“That’s right, isn’t it, Randy? You guys never let us win.”
“Hey, man, stop bitching. You got it in you. Don’t give up on yourself,” said the young marine he’d called Randy.
“Yeah, right. This is my friend Vincent. Another Yank. And Pratt, who’s Thai.”
“Where in the States are you from, man?” the other man asked Calvino, smiling and then sticking out his hand. “Roosevelt’s my name.”
“Roosevelt, I’m from Brooklyn. Like Henry Miller.”
“Henry who?” asked Randy.
“Fool,” said Roosevelt, nudging Randy in the ribcage, “the guy who played ball for the Louisville Cardinals. You know, the guy that scored the big overtime touchdown against Florida State in 2002. I was just a kid, but I remember that game.”
“Henry Miller… Yeah, the guy who made the big upset. Whatever happened to him?”
“Big upset win and then forgotten. Time does that. Doesn’t seem fair,” said Calvino. “My friend is a saxophone player.”
Pratt smiled and nodded. “I do my best.”
The two young men looked Pratt up and down.
“Man, you don’t look nothing like a saxophone player,” said Randy.
“He plays just like Miles Davis,” said Calvino, winking.
“Man, you gotta be joking. Come on, Roosevelt, we ain’t finished warming up.”
Saxon blocked Roosevelt’s path.
“Either of you superstar athletes seen Ohn Myint?”
“Swamp Bitch?” said Roosevelt.
They both smiled at her running club name.
“She’s the heart and soul of the club, why we keep on coming back. Ain’t that right, Randy?”
“For Swamp Bitch. No one gonna forget her like they forgot Henry Miller,” said Randy. “She looks the part.”
“Man, she’ll take you apart is what you mean,” said Roosevelt.
Randy stepped out into the road and pointed fifty meters ahead. A Burmese woman with glasses and flat shoulder-length black hair tied with a blue band into a ponytail, dressed in shorts and white running shoes, stood with her hands on her hips, talking to three men also dressed in running gear. Ohn Myint held court, arms folded, a bottle of water tucked against her chest. Saxon waved at her, and when she didn’t respond, he called her name.
“Ohn Myint,” he said as they approached, “this is my friend Vincent I told you about.”
“What did you tell her?” asked Calvino out of the corner of his mouth.
“Don’t worry. Not the truth. I wouldn’t want Swamp Pussy to get scared and take off before the race started.”
“And this is Vincent’s friend, Pratt, a jazz musician from Bangkok.”
She offered her hand to Pratt, who shook it.
“I love jazz,” she said.
The runners standing in a circle around her turned out to be an oil and gas industry expat, an official from the British embassy and a Burmese businessman whom everyone respected and loved—he’d arranged for the beer truck that would be waiting to sell beer at the end of the 10K run. They looked like men who wore suits and ties all week long but on the weekend changed into schoolboy gym clothes that revealed that they no longer had schoolboy bodies.
One person in the group would take a drink from a plastic bottle of water and hand it to the runner next to him. Hands on hips, squinting at the sun, they shared not just a collective