Whale Talk

“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.

  I stay a few minutes, imagining myself trying to get a decent workout in that abbreviated pool. It doesn’t look promising. But as I drive through the quiet dusky streets of the uncharacteristically warm Cutter fall, Chris’s ease in the water flashes before me and suddenly the mathematics—the relativity—of it all hits me. If it kills Barbour to see a guy as far out of the mainstream as Chris is, wearing a letter jacket that doesn’t belong to him, how far up his nose will it get when he sees him wearing one that does belong to him? And suddenly I hear the voice the universe—and Simet—wants me to hear. It says, “Swim.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Among his many other quirks, my father, John Paul Jones, is a TV buff. He doesn’t sit around staring at it all day, but he religiously records certain programs to watch later. Usually they are jock interviews or hourlong biographies or educational TV documentaries about animals whose faces are carbon copies of their asses, or about black holes and the Hubble space telescope and anything about whales.

  One interview Dad watches over and over, and believes should be shown at the beginning of every athletic season at Cutter High School and to every coach and administrator and athlete who ever hears the cheers of his hometown crowd, is an interview that Roy Firestone of ESPN did with Arthur Ashe not long before the tennis great died of AIDS. Ol’ Roy was the king of drawing tears, but he was way out of his league because if anyone ever got tears out of Arthur Ashe, they would never be tears for himself. So after several attempts, Roy leaned forward and said, “Arthur, when you’re all alone, do you ever just look up and say, ‘Why me?’”

  Arthur looked him straight in the eye, and in that soft, steady voice that came to represent the very meaning of integrity before his death, said, “Why not me?”

  Dad says Arthur knew something that eludes most of the jocks and coaches and administrators at Cutter: that the universe doesn’t create special dispensation for a guy because he can run faster or jump higher or thread the needle with a fastball. He knew that we take what the universe gives us, and we either get the most out of it or we don’t, but in the end we all go out the same way.

  So I hang back after Simet’s class while he’s gathering our papers off his desk.

  “Don’t leave me hanging, Jones. Morgan is closing in on me about the wrestling position. He says with the shortage of male teachers this year, we’re all drawing extra duty.”

  “The testosterone shuffle.”

  He picks up his grade book. “Let’s see, how are you doing in my class?”

  I say, “I’ll do it.”

  “My God.” He stares, eyes following his finger across the page. “Straight A’s. What a guy.”

  “But I won’t do it alone.”

  “I’ll be with you every stroke of the way.”

  “That’s not what I mean. I know you swam on a small college team,” I say, “but not so small the workouts were solitary confinement. I need a team around me.”

  “Better start recruiting.”

  “I’m ahead of you. Only scouted one guy so far, but there have to be more where he came from. I mean, we evolved from water, right?”

  “That’s right,” he says. “Swimmers under every rock.”

  “One other thing. Who establishes the criteria to earn a letter?”

  “The coach of the sport,” he says. “Why? You think I’d let you jerk me out from in front of the oncoming grapplers’ train and not give you a letter? What kind of man do you think I am?”

  “Never mind that, but I’m not thinking of me. I want whoever else I get to come overboard with me to have a chance.”

  “When I see the caliber of fish you’re catching, we’ll talk about it.”

  Whatever caliber of fish I catch, they’ll all be suckers, but no sense getting into that with him yet.

  A lot happens in my imagination. In my imagination Chris Coughlin stands in front of his locker in his own letter jacket,
a miniature gold swimmer stroking across the middle of the C, and when some righteous buttmunch like Mike Barbour jacks him up, some ultra-righteous coach, say maybe Simet, has Barbour running stairs.

  And in my imagination I have answers to the pertinent questions, such as, “Who else can I get to piss off the likes of Mike Barbour?” And sometimes what is in my imagination comes to fruition. See, by the time most of us get to ninth grade, we know whether we can play football or basketball or baseball—the big three—or whether we’re fast enough or can jump high or far enough to turn out for track. But no way do we know our talents as swimmers. I mean, most Cutter kids swim and water ski on the river, so a lot of us can propel ourselves in a life jacket from the place we fall to the ski, but when I swam age group, my parents drove me a good forty-five minutes to the nearest indoor pool. The point is, there have to be at least a few other guys around like Chris Coughlin, with that natural feel for the water, who we can recruit to keep me from looking like the national swim team for Antarctica.

  Swimming’s a winter sport in high school, so I have some time to pull it all together, but swimming’s also a sport you train long and hard for if you don’t want to embarrass yourself in a big way when your stroke falls apart on the final lap of a two-hundred free because you haven’t put in the requisite miles, so I can’t wait too long.

  The following weekend I run off about fifty envelopes I designed on Mom’s computer. They say YOU MAY HAVE ALREADY WON! with a reproduction of Ed McMahon and Dick Clark in one corner. Then I stuff a flyer inside that reads FEARLESS HIGH SCHOOL MERMEN & MERMAIDS WANTED: CASH PRIZES AND INSTANT FAME above my telephone number, and because we are having one of those rare great hot fall days, I take them out to the river and stick one under the windshield wiper of every car in sight. I figure, hey, it’s a river. At least most of the people here can swim.

  Eight hours later, in the early evening, I answer the phone to the first ring and hear, “To whom might I be speaking?”