He let go of the fence. He looked down at his hands for a second, at the white marks the wire had left across his fingers. Then he looked up at me and I saw his face plain for the first time in four years, and it wasn't a face I knew.
"Because it's mine," he said. "The record. Eight forty-nine point four. Carl Haskell, Satilla County High School, May of 1998." He said it like a man saying his own address. "I was a junior."
Behind him, Jesse had come up close enough to hear. He didn't look surprised. That was the thing I noticed even then, even with everything else, with my ears ringing. My younger son did not look one bit surprised.
"You knew," I said to him.
"Everybody knows, Dad." Jesse said it quietly. "Every runner in the state knows. It's on the wall at the state meet. Luke told me freshman year. Luke's known since freshman year that the guy who coaches me is the guy he's trying to beat."
I stood there with my fingers in the fence.
"Roy," Haskell said. "Get your keys."
"I'm going," Jesse said. He was already pulling the jersey off over his shoulder pads, all in one tangle, without unbuckling anything, the way you're not supposed to. "I'm going, Dad. I don't care. You can take my job and give it to Dillon."
"Nobody's giving anybody's job to Dillon," Haskell said, still looking at me. "Jesse, leave the shells. Put them on the bench." And then, to me, "I'm coming with you."
"You're—"
"You don't know where you're going," he said. "You've never been to Amicalola Valley. You don't know where the gate is or where to park or where to stand. You won't know what you're looking at when you get there." He said all of this flat, not unkind, just true, the way he'd tell a guard he was lining up in the wrong gap. "And I've been watching that number for twenty-eight years. I'd like to be there when it goes."
He came through the gate. My truck was on the gravel thirty yards away. I don't remember walking to it. I remember fumbling the keys and dropping them in the gravel and Jesse picking them up and putting them in my hand, and I remember him climbing into the back of the cab in his practice pants and cleats and a sweat-soaked gray undershirt, his shoulder pads left in a heap on the bench behind us, and Carl Haskell getting in the passenger seat and pulling the door shut and saying, "Go," like he was calling a play. And I remember the clock on the dashboard when I turned the key. It said 6:21.