Highway 52 goes north out of Pettit past the Dollar General and the Harlow Farms feed mill and the long rows of poultry houses, and then it starts climbing. I had driven that road a thousand times in a bucket truck. I'd never driven it like that. I had the F-250 up to sixty-five on the straights and I was taking the curves at forty-five where the yellow signs said thirty, and the cooler in the bed was sliding back and forth and banging against the wheel wells.
Nobody said anything for the first few miles. Haskell had his phone in his lap. Jesse was in the back seat behind me and I could see him in the mirror, sitting forward with his forearms on his knees, still in his cleats, the black eye-paint smeared on his cheekbones from practice.
"What's it mean," I finally said. "Sixty-six."
Haskell looked over at me.
"You said he wants to go out in sixty-six. I don't know what that means. I don't know what any of it means." I was gripping the wheel at ten and two like a student driver. "I'm asking."
He was quiet for a second, and then he told me, and he told me the way he'd tell a freshman a blocking scheme, plain and in order. A lap was four hundred meters. The thirty-two hundred was eight laps. Sixty-six seconds a lap, every lap, the same, eight times, came out to eight minutes and forty-eight seconds. That was the plan. Run even. Run every lap the same. Don't go out too fast in the first one because you feel good, because everybody feels good in the first one, and if you go out in sixty-two because you feel good, you pay for it in the sixth lap with interest. The sixth lap was where it got decided. The sixth lap was where you found out who you were.
"He'll be by himself," Haskell said. "That's the hard part. Nobody in that race can go with him past the first half mile. He'll be out front with nobody to pull him and nobody to chase. The whole thing's in his head. He's got to make his body hit sixty-six with nothing but a clock telling him if he's right."
"How does he know? If he's right?"
"Marlene'll call his splits. She'll stand at the two hundred mark with her watch and yell the time at him every lap. And there's a clock at the finish. He'll see the number every time he comes through."
"So he just looks at the number."
"He just looks at the number." Haskell almost smiled. "And then he does arithmetic while he's dying. Sixty-six, sixty-six, sixty-seven, okay, I'm a second down, I've got to get it back. And getting it back costs more than it would've cost to never lose it. That's what he's doing for nine minutes."
I thought about that. I thought about my son going around that asphalt track behind the middle school at nine years old with my Timex on my wrist, never once looking at me. He'd been looking at the track ten feet in front of his shoes. He'd been doing arithmetic. He'd been doing it since he was nine.