Whale Talk (3 page)

I stay a few minutes, imagining myself trying to get a decent workout in that abbreviated pool. It doesn’t look promising. But as I drive through the quiet dusky streets of the uncharacteristically warm Cutter fall, Chris’s ease in the water flashes before me and suddenly the mathematics—the
relativity
—of it all hits me. If it
kills Barbour to see a guy as far out of the mainstream as Chris is, wearing a letter jacket that doesn’t belong to him, how far up his nose will it get when he sees him wearing one that
does
belong to him? And suddenly I hear the voice the universe—and Simet—wants me to hear. It says, “Swim.”

Among his many other quirks, my father, John Paul Jones, is a TV buff. He doesn’t sit around staring at it all day, but he religiously records certain programs to watch later. Usually they are jock interviews or hourlong biographies or educational TV documentaries about animals whose faces are carbon copies of their asses, or about black holes and the Hubble space telescope and
anything
about whales.

One interview Dad watches over and over, and believes should be shown at the beginning of every athletic season at Cutter High School and to every coach and administrator and athlete who ever hears the cheers of his hometown crowd, is an interview that Roy Firestone of ESPN did with Arthur Ashe not long before the tennis great died of AIDS. Ol’ Roy was the king of drawing
tears, but he was way out of his league because if anyone ever got tears out of Arthur Ashe, they would
never
be tears for himself. So after several attempts, Roy leaned forward and said, “Arthur, when you’re all alone, do you ever just look up and say, ‘Why me?’”

Arthur looked him straight in the eye, and in that soft, steady voice that came to represent the very meaning of integrity before his death, said, “Why not me?”

Dad says Arthur knew something that eludes most of the jocks and coaches and administrators at Cutter: that the universe doesn’t create special dispensation for a guy because he can run faster or jump higher or thread the needle with a fastball. He knew that we take what the universe gives us, and we either get the most out of it or we don’t, but in the end we all go out the same way.

So I hang back after Simet’s class while he’s gathering our papers off his desk.

“Don’t leave me hanging, Jones. Morgan is closing in on me about the wrestling position. He says with the shortage of male teachers this year, we’re all drawing extra duty.”

“The testosterone shuffle.”

He picks up his grade book. “Let’s see, how are you doing in my class?”

I say, “I’ll do it.”

“My God.” He stares, eyes following his finger across the page. “Straight A’s. What a guy.”

“But I won’t do it alone.”

“I’ll be with you every stroke of the way.”

“That’s not what I mean. I know you swam on a small college team,” I say, “but not so small the workouts were solitary confinement. I need a team around me.”

“Better start recruiting.”

“I’m ahead of you. Only scouted one guy so far, but there have to be more where he came from. I mean, we evolved from water, right?”

“That’s right,” he says. “Swimmers under every rock.”

“One other thing. Who establishes the criteria to earn a letter?”

“The coach of the sport,” he says. “Why? You think I’d let you jerk me out from in front of the oncoming grapplers’ train and not give you a letter? What kind of man do you think I am?”

“Never mind that, but I’m not thinking of me. I want whoever else I get to come overboard with me to have a chance.”

“When I see the caliber of fish you’re catching, we’ll talk about it.”

Whatever caliber of fish I catch, they’ll all be suckers, but no sense getting into that with him yet.

A lot happens in my imagination. In my imagination Chris Coughlin stands in front of his locker in his own letter jacket, a miniature gold swimmer stroking across the middle of the C, and when some righteous buttmunch like Mike Barbour jacks him up, some
ultra
-righteous coach, say maybe Simet, has Barbour running stairs.

And in my imagination I have answers to the pertinent questions, such as, “Who else can I get to piss off the likes of Mike Barbour?” And
sometimes
what is in my imagination comes to fruition. See, by the time most of us get to ninth grade, we know whether we can play football or basketball or baseball—the big three—or whether we’re fast enough or can jump high or far enough to turn out for track. But no way do we know our talents as swimmers. I mean, most Cutter kids swim and water ski on the river, so a lot of us can propel ourselves in a life jacket from the place we fall to the ski, but when I swam age group, my parents drove me a good forty-five minutes to the nearest indoor pool. The point is, there have to be at least a few other guys around like Chris Coughlin, with that natural feel for the water, who we can recruit to keep me from looking like the national swim team for Antarctica.

Swimming’s a winter sport in high school, so I have some time to pull it all together, but swimming’s also a sport you train long and hard for if you don’t want to embarrass yourself in a big way when your stroke falls apart on the final lap of a two-hundred free because you haven’t put in the requisite miles, so I can’t wait too long.

The following weekend I run off about fifty envelopes I designed on Mom’s computer. They say
YOU MAY HAVE ALREADY WON
! with a reproduction of Ed McMahon and Dick Clark in one corner. Then I stuff a flyer inside that reads
FEARLESS HIGH SCHOOL MERMEN & MERMAIDS WANTED: CASH PRIZES AND INSTANT FAME
above my telephone number, and because we are having one of those rare great hot fall days, I take them out to the river and stick one under the windshield wiper of every car in sight. I figure, hey, it’s a river. At least most of the people here can swim.

Eight hours later, in the early evening, I answer the phone to the first ring and hear, “To whom might I be speaking?”

I say, “Shouldn’t that be my question?”

“It might be if you hadn’t left a number without a name on that flyer you placed on my automobile windshield this afternoon.”

“This is T. J. Jones.” I do know that’s redundant, by the way: the J and the Jones. “And to whom might I be speaking?” I ask, placing the “m” on the end of
who
for what I hope will be the last time in my history of casual speech.

“You might be speaking to almost anyone, as many of those flyers as you distributed,” the voice says, “but you
are
speaking to Daniel Hole.”

When your name is The Tao Jones, you think twice before passing judgment on a peer’s name, but I am quick with silent gratitude that my last name can’t be translated into any target so basic to adolescent males. “What can I do for you, Mr. Hole?”

“I called to gather information regarding your rallying cry for fearless swimmers. I’m assuming you’re in search of people who experience a certain amount of comfort in the water.”

Dan Hole. He was in my English class a few years ago, and I think a couple of social studies classes since. Dan “Never-Use-a-Single-Syllable-When-Polysyllables-Are-Available” Hole. I say, “Yeah, people who experience comfort in the water. Is that you?”

“Totally comfortable,” he says. “What is your plan?”

“My plan?”

“Well, do you simply want to acquaint yourself with people who can swim, or is there some mission?”

Jesus. “We need you for a swim team.”

Silence fills the line.

“Dan?”

After a moment, “That would require a considerable outlay of energy.”

“And time,” I say.

“Indeed.” More silence. “I actually participated on a swimming team in my youth,” he says.

“That’s great,” I say back. “Exactly what we’re looking for.”

Dan wants particulars. Where will we swim; when? Will the chlorine level be controlled better than it was at the YMCA pool in his former hometown, where he swam for their team? (I assure him it will, at which time he questions my sincerity, given I don’t even know where his former hometown is, and therefore cannot possibly have the particulars on the chemical makeup of the water in the YMCA there. I lie and say all YMCAs are the same; it’s a rule.) Will we have time for our homework? One doesn’t ever want to get out of balance with the “athletic thing,” as many of the football players are wont to do. I assure him I’m interested in a college education myself and wouldn’t go out for a sport
where I might be wont to not want to do my homework. That seems to satisfy him. “And our mentor would be whom?”

“You mean the coach?”

“Yes, the coach.”

I say it would be Simet.

Another silence.

“He’s my English teacher,” I tell him.

“Yes, I’m aware of Mr. Simet. He’s rather frivolous, don’t you think?”

I agree Simet can be a bit of a slacker, but I assure Dan Hole he was a collegiate swimmer and is probably the best we can do under the circumstances. Dan is wearing off on me. I say
collegiate.

“Let me get back to you on this,” Dan says. “I’m tempted to respond to impulse and sign on, but history tells me that’s ill-advised. I’ll have a reply within forty-eight hours.”

I hang up, exhausted.

I know if I end up with Chris Coughlin and Dan Hole, seemingly two ends of some otherworldly continuum, I’ll need to get some guys to fill in the middle, if for no other reason than to save Chris.

The second call comes from Tay-Roy Kibble. Tay-Roy is a guy I know from every school musical
production from grade school tonette band to high school symphony, choral events included. This guy has a set of pipes on him, and plays all the woodwind instruments, plus the piano, well enough to be presented as a featured soloist every time. He’s also a bodybuilder, though not quite as accomplished there as in the musical field. He doesn’t embarrass himself, though, and enters only steroid-free events, usually placing in the top five of eighteen-and-unders. Tay-Roy is a senior, too.

On the phone he says, “This is Tay-Roy Kibble. I’m calling about a flyer on my car windshield out at the river this morning.”

“Hey, Tay-Roy. T. J. Jones. I’m trying to get enough guys together for a school swim team. Mr. Simet wants to coach it…actually, to keep from having to be an assistant wrestling coach.” I go on to give him the downside: no real pool, all “away” meets, basically giving him every excuse to say, “Excuse me, my Caller ID shows an important call” and unplug his phone, because I know the hours he puts into his music, not to mention the bodybuilding.

“Actually, that sounds kind of fun. I’m kinda burned out on the bodybuilding thing. You have to travel too far to catch the drug-free contests, and the price of regular supplements is killing me.”

I ask if he swims much.

“I can chase down my water ski,” he says, laughing. “Actually, I swam the river, over and back, from Boulder Beach last summer.”

That isn’t bad. It’s more than three-quarters of a mile across there. I tell him that’s farther than I’ve swum in the last year and sign him up. If nothing else, Tay-Roy is plenty familiar with All Night Fitness. When he’s working out for a contest, he’ll spend more time on that little bump of a muscle that pops out right next to your elbow than I spend on my entire upper body. He even knows what that muscle is called.

So if I can convince Chris to swim, and Dan assesses the situation in our favor, we’ll have at least enough swimmers for a relay. Who knows what else will come floating up from the bottom?

My quest gains momentum the next day while I’m pitching the team one more time to Chris Coughlin at first lunch, and look up to see Barbour standing over us with a couple of offensive (I won’t say
how
offensive) linemen. Talk about thinking football is
life
. Cutter could win it all this year, and football guys are gods. Before the first game is even played, Barbour is being talked about as first string All-State. The one thing that could
make me play football is if I could transfer to another school and go up against that asshole. Anyway, it’s clear he’s going to loom until I acknowledge his presence, but I leave him unattended until Chris appears ready to bolt out of sheer terror. “Barbour the Barbarian,” I say finally. “What can I do for you?”

“I wanna talk to the dummy.”

I point to Greg Steelman, the lineman beside him. “So talk.”

He points to Chris. “That dummy.”

“Christopher may not be matriculating to Harvard,” I say, “but he’s plenty smart enough not to waste his time in discourse with you. What do you want?”
Matriculating. Discourse
. Dan Hole is lodged in my brain.

He glares at Chris. “I said I was—”

I stand, shoving my chair back hard enough to send it crashing to the floor—bringing us into focus as objects of attention from five tables in every direction—then step forward. Steelman puts a hand on my shoulder, but I brush it off with enough force to let him know he’ll at least get his hair messed up messing with me. “If you call my friend a dummy one more time, I’m going to take you apart. I know, you’re a hotshot football stud and you think nobody has your number, but even if I don’t, we go at it, we get three days to cool off, and that
means you miss three days of practice, which makes you ineligible for the game Friday. It makes me ineligible for a math test. So go ahead, Barbour, sound off.” I think I said I’ve spent a record number of days out of school for letting the heat that starts in my gut rise all the way, and I do my best to keep that under control, but the day I take Barbour out will be worth finishing the year homeschooled.

Coach Benson, the head football coach, spots us from his lunch-duty spot by the door and hustles over. “What’s going on?”

“I’m just keeping these two apprised of the school athletic code; how nobody wears a letter jacket but the guy who earns it.”

I translate that for Benson. “He wants to tell Chris Coughlin one more time he can’t wear his dead brother’s jacket.”

Chris puts his head down, and I touch his shoulder. “Sorry, buddy, I shouldn’t have said it like that.”

“There’s pride in being an athlete at this school.”

“There may have been before you peed into the athletic gene pool,” I tell him.

Coach Benson says, “Mr. Jones, there’s no call for that kind of language.”

“I’m just speaking in his native tongue, sir.” I realize
I stepped onto dangerous ground with Benson, who is a stickler for courteous language, so I follow with, “Sorry, sir. You’re right. What I should have said is that Barbour is a stud football player with everything going for him, and it ticks me off when he takes after somebody like my friend Chris, who has a tough time protecting himself.”