Part 12 (1/2)

”I read your book,” Caleb blurted out. ”I came here.”

Mack smiled. For the first time, Caleb felt the pull of those eyes.

”You run, dude?” His voice was surprisingly nasal.

”I just did six.”

”Miles?”

”Yes.”

A pained pause followed. The other people at the table were looking at him.

”Come back when it's hours.”

”I can't run six hours straight.”

”Sure you can. Isn't that why you came here?”

Through the holidays Caleb ran seven days a week, base building, exercising ladders and cutdowns and pyramids. He practiced meditating, to direct kinetic energy deeper into his body. He e-mailed his resignation to his manager and signed a year lease near Centennial Park.

By then he had cut refined sugars and red meat from his diet. His musculature began to harden, while he lost fifteen pounds. His first runs through subzero temperatures made him gasp. In February Mack saw him on a frozen trail and complimented him on his progress. It was considered a long winter, but to Caleb it went by in a white blur.

That April Caleb returned to the Rocking Horse, and waited for Happy Trails to arrive. When Mack sat down, Caleb approached his table.

”Come out with us Friday,” Mack offered as he lifted a shot gla.s.s.

”I can't do six hours yet.”

”Let me tell you what you can do.”

Caleb's first run with Happy Trails was ecstatic. As the sun rose he moved with fifteen other rigid-spined, piston-armed, wide-smiling runners. He could feel warmth emanating from their bodies, just as Mack's book had described. The runners in front of him kicked up last evening's rain, which fell around his eyes like an angel's tears. After five hours he bent over on a narrow trail, his hands on his knees, and threw up. Mack jogged over, and leaned down.

”Run.”

Caleb shook his head, heaving. He tightened his eyes, shaking, acid burning through his chest. But somehow his legs started moving. Within a half mile his stomach cramped, and he stumbled, fire raging through his spasming body.

”Drop,” Mack explained quietly, ”and this is your last run with us.”

Caleb stared wide-eyed at him, seeing that he meant it.

Suddenly Mack raised his hands and shouted, ”'Now triumph! Transformation! Jubilate!'”

Caleb straightened. There followed the hardest minutes of his life. He deteriorated from a walk to a crawl. Mack stayed beside him the whole hour, repeating affirmations. When the stopwatch hit six hours, some of the others carried him, he had no idea how far, to their house.

He awoke on a mattress on a floor, to the sound of group chanting downstairs. When he appeared in the big room, they all stopped and clapped for him.

Afterward, Caleb was admitted into members.h.i.+p. He ran with Happy Trails several times a week. He discovered how to absorb the energy in the steam emitting from a buck in the woods, and from the friction of a warbler's wings against a branch.

By this time, it had become very difficult to speak with his family. When he called, Julie spoke to him as if he were a child suffering some shock. Fred wanted to find him a job in Seattle. Shane explained that he understood and wanted to come out and see him. Their disconnection from what he was experiencing frustrated him; they a.s.sumed he was in trauma, when really he was in transcendence.

That fall, Caleb ran his first ultramarathon, a fifty-mile Fat Race in Winter Park. When he finished in eleventh place, Mack hugged him, his breath steaming in the cold.

”'Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing. Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms. Strong and content I travel the open road.'”

Caleb felt hot tears streaming down his face. Afterward, Mack gathered the house in a circle. They held hands, and quietly initiated Caleb into Sunday energy healing.

Once he moved into the house, he experienced total clarity about his life. He knew what was expected of him each day, and still each minute was filled with unpredictable pleasures. Every two months he competed in hundred-mile ultrathons, moving gradually from placing sixtieth, to thirtieth, where he plateaued for some years, and then the twenties, and now, finally, the single digits.

Caleb kept his life this way for ten years, until the morning when he had been in the kitchen and heard a knock from the front door, and watched it open, revealing June and Lily.

After that, there was no such simplicity again.

Now, lying on this narrow shelf, inches away from an endless drop, the smell of Lily's skin washed over him like a rain. He thought of how he had accomplished nothing to help her, and he let loose a prolonged and agonized scream. A face appeared upside down far above him.

”Oh, Jesus!” a woman shouted.

Eventually someone arrived with a rope. Caleb pushed his pelvis up and tied it around his waist as instructed, held it even as it sliced into his fingers, as he was lifted from the berm, dangling in the perilous air, his feet kicking at the dirt and rock, multiple hands grabbing his s.h.i.+rt and pulling, and only when he felt the canyon trail beneath his back did he let go of the rope. A stretcher, oxygen, and blankets awaited him.

”We've been looking for you for an hour, buddy. Thought you fell through a cornice. Your pacer's been going crazy.”

Caleb's voice, husky and broken, asked simply, ”What's the cutoff?”

The Search and Rescue workers stared at him as if he had lost his bearings. But a watching race official understood.

”You're forty minutes over.”

Caleb accepted water, thanked them, and started into his antelope strides back around the ridge of Engineer Mountain.

Behind him he heard the rescue workers shouting for him to come back. His lungs hiccuped brown sputum as he made his way down toward Telluride, where the sudden appearance of people and cars panicked him. He ran as quickly as he could through its streets, for the safety of the trails.

After miles of switchbacks he encountered a runner dry-heaving on the near bank of a river. The recent storm had flooded its banks; the water was far too high to run through. Caleb jogged west, his exhausted eyes searching for some way across. A mile upriver he dove in to swim. The current pulled him back east. It didn't matter; he was simply moving.

On the other side he found the course and began to see other entrants sitting wretchedly along the trail like refugees; one young guy lay on the ground sobbing. Caleb's sides began cramping, and his incoming breaths sounded like Lily's exhales. He guessed himself to be around eighty miles in.

At the Chapman Gulch aid station, Juan hugged him.

”Where you been man? Mack almost called out Search and Rescue.”

”I had a problem.”

”Man, you hear about John?”