I love the way life can put things in perspective for you. I’m worried about pulling it together enough to qualify for State in swimming while I put a little grief into Mike Barbour’s life, and here’s a guy who spends more than sixteen hours a day working for minimum wage with no benefits, who has given up his home so his son can escape the same fate. As I lie in my warm, comfortable bed, drifting off for a couple of hours before school, my quest seems less daunting.

CHAPTER 4

Within the next two weeks we round out our swim team from the Sahara with guys cut from football and cross-country. (How do you get cut from cross-country?) I head over to the gym on both cut days, take down the names, spend a couple of days matching them with faces, then issue a personal invitation to those I believe would look most out of place in a Cutter High School letter jacket. Simet does his part by cementing a deal with All Night Fitness that allows us three hours workout time per day; one at 5:00 A.M. and the other two right after school. He stretches things a little, telling them I was once an Olympic hopeful, and that if I make it big, he’ll make sure All Night gets good press.

“You told them I was an Olympic hopeful?”

“There must have been a time or two when you hoped you’d go to the Olympics someday,” he says.

Ah, semantics.

“So how many more do you have for me?”

I say, “Drafted ten, landed three.”

“Any that stand out?”

I smile. “Simon DeLong.”

Simet flinches. “Simon DeLong weighs three hundred pounds.”

“Two eighty-seven,” I tell him. “And he’s grown an inch. He’s almost five-eight.”

“How did you get him into a swimsuit?”

“I let him do that himself.”

“Yeah, but how did he find one?”

“That was the easy part. I sent the Speedo people a body shot and told them he was determined to deck himself out in their stuff. Federal Express showed up a day later with swimsuits, warm-ups, goggles; all from Tyr. Shipped directly from Speedo headquarters.”

Simet knows I’m lying but appreciates the humor. He shakes his head in true amazement. “God, what’s it going to be to put Simon in a circle pattern?”

I say, “Dangerous.”

“Who else?”

“Know a kid named Jackie Craig?”

Simet says he knows him by sight, but that’s about it. Jackie is nondescript. Medium build, brown hair, about five-ten; the kind of guy who could get away with robbing 7-11s because even if they caught him on camera, no characteristic would stand out. He’s been cut from J.V. football.

“And last but not least?” Simet says.

“Andy Mott.”

“Is that why you told me about Simon DeLong first?”

“You have to admit, never in the history of Cutter High School has a team of this diversity been assembled.”

Simet considers, then, “I admit that.”

If you look in the dictionary under surly, you’ll find a picture of Andy Mott glaring back at you so hard the edges of the page will curl. He walks with a strange limp, though I don’t know anyone who knows why. It isn’t something you’d ask, and it isn’t something he’d offer. He’s a junior; a big guy, close to six-three. Tay-Roy says he benches major pounds and can do as many pull-ups as most guys can do sit-ups. In the hallway he limped up to me and said, “Heard you’re looking for swimmers,” and I said, “Yeah,” and he said, “Sign me up,” and it occurred to me that was eight more words than I’d ever heard him speak. I said, “Okay,” already wondering what that would do to the long bus trips we were in for.

I start showing up at All Night around three-thirty every morning, knowing every mile I swim will pay off at the end of the season. Oliver Van Zandt says he’ll pay me five bucks a week to find and wake him so he doesn’t have to sleep with one eye open for the morning aerobics woman setting up for the early class, or some maintenance guy coming in early to make a pool repair.

He works out with me on weights, then watches me swim. It’s nice to have the company.

At least things on my romantic horizons are calm through this, which I believed at one time would never be the case. I need that calm, rational, straightforward support in guiding this Bart Simpson swimming team through football city, and Carly Hudson gives it to me.

When my parents adopted me, they sent me to a child therapist because my two-year-old rage scared them. Her name is Georgia Brown and, simply put, she saved my life. I don’t remember specifics, but she’s quick to tell me I was a true hellion with an astonishing temper even by her standards, and she’d worked with kids like me almost ten years by then. In the face of the slightest frustration, I’d leap into the air, throw my legs straight out and land as hard as gravity would allow, or run, screaming, headlong into the side of the bathtub. If some other kid in my day care took a toy from me, or even had a toy I wanted, I went for that toy with malice aforethought, and all who resisted paid dearly. Mom and Dad took me to Georgia ’s playroom (in her home) once a week to work out the rage that accompanied the loss of my mother and the hours upon days of being left unattended.

Normally Georgia doesn’t work with kids over five, but she either took a liking to me or didn’t want my name on her list of future mass murderers, so though I don’t see her formally now, when I feel the need I show up on her porch. She warned me back in junior high that I would have struggles with girls. “Lots of kids with your early childhood history have a real problem being left,” she said. “The first girl you run into isn’t likely to be the one for you, nor are you likely to be right for her. That will also be true of the second and the third. Which means what?” and before I could answer, “You’re gonna get left, darlin’. Plenty of times. Get it through your peanut head.”

Georgia gets away with calling my head peanut because she’s mixed race, too. She’s fond of saying if they called in an airstrike on the two of us having coffee, they would wipe out two-thirds of the people of color in town.

At any rate Georgia gave every warning I needed to avoid the landmines of love, and I proceeded to march into battle and step on every one. All the way through junior high and early high school, I picked girls flattered at how much I was willing to do for them. I carried their books, traded the best parts of my lunch for their sorry peanut butter sandwiches with no jelly, even did their homework. Each one loved it right up until she couldn’t answer her doorbell without seeing my smiling face and started inventing reasons to ditch me, at which point I turned into a pint-sized stalker, walking by her house to see if she was home and who might be visiting her, calling and hanging up when she answered-all stuff that could get me arrested as an adult.

At the end of each crushing love affair I went to Georgia, and each time she told me, “Honey, you’re always wantin’ to make yourself indispensable. You figure if you help them with their worst problems, they’ll never leave. Since you can’t figure out exactly what their worst problems are, you help them with all their problems. Any girl who will let you do that is pretty sick. Healthy people want to solve their own problems, which, by the way, you have plenty of. Best way to be healthy in any relationship is to take care of yourself and let the other person do the same.” She asked did I understand her.

I said I did, and to prove it I went right out and fell in love with Carly Hudson. I mean facedown in the soup in love; head-banging, eye-popping, short-of-breath, plead-with-the-universe-till-your-voice-box-is-raw kind of love. The kind of love so deep that, when it’s not going the way you want it to, your ancestors moan. She’s a jock, which appeals to me out of the chute. Dark hair, dark eyes, makeup applied with a subtle artist’s eye and hand. There is no butt-twitching or flirtatious glancing or any of the symptoms that usually rocket me to Hormone City, but her natural sexuality is jarring.