Flat Water Tuesday Read online

  He sat me down on the window seat and I looked directly out onto the water, which reflected the morning sun on my torn palms. A heavy layer of dust covered the windowsill along with a few mummifying summer flies. Whistling tunelessly, Connor ducked into the small bathroom opposite his own, monkish bedroom and brought back the instruments of torture: a razor, a brown bottle of rubbing alcohol, nail scissors and a Zippo lighter. He dragged the smaller table over to us. The wooden oar handles had sucked the moisture from my palms and scraped away the dead, soft flesh. My fingers were burned, reddened and blistered. The heels of my palms would be split soon and the thin bones of the hands themselves would ignite into phosphorous sticks.

  Connor shook his head, eyes down on my palms. His face looked almost translucent, the bones under his eyes and along his jaw oddly feminine. He flicked the lighter, held the edge of the paper-thin razor blade directly into the flame until it glowed. I could smell the carbon blackening the steel. He snapped the lighter shut. “We’ll do the right hand first. That’s the worst.” He found the biggest blister on the middle finger and carefully positioned the blade over the exact center. He sighted it, then shook his head. “I can’t see. Hold your hand closer to the window.”

  “Just do it.”

  He smiled, amused. “Getting scared, Carrey?”

  “You think I haven’t done this before?” I took a sharp breath.

  “You rowed well today. Really. I watched you coming back down the river. Did you make it to the covered bridge?”

  “Almost.” I grit my teeth and looked up at him, trying to ignore the hot edge of that razor hovering over my fingers.

  “Nice. I haven’t been out since I came back to school.”

  He sliced into the soft belly of the first blister and I felt the skin contract with his touch and the heat. A tiny puddle of clear, sweet-smelling pus drooled out around the wound. He quickly put the blade down on the desk and snatched up the brown plastic bottle of rubbing alcohol. He poured a few drops over the hole in my hand and I ground my teeth through the chemical freeze that made my fingers curl. I had to hold my hand still with the other. He looked up at me. “You’re not going to throw up, are you? If you do, do it out the window.”

  I forced myself to look away from the red hole in my hand. I focused on the trophy case moldering by the bedroom, counted the cups over the Henley plates and the medals sitting in pools of decaying ribbon. I stopped when I got to thirty and then started into the brass hardware and the plaques, some of which were piled next to the case, waiting their turn. The FSBC hoard. The alcohol fumes were making my eyes mist over. Connor leaned farther over my hands. “Did I slice the skin below?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “It looks like it hurts.” He said it with what sounded like satisfaction. He picked up a cotton swab, held it like a pencil, and carefully daubed away the open blister’s germs. He put the nail scissors to the flame of the lighter and began snipping away the damp flaps around the cut. Soft white caterpillars of dead skin floated to the desk below us, where they curled. He patted the open blister with alcohol again and I bit my lip through the second burn. Four more blisters to go on my right hand, but he was working quickly and expertly.

  He drew the blade across the next blister and I wanted to howl as it split open. “Channing was once the best coach in New England. He could have coached at Harvard. Exeter and Andover wanted him. He had a firm offer from Dartmouth five years ago. Now, I doubt he could move if he wanted to. He hasn’t won the Warwick Race in five years, hasn’t gone to Henley in six. The alumni aren’t happy about it, of course. But he’s good. He’s always had winning seasons, but Fenton hasn’t had such a dry run in the school’s history. Warwick’s really upped its game and we just haven’t had the right combination of rowers.” Connor burst the last two blisters one after the other—pop, pop—I swore I could hear it. He put the blade next to the clippers on the desk and made me make a fist. “Does that feel all right? It feels like your hands are in ice if your blisters are getting infected.”

  “I know. I’m fine.” But I could feel the pain now, hot and strong.

  He switched his attention to my left hand. Although the pain was not nearly as bad, I had to force myself to swallow the bile that kept rising in my throat. I had cauterized my own blisters at least a hundred times—all rowers routinely perform this minor surgery—but had never shared the ritual. It was an uncomfortably intimate experience.

  “Done. I won’t bandage them; they need to dry out. Don’t get them dirty. You’ll be okay for tomorrow.”

  I cleared my throat, but could not bring myself to actually thank him. It was taking all I had not to look at my hands. They felt as if they were on fire.

  “You should know something. The Harvard coach called Channing asking about you. One good thing about Channing is he’s friends with that coach. They were on the same freshman crew, you know, like, two hundred years ago.”

  He knew he had me. You listen to that kind of thing when you train alone. You like to hear people are talking about you.

  “You understand that Harvard only cares how you do in the God Four, right?”

  “The God Four? You mean the varsity four—first boat?”

  “Yes. It’s called the God Four because for a long time God himself couldn’t beat us—this was years ago, obviously. The name’s stuck, though.” He nodded as if confirming something to himself, then turned to me. “You can row out there in the single all you want, but you need to prove yourself in the four.”

  “Prove myself in the four? Why?”

  “I told you—we haven’t beaten Warwick School for five years. That’s the most important thing for you to think about right now. We go to the National Champs no matter what, but that takes place at the end of the year—after the colleges send out acceptances. So Harvard and the other schools look at the Warwick Race instead.” He nodded toward the stairwell. “My family has seven Harvard grads, dead and alive, who have rowed against Warwick and beaten them. It’s all I’ve heard about for the last ten fucking years of my life. I’ve lost against them for the last three years and it’s not happening again, believe me. Now I’m captain and we’re going to win. And I guarantee Harvard will know about it two minutes after we crush Warwick.”

  “Well, good luck with that, Connor. Really. But I don’t get what all this has to do with me. I’m a sculler. I don’t row in a team and I can’t afford to go to Harvard.”

  “You don’t get what all this has to do with you?” He looked genuinely nonplussed. “The only reason you’re here is to row in the four. Why else? I’ve watched you. You have a self-taught form, no finesse. But you’ve got the power we need.” He grinned.

  I could feel the blood rushing to my fingers. “I’ve won a lot of medals rowing with no finesse. You don’t understand. I’m not rowing with three other preppy kids. Or dragging some coxswain down a race course.”

  “You should see your face. You look ready to hit me.”

  “I came to Fenton to scull. I’m a sculler. A sculler who wins. I don’t want to relearn this sport and lose with your team, no disrespect.”

  “You really don’t get it.” He laughed. “You don’t get it at all.”

  “Get what?”

  “The point of the Warwick Race. It’s not … you know … just another race. It’s how they select the freshman crew at Harvard. Do I need to paint you a picture? Channing and the coach are old friends. Do you think there’s some kind of, I don’t know, selection camp for Ivy League rowers in high school? If we win this race, we all get in. The whole team. That’s their deal.”

  “Channing thinks you’re that good? What’s so different about this year? Who are the other rowers?”

  “He has me and Chris Wadsworth and John Perry. And Ruth Anderson, that chick in your chemistry class who’s the coxswain. And now he’s found you. And, yes, he thinks we’re good.”

  Everyone knew John aka “Jumbo” Perry. He was the noseguard on the football team, one o
f those kids who looked like a hit man even when he was wearing a letter jacket. Wadsworth was from Maine and hung out with the squash jocks. I didn’t know he rowed. As for Ruth Anderson …

  “We all go to Harvard, just like that? After an eight-minute race?”

  “Channing and the coach cooked this up years ago. They have a gentleman’s agreement. That’s the way it works. I can’t believe nobody told you all this.”

  “Well they didn’t. And what’s the deal, by the way, if you lose this great race—again—this race you haven’t been able to win in five years? What happens then? Let me take a guess. All of you guys go to college anyway and I get sent home, and thanks for the memories. What about our grades and SATs and all that?”

  “You mean does the coaching staff at Harvard care if you delivered newspapers in Niccalsetti and sang in the choir and know how to do the algebra on the SAT? No. Not when they are dealing with a kid who can beat the Warwick boat. Maybe they’ll give you special classes or something if you are really, you know, like, primitively dumb. God knows I’ll need them. Channing called his buddy and told him that things may finally change this year and that Warwick is going to face a harsh challenge. He said he’ll watch with interest.”

  “That’s it? He’ll watch with interest? That’s not much of a guarantee.”

  “They don’t put agreements like this in writing, Carrey.”

  “I wouldn’t believe it if they did.”

  “Carrey, win the race and you’ll be a blue-chip recruit from Niccalsetti, New York, who broke Warwick’s winning streak. They don’t expect you to have much money. They have a few billion lying around to help you out.”

  “A few billion.”

  “This deal with Harvard is common knowledge around here, Carrey. Ask Ruth. Ask Wadsworth, or even Perry, who, if he doesn’t win, will probably have to go to trade school. Or maybe prison.”

  It was time for class. He stood in front of me with that grin on his face. The kid was already used to telling people what to do. Standing in his own house in high school, with his earnest face and his expensive, ruined shoes and oppressive pictures on the wall.

  “Want to hear something ironic?”

  “What?”

  “Half the kids Harvard accepts blow them off. Ruth is all about Yale and she has the grades, too. Wadsworth already wants to go to some dinky school like Williams or whatever. It would be you, me and Perry from our crew. We could share a room on the Yard.”

  “What yard?”

  “Nice. Classic. You’ll figure it out.”

  “So just answer my question.”

  “What question?” He waited.

  “What happens if we lose to this superboat from Warwick? Then what?”

  Connor grinned at me again, like he’d taken the serve off me on the tennis court. His was the safety of a kid with generations of Harvard-educated men behind him whose money and power would protect him from the things that struck down the rest of us mortals. “I haven’t given it any thought. If you think about things like that, they tend to happen.”

  My hands were really burning. It was getting hard to hide it. I wanted to scream. I’d been told that one year at Fenton would open doors for me. That’s what my father said again and again on the rides back from the site over the summer. My coach at the Black Rock Rowing Club told me the same thing: one year at Fenton and you can write your own ticket. But I hadn’t heard about the Warwick Race and what it meant until now. The Warwick Race results were engraved on a long wooden plaque in the dining hall, above the headmaster’s table, like homage to crews lost in battle. I should have realized their significance, but you can’t spend your whole life reading plaques.

  “I’m not rowing in the race, Connor. I’m going to scull and kick ass and then we’ll see what coach is interested in what rower. You can take your chances with your friends. I don’t have a dog in this fight.”

  “Rob, how can I put this so you’ll understand? The God Four is the top boat in this school. There is no sculling program. You row in the God Four against Warwick, if we select you, or you row in the JV. Or you can play baseball. Or foosball. But Channing won’t let you row one race in that scull. Not one.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “We will not see. Because Channing is the coach and I’m the captain of this team and this is how the school does things and—”

  “Hey Connor, you know what? Fuck you, fuck your school and fuck the Warwick Race. How about that?”

  I tried to elbow my way around him in that close room. He made a quick sidestep to block me, surprised that somebody would give up an audience with him so easily. I just wanted to shove him aside but I wound up running into him, and the air whistled out of his lungs. He stood his ground, managed to push me back against the wall with his shoulder, an instinctive reflex to put me back where I had been standing, back in my place.

  My right hand balled into a fist and the pain was horrible. It occurred to me that the close warm air in there, the stink of alcohol combined with my own wounds and anger and hunger, was going to make me puke after all. Or pass out.

  “Carrey, if you walk out on me I’ll blackball you and you can go back to wherever they found you.”

  Then I really did try to push him aside and at the same time he tried to hit me, swung at me hard enough so that he just missed when I stepped back and swatted him, going for the face, but hitting him in the neck with the side of my hand, an oblique karate chop that sent liquid fire up my wrists. He struck me in the chest and it was hard enough to hurt and I lowered my shoulder and drove it into him, pushed him off his feet. We danced awkwardly across the room, into the banister, pressed close, face-to-face. “Carrey, cut it out,” he managed to gurgle, and there was that one second of satisfaction when I heard panic in his voice.

  But it wasn’t me he was frightened of.

  We were shoved up against a one-hundred-year-old banister that cracked under our weight, then shattered in an explosion of splintered wood. We fell into space along with the wreckage of the railing and there was a moment of stomach-clutching descent before we smashed into the stairs, sweeping off the photos lining the walls in a shower of glass and paper, the two of us twirling downward to land in a bloody heap at the bottom, me crammed against the door and Connor against the last two stairs. I pushed myself away from him gingerly.

  The stairs were littered with the remains of the banister, and Connor had been cut up pretty bad on the way down. His forearms were covered with bleeding scratches and there was a nasty-looking tear behind his ear. For that matter I would be carrying bruises with me for weeks. I watched him pull himself up to his feet and lean against the wall. His teeth were reddened and he had to steady himself against the stairs. I tried to get to my feet and felt the skin against my ribs stretch. Then he surprised me. He looked at me and said, “Are you all right?”

  I nodded. “You?” I doubted I would have taken that fall without breaking something.

  “You almost broke my neck.” He said it with a sense of wonder. Admiration. “That was fast.”

  “I didn’t want to break your neck, I had no idea this thing was going to—”

  “Let’s hope you can react that fast on the water.” He brushed the dirt and paint and shards of dried wood and glass off his shirt.

  And then I puked. I spat up water and bile and what looked like blood, kneeling over the wreckage and dust. Connor stepped back and waited until I was done. He helped me to my feet and I closed my eyes against the rush of blood from my guts to my brain. Then he said, “Keep this quiet. If Channing finds out, we’ve had it.”

  But it was too late. Mr. Roberts, who was on duty that morning, knocked once and opened the door into the tiny foyer where we were standing. He was one of the geometry teachers, short and blinking in a wrinkled corduroy suit he wore even on that sweaty fall day. We loomed over him out of the mess. He took in Connor’s bloody mouth, ear and arms, my ripped clothing and the utter destruction of the banister and pictures scattered and c
rushed all over the stairs. The sour reek of my vomit made him step back out into the driveway. We both took the minute he gave us to catch our breath, but Connor didn’t say anything else to me. He was too busy blotting the blood off his perfect teeth. Fifteen minutes later I was in the dean’s office with Connor, and ten minutes after that I was on my way to first period, with a note calling for twenty hours of punishment work to do, over two weeks, after school.

  Later I was told Connor had paid for the damage to the stairs himself. He had the banister restored perfectly, hired a company from Hartford to do the work. He sent out all the pictures to be reframed as well, and paid for it with a personal check. He never mentioned any of it to me at all. I heard it from some kid on the freshman club team who didn’t believe I’d actually hit Connor Payne in the face.

  3.

  I walked through the orange arrival halls of Kennedy in a dazed, jet-lagged fog, past the tired airline crew and into the guts of the building. I rode the escalator down past the jaded, post-9/11 security and then stood in line with my fellow travelers under the cameras budding out of the low ceiling above the corrals leading to the customs desk. I’m the type of person customs agents, maître d’s, bouncers and doormen don’t seem to like. I get detained, I get things confiscated, I get thrown out, declined. Carolyn once told me, “It’s because you always look like you’re ready to hit people. Even bartenders don’t like you. Just relax, can you do that?”

  When it was my turn for inspection the wired-down-tight customs officer took a look at all the stamps in my passport and gave me a glance, this man possibly a year older than me, hyperalert for this time of day. He was in short sleeves, his badge hanging off his breast pocket. “You’ve been in and out of the country a few times,” he said. He paid special attention to the stamps from Rwanda and Uganda. He squinted at the crude signatures under the stamps from Zambia.