"Your old one. The Timex. The black one with the light." Jesse's voice was flat now, like he'd decided he was going to say everything and get it over with. "He took it off your dresser when he was nine. He's worn it in every race since freshman year. On his right wrist, under a sweatband, so the officials don't make him take it off. He doesn't even use it. The battery's been dead since tenth grade. He says it's for luck. He says it doesn't mean anything." Jesse looked out the window again. "He told me not to tell you. He said you'd make it into a thing."
I had to pull over. I'm not proud of it. We didn't have time, and I knew we didn't have time, and I pulled onto the gravel shoulder by a mailbox that said FENDLEY and put the truck in park and sat there with both hands on the wheel, and I could not see the road.
Nobody said anything for maybe fifteen seconds. Haskell didn't tell me to go. Jesse didn't either. Then Haskell said, quietly, looking straight ahead through the windshield where the feathers had been, "My daddy timed my record."
I wiped my face with the heel of my hand and looked at him.
"Nineteen ninety-eight. Region meet, Waycross. Hand-timed. They didn't have the electric timing at the small meets yet down there. You had three officials with stopwatches at the finish line and they took the middle one." He was turning his phone over and over in his hand. "My daddy was the head timer. He was a math teacher at Satilla County Middle and he'd been timing meets for twenty years. Dub Haskell. Everybody knew him. He stood at the finish line with the other two and he clicked his watch when I crossed and then he collected all three watches and wrote the times on the card himself, and walked the card over to the meet referee. Eight forty-nine point four. The record before that was eight forty-nine point nine. I broke it by half a second." He stopped turning the phone. "I never saw the watches. I never saw the card. I didn't think about it. Why would I? I was sixteen. I'd just broken the state record. I thought I was going to go to Arkansas and run in the Olympics."
"What happened?"
"My daddy happened." He laughed, short and with no humor in it. "That summer he sat me down at the kitchen table and told me the University of Arkansas wasn't going to give a full ride to a kid from Satilla County who was five-nine and a hundred and thirty pounds, and that running in circles wasn't a future, and that he'd talked to the football coach, and that I was fast enough to play corner, and that a man needed a sport people came to watch. He'd played football. He loved football. He went to every game I ever played in, senior year. Stood at the fence. Never missed one." Haskell looked at me then. "So I played corner. Got a walk-on spot at Valdosta State. Got a degree. Got into coaching. I've never run another race in my life."
"Coach—"
"In 2009 my daddy died," he said. "Pancreas. At the funeral home in Waycross, a man came up to me I didn't know, an old man. He said he'd been one of the timers at that region meet. One of the three. He said, Your daddy sure was proud of that record. And then he said, kind of laughing, I always thought I had you at fifty flat. That's all he said. I always thought I had you at fifty flat. And he shook my hand and went and looked at the casket." Haskell put the phone face-down on his knee. "Fifty flat's not a record. Fifty flat's a tenth slower than the old one. And the card's gone and the watches are gone and my daddy's gone, and I'll never know. For seventeen years I've looked at that number in the record book and I've wondered if it's mine or if it's his. If he put his thumb on it. Because he wanted it so bad for me. Or for him. I don't even know which."
The truck idled. A wren landed on the FENDLEY mailbox and left again.
"Your boy's going to take it tonight," Haskell said, "and he's going to take it on electric timing, to the hundredth, and nobody's daddy is going to write it down on a card. And I want to be there. I've wanted it gone for seventeen years." He looked at the dashboard clock. "And I don't want you to be the man at the fence of the wrong race, Roy. I've been that man's son. Drive the truck."
I drove the truck.