“Up for a little racial tension?” he asked me in the lunch line today. He showed up with Lion and Elaine, armed to the teeth with Doomsday warnings. Yesterday, Herb Elliot. Today, racial tension. The man has range.
“Sure, I haven’t got a lot else to think about,” I said, looking at Elaine and Lion, then back to Walter Cronkite. “What week is that scheduled for?”
“Coming soon to a theater near you,” he said, reached inside his coat and pulled out a rolled-up newspaper, unrolled it and spread it out on my tray. I put a plate of burgers—one dish the nutritional demolition squad in the cafeteria hasn’t yet learned to destroy—on top of it. The girl behind the counter informed me that there was a two-burger limit. I’ve been eating here once a day for the last four years and that rule has always been the same on burger day. “Really?” I said. “Sorry, I didn’t know that.” I put the rest back and, when she looked the other way, slipped an extra under my coat. I tell you, it’s a never ending battle.
We moved out into the dining area, over by a window, and set our trays on a table. Lion opened his bookbag and removed a Mason jar and a Tupperware container that he filled with milk and peanut butter respectively, for later consumption. There is no late-night food service in his palatial digs like there is in homes with regular families, so he stocks up in the cafeteria. Once when one of the guys who cleans the tables in the cafeteria told him he couldn’t be taking food off the premises, Lion told him it was okay, that he was one of three athletes in the nation who’d been awarded athletic scholarships to high school, and there was an “all you can eat” clause in his. That’s the last that was said. No one messes much with Lion. The kindest thing said about his presentation of himself is it’s “different” and that’s not the half of it; and he’s a real horse. Except for maybe Jeff, he’s the biggest guy I’ve ever seen call himself a swimmer. We are not talking svelte and streamlined here. These are guys who, when we’re up to 10,000 to 12,000 yards a day and their percentage of body fat is zero or less, still weigh in around 190. Lion and Jeff do not look like the swimmers you see atop the Olympic podium; Lion and Jeff are chiseled out of marble block with crude tools. These are not sleek sailboats; these are destroyers.
I removed the paper from under my plate and gave it a look. It was called the Aryan Press and in the center of the front page was a not very professional drawing of an ape alongside an equal-quality drawing of a black man. Both were side profiles in similar positions, bent forward and staring straight ahead. Around each picture were labels and arrows showing assumed similarities between the two. I’ve seen it before on a poster—though more professionally drawn—down in the men’s can at the Red Rooster. It’s the “scientific proof” bigots use to prove blacks are further back on the evolutionary scale than whites. If it weren’t so silly, it’d be downright offensive. The rest of the paper was filled with stories about atrocities Jews and blacks have committed on the blue-eyed, blond population through the ages—a couple of hard shots to the stomach about “equal opportunity” and some serious warnings about the dangers of contaminating a pure bloodline. I stared at it a few seconds, then asked Jeff where he got it.
“They’re all over school,” he said. “Somebody’s been sticking them in unlocked lockers, and there’s a stack of them out by the front entrance.”
Before any of us could say what we thought we should do, Lion was up and headed for the door. Jeff and Elaine and I followed him out of sheer habit. At the front entrance he took one look at the stack of papers, moved them to the middle of the sidewalk, broke the bailing wire that held them together, spread them out a little for air and put a match to them. The match blew out and he tried another. Someone threw him a disposable lighter and that did the trick. Without thinking, we were into the spirit, moving the metal garbage cans around the fire to keep it contained, and stood watching the papers burn as kids and teachers poured out of classrooms and the cafeteria. Most of them obviously didn’t know what the commotion was about, and Lion passed a couple of unburned copies among them. Then he stood up on one of the garbage cans and raised his hands. He presented enough of a spectacle to get something that vaguely resembled silence, and he roared, “I catch anyone passing this crap out and he’ll answer to me for it! I’ll kick his butt! I’ve been going to this school four years and I’m proud of it! This crap stinks and I won’t have it!” He got down as Mrs. Stevens, the vice-principal, stormed through the doors with a fire extinguisher. She extinguished the flames in seconds, then turned to the crowd, furious. “Who’s responsible for this?” she demanded, and Lion stepped forward.
“I am,” he said, “and I’m headed for your office.”
Mrs. Stevens said, “You better be, Buster, and you better have a darn good explanation.” They both disappeared as Elaine and Jeff and I started picking up the partially burned papers, cramming them into the garbage drums. I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned to see Max. “What’s going on?” he asked, and I handed him one of the papers. He looked at it and smiled, shaking his head. “Lion find a cause?” he asked.
I smiled and nodded. “Looks like it.”
Max shook his head again and said, “I wouldn’t give it my time.” He went back inside.
It had all happened so fast no one had time to think. That’s the way Lion is. When he’s hot, he comes on like a flash flood. He knows exactly what his values are at any given moment and what he’s willing to go to the wall for; let the consequences fall into place later. Consequences would be light for this. Lion would be back in the cafeteria almost before we would. Mrs. Stevens came to Frost seven years ago because she’s been the most successful administrator in the city at taking care of racial issues, and though there aren’t all that many blacks in Spokane, Frost has by far the majority of them.
Mrs. Stevens is black.
We weren’t back in the cafeteria five minutes before Lion was there, stuffing his face as though nothing had happened. “Can’t let that stuff get out of hand,” he said. “Boy, I like that Mrs. Stevens.”
I looked to Jeff. “Well, I guess that takes care of racial tension,” I said.
He shrugged and raised his eyebrows. “We’ll see,” he said. “You know, those are printed locally, over in Falls Lake. Those guys have been there quite a while, but it looks like they’re trying to get something started. You’d be surprised how many people believe that crap even though they’re not in the inner circle.”
Lion took another huge bite and said, “I better not see any more of them.”
Elaine got up to get another burger and I remember feeling a little self-conscious about watching her butt move toward the counter like the flanks of a thoroughbred racehorse. Old Elaine wears some fairly tight britches and she’s real muscular. She’s always been one of the guys, so it feels a little like incest, but she’s been wedging herself into my dreams lately, and there’s not much a guy can do about that. That’s not information I’m ready to put out for group discussion, but that’s the way it is. It doesn’t help that I already have a girlfriend.
“So tell me, O wise red peckerhead,” I said to Jeff, in a futile effort to banish Elaine from my lunchtime fantasies, “what’s today’s little teaser on Stotan Week?”
“You didn’t check out Herb Elliot, did you?”
I had to admit I hadn’t.
“I have to know you really want this information, Walk,” he said. “I just can’t give it out. I have to feel needed.”
Elaine sat down again. “A Stotan is a cross between a Stoic and a Spartan,” she said, and Jeff’s chin dropped to his pecs. “The term was coined by Percy Cerruti, coach of the great Australian miler Herb Elliot in the late fifties and early sixties.” She ran it off with encyclopedic brilliance. “Cerruti used that term to describe Elliot in his single-minded determination to be the greatest miler of all time. Elliot would do his regular workouts, which were considerable, then throw off his clothes to run dune after dune on the Australian beaches, driving himself to the brink of exhausted ecst
asy. Herb Elliot thought American athletes were wussies. Percy Cerruti thought Herb Elliot was a Stotan.” She chomped down on her burger.
“Slime-bag,” Jeff said. “Scuzz-ball.”
Elaine went on, seemingly delighted by Jeff’s epithet. “I would imagine that Stotan Week will be a week in which Max asks you to put forth Stotanic efforts to make yourselves less like wussies and more like Herb Elliot.”
Lion’s eyes lit up; you could see his mind whipping along ahead of Elaine, visions of himself and Herb charging over an infinity of Australian sand dunes, then diving into the surf and swimming to New Zealand.
Jeff was pissed at having been scooped.
CHAPTER 4
November 23
Well, Thanksgiving was yesterday and I have a pound or two to swim off. It shouldn’t be too bad, though. We went over to the pool in the morning and put in about 4,000 yards before going home and putting in about 4,000 calories. Actually, I didn’t do that at my home. I did it at Elaine’s. That’s right, this smooth captain wangled an invite to her place for Thanksgiving dinner and didn’t even do a whole lot of damage to his relationship with his parents in the process. My folks had planned for several months to go to my dad’s sister’s place in Seattle for Thanksgiving and I was able to convince them that if I didn’t work out Thursday and Friday I’d lose too much to make up. Mom and Dad know next to nothing about swimming—in fact, I can’t remember them going to a meet—but they know it’s important to me, and in the interest of letting me do and have anything I want, they let me beg off going to Seattle. Letting my orphan status out in the presence of Elaine’s mother was no difficult task either, so I ended up right where I wanted to be. It was probably a bad idea for my libido, but I couldn’t pass it up. I don’t think there’s a way to take care of this. In my wildest imagination I can’t see me telling Elaine I’m hot for her. If she did believe me, she’d punch me in the nose. She’s a tough one, that Elaine. It’s also going to be hard to explain to Devnee, my supposed girlfriend, why, with my parents out of town for the holiday, I didn’t spend it with her. Probably what I’ll do with that is lie. I’ve got to stop that one of these days—it seems like I lie pretty easily and convincingly to girls—but not right now. I’ve got my hands full figuring out how crazy I am even thinking about Elaine. Boy, I hope this stuff with girls gets easier when you get older. So far it’s a big pain in the butt.
Under any circumstances Elaine and I are good friends, and dinner was really nice. Her mom is one of those people you’d adopt as a parent, given the choice. In fact, back in our AAU swimming days, when she drove us to all the meets, I thought she was my mother. She’s a big, strong, smart, earthy woman with a huge heart and it’s a treat to be around her. If she has a fault, however, it’s her taste in men. You have to meet Elaine’s dad to believe him. Elaine’s been telling stories about him for years, and from what I saw yesterday, nothing has changed. The man’s a pack rat—a collector. The nooks and crannies of the house are filled with cases of canned food, scuba tanks, old car parts, an old plow blade, for Chrissakes, and enough telephone parts to start a medium-sized communication company. His holdings are much expanded from last time I was there. When I asked him what it was all for, he just smiled and said you never know when you might need some of that stuff. I pictured a flash flood where Mr. Ferral fights his way through the crashing wall of water raging through the kitchen, straps on his scuba tank and makes himself a telephone to call for help, thereby saving his entire family, which is cowering behind the plow blade for protection from the canned goods washing through the room.
And he never leaves the couch. He lives on the couch. He has two TV sets within arm’s reach and Elaine says the only way on earth to get his attention is to walk in front of one of them. They’re both going all the time and they’re set on different channels, the sound up on only one. He switches them back and forth at will, and I guarantee it’ll drive you stark raving berserk to watch a program with him. The master stroke in all this, however, is an adjustable, wide-angle rearview mirror mounted on the back of the couch. When I first saw it, several years ago, I thought it was just another of the legion of bizarre items strewn around the house, but when I accidentally bumped it, it didn’t fall over. It’s screwed right down into the frame so he can watch TV from either side.
“It doesn’t bother you that the titles come up backward, I guess,” I said.
“The human mind is a wonderful thing,” he said. “It can get used to almost anything. The Chinese read like that all the time.”
I don’t think that’s exactly how the Chinese read, but I got the point.
I stayed quite a ways into the evening and Elaine and I went for a walk around her neighborhood. Except for their house, which would be a blight on the poorest sections of Newark, New Jersey, because of all the junk Mr. Ferral has piled around, seemingly holding the house up, the neighborhood is a nice, quiet little lower-middle-class place with a comfortable feeling of families who have lived their whole lives there. We live in a ritzier part of town that feels sterile to me. I know our next-door neighbors, but I don’t know any of the people up and down the street. Elaine’s neighborhood is like a little community.
The leaves on the trees are nearly gone and temperatures have been getting down around freezing at night, so smoke curled out of almost every chimney and it felt like there was probably a lot in that little neighborhood to be thankful for. It seemed as if Elaine and I bumped gently together a few times more than random chance would have it, but it’s hard to say. I was pretty aware. We talked about swimming and what it would take for me to do well at State—how much I wanted it—and a little about the Nazi newspapers that Lion burned, and about how strange it seems to me sometimes that I’m so far away from my parents and that my brother is like a distant uncle to me unless we have a reason to purposely make a connection. Sometimes I wonder who I am, because it seems like I don’t have a solid anchor in my family. Elaine said she thought when we don’t have a family to hook up to, we hook up to the next-best thing—our friends. “Look at Lion,” she said. “He doesn’t have any family at all, but he knows who he is, mostly in relationship to all of us. You probably do that some too.”
“I know I do,” I said. “And, all in all, it’s probably more healthy than what my real family has to offer. But I keep getting pulled back to them. I want my brother to be different. I want his life to mean something. And, Christ, just because my parents are old doesn’t mean they have to give up on everything. Sometimes I think they’re just breathing our air. My family doesn’t have any personality.”
She smiled. “They aren’t exactly the Beaver Cleavers, but they could be worse. You could have my dad. Look at the things he makes important.” She shrugged. “You have to go with what you get.”
We got back to the house and Elaine made me a monstrous turkey sandwich and wrapped a piece of pumpkin pie for later. Her mom invited me back for the meal of my choice over the weekend, but I politely declined, telling her I might need it more later; that I’d take a rain check. It was after midnight when I turned onto the arterial leading up onto the South Hill, where I live. It was one of those times when I felt closer to getting a better look at things. Talking with Elaine like that, with no judgment from her or anything, seemed to bring my feelings more to the surface so I could look at them. I love times like that; you don’t get many of them. I passed the turnoff to our house and continued on up to 57th and out to the Palouse Highway, which heads east toward the Idaho panhandle. There wasn’t another car on the road and the white line shooting under my car had an almost hypnotic effect. Away from town, the stars became bright enough to outline the mountains around me, and I turned off the dash lights and leaned over the steering wheel to look up at the Milky Way. Out there alone, it was a lot easier to see why Elaine gets such a charge out of her Astronomy class. I must have driven for an hour and a half in my little Duster cocoon, thinking; trying to come up with answers for the things I think are important. I c
ame up with a lot more questions than answers: like, what am I going to do about Devnee, my girlfriend? She’s a nice girl—a really pretty girl—who I’ve been going with about two months longer than I should have, obviously, because I don’t feel anything for her anymore; but I can’t say that to her. I just can’t do it—no matter how much I want to end it and no matter how much I have to fake it when we’re making out. When the moment comes to say, “I just don’t care about you anymore,” or whatever I could come up with, I just cannot do it. Does that mean I have to marry her?
And how about old Long John? Somehow he gets me thinking that because our parents don’t have time for him anymore—or at least Dad doesn’t—that responsibility has fallen to me. I admit I get some interesting information from him, and sometimes he’s fun to be around because he’s smart and funny, but he’s also a drug freak who won’t take care of his own life and has caused me maximum grief. And I think he could take from me forever, and he will if I don’t stop him.
My mind drifted along the lines of Elaine’s and my conversation and came up with zero conclusions, which has been standard lately for this aquatic Aristotle.
With not one clear resolution, I finally turned the car around and headed for home.
CHAPTER 5
November 29
It’s too bad this school wasn’t named after Jim Thorpe or Jackie Robinson or some other great athlete, rather than a poet or a snowman. I mean, Frost is a jock school. You don’t have a lot of pull if you’re a swimmer, because swimming is on the way out and it’s not the world’s most exciting spectator sport anyway. It’s hardly engrossing to watch six mostly naked guys motor from one end of the pool to the other as fast as they can, only to turn around and go back. But the coaches and jocks in the major sports are hot stuff around here and they have a lot of influence. That’s because Frost has good teams in the major sports. We win a lot of athletic contests every year and get a lot of play in the local papers. The Athletic Council, made up of the captains of each team and the coaches of the major sports, is probably more influential than the Student Council, mostly because the Student Body President is also the captain of the basketball team and is the consummate jock. In this school, jocks rule.