Chris Crutcher - Whale Talk

He says, “How’s Heidi?”

“Georgia’s on her way over. She’s okay, I think. I mean, shit, it’s hard to tell. Mom and Alicia are fixing her arm.”

The line goes dead.

There is a certain way my dad gets that makes you nervous; kind of the opposite of his Zen, let-it-be self, and this cold, get-the-job done countenance is a good indicator.

The main-line phone rings three more times without a follow-up call from Dad, then on the fourth they ring almost simultaneously. “Hey,” I say.

“Is the phone ringing?”

“Yup.”

“Got him,” Dad says. “I’ll get him on tape a couple more times. Be sure the Caller ID registers time and date.”

I check it. “It is. Dad?”

“What?”

“Then what?”

“Then I’m going to have a little talk with Rich Marshall about how to treat kids.”

“Where are you?”

“Never mind, T. J. He’s already got the racial thing going with you. I don’t want you anywhere near this.”

“Okay,” I say. “But tell me where you are anyway, just in case something happens, and I need to call the cops.”

Dad knows me too well. “I’ve got my cell phone right here. If I need cops, I’ll call cops.”

Shit.

“You wait there and make sure the technology is working.”

We have Call Waiting on both lines, so I can use the phone while I’m waiting for Dad to call again, and I do that to call AT &T to track down the pay phone locations, but those guys are nine-to-fivers and I would have to “push 1, 2, or 3” a whole bunch of times just to find out they will be with me tomorrow.

The next call comes from Rich, followed quickly by Dad.

“He’s calling,” I say. “Turn on that camera and make him famous.”

“No sooner said than done,” Dad says. “One more for safety’s sake.” And the line goes dead.

But my daddy’s not so smart as him thinks, as Chris Coughlin might say, because I recognize the next number that comes up from having given it to Carly’s dad about ten times one night when I wanted her to call me back at Wolfy’s. I don’t know what’ll go down when Dad and Rich Marshall come face-to-face, but if it’s at Wolfy’s, Dad could easily be outnumbered by a whole lot of folks with Rich’s sensibilities, so I’m moving down the road in my speedy Corvair in the time it takes me to tell Mom to watch the phones. She wants to call the cops, but I convince her not to crank this up bigger than it needs to be as I’m walking out the door. The look in my father’s eyes when he saw Heidi’s arm keeps my foot heavy on the pedal.

Wolfy’s is less than a mile from the house, and Dad is putting the camera away as I pull into the lot, gets almost to the door before he sees me.

“Goddamn it, T. J., I told you to stay there.”

I look through the front window at Rich talking to Mike Barbour and a couple of his friends. I tell him I’m just here for crowd control.

He walks in and right up to Rich, shoving his fingers deep on either side of his Adam’s apple, pushing the back of his head against the window. It’s so quick and silent most of the patrons don’t even turn to look. Marshall gasps for air. In my dad’s softest voice he says, “Marshall, I’ve got you on tape three times calling our house, which is a direct breach of the no-contact order. I’m not sure how many times you have to hear this to believe it, and I can barely believe I’m giving you one more chance. About forty-five seconds before I left the house, your stepdaughter came out of the bathroom with her forearm bleeding because she tried to change the color of her skin with a Brillo pad. You told her it would work.”

Barbour moves toward Dad and so do I, shaking my head. “You should be home resting for your swim competition.”

“Fuck you, Jones.”

We glare, but he stays put, and Dad finishes his proposition. “Now, I can run these pictures over to the police and let you have a few days more in the slammer, or you and I can make an agreement right here and now that you have called my house, and stalked your family, for the last time.”

“This is assault,” Rich squeaks through a partially closed windpipe.

“Yes, it is,” Dad says.

“Fuck you,” Rich says. He sounds like Donald Duck, and Dad pinches harder.

“That’s not the right answer.”

Rich’s face is bright red, headed through the rainbow toward darker colors. He can’t talk, so he nods his head in panic, and Dad loosens his grip. By now patrons are noticing something is wrong, and the night manager starts around the counter. “Is there a problem here?”

Dad looks at Rich. “Is there a problem here, Rich?”

Rich’s mouth is pinched, moving toward a sneer, but he says, “No. No problem.”

“Good,” Dad says, and looks at the manager. “No problem, Sam. I’m sorry if I stirred things up. We’ll be going,” and he moves toward the door.

I back out behind him because I don’t trust either Marshall or Barbour any further than I could punt them. Rich stands massaging his throat and glaring at Dad, and then me, with pure hatred.

The next morning what little slack there is between Barbour and me is drawn tighter than a bowstring. He stands around with his blockers watching my every move, as if somehow that will intimidate me. What he doesn’t know is I’m visualizing his muscular body sinking to the bottom of the pool at All Night when skinny little Chris Coughlin swims him into submission. He has no idea how badly I want a clean shot at him myself, a little self-defense action to render him infirm. Under normal circumstances I could bait him in front of his friends and bring him right at me, but Dad was clear that he doesn’t want any escalation with Marshall or Barbour. The connection between Rich and Mike is unclear, but it’s definitely there, and the bottom line is that Heidi and the twins have to be kept safe at all costs and, of course, if we can pull Alicia back under the umbrella, hooray for us.

Georgia was there when we got back last night, working through Heidi’s stuff with her, and before she left, she stopped in my room.

“Don’t want you getting into a bunch of mess over this,” she said. “You got to be a professional. You work for me.”

“But as a professional,” I said back, “you’ve got no problem with my defending myself.”

“No, but I have a problem with you creating a situation where you have to defend yourself.” Georgia knows me like a well-read book. She said, “You listen to me, and I told your daddy the same thing. The way Rich Marshall is acting right now tells us he’s less rational than usual, which means he’s not rational at all. And it wouldn’t be all that hard to get that Barbour boy cranked up right with him. They may not be brothers, but they came out from under the same rock, which means if you mess with one of ’em, you’re messing with the other. If you want to kick somebody’s ass, you get some gloves and do it in the ring.” I told her I had an even better plan than that. I had somebody lined up to do the ass kicking for me.

The scenario at All Night Fitness is almost surreal. Several coaches and a couple of athletes from the Athletic Council are there, along with football players to cheer Barbour on. Icko runs the workout to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, while Benson and Simet watch from the pool deck. Simet was quick to agree to that; he knows the story about Icko bending rebar for Barbour’s benefit back when Barbour was still threatening Chris about wearing his brother’s jacket.

Chris is big-time pissed at me. “Why I gots to do it?” he says. “Why not somebody with muscles like Tay-Roy?”

“’Cause you’re the guy who can take him,” I say, “and because you’ve got a reason to get even. Remember how he scared you?”