Whale Talk

  “Nigger girl,” Rich says. “Come here to me. Where’s your momma?”

  I move back, and she scurries to wrap her arm around my leg, staring silently at Rich as I holler for Dad, and light splashes across the floor as my parents’ bedroom door opens and he barrels toward us. I don’t care who you are; you could be Rich Marshall or Mike Tyson, but the sight of my old man coming at you out of the dark, bare chested with a baseball bat in his hand, is a daunting sight.

  “This ain’t over,” Rich says. “Nobody fucks with my family.”

  “Looks like it’s over for now,” I say, but he is already headed down the walk.

  I give Dad the pistol, and Mom and I sit with Heidi while he calls the police. I expect her to be scared, but all she can say is she wishes my daddy had given old Rich a good whack with that bat. We decide we will call my father the Louisville Slugger from now on. Heidi thinks that’s pretty funny.

  When we have her back in bed, I tell my parents Rich thinks I’m having sex with Alicia. “I barely even know her,” I tell them.

  “That doesn’t matter,” Mom says. “Don’t fool with him. The last thing in the world you want is to be in Rich Marshall’s cast of characters. He’s a stalker, pure and simple, and stalkers believe what they want to believe. You don’t even want him thinking your name.”

  “Too late for that. He uses it in vain every day at school.”

  “Well, I’ll be on the phone at seven-thirty in the morning,” she says. “And if Rich Marshall spends one more hour in that school, they’d better have a hell of an attorney.”

  “Cops will pick him up tonight,” Dad says. “We won’t have to worry about that for a while.”

  I tell them I’m not afraid of him even a little bit. In fact I’d welcome the chance.

  Mom puts her hand on my knee and grips it hard enough that I feel heat. “Listen to me, T. J. You might be stronger and quicker now, but men like Rich are relentless, and they’ll come after you in ways you can’t imagine. If he believes you’re taking something that belongs to him, he’s as dangerous as they come. I see men like him in court every day.”

  I say I’m pretty familiar with the way Rich Marshall operates.

  “You think you are, but this is completely different from him shooting that deer. That was just mean. When he’s in this spot, he’s desperate, which means he imagines things, like you sleeping with Alicia. When he talks like that, he isn’t telling you what he thinks, he’s telling you what he fears. One thing you want to know about Rich Marshall is this: In his mind, what he fears is his worst enemy. Anything that makes Rich Marshall feel weak will bring him at you like a devil. At that point, it isn’t about whether you can whip him, it’s about whether you see him coming.” She squeezes my knee again. “You listen to me, young man. If you’re wanting to try out your testosterone, try it out on someone else.”

  Mom won’t let me go to bed until I promise to keep my testosterone under control.

  CHAPTER 10

  I catch my dad working in the garage on one of the old bikes, an older BMW with a sidecar. That one belongs to him; I remember riding all over the country beside him when I was a little kid. We still go out on it sometimes, only now I drive as often as not. He always looks great in his old World War I army helmet, long brown hair flowing back, mirrored sunglasses and full beard hiding his face, riding beside me like I’m his chauffeur.

  We talk while he works and I hand him tools, my one mechanical competence.

  He says, “Guess I freaked you out a little in the bedroom that day.”

  “A little.”

  He breathes deep, sets down his wrench, and turns toward me. “I’m not proud of that, T. J.”

  “I didn’t know it was still that bad.”

  “Most of the time it’s not. Just once in a while, when I’m not paying attention. Usually when I start feeling too good.”

  The next question, I’m almost afraid to ask. But we’re here, and we’re talking…. “What do you tell yourself about that day?”

  He laughs, a laugh that says you’ve just asked him something he’s asked himself a million times. “Different things,” he says. “In the old days I told myself I was a worthless scumbag; that no trucker fails to look under his truck before he takes off. I told myself there was no difference between negligence and an intentional act; the result’s the same.”

  “That’s pretty rough.”

  “Yeah. Another few months of that, and I’d have taken a fast motorcycle into a big tree.”

  I wait for the rest.

  “Now,” he says finally, “I’m a little kinder to myself most of the time. I tell myself I learned an important lesson the hard way: that the universe doesn’t make allowances for mental lapses or ignorance, but that maybe I’m a better man because I know that.”

  I tell him he is a good man, but he isn’t looking for compliments and doesn’t respond.

  “Before that day, if I’d read a newspaper article about a guy who ran over a baby out of negligence, I’d have cursed him for his stupidity and figured he deserved whatever came of it. I’m a lot more tolerant of things I used to despise, a lot slower to draw the line between good and bad. I look at a guy like Rich Marshall, for example. Thirty years ago I’d have hated his guts.”

  “I’m thirty years behind you on that one.”

  Dad laughs. “Well, I’m still not going to let him get his hands on a kid if I can help it, but you don’t get like Rich is by being treated well all your life. I knew his old man, and he was one rough son of a bitch.”

  “It’s hard for me to think of it like that,” I say. “I think of him shooting that deer or what it must be like to live with him. Nothing in me can like him. And guys like Barbour are just Marshall Lite. It’s hard to see them as victims.”

  “No real reason you should,” he says. “You have to see everyone in relationship to you. Just because you understand the shit in someone else’s life doesn’t mean you don’t stand up for your own.”

  He works meticulously on the bike as he talks, touching the parts, turning them over in his massive hands with the same care he uses in choosing his words. “I guess you could say, in the long run that incident changed about everything I believed. So much of what I’ve done has been in response to it. When I get a chance to play with a kid like Heidi, like with the french fries, it’s as if the universe is throwing me a bone, letting me earn my way back a little closer to balance. Giving her a place to live is a true blessing, way more for me than her.”

  He falls quiet, and I stay awhile, handing him tools and watching the care he puts into his work

  “Anyway,” he says later, “don’t get freaked out if you see me like you did in the bedroom. I’m just finding my way.”

  I picture him back in the room, staring at—“The whale tape,” I say. “Why was that playing?”

  He laughs again. “Ten or fifteen years ago I read an article in Sports Illustrated about this elderly couple who had spent their lives studying whales up close. They were two of very few people actually allowed out into the migratory paths of whales, and they spent time in the water with them. I don’t even remember the point of the article, but it made a case for the possibility that whales’ language is as sophisticated as ours, very intricate and precise. It also claimed that whale songs travel for hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles in the ocean.

  “I was in one of those emotional places where I cursed my entire being. Mad at myself for not looking under the truck, mad at my parents and relatives and teachers for not warning me this kind of pain even exists in the world, mad at God for not looking under his truck and seeing me there.

  “And I realized I had reached adulthood without even knowing what it is to be human. Nobody ever told me how dangerous it is, how risky. I started wishing I were a whale. At least they know what it is to be a whale. I mean, think of it. I walk outside and scream at the top of my lungs, and it travels maybe two blocks. A whale unleashes his cry, and it travels hundreds or even
thousands of miles. Every whale in the ocean will at one time or another run into that song. And I figure whales probably don’t edit. If they think it, they say it. If some man-whale cheats on his wife, her anguish, her rage, her despair, is heard and understood by every whale who swims into the range of her voice. The joy of lovemaking, the crippling heartache of a lost child—it’s all heard and understood. Predators and prey have equal voice. The Mother Teresa whales and the Jeffrey Dahmer whales all have their say. Whale talk is the truth, and in a very short period of time, if you’re a whale, you know exactly what it is to be you.”

  I watch a spider crawl across the ceiling toward the light.

  “All that is exactly opposite of what it is to be human, at least for me. My parents were wonderful people, I suppose, but they didn’t want me to know what was out there. They didn’t want me to know the real skinny on sex or love or boredom or hate or disappointment. They sold me their wishes as if they were fact. After you saw me in the bedroom, I was embarrassed. I feel so weak when I get like that. But the truth is, that’s just the way it is with me some of the time, and you might as well know it.”

  I tell him what I haven’t said. “I guess I was afraid you were suicidal.”

  “Suicidal or not, I’m not going to kill myself,” he said with a smile. “If I were going to do that, I’d have done it a long time ago. What you need to know about your old man is that I always bounce back.”

  I went to my room and tried to get some sleep, but I couldn’t help running Dad’s and my conversation over in my head. If we all spoke in whale talk, and I heard the voices of Chris Coughlin and Andy Mott and Simon DeLong, how would I put them in the same ocean with the shit that comes out of Rich Marshall and Mike Barbour?

  By the second round of swim meets we look forward to the road trips as if they are vacations. We have attained a certain celebrity at meets, as Team Bizarro led by Superman. It turns out other teams have a few rookies who probably should have turned out for javelin catching, too, so we pick up unexpected points occasionally, but one coach called us the only team in the state that could actually make a swimming meet last longer. We have learned the trick bad hockey goalies have known forever. When the puck whizzes into the net for the eleventh time in the first period, pretend it didn’t happen. If you’re Simon or Mott or Jackie Craig, you just pull yourself out of the water as if they weren’t waiting for you to get out so they can start the next race. If you’re Dan Hole, you leap out, oblivious to all others, hustle to your workout bag, pull out your clipboard and a calculator, and chart your time. If you’re Chris Coughlin, you’re giddy just to hear your teammates clapping and chanting your name, and if you’re Tay-Roy Kibble, you flex as you pull yourself out and the entire crowd forgets why you were in the water in the first place. If you’re T. J. Jones, you kick exactly as many asses as dare dive into the water with you.

  But the fun is the ride. We study first, then play sports trivia or word games on the trip to the meet, eat pizza and leak out little bits of our lives on the way back. Mott still sits in back listening to his Walkman most of the time, but once in a while he ventures forth to add one scary thing or another, or just listen. I’m gaining more respect for him as I get to know him. The guy has some serious demons, but he keeps them corraled most of the time. Speaking of whale talk, there’s a guy who couldn’t have known what to expect.

  About four weeks from the conference meet our bus lumbers through the night on the way back from Pullman. Coach is sacked out in the seat behind Icko while the rest of us stare out at the carpet of stars laid across the moonless sky on this absolutely clear, subzero night. My father once told me the perspective of an entire generation—and of all generations to follow—changed in late 1968 when the early Apollo astronauts came back with the first pictures of Earth as seen from the moon. “It was the first time most of us knew how finite things are here,” he said. “A beautiful blue-and-white marble floating in a vast blackness; self-contained and totally dependent upon our care of it. If we poisoned it with our waste, or filled it with dissension and hate, we were pretty much locked in with it. From a physical point of view, God appeared a long ways off.”

  I keep that picture taped on the inside of my locker at school, and on a poster on the wall in my room at home, alongside another poster of an entire galaxy being born as seen through the eyes of the Hubble telescope, alongside a poster of an atom, because I like to have my mind bent in the way only time and space can bend it. Are we huge or are we small? The distance between the protons and neutrons of a given atom, relative to their size, are as great as the distance between stars. If you were to look at each atom as a universe unto itself, think of the number of universes within each of us; at the same time, look at any one of us in the vast space I am seeing out the window of this bus, which is a molecule on a cell on a flea on a hair on a wart of the known universe. And I think of the power, the electricity, that dances between me and Carly, how the emotional part of that, the connection, sometimes seems so big it can’t be contained. How does that compare with the power of a lightning bolt, or of the nearly silent whisper of a breeze? Are we big or are we small?

  “How come none of you guys has ever asked me how I lost my leg?” Mott startles me so bad my forehead bangs against the window.

  “Probably because we know you’d tell us to go to hell,” I say.

  He’s quiet, settles into the seat behind me. “Gangrene,” he says finally.

  I see Icko’s eyes in the mirror, penetrating the darkness of the bus.

  Dan looks up. “Gracious,” he says, “isn’t that—”

  “Rot,” Mott says.

  Dan says, “I guess that’s one way to express it.”

  Mott says, “It’s the only way to express it.”

  “Well,” Dan says back. “You could always say—”

  “Don’t say it, Mr. Hole,” Icko says. “These aisles are awful damn narrow for push-ups.”

  “Rot it is,” Dan says. He looks at Mott. “How in the world did you contract gangrene?”

  “Another time,” Mott says. “Hey, Tay-Roy.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You got a picture?”

  “Of what?”

  “Of you.”

  “You mean like a school picture?” Tay-Roy asks.

  “Naw,” Mott says. “I got one of those. Maybe something where you were posin’. You know, like a body contest. Or something out on the river in a tank suit.”

  “Not with me,” Tay-Roy says. “I’ve got both at home. My mother lives from one Kodak moment to the next. Why?”

  “Wanna buy a couple,” Mott says.

  “What?” Tay-Roy seems confused. “I don’t sell pictures of myself.”

  Mott reaches into his wallet. “Sure you do. You’ve just never had the opportunity. Give you twenty apiece for them.”

  Tay-Roy laughs. “Forty bucks for two pictures? Why don’t you threaten me, and I’ll give them to you free?”

  Chris reaches into his wallet, extracts a bent school photo that has to be four years old. “You can have this one,” he says. “You can have it for two dollars.”

  “I got this girlfriend,” Mott says to Tay-Roy. “Lives in Birmingham, Alabama.”

  Tay-Roy says. “That’s great. I can’t even get one in Cutter.”

  “Well, you could get one in Birmingham, Alabama,” Mott says. “Because I sent this one your picture, and she’s dispensing serious drool.”

  “You sent a girl my picture and told her it was you?”

  “Yeah,” Mott says. “I scanned your yearbook picture. Told her I’m a bodybuilder, so now I need to scan her some muscles.”

  “That’s crazy,” Tay-Roy says. “What will you do when you meet her?”

  “She lives in Birmingham, Alabama, for Christ sake,” Mott says. “I’m not going to meet her.”

  “Then what’s the point?”

  Mott smiles and leans back on the seat, closes his eyes, and simulates whacking off.

  Jacki
e Craig is sitting forward in his seat, completely engrossed and silent as a stifled yawn. Dan is strangely quiet. In the driver’s seat, Icko laughs quietly and shakes his head. The lights from an oncoming car highlight Mott’s pockmarked cheeks, his hawkish nose. He is not what you’d call classically handsome.

  “The Internet is a great equalizer,” he says. “A guy can be anybody he wants.”

  I say, “Yeah, well, so can a girl.”

  “And the sweeter thing she wants to be, the better I like it,” Mott says.

  “I don’t know if I can go along with this,” Tay-Roy says. “Somehow it doesn’t seem honest.”

  “It’s not honest,” Mott says back. “It’s cybersex. Come on, Kibble. If she ever does show up, think of that treat you’re in for.”

  “I don’t know,” Tay-Roy says. “This kind of thing can backfire.”

  In a far more timid voice than I’ve heard him use, Dan says, “I fear it could backfire more times than once.”

  “Meaning what?” Tay-Roy asks.

  “Meaning you are a Gentleman’s Quarterly item not only in Birmingham, Alabama.”

  All eyes swing to Dan.

  “I’m afraid so,” he says. “Evansville, Illinois. I was hoping for something in one of these.” He stands and flexes, his fists nearly touching at his belt buckle, imitating a gorilla.

  Tay-Roy’s eyes widen. “A crab,” he says. “Jeez, you guys.”

  “I’ll sign a waiver,” Mott tells him.

  “I’ll draft it right here,” Dan says. “If discovered, you can disavow any knowledge. An innocent victim of our lasciviousness.”

  “That’s it!” Icko hits the brakes. The aisle is too narrow, but he opens the doors, and Dan racks off ten push-ups in the snow.

  “Well worth it,” Dan says, “if Tay-Roy yields to our pleas.”

  Tay-Roy smiles and sighs. “Okay, but if this comes back to bite me, you guys are going to pay.” He turns to the others. “Simon, what do you think, you want in on this? Jackie?”