Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes

  Ellerby slides to a stop in the packed snow in front of my house in the Christian Cruiser and blasts the horn, which plays a sort of sick tuba rendition of “The Old Rugged Cross,” then jumps out and starts up our ice-covered sidewalk. He nearly falls on his butt twice and calls to my mother to come skate couples with him. Mom opens the kitchen window to tell him to get that monstrosity away from her house before she calls a local Christian terrorist group, but Ellerby only smiles and says, “Hi, Mrs. Moby,” and drops dramatically to his hands and knees to crawl safely to the kitchen door.

  The Cruiser would be a true eyesore even in a nation of atheists. It’s a pale blue 1973 Pontiac station wagon with airbrushed clouds billowing from hood to tailgate. Bold black old English script, stretching from the front to the rear fender, announces THE WAGES OF SIN IS A BUCK FIFTY. A MIGHTY FORTRESS IS OUR DOG, in identical script, screams at innocent bystanders from the driver’s side, a testament to Ellerby’s lifelong commitment to his family’s rottweiler, Dick. (He sometimes threatens to give the dog to me just so it could be called Moby’s Dick.) And if you happen to be chasing Ellerby down in a police helicopter, a not altogether unfathomable possibility, you will be treated to ORAL ROBERTS TAKES ASPIRIN, an old Rodney Dangerfield line from the days when Oral healed all comers over Sunday morning television. Ellerby is a dedicated student of the history of Christian broadcasting. His car has been the target of more vandalism than the Berlin Wall in the two years since he unveiled it, but Steve is an excellent body and fender man, and he just drags it down to his uncle’s shop, pounds out the dents, and repaints it. It looks brand new.

  Ellerby whisks past my mother standing over the kitchen sink, patting her lightly on the butt. She has long since quit threatening to send his teeth home in a paper bag for that. “Call me a throwback,” he says, a wistful glint in his eye, “but when I see a teenage butt on a thirty-six-year-old woman, well, I just have to attend to it.”

  In my room he plops onto the chair next to my bed, where I lie staring straight up at the insides of my eyelids, listening to the Byrds full blast in my headphones from the CD player mounted on my headboard. Mom keeps me supplied with the finest in musical electronic hardware as long as I agree to buy one CD of songs recorded between the years 1956 and 1975 for every contemporary one. I’m hooked and I don’t even know what’s on MTV anymore, because I’m busy with Bob Dylan and Buddy Holly and the Byrds and the Rolling Stones and the Dave Clark Five and Turtles who are neither mutant nor ninja.

  So I’m lying here, lost in a world in which “for every thing there is a season,” and Ellerby’s hand on my foot almost launches me clear through winter.

  He picks The Best of Buddy Holly from the pile. “Half these people are dead.”

  I look at my watch. “Jesus, is it time already?”

  “Past time,” he says. “Our scales are crackin’ and peelin’.”

  Yesterday’s meet with South Central was the only one on this week’s schedule, so we have a free Saturday. When that happens, Lemry puts it to us to be sure we don’t peak too early in the season. She wants every kid at his or her fastest when it counts—for Regionals and State. Everything else is practice.

  Today’s workout is to be particularly dreaded because there is an asterisk beside it on the bulletin board, tabbing it as “special,” which in real terms means torturous. “Special” means “How much can you take?” and is freshly dredged from the very bottom of the barrel of Lemry’s fiendish mind. Today’s will be a hundred—count ’em, a hundred—timed one-hundred yard swims, starting at two-minute intervals. If you make it in a minute, you have a minute to rest. If you make it in a minute fifty-nine seconds, you have a second to rest. But that ain’t all. To remain in the workout, you must hit your time standard or faster, which is figured at ten to fifteen seconds slower than your best time in a meet, depending on who you are and what you swim. Miss your standard, swim no more. Also, every fifteenth hundred is butterfly, and like Walker Dupree in a book called Stotan! my idea of hell is swimming butterfly down a one-lane pool into infinity.

  A sane person would miss his time standard after about twenty and call it a day, but no true swimmer fits that description even loosely. There’s something about shared pain that keeps you going when you might back off on your own. And I would cram my tongue into a beehive and wiggle it wildly before letting her hear this, but when somebody puts as much into us as Lemry does, I’d die before wimping out on her. That goes for most of the rest of the team, too.

  Ellerby and I whip the Cruiser through the snowy back streets of Spokane, Mahalia Jackson wailing “The Lord’s Prayer” through the speaker mounted on the roof. I crouch low in the seat, my stocking cap pulled low in hopes I won’t be arrested as an accomplice to desanctifying the word of God.

  The Cruiser has caused a bit of a crack in the solidarity of our team—maybe even a chasm. Make that an abyss. Last year, Mark Brittain, who has brothers named Matthew, Luke, and John and a sister named Mary—need I say more?—beseeched Lemry to prohibit Ellerby from driving it to meets, including those at our own school, and to put a major squelch on his sacrilegious antics whenever he is any way representing the school or the team. Lemry told Mark to read the U.S. Constitution. Instead, Mark logged fifty more hours watching the Trinity Network, then took his complaint to the administration—with a petition signed by twenty-five or thirty of his faithful followers—requesting not only that Ellerby be banned from representing the school in his loathsome powder blue monstrosity, but that it also be outlawed in the student parking lot now and forever more, world without end, amen. Brittain had a friend in high places, because Mautz is the vice-principal here at MacArthur now, and Ellerby is about an ear hair above me and Sarah Byrnes on his list of primary candidates for live organ donors. Luckily for all us backers of western democracy, Mr. Patterson, our principal, is a man of justice and vision and knows—though he would never say it—that Mautz is a wart on the butt of humanity. Anyway, Patterson keeps Mautz from turning MacArthur into a prison camp, and that means the Christian Cruiser rolls on past the scorn of Mark Brittain and his disciples.

  I should probably also mention that Ellerby’s dad is a preacher. He’s the white, stiff-round-collar man at St. Mark’s Episcopal church, where Ellerby wears a robe and lights the candles every week. And they call me an enigma.

  My best hundred freestyle—a freak performance, actually—took me a little under 52 seconds to complete, so my time standard is 1.02. Lemry’s kind and rounds her numbers up. I’m best at long distances, the five hundred and 1650 freestyles, so time standards are probably easier for me to hit. Ellerby is a flyer—so much a flyer that his best hundred fly time is almost the same as his best hundred free, which is the fastest on the team. That gives him an advantage over me in this workout, because the fly requirement every fifteenth hundred makes me consider suicide, while it recharges him. I may have said—there’s something seriously wrong with Ellerby.

  The time span on this workout is more than three hours, but probably only five or six of us will go the distance. When someone misses a standard, they remain and cheer the others on, and afterward Lemry will provide pizza, delivered hot and fresh from Pizza Maria’s, and several billion gallons of Coca-Cola. We have ten boys and ten girls on the team, so it’s a nice little party, but there’s very little chance of it getting too intimate after that kind of workout. In my own case, I should say to keep the record straight, Las Vegas bookmakers get migraine headaches even considering the odds.

  “You up for this?” Mark Brittain leads the circle pattern in the lane next to mine, a tribute to Lemry’s genius. Either of us would willingly belly flop from the three-meter board onto pungi sticks dipped in dead animal rot before letting the other outlast us. Brittain can outsprint me any day at a hundred or two hundred yards, but repeat time standards are my game. He might touch ahead of me on the first twenty, but he can’t afford to beat me by far or he’ll waste himself for the stretch. We’re about equal in the butterfly,
so he has no advantage there, and though there’s really no doubt he’s a more talented swimmer, he doesn’t have the guts of a man with eight years’ verbal abuse from Sarah Byrnes. I have those guts.

  “Yeah, I’m up for this,” I say back. “How ’bout you?”

  “Don’t know. Been torn down a little lately. I’ll give it my best shot.” A cheap attempt at a psych job. Get me thinking he’s barely holding on at first, and then come after me. Even though the real competition is against the clock, it’s hard to ignore the guy in the next lane when he’s Mark Brittain. Sorry, Mark. This is a hundred hundreds. I own you.

  Ours is a regulation six-lane, twenty-five-yard pool. Ellerby, Brittain, and I lead circle patterns in adjacent lanes so we can see each other—another stroke of Lemry’s genius which seems to keep our competitive juices flowing. My group and Brittain’s have four swimmers each and Ellerby’s and the rest have three. Fastest swimmer goes first, with the others leaving at three-second intervals, swimming on the right, just like on the highway. Pass down the middle, and if you catch the person in front of you on one repeat, you go first on the next.

  The shrill blast of Lemry’s whistle ricochets around the high walls, and the swimmers in Brittain’s lane each drop to one knee, clasp hands, and bow their heads. Brittain leads them in a quick prayer asking God to let each do his or her best. On the far side, Ellerby drops to both knees, throwing his head back as he stretches his arms wide, and loudly begs Jesus to come swim the laps for him. When there’s no answer, he opens one eye to a squint and asks if John the Baptist is home. “Damn,” he says in the face of no response. It’s old stuff and Brittain’s squad doesn’t react. Lemry sighs and shakes her head. Any conflict will keep us going. She knows we’ll need every bit of love and hate we can muster to get through this.

  The first ten repeats go down easy for everyone. At fifteen, the first of six flys, we get a hint of how this will end. Seven people drop out after forty-five—the third fly—six of them boys. The girls would gloat, but by now the idea of using even one calorie for oral communication is unthinkable. At sixty we lose two girls. At sixty-one, when the first of Brittain’s group succumbs, Ellerby breaks the code of silence to ask Brittain’s Lord why he has forsaken them, but after that the only sounds to be heard are the constant churning of the water interrupted by the slap of feet and calves on each flip turn, the shrill blast of Lemry’s whistle, and the urgent whine of eleven wheezing, oxygen-deprived idiots sucking every last molecule of breathable air out of the chlorine-filled atmosphere.

  At eighty-five, seven of us remain, and I’m holding less than a half-second under my time standard, cursing myself for my one miraculous hundred-yard freestyle during the second meet of the year—which was within two-tenths of Brittain’s best, giving us both the same standard. I’m touching ahead of him now, have been since about thirty-five, but not by much. I feel at a disadvantage setting the pace, because he knows I won’t miss. That means I have to think and swim when all he has to do is swim. Mostly I’m just looking for reasons to hate him because he’s such a pompous turd, and the power of that particular emotion will get me through this.

  At ninety, we swim our last fly. There’s no time standard on the flys, but butterfly is butterfly and at this point a slow one is just as hard as a fast one, and the important thing is the recovery time between repeats. Brittain and I finish in a dead heat at about a minute forty—Ellerby beats us by an easy ten seconds—and for the first time I think I might not be there for the final ten; twenty seconds’ rest just might not do it. Ellerby gives me the high sign—he’s alone in his lane by now—indicating he’ll set the pace for this one. If I can hit the next two, I’ll recover.

  We hit the water on the whistle and the surge of power I normally feel through the first lap is absent. I see Ellerby coming out of the turn a half body length ahead of me and know I have to pick it up on two and three to have a chance. Brittain is hanging with me, continuing to let me work the strategy so if I miss, at least he won’t have done any worse than I did. That pisses me off, and I have a good second lap and feel a little power gathering when I flip into number three. At the end of three I’m out of gas and running on the simple knowledge that if I give it up to pain and go all out, I’ll have a minute to catch up, and I grit my teeth and sprint for the finish, touching a tenth of a second under my standard, in a dead heat with Brittain. Ellerby is a half body length ahead.

  Nine more.

  Ninety-two is a carbon copy of ninety-one, and now I know I’ll make it. Only three boys remain; four girls. The rest of the team is revived sufficiently to urge us on loudly, chanting our names on starts and finishes.

  Before the whistle on ninety-five, I look past Brittain to Ellerby and nod, raising my eyebrows. Ellerby nods back. We’re greedy. We want to make it, want Brittain to fold.

  Ellerby holds up two fingers—the number of seconds we’re going to take this one under the standard—and I nod. If we can pull it off, Brittain won’t know what hit him; he expects us to cut the time standard by a razor’s edge.

  When Lemry’s whistle blasts, we hit the water and I reach to the bottom of my reserves for a strong first lap. Ellerby does the same, and of course Brittain goes with us. Ellerby and I wring tenths of a second out on laps two and three, then kick all out on four. Brittain goes with us. We finish a second and a half under our standard.

  Astonished realization passes over Mark’s face when he sees the clock. He’s not a distance man, and for him the jig is up. I smile and gasp, “Good swim.” He misses ninety-six by a full second, and he’s gone. Ellerby and I and two of the remaining girls finish the last three and Pizza Maria is banging on the door.

  Mark Brittain is pissed.

  The devil made us do it.

  The euphoria of our conquest drives me through the subsequent feeding frenzy in high gear, but within minutes of devouring my last slice whole, I begin to slip. Deep heat radiates from every muscle, and as that warmth consumes me I could fall asleep on the bare deck, but I still have to visit Sarah Byrnes, so I slap high fives all around and get Ellerby to shower with me and swing me home low in his sweet chariot.

  “Guess we did a dance on Brittain,” Ellerby says, settling behind the wheel.

  “Guess so,” I say back, sliding down in the seat.

  “It’s hard to resist. He’s so damn righteous; such a dumb, plastic God Squadder. Sometimes I wish I could have religion their way. You know, no responsibilities in life but to cut down people who don’t think the way you do.” He waves a hand. “Aaahh. It’s not worth talking about. But we burned him, didn’t we? I knew we could get him. He’s such a leech he couldn’t check out his own body to figure out we were doin’ him in.” He pounded the steering wheel. “God, I love justice.” He looks over at me. “Goin’ up to see your friend?”

  I nod.

  “You like her.” It isn’t a question.

  I nod again.

  He starts to say more, but doesn’t, and we ride over the silent snow-covered streets to my house, chuckling every once in awhile when one or the other of us pictures Brittain’s face the moment he realized he’d been duped.

  At home, I grab Mom’s car to negotiate the icy streets across the South Hill to Sacred Heart, thinking of those days long ago when I held onto Sarah Byrnes like the only life raft in truly tempestuous, treacherous seas. She pushed her scars directly into our tormentors’ faces, while I disappeared into my cottage cheese carcass like a scared turtle in a soft shell, watching her wage our war of the outcasts alone. It’s really hard to imagine how afraid I was then; how I pulled the covers over my head at night and prayed to hurry up and get older so I wouldn’t care so much. It’s also hard to imagine how I ate as much as I did.

  The population of the Child and Adolescent unit is down on weekends. There are no classes and no therapy groups going, and a few older kids sit reading while others quietly play games. Younger kids trail nurses and counselors like pull toys from spot to spot.

 
Sarah Byrnes sits on the same spot on the same couch where I left her. Laurel isn’t here, but a big, young guy named Sam is taking her place, and he approaches as I sit making conversation with myself in hopes Sarah Byrnes will latch on to something she wants to talk about.

  He says, “You must be Eric.”

  I nod, shaking his extended hand. “Anything different? Has she been on this couch since yesterday?”

  Sam smiles and shakes his head. “No. She sits in on all the activities. She just isn’t talking, that’s all. We know she hears and understands because she does whatever we’re doing.”

  “She eating okay?”

  Sam nods. “Weight is good. She doesn’t eat a lot, but then she’s not burning a lot of energy.” He squats beside us next to the couch. “Was there an event that set this off?”

  “Not that I know of. She was sitting in American Government class and just tripped out. When the bell rang, she didn’t move. It couldn’t have been in response to anything we were talking about because we were answering the questions at the end of the chapter.”

  Sam nods, then grimaces. “Well, if you think of something, or if you know anyone who might shed some light on this, let us know. I’m told you’re her best friend. You should know the more you come and talk, the better chance she has of coming out. Talk about old times, you know, familiar things.” He pauses. “What do you know about her father?”

  I look sideways at Sarah Byrnes and say, “I’ve known Sarah Byrnes since grade school, but she’s only invited me to her house three times, and her dad was never home. He’s mean, though, I’ll tell you that. Mean big time. I know for a fact he wouldn’t let them repair her face when she first got burned. He seems awful proud of how tough she is.”

  “What does she say about him?”

  I remember her threatening me with her fists when I tried to talk about her father in junior high. “Not much.”

  Sam scratches his head. “That fits what we’ve seen. He’s come up twice—didn’t stay more than ten minutes either time. Does she have any other close friends? Anyone who might know something about her, or push her a little?”