by Ron Irwin
The rain was falling in straight lines on the water. We were soaked through by the time we got to the stake boats to meet Warwick, when their coxswain told them to let their oars fly and they drifted in perfect precision into the waiting hands of the freshman assigned to hold their stern for the countdown. Then, eerily, the rain suddenly stopped, as if a curtain had been pulled aside, as if the weather itself was holding its breath. With the end of the rain, the water became utterly flat, a mirror to the heavens.
Despite Channing’s instruction I glanced over to see our rivals glaring straight ahead for the start. Cooper was hunched deep into the boat and grumbled incessantly at his rowers. His voice sounded like the snarls and barks of a small but particularly vicious dog. Although it had now abated, rainwater still dripped from my hair down my face and down my back. I looked again at the reflection of the trees on the river and then I smiled. Ruth sighted the course, her hand up, then whispered something to Connor, who whispered something back and then turned swiftly in his seat to flash us that insane, cocky grin. Channing steered up in the coach’s launch with the young Warwick coach beside him. He held the megaphone to his lips and readied the boats. Ruth lowered her hand, and then Brendan Cooper dropped his.
Channing shouted the start and we surged into the river.
Warwick had us by half a boat length within fifteen strokes and started to pull away through the first fifty. I could see their stern deck jerking back and forth in the water and Ruth screamed into the microphone and kicked the rating up. We burned into the race at an impossible cadence and took back one seat.
The boats torpedoed toward the halfway point—one thousand meters—in a suspended silence, as if the thunder clouds still threatening us above had drawn the sound from the coxswains’ lungs. Ruth was almost whispering to us as we charged down the course and Cooper seemed to be yowling into his microphone. Noting that the two boats were spread apart on the water and in no danger of running into each other, the coaches sank back, farther away than they might otherwise have been.
As we took the seat back Ruth’s voice, calm and almost reassuring, rose out of the boat. “We’ll be dropping the rating in three.”
Perry swore. To drop the rating now would mean giving up the seat we had just taken, letting Warwick jet in front of us. I bit my lip and pulled, made myself focus on the race. All I heard was the oiled movement of the riggers, the splash of our oars on the water and the grunts and struggles of bodies depleting.
Ruth breathed carefully into the mike and said, “We will drop in three, and this is one … and this is two … and this is three.” And the rating did drop, possibly only by two strokes a minute, although at that speed it seemed like an immense drop, and Warwick immediately snatched back their seat.
Connor held the rating. I forced myself to tap out the oar with him, mirror the movement, and hold the slide while the boat surged forward. Wadsworth and Perry hooked into the new pace, and finally, at exactly one thousand meters, we hit our stride, behind Warwick but suddenly flying. One hundred strokes to go, and it felt as if the boat had found some kind of grace, like a giant bird expanding its wings and folding them against the sky. Ruth would have been looking at the speed of the boat when she spoke into the mike. “You will not increase the rating but you will give me ten hard strokes in three.”
And she counted down, and the desire to rush the slide and grab back the seat, for me, was almost irresistible. I willed myself to follow the agonizingly slow rating and when we dug in, the boat seemed to surge out of the water. I glimpsed Ruth crouching down into her seat to avoid being thrown backward with each stroke.
We had not made the seat back. Warwick remained ahead.
I felt the first stirrings of panic. We had barely held on to them through the power ten. In the next hundred strokes we might have three more power tens in us and a sprint over the finish line. Ruth jetted the rudder, tried another route, pushing the boat closer to Warwick as she did so. The move gained us perhaps half a meter on their boat, but as we neared the Warwick four we could hear the excitement in Cooper’s voice as he held us off and bore down on the last five hundred meters of the race. Water, or sweat, or both, ran into my eyes and I blinked it away, tried to focus on Connor, to grit my teeth through the maddeningly slow rating.
Cooper screeched into the mike, insulting Ruth as we neared his boat. “Back off, Fenton, don’t touch our oars.” But Ruth held her course, our oars less than two meters away from theirs now, enough for the coach’s boat to churn closer and for Channing to lean forward, ready to ward us off them. Even one small touch of the oars would skew the result, possibly nullify the race, and we were as close now as either coach would allow.
Cooper was sitting just level with me and I could see him glancing down the course and then over at us. I realized that they had never been held this long and that he was desperate to sight the five hundred meter buoy; that Ruth knew this and that Connor would catch scent of their fear and it would electrify us.
Then Ruth’s cool voice. “Power through in ten, and rating up one in three.” Bringing that rating up was pure relief and as she counted I knew the others wanted to drive it up even higher, but that one beat a minute was enough to pull us further into Warwick, enough so that I could see Cooper perfectly now, leaning back against the drive of his boat, startled that we had driven almost level in just ten strokes. He called for a power ten as we cruised by the five hundred meter buoy, a sure sign that he had been waiting to pull out another burst of power.
I yearned for Ruth to match him, but she forced us to wait again as we took back half a seat, and only then, “Power twenty, Fenton, to pass them in three. And that’s one…”
She wasn’t changing the rating. We were running at possibly thirty strokes a minute and Cooper would have jammed his boys up five strokes higher. If we were going to pass Warwick we had to mine it, using our strength only, and we dug deeply into each one as she counted. After the first three strokes the boat felt unnaturally heavy, like it was filled with sand or water. I grit my teeth and pulled, and by the end of the fifth stroke I knew that the heaviness was the acceleration of the boat, its natural resistance to a sudden increase in speed. Our combined weights had to catch up to the boat’s propulsion; the same problem a bird faced becoming airborne, looking for liftoff. By our tenth stroke Cooper was already on his fifteenth, gibbering into his mike, almost standing up.
“Twenty-five more strokes to go, Fenton,” Ruth intoned, almost offhandedly. “Step on it.”
Almost imperceptibly, Connor increased his length yet further. Ruth powered us into it and for the next ten strokes we flew like we knew we were able to. We reached a crescendo of speed and the exhilaration behind our exhaustion was something to cling to.
And then Connor grunted and pulled five impossibly strong strokes; a silent push that Cooper would not expect or hear, that Ruth could never ask of him, that he knew we would follow. It was as if we had caught the boat a millisecond ahead of the rating and launched it out of the river. I felt the bones of my vertebrae grate together through each one of those scrapes of the water. Cooper responded to the move too late and howled. Our oars reached out into the final gap that lay before the finish of the race. I rowed through a blue haze of exhaustion, deaf to Ruth’s banshee countdown of the last ten strokes as we tore through them.
We crossed the line and leaned back into the warm exhalation of the fresh breeze. Gasping for oxygen, I looked to the port shore and there was Wendy standing apart from the crowd, waving at me for a perfect moment before she vanished into the insane bellow of the students who had braved the broken weather to witness the Fenton God Four defeat Warwick by the length of a human body.
30.
This is what I told the police later. The race took place on Tuesday, as was the tradition. After Channing had raised his arm signaling the end of the contest, we rowed to the dock and collected our shirts, an exhausted, oddly somber quintet shaking hands with an equally depleted and noticeably dimin
ished Warwick. To the Fenton crowd’s delight, Connor accepted a tarnished silver trophy—the cherished Tuesday Cup—that would be proudly and prominently displayed in the dean’s office for the next year. We threw Ruth in the water, as was also the tradition, and jumped in after her, which was not. Drunk and euphoric alumni sprayed us with champagne and we were hardly able to move through the crowd to put the boat back. There was a party for us at Fenton afterward and then various dinners in town. We were finally able to revel in our victory. The Payne family held court for the entire crew at the Fox and Fiddle Inn. Channing did not come out at all. He had been whisked away almost immediately after the race by the headmaster and whoever else funded the machine that was Fenton. In his absence and on Connor’s father’s tab, all five of us got thoroughly drunk, quickly intoxicated by the potent mix of expensive alcohol of various kinds and our own success.
Early on in the evening, I stole away from the fracas to call home with the news from the phone in the coatroom of the inn. But when my father took my call in his workshop I found I had no idea what to say, other than we had won a very important race. He waited, and then said, “That’s not news, son. That’s business as usual, as far as we’re concerned. What did they expect?”
I tried to tell him about the significance of the race, about the Harvard coach conferring with Channing in the boathouse and then shaking all of our hands. I described the near riot in the spectator’s tent when the students came back from the finish line. I wanted him to be able to picture Channing’s face as I had glimpsed it when we poured ourselves over the finish; the way he had thrown the megaphone out of the boat and hugged himself before punching the sky that was swollen with the rain that would fall upon us as we rowed back ahead of the crushed Warwick boat. But the race was over, and my father was too far away, and I was on a pay phone with the time running out. “It’s a big win, Dad. The most important one. I wanted you to know.” I knew he’d take my word for it, but he’d disbelieve that the race would change my life, and in that he was wrong.
I hung up the phone and went back into the dining room of the inn to find that the team had moved away from the main table and was sitting outside on the porch. The celebrations were winding down. Connor had brought along an ice bucket and champagne. A tray of glistening champagne glasses, all perfectly full, stood in the middle of the table. Jumbo had brought his own bottle out of which he was taking generous slugs while slumped back in his seat. He offered it to me as I sat down, smiling crookedly, and I took it by the neck, swallowed what was left.
“We did it. We did it by half a length.” Jumbo grinned at the table. Then at the stars.
Ruth reached out, placed a glass of champagne in front of her.
Wadsworth was drinking, amazingly, a Coke. Perry prodded him. “The rest of the year will be a cakewalk. When the other schools hear we took down Warwick, they will fall at our feet. They will beg for mercy. The poor bastards.” Jumbo reached over to Connor’s bottle, helped himself to a long draught. Connor regarded him with a rare half smile. Was he really wearing a white dinner jacket? Connor took up his own champagne flute, examined the liquid within as if counting the bubbles.
Wadsworth snatched the bottle from Perry. “Careful, big guy. Even if we did win the Warwick Race, we’re still not supposed to come back to campus completely blotto.”
Perry laughed. “Let them try to kick me out. They wouldn’t dare. We’re untouchable. Remember? We’re Gods! Gods are not expelled!”
Ruth laughed. “Some ‘god’. Look at you. Drunkard. We have another race coming up, Jumbo.”
“Yeah? Bring it.” Perry burped, grabbed back the bottle from Wadsworth and stood unsteadily, held it aloft in his paw. “Here’s to the flat water on the Tuesday race. Here’s to defeating Warwick. Finally. Here’s to flat water Tuesday!”
Connor grunted, put up his glass. “Flat water Tuesday it is.” And we all drank to it.
But then Connor stood and held up his half-full glass before us again. “And let’s also have a toast to all that comes next.” We all looked at him expectantly. He thought for a few seconds. “What does come next? Could anything possibly come after the Warwick Race? Oh, yes! There’s the Exeter Race, The Holy Spirit Race, The Andover Race, etcetera, etcetera, till the end of the season. Then the National Championships.” He paused. I did not like to hear the bitter tone in his voice. “Then we graduate. But don’t worry. There’s plenty more to look forward to. Here’s to making the Harvard heavy eight. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Head of the Charles and The Head of the Schuylkill! And let’s not forget the good old Harvard–Yale Race.” He drank off the glass, took the bottle from Jumbo, poured his glass full again, drank a sip, held it before him. “Then hoist up your loving cups to the National Team selection camp. After that, we can all drink a last one to … the Olympics!”
Connor drained the glass and flung it against the wall of the inn, where it shattered into tiny, glinting shards. He collapsed into his chair. “Maybe then my dad will be happy. I’ll have definitely shown him.” He raised his hand for the waiter, pointed at the bottle, spun his finger round. Gazing straight ahead, he said, “Drink up, Fenton School Boat Club. The drinks, and the laughs, are on me.”
Silence descended. Connor contemplated the remaining glasses scattered across the table; pieces in a game he was endlessly playing against an adversary only he could see. On that evening, you could look in on the five privileged kids sitting in the light spilling out of the dining room sharing a careless pensive moment while Connor regarded a future of infinite competition. I knew for sure that rowing was slowly coming to an end for me, that the race against Warwick had been a kind of coda to this segment of my life, a part of my life that had been closing for months now. Looking around the table, I became aware that I was not alone. Ruth and Wadsworth both seemed suddenly older; they looked at this evening with a kind of bemused irony, as if they had walked into a party they had not been invited to but to which they had been warmly welcomed. And Perry had always been an outsider to this, perhaps even more than I. Whatever I had to prove to Connor had been proven. It was clear to me that Connor had no such release. He would always be looking for the next stretch of water to prove himself on, always searching for the last test, the final selection, the ultimate victory. And each triumph for him, I knew, would mean less and less, until that day when he stood alone with his laurels, all the cheering and applause forever silenced by an adulthood which was closing in upon him; the searching, relentless bow of a boat he could never leave in the golden wake of his glorious youth.
And then the waiter came with yet another linen-wrapped bottle and another set of glasses. Jumbo plucked it off the waiter’s tray and twisted the cork out of it in one massive turn, spilling an amber froth down his wrist and arm. “Hell, I’ll drink to that.”
Connor grinned. I held out my own glass, he held out his. Ruth found hers. Even Wadsworth partook.
* * *
School had to continue. The crowds dispersed. The Payne family and other parents left us at the dorms and disappeared back into New York and Cape Cod and elsewhere. The tent was taken down. We had classes and the next race, against Exeter, to think about. It was scheduled to take place on the following Friday. We had a week and a half to recover and prepare. Channing had decreed that we could have the Wednesday following the Warwick Race off, but that we had to go for a light run to ward off the effects of our revelry the night before.
Connor was the one who enforced this decision. Naturally.
Rain continued to fall on Tuesday night and on and off on Wednesday. We gathered at the boathouse after classes ended and stood in the doorway to wait for it to stop. Sore and stiff with lactic acid from the exertions of the race, sluggish and bloated from the rich food we had gorged ourselves on and hungover as all hell from who knows what combination of drinks we had downed, we were all, even Ruth—especially Ruth—hoping that Connor would tell us to forget it. Channing hadn’t appeared to see if we would actually do t
he run. As usual, it was a matter of honor, of the sport’s relentless probing of a rower’s pain threshold. The river was dotted with endless dimples of raindrops over raindrops. Detritus lazily spun and flowed in the brown water. The close, muggy heat exacerbated our discomfort.
Miserable and desperate to get it over with, we initiated a communal lope through the drizzle. Connor led, Ruth pushed a tight pace next to a flat-footed and wheezing Perry, who pounded beside Wadsworth. We were slow, the efforts and indulgences of the day before had taken their toll.
Connor ran well. I took up the pace behind him, then ran alongside him. We had pulled away from the others when the covered bridge appeared at the end of the road, a yawning cavern. The two of us knifed through the rain until we reached its darkness. I sprinted by him to find that the floor of the bridge was dry. Wadsworth jogged into the bridge’s mouth, then Perry, then Ruth, Ruth’s breaths coming in quick rasps. She was soaked through. Her hair hung long and wet and crazy around her face. A witch’s hair. Her eyes were red rimmed from the run and you could see the lines of blue veins in her hands as she stood there, clenching and unclenching her fingers. She was wearing running shorts and a Fenton T-shirt. Her heaving chest was almost as flat as mine.
Connor looked directly at Perry. “Rob beat me but we still kicked your fat ass, Jumbo.”
“Good for you, dude.”
Connor spat over the side of the bridge, then got up onto the rail and stared into the mist and the river. He spat again and turned, his eyes roving over us. “The river’s high now, it’s deeper.”
Wadsworth looked at him evenly from his side of the bridge. “Get off the railing, Connor,” he said. “Get off now.” And I heard it for sure. The irritation of a mature person dealing with a kid.
Connor looked at him. “C’mon, Wads. I want to make the jump. I’m thinking there’ll never be a better time. We could all do it. A victory leap. We can do anything now.”