So I took him to the middle school track, the old asphalt one that used to be behind the Pettit Middle gym, before they put the new one in. I had my Timex Ironman on, the black one with the Indiglo light that I'd bought at the Walmart in Gainesville in 1999 with my first paycheck from the EMC, and I showed him how a lap was a quarter of a mile and four of them was a mile, and I said, "Go," and pushed the button.
He went out like a scalded cat, the way kids do, and then about halfway around the first lap he slowed down. I thought he was quitting. I almost yelled at him. But he didn't quit. He just found something, some speed that his body liked, and he settled into it and he stayed there, and he stayed there, and he stayed there. I remember standing on the inside of the turn with my thumb on the button watching him come around the second time, and the third time, and I remember that he didn't look at me. Most kids look at you. Jesse, when he was nine, if he did anything at all he looked at me first to see if I'd seen. Luke went around that track four times and never once looked at me. He looked at the track about ten feet in front of his shoes.
He finished and I stopped the watch and it said 6:41.
I didn't know what that meant. I still remember the number because I've thought about it a hundred times since, but I didn't know, standing there, if 6:41 was good or bad for a nine-year-old. It sounded slow to me. A mile sounded like something that should take four minutes, because that was the number you heard. So I said, "Huh."
That was the whole thing I said. Huh.
He stood there with his hands on his head breathing hard and he looked at me then, finally, and waited. And I didn't have anything else. I didn't know what to tell him. With a ball I would have known. I would have said keep your elbow up or step into it or follow through. I didn't know a single thing to say to a boy about running in a circle, so I said "Huh," and then I looked at the Timex, because it was a quarter to eleven, and I said, "We got to get your brother to his game."
On the way home in the truck he asked me if he could have the watch. I said it was my work watch. He didn't ask again. About a month after that the Timex went missing off my dresser and I figured I'd left it on a pole somewhere, and I bought a new one, a Casio, and I didn't think about it again for a long time.
The second time I tried was his freshman year. Cross-country. He'd gone out for it because a teacher made him, I think, or because a boy he knew was doing it, and by October he was the fastest freshman on the team, which Tonya told me, and she said I should go to a meet. So I went to one. It was the region meet at a park outside Dahlonega, on a Saturday morning with the leaves turning, and I stood in a field of about four hundred parents in camp chairs and folding blankets and I had no idea where to stand.
That's the thing nobody tells you about cross-country. There's no stands. There's no field. They start in a long line across a meadow, two hundred boys in their singlets like a cavalry charge, and a man fires a gun, and they all run off into the woods. And then they're gone. You can't see them. People around me knew what to do. I stood by the start line like an idiot for six minutes. Then I followed a woman in a Lumpkin County sweatshirt who seemed to know where she was going, and I got to the top of a hill just as the front of the race came through.
He went by me in about four seconds. He was in a pack of maybe fifteen boys and he was in the back of it, and I yelled, "Go, Luke!" and he didn't look over, and then he was gone into the trees again. I stood there. I'd driven forty minutes for four seconds.
I saw him one more time, at the finish, coming down a long chute of orange flags with his face all twisted up, and I yelled again and I don't think he heard me. He finished twenty-third, I found out later. Out of two hundred and some. The top fifteen got medals. When I found him afterward he was sitting in the grass behind the team tent with his spikes off and his feet black with mud, and he looked up and saw me and his face did something I didn't like. It was surprise, mostly. And then something under it, a kind of embarrassment, like I'd walked in on him in the bathroom.
"Dad," he said. "You didn't have to come to this."