Missing In Rangoon

The Burmese runner had straggled over the finish line hours after everyone else on the 10K run. A search party had been sent out to find him. They found him drinking tea in a hut with two old men and an old woman with missing teeth and a red betel nut smile. Derek tore into him, calling him an idiot, a jackass and an imbecile. Derek had drunk a lot of beer and the Burmese, head down, just took it all in. Derek’s verbal attack and the Burmese man’s later physical attack on Derek had left the Rangoon Running club with two black eyes.

“This is the guy Jack introduced to the club?”

Ohn Myint said, “It wasn’t Jack’s fault.”

Calvino thought Saxon would have liked that display of loyalty. He made a mental note—the woman wasn’t a bitch. She was straight up, not letting anyone say anything bad about a friend.

On the way to the starting line, they turned down the wrong road, not once, but twice. Twenty kilometers outside Rangoon was a different landscape. They stopped, and the British official asked for directions. The reply was a shrug of the shoulders. In Burmese Ohn Myint asked a young woman in a dress holding a small child on her hip. She translated the instructions into English, and they made a U-turn and headed back in the direction they’d come from. They were the last to arrive at the end of the dirt road. The British embassy official pulled to the side and cut the engine. They got out and walked along the road, which ran between green fields. Toward the horizon was the outline of

a village. Other cars had parked, and the runners were on the road, warming up. The men and women who had stood apart before had come together to form a group of nearly thirty runners.

Ohn Myint had been out days before laying the run, marking it with shredded paper and throwing in some false trails to make it interesting.

Jack Saxon had arrived in another car. He waved at Calvino.

“Don’t get lost,” he said.

“I’ll do my best not to embarrass you, Pistol Penis.”

Saxon tilted his head.

“Kiss My Trash. Go well. Too bad about Crack Shot.”

“Things happen for a reason.”

“Yes, they do. I believe that, Vinny.”

The countryside stretched out, clean, smooth and green, a place to run off steam, thought Calvino. The thought of running ten kilometers made him sigh. The two US marines pulled up beside him, running in place.

“You can run with us if you want,” said Randy.

“We’ll see you don’t get lost,” said Roosevelt.

Calvino smiled. “You go ahead.”

Five minutes after the race started, the two of them were tiny dots framed against the sky.

“Big upset, that Henry Miller,” he imagined Randy saying to Roosevelt. “Hey, whatever happened to that guy from Brooklyn? I bet he got his ass lost.”

Moments after the run started, Calvino had fallen back to the blurry line that divided the slowest of the runners from the fastest of the walkers. Ahead of him he saw Ohn Myint a hundred meters off. Two young female NGOs with pale white skin were ten meters ahead. They looked to be carrying an extra twenty or thirty pounds in bulges around their hips and legs. They performed like the starter car at a Nascar track. Each time he pulled up close, they increased their pace. They might have been overweight, but they could outrun him. His unsuccessful efforts to catch and pass the two women were, he told himself, a greater humiliation than getting lost. He was grateful that the two young marines from the US embassy hadn’t been around to witness it.

Five kilometers into the run, Calvino found himself running alone down a narrow dirt road that snaked through a hamlet. The inhabitants were lined in front of their huts, laughing and clapping as he crossed a small bridge. They cheered him as he sweated, face red, legs numb, lifting his arms and flashing the victory sign. He passed a stream running underneath the road that smelled of pig shit. The women wore their best dresses, flowers in their hair, with their children playing in the dirt at their feet. Chickens and pigs caged in pens rested alongside the houses. Older children ran behind him, laughing and cheering, passing him, falling back, passing him again. It made them happy to have a runner they could run circles around.

He had captured an audience simply by running so slowly. The villagers felt he lingered long enough that they almost got to know this white man.

Focus, he told himself. Take it one step at a time. Look happy. Don’t think five kilometers left. Just run.

Legs rubbery, Calvino ran, stopped, ran, stopped and then leaned over, hands on his legs, staring at the ground as he struggled to catch his breath.

Sixteenth century, he thought as he looked around him. I’ve gone back in time.

There was nothing like the countryside outside Rangoon to remind the newcomer that when a country has gone to sleep for fifty years, when it finally awakes, rubbing its eyes, whatever comes down the road—in this case Vincent Calvino—must be a figure from the future. All along the road Calvino stopped to shake hands with the old men, often flashing a gold or silver tooth or reddish lips from betel nut, and the women and children. By the second village, if there had been a by-election, Calvino would have won. The underdog with grit had universal appeal that extended to the outer reaches of the Burmese countryside.

The main threat was the village dogs that didn’t like strangers. Ohn Myint had told the villagers to keep their dogs on chains. Calvino saw them—gnarling dogs collared to trees and posts, showing their teeth as he passed. He couldn’t have outrun the most ancient and lamest among them. Their tethers held, but he still shuddered as he ran past the last one that lunged at him.

Shaking all of those hands wasn’t enough to wipe away the embarrassment of falling behind a pair of big women. The two marines… Okay, he could live with the fact that a couple of combat-fit twenty-year-olds could leave him in the dust. But it rankled that even the two guava-shaped NGOs had more acceleration, endurance and style than he did. He ran alone. The fat, the old—and, he imagined, cripples too—were all somewhere well ahead of him, crossing the finish line, drinking a cool beer, perhaps wondering if a search party should be organized to find him.

After reaching the seven kilometer mark, Ohn Myint ran back to find Calvino standing in a vast rice field.