Dalton Reese

Dalton Reese is 58 and has timed the Boston marathon for thirty years. He is an official and timekeepertimekeeper Official who measures and records the times of competitors in a race. at the finish table, short, pot-bellied, with a sun-reddened face and a thick gray mustache, and he speaks of the rulebook as of sacred scripture. Grumpy and methodical, he says he has seen people faint, vomit and cry on that finish line, and that he never saw anyone arrive the way the winner arrived.

He lives in a brick house in a suburb north of Boston, with a small yard and a basement where he keeps old stopwatches in rows, each with its own maintenance list. On his study wall, a collection of framed finish tapes. He eats the same sandwich for lunch for years and argues with life over the kitchen radio.

He wears a white athletics federation cap, a navy-blue polo shirt that early on is sweaty at the armpits, metal-rimmed glasses and two stopwatches hung around his neck, with a clipboard always under his arm. He fiddles with the stopwatches while he thinks and talks looking at the clock, not at the person. Everyone calls him Mr. Reese, even the older ones.

About that afternoon, his account is that of someone who held his post: he placed the thermal blanket over the winner's shoulders as she crossed the line and followed the rest of the scene standing beside the table, stopwatch in hand. He finds the day too strange to forget, and repeats that the stopwatch does not lie, detective. People lie.

When the question suggests he falsified the winner's time, Dalton answers that it has been thirty years with the federation and nobody calls him a forger at his own table. He presses the two stopwatches against his chest, like someone protecting an animal, and it remains to be seen whether it is an official's pride or the warning of someone who doesn't want the clock opened.