So Barbour has the jacket buttoned at the bottom and pulled down around Chris’s shoulders so he can’t move his arms, and his nose is about an inch from Chris’s. I can’t hear what he’s saying, but tears squirt out of Chris’s terrified eyes and his entire body trembles. I hustle over and insert myself between them, put an arm over Chris’s shoulder, and say, “What’s the matter, buddy? You look like you’ve been staring into a giant asshole,” and move him a few steps down the hall, adjusting the jacket. Chris is hyperventilating, barely able to breathe.
“When you see one of those,” I tell him, loud enough for Barbour to hear, “you gotta close your eyes and pretend it’s not there. ’Course it helps if you also hold your breath.”
Barbour’s hand clamps onto my shoulder, and I turn in mock surprise. “Barbour! ’Sup, man?”
“I was talking to him, shithead.”
“That’s Mister Shithead to you. You were talking to my buddy Chris? He has to get to class. I run his complaint department, though, right, Chris?”
Still speechless, Chris nods.
Barbour says, “Fine. I’ll tell you. Next time I see him in this jacket, I’ll take it off him and burn it. You earn one of these if you’re gonna wear it at this school, something you’re too chickenshit to know anything about. It’s an honor to wear these colors. You don’t put on the jacket your brother earned. That’s an athletic department rule.”
I say, “Doesn’t apply. Chris isn’t in the athletic department,” and Barbour says, “Yeah, well, in this school an athletic department rule is a school rule.”
“Guess that wasn’t in my orientation packet,” I say. “What’s the matter with you, Barbour? You know the deal with Coughlin’s brother. Is this prick thing habitual, or do you work at it?”
“One of these days you’re going to find out, Jones.”
“I lie awake nights, waiting for that day.”
Barbour says, “I’ll save my energy for a white man.”
“Because of your limited I.Q. I’ll give you one of those, my friend. One more will get us both a three-day suspension.” Barbour’s family is famous for their send-all-the-Japs-back-to-Japan-with-a-nigger-under-each-arm attitude, so I feel like I have to hold my own.
We stand facing each other a few seconds, and finally Barbour reiterates the athletic department’s zero-tolerance position on letter jackets and walks away. I pat Chris’s shoulder and tell him not to worry about it and start for class, but look back to see him stuffing the jacket into his locker, trying in vain to cram it behind his books.
I walk back, pull the jacket out, and hand it to him. “Chris, you can wear it. It’s okay.”
“He said it was a rule.”
“He lied. You can wear it anytime you want.”
“He said the athletic department gots a rule.”
“It belonged to your brother, Chris. You wear it. If Barbour gives you any more trouble, you come tell me, okay?”
Chris stares at me.
“Okay?”
“Okay.” He says it without conviction.
As I turn the corner for class, I glance back again, and Coughlin is frantically stuffing the jacket back into the locker.
I stay in the afternoon to catch up on an article for the school paper, and catch a flash of blue and gold as I pass the janitor emptying the day’s leavings into the Dumpster. I wait until he moves back inside and take a look, and sure enough, drag a Cutter High letter jacket out, with COUGHLIN lettered across the back.
Later I drive over to All Night Fitness to see if there is any possibility I can train in that pool. We have a family membership, so I spend time there already, but almost never in the water. Since it’s the only indoor pool in town, All Night rents it out for parties and YMCA swim lessons and women’s and seniors’ water aerobics classes. I hope to swim a few laps to get a feel, but a sign on the entrance says PRIVATE GROUP. I push the swinging door open and stand just inside.
A young man and woman in Y T-shirts stand with lifeguard poles at either side of the pool, and Y staff people are spread out through the crowd like Secret Service at the White House Easter Egg Roll. Political correctness aside, the water and deck are filled with kids who look like they’ll be getting the very best parking places for the rest of their lives. In the far lane Chris Coughlin helps a little girl with shriveled arms on a kickboard. The girl locks her gnarled elbows over the Styrofoam board and kicks while Chris pulls her along. The noise is deafening, but I watch him patiently help her extend her feet, toes pointed inward to propel herself properly, then release the board long enough to let her move under her own power for a few kicks until she becomes still in the water. Then he pulls her a little farther. I am struck with how completely comfortable he seems in the water.
His brother’s jacket is still in my car, and I intend to go get it, but when I yell to get his attention he glances up, then quickly away, and I know my presence embarrasses him, so I just wave. He looks ashamed. How messed up is that? You get treated like shit, then have to be ashamed that you’re the kind of person people treat like shit.
I stay a few minutes, imagining myself trying to get a decent workout in that abbreviated pool. It doesn’t look promising. But as I drive through the quiet dusky streets of the uncharacteristically warm Cutter fall, Chris’s ease in the water flashes before me and suddenly the mathematics-the relativity-of it all hits me. If it kills Barbour to see a guy as far out of the mainstream as Chris is, wearing a letter jacket that doesn’t belong to him, how far up his nose will it get when he sees him wearing one that does belong to him? And suddenly I hear the voice the universe-and Simet-wants me to hear. It says, “Swim.”
CHAPTER 2
Among his many other quirks, my father, John Paul Jones, is a TV buff. He doesn’t sit around staring at it all day, but he religiously records certain programs to watch later. Usually they are jock interviews or hourlong biographies or educational TV documentaries about animals whose faces are carbon copies of their asses, or about black holes and the Hubble space telescope and anything about whales.
One interview Dad watches over and over, and believes should be shown at the beginning of every athletic season at Cutter High School and to every coach and administrator and athlete who ever hears the cheers of his hometown crowd, is an interview that Roy Firestone of ESPN did with Arthur Ashe not long before the tennis great died of AIDS. Ol’ Roy was the king of drawing tears, but he was way out of his league because if anyone ever got tears out of Arthur Ashe, they would never be tears for himself. So after several attempts, Roy leaned forward and said, “Arthur, when you’re all alone, do you ever just look up and say, ‘Why me?’”
Arthur looked him straight in the eye, and in that soft, steady voice that came to represent the very meaning of integrity before his death, said, “Why not me?”
Dad says Arthur knew something that eludes most of the jocks and coaches and administrators at Cutter: that the universe doesn’t create special dispensation for a guy because he can run faster or jump higher or thread the needle with a fastball. He knew that we take what the universe gives us, and we either get the most out of it or we don’t, but in the end we all go out the same way.
So I hang back after Simet’s class while he’s gathering our papers off his desk.
“Don’t leave me hanging, Jones. Morgan is closing in on me about the wrestling position. He says with the shortage of male teachers this year, we’re all drawing extra duty.”
“The testosterone shuffle.”
He picks up his grade book. “Let’s see, how are you doing in my class?”