Whale Talk

  I say, “Shouldn’t that be my question?”

  “It might be if you hadn’t left a number without a name on that flyer you placed on my automobile windshield this afternoon.”

  “This is T. J. Jones.” I do know that’s redundant, by the way: the J and the Jones. “And to whom might I be speaking?” I ask, placing the “m” on the end of who for what I hope will be the last time in my history of casual speech.

  “You might be speaking to almost anyone, as many of those flyers as you distributed,” the voice says, “but you are speaking to Daniel Hole.”

  When your name is The Tao Jones, you think twice before passing judgment on a peer’s name, but I am quick with silent gratitude that my last name can’t be translated into any target so basic to adolescent males. “What can I do for you, Mr. Hole?”

  “I called to gather information regarding your rallying cry for fearless swimmers. I’m assuming you’re in search of people who experience a certain amount of comfort in the water.”

  Dan Hole. He was in my English class a few years ago, and I think a couple of social studies classes since. Dan “Never-Use-a-Single-Syllable-When-Polysyllables-Are-Available” Hole. I say, “Yeah, people who experience comfort in the water. Is that you?”

  “Totally comfortable,” he says. “What is your plan?”

  “My plan?”

  “Well, do you simply want to acquaint yourself with people who can swim, or is there some mission?”

  Jesus. “We need you for a swim team.”

  Silence fills the line.

  “Dan?”

  After a moment, “That would require a considerable outlay of energy.”

  “And time,” I say.

  “Indeed.” More silence. “I actually participated on a swimming team in my youth,” he says.

  “That’s great,” I say back. “Exactly what we’re looking for.”

  Dan wants particulars. Where will we swim; when? Will the chlorine level be controlled better than it was at the YMCA pool in his former hometown, where he swam for their team? (I assure him it will, at which time he questions my sincerity, given I don’t even know where his former hometown is, and therefore cannot possibly have the particulars on the chemical makeup of the water in the YMCA there. I lie and say all YMCAs are the same; it’s a rule.) Will we have time for our homework? One doesn’t ever want to get out of balance with the “athletic thing,” as many of the football players are wont to do. I assure him I’m interested in a college education myself and wouldn’t go out for a sport where I might be wont to not want to do my homework. That seems to satisfy him. “And our mentor would be whom?”

  “You mean the coach?”

  “Yes, the coach.”

  I say it would be Simet.

  Another silence.

  “He’s my English teacher,” I tell him.

  “Yes, I’m aware of Mr. Simet. He’s rather frivolous, don’t you think?”

  I agree Simet can be a bit of a slacker, but I assure Dan Hole he was a collegiate swimmer and is probably the best we can do under the circumstances. Dan is wearing off on me. I say collegiate.

  “Let me get back to you on this,” Dan says. “I’m tempted to respond to impulse and sign on, but history tells me that’s ill-advised. I’ll have a reply within forty-eight hours.”

  I hang up, exhausted.

  I know if I end up with Chris Coughlin and Dan Hole, seemingly two ends of some otherworldly continuum, I’ll need to get some guys to fill in the middle, if for no other reason than to save Chris.

  The second call comes from Tay-Roy Kibble. Tay-Roy is a guy I know from every school musical production from grade school tonette band to high school symphony, choral events included. This guy has a set of pipes on him, and plays all the woodwind instruments, plus the piano, well enough to be presented as a featured soloist every time. He’s also a bodybuilder, though not quite as accomplished there as in the musical field. He doesn’t embarrass himself, though, and enters only steroid-free events, usually placing in the top five of eighteen-and-unders. Tay-Roy is a senior, too.

  On the phone he says, “This is Tay-Roy Kibble. I’m calling about a flyer on my car windshield out at the river this morning.”

  “Hey, Tay-Roy. T. J. Jones. I’m trying to get enough guys together for a school swim team. Mr. Simet wants to coach it…actually, to keep from having to be an assistant wrestling coach.” I go on to give him the downside: no real pool, all “away” meets, basically giving him every excuse to say, “Excuse me, my Caller ID shows an important call” and unplug his phone, because I know the hours he puts into his music, not to mention the bodybuilding.

  “Actually, that sounds kind of fun. I’m kinda burned out on the bodybuilding thing. You have to travel too far to catch the drug-free contests, and the price of regular supplements is killing me.”

  I ask if he swims much.

  “I can chase down my water ski,” he says, laughing. “Actually, I swam the river, over and back, from Boulder Beach last summer.”

  That isn’t bad. It’s more than three-quarters of a mile across there. I tell him that’s farther than I’ve swum in the last year and sign him up. If nothing else, Tay-Roy is plenty familiar with All Night Fitness. When he’s working out for a contest, he’ll spend more time on that little bump of a muscle that pops out right next to your elbow than I spend on my entire upper body. He even knows what that muscle is called.

  So if I can convince Chris to swim, and Dan assesses the situation in our favor, we’ll have at least enough swimmers for a relay. Who knows what else will come floating up from the bottom?

  My quest gains momentum the next day while I’m pitching the team one more time to Chris Coughlin at first lunch, and look up to see Barbour standing over us with a couple of offensive (I won’t say how offensive) linemen. Talk about thinking football is life. Cutter could win it all this year, and football guys are gods. Before the first game is even played, Barbour is being talked about as first string All-State. The one thing that could make me play football is if I could transfer to another school and go up against that asshole. Anyway, it’s clear he’s going to loom until I acknowledge his presence, but I leave him unattended until Chris appears ready to bolt out of sheer terror. “Barbour the Barbarian,” I say finally. “What can I do for you?”

  “I wanna talk to the dummy.”

  I point to Greg Steelman, the lineman beside him. “So talk.”

  He points to Chris. “That dummy.”

  “Christopher may not be matriculating to Harvard,” I say, “but he’s plenty smart enough not to waste his time in discourse with you. What do you want?” Matriculating. Discourse. Dan Hole is lodged in my brain.

  He glares at Chris. “I said I was—”

  I stand, shoving my chair back hard enough to send it crashing to the floor—bringing us into focus as objects of attention from five tables in every direction—then step forward. Steelman puts a hand on my shoulder, but I brush it off with enough force to let him know he’ll at least get his hair messed up messing with me. “If you call my friend a dummy one more time, I’m going to take you apart. I know, you’re a hotshot football stud and you think nobody has your number, but even if I don’t, we go at it, we get three days to cool off, and that means you miss three days of practice, which makes you ineligible for the game Friday. It makes me ineligible for a math test. So go ahead, Barbour, sound off.” I think I said I’ve spent a record number of days out of school for letting the heat that starts in my gut rise all the way, and I do my best to keep that under control, but the day I take Barbour out will be worth finishing the year homeschooled.

  Coach Benson, the head football coach, spots us from his lunch-duty spot by the door and hustles over. “What’s going on?”

  “I’m just keeping these two apprised of the school athletic code; how nobody wears a letter jacket but the guy who earns it.”

  I translate that for Benson. “He wants to tell Chris Coughlin one more time he can’t w
ear his dead brother’s jacket.”

  Chris puts his head down, and I touch his shoulder. “Sorry, buddy, I shouldn’t have said it like that.”

  “There’s pride in being an athlete at this school.”

  “There may have been before you peed into the athletic gene pool,” I tell him.

  Coach Benson says, “Mr. Jones, there’s no call for that kind of language.”

  “I’m just speaking in his native tongue, sir.” I realize I stepped onto dangerous ground with Benson, who is a stickler for courteous language, so I follow with, “Sorry, sir. You’re right. What I should have said is that Barbour is a stud football player with everything going for him, and it ticks me off when he takes after somebody like my friend Chris, who has a tough time protecting himself.”

  Coach looks at Barbour.

  “I didn’t take after anybody,” Barbour says. “Like I said, I was just bringing these guys up to speed on the letter jacket rule. Just the stuff we talked about in the Lettermen’s Club meeting.”

  Benson is the adviser for the Lettermen’s Club, so whatever they talked about, he knows.

  I put my arm over Chris’s shoulder. He’s wearing an old Levi’s jacket, nearly worn through at the elbows, which couldn’t have been washed since he entered high school. “This isn’t a letter jacket,” I say. Chris stands silent beside me, eyes darting like it’s his first day on the prison yard. I say, “Hey, man, take off, okay? I’ll catch up with you later. And we’re agreed, right? You’re gonna swim?”

  “Maybe,” he says. “It sounds hard.”

  I say, “Very soft. The water’s very soft.”

  He laughs.

  When Chris is out of earshot, I turn back to Barbour.

  “I caught him wearing his brother’s jacket again at the bowling alley last night,” Barbour says. “What kind of pride can we have if—”

  I say, “Coach, I don’t want to be disrespectful with the language again, so I might need a little help with this. What’s an acceptable term for chickenshit?”

  “You’re on thin ice, Jones.”

  I take a deep breath. Even Benson has to be reasonable on this one, if I don’t push him any further into Barbour’s camp. “Okay, what’s an acceptable term for a big-time football hero who’s threatened by a brain-damaged kid so scared he can barely make it through a school day without hyperventilating himself into unconsciousness, wearing his dead brother’s letter jacket because it’s the only thing that gives him any connection to his brother and therefore to this school?”

  Coach scratches his chin. Interesting how you can say almost anything you want as long as you don’t say shit or fuck or any word derivative thereof. I’m getting a handle on the communication thing. He says, “I’ll admit it’s a different situation with the Coughlin kid, but the jacket is a symbol of excellence. The Lettermen’s Club and the school Athletic Council have adopted a zero-tolerance policy on this.”

  I’m speechless a second; it doesn’t fit that a grown man could be that dumb. I say, “What do the Lettermen’s Club and the Athletic Council have to do with making school policy? They have an administration for that. They have a school board.”

  “That’s true, Jones. But in case you haven’t noticed, Cutter High School lives and dies on its athletic reputation. Eighty or ninety percent of the respect shown this school is for its athletic accomplishments.”

  “Shown by who?”

  “By other schools, by townspeople who vote on tax levies and make other kinds of financial contributions. Believe me, Jones, the athletic department in this school has plenty of power—which, by the way, you could have shared in, had you had any school spirit. You could be wearing one of these jackets, Jones.”

  “Coach, I wouldn’t wear the same brand of underwear Mike Barbour wears.” This seems like a good time to back out of this conversation, so as not to tip my hand. I say, “I don’t know if you heard Barbour correctly a minute ago, but he said he saw Chris wearing Brian’s jacket in a bowling alley. That’s completely away from school. Any chance we can keep this zero-tolerance thing confined to the grounds?”

  I don’t wait for the answer, just pick up my backpack and head across the lunchroom.

  Coach Benson is an interesting case. Things are black and white with him. He can’t understand why I won’t play football and basketball for Cutter. I sat down and explained it to him once, told him how ugly I get when people start yelling and telling me what to do, but he said I was immature, that someday I would look back and regret not giving what I had to my school. He’s not the real enemy here. You have to admire the consistency in his life. He played three sports here at Cutter, was a standout defensive back at a small college in Montana, and came right back here to coach. He married his college sweetheart, and they’ve been together since. He goes to church, takes charge when any family in town experiences a crisis. I mean, you can’t dislike the guy, even when he blurts out his “zero-tolerance” policy on letter jackets. On the other hand, what kind of person has time to dream up a zero-tolerance policy on letter jackets?

  After school I catch up with Chris again. Actually, he catches up with me hanging out in the journalism room trying to outsmart the Internet controls the school puts on to keep us on the straight and narrow as we travel the information highway. I’ve just typed in “chicken breasts,” hoping the browser will spit back a little bit about chickens and a whole lot about breasts.

  “What are you doing?”

  I swivel in the computer chair; Chris is staring at the screen. “Medical research,” I say, clicking Exit. “What are you doing?”

  He shrugs, glances uneasily at the door.

  “You worried about Barbour? The football guys?”

  He glances at the door again. “A little bit.”

  I tell him this is the safest part of the day. “This is when we know exactly where all those gorillas are. They’re out on the football field.”

  Chris laughs. “Gorillas.”

  I say, “Big hairy gorillas in shoulder pads,” and he laughs louder. “In jock straps,” and he squeals. It’s like playing with a little kid. I say, “Look, Chris, I have an idea. Your brother was a pretty big guy, right?”

  “Yeah, he was big. Way big. He played football. And baseball. He gots drafted….” He hesitates, and tears of remembrance rim his eyes.

  “I know, Chris. Everyone remembers your brother. They have his picture in the trophy case so we won’t forget.”

  He launches into all the statistics next to Brian’s picture, but I stop him. “I know, Chris. I read it every day, just like you do.”

  He looks around the room and moves closer and in a near-whisper says, “I don’t really read it; some of the words are too hard.”

  I say, “Yeah, but you know what it says, right?”

  He smiles. “Right.”

  “Okay, here’s my idea. Your brother was big, and you’re not quite so big.”

  He smiles.

  “So actually the jacket doesn’t fit you very well. I mean, when you wear it, I can’t even see your hands.”

  “I think I’m not going to wear it. Those football guys said they was gonna burn it.”

  I say, “Yeah, that wouldn’t be good. Listen, now that you’re going to be a swimmer—”

  He smiles. “I’m gonna be a swimmer in the soft water.”

  “Right. Now that you’re going to be a swimmer in the soft water, we’ve got to have a way to identify you; you know, like let everyone know you’re a swimmer. I’ve got a great jacket at home that doesn’t fit me anymore. It has a big Speedo emblem on the back. Speedo is a company that makes swimming suits and goggles and stuff that swimmers wear. How about I give you that one, and you keep your brother’s jacket safe at home? You could put it someplace in your room where you can look at it every day. And then you can come to school in the Speedo jacket and everyone will know you’re a stud swimmer.”

  He laughs again, as if he’s never considered the idea of Chris Coughlin, the stud. br />
  He isn’t alone.

  CHAPTER 3

  Boys’ sports at Cutter High School are driven by the downtown alumni, who call themselves “Wolverines Too,” almost as much as it’s driven by the athletic department, or by Mr. Morgan, the principal. That bothers me because the power behind Wolverines Too is a guy I never forget to keep my eye out for. His name is Rich Marshall, and he eats what he finds dead in the road. Supposedly WT is a group of community-spirited Cutter graduates who hung around after graduation to make their fortunes in this mountain town of nine thousand people just far enough north of Spokane to be Hick City. In theory, their organization supports all Cutter extracurricular activities. That should encompass music, drama, honors society, the chess club, and, in my book, the kids who hang out on the smoking hill. In fact, it encompasses male jocks. Wolverines Too is basically a group of guys whose glory days unfolded on the Cutter athletic arena between the ages of fourteen and eighteen and who want to re-create those glory days through the lives of Cutter’s current stable of jocks. They “mentor” them, and sometimes find them jobs in their places of work. They’ve been known to raise significant dollars for football equipment or basketball uniforms when allocated athletic funds run low. In my memory they have never raised a dime for a girls’ team. I find it interesting that not one former female athlete belongs to the group.

  Rich Marshall encompasses most of what I believe is wrong with our species, and I don’t say that just because of his family’s civil-rights record, which is not unlike the Barbours’. The entire Marshall family operates in a permanent state of confusion because they can’t figure out who they hate most. Rich graduated the year before I started high school, so by all rights I should have never had contact with him, but a year after he graduated, his dad died of a heart attack and Rich took over Marshall Logging, which is probably one of the few viable logging companies left in the Northwest. Mike Barbour sets chokers for them in the summer at about three or four times minimum wage. I swear, Barbour’s the only guy I know with a full ride to high school.