Carly moves quickly through the crowd to my side. “You sure you don’t want me to come see this?” she asks. “You’ve never missed one of my games.”
“I’ll tell you again what I tell my parents,” I say. “On the boredom scale, watching a swim meet is one step below watching mold grow. Come see me at Hoopfest.”
She says, “Come see me at Hoopfest.” And I say, “Will do.”
The bleachers at the conference pool at Frost are packed; swimming is a much bigger thing among schools with swimming history. There’s only one guy in our conference who can challenge me in the sprints when I’m at my best, and that’s Scott Wakefield from Frost. He’s within a tenth of me in the fifty and two-tenths in the hundred. A couple of guys have slightly better times than mine in the two hundred. The big sprinters are on the coast, around Tacoma and Seattle. The fifty at State would look like a six-way dead heat if it weren’t for the electronic touchpads, but over here Wakefield and I should blow the field away. I’m gaining a bit of celebrity on our side of the state, partly because of the number of black swimmers any of them have seen, and partly because it’s by now well known what our training facility looks like. The Spokane and Wenatchee coaches have already approached me to swim on their summer teams-they think I could actually make the Olympic trials down the road, with proper training-but I’m pretty sure this will be my last season in the water. Spring is around the corner, and I’m antsy to resume honing my basketball skills for Hoopfest. I believe there are no black swimmers in the swimming hall of fame because swimming is no damn fun.
We are not prepared for Chris’s response to crowds. He’s been gathering confidence every time he touches the wall and sees his time is faster than the last, which, by the way, speaks to his ability to learn, because he knows the second he sees it. The swimmers on the other teams know his story now and always cheer him on. This kid hits times that would win fourth place in the 11-12 age group of a novice meet, and every time he finishes, the crowd erupts. He has taken to blowing kisses toward the cheers.
He and Mott are entered in the five hundred freestyle, and the entire team from Moses Lake chants his name as he steps onto the block. He turns and waves, smiling wide and basking in the glow as the starting gun fires. The crowd screams, “Go!”-which confuses him, and he watches in bewilderment as the field pulls away. Jackie has the presence of mind to run over and push him in, which should technically disqualify Chris, but the judges give us leeway, and once he hits the water, instinct takes over and his arms rotate like propellers. Adrenaline alone puts him back on pace for his best time at a hundred-fifty yards, and when he sees his time at the finish, he squeals. His opponents have passed the word not to get out of the water before any of our guys finish, and though it’s only a prelim, they all duck under their lane ropes to congratulate him. Something about the entire experience makes me like these guys a lot.
The rest of the meet is uneventful. I lose the fifty by a hair, but I didn’t get the best start, so I’m not worried, and I win the hundred by almost a half body length. I finish third in the two hundred, and we climb on to the bus in the late Saturday afternoon darkness with the best meet of our lives under our belts.
We get our traditional pizza to go, and soon we’re on the highway, having entered our mermen’s cocoon for what we believe is the last time. The school won’t fund any of the other guys to go along with Simet and me to State. We get mileage for Simet’s Humvee, a double room at Motel 6, and per diem of fifteen bucks a day each. The football team stayed at the Doubletree.
As we roll over bare roads through the cold, clear night, Simet stands next to Icko, facing us, holding tight to the bar by the door. He says, “Guys, I’ve been with some good teams in my time. My AAU team took fifteen swimmers to Nationals when I was sixteen, and several of us made it to the NAIA finals my junior and senior years in college. But I’ve never had an athletic experience like this one. I’ve never swum on or coached a team where not one swimmer backed off on even one repeat. I know there’s been controversy over whether or not you guys should letter, but most of that controversy is being caused by guys who couldn’t carry your jocks, if you had any. There is not an athlete at Cutter who has more right to wear the blue and gold than the guys on this bus.”
“Fuckin’ A,” Mott says from the back of the bus.
“Fuckin’ A,” Coach says right back at him.
“Fuckin’ A,” Chris Coughlin says, and covers his mouth.
Mott waits a few minutes, then sneaks up into the seat behind me. “You gonna go over there and make us look good, hotshot?” he says.
“Do my best.”
“The muscle man says we got to swim relays against you for the next couple of weeks. That right?”
“You guys don’t have to do that. You kept me going all this time. It’d be shitty to make you stretch out another two weeks when you don’t even get to swim.”
Tay-Roy says, “No, man, this is a team. Our season lasts as long as one of us is still alive.”
“Yeah, but-”
“Look at it this way,” Mott says. “We get two more weeks free membership at All Night.”
“Yeah, but-”
Simet says, “It’s done, T. J. Shut up.”
I do.
It’s quiet a few more miles. In a low voice, Mott says, “How come you guys never asked me about my gangrene?”
“Same reason we didn’t ask you about your leg in the first place,” Tay-Roy says. “Jeez, Mott, don’t you know your own rep?”
“I’m granting serial killer’s dispensation,” Mott says.
Chris says, “You gots a green gang? What’s that?”
“Fuck,” Mott says. “We’ve gotta keep this team together just to keep that boy out of an institution.” He says it low enough that Chris doesn’t hear. “Somebody tell him what gangrene is.”
“Rot,” Dan says, “pure and simple.”
Icko says, “Last meet of the year, and the boy genius finally utters a one-syllable word all on his own.”
We sit through a few more seconds of silence. Even when Mott feels like talking, he does it at his own pace.
“You guys know a guy named Rance Haskins?”
Everyone knows Rance Haskins. About four years ago he killed an eighteen-month-old infant by squeezing his stomach because he peed his pants. The Department of Social and Health Services took a lot of heat because the mother’s relatives had lined up with complaints that he was dangerous, warning that they couldn’t get the baby’s mother away from him. Rance got three years for involuntary manslaughter, was out in a year and a half, then blinded a second child by shaking her. The mother of the blinded baby wouldn’t testify against him, so he ended up back in the slammer for parole violation, because he wasn’t supposed to be around children. The guy did in two kids and was out of prison in three years and a month. Free and clear. Rance Haskins is a famous guy. The Spokane newspaper does a story on him every once in a while.
“I don’t know him,” I say. “But I know who he is.”
“Well, before he was famous, he was my mom’s boyfriend.”
I’m not going to like this story.
“My old lady didn’t have any excuses. She didn’t take drugs, didn’t drink; hell, she wouldn’t even take an aspirin. Rance made her dance at the Déjà Vu in Spokane for extra cash. She looked pretty good for somebody took as much shit as she did. She’d want to take me to work with her, but the bosses wouldn’t allow it, and Rance wouldn’t let her use her own damn money to put me in day care when he considered himself a perfectly good baby-sitter. Man, if you want to pass up purgatory and go straight to hell, you want to enroll in Rance Haskins’s Day Care. Soon as my mom would take off for work, he’d tie my leg to the pipe under the kitchen sink, give me a big ol’ aluminum bowl to pee in, and take off with his buddies, or invite them over for a little drugfest. Got so messed up this one time, he passed out and his friends hauled him off to Emergency. My old lady just happened to go home from Déjà Vu with some guy to pick up some extra cash, and I’d been there almost twenty-four hours. I guess I kept trying to get away, but ol’ Rance was a real Boy Scout, and the knot just got tighter. Time Mom found me, my foot was discolored all the way up my calf. Gangrene set in, and in the end they had to whack that baby off before it snuck up and got something really important.”