"Robert Reed - X-Country" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reed Robert)

our various social functions. During that first year, he simultaneously dated two
young women—gazelles nearly as fast on their feet as he was. As for employment,
Kip seemed to lack both the time and the need. He wasn’t retired so much as he was
incredibly busy with the disciplined life of an eternal athlete. Hard runs were woven
around sessions in the weight room, plus he was a regular in both yoga and pilates
classes. His diet was rich with nuts and green leaves, and he never drank more than
half a beer. And where our local twenty-five-year-old stallions were a grim, brutally
competitive lot, Kip seemed utterly at ease with himself. Wearing his boyish zest
along with a killer wardrobe, he liked to drive around town in a BMW—a
convertible, of course—waving at his many good acquaintances while the blond hair
rippled in the wind.

I would confess to feeling envious of Kip, but “envy” doesn’t do my
complicated feelings justice.

And I liked the man. Always.

So far as I know, I was first to hear about Kip’s cross-country race. He’d
been living with us for nearly fourteen months. On Thursdays, half a dozen old dogs
would meet up at Calley Lake to run tempos. It was two miles to the lap, and a good
tempo is supposed to be twenty seconds a mile slower than your honest 10K pace.
Kip and I decided to do three miles. A lap and a half. He finished at least ninety
seconds ahead of me. By the time I reached the mark, he was breathing normally,
smiling happily, offering me a buoyant “Good job” as I staggered to a halt beside
him.

It was a hot afternoon in May. I needed water, and he drank a little sip from
the fountain, as if to be polite. Then we started trotting that last mile around the lake,
heading back for the starting line and the younger forty-something runners who were
already finishing their four miles.

Kip was capable of an innocent, almost goofy smile.

Something about the blue eyes and that endless grin made people believe there
wasn’t much inside his pretty-boy head. “A blond with implants,” was the
often-heard joke. And his voice was usually slow and careful, as if his words needed
to be examined, singly and together, before any sentence could be shown to the
world.
 “Don,” he said to me. “I’m thinking about holding a race.”

“Yeah?” I said.

“An X-country race.”

He said it that way. “X” as in the letter, and then “country.”

“Cross-country?” I asked.

He didn’t say yes or no. Instead, he let his big smile get bigger and the blue
eyes dreamier, and staring off into the watery distance, he told me, “At my old