Chris Crutcher - Whale Talk

“I took a job in a sawmill in a small logging town on my old route, worked a full forty-hour shift every week, then volunteered to sub for anyone calling in sick. I’d keep enough of my paycheck for rent and food and send the rest to the widow, but after a couple of months it started coming back. There was simply no way to get redemption.”

Dad always called the woman “the widow,” though I know he knows her name. He said he couldn’t bring himself to say it. “I sometimes consider those six hours,” he said, “when the deed was done, but I didn’t know it yet. Driving back toward Boise, letting my mind wander back over our slow lunch, the light in her eyes, her soft hair; I considered they might be the best six hours of my life. She was so…elegant. When she reached across the table in the Pine Knot and touched my hand, we both knew what would happen next. And yet, in those same six hours, when I was on top of the world, the world had already crumbled under me. I was riding back toward Boise on the cloud of a lie.”

Dad’s fifty-three now; that happened more than thirty years ago, and though he’s done whatever he needed to do to accommodate that astonishing incident into his life, I believe no day goes by that it doesn’t touch him in some way. My father will not have a mousetrap in the house; he slides a card or a piece of paper under a spider or potato bug to deposit it safely outside, rather than step on it. He won’t say it, but Mom thinks he believes the only way to buy his way out of hell is to protect every life that comes into his sphere of influence. Scary looking as he is, children flock around my father as if he were created by Walt Disney. He is the most patient man I know; it is a patience born of agony.

Dad doesn’t have that part of the male ego that gets edgy if your wife makes more money than you do. Mom makes a darned good living. Dad makes squat. What income he does have comes from restoring classic motorcycles, or making repairs in his garage at home. Everything else he does free. He’s a Guardian ad Litem, which is a volunteer through juvenile court to represent children in child-abuse cases. The state can’t afford to pay real attorneys to represent children’s best interests in court, so they train volunteers. It requires that he get to know the kids on his caseload, as well as their parents, and work with therapists and caseworkers to help reunite the kids with their parents, or get them out of there if it appears the parents can’t pull it off. He also volunteers his “play” services at a couple of day cares and works with the local Head Start coordinating play activities a couple of times a week. He could turn some of those things into paying jobs, but he told himself after the accident that he would never do anything for children for his own financial gain. I think it’s also the reason he doesn’t discipline me much. That comes from my mother. Because of Dad, I don’t even have a curfew.

It’s funny. Dad doesn’t attend church, and it is seldom I hear his spiritual take on anything. But the running over of that little boy almost turned him into a saint, as far as his public behavior goes. He still has his temper, and there are times when you just steer clear of him simply in response to the look in his eye, but I don’t know a human being in the world more determined to do “right.” Sometimes I wonder how much effect that event has had on me, how it might have been one of those awful trade-offs in which I got a lot more of my father’s attention through his quest for redemption.

Things start falling into place with the swim team. Unfortunately things also start falling into the water. All the guys but Andy Mott begin showing for the morning workout. All Night provides each of us a temporary free membership entitling use of the entire facility in return for placing a small logo on our tank suits and another on the chest of our warm-ups. So I guess you could call us the Cutter All Night Wolverines.

But big-time organization is in order. The narrow lanes do not accommodate circle patterns. For one thing, Simon DeLong’s particular body design barely allows for all of him in one lane, much less another person. It is increasingly clear that, while he may never be very fast, he’ll always start at an advantage off the dive when the competitors on either side grab on to the lane ropes to keep from being washed into the gutter. Unfortunately, during workouts, we play the parts of those competitors. Chris and Dan Hole are small enough to swim in one lane, but Chris’s mind tends to wander and it doesn’t come back until he’s had a header with Dan, who then stops to explain to him, in terms Chris couldn’t possibly understand, the theory behind circle patterns. Hell, I know the theory and don’t understand Dan’s explanation.

Tay-Roy and I tried to share a lane, but we both have shoulders like I-beams, and though we can pass each other nine times out of ten without incident, one of us will get hurt on that tenth time. The point is, swimming is supposed to be a noncontact sport and the All Night Wolverines are about to end up spending the lion’s share of our per diem on aquatic bicycle helmets.

Both Dad and Georgia say over and over that the universe offers up whatever we need whenever we need it. I think the universe offers up way more than we need most of the time, but they may have a point. One morning about quarter after four I’m sitting on the toilet at home, unloading the extra cargo before taking to the water, and I solve our space problem. Rain the night before has brought three or four little black potato bugs up through the drain and into the bathtub; the kind of bugs I said my dad scoops up and takes outside. When they get caught in the tub like that, without human intervention they’re doomed, because once they crawl to the curve of the tub they become like barefoot children trying to climb a glacier. If you’re Dad, that’s when you scoop them up, but it occurs to me that our bathtub is All Night Fitness for potato bugs. These babies have to be getting into peak shape, like the thong-leotard ladies on the treadmills at the real All Night, only nowhere near as easy to watch.

So between workout and school, I stop by Delaney’s Hardware and pick up some industrial strength I-bolts, get permission from the owner of All Night to secure them into the wall, hook plastic handles to surgical tubing, and run them through the I-bolts. So when four of us are swimming, the other three can lie on their stomachs on a wooden bench placed back far enough to get proper tension on the surgical tubing and swim in place. All Night has already granted us permission to crank up a boom box, so what could be an astonishingly tedious workout turns into a form of on-your-belly rock-and-roll dancing. It is getting us in great shape, though I’m pretty sure we don’t look much smarter than potato bugs. An aerial view of this would have to be ugly.

The other guys want to keep me in the water most of the time because if we are to score points, I’ll be getting most of them, but I won’t take more water time because I can rack up distance during off hours, and at this point camaraderie is as important as miles. I mean, we are going to have to like one another a lot to get through the season, and we are not exactly computer matched for personality compatibility.

One unexpected gain. Loud music at four-thirty is not conducive to sleep, so Oliver Van Zandt has become our unofficial interim coach until Simet can come on board, just after Thanksgiving, according to state regulations. Oliver knows squat about swimming, but he’s been an athlete all his life, so he studies the workout Simet and I prepare, and yells at us the entire time. This is truly becoming a Far Side swimming team.

I phone Simet late one afternoon after workout. “You need to take me to dinner.”