Chris Crutcher - Whale Talk

“I’m thirty years behind you on that one.”

Dad laughs. “Well, I’m still not going to let him get his hands on a kid if I can help it, but you don’t get like Rich is by being treated well all your life. I knew his old man, and he was one rough son of a bitch.”

“It’s hard for me to think of it like that,” I say. “I think of him shooting that deer or what it must be like to live with him. Nothing in me can like him. And guys like Barbour are just Marshall Lite. It’s hard to see them as victims.”

“No real reason you should,” he says. “You have to see everyone in relationship to you. Just because you understand the shit in someone else’s life doesn’t mean you don’t stand up for your own.”

He works meticulously on the bike as he talks, touching the parts, turning them over in his massive hands with the same care he uses in choosing his words. “I guess you could say, in the long run that incident changed about everything I believed. So much of what I’ve done has been in response to it. When I get a chance to play with a kid like Heidi, like with the french fries, it’s as if the universe is throwing me a bone, letting me earn my way back a little closer to balance. Giving her a place to live is a true blessing, way more for me than her.”

He falls quiet, and I stay awhile, handing him tools and watching the care he puts into his work

“Anyway,” he says later, “don’t get freaked out if you see me like you did in the bedroom. I’m just finding my way.”

I picture him back in the room, staring at-“The whale tape,” I say. “Why was that playing?”

He laughs again. “Ten or fifteen years ago I read an article in Sports Illustrated about this elderly couple who had spent their lives studying whales up close. They were two of very few people actually allowed out into the migratory paths of whales, and they spent time in the water with them. I don’t even remember the point of the article, but it made a case for the possibility that whales’ language is as sophisticated as ours, very intricate and precise. It also claimed that whale songs travel for hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles in the ocean.

“I was in one of those emotional places where I cursed my entire being. Mad at myself for not looking under the truck, mad at my parents and relatives and teachers for not warning me this kind of pain even exists in the world, mad at God for not looking under his truck and seeing me there.

“And I realized I had reached adulthood without even knowing what it is to be human. Nobody ever told me how dangerous it is, how risky. I started wishing I were a whale. At least they know what it is to be a whale. I mean, think of it. I walk outside and scream at the top of my lungs, and it travels maybe two blocks. A whale unleashes his cry, and it travels hundreds or even thousands of miles. Every whale in the ocean will at one time or another run into that song. And I figure whales probably don’t edit. If they think it, they say it. If some man-whale cheats on his wife, her anguish, her rage, her despair, is heard and understood by every whale who swims into the range of her voice. The joy of lovemaking, the crippling heartache of a lost child-it’s all heard and understood. Predators and prey have equal voice. The Mother Teresa whales and the Jeffrey Dahmer whales all have their say. Whale talk is the truth, and in a very short period of time, if you’re a whale, you know exactly what it is to be you.”

I watch a spider crawl across the ceiling toward the light.

“All that is exactly opposite of what it is to be human, at least for me. My parents were wonderful people, I suppose, but they didn’t want me to know what was out there. They didn’t want me to know the real skinny on sex or love or boredom or hate or disappointment. They sold me their wishes as if they were fact. After you saw me in the bedroom, I was embarrassed. I feel so weak when I get like that. But the truth is, that’s just the way it is with me some of the time, and you might as well know it.”

I tell him what I haven’t said. “I guess I was afraid you were suicidal.”

“Suicidal or not, I’m not going to kill myself,” he said with a smile. “If I were going to do that, I’d have done it a long time ago. What you need to know about your old man is that I always bounce back.”

I went to my room and tried to get some sleep, but I couldn’t help running Dad’s and my conversation over in my head. If we all spoke in whale talk, and I heard the voices of Chris Coughlin and Andy Mott and Simon DeLong, how would I put them in the same ocean with the shit that comes out of Rich Marshall and Mike Barbour?

By the second round of swim meets we look forward to the road trips as if they are vacations. We have attained a certain celebrity at meets, as Team Bizarro led by Superman. It turns out other teams have a few rookies who probably should have turned out for javelin catching, too, so we pick up unexpected points occasionally, but one coach called us the only team in the state that could actually make a swimming meet last longer. We have learned the trick bad hockey goalies have known forever. When the puck whizzes into the net for the eleventh time in the first period, pretend it didn’t happen. If you’re Simon or Mott or Jackie Craig, you just pull yourself out of the water as if they weren’t waiting for you to get out so they can start the next race. If you’re Dan Hole, you leap out, oblivious to all others, hustle to your workout bag, pull out your clipboard and a calculator, and chart your time. If you’re Chris Coughlin, you’re giddy just to hear your teammates clapping and chanting your name, and if you’re Tay-Roy Kibble, you flex as you pull yourself out and the entire crowd forgets why you were in the water in the first place. If you’re T. J. Jones, you kick exactly as many asses as dare dive into the water with you.

But the fun is the ride. We study first, then play sports trivia or word games on the trip to the meet, eat pizza and leak out little bits of our lives on the way back. Mott still sits in back listening to his Walkman most of the time, but once in a while he ventures forth to add one scary thing or another, or just listen. I’m gaining more respect for him as I get to know him. The guy has some serious demons, but he keeps them corraled most of the time. Speaking of whale talk, there’s a guy who couldn’t have known what to expect.

About four weeks from the conference meet our bus lumbers through the night on the way back from Pullman. Coach is sacked out in the seat behind Icko while the rest of us stare out at the carpet of stars laid across the moonless sky on this absolutely clear, subzero night. My father once told me the perspective of an entire generation-and of all generations to follow-changed in late 1968 when the early Apollo astronauts came back with the first pictures of Earth as seen from the moon. “It was the first time most of us knew how finite things are here,” he said. “A beautiful blue-and-white marble floating in a vast blackness; self-contained and totally dependent upon our care of it. If we poisoned it with our waste, or filled it with dissension and hate, we were pretty much locked in with it. From a physical point of view, God appeared a long ways off.”

I keep that picture taped on the inside of my locker at school, and on a poster on the wall in my room at home, alongside another poster of an entire galaxy being born as seen through the eyes of the Hubble telescope, alongside a poster of an atom, because I like to have my mind bent in the way only time and space can bend it. Are we huge or are we small? The distance between the protons and neutrons of a given atom, relative to their size, are as great as the distance between stars. If you were to look at each atom as a universe unto itself, think of the number of universes within each of us; at the same time, look at any one of us in the vast space I am seeing out the window of this bus, which is a molecule on a cell on a flea on a hair on a wart of the known universe. And I think of the power, the electricity, that dances between me and Carly, how the emotional part of that, the connection, sometimes seems so big it can’t be contained. How does that compare with the power of a lightning bolt, or of the nearly silent whisper of a breeze? Are we big or are we small?