Cutter High School has many rituals I could do without, but none is more annoying than the special assembly before each new athletic season. The athletes from the teams are introduced, and the captain and coach have to make a short speech about team goals and what it means to compete for Cutter.
We operate on a shortened class schedule that day, so the assembly lasts the entire final hour. Winter sports include basketball, wrestling, volleyball, gymnastics, and now swimming. To this, I have not been looking forward. We will parade our band of merry men before a crowd of more than seven hundred students that includes the members of the state champion football team.
The other teams have a large number of returning lettermen, so the gym floor is covered with blue and gold by the time we are introduced, dead last, fitting for the spot we are sure to place in the conference. Icko has taken an hour off work and follows Simet onto the floor decked out in his Burger King uniform. I’m behind him, followed by Chris Coughlin, who is so seriously traumatized by having to walk in front of that many people that I have to keep saying, “Stay with me, Chris. Stay with me, Chris. Chris?” I hear the laughter and turn around to see Jackie Craig run into him because Chris has stopped when someone in the bleachers calls out, “Dummy!” A moment later we watch a teacher hauling the culprit out, but Chris is still paralyzed and Jackie’s nose is bleeding from the collision. I take Chris’s arm, bring him next to me, and tell him to stare just above the top bleacher and hum “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” in his head.
Simet introduces us as a new team with a good chance of getting points at State to help Cutter out with the all-sport state championship. When he introduces Icko, several people shout out orders for a burger and fries. Then I’m introduced as captain to a mixture of cheers and boos. I’m fairly popular, but there’s not a student in this school who doesn’t know I’m considered a slacker for not turning out for football and basketball. My speech is short. I tell them our goal is to finish the season with as many swimmers as started. Mott picks up a couple of days of I.S.S. when he hears somebody snicker at his name and gives the entire crowd a double middle-digit salute.
All things considered, we weather it pretty well.
The experience starts me obsessing on the idea of embarrassment and humiliation. Truth is, I have no idea how I stack up against the rest of the swimmers in the state, don’t even know who the best ones are. I downloaded last year’s best times off the Internet, but I still can’t get a fix on where my times fit; I get an extra turn each hundred yards because we’re swimming in a twenty-yard pool, give or take a couple of feet for the underwater shelf that also prevents me from flipping turns at that end. For a sprinter, starts and turns are absolutely crucial. All I can do is work out as hard as I possibly can, and start checking my times against the best times after our first meet, which isn’t until after Christmas vacation. Meantime, the trick is to get in as much distance as possible so I can avoid both embarrassment and humiliation.
That evening, just after I drop off Carly to head home, having completed a science experiment with steam and the interior of a Chevy Corvair, a car pulls up close on my tail. I’m just paranoid enough to know it’s got to be Rich Marshall or one of the jocks from the football team, ready to let me know one thing or the other about letter jackets or patriotism to good old Cutter High. So I drive around awhile, through some tougher parts of town, back and forth down some alleys. Out by the old cemetery I try to ditch whoever it is, inching through the graveyard itself, then accelerating as quickly as a Corvair can without dropping the engine onto the street. My evasive action doesn’t have the same effect of James Garner’s Camaro in the old Rockford Files TV show, and I finally pull up in front of my house, jump out, and rush back before whoever it is can get their driver-side door open, then prop my knee against the door, ready to do whatever business is needed.
The window rolls down slowly, and I’m face-to-face with Judy Coughlin, Chris’s aunt. She says, “Goodness, were you lost?”
I know nothing about this woman except that she took over for Chris’s mother when Chris came out of the hospital after the Saran Wrap incident. Before that, when he lived with his mom, any bad guy who wanted to got his hands on that kid and did what they wanted. I look at him sometimes in the water, think of what a stud his half-brother was, see that natural stroke, the possibilities that might exist for him if he didn’t have to wait almost a full second after I say go to actually jump in the water.
I start to make up some wild story to explain my circuitous route home, before realizing a couple of sentences into it that I must sound like the goofball of the universe. “Never mind,” I say. “I’ll pay you money not to tell my dad.”
“I just wanted to thank you,” she says.
“For what?”
“You know, for taking my nephew onto your swim team.” She looks tired, and grateful.
I say, “Hey, I need him more than he needs me. He’s not going to be a bad little swimmer.”
“He’s been in school twelve years,” she says. “This is the first time in eleven years anyone has paid one bit of attention to him, other than to make him drink urine out of a Seven-Up can or trick him into giving a dog an erection.”
I know all the Chris Coughlin stories. His hard times have come at the hands of teachers as well as kids, some of them not nearly as major as the Seven-Up incident, but just as devastating in the long run. Through the years Chris was always with our class part of the day, being mainstreamed in art and music, and of course he was present for class functions like Christmas parties or class plays.
In fifth grade our teacher was a guy named Sanford Davis. That year was the first most of us had a man teacher, and we were pretty excited about it, ready for someone to challenge our budding masculinity. But Mr. Davis wasn’t exactly the hands-on mountaineer we had in mind. He was the new preacher at the Mountain Bible Center, and he ran his classroom the way I imagine he ran his church, with a holy iron fist. He tolerated exactly zero bullshit in his classroom. We sat in rows, the person with the best grades in the front seat to his far left, moving down the academic gradient to Chris Coughlin in the back seat of the right-hand row. Every three weeks he went through his grade book and reseated us. The one person who never moved was Chris; his position was nailed down by a good twenty points. Davis often used him as an example of an “unfortunate” and threatened on a regular basis to put a student in a desk behind Chris, which I suppose would have had to be considered educational wasteland. He talked about Chris as if he weren’t there, though most of the time it was hard to tell if that bothered Chris or not. He would hear his name, look up, then go back to what he was doing. I now know he felt every sting. He’s slow, but he gets the basic stuff just fine. Seven years later the mention of Davis’s name brings a crinkle to his nose.
We were waiting for the designated Santa, and Davis was killing time having us make all the words we could out of the word Christmas. The concept of moving letters around to do that was beyond Chris, but he saw two right off; his own name and what he believed was Jesus’ last name, and he wrote them down in that order.
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.