PRESS KIT

The Frontrunner

Selected Excerpts & Powerful Quotes

Russ Clayton stands, balanced on the edge of the very top of the quarry, the cold rock beneath his  bare feet, long boned and white. His toes grip the sandstone. At least 60 feet below, the still water  shines, a pool of obsidian. The half-moon and its penumbra of light floats in the center. A breeze  

rises up the quarry wall, warm and soft. Passes over his face. Ruffles his hair. A nightbird calls  out but there is no response, only the murmur of the wind brushing leaves. A cloud passes. The  moon’s reflection fades and then snaps back to sharp focus against the flat, dark water. Russ’s  heart thuds. In his hands, with fingers spread wide, he holds a small boulder. The size of a  bowling ball. He is afraid that it’s weight will tip him over the edge.  

He lifts the rock up before him, chin, eyes, and chest high, as if in offering, and lets it roll off  his fingertips. Holding only moonlight in his palms, he counts off the seconds as the rock falls  through the black air, passing the carved face of the quarry wall in silence.  

***

“Two kinds of racers. Frontrunners and the rest. Frontrunners are a rare breed. They go out  fast and run from the front. They run for time and figure if they go fast enough for long enough  the rest will suffer so badly they will just give the fuck up.”  

“The rest?”  

“The rest? Those that made the promise and are really racing, not just going through the  motions? They hang and kick. They hope to stick with the Frontrunner, not break that invisible  thread that connects them to the leader. Ahead of them is the Frontrunner, tortured by not  knowing where anyone else is and self-doubt. Think of it. No one has ever been where he is in  that moment, there in the front of this race, on this day with nothing ahead but an ocean of pain  and the empty track. A man running without limits. While all the rest? They only need to stay  with the Frontrunner until the very last seconds when they will try to pass him and kick it to the  tape. The hangers have it easy. They already know that someone has run faster than them. There  he is, leading. So they know it is possible. They’re not plowing new ground or breaking any  barriers. There the guy is, right in front of them. So, the only test they face is sticking with the  leader and then outkicking him.”  

Russ asks, “Why would anyone want to be a Frontrunner?”  

“It’s not something you decide. You are born to it or, you’re not.”  

***
As he watches his boy run down the road and head for home, Chuck remembers sending him  off to school the first time. He must have been about five. After he found his seat on the bus,  Russ had turned to look out of the window and Chuck could see the boy’s eyes following him,  wide open, not worried, but wondering. Then, the bus disappeared down the road and Chuck  went back into the trailer and sat there in the kitchen watching the coffee in his cup grow cold  and listening to the faucet drip. As he thought about it, it seemed to Chuck that he was destined  to be alone in the world. Caroline left him, his parents now dead, the other women and Tiffany  gone. Now Russ.  

It got easier as the years passed or, at least, he had gotten used to the going away. But, he  knows that this time will not be like the times Russ got on the school bus. There will be no  coming home at the end of the day with art projects clutched in his hand and a mostly empty  lunch box. He knows he can never run the odometer back and try again. You get one shot and  one shot only. It makes him shake his head to wonder at the fact that here he is doing his damn  best on this empty country road to help his son get away.  

My damn best. That’s something I can hold onto.  

***

Buck does not clap or wave. He stands, hands in his pockets. Mute. Eyes flicking from Russ  back to the chase pack. Then back to him and, as Russ draws close, they meet eye to eye. But by  then, anything he might say would have come too late. The fragile mental barrier Russ  constructed between himself and fear, shatters. It’s too much. And while he knows as a  Frontrunner, that he must not, he can’t help but commit the cardinal sin.  

He looks over his shoulder.  

***

Eventually, as is inevitable, the day ends and dusk falls. Sunburned and encrusted with a film of  salt and again feeling dizzy, he approaches the outskirts of another small village whose place is  marked on the horizon by a concrete grain elevator. He climbs a rolling rise a few miles from the  town and, at the crest, sees below him, sitting on the edge of a cornfield with the end of day light  flashing off its aluminum sides, a diner and the yellow light that spills from its windows. Dot’s  Diner.  

It’s time. Russ knows that the road for him ends here today. He is empty. Both mind and body  fragile vessels cracked wide open and drained. A pile of shards waiting to be fitted back together  in a new form and filled to the brim with a clear lake of shimmering hope. A bowl held by his  own two loving hands. And, inside, peering back and reflected on the surface, a visage of himself  he struggles to recognize.  

***

“It's the anticipation of pain that makes us slow down, not pain itself. Your brain is the  governor God gave us. You’ve got to ignore your brain. You’ve got to ignore God.”  “How? How do you ignore God?”  

***

The sun sets and the night drops a dark blanket over the land. The stars appear. Russ runs.  Around midnight, the moon peaks out from over the mountains and throws Russ’s shadow on the  track. It follows him, stretching and contracting, ahead and then to the side and then behind, lap  after lap flashing past the kerosene lamps glowing yellow in the night. A silent ghost floating  across the land.  

Russ remembers his watery image caught in the plate glass window of the hardware store. He  thinks of Doug bending over him at the Compton race, showing him the stopwatch. He thinks of  his father, standing on the pedals to keep pace, ringing the bell, loving him. He remembers  Mollie letting him sit in her bay window and talking with him. And Stewie and Jimmy laying on  the grassy infield. And sitting with Lauren on the hill and watching the lights blink on in Eugene  below, tickling her and laughing.  

After mile 19, Russ asks, “What was my time?”  

“Does it matter?”  

After the first lap of mile 20, as Russ passes the Brad in the lawn chair, Brad shouts out into  the darkness, “Where are you?”  

Russ does not answer.  

But he knows.  

I’m right here, right now.  

***

Russ turns off the engine and it ticks, spilling heat into the cool morning air. He looks up at the  crystalline blue sky domed above and thinks of his long journey to this place. In the rearview, his  father’s eyes look back, set deep on each side of his mother’s nose.  

Russ smiles remembering what his father told him about the promise he made to himself in  the trailer some twenty years ago, looking down into his son’s tiny face. A resolution made by an  underdog. A promise that no one would have bet he would make, much less be able or equipped  to keep. The odds stacked against him. Dad had the meeting. Just him facing him. He came to the  line clear eyed. Certain he could not fail if he took the lead, ran from the front and never looked  back.  

The proof sitting right here in an old pickup truck