Dad said, “Don’t take it on.”
“Meaning?”
“Leave it alone. If you don’t exercise authority over it, your authority won’t be undermined.” Then Dad asked if Morgan knew how my clothes got that way, and Morgan said there wasn’t a hearing citizen in the county who didn’t.
“And what are you doing about it?”
Morgan said it was outside school jurisdiction, a matter Dad and Mom could take up with the legal system if they so desired.
“Tell you what,” Dad said, “we’ll let it ride. And that should be a relief to you, because you’ve got this maniac running loose in your school and he’s not even a student. T. J. knew what he was getting into when he went to the clearing; it’s not as if Rich Marshall’s reputation is a secret.” Then he said, “Let me give you a piece of advice that could make your life easier. The last time I tried to power struggle this kid, he was five years old, and I was at least three years too late. I doubt you’ll have any better luck than I did. If you suspend him, we’ll support him however we have to. Truth is, I think this is a free-speech issue.”
Mom was more succinct. “Suspend him and deal with our attorney.”
Mr. Morgan was not one to welcome outside intervention, particularly of the legal variety, but he also didn’t like being strong-armed with the culprit right there in the room. “What will you do if Rich takes matters into his own hands?”
I said, “He did that.”
Mom said, “I’m assuming you have some control over an alumni group whose name is all over the printed programs for your football and basketball teams.”
“Whose members you allow into your school building on a daily basis,” Dad added.
“Of course, but that control is limited.”
Dad said, “You make sure our son is safe during school hours and I’m sure he can take care of the rest. He’s already survived the best Rich Marshall has to offer.” He stood up, dwarfing Morgan. “We could have made a lot bigger fuss over this, sir. If I had a brain in my head, I’d get a restraining order that would put Rich Marshall three states away from my son. But T. J. talked me out of that. For now. If there’s a scent of trouble, you will be getting some very bad publicity.”
I wore my bloody garb of protest through the end of the week to no further administrative challenge. In the end I was proud to have forced Rich to take the head shot, spoiling the fawn as a trophy. There’s always a pearl somewhere in the shit. Mom was proud she made the school think we had an attorney that wasn’t her.
I can’t look at Chris Coughlin without seeing myself. At one level that’s strange; he’s maybe five-eight and a hundred-thirty pounds, and before I got him swimming, five of those pounds were dirt. He can’t have three percent body fat, and in a swimming suit you can see the outline of every tiny muscle in his body. He’s pale as chicken gravy, and his eyes are dull as automobile primer. Only when he’s tickled does a light flash behind them.
That could be me. When my bio-mom Glenda was at the top of her druggie game, she would leave me for days, propped in the crib or the car seat, sucking on an empty bottle, crusted food on my chin and four-days-unwashed shirt. Strange men came in and out of her place at will. I’ve heard my mom say a thousand times that if you give her a drug-addicted mother with a kid under two, she’ll give you a ninety-five percent chance of that kid getting molested or beat or both. I guess ninety-five kids had already gotten it, because I have no sense of that ever happening to me.
But the wrong guy, pissed at Glenda and whacked out on crank, could have changed the way my mind and body respond to the world in a heartbeat. So when I see a guy like Chris Coughlin eating shit, it’s personal, and I mean in a bottom-level, core, DNA sense. Sometimes I trick myself into thinking I’m this righteous dude who stands up for the downtrodden, sort of a spiritual Robin Hood, an independent superhero who goes his own way, but the reality is, most of the time it’s not a choice. Even though I have all these gifts, these physical and intellectual treasures, when I see someone getting kicked I feel it. Georgia, who was my childhood therapist, says it’s because those first two years were full of losses, and even though I don’t remember them in my mind, my body-my being-remembers.
So as this Far Side team assembles, I know I’m choosing an arbitrary battleground. Knee injuries aside, there is nothing inherently wrong with organized football or basketball, and there are guys who play and guys who coach who I have nothing but respect for. But sports here are too big a deal, the jocks get too much, and that doesn’t leave enough for the rest of us. That wouldn’t bother me as much except for the way Barbour and some of the real gung-ho guys use Chris and guys like him as examples of what happens to someone who wants a little piece of it, if only through the fading, worn letter jacket of his dead brother, as if they’re delivering some message to the rest of us. I’d better be a little careful, or this could get too important.
A few days pass before I root out any more potential Aquamen-no Aquawomen are stepping up-but I do encounter a guy who will turn out to be integral to our swimming fortunes. Even before Simet strikes a deal for use of the pool at All Night Fitness, I start training on my own. Like I said, a lot of how you do in the last meet of the year depends on the number of miles you put in long before the first. I decide to swim late at night or early in the morning to avoid fifty-year-old ladies running laps up and down the lanes (what kind of workout is that?) and the Sidestroke Club, which is a group of ten or fifteen men and women who think they can get in shape swimming sidestroke about eight miles a day. I hate to tell them, but swimming sidestroke is the exercise equivalent of putt-putt golf.
I’m psyched to get going, and I wake up for my first workout at 2:30 A.M. All Night Fitness really is open all night, twenty-four hours a day, fifty-two weeks a year, Christmas included. I go overboard from the start, hitting the weight room first, alternating between upper body and legs, covering all the muscle groups; twelve reps on heavy weights, drop ten pounds for ten reps, drop ten more for eight. When my muscles feel like tapioca, I head for the pool, determined to flip my turns only at the shallow end so I can use that underwater shelf to knock myself silly enough to actually consider this project an intelligent undertaking. I’m not in good enough shape to hold my stroke for long distances, so I swim eighty-yard repeats leaving every minute-thirty seconds until there is an even chance the night guy will have to siphon me out of the scum gutter.
I’ve got to learn to start slower.
In the locker room I peel off my suit and stumble into the sauna. It’s stone cold, so I flip the switch and sit naked on the cool redwood bench waiting for heat, breathing deep, feeling that sweet burn in my arms and chest.
A voice from nowhere. “You leave that on, you’re gonna give me night sweats.”
My yell ricochets off the walls like a bullet fired into a stainless-steel freezer. I see no one at first, then a foot slides out from under the bottom bench, followed by a leg, followed by a guy who turns out to be Oliver Van Zandt. He puts a finger to his lips. “Shut up or you’ll bring in the night guy.” He is dressed in gray sweatpants and a T-shirt, with a completely white beard and hair falling to his shoulders; looks like Gabby Hayes with muscles.
I say, “Man, you scared me to death.”
“If I had, you’d make less noise.”
“You fixing something under there?”
He opens the door, glances around the empty locker room, pulls it shut quickly. “I live here.”
“In the sauna?”
“In the club,” he says, and proceeds to detail a schedule that includes a full shift at Wendy’s followed by one at Burger King. His son is a sophomore at U of W in Seattle. He can’t afford a mortgage and tuition, so he joined All Night for just under thirty bucks a month, works out, showers and shaves here, and sleeps hidden out between the hours of eleven and four-thirty or so, when the place is virtually empty.