“Gotta happen sometime,” Dad told her. “Might as well see if you have the power to refuse him while you have some support.” Mom thinks we should try to catch him and add a few extra weekends in the slammer for breaking the no-contact order, but Dad says we should simulate real life as much as possible, and there will be a time in the very near future when Alicia has to figure out whether or not she’s going to be able to put the kids’ best interests ahead of her own. Heidi is doing much better, which means she’s meaner than a Doberman to her younger brothers, who have enjoyed Rich Marshall’s umbrella protection plan from the day of their birth. A new pecking order is being established, and nothing in me wants to stop it.
The hangups prompt my mother to order Caller ID, and between that and Last-Call Callback we discover most of the calls are coming from the pay phone at the 7-Eleven about eight blocks away. One of Rich’s logging truck drivers must have quit, so Rich is driving until he can hire another, and the convenience store is directly on his route.
Rich is also making his presence felt in more subtle ways. One day there is a Marshall Logging plastic travel coffee cup on the sidewalk across the street from the house. Another day a double-bitted ax is stuck in a tree in our backyard, a blue hard hat left in the vacant lot behind our place. We know it’s him but have no proof. There are several hundred of the coffee cups strewn around town, remnants of a campaign ploy Rich used last year in a failed run for a city council position.
“He’s watching us,” Alicia says just after Dad pulls the ax from the tree trunk. “He’s letting me know he’s around.”
Dad puts the ax in the garage, then stands in front of Alicia, placing his hands on her shoulders. “Tell me you haven’t been communicating with him, Alicia.”
“I haven’t. Honest, Mr. Jones. Not once. Since I’ve been here, not once.”
“I’m going to trust that,” he says. “What do you think he’ll do?”
She looks away, a flash of desperation passing over her face. “Something bad,” she says. “Rich obeys the rules up to a point, then he doesn’t care. When he thinks somebody is taking something that’s his…See, he doesn’t really care about the kids. I’ve always known that. It’s when he thinks he’s losing me.” She nods toward me. “He thinks I’m…you know, because of Willis…When it gets bad, I don’t know what would stop him.”
Dad’s face goes hard. “I’ll stop him.”
I’d put my money on Dad.
Late that night the phone rings, followed by an extra loud hang-up. Ten minutes later it rings again. Ten minutes later, again. All from 7-Eleven. Dad tells Alicia to answer it, then he and I hop in my car for a quick run to the store, where we discover Rich’s pickup idling next to a row of three pay phones. We pull up on the far side of the building so we can watch him catty-cornered through the store windows. His pickup door opens, and he takes the few wobbly steps to the phone. It’s obvious he doesn’t know this state has an open-container law.
Like a cat, Dad is out of the car and at the door of the phone booth, his knee wedged against it to keep Rich trapped. He whacks the glass hard with his hand, and Rich turns with a start. “What the fuck?”
“Nobody’s home,” Dad yells through the door.
“Who the-Get the hell away from the door.”
Dad opens it partway, blocking Rich from coming out. “Marshall, I’m standing here talking with you at midnight at a phone number that I can match up with my Caller ID, which means you’ve broken a no-contact order. It’s hard to tell if you’re dumber than you are mean, or the other way around, but I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and go with dumb. Which means if no one at my house hears from you for thirty days at least, I won’t report this.”
“Get the fuck away from me,” Rich says. “Lemme outta here.”
“Soon as you repeat back to me what I said,” Dad says.
“GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM THE DOOR!” Rich screams, but Dad forces it closed.
“Repeat it,” Dad says.
“Man, if you don’t want your ass kicked-”
“I do want my ass kicked, Marshall. And I want you to be the one to try. Now, you’re drunk and you’re screwing up big time, and if I were you, I’d cut my losses and go home.” Dad backs away from the door.
Rich comes out, looks like he’s going after Dad, but he gets a better look and, even in his altered state, reconsiders, which to my way of thinking is a very smart move for a guy drunk on his ass.
Dad says, “Rich, I’m doing my best to be decent to you, but if you keep stalking, I could get pretty uncivil.”
“Foster parent can’t do that,” Rich says. “You got rules.”
“Yeah,” Dad says. “I’m telling you, when it comes to protecting folks, I make my own rules.”
“You got a lot of guts, messin’ with a guy’s family.”
“And I wouldn’t forget that,” Dad says. “I’ve got a lot of guts.”
Rich turns for his pickup. “For a baby killer,” he says. “A lot of guts for a baby killer.”
Dad shows no reaction.
“Better keep your hands off my wife, Sambo,” Rich says as he brushes past me. “You and your daddy better watch your backs.” He’s in his truck and gone.
“You gonna call the cops?” I ask on the way back.
“We’ve got the evidence,” Dad says. “I’ll wait and see what happens with the calls and the artifacts. When a guy gets past a certain point, legal action just pisses him off. We don’t want Rich thinking he has nothing to lose. That’s the worst place for a stalker. If he thinks he can win something by staying away, maybe he will.”
I repeat Rich’s parting words.
“And we will watch our backs, won’t we, son?”
I agree that we’ll watch our backs.
Under normal circumstances Simet and I would take a school car or his Humvee to State, but he wants the team in on this and so arranges to borrow his uncle’s Winnebago, a vehicle so wide it’s illegal in three states. Luckily one of them isn’t Washington.
Because I’m the only one swimming, and because our struggle with the Athletic Council has become public, the students lined up to see us off this time look like those being sent home for writing a threatening essay. No cheerleaders, no marching band, and-surprise!-no one from Wolverines Too, which was out en force when the football team boarded the bus for State.
The ride over is great. Icko manages the beast as if it is a super school bus, with Simet in the copilot’s seat and the rest of us lounging in captain’s chairs and sprawled out on the beds. Mott wants to get one of those transparent maps you put on your back window, skip the meet, and see how many states we can color in before anyone discovers we’ve told the school to kiss our ass.
“Better get a map of the world,” Simon says. “It’s a question of them caring.”
Mott smiles from his sprawled-out position on the bed. “Better make it a map of the solar system.” Which launches Dan Hole into some discourse on astrophysics, until Icko informs him he doesn’t consider the season over yet, and Dan could “build up a real set of pecs talking about that stuff.”
The meet is held at the University of Washington pool, a pretty impressive place if you’ve been swimming in backwater towns of eastern Washington and northern Idaho. The water is just as wet and the pool just as long, but there are seats for as many people as usually see a basketball game in Cutter. Teams from all over the state, male and female, dot the deck and fill the practice lanes, and hordes of fans yell encouragement from the bleachers.
My races are spread over two days. The hundred on the first, and the fifty and two hundred on the second. It’s intimidating even though my times are fastest in the state for the hundred and the fifty. The other contenders are surrounded by teammates, all in flashy warm-ups with state-of-the-art workout bags, as opposed to my gray sweats and canvas bag.