Whale Talk (14 page)

On Friday morning the student body gathers on the school lawn, complete with the cheerleaders lined up on the steps like Rockettes, as Icko brings the bus around, and though no one is going to watch us swim, they cheer as if we’re the football team. Mott is on the bus already, having stopped Icko as he came through the parking lot. Chris stands totally amazed, waving at the crowd, while Jackie simply watches, not embarrassed, not anything that I can see. I see Tay-Roy tap Kristen on the shoulder before coming down to join us, and as we stand there ready to board, I elbow him. “Kristen Sweetwater?”

He looks embarrassed but keeps smiling. That would be
so
sweet.

“She’s cool,” I whisper, “but what are you going to tell your girls in Birmingham? And Evanston?”

Dan Hole is so busy calculating the times he should hit, he is oblivious to the celebration. Barbour and some of the football guys stand together to one side; only a
few of them clap or cheer because he has convinced them this whole thing is a ploy to diminish their standing as nobility at Cutter High. The jock wars continue.

Carly moves quickly through the crowd to my side. “You sure you don’t want me to come see this?” she asks. “You’ve never missed one of my games.”

“I’ll tell you again what I tell my parents,” I say. “On the boredom scale, watching a swim meet is one step below watching mold grow. Come see me at Hoopfest.”

She says, “Come see
me
at Hoopfest.” And I say, “Will do.”

The bleachers at the conference pool at Frost are packed; swimming is a much bigger thing among schools with swimming history. There’s only one guy in our conference who can challenge me in the sprints when I’m at my best, and that’s Scott Wakefield from Frost. He’s within a tenth of me in the fifty and two-tenths in the hundred. A couple of guys have slightly better times than mine in the two hundred. The big sprinters are on the coast, around Tacoma and Seattle. The fifty at State would look like a six-way dead heat if it weren’t for the electronic touchpads, but over here Wakefield and I should blow the field away. I’m gaining a bit of celebrity on our
side of the state, partly because of the number of black swimmers any of them have seen, and partly because it’s by now well known what our training facility looks like. The Spokane and Wenatchee coaches have already approached me to swim on their summer teams—they think I could actually make the Olympic trials down the road, with proper training—but I’m pretty sure this will be my last season in the water. Spring is around the corner, and I’m antsy to resume honing my basketball skills for Hoopfest. I believe there are no black swimmers in the swimming hall of fame because swimming is no damn fun.

We are not prepared for Chris’s response to crowds. He’s been gathering confidence every time he touches the wall and sees his time is faster than the last, which, by the way, speaks to his ability to learn, because he knows the
second
he sees it. The swimmers on the other teams know his story now and always cheer him on. This kid hits times that would win fourth place in the 11–12 age group of a novice meet, and every time he finishes, the crowd erupts. He has taken to blowing kisses toward the cheers.

He and Mott are entered in the five hundred freestyle, and the entire team from Moses Lake chants his name as he steps onto the block. He turns and waves,
smiling wide and basking in the glow as the starting gun fires. The crowd screams, “Go!”—which confuses him, and he watches in bewilderment as the field pulls away. Jackie has the presence of mind to run over and push him in, which should technically disqualify Chris, but the judges give us leeway, and once he hits the water, instinct takes over and his arms rotate like propellers. Adrenaline alone puts him back on pace for his best time at a hundred-fifty yards, and when he sees his time at the finish, he squeals. His opponents have passed the word not to get out of the water before any of our guys finish, and though it’s only a prelim, they all duck under their lane ropes to congratulate him. Something about the entire experience makes me like these guys a lot.

The rest of the meet is uneventful. I lose the fifty by a hair, but I didn’t get the best start, so I’m not worried, and I win the hundred by almost a half body length. I finish third in the two hundred, and we climb on to the bus in the late Saturday afternoon darkness with the best meet of our lives under our belts.

We get our traditional pizza to go, and soon we’re on the highway, having entered our mermen’s cocoon for what we believe is the last time. The school won’t fund any of the other guys to go along with Simet and me to State. We get mileage for Simet’s Humvee, a double
room at Motel 6, and per diem of fifteen bucks a day each. The football team stayed at the Doubletree.

As we roll over bare roads through the cold, clear night, Simet stands next to Icko, facing us, holding tight to the bar by the door. He says, “Guys, I’ve been with some good teams in my time. My AAU team took fifteen swimmers to Nationals when I was sixteen, and several of us made it to the NAIA finals my junior and senior years in college. But I’ve never had an athletic experience like this one. I’ve never swum on or coached a team where not one swimmer backed off on even one repeat. I know there’s been controversy over whether or not you guys should letter, but most of that controversy is being caused by guys who couldn’t carry your jocks, if you had any. There is not an athlete at Cutter who has more right to wear the blue and gold than the guys on this bus.”

“Fuckin’ A,” Mott says from the back of the bus.

“Fuckin’ A,” Coach says right back at him.

“Fuckin’ A,” Chris Coughlin says, and covers his mouth.

Mott waits a few minutes, then sneaks up into the seat behind me. “You gonna go over there and make us look good, hotshot?” he says.

“Do my best.”

“The muscle man says we got to swim relays against you for the next couple of weeks. That right?”

“You guys don’t have to do that. You kept me going all this time. It’d be shitty to make you stretch out another two weeks when you don’t even get to swim.”

Tay-Roy says, “No, man, this is a
team
. Our season lasts as long as one of us is still alive.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Look at it this way,” Mott says. “We get two more weeks free membership at All Night.”

“Yeah, but—”

Simet says, “It’s done, T. J. Shut up.”

I do.

It’s quiet a few more miles. In a low voice, Mott says, “How come you guys never asked me about my gangrene?”

“Same reason we didn’t ask you about your leg in the first place,” Tay-Roy says. “Jeez, Mott, don’t you know your own rep?”

“I’m granting serial killer’s dispensation,” Mott says.

Chris says, “You gots a green gang? What’s that?”

“Fuck,” Mott says. “We’ve gotta keep this team together just to keep that boy out of an institution.” He
says it low enough that Chris doesn’t hear. “Somebody tell him what gangrene is.”

“Rot,” Dan says, “pure and simple.”

Icko says, “Last meet of the year, and the boy genius finally utters a one-syllable word all on his own.”

We sit through a few more seconds of silence. Even when Mott feels like talking, he does it at his own pace.

“You guys know a guy named Rance Haskins?”

Everyone knows Rance Haskins. About four years ago he killed an eighteen-month-old infant by squeezing his stomach because he peed his pants. The Department of Social and Health Services took a
lot
of heat because the mother’s relatives had lined up with complaints that he was dangerous, warning that they couldn’t get the baby’s mother away from him. Rance got three years for involuntary manslaughter, was out in a year and a half, then blinded a second child by shaking her. The mother of the blinded baby wouldn’t testify against him, so he ended up back in the slammer for parole violation, because he wasn’t supposed to be around children. The guy did in two kids and was out of prison in three years and a month. Free and clear. Rance Haskins is a famous guy. The Spokane newspaper does a story on him every once in a while.

“I don’t know him,” I say. “But I know who he is.”

“Well, before he was famous, he was my mom’s boyfriend.”

I’m not going to like this story.

“My old lady didn’t have any excuses. She didn’t take drugs, didn’t drink; hell, she wouldn’t even take an aspirin. Rance made her dance at the Déjà Vu in Spokane for extra cash. She looked pretty good for somebody took as much shit as she did. She’d want to take me to work with her, but the bosses wouldn’t allow it, and Rance wouldn’t let her use her own damn money to put me in day care when he considered himself a perfectly good baby-sitter. Man, if you want to pass up purgatory and go straight to hell, you want to enroll in Rance Haskins’s Day Care. Soon as my mom would take off for work, he’d tie my leg to the pipe under the kitchen sink, give me a big ol’ aluminum bowl to pee in, and take off with his buddies, or invite them over for a little drugfest. Got so messed up this one time, he passed out and his friends hauled him off to Emergency. My old lady just happened to go home from Déjà Vu with some guy to pick up some extra cash, and I’d been there almost twenty-four hours. I guess I kept trying to get away, but ol’ Rance was a real Boy Scout, and the knot just got tighter. Time Mom found me, my foot was
discolored all the way up my calf. Gangrene set in, and in the end they had to whack that baby off before it snuck up and got something really important.”

Chris Coughlin leans forward in his seat, his eyes glued to Mott’s silhouette outlined in the side window. Brothers in arms.

“Jesus, Mott,” I say. “What did the doctors say when they saw your leg?”

“Haskins is a smart cookie. Took me to this hometown doc in Baxter Falls, little town about twenty miles outside of nowhere. Made up some cock-and-bull story the guy believed. Then we moved to Oregon for a couple of years, so when the people there saw me, I was already a one-legged kid. That’s when he left her. Came back up here and got famous.”

“Who else knows this?”

“Me. You guys.”

“How come you never told?”

He shrugs. “Hell, I barley rememher it, don’t know if I really do. Rance is gone. Leg’s gone. Who do you tell? Got damn fast on crutches. My mother blackmailed Rance into puttin’ hard-earned drug money into a trust fund so I could get this space-age leg soon as I finished growing. No point telling anyone now.”

I start to ask why he’s telling us, but I know. It’s a gift.

“An’ you guys don’t tell nobody either, got it?”

“Jeez, Mott, don’t you want to get him?”

“Guys like Rance Haskins already been got,” Mott says. “Hell, he doesn’t care if he spends the rest of his life in prison or in Palm Springs. He’s the same miserable son of a bitch no matter where he is.”

“Maybe, but Jesus, Mott. He got your leg.”

Mott brings his leg up on the seat, raises the leg of his sweatpants. “Yeah, but look what he left me. This baby’s bionic.”

Simet and Icko are doing what they always do during these conversations, remaining invisible unless we invite them in. God, what must Coach be thinking? Here are these guys, brought into his sphere of influence under the guise of a swim team that can’t swim. For some of them, he and Icko are the only decent adults they’ve ever known. There’s nothing he can do about the past for any of them. And now the only thing he can do about the present is stand up for them against the rest of the Athletic Council, who want to rob them of their letter jackets. I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished. I felt tremendous relief today when Jackie Craig and Simon DeLong finished the hundred-yard backstroke in personal bests, because it meant everyone had safely lettered, that we’d accomplished our goal, or at least
my
goal. I know the whole thing is only symbolic, a gesture. But it’s a hell of a gesture, because it lets us stand up for ourselves in the language that is understood at this school. Part of me doesn’t want it to end, because it’s so much more than what I had in mind in the beginning, and I don’t know if what we got from it can ever be re-created.

The monthly Athletic Council meeting is set for lunchtime of the Monday we return from the conference meet. I get a note from Simet between first and second periods to see him in his room before he goes in. “These guys must have stayed up late,” he says “They’re pushing hard to revote on our letter requirements. I told ’em I was bringing you with me.”

“Bet they loved that.”

“Everything’s relative. I threatened to bring the whole team. I think Andy Mott makes everyone nervous.”

“Mott is my personal hero.”

“Benson is bringing some representatives from the football team, and I guess Roundtree is bringing a couple of hoopsters. There is some common feeling that I misrepresented the truth.” He laughs.

“What do you want me to say?”

“I just want you there to have us represented. You may not have to say anything. Play it by ear, but whatever you do, don’t lose your temper and don’t get into it with Barbour. It could be a tight vote, and you don’t want to piss anyone off.”

I run into Carly coming out of Simet’s room and bring her up to speed. “This is too cool,” she says. “Janet Lindstrom is the girls’ sports rep to the council, and she’s gone. I’m first alternate. I don’t know how Janet would vote, but I’m in your pocket, if you play your cards right.” She kisses me on the cheek. God, I love her. She is so perfect for me, requires so little.

Simet and I walk into the council a few minutes late because of a last-minute strategy meeting, and the room falls silent, making me wonder if Benson and Roundtree had a last-minute strategy meeting of their own.

Benson is chairperson for the year, and as he opens the meeting, I realize if parliamentary rules are in play he can vote only in case of a tie, so between that and the addition of Carly, we may have been handed a two-vote swing. He dispatches with old business in about fifteen seconds, then calls for new.

Mike Barbour raises his hand. “I move to call for a review on the letter requirements for the swim team.”

Before anyone can respond, Carly says, “Call for discussion.”

There is agreement.

Barbour says, “The letter requirements were misrepresented to the council, I believe.”

That’s
way
more articulate than Barbour is. Somebody has been coaching him to imitate a human.

Simet knows how to play this game. “Misrepresented? You’re saying I deceived you?” He turns to Barbour. “That’s the gentleman’s way of saying ‘You callin’ me a liar?’”

That throws Barbour for a second. Even
he
isn’t in the business of calling a teacher a liar. “No, well, what I mean is, I don’t think the rest of us knew whether the requirements were
hard
enough to earn a letter.”

“So you basically made your decision without sufficient knowledge.” It isn’t a question.

“I think what Mike is trying to say,” Benson says, “is that we believed you were setting a standard for yourselves that would meet criteria that would set your team in an equal position with other sports teams.”

Simet and Benson lock eyes. Simet says, “I haven’t been a member of this council very long, but in almost every formal meeting I’ve attended elsewhere, the chairperson’s job is to run the meeting and let the other
members debate, to avoid an appearance of bias.”

That
pisses Benson off, and the jacked muscle in his jaw tells us so, but he’s cool and hands the gavel to Roundtree. I don’t think Benson knows
how
any formal meeting is run. He’s used to saying what he wants when he wants. It doesn’t matter which of them is chair, it still takes a vote away from the bad guys unless we’re in a tie.

Carly says, “I wasn’t here the day of the original vote, but it seems to me that if the council made a decision and the swimmers swam their entire season with that goal in mind, it would be unfair to change it now.”

Go, Carly!

Barbour says, “We didn’t know every kid on that team was gonna get a jacket.”

“Neither did I,” Simet says.

“But I think that may be the point,” Benson says. “It’s a brand-new sport here at Cutter, and every athlete lettered. What other sport in the school’s history has lettered every athlete in the program?”

“Actually,” Simet says, “the chess club lettered all its athletes in 1989 and again in ’93.” Now
how
in hell would Simet know that?

“The chess club!” Barbour blurts out. “That ain’t no athletic team.”

“It was then,” Simet says. “Before ’95 it was
considered a sports team, and the members earned letters. In those two years, every athlete lettered. No one said a word.”

“Correction,” Roundtree says. “Someone did say a word, which is why the chess club is no longer considered an athletic team. Chess is a game, not a sport.”

“I won’t get into that argument with you, Coach. Don’t know whether I’d argue for or against chess as a sport. My point is, when it was considered one, everyone lettered. In context, there is precedent for all the athletes on a team lettering.” The council is quiet, probably digesting Simet’s words, but he raises his hands in mock surrender. “Hey, I don’t even think it’s a big deal, or has anything to do with the point of this issue. It’s just a fact.”

“Okay,” Roundtree says. “Then let’s focus on the issue. The item under discussion is whether the council had enough information when we took our last vote to make an intelligent judgment regarding the letter requirements of the swim team. Mr. Barbour thinks not, and it appears Coach Benson agrees. Is there more discussion, or should we vote to reconsider?”

My hand goes up. “Wait. How many other coaches had to bring their letter requirements before this council? I haven’t been here before, but you guys didn’t discuss
basketball or volleyball or wrestling or any other winter sport, did you?”

Benson says, “The letter requirements for those sports have been set for a long time. Most often it’s a question of rubber stamping, because the requirements are reasonable.”

“So there are bylaws that say the council has the right to pass judgment on a coach or a team? Like, you could show me where all this is written down?”

Benson is really tightening up now. “It is understood at this school, Mr. Jones, that the Athletic Council oversees all athletic matters. This unquestionably falls under our jurisdiction.”

“But it’s not written down,” I say

“It doesn’t have to be written down.”

“But it isn’t.”

“I’ve said all that needs to be said,” Benson says, “and I’m asking that this be brought to a vote.”

“Actually,” Simet says, “I think it does have to be written down somewhere, Coach. I can’t imagine that the purpose and criteria for this council isn’t recorded somewhere. Is it possible to postpone this long enough to look into that? I won’t order the letters yet, and we can hold off on making a decision until we see exactly how this is all laid out. That’s fair, isn’t it?”

Benson thinks it isn’t and says so, but when put to a vote, waiting seems reasonable to a simple quorum. Thank God for women’s sports and for Carly Hudson.

“I just wanted to regroup,” Simet says back in his room. “That would have been too close to call. It will take them a while to dig up the paperwork, if there is any, and set up another meeting. We might have been able to pull the votes, but I didn’t want to take a chance if we can do it without. If we can work up a little compassion for Chris and play down Mott’s two-gun salute to the student body, we could have a shot.”

Carly tells me afterward we should have gone ahead and called for a vote. She’s afraid Janet Lindstrom might vote with Benson. It’s a chance we’ll have to take.

Workouts are a kick. We have put the supine surgical-tubing station (which Dan Hole began to call muscle masturbation—thereby placing him forever in Mott’s good graces) into mothballs, and now the guys simply line up in an endless forty-by-infinite-yard relay, where they go after me forty yards at a time, and I build up incredible yardage. In the second week we’ll taper me again, with medium-speed yards coupled with quality sprints, until I supposedly peak at some cardiomuscular apex that will allow me to lay waste to the swimmers
on the coast, none of whom have I yet seen up close and personal.

To stay with me, each of my guys starts from a dive, which adds a little twist to my workout one out of four times when Simon hits the water hard enough to surf me into the next lane. When this is all over, I may try an open-water swim. I say one out of
four
times because Chris Coughlin works out on the other side of me, swimming as hard as he can, then waiting for me to lap him before coming after me again. He really does have some potential down the road, and Simet is keeping him in shape to see if he can get on an age-group team as soon as the state meet is over.

The music from the boom box is so loud Simet has to cup his hands and holler directly into my ear to correct the tiniest imperfections in my stroke, but it adds to the overall ambience and is not to be squelched. Somewhere near the end of the season, Jackie Craig became captivated by the music of John Philip Sousa, so now “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” is sandwiched between “Stars and Stripes Forever” and “Semper Fidelis.” Jackie didn’t say a word; simply handed Simet the Sousa CDs when Simet called for new music as he did at the beginning of each week.

For the past two weeks we’ve been getting a lot of telephone hang-ups at home, which I assume is Rich Marshall slamming down the receiver every time he calls and Alicia doesn’t answer. She does answer the phone as regularly as anyone else in the house, so sooner or later he’ll get her.

“Gotta happen sometime,” Dad told her. “Might as well see if you have the power to refuse him while you have some support.” Mom thinks we should try to catch him and add a few extra weekends in the slammer for breaking the no-contact order, but Dad says we should simulate real life as much as possible, and there will be a time in the very near future when Alicia has to figure out whether or not she’s going to be able to put the kids’ best interests ahead of her own. Heidi is doing much better, which means she’s meaner than a Doberman to her younger brothers, who have enjoyed Rich Marshall’s umbrella protection plan from the day of their birth. A new pecking order is being established, and nothing in me wants to stop it.

The hangups prompt my mother to order Caller ID, and between that and Last-Call Callback we discover most of the calls are coming from the pay phone at the 7-Eleven about eight blocks away. One of Rich’s logging truck drivers must have quit, so Rich is driving until he can hire
another, and the convenience store is directly on his route.

Rich is also making his presence felt in more subtle ways. One day there is a Marshall Logging plastic travel coffee cup on the sidewalk across the street from the house. Another day a double-bitted ax is stuck in a tree in our backyard, a blue hard hat left in the vacant lot behind our place. We know it’s him but have no proof. There are several hundred of the coffee cups strewn around town, remnants of a campaign ploy Rich used last year in a failed run for a city council position.

“He’s watching us,” Alicia says just after Dad pulls the ax from the tree trunk. “He’s letting me know he’s around.”

Dad puts the ax in the garage, then stands in front of Alicia, placing his hands on her shoulders. “Tell me you haven’t been communicating with him, Alicia.”

“I haven’t. Honest, Mr. Jones. Not once. Since I’ve been here, not once.”

“I’m going to trust that,” he says. “What do you think he’ll do?”

She looks away, a flash of desperation passing over her face. “Something bad,” she says. “Rich obeys the rules up to a point, then he doesn’t care. When he thinks somebody is taking something that’s his…See, he doesn’t really care about the kids. I’ve always known that. It’s
when he thinks he’s losing me.” She nods toward me. “He thinks I’m…you know, because of Willis…When it gets bad, I don’t know what would stop him.”

Dad’s face goes hard. “I’ll stop him.”

I’d put my money on Dad.

Late that night the phone rings, followed by an extra loud hang-up. Ten minutes later it rings again. Ten minutes later, again. All from 7-Eleven. Dad tells Alicia to answer it, then he and I hop in my car for a quick run to the store, where we discover Rich’s pickup idling next to a row of three pay phones. We pull up on the far side of the building so we can watch him catty-cornered through the store windows. His pickup door opens, and he takes the few wobbly steps to the phone. It’s obvious he doesn’t know this state has an open-container law.

Like a cat, Dad is out of the car and at the door of the phone booth, his knee wedged against it to keep Rich trapped. He whacks the glass hard with his hand, and Rich turns with a start. “What the fuck?”

“Nobody’s home,” Dad yells through the door.

“Who the—Get the hell away from the door.”

Dad opens it partway, blocking Rich from coming out. “Marshall, I’m standing here talking with you at midnight at a phone number that I can match up with my Caller ID, which means you’ve broken a no-contact
order. It’s hard to tell if you’re dumber than you are mean, or the other way around, but I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and go with dumb. Which means if no one at my house hears from you for thirty days at least, I won’t report this.”

“Get the fuck away from me,” Rich says. “Lemme outta here.”

“Soon as you repeat back to me what I said,” Dad says.

“GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM THE DOOR!” Rich screams, but Dad forces it closed.

“Repeat it,” Dad says.

“Man, if you don’t want your ass kicked—”

“I do want my ass kicked, Marshall. And I want you to be the one to try. Now, you’re drunk and you’re screwing up big time, and if I were you, I’d cut my losses and go home.” Dad backs away from the door.

Rich comes out, looks like he’s going after Dad, but he gets a better look and, even in his altered state, reconsiders, which to my way of thinking is a
very
smart move for a guy drunk on his ass.

Dad says, “Rich, I’m doing my best to be decent to you, but if you keep stalking, I could get pretty uncivil.”