Flat Water Tuesday (10 page)

I heaved the cans of paint onto a makeshift table his crew had set up inside the shed using milk crates and one of the sheets of plywood they’d stiffed him for. Channing at least had bought good paint for the outside, an off-white, and two bottles of thinners with a bundle of brand-new, honest-to-god stirrers taped together. He’d also remembered to get sandpaper and new brushes.

“Rowing with others takes a certain kind of determination, Carrey.”

“Doesn’t seem like I have a choice.”

“The sport is not just about brute power. Or endurance. Or the ability to suffer. Rowing in a team forces you to respond to what other men do in the boat. To adhere to a strategy. To follow commands. To put your petty gripes and prejudices and fears aside.”

“It means putting up with three rowers I don’t know or trust and a girl who could steer us into the rocks. My experience working with other people has been pretty disappointing.”

“Carrey, eventually you will learn to be pleasantly surprised when people do
not
disappoint you. You’re going to stir that paint, I suppose.”

“Unless you have a mix machine around here, yeah I’m going to stir it. When it’s time to open the can. And that only happens once the prep work is done.”

“You mean when the preparations are finished. My second piece of advice to you is to stir that paint well.”

He was trying to make sure I knew what I was doing but I think he had confidence in me already. I picked up the sandpaper and looked around for scissors, finally just tore a piece off and began on the wood outside the door. It was late already and he’d have to let me go in fifteen minutes. The sandpaper’s scratching shut him up for a while. He took a step away from the door and stood in the evening’s sun, looked up at it and blinked, as if he’d never noticed it before. He looked at me again. “It’s already been sanded.”

“Whoever sanded this did it so half-assed they shouldn’t have bothered.”

“Carrey, I might have sanded this house. Did that occur to you?”

“You want the job done right or what?”

“I want it finished.”

“Then give me a day to prep this surface or else you’ll be skewering me in front of the whole team again. I’ll never hear the end of it.”

He looked at his watch. “Almost time for you to go back.”

“You don’t want me to stay? Are you going to count these hours?”

“Hours? By my estimation, Carrey, you were here for only a few minutes.”

“I was held up. You can check with the dean.”

“Don’t be held up tomorrow.” He gently touched the side of the shed, ran his hand down the wood as if he couldn’t understand how this half-built thing had appeared on his property.

“You have a lot more than twenty hours of work owing to you on this place. You know that, right?” Talking to Channing now was like talking to a man who almost wasn’t there. He was gazing with some worry at the porch jutting out of the main house that needed almost as much work as the shed, collapsed as it was, its foundations covered in moss—fingers of it—old age clawing the bricks and wood.

“You’re nineteen years old and as raw and brash and rude as they come and the best team in the world is interested in you,” he said. “Amazing.”

“I’m a PG recruit. I’m here because it’s a free ride.”

“It won’t be a ride of any sort. I can assure you of that. You’re not the first rower to want a place on this crew. Others have come before you.”

“Who says I want it?”

“You’d be a fool not to. And you didn’t walk out of our meeting, as I partly expected you would.”

“Do you really think I’d be a fool not to look forward to seven months of training with kids who will despise me because I don’t get my clothes from the right catalogue? To relearning a sport I’m already pretty good at? Trusting my future to Connor Payne, who hasn’t won this magical race in three years of trying and a coach who hasn’t won it in five? All so I can help a bunch of rich guys beat another bunch of rich guys in a race that I don’t care about?”

He nodded, his eyes flickering at my mention of the Warwick Race. “Yes. Exactly right.”

“I’m starting to think this isn’t just strange. It’s insane, that’s what it is.”

“Rowing is a pastime for people who enjoy winning at all costs. You are among this cohort, or you would not be here.” He hummed to himself, checked his watch again. “And, Carrey, the others won’t despise you. They might begin to hate you, at least as much as you seem to hate them, but they won’t despise you. Maybe you could settle for a mutual disdain.”

I ran the sandpaper over the door frame and it tore. It was getting hard to see what I was supposed to be doing.

“Tomorrow you can clean this place up. And finish sanding.”

“I’ll be here at 3:30
P.M.
”

“Don’t let yourself be delayed.”

“I won’t.”

7.

Walking back down River Road to school I felt the temperature drop the minute the sun fell behind the mountain. Winter was lurking, you could feel it in the air, just under the warmth. I thought about what my father and Channing had said to me. I had taken enough time to get my bearings, figure out where I stood. You always had to know where you stood, or so my sister Wendy—three years dead now—once told me. I reckoned my position was pretty clear.

I arrived back at North Dorm too late to change for dinner. They made you wear a coat and tie and I was in my work clothes. Anyway, I liked the quiet. Everyone was in the dining hall and I had the place to myself. I sat on one of the benches outside and figured I’d get some candy bars now and hit the snack bar after study hall. I was burning calories like a machine and I could eat anything. I went down the battered steps into the rec room, which always smelled like dust and rotten fruit. It was a pit, with a twenty-year-old TV and furniture that looked like it had been caged with wild animals. The place was littered with junk: book bags, sports equipment, books, old magazines that had been eviscerated, a Nerf football in shreds, as if it had been rescued from the jaws of a particularly vicious dog. I went to the vending machines along the far wall and started feeding in dollar bills from the wad my father had given me, watched the candy bars and chips fall from the racks inside to the trough below.

That’s when I heard Ruth’s voice. She was furious, yelling at someone to go to hell. I walked back across the rec room to the stairwell and peeked out, saw her in the dark phone booth—the bulb long dead—her hair pushed back and two anger marks on her cheeks. Her knuckles were sharp outlines where she gripped the phone. She was looking right at me but I’m not sure she saw me, or if she did, she found it easy to pretend that she did not.

Ruth had an aura of another place about her, like Fenton hadn’t managed to touch her in the whole three years she’d been here. We shared a chemistry class and we had definitely noticed each other. At least twice that I was aware of, when we were supposed to be learning how to balance equations, I had sensed her watching me. When I glanced at her the second time she didn’t look away. Her eyes were so intense and clear—green as a tiger’s—that I couldn’t hold her gaze. But I gave it a second before looking down. She seemed fragile and tough at the same time—she had to be. Ruth had steered the God Four to victory after victory last year and then been denied the Warwick Race. She was intriguing.

The other chicks in the school hated her, of course; too good looking, too confident, too indifferent. From what I could tell, the guys on the team tolerated her. And feared her because she had to know them at the most elemental level. It was the coxswain who called out the final strokes of the race, who set the training, who raised the rating until you ran into a wall of exhaustion. Every time I looked over at her, I remembered that there was something almost satanic about every good coxswain. She was friendless like me and she didn’t care.

And I’d die before I gave her the satisfaction of saying hello first.

“I’m asking you if I can come home for one weekend. One.” The person answered, a long answer that she didn’t like. “Mom, you promised me you would not do this. We had an agreement.”

Another answer, and you could tell from the way Ruth set her mouth it was pretty feeble. “I have to go. No. I have to go.” She slammed down the receiver and stood up in the cramped space. She picked up her bag. It wasn’t a student’s backpack—a scuffed, torn nylon job like mine with the names of doomed rock bands scrawled across the bottom and a dope blossom drawn across the logo—but a leather satchel, a mail pouch. She flipped it open. Her books were carefully lined up in the first section and she had another pocket in there with a brush and a bag of chick stuff.

She rummaged around until she found a hard pack of Marlboro Reds, tweezed one out with her fingernails and mashed her lips around it hard enough to flatten the filter. She felt inside the bag for a lighter and had to almost tear the thing apart again. She finally found it and flicked it twice, lit the end of the cigarette and frowned, got two puffs in, holding the cigarette away from her face, blinking and swallowing hard.

“What are you looking at, Rob Carrey?”

“Is that your first cigarette?”

“Were you listening to me on the phone? Don’t you have anything else to do other than eavesdrop on people’s conversations?” She took a deep breath, looked around, checked her watch, fanned the air. “Better stand back, I wouldn’t want to ruin your crew jock lungs, Rob.”

“Give me that pack.” I was right, it was the first cigarette she’d taken from the pack, you could see them all still bunched together in there. I flipped it over, gave it a tap and a cigarette popped out. I took the lighter from her hand, her fingers cold in mine for a millisecond when she handed it over. I torched the Marlboro and gave the lighter back to her. I sifted a Coke can out of the garbage and held it out between us. “Go on. Ash in this or you’re going to burn the building down.”

She managed to push about half the burning end in the opening and smeared cinders down the side of the can when she pulled it away.

“This cigarette is stale.”

“Well, my goodness, that’s gratitude.”

“It tastes like you’ve had it in the bottom of a drawer for a year. Feels cool to be holding, doesn’t it? Except who is ever going to suspect
you
of anything?”

She looked at me, softened for a second and then recalled how pissed off she was. “Since when do rowers smoke? You should be paranoid about your health.” She was doing better with it now, taking smaller puffs and not looking like she was going to choke to death after.

“I’m almost a pack a day at home, if you count secondary smoke as smoking. All the best science says you should. If they catch us doing this, it’s twenty hours of work. A black mark on your perfect record, Ruth.”

“My record isn’t perfect. Please stop saying that.” But she flushed and looked away and I knew I’d scored a point.

“So you want to take up smoking? That’s the best rule you can break?”

“I’ve been giving some thought to taking up a lot of things.” She tried to inhale and then coughed on it. You had to feel sorry for her but I wasn’t going to put mine out and give her an excuse to bag hers as well. She held the cigarette away from her face, straight up, like she’d seen on TV. She let it burn. “I’ve seen you on the water a few times.” She looked away from me. The hallway was dark and close, too warm and humid from the ancient heaters. I heard banging in the walls, heat struggling upward. “Can I say something to you? And you won’t be offended or take it the wrong way?”

“Half of what people say to me I take the wrong way and I wind up in trouble.”

“When I heard you were the PG rower I didn’t believe it, not at first. I really didn’t. You seem so different. I think you are, anyway. You were supposed to be in Channing’s English class but he transferred you out. He can’t stand rowers in his class. Everyone knows that.”

“Why?”

“Because rowers usually aren’t smart. They’re idiots. He’s the rowing coach, he should know.”

“Who was on the phone?”

She waved her cigarette at the pay phone and the ash fell onto the little steel writing ridge where she rubbed it in with her finger. “My mother. She’s supposed to live in this country. She should be here now but decided to go to England when I wanted to see her for a weekend.” She threw her hair back and changed the subject. “So, you’re from Niccalsetti, New York. Upstate New York. The Black Rock Rowing Club, right?”

“You’re the first person I’ve met here who knows about it.”

She looked at me evenly, like she was inspecting me. “You’ll make the team if you want to—Paul Wendt’s place from last year, the number three seat. I didn’t think you stood a chance at first. I do now.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because you’re not arrogant enough. You’re something else, but not arrogant. You need to be arrogant to make the team.”

“Are you arrogant?”

“I’m the first female to coxswain the God Four in the history of the school. When they elected me to the team, twenty of the rowing alumni sent back their colors.”

“Did you keep them?”

“Channing gave me their ties and I used them to stuff two throw pillows.”

“Don’t exhale like that.”

“Excuse me? Like what?”

“Like you’re blowing a fly away from your face, out the side of your mouth. If you’re going to smoke, do it right.”

“Like this?”

“Now you’re not inhaling.”

She just went on as if she hadn’t heard me. She regarded me through all the smoke. “I want you to be a good rower. I’m hoping you’ll help us beat Warwick. It was dumb to stand there in front of everyone and tell Channing you weren’t going to try out, that you only want to row in the single.”

“I’m really not psyched to be rowing on a team.”

“That’s ridiculous. Just get over your hang-up, get on the team and start rowing—and winning. We can’t lose the Warwick Race again, we just can’t. The dumb alumni will blame me and say it’s because I couldn’t steer. Paul was good last year. But you have to be better. You can’t just be this cocky boy from upstate New York. You have to rock.”

“I’ve never had to rely on others to win. Never had to trust somebody else to steer a boat I was in. I mean, seriously, the whole idea around a coxswain is … what? So you steer, and…? You’re really sort of the coach’s spy, right?”