Whale Talk (13 page)

This is probably why my mother is such a hell of a lawyer; she actually makes me stop and think, when all I wanted a few minutes ago was blood.

“You don’t remember, T. J., but if you don’t believe this, ask Georgia: When you came to us, you were
inconsolable
. Your mother had left you alone for days. You had diaper rash so bad your butt looked like a crater. And thrush, my God. You’d been left unattended for hours on end, sometimes days. You ate when your mother felt hungry, which was the only time she was reminded that you might be hungry, too, and she was eating darn little, because she was
launched
on meth.

“Your dad and I fed you and cleaned you up and held you and walked the floor till we were both blind with exhaustion, and nothing quieted you. The day your mother came to say good-bye, she walked through the door, and you stopped crying the instant you saw her.
She held you and cried, and you didn’t utter a
peep
. Not a
peep
. Within seconds of her leaving, you cranked up again.”

“The point being—” I’d heard that story before.

“That you didn’t respond to what was good for you, you responded to what you knew, what was familiar. That’s what Mike Barbour does, and Rich. That’s what Kristen Sweetwater does. And if you think you’re going to teach anyone a lesson, get ready to learn one yourself.

“Georgia came and let you rage; let you play out every trauma. One day you’d be the helpless, thumb-sucking victim, the next you’d kick the hell out of anything that got in your way. Over and over and over you played out your life, until finally you had done it all enough to feel at some primitive level like you had it under control. I’m not kidding, T. J.; it went on for nine months. That’s how you learned. You played it out and played it out. If we hadn’t had Georgia, I wouldn’t have known
what
to do. But I know this: I’d have decided enough was enough long before it was enough for you, and I would have put a stop to it. And according to Georgia, that would have set the fear and rage so deep in you it might not ever have come out.”

I’m drifting off in my room, maybe a half hour later, visions of punching Mike Barbour’s chest so hard his heart stops dancing in my head, when the light comes on.

“Hey, big boy.” It’s Dad.

I squint into the light. “Is there a fire?”

He laughs. “No fire. I’ve been talking with your mom.”

“So you know about Barbour.”

“Guess we shouldn’t be surprised,” he says, “as much as he hangs out with Rich Marshall.”

“Yeah, they’ve got a real mentoring system going there.”

“Your mom says you were so mad you were getting ready to commit a crime.”

“I was just going to kick his ass.”

“Yeah, that’s what I meant.”

“I do not get what is such a big deal about a fight,” I tell him. “I mean, if someone were threatening Mom, you’d do whatever you had to do to stop him.”

“You’re right. And if you had been there when Rich was hurting that girl, I’d have expected you to do whatever you had to do to stop it.”

“Ah, so this is about timing.”

“This is about ‘what’s done is done.’ Look, the Mike Barbours and Rich Marshalls of the world have just as
much right to exist as you do. They have just as much purpose. You think it’s your job to teach them a lesson, but they’re not going to learn any lesson you’re going to teach, so I have a feeling it’s the other way around. You kick Mike Barbour’s ass, and it just cranks him up to be more like he already is. He’ll immediately turn it racial and respond by hurting somebody else. He and Marshall both have that amazing capacity to believe that other people make us do things.”

“Dad, that’s great philosophy, but what about Kristen Sweetwater?”

“What is Kristen Sweetwater going to get out of you wasting Barbour?”

“Revenge.”

“Exactly. She’s not going to learn one thing about standing on her own two feet. She’ll learn she has power only when you or Carly is around.”

“So I just let guys like Barbour do their thing.”

“You can’t keep guys like Barbour from doing their thing. Look, T. J., if you were going to teach Heidi to stay away from mean dogs, would you go out and find one mean dog and teach her all about him? Or would you show her as many mean dogs as you could find, and tell her about the ones you couldn’t find?”

“Yeah, but—”

“And if a mean dog attacked her, would you beat hell out of it and let her around it again?”

“No, Dad, but somebody would put it down.”

“Right. Somebody would kill it. But we’re not going to kill Mike Barbour, and nothing short of that is going to change the way he treats people.”

I am
so
goddamned exasperated.

“Look, T. J. Your mother and I have been in court on these kinds of cases almost as long as you’ve been alive. Me as a Guardian ad Litem and her as a lawyer. We see it over and over. You know what Mike Barbour’s like. No way is this the first time he tried to strong-arm that girl. And I’ll bet you the price of any of my classic cycles you want that she’s been in this same spot with other guys. Now, you protect people in the moment they need protection, or ahead of time. But not after. After, you work with them.”

He watches me, and I watch the ceiling.

“What can I do to help, son?”

“I don’t know. Rich Marshall and Barbour or guys like them have been in my life as long as I can remember. I don’t invite them in, but they’re always there. I’m sick of ’em.”

“They’re there for a reason,” he says. “When you figure out what it is, you won’t even notice them anymore.”

“I guess I
did
invite Barbour in when I entered the war over the letter jackets.”

“Focus on that, then—the jock stuff. At least you’re taking Barbour on in your own life instead of someone else’s. Those swimmers, they’re your friends. You guys are into something together there. You can do the letter jacket thing without even talking to Barbour or Marshall. Do your best, win the letter, and wear it with pride.”

It’s not bad advice, and I’m so tired I think my eyes are going to bleed, so I say good night to Dad and banish him from my room. As he steps through the door to leave, I say, “Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“You should have been a whale.”

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.