Whale Talk

CHAPTER 12

If I am going to accept the Rich Marshalls and Mike Barbours of the world, I have to accept that it won’t be mutual. Big duh. The longer Heidi stays at our place, the more rattled Rich gets and the better look I get at him. The four weekends in jail he received for showing up at our place bearing arms are not rehabilitating him, and he has not taken his suspension from duties as Cutter’s returning jock savior lightly. My mother did as promised. The day after his midnight visit, she marched into Morgan’s office and told him if Rich Marshall set foot on the grounds while school was in session, Morgan had damned well better polish his witness stand persona because she would keep him up there until he was old and sorry. Let me tell you, my mother can turn from a protector of the young into the kind of lawyer everyone makes vicious jokes about in the time it takes Simon DeLong to eat a box of marshmallow-covered Snow Balls, so even though Morgan tried to minimize Rich’s actions, he doesn’t dare let him back onto the premises.

So Morgan calls me into the office on Tuesday of the week after my record-setting speeding ticket. Coach Benson is there, and my thoughts fly immediately to a future article in The Wolverine, exposing what I fear will be the Athletic Inquisition.

Morgan says, “T. J., I want you to know this is off the record.”

I ask if that means I can cuss.

“I suppose, if you feel the need,” he says. Morgan missed the humor class when he went to principal school. Benson was absent that day, too.

I promise to keep myself under control.

“I’ve heard rumors.”

I glance to Benson, but can read nothing.

“That something is brewing between you and Mike Barbour.”

“That’s not a rumor, that’s the way of the world.”

“So you admit it’s true.”

“Things have been brewing between me and Mike Barbour since we started high school,” I tell him. “I’ll do my best to see they don’t come to a boil just yet.”

“Is this about the letter jackets?”

I quote my mother. “It’s about dead baby deer and sports and girlfriends and your basic struggle between good and evil,” I say. “Nothing that can’t wait until five or ten minutes after graduation.”

“Coach Benson tells me there was trouble at the dance the other night.”

“There could have been, but there wasn’t; other than that I may be paying my own car insurance.”

Benson says, “I’d like to know what that was all about, T. J.”

“It was about your star defensive back hammering on a girl,” I tell him. “It’s a good thing my parents got to me before I got to him, Coach.”

“There are two sides to every story, T. J. That’s not exactly the way Mike tells it.”

“How many guys do you know who beat on their girlfriends and then come out and say so?”

“Mike tells that a little differently. And they’re back together.”

Shit. “It must be tough being an educator; having to figure out who to believe all the time. I know!” I say sarcastically. “Why don’t we go have a look at Kristen Sweetwater’s arm.”

“Don’t get smart with me, T. J.”

I turn to Morgan. “I thought this was off the record.” Then back to Coach. “Don’t worry, nothing will come of it. Your golden boy will graduate to O. J. status before you know it. Look, why am I here?”

“Mike Barbour has a full ride to the U. I think he has a pretty good chance to be successful there. I don’t want this ballooning into something bigger than it is. I’m just protecting his reputation. You have to admit, T. J., you can be pretty dramatic. I can’t help but remember that bloody shirt you wore to school for a full week, then brought in your parents to block the school from holding you responsible.”

“I can’t help but remember how it got bloody.”

“Maybe. But you and Rich Marshall tell a different story there, too.”

“So you’re worried about me soiling Barbour’s rep, huh? Well, everything from here on out is on the up-and-up. No dramatics, and my swimming guys won’t be wearing T-shirts with a picture of Mike Barbour under a red circle with a slash through it. We’ll be wearing letter jackets. No slanderous remarks. Barbour will last long enough in college to beat up plenty of girls.”

About ninety-eight percent of the time, Benson is Don Shula. The other two percent, he’s Bobby Knight. I’ve seen him blow on the football field a couple of times, and he can be truly scary. His face reddens like a thermometer in a blast furnace and the vein in his neck swells up like a miniature python. I see the reptile in him coming out this minute.

“By God, Jones, if you were eighteen, that statement would be libelous, and I’d encourage Mike Barbour to pursue it. I’ve kept my mouth shut about you for four years, watched you waste athletic talent most boys would kill for, flaunt your skills at Hoopfest or playing flag football games, and doing not one damn thing for your school. Well, you’ve pretty much ruined a career before it could get started, but I’ll be damned if I’ll watch you drag other athletes down with you. This charade you and your coach are pulling to get your band of nobodies into letter jackets is not going to happen if I have anything to say about it.”

“You already had something to say about it, Coach,” I say. “The Athletic Council already voted. It was unanimous.”

“It was unanimous because no one knew what you were up to,” he says. “It can be brought back for a vote.”

The trick to being a good smartass is knowing when to call it good, and I figure now is about right for me to take my leave. It always feels better to let the other guy get mad-a sensation I don’t get to have too often. “So, am I out of here, then? No assault rumors against Barbour, no subversive articles about the football team on steroids?”

Morgan says, “Yeah, Mr. Jones, you’re out of here.”

I’m in Simet’s room before Morgan’s door slams. “Benson wants another Athletic Council vote on our letters,” I say. Man, the last thing I want is for my guys to miss out on their jackets. Points and wins have been scarce and nonexistent in that order. The jacket remains the prize.

“Don’t worry about it,” Simet says. “When this whole thing started, I was a little skeptical about your plan to get Our Gang into letter jackets. But there isn’t another group of jocks in this school that works as hard as we do. The wrestling team would come closest, but even they have some slackers. Our guys put out every minute of every workout. I’ve never coached a team like this before. There isn’t a kid out there who doesn’t deserve a letter.”

“Yeah, but Benson is going to argue that we pulled the wool over the council’s eyes. He’s pissed, Coach.”

“Then I’ll be pissed, too. It’s all relative, like anything else. If we keep this team together after you’re gone, the requirements will get stiffer, plus this ‘better on every swim’ thing is finite. This was a good call.” He gets a firm grip on my shoulder. “And by the way, anything you hear in this room stays in this room, right?”

“Hey, I’ve signed a confidentiality oath,” I tell him. “’Course, I might have to charge you.”

When I get home from school, we have a new houseguest, and Heidi is beside herself with glee. My mother and Georgia and the caseworker have put their heads together and decided it’s best to put Alicia in foster care along with Heidi. That way she can’t make decisions that will put Heidi in danger and Heidi doesn’t have to lose her. Of course, that also means we have her twins. Alicia has sworn she won’t tell Rich she’s here, and she knows if she does anything to put the kids in his care, she goes and the kids stay.

Dad tells me we are going to implement the Marshall Plan, which, if you know your American history, is a pretty good pun. Our Marshall Plan is simple. If you see Rich, or if he calls the house, dial 911. There is a restraining order on him for Alicia and the kids, as well as for us. “If I know Rich Marshall,” he says, “he’ll know where everyone is by this time tomorrow night. Whether he comes around depends on how much jail time he wants to log.”

It’s a pretty wild evening, with Heidi so glad to see her mother and all three kids fighting for Alicia’s time while her fuse smolders and she tries not to blow up at them in front of my parents. Mom seems to understand she’s on a short leash and helps with Heidi, while Dad distracts the boys, who I call Thing One and Thing Two. This is probably the first time Heidi’s been in a house with her mother and brothers where she’s been afforded equal footing, and she’s taking full advantage. By the time the kids are in bed, Alicia looks exhausted, and she steps out onto the front porch for a cigarette. I see her standing there, back to the door, a curl of smoke winding its way lazily toward the porch light. I pull on my coat and step out, dusting the skiff of snow off the porch swing to sit.

“Hey.”

She doesn’t turn. “Hey.”

“Guess we’re going to be family here for a while.”

“I guess.” She sounds cold, protected. “You okay with it?”

“Sure. Why wouldn’t I be?”

She still doesn’t turn around. “You know, Rich and all. Heidi.”

I say, “Heidi and I are tight.”

“I know, T. J. That’s my point.” She sounds irritated.

“Could I ask you something?”

“You can ask.”

“What keeps you with a guy like Rich?”

She is quiet.

“I mean, you don’t love him, right?”

“What do you know about love? You’re a kid.”

“Yeah, Alicia. I’m maybe five or six years younger than you.”

She takes a drag on the cigarette and finally turns to face me. In many ways, she’s a lot more than five or six years older than me. She says, “You must hate me.”

“I don’t hate you. I just don’t get it about Rich, and about Heidi.”

“I don’t either, T. J. I know what they say in my therapy groups, and what my counselor says. They say I feel worthless, and I have to prove the things to him that I could never prove to my dad. They say I have an overwhelming need for approval, and all he has to do to keep me around is not approve. They say I tell myself he cares about me because he wouldn’t get that mad at someone he doesn’t care about. They say the only way I think I can get power is to let him hurt me so he’ll come crawling back, begging me not to leave.” Alicia flicks the cigarette out into the snow.

I ask how much of that is true.

“All of it. But knowing it and doing something about it are two different things. I’m hoping living here will make the difference. I want to quiet my insides, get back to some feeling I can tolerate.” She sighs. “I guess some girls don’t feel complete unless they have two assholes.”

I watch her; listen. Under those hard times on her face, she’s a really pretty woman, and she has to be smart or she couldn’t have laid all that out for me. That makes it harder to understand.

“I just can’t be with anybody, that’s all.” She pauses, shaking her head slowly. “It was different with Willis, Heidi’s dad.” She chokes a second, remembering. “I mean, he was good to me but he could keep me interested.” She pauses again. “But then he was gone and I came back to Rich, and except for the fact that Rich won’t let me forget that I slept with a ni-Willis, it’s like he never existed, like maybe I dreamed it.”

“There’s Heidi.”

She looks me in the eye. “Things are going to get bad around here, T. J. I told your parents that. Rich will find me whether I let him know where I am or not; he always does. And you need to know he really hates you. He’s accused me of fucking you. He’s accused you of trying to take Heidi away from him. He hates that I’ve been with a black man, and his worst fear is that I want to be with another one. That’s the one thing he’ll never forgive me for. You want to watch out for him. You see only the very tip of what’s going on with him.”

I tell her thanks for the warning.

“Well, let me give you one more. I’m going to try to make it work here, I really am. I feel strong right now, but I know how I am. When the stars line up right, I’ll lie and protect him and deny this conversation ever took place.”

Man, this shit makes absolutely no sense, but all I have to do to believe her is look in her eyes. “That must drive you crazy.”

She looks at me like “No shit.”

We talk a little about Kristen Sweetwater, and she says about what my parents said. “It doesn’t matter who you are. You can be a pretty little cheerleader who looks like she owns the world, or you can be that funky little guy on your swim team that Mike hates so much, or you can be me. Deal is, if you’ve been treated bad, you’re going to have to find a way to get over it.”

I ask how she knows about Chris.

“Are you kidding? Mike hangs out with Rich all the time. Half of what they talk about is how things are going to hell at Cutter High. I swear, if I’m ever going to get over Rich, it will be because he’s dumber than dirt. Who cares about a high school football team?”

By the time we get to the conference meet, which is held at Frost High School in Spokane this year, all of us are pretty much assured of lettering if the Athletic Council doesn’t do a recall vote. Simet says it would be close anyway. A couple of the girls’ coaches would vote our way, and several votes are up in the air. Anyway, it will be the last meet for everyone but me, and we’ve tapered off our workouts, so times are dropping like rocks. Actually, I’m the only one who came close to not making it. In the second to last dual meet I almost missed my turn in the fifty, had to haul serious ass to get back, and, in fact, bettered my time by only a hundredth of a second. Coach isn’t going to swim anyone but me in that event at conference, because it’s too easy to miss a turn or get off the blocks slow and wreck your chances, and my time already qualifies me for State.

By now the coaches in the other sports are behind me a hundred percent, Benson included, because if I pull out a couple of top three finishes in the sprints and even as low as sixth in the two hundred, we’ll have serious pointage toward the all-sport championship, and the school who gets that has major bragging rights. Cutter has never won it because we’ve always been big in the major sports but have fallen down in sports like gymnastics and soccer and cross-country. And, of course, we’ve never had a swim team before.

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.