I had my wallet out. I had a twenty. I was trying to get the twenty out with fingers that would not work.
"Ma'am," Haskell said, very calm, "there's a boy on that track about to break the state record, and this is his daddy."
She looked at me. She looked at the twenty in my hand. Then she looked over her shoulder at the track, where you could see, between the end of the bleachers and the long-jump pit, a thin line of runners going down the backstretch under the lights, and she said, "Well, go on, then," and sat back down, and I put the twenty on her table anyway and didn't wait for change.
Haskell went left, not right. Right was the home bleachers and the finish line and the crowd. Left was a gravel path along the outside of the fence around the far turn, toward the backstretch, where there was nobody but a few kids sitting on coolers and a woman standing alone at the chain-link with a red visor on and two stopwatches around her neck.
"Marlene's at the two hundred," Haskell said. "That's where we want to be."
I ran. I hadn't run in years, not really, not since my knee, and my knee let me know about it. I ran in my steel-toes on the gravel with my keys bouncing in my pocket and my breath going ragged, behind a forty-six-year-old football coach who was running like a deer, and behind me I could hear Jesse's cleats clattering. As I came around the end of the turn, a boy went by on the other side of the fence, close enough to touch. Not Luke. A kid in a green singlet with AV on the chest, his face red, his arms swinging wide. And then two more after him, a few seconds apart. And then nobody for a long way.
I looked up the track. Way up ahead of the boy in green, going into the far turn by the finish line, there was a boy in red, all by himself.
I knew him by the way he ran. I can't tell you how. I hadn't watched him run in three and a half years. But I knew him by the way he held his head, very still, like it was set on a post, and the way his arms didn't swing so much as hang and tick, and the way the whole rest of him seemed to happen underneath that still head without any fuss at all, the legs turning over, the feet coming down light. He was so far ahead. He was more than half a lap ahead of the boy in green. He looked like he was running a different race.
Marlene Ogletree didn't look up when we came to the fence beside her. She was a small woman in her fifties, tan and freckled, with her gray hair pulled through the back of the visor, and she had one stopwatch in each hand and her eyes on the far side of the track.
"Where is he," Haskell said.
"Five thirty-one at two thousand," she said. "He went sixty-six-nine for the fifth. He's slipping, Carl."
"How was the mile?"