OLD MARATHONERS DON'T JUST FADE AWAY

A story in Night Flights, Volume II
Copyright 2012 Rodney E.J. Chang

Old man Edward McDonald had been an avid marathoner for most of his life. It had been over fifty years since his inaugural attempt to conquer the standardized 26.2 miles of the sporting event. His fastest finishes were behind him now. His knees, hips, and small of the back registered complaints whenever he tried to do half the training distances that he did in his prime. Now all he could hope for has staggering across finish lines without too much pain from barrages of leg cramps. His physical appearance insured patronizing applause, which he disliked but smiled back all the same. It reminded him that the crowds were impressed that he still was competing - or just “still kicking.” Edward was pushing 90, but still humping the pavements. He was an old warrior, that's for sure.

Considering the abuse over the years, which amounted to a lifetime of overtraining, Edward was fortunate to have the right genes. Even as the aches and pains persisted as he continued his lifelong sport, his joints still had enough remaining cartilage to endure further assault. The aged runner, long retired from his post office clerical position in small town Missoula, Montana, told himself he'd hang up the running shoes when he turned ninety - which was only a few years off. Like an well-used automobile, Edward had logged over 200,000 miles with his knees, hip joints, leg muscles and tendons. Unlike an old car, he couldn't trade in his used body for a new model.

Oh, he knew he was addicted to the sport. In his sixties he made a nice run of finishes as a member of the international Marathon Maniacs, a group loaded with other compulsive-obsessive runners like himself. He was also paranoid, thinking if he ever totally stopped running, time would finally catch up with him and he'd drop dead in no time after reducing his life motor to idle. So he dared not to stop running. 

He presently lived just with his grandson, Christopher, in a small apartment in the Missoula's historic, downtown district. He had no other surviving kin. Ed made arrangements to give everything to his to-be sole surviving relative. He felt good about that, knowing how the still single forty-five year old had a difficult time making ends meet. Christopher merely survived on what pay he made as a mediocre salesman in a struggling household furnishings store. 

The zest of life had passed the old man by. Wife, children and siblings had passed on to join the family history. Now there was really nothing left to live for – except for his running. All that he looked forward to was more lumbering jogs. He made an effort to keep to his schedule of running three times a week. Impressive for a late-eighties year old man. Edward got up early to beat the heat, did a couple of miles, more if a running event was approaching. As he jogged before dawn, he always enjoyed viewing the morning sunrise from behind the mound-like green hills overlooking the University of Montana campus. He was a life-long Grizzly fan, went to every home football game, and always wore a UM t-shirt when he jogged. Nobody would have guessed that old Ed never completed high school. 

After his runs, Edward would sit around the apartment, read the paper, and watch soup operas or sports events on television. It might seem like a boring lifestyle to young people, but at his age doing nothing was satisfying in itself. It also provided the recuperation time to restore, work out the kinks and ice his joints from the morning runs. 

Edward was skinny, saggy and wrinkled, looking frail like any other eighty-pushing-ninety year-old would appear. But his doctor said, because of his lifelong regimentation of long distance running, his heart – and mind, were in excellent condition. He had no major medical condition, amazing for his age, but took pills to control his blood pressure and cholesterol. He did start watching his diet and cutting back on his drinking at sixty.

Edward could have made it to ninety if it wasn't for the early morning drunken driver. Edward was jogging, turning a corner on Elm and Cedar, when red-eyed Archie Smith, Jr., plowed into the old man. Over one of the large grassy hills that graced Missoula, dawn was just peeking out with its glowing red eye still just a sliver. So it was a witness to the body on the street, its legs bent in impossible horrid positions from the torso, lying in a pool of dark red. Both legs, of all things, displayed just red flannel socks. The bloodied, running shoes had landed across the street, scattered apart about twenty feet from each other from the fatal impact.

Christopher took care of the funeral arrangements. He made sure to follow the will's orders for the viewing. Members of the Missoula Trail Running Club filed by the open coffin to pay their final respects to a former long time member. Not that he was still an active member in his later years. None of the younger members knew of him. When Edward no longer could keep up with the rest, he knew that he was a drag on the group. So he quit the club at the ripe old age of seventy-eight. Plus the club's preference for up and down routes of trails in the wilderness was then too much for his compromised knees, ankles, and hip joints. But there they were at the funeral service, responding to the obituary in the town paper and coming out to show respect for one of their own.

As they filed past, each widened his eyes, looked at the other next to them, and chuckled. For there, in the casket, were Edward's exposed feet, not covered by the veil that concealed his torso and upper legs. He wore bright red flannel socks, the same ones that accommodated the running shoes that Edward last wore. The ones that were retrieved from the accident scene. Over the socks was his latest pair of running shoes. People could see the blood stains on the footwear. 

One of the guys just had to ask. Roy Ruppenthal, you wouldn't think he was a runner with the weight that the middle-age man carried, came up to Edward's grandson and asked, 

“So what's with the gaudy red socks and sending your grandfather off in those bloodied running shoes?” Even if Edward was a former runner, the attire seemed disrespectful. 

“Does it have something to do with like how some soldiers prefer to be buried with their boots on?”

“If you gotta know, it's because it was my grandpa's kooky request that he be buried with his last pair of running shoes and socks. Don't ask me why. I tried to get the stains off so it wouldn't look so morbid. But as you can see I failed. Bloodstains are a bitch. And I agree it don't go well with those gaudy red socks, or that tacky bow tie that he's wearing. But that's what the old kook … I mean Grandpa, demanded in the will – if I wanted to receive the inheritance."

“I get it now,” said Roy the runner, still attempting through exercise, but not making any significant progress, to get his bloated beer belly down. Oh, he tried to cut back on his drinking but always lost his conviction when the motto, “A man's gotta have his beer,” popped up in his mind.
“The accountant above, and the runner below. What a fitting attire, an informative sight for everybody about Edward's balanced life.”

After hearing Roy say that, Christopher had a little more respect for his grandfather's final resting attire. But not much. He still thought the deceased’s wardrobe looked ridiculous.

Not that I myself would get caught dead in such corny attire, he confided to himself. He still looks like a clown, if you ask me.
As Roy started away from the casket, he whispered to Christopher, 

“Looks like you are getting the old man's money.”

“You bet I am,” the grandfather's greedy grandson unabashedly replied.

“I earned it, having to explain Grandpa’s silly attire to everybody.”

In a couple hours, the few cars that came drove off. Bouquets of flowers laid on top of the mound of replaced dirt. A monument declaring that here lies the late Edward McDonald would be installed by the end of the next week. Old man Edward now rested in peace down there in the dark in perfect stillness and silence. Conditions that old folks like. Dressed in his red socks and last pair of running foot gear.

That evening his grandson was retiring for the night. It had been a long day but it was personally satisfying. He had dutifully laid his grandfather to rest. Now he waited to get “paid.”

“V.I.P., you old geezer,” he mumbled as he held a cold brew. But Christopher thought more about the big bucks that would be coming his way, once the lawyer did the paperwork. At least, Grandpa, you don't have to do any more of that silly running. I told you that you were too old to keep doing that shit. Why, with your failing eyesight, one deaf ear, and you more frequently tripping on the sidewalks ledges and street curves, you were lucky not to have broken a leg or hip. And who would be stuck as your caretaker? Man, that would have meant so much more of my valuable time to care for your crippled body. Thank God that never happened. You know, I warned you to stop the nonsense. But you stubbornly kept to your morning routine and just happened to run out from that street corner on the wrong dark morning. Well Sir, it's all over for you. Nothing I can do about it. In fact that drunk took care of business for me. Now it's just collect what's mine sooner than I thought I'd have to wait. Thanks, Grandpa, for doing me a favor.

Christopher grinned as he thought about all of this, sipping a beer as he comfortably now sat in the old man's favorite chair in the living room. He raised the bottle up in the air, offering a salute to his grandfather for dying sooner than he thought he would have to wait. A late night show was on the television, some black and white flick titled “The Shrinking Man.” But Christopher, too lost in thought about how he would be spending the money, did not comprehend the images and sounds. He envisioned himself in Las Vegas, with beautiful women surrounding him as he flashed money in his hands. After finishing off two thirds of the bottle (he had already finished off two previous ones), he trudged upstairs to retire.

As he laid in the dark in the comfortable bed, he began thinking about how he'd invest some of his newly bestowed fortune. 
Let's see... fifteen percent in a gold fund. And I'll need some foreign equity exposure... maybe China...besides putting a major portion into American stock index funds. Better hedge the stocks with some bond funds.

Christopher wasn't lying in his narrow twin bed in the smaller bedroom of the apartment but, for the first time, in his grandfather's king size bed in the larger and more comfortable master bedroom. He fantasized talking to the recently departed: 
Your bed is way more comfy than the one I was forced to sleep in. Thanks for handing over your room and bed, Grandpa; you're a swell guy. 
Christopher didn't bother to change the bed sheet that was previously slept on by Edward. It reeked with the smell of his grandfather. He wasn't the type that would win an award for good housekeeping. Nor was he superstitious.

As these final thoughts of the day played through his mind, Christopher heard a scuffling noise at the front entry door. Maybe it was that mouse he had seen recently dashing behind the refrigerator the other day. He was meaning to get a mousetrap and take care of the varmint. Being the procrastinator that he was, Christopher decided to leave it be and deal with the pest some other day. Besides, it had been a tiresome few days as he undertook the funeral arrangements and then the funeral itself. 

The sound didn't subside but kept getting louder and louder. 

Now it sounded like the clopping of shoes on the old apartment's wooden flooring.

“Shit, what now?” the tired and tipsy forty-five year old said to himself. 

Christopher grudgingly sat up and got out of bed, then walked into the dark hallway that led to the front living room and entry door. The room had dim stray light from the streetlights shining inside via access through the windows. Traversing the room he went over to the entry area, from where he judged the sound had come. 

He turned on the entryway ceiling light. 

To his shock there, below his feet, were the running shoes of Grandpa Edward. They appeared to be the same pair that he was wearing when he was buried. With disbelieving wide eyes, Christopher stared at the same telltale bloodstains around the openings, created right before the shoes had catapulted out from the feet, at the moment of impact of the fatal collision. 

It can't be, he thought in disbelief.

Imbibed with alcohol and not knowing what to make of it, or to do with these shoes that mysteriously had returned home to the apartment – from the grave, the drunken Christopher simply threw them away with the morning trash. That he thought would be the end of it. He wrote it off as some kind of sick joke. He didn’t have the time or interest to investigate. His only concern was getting the inheritance money.

But the next night, the same thing. The noise downstairs late at night, and the reappearance of the same blood stained running shoes. This time a more determined Christopher burnt the shoes. 

Yet, a few days later, again the noise at night; and still the reappearance of the shoes. Now, besides the stains, they also appeared marred by fire.

“What the hell?....” was as far as Christopher would consider the dilemma.

Within days the grandson had moved out. He abandoned the deposit money in order to break the lease to get the heck out of there as soon as he could. He reckoned the place was now haunted or even cursed.

Anyway, it's chump change, Christopher reasoned, compared to the bucks I'm inheriting real soon. 

But little did he know that his grandfather's assets, kept secret all these years from everyone, including his next of kin, amounted to a check for a measly five thousand dollars and seventy six cents. And there was still the funeral services and casket to pay for. Christopher had charged these on his own credit card for expediency. He felt generous, figuring the old man had to be worth at least a half a million dollars, considering how old he was and how thrifty Edward had been when it came to spending money. 

So, despite his grandfather's passing, Christopher continued to struggle to make ends meet for the rest of his miserable life. He later was fired from the household furnishing business and spent years as an all-night security guard for Target. He never became marriage material, nor was he able to save enough to ever retire. One dreary winter morning, a morning employee discovered the old night guard dead in the parking lot. Christopher had suffered a fatal heart attack.

For the vacant apartment, the “For Rent” ad would repeatedly be run in the town’s newspaper for the unit. Because during some early mornings just before dawn - the time Edward usually stepped out to run, tenants could hear the haunting sound of shoes running somewhere in the house, sometimes even along the hallway outside of the bedrooms. The source of the disturbance could not be found. The rental manager tried to explain to complaining tenants that it was old creaking boards of the aging structure. But the sound continued even after all the loose floor boards had been replaced. Besides, it sometimes even seemed to originate from inside the ceiling. So tenants themselves kept running - away to some other rental property. This necessitated the placement of an ad repeatedly - at progressively lower rates.

The sound of running never abated. Eventually, the unit did remain rented. A large illegal immigrant family that could afford no more for rent just accepted, and then learned to ignore the eerie sound. A household altar, complete with lit candles and a crucifix with a replica of the body of Jesus Christ, in the family's mind, protected them from the spirit that also resided within. 

But at least nobody saw the bloody shoes again.