Be Not Far from Me(22)

And thank God, because I’d go through two or three pairs in a season, running to practice, running at practice, and then running home. I ran on the weekends, got up early and ran in the mornings. I’d run to school and half the time beat the bus there. The wind in my ears meant I couldn’t hear nothing else, and that was just fine.

But there were things I did kind of like hearing; my name on the announcements at school when I placed at a big invitational, everybody’s reaction at my face in the paper when I made it to nationals as a sophomore. Davey Beet even wrote me a letter about that, the handwriting careful and neat, as were the words. I wrote him back right away, but it was a community college mailbox and he had dropped out before my letter reached him. It came back to me, “Return to Sender” stamped in red ink.

Getting a letter from Davey Beet was the high point in my life until a man in a windbreaker walked up to me after a meet and asked if I was considering going to college and where. I eyed him funny for a second, until my coach cut in and I realized I was talking to a scout.

The idea that there was a college out there that might have a spot in it for me had never even been the whiff of a dream. I went home with paperwork and talked to Dad, and we both cried a bit, and when I signed at the end of junior year the local and county papers showed up to take pictures. The truth is that there’s a full-ride scholarship in my feet, and one of them coming off doesn’t mean I get half the money.

It means I get none.

“Shit,” I say again, and pull my leg from the water.

I’m nearly numb, so it doesn’t hurt as bad when I press against the skin, leaving white indentations behind. The crushed part of my foot is gray and dead, but I’ll have to cut where the tissue is still alive if I’ve got any hope of stopping this infection.

It’ll hurt. But that’s not what worries me. What worries me is that I’ll cut off part of my body and wake up tomorrow to find out I was half a mile from somebody’s house, and that I threw away college and any chance of being anything other than a washed-up athlete in a small town because I didn’t know it.

All the time I’ve been out here I’ve been thinking in longer terms, bigger goals. When I find the road . . . when I get to the hospital . . . when they fix my foot . . . this will all be like it never happened. But I don’t think I’m anywhere near a road, or a hospital. The only thing of those three here right now is my foot, and it’s going to kill me. It’s the right now I got to be thinking about, real hard.

I pull Davey Beet’s hat down over my face, to shut out the world for a while.

“I don’t know what to do,” I admit.

It gets hot under there fast, so I pull it back up, and the first thing I see is a nice hefty piece of flint sticking out of the bank opposite me.

“Well, fuck you too,” I say.

Momma told me once that I was born with teeth.

It’s one of the few things I remember real clear about her, mostly because she made it sound like I chewed my way out of her rather than being born the normal way. For the longest time I watched barn cats giving birth, wondering why they didn’t seem to mind so much. I learned later that humans are the only mammals that experience terrible pain when giving birth, something they told me at Camp Little Fish was Eve’s fault, but I thought it sounded more like poor planning on God’s part. When I said so Davey Beet laughed until his face was red as his last name, and I was blushing too because he’d noticed me.

Dad told Momma she didn’t need to be telling me that story anymore, and there was a big fight—one of the last ones. She told him he didn’t have no idea what it was like to carry a child for the better part of a year, almost die getting it out, and then have it not need her anymore. He told her to shut her mouth and stop making me feel bad for doing nothing worse than being born, and that if I was born with teeth it was because I came out ready to defend myself, and there wasn’t any shame in that.

So I was kind of proud of it, actually. When I told Meredith, she called me a liar, so I knocked her down on the playground and her mom called mine. I listened in on the conversation, Momma using an old wall phone with a cord she’d wrap around and around her arm while she talked. She started out apologizing for me—something she’d gotten good at, I guess—but then after a few drinks of Wild Turkey she was telling Meredith’s mom all about the teeth, and how I was born with fingernails long as Tammy Faye Bakker’s.

Momma said she could feel me inside her, running my nails across her ribs, exploring the inside of her body the same as I do the woods now. She said she knew I was a wild thing and was surprised when I started walking early because it would’ve been more fitting for me to stay on all fours my whole life. I busted in then and told her I walked early so I could run sooner, all to get away from her and her endless bitching.

I got a smack across the mouth for that, but I guess I kind of deserved it.

I’m using those nails now to dig out this chunk of flint from the creek bank, and damn if it isn’t perfect for what I need it to do. It’s got an edge already, one I can sharpen by knapping off a slice with another rock. Once again, the world is telling me to cut into my own flesh because instead of exploding into a bunch of tiny pieces when I hit it, the flint breaks clean, making an edge sharp enough to slice my finger pad. The whole thing fits in my hand nicely, the edge of a tooth that isn’t mine, but only hungers for what I’ve got. When I hold it I become a weapon, my arm an ax handle, the flint a good blade. I can hack off the bad part of my foot with this; I know it.