Whale Talk

by Chris Crutcher

  “You mean the dark-colored ones?”

  “The nigger dolls!” she screams at me.

  Georgia nods again.

  I say, “The nigger dolls.” I retrieve two.

  “Scream,” Heidi orders.

  “What should I scream?”

  “Stupid black bitch!”

  “What?”

  “Stupid bitch!” she yells again. “Black bitch!”

  Again Georgia nods. I don’t like this particular bad dad role.

  I look at a doll, raise my voice, and call it a stupid black bitch.

  “Me!” Heidi screams. “Yell it at me!” She turns to Georgia. “Make him do it right!”

  In a calm voice Georgia tells me I’m supposed to yell at Heidi for letting the black dolls in the house, and I finally piece together from Heidi that I’m also supposed to find them one by one, scream at Heidi for letting each one in (“Get these nigger babies out the house! They stinky!”), and throw them out, and it wouldn’t hurt if I kicked or punched them while I’m at it. It’s a lot easier to hear that word than to say it to a little kid, because I know the impact when you aren’t steeled against it. But Georgia knows what she’s doing.

  As I get deeper into my role, Heidi turns back to the white babies, tucking them tighter, rocking them as she rocks herself, never engaging me unless I lose zeal for my task.

  I find the last doll crammed inside an igloo dog house Georgia has turned into a cave for some other kid and jerk it out by the arm, open the door to the hallway, and fling it, only to see someone disappearing down the stairs. I am caught for one moment in mid-scream, but Heidi screams, “GET THESE GODDAMN FUCK NIGGER KIDS OUT THE HOUSE!!!” and the dead come alive and I am back in business. I hear the front door slam.

  Minutes later in the living room, Georgia touches my shoulder. “You okay, baby?” Since I was two she’s called me baby.

  “Yeah, I’m okay.” I nod toward the kitchen, where Heidi plays. “I can think of better things than nigger to holler at a kid.”

  “Over and over I tell you, racism is—”

  “Ignorance,” I say back.

  The sound of running water brings our attention to Heidi in the kitchen, squeezing dish soap into the filling basin. She pulls herself up onto the lip, stretching to snag a bristle brush, then begins scrubbing her arms. Georgia sighs, closes her eyes, whispers, “She thinks if she can wash it off, her daddy will love her.”

  Heidi’s eyes focus on her brown arms, scrubbing. Georgia moves to the sink and kneels beside her, draping her arms over the lip next to Heidi’s. Heidi stops scrubbing. Georgia says, “Hey.” Heidi doesn’t answer, but glances down at Georgia’s arms, then runs her fingers softly over Georgia’s forearm.

  Georgia motions me over and I take the clue, kneeling on the other side of Heidi, soaping up my arm.

  She looks sadly into my eyes. “You’re a dirty nigger, too.”

  Georgia’s look tells me this is not a time for political correctness. “Yeah, I guess so.”

  Heidi’s sudsy hand touches my face. She looks sorry for me.

  I take the brush, begin scrubbing my own arm. “Dang,” I tell her. “I don’t think it comes off.”

  She says, “Wait,” and pulls herself again over the lip of the sink, stretches to grab a soap bar, then squirts the liquid soap over it and hands it to me. She says, “Two soaps.” I wash my arm like crazy, then rinse. We both stare at my arm. “Nope,” I say, “what else can we try?” Georgia backs away, and for the next few minutes Heidi and I try every kind of brush-soap combination she can imagine, including turning the water in the basin cold.

  Finally I say, “Know what?”

  “What?”

  “I think we’re stuck with it.”

  Heidi takes a long last look at my arm, then walks me to the hand towel hanging from the refrigerator handle. I dry my arm and she does the same.

  My forearm is red and raw on the spot where we’ve been performing our ethnic cleansing experiment. I say, “Know what else?”

  “What?”

  “If we keep this up, we could hurt ourselves.”

  Minutes later, Heidi on my shoulders, I two-step around the living room to a Bob Marley CD I have convinced her is the hottest thing since Barney. There is nothing of the rage and desperation of the last two hours in her eyes, but I’m aware of Georgia’s continuous assertion that the only pure evil is nothing. For this moment, high atop my shoulders, Heidi squeals, visible and proud. But I know she’ll come crashing down the moment she is degraded again. I know—just because I know—that despair moves in like a flash flood when she is diminished. It isn’t even about race, really. It’s about nothingness.

  Georgia emerges from her office with a form and a pen, lifts Heidi off my shoulders, hands me the form, and says, “Sign this.”

  “What is it?”

  “A confidentiality oath.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a signed statement that you won’t tell anyone anything that goes on here in therapy,” she says. “So I can have you work with Heidi, or any other kid who needs you when you’re around.”

  “You’re hiring me?”

  She laughs. “For far under minimum wage. I’m keeping my license safe, baby.”

  I glance at the written oath, dated two weeks ago. “This is old.”

  “Predated,” she says back. “Sign it before Heidi’s mother gets here. She’s already seen you with her.”

  I don’t get it.

  “Didn’t I see Alicia in the hall when you threw the doll out?”

  “Alicia Marshall!” Click! I look at Heidi. “Alicia Marshall’s your mom?”

  She looks away.

  “This is Rich Marshall’s kid? He did this?”

  “Watch your tone,” Georgia says. “You’re a professional.”

  I start to answer, but Georgia glances at Heidi and quickly back at me with a look that says later.

  I disappear into the kitchen when Alicia returns, after which Georgia extracts two of the finest homemade oatmeal cookies currently in production from her cookie jar. “Here,” she says, “You deserve these.”

  “I’m getting paid in cookies?”

  “Get used to it.”

  “Jesus, I knew Alicia had a mixed-race kid, but it didn’t even occur to me that was her.”

  “You know a lot of mixed-race kids in this town? Guess I better bring you up to speed, darlin’.”

  I know part of this story already, but now Georgia fills me in on the rest. When he graduated from high school against all odds, notorious deer-slayer Rich Marshall went to work in the woods setting chokers for his dad’s logging company, passing up the chance to play football at the local community college long enough to bring his grades up to an even 0.00 so he could attend an NCAA Division I school. His girlfriend, Alicia Dalton, signed up at the beauticians’ school at Spokane River Community College, dumped Rich, began dating a black defensive back named Willis Stack, and got pregnant.

  I won’t go into the white supremist militia dogma Rich began spouting in response to “this interracial travesty in our midst,” but Alicia was in love, and she and Willis decided to get married. Then Willis was paralyzed from the neck down as a result of a crushing hit he laid on a wide receiver from Wenatchee. The story goes he couldn’t bear to think of raising his kid in that condition or of saddling Alicia with his care, so in the middle of the night, about three weeks after he was released from the hospital, his brothers loaded him into their van and spirited him away, leaving Alicia heartbroken and lost. She dropped out of school, had the baby—which she named after Willis’s sister Felicia—and went to work as a checker at Jensen Brothers Foods, where good old Rich shopped for his frozen TV dinners and Cheetos and Budweiser and started courting her again, every bit as pissed off as he was the day she started dating Willis.

  In her defeated state, Alicia believed Rich when he said nobody would have her “nigger baby” but him, and they entered into wedded bliss, legally changed Feli
cia’s name to Heidi because it was the “whitest” name Rich could think of, became parents to twin boys nine months to the day from the wedding, and settled into a life of what Alicia described to Georgia as hell on earth. That gives hell and earth a bad rap in my book. Heidi was not allowed to touch food other family members might eat, or play with her younger brothers’ toys except on special occasions, which occurred when Rich said they occurred, or when he was out of town or passed out on the couch. This guy was every girl’s parents’ nightmare, a control freak with an I.Q. three points lower than his belt size.

  Child Protection Services got involved through an anonymous report when Rich decided Heidi had earned twenty-five “spanks” with his belt—ten for forgetting to clean her room, five for dropping her dessert on the floor after he’d told her to be careful, and ten for not washing out the dog’s bowl—and demanded that Alicia deliver the blows to his specifications. When Alicia turned out not to have the heart for it, Rich took over and Heidi was black and blue from the middle of her back to her knees. Rich’s parents got him an attorney who was able to plea-bargain him down from an assault charge, and the kids were placed out of the home until Rich learned to manage his rage and meanness and Alicia learned to protect them from his rage and meanness.

  Now this is where I don’t get it about males and females in so-called civilized America. Alicia Marshall is a good-looking woman, and she’s smart enough that she sure didn’t have to settle for whatever emerged from the nearest manhole. She told Georgia she loved Willis Stack, and Georgia says it’s clear she loves Heidi. What could be inside a person that could allow an asshole like Rich Marshall to come along and take her kid apart? Georgia says it’s what isn’t inside a person.

  At any rate, they both started into mental-health treatment, but Rich blew out of it in the first week. Anger management group and parenting classes got in the way of his drinking beer, a problem he solved by giving up the classes. Alicia got the kids back with the promise that she would stay in treatment and would never see Rich in their presence. That was perfect for Rich because he didn’t like the kids all that much anyway, and he could see her often enough to make sure she knew she’d never learn to live without him. In my view, learning to live without Rich Marshall is like learning to live without cholera, but nobody asked me.

  As I walk toward my car from Georgia’s house, what I know is this: The feeling I had inside when Heidi and I were scrubbing ourselves “clean” will keep Rich Marshall in my life long after I would normally have had him surgically removed like a giant hemorrhoid. No way can I turn away from Heidi now; her sorrow for my color has to be repaired. I’m big enough—old enough—to stop guys like Rich, but Heidi’s not. Georgia’s right about bigotry: that absent the element of hate, a person’s skin color is only an indication of his or her geographical ancestry. But with that element, it is a soul stealer.

  CHAPTER 6

  Time passes, and the swim team gets better and better, not in the sense that we’re ever going to win a meet or even a race that I’m not in, but in the sense that no one is turning back.

  Tay-Roy is turning into our go-to butterflyer. He operates on power and endurance, and big as those shoulders are, they are amazingly flexible. He doesn’t yet have the stroke timing right, but he’s down and back in the time it takes any of the others to get down. That alone won’t win races, but it will avoid crippling embarrassment.

  Chris Coughlin is so glad to be a part of something he works like one of those potato bugs in my bathtub, and he’s as happy stroking away belly down on the bench as he is in the water. In fact, he likes it more because he can hear the music better. We’ve been democratic about music selection, and Chris likes Christmas music, so interspersed with all the rock and hard-driving country and rap (and Dan Hole’s “1812 Overture”) comes “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Chris likes the Gene Autry version.

  Water is the very best place for Dan Hole because he can’t talk when his face is in it, and the longer he’s quiet the more likable he becomes. Simon has realized he doesn’t weigh close to three hundred pounds in the water, and after the first two weeks of working out and lifting weights, Interim Coach Oliver thought he saw the outline of triceps poking through the meat. I caught Simon later in the locker room when he thought everyone was gone, straightening his arm to flex, smiling and shaking his head. A boy and his muscle.

  Interim Coach Oliver, the permanent uninvited houseguest of All Night, is an entity unto himself. As I said, he knows nothing about swimming, but he’s a master motivator and is a better influence the more screwed up the athlete is. Having brought Simon to playing with the idea that there’s a Tay-Roy Kibble inside him ready to burst through at any time, he’s focused his energy on converting Dan into a “regular guy who’s able to converse with his peers,” demanding ten push-ups every time he uses a word Oliver doesn’t understand. It’s too early to tell, but I think Dan has a better chance of building his pecs to Schwarzeneggerian bulk than dumbing down his vocabulary for the likes of us. The guy even bitches in high-brow: “I’m punished for bringing aristocratic flair to the language and vocabulary of these aquatic Cro-Magnons?” he says. “How can that be?”

  Interim Coach Oliver belches and says, “You’re damn lucky I know ‘aristocratic.’ I ain’t so sure which ones were the Cro-Magnons. Gimme ten more.”

  Interim Coach Oliver created a “station” system, wherein one station is the pool, one the surgical-tubing-bench-humping swimming, one a series of deck drills—jumping jacks to push-ups to sit-ups to dips. Three minutes all-out in each station, three times around, to the sound of Interim Coach Oliver’s booming voice, gets us going pretty good when we’re bored with the tedium of the long workouts. Three days a week we hit the weight room, where Tay-Roy puts us through a killer weight workout he dreamed up after reading how Olympic swimmers weight train.

  Don’t get me wrong. In the long run a swimmer is the product of, more than anything else, the number of yards he or she can log in the water. We’re feeling good on the front end of all this, but when the season starts we’d better have some creative individual goals, because we’re going to get our asses kicked. If I have my way, though, when the season is over, there will be six guys stalking the halls you couldn’t have imagined wearing the holy shroud of blue and gold.

  Things are less optimistic out in “real” life. Alicia Marshall must have told Rich she saw me in Heidi’s play-therapy session because every time I ran into him at school the next day, he squinted one eye as if he was lining me up in the crosshairs, then turned away. He doesn’t know I get power knowing he knows I have the goods on him. He’s a guy to watch every minute, though; I’ve never forgotten the look on his face the day he shot the deer. It could just as easily have been me.

  It’s hard to know how paranoid to be. Both Rich and Barbour are consistent in subtly mentioning my “roots” at least one out of three times they say anything to me at all. The only person I know who relates to being nonwhite is Georgia, and she tells me that while she never forgets her heritage, her job on the planet is to be a voice for children, and that’s what she concentrates on first. “But I’m over forty,” she says, “and you’re almost eighteen. It’s one of those things you have to figure out for yourself. Things will look different when you get to college. The inland Northwest isn’t exactly the most ethnically balanced spot in the universe.” For the most part it’s not something I spend a lot of time with except when I hear some off-the-wall remark from Barbour, or when Rich Marshall is messing with my head. I said earlier the Aryan Nations fort is about forty miles from Spokane, in the Idaho Panhandle at Hayden Lake. Neo-Nazis from all over the country come there to “summer camp,” where they have war games and spout mindless slogans of racial purity. Sometimes they obtain a parade permit and march through the streets of Coeur d’Alene or congregate in Riverfront Park in Spokane. On the surface these guys look like a bunch of bozos. The Reverend Butler, the geezer who runs it, is articulate enough, but he’
s crazier than an outhouse rat. And the smartest of the guys who show up for that camp can draw maybe one out of three swastikas correctly. I drove to Spokane to observe one of their rallies last year for a journalism story, and more than anything they looked ridiculous. I said that in the article, but Dad read it and asked if I knew that the guy who opened fire in a Jewish day care in Los Angeles a few years back had ties to those guys. Or whether I was aware a Jewish radio-talk-show host in Denver was gunned down by people traced back to this group. Or that a guy coming from somewhere in the South to support Randy Weaver, the white supremist who held off the FBI at Ruby Ridge, shot two people in the Spokane bus station just because they were a mixed couple. He didn’t want to alarm me, he said, but he wanted me armed with the facts.

  Truth is, I wouldn’t give any of that a second thought—except when I went to cover the story, I swear I saw Rich Marshall standing in the middle of the park talking with one of the “officers.” They were whooping it up like old buddies. That didn’t surprise me all that much, and to tell the truth I couldn’t care less generally; he has the requisite I.Q.

  But the next day he catches me just after I’ve said good-bye to Carly in Wolfy’s parking lot and pulls his pickup in close just after I open my car door, trapping me. He says, “Hey, Jones.”

  “Hey, Rich.”

  “Hypothetical question.”

  I take a deep breath, appear disinterested. “What, Rich?”

  “Let’s say you got married and had a family. And let’s say the Department of Children’s Services made up a bunch of bullshit to keep you away from your wife and kids.” He waits.

  “Okay,” I say, “let’s say that.”

  “And let’s say you find out some guy who ain’t got no business within ten miles of your family gets himself involved.”

  “Okay.”

  “What do you do with him?”

  “Nothing, Rich. I just do whatever I have to do to get back with my wife and kids.”

  “Not me,” he says, pointing his trusty forefinger at me, bringing his thumb/hammer down. “Not me.”