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Authors: Chris Crutcher

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BOOK: Whale Talk
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I said, “Whoa!”

“Yeah, whoa,” she said back. “He was a well-respected businessman who didn’t need the bad press. He hasn’t laid a hand on me or my mother since. The next day I turned my cheerleader’s uniform in to the office and asked if I could try out late for basketball.”

Of course there are scars. Carly is a talent in a lot more areas than just sports. She can sing, I swear she has a photographic memory, plus she’s fashion-model good-looking in the face, though way too strong and powerful to be considered anywhere near that in the body. Yet, when I asked her once what she thought she was very best at, she said, “Packing.”

I said, “Packing? Packing what?”

She said, “Clothes, hair dryer, makeup, food. Before our nonviolence treaty I could pack everything my mother, little brother, and I would need for three days, in just under the time it took my dad to run to Zip Trip for another half-rack of beer after he loosened my mother’s teeth.” She went on to tell me how she’d drag her and her brother’s suitcases over four-foot snowdrifts, staying off the road, because her dad would find them gone, grab a couple of beers, and patrol the streets.

Jesus. “Why three days?”

“Because that’s the longest my mother ever stayed away.” She said she probably disliked her mother more than her dad, because she hated the weakness she saw every time her mother went crawling back. “I’d have been out of there a long time ago if it weren’t for my brother,” she said. “I gave up on Mom by the time I was twelve. Thomas is turning sixteen this year and he’s almost as big as Dad, so I don’t think there’ll be any trouble.”

Then, in answer to the unasked question of why she was telling me all this, she said, “So here’s the deal with me and guys, bubba. If we’re friends, we’re friends. If we have sex, we have sex. I don’t sleep with more than one person, and I won’t go with anyone who does. We double up on birth control. And nobody runs my life, which means I don’t go in for a bunch of whining when I have something important to do and you want to go to the prom. You interested?”

Actually, at that point I was still stuck back where she said, “If we have sex, we have sex.”

I was interested, and the rest is history. Georgia Brown says Carly saved me from having to learn that middle-school lesson over and over again into my fifties.

Funny how everything is relative. If
my
father were ever to behave the way Mr. Hudson behaves, he’d spend the rest of his life begging forgiveness—from the Turkish prison my mother would see to it he was sentenced to. And if anyone ever broke my mother’s jaw, they’d better be ready to take a bullet.

So if I’m Carly, a good day is one in which no one in my family gets brutalized; and if I’m Chris Coughlin, a good day is when nobody calls me dummy and the football players don’t jack me up, and somebody puts their hand on my shoulder and smiles at me when they see me staring at my dead brother’s picture in the trophy case. If I’m The Tao Jones, a good day is when I lock onto whatever I’m passionate about and pursue it with abandon, whether it’s swimming, or messing with Mike Barbour’s head, or a good journalism story, or Carly Hudson.

If you’re my father, a good day is one in which you avoid remembering the events of July 27, 1968.

Everything is relative.

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.”

BOOK: Whale Talk
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