Heat (6 page)

“She knows all about hogs,” I said.

“No kidding,” said Mom, with greater interest than I expected.

“You don't want to live downwind,” I said. “If you raise too many pigs per acre it's bad for the water table. The manure soaks into the ground.”

“Harvey must love hearing about that every night,” she said. Everyone called my Dad by his entire first name, never Harv.

“Hogs ate a boy's fingers off,” I said, since the subject seemed to intrigue Mom. “He passed out from the fumes, and the animals thought he was fodder,” using Cindy's exact words.

The drive from Oakland to Sacramento takes a couple of hours, some one hundred miles through metropolitan fringe, dairy-cow hills, and at last the flat pasture land that used to be an inland sea, according to Rowan. In prehistoric time, he means, although sometimes during winter a levee breaks and again the valley turns into ocean.

Denise suffers from hay fever, and she is almost superstitious about taking antihistamines before a meet, worried they might make her pee test come out false-positive. I tell her this is unlikely in the extreme, but athletes trust suffering.

Some schools rent little yellow school busses, or own cute little vans with
REDWOOD PREPARATORY
or
CARMEL HIGH SCHOOL
lettered on the door panel. The academy rents air-conditioned Peerless Stage busses, the same conveyances gamblers charter for the long trip to Reno. The bus was not half full, even with the chaperones, the volunteer supervisors, wives of dentists, and professors on sabbatical. The seats have head cushions, and the armrests have obsolete ashtrays, little metal doors you can flip open and see the old freckles of ash even professional maintenance cannot completely remove. The seats cushions are green velour, very comfy.

Denise and I are among the leading lights of the swim and dive team, and we are also the youngest members, so the other athletes leave us alone. There is no chill involved, it's all amiable. But Denise and I often lunch together, or swing into the back seat of a bus, and they give us a nod or a wave and let us be. Miss P came to the rear of the bus, hand to hand along the seat backs, asking if Denise was okay.

“Snot,” said Denise, sounding like someone talking from inside a pillow. “My head is full of it.”

Miss P shook her head sympathetically and hunched to get a better view of the dry, empty fields. “Adrenaline will clear it,” said Miss P, and this was true. A sudden shock, or anticipating the gaze of five thousand strangers, will clear your sinuses before you even suit up.

“My head feels like it's this big,” said Denise almost peacefully.

“I'm allergic to acacia,” said Miss P, and I could see that the coach needed to keep her mind occupied, too.

I wasn't scheduled to dive. I had put on a show of disappointment, looking around at things with a hard, frustrated glare, but as I sat there watching the dried-up scenery go by, I was relieved.

I didn't know how I would feel, watching my friends compete. Maybe I wouldn't be able to look without my ears ringing, the pain coming back.

Miss P had been legendary as a coach who made her athletes run fifteen laps if someone giggled during roll call. But by the time I got to the academy Miss P had lost weight, dwindling from the hardy, tanned brunette who took the top members of the academy swim team to three bronzes in the Goodwill Games a few years ago.

She was still a good coach—a better coach now, in a way, because a touch of frailty made her athletes patient with her if she forgot her whistle or had to sit down during touch-and-go, the relay laps we swim by the hour. She had stayed with me while we watched the videotaped accident backward and forward, until I could see what happened with my eyes closed, my head kissing the edge of the platform.

Sacramento is a sprawling, flat town, with trees blue in the distance, mirage shivering the streets. One step out of the bus and I wanted to climb right back in. Denise made an exaggerated stagger, like someone who's been shot, but it was no joke. The weather report had said it would hit one hundred and five Fahrenheit, and it felt way hotter than that all the way across the asphalt parking lot.

Parking attendants with
EVENT STAFF
on their backs in yellow letters squinted around at things, talking into handheld radios, probably to make sure their colleagues had not succumbed to heat stroke. The academy men trailed off with a male assistant, Mr. Browning, the guy who shot the videos, and the women angled into our own facility, but you could see when we split up how few we were.

Our team had a corner of the locker room, a roomy place used by professional teams hardly anyone in Oakland knows anything about, a football league with teams in cities like Salt Lake City and Barcelona, and soccer teams who play in front of nine loyal fans. But marginal pro teams still have plush facilities, and we enjoyed the feel of carpeting under our toes, and lockers big enough to accommodate half a wardrobe.

Swimmers tried on their goggles, took them off, untangled the straps, tugged them on again. Denise climbed into her black swimsuit and put on the red-and-white warm-up togs Miss P insists on, telling us we have to wear our colors whenever we represent the academy.

I wore exactly what Denise was wearing, and what they all wore. I kept my eyes up, looking people in the eye, zipped all the way to my chin even in the Martian-surface heat we had to single-file our way through. I didn't want to look in the direction of the platform. I wondered if it was a mistake to be there at all.

I forced myself to watch the swimmers in their preliminary heats, my ears ringing. I sat on the bench while Denise did her dive, screwing up every time, especially on her entry. A front dive is a plain dive, but if your entry is good—the rip you make entering the water—the judges love it. If it looks like nothing has happened, it goes well. One minute the diver is erect on the tower, and the next she's gone, hardly a ripple.

In Denise's case there was a ripple. On all three dives. A splash, water all over the place. And each time you could see what a mistake it was. You could see it in Denise's eyes each time she came out of the pool. Miss P looked at me and shook her head in apology to me, to the team. But I stood up and clapped my hands, and each time I told Denise how well she had done.

CHAPTER NINE

Swimming arenas are a wash of noise, reverberating whistles, shouted encouragement. Some divers wear earplugs to escape the surreal murmur of the crowd. Even a huge place fills with the smell of the lifeless water.

I kept busy on the bench, handing out the blue Speedo WaterShed towels we use instead of terry cloth, but I hated meeting Miss P's eyes. The wound in my scalp tingled, itched. The Watershed towels are rubbery and specially treated—one wipe and you're dry. We still use regular cloth towels as a hood—to sit under if you don't want people to see your face.

Charlotte Witt, an academy senior with seasons of competitive experience, led the field after the preliminary round, doing a front dive layout with a difficulty rating of only 1.2, a springboard dive. Charlotte was a very good diver, but this late in her high school career she was developing too much of a figure and too much of a concentration problem.

“You don't have to do this,” Miss P said, leaning close to me. “You can go in and take a rest.”

I waved her away.

“You look rotten,” said Denise. I felt like telling her that if I had done so badly on my difficulty-zero dives I would keep my mouth shut. Denise and I liked to run or swim laps together, and she laughed at the same books I do, where the author proves space aliens built the Great Pyramids and invented Oreos. Sometimes I wished she had chronic laryngitis.

I had to go into the locker room and lie down on a bench. Even in there I could hear the endless babble, a cavern of faceless voices beyond the metal doors.

Dad had called just before I left to catch the bus, and I didn't have the heart to tell him that I hadn't gotten medical clearance. I had never even mentioned my injury. I conned myself into half believing I didn't want to cause him any worry. I knew he was proud of me for earning a write-up in the
Chronicle
, “Prep Platform Promise,” although they had not run the picture the paper had spent an hour getting from various angles, me in midair. Dad wished me luck, and then, putting on his confidential voice, he said, “You were real good with Cindy.”

I had been sitting on my bed, one shoe off, one shoe on, glad to hear his voice at last, and yet I couldn't help bridling a little at his phrasing. “Of course I was
good,”
I said, serving the word back to him.

“We'll take the boat out this weekend,” he said.

Cindy had told me, in complete seriousness, that it was all right to have a painted still life with fruit on a plate in the dining room. She had read it in a magazine. I listened for some sign in Dad's voice of what he might see in Cindy, wondering at the power sex has over people. And Cindy wasn't even terribly pretty—she was all right, in a tepid, Bo-Peep way but didn't have the kind of looks Mom has when she really tries.

“We'll go out and see if any whales are migrating,” he was saying.

Dad has no idea when whales migrate, what they eat, or whether or not they poop in the water. But I was grateful for the effort he was making. “I bet the boat has barnacles all over it,” I said, so pleased at the idea of going out on the bay that I couldn't express it.

A company called Marine Core power-vacuumed
Queen Athena's
hull, and Dad himself called me from the motor yacht sometimes, using the boat as a weekend office. I don't think he took it out more than three times a year, but it was his pride. His only hobby was caring for the
Queen
, rubbing tung oil on the teak finishing, experimenting with brass polish and chemicals that killed mildew.

Lying on a locker room bench is not reassuring. The benches are slatted wood and narrow, and it is easy to have the illusion that you are ten thousand feet up on a plank, one move and you plummet. I kept telling one of the dentist-wife moms that I was all right, every time she bustled in to check.

I had to pull the earphones off my head. I was listening to one of Miss P's favorites, a tape on concentrating your mind. Waves crash, and wind blows through grasses, and it sounds a lot like the recordings Rowan and his parents make, except that a man's voice tells you to imagine things. I would hear a discordant female voice saying my name, and I would have to stir myself from My Own Private Landscape and tell a woman who probably couldn't even swim that I was down-stressing.

“You sure?” she would say each time, lipstick and frosted hair.

I wasn't light-headed, and I wasn't seeing double. I wanted to turn the volume all the way up, high enough to damage my ears, so I wouldn't have to hear the endless, lapping sounds of the dives. And my own nagging inner voice: If I couldn't even stand to watch, what was going to happen when Dr. Breen said I was cleared to dive?

After the day's competition, we ate at a Chinese restaurant near the state capitol, Denise and I sharing a baked fish that arrived looking like a dragon, mouth agape, roasted eyeballs staring. Denise asked the waiter to take off the head so she wouldn't have to look at it. Her dad calls her “Princess,” and had Bausch & Lomb custom design prescription goggles so she could have 20/20 vision underwater.

Miss P said it was okay to open the fortune cookies, and if the fortune was bad it would come true only if we ate some of the cookie. She laughed, but she looked tired, more weary than a coach should, with one day of elimination over and plenty of scoring to come.

I hunted around among the cracked-open cookies. The fortunes were on little paper tabs that scatter and soak up spilled tea. There were two kinds of fortunes:
You are outgoing and have many friends
, the blazing compliment.
You will make a fortune and travel widely
, the golden lie.

If I worked in a cookie factory I would write fortunes that would help improve the world.
Three incredibly delightful things will happen to you if you recycle aluminum for a year
. I opened a new cookie, read the little white slip, and handed it to Miss P across the table. It told her she won respect wherever she went.

She read it and smiled thank you.

“You were okay,” I told Denise that night, kicking my feet to loosen the strait-jacket covers.
Okay
can mean a lot of different things.
The hamburgers are okay
can mean: Take these away, no one can eat them.

“I was shit,” she said. She was watching television, aiming the remote but not using it.

We were in the Holiday Inn, right beside the Interstate 80 Alternate. You could walk under the freeway and visit Old Town, shops where they sold raspberry ropes and licorice chews, and the shop clerks wore derby hats. Tourists licked pistachio nut and pumpkin sherbet ice cream cones, but we were forbidden what Miss P called
glop
, so after a quick peek at the postcard racks we had scurried back to the inn, safe and snug by curfew.

“It just wasn't your best day,” I conceded gently.

Denise snapped off the television and gave me a steady look. The whites of her eyes were bloodshot. The goggles make her look like a frog; she leaves them at home. She thinks the bathing cap she wears makes her look like a classic diver from the fifties. “Be honest with me, Bonnie,” she said.

My voice is all springtime and daisies compared with Denise's gangster contralto. I didn't really want to be frank with her—she wasn't as calm as she looked. “Okay.”

“I've never had a worse day, right?”

Sometimes you just don't want to cause that little extra bit of pain.

“I was that bad,” she said.
So bad you can't even express it
.

But Denise's dives hadn't been shockingly terrible—just a matter of awkward timing. And no poise—she had lost her calm, bunching her jaw, diving like someone smashing through a cinderblock wall. “I've seen a lot worse,” I said.