Flat Water Tuesday (35 page)

She took it from me, shook it out. I couldn’t read her expression. “How did you get this?”

I didn’t answer her question, ashamed to admit that the Dover cox had left it behind, disgusted by our behavior. I wished I could tell her that I had come to my senses once she had walked away, had taken it from him to give back to her, but I had not. Instead I could only promise, “No one will ask you to do it again.”

“No, they will not. Because we’re not going to lose again. Especially not tomorrow.” She opened up her satchel and pulled out a notebook, flipped through it while she nibbled the end of a piece of her hair. I had rarely been alone with Ruth when she was in dress code. Her dark hair hung loose over her collar and she looked amazingly well put together. She found what she was looking for, a carefully compiled graph of dates and times. She pointed at yesterday’s date, the Sunday that Channing had insisted we get back on the water after torturing us all Saturday morning. “Look at this. The boat really started to pick up in the middle of practice, but we started out ahead anyway.”

I had gone on the water both days with the single aim of copying Connor perfectly. Saturday had passed without Channing making one comment about my efforts. The entire practice had been nerve wracking. I found myself biting the inside of my mouth to keep my recoveries slow and I knew Connor was exaggerating his releases for my benefit. On Sunday my determination seemed to start paying off. Within a few minutes of that morning practice Connor and I were matching each other stroke for stroke. Watching from the stern of his boat, Channing followed us wordlessly down the river again. The boat had not felt faster to me, but it had felt lighter.

But, as usual, Ruth had kept track of all the times, and I saw that each piece we had rowed on Sunday was incrementally faster than the one before it and definitely faster than any on Saturday and the week before. Ruth absently reached into her bag and snapped open a hard case, slipped her sunglasses on and looked at me. “At first I thought the current of the river might be helping us, and then I realized that you had found a way to follow Connor. I kept waiting for Channing to say something but he’s not going to and I know why. He thinks you’re doing it unconsciously and if he comments on it, you’ll stop. I can’t see why it’s working but it’s working. So keep doing it. I’d love to know how Connor finally convinced you to stop rowing like a sculler and start following him.”

“I went and asked him for help. I don’t want to lose this race, Ruth, just as much as you and the others don’t.”

“The times are fast. Channing might not trust them. He might not want to jinx this. Or he might think you’ll get cocky and screw up if you know the boat is flying.”

I gently pushed the notebook away. “The times don’t mean anything now, Ruth. Just tell me how it feels. How does the boat feel?”

She thought. “It feels like you guys are rowing together. It feels fast. It feels like you know there’s nothing to lose.” She hugged the notebook to her. “Channing wants to meet us an hour or so before the race. He’ll be going over all the equipment tonight and will give us last-minute instructions later. Speaking of which … we’d better head back. I need to eat something before practice.”

“Warwick beat Brooks Academy.”

“I know. By three boat lengths. I didn’t even look at the times. But they were rowing on their lake—we have a current here and they won’t be used to it.” Kids were walking toward the courts, would be invading this weird club soon. “In just over twenty-four hours it will all be over. It won’t matter anymore.”

“I know.”

She let me hold her hand and we walked the whole way back to her dorm in complete silence.

29.

It was raining steadily as Channing spoke to us before we laid hands on the boat. We were in the wooden meeting room next to his office where I had been inducted into the team all those months before. The small, round windows were thrown open to the mountain and overlooked the palatial tent that had been erected that morning, inhabited now by nervous parents, somber members of the Board of Trustees and pink-faced alumni of all kinds and ages ranging from the eager, recently graduated to the jaded, middle-aged-running-to-fat, to the seen-it-all-stooped-and-wrinkled, all helping themselves to drinks at the bar.

Channing had plotted the race on the blackboard and led us through every stroke. When he was finished, he looked out a window and motioned for us to come to the sill and watch the Warwick team walking their pale blue boat down to the dock, their coach and assistant coach striding assuredly behind them. There was squat, psychotic coxswain Cooper, barking orders. There was Brickman, huge and ominous in the three seat. The infamous Warwick crew—subject of our collective obsession for so long. As they stripped down in preparation for battle, I could have sworn I saw Cooper look directly up at us, although I doubt he had the vantage to see us.

Channing pointed with contempt. “Look at them. Take a good look now because I do not want any of you glancing over in the boat during the race. There they are, four arrogant young men and that disgrace of an individual they call a coxswain, the one who crashed an Empacher shell at the Head of the Charles two years ago. Look down upon them, all of you. Look upon them from a vaunted height.”

Connor glowered menacingly out the window but I couldn’t help noticing how impossibly thin and frail he seemed compared to Brickman. The rain suddenly blew into the room, blew out. Next to Connor, Wadsworth stood angular and awkward and Perry looked massive and unwieldy alongside Chris. Ruth hovered pale and ghostly just behind me, her mirrored sunglasses on despite the utter absence of sun. We contemplated the Warwick team, the ease and confidence with which they flipped the boat into the water, their size, their disregard for the rain, the arrogant way they ignored the small band of Warwick supporters clapping and cheering for them. All five of them were wearing identical white baseball hats to ward off the rain.

Looking at that boat, I suddenly felt like throwing up. Each rower seemed taller, stronger, more intimidating than the Dover kids. And inside that tent somewhere, where jovial laughter rose up to us with the wind, was the Harvard coach. Students dressed in slickers and rain gear were starting to line the way to the water. There would be many more of them at the finish, crowded under the shelter of trees.

Channing coughed. “They are no better than you. Their equipment is the same. They can be beaten. They can be beaten because they are so sure they
cannot
be beaten. They can be beaten because I have timed you for months now and in the last few days your times have been superior to any boat I have coached on that river. That same river that you know far better than they do, remember. Let them lose a second on a turn, let them fail to negotiate the new current, let them misjudge the wind—our wind—and they are done for. Look upon them and know that their confidence in themselves is misplaced.”

He glanced at us, looked us over with a kind of crazed astonishment. “They know about John Perry, the strong giant on our crew from the football team. And, oh yes, they feel fear. They know about the indefatigable Chris Wadsworth, who like Connor and Perry, has rowed with us for four years. And they fear this experience, too. They have heard that we have scoured the earth and come up with a trump card in Rob Carrey, a recruit. They have no recruits. This eats at their imaginations. They are very aware that our coxswain is twenty pounds lighter than theirs, has never crashed a boat into anything, and knows their strategy as well as I do. And I can assure you that all of them know of Connor Payne and wish they did not.”

He grinned suddenly, looking at the Warwick four as they ran their oars to the water, Cooper squatting and holding the boat to the dock. “They have not raced in rain yet, but we have practiced in the snow.” He lowered his voice and seemed to hiss. “This might be my last race against this particular team. And I have never felt surer of victory.”

He glanced at the rafters, as if dragging up his own memory. “Fifteen hundred years ago, we are told, a small band of three hundred Spartans and seven hundred allies faced an invading army of two hundred and fifty thousand Persians. A spy was sent out by the invading king to scout them and was astonished to find them not cowering in fear at their imminent annihilation, but calmly sitting upon the ground combing their hair. The Persian king was informed that this meant that the Greeks were preparing for a fine battle. Incensed, the Persian king sent an emissary to boast that his army was so great that the arrows of his soldiers would blot out the sky.” Channing coughed again. “His Spartan opposite simply replied, ‘Then we shall fight in the shade.’” Channing turned to us. “But today we face enemies of equal size. We are fighting with home advantage, on a river we know by heart in difficult weather.” He looked at Ruth. “Use the current when it serves, Ruth. That team has never rowed on this river when it is high. It might look flat but the current beneath is significant as you well know and Brendan Cooper will misjudge it.” Channing put his back to it. “Just remember that you cannot control what they do out there. You can only control what you do. And understand that if you row your best race, they will not beat you. It is now up to you to find out what that race is. It’s time, Fenton. The die is cast.”

And we proceeded down the stairs to the boathouse, where inquiring lines of alumni and students peered into the darkness while we unracked the shell and followed Ruth, who walked in front of us on stick legs into the warm rain, as if we were heading out to yet anther practice. Channing stood just inside the sliding doors and I glanced at him as we passed. He was looking not at the river, but at the tent and the fields and the school and the mountains beyond.

The small crowd began to clap as we walked by. The rest of the school would be at the start, and vanloads of this group would follow down the road to the finish line as soon as we had launched. It was not a huge crowd, I observed. In the long buildup to this day it had often seemed as if the entire world would be watching, such was its import, but this was not the case. I forced myself not to smile, to focus on Ruth and pick my way carefully to the water, where we would line up against the lip of the dock, raise the boat over our heads, and flip it down to kiss the river.

The rain was falling in straight lines on the water. We were soaked through by the time we got to the stake boats to meet Warwick, when their coxswain told them to let their oars fly and they drifted in perfect precision into the waiting hands of the freshman assigned to hold their stern for the countdown. Then, eerily, the rain suddenly stopped, as if a curtain had been pulled aside, as if the weather itself was holding its breath. With the end of the rain, the water became utterly flat, a mirror to the heavens.

Despite Channing’s instruction I glanced over to see our rivals glaring straight ahead for the start. Cooper was hunched deep into the boat and grumbled incessantly at his rowers. His voice sounded like the snarls and barks of a small but particularly vicious dog. Although it had now abated, rainwater still dripped from my hair down my face and down my back. I looked again at the reflection of the trees on the river and then I smiled. Ruth sighted the course, her hand up, then whispered something to Connor, who whispered something back and then turned swiftly in his seat to flash us that insane, cocky grin. Channing steered up in the coach’s launch with the young Warwick coach beside him. He held the megaphone to his lips and readied the boats. Ruth lowered her hand, and then Brendan Cooper dropped his.

Channing shouted the start and we surged into the river.

Warwick had us by half a boat length within fifteen strokes and started to pull away through the first fifty. I could see their stern deck jerking back and forth in the water and Ruth screamed into the microphone and kicked the rating up. We burned into the race at an impossible cadence and took back one seat.

The boats torpedoed toward the halfway point—one thousand meters—in a suspended silence, as if the thunder clouds still threatening us above had drawn the sound from the coxswains’ lungs. Ruth was almost whispering to us as we charged down the course and Cooper seemed to be yowling into his microphone. Noting that the two boats were spread apart on the water and in no danger of running into each other, the coaches sank back, farther away than they might otherwise have been.

As we took the seat back Ruth’s voice, calm and almost reassuring, rose out of the boat. “We’ll be dropping the rating in three.”

Perry swore. To drop the rating now would mean giving up the seat we had just taken, letting Warwick jet in front of us. I bit my lip and pulled, made myself focus on the race. All I heard was the oiled movement of the riggers, the splash of our oars on the water and the grunts and struggles of bodies depleting.

Ruth breathed carefully into the mike and said, “We
will
drop in three, and this is one … and this is two … and this is three.” And the rating did drop, possibly only by two strokes a minute, although at that speed it seemed like an immense drop, and Warwick immediately snatched back their seat.

Connor held the rating. I forced myself to tap out the oar with him, mirror the movement, and hold the slide while the boat surged forward. Wadsworth and Perry hooked into the new pace, and finally, at exactly one thousand meters, we hit our stride, behind Warwick but suddenly flying. One hundred strokes to go, and it felt as if the boat had found some kind of grace, like a giant bird expanding its wings and folding them against the sky. Ruth would have been looking at the speed of the boat when she spoke into the mike. “You will not increase the rating but you will give me ten hard strokes in three.”

And she counted down, and the desire to rush the slide and grab back the seat, for me, was almost irresistible. I willed myself to follow the agonizingly slow rating and when we dug in, the boat seemed to surge out of the water. I glimpsed Ruth crouching down into her seat to avoid being thrown backward with each stroke.