Whale Talk

CHAPTER 5

Our family legacy of helping kids runs deep. The more obvious source would be my mother, working as she does in the juvenile court division of the attorney general’s office on child-abuse cases. Plus, she was the one so quick to snap up my raggedy two-year-old butt when my bio-mom called it quits. But the kid thing goes back further, into a darker hole.

My dad was one of those smart guys who doesn’t do squat in school. He never forgets anything he’s interested in, and he can assemble almost any gadget without instructions. When we get some new electronic gizmo, like a VCR or a digital camera or a scanner to go with the computer, he doesn’t even take the instructions out of the little plastic envelope. He says the guys who write those things start by telling you not to stand in the bathtub when you plug it in; that you’ll read three-quarters of the booklet before running into your first piece of useful information. I’ll bet his I.Q. is someplace in the one-sixties, but when I asked him once what he remembered most about high school, he said, “The clock.”

So, due more to attention span than ability, he skipped college and went to work in a Harley shop out of high school, then enrolled in truck-driving school on his twenty-first birthday, thinking he’d get paid the big bucks to see the country. What he got paid to see, again and again and again from the cab of his ten-wheeler, was the country between Boise, Idaho, and a small town called New Meadows, a hundred-fifty miles north on winding two-lane. He got to be a small-time hero in that town, hauling meat and produce and bread and beer and information from the capital city; everyone knew his truck when it rolled into town, and everyone waved.

One day, after he’d been driving the route about a year, he stayed for lunch with a young widow who worked at the New Meadows Merc, which is like a general store, and whose husband had been killed in a hunting accident two years earlier. Big and scary looking as he can be on first sight, that’s how gentle and understanding my dad is when you get to know him. As Dad tells it, the widow was just beginning to come out of the shell she’d created around herself following her husband’s death. Her baby was eighteen months old, had never known his father. The widow’s mother took care of the baby while they had lunch at the exclusive Pine Knot Café, and they both felt some chemistry bubbling. She took him to her house, where they made fast, hot, electric love, uncharacteristic for either of them, to hear Dad tell it.

When Dad got the widow back to the store, he was behind schedule, so he jumped into his truck, confident traffic would be light that time of afternoon, that he had a pretty good chance of making up most of the time he’d lost. The lovemaking had transported him; it was the sweetest he’d felt in years.

But somehow while the baby’s grandmother wasn’t looking, the little boy had crawled under the truck and got caught between the rear dual tires. It was several minutes before anyone realized the baby was missing, and they quickly searched the store, hitting the obvious places before the widow was struck with the unthinkable and jumped into her car to chase after Dad, hoping beyond rationality that the baby had somehow gotten into the trailer. She discovered a small severed arm lying next to the white line about a mile and a half outside the city limits, maybe a hundred yards from where the truck spit out the rest of the little boy’s mangled body.

The state patrol let Dad get home before telling him, in hopes there would be a family member or a boss to help him with the emotional sledgehammer that was about to thunder into his chest, so it was almost six hours after the baby’s death that Dad discovered what he’d done.

I was twelve when he told me that story, in response to my kidding him about whether or not he’d ever had a real job. He’d always known he’d tell me someday, because it became the defining moment in his life. For years it was who he was. I don’t know that I was ready to hear it; I woke up with nightmares every night for two weeks, but I haven’t seen him the same since.

“I thought I’d have to kill myself,” he told me later, “just to end the pain. For more than two years it was constant; didn’t ease up when I worked out, when I slept, when I rode my bike a hundred miles an hour, or when I used drugs, and believe me, buddy, I used them all. Nothing touched it. I literally ached for the relief of being gone. The law wouldn’t charge me, the widow wouldn’t sue me for every penny I would ever make; I can’t tell you how bad I needed to be punished, but no one would do it.

“I took a job in a sawmill in a small logging town on my old route, worked a full forty-hour shift every week, then volunteered to sub for anyone calling in sick. I’d keep enough of my paycheck for rent and food and send the rest to the widow, but after a couple of months it started coming back. There was simply no way to get redemption.”

Dad always called the woman “the widow,” though I know he knows her name. He said he couldn’t bring himself to say it. “I sometimes consider those six hours,” he said, “when the deed was done, but I didn’t know it yet. Driving back toward Boise, letting my mind wander back over our slow lunch, the light in her eyes, her soft hair; I considered they might be the best six hours of my life. She was so…elegant. When she reached across the table in the Pine Knot and touched my hand, we both knew what would happen next. And yet, in those same six hours, when I was on top of the world, the world had already crumbled under me. I was riding back toward Boise on the cloud of a lie.”

Dad’s fifty-three now; that happened more than thirty years ago, and though he’s done whatever he needed to do to accommodate that astonishing incident into his life, I believe no day goes by that it doesn’t touch him in some way. My father will not have a mousetrap in the house; he slides a card or a piece of paper under a spider or potato bug to deposit it safely outside, rather than step on it. He won’t say it, but Mom thinks he believes the only way to buy his way out of hell is to protect every life that comes into his sphere of influence. Scary looking as he is, children flock around my father as if he were created by Walt Disney. He is the most patient man I know; it is a patience born of agony.

Dad doesn’t have that part of the male ego that gets edgy if your wife makes more money than you do. Mom makes a darned good living. Dad makes squat. What income he does have comes from restoring classic motorcycles, or making repairs in his garage at home. Everything else he does free. He’s a Guardian ad Litem, which is a volunteer through juvenile court to represent children in child-abuse cases. The state can’t afford to pay real attorneys to represent children’s best interests in court, so they train volunteers. It requires that he get to know the kids on his caseload, as well as their parents, and work with therapists and caseworkers to help reunite the kids with their parents, or get them out of there if it appears the parents can’t pull it off. He also volunteers his “play” services at a couple of day cares and works with the local Head Start coordinating play activities a couple of times a week. He could turn some of those things into paying jobs, but he told himself after the accident that he would never do anything for children for his own financial gain. I think it’s also the reason he doesn’t discipline me much. That comes from my mother. Because of Dad, I don’t even have a curfew.

It’s funny. Dad doesn’t attend church, and it is seldom I hear his spiritual take on anything. But the running over of that little boy almost turned him into a saint, as far as his public behavior goes. He still has his temper, and there are times when you just steer clear of him simply in response to the look in his eye, but I don’t know a human being in the world more determined to do “right.” Sometimes I wonder how much effect that event has had on me, how it might have been one of those awful trade-offs in which I got a lot more of my father’s attention through his quest for redemption.

Things start falling into place with the swim team. Unfortunately things also start falling into the water. All the guys but Andy Mott begin showing for the morning workout. All Night provides each of us a temporary free membership entitling use of the entire facility in return for placing a small logo on our tank suits and another on the chest of our warm-ups. So I guess you could call us the Cutter All Night Wolverines.

But big-time organization is in order. The narrow lanes do not accommodate circle patterns. For one thing, Simon DeLong’s particular body design barely allows for all of him in one lane, much less another person. It is increasingly clear that, while he may never be very fast, he’ll always start at an advantage off the dive when the competitors on either side grab on to the lane ropes to keep from being washed into the gutter. Unfortunately, during workouts, we play the parts of those competitors. Chris and Dan Hole are small enough to swim in one lane, but Chris’s mind tends to wander and it doesn’t come back until he’s had a header with Dan, who then stops to explain to him, in terms Chris couldn’t possibly understand, the theory behind circle patterns. Hell, I know the theory and don’t understand Dan’s explanation.

Tay-Roy and I tried to share a lane, but we both have shoulders like I-beams, and though we can pass each other nine times out of ten without incident, one of us will get hurt on that tenth time. The point is, swimming is supposed to be a noncontact sport and the All Night Wolverines are about to end up spending the lion’s share of our per diem on aquatic bicycle helmets.

Both Dad and Georgia say over and over that the universe offers up whatever we need whenever we need it. I think the universe offers up way more than we need most of the time, but they may have a point. One morning about quarter after four I’m sitting on the toilet at home, unloading the extra cargo before taking to the water, and I solve our space problem. Rain the night before has brought three or four little black potato bugs up through the drain and into the bathtub; the kind of bugs I said my dad scoops up and takes outside. When they get caught in the tub like that, without human intervention they’re doomed, because once they crawl to the curve of the tub they become like barefoot children trying to climb a glacier. If you’re Dad, that’s when you scoop them up, but it occurs to me that our bathtub is All Night Fitness for potato bugs. These babies have to be getting into peak shape, like the thong-leotard ladies on the treadmills at the real All Night, only nowhere near as easy to watch.

So between workout and school, I stop by Delaney’s Hardware and pick up some industrial strength I-bolts, get permission from the owner of All Night to secure them into the wall, hook plastic handles to surgical tubing, and run them through the I-bolts. So when four of us are swimming, the other three can lie on their stomachs on a wooden bench placed back far enough to get proper tension on the surgical tubing and swim in place. All Night has already granted us permission to crank up a boom box, so what could be an astonishingly tedious workout turns into a form of on-your-belly rock-and-roll dancing. It is getting us in great shape, though I’m pretty sure we don’t look much smarter than potato bugs. An aerial view of this would have to be ugly.

The other guys want to keep me in the water most of the time because if we are to score points, I’ll be getting most of them, but I won’t take more water time because I can rack up distance during off hours, and at this point camaraderie is as important as miles. I mean, we are going to have to like one another a lot to get through the season, and we are not exactly computer matched for personality compatibility.

One unexpected gain. Loud music at four-thirty is not conducive to sleep, so Oliver Van Zandt has become our unofficial interim coach until Simet can come on board, just after Thanksgiving, according to state regulations. Oliver knows squat about swimming, but he’s been an athlete all his life, so he studies the workout Simet and I prepare, and yells at us the entire time. This is truly becoming a Far Side swimming team.

I phone Simet late one afternoon after workout. “You need to take me to dinner.”

“Why can’t we just meet in my room after school, or during your study hall?”

“Because the best I could get there is that wretched fried egg sandwich your wife sends with you. Why don’t you tell her how cold and hard that thing gets?”

We meet at a little Italian place he likes, which I’m sure he thought would intimidate me because the menu is hard to read and most of the diners dress relatively well. Guess again. My father and I have a common tie, and I can turn it and a shirt and a pair of Dockers into a G.Q. thing for sure.

Simet orders a glass of wine and a Coke for me. “So why are you plaguing me? And whatever happened to pizza?”

“Pseudo-Italian,” I tell him. “It doesn’t cost enough.”

He reaches over and grips my triceps. “You getting into shape?”

“Against all odds,” I say. “Getting in five to six thousand yards.”

“Are the other guys showing up?”

I assure him they are. “I’m working some with Chris; getting him used to the idea of being on a team and getting on a schedule. I’m worried about what he’ll do the first time he hears a starter gun.”

“What about DeLong and Mott?”

“Haven’t seen Mott yet.” I don’t tell him it’s to my relief. You never know what Mott is thinking, whether he’s simply feeling ornery-a natural state for him-or if he’s plotting a mass murder. “Simon’s there like clockwork.” I shake my head in wonder. “He’s the only guy I’ve ever seen who can raise the water level in a swimming pool.” I take a long drink. “We still need to talk about letter requirements.”

“I told you not to worry, you’ll get your letter.”

“Yeah, but I’m thinking about the other guys.”

Simet says, “We can make it a particular number of points. A first place gets you five. Second is three and third is one. You can swim three individual events or two individuals and a relay. Let’s say you earn a letter if you average two points per meet.”

I consider our personnel. Most of them won’t beat anyone on the other team and will only pick up third-place points in the events I’m not swimming or in events where the other team swims only one swimmer. I say, “How about just if they don’t drown?”

Simet laughs. “Somewhere between lies a compromise. We’ve got time to think about it. We have to be careful; the athletic department has a lot of pride at this school, and a lot of clout. The letter jacket is the ultimate prize. I’m going to have to be judicious if I want respect in the coaching fraternity.” He is only half joking.

“Well,” I say, “somehow we have to put it within reach.”

There is something seriously messed up about Rich Marshall being around as much as he is. Since he’s now the head guy at Marshall Logging, he seems able to take off as much time as he wants to play school, which he’s been doing to some degree since the year after he graduated. I mean, the guy never left, was roaming the halls back when I was a freshman. I understand why the football coaches want him around; he was a real monster when he played, and he’s a good guy to introduce psychopathy to the other players. But he also volunteers in PE classes sometimes, which puts him in the halls during the regular school day way more than I’d like. He’s kind of a cross between a kid and an adult, and I mean that in the least flattering terms of either. You see him in the coaches’ room being treated like an assistant, but you also see him hanging out between classes with Barbour and the more arrogant members of the football team. A couple of times I’ve caught him staring at me with the same look he had when I wore my bloody T-shirt to school, and he makes continual references to the fact that they could sure use me out there on the football field, if I had the heart for it. He also remarked recently on the number of black guys in the swimming hall of fame. Because of the deer incident my freshman year, my parents have offered to raise hell that he’s there at all, but I don’t want that. Hey, when he’s here, at least I know where he is.

And now he’s popping up in even more corners of my life. I stop by Georgia Brown’s house after workout a few days after my conversation with Simet about the letter jackets, just to see what’s going on. She doesn’t answer the door, but I have walk-in privileges, so I snatch some Gatorade out of the fridge, turn on Sports Center, and make myself comfortable on the couch. Within seconds, big commotion spills down from upstairs, which tells me Georgia’s in the thick of a therapy session, and I sneak a few steps up to see if I can get a glimpse into the playroom. Georgia sees me through the stair railing and motions me on up.

Play therapy, as practiced by Georgia Brown, is done live and full scale, meaning she will drag in anybody available to play the roles that allow the kids to work out their life traumas. Most times I’m a bad dad they want to tie up and put in prison, so my job is to struggle and struggle and never get loose while still protecting my nuts. As I said before, I’ve been on the other end of this, so I never refuse.

Inside the playroom a girl of about four or five, with almost my exact coloring, plays with dolls. Georgia whispers, “This is Heidi. Think we’re gonna need a bad dad here.”

Heidi has dragged a plastic basket full of dolls to the middle of the room, where she sorts them by color, placing the fair-skinned ones into cradles, tucking them in tenderly, singing bits of lullabies. The darker-skinned dolls don’t fare so well; flung across the room, stuffed behind toy appliances, some beheaded or otherwise dismembered. She looks up.

“This is T. J.,” Georgia says to her. Heidi looks at me, through me, and turns her attention back to the white dolls. She sings, urges Georgia to do the same. Occasionally she glances at me but quickly turns away, gives the dolls bottles, nurtures them like a nurse.

Suddenly she stands and marches right to me, grabbing my hand. She says, “You be the bad dad.” I’ve played it frequently, know the role. Interesting that the kids all use the same term.

I say, “Okay, I’m the bad dad.”

“Find all the nigger dolls,” she says.

Georgia nods.

“You mean the dark-colored ones?”

“The nigger dolls!” she screams at me.

Georgia nods again.

I say, “The nigger dolls.” I retrieve two.

“Scream,” Heidi orders.

“What should I scream?”

“Stupid black bitch!”

“What?”

“Stupid bitch!” she yells again. “Black bitch!”

Again Georgia nods. I don’t like this particular bad dad role.

I look at a doll, raise my voice, and call it a stupid black bitch.

“Me!” Heidi screams. “Yell it at me!” She turns to Georgia. “Make him do it right!”

In a calm voice Georgia tells me I’m supposed to yell at Heidi for letting the black dolls in the house, and I finally piece together from Heidi that I’m also supposed to find them one by one, scream at Heidi for letting each one in (“Get these nigger babies out the house! They stinky!”), and throw them out, and it wouldn’t hurt if I kicked or punched them while I’m at it. It’s a lot easier to hear that word than to say it to a little kid, because I know the impact when you aren’t steeled against it. But Georgia knows what she’s doing.

As I get deeper into my role, Heidi turns back to the white babies, tucking them tighter, rocking them as she rocks herself, never engaging me unless I lose zeal for my task.

I find the last doll crammed inside an igloo dog house Georgia has turned into a cave for some other kid and jerk it out by the arm, open the door to the hallway, and fling it, only to see someone disappearing down the stairs. I am caught for one moment in mid-scream, but Heidi screams, “GET THESE GODDAMN FUCK NIGGER KIDS OUT THE HOUSE!!!” and the dead come alive and I am back in business. I hear the front door slam.

Minutes later in the living room, Georgia touches my shoulder. “You okay, baby?” Since I was two she’s called me baby.

“Yeah, I’m okay.” I nod toward the kitchen, where Heidi plays. “I can think of better things than nigger to holler at a kid.”

“Over and over I tell you, racism is-”

“Ignorance,” I say back.

The sound of running water brings our attention to Heidi in the kitchen, squeezing dish soap into the filling basin. She pulls herself up onto the lip, stretching to snag a bristle brush, then begins scrubbing her arms. Georgia sighs, closes her eyes, whispers, “She thinks if she can wash it off, her daddy will love her.”

Heidi’s eyes focus on her brown arms, scrubbing. Georgia moves to the sink and kneels beside her, draping her arms over the lip next to Heidi’s. Heidi stops scrubbing. Georgia says, “Hey.” Heidi doesn’t answer, but glances down at Georgia ’s arms, then runs her fingers softly over Georgia ’s forearm.

Georgia motions me over and I take the clue, kneeling on the other side of Heidi, soaping up my arm.

She looks sadly into my eyes. “You’re a dirty nigger, too.”

Georgia ’s look tells me this is not a time for political correctness. “Yeah, I guess so.”

Heidi’s sudsy hand touches my face. She looks sorry for me.

I take the brush, begin scrubbing my own arm. “Dang,” I tell her. “I don’t think it comes off.”

She says, “Wait,” and pulls herself again over the lip of the sink, stretches to grab a soap bar, then squirts the liquid soap over it and hands it to me. She says, “Two soaps.” I wash my arm like crazy, then rinse. We both stare at my arm. “Nope,” I say, “what else can we try?” Georgia backs away, and for the next few minutes Heidi and I try every kind of brush-soap combination she can imagine, including turning the water in the basin cold.

Finally I say, “Know what?”

“What?”

“I think we’re stuck with it.”

Heidi takes a long last look at my arm, then walks me to the hand towel hanging from the refrigerator handle. I dry my arm and she does the same.

My forearm is red and raw on the spot where we’ve been performing our ethnic cleansing experiment. I say, “Know what else?”

“What?”

“If we keep this up, we could hurt ourselves.”

Minutes later, Heidi on my shoulders, I two-step around the living room to a Bob Marley CD I have convinced her is the hottest thing since Barney. There is nothing of the rage and desperation of the last two hours in her eyes, but I’m aware of Georgia ’s continuous assertion that the only pure evil is nothing. For this moment, high atop my shoulders, Heidi squeals, visible and proud. But I know she’ll come crashing down the moment she is degraded again. I know-just because I know-that despair moves in like a flash flood when she is diminished. It isn’t even about race, really. It’s about nothingness.

Georgia emerges from her office with a form and a pen, lifts Heidi off my shoulders, hands me the form, and says, “Sign this.”

“What is it?”

“A confidentiality oath.”

“What?”

“It’s a signed statement that you won’t tell anyone anything that goes on here in therapy,” she says. “So I can have you work with Heidi, or any other kid who needs you when you’re around.”

“You’re hiring me?”

She laughs. “For far under minimum wage. I’m keeping my license safe, baby.”

I glance at the written oath, dated two weeks ago. “This is old.”

“Predated,” she says back. “Sign it before Heidi’s mother gets here. She’s already seen you with her.”

I don’t get it.

“Didn’t I see Alicia in the hall when you threw the doll out?”

“Alicia Marshall!” Click! I look at Heidi. “Alicia Marshall’s your mom?”

She looks away.

“This is Rich Marshall’s kid? He did this?”

“Watch your tone,” Georgia says. “You’re a professional.”

I start to answer, but Georgia glances at Heidi and quickly back at me with a look that says later.

I disappear into the kitchen when Alicia returns, after which Georgia extracts two of the finest homemade oatmeal cookies currently in production from her cookie jar. “Here,” she says, “You deserve these.”

“I’m getting paid in cookies?”

“Get used to it.”

“Jesus, I knew Alicia had a mixed-race kid, but it didn’t even occur to me that was her.”

“You know a lot of mixed-race kids in this town? Guess I better bring you up to speed, darlin’.”

I know part of this story already, but now Georgia fills me in on the rest. When he graduated from high school against all odds, notorious deer-slayer Rich Marshall went to work in the woods setting chokers for his dad’s logging company, passing up the chance to play football at the local community college long enough to bring his grades up to an even 0.00 so he could attend an NCAA Division I school. His girlfriend, Alicia Dalton, signed up at the beauticians’ school at Spokane River Community College, dumped Rich, began dating a black defensive back named Willis Stack, and got pregnant.

I won’t go into the white supremist militia dogma Rich began spouting in response to “this interracial travesty in our midst,” but Alicia was in love, and she and Willis decided to get married. Then Willis was paralyzed from the neck down as a result of a crushing hit he laid on a wide receiver from Wenatchee. The story goes he couldn’t bear to think of raising his kid in that condition or of saddling Alicia with his care, so in the middle of the night, about three weeks after he was released from the hospital, his brothers loaded him into their van and spirited him away, leaving Alicia heartbroken and lost. She dropped out of school, had the baby-which she named after Willis’s sister Felicia-and went to work as a checker at Jensen Brothers Foods, where good old Rich shopped for his frozen TV dinners and Cheetos and Budweiser and started courting her again, every bit as pissed off as he was the day she started dating Willis.

In her defeated state, Alicia believed Rich when he said nobody would have her “nigger baby” but him, and they entered into wedded bliss, legally changed Felicia’s name to Heidi because it was the “whitest” name Rich could think of, became parents to twin boys nine months to the day from the wedding, and settled into a life of what Alicia described to Georgia as hell on earth. That gives hell and earth a bad rap in my book. Heidi was not allowed to touch food other family members might eat, or play with her younger brothers’ toys except on special occasions, which occurred when Rich said they occurred, or when he was out of town or passed out on the couch. This guy was every girl’s parents’ nightmare, a control freak with an I.Q. three points lower than his belt size.

Child Protection Services got involved through an anonymous report when Rich decided Heidi had earned twenty-five “spanks” with his belt-ten for forgetting to clean her room, five for dropping her dessert on the floor after he’d told her to be careful, and ten for not washing out the dog’s bowl-and demanded that Alicia deliver the blows to his specifications. When Alicia turned out not to have the heart for it, Rich took over and Heidi was black and blue from the middle of her back to her knees. Rich’s parents got him an attorney who was able to plea-bargain him down from an assault charge, and the kids were placed out of the home until Rich learned to manage his rage and meanness and Alicia learned to protect them from his rage and meanness.

Now this is where I don’t get it about males and females in so-called civilized America. Alicia Marshall is a good-looking woman, and she’s smart enough that she sure didn’t have to settle for whatever emerged from the nearest manhole. She told Georgia she loved Willis Stack, and Georgia says it’s clear she loves Heidi. What could be inside a person that could allow an asshole like Rich Marshall to come along and take her kid apart? Georgia says it’s what isn’t inside a person.

At any rate, they both started into mental-health treatment, but Rich blew out of it in the first week. Anger management group and parenting classes got in the way of his drinking beer, a problem he solved by giving up the classes. Alicia got the kids back with the promise that she would stay in treatment and would never see Rich in their presence. That was perfect for Rich because he didn’t like the kids all that much anyway, and he could see her often enough to make sure she knew she’d never learn to live without him. In my view, learning to live without Rich Marshall is like learning to live without cholera, but nobody asked me.

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.