Light Lifting Read Free Page B

have been making it up. I couldn’t see anything, but I stood in the opening and waved my light around anyway, shouting his name. For a second I thought I could just make him out in the distance, maybe a hundred yards away but then the sound of the train blast rose up again and the whole rig came rolling around the last corner of the tunnel. I saw the big round light and it touched me and filled up the whole space, illuminating everything. I put my hand up like you do when you’re trying to block out the sun and I saw him. Burner was there charging toward me, the only dark space in front of the light. He had this long line of spit hanging out of his mouth like a dog and the look on his face wasn’t fear but something more like rage. The gap kept closing and it seemed to me like the big light was almost pushing him out. I emptied out my lungs yelling up against that bigger noise. I said “Come on, come on,” and I waved my whole arm in a big circle, as if I could scoop out the space between us and reel him in.
    In the end, it wasn’t as close as it seemed. Burner came up and around the corner and he kind of ran me over as I tried to catch him. We had about ten or fifteen seconds to spare before the train came roaring through and that was enough time for us to take off and scramble through the hole in the fence. We knew they’d be making their calls and trying to track us down so we spent the next half hour running and hiding behind a few dumpsters and trying to make our way back to my car. We never had any time to talk about it until later that night when it became, like everything else in our pasts, a kind of joke. We called it “The night Burner pulled a train out of his ass.”
    But that’s the image I keep of him – Burner running in the light and getting away. That’s the one I keep. For those few seconds, he was like one of those fugitives trying to break out of prison and they just couldn’t catch him. The train kept coming down on him like some massive predator and he shouldn’t have had a chance, but he was like that one stupid gazelle on the nature show, the one who somehow gets away even though the cheetahs or lions or hyenas should already be feasting. Burner was one of those fine-limbed lucky bastards, but he was still here and his life, like mine, kept rolling along, filling in all this extra time.
    WE GOT OUR STUFF TOGETHER and left the hotel at around four o’clock with our bags slung over our shoulders. We took a shuttle bus, one of those big coaches with dark tinted windows that ferried the athletes back and forth. On the day of any big race, those buses are tough places, crowded with all kinds of people who just want to be alone. The big-shouldered sprinters are the worst. You don’t want to be anywhere near them in the last hours. For them it’s going to be over in ten seconds, good or bad, so they don’t have room to negotiate. You’ve seen them – some of those hundred-metre guys are built up like superheroes or like those stone statues that are supposed to represent the perfect human form, but when the race gets close, every one of them is scared. As Burner and I squeezed our way down the aisle, we passed this big black guy sitting by himself, completely cut off from everything else. He had dark glasses on and big headphones so that nothing could get in or out and he just kept rocking back and forth, slow and silent and always on the beat so you could almost see the music he was listening to. He looked like one of those oriental monks, swaying and praying and perfectly out of it.
    Burner was at the jumpy stage now and he was nearly shaking because we were on our way and it seemed like things had already started. We dumped ourselves into an unoccupied row and right away he started drumming his hands on the seat in front of us.
    â€œI am feeling it, feeling it,” he said, almost singing, and he had this big goofy grin on