Whale Talk (17 page)

We have Call Waiting on both lines, so I can use the phone while I’m waiting for Dad to call again, and I do that to call AT&T to track down the pay phone locations, but those guys are nine-to-fivers and I would have to “push 1, 2, or 3” a whole bunch of times just to find out they will be with me tomorrow.

The next call comes from Rich, followed quickly by Dad.

“He’s calling,” I say. “Turn on that camera and make him famous.”

“No sooner said than done,” Dad says. “One more for safety’s sake.” And the line goes dead.

But my daddy’s not so smart as him thinks, as Chris Coughlin might say, because I recognize the next number that comes up from having given it to Carly’s dad about ten times one night when I wanted her to call me back at Wolfy’s. I don’t know what’ll go down when Dad and Rich Marshall come face-to-face, but if it’s at Wolfy’s, Dad could easily be outnumbered by a whole lot of folks with Rich’s sensibilities, so I’m moving down the road in my speedy Corvair in the time it takes me to tell Mom to watch the phones. She wants to call the cops, but I convince her not to crank this up bigger than it needs to be as I’m walking out the door. The look in my father’s eyes when he saw Heidi’s arm keeps my foot heavy on the pedal.

Wolfy’s is less than a mile from the house, and Dad is putting the camera away as I pull into the lot, gets almost to the door before he sees me.

“Goddamn it, T. J., I told you to stay there.”

I look through the front window at Rich talking to Mike Barbour and a couple of his friends. I tell him I’m just here for crowd control.

He walks in and right up to Rich, shoving his fingers deep on either side of his Adam’s apple, pushing the back of his head against the window. It’s so quick and silent most of the patrons don’t even turn to look.
Marshall gasps for air. In my dad’s softest voice he says, “Marshall, I’ve got you on tape three times calling our house, which is a direct breach of the no-contact order. I’m not sure how many times you have to hear this to believe it, and I can barely believe I’m giving you one more chance. About forty-five seconds before I left the house, your stepdaughter came out of the bathroom with her forearm bleeding because she tried to change the color of her skin with a Brillo pad.
You
told her it would work.”

Barbour moves toward Dad and so do I, shaking my head. “You should be home resting for your swim competition.”

“Fuck you, Jones.”

We glare, but he stays put, and Dad finishes his proposition. “Now, I can run these pictures over to the police and let you have a few days more in the slammer, or you and I can make an agreement right here and now that you have called my house, and stalked your family, for the last time.”

“This is assault,” Rich squeaks through a partially closed windpipe.

“Yes, it is,” Dad says.

“Fuck you,” Rich says. He sounds like Donald Duck, and Dad pinches harder.

“That’s not the right answer.”

Rich’s face is bright red, headed through the rainbow toward darker colors. He can’t talk, so he nods his head in panic, and Dad loosens his grip. By now patrons are noticing something is wrong, and the night manager starts around the counter. “Is there a problem here?”

Dad looks at Rich. “Is there a problem here, Rich?”

Rich’s mouth is pinched, moving toward a sneer, but he says, “No. No problem.”

“Good,” Dad says, and looks at the manager. “No problem, Sam. I’m sorry if I stirred things up. We’ll be going,” and he moves toward the door.

I back out behind him because I don’t trust either Marshall or Barbour any further than I could punt them. Rich stands massaging his throat and glaring at Dad, and then me, with pure hatred.

The next morning what little slack there is between Barbour and me is drawn tighter than a bowstring. He stands around with his blockers watching my every move, as if somehow that will intimidate me. What he doesn’t know is I’m visualizing his muscular body sinking to the bottom of the pool at All Night when skinny little Chris Coughlin swims him into submission. He has no idea how badly I want a clean shot at him myself, a little self-defense action to render him infirm. Under normal circumstances I could bait him in front of his friends and bring him right at me, but Dad was clear that he doesn’t want any escalation with Marshall
or
Barbour. The connection between Rich and Mike is unclear, but it’s definitely there, and the bottom line is that Heidi and the twins have to be kept safe at all
costs and, of course, if we can pull Alicia back under the umbrella, hooray for us.

Georgia was there when we got back last night, working through Heidi’s stuff with her, and before she left, she stopped in my room.

“Don’t want you getting into a bunch of mess over this,” she said. “You got to be a professional. You work for me.”

“But as a professional,” I said back, “you’ve got no problem with my defending myself.”

“No, but I have a problem with you creating a situation where you have to defend yourself.” Georgia knows me like a well-read book. She said, “You listen to me, and I told your daddy the same thing. The way Rich Marshall is acting right now tells us he’s less rational than usual, which means he’s not rational at
all
. And it wouldn’t be all that hard to get that Barbour boy cranked up right with him. They may not be brothers, but they came out from under the same rock, which means if you mess with one of ’em, you’re messing with the other. If you want to kick somebody’s ass, you get some gloves and do it in the ring.” I told her I had an even better plan than that. I had somebody lined up to do the ass kicking for me.

The scenario at All Night Fitness is almost surreal. Several coaches and a couple of athletes from the Athletic Council are there, along with football players to cheer Barbour on. Icko runs the workout to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, while Benson and Simet watch from the pool deck. Simet was quick to agree to that; he knows the story about Icko bending rebar for Barbour’s benefit back when Barbour was still threatening Chris about wearing his brother’s jacket.

Chris is big-time pissed at me. “Why I gots to do it?” he says. “Why not somebody with muscles like Tay-Roy?”

“’Cause you’re the guy who can take him,” I say, “and because you’ve got a reason to get even. Remember how he scared you?”

“He scares me right this minute,” Chris says. “What if I beat him, and then he finds me alone by myself?”

Mott is behind us, listening. He leans forward and whispers into Chris’s ear. “If he finds you alone, I’ll beat him to death with my steel leg. And that’s a promise. And I’ll go over and tell him that right now if you want me to.”

“Like just take it off and whack him?” Chris says.

“Right across the side of his ugly head,” Mott says back.

That’s a good visual for Chris, but he’s still worried. The rest of the team gathers around him while Barbour steps out of his sweats. He’s pretty impressive physically, and that brings back Chris’s demons. I tell Tay-Roy to take off his shirt, which he does just to let Chris make the comparison.

“Okay,” I say. “So we got more muscles on our side, and a steel leg. All you have to do is get in the water and keep swimming until that scumbag quits. You don’t even have to swim faster than he does, just longer. Okay?”

Jackie steps forward and ruffles Chris’s hair. He says, “Kick his ass,” and Chris breaks into a big grin. Nobody has ever heard Jackie Craig say ass. Then Dan puts a hand on Chris’s shoulder. “It’s only about tenacity, Christopher. Tenacity will get the task completed here.”

Chris watches Barbour, stretching and hyperventilating, across the pool. Though his buddies are kidding and cheering him on, Barbour shows no signs of humor. And he isn’t looking over here at Chris. He’s looking at me.

I’m looking back.

Icko tells them both to get in and warm up. Chris takes a hundred yards at about three-quarter speed, ten or twelve deep breaths between, and repeats, warming
up like he has every day for the past four months. He looks good in the water, comfortable. I’m proud of him.

Barbour takes a couple of laps and says he’s ready. Simet stands next to Benson with a big smile. This won’t take long.

Icko brings them up to the blocks. “You said you can take Chris in the short stuff, right, Mike?”

“Whaddaya mean?”

“I heard you say you could take him for a hundred yards. Do you still think that?”

“Hell, yes. What does it matter? This isn’t a race.”

“I know,” Icko says, “but we do interval training, and to keep it fair I want to be sure the intervals are equal. If you’re about the same speed, you get the same intervals between. So we’re doing ten one-hundred-yard swims, leaving the blocks every two minutes. The faster you swim, the more rest you get.”

Barbour says, “Let’s just do it.”

This poor bastard has no idea what he’s in for.

Icko starts them, and Barbour flies out over the water with a grunt. He swims ahead of Chris, but Chris catches him coming off the wall, having learned to flip at the deep end. Barbour touches him out, but he comes up gasping, where Chris is barely breathing hard.

Mott quickly organizes a lottery, and we each throw in a buck. We have Barbour dying anywhere from two hundred to seven hundred yards. I pick five.

He’s dust in four, actually has to be helped out of the water. It’s all we can do to get Chris to stop. He’s into this swimming thing.

I can’t help myself. I walk over to the other footballers and offer to let them make it a relay. Barbour has regained enough breath to say, “Fuck you, Jones. In case it slipped your mind, one swimmer didn’t hit his best time every time. You tanked that last race. You’re the only guy who doesn’t letter.”

“I know, Barbour. Some things just couldn’t get any better.”

Jackie gets Chris out of the water and jumps around the deck with him. On his own, Chris walks over to Barbour and sticks out his hand. He says, “You beat me on the first one. That was pretty good.”

“Get away from me, you little retard!”

Chris is stricken; he has no defense for that.

I start back toward Barbour, but Simet yells my name. “It just tells you how bad he got beat.”

Barbour tells him to go to hell.

Benson tells Barbour to get hold of himself, and Simet pats Benson on the back and says he might want
to run his boys through a Dale Carnegie course in the off season.

Mott and Dan pat Chris on the back and tell him he just won us all letter jackets, and Simon puts him on his shoulders.

Barbour is long gone, but Benson comes over to tell Chris he did a hell of a job. And he apologizes for Barbour calling him a name.

“You should get him in trouble,” Chris says. “He don’t sposed to call me that.”

It’s hard to say much about the rest of the year. We sit at our own table for the winter sports banquet, and when time comes to introduce us and talk of our accomplishments, Simet makes them sound like those of any sport, never mentioning when he talks about “third-place points” that there were only three swimmers in the water, or that sometimes they were ready to turn out the lights by the time we finished.

We voted Chris “Most Inspirational,” and if there is anything that will be indelibly burned into my consciousness about this season, it’s the look on Chris’s face when Coach hands him the trophy. He giggles until I think he’ll pee his pants, then he touches the gold-plated swimmer at the top, which is pretty
muscular, and says, “It gots Tay-Roy up here.”

Tay-Roy winks at him and makes a muscle.

Then Simet hands out our letters, never mentioning the controversy but letting the parents of the other athletes know what an amazing group of guys this is. “Today the quality of the Cutter athlete is elevated,” he says. “We began the year with only one true swimmer on the team. Most of these guys turned out with no idea what they were in for. The pool was too short, and the lanes weren’t wide enough. We worked out a system for dry-land swimming so we could keep everyone working all the time. Some days the air and water in the pool were so warm I thought guys would pass out, but not one did, and not one ever backed off.”

He rubs the back of his neck. “This was a different kind of team than I’ve coached. Jackie Craig said his first words on the way to the State meet. He just showed up twice every day and swam his heart out. Dan Hole turned us Shakespearean, and Tay-Roy kept us supplied with interested females.” Coach smiles wider and shakes his head. “And Simon DeLong.” Simon waves to the crowd. “You may have noticed that Simon does not have the body design of the swimmers you see atop the Olympic starting blocks, but let me tell you, folks, this kid has a sweet breaststroke and backstroke, and if he
stays with it, in another year you won’t recognize him.” Then he says, “I don’t know an athlete in the world with more courage than Andy Mott,” and he doesn’t elaborate.

“Every one of these guys, every time he swam, with one exception, hit his best time, which was the criteria we set for our letters, which I will now present.”

We don’t get the jackets yet—that happens at an all-school ceremony at the end of the year—but Coach calls each swimmer up to accept the certificate. Everyone but me.

The afternoon my guys actually get the jackets, a few days after the state track meet and a week and a half before graduation, might just be the highlight of my high school career. Morgan calls the new lettermen down to the gym floor team by team, makes a
long
speech about the tradition of Wolverine athletics, how everyone who wears the blue and gold is a cut above, an elite athlete in an elite program. “We are the envy of our conference,” he says.

All the first-year lettermen stand in front—flanked by the second-and third-year lettermen—each receiving a jacket in a blue box tied in gold ribbon. When they announce the swim team, Carly and I stand and cheer, and they all throw a fist into the air. That plays to mixed
reviews in the bleachers until Mott pulls up his pants leg, unhooks his leg, and thrusts it high into the air. The gym goes
quiet
. This is way better than his middle finger, because how can you suspend a guy for holding up his leg? He hands it to Jackie, who is taken off guard a moment, then thrusts it high. Andy Mott swam this entire swimming season on one leg, and not one kid outside the team even knew it.

And in the end I live up to my name. The Tao—the
real
Tao, that knows and
is
everything—celebrates irony. Nothing exists without its opposite. I didn’t earn a letter jacket because I could, and all my friends did because they couldn’t. Some things really don’t get any better.

And some things do. Chris taps Simet on the shoulder, and Simet calls me down to the gym floor. I work my way down through the crowd, watching Chris retrieve a paper sack he has hidden behind him. When I reach him, he pulls out a blue-and-gold jacket and hands it to me.

“I don’t get a jacket, Chris. I slowed up at State, remember?”

Simet says, “Take a closer look.”

I unfold the jacket, and my throat closes over. Across the back it says,
COUGHLIN
, on the front it says,
BRIAN
.

“My brother would of been glad if I gave you this,” Chris says. “So I did.”

It would be nice to say the year ends on this note, that we walk away feeling bigger and better because we set a goal and met it, that a bunch of obscure guys who never had friends before, now have friends and life looks different. And that’s all true, but that isn’t how it ends.

I talk the guys into switching sports through spring, into getting ready for Hoopfest. If you think we didn’t look like swimmers, you should see how much less we look like basketball players. After our third practice Mott says, “Let’s do this like the Chicago Bulls did when they had Michael Jordan. You find some guys who can play this worthless sport, and we’ll be your entourage.” The other guys are quick to agree.

My dad is a pretty fair ballplayer, particularly under the boards, and Simet is one of those rare animals like me, a good athlete on land or sea. We need a fourth, and I pen in Mott’s name, because though he doesn’t move real well on the court, he can put down three pointers with alarming regularity. After a few practices we discover he can also place the alley-oop pass pretty well, which could come in handy when we want to surprise a team for those last two or three points. We enter ourselves in the open division, knowing that will pit us against some tough teams, but we’ll be competitive.

We call ourselves the Slam-Dunking Mermen, in deference to our entourage, who attend most of our practices over at All Night and give us regular scouting reports on the Bushwhackers, Rich Marshall and Mike Barbour’s team. With any luck, fate will not stack us up against them, but they are in the same division, so it’s not unthinkable. If both teams keep winning (or losing, for that matter), we could run into them. Part of me would like to see that happen, and part of me wants to avoid it like STDs.

Barbour hates our entire team worse than ever, because somewhere a little after Easter break Kristen Sweetwater finally called it quits with him and was able to stay with it. It probably helped that Tay-Roy started putting moves on her on the heels of Barbour humiliating her yet again, and Tay-Roy has far less tolerance for her acceptance of that kind of behavior. He told her no girl he was with would
ever
be subjected to it, and if she started to go back with Barbour, he’d kick Barbour’s ass. It would be a true battle of the Titans, and I don’t know who’d walk away the victor, but I’ve watched Tay-Roy’s resolve as a swimmer and as a bodybuilder, and if you’re going to take him on, you’d better bring a lunch. Tay-Roy is old school. If something doesn’t look right and it falls within his sphere of influence, he influences it.