Each One a Nation, page 3
Four
Darlene Del Rio, cursed with the misfortune of being born with both obscene beauty and a bottomless capacity to care, experiences each day as a block of cheese experiences a cheese grater. Each one of Darlene’s days causes her pain, not from a poor lot in life, but because she spends them renting out pieces of herself for the benefit of others. The best of humanity will do this, being the thing that makes them the best; but pain occurs when too many pieces are rented out for too long, for lack of control leads to pain, and control is a thing strengthened or weakened by proximity. There is one thing that makes her see color. Each time Eric announces a new homecoming, Darlene goes into a state of ambitious delirium, forming and shaping the perfect moments and pushing them to the forefront of her skull. She strives to achieve that moment, to make it match up with her dreams.
So, it is no surprise to Devyn when she wakes up at three-thirty and shuffles sleepily into the kitchen for breakfast, that the first thing her mother does is to look up from her monogrammed mug and say,
“Devy, you know the holiday is coming up. It’s only a few weeks away.”
Devyn forks a massive piece of sausage patty and shoves it into her mouth, nodding her head and chewing. The holiday is no national holiday, but a family holiday stemming from Devyn’s sixth birthday when she’d told her parents that Eric’s presence was better than Christmas. In the moment of her saying this, Darlene found one of her desired moments. “Dadmas,” she’d said instinctively, and has never let go.
The coming holiday is a two-week stay with Eric, between a three-dayer in Madison and a two-weeker in Seattle that happen to coincide with Devyn’s fifteenth birthday and Darlene’s thirty-eighth. Devyn is, by all means, excited to see her father but knows, even at an age where carts and horses are so aloofly ordered, that her father’s presence brings a biting tension, joy, pressure, and tightness to her waking hours. Where Eric can see her and touch her, she takes each step consciously.
For Darlene, Eric’s homecoming brings about feelings similar to those of a young teacher with a class full of rowdy students when administration finally arrives. Inside of Darlene forever lies an incessant devotion to the man, constantly consuming her thoughts and her actions, laboring under the weight of a religious sort of belief that any storm can and will be calmed at the presence of his hand. Because of Eric, she knows hope, not because she was incompetent before him, but because he allows her to love the way she loves and does not cower from it. Every Dadmas plays double for both her and her child, as a thing she longs so lovingly for and shutters at the idea of Devyn not doing the same. So it is no surprise to Devyn when Darlene stares directly at her for a passive moment, sighs and says, “Sometimes I think you aren’t excited to see your father, Devy, which is sad and unreasonable considering how much he loves you. His profession makes him very lonely, and all he ever asks for is your attention.”
Devyn chews slowly and listens to the ambient sounds coming from her mother’s throat. Everything outside of the home and everything inside of her is still, quiet, dark and foggy, having not yet adjusted to the reality of the day, and not in any mood to bear the brunt of her mother’s presuppositions.
“I’m excited,” she tells Darlene, to which her mother screws up her face and looks back down toward her phone.
“We are planning a party for you and I, and to celebrate him being home, if that’s not too joyous an occasion for you to swallow. All of our friends will be there and your father is going to order some choice butchery. Feel free to invite anyone else you wish. We are just so excited to host!”
Devyn hears her mother stop talking, swallows, and looks at the clock. Darlene has already given her the same speech for weeks prior and has invited approximately nobody other than her friends. Darlene catches her gaze and says, “You better get ready, we have to get going,” before Devyn can make a move herself, claiming a small victory over an obvious action. Devyn returns to her room to fetch her school bag and her swim bag. Still half-observant and now carrying a low-grade annoyance, she hauls both bags onto her shoulders and puts her headphones over her ears. She loads up the trunk of the car with her bags, climbs into the passenger seat, and sits silently with her head against the window watching the dark outlines of pines pass outside of the window.
When they arrive at the GAC, their car joins a string of dotted headlights in the parking lot of underclassmen and their parents in their ghostly drop-off ritual on Catman’s day of reckoning. Darlene pulls to the entrance and parks the car. As Devyn closes the door and begins to walk away she hears the car window roll down and her mom call to her from behind.
“Oh, Devyn,” she says, “would it kill you to say ‘thank you’?”
Devyn turns to face her.
“Thank you,” she says. The sentence continues on in her head. Thank you for bringing me to the torture chamber on this day of torture. Thank you for delaying my brain development by making me wake up this early. Thank you for terrifying me into ambition that sometimes doesn’t allow me to breathe. Thank you, Mom. Thank you.
She joins the crowd of athletes moving slowly toward the building and enters the doors into an over-lit hellscape where the over-ambitious upperclassmen are already splashing. She simultaneously hates them and hopes to emulate them. In the locker room, she locks up her things and executes the torturous duty of dragging herself into a suit that is still wet from the previous day. The discomfort of it against her in the blaring cold of the locker room makes her skin crawl with disdain, and as she sits on the cold concrete bench consuming her final moments of rest, Sloane and Mallory join her quietly. They too try to enjoy the stillness before the locker room door opens slightly and a craggly, wrinkled arm holding a bullhorn appears from behind it. The blare echoes off of the tight concrete walls and metal lockers until the arm recedes leaving the girls in their final moments of freedom.
“God, I hate when he does that,” says Devyn, standing.
“At least we only have one today,” says Sloane.
“Wrong,” says Mallory, “we actually have an afternoon, too. You’re thinking of last week.”
Sloane considers the calendar in her head for a moment before her shoulders droop and her face slackens at the realization that her friend is right. In their world, nothing could be worse than a double on Tuesday, especially on days of reckoning.
“I want to quit,” she says.
“We all do,” says Mallory.
Devyn, feeling a bit superior to her friends for not wanting to quit, or at least for being unwilling to admit she does, leads the three through the locker room doors and into the arena where Senior is yelling with his hand over the timer and his face to his stopwatch.
“Otnow!” he yells, “get on in that water and don’t be no turds about it today. Come on, youngsters, you can swim or you can go home to your mommies.”
Devyn drops her towel on the bench and makes the plunge. The water feels like absolute death for a moment until she reemerges and finds herself quite at home. From there, it is all movement and buoyancy. The session is a day of reckoning indeed. The Catmans had both arrived at three a.m. to discuss strategy, at which point Robert Catman Senior had instructed his son to “county fair those little pricks until they know what building they’re in.”
A sinister hour ensues, and at the end, the swimmers clinging to life on the side of the pool become the rule rather than the exception, tears and vomit mixing with the water on the wet deck for the custodian to worry about later. Senior leaves the older athletes alone to do their standard session, led by their captains, and focuses entirely on the underclassmen, whom he lords over from just outside his office with threats and insults. Bobby Catman complies with his father’s wishes but holds a secret belief that not only time is being wasted, but development is being delayed for the sake of toughness. When the massive timer on the wall finally winds down to triple zero, Senior sounds the alarm three times in sharp succession to schedule the end of the session. The swimmers pull themselves from the water quietly as he disappears behind his office doors.
Devyn lays on the bench without a thought in her mind, her breath beginning to return to something resembling normalcy. She stays that way for a while until she remembers that she has a full day of youth to complete too, and that she must, somehow, dress herself, and go to school, and participate in classes, be social, and somehow avoid sleeping through the entire thing before returning to the very same building once more in the afternoon to do it all over again. The terrifying thought gives way to an even more terrifying reality, when she finally peels herself from the bench to find her father, the Eric Del Rio, leaning against the rail at the bottom of the stairs talking to Robert Catman Jr.
“Hey, Dev,” he says when she finally reaches him, “surprise!”
“I thought you were still in Seattle,” she says with obvious disappointment in her voice.
He gives Bobby a wry look and chuckles.
“Again,” he says, “surprise!”
He doesn’t hug his daughter at risk of wetting his clothes, and he tells her to go change and that he would be taking her to school. Then he turns to his childhood friend Bobby Catman Jr. and says, “That was an absolute bloodbath, Bob. But I’ve got to say, I loved it.”
“I’m sick of it,” says Bobby, chewing spearmint gum rapidly, “he’s losing it as he ages and we’re going to start losing them, too. He’s been doing the same thing for years and it hasn’t gotten us anywhere.”
“Well,” says Eric, “when do you take over?”
“He’ll do it till he dies,” says Bobby, “which I’m sad to report won’t be anytime soon.”
“And what would that look like?”
“E, let’s not get morbid.”
“Nah nah, I mean what would you in charge look like?”
“Well, first, we would win. We would win way more than we are now.”
“I like hearing that.”
“And we’d be way more efficient at what we’d do; that’s for sure. We’d spend less on almost everything and do it all in half the time.”
“You’re serious?” says Eric.
“E,” says Bobby, checking the stairs before he proceeds, “if I had my own place, not only would we have a swarm at Juniors, we’d have so many kids at Juniors that for the sake of regional equity, we would have to keep a few home.”
Eric fumbles with a receipt in his pocket, moving his brain along with it.
“And how long would it take to achieve that?” he asks. He points at the outline of the gum container in Bobby’s shorts.
Bobby whips out a piece and hands it to Eric, who begins to chew quickly as well, stopping to spit into the drain every minute or so.
“I mean, it’s gonna be your kid and/or Mallory, I think. The boys are all dog shit. So the odds are low in the near future as far as a swarm goes, but I could probably get Devyn there in a year.”
Eric stops chewing.
“You twisting my dick right now, Bobcat?”
Bobby has not worked with Devyn long enough to know that she can move athletically, but that her ceiling is still terribly unclear. But he remembers what his father said about her, and decides to stake his claim saying, “Look, I’ll say it like this: Devyn is for sure, I can get her there. I want you to understand that this is more of a strategy game than a skill game. I can make her win a lot, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that it will translate past these walls.”
“I don’t care,” Eric says, “winning is winning.”
“Fine,” says Bobby, returning to his gum, “I’ll run her the same way I run Mallory.”
“You have them on individual programs?” asks Eric.
“When Dad isn’t in the way, yes. Mallory is a good, technical swimmer, in the same way McWhite is, like Ian used to be. I just put her through targeted strains and let her brain do the heavy lifting. I’ll make her competitive this way, then when she’s older, Dad will ruin it.”
“And with Devyn?”
“Same,” says Bobby.
“So how do we bypass Senior on the ruining bit?”
“I work with her more than she does. Get her on my side rather than his.”
The wheels begin to spin in Eric’s head, being a man who becomes excited at the prospect of square-one, as he imagines the possibility of a place where his daughter could be under the control of a coach who is not only one of his oldest friends, but who guarantees the type of success he expects from his daughter.
“Let’s do it then,” he says.
“Let’s do it?” Bobby replies.
“Let’s make it happen.”
“E,” says Bobby, “how could we pull that off? I mean, he’s my dad.”
“Nothing is as simple as that, Bob,” he says, “but I’ve made more complicated things happen. Will you deliver?”
“Of course I’ll deliver. I would just need way more time with her and, to be honest, things are tight as it is.”
Devyn appears from the locker room looking very near death.
“Then we’ll chat,” says Eric with a wink. “Come on, Dev.” He walks toward the door with a slinking Devyn at his side. Just before he reaches the door, he spins around and flashes his phone to his friend.
“We’ll be in touch,” he says once more, and exits.
Five
On the doorway steps, under the shelter of a covered parking spot, sits a handsome, bloated spectre of a man in jean shorts, a dark gray tank top, tube socks and timberland boots. The man’s name is Edward Jackson Jr. He spikes a cigarette into a Foldgers can on the ground as his son, Eddie, climbs the steep driveway. It has been nearly a week since the fire and Eddie has yet to even start looking for a job.
“The Third Iteration,” he says, lifting his stained fingers.
“Hey Pa,” says Eddie.
“I’m working tonight, Third, but I’ll tell you what. If you clean the place I’ll give you everything I make.”
“Deal,” says Eddie.
His father shoots him an approving nod and stuffs his hands into his pockets. The lingering question between them has been on the future of Eddie’s homeless friend, Boone, who has been living with the Jacksons since he dropped out of Eddie’s tenth grade English class. Boone is a shady character of unclear origin and didn’t so much become Eddie’s friend through natural course but rather inserted himself into Eddie’s life without Eddie’s knowing he’d done it. This caused major problems in Eddie’s early attempts to date; but, after a while, it simply dawned on him that Boone was his friend, a fact that has never changed. Sure enough, after a pregnant pause of procrastination, EJ kicks a rock around on the ground and says, “So, uh, Third, here’s the thing about Boone staying here.”
“Pa,” says Eddie, “it’s damn near the holidays.”
“Hey,” says EJ, “you know me, man. You know it isn’t the inconvenience that I’m talking about. He’s seventeen years old and he’s sleeping in a goddamn truck, ya know? He’s living in a trailer park and he ain’t even sleeping in one of the trailers, man. Like, this is so not cool with the law and all and, I don’t know, man.”
“He knows he’s allowed inside, Pa.”
“That’s just it, man. He isn’t a dog, ya know? It’s the principle of the thing. There are places equipped for this kinda stuff, man.”
“Pop, he’s with us now. Those places will do no good for him, you know that.”
“Just feel bad for the kid, man. Ya know?”
Eddie toes the gravel as his father did before, letting EJ know that he’ll hear no more.
“Anyway, son, gotta be gettin’ off to the ol’ career, so uh…”
EJ holds out his hand for the keys to the truck. Eddie hands him an enormous ringing clump of them, which he straps to his waistband and bounds off to the truck with them clacking against his thigh.
The interior of the doublewide is, in a word, sticky. Eddie moves inside where there is pancake batter in a bowl in the fridge and a dank smell of man sweat and marijuana in the general air. He heats the griddle and pours a large circle of batter onto it, gets distracted by the blue light and white roar of the TV’s gameshow screen, burns the pancake, and dumps it into an overflowing trashcan. He takes the bowl of batter with him to the couch and spoons it into his mouth while he watches the deep glare and goes somewhere else for a moment.
On the television, Eddie watches a show called Cash Grab, a play on the old school money-booth scenarios where the contestant is locked in a hurricane simulator full of dollar bills with the goal of grabbing as many as possible before time expires. In this case, the contestant is positioned at the goal line of a turf football field, while on the other end of the field a cannon shoots a boatload of hundred dollar bills toward the field’s center. The contestant, once the cannon is fired, is to run through a gauntlet of padded football players toward the money, attempting to scoop up as many bills as possible before either reaching the field’s opposite end zone or ending up seriously injured. Eddie, between rounds, wonders about the show’s legal team sweating profusely in the production truck. Before long, the door swings open and Boone enters, tracking mud in on the carpet with his first couple of steps before realizing, pausing, and saying, “What am I, an animal?”
He kicks the boots back out the door and takes a step inside, where his sock impacts and departs from the floor with a horrifying noise. He bounds forward like a ballerina onto the living room carpet.
“By God if that didn’t remind me of grilled cheese gettin’ peeled apart,” he says.
He bounds another time and lands on the couch next to his friend where he pulls his nine millimeter from his waistband and lays it on the table.
“Cash Grab, boy. If I could get on this I’d shut the whole operation down. Try to stop me from the scoop and score. Try to stop me with your third-rate linebackers. No sir, boy. I’m rich at the end of that day.”
“Boone, you couldn’t make it from here to that door without tossing crud. You don’t get to keep that money anyway. They would never let it happen that easy,” says Eddie.
