Pellam thinks about suggesting a new name for the film: Devil’s Playground. But he knows in his heart that the director will never buy it — he just loves his misspelled title.
Fine. It’s his movie, not mine.
As he ends the call Pellam feels eyes aimed his way. He looks up and believes that Rita is casting him a flirt, which is not by any means a bad thing.
Then he glances at her with a smile and sees she is, in fact, looking a few degrees past him. It’s toward a young man standing beside a revolving dessert display, featuring cakes that seem three feet high. He’s looking back at her. The nervous boy is handsome if pimply. He sits down at the end of the counter, isolated so he can gab a bit with her in private. He also will, Pellam knows, leave a five-dollar tip, though he can’t really afford it, on a ten-dollar tab, which will both embarrass and enthrall her.
Ain’t love grand?
The pie comes in for a landing and Pellam indulges. It’s good, no question.
His thoughts wander. He’s considering his time in Paradice, wait, no in Gurney, and he decides that, just like State Route 14, life sometimes is a switchback. You never know what’s going to happen around the next hairpin, or who’s who and what’s what.
But other times the road doesn’t curve at all. It’s straight as a ruler for miles and miles. What you see ahead is exactly what you’re going to get, no twists, no surprises. And the people you meet are just what they seem to be. The environmentalist is simply passionate about saving the earth. The hitchhiking poet is nothing more or less than a self-styled soul mate of Jack Kerouac, rambling around the country in search of who knows what. The sheriff is a hardworking pro with a conscience and a grandkid who needs particular looking after.
And the sexy cowgirl with red nails and a feather in her Stetson is exactly the bitch you pretty much knew in your heart she’d turn out to be.
THE COMPETITORS
Olympic stadiums are unlike any other structures on earth.
From the 1936 sports complex in Berlin to the 1976 Montreal games’ soaring edifice, taller than the Washington Monument…all such stadiums exude true magnificence, each a testament to a pivotal moment in human history.
The power, though, derives less from architecture than from the spirit of competitions past and competitions to come, an energy filling the massive spaces like the cries of spectators. An Olympic stadium is where you test yourself against your fellow man. For that defines human nature.
This philosophical thought was going through the mind of Yuri Umarov as he gazed at the world’s most recent Olympic stadium, brilliantly conceived to resemble a bird’s nest, its image rippling in the heat.
Yuri, sitting, coated in sweat, beside the cinder track of a Beijing high school, where, along with dozens of other people — local and international — he’d been working out all morning.
Competition. Winning. Bringing glory to your countrymen.
He felt this spirit now, this energy.
Though he also felt exhausted. And the glory he sought seemed extremely elusive. His legs and side hurt from pounding along the track the hundredth time since 5 a.m. His lungs hurt from inhaling the thick air. The government here had supposedly been working to cleanse the atmosphere but to Yuri, a country boy from the mountains, it was like training in a roomful of smokers.
He looked up and saw his mentor approach.
Gregor Dallayev, white haired, twice his age, walked briskly. Still athletic himself, the man, who sported a massive mustache, was wearing white slacks and a dark shirt with a collar. Sweat stains blossomed under his arms, but he appeared otherwise unmoved by the fierce summer heat.
He was also unmoved by Yuri’s performance.
“You are sitting down,” Gregor said impatiently in Russian.
Yuri stood immediately. He took the water the man held and drank half down, then poured the rest on his head and shoulders. He was breathing harder than he needed to, trying to convince the older man that he was truly exhausted. Gregor’s sharp eye studied the athlete with a look that said, “Don’t try to fool me. I’ve seen that before.”
“That last run was not acceptable.” He held up a stopwatch. “Look at that time.”
Sweat clouded Yuri’s eyes and he could hardly see the watch itself, much less the digital numbers.
“I was…” Yuri was going to come up with an excuse, a cramp, a slippery patch of cinders. But Gregor would not accept excuses from anyone. And in fact they tasted bad in Yuri’s mouth, too. Such was his upbringing and training, during his nineteen years of life. “I’m sorry.”
Gregor, though, relented, smiling. “Beastly sun. Not like home.”
“No, sir. It’s not like home at all.”
Then, as they walked back to the starting line, Gregor was once again the taskmaster. “Do you know what your problem is?”
There were undoubtedly many of them. Yuri found it easier to say, “No, sir.”
His mentor said softly, “You are not seeing the second ribbon.”
“The second ribbon?”
Gregor nodded. “In there,” he said, nodding at the stadium sitting in the hazy sun, “in there, the best runners will not be running to break the tape with their chests at the finish line.”
“They won’t?”
“No!” the mentor scoffed. “They will not even see the tape. They won’t even see the finish line. They will be concentrating on the second ribbon.”
“Where is the second ribbon, sir?”
“It is beyond the finish line. Maybe ten feet, maybe twenty. Maybe one.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen it.”
“You don’t see it, not with your eyes. You see it in here.” He touched his chest. “In your heart.”
Yuri waited for him to finish, as he knew the older man would.
“That is the ribbon you must reach. It’s the goal beyond the goal. See, inferior runners will slow as they approach the end of the race. But you won’t. You will continue on faster and faster, even though you can go no faster. You must pass through the finish line as if it’s not there and fly straight to the second ribbon.”
“I think I understand, sir.”
Gregor looked at him closely. “Yes, I think you do. Tomorrow, any time over thirty seconds is failure. Your whole journey here will have been wasted. You don’t wish to disgrace yourself and your country, do you?”
“Of course not, sir.”
“Good. Let’s try it again. Your last run was thirty-one point two seconds. That’s not enough. Now, take your mark. And this time, run for the second ribbon.”
Billy Savitch was the youngest on the American team.
In his thin nylon running suit, emblazoned with the tricolor U.S. flag, he was wandering around the American compound, nodding hello to the athletes he knew, pausing to chat with the staff. And ignoring the flirts from the girls. Billy had no interest in them but you could understand why they’d smile his way. He was rugged and handsome and charming. With his crew cut and sharp eyes and chiseled face he looked like a cowboy — which they still had a fair amount of in his home state of Texas.
This was the second time he’d been out of the country and the first time to the Olympics, though, of course, he watched the games every four years — in the past on the big screen TV at his parents’ house and, the last one, on his very small screen TV, in the house that he shared with his wife and baby daughter.
And, my God, just think about it. Here he was in China, part of the most famous sporting event of the world. It was the best thing that had happened to him ever, short of being a husband and father.
Though there was a bit of a taint on the experience.
His junior status. He was just a green kid. And, as an all-star running back on his team at home, it was hard for him to be relegated to the bottom of the barrel. Not that his colleagues didn’t treat him politely. It’s just that they rarely even noticed him.