Flat Water Tuesday (29 page)

Connor sought me out. I had been avoiding him and brooding about how he would use the fact he had saved my life against me. But he didn’t mention the ice or the infirmary or the healing cut on my scalp when he fell into step with me. “What’s with the silent treatment? You’re a hard man to find. Listen, you need to go see Channing. Today. At his house.” He looked at me, looked again. “You just went completely pale. They’re not going to kick you out or anything. It’s not that. If the school wanted you out for being a bonehead, you’d be gone by now. It’s something else.”

“What?”

“No idea. Don’t look at me like that. I really have no idea. He told me to find you and make sure you showed up right after classes. Today.”

“The river’s broken. We’ll be on the water soon.”

“It’ll be awhile before all the ice floes are melted.”

“How long?”

“A few weeks. At least. We’re not finished with winter yet. I’ll see you around, Rob. Don’t be a stranger.”

*   *   *

When I ran out to Channing’s house I dropped the mile in under seven minutes and wasn’t even winded when I hit his driveway. The last part of the run was downhill. I stopped by the shed. It was in good shape. It could endure the elements because the basics were right. I had come out twice a week to check on it, had even waterproofed the seals and the interior. I stood in its sawdust silence, and the turmoil of the previous weeks seemed far away; done with. I opened the shed door and looked over at Channing’s house, less weatherproofed, peeling in the weak sunlight of the afternoon. I waited, coughed, stamped my feet. If he was in there he didn’t know I was here, and I didn’t feel like freezing to death while waiting to be acknowledged.

I walked back to the far side of the house to find his garage door open. He’d just left it that way. There was zero crime in Fenton. Not that Channing had anything worth stealing in that garage, unless somebody had a jones for rusted garden tools, battered garbage cans and rows of rotting paint cans.

He kept things. Hellmann’s mayonnaise and Peter Pan Peanut Butter jars. Stacks and stacks of the
New York Times
, all tied up in string and forgotten. He had a surf-casting set in there and an old Schwinn bike hanging up, rusted solid. And boxes. All kinds of them. Majestic Van Lines boxes, boxes marked
Summer House
and
Clothes,
and one or two with just ‘Cape Cod’ in his handwriting. They were covered in dust and dirt and rat shit and some must have been infested with mice and weevils and whatever else lives in garages people never clean out. No legal books. Maybe he’d thrown them all out when they chucked him from the firm. I stood amidst all his junk and saw how he only
just
had enough room for his old Chevy Estate station wagon, a Brush Hog, a lawnmower and a Weed Eater that was out of twine.

I tried the door leading from the garage to the house itself. It practically fell open and there I was looking into Channing’s kitchen.

“Mr. Channing? Coach?”

He had old, brown roll-on linoleum stuck to the kitchen floor and an ancient sink set into a chipped, green Formica counter that was dotted with burn marks. His pots and pans hung off hooks and there were rows of dusty cookbooks above the sagging white electric stove. Dingy, flowery wallpaper was peeling up against the ceiling where the steam from the stove had stained it in brown clouds. The cupboards matched the counters at one time, but were now falling apart, right out of the walls. I searched for a light switch, snapped it on, and a three-bar florescent light flickered and hummed to life above me. And then one of the light tubes winked off.

I’d worked on a few jobs where the previous owner had died and nobody had known anything about him. You’d just throw all his stuff away and start over with new plumbing and new plug points for the next renter or buyer. This was that kind of kitchen. Two guys could set to work in a kitchen like this with a crowbar and a sledgehammer and rip it all out in an hour. You could tear the whole thing apart before lunch and leave it in the driveway for the junk truck—you’d never be able to resell or reuse any of it. The afternoon light flooded into the room and I held my breath. I hated to imagine Channing sitting here with his back to the window drinking his Sanka from the half-full jar by the sink and thinking about nothing while he did it, like any old guy killing time before work.

I walked through that awful kitchen and into the living room, which at least had a couple of comfortable-looking overstuffed chairs in it, even if they didn’t match the room. He’d set a black and white TV on a bench before the dusty fireplace and a bunch of TV guides were stacked next to his chair with two empty highball glasses balancing on top of them. There was a desk in the corner, positioned so if he sat there his back would be to the window and the road beyond. The desk might not have been a desk at all; it looked like it might have once been a dining room table. Two pictures were stranded on top of it. One was of a kid standing on a wooden sailboat deck shading his eyes to look at the camera. The edges of the picture were frayed with age and the color washed out. The kid was maybe twelve or thirteen years old. Next to it was a picture of a different sailboat, also taken a long time ago with a cheap camera.

A newspaper clipping had been stuck on the wallpaper beside the desk. It was faded and greasy the way newspaper gets when it’s been around a long time. There was a cluster of pinholes right above the clipping and reddish marks where he’d taped it in different places over the years. It took me a few seconds to recognize that the darkened picture on that curled paper was of two rowing shells crossing a finish line. The photo was of the Harvard boat crossing the line first against Yale at Gales Ferry. It was snapped just before the winners would have pumped their arms in the air in victory. The coxswains were both hunched in the back of the boats, and both teams were wearing white tank tops. You could see the backs of people watching the race in the foreground. The caption read,
Harvard takes Yale by one half length at Gales Ferry
, and beneath it were the names of the rowers in each boat. I could barely read them, but finally saw,
C.Channing
. He’d rowed six-seat. I could not see his face. I looked around the room again for more pictures, but there was no further evidence that this was a rower’s study, a rowing coach’s study. No other news clippings, no oar over the full bookcase, no framed photographs, no cups, medals, or trophies. Nothing.

Somewhere he must have the Yale shirt he’d taken off the other six man, the one the losers traditionally hand over in defeat. I took another look at the clipping on the wall; just a random race result between some college kids in New London, Connecticut. But it was the biggest race in college rowing. I pushed the clipping flat with my fingers. It felt like a skin shed years ago and salvaged.

“What are you doing in here, Carrey?”

He was standing in the doorway with his hands in his pockets. I was busted. Hadn’t even heard him.

“Nothing. Just looking for you, Coach. You asked me to drop by?”

“How long were you in here, Carrey?”

“Five minutes. Max. I didn’t take anything—I didn’t even move anything.”

He made a big show of looking around the room carefully. The dark furniture and walls and desk seemed to suck the sunlight from the air. “I certainly hope you weren’t pilfering books. I have a valuable collection.”

“I didn’t touch anything, Mr. Channing, I swear.”

I waited to see what he would do, but he just stood there.

“Coach, can I please ask one thing?”

“Ask it.”

“Where are all the trophies? All your rowing things?”

“Many of my belongings have been lost, sold, stolen, or litigated away from me over the years.”

“You don’t keep any of the stuff you win for Fenton?”

He paused, then said, “The trappings of victory are not mine to keep. They are at the school. In my office at the boathouse. On the walls in the banquet room. You know this, Carrey.”

“But your own stuff, I mean. Your own medals.”

“Carrey, have you ever noticed that the minute you put a trophy in a case, it becomes impossibly old? I do not know why. The luster of victory wears off quickly, I suppose.” He looked at me, suddenly old and frail himself. “The thought for the day is not about trophies. It is about this:
ubi concodia, ibi victoria.
”

“Where there is unity, there is victory.”

“Carrey, I am surprised. By God, you remembered a line of Latin. And who said this?”

“No idea.”

“Publilius Syrus. A writer who started out as a slave and found a kind of freedom.
Where there is unity, there is victory
. Every rower knows this because without total unity in the boat, you will only find defeat.”

“I’d like to be a unified force of one.”

“Carrey, if you agree to think of Publilius Syrus every day from now on, I will agree to have you on the God Four.”

“Fine.” I said it quickly. There was always the chance he wasn’t just joking.

“Then you are on the team. Barring some misfortune that kills you.”

“I’m really on the God Four? Just like that?”

“You will be in the boat, but the world is yours to lose.”

I didn’t know what to say. I stood in his living room, speechless. Grinning like an idiot. Finally, something did occur to me. “
Ubi maior, minor ceasat
.”

“And what on earth does that mean, Carrey?”

“The weak die before the strong.”

“The last word is ‘
cessat
.’ Fool. Its real meaning is that what is important brushes away what is not important. Like, for instance, the importance of your learning how to row with the others. Getting along with them. This is more important than whatever you have achieved in your scull.”

“I’m improving.”

“You are getting stronger. Whether you are improving as a rower remains to be seen.”

“Do the others know?”

“You will find out. But I want to remind you that nothing is permanent in rowing. I can remove you at any time. I can do it even if you only irritate me. Do you have any more questions, Carrey?”

“Just one, Coach.”

“Then ask it and leave. I have things to do.”

“Did you go to law school? At Harvard?”

“An idiotic question. Why would you think that?”

“I’m just asking.”

“Carrey, let me tell you something I teach all my English students. Are you ready for it?”

“Okay.”

“Don’t believe everything you read. Don’t believe half of it. And none of what you hear.”

*   *   *

I had lost enough weight so when I looked in the bathroom mirror I could follow the network of veins down my shoulders and arms. If I made a fist, the muscles in my shoulder cuff pumped up and expanded like a fan beneath my skin. I was in the best physical condition of my life. Wadsworth looked much the same as me—lean and mean—and Perry, who had dropped at least twenty pounds of fat but none of his muscle, looked downright menacing.

By the time we were six weeks off the spring racing season, I might not have recognized Connor. His clothes hung from his body and his newly cut short hair only emphasized the fact that you could clearly see the outline of his skull. I had come to believe he was running at night after all the communal training was over. Ruth was not only skeletal, but also undernourished. We could virtually eat what we liked—our training was so intense that we were burning up thousands of calories every day. But she was thin to begin with and had to deprive herself of a lot of food to drop even more weight off her small frame. How she managed to keep up with us on our training runs on the meager rations she allotted herself I do not know. In fact I had no idea just how dangerously underweight she was. The year after we graduated, the school would set a minimum weight for coxswains.

I was eating food supplements, painkillers and vitamins throughout every day—we all were. Three white tablets after morning practice, washed down before the powdery taste coated my tongue. Then a Tylenol, followed by an anti-inflammatory bumblebee-shaped horse pill for my knees. Then two vitamin Cs to ward off winter sickness and flu. A supplement for stress. Two more complex vitamins. Lecithin. A marblelike tablet full of bitter gelatin. A jar of translucent pills stood by my window, golden tears of soft amber. Then two amino acid pills. These were meant to help my body build red, aerobic muscle but instead made my sweat smell like rotting flowers. My dessert was a tiny anti-asthma pill that kept my throat and nasal passages from closing in the cold air. It dried my sinuses and gave me a hollow feeling for the duration of the early morning.

It was now the end of February. Five days of weak sun had melted the snow on the road and the hold-out ice floes on the river drifted by the school like wreckage. The crew started running together outside, long runs down the roads behind Fenton, through the sheep mud of this unexpected spring. We trod on piles of dark leaves covered with old, dirty snow, kicked them aside. River Road was slick and streaked with muddy tire tracks and we ran through the wet and occasional cold gusts with anticipation thinking that winter was over.

One afternoon I joined Connor, Ruth, Perry, and Wadsworth who were all on the main school bridge looking down at the black water running hard in-between the broken floes. Connor leaned over and spat far into the depths below. He turned and folded his arms theatrically. “Your captain declares it time for the God Four to have its first on-the-water practice,” and a collective whoop went up. It was the first time I felt truly one of them.

Connor opened the boathouse doors to reveal the slumbering boats. We pulled out the Fenton first boat, flipped it into its cradle and brought out the riggers. Working quickly, we assembled it wordlessly, cranking on the riggers and sliding the seats into place. When that was finished, Ruth stood at the bow formally and made us wait before making the classic coxswain’s call, “Reach down … and up … and over the heads.”

We flipped the boat over our heads and maneuvered it out into the cold. Ruth had us walk it forward and then drop it to our shoulders without looking back. I smelled the plastic and grease smell of the rowing shell and then the river and then the wind off the river and excitement surged through me. Ruth led us down to the long wooden dock—still covered in a thin, wind-dappled layer of ice—where we cranked the boat over our heads and flipped it down into the water. She held it firmly while we ran up for the oars, the boat straining against her, looking like it wanted to pull away and take to the water itself.