Whale Talk (2 page)

“What do you think?”

“That you generally give me less information than I need to make an informed decision.”

He gathers his books and nods toward the parking lot. “Hop into my babe-mobile and I’ll buy you a milk shake. Maybe a pizza. We’ll talk.”

I follow him down the hall. “Make it a steak. Something is sick and wrong here.”

“Let’s hope it takes you a while to figure out what it is.”

At Solomon’s Pizza, Simet tells me that Mr. Morgan, the principal, asked him to replace Mr. Packenbush as assistant wrestling coach, who’s resigning due to reasons of health. In a burst of panic, Simet told Morgan he’s been trying to get a swimming team going, since Cutter is one of only three high schools in the conference without one.

I say, “Morgan, of course, pointed out that we don’t have a pool.”

“Way ahead of him,” he says back. “I told him I could get free workout time at All Night Fitness, which I’m praying will actually be true.”

“The pool at All Night is twenty yards,” I remind him, “with an underwater ledge at the shallow end that will give you a subdural hematoma if you flip your turn.” A subdural hematoma is what happens to your brain if you get whacked on the head hard enough to bounce it off the inside of your skull. I hear that term a lot when my mom is trying a child-abuse case.

Simet says I’m mucking things up with details—

“With only four lanes—”

—making it more difficult than it had to be.

“—and a ladder smack in the middle of one of them.”

I should think of it as a challenge.

“Every meet would be away,” I tell him. “No teams would come here to swim. In a twenty-yard pool, records don’t count.”

“All part of what makes an insurmountable obstacle interesting,” he says. “A perennial road team. Mermen without a pond.”

“You’re forgetting something else. Nobody I swam with in age-group swimming lives here. There can’t be three real swimmers in this entire school.”

He considers that a minute, takes a bite of pizza and a long swallow on his beer. “I’m going off the record here,” he says. “Educators are supposed to
stick together and not bad-mouth one another, so we can collectively stay ahead of the educatees. But do you know Coach Murphy?”

Murphy is sixty-eight years old, having received divine dispensation to teach till two days after he dies, and I have judiciously avoided taking PE or health classes from him for four years. He tolerates zero bullshit or less. “Yeah, I know Coach Murphy.”

“Then you know what my life would be like as his assistant.” He leans forward. “I have my ways, Jones. If I go down, you go with me, which is to say if I coach wrestling, you wrestle. You have completed six semesters of English. You need eight. Think how easy it would be for me to misplace your records a week before graduation or remove a leg from one of your A’s. You’d be caught at Cutter High School like a rat in a Twilight Zone cage.”

“They’re really willing to let you have this team? No facility, no swimmers?”

“One swimmer,” he says.

“One used-to-be swimmer,” I say back.

“T. J., I’ve looked at some of your old times. You were phenomenal. And I’ve coached some big-time swimmers, guys headed for the trials. Tell you what, I can whip you into good-enough shape to get us points
at State, which would elevate Cutter in the overall all-sport state championship.”

“Spock, are you out of your Vulcan mind?” I ask in my best William Shatner, which isn’t all that bad.

Simet fixes his gaze on the table. “Actually, that’s why they agreed. I told them you were a lock. If I don’t come through, they’ll sue for malpractice.”

“You mean if
I
don’t come through, they’ll sue for malpractice.”

“Same thing.”

“If it’s the same thing, you swim.”

He nods at the remaining slice of pizza and says, “Go ahead and eat that,” which means he is desperate. He glances at his watch as I snap it up. “You don’t have to answer tonight. I’ll give you twelve hours.”

It could be worse. Simet is a guy who always teaches you something, and it’s not always about English or journalism. He
was
a hell of a swimmer himself in his younger years, when dinosaurs roamed the planet, and he seldom lets his classes forget what a spiritual experience it is to test yourself against that particular element. And though I burned out on it back then, I remember what amazing solace I felt working out. Up until I started swimming in grade school, half my teachers wanted me medicated
and the other half wanted me in reform school. It helped me focus, beveled the edges on my boundless, uncontrolled energy, dulled my rage. All things considered, it is enough to make me consider Simet’s proposal.

And here comes the kicker, the thing my father would say couldn’t be a coincidence. I’m walking out of Simet’s room the next day, thinking if I go along with him, I’ll be breaking a career-long rule banning myself from organized sports while playing as many disorganized sports as time in my life allows. I mean, I
love
athletics. When I’m gliding to the hoop in a pickup game, or gunning some guy down at home plate from center field in a summer vacant-lot game, or falling into a perfect pace five miles out on a run, I feel downright godlike. But those things I do on my own. Cutter is
such
a jock school; they pray before games and cajole you to play out of obligation, and fans scream obscenities at one another from the stands, actually creating rivalries between
towns
, which has always seemed crazy to me. I remember my freshman year when the entire town was actually happy because the stud running back from Jackson Quarry became ineligible because of grades. Our
educational
community got giddy because some kid they didn’t know tanked his math class. I mean, fifteen seconds after I finish a three-on-three game at Hoopfest,
I’m sitting on the curb sharing Gatorade with the guys on the other team, talking about moves they put on me, and vice versa. Why would anyone want his opponent not to be at his best?

I’m on a roll there, but the point is that athletics has become such a big thing here that our administration begins each year figuring ways to pile up points for this all-sport state championship. And the symbol, the Shroud of Turin for Cutter High athletes, is the letter jacket. A block
C
on a blue-and-gold leather-and-wool jacket at Cutter High School is worth a whole bunch of second chances in the front office, of which I’m still waiting for my first. Those who don’t own one of those jackets can easily become victims of our zero-tolerance policy. Well, in the eyes of The Tao Jones, nothing is true without its opposite, and it has been my minor quest to make sure that the finest athlete at Cutter High School did his very best to never earn that jacket. I should also say I’m not
totally
righteous in my quest for athletic purity. When I was an age-group swimmer I was
driven
. It consumed me, and I get uneasy thinking of becoming that focused on it again.

Variation on the theme. I’m moving catlike through the halls toward my locker minutes after Simet has challenged me to become the Mark Spitz of the desert
(we don’t have a
swimming pool
) and run into Mike Barbour—linebacker extraordinaire and student most likely to graduate with multiple felonies—jacking up Chris Coughlin against the lockers by the drinking fountain because Chris is wearing his dead brother’s letter jacket.

Chris Coughlin is big-time special ed. He’s mainstreamed into PE and industrial arts, but spends most of his time in Resource Room improving his reading skills enough to read traffic signs and memorizing the intricacies of basic addition and subtraction. Everyone knows Chris’s story: born addicted to crack cocaine, then got a double dose of shit just after his first birthday when his mother’s boyfriend wrapped his face in Saran Wrap to make him stop crying. At his sentencing the boyfriend said he only wanted to make Chris pass out, not cause permanent brain damage. Oops.

Anyway, Chris’s aunt and uncle took him and did all they could to make it up to him, but they couldn’t regenerate brain cells. Chris’s older half-brother, Brian, was raised by his own biological father and is something of a legend around Cutter from four or five years ago for having gained more yards in football and for hitting more home runs in baseball than any Cutter Wolverine before or since, and for being drafted into the Cincinnati
Reds farm system out of high school. He was destined to have a street or a small park named after him someday, but was killed in a freak rock-climbing accident in the spring of his senior year. That about did poor old Chris in. He didn’t have much, but he had a famous big brother. Brian was a real class act: good student, good athlete, great guy. The only times I remember seeing Chris smile were when he rode behind Brian on his dirt bike, or later, after Brian was gone, when he’d brag to anyone who would listen every time he passed Brian’s picture in the trophy case. They didn’t live together, but Brian sure let everyone know Chris was his brother, and if you messed with Chris back in those days—he was an easy mark—you could expect a visit from Brian.

So Barbour has the jacket buttoned at the bottom and pulled down around Chris’s shoulders so he can’t move his arms, and his nose is about an inch from Chris’s. I can’t hear what he’s saying, but tears squirt out of Chris’s terrified eyes and his entire body trembles. I hustle over and insert myself between them, put an arm over Chris’s shoulder, and say, “What’s the matter, buddy? You look like you’ve been staring into a giant asshole,” and move him a few steps down the hall, adjusting the jacket. Chris is hyperventilating, barely able to breathe.

“When you see one of those,” I tell him, loud enough for Barbour to hear, “you gotta close your eyes and pretend it’s not there. ’Course it helps if you also hold your breath.”

Barbour’s hand clamps onto my shoulder, and I turn in mock surprise. “Barbour! ’Sup, man?”

“I was talking to him, shithead.”

“That’s Mister Shithead to you. You were talking to my buddy Chris? He has to get to class. I run his complaint department, though, right, Chris?”

Still speechless, Chris nods.

Barbour says, “Fine. I’ll tell you. Next time I see him in this jacket, I’ll take it off him and burn it. You earn one of these if you’re gonna wear it at this school, something you’re too chickenshit to know anything about. It’s an honor to wear these colors. You don’t put on the jacket your brother earned. That’s an athletic department rule.”

I say, “Doesn’t apply. Chris isn’t
in
the athletic department,” and Barbour says, “Yeah, well, in this school an athletic department rule is a school rule.”

“Guess that wasn’t in my orientation packet,” I say. “What’s the matter with you, Barbour? You know the deal with Coughlin’s brother. Is this
prick
thing habitual, or do you work at it?”

“One of these days you’re going to find out, Jones.”

“I lie awake nights, waiting for that day.”

Barbour says, “I’ll save my energy for a white man.”

“Because of your limited I.Q. I’ll give you one of those, my friend. One more will get us both a three-day suspension.” Barbour’s family is famous for their send-all-the-Japs-back-to-Japan-with-a-nigger-under-each-arm attitude, so I feel like I have to hold my own.

We stand facing each other a few seconds, and finally Barbour reiterates the athletic department’s zero-tolerance position on letter jackets and walks away. I pat Chris’s shoulder and tell him not to worry about it and start for class, but look back to see him stuffing the jacket into his locker, trying in vain to cram it behind his books.

I walk back, pull the jacket out, and hand it to him. “Chris, you can wear it. It’s okay.”

“He said it was a rule.”

“He lied. You can wear it anytime you want.”

“He said the athletic department gots a rule.”

“It belonged to your brother, Chris. You wear it. If Barbour gives you any more trouble, you come tell me, okay?”

Chris stares at me.

“Okay?”

“Okay.” He says it without conviction.

As I turn the corner for class, I glance back again, and Coughlin is frantically stuffing the jacket back into the locker.

I stay in the afternoon to catch up on an article for the school paper, and catch a flash of blue and gold as I pass the janitor emptying the day’s leavings into the Dumpster. I wait until he moves back inside and take a look, and sure enough, drag a Cutter High letter jacket out, with
COUGHLIN
lettered across the back.

Later I drive over to All Night Fitness to see if there is
any
possibility I can train in that pool. We have a family membership, so I spend time there already, but almost never in the water. Since it’s the only indoor pool in town, All Night rents it out for parties and YMCA swim lessons and women’s and seniors’ water aerobics classes. I hope to swim a few laps to get a feel, but a sign on the entrance says
PRIVATE GROUP
. I push the swinging door open and stand just inside.

A young man and woman in Y T-shirts stand with lifeguard poles at either side of the pool, and Y staff people are spread out through the crowd like Secret Service at the White House Easter Egg Roll. Political correctness
aside, the water and deck are filled with kids who look like they’ll be getting the very best parking places for the rest of their lives. In the far lane Chris Coughlin helps a little girl with shriveled arms on a kickboard. The girl locks her gnarled elbows over the Styrofoam board and kicks while Chris pulls her along. The noise is deafening, but I watch him patiently help her extend her feet, toes pointed inward to propel herself properly, then release the board long enough to let her move under her own power for a few kicks until she becomes still in the water. Then he pulls her a little farther. I am struck with how completely comfortable he seems in the water.

His brother’s jacket is still in my car, and I intend to go get it, but when I yell to get his attention he glances up, then quickly away, and I know my presence embarrasses him, so I just wave. He looks ashamed. How messed up is that? You get treated like shit, then have to be ashamed that you’re the kind of person people treat like shit.