Mileage

Fiction

“I just don’t think I’m aging gracefully,” he said, patting at his potbelly. The eggs were frying on the stove, and he’d already loaded up his coffee with ample cream and sugar.

It was six-thirty, Friday morning, three days out from his fiftieth birthday. There was no good news in the paper, and his knee pain was back with a vengeance. At least the paper was here early, and at least Tammy made the coffee strong.

“Sure y’are, Thomas,” Tammy said, waving a dismissive hand. “Maybe y’don’t go runnin’ no more, but you look fit as a fiddle if y’ask me.”

She laid the bacon strips onto the roaring-hot cast-iron skillet. They danced and popped and began to make their grease.

Thomas pinched a roll of old-man fat between his fingers. It was maybe two inches thick– enough to lose, if you asked him, or her, or anyone else. He squeezed it thoughtfully.

“Idunno, Tam. Maybe I should cut back on some stuff for a while. I’ve got that appointment next week, and I bet Dr. Wellgate will have some choice words for my cholesterol. Hell, my blood pressure, for that matter. I’m no spring chicken.”

Tammy clucked her tongue and slid the Wonderbread into the toaster slots.

“Your father was a big man, Thomas– bigger’n you, by a landslide– and he lived ‘til his eighties.”

“Seventy-nine,” Thomas said, still pinching the fat. The bacon screamed on the skillet.

“Still, he was a big man, he drank a six-pack ev’ry day, ate nothin’ but grill-burgers and liver n’ onions, and he made it to seventy-nine. Y’got thirty-five years left in you yet, Tom. Hell, maybe more. Forty, if you keep it up.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe.”

Thomas was the type of man to avoid looking in a mirror when walking past one; he rarely found himself being photographed, especially now that Andy was grown and out of the house. He had a dull memory of the spry young man that he used to be, but it had been, in all honesty, maybe fifteen years since he had given himself a thorough looking-at.

Thomas picked up his cereal spoon (he often liked to whet his appetite with a quick bowl of Chex or Special K before his bacon, eggs, and toast on Fridays) and looked at his flabby, upside-down face in the reflection.

Fifty. Could it really have been over two-and-a-half decades ago that he was drinking hard liquor on the weekends, smoking reefer with his college chums, throwing caution to the wind, seeing sleazy midnight showings of shitty b-flicks, and eating big, buttery tubs of popcorn all to himself? When was the last time he’d been awake past nine p.m.?

His back ached when he slept in a new position, his hair had gone a dull gray, on rainy days, he had a deep, racketing cough, and he needed a bowl of cereal with his breakfast to keep his bowel movements regular.

Old, he thought, staring at that stranger’s face in the curved reflection of the spoon. You’ve become old.

Thomas stood up quickly from his chair, dropping the spoon back into the cereal bowl with a clatter. The chair screeched across the linoleum as he scooted it out.

“What’s wrong?” Tammy asked him, eyes wide. She had the bacon tongs held up in surprise, and gave them a subconscious clack as she stared at her husband of twenty years. “Is it your stomach? I know you get a bit swimmy if you drink coffee before you have any protein–”

“No, Tam, I’m fine. I just…” He stared down at the shape of his belly beneath him, at his toes, just visible beyond the curving horizon line of his gut. He thought about every cookie, every coffee, every beer and every strip of bacon.

He looked up at his wife, who had somehow remained rail-thin through it all.

It ain’t the car, he thought wildly, it’s the mileage.

“I’m going on a run,” he told her. He ran his hand through his sparse hair. “Gotta get the sillies out.”

“A run?”

“Yes. Just a quick one.”

“You haven’t been running in twenty years. You’ll kill yourself out there, have a heart attack or–”

“I thought I was ‘fit as a fiddle.’ You said I should run.”

“I didn’t say you should run! Lord, it’s barely even light out there! The rain’s pissin’ down– if you have a… if you get hurt, no one’s gonna be able to help you. Your knees, your back… just sit down and eat a proper breakfast, Tommy. You shouldn’t try straining yourself just to make a point.”

But Thomas couldn’t sit down. He surveyed the house that he and his wife had lived in for the majority of their marriage. The house he had woken up in for two decades, where he had eaten his heartiest of meals and cried while looking over his bank statements. Where he’d raised his only child. Where he’d drunk his coffee and watered his flowers. The house he would die in.

“I’m not making a point,” he said quietly. The bacon was popping even louder now, but the thought of the usually-enticing grease made his stomach churn. “I’m old. There’s no way around it. I’m big around the middle, Tam. I’ll be fifty in just a few days, and I need to run because I need to know I still can.”

“You’re gonna hurt–”

“I know the signs. If I feel even a tingle in my left arm, I’ll lay down on the grass and thank god I’m alive until it goes away.”

Tammy pulled her apron off and tossed it onto the floor.

“What the hell’s gotten into you, Tommy?” she shouted. Her eyes were big and watery. She only called him ‘Tommy’ when she was mad. “You’re old! So what? I’m old, too!” She flicked off the stovetop, leaving the bacon slices in their half-cooked arrested development. “I’m not going to let you go out there and kill yourself just because you’re scared to turn fifty! You can’t run a mile anymore! Most people above forty-five can’t either!”

Thomas braved another look down at his gut. He remembered his father, near the end, and how the hospice seemed to have aged him more than the latter twenty years of the old man’s life had. Before Dean Burnett had been admitted, he was a stout, active old man who– as Tammy had mentioned, in as many words– drank too much and ate too poorly. After his mind went, Thomas watched the man who was supposed to be his father become a toothless, baggy suit of himself. Wrinkles, like the creases of an old paper bag, filled what was once his full, happy face. His chest sunk in, but that big, round belly remained until his final shudder of breath racketed around the almost-empty hospice room.

Old, that last breath seemed to say, for only Tom to hear. Old.

“You’re right,” Thomas said quietly. “I am scared to turn fifty. Scared shitless, Tam. It snuck up on me, the tricky bastard. I got old before I even noticed it was happening.”

He patted his tummy. He smiled.

“I ain’t gonna run a mile,” he said.

Tammy sighed. She turned back to the stove and flicked it on again.

“I’m gonna run five,” Thomas said, “one for every decade,” and left the kitchen before he could feel his wife’s wrath.

He made it down the hall and into the bedroom before Tammy realized what he had said, and went thundering after him, brandishing the tongs.

STRETCHING

She was right, it was pissing outside, but Thomas liked the feeling of the rain on his bare arms and legs. It had taken nearly fifteen minutes to find his old running shorts, and when he realized that they no longer fit him, he sacrificed a pair of his favorite gray sweatpants with a pair of scissors, which he wore now as he stretched his calves in the driveway.

While cutting, Tammy had stood over him, first bargaining, then pleading, then crying for him not to go for the run. He had finished fashioning his new shorts, kissed her, and promised for the upteenth time that everything would be okay. Then he pulled on his running shoes and made for the door before she could protest further. Thankfully, the cutoff Garfield sweatshirt he used to run in was already a few sizes too big; it fit him now almost perfectly. And it proudly declared to the world his hatred of Mondays.

He felt Tammy’s eyes on him now from the living room window as he finished his stretches. He turned to her, obscured by the glass, and gave a wave. She did not wave back– just looked at him sadly and drew the curtains.

And if I do have a heart attack, he thought, that’ll be the last interaction we share. A morbid thought, but for some odd reason, it made him feel like laughing. He chuckled to himself and walked to the empty street past the outlet of his driveway.

If Thomas remembered correctly– and he usually did– starting here on Chickadee Circle, turning left on Elm, then right on Spruce would start a near-perfect five mile journey around the back roads of Dunbar. These old cul-de-sacs were arranged in a fan, and his house sat at its base. By running left and up, then bearing right, he’d cover the whole wide-end of the fan-shape and end up back where he started. A great loop, five miles and some change. If, of course, he didn’t pass out. Which was always a possibility.

It was just after seven in the morning. In his heyday, Thomas could run a mile in eight minutes and forty-nine seconds. Near the end of his running career, it was taking him ten– not terrible, but nowhere near great. He’d be lucky to complete today’s journey in an hour and a half, but he started his watch timer, anyway. Just to see what would happen.

A deep breath, a pause to listen to the rain, and Thomas was off.

Running.

MILE ONE

The pain started just a half-mile in. Already, his lungs were on fire, his belly was swishing from side-to-side, and his heart was hammering away like the fire of a machine gun, but it was the pain in both knees that almost crippled him before he even made it to the end of the block. It felt as though bits of glass were grinding and smashing beneath his kneecaps; Thomas had to bite down on his tongue to keep from screaming. It was worse than he could have imagined– each intake of breath was another coal on the fire in his chest, each step was another cascade of pain down his legs, each foot traveled was another foot of ground he’d have to cover when he inevitably threw in the towel and gave up.

He almost bailed out of the whole ordeal when he turned on to Elm, and probably would have, if it hadn’t been for the station wagon.

There was a stop sign at the end of Chickadee– Elm was a blind-spot, so cars often lingered for a bit longer than was expected of them, as to ensure a safe passage from street-to-street. Thomas came up behind the car, lungs ablaze, knees exploding like tiny atom bombs were planted in his joints.

Maybe the driver had been watching him run up. Maybe he only noticed him then. Either way, the twenty-something-year-old behind the wheel laid his hand across the horn, then leaned out the window and yelled, “Alright man! You got this, padre! Feel the burn, baby!” before peeling off around the corner.

Thomas had never been cheered on before, not for anything in his fifty years of life. It was like a drug had been shot into his brain. His lungs opened up, his heart found a steady beat, and his knees loosened. The pain was still there, sure, but the pain was what was reminding him that he was alive, god dammit. It was something he could push through.

Thomas put the pain on the backburner. Belly swinging, he picked up the pace, made the turn onto Elm, and ran after the station wagon, the driver of which was still hooting and hollering as he disappeared up the street.

The rain poured down. Thomas’s shoes slapped against the pavement. Sweat began to trickle down his back.

He didn’t notice that the time on his watch was running backward. To the left of the numbers, a small ‘minus’ sign had appeared.

MILE TWO

The rest of Mile One went over without a hitch. There was a small moment at the end of Elm where Thomas was afraid he may puke, but with nothing in his stomach save for a small helping of cereal, the feeling subsided rather fast. He was now on Spruce, the beginning of Mile Two and the start of his longest straight stretch with no turning– not to mention the steady incline that was waiting in just three hundred yards.

Not caring who could see, Thomas slowed down just long enough to pick a wedgie from the seat of his pants, but made an effort not to stop running outright. Back in college, when running track, Thomas had a sadistic and fat trainer named Bruce Tyson– Bruce to all of the students, and Mr. Tyson to the academic board when having a complaint lodged against him for what the track team could only describe as “unnecessary cruelty.”

As much as Thomas hated Bruce in those days, he appreciated a few of the Tysonisms that the coach had left behind before his sacking during Thomas’s junior year. The most memorable lesson had come during one track meet, wherein Thomas and his running buddy, a towheaded, miscreant communications major named Arlan Cantwell had pulled over to the shoulder of the track to tie a shoelace. Bruce had appeared behind them like a red-faced ghoul, pushed Arlan over onto the asphalt, yanked the kid’s loose shoe off, and threw it like a football toward the bleachers.

“What the fuck was that for?” a beet-red Arlan had yelled.

Bruce crouched down onto his haunches and wagged a sausage-shaped finger in his face.

“Don’t you ever stop running until you’ve finished the race, Cantwell. The next time you do so on my track, it’ll be your pecker I lob back to campus, not your fucking trainer. Got it?”

“Jesus, yeah, don’t have a cow, Mr. Tyson.”

“It’s Bruce, cocksucker. Now get up and run.”

Arlan did as he was told, sans shoe. It was slow-going, and the sound of his un-sneakered foot slapping the asphalt was awful. Thomas, one of Coach Bruce’s favorites, had watched him go with slack-jawed surprise. The phrase put an egg in your shoe and beat it had come to mind, and he had to cover his mouth with his hand so as not to laugh. Mr. Tyson didn’t seem to notice.

“You know why the shark is the apex predator?” Bruce asked him, pulling out his wet and pre-chewed cigar seemingly from nowhere.

“Why, Bruce?” Thomas had asked.

“Because they never stop, son. They never slow down. Now I suggest you keep running.”

Thomas, not knowing if this was true or not, got his ass into gear anyway.

That was the day he ran his fastest mile.

He remembered it now, the feel of the stopwatch strapped to his slick wrist, his thin, yet strong legs pumping like some divine machinery, the sun in his face, the wind in his hair.

Nearing fifty, usually out of breath from walking up the basement stairs, he felt closer to that young man again than he had ever before. He was older now than Coach Bruce had been when he had his stroke and died in a Wendy’s parking lot. That had been the talk of their seventh annual college reunion, back when he still spent summers at the cape with the boys. But Thomas was alive, now. He was still alive.

He decided then not to look at his watch until he reached what he would guess to be the fourth mile. Knowing the time felt like an omen.

Which is of course why he didn’t notice that his watch was currently dictating that he had just ran two miles in negative fifteen minutes and thirty eight seconds.

MILE THREE

On the third mile, Thomas began to think about his mother. Perhaps it had been the broken bottle that he nearly stepped on when passing by the abandoned property that once belonged to the Johnsons. It was a Schnapps bottle. Cynthia Burnett had been a Schnapps woman. It was a time in his life that Thomas rarely thought about.

He didn’t resent his mother for leaving when he was fifteen, and neither did Thomas’s father– in fact, her absence was the glue of their father-son relationship. The role reversal wasn’t lost on Dean, however. It was emasculating, to be walked out on by the woman you loved. That was the day that Dean had joined Thomas on a run for the first time in his life. It was funny how often it all came back to running.

Thomas was down by the high school track when Dean came to tell him the news, and the two had run laps for three hours straight until Dean collapsed from exhaustion. Thomas ran an hour longer by himself. As if he could shed that day's events somewhere out on the track. As if he could outrun her absence.

It was also the first time Dean cried in front of his son, as Thomas drove them home that evening.

“I’m sorry, Tommy,” Dean had said. “I’m sorry I couldn’t make her stay.”

“It’s not your fault,” Thomas had said. “It’s not your fault.” He said it as many times as he could. As many times as he thought would help.

Thomas was thrust suddenly from the memory– the car, his father’s tears– as his makeshift shorts started to sag.

That was odd– they had been tight as the devil when leaving the house. He grabbed the waistband and hoisted them up higher, where they stayed put for the time being.

He ran his hand down the length of his belly. Was it slimmer? That was impossible, or else some sort of odd placebo– there was no way he could have lost weight just from running for half an hour. Such a feat would take consistent exercise for a month for a man his age. Still, he pinched the fat he had taken ahold of just an hour ago in the kitchen, and was shocked to find it was marginally less than before.

“Jesus,” he breathed, never breaking stride. In fact, it felt impossible to do so: the pain in his knees had all but gone. He hadn’t felt this good physically in almost ten years. Since Andy still lived at home.

And, was he also imagining that his sweatshirt was looser? Previously it had been his considerable belly that he felt swishing as he ran– now it was the sweatshirt itself.

Thomas finally looked at his watch. He gasped. It was impossible.

Not only was his watch counting backwards, but the digital readout was far more comprehensive than just hours and minutes. The Casio numbers flashed, rolling higher and higher into the negatives: thirty seconds, forty-five minutes, twenty-two hours, thirteen days, and seven years.

Thomas ran by a line of parked cars, and caught a glimpse of himself in their rain-slicked reflection. It was unbelievable, unimaginable, and it went against everything that he knew to be true. It was something out of science fiction, something out of the pulp mags he used to read when he was six years old, after running to Pete’s Corner Store near his childhood home in Milton. But it was there, all the same. Plain as… well, as the nose on his face.

The reflection in the cars was of Thomas Burnett, but not of the Thomas Burnett that would be fifty in just three day’s time.

It was the Thomas Burnett of ten years ago. He was slimmer, muscular. His hair was a lush, thick brown. His skin was practically glowing. His clothes hung off him like hand-me-downs from a distant cousin.

Thomas Burnett was running back his own speedometer.

It ain’t the car, he thought again. It ain’t the car.

MILE FOUR

He was crying, feeling the weight fall off him as easily as shedding a heavy winter coat. His shorts were so baggy that they slid off of him completely as he turned off of Spruce and onto Chester; he kicked them off as he made around the bend. He was running now in his boxers. He didn’t care. He was alive.

Part of Thomas worried that he had snapped, lost his mind, fallen into some grand delusion. Something similar had happened to his cousin Mike about fifteen years prior, which had ended with the man burning his house down. But from what Thomas knew of “going crazy,” there was never any doubt about the delusions as they were happening. And this– well, this was unbelievable; he had to keep pinching himself to make sure he was awake, though he was finding less and less of himself to pinch.

Likewise, the ancient pains of the last twenty-five years were evaporating like so much ice on a hot summer’s day. His legs felt strong, springy. His back was straight, devoid of its usual dull throb. His wrinkles, by god, they were smoothing themselves out. He could feel the texture of his face. The typography was completely different. Familiar, sure, but not as it had felt just hours prior. It was how it used to feel.

There was no way to delude himself into feeling these things. They were really, truly happening.

The most incredible thing to him was the scar.

When Thomas was thirty-two, he sliced his palm open when trying to divide up a mango at a barbeque. It was a stupid, simple mistake that rendered him in the emergency room for ten stitches. The scar that remained was jagged and white, tracing down the length of his palm. He liked to joke that it was his only reminder of a bad fight with a ripe fruit; he rubbed at it with his middle finger when he got nervous at the airport or the DMV.

When he tried to rub it now, he noticed it was gone.

Thomas laughed. He laughed, and he laughed, and he found it nearly impossible to stop.

“It ain’t the car!” he shouted to no one. The rain kept coming, and he lapped it up as he ran.

MILE FIVE

Mia Sommers liked to drink her morning coffee on the porch, even on rainy days like today. She lived on the corner; she liked to watch the cars pass by, and maybe read a book while she woke up. Usually Jeff would be at work– he took the night shift these past three months– but today he stayed home and made breakfast for the two of them. He was inside right now, flipping the pancakes.

Mia sipped her coffee, and looked down the street to see a man running in the middle of the road, wearing a sleeveless Garfield sweater and a pair of underwear.

She couldn’t help but laugh; it was the stupidest thing she had ever seen. The man looked no older than twenty-six– he was cackling wildly to himself as he ran. Evidently, he heard her laugh, because he waved as he passed by.

“You go, dude!” she cheered as he rounded the corner. She set her coffee down on the bannister and applauded. He hooted back at her and kept on running. His shoes were slapping on the pavement with great enthusiasm. He was the happiest young man she had ever laid eyes on.

“What’s all the hub-bub?” Jeff said, stepping onto the porch with their plates of pancakes.

“You missed all the fun,” she said. “Dude ran by just now in his underwear. Looked like he was having the time of his life.”

Jeff handed her a plate. “Was he cute?”

She wrinkled her nose. “In his twenties. College boy. Too young for me.”

“She tells me what I want to hear.”

They kissed. Jeff sat down in one of the deck chairs. He cut a slice of pancake off with the side of his fork, and popped the bite in his mouth.

“You think this rain will let up today?” Mia asked him. “I wanted to go for a walk. Hell, maybe a run, after seeing homeboy booking it down the street.”

“I hope so,” Jeff said, chewing. “This rain’s making these ancient bones ache. I can feel it in the legs, mostly.”

Mia rolled her eyes. “You’re thirty-two,” she said.

“I know,” Jeff agreed, solemnly. He took another bite of his breakfast. “Nice and old.”