"Four twenty-four five. Perfect. He was perfect through the mile." She clicked something. "And then he went sixty-six-nine. He's by himself. The Hightower boy sat on him for six hundred meters and then dropped off like I told you."
Luke came out of the far turn and onto the homestretch on the opposite side of the field and ran past the finish line and the bleachers, and a sound came up off the bleachers, not a roar but a ripple, people leaning forward. The bleachers were mostly full of Amicalola parents and kids from the other teams, wearing other colors, and they were cheering for my son anyway. They knew. All of them knew what was happening except me.
He came around the near turn toward us.
I want to tell you what it was like when he came by. I'd driven thirty miles up a mountain to see it and I'd been dreading it every foot of the way, I realize now, and I still don't have the words. It was very fast and very quiet. That's the thing I remember. In football everything is loud, the pads and the grunting and the whistles and the crowd. He came by us on the other side of the chain-link not six feet away and the only sound was his breathing and his feet. His breath was coming in a rhythm, two in and two out, hard, but even, like a saw going through wood. His spikes on the rubber made a sound like somebody flicking a fingernail on a cardboard box, very fast. His face was gray. His mouth was open. There was spit on his chin. He was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life, and I'm including the day he was born.
He didn't look at us. He didn't look at anything. He looked at the track ten feet in front of his shoes.
And there was a red sweatband on his right wrist.
"Thirty-four," Marlene shouted as he passed, reading her watch. "Thirty-four, Luke! Get on it!"
Then he was gone up the backstretch, and Marlene turned and saw me for the first time. She looked at me, and then at Haskell, and then at Jesse in his cleats, and then back at me, and her eyebrows went up under her visor about an inch.
"Mr. Varner," she said.
"Ma'am."
That was all. She went back to her watches. I don't know what else either of us would have said.
He came through the finish line the sixth time and Marlene clicked and said, "Six thirty-eight six. Sixty-seven-two." She said it under her breath, mostly to herself, and then she said, louder, to Haskell, "Sixty-seven-two."