Flat Water Tuesday

by Ron Irwin

  “What was it then, oh guru of the river?”

  “Your stomping out of there like a little kid. Do you really think these people are out to get you? They’re not. They don’t care one way or another so long as the boat wins this spring. So stop getting emotional about it and get better. Go build some character.”

  “Like yours?”

  “Yeah. Like mine.” He looked at me clearly, searching my face. “I have to go back. I’ll clear your stupid stunt with Channing. Go somewhere and cool off. Be there tonight for the playback. And don’t lose your temper again. This isn’t just about rowing. It’s time you noticed that.”

  I’d hit a wall back there. And he knew it. I’d choked, and formal training had barely begun. Connor turned, slid open the door to the boathouse and disappeared.

  I walked into the clear cold of New England, found my way down to the road, crossed it and made it halfway up the walkway to the school. Leaves were already falling and being blown in swirls around me. I sat down on a bench inside the school gates and leaned over on my knees. I thought for a second I was really going to puke but the feeling passed. The sweaty, jittery feeling didn’t. I held my hands in front of my face, watched them trembling. Made two fists and felt that warm, rushing sensation in my palms, then opened them, willing them to stop shaking. They didn’t. I tried to take a deep breath and couldn’t do it. And then I started to laugh. I have no idea why.

  “What the hell are you laughing at?”

  It was Perry. Without me noticing, he’d somehow gotten all the way down to the gates in his navy sweatpants and huge, clownlike running shoes. His face was red and he was still really sweaty. It was as if steam was rising from him when he sat down heavily next to me and kicked his legs out so his feet were resting on their heels. “Are you going nuts already?”

  “I might be.”

  “They let you have it down there, dude, but I’ve had it worse than that.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a Mars Bar, bit off the top of the wrapper and spat it into the wind, took a wet bite out of it and offered some to me. I shook my head, looking at his big horsy teeth marks in the candy.

  “Why do you do this, Jumbo?”

  “Call me John, okay? Could one guy call me John on this team? Do you think I want to come back here in fifteen years for some reunion and have my kids hear that everyone called me ‘Jumbo’?”

  I leaned back, watched him chewing, just shoving the chocolate in his mouth. He was like a bear in the zoo eating a piece of candy a kid had given him. He looked at me and wiped his mouth. “They hassle everyone, dude, make sure nobody feels singled out. Didn’t you know that? And the worst thing you can do is get mad.”

  I was getting cold sitting there.

  “I’m telling you. You can always get back in their good graces. They’ll test us again this week. Weights and ergs. You know what bench pulls are, right?”

  “Yeah, Jumbo. I know what bench pulls are. Believe me.”

  He slapped me on the shoulder, hard. “Good. Then you can get back in their good books.”

  “It’s worth a shot.”

  He nodded. “There’s a guy named Tony Brickman at Warwick. He set a record last year for the bench pull. Connor doesn’t like to talk about it. The guy also went to the Crash-B Sprints. Competed against college kids on the erg. He did okay.”

  I had a sudden vision of a big, red-haired version of Connor on an erg. A kid bigger than Jumbo who could run and had endurance and was as much of a psychopathic freak as Connor. A kid with a million dollars and a hundred years of champion rowers in his family who would kill him if he lost. To anyone.

  “Jumbo?”

  “What?”

  “Do you know what happens when you put a bunch of weights and an ergometer on the water?”

  “No?”

  “They sink, Jumbo.”

  He thought for a second, and then his face cracked into a grin. And then he laughed and then choked while he coughed up a golf ball of snot. “That’s an old one, Rob, man.”

  He punched me on the arm and it hurt.

  14.

  Carolyn was entering her second trimester and visibly, proudly pregnant when I left for the Zambia shoot. I’d be away for about a month and for the first time in my life I was reluctant to leave for an assignment. But there was no getting out of it. The special we wanted to produce was an ambitious one about traditional medicine and involved coordinating shoots in Zambia, South Africa, Madagascar and Brazil. Filming in Brazil and Madagascar was in the can—shot by crews I had subcontracted out to—and most of my South African work was also complete. Only the Zambia footage was outstanding, and it was important.

  After doing some preliminary interviews in Cape Town, I flew into Lusaka to film traditional healers on location in a small village north of Kitwe. These highly esteemed medicine men and women hated to be referred to as witch doctors and preferred to call themselves sangomas. The traditional healers—the sangomas—across many of these far-flung, rural communities had what some researchers believed might be workable, cheap treatments for AIDS. The interviews I would be conducting, most through an interpreter, were going to be aired on the channel along with footage of the western doctors and several drug company reps who had come out to meet with the sangomas and some of their patients. It was a unique experience walking around rural Zambia with a doctor who lectured at Columbia University, a woman who had never been out of New York. I followed her with the camera every day while she met with the sangomas, some of whom begged us for money and quietly accepted small gifts in return for interviews. The channel never pays interviewees; I was bribing these guys with beer and a few dollars out of my own pocket.

  We were lucky enough to be invited to witness a three-day indoctrination ceremony for a new sangoma. We filmed the grisly business of the bloody slaughter of chickens and goats and then a furiously bellowing cow, as well as the endless ululating praise recitations. The Big Pharma reps and the American doctors with us found the first offering of chicken feet and the meat peeled off a goat’s head—called a “smiley” because the skin pulled back from the teeth when the head was cooked—to be gastronomic revelations. The doctors and pharmacists were struggling to figure out how to isolate the alkaloids that had helped many of these healers bring the fight against AIDS to a new level. Because the simple fact was that some of their patients were living and nobody knew why. We all know that the drugs we now use to fight cancer owe their existence to the alkaloids found in the plants of Madagascar and the redwoods of California. So the cure for HIV might very well lie behind the all-night ceremonies of certain Zambian sangomas sipping bloodred tea and tearing apart humble potatoes that seemed to prolong the life of the hopelessly ill indigenous people who met them only in that strange context. As one sangoma told me, “Your body remembers these herbs I give my people. They are part of the medicines your spirit craves.” He took a pull from the expensive scotch bottle I had bought in Heathrow and pointed at the uncomfortable executives sitting nearby on folding chairs. “They know this, yet they do not want to know this.”

  Healing and belief. In Africa they went hand in hand.

  Ten tapes later I wrapped up the shoot and drove my rented Toyota Land Cruiser, packed with my equipment and American doctors and reps, to the Kenneth Kaunda International Airport outside of Lusaka. I dropped them off and headed straight to the Taj Pomodzi Hotel in the center of town, the only really decent hotel in the city. My flight left the next day. The Pomodzi was comfortable in a washed out, ’70s, African revival way, and positively luxurious after two weeks of filming in the bush. It had a green pool and a bar where air crew from British Airways flights hung out with drunk journalists and NGO workers watching satellite TV and drinking semicold Zambian beer, each bottle a different shade of amber, thanks to the vagaries of African brewing. Exhausted, I headed straight to my room, locked up my equipment, took a long shower and collapsed on the bed, the air conditioner turned all the way up, beckoning sleep. There was a knock a
t the door just as I was dropping off and I groaned, got up in my towel and opened the door a crack. A young woman from the front desk was standing there deferentially, her eyes down, holding a piece of hotel stationery which she proffered to me with both hands. “Telephone message for you,” she said. “This lady who calls, she says you must telephone her right back.”

  The message was from three days beforehand when we had been filming the raucous celebrations of the new sangoma graduate. I sat down on the bed. It was a New York number I did not recognize. I called through on the credit card and a woman answered, “Lennox Hill Hospital.”

  I almost put down the phone. Then I realized what must have happened and I crossed my fingers against it. “Yes. Sorry, I’m calling from overseas. Is a patient registered there by the name of Carolyn Smythe?”

  There was a flurry of typing and the brusque voice came back on. “That patient was in ob-gyn. I’m putting you through to the nurse on duty.”

  Another nurse, another flurry of typing, and I was transferred yet again. An exhausted voice came on the line. “That patient has been discharged.” She refused to reveal any further information.

  I called the loft immediately and Car picked up after one ring. Her voice was flat and tired, as if she had been sleeping for a very long time. When she heard me, she started to cry. Long, sniveling howls. Racking sobs that rattled the phone line across the Atlantic and shattered our love.

  * * *

  The Schoolhouse basement was a common room off-limits to underclassmen, which, for obvious reasons and not very imaginatively, was referred to as the coffee room. It was nothing special; just a spare room with some tables and chairs, a couple of sad couches, a coffee urn and a guy in a stained white coat listening to a radio and collecting dollars into a Tupperware bowl. Still, it was one of the few places on campus you could escape to other than your dorm room, and it had the added bonus of being a co-ed zone where seniors could freely hang out and flirt with each other outside of the classroom. Somebody had tried, unsuccessfully, to counter the room’s starkness by putting up a few posters on the walls, the usual ones of old bands and rap singers and animal pictures that upperclassmen had left behind after graduation.

  The coffee guy’s name was Al but everyone called him The Coffee Guy, and he hated all of us, not without reason, I have to admit. He must have been one of the most persecuted individuals in Connecticut. He looked like one of the union truck drivers they put on load duty rather than behind the wheel: an ex-drunk short timer with six months to go before being pensioned out who didn’t want to break his back before that first check came in. He sat heavy and rumpled on his folded chair, his legs pushed apart by his belly. He was notoriously impervious to both insult and flattery; no amount of taunting or buttering-up could get a rise out of him despite the earnest efforts of many.

  Except for The Coffee Guy, Ruth was alone in the corner reading and sipping coffee when I walked in. Al took my order, drew me a cup and accepted my dollar, all without looking up from his newspaper.

  She was reading through square, mannish glasses that she took off and folded closed as I approached. But she kept the book open in front of her I noticed. I sat down and pushed it up. “What’s this?”

  She pushed it back down, hard. “Ionic Greek, if it’s any of your business.”

  “You speak Greek?”

  “They stopped speaking Ionic Greek about three thousand years ago, give or take a few hundred.”

  “How come you’re not studying any languages you can use?”

  “What are you studying?”

  “Spanish. Because they make me.”

  “Are you doing well?”

  “I’ve been able to speak it since I was ten. It’s a blow off. Some of my father’s workers are from Mexico. I was thinking of taking up French.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s pretty suave.”

  “You’re pronouncing it wrong. You don’t say ‘swave.’”

  “How do you, then?”

  “Do you plan on flying to Paris after graduation?”

  “You never know. I might. The world championships are in Belgium. They speak French there.”

  “They speak Flemish, dummy. And Paris—okay, forget Paris. I hate that city. It’s not worth it. And you’d get along without French anyway. My mother doesn’t speak the language and she has a pied-à-terre there.”

  “A what?”

  “You know. An apartment. She got it from her first husband as part of the settlement. Lucky her.”

  “So you speak French. You could have helped me pass.”

  “I had a French tutor until I was sent here.”

  “Why didn’t you stick with it?

  “I had learned enough. And he kissed me in my mother’s living room. And I hate Paris. You don’t listen, do you?”

  “What did you do when the guy kissed you?”

  “I hit him where men don’t like being hit. Then I ran downstairs and had the doorman come up and throw him out. Then I called his wife.” She closed the book softly, kept it before her with her fingers gently upon it, like a hymnal. “What do you want?”

  “I came down here to apologize for being such a jerk in the tanks.”

  “Am I supposed to be impressed? Is that what you thought? Connor covered for you, you know. Channing was pissed. You just can’t do that stuff, Rob.”

  “I know it. I screwed up. I nearly didn’t go at all. Seriously.”

  “Don’t be dumb.”

  I picked up the little bowl of sugar envelopes sitting before her, ripped one open and made a pile in the middle of the table, stirred it with the red stick from Ruth’s coffee. I drew a boat in the sugar, made marks for every oarsman.

  “Oh. I get it,” she said. “You wanted to make a statement. You wanted to be a rebel.” She leaned over and gently exhaled, scattered sugar across the table. “I don’t like that kind of attitude. Can I ask a stupid question?”

  “Go ahead. There are no stupid questions, or so they tell me.”

  “Do you really think switching from a single to the four is going to be so hard? I watched you in the tanks. Your problem isn’t your rowing. You know exactly how to use that sweep oar. Your problem is that you’re angry. You started out angry. At Channing, at Connor. Maybe you’re angry with me, too. It’s as if you think we want to take something from you.”

  I scratched the table with the stick, tried to etch in my initials. She cupped her hand and brushed the sugar into it, poured it into her empty mug. “You came here to row with us, so you’re going to have to be on our team. And you’re going to have to go to our training sessions. And wear the tie and observe all the silly traditions. Anyway, you were only asked to the tanks. You weren’t asked to race. Not yet. There’s a difference.”

  “I wasn’t mad down there. Channing, Connor, you, the others … rowing in the tanks … I don’t know, you were all only a few feet away. I was … afraid I guess. I kept thinking that Channing was going to look real close and see that I’m a fraud. That he’d know there was no secret sauce.”

  “What secret sauce? What are you talking about?”

  “You know, the secret sauce at McDonald’s. The secret herbs and spices in KFC, the secret formula in Coke. The whole reason people buy that stuff is there’s a secret ingredient that makes it better. Even the scientists can’t figure out what it is. But it’s in there.”

  “There’s a secret sauce in McDonald’s and KFC food?”

  “Yeah. I mean, no. I mean, nobody knows. That’s the point.”

  “Carrey, you aren’t making any sense.”

  “How could you not know about the Colonel’s secret recipe? That’s what doesn’t make sense.”

  She blushed. “Here’s what I do know. Boys who row in the God Four are cooler than scullers. That’s what I know. So, good luck.”

  “I don’t need luck. I told you that. I don’t need them to like me, Ruth.”

  “But you want them to. Everyone wants to be liked.”


  “You don’t.”

  She scowled into her book. “Winning isn’t everything. I never thought I’d say that, but it isn’t. And no one likes a sore loser.”

  “Winning is everything here. At least as far as crew is concerned. They want to win the Warwick Race so badly it’s like an obsession. Nobody has said they’d be happy with a loss. That’s for sure.”

  “We want to win against Warwick, yes. But you don’t need to win at everything, Carrey. You don’t need to beat Connor on the water every time you two go out in your dumb sculls. Or sprint faster than him on every single training run. Or kill yourself trying to better his erg scores. Or act like a prima donna in the tanks. Talk about an obsession … I mean, what is it with you and him anyway? The guys on the team like you, Carrey. But they’re starting to think you’re kind of a jerk. Like, worse than Connor. And that doesn’t work for me. I have enough jerks to deal with.”

  “So what do you think I should I do?”

  “Calm down. Just calm down. Be cool. Like when you first got here, before you even knew there was a Warwick Race. Before you met Connor and he started running around in your head. You seemed much nicer then, okay?”

  “I’ll give it a shot. I can’t guarantee anything, though.”

  “Well, that’s the best I can hope for, then. Now, go away. I need to study and you’re distracting.”

  I checked her out, this fragile-tough chick with her Greek book. Wendy would have liked Ruth, and that is high praise indeed. She turned a page and I saw that she was smiling. As I walked out of the room I gave The Coffee Guy a thumbs-up. He didn’t respond, but I was pretty sure Ruth watched me do it.

  15.

  I sat behind Ruth Anderson for an entire year, just two seats away, watching her work, listening to her in class, and then saw her almost every day through winter training and, of course, in the boat. Why I was so drawn to her remains a mystery to me. My memory of her is of a girl far more complex than she ever could have been, given how young we were and the restricted environment we lived in.