An abandoned Milwaukee Northern line ran behind Northwood East High School, and Coach Carne had the team train over the split and rotting sleepers, on their toes, up to three miles out and three miles back for the varsity. The exercise steeled Sam’s will and fattened his calves, and by midseason he held the number-three spot on the roster, after Bruce Miller and Lanny Park, and even finished second at the Oak Park Invitational, which had a famously flat second half.
Lanny and Bruce and another teammate, named Bryan, had turned back at two miles, this being a Friday, with a meet the next day and a party rumored for that night. Sam promised he’d meet them later at Jan Tenowski’s, whose parents were in Lake Geneva. If she wasn’t already planning on taking advantage with a beer-baited get- together, they were sure they could talk her into it.
As the balls of his feet sprung again and again off the timbers, Sam’s legs felt good, which meant he could hardly feel them at all. There was a certain point in the middle of a quality run when they seemed to propel themselves. There was no pain, no effort, the oxygen arrived in sufficient quantities, and the rhythm of the footfalls both propelled and recharged him. At this pace, on this cool evening, he was certain he could run forever, and in the seconds right before the hornet struck, he was convinced that Lanny’s number-two spot could be stolen from him on a regular basis, starting tomorrow.
He had joined the cross-country team in the seventh grade, mostly because of girls. That’s not to say Northwood runners had significant numbers of groupies, although the cheerleading squad scheduled an appearance at one meet every fall in a display of pep they probably counted as charity. For an awkward and easily embarrassed thirteen-year-old, however, a spot on an athletic roster seemed like a minimum standard to meet socially, and Sam had always been blessed with good stamina, if not world-beating speed. Running allowed him to work alone, which he liked, but it didn’t single him out, either. The team shared the credit for success, but the blame for failure was distributed just as equally, and that was all fine with Sam. Most important, he was an athlete, which, in the eyes of girls, was the high school equivalent of having a good job.
There were other benefits, as well, his parents noted. Sam’s grades improved, and he gained confidence. He thought the teachers gave him more respect and, when he needed it, the benefit of the doubt.
The yellow jacket landed on his shin about six inches below the right knee. Sam looked down at it, but didn’t stop or break stride, as doing so suddenly on such a treacherous path would cause him to stumble. He stared down at the hornet, which clung to his skin even as his feet found tie after tie, sending vibrations up and down his legs. He leaned forward and tried to swat it away.
It stung.
Sam pulled up like a wounded horse and he slapped at it, meeting some resistance, as the insect hadn’t yet let go of the stinger. He fell and his left ankle turned painfully against the half-buried right rail.
“Dammit!”
In just a few seconds, the sting had become swollen and purple and painful. Sam stood panting beside the tracks and watched the wound mutate. It was the first time he’d been stung by an insect, and in the minute or so it took for him to catch his breath, he realized he was allergic.
The next time he was stung – by a bee, while playing in a three-on-three basketball tournament in Chicago – he was much older. That particular night, he called his parents.
“Did you go to the emergency room?” his mother asked.
“No, Mom,” Sam said. “I took a couple of Benadryl.”
“I remember the day you got stung during running practice.”
“Cross-country practice,” he corrected.
“Cross-country running practice, ” she snapped back, but then she chuckled. “Your ankle was as big as a softball when you got back.”
“It wasn’t my ankle, it was my shin. And that was a lot worse than the one today. I had to walk two miles on it.”
“Well, it was huge.”
They talked about his sister’s family in Milwaukee until they’d exhausted the topic, and both he and his parents – Mom and Dad on separate cordless extensions – sat quietly with the headsets at their ears. It wasn’t uncomfortable silence – each party knew the call hadn’t yet reached maturity – but no one said a word for almost half a minute as they waited for the conversation to start itself again.
“Sam, there’s a little boy here in Northwood who looks exactly like you,” Mrs. Coyne said finally.
“Really?” Sam was paging through The New York Times Magazine with the phone wedged between his shoulder and head. There was an article on a jazz guitarist he liked and he didn’t feel like waiting for his parents to hang up before he started reading it.
“Yeah, it’s really something,” his father said. “Are you sure you didn’t get any of those girls pregnant in high school?”
Between another father and son, the remark would have been laughed away as familiar joshing. Between Sam and his father there was subtext.
The period of Sam’s worst battles with his father ran roughly the same duration as World War II: from September of his thirteenth year until the August after his graduation from Northwood East. Sam drank a lot of beer and smoked a lot of pot on weekends. He brought girls to the house, girls he knew his mother and father wouldn’t like, and when he slept with one of them he did nothing to conceal the fact from his parents. Freethinkers, Mr. and Mrs. Coyne didn’t mind the sex so much – not after he turned seventeen, anyway – but they were appalled by his lack of discretion. Smart girls, dumb girls, skinny girls, fat girls, rich girls, poor girls: teenaged Sam screwed in the same bored fashion that he flipped channels on the television, with each program being no more or less interesting than the next.
His promiscuity had much to do with the deep supply of willing partners, of course. Sam attributed this to a story that circulated the school concerning his private girth. As it spread, the tale had become exaggerated, of course, but not by much. By the time Sam reached his junior year, he found there was always a curious girl willing to bring him home or follow him home or go for a drive or take in an unpopular movie from the back row. It wasn’t always intercourse – some only wanted a preview – but the attention was all the same to him, frankly.
“So, who is he?” Sam asked.
“The boy? Oh, we don’t know his name,” Mrs. Coyne said. “Dad saw him at the fruit store, and then pointed him out at the butcher.”
“It was uncanny, really. We came home and pulled out the old photo albums. You could be twins – if you were still in second grade,” Mr. Coyne said.
“Did you see the mother?”
“About your age. A few years older maybe. Pretty. Thin,” his mom said.
“You remembering something, son? Did you ever have a rubber go on ‘spring break’?”
“James.” Mrs. Coyne’s frown translated into a sour murmur over the phone.
“There’s nothing to remember, Dad,” Sam said.
“Are you sure? Are you sure you didn’t slip one past that chubby field- hockey goalie? What was her name? Rebecca?”
“He’s kidding, dear.”
“Yeah, Mom. Anyway, that’s funny. This kid. He looked just like me, huh?”
“They say everyone has a twin,” Mrs. Coyne said. “Yours just showed up twenty years late.”
“Weird.”
“So how’s work?”
“Busy.”
“Any good cases?” his father asked. “Have you taken any dirty drug money this week?”
This joke, on the other hand, was not as caustic as it sounded. James Coyne was proud of his son’s work as an attorney, and he boasted to his friends about Sam’s big-moneyed clients. Mr. Coyne often used the phrase “dirty drug money” as an ironic and not-too-subtle reference to his own activist college days. He wasn’t ashamed of them, exactly. He wasn’t embarrassed about his objection to the war, or the editorial pipe bombs he tossed on the back pages of campus newspapers in the direction of the White House. In middle age, however, he had become a pious capitalist, starting his own business, building it large enough and quickly enough to sell it by the time he was fifty, and in retirement he considered the demonstrations of his early adulthood as another stage of growing up. He saw his son’s teenage promiscuity the same way in retrospect, but he couldn’t resist the sharp needling over it, then or
