The Man Who Was Running

Owen Ketcham ran the river path in Millvale six evenings a week and had done it for nine years, and he had a system for it, because he had a system for everything and because the systems were the only things he had left that his wife had not been in.

He was fifty-four. He had run the Millvale water plant from 2009 until he took the buyout, and he still went in on Tuesdays and Thursdays as a consultant because the young man they had hired could not read the old valve charts, and he was paid a hundred and forty dollars a day for six hours of walking up and down a building he knew better than his own house. He had had a heart scan in October and it had come back clean and he had bought new shoes on the strength of it, and he had a daughter in Boise who called him on Sundays and whom he had not told about the scan.

The path is three and a quarter miles each way, gravel, along the top of the levee, from the boat ramp at Kestrel Park to the county line and back. He ran it out and walked it back, always in that order, and he did the out in twenty-eight minutes and did not care about the time and checked his watch every four minutes.

He started at six thirty that Thursday, and it was dark by a quarter to seven, and the path had the two things it had in February: the cold that comes up off the water and goes down into the lungs, and the company. There was a woman with two dogs at the boat ramp. There was a pair of kids on bikes near the trestle. Past the trestle there was nobody, and past the trestle the path runs a hundred yards with the levee on one side and the reeds on the other and then comes out under the county bridge where the light from the road above comes down through the girders, and that is the part of the path that everybody in Millvale knows to be the dark part and that nobody in Millvale has ever thought twice about.

He was under the bridge when he passed the first thing and did not see it.

He passed it and was four strides past it and then his body did the thing that a body does, which is to stop and turn before it has told the mind anything, and he turned, jogging in place on the gravel out of long habit, and looked back at the bank under the bridge.

There was a shape in the reeds at the edge of the water. It was a good shape, it was the shape of a man, and what made Owen Ketcham's hands go cold in his gloves — this was in his statement, this was the sentence he gave the two deputies at the hospital in the eleven minutes he was conscious — was not the shape; it was that the shape was only a shape. It was a man made of the air right above a fire. It was a dark warm wriggle the size of a man, standing still, up to its knees in the frozen reeds, and inside it, about at the level of the stomach, there hung a small dark knot the size of a plum.

Ketcham said, "Hello?"

The shape did not move. The knot moved.

Ketcham's mouth filled with the taste of pennies, which is what his mouth did now in the second half of a run, and he turned and he ran, and he ran well, because he was a man who ran six evenings a week and had a clean scan in October, and he did not look back for four hundred yards, and when he did look back there was nothing on the path behind him but the path.

He stopped at the trestle and put his hands on his knees and laughed at himself for about six seconds.

He was fifty-four years old, and he had run this path nine years, and he had had two beers with his dinner because his daughter had called early, and there is a thing that happens to a man alone on a levee at night in February, and it had happened to him once before, in 2022, in the fog, with a plastic bag, and he had told his wife about it and she had laughed at him, and that had been that.

So he stood up off his knees and did what he had come to do, which was the thing he did every evening at the top of the trestle, which was to eat the banana.

That was all. He had a banana in the pocket of his windbreaker, the way he had a banana in the pocket of his windbreaker at the trestle every evening, because his mother's people had all died of the same thing at the same age and he was not going to be the one who did not eat the banana.

He got it out and peeled it and took a bite and turned and looked at the water and chewed, and behind him, four feet behind him, in the dark, at the height of his own right shoulder, the second half of the banana was eaten.

He heard it first. Nobody who has not heard it can be told what it sounds like to hear a banana being eaten by something standing behind you: it is a wet, patient, thorough sound with a person's breath in it, and it came to Owen Ketcham's ear from a distance of about two feet, and there was no one on the path.

He turned around with the half banana in his hand.

There were teeth marks in it. There were teeth marks in his half of the banana, in the half he was holding, at the end that had been pointed away from him, and there was nothing anywhere on the path as far as the trestle light went, and the man in the reeds was nine hundred yards behind.

Then the windbreaker moved. That was the last thing he saw clearly. His own windbreaker, the right-hand pocket, went out from his side the way a pocket goes when a hand goes into it and takes out a glove, and it settled, and the headlamp he carried for the dark part of the path was in his pocket, and he got it out and turned it on and swung it out across the reeds, and the light found the shape, and the shape had not moved, and it was looking at him, and Owen Ketcham, fifty-four years old, standing at the top of the Millvale trestle with half a banana in his hand, said the only complete sentence that was in him, which was:

"Who's there?"

And the last thing he heard, before the steel, was a voice four inches from his left ear, in the flat even tone of a man who had a stack of answers and was choosing the shortest, and the voice said:

"Nobody. That's the whole of it. Every one of you keeps asking who's there."

They found him at twenty past eight, off the path, down the bank, in the frozen mud at the bottom of the levee, and what killed him was a length of steel fencing post that had been in the ground at the corner of the trestle washout since the county replaced the railing in 2019, and the coroner from the state police said the following morning that it had been used eleven times and then dropped, and that the drop was the only reason there was anything left of the man's face for his daughter to see in Boise.

They found the banana peel twelve feet away, on the path.

They found, in the frozen mud of the bank, going down and coming up, a set of prints, and the prints made two county deputies stand in the dark for ten minutes without speaking to each other. One of them was Deputy Roy Nunn. He had come over the Cedar Hollow grade at forty miles an hour with his lights on and his radio off, because the call had come in on the county net and the description on the county net had been man, no shoes, and he had not slept in four days and had been sitting in his kitchen with his coat on since eleven o'clock at night waiting for exactly this.