“Man, I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault,” he says, and hesitates. “So my dad, what’s he do?”

“Not much of anything now,” I say. I haven’t talked about that day with anyone but my mother and Georgia, but it’s what I came here for. I tell him about Hoopfest, the events leading up to it.

“Jesus, that was my dad? We read about that.”

“That was your dad.” I tell him as much as I can about the effect killing Kyle’s older brother had on him.

“Boy, nobody came out of that one, did they?”

“Maybe you and me,” I say, and tell him about whale talk, how if we knew more about humans maybe we could accommodate one another better. All the time I’m saying it, he stares at the picture of the giant tail with a soft smile on his face. I swear to God, put a beard and a few tattoos on him, and he’d look like Dad spit him out.

“You graduated this year, huh?”

“Yeah.” I don’t say how hollow that day was for me.

“Going to school?”

“I was accepted to U Dub, but my heart’s not in it, you know? Think I’ll wait a year. Sell off some of Dad’s bikes.”

“Spend much time on the river up there?”

“Yeah, we’ve got a boat. I ski some. Wake-board.”

“Ever do any Whitewater rafting?”

I tell him no.

“I could use some help,” he says. “I’ve got some good guys working for me over there, but it’s hard to run this place and keep an eye on that business as much as I should. You look in good shape. We’re in the middle of the season now. I could train you. Even if you decide to go to school, it’s great summer work. You can make a bundle.”

I tell him I’ll think about it.

He puts a hand on my shoulder. “I’d like to get to know you. You could fill in some holes for me. There’s an…an emptiness when you can’t get to your dad.”

It’s a feeling I know. “How soon do you need to know?”

“Anytime in the next thirty years,” he says. “I’ll be doing it at least that long. Hey, man, it’s a rush.”

“I’ll get back to you one way or the other,” I say. “And I’ll be back.”

I pick up my pack, stop at the door. “You’d have been proud of him,” I say. “If he’d known about you…God, he’d have been down here in a minute.”

I take the ride back to Cutter slow. Rich Marshall is in jail for the rest of his life, no possibility of parole. His attorney tried to plead down from first-degree murder because Rich actually killed someone different from the one he was aiming at. That may have saved him from the death penalty, but the prosecution successfully argued that he was going to kill somebody, and that was the premeditated part.

I didn’t go to the trial. To tell the truth, I really didn’t care how it turned out. I don’t know what’s the matter with me, but they could have let him off and I don’t think I’d have felt a thing. All I know is my dad is dead. And that’s all I care about.

Maybe I’m still numb, but maybe Dad passed something on to me in those few minutes he lay bleeding on the court. Maybe I heard him differently than I’d heard him before. Maybe what he said translated well into whale talk. Not one minute for revenge. He didn’t want me living a life of what might have been. That was his life, and he wanted it stopped there. There are worse things a guy could do with his life than honor the wishes of a good and dying man.

Some positive things have come of all this. Alicia and Heidi and Things One and Two are permanent at our place now, and I think Alicia has some sense of what it means to step up, even if she discovered it late. Mom invited Icko to build living quarters on the edge of our property, and he’s going to be a kind of caretaker for the place and live there free. He and his son are player/coaches for the South Park Mermen this summer, a slow-pitch softball team that travels around eastern Washington and northern Idaho losing softball games with astonishing regularity. Tay-Roy and Mott have gone their ways, but the heart of the team is a ghost of a shortstop, the world’s largest first baseman, and a right fielder in a Cutter letter jacket that he removes only when he feels faint from the heat. Dan Hole keeps their stats.

Mike Barbour approached me at the funeral and shook my hand. He said, “I didn’t know, man. I didn’t.” He was popping out of his suit, looked horribly uncomfortable, tears welling in his red-rimmed eyes. “Part of this is mine,” he said. “I ain’t askin’ you to forgive me. I just want you to know I know that.” Little acts of heroism.

Tonight, after Alicia and the kids are in bed, Mom and I put the whale tape into the VCR, turn up the sound, and sit in the porch swing listening, staring at the carpet of stars.

“God, Mom,” I say. “Sometimes there’s just no place to put this.”

“Well,” she says, “if there’s no place to put it, maybe we don’t need to put it anywhere.”

About the Author

CHRIS CRUTCHER has written nine critically acclaimed novels, an autobiography, and two collections of short stories. He has won three lifetime achievement awards for the body of his work: the Margaret A. Edwards Award for Outstanding Literature for Young Adults, the ALAN Award for a Significant Contribution to Adolescent Literature, and the NCTE National Intellectual Freedom Award.

He has been a child and family therapist with the Spokane Community Mental Health Center and is currently chairperson of the Spokane Child Protection Team. Chris Crutcher lives in Spokane, Washington.

www.chriscrutcher.com