Jose

The next day Jose is down in the locker room. He is wearing his malcom X cap that spells the word MeXican with a capital X.

Apparently there was a fight between Jose and Peacock.  It happened across the street from the school, in the smoker’s alley next to Schepke’s flowers where the smokers congregate during lunch hour . They got into an altercation and Jose popped him and school security and then the police became involved. There were no arrests. No charges were pressed. Coach Ricca  got sent to the office. Apparently since the incident didn’t happen exactly on school property no charges were pressed and Peacock and Munoz just had to shake hands, verbally rectifying their tiff in front of the Dean and Coach Ricca. We do the Main street five,  where we run through the golf course, trickle through a tip of West Peoria, crossing the hush of Western avenue near the same pay phone I used to call Stacia last summer, wending our way via Cooper, running across Olin Quad trying not to look at the college girls, hitting Main street and running on shipped concrete until running central where we take a right and another right on Moss, working our past the palatial estates of Moss avenue transversely crossing Western through Jumers parking lot down Martin Luther King drive, taking the vaginal path that leads from Madison golf course and empties into the shingles dregs of the south side.

I run with coach the whole way. For the most part Peacock is with us.

Jose lags behind.

 

The next day after school men are standing outside the building in what looks to be Sunday school suits. Some are wearing sunglasses.  Their visages have an overtly damp cardboard flavor attached above the stump of the neck They are not saying anything. As students almost nonchalantly bristle past toting backpacks and academic cargo the men in the dated suits with pants cuffs each hold out a lime-colored book the size of my wallet when folded in my back pocket.


                                                 

It is the same bibles they pass out at Christ Lutheran every year even though it is idle since Christ Lutheran was a Christian academy. There is a cardboard box fraught with miniature bibles which contains the new testimony plus Psalm and proverbs.

 

I take a bible and open it up. All I can think about is that I have two more shots to break my cousin's record. All I can think about is that I have busted my ass all summer and I am not getting faster. All I can think about is Angelina Lighthouse and how I am in high school and everything still doesn't make any sense.

Our next race is at Pekin in exactly one weeks time.