After school I catch up with Chris again. Actually, he catches up with me hanging out in the journalism room trying to outsmart the Internet controls the school puts on to keep us on the straight and narrow as we travel the information highway. I’ve just typed in “chicken breasts,” hoping the browser will spit back a little bit about chickens and a whole lot about breasts.
“What are you doing?”
I swivel in the computer chair; Chris is staring at the screen. “Medical research,” I say, clicking Exit. “What are you doing?”
He shrugs, glances uneasily at the door.
“You worried about Barbour? The football guys?”
He glances at the door again. “A little bit.”
I tell him this is the safest part of the day. “This is when we know exactly where all those gorillas are. They’re out on the football field.”
Chris laughs. “Gorillas.”
I say, “Big hairy gorillas in shoulder pads,” and he laughs louder. “In jock straps,” and he squeals. It’s like playing with a little kid. I say, “Look, Chris, I have an idea. Your brother was a pretty big guy, right?”
“Yeah, he was big. Way big. He played football. And baseball. He gots drafted…” He hesitates, and tears of remembrance rim his eyes.
“I know, Chris. Everyone remembers your brother. They have his picture in the trophy case so we won’t forget.”
He launches into all the statistics next to Brian’s picture, but I stop him. “I know, Chris. I read it every day, just like you do.”
He looks around the room and moves closer and in a near-whisper says, “I don’t really read it; some of the words are too hard.”
I say, “Yeah, but you know what it says, right?”
He smiles. “Right.”
“Okay, here’s my idea. Your brother was big, and you’re not quite so big.”
He smiles.
“So actually the jacket doesn’t fit you very well. I mean, when you wear it, I can’t even see your hands.”
“I think I’m not going to wear it. Those football guys said they was gonna burn it.”
I say, “Yeah, that wouldn’t be good. Listen, now that you’re going to be a swimmer-”
He smiles. “I’m gonna be a swimmer in the soft water.”
“Right. Now that you’re going to be a swimmer in the soft water, we’ve got to have a way to identify you; you know, like let everyone know you’re a swimmer. I’ve got a great jacket at home that doesn’t fit me anymore. It has a big Speedo emblem on the back. Speedo is a company that makes swimming suits and goggles and stuff that swimmers wear. How about I give you that one, and you keep your brother’s jacket safe at home? You could put it someplace in your room where you can look at it every day. And then you can come to school in the Speedo jacket and everyone will know you’re a stud swimmer.”
He laughs again, as if he’s never considered the idea of Chris Coughlin, the stud.
He isn’t alone.
CHAPTER 3
Boys’ sports at Cutter High School are driven by the downtown alumni, who call themselves “Wolverines Too,” almost as much as it’s driven by the athletic department, or by Mr. Morgan, the principal. That bothers me because the power behind Wolverines Too is a guy I never forget to keep my eye out for. His name is Rich Marshall, and he eats what he finds dead in the road. Supposedly WT is a group of community-spirited Cutter graduates who hung around after graduation to make their fortunes in this mountain town of nine thousand people just far enough north of Spokane to be Hick City. In theory, their organization supports all Cutter extracurricular activities. That should encompass music, drama, honors society, the chess club, and, in my book, the kids who hang out on the smoking hill. In fact, it encompasses male jocks. Wolverines Too is basically a group of guys whose glory days unfolded on the Cutter athletic arena between the ages of fourteen and eighteen and who want to re-create those glory days through the lives of Cutter’s current stable of jocks. They “mentor” them, and sometimes find them jobs in their places of work. They’ve been known to raise significant dollars for football equipment or basketball uniforms when allocated athletic funds run low. In my memory they have never raised a dime for a girls’ team. I find it interesting that not one former female athlete belongs to the group.
Rich Marshall encompasses most of what I believe is wrong with our species, and I don’t say that just because of his family’s civil-rights record, which is not unlike the Barbours’. The entire Marshall family operates in a permanent state of confusion because they can’t figure out who they hate most. Rich graduated the year before I started high school, so by all rights I should have never had contact with him, but a year after he graduated, his dad died of a heart attack and Rich took over Marshall Logging, which is probably one of the few viable logging companies left in the Northwest. Mike Barbour sets chokers for them in the summer at about three or four times minimum wage. I swear, Barbour’s the only guy I know with a full ride to high school.
Rich and I got crossways of each other when I was a freshman, after he shot a deer out from under me.
Let me back up a bit and say I don’t get it about guns and male bonding and becoming one with your father or uncle by killing some animal born unfortunate enough not to know what a malevolent subspecies the human predator is. To quote my favorite philosopher, Chris Rock, “What kind of ignorant shit is that?” I think people don’t consider sometimes how arbitrary things are. If this country had been founded by photographers, fathers and sons could bind their connections bringing back pictures of the animals they now bring draped over the hoods of their four-wheel-drive pickups. They could do that now if they understood that the whole hunting thing got started back before you could get meat at a drive-up window. But when an activity has outlived its usefulness in this country, we keep it alive by calling it a sport. It’s a sport to drive to the edge of the woods and fire a nine-hundred-mile-an-hour missile that tears a hole in its target before that target even hears the crack of the rifle. Listen, if you want to make a sport of deer hunting, take any weapon no sharper than an antler, chase it down, and get it on. Yeah, yeah, the deer would then have the advantage of speed, but you’d still have the overwhelming advantage of malicious intent.
A digression into politics there, but I’m better now.
I was recounting how I got on the bad side of Rich Marshall, as if there were a good side. I was a freshman, hanging out at Durfee’s Chevron with a bunch of guys my age, drinking pop and listening to heroic stories about their first football season, which they were in the middle of. It was the final weekend of deer-hunting season. Rich had already decided Barbour was going to replace him as Jabba the Jock and had taken him under his wing like out of some United Way Big Brother from a negative universe. Rich and Mike and Mark Wyberg roared into the station in Rich’s big ol’ Ford dually, one of those monster pickup trucks that runs on diesel, with dual wheels in the rear and a camper on the back that he still claims every cheerleader in school has been naked in. I swear, if God had made Rich choose between that ugly truck and his you-know-what, which he claims is also supersized by McDonald’s, it would have been a three-day decision. Anyway, he stormed into the front office yelling, “Any you guys not got your deer yet?”