Period 8 by Chris Crutcher
They swim eight fifteen-minute segments, four up and four back, switching sides every quarter hour so one keeps an eye on the shore while the other sets the pace. For the first three segments Paulie holds back, strength and size and youth all trump cards. But grit and tenacity and decades of experience even things out, and it’s all either can do to stay with the other at the finish.
“Not bad for a first shot,” Logs gasps, peeling off his wetsuit. He tiptoes barefoot to the passenger-side door, hauls out sweats and flip-flops.
“Man-oh-man, how do you do it? Are you really pushing sixty-five?” Paulie says. “No way should I be digging into my reserves to hang with you. Maybe I have fibromyalgia.”
“Cute. Let’s talk about a cure for that in the whirlpool,” Logs says. “When my hands and feet start to thaw out I’ll feel every one of those sixty-four years. Meet you up at the U.”
In the pool area at the university student rec center, Paulie and Logs lower themselves into the otherwise unoccupied whirlpool, immersing to the neck with a mutual aaahhhhh as the swirling, heated water envelops them. “Best part of swimming like that is stopping,” Logs says. “I could give up the workouts, I just couldn’t give up this.”
“That’s like saying I could give up setting myself on fire, if it didn’t feel so good when they put me out.”
“Addiction is an interesting phenomenon,” Logs says. “What about you, feeling any better?”
Paulie smiles and sinks deeper, clear to his lower lip. “I can forget almost anything for a little while once I get in the water,” he says, “but in the end I have to dry off. Man, Logs, I thought I should tell the truth, but fuck . . .”
“I know this doesn’t mean a lot now, but time helps. Most of us can only feel shitty for so long.”
“It doesn’t help that I have to feel stupid, too,” Paulie says. “It’s not like I didn’t know better. I mean, my old man . . . Jesus.”
Logs grimaces.
“I was trying to get away, I swear. That sounds lame, but . . .”
“Much as I do not want to hear details, do you want to talk? Something feels really off about this, Paulie.”
“Naw. This is too embarrassing.”
Logs lays his head back and stares at the ceiling as Paulie takes a deep breath and sinks out of sight, letting the jets soothe his aching shoulder muscles. He holds his breath as long as possible, suspended just below the surface
When he comes up for air, Logs says, “You didn’t hear any more about Mary Wells, by any chance.”
“Why do you keep asking me about Mary Wells?”
“Same reason I ask about any kid I want the goods on. Four years you’ve been my mole. I’ve almost seemed cool, getting my information from you.”
“I don’t know much about Mary Wells. Everyone still calls her the Virgin Mary. Great grades . . . well, you know what kind of grades she gets. Doesn’t go out with anyone who knows her dad and anyone who’s been out with her once, knows her dad. What else is there to know?”
“The Virgin Mary, huh? That’s kind of cruel.”
“We’re high school kids, Logs. Cruel’s how we roll.”
“But you don’t call her that. . . .”
“No, Dad, I don’t call her that.”
“What I’m interested in,” Logs says, “is where she is. She hasn’t missed a class or a Period 8 in four years.”
“Didn’t Mrs. Byers call her house? Shit, I stop to get a drink outside the classroom three seconds after the bell and she thinks I’m going Ferris Bueller on her.”
“I didn’t report it,” Logs says.
“Can’t you get in trouble for that?”
“At this point I’ll get in trouble only if I’m caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy,” Logs says. “I didn’t report her because she stuck her head in my room after school a little while back, looking kind of desperate, and asked if I had time to talk. I had a pissed-off parent with me, so I asked her to wait. She looked like she’d been crying. Anyway, my meeting took longer than I expected and when it was over, she was gone. I tried to catch up with her the next day, but she blew me off like she’d never asked. A week later she doesn’t show for class for the first time in her high school career. All her other classes are Running Start, here at the university. I don’t know if she’s making those or not.”
“So why didn’t you go ahead and mark her absent?”
Logs raises a water-wrinkled hand. “Swear to secrecy,” he says. “We talk about her dad the same way you guys do. I don’t know, I had this sense she was reaching out privately. If she’s not here tomorrow, I’ll do something.”
Paulie says, “Nobody I know knows much about her other than that she’s top-model good-looking and hard to get to know. Stack says he’s studied with her a couple of times. She’s kind of a mystery.”
“She doesn’t seem like Arney’s type.”
“Everybody was Arney’s type when he was kicking my ass in that stupid election. He can get next to anybody. Hell, I voted for him.”
“The election’s over.”
Paulie laughs. “Arney’s in campaign mode all the time. I gotta say, even being his halfway bud is a chore. He’s just kind of, I don’t know, always working it.”
“Like . . .”
“I don’t know. You just don’t know what he’s thinking.”
Logs pulls himself out of the whirling, steaming water. “You think Arney knows something we don’t?”
“All I know about Arney is what you see isn’t always what you get.” Paulie sinks deeper. “I’ve known him a long time. Once back in kindergarten his family was over at our place on Christmas night. I’d gotten this big-ass candy cane, like tall as me. I was saving it to show my friends. Arney gets all buddy-buddy with me, says we could eat it by ourselves and brag about it. That doesn’t work so he goes Eddie Haskell on my mom, but she watches Leave it to Beaver reruns, too, so no go. We were playing around later in my room and he accidentally knocked it against the wall and it broke. After I stopped bawling and threatening to kill him it was, you know, what the hell, we might as well eat it. We unwrapped it and he took a big ol’ chunk and . . . I don’t know, there was this look on his face like . . . he’d known he’d get it all along.”
Logs shakes his head. “It stuck with you. That was a long time ago.”
“Well, I’ve seen that look a few times since.” He doesn’t mention he saw it recently, just before he fucked up.
“Listen, I gotta get out of here before somebody has to slap my chest with the shockers,” Logs says. “Catch you tomorrow.”
“Later.”
Hannah hits “Save” on her Word document, sets her laptop to the side of the bed, and wanders downstairs to the kitchen for a snack. Her arms and shoulders are tight from her afternoon workout at the gym on the ergonomic rowing machine, even though she’s in perfect condition for this time of year. She cranked it extra-hard today, her anger at Paulie and the dumb-ass guys in Period 8 and the faceless girl Paulie cheated with driving her. If she could find that girl, there would be a short, loud, threatening meeting of the minds.
Maybe all’s fair in love and war, she thinks, but chicks have to have solidarity, or guys will . . . well, look what guys will do. The refrigerator light spills into the darkened kitchen as she removes the carton of milk and a half loaf of wheat bread and lays them on the granite counter. She leaves the refrigerator door open long enough to dig the peanut butter jar from a corner of the cupboard, open it, and spread the contents thickly onto the bread. She pours a glass of milk, returns the bread and milk to the fridge, and eats in pitch-dark.
She fumes, alternating between thoughts of screwing every guy friend Paulie ever had and kicking the ass of every girl who ever stole another girl’s boyfriend. It’s going to be one of those nights: forty-five minutes of fitful sleep followed by sledgehammer wake-up and thoughts of grave malice, then chest-crushing loss. It’s easy to appear tough in public, more difficult to pull it off in the silence of l
For the past two years, as soon as the water turned warm enough, Hannah would bring her single scull to the lake with Paulie and Mr. Logs and guide them the mile and a half across, the two of them swimming on either side. Then she would throw out abbreviated water-ski ropes that attached to the sides of her scull and pull them back while Paulie whined “Are we there yet?” or counted like a coxswain, or in some other way annoyed her. On good days they’d do it twice.
Later the three would go for pizza, or if Mr. Logs begged off, she and Paulie would take a pizza to a makeshift “apartment” that doubled as storage space above a vacant storefront at a strip mall near Paulie’s house. If a small Wonder Woman refrigerator magnet was not placed discreetly over the keyhole, they would use their key, put Wonder Woman in her place to remind any of the six other key holders it was first-come, first-serve, and slip inside.
In the dim, warm safety of that space, to the music-of-choice emanating from the iPod dock, or a favorite movie on the 23-inch flat screen the shareholders had thrown in matching dollars on, Hannah could let down and be Hannah.
“I cheated” ended all that.
She pulls on a pair of sweatpants and a hoodie, slips her feet into her flip-flops, doesn’t bother to tell her parents where she’s going, or that she’s going, and walks to her car.
“Can I come in?” Hannah stands on Logs’s porch, staring at him in the doorway. He’s dressed almost exactly as she is.
“Hannah. Of course. What are you doing out at this hour?”
She sits on the couch, kicks off the flip-flops, and curls her feet under.
Logs says, “Something to drink?”
“What I want to drink, you’d get fired for giving me.”
Logs sits in his recliner, hits Mute on the remote. “Talk to me.”
“I’ve got a rule,” she says. “I just don’t put up with that shit.”
“It’s a good rule.”
“So why do I feel so bad?”
“You guys seemed to be a pretty good match.”
“You know who the chick was?” she asks.
Logs shakes his head. “Couldn’t tell you if I did.”
She points a finger at him. “Wouldn’t tell me if you did. Man code, right?”
“Human code,” Logs says back. “It would be the same if it were you instead of him.”
“Man, I will find her and I will kick her ass,” Hannah says.
“Girl code?”
“I hate this whole dating thing, or boy-girl thing or whatever you want to call it. You’re never safe. I mean, if Paulie Bomb is a player, who is there? And why—”
“You know,” Logs interrupts, “as much as it might sound like bull, Justin Chenier had a point today. I don’t think Paulie’s a player, but biology is a powerful thing. We have to learn to outthink it, I guess. If I ran the zoo, people would wait on sex, but I don’t run the zoo and sex happens when it happens. I settle for good decisions about birth and STD control. Since I can’t change God’s faulty mind-body engineering, I might lobby for a different standard for ‘cheating.’ ”
Hannah is visibly irritated. “Meaning?”
“Meaning sex and love go together sometimes and sometimes they don’t. I get that you guys made a promise to each other and Paulie broke it. I’m not letting him off the hook, but something he said makes me believe there are extenuating circumstances. If I felt the pull as strongly as you seem to feel it, I’d make sure I knew everything before going zero tolerance.”
Hannah stares at her lap. “No offense, Mr. Logs, but that sounds like manspeak, which sounds exactly the same as horseshit.”
“Hey,” Logs says, “if this relationship stuff were easy, more people would do it right.” He sighs. “And by the way, almost nobody gets it right the first time.”
Hannah touches her chest. “It’s this hurt,” she says. “If I could just . . .” She snaps back. “There are certain things I can’t have in my life, and my boyfriend screwing other chicks is one of them. How could Paulie not get that? My god, look at his parents.”
Logs sighs again. “Tell me what I can do for you, Hannah.”
She starts to speak, hesitates. “Listen to me bitch, I guess.”
“That I can do.”
“And keep your mouth shut. You can’t tell Paulie I was here and you can’t tell him I give a shit.”
“You get the same confidentiality he gets,” Logs says. “Just let me know when you want advice.”
“I want advice! Jesus, Mr. Logs. Quit treating me like I’m some kind of grown-up. Why do I have to pretend like my brain’s developed any more than those jerkoffs? AAUGH!”
Logs smiles. “Look, you don’t have to sleep with Paulie to find out if you can still be friends. Start working out with us again. It’s always better to swim with a boat and not have to look for the shore all the time. You said it’ll be three or four weeks before your new scull is ready. By then maybe this will look different.”
“If I went with you guys now, I’d hit him on the head with an oar.”
“This doesn’t sound like some guy who waited for his girlfriend to go out of town so he could try someone new. Something is unusual about this.”
“Yeah, right. Some—”
“Let it sit, Hannah. Most things look different with time and distance.”
On the porch, Hannah says, “Thanks, Mr. Logs. I’ll bet a bunch of girls had a hard time hating your guts back in your time.”
“Not as hard as you might think,” Logs says. “Paulie is twice the man I was.”
“Yeah, well, we’ll see.” She starts down the stairs.
“Hey, one other thing.”
Hannah stops.
“You know anything about Mary Wells?”
“The Virgin Mary?”
Logs sighs. “Yeah. Mary Wells.”
“Not much. I mean, what’s to know? You couldn’t be much more obscure than Mary Wells for someone as pretty as she is.”
“Have you seen her around?”
“She’s Running Start. I wouldn’t.”
“I know, but she’s been in Period 8 every day for nearly four years and suddenly she’s gone. Missing government, too. Last time I saw her she seemed distressed.”
“I hadn’t noticed,” Hannah says. “If someone told me Mary Wells seemed ‘distressed,’ I wouldn’t even know what that would look like. She’s, like, a smiley mannequin. I mean, get a personality, girl. Sic Mrs. Byers on her.”
Logs waves her away. “Nah. I’ll follow up tomorrow. You drive safe, okay?”
“Thanks, Mr. Logs.”
Hannah disappears into the dark of the driveway.
.4
Logs pops a beer and walks back into the living room, punching Power on the remote, watching the oversized flat screen go black. The porch light casts warm stripes through the half-closed venetian blinds and he sits, insulated from school and the world. Lessons are planned, most of the town sleeps, nothing or no one but his cat, Gehrig, to talk with until morning. This is it. He won’t let himself go fallow, will swim with Paulie, or by himself when Paulie leaves. He’ll travel; maybe write. There was a time back in his twenties when he thought he could be a writer, maybe even as a living. But story after story, great idea after great idea, died in mid-telling. He simply didn’t know how to end any of them. Maybe now, he thinks, when I’m closer to my own ending, when I understand endings better.
He feels the light, acrobatic pressure of cat feet in his lap, takes a long swig of his beer, and strokes the tiny cat’s head. Gehrig is fifteen, can’t weig
Now Gehrig lies stretched like a tiny afghan across Logs’s legs, purring like logging equipment. His entire head fits in the cup of Logs’s hand and he massages between the ears to increasing vibrating decibels. “We’ve had a good run, don’t you think, buddy?” Logs asks. “Fixed more than we broke, maybe? Lent a hand up?”
Gehrig’s answer is his steady purr.
Hannah drives the back road home, deliberately avoiding city streets and forcing herself to concentrate. She’s got at least another hour of homework and it’s closing in on midnight. She pulls to the side of the road and screams “FUUUUUUCK!” at the top of her lungs, pounding her fists against the steering wheel. Then she takes a deep breath and pulls back onto the blacktop.
It’s only a few more miles to her house on this winding two-lane, but it’s starting to feel like a hundred, her eyelids drooping under the weight of crushing fatigue. Not much chance with homework tonight; maybe she can get up early enough to catch up. Or maybe charm someone into letting her copy. She punches the power knob on her satellite radio, cranks up the volume, and hops from station to station looking for the old stuff. The really old stuff. Logs old. She regularly torments friends and enemies alike singing lyrics to songs written at the very birth of rock and roll. Now she wails along, loud to keep herself awake and off-key because that’s her only choice:
Where oh where could my baby be . . .