Whale Talk (8 page)

As I walk toward my car from Georgia’s house, what I know is this: The feeling I had inside when Heidi and I were scrubbing ourselves “clean” will keep Rich Marshall in my life long after I would normally have had him surgically removed like a giant hemorrhoid. No way can I turn away from Heidi now; her sorrow for my color has to be repaired. I’m big enough—old enough—to stop guys like Rich, but Heidi’s not.
Georgia’s right about bigotry: that absent the element of hate, a person’s skin color is only an indication of his or her geographical ancestry. But
with
that element, it is a soul stealer.

Time passes, and the swim team gets better and better, not in the sense that we’re ever going to win a meet or even a race that I’m not in, but in the sense that no one is turning back.

Tay-Roy is turning into our go-to butterflyer. He operates on power and endurance, and big as those shoulders are, they are amazingly flexible. He doesn’t yet have the stroke timing right, but he’s down and back in the time it takes any of the others to get down. That alone won’t win races, but it will avoid crippling embarrassment.

Chris Coughlin is so glad to be a part of something he works like one of those potato bugs in my bathtub, and he’s as happy stroking away belly down on the bench as he is in the water. In fact, he likes it more because he
can hear the music better. We’ve been democratic about music selection, and Chris likes Christmas music, so interspersed with all the rock and hard-driving country and rap (and Dan Hole’s “1812 Overture”) comes “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Chris likes the Gene Autry version.

Water is the very best place for Dan Hole because he can’t talk when his face is in it, and the longer he’s quiet the more likable he becomes. Simon has realized he doesn’t weigh close to three hundred pounds in the water, and after the first two weeks of working out and lifting weights, Interim Coach Oliver thought he saw the outline of triceps poking through the meat. I caught Simon later in the locker room when he thought everyone was gone, straightening his arm to flex, smiling and shaking his head. A boy and his muscle.

Interim Coach Oliver, the permanent uninvited houseguest of All Night, is an entity unto himself. As I said, he knows nothing about swimming, but he’s a master motivator and is a better influence the more screwed up the athlete is. Having brought Simon to playing with the idea that there’s a Tay-Roy Kibble inside him ready to burst through at any time, he’s focused his energy on converting Dan into a “regular guy who’s able to converse with his peers,” demanding ten push-ups every
time he uses a word Oliver doesn’t understand. It’s too early to tell, but I think Dan has a better chance of building his pecs to Schwarzeneggerian bulk than dumbing down his vocabulary for the likes of us. The guy even
bitches
in high-brow: “I’m punished for bringing aristocratic flair to the language and vocabulary of these aquatic Cro-Magnons?” he says. “How can that be?”

Interim Coach Oliver belches and says, “You’re damn lucky I know ‘aristocratic.’ I ain’t so sure which ones were the Cro-Magnons. Gimme ten more.”

Interim Coach Oliver created a “station” system, wherein one station is the pool, one the surgical-tubing-bench-humping swimming, one a series of deck drills—jumping jacks to push-ups to sit-ups to dips. Three minutes all-out in each station, three times around, to the sound of Interim Coach Oliver’s booming voice, gets us going pretty good when we’re bored with the tedium of the long workouts. Three days a week we hit the weight room, where Tay-Roy puts us through a killer weight workout he dreamed up after reading how Olympic swimmers weight train.

Don’t get me wrong. In the long run a swimmer is the product of, more than anything else, the number of yards he or she can log in the water. We’re feeling good on the front end of all this, but when the season starts
we’d better have some creative individual goals, because we’re going to get our asses kicked. If I have my way, though, when the season is over, there will be six guys stalking the halls you couldn’t have
imagined
wearing the holy shroud of blue and gold.

Things are less optimistic out in “real” life. Alicia Marshall must have told Rich she saw me in Heidi’s play-therapy session because every time I ran into him at school the next day, he squinted one eye as if he was lining me up in the crosshairs, then turned away. He doesn’t know I get power knowing he knows I have the goods on him. He’s a guy to watch every minute, though; I’ve never forgotten the look on his face the day he shot the deer. It could just as easily have been me.

It’s hard to know how paranoid to be. Both Rich and Barbour are consistent in subtly mentioning my “roots” at least one out of three times they say anything to me at all. The only person I know who relates to being nonwhite is Georgia, and she tells me that while she never forgets her heritage, her job on the planet is to be a voice for children, and that’s what she concentrates on first. “But I’m over forty,” she says, “and you’re almost eighteen. It’s one of those things you have to figure out for yourself. Things will look different when you get to college. The inland Northwest isn’t exactly
the most ethnically balanced spot in the universe.” For the most part it’s not something I spend a lot of time with except when I hear some off-the-wall remark from Barbour, or when Rich Marshall is messing with my head. I said earlier the Aryan Nations fort is about forty miles from Spokane, in the Idaho Panhandle at Hayden Lake. Neo-Nazis from all over the country come there to “summer camp,” where they have war games and spout mindless slogans of racial purity. Sometimes they obtain a parade permit and march through the streets of Coeur d’Alene or congregate in Riverfront Park in Spokane. On the surface these guys look like a bunch of bozos. The Reverend Butler, the geezer who runs it, is articulate enough, but he’s crazier than an outhouse rat. And the smartest of the guys who show up for that camp can draw maybe one out of three swastikas correctly. I drove to Spokane to observe one of their rallies last year for a journalism story, and more than anything they looked ridiculous. I said that in the article, but Dad read it and asked if I knew that the guy who opened fire in a Jewish day care in Los Angeles a few years back had ties to those guys. Or whether I was aware a Jewish radio-talk-show host in Denver was gunned down by people traced back to this group. Or that a guy coming from somewhere in the South to support Randy Weaver,
the white supremist who held off the FBI at Ruby Ridge, shot two people in the Spokane bus station just because they were a mixed couple. He didn’t want to alarm me, he said, but he wanted me armed with the facts.

Truth is, I wouldn’t give any of that a second thought—except when I went to cover the story, I swear I saw Rich Marshall standing in the middle of the park talking with one of the “officers.” They were whooping it up like old buddies. That didn’t surprise me all that much, and to tell the truth I couldn’t care less generally; he has the requisite I.Q.

But the next day he catches me just after I’ve said good-bye to Carly in Wolfy’s parking lot and pulls his pickup in close just after I open my car door, trapping me. He says, “Hey, Jones.”

“Hey, Rich.”

“Hypothetical question.”

I take a deep breath, appear disinterested. “What, Rich?”

“Let’s say you got married and had a family. And let’s say the Department of Children’s Services made up a bunch of bullshit to keep you away from your wife and kids.” He waits.

“Okay,” I say, “let’s say that.”

“And let’s say you find out some guy who ain’t got
no
business within ten miles of your family gets himself involved.”

“Okay.”

“What do you do with him?”

“Nothing, Rich. I just do whatever I have to do to get back with my wife and kids.”

“Not me,” he says, pointing his trusty forefinger at me, bringing his thumb/hammer down. “Not me.”

I shrug and get into my car, waiting for him to pull back so I can close the door, and then sit there waiting for the adrenaline flow to ebb.

Ten minutes later at All Night, I tear the water
up
; swim two-hundred-yard repeats leaving every three-and-a-half minutes until I can barely drag the paddles through the water, forcing my elbows high through each stroke, sending deep burning pain into my shoulders and chest, trying to replace the fear and contempt in my gut. Maybe this is Rich Marshall’s purpose in my life, to make me faster.

An hour and a half later I drag my dripping butt out of the water and head for home, only to rise—now more pissed than scared—around four to return for some distance work before the rest of the guys show for the station workout, and find Icko waiting for me.

Icko is Interim Coach Oliver’s new acronym.
Yesterday I started calling him our I.C.O., but when Chris Coughlin heard it he was convinced I was spelling the name so he wouldn’t understand something, like they do at his home. I tried to explain about acronyms, but that went about as far over his head as you can go without escaping gravity, and he started calling Oliver Icko. As I tried to explain it for the tenth or eleventh time, Oliver overheard me and said, “Hey, I like it.
Icko
. It has a certain ring.”

I said, “Yeah, like already chewed food, or snot running into your mustache. Ick-O!”

Icko told me to watch it.

At any rate, when I show up now, a little after four, he’s already up. “You got a minute, chief?” He follows me to the pool.

I say, “What’s up?”

“I been watching what you call a swim team pretty close,” he says, “and no matter how hard I watch, it don’t look like any swim team I ever saw.”

I said it was a little raw.

“Raw? Hell, I seen open, seeping sores ain’t as raw as this team. Ever notice you’re the only actual swimmer? Hell, you look like one of them boys in the O-lympics.”

I tell him it’s the same principle as my parking my
Chevy Corvair next to some
really
ugly cars in the school parking lot. He says I couldn’t find an ugly enough car to make a Corvair look Olympic, but he gets the point.

“There some kind of vendetta goin’ on at school about this team?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” he says, “you know the Barbour kid, the one that works for Marshall Logging in the summer? The football stud?”

“Mike,” I say. “Mike Barbour. Yeah, I know him.”

“I seen him stacking up little slow Chris back behind the hardware store.”

Shit. “Did he hurt him?”

“Naw,” Icko says. “I done what I used to do with my boy.”

“What was that?”

“Picked me up a piece of rebar.”

“You used to hit your kid with rebar?”

Icko laughs. “Never thought of that. Naw, I just stood there talking to him real reasonable, you know, sayin’ he ought to increase his circle of friends enough to include people like my friend Chris there, while I bent the rebar into a horseshoe. He seemed to understand.”

“Was Chris okay?”

“Yeah, I guess. You know how he don’t say much.
Well, he was sayin’ less than that. He liked the rebar thing, though. ’Cept he thought it was a magic trick. Asked me to teach it to him.”

I ask Icko if he knew why Barbour was bugging Chris in the first place.

He says, “Somethin’ about a letter jacket. I didn’t understand. I mean, the kid was wearin’ that Speedo jacket he always wears.”

Man, Mike Barbour is a one-trick pony.

So later in the morning I’m “doing lunch” in Simet’s room, bringing him current on the progress of his semi-landlocked mermen, advising against his applying for the job with the men’s national team.

He says, “What are your goals?”

“A small cattle ranch outside Albuquerque,” I tell him. “A few longhorns—”

“For the season,” he says.

“Swim as fast as I can. Get the gold.”

“That it?”

“Letter jackets for the downtrodden, one and all.”

“That’s still the big deal to you, isn’t it?”

“Still is.”

“Coach Benson caught me in the teachers’ lounge this morning,” he says.

“You must have been delighted.”

“Not particularly. He was feeling me out for swim team letter requirements; said he thought it was great I was getting a team going, though I should have talked you into going out for football if I really wanted to do the school a favor, rather than create a whole new sport for you.”

I love that they all want me. “What did you tell him?”

“I told him I didn’t create swimming; it’s been going on a long time. Told him about a couple of guys named Schollander and Spitz.”

Simet’s as big a smartass as I am.

“He said he knew the letter requirements were up to me, but he hoped I wouldn’t diminish what it means to be a Wolverine. Mike Barbour’s name came up, along with a couple of other ball players; and yours, of course. Said they were concerned that you were trying to make a sham of it.”

“It’s already a sham. I’m just exposing it.”

“You got something going on with Mike Barbour?”

I shrug.

“Well, I don’t know exactly what this is all about, but remember I have to live here after you’re gone. We can be creative, but I have a certain respect for athletics myself, so don’t push it
too
far.”

I promise I won’t push it too far. But like I said, Simet’s one of those guys who remembers what it was like to be a kid, so I figure “too far” is quite a ways out there.

Finally Andy Mott shows. I believe I may have mentioned I wasn’t exactly looking forward to that. You know how that Li’l Abner character goes around with a cloud over his head all the time? Well, Andy’s cloud is three times the size and shudders with thunder and lightning. Andy seldom talks; the cloud speaks for him.

He limps onto the deck in that unique gait one morning, dressed in gray sweatpants, Nikes, and a T-shirt. His torso cuts an impressive figure; he ain’t Tay-Roy, but he isn’t Chris Coughlin, either. This guy has spent some time pushing iron away from gravity.

He whips off the T-shirt, kicks off his shoes as he sits on the bench, pulls off his sweatpants, then unstraps his right
leg
. The guy has a prosthesis from just above the
knee. He shoves it behind the bench, hops over to the end of the pool, and stands.

Andy Mott is a junior, moved here two years ago, and
no
body knows he’s missing a body part. He says, “What’s the workout?”

I almost can’t tell him we’re doing kicks.

He looks at me with contempt, or maybe that’s just his look, and says, “My best thing,” and hits the water.

Everyone is stunned, but Chris is paralyzed; wide-eyed with mouth agape, staring first at Andy in the water, then at the leg, a space-age metallic thing, then back to Andy. Communication with Chris Coughlin teaches one patience. There is a standard two-second lag time between input and output. Even with the simplest of questions, you watch his eyes and see the wheels slowly turn. His brain has a standard transmission, as if he has to create his own synapses. That’s for a simple question. When some guy limps into the pool and takes off his leg before diving in, Chris’s wiring tangles irreparably.

I have to admit it frays the ends of my own, but I walk Chris over to the bench and start him swimming on the surgical tubing, though he almost breaks his neck craning it to see if Andy’s for real.

At the end of the workout, Andy pulls himself out of the water, hops over, and straps on the leg. Chris still
can’t take his eyes off him. Andy looks up and says, “What’s the matter, never seen a one-legged swimmer before?”

After the standard hesitation, Chris shakes his head slowly and says, “Huh-uh.”

I couldn’t be happier. Before Andy actually turned up, I believed the Magnificent Seven consisted of one swimmer of color, a representative from each extreme of the educational spectrum, a muscle man, a giant, a chameleon, and a psychopath; when in fact we have one swimmer of color, a representative from each extreme of the educational spectrum, a muscle man, a giant, a chameleon, and a
one-legged
psychopath. When I envision us walking seven abreast through the halls of Cutter High, decked out in the sacred blue and gold, my heart swells.

By the time Thanksgiving vacation is over and Simet is legally coaching, we are a well-oiled machine. We have three in the water and four on the benches at all times. I’m putting in extra yards during off hours and my repeat times are getting faster daily, and if
my
times are in rapid descent, the other guys’ times are in freefall. Fifteen minutes of simple stroke technique per day will make a nonswimmer exponentially faster, and Simet is truly a master technician.

Dan Hole benefits most from that because he is first and foremost a student, and the very physics of swimming fascinates him. Jackie Craig, who remains the team’s ghost, listens intently to Simet’s every word, watches Dan put those words into practice, then imitates Dan’s every move. Though he’s been with us for weeks, I don’t think Jackie has uttered three sentences. I look back and realize I haven’t even thought of him and wonder if his whole life is like that. He shows up, watches, imitates, all the time remaining invisible. Mott comes in every day looking surly, leaves looking surly, and does everything in between with a barely controlled rage. I believe if the water were alive, he would beat it to death. Chris doesn’t get much from the technique instruction, but once or twice a week Simet gets into the water with him and manually moves his arms and legs correctly through the strokes. Chris probably has the best natural stroke on the team, and that’s a good thing, because no matter how much Coach works with him, that stroke doesn’t change. Simon continues to churn the water in search of muscle definition.

Tay-Roy probably has the most overall talent next to me. Though not a natural, he has an okay feel for the water, and as he alters his body design from bodybuilder to swimmer, he gets better and better. He’s the
one guy who knows what it means to dedicate himself athletically. I don’t know how many people understand the dedication bodybuilding takes, or what it takes to bring yourself to the musical level Tay-Roy has achieved. Even I can learn from him. He is singular in his vision of himself as an athlete.

The first day Simet is on the job, Icko tries to disappear, standing over by the door for most of the workout, then slipping out early. The second day, while I’m moving from the water to the benches, I grab his arm and bring him to Coach. “Oliver Van Zandt,” I say, by way of introduction.

Simet sticks out his hand. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Van Zandt. I didn’t realize that was you. I understand I have you to thank for keeping this group together.”

“They were pretty much together already, I was just around,” Icko says. “And you can call me Icko.”

Coach says, “Not the way I heard it, Icko.”

“I don’t know much about swimming,” Icko says. “In fact, I don’t know
nothin
’ about swimming.”

Coach glances around the pool. Jackie Craig and Chris Coughlin lie flat on their stomachs, stroking away on the benches to the beat of Bob Seger’s “Betty Lou’s Gettin’ Out Tonight,” while Tay-Roy churns the water in his lane like a washing-machine agitator, and Simon
DeLong displaces enough water on his dive to wash Dan Hole to the far side of one lane and Mott to the side of the other. “You’re not the only one here who doesn’t know much about swimming, sir. And I’d sincerely appreciate it if you were to stick around as my assistant. I’m sure there’s money in the budget to compensate you.”

“Hell,” Icko says, “I got two full-time jobs as it is. No reason to pay me for this. I kind of enjoy it.”

“I kind of enjoy it, too,” Simet says, “but they still pay me.”

As I’m moving to the benches, I hear Simet ask Icko if he can drive a school bus.
That
would make us one self-contained traveling water show.

I look at us: a group of real outsiders, a group Cutter High School has offered very little to. You could make a case for the fact that Cutter has offered me a
lot
and that I’ve simply refused to take it, but for whatever reason, I fit better here than I’ve fit anywhere before. It’s hard to put my finger on, maybe it boils down to the racial piece. It isn’t as if I live in a city where racial struggles are everyday issues if you discount people like Rich and Mike Barbour, and it isn’t as if I’m carrying much personal cultural history, though my parents have always kept me supplied with books about African-
American heroes, and we’ve always celebrated certain of their accomplishments and birthdays. But the fact is, my parents are white and the only others close to my “persuasion” are a child therapist and a preschooler. Sweet Georgia Brown, more by example than by lecture, has continually demonstrated that racist thought and action say far more about the person they come from than about the person at whom they are directed. Yet, no matter what you
know
, it doesn’t always alter how you
feel
.

When I was eight, in the third grade, I learned about Charlotte Volare’s birthday party the day after, when one of my friends asked why I wasn’t there. I walked up to Charlotte and asked her the same thing. She said her parents didn’t want me in their house because I wasn’t white; that her grandfather had been killed by some Japanese people in this thing called World War II, an event neither of us could quite pin down. It was okay for her to play with me at school, but she could never
ever
kiss me or have me to her house. I was pretty hurt, and Dad offered to call up Mr. Volare to find out what gives, but Charlotte was gorgeous beyond belief, with large, round brown eyes, and dark, thick hair that spilled down to the middle of her back like a luxurious blanket. Even at eight, I was pretty sure if my biker dad
jumped in the middle of Mr. Volare’s shit I could kiss good-bye any idea of becoming Charlotte’s secret boyfriend, so with Georgia’s help I talked him out of it. But the sting was undeniable. Charlotte was so matter-of-fact with her explanation that I thought there really
was
something different and wrong about me that everyone else took for granted.

“Not a thing wrong with you, baby,” Georgia said over a plate of those miraculous cookies when I showed up at her house, crying and majorly pissed. “Some people’s parents are just stupid and mean; so mean they would cheat their own children out of having a great friend like you. Got to feel bad for that Charlotte.” By the time that conversation was over, I half felt bad for Charlotte.

So as an outsider, I may rate only a three or four on a scale of ten, where Dan might be a six, Simon and Chris an eight, Jackie—who knows?, Tay-Roy wherever he puts himself (he goes his own way], and Mott a fifty. Andy is famous as the king of in-school suspension, out-of-school suspension, and Saturday school; he spends more time in those places than in the classroom. We know he accrues most of that time not from fighting, but from calling to public attention Morgan’s shortcomings as a principal, or pointing out some teacher’s personal deficits in front of the class. While he hasn’t said
a cross word to Simet or Icko, nor to any of us for that matter, he is notorious for the level of vitriol in his parting comments. I haven’t yet figured out why he picked this team for his sanctuary.

Cutter High School has many rituals I could do without, but none is more annoying than the special assembly before each new athletic season. The athletes from the teams are introduced, and the captain and coach have to make a short speech about team goals and what it means to compete for Cutter.

We operate on a shortened class schedule that day, so the assembly lasts the entire final hour. Winter sports include basketball, wrestling, volleyball, gymnastics, and now swimming. To this, I have not been looking forward. We will parade our band of merry men before a crowd of more than seven hundred students that includes the members of the state champion football team.

The other teams have a large number of returning lettermen, so the gym floor is covered with blue and gold by the time we are introduced, dead last, fitting for the spot we are sure to place in the conference. Icko has taken an hour off work and follows Simet onto the floor decked out in his Burger King uniform. I’m behind him, followed by Chris Coughlin, who is so seriously
traumatized by having to walk in front of that many people that I have to keep saying, “Stay with me, Chris. Stay with me, Chris. Chris?” I hear the laughter and turn around to see Jackie Craig run into him because Chris has stopped when someone in the bleachers calls out, “Dummy!” A moment later we watch a teacher hauling the culprit out, but Chris is still paralyzed and Jackie’s nose is bleeding from the collision. I take Chris’s arm, bring him next to me, and tell him to stare just above the top bleacher and hum “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” in his head.

Simet introduces us as a new team with a good chance of getting points at State to help Cutter out with the all-sport state championship. When he introduces Icko, several people shout out orders for a burger and fries. Then I’m introduced as captain to a mixture of cheers and boos. I’m fairly popular, but there’s not a student in this school who doesn’t know I’m considered a slacker for not turning out for football and basketball. My speech is short. I tell them our goal is to finish the season with as many swimmers as started. Mott picks up a couple of days of I.S.S. when he hears somebody snicker at his name and gives the entire crowd a double middle-digit salute.

All things considered, we weather it pretty well.

The experience starts me obsessing on the idea of embarrassment and humiliation. Truth is, I have no idea how I stack up against the rest of the swimmers in the state, don’t even know who the best ones are. I downloaded last year’s best times off the Internet, but I still can’t get a fix on where my times fit; I get an extra turn each hundred yards because we’re swimming in a twenty-yard pool, give or take a couple of feet for the underwater shelf that also prevents me from flipping turns at that end. For a sprinter, starts and turns are absolutely crucial. All I can do is work out as hard as I possibly can, and start checking my times against the best times after our first meet, which isn’t until after Christmas vacation. Meantime, the trick is to get in as much distance as possible so I can avoid both embarrassment and humiliation.

That evening, just after I drop off Carly to head home, having completed a science experiment with steam and the interior of a Chevy Corvair, a car pulls up close on my tail. I’m just paranoid enough to know it’s got to be Rich Marshall or one of the jocks from the football team, ready to let me know one thing or the other about letter jackets or patriotism to good old Cutter High. So I drive around awhile, through some tougher parts of town, back and forth down some alleys. Out by the old
cemetery I try to ditch whoever it is, inching through the graveyard itself, then accelerating as quickly as a Corvair can without dropping the engine onto the street. My evasive action doesn’t have the same effect of James Garner’s Camaro in the old
Rockford Files
TV show, and I finally pull up in front of my house, jump out, and rush back before whoever it is can get their driver-side door open, then prop my knee against the door, ready to do whatever business is needed.

The window rolls down slowly, and I’m face-to-face with Judy Coughlin, Chris’s aunt. She says, “Goodness, were you lost?”

I know nothing about this woman except that she took over for Chris’s mother when Chris came out of the hospital after the Saran Wrap incident. Before that, when he lived with his mom, any bad guy who wanted to got his hands on that kid and did what they wanted. I look at him sometimes in the water, think of what a stud his half-brother was, see that natural stroke, the possibilities that might exist for him if he didn’t have to wait almost a full second after I say go to actually jump in the water.