches won a game due to forfeit three years earlier — the team from Forty-Five had been forced to suspend all of its players at the last minute when its appeal was denied by the South Carolina High School Athletic League, in regards to having a number of thirty-year-old players who didn’t go to college — and the fans in attendance stormed the vacant field and with the use of Harmon Harrell’s tractor knocked over the goalpost and carried it into town. From that point on, when a visiting team scored a touchdown, or wanted to attempt a field goal, the teams had to turn around if indeed they had no goalpost in which to direct a kick.
“You’re Brunson?” Mack says when he gets down to the field. “You’re Brunson’s mom?” he asks the woman who stands there, holding what appears to be wide rubber bands meant for strapping furniture to a flatbed’s frame. “I’m Mack Sloan.”
Mrs. Pettigru says, “I wouldn’t be allowing this to happen if there was homecolleging.”
Mack says, “What are those things?” and points at the rubber bands.
He hasn’t looked closely at his prospect yet. Brunson wears eyeglasses that appear to be fake, the lenses are so thick. He has them tied to his head with what looks like a bra strap. And in a voice that Mack would later describe as something between a tracheotomist’s and a kettle spewing steam, Brunson says, “Because of the cardiovascular limits of the heart vis-à-vis oxygen intake, I tie my forelimbs with these industrial bands before I run so that my most vital organ vis-à-vis the running process does not need to validate anything between my glenohumeral joint and my phalanges.”
Mack looks at Brunson. He thinks, what if aliens come down to the planet and discover this guy? Wouldn’t they wonder if they’d never left home? He says, “All right. You seem to be the kind of guy who might have pre-med in his future.”
Mrs. Pettigru, wearing a cotton-print dress, says, “My Brunson has always been interested in animals. Does your college have a veterinary program?”
“I like cheetahs,” Brunson says. “They’re the fastest. If this school had been called the Calloustown Cheetahs, I might have had to fight my mother about allowing me to matriculate. What’s your college’s mascot?”
“It’s a duck. They’re not much on land, but they can fly. Some of them can fly.” Mack looks down at Brunson’s shoes. The boy wears a pair of regular, flat and slick-bottomed Keds-brand canvas boatshoes. One of the Pettigrus took a bottle of Wite-Out and marked a Nike swoosh on the sides. Mack says, “Duck.”
Brunson twists and ties his upper biceps with the two rubber bands. He sits down cross-legged on the track. His mother says, “It’s important for Brunson to achieve the correct amount of tingling in his arms before he runs a lap.”
Mack Sloan thinks, there’s no way I’ll ever recommend offering this kid a scholarship. He thinks, people think members of our track team are freaks already? — get a load of this new guy! He thinks, hell, I’m here — I might as well see what happens. He thinks, cardiovascular vis-à-vis cheetah glenohumeral joint and my phalanges veterinary school vital organ homecolleging.
“A fun thing to do is have me run a quarter mile without the additional garments, and then compare and contrast what happens once my heart no longer has to pump blood to needless expanses,” Brunson says.
“Okay,” Mack says. He’d dealt with runners who insisted on smoking pot the night before a race, runners who drank six beers the night before a race, runners who had to fuck two different women the night before a race and then another one a couple hours before the starting gun. Mack had dealt with runners — world-class runners — who insisted on eating sushi, or Vienna sausages, or Fig Newtons. He’d had runners who had to watch The Godfather: Part III the night before a big race, and others who insisted that virgins recite the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins.
But not this.
“You about ready?” Mack says.
Betty Pettigru says, “I’m going to take my spot in the stands. I always sit in the stands. When I’m in the stands, my son’s never lost a race.”
“Wait a minute,” Mack says. “So you’re on the track team here?”
“I’ve never been in an actual race,” Brunson says. “Do you think that might make a difference? I mean, psychologically, it might make me run either faster or slower.”
While I’m down this way, Mack Sloan thinks, I might as well go down to Myrtle Beach and kill that Coach Strainer dude.
“Uh-oh,” Brunson says. He stands up, and half lifts one arm toward the parking lot. “Somebody’s here.”
Mack turns around to see every man whom he’d met at the bus depot. They walk down the embankment. One of them says, “We just thought we’d come on down here and see if we got us a savior.”
Mack pulls the stopwatch out of his pocket. He says, “I didn’t even think to ask — are you sure this is a quarter-mile track? It looks like a quarter mile, but are you sure?”
“It’s 440 yards,” Brunson says. “I’ve circled it ten times with the Lufkin MW18TP Measuring Wheel, and it came out to 13,200 feet. And then I divided that by three, which comes out to 4400 yards, and then divided that by ten, which comes out to 440 yards. I thought about doing a hundred laps, just to make sure, but it was getting dark and I still had to write a term paper for my mother comparing and contrasting the Suez Canal with the Panama Canal. A cheetah can swim across both of them, by the way. A cheetah’s not the fastest swimmer, but it can swim.”
“I’m ready!” Betty Pettigru yells from the wooden bleachers.
The bus depot men arrive trackside. One of them says, “I don’t know.”
Mack Sloan says to Brunson, “You don’t need any blocks or anything? Don’t you think you better stretch, or warm up a little? You might want to take off your sweats, too.”
Munny Munson says, “I still believe we got a better shot at making Calloustown famous if we become home to a serial killer, as opposed to a spastic.” He says, “Hell, Betty Pettigru’s ex-husband had the right idea, up until he smoked himself to death.”
“I’d like to fuck her,” one of the Harrells says. “She ain’t nobody’s sister.”
Brunson says, “I’ve heard about those block things. Do you think they’ll really help?” He pulls off his sweatpants to reveal what may or may not be an old pair of his mother’s hot pants from the 1970s. When he toes the line, his arms swing half useless.
_______
“Go!” Mack Sloan says. He’s performed this task so many times he can’t remember. He has timed prospective athletes in thirty states. He’s gone down to Central America and found sprinters, South America for middle-distance runners, and Africa for long-distance runners.
Brunson takes off. His mother bellows, “Catch that big cat, honey, catch that big cat!” and makes some odd noises in between, like long, extended Ummms that might point toward a nervous tic, or Tourette’s. Mack Sloan keeps his eyes on his prospect, but the Munson and Harrell men stare up toward the stands. Betty Pettigru’s mid-sentence, guttural noises — by the time Brunson hits the 220 mark — now sound as if they’re caused by orgasm.