Flat Water Tuesday (33 page)

Perry nodded in affirmation. “You need to take the oath.”

“What oath?”

He held up a joint, lit it theatrically and took a hit, swiping the smoke away from his face with a paw. He handed it to me. “The oath is, you swear on Bob Marley’s grave never to tell anyone about the Society of Glowing Golf Balls. Membership is restricted.”

“I swear. Gimmie that before you hurt somebody, Jumbo.”

“Swear on his dreadlocked soul.”

I snatched the joint from him.

“Careful, Carrey,” Perry warned. “This stuff has a kick.”

“You guys are smoking weed six days before the Warwick Race?”

Wadsworth shrugged. “Looks like you are, too.”

I inhaled on the joint, felt the effect of it cloud into my capillaries. Sure enough it hit me almost immediately. I inhaled again while Wadsworth drew back the driver and crushed the eerily glowing ball. It streaked off into the darkness and arched towards the water, settling into the dark shapes of the brush near the river. Perry watched, I watched, Wadsworth watched. None of us said anything. I handed the joint to Wadsworth and he took a drag.

“That was far,” Perry said. “Inaccurate but far, man. Let me show you how a pro does it.” He took the driver from Wads, bent down, and set a pink ball up on the tee. It glowed innocently, a ruby in the blackness, as he adjusted his bulk over it. He glanced up at me. “This is how you address the ball, dude.”

Wadsworth waved at it. “Hello, ball.”

Perry drew back and slapped the ball into the night. It missiled off the roof toward the fields, and I watched it disappear into what I thought might be the river. The thought of the ball resting on the river bottom, emitting that comforting rosy glow, was extremely soothing.

Perry was saying something. I looked at him, perplexed. “Your turn,” he repeated.

“I don’t play.” I didn’t mention that there seemed to be something fundamentally wrong about hitting those beautiful dimpled orbs. My knees were sore, my arms were sore, but the pain seemed much less acute up here. Perry handed me the driver. “Give it a try. Go on.”

I bowed over a yellow ball. Tried to set it on the tee. It rolled off. Set it up again and everything was cool.

“Dude, terrible stance.” Perry snatched the driver from me. “Hold it like this. Arms straight, wrists firm.” He handed me the club and I tried to adjust myself. “Okay, Rob. Close enough. Let ’er rip.”

I wound back and whacked at the ball, missed entirely. Wadsworth laughed, “Again! Again!”

I connected with the ball on my fourth try, and it was more of a slapshot than a drive. Still, the ball streaked off into the darkness.

Into outer space. Gone.

Perry cheered. “Slice! Dude, slice!” He teed up another ball, a blue one this time. “Fore!”

After three false tries, I slapped it again. I dropped the driver, stood back on my heels and watched the ball bounce in impossible parabolas down the main drive of the school. When was the last time I smoked pot? I looked at the bag of glowing balls, chose a martian green one, pitched it into the darkness where it sailed toward the river and abruptly disappeared.

Wadsworth picked up the driver, launched a red ball into the gloom. It traced the green trail mine had left behind. “You need to relax, Carrey. Just slow down your slide in the boat. Your recovery is way too fast. Just chill. Then Connor will be happy. Channing will be happy. The boat will be faster. It’ll be all good.”

I picked up another red ball, whipped it far out toward the science building, where it bounced along the roof in cheerful zigzags. “It’s not like I don’t want to.”

Perry accepted the driver from Wads and bent over a glowing golden orb. He drew back, smacked it, and it beelined toward the water, then abruptly arched upward into the stars. I watched in amazement. A quantum leap, a defiance of gravity. Perry glanced at me. “You have nothing to lose.”

“Rowing in the four is different than rowing in the single.”

“Ya think? Damn. That’s deep.”

Wadsworth claimed back the driver, stood back and consulted the heavens. “Of course it’s different. It’s way faster. And you’re not in charge. But the key to speed in the four … is … following.”

“Following
Connor
might be the problem.”

“Connor is … wise, dude,” Wads said.

Perry giggled. “Yeah. Like, you know. Wise.”

Wadsworth set up a purple ball, blasted it into the purple horizon. “If you just relax for one race, we’ll go faster. It’s that easy.”

“But, we have no idea how to make you do that,” Perry added.

“Nope. No clue.” Wadsworth sighed. Teed up a glowing, ice blue ball. Drove it all the way back to Superman’s fortress.

27.

Ten miles away from Fenton, I parked the Jeep outside one of the pizza/bar/coffee places that dot that area of New England. I walked into the small shop and found it almost empty. It was the kind of spot you frequented as a prep school kid, serving the gamut from milk shakes and sodas to pizzas, hot dogs and hamburgers to pasta to bogus vegetarian meals and salads to desserts with names like “Mac’s Surprise.”

I ordered a cup of coffee at the counter from a young woman wearing a flannel shirt that reached her knees, which looked like bumps sticking out of legs packed into tight black leggings. She had long, tired brown hair and sausage fingers and chatted perfunctorily with the cook through the serving window as she stood at her post in front of the register. She was wearing gaudy running shoes, incongruously, and as I paid I thought about what Connor would have made of her had we stopped by a decade and a half ago. I imagined the casual names we’d have used to describe her, the snobbery of the rich and the beautiful when having dealings with the poor and the plain. She smiled at me when she gave me my change and I smiled back. “You going to the reunion?”

“Yes.”

“You’re the third person who came in today. Two other guys came in and ordered beers. They looked like they were getting ready to have a good time over there.”

Or they were bracing themselves,
I thought.

She told me to sit down anywhere and I chose one of the two booths, sat looking out at the hard packed gravel drive and the dark road. She served the coffee with the same brilliant smile, and I sipped it, accepted a refill and sipped some more, looking out at the road, knowing just what the soft shoulder would feel like when you ran down it early in the morning.

I had made decisions at that school. Decisions that were with me now and would remain with me. I had decided, for instance, that no matter what I did in college, and in life, I would do nothing that required me to work on a team, or in any kind of team environment. I would never work directly under an authority figure, either, or select a job where I had to compete head to head with others. Documentary filmmaking fit the bill for this. As far as I was concerned, it was not really a collaborative effort. I could choose what projects I wanted to work on and was in charge of my own shoots. Even when I worked with Carolyn, I had her create the final cut for me from my scripts. The people I filmed, when I did film people, were small and distant figures down an eyepiece. You can film terrible things when your mind is fooled into thinking it’s happening on TV.

I lingered over my coffee. The woman behind the register disappeared into the back. I thought, seriously, of ordering a beer, and knew if I did I wouldn’t leave the place.

One thing that people in my industry had to learn in order to get ahead was how to be nice. They
schmoozed
, they
took meetings
, they
traded contacts
, they
beamed each other
and
shot each other e-mail.
Carolyn was a great connector, she was good with people in a way I could never be. Being unable to deal with people, even with people in my own profession, certainly meant I would never go big-time, would never run my own production company or get a contract for a really serious string of shows.

I would not make much more money than my father did, and that had irked him. I’d be small-time, like he was. Unlike him though, sooner or later I’d have to find a job that didn’t beat my body up so much, and I had some options to do so. I could write, or teach. I had taught before, after Carolyn had forced me to do it, given informal talks at small colleges and film schools about the business, short presentations at film festivals. The first time I had done this, I had realized something I had not known before: Teaching is a lonely pursuit. The podium acts like the viewfinder, and the faces in the class seem to meld into each other. You prepare the talk, you give the presentation, you take the questions and move on. I was attracted to the idea. Teaching would allow me to be my own boss, in a manner of speaking. The more you taught, in a strange way, the more disconnected you became from your charges.

Channing must have liked that as well.

*   *   *

I tied into the single my father made for me, clamped down the sculls and concentrated on breathing hard. I was still allowed to use it on the condition I had Channing’s permission, which I did not. As I pushed off and tapped the boat into the current I watched the winter detritus from far upriver float down the exact middle of the bed. Old logs, dead trees, clumps of grass, and mud that we called “clong”, all tossed aside by the brown water that moved now with resolve and strength. It was still cold out, the cold could hang on until May even, but it was a good cold. I worked into the piece, thinking about gaining length as I rowed down the river toward the town bridge. I could smell it as I approached—wet winter steel—and I looked back to see it and align myself. The darkness below it came on quickly and as I passed under, I glanced up at the support beams and cross-bars, took two more strokes, and ran out.

“Solid rowing.”

Channing’s voice startled me and I looked sharply to the shore to see nothing but the banks sloping into the water, covered in leaves. Then I looked up on the bridge and there he was, his elbows on the railing. I brought the scull to an awkward stop. “You have a weak recovery, Carrey. You’re pulling the blades out too soon. You do it in the four as well.”

“I’m working on it.” I looked up at him.

“I’ve told you all week, all year, that your recoveries have to change if you want more speed.”

“You can judge my recoveries from up there, too?”

“I can, yes.”

I rowed away from him, left him there watching me. He cupped his hands over his mouth and shouted down across the river. “You’re bringing your hands too close to your body, and hunching over to pull the oars from the water. Fool.”

I ignored him, rowed all the way down the river until it bent. From the bend you could get in fifty more strokes and then the river dammed up in front of the covered bridge and you had to turn around. I spun the boat and thought about my hands being too close to my body. I leveled them out and flattened and pulled. I rowed back up the river and when I turned the corner I checked my line and then looked up at the bridge. He was still up there, waiting. I turned back and settled into the oars, twenty fast strokes.

“You’re rowing like you’re strapped to a bowling ball,” he called. “You have short strokes.”

I carried on rowing and as I got closer I could hear him muttering to himself. “Bad stroke. Bad, bad. Good stroke, good one, good. Bad. Bad.” He coughed. I slipped back under the bridge and rowed a further fifteen strokes before stopping. He shaded his eyes when I did. “Look at the Harvard man, hunched over his oars.”

I laid my oars flat on the water and felt the current push me away from him. I turned the oar, palmed some water with my blade and pulled, gently, running out beneath him.

“Go ahead. I want to see one perfect stroke, Carrey. Just one.”

I came up the slide slowly and turned the sculls until they dug into the river, set the blades and snapped off a stroke into the current, leaning back and tapping the sculls out of the water. I moved five meters down the river and quickly turned to see what was coming at me. Channing watched for a moment and shook his head. “You pull with your lower back. I’m not sure how you stay on your feet after a race. And you duck your head. How on earth are you so fast on the water?”

“Luck.”

“It’s not luck. It’s power. It’s strength. Do you think you’ll have it forever?”

I shrugged. “Long enough.”

“You have no discipline, Carrey. You row like you’re chopping wood or sawing or laying down track. Power is cheap in this world, Carrey. Very, very cheap.”

I looked up at him and snapped off another stroke. He shaded his eyes again, watched, shook his head again. “You look like you’re doing a job.”

“It is a job.”

“It’s not. Not a soul will pay you.”

“Rowing this way has got me pretty far.”

“Roll forward on the slide. Do it.”

I rolled forward and the boat began to rock in the current. Balled up at the end of the tracks I was vulnerable, my arms spread out over the water.

“Chin up, now.”

He was right, I was looking down at the bow deck. I looked up and felt my spine settle into my back, the bones pile into one another, connecting, and the muscles in my forearms stretch out.

“Get those blades off the water and hold them. Then turn the oar handles and don’t bend your arms until I give the command.”

For one second I was free and balanced over the water while I turned the blades over the current. Poised this way in space, I could place the oars exactly and when they cleaved the water, I pushed with my legs and fell backward, my arms burning to pull into my body. He waited for a moment and then said, finally, “Row,” and my arms bent and the oars came into my chest. I might have gained a foot of run. My body felt taller, stronger.

He nodded as if finding resolution to some debate he’d been having with himself. He looked down from the bridge. Deep inside the structure you could hear drips of water falling hollowly.

“There are scullers older than you and faster and less likely to do idiotic things. Harvard wants to see rowers who have the ability to bring magic into a team. That’s what they are looking for. The only thing you have on your side is youth and power. If you do not progress, you’re nothing.”