Davis was pacing up and down the aisles, hands folded behind his back, smelling of Old Spice and trying to catch us cheating. He turned around at Chris’s desk, ready to retrace his steps, noticed Chris’s unpardonable sin, bent down and told him to reverse the order of the names. Well, the problem was that slow as he was, Chris has always gotten excited anytime he did something on his own, and having to change the order would mean he didn’t do it right in the first place, and he dug in his heels and refused to budge. By God, he had found those two words by himself and they were right and he wasn’t going to erase or scratch them out.
Davis said, “You can’t put your own name before the name of the Lord.”
Chris said this wasn’t the name of the Lord, it was Jesus’ last name.
Davis said they were the same thing; that lord was a title, like king.
That was way past Chris’s ability to understand.
Davis tried to explain that Chris simply shouldn’t put his name ahead of Jesus; it wasn’t right.
Then Chris said the smartest thing that was said all day. He said they told him at Sunday school that Jesus liked kids and He was nice. So He wouldn’t mind.
Davis made the mistake of saying Chris went to the wrong Sunday school, and Chris just sat there stupefied. Then Davis did the thing somebody should have shot him for; he made Chris stand up beside his desk, and he said, “Chris Coughlin thinks he’s better than Jesus.”
Davis didn’t know that Chris’s brother took Chris to Sunday school each week, that now Davis was treading on holy ground. Chris spun out, screaming that Davis was a liar, that nobody was better than Jesus and he did not go to the wrong Sunday school and he would be glad to bring his brother in here to kick Davis’s ass for saying that.
I got to escort him to the office, and he spent the next minutes trembling and trying to explain how he wasn’t better than Jesus and he went to the right Sunday school because his brother took him and his brother would never take him to the wrong one. Of course nobody there knew what he was talking about, and in the end, Chris Coughlin missed the Christmas party. Another day in the life…
I look at his aunt now, standing next to her beat-up Dodge Dart. She looks small and helpless, kicked by the world. “Really,” I tell her. “Chris could be a real swimmer if he stays with it.”
She smiles. “He’ll stay with it as long as there’s somebody like you to watch over him. He says you’re his hero. He’d do anything for you. It’s a moment for him. He doesn’t get very many moments. I just wanted to thank you.”
Before I can say another word, she is back in the Dart, driving down the road.
Man, what kind of a fucked-up world is this? You should have to be a lot more than decent to be a kid’s hero.
CHAPTER 8
Practices go better than I could have imagined through Christmas vacation. We’re still holding two a day, and all seven of us show for every one. Chris actually gets used to Andy sliding his leg under the bench before each workout, and at one point he sneaks over and touches it. Icko uses what little free time he has to study for his Class II driver’s license so he can drive the bus, for which the school district will pay him. He turns into our utility guy, coaching out-of-water activities and doubling as team psychologist (“You want to turn out like everyone thinks you’ve already turned out?”), tripling as manager in charge of making sure Chris always knows where his swimming suit and goggles are and that he isn’t terrorized by the existence of Andy Mott on the team or on the planet.
Our first road trip, which takes place on the second weekend back from vacation, sets the stage for our season. It’s an evening double-dual meet between us and two Idaho schools, which means it doesn’t count in the conference standings. Swim teams are spread pretty thin throughout eastern Washington and northern Idaho, so the travel can be grueling. We’ll be on two-lane blacktop most of the way, and the sky begins spitting snow as we prepare to leave. Icko, who has come straight from his job at Burger King, disappears into the school and returns with two burlap bags filled with tire chains, throws them into the back of the bus, and calls all aboard. Neither of the district’s two minibuses is available for the trip, so we’re traveling in what seems like a 747.
Mott puts on his headphones as he steps onto the bus, walks back to the last seat and lies down, disappearing from view. The rest of us, plus Simet, fill in the first three rows behind Icko and bring out the cards and Game Boys and reading material. It’s a seventy-mile trip that will take about two hours, given terrain and road conditions.
When we’ve been on the road fifteen or twenty minutes, I lean forward and tap Simet on the shoulder. “You ever figure out the letter requirements?”
He grimaces. “I was supposed to have them up for consideration by the Athletic Council before the first meet,” he says. “I put them off until the first conference meet.”
“I have an idea.”
“Shoot.”
“How about anybody who hits his best time each time he swims, gets a letter.”
He frowns. “You kidding me?”
“No, man, listen. This is perfect. Remember what it was like when you started swimming? You got faster by the week, just from the competition and the increased workouts and stroke technique. Seriously, I hit my best times every week for a couple of years when I started. Almost everyone did.”
He considers. “That was a long time ago,” he says. “I can’t be sure.”
“They probably didn’t have clocks back then, but trust me, it’s true. And here’s the beauty of it. The Athletic Council will never figure it out. I mean, if you asked the track team to do that, no one would letter.”
Simet smiles. “You might be right. I’ll tell them I could choose an arbitrary number of points, but that might be too easy because a lot of teams will have only one entry per event, and my guys would pick up too many easy points.” He thinks a minute longer. “One thing, though.”
“What?”
“You don’t tell any of these guys until after we swim tonight. I want them going all out for their first meet, so we know we’re getting the most out of them the rest of the season.”
“Fair enough.”
About a half hour from our destination, Coach walks back and slips Mott’s earphones off, calls for everyone’s attention. “Listen up,” he says. “How we do in this first meet sets the stage for the rest of the year, sets our goals. I want you to close your eyes and listen to me.” He pauses. “That’s everyone but you, Icko.”
Icko laughs. “Got my eyes on the road, boss.”
“Okay, the rest of you. Picture this. It’s a big school, a couple of years old. Two stories. The pool is at the west end. We enter through the north side of the gym and walk across the basketball floor to the lockers.” He goes on to describe the place in detail, from the lighting to the electronic timing pads, the coaches’ office, even the lifeguard stands. He wants us to visualize it, he says, because he wants it to be familiar. Nothing new or big or scary. The pool is longer, so we’ll have to get used to that during warm-ups, but remember it means fewer laps. There’ll be good swimmers, but they’ll have some guys who are new, also. Since we don’t know how we stack up, we just go out and hit the best times we can. Nothing we do tonight will be wrong. We’re just discovering who we are as swimmers.
“A double-dual meet is exactly what it sounds like. We swim against each team individually. It’s as if we’re swimming two meets. So we could lose to one team but score points against another. Again, just swim as hard as you can and have some fun. We’ll hit the pizza place on the way out of town.” Again he pauses. “Okay, anyone have any goals they want to state for everyone to hear?”