“Well, you can find him over at the store about twelve hours a day when he’s not running the river. Bet he’s there now.”
The store is clean and quiet; a checker reads a Stephen King book behind the counter. She glances up to greet me when I walk in and points me toward the produce section when I ask for the owner.
“Kyle Couples?”
“The one and only. What can I do for you?” He’s a big man, dark and fit, somewhere in his late twenties or early thirties.
“I think we may have the same father.”
He looks at me with surprise. “Excuse me?”
My ethnicity hasn’t occurred to me. “Not biological,” I say. “I’m adopted.”
When he’s past the shock, and I have a chance to tell him how I think we’re related, Kyle invites me to his upstairs office. The walls are decorated with pictures of him on different motorcycles, most of them Harleys, all of them classic. Behind his cluttered desk is a blown-up photo of a huge gray whale diving.
“You like bikes,” I say.
“I love bikes,” he says back.
“And whales.”
He smiles sheepishly. “Always had a thing for ’em. Don’t know why. The year I graduated from high school, I took a bike trip to the coast, just south and west of Seattle. Went on a boat tour, got close enough for me to get that shot. I don’t know. Just something about ’em. They have a kind of…majesty.”
I stare at the picture. How in the world…? They didn’t know each other a day, and yet… “Your mom lives in Boise?”
He looks away. “How’d you know that?”
“The guy at the Pine Knot. You talk to her much?”
“I don’t talk to her at all,” he says.
I back off, give him time to tell me.
“She just never really accepted me,” he says finally. “I mean, hell, who could blame her? First time with a man after her husband is killed, and it ends in her kid getting killed and all kinds of shame for getting pregnant. I’ve heard stories about my mother, about how cool she was before I was born, before she lost her husband, before your dad…before Tyler got killed. But that wasn’t the mom I ever knew. She was just absent. My aunt and uncle raised me, really. I lived with Mom and all, but by the time I was in second grade, I spent as little time there as I could.”
“Man, I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault,” he says, and hesitates. “So my dad, what’s he do?”
“Not much of anything now,” I say. I haven’t talked about that day with anyone but my mother and Georgia, but it’s what I came here for. I tell him about Hoopfest, the events leading up to it.
“Jesus, that was my dad? We read about that.”
“That was your dad.” I tell him as much as I can about the effect killing Kyle’s older brother had on him.
“Boy, nobody came out of that one, did they?”
“Maybe you and me,” I say, and tell him about whale talk, how if we knew more about humans maybe we could accommodate one another better. All the time I’m saying it, he stares at the picture of the giant tail with a soft smile on his face. I swear to God, put a beard and a few tattoos on him, and he’d look like Dad spit him out.
“You graduated this year, huh?”
“Yeah.” I don’t say how hollow that day was for me.
“Going to school?”
“I was accepted to U Dub, but my heart’s not in it, you know? Think I’ll wait a year. Sell off some of Dad’s bikes.”
“Spend much time on the river up there?”
“Yeah, we’ve got a boat. I ski some. Wake-board.”
“Ever do any Whitewater rafting?”
I tell him no.
“I could use some help,” he says. “I’ve got some good guys working for me over there, but it’s hard to run this place and keep an eye on that business as much as I should. You look in good shape. We’re in the middle of the season now. I could train you. Even if you decide to go to school, it’s great summer work. You can make a bundle.”
I tell him I’ll think about it.
He puts a hand on my shoulder. “I’d like to get to know you. You could fill in some holes for me. There’s an…an emptiness when you can’t get to your dad.”
It’s a feeling I know. “How soon do you need to know?”
“Anytime in the next thirty years,” he says. “I’ll be doing it at least that long. Hey, man, it’s a rush.”
“I’ll get back to you one way or the other,” I say. “And I’ll be back.”
I pick up my pack, stop at the door. “You’d have been proud of him,” I say. “If he’d known about you…God, he’d have been down here in a minute.”
I take the ride back to Cutter slow. Rich Marshall is in jail for the rest of his life, no possibility of parole. His attorney tried to plead down from first-degree murder because Rich actually killed someone different from the one he was aiming at. That may have saved him from the death penalty, but the prosecution successfully argued that he was going to kill somebody, and that was the premeditated part.
I didn’t go to the trial. To tell the truth, I really didn’t care how it turned out. I don’t know what’s the matter with me, but they could have let him off and I don’t think I’d have felt a thing. All I know is my dad is dead. And that’s all I care about.
Maybe I’m still numb, but maybe Dad passed something on to me in those few minutes he lay bleeding on the court. Maybe I heard him differently than I’d heard him before. Maybe what he said translated well into whale talk. Not one minute for revenge. He didn’t want me living a life of what might have been. That was his life, and he wanted it stopped there. There are worse things a guy could do with his life than honor the wishes of a good and dying man.
Some positive things have come of all this. Alicia and Heidi and Things One and Two are permanent at our place now, and I think Alicia has some sense of what it means to step up, even if she discovered it late. Mom invited Icko to build living quarters on the edge of our property, and he’s going to be a kind of caretaker for the place and live there free. He and his son are player/coaches for the South Park Mermen this summer, a slow-pitch softball team that travels around eastern Washington and northern Idaho losing softball games with astonishing regularity. Tay-Roy and Mott have gone their ways, but the heart of the team is a ghost of a shortstop, the world’s largest first baseman, and a right fielder in a Cutter letter jacket that he removes only when he feels faint from the heat. Dan Hole keeps their stats.
Mike Barbour approached me at the funeral and shook my hand. He said, “I didn’t know, man. I didn’t.” He was popping out of his suit, looked horribly uncomfortable, tears welling in his red-rimmed eyes. “Part of this is mine,” he said. “I ain’t askin’ you to forgive me. I just want you to know I know that.” Little acts of heroism.
Tonight, after Alicia and the kids are in bed, Mom and I put the whale tape into the VCR, turn up the sound, and sit in the porch swing listening, staring at the carpet of stars.
“God, Mom,” I say. “Sometimes there’s just no place to put this.”
“Well,” she says, “if there’s no place to put it, maybe we don’t need to put it anywhere.”
About the Author
CHRIS CRUTCHER has written nine critically acclaimed novels, an autobiography, and two collections of short stories. He has won three lifetime achievement awards for the body of his work: the Margaret A. Edwards Award for Outstanding Literature for Young Adults, the ALAN Award for a Significant Contribution to Adolescent Literature, and the NCTE National Intellectual Freedom Award.
He has been a child and family therapist with the Spokane Community Mental Health Center and is currently chairperson of the Spokane Child Protection Team. Chris Crutcher lives in Spokane, Washington.
www.chriscrutcher.com
