I looked in the mirror. He was looking out the side window, at the guardrail and the drop past it.
"You ever wonder why I'm good?" he said.
"You're good because you work."
"I'm good because you're out there," he said. "Every night. You're out there every night with the rangefinder and the bag of balls, and you're at the fence every practice, and you see every single thing I do. Every single thing. I can feel it on the back of my neck when you're watching. I throw a pick and I don't even look at Coach first, I look at the fence, to see your face. Did you know that?" He was still looking out the window. "That's why I'm good. That's a lot of why."
"Well," I said. My throat was tight. "Well, that's—"
"It's not all good, Dad. I'm not saying it's good." He turned and looked at me in the mirror then. "Some days I'd give anything if you weren't at the fence. Some days I'd give anything to throw one bad ball where nobody saw it."
I didn't say anything.
"And Luke," Jesse said, "nobody's ever seen anything he's done. Not one thing. He gets up at five in the morning and goes out in the dark and runs ten miles and nobody sees it. He runs a workout on the track in the rain and nobody sees it. He breaks the school record in the mile and the only person in the stands is Mom, on her day off, and she leaves before the awards because she has to be at the plant. And he comes home and you're in the backyard with me, and he goes up to his room and writes it in his notebook." His voice cracked a little and he cleared it. "He's got like eleven of those notebooks. Every run he's ever done since eighth grade. Did you know that? Every single run. Miles and time and weather. That's his fence. A notebook. That's who watches him."
There was a long passing zone coming up past the Burnt Mill turnoff, a quarter mile of dashed yellow on a straightaway. I knew it the way I knew my own driveway. I waited till the chicken truck was a hundred yards into it and then I put the F-250 in the oncoming lane and floored it, and the diesel roared and the feathers blew off the windshield and we went past those eight stacks of cages so close I could see the chickens' eyes, and I cut back in front of the cab with forty yards to spare before the dashed line ended and the driver laid on his air horn behind us. Haskell didn't say anything. He had one hand flat on the dashboard.
I turned onto Burnt Mill Road. It was narrow and bad, patched blacktop through hardwoods, and I knew it went over the ridge and dropped down into the Amicalola valley on the other side.
"He runs with your watch," Jesse said, behind me.
I didn't understand him at first.