In my neighborhood there is no place to run. One must leave the suburbs to be even a middle-distance runner. Where I live there are four-way stop signs at every intersection; the blocks are short, and those tight-angle corners are hard on the balls of the feet. Also, the sidewalks are threatened by dogs, festooned with the playthings of children, intermittently splashed with lawn sprinklers. And just when there's some running room, there's an elderly person taking up the whole sidewalk, precarious on crutches or armed with quacking cones. With good conscience one does not yell “Track!” to such a person. Even passing the aged at a safe distance, but with my usual speed, seems to alarm them; and it's not my intention to cause heart attacks.
So it's the open road for training, but it's the suburbs I'm in training for. In my condition I am more than a match for a car caught speeding in my neighborhood. Provided they make an even half-hearted halt at the stop signs, they cannot hit over fifty before they have to brake for the next intersection. I always catch up to them. I can travel across lawns, over porches, through swing sets and the children's wading pools; I can burst through hedges, or hurdle them. And since my engine is quiet—and steady, and always in tune—I can hear if other cars are coming; I don't have to stop at the stop signs.
In the end I run them down, I wave them over; they always stop. Although I am clearly in impressive car-chasing condition, that is not what intimidates the speeders. No, they are almost always intimidated by my parenthood, because they are almost always young. Yes, my parenthood is what sobers them, almost every time. I begin simply. “Did you see my children back there?” I ask them, loudly and anxiously. Veteran speeders, upon being asked such a question, are immediately frightened that they have run over my children. They are instantly defensive.
“I have two young children,” I tell them. The drama is deliberate in my voice—which, with this sentence, I allow to tremble a little. It is as if I am holding back tears, or unspeakable rage, or both. Perhaps they think I am hunting a kidnapper, or that I suspect them of being child molesters.
“What happened?” they invariably ask.
“You didn't see my children, did you?” I repeat. “A little boy pulling a little girl in a red wagon?” This is, of course, a fiction. I have two boys, and they're not so little; they have no wagon. They may have been watching television at the time, or riding their bikes in the park—where it's safe, where there are no cars.
“No,” the bewildered speeder says. “I saw children, some children. But I don't think I saw those children. Why?”
“Because you almost killed them,” I say.
“But I didn't see them!” the speeder protests.
“You were driving too fast to see them!” I, say. This is sprung on them as if it were proof of their guilt; I always pronounce this sentence as if it were hard evidence. And they're never sure. I've rehearsed this part so well. The sweat from my hard sprint, by now, drips off my mustache and the point of my chin, streaking the driver's-side door. They know only a father who genuinely fears for his children would run so hard, would stare like such a maniac, would wear such a cruel mustache.
“I'm sorry,” they usually say.
“This is a neighborhood full of children,” I always tell them. “You have other places you can drive fast, don't you? Please, for the children's sake, don't speed here anymore.” My voice, now, is never nasty; it is always beseeching. But they see that a restrained fanatic resides behind my honest, watering eyes.
Usually it's just a young kid. Those kids have a need to dribble a little oil; they want to race the frantic pace of the music on their radios. And I don't expect to change their ways. I only hope they'll do it somewhere else. I concede that the open road is theirs; when I train there, I keep my place. I run in the stuff of the soft shoulder, in the hot sand and gravel, in the beer-bottle glass—among the mangled cats, the maimed birds, the mashed condoms. But in my neighborhood, the car is not king; not yet.
Usually they learn.
After my five-mile run I do fifty-five push-ups, then five hundred-yard dashes, followed by fifty-five situps, followed by fifty-five neck bridges. It's not that I care so much for the number five; it's simply that strenuous and mindless exertion is easier if one doesn't have to keep track of too many different numbers. After my shower (about five o'clock), through the late afternoon, and in the course of the evening, I allow myself five beers.
I do not chase cars at night. Children should not be playing outside at night—in my neighborhood, or in any other neighborhood. At night, I believe, the car is king of the whole modern world. Even the suburbs.
At night, in fact, I rarely leave my house, or allow the members of my family to venture out. But once I went to investigate an obvious accident—the darkness suddenly streaked with headlights pointing straight up and exploding; the silence pierced with a metal screaming and the shriek of ground glass. Only half a block away, in the dark and perfect middle of my street, a Land Rover lay upsidedown and bleeding its oil and gas in a puddle so deep and still I could see the moon in it. The only sound: the ping of heat in the hot pipes and the dead engine. The Land Rover looked like a tank tumbled by a land mine. Great juts and tears in the pavement revealed that the auto had rolled over and over before coming to rest here.
The driver's-side door could be opened only slightly, but enough to miraculously turn on the door light. There in the lit cab, still behind the steering wheel—still upside-down and still alive—was a fat man. He looked unharmed. The top of his head rested gingerly on the ceiling of the cab, which of course was now the floor, but the man seemed only dimly sensitive to this change in his perspective. He looked puzzled, chiefly, by the presence of a large brown bowling ball that sat alongside his head, like another head; he was, in fact, cheek to cheek with this bowling ball, which he perhaps felt touching him as he might have felt the presence of a lover's severed head—formerly resting on his shoulder.
“is that you, Roger?” the man asked. I couldn't tell whether he was addressing me or the bowling ball.
“It is not Roger,” I said, answering for us both.
“That Roger is a moron,” the man explained. “We crossed our balls.”
That the fat man was referring to a bizarre sexual experience seemed unlikely. I assumed that the fat man referred to bowling.
“This is Roger's ball,” he explained, indicating the brown globe against his cheek. “I should have known it wasn't my ball because it wouldn't fit in my bag. My ball will fit in anyone's bag, but Roger's ball is really strange. I was trying to fit it in my bag when the Land Rover went off the bridge.”
Although I knew there was no bridge in my entire neighborhood, I tried to visualize the occurrence. But I was distracted by the gurgle of spilling gasoline, like beer down a thirsty man's throat.
“You should get out,” I told the upside-down bowler.
“I'll wait for Roger,” he replied. “Roger will be right along.”
And sure enough, along come another Land Rover, as if they were a separated twosome from a column of an army on the move. Roger's Land Rover come along with its headlights out and did not stop in time; it plowed into the fat bowler's Land Rover and together, like coupled boxcars, they jarred each other another tough ten yards down the street.
It appeared that Roger was a moron, but I merely asked him the expected question: “Is that you, Roger?”
“Yup,” said the man, whose throbbing Land Rover was dark and creaking; little fragments of its windshield and headlights and grille dropped to the street like noisy confetti.