Flat Water Tuesday (30 page)

I picked my oar out of the snow and glanced at Perry. Connor stood next to me for a second, his breath puffs of vapor before us. “What are you thinking?” he asked me, his voice sharp. “You have that look on your face.”

“I’m thinking that right before everything good that’s ever happened to me, something went wrong.”

“Nothing’s going wrong. You have to learn to enjoy this sport, Carrey. Remember when you used to enjoy rowing? You’ll enjoy it today.”

“I know it.”

“You have to love the arrogance of it. We’re about to illegally take out twenty thousand dollars worth of school property. How does that make you feel?”

“Like I’m taking a joyride in someone else’s Porsche.”

“This will be better. Take my word on it.”

We pushed off the dock and the boat seemed to find itself and graft to the current. Hunched over our oars we let the boat take us down the river while Ruth settled into the stern. She leaned out over the water and sighted the curves, then breathed into her microphone and commanded us to keep our heads in the boat. Our first few strokes fought the speed of the water until we were rowing hard enough for the boat to be steered in the current, and with the current we flew down the river, past the school. Were you to look out the window that day, glance up while packing your books, cleaning up your desk, getting ready for that late winter dusk, you’d see four bodies laying back and that boat catching speed; a thing woken from hibernation and bounding away in exhilaration.

“Oh, man,” Wadsworth purred.

“All right!” Perry yelled.

“Quiet in the boat,” Ruth admonished, failing to disguise the smile in her voice.

I rowed behind Connor and after the first three strokes I didn’t feel the cold; after the first power twenty I didn’t even feel the speed. I’m pretty sure I closed my eyes the entire way. Ruth didn’t put us through our paces. She just let us bring the boat down to the dam where we dragged it to a stop and sat, hunched over our oars, breathing heavily, light-headed and euphoric. Hunks of ice and logs and other flotsam that had crowded along the boom surrounded us and nudged the boat. My oar was tinseled with tiny icicles.

Ruth finally spoke into the headset and her voice cracked up around us, an electric, confiding tone. “Carrey’s one of us, guys. Channing says we have to be nice to him now.”

Connor turned, flashed me a grin, and Perry pounded me on the back hard enough to knock the wind out of me. Wadsworth murmured, “Way to go, Rob.” I hate to admit how good it felt.

Then Ruth’s stern coxswain voice restored order, “Let’s touch it and start half slide in two, people. We need to get back.” Ruth hated to break rules. Deep down, she just didn’t have the criminal spirit.

Connor’s shoulders heaved as he sighed in irritation. “What’s the big rush, cox?”

Ruth leaned out of the boat, glanced at Connor, then her voice rose up. “Quiet in the boat. Bow pair, touch it and start half strokes; stern pair, join in on three, that’s one … and two…”

We turned and rowed back in the half darkness, Ruth sighting our way and standing in the stern every so often to look for the deadheads and logs and trash. Even fighting the current the boat had a warrior spirit. When we reached the dock, Connor once again turned to me with a look and I knew what I’d known all along; we were fast and had power and there was nothing except God Himself that would stop us. And even then He’d have to pull something pretty serious.

Which, naturally, He did.

24.

The FSBC crew went in for ultra-colorful rowing garb; hazard yellow climbing jackets and warm-up pants in violent reds, loud blues, deep purples, and various shades of black. We liked to wear tractor caps, too, pulled down low with the bills kneaded until they curled just right and you looked out on the world with tunnel vision. On practice days I wore my
Carrey’s Joinery
cap and I fit right in with those kids advertising CAT and John Deere on theirs, though none of them had ever used a mini-dozer, power shovel, or tractor in their lives. Certainly none had had to face the wrath of a contractor when a worker arrived on site still shitfaced and broke a five-thousand-dollar piece of equipment by driving it over building rubble or smashing into a wall.

We practiced at Fenton through the spring vacation. Day after day of it; and every morning the God Four was the first to hit the water. Two weeks of rowing through that wet cold and we felt invincible. We rowed set pieces between landmarks beside the river and the times we clocked were almost perfect. We could not be sure of what other teams were doing, of course, or how the water and wind would affect us in a real race, but we could dependably make the boat run fast enough so that we began to believe we were unstoppable; that we could be walking into an undefeated season. Channing was patient with our confidence, fully aware it was premature but allowing it because of the team spirit we were building. By the time the rest of the school returned from their ski trips in Vail and holidays in Florida and Europe, we were itching for competition.

But then things went wrong.

Rowing is like any sport that melds a human to a machine—like cycling, like kayaking, like race car driving—the key to peak performance lies in the tiny details. And Channing was a tinkerer. He spent every day of spring vacation looking for flaws in the machine, not trusting, from years of experience, that he had such a perfect four. He finally found one; not that he wanted to, it gave him no happiness for his suspicions to be validated. Especially this close to race day.

The practice that signaled the end of our honeymoon period began right after class on an afternoon when the weather was finally warming up. Ruth was waiting for us in the boathouse as we filed in and took our places in front of the long, blue Vespoli four and pulled it from its rack.

“Hands on this boat, gentlemen.”

We hoisted the boat to our shoulders at her instruction and balanced it for a quiet moment in the gloom while Channing headed down to the launch dock. In the silence you could hear the rattle in Perry’s throat. We stood there, adjusting to the weight, waiting for Ruth’s next command. When she gave it, in her distracted, soft voice, we inched out of the boathouse, an awkward caterpillar. Ruth backed away from us to check the riggers as we moved through the doors and finally the boat was birthed from the boathouse and we were following her to the river.

Channing was already waiting in the swirls beneath the bridge, sitting in the stern of the coach’s launch and watching our progress. We brought the boat down to the edge of the dock where Ruth gave us the commands to lay it down easy against the surface of the water and run up for the oars, which had been fanned against the side of the hill. We kicked off our shoes while we lowered the oars into the riggers and screwed them down. The damp chill of the dock seeped into my feet. I stood lined up against the boat while Ruth counted us down and then ordered in the starboard side and then the port. To get in the boat I balanced between the tracks and lowered myself like an acrobat into the sliding seat. The weight of the oars stretched across the dock held the boat in place. All the while, Channing watched us from the water, already critiquing as we hunched over to tie in, adjusted the foot stretchers and ran our bodies up the slides before pushing off in one motion.

There was a momentary pause. Ruth leaned out of the boat, dark glasses on, headset strapped over her face; a diminutive pilot. Her voice cracked through the speakers below us. “Three, take half a stroke. Jumbo, touch it,” and then the inertia of the boat and its weight and size gave way to the current and the river had us. The boat’s bow pushed downstream and I felt myself limbering up, the flat of the oar blade skipping over the water while the bow pair pulled us away from shore and Ruth half stood in the boat looking for the debris of winter being flushed down the Housatonic to greater seas.

Channing’s launch chugged into speed behind us and he followed at a respectful distance, always beginning fifty yards down the river from the boat, trying to see us as one small unit he could pick up and hold in his hands. You could look over Connor’s shoulder and see him enveloped in a haze of diesel fumes. The boat passed under the town bridge and the splashes and drips echoed and sounded hollow and subterranean.

Ruth leaned out of the boat again and exhaled into the microphone, a long scratchy growl that rose out of the bottom of the boat. “Touch it, and let the bow pair join in. Wads I want you to take it easy on these strokes. Jumbo, you’ll be rowing with arms only. On two, and that’s one … and two…”

Connor hunched over in his seat and looked down the port side of the boat for a second, then turned around and felt the rhythm of those strokes as they pulled his torso gently backward. I sat there breathing hard, crouched over my oar, which I balanced on my thighs and held down lightly with my palm, getting ready to have Ruth feed us into the bow pair’s cadence.

The command came down. “Stern pair, join in, hands only, on three,” and she counted and I looked up directly into the fine white hairs on Connor’s neck and we slotted into the cadence. The boat slowly picked up speed. Ruth leaned from side to side, watching the oars, measuring catches.

And part of me wasn’t there. Part of me wanted to be in my single scull, doing the same exercises, feeling the smaller boat run out on its own steam. I rowed with only my fingertips, feeling the motion of Connor’s back and arms. Ruth leaned out, watched our oars on the starboard side, exhaled. “Carrey, follow Connor. Get the oar out of the water faster. Quick catches here. C’mon.” Another exhale into the microphone. “Okay. Add the bodies in three…” and in three strokes we were bent at the waist, rowing awkwardly with stiff legs, holding the sliding seats in place by bracing with our thighs. I felt each stroke in the cables of muscle running down my spine and into my pelvis, crunching my guts together. The sound of the launch buzzed to a greater speed and the boat was moving fast enough so I could feel the force of the air parting before us.

“And moving into half slides.” Upon the command the launch behind her growled louder and Channing came up the stern to watch what happened next. The port-side rowers had to match each other perfectly. Same with the starboard. In addition, both sides had to be in unison. But the only way an oarsman could tell what his mates on the other side of the boat were doing was to literally feel what the body in front of him was doing, and to glance over the moving bodies at the stroke.

Channing would have seen us for what we were, four precocious kids in an expensive boat wearing motley weather gear for about ten cents’ worth of crappy weather. He would also have figured we were fast as hell, or could be, and when Ruth had us move to full strokes you could hear the oarlocks straining against the riggers as we knifed up the river. I could feel the power, feel it like you were holding down a gear on a locomotive, one of the Canadian Pacific Freight trains that used to slide over the Black Rock Canal bridge back home during morning practice. That boat was barely in control at resting speed. It had taken five years of rowing in the Black Rock Canal for me to be leaning back into the late winter wind in this boat. It was only four hundred miles away, but really a world apart.

“Carrey, lengthen,” called Ruth, and she said it evenly, without the usual biting tone of command, so that I knew she was doing it for my sake as the launch came up the river off the starboard of the boat.

“Carrey, follow Connor’s lead,” Ruth repeated, more urgency in her voice now.

We were cruising at an easy twenty-four strokes a minute and I lengthened my stroke.

“Slow on the last phase of the stroke, Carrey,” Channing commanded. “Don’t dump, you’re not in a single. Ruth, check Connor’s rating. I have him all over the place, don’t rate him over twenty-five, do you hear me?”

I followed Connor for the two strokes it would take Ruth to read his rating through the computer. “Twenty-four, Connor, good.” Pause. “That’s twenty-five, not so good. Hang in there. Easy. Carrey, you’re rushing Connor. Slow it down you two, this is just one practice.”

I could feel the sweat starting under my hat.

“Carrey, dig into this,” Ruth warned. “Jumbo, baby, don’t slack up out there, we’re going to be watching you next.”

Channing was standing in the launch now, the sound of the motor an incessant buzz. Connor had lengthened enough, I guessed, but Channing stood there in silence, glowering at the erratic rating. It was now uneven enough so that I could feel the boat’s catches get weak and sloppy. “Ruth, make Carrey watch the rating.”

“C’mon, Carrey.”

Channing’s voice now, irritated, “You’re going to pull this up to full pressure now. Full pressure any way you want to do it, coxswain, and then it will be fifty strokes to see how you can sustain it. Full power.”

Ruth’s voice barked through the loudspeakers loud enough to flag us awake. “All right, you heard Channing. We’re keeping the same rating but you
will
build to three-quarter pressure in three and then full pressure on my count.” She paused exactly two strokes to let that sink in and I heard somebody wheezing on each inhale and realized it was me; the boat had already started to speed up when Channing had handed down the command to Ruth.

“Building in three to three-quarters, and that’s one…” and the speed began to pick up immediately. But now there was something else. Something uncontained. “That’s two…” I threw all of my concentration into following Connor. But I knew I was off, and I was throwing the others off. “That’s three. And we’re on three-quarters pressure, thank you.”

Connor muttered something to Ruth and Ruth spoke into the microphone, “Slow those damned slides, guys. Especially you, Carrey. Slow them right down, you
dorks
. Twenty-four. We are
not
building the rating.”

The boat was moving good and strong but we were all crashing into the stern on our recoveries. Every stroke you could feel it, almost see it in our wake, a slight jerk to the stern from all that loose human freight shifting backward. “Slow down, Carrey. Nice and easy, apply full pressure in three and I want all of you guys to hold it together on this one. And that’s one…”