A Farewell to Legs by Scott Fivelson

A Farewell to Legs
a Hemingway fiction in our time

The man wore khaki running shorts and a khaki tank top with the number 38 and the words, TRANS-AFRICA MARATHON.  He was lying face down in the long wide place with the big trees on both sides.  Is this, he thought, where the great jogging elephants go on their great jogs?  He knew in his head he was not where those who were running the race had run because, wherever those who ran ran, there were always the places they had stepped and the places they had not and the places they had stepped always looked like shoeprints to you until the year the Englishman came with his smug smugness and said they looked rather like your frozen waffles. Englishmen spoiled everything.  But it didn’t matter now, there were no traces of the ones who ran the long run and wore the poly-cotton.  He was worse than lost; he was truly lost.  He lay there, one of the lost generation.

So there he was.  And the hell of it was, he’d started out so well.  He had run ten excellent miles, followed by ten more excellent miles, and then another ten miles that were very good but which only a non-runner would call excellent.  By noon, the sun was big and good but also a little too hot, that’s when he fell behind and then, of course, he’d made that wrong turn at Kenya.  It was some time after that that the thing with the legs started. It seemed to hurt you less if you called it the thing with the legs.  But no matter what you called it, it was getting damned hard to ignore after that last hill, which was good and big and might have been Kilimanjaro.

“I wish the boy was here,” he said aloud, his headband tight.  “But I am glad the great Rodgers, who has won the Boston a great many times, is not here with me in this place. I think it would be a great shame to die in front of the great Rodgers and I know he would have to run around me and then he would lose a tenth of a second.  I would not want to slow down the great Rodgers.  Still, I wish the boy was here.”

The boy, who had gone away in the bush to get wood for a signal fire in the way the man told him, one twig at a time, picking up only the twigs that were good, was hoping he would not be whipped for picking up one or two twigs that were only fair when, hearing the voice of the man, he returned to his side with the stack of wood on his head.

“Bwana want Ace bandage?”

The man looked down below his shorts, where his legs were.  His legs were damned green-looking.  His Nikes were all right though.  A hell of a fine shoe, the Nikes.

“Ace bandage later, Molo.  Start fire,” said the man.

The boy started a fire.  It made smoke that the wind blew.  The wind was coming from the east, the west, the north, or the south.  There is much you do not know when you are lost, thought the man.  In the air high above the runner, the big birds circled, above him because he smelled of death, high above because he hadn’t showered.  So this was how it ended, he thought, racked with the old injuries, and it did not help that you had learned to live right with your feet.  Wherever you had gone the rest of your life, Paris had always stayed with you, and so had the shin splints and the stress fractures and that whole metatarsal business that had developed when you were young and poor and jogging 12 miles a day without proper shoes on its cobblestone streets.

But before the ice packs and the emergency rooms and the surgery and the traction, before all that, there had been Paris and two healthy legs and what else did you need?  He remembered all of it still, even the names of the streets he had jogged on, up rue Bonaparte down rue Mouffetard, and one day he learned eight rues made a mile and, later, the first time he tried to run 96 rues, after the run was over, he was so wet with that thing they called sweat that spring that he had to wring out his beret, and then he had staggered good and slow back to the last café on his route, one of the good cafés where the clientele had not tried to stick out their feet, and had sat at a table and drunk le gatorade until they said they were closing and, even then, when they said they were closing, he had asked for more le gatorade.  He remembered, too, running for his life along the Champs Elysees, where the autobus driver had always honked hello whenever he saw you but then had been too much in the war and now would try to run you down.  But even without the Champs Elysees there were many fine places to jog, and also the places where it was not so fine where the whores jogged, slowly.

Now in his mind he saw the others he had known in Paris then, the ones who wrote or painted when they had a pulled muscle but had come to Paris to jog.  He thought of the one they called Pablo and of how at first he had jogged badly; he was always out of breath, and you called this his blue period.  But later that year, when Pablo ran the Dublin with Joyce, he had the luck, so you said to him, “Let us fly to Strasbourg tomorrow and carbo-load on pastries and then jog to Zurich where we will stop and feel very sore and very wonderful.” And you were sore, too, but not as sore as you were at Scott, who remembered to drink lots of fluids before you went jogging, but always the wrong kind of fluids, and later acquired the annoying habit of jumping into fountains as a cool-down activity.  If you wanted to jog the hard jog in those days, it was better to jog with Miss Stein, who ran good and as well as any man and usually in the men’s division and now you remembered how you begged her not to wear the little shorts and how it broke her heart when the friendly nearsighted Italian with a face like vacations came up and took a photograph of her because he thought she was the Arc de Triomphe.  He apologized, too, in his Italian way, but, of course, it did not help, she would not jog again in the little shorts, ever, and somewhere you still had the negative.

It was later now, because time had passed, which was how, the man knew, it worked in Africa and also in the other places.  It was one time first and then time passed and then it was another time.  This was one of the things he had learned, and also the multiplication tables.

The man lay on his back now in the middle of the long wide place.  The fire had not yet attracted a plane, but it had brought more big birds.  The man looked under his tank top, where his waist was.  He was damned green-looking.  His Nikes were all right though.  A hell of a fine shoe, the Nikes.

Just then a long narrow snake glided across the long wide place and the man watched it go.

The snake jogs fast, but his form is bad, thought the man.  What kind of workout does he hope to get if his feet do not leave the ground?  I think that he is lazy.  Or maybe he has bad knees.  But even if he has bad knees, I know that the snake was meant to run, because he was born with racing stripes.

“Go for it, snake,” the man said aloud.

Now a swarm of big red ants crossed the clearing in a scurrying mass and the man knew it was a marathon.

The ant jogs well and better than the grasshopper who can only do the broad jump, thought the man.  Though there is no family resemblance, he is our brother and would make an excellent teammate in a relay if only you did not have to pass the baton, which I think would end his career.  Still, thought the man, he would be good in the 440.

It was light yet, but the men knew that eventually it would be dark.  And after it was dark, it would be light again.  That was another one of the things he had learned.

“Rest now, number 38,” he said aloud, closing his eyes, “and wait for the search plane that they will send when you do not come to the finish line.”

And as he closed his eyes he saw Pamplona again and it was the fiesta and now he remembered how it had been easier to run with another than to run by yourself and how, even this, as easy as it was, had not been as easy as running with the bulls.  Running with the bulls was the easiest, and if you wore red, it was even easier, although you did not know that that first time in Pamplona before the bullfight when the bulls were released from corrals outside town to race through the streets to the bullring and there was the crowd waiting to run with the bulls and you in your red sweat suit.  And then you were running, left, right, left, right, the way you could do now without thinking, and here came the bulls, snorting to psych you out and running their personal best, and then you felt it in your side, a sudden excruciating sticking like a six-inch horn, and then the pain got really bad and you knew it was just a muscle spasm and then you were into the final straightaway and the bulls were putting on the big surge and no one else was near, just you and the bulls, because they did not like that sweat suit, and then it was over, not your life but the run, the bulls were in the ring and the crowd was cheering and squirting el gatorade into your mouth from a goatskin and carrying you on its shoulders and you still remembered how after the bullfight Manolete presented you with the toe.

It was very light when the man awoke and found, with a start, that he no longer lay in the middle of the long wide place.  The boy had obviously carried him here, though the boy was not here now.  The man was also surprised at his legs, which after a good night’s sleep were all right.  Then he thought of the race.  He felt the coming of the adrenaline.  He started to run.

When the man jogged he always liked to look around at the country as it jogged by in the other direction, but there was not so much to look at here as in the other place.  The other had been a long wide place with big trees on both sides.  This was more of a long wide place with nothing on both sides.  The absence of color also made it a hell of a white place.  All he saw was clouds, the ones in the air and also the ones on which he was jogging.

Now a white, pearly gate came into view just up ahead, a single taut length of golden tape stretched across it.  The man looked over his shoulder to see if he’d be able to finish easy, but there was another runner behind him, trying to close his five-cloud lead.  The man sprinted the distance to the open gate and broke the tape.

Throughout his life, which was now over, the man had always believed that the afterworld, if there was such a thing, consisted of two places.  There was the good place, for the ones who’d been good, and then there was the other place.  The instant after he broke the tape, the man learned he was wrong, because in that next instant he found himself in line with thousands of runners who, for misusing their legs, were now scheduled to live their next lives as trout.

“You have proven yourself unworthy of the human form,” a voice told the man.  His Nikes were all right though.  A hell of a fine shoe, the Nikes. The man said farewell to his legs and also to his Nikes, of which he would have no need when he was put on earth again.  Then there was only the waiting, the waiting with the others. Then there was blackness.

In a big two-hearted river up in Michigan, the trout were running.

copyright 2009 Scott Fivelson