"Sixty-five five gets it," Haskell said. "Sixty-five five on the last lap gets it. Sixty-five five." He said it over and over like a prayer. His forehead was almost against the fence.
Luke came around the near turn for the last time. He was coming apart. You could see it. His head was still set on the post but the rest of him had started to fight, his shoulders up around his ears and his arms swinging hard across his chest, and his face wasn't gray anymore, it was dark, and his mouth was pulled back off his teeth. He came at us with his eyes on the track. Behind me Jesse was screaming. Marlene was screaming. I was screaming something, I don't know what, and Carl Haskell was not screaming at all. He was standing perfectly still with both hands locked in the chain-link, and as my son went past him he said, not loud, almost gently, "Go on, son. Take it."
Luke went up the backstretch. And here's what I'll always have, and what I won't. I didn't see him finish. Not really. We were on the far side of the field, at the two hundred, and from there the finish line was across the infield, a hundred yards away through the high-jump pit and the pole vault standards, and what I saw was a small red figure come off the last turn into the lights on the homestretch, small and far away, with the whole bleacher standing up behind it, and the figure got smaller and smaller toward the line and then went through it, and then disappeared, down, onto the track, like somebody had cut the string.
On top of the press box there was a scoreboard with a running clock in big orange numbers. I'd been looking at it without seeing it. It had been running the whole time. Now it stopped. It said 8:48.3.
There was a little delay. A few seconds. And then the clock went blank, and came back, and the number on it said 8:48.31.
Haskell let go of the fence.
He let go of it and stepped back from it and put both his hands over his face. He stood like that. He didn't make a sound. And then he put his hands down and his face was wet and he was smiling in a way I'd never seen him smile at a football game, not after the playoff win, not after anything, a strange crooked loose smile like something had been unscrewed in him.
"There it goes," he said. "There it goes."
The public address speakers crackled. A man's voice, an old country voice, came out of them over the whole valley.
"Ladies and gentlemen, the winning time in the boys' thirty-two hundred meter run, Luke Varner of Cagle County, eight minutes, forty-eight point three-one seconds." A pause. You could hear him breathe into the microphone. "Pending ratification, ladies and gentlemen, that is a new Georgia high school state record."
The bleachers came apart. I could hear it from the other side of the field, a sound like a dam going. Marlene Ogletree threw both stopwatches in the air and caught one of them and dropped the other one in the grass and didn't pick it up. Jesse grabbed me around the middle from behind and lifted, which he has not been able to do since he was fourteen, and shouted something into my back that I didn't understand. And I stood at the fence on the far side of a track in a valley I'd never been to and looked across a hundred yards of infield at a pile of red singlets in the middle of the homestretch where my son was underneath somewhere, and I could not get to him.
I'd come thirty miles and I'd got to the fence with a lap and a half to go and I'd yelled his name, and he'd never looked, and now he was across a field under a pile of his friends, and the truth that I had to stand there and take, while the PA announcer said his name again and the bleachers kept on going, was that he'd have run eight forty-eight point three-one whether I'd come or not. He hadn't needed me there. He'd never once needed me there. He'd done the whole thing, all of it, every mile of it, every morning, with a dead watch and a notebook.