Authors: Chris Crutcher
Petey looks at the ground in embarrassment, partly because he cried and partly because he can’t get his mind off Chris Byers’s “obvious reasons.” All of a sudden the idea of rolling around on a wrestling mat—for lack of better opportunity—with this girl has become not such a bad one. He tries to wipe it out of his head because that’s just what Chris is talking about hating, but it does not go easily. He will keep it to himself.
“You know what I like about it?”
“About wrestling?”
“Yeah. I like how you use strength and balance. I love working against muscle—using someone else’s strength to my advantage. I like the intelligence. When I wrestled in junior high, I was as strong as anyone I wrestled, but not anymore. I mean, I still need strength, but I have to be smarter to score points.”
Petey knows what she’s talking about. He has beaten stronger opponents than himself with balance and touch, and other than fielding a red-hot grounder or gunning a runner down at home plate, there is no better feeling in the world of athletics.
“So, I guess part of the reason I’ve put up with all the bullshit is I like the way it feels. But like I said, I’ve had about enough. I mean, it’s not how I want to be remembered. Anyway, when I get really tired of it, I do what I did to your friend at the mall.”
Petey laughs, remembering. “Actually that was about the first time I ever saw Johnny without anything to say. Girls have had pretty bad reactions to his jokes before, but you’re the first one to put him on his butt. That was a great takedown. I think it was illegal, though.”
She smiles. “I’ll use a legal one on you.”
“You never know,” Petey says. “I’m tougher than I look. Wiry.”
“You’d have to be, no offense.”
Petey tries to think of a reason to stay; but he’s run out of words, and though it’s been a pretty mild winter by Montana standards, the chill of night creeps under his jacket. “So, I guess we just do it, huh?”
“I guess so.”
He stands. “Look. It was really nice talking to you. I feel a whole lot better than I did driving up here. If I can just keep this conversation in my head, maybe I’ll be okay. I’m glad you’re not still mad at me.”
Chris puts a hand on his shoulder, and Petey notices she’s almost as tall as he is. “Me, too. This should be an
interesting experience. I’ve never wrestled somebody I knew before. Or liked.”
If the tires on Petey Shropshrire’s Dodge Dart touch the road on the drive home, he is not aware of it.
“Is Chris Byers there?”
“Just a moment. Could I tell her who’s calling?”
“Peter Shropshrire.”
Silence.
“There’s nothing I can do about it,” Petey says. “It’s my name.”
“Hello?”
“Chris?”
“Yeah.”
“This is Petey Shropshrire. Remember me? We talked on your porch this afternoon. I was—”
“Of course, I remember you. It was only two hours ago. God, you can be strange.”
“Yeah,” Petey says. “Everybody says that.”
“Really.”
“Listen, if I came up with an idea that would get me off the hook for wrestling a girl and helped you end your career with a flare, would you do it?”
“I don’t know. Tell me—”
“Would you
consider
it?”
“Petey, I don’t know. Tell me—”
“Just say you’d consider it.”
She sighs. From her little experience with him, she already knows there is no derailing Petey Shropshrire. “Okay, Petey. I’d consider it.”
The Coho Wolverines and the Silver Creek Grizzlies line up across the mat from each other in ascending order, lightest to heaviest. In accordance with tradition, each wrestler locks on to the eyes of his opponent directly across the mat and stares him down Mike Tyson style. The orange and yellow of the Wolverines’ warm-ups stand in bright contrast to the softer brown on brown of the Grizzlies. Johnny Rivers rocks imperceptibly from heel to toe, beginning his slow ascension to the frenzy that will overtake him moments before he steps onto the mat to devour his challenger. Locked in battle, he is devoid of his loony and often insensitive sense of humor, though the insensitivity remains. There is little question of the outcome of his match tonight, only question of its length.
The result of Petey’s match is an equally foregone conclusion, though Petey is the only Wolverine who knows that.
Owing to the unusual nature of Petey’s and Chris’s
match, an agreement has been reached between the coaches. One-nineteen will wrestle out of turn tonight—wrestle the final match—to equal the import the local media have already heaped upon it.
The two teams seem nearly equal in ability and sport identical win-loss records. It will be very close. The wild card is the Shropshrire-Byers match. Petey is an unknown, having labored most of the year and all of last down on JV. Byers is an unknown talent. She has wrestled two close matches, which she lost by one point, and surprised three other opponents with pins. Is she legitimate? Or did she get a quick drop on her opponents while they were figuring the “gentlemanly” way to take her down? Conventional wisdom indicates the former. Chris Byers has amazing natural strength for a person her size, male or female. Her 12 percent body fat is low even by standards set for youthful, well-trained male athletes, and she can crank out a hundred uninterrupted push-ups as well as fifty chins. She is likely not as quick as Petey Shropshrire, but Coach has warned him consistently he better not let her get ahold of him. Plus what Petey said to Johnny Rivers two weeks ago is true; Chris Byers has to gain on her natural weight to hit 119, Petey has to starve. He could be weak. If all goes as predicted, theirs could be the deciding match.
Al Greer pins his man at 103 for Coho; but Brian Sears’s shoulder blades dig into the mat at 1:37 of the first round, and the score is tied. Petey and Chris skip at 119; the rest of the middleweights trade off all the way. Johnny Rivers pins his man at 160 almost before either of them steps out of his warm-up, but by the end of the heavyweight match, Coho is down two points on the strength of fewer pins.
Within seconds of their match Chris and Petey slip away to their respective locker rooms. The buzz of anticipation fills the gymnasium, and opposing chants break out. “Petey! Petey! Petey!” is answered with “Byers! Byers! Byers!” and as the PA announcer calls them to the center of the mat, both explode from the locker room—instantly stunning the crowd to silence. Petey streaks across the gym floor in his bare feet, a thick imitation tiger skin strapped over one shoulder and a four-foot Fred Flintstone Nerf club in one hand. He bellows, “Bigfoot want woman!” as he steps onto the mat.
Opposite him, decked out in a skintight leopard-skin-pattern leotard, Chris Byers slinks across the gym floor. She is Daisy Mae to Petey’s primitive Abner. Her long lashes drop, and she turns to the crowd, waving seductively. In the bleachers Petey’s grandfather slaps
his knee and nods so hard his glasses nearly fall off his nose. The crowd begins to get it, and while the officials and coaches sit stunned, they resume their respective chants. Coach regains his composure first, steps onto the mat, and clamps down on Petey’s shoulder. “What the hell are you doing, Shropshrire?”
“Bigfoot bring woman down,” Petey growls.
“You get back into that locker and into your gear,” Coach says. “I’ll try to keep from having to forfeit. Move it.”
“Come on, Coach,” Petey whispers. “It’s just a way to get rid of the tension for all the hype. It’s good for both of us. Just let us wrestle.”
Coach thinks a moment, glancing across the mat to Silver Creek’s coach for guidance. The Silver Creek coach shrugs
why not?
“The foolin’ around better be over, boy,” he says into Petey’s ear. “You win this one or we lose the match. Got it?”
“Got it,” Petey says. “Just like the big boys.”
Petey drops the club off the edge of the mat and meets Chris Byers at the center, where they lock up hand to elbow in the traditional starting position. The roar from the crowd deafens them, and they barely hear the referee’s whistle, but when they do, each appears to work for the advantage. Her mouth close to Petey’s ear,
Chris whispers, “One, two, three,” and steps back, clutching his forearm with both hands while turning away, and flips him. Petey performs a full airborne somersault, landing flat on his back, roaring like an injured animal. Chris holds her grip on his forearm, stomping the mat fractions of an inch from his head. Petey slaps his palm against the mat in the best Hulk Hogan tradition and bounces on his back as if his head is being kicked. The crowd rises to new decibel heights.
Brent Edwards, the referee, runs the local department store in Coho. His store sports the most complete novelty section anywhere in the state. Brent Edwards loves a good joke. Chris and Petey couldn’t have counted on this; both expected to be stopped after their first wild antics, but Brent slides into his role as if he works after midnights on weekends for Turner Broadcasting. With the dramatic flair of a man aced out for the lead villain in his senior class play, he pushes Chris back to the edge of the mat and kneels beside the fallen Petey, lifting, then shaking him. Petey falls back to the mat as if deceased. “I hope you’re ready to face Coach,” Brent whispers. “I wrestled for him. You’ll run bleachers for this.”
Petey smiles. “I’m ready.”
Brent smiles back. “You’re in
love
.”
A hand grips the referee’s shoulders, and he’s pulled back on his butt, as Chris steps back and leaps, executing a perfect knee drop, followed by a patented Gorgeous George Eye Gouge. A guttural roar escapes Petey’s lips, and he stumbles to his feet, pawing at his eyes as if that will return his sight, then falls again to his knees, groping toward the edge of the mat where the club lies. Meanwhile, Chris Byers circles the mat, arms extended above her head, welcoming her beloved fans to the world of
real
wrestling. “Men…are…scum!” She repeats it like a mantra until the female sector of the audience screams it back, stomping the bleachers with each word.
She remains facing her adoring followers as Petey, silently and with great stealth, creeps up behind her with the club.
“Men…are—”
Whack!
and Chris Byers stands glassy-eyed a full three seconds before dropping to the mat like a rock.
Petey slings the club over his shoulder, reaches down, and clutches a handful of her hair, dragging her a few feet across the mat. Now the male voices in the crowd erupt.
“Far enough!” Chris says through clenched teeth. “You’re pulling it out!”
“It’s for the cause,” he whispers back, ventriloquist style.
“Far enough,” Chris says again, “or the cause will be new teeth for Petey Shropshrire.”
Petey stops and drops her head to the mat, standing with one wrestling shoe lightly just below her chest. “Woman…kneel!” He starts the chant and is joined by the male population. As their collective voice rises, he steps forward to lead the cheer, and Chris slowly rises behind him. Though his crowd screams their warning, Petey is obviously too wrapped up in their adulation to care. Suddenly he stares into the eyes of Chris Byers, formidable female opponent who was, only two weeks ago, going to make his entire wrestling season a humiliation. She smiles, takes his cheeks in her palms, and executes a World Wrestling Federation textbook head butt. Both wrestlers silently count to three, then fall backward to the mat. Brent Edwards slaps his hand down for the double pin.
Petey Shropshrire is running the bleachers. Bottom to top, down, bottom to top. He started as practice began, and he will finish long after practice ends. His legs will be molten mush. His shenanigans last weekend cost his team the match since Silver Creek led going into
it, and no points were awarded for their memorable double pin. Chris and he had agreed before the match that no matter what the score, they would go through with it.
None of that matters. It’s Friday. He has run bleachers every night this week, and his punishment will probably end sometime after his thirty-fifth birthday if Coach has his way, which he usually does. He’s permanent JV now and won’t wrestle another match until Coach thinks he’s learned his lesson about letting down teammates, though to his teammates he’s a bona fide hero. Chris Byers is no longer a wrestler and therefore has more leisure time. In about an hour or so, even if he needs a wheelchair to reach his Dodge Dart, he’s headed to Silver Creek to see a movie with Leopard Lady, the female wrestler of his dreams.
There is a case to be made that from the time of birth, when we lose a warm, enclosed safe place to be, our lives are made up of a series of losses and that our grace can be measured by how we face those losses and how we replace what is lost. Lionel Serbousek lost his parents in a boating accident when he was fourteen years old. Though he continues to explore his passions—athletics and art—with the fervor of the brash Stotan he is, he remains haunted by his memories of that day on the lake and “what could have been….” Like most of us, when his pain is the greatest, he covers it with anger, anger approaching rage. That rage has the power to consume
.
My name is Lionel Serbousek. I’m a high school senior, an artist and a swimmer, and I like to think, finally, a good friend. I’m also an orphan; I live by myself. I can tell no story about my life without telling this one first because it colors everything I do and everything I think.
I woke up on a bright Sunday morning almost three years ago to go fishing over in Lake Coeur d’Alene with my family, and everything was about as great as it could be. I was just short of fifteen—at the top of my age-group—and kicking ass in the hundred fly all over the Northwest. That summer I also sold three oil paintings for money; my father was beginning to respect my talent for the first time. Almost every week my name appeared in the
Spokesman-Review
for being either fast or weird. I won first place in the junior division of the
Spokane Custom Auto Show for my Jeepster even though I wasn’t even old enough to drive it at the time. It’s a ’53 beauty, minus the top, painted fire engine red with an authentic full-scale World War I plastic machine gun mounted in the rear well and Iron Crosses gracing each door. Those who glimpse me in their rearview mirror take immediate evasive action.
I was ready to start my sophomore year swimming with Walker and Nortie and Jeff for Frost High School, where Max II Song would finally take over as coach. Max had been with us for two years in AAU, and we believed him to be the best coach alive in any sport because he treats you with the same respect no matter who you are, or how fast, and still works you so hard your muscles experience full meltdown every workout. You get
fast
if you swim for Max.
At the beginning of that day things couldn’t have been better, but by sundown I felt as alone as if I’d been hatched from an egg by the sun.
I think if human beings had even the slightest capacity to foretell the future, we’d be a completely different animal.
In the moment
that I helplessly watched my family’s death unfold before me, I wished I’d lived differently, done my chores on time, told no lies, eaten my vegetables, thanked my parents for giving me a room of
my own, told them I loved them, been a better big brother for Kyle.
The person who killed my family was my best friend in fourth grade. He swam backstroke on our medley relay team and stayed over at our house nearly every other weekend; he learned to fish from my dad. His name is Neal Anderson. I still get a card every Christmas from his family, but I have avoided him like AIDS since the day of the accident.
Neal wasn’t supposed to be driving his parents’ boat that day. They have a summer place on the lake with a private dock and a rocket Sun Runner ski boat, and his parents were in Spokane. Neal and a couple of his buddies got into Mr. Anderson’s beer and decided they could take a few spins on the skis before his parents got back. Away from the water it was killer hot that day in late August, and boats dotted the lake like chicken pox.
My father was a head shaker. He was of medium height and build, with jet black hair that was receding toward the back of his head like a grass fire in high winds. He was one of those adults who believe that if you take time to tell your children things, they’ll grow up believing them and act accordingly. Anytime that
failed to happen, Dad would simply shake his head slowly. With me, Dad shook his head a lot. I was a dreamer who didn’t take life seriously enough for his money, and I think that made him afraid for me. More than anything he wanted me to grow up rational. I think he judged himself as a father by the degree to which I could assess any given situation and react appropriately. I never saw much of a temper in him, but I always knew when he was mad at me. “You need to
think
,” he’d say. “If you’d just
think
.”
Mom would say, “He’s an artist, dear. Let him be.” You don’t get laid back much further than my mom.
If I’d known Dad was going to die, I’d have made a special effort to decrease the number of times a day he felt compelled to shake his head. But I thought I had more time. I thought I had
all
of time.
We set out early, around 4:00
A.M.
The lake was about thirty miles from our house on the south side of Spokane, across the Idaho border. We were on the water shortly after 5:00. By 5:30 Kyle had lost his pole when he fell asleep and it dropped overboard. Kyle was five. I was going to let him use mine, but Dad forbade it. He wanted Kyle to know the natural consequences of falling asleep with your fishing pole in your hand.
Fishing was a metaphor for life with my father. It
required all the best elements of what he thought one needed to put together a graceful life. It required patience, knowledge, and skill. It wasn’t frivolous, and on a good day you were rewarded immediately for doing it right, though certainly there were no guarantees. Guarantees or no, my dad could catch twenty-inch rainbow trout in an oil spill. You could kid around with him about some things, but fishing wasn’t one of them. I learned that at the age of six when we were fishing a slow, lazy river up near the Canadian border. It was my first time out with him, and I had looked forward to it for months. He showed me how to cast my line and watched me do it until I got it right, before moving a few feet along the grassy edge of shoreline to drop his own line in. I glimpsed a fish swimming in a little hole directly in front of my feet, several yards from where my line drifted with the current. In what seemed like a perfectly rational move at the time—and doesn’t look
all
that bad today—I quickly reeled in my sinkers and began swinging them at the water as if my pole were a bullwhip, in an attempt to knock Mr. Fish for a loop. After which I intended to reach in and throw his dazed floppy self onto the grass.
Dad had that pole out of my hand on the third swing, and we spent the next half hour discussing the
conduct of a True Sportsman. I was not allowed to fish for the rest of that day.
It hurts to remember that the very last time I was with Dad, he was upset with me. Not in a big way, like the time with the socks, when I went to the first day of sixth grade without any—it was in vogue at the time—and they wouldn’t let me into school. I simply went back home and painted a pair on my legs—even lettered
Adidas
vertically down the ankles. I really am a pretty good artist, in fact, a
hell
of an artist, and that was one
fine
pair of socks; but they didn’t come off as easily as they went on, and Dad was pretty unhappy with me because my age-group swim coach wouldn’t let me into the water until all the paint was off.
It took a wire brush.
“You have to
think
,” Dad said, after midnight, on the way to make up the practice I’d missed in the pool at his club. Logical consequences, he said. Dad didn’t understand I had to
think
before I pulled boners like that. Plus I couldn’t understand why he was upset; they were my legs—my nerve endings.
That day—that last day—he was only
irritated
at me for fishing with poison berries.
Irritated
was a step removed from
truly upset
. I don’t even know for sure why I put them on my line; certainly I knew better. We
were fishing just offshore, near thick bushes hanging over the water. I was at the rear of the boat, and the worms and salmon eggs were in front with Mom and Kyle, who were fishing together on one pole, unbeknownst to Dad. Mom wasn’t all that big on natural consequences when they meant her baby would be bored and whiny all day. I was just too lazy to move to the front of the boat to get the right bait.
“Reel her in,” Dad said. “Gonna shoot out to the middle and try for some deep ones.”
“I’ll leave my line in the water,” I said. “Troll a little.”
“Reel her in,” he said again. “You can’t troll at forty miles an hour.”
“Go ahead,” I said, knowing my dad could spot “what’s wrong with this picture” blindfolded with his eyes gouged out, and the second he got a peek at those berries, there’d be a serious discussion, much too serious for six o’clock in the morning.
“
Reel her in
,” he said again, and the argument was over. I tried to get him to start the boat moving while I brought the line in so he’d be distracted, but he waited.
“I have a theory,” I said when he spotted my hook near the surface.
“What the hell is that?” he said, ignoring my theory.
“What?”
“On your line. What are you using for bait?”
I grimaced. “Berries.”
“Berries. What kind of berries?”
“Whatever was on that bush. Just those orange berries.”
“You mean poison berries.”
“I don’t know that they’re poison.”
“Would you eat them?”
I stared at the berries trailing my sinker toward us. “I suppose not. Want to hear my theory?”
“I want you to get those berries off that hook.”
I took them off and listened to the short version of Dad’s “You Got to Do Things Right” lecture for the umpteenth time that summer. I would be going into tenth grade. Things wouldn’t be so easy there. Teachers would expect more of me. Childish ways were to be left behind. It was time to
think….
Dad missed my theory, which was being formulated as we spoke and went something like this: With all those fish in the lake, there have to be some smart ones and some dumb ones. Minnows who listen to their parents and teachers (they travel in schools, remember) and minnows who don’t. There have to be some fish in there with shaky upbringings who act just like kids with
shaky upbringings. And there have to be a
few
, just a few, whose size is in inverse proportion to their fishy smarts, like Ed Janeczko on Frost High School’s football team—six feet five inches, 280 pounds, with an IQ just under his belt size. Now Ed is a pretty rough customer who fights with his mom on a loud and regular basis, and I’m pretty sure if she told him not to eat something, that would be reason enough right there to do it. So, if you follow the theory that all living things are in some ways connected, it isn’t too big a jump to figure if I’m patient enough with poison berries on my line, I’m gonna catch the Ed Janeczko of rainbows, and when that happens, I’ll surely have the lake record. In effect, I was doing it for Dad.
Neither Mom nor Dad ever got to hear that theory—or anything I’ve said since.
We were dead still in the middle of the lake in early afternoon, fishing deeper water, when Neal and his buddies, at least two six-packs into the afternoon, decided to take a quick spin in his dad’s Sun Runner. Nobody in our boat but me even saw them coming. I hollered; but Mom and Kyle were hauling in a fish, and Dad was shouting advice. They didn’t even look up.
And I jumped.
I jumped.
I’ve watched it over and over, always knowing if I’d stayed a little longer or yelled a little louder, I could have saved them. It runs in slow motion in my dreams, so there’s always plenty of time. Of course, in my dreams, no sound comes out of my mouth and my legs are filled with shot puts and they all turn to smile at me.
Neal’s boat cut ours in half. None of my family even bobbed to the surface. Kyle’s shirt floated near the wreckage, and I dived as deep as I could, only to be surrounded by blackness. The two guys in Neal’s boat were thrown clear—the skier cut off to one side—and they screamed and yelled and floundered in the water, trying, I think, to figure out what had happened. I didn’t know it was Neal at the time, but I got hold of him and did my very best to drown him. I held him under with both hands on his throat, and it took all the other two had, plus help from a guy who saw it all from a passing boat, to pull me off.
It’s funny. There is a feeling in that instant following some life-changing event—at least I think I’m not the only one who has it—that you can step back over that sliver of time and actually stop the awful from happening. But that feeling is a lie because in the tiniest microminisecond after any event occurs, it is as safe in history as the Civil War. Data in the Universal Computer are
backed up, as it happens. There is no reverse, not even a neutral. It is that truth that haunted me at first because had I found a way to go back, even if I couldn’t have saved them, I’d have stayed in the boat.
Swimming saved me. Swimming and Max. And Elaine Ferral. I have no relatives on either my father’s or mother’s side, so the state tried to put me in a foster home. They tried eight before they quit. The longest I lasted before hitting the road was twenty-three hours. It was Max who got the Department of Social and Health Services off my back.
“He’s fourteen,” the caseworker said. “He can’t be out on his own.”
“He’s been on his own since you guys have been in charge,” Max said.
“But we can’t have it that way.”
Max said, “You can’t have it any other.” When the caseworker started to argue, Max put up his hand. “If you think of his age in years, he’s young. If you think of it in
loss
, he’s an old man.”
She opened her mouth again, and Max said, “And you’re making him older. Leave him alone. He’s fine. We’ll look after him.”
I took out my pain on the water. The louder the
whine of the approaching Sun Runner echoed in my head, the clearer the sight of splintering fiberglass and flying bodies, the harder I swam. My teammates, particularly Walker and Jeff and Nortie, pushed hard beside me, as if they could absorb some of my pain, and slowly but surely the searing edge began to dull. I don’t know if time heals all wounds, but I know it at least slows the spiritual bleeding.
Elaine. Elaine swam with us in age-group, before deciding greenish blond hair and blood-red chlorine-infected eyes were a definite social stopper. Like any smart, evolutionally aware, upwardly mobile animal, she opted for dry land sports sometime in junior high. But she was the toughest of us all in her day. In eight years of swimming I never saw her back off once. Out of the water Elaine was the glue that held our group together. She was like a little parent, only smarter, settling minor disputes, helping us hold our course. There’s no rational explanation, but some people you just don’t mess with, and Elaine Ferral was one of them. And she was there for me always after the accident. She sensed when my loneliness was ready to smother me and would show up with food or friends or just her wonderful self. I never loved her, not like a girlfriend; but I cried with her, and I told her everything.
Elaine Ferral knows my soul, and more than anyone, she walked with me through the land-mined terrain of my grief.