Chris Crutcher - Whale Talk

“Hey, Tay-Roy. T. J. Jones. I’m trying to get enough guys together for a school swim team. Mr. Simet wants to coach it…actually, to keep from having to be an assistant wrestling coach.” I go on to give him the downside: no real pool, all “away” meets, basically giving him every excuse to say, “Excuse me, my Caller ID shows an important call” and unplug his phone, because I know the hours he puts into his music, not to mention the bodybuilding.

“Actually, that sounds kind of fun. I’m kinda burned out on the bodybuilding thing. You have to travel too far to catch the drug-free contests, and the price of regular supplements is killing me.”

I ask if he swims much.

“I can chase down my water ski,” he says, laughing. “Actually, I swam the river, over and back, from Boulder Beach last summer.”

That isn’t bad. It’s more than three-quarters of a mile across there. I tell him that’s farther than I’ve swum in the last year and sign him up. If nothing else, Tay-Roy is plenty familiar with All Night Fitness. When he’s working out for a contest, he’ll spend more time on that little bump of a muscle that pops out right next to your elbow than I spend on my entire upper body. He even knows what that muscle is called.

So if I can convince Chris to swim, and Dan assesses the situation in our favor, we’ll have at least enough swimmers for a relay. Who knows what else will come floating up from the bottom?

My quest gains momentum the next day while I’m pitching the team one more time to Chris Coughlin at first lunch, and look up to see Barbour standing over us with a couple of offensive (I won’t say how offensive) linemen. Talk about thinking football is life . Cutter could win it all this year, and football guys are gods. Before the first game is even played, Barbour is being talked about as first string All-State. The one thing that could make me play football is if I could transfer to another school and go up against that asshole. Anyway, it’s clear he’s going to loom until I acknowledge his presence, but I leave him unattended until Chris appears ready to bolt out of sheer terror. “Barbour the Barbarian,” I say finally. “What can I do for you?”

“I wanna talk to the dummy.”

I point to Greg Steelman, the lineman beside him. “So talk.”

He points to Chris. “That dummy.”

“Christopher may not be matriculating to Harvard,” I say, “but he’s plenty smart enough not to waste his time in discourse with you. What do you want?” Matriculating. Discourse. Dan Hole is lodged in my brain.

He glares at Chris. “I said I was-”

I stand, shoving my chair back hard enough to send it crashing to the floor-bringing us into focus as objects of attention from five tables in every direction-then step forward. Steelman puts a hand on my shoulder, but I brush it off with enough force to let him know he’ll at least get his hair messed up messing with me. “If you call my friend a dummy one more time, I’m going to take you apart. I know, you’re a hotshot football stud and you think nobody has your number, but even if I don’t, we go at it, we get three days to cool off, and that means you miss three days of practice, which makes you ineligible for the game Friday. It makes me ineligible for a math test. So go ahead, Barbour, sound off.” I think I said I’ve spent a record number of days out of school for letting the heat that starts in my gut rise all the way, and I do my best to keep that under control, but the day I take Barbour out will be worth finishing the year homeschooled.

Coach Benson, the head football coach, spots us from his lunch-duty spot by the door and hustles over. “What’s going on?”

“I’m just keeping these two apprised of the school athletic code; how nobody wears a letter jacket but the guy who earns it.”

I translate that for Benson. “He wants to tell Chris Coughlin one more time he can’t wear his dead brother’s jacket.”

Chris puts his head down, and I touch his shoulder. “Sorry, buddy, I shouldn’t have said it like that.”

“There’s pride in being an athlete at this school.”

“There may have been before you peed into the athletic gene pool,” I tell him.

Coach Benson says, “Mr. Jones, there’s no call for that kind of language.”

“I’m just speaking in his native tongue, sir.” I realize I stepped onto dangerous ground with Benson, who is a stickler for courteous language, so I follow with, “Sorry, sir. You’re right. What I should have said is that Barbour is a stud football player with everything going for him, and it ticks me off when he takes after somebody like my friend Chris, who has a tough time protecting himself.”

Coach looks at Barbour.

“I didn’t take after anybody,” Barbour says. “Like I said, I was just bringing these guys up to speed on the letter jacket rule. Just the stuff we talked about in the Lettermen’s Club meeting.”

Benson is the adviser for the Lettermen’s Club, so whatever they talked about, he knows.

I put my arm over Chris’s shoulder. He’s wearing an old Levi’s jacket, nearly worn through at the elbows, which couldn’t have been washed since he entered high school. “This isn’t a letter jacket,” I say. Chris stands silent beside me, eyes darting like it’s his first day on the prison yard. I say, “Hey, man, take off, okay? I’ll catch up with you later. And we’re agreed, right? You’re gonna swim?”

“Maybe,” he says. “It sounds hard.”

I say, “Very soft. The water’s very soft.”

He laughs.

When Chris is out of earshot, I turn back to Barbour.

“I caught him wearing his brother’s jacket again at the bowling alley last night,” Barbour says. “What kind of pride can we have if-”

I say, “Coach, I don’t want to be disrespectful with the language again, so I might need a little help with this. What’s an acceptable term for chickenshit?”

“You’re on thin ice, Jones.”

I take a deep breath. Even Benson has to be reasonable on this one, if I don’t push him any further into Barbour’s camp. “Okay, what’s an acceptable term for a big-time football hero who’s threatened by a brain-damaged kid so scared he can barely make it through a school day without hyperventilating himself into unconsciousness, wearing his dead brother’s letter jacket because it’s the only thing that gives him any connection to his brother and therefore to this school?”

Coach scratches his chin. Interesting how you can say almost anything you want as long as you don’t say shit or fuck or any word derivative thereof. I’m getting a handle on the communication thing. He says, “I’ll admit it’s a different situation with the Coughlin kid, but the jacket is a symbol of excellence. The Lettermen’s Club and the school Athletic Council have adopted a zero-tolerance policy on this.”

I’m speechless a second; it doesn’t fit that a grown man could be that dumb. I say, “What do the Lettermen’s Club and the Athletic Council have to do with making school policy? They have an administration for that. They have a school board.”

“That’s true, Jones. But in case you haven’t noticed, Cutter High School lives and dies on its athletic reputation. Eighty or ninety percent of the respect shown this school is for its athletic accomplishments.”

“Shown by who?”

“By other schools, by townspeople who vote on tax levies and make other kinds of financial contributions. Believe me, Jones, the athletic department in this school has plenty of power-which, by the way, you could have shared in, had you had any school spirit. You could be wearing one of these jackets, Jones.”

“Coach, I wouldn’t wear the same brand of underwear Mike Barbour wears.” This seems like a good time to back out of this conversation, so as not to tip my hand. I say, “I don’t know if you heard Barbour correctly a minute ago, but he said he saw Chris wearing Brian’s jacket in a bowling alley. That’s completely away from school. Any chance we can keep this zero-tolerance thing confined to the grounds?”