The Intruders Read Free Page A

I pounded up the approach, back and forth, refining my run-up, I saw a guy walking from the far end. Finally I realized it was Gary Fisher.
    He wandered the periphery, not headed anywhere in particular. He’d been one of our star sprinters before he quit, and maybe he was there for the same kind of reason that I was. He wound up a few yards away and watched for a little while. Eventually he spoke.
    “How’s it going?”
    “Okay,” I said. “Not going to win, though.”
    “How’s that?”

    I explained that a guy from another school had recently revealed himself not only to be good at throwing but to care about it also. After easy wins had stopped being a given, my interest had waned. I didn’t put it in those terms, but that was the bottom line.
    He shrugged. “Never know. Could be Friday’s going to be your day. Be cool to go out on a win.”
    For a moment then, I found I did care. Maybe I could do it, this last time. Fisher stood a bit longer, looking across the track, as if hearing the beat of feet in races gone by.
    “She was provisional,” I said suddenly.
    It was like he hadn’t heard me. Then he slowly turned his head. “What’s that?”
    “Donna,” I said. “She never really…locked in, you know? Like she was just renting space.”
    He frowned. I kept going.
    “It was like…like she knew it might just not work out, you know? Like she came into the world aware that happy-ever-after was a long shot. So she put all her chips on one bet to win. Came in red instead of black, so she just walked away from the table.”
    I hadn’t rehearsed any of this, but when I’d said it, I felt proud. It meant something profound, or sounded like it might—which is plenty good enough when you’re eighteen.
    Fisher looked at the ground for a minute and then seemed to nod faintly. “Thanks.”
    I nodded back, all out of words, and went thudding down the track to hurl my spear. Maybe I was showing off, hoping to impress the Gary Fisher of eight months before. Either way I pulled my arm over far too fast, reopened an old split on the tip of my middle finger, and wound up not making the last meet after all.
    The end of school came and went. Like everyone else, I was too busy rushing through celebrated rites of passage to pay much attention to people I didn’t really know. Tests, dances, everything hurried as our childhoods started to run out of gas. Then—bang: out into the real world, which has a way of feeling like that supertest you never got around to studying for. It still feels that way to me sometimes. I don’t think I heard Fisher’s name mentioned once during the summer, and then I left town to go to college. I thought about him every now and then over the next couple years, but eventually he dropped out of my head along with all the other things that had no relevance to my life.
    And so I was not really prepared for the experience of meeting him again, nearly twenty years later, when he turned up at the door of my house and started talking as if no time had passed at all.
     
    I was at my desk. I was trying to work, though a time-management study would probably have suggested that my job consisted of staring out the window, with only occasional and apparently random glances at a computer screen. The house was very quiet, and when the phone rang, it jerked me back in my chair.
    I reached out, surprised that Amy was calling the landline rather than my cell, but not thinking much more about it than that. Being on the phone to my wife meant a break from work. Then I could make more coffee. Go have a cigarette on the deck. Time would pass. Tomorrow would come.
    “Hey, babe,” I said. “How stands the corporate struggle?”
    “Is this Jack? Jack Whalen?”
    It was a man’s voice. “Yes,” I said, sitting up and paying more attention. “Who’s this?”
    “Hang on to your hat, my friend. It’s Gary Fisher.”
    The name sent up a flag right away, but it took another second to haul it back through the