by Sean Desmond
That same Friday marked Daniel Patrick Malone’s fifteenth birthday. And at precisely 6:57 a.m., just before dawn broke on the ides, Dan was dropped into the gloom of the Hockaday parking lot for swim practice.
The plans to build a pool on the Jesuit campus were slated for some time in the twenty-first century. Until then, practice was held at Hockaday, a girls’ prep and boarding school that was even more stuck-up and posh than Ursuline. The Jesuit swim team was thoroughly second-rate, but the Rangers were building it back, and Dan was one of the many good, but not great, sophomores looking to drop time, qualify for state, and letter.
But none of that mattered as everyone dawdled on deck, adjusting goggles, some stretching, most still snoozing. The Hockaday pool looked as frigid and as appealing as the North Atlantic. Dan cursed the calm, hyaline skin of the pool, then kicked Rick, who was passed out in his Ranger hoodie. Dan scanned the windows for any cute Hockaday girls going by, but goddamn, it was too early for this shit.
At 7:07, just as the swimmers began to hope that practice might be scratched, Coach Chris Moyle came careening through the glass double doors. He was the son of the original Coach Moyle, who was the Landry and Lombardi of Jesuit swimming, with several state titles notched on the wall of the Ranger locker room. And Chris suffered all the unfair expectations of a coach’s son, along with a severe case of who-gives-a-shit. Now, at thirty-three, with court dates for custody and alimony arrangements, the not-so-young Coach Moyle was nowhere near cutting it. For his day job, he was a “technician and inventory manager” for Dolphin Pool Supply but also bartended at the Fridays off Stemmons, which often turned into long nights chasing tail across West Dallas.
“Everyone in the water by the top of the clock.” Coach Moyle steadied himself as he slapped the surface with a lane line. “Let’s go. We are what we repeatedly do.”
Even when sweating one out, Moyle was the Trevi Fountain of coaching aphorisms—ranging from the thoughtful (“If it doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t change you”) to the cryptic and quasi-Zen (“Don’t wait for it, swim for it”) to the tautological and banal (“Float, don’t sink,” “This is a lesson in the competition of life”).
“Last one in can warm up with four hundred fly. Let’s go, gentlemen. The later we start, the more pain I put on it.”
Dan stripped off his sweats down to his blue Speedo, plunged into the deep end, and sank to the bottom of this blue world, letting the chilly chlorination wake him. Dan was the lead on lane three, which was respectable and on the cusp of varsity, which occupied the first two lanes. In pole position was Drew Radcliffe, their freshman sensation. Drew lived between lane markers from an early age and had that delphine build—shoulders like a linebacker, with a narrow waist and giant paddles for feet. He already held Ranger records for everything breaststroke and IM, and was ranked number five U18 in the state of Texas. He was just thirteen.
“We’re doing four one hundred pulls in IM order. On fly I want to see strong rotation, but more important”—Moyle stroked his ribs past his diaphragm like he had indigestion—“I want to see this push here, that’s what starts the next stroke, that’s what moves your ass through the water. Okay on the twenty. Lane one, wake up, pay attention, ready, go.”
Dan pushed off with Rick behind him. Dan wasn’t fast, but he could swim all day and was the only sophomore with a negative split in the five hundred free—which made him a glutton for punishment. As soon as all lanes were off, Coach Moyle disappeared out to his truck, probably for an eye-opener. After the first one hundred IM, he was spied smoking in the fire lane of the parking lot, then using the pay phone in the foyer of the natatorium. After the second IM, senior Ron Fenatacci, who was a bit husky and had the unfortunate nickname of Don Fatuccini, pulled Drew back from lapping the rest of the team and then held the lead swimmers on the other lanes.
“Stop, he’s not counting. Just say we did the four hundred.”
Moyle’s sixth sense kicked in, and he hung up the phone, pulled the elastic around his Kappa track pants, adjusted himself, and came out onto the deck.
“That was fast, Rangers. You guys did the whole four hundred?”
“Yes, sir, Coach.”
“Shut up, Fatuccini—I know when you’re lying.” Moyle didn’t really seem to care as he rubbed bloodshot eyes. “Get off the blocks. We’re doing one-four locos. And I’m timing it. Shit, where’s my stopwatch?” Coach Moyle reached into his back pocket and skidded along the wet tiles. “Goddamn it, first group at the top. I want to see sprinting and then solid turnover. And if we don’t do it right . . .”
There was a banging against the double pane of floor-to-ceiling windows, and the boys popped up in their lanes like curious mermen, pulling goggles back to see. The pounding was followed by a muted “Chriiiisss.” And standing there on the other side of the glass wall of the Hockaday pool was Coach Moyle’s “date” from the previous evening.
“Chriiiisss, what the hell?”
Coach Moyle rubbed the gray oysters below his eyes and scratched his stubble before finally yelling out, “Lacy, go back to the fuckin’ truck.”
The boys stared. “Lacy” was something. Daisy Dukes, an ample bikini décolletage decamping from her cut-off T-shirt. A Heather Locklear bird’s nest of blond, now cattywampus from being slept on in the back of a Dodge Ram. She was barefoot and had bangles on both arms, with hoop earrings and long pink nails. She stepped away from the glass and saluted with two middle fingers.
Dan and Rick looked at each other.
“. . .”
“. . .”
Lacy smacked the window again. “You left me in the truck, dickhead!”
“I called a taxi. Go back to the truck and wait!”
With glassy-eyed oblivion, the hungover swim coach turned back to the starting blocks.
“Rangers, I want your heads in the goddamn water! First group, ready go.”
To his credit, the half-drunk Coach Moyle continued to run a hard-ass practice while ignoring the Harry Hines hooker he had left stranded in front of the Hockaday School for Girls.
* * *
“Eyes up here. Follow me. Is Mr. Blaylock alive? Someone check his pulse.” Oglesby slammed Diviner, a pale yellow teaching stick that branched into a Y at its top, against the radiator. Jay Blaylock, who had been moved to the front of the class in the hopes of finding a cure for his narcolepsy, smacked the drool off his cheek. Oglesby rolled his eyes. “So what’s this book about?”
“Holden Caulfield.”
“Minus five for stating the obvious, Mr. Blaylock. Rule number three: think before you speak. Gentlemen, I’m getting impatient. We can just take vocabulary quizzes if we don’t get this discussion on track. What is this book really about? What’s the essential theme?”
“Being a teenager and how much it sucks,” Sticky offered.
“That’s a better answer. And why does it suck, Mr. Deangelis?”
“Because life is unfair, sir.” Deangelis smiled as he parroted a favorite Oglesby rule.
“Okay, let me ask it this way . . . is Holden crazy?”
“The world drives him crazy,” Rick shot back.
“How so?”
“According to him it’s full of phonies.”
“Good. Gentlemen, I have a handout today.” Oglesby pulled a folder from his army bag. “Take one, pass it down.
“Okay, trivia question to steal the five points I’m taking off Mr. Blaylock’s next paper. When Holden leaves to visit his teacher, Old Spencer, where is his house?”
At this point, half of the honors English class shrugged and the other half turned to Dan to see if he knew. Dan studied the handout in front of him and without looking up said, “He lived on Anthony Wayne Avenue.”
“Correct, five points to Malone. And who is Anthony Wayne? Did anyone bother to look it up?”
Silence. No one had.
“Rule number five. Reading is close reading, gentlemen. The Catcher in the Rye was published on July 16, 1951, by Little, Brown. On July 16, 1779, one hundred seventy-two years earlier, Continental Army general Anthony Wayne attacked what was thought to be an impregnable British position in the palisades of Stony Point, New York. The attack was successful, and the victory so unexpected and brazen that it earned the general the nickname Mad Anthony Wayne. Honors sophomores, look at this list of phrases on the handout. All of them come from Holden.”
The Xerox, typed on Oglesby’s Selectric, read as follows:
kills me . . . I’m not too crazy . . . you have to be a madman . . . chuckling like a madman . . . serious as hell . . . mad about history . . . it drives me crazy . . . it makes me so depressed I go crazy . . . I wasn’t too crazy about him . . . it drove him mad . . . you’re nuts I swear to God . . . he was madly in love with himself . . . they’re crazy about themselves . . . like you’re dying to do them a favor . . . it was still coming down like a madman . . . it looked pretty as hell . . . he was mad about himself . . . smoking like a madman . . . say no or I’ll drop dead . . . I almost wished I was dead . . . I damn near broke my crazy neck . . . I was probably the only normal bastard in the whole place . . . I apologized like a madman . . . Girls can drive you crazy . . . old Marty was murder . . . the girls nearly committed suicide . . . that killed me . . . if you want to say stay alive, you have to say that stuff . . . I felt like jumping out the window . . . if you think I was dying to see him, you’re crazy . . . that was cutting her throat over her too . . . I didn’t break my neck looking for him . . . I swear to God I’m a madman . . .
“So what does this tell us about Mr. Caulfield?” Oglesby flicked his nose with his knuckle and twirled Diviner across his chest. “Anyone besides Malone? Fine, go ahead.”
Dan sat up from his normal slouch. “Holden isn’t sure if he’s crazy or if the world is crazy and driving him crazy, and the whole time he’s thinking about killing himself.”
Rick let out a short whistle. “Jesus, Malone, you’re killing me.”
Oglesby nodded. “Correct. His language throughout the book betrays this. This is the problem the modern-day hero faces. They question the value of the heroic act itself. And if the answer is that action doesn’t matter, then self-negation, suicide, is an alternative. Next year in Mrs. Felice’s class, you’ll read Hamlet, and this is the central question. What’s a sane response to an insane world?”
“But what if Holden is crazy and the world is not?” Rob offered.
“Then he’s unreliable as a narrator, no? But he admits it. This”—Oglesby waved the handout—“is not just Holden talking in slang. He’s not sure.”
“So Holden is just acting crazy?” Teddy Boudreaux asked like he needed a safe answer for the test.
“You tell me.” Oglesby smiled. “What’s the difference between acting crazy and being crazy? If he kills himself, is that a sane reaction? Are all the people in mental hospitals somehow sane?”
Rick bit his lip, trying to follow through. “Okay, that’s the worst case. Holden is crazy and may give up. To him the world is crazy, or at least that’s how he sees it, feels it.”
“Good, or what else? What’s really the worst case?” Oglesby swiped his stick across the front row of seats. “Malone knows. Anyone else? Mr. Malone, tell us what’s the worst-case scenario.”
“It’s not either/or. Life is a contradiction. Both Holden and the world are crazy.”
“Right. See how when we read the text closely we can parse this? Remember: the hero always has a personal flaw and an antagonistic universe to overcome. This will be a core question you must address in the Game—is there a way to build a society that can accept a hero like Holden, and that Holden can, in turn, live with? And more importantly, do we want that to be the case? Is the hero’s fate to find contentment or to fight on?”
Oglesby glanced up at the classroom clock—ten minutes left in the period. “All right, gentlemen, it’s time. We have enough grades from the first and second quarters to have our possible fall induction of the first three candidates for Norwegian rat.”
Rob shot Dan a knowing look. You’ve got this, dude.
“Our first Norwegian rat nominee, with a grade average just below the human body temperature of ninety-eight point five, is Mr. Ethan Tsao. Please come to the front of the class.”
“Of course,” Sticky muttered. This was no surprise. Tsao was straight A’s in every subject. He was a silent assassin, rarely spoke in class, always scribbling notes with a bored, tired expression. More machine than man, Dan thought.
“Our second nominee, Teddy Boudreaux, with a grade point average of ninety-six point two.”
A few jeers for the smarty pants, led by Sticky’s “Boo-dreaux.”
“The third and final slot was very close. Mr. Malone . . .”
Dan half-rose from his seat. Oglesby held him back with Diviner. Not so fast. He turned to his grade book, finding his line of marks for Malone.
“So let’s add in the five points you earned today. Also, when it came to the assignment ‘1001 Things to Do with a White Elephant,’ only Malone endured to write a thousand entries.”
“You are such a nerd,” Sticky side-mouthed.
Dan had torn out the page from the eight hundreds about his family and finished his list. He’d tried to convince himself that he didn’t want the comments to boomerang back to his father or mother, but the truth was he wasn’t ready to write about those feelings and wasn’t sure when he ever would be. That said, he felt Oglesby’s “but” coming a mile away.
“But . . .” Oglesby turned away from Dan and slowly directed his stick at another sophomore. “Mr. Gilchrist has the same ninety-four point eight average. And his journal was not a week late. Which means this comes down to our latest vocab quiz.”
Oglesby pulled a folder from his pack and found Chad’s and Dan’s tests to compare. Dan sat back at his desk and watched. And waited. And then finally Oglesby raised his eyes and looked at Dan, only to shake his head with a sad smile.
Oh no.
“Mr. Malone, what does ‘indolent’ mean?”
Shit. “Lazy.”
“And ‘insolent’?”
“Rude.”
Oglesby grimaced. “You got them backward on the quiz, I’m afraid. Which means your average will drop below Mr. Gilchrist’s, who is our third nominee. Mr. Gilchrist, please come forward.”
“Oh, that sucks, Malone,” Flanagan cackled.
Dan’s face flushed, and his insides heaved themselves up into his chest. How did I fuck that up? Dan wanted to protest. Gilchrist took a victory lap to the front of the room, patted on the back by Rick and others. A rictus of anger flashed across Dan’s face as he slouched back in his chair. He was about to crumble, but through his misery there was a tiny stoic voice in the back of his mind that told him Oglesby might be testing him. The path of the Norwegian rat is never easy. This too is a trial. As this trawled through Dan’s thoughts, Oglesby turned to his backpack and pulled a copy of Ficciones and three rubber brown rats from his backpack, placing them out on the teacher’s desk like trophies. Dan’s heart ached at the sight of them.
Oglesby raised Diviner in Excalibur fashion. “To attain the order of Rattus norvegicus, you must undergo a mental trial. Gentlemen, are you ready?”
They all nodded as he began the incantation.
“Then repeat after me.” He held up the Borges and turned to the following cite. “‘To think, analyze and invent . . .’”
“‘To think, analyze and invent . . .’”
“‘. . . are not anomalous acts, but the normal respiration of the intelligence. To glorify the occasional fulfillment of this function, to treasure ancient thoughts of others, to remember with incredulous amazement that the doctor universalis thought, is to confess our languor or barbarism.’”
&nb
sp; Dan sat there—too sick with himself to pay attention. I did all this extra shit and it’s still not good enough. That goddamn white elephant list. This is such bullshit.
As the three boys repeated the oath, Oglesby set the book to the side and crossed them with Diviner. “‘Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe that in the future I will be.’”
Teddy Boudreaux furtively reached for one of the rubber rats. Oglesby slammed his stick down on the desk.
“Just a minute. You must each answer a final close-reading question. Let’s start with the first candidate-elect. Mr. Tsao, what are the names of the twin boys in Lord of the Flies?”
Tsao looked down at the blue carpet. He really did try to keep the lowest profile possible, an ultra-shy kid with big, owl-rimmed glasses. His face blistered with shame. He didn’t have it. Teddy Boudreaux did.
“Simon and—”
“Incorrect.”
“Samneric! Samneric!” Teddy blurted, and again reached for the rat, and again Oglesby brought Diviner down.
“Now for your question, Mr. Boudreaux.”
“Ha.” Sticky laughed, “Psych! You suck, Boo-dreaux.”
“Second question for the second candidate. Who built the Trojan horse?”
“Oh come on.” Sticky threw up his hands. “I know that.”
“Congratulations, Mr. O’Donnell. You can write a five-hundred-word essay on it.”
Dan broke out of his ignominy, sensing the trap. Teddy Boudreaux had a big smile on his face. He was falling for it.
“Odysseus!” Boudreaux pumped his fist.
“Incorrect.”
The class gasped. Boudreaux’s chin dropped like a guillotine.
Oglesby moved on quickly. “Mr. Gilchrist, do you know the answer? Who, according to Homer, built the Trojan horse?”
“Menelaus?”
“Incorrect.”
Oglesby swept the rubber rats back into his bag.
“There will be no induction today. Mr. Malone . . .”
“Epeius,” Dan replied, sad and calm. The small voice in his head, which, come to think of it, sounded like his father, offered this: No crocodile tears. Don’t let him see you hurting. Don’t let him know that he’s gotten to you.
