"I heard," Haskell said.
"What's that mean," I said. "Is that bad?"
Haskell didn't take his eyes off the track. "He's a second and change behind where he wants to be. He needs to go two-ten-seven for the last eight hundred to get under. Sixty-five and change. Twice." He swallowed. "That's the sixth lap. That's the one I told you about."
"Can he do it?"
"I don't know, Roy. That's why they run it."
The boy in green came by us, and then the other two. Luke was coming around the near turn again. Haskell had both hands on the fence now, his fingers through the wire.
Jesse yelled first. Jesse cupped his hands and yelled, "Let's go, Luke!" the way you'd yell it at a football game, the way I'd taught him, and his voice cracked in the middle. Marlene shouted the split. And I opened my mouth and I didn't know what to yell. That's the God's honest truth. Seventeen years and thirty miles and I stood at the fence with my mouth open and nothing in it, because everything I knew how to say was about something else. Step into it. Elbow up. Eyes. Follow through. None of it was for him.
So I just yelled his name. "Luke." Not even loud. And then louder, as he went by: "Luke!"
He didn't look. I didn't expect him to. But he went past us and up the backstretch, and it seemed to me, and maybe it was only that I needed it to, that the saw-sound of his breathing got shorter, and the fingernail sound got faster, and his arms started to come up.
"Thirty-two," Marlene said, clicking. "Thirty-two-one at the two hundred. That's sixty-four pace. He's going."
He came through the bell lap at the finish line, and somebody up there in the bleachers rang an actual bell, a big brass cowbell kind of thing, and the PA announcer said something I couldn't make out, and the ripple in the stands became a sound, a real one, people standing up. Marlene clicked.
"Seven forty-three eight!" she yelled, and she was yelling at Haskell now, not under her breath. "Sixty-five-two! Carl! Seven forty-three eight!"