Flat Water Tuesday (7 page)

He took a breath and visibly composed himself. Our exchange had rattled him. He began again. “Every year, as most of you know, we formally challenge Warwick School to a race. And for the last five years, to our perpetual shame, Fenton has failed to win.” He said this in the same way he might announce that we had all been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

“For the benefit of those present who were … elsewhere … last year our disgrace took place at Warwick. This year we race at home and we will not, I repeat
not
, be humiliated on our own river again. Channing waited while every rower shifted in his seat. “As always, we face Warwick on the third Tuesday in April. You should know that the FSBC alumni have made it clear that they hope to see us win.” Channing paused. “But they are not us. They are not here. History does not wait for the verdict upon them. All of them wish they had one more crack at victory on the water against that hated place Warwick. This chance is reserved for we few.” Another pause. He was quite the showman. “Listen.”

We listened. Outside, you could hear the shouts and whistles on the fields around us, pulses of noise. “The armorers, accomplishing the knights, with busy hammers closing rivets up, give dreadful note of preparation.”

I had no idea what Channing was talking about, but I had the sense of it.

“And preparation for rowing is indeed dreadful. Mr. Perry, let’s start with you.”

John Perry was riding his chair backward. He sat like a chained beast, his blue letter jacket buttoned precariously over his bulk. He looked up at Channing with tiny blinking eyes.

“You
are
John Perry, yes?”

Perry looked at all of us for support and we looked back at him. Connor interlaced his fingers behind his head and examined Perry while Ruth looked politely away, at some spot on the floor to my left.

“Coach?” Perry was flustered. “I mean … you know who I am Mr. Channing—”

“John Perry from the losing first boat of last year? This is you?”

Perry tried to smile. “Yeah, okay, it’s me—”

“I ask because you look like his fatter, slower twin. Perry, you are too heavy for my boat. Your task is to lose weight and become stronger and gain endurance. This does not mean eating pizzas at the Fenton Pizza Garden or grappling with idiots from Taft on the football field.”

Wadsworth snickered under his baseball cap. Seated in a window seat, he was framed by the late afternoon light, his legs dangling into space. Channing turned on him immediately. “Chris Wadsworth. Another survivor from the disastrous boat of last year. Have you been thinking how you will make amends? You have work to do.”

He turned to the board and wrote the number 7 in the middle. “You have seven months, gentlemen—and lady—until the Tuesday race against Warwick School. Less than that until the season starts.” He took off his glasses. “I cannot call formal practices until the spring but Mr. Payne and Ms. Anderson will be keeping track of who is working. This means that while I cannot
force
you to begin training now, I can
ask
that you start thinking about the fact that no rower’s position here is secure and I can
urge
you to make every preparation necessary for what lies ahead. You will all be tested and some of you shall be found wanting.”

He turned the full force of his gaze on me and I knew he was getting ready for his final delivery. “Carrey, you have never seen what awaits you this spring. You need to understand that right now you are just … the raw material. You are merely breathing potential. The tabula rasa where Fenton’s history will be written. Did you seriously think we would tremble before your abilities?
You
, a PG mercenary who is already a disciplinary case two weeks into the start of the school year because—”

“Come on. That was not my fault, I—”

“We do not care to give hearing to your explanations or alibis, Carrey. We care about getting ready for a race that will define us. Will define you. We care about crossing the finish line ahead of the other boat. We care about winning. This is all we care about. And we cannot win if you are being disciplined, or if you have been expelled. So, Carrey, I ask that you be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them. Don’t query the form in which greatness comes. Am I clear?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah? Do you mean ‘yea’? As in, ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me?’”

“Yes.”

“No, Carrey. No. I offer none of you comfort. I offer you no protection from evil. This you will fashion yourself or be beaten. Opportunities for glory are flying around all of you like bullets. And some of you, Carrey, are crawling upon the ground with helmets on. Have you made your decision? We all await.”

My head was spinning with rage.
Do it
, I thought. Leave this crap. Walk out the door.

I grit my teeth. Screw this for a laugh, as Wendy would say. Walk out.

Walk out and go … where?

Home?

I took a breath.

“I’ll do it.” And felt like I was betraying everything I’d come from and suffered through to stand there. A Judas for a bunch of prepsters.

“You will do what, exactly?”

“Try out for the four.”

“And suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune with the rest of us?”

“Whatever.”

Triumphant, Channing stared at the others, all of them looking away from me as I stood there, defeated. “Seven months. Connor will be ensuring that you begin your preparations. Dismissed.”

You never saw a room full of kids clear out so fast, all shoulders and gangly arms squeezing through the door and pounding down the stairs. Connor and Ruth conferred briefly then got up and left. I put my bag over my shoulder and started to follow.

Channing caught me at the door. “Mr. Carrey. A word.”

Connor glanced back at me and grinned, shut the door behind him.

Channing put his glasses back on and it occurred to me they might also be a prop. He dug around in the mess of his briefcase and pulled out a folder, licked his thumb, opened it. He read for about three seconds to himself, then looked at me. “It says, in summary, Robert Carrey. PG student. Championship-level rower with decent grades. Hails from the Niccalsetti Senior School, an institution of learning I was unfamiliar with until you appeared here. Your grades are surprisingly high—are you hiding a brain from us, young Carrey?”

It was my turn to look out at the trees sloping up the sides of Mt. Algo and just breathe. There were millions of those trees. I was barely holding it together. It was a farce—being my age and dealing with this crazy old man.

“Mr. Carrey, a recent missive from our mutual friend the dean informs me you have been caught destroying school property and fighting with one of our associates in the Rowing Cottage.”

“I tried to tell you. Connor deserved it. If you start in on me you might as well go get him, too.”

“Connor Payne might have deserved it but you have both been punished for it. Did you deserve to be punished?”

“He was asking for it.”

“Connor Payne asked you to hit him and you complied?”

“I didn’t hit him, I just wanted him to get out of the way.”

“Be that as it may, you now owe the school twenty hours of work, and you will be working for me. Off campus. I happen to need a painter. Can you paint?”

“I can paint.”

“Are you sure? The school does offer free labor to its senior teachers but I have found in the past it is often not the most qualified or intelligent or diligent labor.”

“I’ve painted stuff for my father since I was eight. If I finish early, will you let me out of whatever’s left?”

“There will be plenty for you to do.”

“All right. I get it.”

“Meet me at my home at four next week on Monday, once you have recovered from your injuries sustained in your … altercation … with the captain of my first boat.”

“What about Connor?”

“What about him?”

“Does he have to paint your house?”

“He does not. I am not his advisor. I have no idea what he will be doing to work off his hours. He may wind up raking leaves, or shoveling mulch, or cleaning bathrooms.”

“I hope he gets the bathrooms.”

“I shall keep you appraised.”

“I’d hate to think you’d make me do a job like this because I’m a scholarship kid, Mr. Channing. Just to put me down.”

“No, no, Carrey. Rest assured we’d have contempt for you even if you paid full fees.”

“Does the school supply you with paints, too?”

“No. But I do have the use of its sandpaper and tools.”

“Free labor and equipment.”

“Teaching is notorious for its many benefits. This is why I entered the profession.”

“I thought you used to be a lawyer. Plenty of perks there.”

“You are misinformed.”

“They say you got fired.”

“Fired or disbarred? I never can keep track.”

“Is it true?”

“With all this free labor and sandpaper and such at my disposal, Carrey, why would I ever consider the law as a profession? Meet me at my house on Monday. Four
P.M.
sharp. Wear your work clothes. Try not to assault anyone on your way.”

“Where do you live?”

“Walk down River Road until you see a white house. Can you remember that?”

“I can.”

“Good. Go. Learn.”

5.

My father showed up at the school a day later than he was supposed to, on the same Monday I had to start work at Channing’s. He arrived in his ten-year-old immaculate Ford F-150, drove right to the boathouse doors and threw down the brake. My scull was strapped to the truck bed, the stern sticking out. He had built a carrier for it himself, a padded cradle that held the scull in place down the New York State Thruway. He had taped the outriggers together and stowed them underneath the boat and had made brackets for each oar that he could lock. He had driven alone, left my mother behind to keep an eye on my older brother and the house. When he arrived at the school he jumped out and inspected the boat, no doubt the tenth time he’d done it during the whole eight-hour drive. Then he walked over to the dean’s office and handed over the balance of the tuition my scholarship didn’t pay for, in cash, and made the dean, Mr. Owen, make up a receipt then and there.

When I got out to the boathouse, my father was looking down at the riggerless scull, long and sleek and green, tied with nylon belting against its cradle. He ran his finger over the top. “I should have found a tarp for her but nothing fit from the workshop and I didn’t have time. Didn’t want it flapping around back there either. I figured you put anything on a coat of varnish slick as that, you wind up scratching it.”

I touched the bottom of the scull, the boat representing a cool month of mowing his lawn and lugging wood up from the lumber yard every morning in my brother’s station wagon and hauling it into his shop out back of the house, then sweeping out the scrap and bagging the off-cuts while he and Tom worked. My father paid me fifty cents below union wages then, when I was training hard every afternoon. He wound up paying for the last twenty-five percent of the boat anyway.

He’d driven to Fenton along Route 7, a map neatly cut from the back of the school catalogue and taped to the road map of the state thruway. He’d arrived to find the boathouse doors open to the late afternoon sunlight. It looked and smelled like a workshop in there and my father felt at home, I could tell. I knew he would have looked over Channing’s tools and the fittings and riggers on the wall. He would have noted with approval the neat boxes of screws and the endless cans of paint and varnish and caulking and sealant and cleaning agents and itched to touch it all but wouldn’t have done so because it wasn’t his workshop and he’d no more touch another shop’s equipment than fly to the moon. In his worn chinos and work shirt and baseball hat he was all work, all business. He understood how to bend steel and wood and people, if he needed to.

He wouldn’t go back into the main school with me, have a look around or maybe something to eat. He just wanted to sit in the truck and talk before moving on. But I knew he didn’t want to park the truck in the visitors’ area, next to the Volvos, Jeeps and BMWs. He didn’t want to embarrass me. I hated that. I felt a surge of protectiveness toward him that I didn’t want.

He believed that by encouraging me to spend a year at Fenton he was depositing me at the gates of a better world. Years later, after I had failed to make any more money than he had, he and I would argue. It was inconceivable to him that a person with my education—so agonizingly hard won—would choose to do anything else but make money and embrace the life that generations of us had been denied.

Once my father had established that the boat was indeed secure, that his handiwork had not failed him, he looked over the long sea of green around him, the manicured fields and glowing white lime in front of the modern field house. He squinted over the soccer and lacrosse training fields, acres of lovingly, expensively maintained grass. The football goalposts held his attention, and the stern blue bleachers rising out of that luxurious emerald sweep. “They play good ball at this school?” he asked.

“They lost their first game to this other school, Taft, because they have no kicker and the quarterback kept overshooting the receiver.”

“Bob Wiley says the Niccalsetti Lions might be undefeated this year. They promoted the second string quarterback. Wiley says he isn’t as good as your brother was.”

“They’ll never have another Tom Carrey on that team.”

He grunted, gazed out at the field, as if seeing my brother—graduated from school, home now, jobless, aimless—backpedaling into that perfect green carpet. “Did you talk to the rowing coach yet?”

“At a meeting.”

“How’d it go?”

“Not as well as it could have.”

“These guys as good as they say they are?”

“They could be. Some college coaches think so, that’s for sure.”

He nodded. “You cleared the scull with your coach, right?”