Rory: “You’ve been waiting, bloody hell, good riddance! Pack up your shit and leave.”
“Pack my shit up? What are you on about?” He gave him a generous shove. “I’m not going!”
“Well I’m not going!”
“Oh, just shut up,” I said. “I wish I could get rid of the pair of you, but I can’t, so here’s what we’ll do—I’ll toss this coin. Twice. The first one’s for who moves out.”
“Yeah, but he’s got more—”
“Not interested. Winner stays, loser moves. Rory, you call.”
The coin went up, it hit the bedroom ceiling.
“Heads.”
It bounced over the carpet; it landed on a sock.
Tails.
“Shit!”
“Ha ha, bad luck, buddy boy!”
“It hit the ceiling, it doesn’t count!”
I turned now to Henry.
Rory persisted. “It hit the fucking ceiling!”
“Rory,” I said, “shut up. Now, Henry—I’m throwing again. Heads you get Tommy, tails you get Clay.”
It was tails again, and the first thing Henry said when Clay moved in was “Here, get a look at this.” He threw him the old Playboy—Miss January—and Rory made friends with Tommy:
“Get the cat off my Goddamn bed, shithead.”
Your bed?
Typical Hector.
* * *
—
Again, in the lead-up, mid-February, when he hit the Regional Championships, at E. S. Marks—where the grandstand was a concrete gargantuan—we had the tape network down to an art. We’d made it a kind of ritual; it was our version of what are your legs, or the power that came from within.
First, I’d crouch below him.
Slowly I’d roll out the strapping tape.
A line straight down the middle.
A cross before his toes.
It started like a crucifix, but the result was something different, like a long-lost letter of the alphabet; a few edges would curl to the top.
When the 400 was called, I walked with him near the marshal zone, and the day was muggy and motionless. As he left he thought of Abrahams, and the bible-man, Eric Liddell. He thought of a skinny, diminutive South African, whose taped feet inspired his.
I said, “I’ll see you after the end,” and Clay had actually answered me, his peg in his shorts, in the pocket: