Race Across the Sky Read Free

a smaller, buzz-cut kid of military bearing, ruffled his hair.
    â€œYou’re eighth,” he laughed.
    Someone pulled off his tank and handed him water. He grinned. It was incomparable, Caleb thought, being so complete. He sat on the curb, watching the next runners jog, stumble, and crawl across the line.
    Juan finished nineteenth, Leigh twenty-sixth overall, eleventh among women. Alice, Kevin, and Makailah all placed in the top forty. As they had each of the previous fifteen years, the Happy Trails Running Club owned Leadville. Caleb pulled off his shoes and limped barefoot down the dark street to a parking lot. The license plates rose and waved like banners. They shouldn’t be doing that, he knew. He needed fluids.
    Mack was waiting for him by his dusty black Jeep, standing with his ankles crossed. The first time Caleb had ever seen him, at the Rocking Horse Tavern a decade ago, he had experienced this same sensation of running into a wall of solid energy. Mack was a small man. Black hair curled around his ears and tufts of black beard were spaced sporadically around his sunken cheeks. His face was a riverbed of wrinkles. With his tie-dye, he had the appearance of an aged roadie. His teeth, long stripped of enamel from decades of running these mountains, were the gray of tombstones. His eyes were a blue so brilliant they seemed not to belong to him at all.
    â€œRide with me, buddy.”
    Inside the Jeep, Caleb was overwhelmed by the scent of sweat and pine. The leather seat irritated his raw thighs as he pulled Band-Aids from his nipples and set them in the ash-tray. His body spasmed violently. Mack handed him an old sweatshirt, and Caleb pulled the green hood tight around his head. For all of the rocks, creeks, ascents, dehydration, snakes, and hallucinations, the biggest danger he faced was right now. The total demolition of his endocrine system from the constant exertion, stress, and the chemicals in the sports drinks had left his body defenseless. Any inconsequential virus that happened to be wandering through the Colorado air would find its way in without resistance.
    Mack spoke in an animated manner, waving his hands. He preferred to drive off-road, even when a highway presented itself, and so they bounced roughly between firs and black-eyed aspens, a blur of hieroglyphic eyes dancing around them.
    â€œYou know Anne Luchamp?” he asked in his nasal voice.
    Caleb shook his head.
    â€œShe finished third in Women’s. She’ll join us next year. I didn’t speak with her, but I felt her energy,” Mack stated matter-of-factly. “Let’s bring her to a party at the house.”
    Reading the waves of kinetic energy that propelled all living things was not a unique gift, but Mack possessed it as strongly as anyone Caleb had ever seen. It was how he healed them, helped them push past any barrier, physical or emotional. As a coach it made him, Caleb understood, a genius.
    â€œI saw June pacing you there at the end,” Mack turned, a wry grin across his small mouth. “She giving you some special training these days?”
    Caleb tried to shake his head no, a trembling taking over his entire body.
    Mack laughed and sang out, “‘I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love.’ You are bequeathed to the dirt, right Caley?”
    Caleb nodded. Yes, he thought, he was bequeathed. This was the pledge he had made, all of those years ago.
    When they passed Superior, Mack turned back onto the old dirt road. They drove for some time, and then he pushed the Jeep around a cluster of oaks, their long roots intermingled as the fingers of lovers, and a simple house made of planks and beams appeared in the distance. It lay just two hundred open yards from the base of South Boulder Peak. Safe, hidden from the toxic world, and plugged directly into the real one.
    Mack shut the engine off and looked at him. “I got a surprise for you. It’s crazy