Time is running out on octogenarian sprinter Frank Durbano. But the most important race of his life is yet to come.
Frank Durbano pokes a finger in his ear and dials his hearing aid to its highest volume. As if that will help, with this crowd.
Still, it will be a gunshot he will be listening for, a remarkably loud phenomenon ordinarily, so odds are he will be all right. At eighty-four, he needs every advantage he can get, even against this superannuated field.
The crowd. They love this event, the 75-and-over 100 yard dash, God knows why. Bunch of old farts struggling down the straightaway, limping and gimping and lurching toward the finish line at a breathtaking ten miles per hour, and those are the fast ones. Yet in the nine years Frank has been running this event at the Penn Relays, the six years or so, decades earlier, when he was quick enough to compete against the really fast guys in races that meant something, and the countless others in between when he watched alone or with his daughter — back when they were still speaking — the crowd never failed to come to its feet and applaud the efforts of the gray-haired dashers.
He thinks of Connie now as he jogs in place behind the starting line, gazing down the track and waiting for the other guys in the race to get their starting blocks set (Frank, who remembers better than breakfast a time when he dug his own footholds in hard-packed dirt with his bricklayer's trowel, never bothers with the damn things). He wonders how her life is turning out. He knows a little about her; a younger, tech-savvy friend once offered to Google her; Frank nearly hit him in the mouth before the friend could explain. Online, he discovered she was still practicing law, still married to that Bob, still the mother of his three grandchildren. All boys, none named Frank.
It's been almost twenty years since he has seen any of them — since Ellen's funeral — and hopes are fading that he will ever see them again, at least in this lifetime.
Why the hell am I even here? he asks himself, not for the first time but, given the latest test results, almost certainly the last. I should be home in bed. Hell, I should be in a hospital with tubes sticking in me. He looks down at his increasingly bony arms — sticks veiled in mottled skin — and has to wonder where exactly they would be able to insert anything for another round. The stuff they put in you is killing stuff, anyway, he rationalizes. Radiation alone has proved bad enough; hell, in WWII, didn't his side drop radioactive bombs on the Japs? There are days it seems the chemo, the radiation and the cancer are running their own race, the finish line being his very death. Those days, Frank will lie corpse-like in bed, barely able to walk to the commode, no wife or daughter to help him, and wager with himself about which competitor will finally finish him off.
The point is, ought he not be at home trying to preserve his life rather than here trying to sprint the rest of it out of himself?
No, he decides again, it's better this way. The active way. The hard way. The heart-pounding, gusto-grabbing, guts-and-balls way. It is, in fact, the only way he's ever known.
And yet he is scared. Unreasonably, irrationally, mortifyingly afraid of dying. How, he wonders, not for the first time, can he at once embrace and quail before his own death?
"Gentlemen, take your marks," the youngster with the pistol says at last, and Frank stands straight and tall at the line. Straight and tall as he is able, at any rate, considering the mileage on his body. He remembers with a pride-leavened nostalgia standing here at Franklin Field with Connie on his shoulders, not far from this very spot, many years ago. It was her very first Penn Relays, with her all of three and no better seat in the house than her daddy's shoulders. Ten minutes earlier, competing for tiny Temple, he'd placed third by a hair to the great Lindy Remingino from ManhattanCollege and Andy Stanfield of Seton Hall in the 100 yard dash. At 27, he'd been a good deal older than the other two, having spent what should have been his college years in the South Pacific fighting the Emperor's hordes at places like Okinawa and Saipan. College for him came later, at night after days spent laying brick, so he could land the job teaching high school English that would leave his summers free for training and racing.
But he'd shown he hadn't lost a step by racing two of America's finest, Olympians both, all the way to the tape. And hoisting Connie to his shoulders on the podium where they'd gotten their medals, seeing her goggly eyes as they took in the crowd, hearing Lindy say, "That your little girl? Ain't she a cutie!" — he didn't think life could ever improve beyond that.
