At any rate, they both started into mental-health treatment, but Rich blew out of it in the first week. Anger management group and parenting classes got in the way of his drinking beer, a problem he solved by giving up the classes. Alicia got the kids back with the promise that she would stay in treatment and would never see Rich in their presence. That was perfect for Rich because he didn’t like the kids all that much anyway, and he could see her often enough to make sure she knew she’d never learn to live without him. In my view, learning to live without Rich Marshall is like learning to live without cholera, but nobody asked me.
As I walk toward my car from Georgia’s house, what I know is this: The feeling I had inside when Heidi and I were scrubbing ourselves “clean” will keep Rich Marshall in my life long after I would normally have had him surgically removed like a giant hemorrhoid. No way can I turn away from Heidi now; her sorrow for my color has to be repaired. I’m big enough-old enough-to stop guys like Rich, but Heidi’s not. Georgia’s right about bigotry: that absent the element of hate, a person’s skin color is only an indication of his or her geographical ancestry. But with that element, it is a soul stealer.
CHAPTER 6
Time passes, and the swim team gets better and better, not in the sense that we’re ever going to win a meet or even a race that I’m not in, but in the sense that no one is turning back.
Tay-Roy is turning into our go-to butterflyer. He operates on power and endurance, and big as those shoulders are, they are amazingly flexible. He doesn’t yet have the stroke timing right, but he’s down and back in the time it takes any of the others to get down. That alone won’t win races, but it will avoid crippling embarrassment.
Chris Coughlin is so glad to be a part of something he works like one of those potato bugs in my bathtub, and he’s as happy stroking away belly down on the bench as he is in the water. In fact, he likes it more because he can hear the music better. We’ve been democratic about music selection, and Chris likes Christmas music, so interspersed with all the rock and hard-driving country and rap (and Dan Hole’s “1812 Overture”) comes “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Chris likes the Gene Autry version.
Water is the very best place for Dan Hole because he can’t talk when his face is in it, and the longer he’s quiet the more likable he becomes. Simon has realized he doesn’t weigh close to three hundred pounds in the water, and after the first two weeks of working out and lifting weights, Interim Coach Oliver thought he saw the outline of triceps poking through the meat. I caught Simon later in the locker room when he thought everyone was gone, straightening his arm to flex, smiling and shaking his head. A boy and his muscle.
Interim Coach Oliver, the permanent uninvited houseguest of All Night, is an entity unto himself. As I said, he knows nothing about swimming, but he’s a master motivator and is a better influence the more screwed up the athlete is. Having brought Simon to playing with the idea that there’s a Tay-Roy Kibble inside him ready to burst through at any time, he’s focused his energy on converting Dan into a “regular guy who’s able to converse with his peers,” demanding ten push-ups every time he uses a word Oliver doesn’t understand. It’s too early to tell, but I think Dan has a better chance of building his pecs to Schwarzeneggerian bulk than dumbing down his vocabulary for the likes of us. The guy even bitches in high-brow: “I’m punished for bringing aristocratic flair to the language and vocabulary of these aquatic Cro-Magnons?” he says. “How can that be?”
Interim Coach Oliver belches and says, “You’re damn lucky I know ‘aristocratic.’ I ain’t so sure which ones were the Cro-Magnons. Gimme ten more.”
Interim Coach Oliver created a “station” system, wherein one station is the pool, one the surgical-tubing-bench-humping swimming, one a series of deck drills-jumping jacks to push-ups to sit-ups to dips. Three minutes all-out in each station, three times around, to the sound of Interim Coach Oliver’s booming voice, gets us going pretty good when we’re bored with the tedium of the long workouts. Three days a week we hit the weight room, where Tay-Roy puts us through a killer weight workout he dreamed up after reading how Olympic swimmers weight train.
Don’t get me wrong. In the long run a swimmer is the product of, more than anything else, the number of yards he or she can log in the water. We’re feeling good on the front end of all this, but when the season starts we’d better have some creative individual goals, because we’re going to get our asses kicked. If I have my way, though, when the season is over, there will be six guys stalking the halls you couldn’t have imagined wearing the holy shroud of blue and gold.
Things are less optimistic out in “real” life. Alicia Marshall must have told Rich she saw me in Heidi’s play-therapy session because every time I ran into him at school the next day, he squinted one eye as if he was lining me up in the crosshairs, then turned away. He doesn’t know I get power knowing he knows I have the goods on him. He’s a guy to watch every minute, though; I’ve never forgotten the look on his face the day he shot the deer. It could just as easily have been me.
It’s hard to know how paranoid to be. Both Rich and Barbour are consistent in subtly mentioning my “roots” at least one out of three times they say anything to me at all. The only person I know who relates to being nonwhite is Georgia, and she tells me that while she never forgets her heritage, her job on the planet is to be a voice for children, and that’s what she concentrates on first. “But I’m over forty,” she says, “and you’re almost eighteen. It’s one of those things you have to figure out for yourself. Things will look different when you get to college. The inland Northwest isn’t exactly the most ethnically balanced spot in the universe.” For the most part it’s not something I spend a lot of time with except when I hear some off-the-wall remark from Barbour, or when Rich Marshall is messing with my head. I said earlier the Aryan Nations fort is about forty miles from Spokane, in the Idaho Panhandle at Hayden Lake. Neo-Nazis from all over the country come there to “summer camp,” where they have war games and spout mindless slogans of racial purity. Sometimes they obtain a parade permit and march through the streets of Coeur d’Alene or congregate in Riverfront Park in Spokane. On the surface these guys look like a bunch of bozos. The Reverend Butler, the geezer who runs it, is articulate enough, but he’s crazier than an outhouse rat. And the smartest of the guys who show up for that camp can draw maybe one out of three swastikas correctly. I drove to Spokane to observe one of their rallies last year for a journalism story, and more than anything they looked ridiculous. I said that in the article, but Dad read it and asked if I knew that the guy who opened fire in a Jewish day care in Los Angeles a few years back had ties to those guys. Or whether I was aware a Jewish radio-talk-show host in Denver was gunned down by people traced back to this group. Or that a guy coming from somewhere in the South to support Randy Weaver, the white supremist who held off the FBI at Ruby Ridge, shot two people in the Spokane bus station just because they were a mixed couple. He didn’t want to alarm me, he said, but he wanted me armed with the facts.
Truth is, I wouldn’t give any of that a second thought-except when I went to cover the story, I swear I saw Rich Marshall standing in the middle of the park talking with one of the “officers.” They were whooping it up like old buddies. That didn’t surprise me all that much, and to tell the truth I couldn’t care less generally; he has the requisite I.Q.