The Front Runner

burled-walnut bed, with dust on the bedspread.
    I locked the door and sat alone in the house the rest of the day, not eating, hardly moving. The canister of ashes sat on the bedside table. It was hard to remember that he'd existed. Yet there were those ashes, and those things in the house, and a dozen semen samples in a clinic deep-freeze, and one Olympic world record, and all the headlines, and all the memories of him in other people's minds.
    Night came. I had asked the campus switchboard to take all calls, and nothing disturbed the silence of the house. I lay down on the bed fully clothed, with all the lights out. Through the window came the soft soughing of the breeze in the spruce boughs. Then, as the hours passed, I could hear a dripping from the eaves. It was raining, a gentle warm autumn rain. The canister sat on the bedside table.
    Exhausted, I must have dozed off. Suddenly I woke up with a terrible start. A sound.
    I lay on my elbow, listening. In the silence of the house, it came again. A clear musical clink in the kitchen, like a teacup.
    I began to shake all over violently, and a hot prickling sweat sprang out on me. In that moment, possibly, I was close to insanity. I got quickly out of bed and went into the living room. The sound came again, making me shudder with a terrible joy. My legs trembling,
    I went toward the kitchen. What did I expect to see there?
    A dark shape moved in the kitchen, came toward me.
    It was the dog. He had been nosing in his china feed bowl, and his metal ID tag had struck musically against it. He was hungry, and sad, and came whining to me, pushing his nose into my hand.
    Sinking into a kitchen chair, I sat there a while and managed to stop shaking. Then I turned on the light, opened a can of dog food and fed him.
    The gray light came at the windows, later now that the season was advancing. Did I expect to hear the joyous abandoned bird songs? But it was fall, and few birds sang now.
    I got up and put my shoes on. It was just past five A.M. Without putting on a raincoat, I took the canister in the crook of my arm, left the dog shut in the house, and went out alone."
    First I went over to the old cinder track, and scattered a couple of handfuls of his ashes there, to sweeten the spikes of my freshmen. I felt no horror at handling them. In fact, I felt nothing at all.
    Then, with the mist cool on my face, I took the long three-mile walk up into the woods. No one had used the main trail since Billy and I had last run there, back in July. The marks of our spikes had long ago been washed away by the rain.
    Turning off onto the side trail, I made my way along, detouring around poison ivy and getting my pants caught in brambles. Finally I came down the slope through the mountain laurel. The seed pods hung on the laurel like clusters of tiny green grapes. The clearing was all grown up with ferns, which were now yellowing and dying down. The leaves on the giant beeches were browning a little. The waterfall over the mossy ledge had dried up to a tiny trickle.
    I scattered the rest of his ashes there. I scraped a hole in the loam and buried the canister. Then I washed the ashes and dirt from my fingers in the trickle dripping from the ledge.
    The Buddhists would have said that he'd been returned to the round of life.
    Two weeks later, school opened and I went back to coaching.
    Joe Prescott had offered to give me a semester off, with my assistants taking over, so that I could go off somewhere and rest. But I didn't see how that would help me.
    A week after the flood of students arrived, I gave the usual campus-wide talk with color slides, to get the kids to turn out for track. The talk wasn't up to its usual par—I didn't crack any jokes—in fact, it was more low-key than usual. But 115 freshmen boys and girls signed up immediately. It was the largest number I'd ever had.
    In addition, we had another influx of quality runners from other colleges and universities. For the first time, we were going to have a big-time team in terms of depth, rather than in terms of a couple of superstars like Billy and Vince. The boys came to me with their eyes blazing with ambition, and with sympathy because of Billy. Several wanted to talk about the 1980 Olympics.
    Two more gay runners came to me, a pair of mara-thoners from UCLA. I had to shelter them. Who else would, if I didn't? Billy would have died in vain if I had turned them away because of my personal grief.
    "But you're coached by me at your