Whale Talk (10 page)

Chris smiles.

Icko goes back out into the snow, returns in just a few minutes. “Plenty of fuel,” he says, “and the engine’s working, so we can keep warm. All the comforts of home, which is a damn good thing, ’cause we ain’t going to the real one for a while. I put a flare up on the road, and we’ve got plenty more, but it’s a good bet nobody’ll be by for a while.” He holds his wrist near the speedometer light. “Close to midnight. Nobody’s gonna miss us till two or so. Should have help by early morning.”

The bus is equipped with an emergency pack that includes blankets, and we all have warm coats. Icko figures if we hang some of the extra blankets ceiling to floor about a third of the way back, we can keep the front part of the bus in the low sixties all night, running the engine intermittently.

Mott glances longingly to the back. “Sounds like I got to give up my seat.” He looks around at us. “What the hell, no reason I can’t come up here and see if I can pick up some social skills.”

“If you can pick up social skills from
us
,” Tay-Roy says, “you are in serious deprivation.”

“He double flagged the student body,” Simet says. “He’s plenty deprived.”

A hint of a smile crosses Andy’s face in the green glow of the dash lights. I’ve never seen him smile before.

We hang the blankets and settle in. Coach says he and Icko will take care of the flares and the heat, that we can relax and get some sleep. “We’re the only ones getting paid,” he says. “And when this makes the papers, we’ll be taking the credit for saving your lives.”

“It’ll be on page twelve,” Simon says, “when they find out who you saved.”

We sit with our backs to the windows, legs on the seats, struggling to get comfortable, and little by little the bus settles into silence. Icko starts the engine a couple of times while Simet hustles up to replace the flares. In the silence Mott says, “What if this is it for you guys?”

I say, “What do you mean?”

“What if I’m the only one to make it out? What if snow fills up this ditch and covers the bus, and I’m the only one smart enough not to be buried alive? Who do you want me to kill when I get back?”

“Find the guy operating that snowplow,” Icko says. “He didn’t even look back to see what happened to us.”

“He must have figured we squeezed by,” Simet says. “Those guys are pretty good about helping folks out when there’s trouble.”

“Well, we’re in trouble, and he ain’t helpin’,” Icko says. “If I got to freeze to death, and the boy’s got a killin’ heart, that guy’s got my vote for now.”

I check to see if this conversation is freaking Chris out, but he’s fast asleep.

“How ’bout you, Coach?” Mott says. “What if you had a freebie?”

“Can I just have them maimed?” Coach asks. “Do I have to go for the whole package? I have this brother-in-law….”

“Nope,” Mott says. “Got to be terminated.”

“Have to take a rain check then,” Simet says. “Somebody’s got to support my sister.”

Mott says, “DeLong?”

Without hesitation, Simon says, “My mom.”

A brief moment of
dead
silence. “Care to elaborate on that?”

“Nope.”

Jesus.

“How ’bout you, O silent one?” he says to Jackie.

Jackie shrugs.

“Didn’t anyone ever tell you to use your
mouth
to
talk?” Mott says. “Your shoulders are for your arms to hang off. You got to speak up, Jackie boy. Otherwise how do I know who to waste?”

Jackie shrugs again.

“We’ll come back to you,” Mott says. “Be thinking. Muscle man, what about you?”

“Nobody pops to mind,” Tay-Roy says. “Maybe I’ll give you my proxy. I have a feeling you have a long list.”

“That I do, Popeye. That I do. Jones?”

“I’m into
saving
lives,” I tell him. “So I’ll have you waste yourself. First. That way I save all these others.”

“Half-black guy around these parts?” Mott says. “Shit, you should have a list that stretches to Seattle. Think you’d rather be a one-legged white boy, or a black guy with everything in working order?” He nods toward Simon. “Or a fat guy.” Toward Chris, “Or a dummy.” And Jackie, “And…whatever that is.”

Simet says, “That’s enough.”

“Isn’t that why you want us around?” Mott says, ignoring him. “Give you a little edge on superiority?”

I say, “Mott, I didn’t ask you to swim.”

“Naw, you didn’t. I’m here of my own volition.” He looks at Dan. “Volition, you like that word, Hole?” He turns back to me. “I’m just checkin’ out the nature of things. You know, how things are.”

“Yeah, well, while you’re checking them out, be careful what words you use.” The heat is rising in me, adrenaline spilling over.

“So now you’re the savior, too. Make sure nobody says anything bad about your team.”

All of a sudden I have him by the collar, pulling him toward close. “No,
you
don’t say anything bad about
our
team.”

Simet’s hand clamps on my wrist. “Let go, T. J.”

Mott’s and my eyes remain locked on each other. His stare is cold.

Simet says, “T. J.” again, and I release my hold.

Simet says, “You check on ‘the nature of things’ on your own time, okay, Andy?”

Mott says, “Whatever.”

Mott puts the headphones back on his head, settles into his seat. I stare out the window into the falling snow, wondering how I let him get to me. Maybe it’s because he’s partly right. I
did
go looking for guys who were out there a ways. Up until now, I thought it was pretty clever. Maybe I’m being an arrogant asshole. I consider that as the bus settles again into silence.

“Hey, man, don’t worry about it.” Mott’s voice startles me. “Sometimes I just have to be a prick. Counselor says I have a personality disorder.”

“It’s okay,” I say. “I mean, I don’t know. Maybe you were right.”

“Naw,” he says. “I’m just good at making people think that.”

“I don’t know. The letter jacket thing—I’ve let myself get a little obsessed. I picked that, you guys didn’t.”

He dismisses that, is quiet a few seconds. Then, “Third guy after my dad left. On the off chance you make it out and I don’t, he’s the one I want offed. Canada Smith is his name. I got a trust fund for this leg. Get Canada Smith, and it’s yours.” He’s quiet another few seconds. “Got to do it slow, though.” Another moment of quiet. “Ol’ Canada couldn’t figure out which bed he was supposed to sleep in.”

I’m speechless.

“I’d tell you the rest of that story, but we don’t know each other that well.” He laughs. “Maybe after the Olympic trials.”

Snowflakes build on the windows. Other than Coach slipping out to put out a new flare, or Icko intermittently starting the engine, there is nothing more than the sound of heavy breathing.

“You might decide you’d rather be a one-legged white boy than all brown an’ shit,” Mott says, after I’ve been sure he’s asleep, “but believe me, you’d
damn
well rather be brown than be somebody got done by his mother’s boyfriend.”

I can’t even imagine it, can’t believe he’s telling me.

As I think it, he says, “My counselor says the only chance I have is to tell people I’m a prick; that way I might have less reason to act like one.” He settles down in the seat. “So, consider yourself told.”

Around four the interior fills again with light, and an engine idles in the near distance. Icko is out the door, scrambling up the hill before most of us can clear our eyes, and before we know it, a state snowplow driver has us standing in the snow while he hooks a chain to the front bumper and hauls the bus to the highway. He and Icko pound the fender away from the wheel far enough to make it drivable, and we are headed through the snowy night, our first meet—and our first group therapy session—behind us.

We’re famous in Cutter for a couple of days after “plunging off the treacherous, icy two-lane” and “surviving the wintry night,” as the
Cutter Free Press
put it. Our team picture made the front page, and with the story slanted toward the events after the meet, the events
of
the meet were cleverly obscured.

The school paper took a different slant:

A controversy arises over some of the syntax and word choices, but the reporter and the editor were able to convince the journalism teacher that certain journalistic license was in order to present the team in its most positive light. It may have helped that the editor and the reporter are one and the same, and the journalism teacher didn’t actually see the article until the paper was published and in the hands of the student body.

Simet sits on top of his desk in the empty classroom a few minutes after the bell, reading and laughing while I stand by the door waiting.

He places the paper on his desk. “Man, I am going
to, if you’ll pardon the expression, eat shit over this.”

I stare at my article. “You think?” I read a few sentences aloud. “Nothing there that isn’t fact. I guess I could have played up Mott’s disqualification, but why bust a guy when he’s riding high?”

“Do you have any idea how Benson and Roundtree will respond to this? I’ve got to present our letter requirements at the Athletic Council meeting this afternoon. You’ll be lucky if they don’t require you guys to win every meet just to win a
lowercase
letter.”

“Tell them I got out of control.”

“They won’t have trouble believing that.”

“And that you’re pissed; that you’re requiring me to write a column next week about how facts can be used to present a different picture than what is true.”

“It’s just not in your nature to try to make my life easy, is it, Jones?”

I agree it is probably not in my nature.

I’m not in the hallway five seconds before I hear the melodic tones of Mike Barbour floating to my ears.

“Jones!”

I turn. He’s with Rich Marshall, carrying the newspaper. “Saw this article on your swim team.”

I say I’m glad he was able to get someone to read it to him.

“I got through it okay. Took me a while, though. Kept stumbling over the word dynasty.”

“It
does
have three syllables.”

“That wasn’t my problem,” he says back. “My problem was with the
meaning
. I thought it meant something about winners. What was that, some Special Olympics swim meet?”

“You’re welcome to get some of your football boys together for a little intramural meet,” I tell him. “Say maybe as a fundraiser to get some of you guys tutors.”

“We’ll do a swim meet,” he says, “if you guys wanna follow it up with a little flag football game.”

Marshall clears his throat. Man, I feel like I’ve been transported to jock-monster hell. These guys are the worst of the worst. This isn’t about athletics, this is about assholes. “Do you have any respect for anything, Jones?”

“Yeah, I have respect for some things,” I say back, and have to hold myself back from saying I have respect for little kids and women and their right not to be treated totally like shit by some unconscious subhuman ass wipe.

“Like what?” he says.

“Nothing you’d recognize, Rich. Really, save your brain cell for helping the PE teachers pick up balls after
class. Maybe they’ll let you keep a few of them so you’ll have enough to figure out that a real hunter only murders adult animals.” Man, I’ve got it going for these guys, more than I realized. I feel snakebit every time I’m around either of them.

“You better be a little careful what you say to me, Jones,” Marshall says. “I’m the same as a teacher when I’m in the building. Don’t make me report you.”

“Report me, Marshall. Report me. Go tell Morgan I’m showing you nothing but contempt. Be accurate for once in your life. Do it next period. I’ve got a history quiz.”

Barbour steps forward and my heart races. I can’t
say
how much I want to mix it up; how badly I want to feel my knuckles buried in the cartilage of his nose, see blood splattered on the lockers. I don’t even care whether it’s his or mine. “You’ll never see one of those goofballs you call swimmers in a Cutter letter jacket,” he says. “Not one. You know who the male student rep to the Athletic Council is? You’re looking at him, my friend of color. Off color.” He grins.

“You guys just keep doing what you do,” I say, my voice pinched as I walk away, slowly as if I couldn’t give a shit; in fact I can barely breathe. I get upstairs and into an empty science lab, where I lean against the wall and
talk myself out of going to the council meeting myself to tell them how screwed up it is to give a nothing-burger like Mike Barbour a vote on the athletic welfare of Chris Coughlin or Simon DeLong.

I don’t have to run into Marshall more than once in a day to give myself permission to get out of the building for lunch. I invite Carly to my house for something to eat and anything else that might happen, since Mom is at work and Dad usually spends Wednesdays out at Head Start, but she has a paper due, so I drive over alone. This thing is getting out of hand, starting to mean too much. What will I do if Mike Barbour ends up with the deciding vote on our letter jackets?

Dad’s car is in the driveway, so I figure I’ll run it all by him; he’s always good for an intelligent perspective. But I don’t see or hear him inside. I pour a big glass of Gatorade and dig some cold chicken and potato salad out of the fridge, take it into the living room, and flip on Sports Center. Dad’s coat lies across the back of the couch and his boots are under the coffee table; very unusual because my dad is a world-class neat freak. I mean, he can have a bike torn down in the garage and every tool is in its place before he stops to take a
leak
. Mom kids him about it all the time.

I holler “Dad” a couple of times, but except for the
TV, the house is quiet. The guys on Sports Center seem determined to make me care about hockey, so I flip them off and wolf down my food, thinking I’ll run up to my room for a short nap before I head back. I see the door closed to my parents’ room, which is as unusual when they’re not in it as the coat on the back of the couch, so I knock once and push it open.

The room is dark but for the flickering of the TV, where a group of humpback whales swim across the screen, emitting faint whale songs. A dark form fills the overstuffed chair in the corner by the dresser.

“Dad?”

No answer. I flip on the light. He sits, staring at the screen.

“Hey, man,” I say. “What’s going on?”

“Hey, T. J.”

“You sick or something?”

“Something,” he says. His beard is wet, eyes rimmed in red. “Turn the light off, will you?”

“Yeah, sure.” I do. “Dad, what’s going on?”

“Nothing. I’m fine. Just leave me alone, okay?”

I’ve never seen my dad like this. “Not okay. Come on, what’s going on?”

He sighs. “Thirty years ago it happened,” he says. “And sometimes it hits me like it was yesterday. Why didn’t
I look under the truck? It would have taken
three seconds
. Hell, if I’d checked for a flat I would have seen him.”

I start toward him.

He says, “Don’t. I’ll be fine. You go on back to school.”

“Dad…”

“I’ll be fine. This happens every once in a while…you just haven’t seen it. It’ll pass.”

“You sure?”

He says, “Go.”

I’m not worth much in my afternoon classes; it’s hard to see someone as big and strong as my father reduced like that. It makes me feel helpless to know that still happens. The guy is always there for anyone who needs him. He deserves better.

I’m in the locker room after school, getting into my sweats to take the bus ride over to All Night, my mind back in Dad’s bedroom.

“Jonesey, Jonesey, Jonesey,” Barbour says. “Looks like your coach jumped ship on you.”

I snap into the present. “Oh, yeah?”

“We had the Athletic Council meeting.”

“That right?”

“That’s right. Wait till your Special Olympics
squadron gets a load of your letter requirements.”

“Save me the suspense.”

Mott and Tay-Roy are headed for the door; they stop to listen.

“Simet went along with us; said it would be too easy for your boys to pick up points when there were no swimmers from the other team in some races. Got us to award the letter on ‘personal improvement.’”

“Hey, we’re improving. Why should that bother me?”

Barbour started to laugh. “Because it means you have to hit your best time every time you swim.”

“What? That’s not possible.”

“Probably it isn’t. None of you guys can swim
one race
slower than you did the time before. One bad race, no letter.”

I say, “You’re full of shit, Barbour. Simet would never do that.”

“You can get the details from him.” He points to Simet walking through the locker-room door.

I holler, “Coach!”

Barbour cackles. Coach looks up.

“Gotta ask you something.” I hustle over and whisper, “Way to go.”

The following meets are carbon copies of the first, except Icko keeps the bus on the road. I swim the fifty and hundred, or the hundred and two hundred, and win every time. The other guys swim whichever events will bring us the most points, establishing times in races they haven’t swum before and bettering their times in those they have. As long as no one falls asleep in the water, we’re all a good bet to get faster and faster. Improved stroke technique alone will keep everyone in the running, not to mention the monster conditioning.

What I like about the meets more than the swimming, though, is the bus ride. When Icko pulls the door shut and fires up the engine, it feels almost cocoonlike. We talk about things we’d probably never mention in any other arena: Simon’s mother drinks like a fish, Mott spent most of middle school in drug rehab, Tay-Roy lost a baby brother to SIDS, Dan Hole’s father has heart trouble, Chris’s aunt plays bingo, and Jackie Craig may or may not have a voice box. Simet and Icko let us talk, feeding questions once in a while to keep the conversation going, but never intruding.

It gets to be ritual; a half hour before we reach our destination, Simet begins going over each of our races, so between then and the end of the meet, we talk or think nothing but swimming. Then we stop at some
local pizza place and, depending on how much time we have, eat there or take it on the bus with us.

Toward the end of the semester it becomes clear we may have problems with academic eligibility. “I’ve been doing the responsible thing,” Coach says, walking to the back of the bus to remove Mott’s headphones, “and it appears a couple of you are in danger of failing one or more classes. Mr. Mott is in danger of
passing
one. Hey, guys, this is serious business. You have to carry a two-oh average, and you have to be passing every class.”

Mott says, “I’m going light on the academic thing this year.”

Coach says, “You were until a minute ago. Now you’re going heavy.” He removes a folded sheet of paper from his pocket, holds it to one side to catch the light from the dashboard, squinting to read. “Mr. Hole, Mr. Jones, and Mr. Coughlin, you’re all in great shape. Mr. DeLong, you are walking the edge in biology. Mr. Craig, you’re three percentage points under in speech. Mr. Kibble, you don’t seem able to remember your valences and the periodic table of elements in chem, and Mr. Mott, you are exactly one percentage point below passing in six classes.” He stares at the page. “Mott, how do you do that!”

“It isn’t easy, sir. I have to keep close track. Last week
I got luckier than usual on an American history pop quiz and my grade slipped up over passing. Scared me.”

“Well, if that scared you, prepare to be terrified, because before this semester ends, you are going to bring every one of those grades at least to a C.” He turns to Jackie. “Mr. Craig, what is your problem in speech?”

Jackie shrugs.

“That might be it right there,” Simet says. “Mr. DeLong?”

Simon says, “Biology is right before first lunch. I start seeing the things we’re cutting up on my plate, and pretty soon I just have to get out of there.”

Coach walks to the middle of the bus and retrieves a huge duffel bag from the overhead rack, dumps it onto the seat. “Icko, can you give me light back here for a sec?”

The dome light goes on. Simet rustles through the educational debris on the seat. “I took the liberty of getting the specifics from your teachers.” He hands Jackie a copy of the periodic table, moving him to the seat across the aisle from Tay-Roy. “Enunciate each element loud and clear, Mr. Craig, as if you were delivering the Gettysburg Address. Mr. Kibble, when you hear the element, you will give Mr. Craig back the symbol and valences. When you have them down one hundred percent, you may stop.”

He hands Chris Coughlin a coloring book and a large box of crayons. “You said you like to color, right, Mr. Coughlin?” Chris’s face lights up; he obviously
loves
to color. “Mr. Coughlin, since you are passing all your classes, I’m going to have you tutor Mr. DeLong. Do you know what a tutor is?”