Whale Talk (4 page)

Coach looks at Barbour.

“I didn’t take after anybody,” Barbour says. “Like I said, I was just bringing these guys up to speed on the letter jacket rule. Just the stuff we talked about in the Lettermen’s Club meeting.”

Benson is the adviser for the Lettermen’s Club, so whatever they talked about, he knows.

I put my arm over Chris’s shoulder. He’s wearing an old Levi’s jacket, nearly worn through at the elbows, which couldn’t have been washed since he entered high school. “This isn’t a letter jacket,” I say. Chris stands silent beside me, eyes darting like it’s his first day on the prison yard. I say, “Hey, man, take off, okay? I’ll catch up with you later. And we’re agreed, right? You’re gonna swim?”

“Maybe,” he says. “It sounds hard.”

I say, “Very soft. The water’s very soft.”

He laughs.

When Chris is out of earshot, I turn back to Barbour.

“I caught him wearing his brother’s jacket again at the bowling alley last night,” Barbour says. “What kind of pride can we have if—”

I say, “Coach, I don’t want to be disrespectful with the language again, so I might need a little help with this. What’s an acceptable term for chickenshit?”

“You’re on thin ice, Jones.”

I take a deep breath. Even Benson has to be reasonable on this one, if I don’t push him any further into Barbour’s camp. “Okay, what’s an acceptable term for a big-time football hero who’s threatened by a brain-damaged kid so scared he can barely make it through a school day without hyperventilating himself into unconsciousness, wearing his dead brother’s letter jacket because it’s the only thing that gives him any connection to his brother and therefore to this school?”

Coach scratches his chin. Interesting how you can say almost anything you want as long as you don’t say shit or fuck or any word derivative thereof. I’m getting a handle on the communication thing. He says, “I’ll admit it’s a different situation with the Coughlin kid, but the jacket is a symbol of excellence. The Lettermen’s Club and the school Athletic Council have adopted a zero-tolerance policy on this.”

I’m speechless a second; it doesn’t fit that a grown
man could be that dumb. I say, “What do the Lettermen’s Club and the Athletic Council have to do with making school policy? They have an administration for that. They have a school board.”

“That’s true, Jones. But in case you haven’t noticed, Cutter High School lives and dies on its athletic reputation. Eighty or ninety percent of the respect shown this school is for its athletic accomplishments.”

“Shown by
who
?”

“By other schools, by townspeople who vote on tax levies and make other kinds of financial contributions. Believe me, Jones, the athletic department in this school has plenty of power—which, by the way, you could have shared in, had you had any school spirit. You could be wearing one of these jackets, Jones.”

“Coach, I wouldn’t wear the same brand of
underwear
Mike Barbour wears.” This seems like a good time to back out of this conversation, so as not to tip my hand. I say, “I don’t know if you heard Barbour correctly a minute ago, but he said he saw Chris wearing Brian’s jacket in a
bowling alley
. That’s completely away from school. Any chance we can keep this zero-tolerance thing confined to the grounds?”

I don’t wait for the answer, just pick up my backpack and head across the lunchroom.

Coach Benson is an interesting case. Things are black and white with him. He can’t understand why I won’t play football and basketball for Cutter. I sat down and explained it to him once, told him how ugly I get when people start yelling and telling me what to do, but he said I was immature, that someday I would look back and regret not giving what I had to my school. He’s not the real enemy here. You have to admire the consistency in his life. He played three sports here at Cutter, was a standout defensive back at a small college in Montana, and came right back here to coach. He married his college sweetheart, and they’ve been together since. He goes to church, takes charge when any family in town experiences a crisis. I mean, you can’t dislike the guy, even when he blurts out his “zero-tolerance” policy on letter jackets. On the other hand, what kind of person has time to dream up a zero-tolerance policy on
letter jackets?

After school I catch up with Chris again. Actually, he catches up with me hanging out in the journalism room trying to outsmart the Internet controls the school puts on to keep us on the straight and narrow as we travel the information highway. I’ve just typed in “chicken breasts,” hoping the browser will spit back a little bit about chickens and a whole lot about breasts.

“What are you doing?”

I swivel in the computer chair; Chris is staring at the screen. “Medical research,” I say, clicking Exit. “What are
you
doing?”

He shrugs, glances uneasily at the door.

“You worried about Barbour? The football guys?”

He glances at the door again. “A little bit.”

I tell him this is the safest part of the day. “This is when we know exactly where all those gorillas are. They’re out on the football field.”

Chris laughs. “Gorillas.”

I say, “Big hairy gorillas in shoulder pads,” and he laughs louder. “In jock straps,” and he squeals. It’s like playing with a little kid. I say, “Look, Chris, I have an idea. Your brother was a pretty big guy, right?”

“Yeah, he was big. Way big. He played football. And baseball. He gots drafted….” He hesitates, and tears of remembrance rim his eyes.

“I know, Chris. Everyone remembers your brother. They have his picture in the trophy case so we won’t forget.”

He launches into all the statistics next to Brian’s picture, but I stop him. “I know, Chris. I read it every day, just like you do.”

He looks around the room and moves closer and in
a near-whisper says, “I don’t really read it; some of the words are too hard.”

I say, “Yeah, but you know what it says, right?”

He smiles. “Right.”

“Okay, here’s my idea. Your brother was big, and you’re not quite so big.”

He smiles.

“So actually the jacket doesn’t fit you very well. I mean, when you wear it, I can’t even see your hands.”

“I think I’m not going to wear it. Those football guys said they was gonna burn it.”

I say, “Yeah, that wouldn’t be good. Listen, now that you’re going to be a swimmer—”

He smiles. “I’m gonna be a swimmer in the soft water.”

“Right. Now that you’re going to be a swimmer in the soft water, we’ve got to have a way to identify you; you know, like let everyone know you’re a swimmer. I’ve got a great jacket at home that doesn’t fit me anymore. It has a big Speedo emblem on the back. Speedo is a company that makes swimming suits and goggles and stuff that swimmers wear. How about I give you that one, and you keep your brother’s jacket safe at home? You could put it someplace in your room where you can look at it every day. And then you can come to school
in the Speedo jacket and everyone will know you’re a stud swimmer.”

He laughs again, as if he’s never considered the idea of Chris Coughlin, the stud.

He isn’t alone.

Boys’ sports at Cutter High School are driven by the downtown alumni, who call themselves “Wolverines Too,” almost as much as it’s driven by the athletic department, or by Mr. Morgan, the principal. That bothers me because the power behind Wolverines Too is a guy I
never
forget to keep my eye out for. His name is Rich Marshall, and he eats what he finds dead in the road. Supposedly WT is a group of community-spirited Cutter graduates who hung around after graduation to make their fortunes in this mountain town of nine thousand people just far enough north of Spokane to be Hick City. In theory, their organization supports all Cutter extracurricular activities. That should encompass music, drama, honors society, the chess club, and, in my book, the kids who hang out on the smoking hill.
In fact, it encompasses male jocks. Wolverines Too is basically a group of guys whose glory days unfolded on the Cutter athletic arena between the ages of fourteen and eighteen and who want to re-create those glory days through the lives of Cutter’s current stable of jocks. They “mentor” them, and sometimes find them jobs in their places of work. They’ve been known to raise significant dollars for football equipment or basketball uniforms when allocated athletic funds run low. In my memory they have never raised a dime for a girls’ team. I find it interesting that not one former
female
athlete belongs to the group.

Rich Marshall encompasses most of what I believe is wrong with our species, and I don’t say that just because of his family’s civil-rights record, which is not unlike the Barbours’. The entire Marshall family operates in a permanent state of confusion because they can’t figure out who they hate most. Rich graduated the year before I started high school, so by all rights I should have never had contact with him, but a year after he graduated, his dad died of a heart attack and Rich took over Marshall Logging, which is probably one of the few viable logging companies left in the Northwest. Mike Barbour sets chokers for them in the summer at about three or four times minimum wage. I swear, Barbour’s
the only guy I know with a full ride to high school.

Rich and I got crossways of each other when I was a freshman, after he shot a deer out from under me.

Let me back up a bit and say I don’t get it about guns and male bonding and becoming one with your father or uncle by killing some animal born unfortunate enough not to know what a malevolent subspecies the human predator is. To quote my favorite philosopher, Chris Rock, “What kind of ignorant shit is that?” I think people don’t consider sometimes how
arbitrary
things are. If this country had been founded by photographers, fathers and sons could bind their connections bringing back
pictures
of the animals they now bring draped over the hoods of their four-wheel-drive pickups. They could do that now if they understood that the whole hunting thing got started back before you could get meat at a drive-up window. But when an activity has outlived its usefulness in this country, we keep it alive by calling it a sport. It’s a
sport
to drive to the edge of the woods and fire a nine-hundred-mile-an-hour missile that tears a hole in its target before that target even hears the crack of the rifle. Listen, if you want to make a sport of deer hunting, take any weapon no sharper than an antler, chase it down, and get it on. Yeah, yeah, the deer would then have the advantage of speed, but you’d
still have the overwhelming advantage of malicious intent.

A digression into politics there, but I’m better now.

I was recounting how I got on the bad side of Rich Marshall, as if there were a good side. I was a freshman, hanging out at Durfee’s Chevron with a bunch of guys my age, drinking pop and listening to heroic stories about their first football season, which they were in the middle of. It was the final weekend of deer-hunting season. Rich had already decided Barbour was going to replace him as Jabba the Jock and had taken him under his wing like out of some United Way Big Brother from a negative universe. Rich and Mike and Mark Wyberg roared into the station in Rich’s big ol’ Ford dually, one of those monster pickup trucks that runs on diesel, with dual wheels in the rear and a camper on the back that he still claims every cheerleader in school has been naked in. I swear, if God had made Rich choose between that ugly truck and his you-know-what, which he claims is also supersized by McDonald’s, it would have been a three-day decision. Anyway, he stormed into the front office yelling, “Any you guys not got your deer yet?”

There was no
yet
for me. No one who values longevity would bring an animal he just shot for kicks into
my
mother’s kitchen. Marshall pulled a twenty out of his wallet. “One a’ you guys run down to Bender’s Sports and get you a tag,” he said. “Quick.”

I asked why.

“Got us a little one tied up out there,” he said. “Nailed his momma, and the dumb little shitter just stood there. So we lassoed him, cowboy style, but we can’t chance bringin’ him out with no tag. Fish an’ Game boys all over the damn place. I can talk ’em out of him bein’ too small if I got a tag on ’im; just say he was a long ways off an’ I misjudged. Gonna take that bad boy over to Hoyt’s Taxidermy an’ have ’im stuffed. Put ’im in the yard come Christmas.”

I feigned interest long enough to get the approximated coordinates of the doomed Bambi, then said no chance was I going to get a deer tag so these erstwhile frontiersmen could gun down a baby deer with a rope around his neck, courageous as that sounded.

Rich looked like he might use my head for a speed bag when I started humming “Davy Crockett,” but one of the other guys offered to go to Bender’s. It was never a bad idea to build up a few points with Rich; he had graduated the previous year and, as part of his commitment to Wolverines Too, was donating time to work out with the team, and you just might end up staring across
the line at him in some practice drill designed to make you eligible for state disability funds.

Anyway, while Marshall and his Gang of Two drove Ralph Raymond to Bender’s, I pedaled my mountain bike out past the old Carter place deep into the woods on an overgrown one-lane logging road to a clearing where, sure enough, the young deer stood vigil over its dead mother, a nylon rope snug around his neck, tied to a pine tree. This wasn’t just Bambi, this was
early
Bambi. Mom and Dad said later it may have had to do with the loss of my own mother, but I’ll never forget the look of it, head bowed, standing over her still corpse. I could almost feel the weight in its chest in my own.

The fawn lurched as I rode up, choking on the tightened noose, but I laid my bike on the ground, talking real soft as I moved in, and though it jerked back in panic twice more, I was able to slip the rope over its head. It bounded away a few yards, stopped, and ventured back. I knew Marshall couldn’t be far behind, so I yelled and whistled and even slapped it on the butt, but it never got past the edge of the trees before turning back.

Across the clearing a cloud of dust rolled up behind Rich’s dually as he slammed on the brakes, snatched his rifle from the gun rack as he leaped from the cab
and sprinted toward me and the deer with Wyberg and Barbour close behind, screaming my name.

Even with all that commotion the fawn wouldn’t go far, and there was nothing left but to throw myself over it. To shoot the deer, asshole Rich Marshall would have to shoot me, and in my imagination that would be better than to witness this killing. Wyberg and Barbour tried to peel me back, slapping the back of my head and kicking my ribs, and in the chaos the deer kicked a three-inch gash in my forehead, but I held on like a bulldogger and Rich couldn’t get a clean body shot. I will forever remember the sensation of that animal going slack in my hold as the bullet went through its temple.

Then the three of them proceeded to kick my ass all over the clearing.

Even at fourteen I was big enough to do some damage to Wyberg, and under different circumstances would have welcomed the opportunity to put a few well-placed bruises on Barbour’s face, but the fight had drained out of me with the soul of the deer. They loaded both animals into Rich’s dually, backed over my mountain bike twice, and left me in the middle of the clearing soaked in a mixture of the deer’s blood and my own.

I met Mr. Simet for the first time as his Humvee crested a rise in the single-lane dirt road and swerved to miss
me, walking directly down the middle toward town—“determination,” as he put it, “smeared across my face in blood and dirt”—and he told me to get in. At first I wouldn’t—couldn’t—tell him what had happened. He stopped by his place to let me clean up and loan me some sweats so my mother wouldn’t have to see me like that, but I took only a glass of water and asked to be taken home.

Simet said later he thought I was crazier than an outhouse rat, and he rendered a credible imitation of my ranting and raving the rest of the way to my house. “Rich Marshall had no right to kill either of those animals. That spoiled rich asshole isn’t starving; he wasn’t hunting food. His family owns an entire logging company, for Christ’s sake. Rich Marshall hunts because he likes to hurt things. An entire football field isn’t big enough to hold how big a shithead Rich Marshall is. I’m by God tired of living in a part of the country where you become a man by mounting some helpless animal’s horns on the hood of the pickup your old man should have made you earn instead of dropping it on you like some Charlton Goddamn Heston rite-of-passage gift on your sixteenth birthday.” Simet still re-creates that speech any time he catches me cranking up.

Other than telling me they were antlers, not horns, he let me purge, and when he dropped me off at my
house, said I should probably call the cops; that if my story were even close to true, Rich Marshall should be prosecuted for assault.

No chance I was calling the cops, but the following Monday morning I pulled on my bloody T-shirt and jeans and, for the next five days, wore them to school like a soldier draped in his war-torn flag, telling everyone who asked and most who didn’t where the blood came from and which unconscious ass wipe put it there—all in the face of significant opposition from the front office. In my imagination people would hear my story and demand that Rich Marshall have nothing further to do with Cutter High School; that even Wolverines Too would drop him like a smoking turd. Mr. Morgan requested that Mom and Dad intervene, citing a school rule prohibiting “disruptive attire”—a rule they used on me once when I wore a T-shirt with a cartoon depicting a proctologist standing over his patient, his dutiful nurse beside him, extending a can of beer. The caption read, “I said a butt light, not a Bud Lite.” Actually, Mom and Dad sided with the school on that one.

But not this time. Morgan was, at the age of thirty-six, the youngest principal in school district history and lacked full appreciation of my parents’ history growing up in the age of civil disobedience.

“Our son is disrupting his classes?” Dad asked as the three of us sat in Morgan’s small inner office. I said before, Dad is a motorcycle guy, and he
looks
like a motorcycle guy: brown hair to his shoulders, an earring, tattoos gracing his massive forearms. He’s real decent and articulate, but he looks like he eats children.

Morgan said, “In the sense that the bloody shirt attracts so much attention, yes.”

“So the other students are refusing to work in order to stare at T. J.’s shirt? And the teachers are paralyzed from their duties because they can’t take their eyes off him? Does that remain constant throughout the entire class period, or does it seem to dissipate when everyone gets bored with it?” Dad was never a fan of the controlling aspects of the educational system.

I think Morgan was beginning to sense that dealing with my parents might be more difficult than dealing with me. “Don’t be absurd. That kind of behavior undermines the authority of the school in the students’ eyes. Certainly as a parent you can understand that.”

Dad said, “Don’t take it on.”

“Meaning?”

“Leave it alone. If you don’t exercise authority over it, your authority won’t be undermined.” Then Dad asked if Morgan knew how my clothes got that way,
and Morgan said there wasn’t a hearing citizen in the county who didn’t.

“And what are you doing about it?”

Morgan said it was outside school jurisdiction, a matter Dad and Mom could take up with the legal system if they so desired.

“Tell you what,” Dad said, “we’ll let it ride. And that should be a relief to you, because you’ve got this maniac running loose in your school and he’s not even a student. T. J. knew what he was getting into when he went to the clearing; it’s not as if Rich Marshall’s reputation is a secret.” Then he said, “Let me give you a piece of advice that could make your life easier. The last time I tried to power struggle this kid, he was five years old, and I was at least three years too late. I doubt you’ll have any better luck than I did. If you suspend him, we’ll support him however we have to. Truth is, I think this is a free-speech issue.”

Mom was more succinct. “Suspend him and deal with our attorney.”

Mr. Morgan was not one to welcome outside intervention, particularly of the legal variety, but he also didn’t like being strong-armed with the culprit right there in the room. “What will you do if Rich takes matters into his own hands?”

I said, “He did that.”

Mom said, “I’m assuming you have some control over an alumni group whose name is all over the printed programs for your football and basketball teams.”

“Whose members you allow into your school building on a daily basis,” Dad added.

“Of course, but that control is limited.”

Dad said, “You make sure our son is safe during school hours and I’m sure he can take care of the rest. He’s already survived the best Rich Marshall has to offer.” He stood up, dwarfing Morgan. “We could have made a lot bigger fuss over this, sir. If I had a brain in my head, I’d get a restraining order that would put Rich Marshall three states away from my son. But T. J. talked me out of that. For now. If there’s a
scent
of trouble, you will be getting some very bad publicity.”