Stotan! Read online

  Chris Crutcher

  Stotan!

  In memory of my dad

  1922–1985

  A Stotan all the way

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  We saw the notice about Stotan Week on the bulletin…

  Chapter 2

  Nortie volunteered for Stotan Week today. The little screwball hoped…

  Chapter 3

  You have to hurt a little for Nortie. He’s a…

  Chapter 4

  Well, Thanksgiving was yesterday and I have a pound or…

  Chapter 5

  It’s too bad this school wasn’t named after Jim Thorpe…

  Chapter 6

  Nortie quit his job over at the East Side Childcare…

  Chapter 7

  We flew through most of the workout today on the…

  Chapter 8

  After Stotan Week the vacation went like a flash. They…

  Chapter 9

  So now Nortie lives with me. He’s got Long John’s…

  Chapter 10

  We got back into workouts, and back into school, no…

  Chapter 11

  I qualified for State out of state—in Havre, Montana. Fourth…

  Chapter 12

  Boy, the last couple of weeks have been a horror…

  Chapter 13

  I don’t understand why things won’t quiet down. Every time…

  Chapter 14

  Well, a week until State. Actually, it’s not even that.

  Chapter 15

  Well, the 1985 State swimming meet is history. Turns out…

  About the Author

  Other Books by Chris Crutcher

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  CHAPTER 1

  November 5

  We saw the notice about Stotan Week on the bulletin board just off the deep end of the pool after our early-morning workout today. It was already curling at the edges from the high humidity and chlorine content of the air, a lot the way my skin feels after a good three-hour workout.

  “What’s a Stotan Week?” Nortie asked, glancing quickly around at the rest of us. It sounded like a riddle.

  No response; we just looked at him, then back to the notice, which read:

  STOTAN WEEK

  Dec. 17 to Dec. 21

  8 A.M. to Noon Daily

  Volunteers Only

  Looking for a few good men

  SEE MAX

  “December 17,” Nortie said. “That’s the start of vacation. How come it’s at the start of vacation? What’s a Stotan Week?”

  Jeff looked at him again. “All in favor of Nortie checking out Stotan Week with Max and reporting back to us, say ‘aye.’”

  Lion and I said, “Aye.”

  “Sorry, guys, not me. I’m not asking. I don’t even want to know. You do it, Walker; you’re the captain.”

  Max makes Nortie nervous because he’s quiet and it’s hard to tell what he’s thinking a lot of the time. Nortie’s not emotionally equipped to talk to Max.

  “Nortie,” I said, “I’m worried about you. You’re a senior in high school. You could actually graduate if the folks in the office forget how to count. You have to learn to talk to people.”

  “I talk,” he said, “but this is a job for the captain. This looks like one of Max’s tricks. If I ask him, he’ll just look at me like I’m in advanced Special Ed or try to get me to believe something really strange.”

  We heard the door slam and the flapping of Max’s rubber thongs as he came through the equipment room toward the pool deck where we stood. Nortie nodded toward me. Max stopped in the doorway.

  I said, “Hi, Max. How’s it going?” I let Nortie off the hook. “What’s a Stotan Week?”

  Max smiled. “Take a chance; show up on the seventeenth and find out.”

  “Says here it’s voluntary,” I said. “I like to know what I’m volunteering for.”

  “Sometimes it’s better not to know.”

  Nortie flinched a little. “I’ll bet it’s tough, huh?”

  Max shrugged. “Wouldn’t be surprised.”

  Lion walked over and sat on the low board, rocking back and forth on his big arms, looking at Max, who’s about half his size. “What happens if we decide not to volunteer?”

  “You won’t get the benefit of Stotan Week,” Max said, and walked over to drop the thermometer in the water. He tied the long string to the ladder and let it dangle, then got the chemical testing kit out of the pump room to check the PH and chlorine levels. We had learned all we were going to learn about Stotan Week for today.

  “See you guys at workout,” he said.

  I don’t know that any of us will ever know what makes Max tick. He started coaching here at Frost my freshman year and I don’t know him much better than I did the first day I walked into the pool area. Not really. He’s one of those guys you only know by what they do. You have to guess how they are.

  Max is Korean; his last name is Il Song. Not Korea Korean, though; Great Falls, Montana, Korean. He grew up on a ranch just outside of Great Falls—sort of a Korean cowboy, I guess—but he’s also spent some time in the Orient, in Korea itself and in Japan, and his parents are from Seoul, so he has a pretty mixed background.

  I’ll say one thing about him straightaway: he’s a tough hombre. He has a third-degree black belt in Tai Kwan Do, which is a kind of karate, and I’ve seen him kick an apple off the head of a guy 6’8”. It doesn’t matter that Lion’s twice his size.

  I know we’ll all show for Stotan Week, whatever it is—even though it’ll certainly alter the extra week of Christmas vacation we’re getting this year—and I know something else: it won’t be easy.

  We start the early-morning workout at 5:30. Max doesn’t show up for it, just leaves instructions on the board. He’s always been real clear that we get out of swimming just what we put into it, and if we let down because he’s not around, we’ll never be that good anyway. We’ve been together long enough that we push each other hard without him, and the morning workouts are just conditioning, not technique, so we don’t miss him as long as he lets us know what we’re supposed to do. Besides, he says he hates to get up that early, but doesn’t mind a bit if we do. It all works out.

  The four of us have spent all our high-school years at Frost, and have been pretty much the core of the swimming team. And, except for girlfriends, have been at the core of each other’s lives. Back in grade school and junior high we swam on the summer AAU team together, so we go back a long ways. There’s another member of our little group of musketeers, but she’s a girl and isn’t on the team, though she works out with us. That’s Elaine. Talent-wise, she’s probably better than any of us, except maybe Nortie, but she’s out of the competition business these days—burned out at seventeen—and works out only to keep in shape and be part of our group. She’s into more cosmic things now.

  This should be the year I make it at least to the consolation finals at State; I’m dedicating the time between now and March to that. These past two years my times have been dropping like a rock, probably because I’ve worked out summers with Max instead of with the AAU team and because he has me on a monster weight program that’s turning me into a big, fast, sleek piece of work. Max says when he was a kid and they wanted their ski boat to go faster, they put a bigger motor on it. It’s working for me, and I plan to do some big-league butt-kicking before this year is over. Being a late developer, I have a few scores to settle.

  Nortie will go again. He’s gone every year—and won at least one event each time. He’s more excited this year, though, because it’s his last year and because we have a chance to take a relay team, which would mean Jeff and Lion would be there too. Nortie and I both went last year, though I didn’t p
lace, and this year the school has said that if we qualify the relay, they’ll pull out all the stops and send us in style.

  This is the last year of swimming at Frost, which is probably why there are only the four of us on the team. None of the other schools in Spokane has a team—or a pool, for that matter—and we have to travel a long way to find meets; mostly to college towns in southeastern Washington and northern Idaho and, once a year, to Montana. Basically, that means we cost a lot more than we’re worth. Plus, we never actually win a meet. We win most of the events we swim, but there aren’t enough of us to take the whole thing. For one thing, we have no diver, so we lose those points, and if we swim one relay, that means we can’t swim the other, so the best we can do on those is break even. Then, we have no one to take second-or third-place points in the events we do win, so we don’t get much ahead. In Tri-Cities they let us swim as many events apiece as we want, to keep the meet interesting. We win that one, but then have to forfeit, legally, because we broke the rules to do it. So we may very well be the best team in the state, of any kind, that winds up each season with a row of goose eggs in the win column. We think that’s pretty funny. Lion even had a bunch of T-shirts made up with our win-loss record across the chest.

  The biggest problem with the early-morning workout is there’s an hour between the time we finish and the time school starts, so we’re just hanging out with not much to do. We can’t get into the main building, and even if we could, all they have in there is books, which is not real exciting at 7:00 in the morning. What we do is head over to Dolly’s Café to chow down on some of Dolly’s home cooking and replenish all the vitamins and minerals we left in the pool. I choose to replenish them with what I have concluded through an independent and scientifically unsupported survey is nature’s perfect breakfast: pancakes, swimming—and I mean swimming—in maple syrup. I see it as my job to carry on the never ending battle against tofu and bean sprouts and brown rice and other communist-inspired dishes that have obviously been smuggled into this country to show my personal eating habits up for what they are.

  Anyway, we whipped the three or four blocks to Dolly’s to grub down before starting our day in the learning machine. Elaine met us there like she always does. She has the same aversion to 5:30 in the morning that Max does, so she only works out in the afternoons. Elaine was national caliber in the ’fly and distance freestyle, a fairly unusual combination, but she doesn’t compete anymore, like I said. One thing about swimming: unless you’re among the best in the country, there’s a girl somewhere who can kick your butt—any stroke, any distance. Elaine was that girl for a lot of guys around here; she had her day, but no more. Elaine swims for fun.

  So the four of us are at Dolly’s, buried in a Disneyland of pancakes, eggs, bacon, hash browns, toast and Nortie’s bowl of raisins and rice, and poor old Nortie can’t get Stotan Week off his pea brain.

  “What do you think it is, Walk?” There is an urgency in his voice that does not become a man of his physical capabilities, squirrelly as he may appear.

  “Don’t whine, peckerneck,” Jeff says. “You’re a hero in this high school; an aquatic phenom. Don’t whine.”

  I’ve got a soft spot for Nortie, but I’ll be damned if I know how he’s going to survive his first twenty-four hours after graduation. I mean, he’s eighteen years old. People will soon expect him to be an adult. I say, “I don’t know what it is, Nort, but it won’t be fun; at least not in the conventional sense.”

  “Think it’s gonna be really tough, huh?”

  Nortie’s strange. He works out as hard as anyone on the team, maybe harder, but anticipation short-circuits him. It breaks my heart, but I say, “Yes, Nort. I think it will be really tough.”

  Lion says, “Did you see the look on Max? I think it will be tough.”

  Nortie groans.

  Elaine plops a chair down at the end of the table at our booth and punches Nortie lightly on the shoulder. “Norton,” she says, “you look distressed. What’s the matter, baby?”

  “Stotan Week,” he says. “We’re having Stotan Week.”

  Jeff puts down his fork for the first time since we sat down. “It’s voluntary, for Chrissakes, Nortie. That means you go only if you want to. And, Nortie, you don’t even know what it is, so will you please shut up? You’re driving me nuts and I feel like I may have to kill you.” Though Jeff loves Nortie like a brother, he’s a little less indulgent of him than the rest of us.

  Nortie nods and is quiet. He knows Jeff is kidding, sort of, but he doesn’t mess with him.

  Elaine is psyched out of her gourd because she and some other cosmic wizards from Frost have been invited to take an Astronomy course at Gonzaga U. for college credit and they get to use the school’s planetarium, and I have to say, if anyone I know would be at home in a planetarium, it’s Elaine.

  Her first class was last night; she doesn’t want to talk about Stotan Week. “Don’t Time and Space just freak you out?” she offers up to any takers. There are none. Time freaks most of us out—everything we do is against the clock.

  Elaine is undaunted by Jeff’s eyes rolling back and Nortie’s head cocking like a confused cocker spaniel’s.

  “Did you know that most of the stars we see could be burned out by the time we see them?” she asks.

  “Really?” Jeff asks in mock horror. He squints and points his fork. “Deep meaning here, right? You’re going to tell us who changes them when they burn out.”

  Elaine points back and raises her eyebrows. “Things may not be as they appear to be, O wise carrot-top. Beware.”

  “Is that my horoscope for November 5, Omar?” Jeff says.

  Elaine smiles her smug little smile and takes a drink of Jeff’s orange juice. “You’ll see,” she says. “You’ll all see.”

  Elaine takes a lot of crap from the rest of us about her perception of what we’re doing on this planet, and she gives out a fair share too, but underneath—and not very far underneath—she’s dead serious in her quest for other-than-traditional knowledge. We figure she’ll go to college next year and major in Weirdness. I mean, besides the Astronomy class, she’s signed up for a night course from Eastern Washington U. called Tibetan Symbolism, and last year she took something called Applied Concepts of Karma in the Western World. Jeff tells her if she keeps it up he can get her a full ride to Rod Serling University. Boy, she can make your head swim in a philosophical discussion; make you wonder what’s real—what’s important.

  I may not know what’s important in the universal sense, but I know what’s important to me right now, and that’s finishing out this year with a bang. I want to swim fast and help my buddies swim fast—make the last year of swimming at Frost one they’ll remember. I also want to do a good job with my studies for once, to prove myself, so I don’t head off to college next year with my return-trip ticket already bought. I think I might be pretty smart, but that’s gone untested from a scholastic point of view, because I think I’m also pretty lazy. I’ve been working to correct that, though. In my attempt to become semi-literate I even read a few books cover-to-cover this last summer, and though it’s not MTV, it’s not half bad. I could get into being a student, with a little practice. See, I have a brother who’s fifteen years older than me floating around town, and, to hear him tell it, he was a pretty smart cookie. He’s forever giving me books to read, and old sixties record albums to listen to so that I can, according to him, improve my mind and become cultured in the way of the old masters—the Hippies. I worry about my brother a little, though. He never got cut loose from that time. I mean, even Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman moved on. And Tom Hayden is a respected politician in California these days, and not just because he has the good sense to lust after Jane Fonda’s body. But my brother—his name’s Long John—still puts drugs into every orifice he can find and preaches love and non-violence like he was gathering followers for a migration to Woodstock. Unfortunately, I’m afraid he’s a pusher. He has no visible means of support, and though he never ha
s a lot of material things, he never goes hungry either. If I ever find out that’s true for sure, he and I may well have a parting of the ways, but meantime I read his books and listen to his music and learn what I can from him.

  CHAPTER 2

  November 12

  Nortie volunteered for Stotan Week today. The little screwball hoped Max would tell him more about it if he just walked in and signed up, but Max merely said okay and wrote his name down. Now he’s begging the rest of us to hurry and go volunteer so he won’t have to go through it alone; and we all will, of course, but not before we terrorize his scrawny butt a few more days.

  His panic is becoming full-blown. “C’mon, you guys. Hurry and sign up. You’re not going to let me go alone, are you? God, just me and Max? I wouldn’t last five minutes. What is it? I tried to look it up in the dictionary, but there’s no ‘Stotan’ not even in the big one in the library.” It doesn’t matter that Max has never thrown a workout at us Nortie couldn’t take. We keep telling him that we’re going to be out of town that week or that you’d have to be an idiot to volunteer for something when you don’t know anything about it. Part of it’s an act, but he’ll rest a lot easier when our signatures are on the paper. We won’t let it go on much longer, mostly because we don’t want a major gastric disorder to be visited on our fastest swimmer.

  The only thing Max has said since he put up the notice last week is that Stotan Week will require total commitment.

  Lion’s up for it. He trusts Max to come up with something to equal all this drama, and to Lion that means a chance to extend himself—which is what he does best. Lion and Elaine are alike in that respect.