Seven hours every day, from 8:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M., with a break for lunch.
There were twenty kids, none of them boys Ben knew, and each morning they ran laps around the track, then weight-trained in the high school gym. They swam in the afternoons to a rhythmic count Coach Wakeland called out, twenty boys synchronized to a 4/4 rhythm. They fist-swam to work on body positioning, ran long-axis drills, sprinted freestyle 25s and 100-meter butterflies and 200-meter individual medleys. Swimming uncoupled Ben from his anger; there was only the celadon-blue water, the black line on the pool bottom, and the endless somersaulting at the wall. And the coach’s voice that summer was the metronome to his life. Three strokes and a breath on four, Wakeland’s four-beat striking Ben’s ear as it broke the surface of the water, his body slipping down the lane, his voice in his head indistinguishable from the coach’s. It happened without him recognizing it, his voice becoming Wakeland’s, and one night when his stepfather berated him for not taking out the trash, Ben escaped to the upstairs bath and slipped his head beneath the scalding water, Wakeland counting to sixty-seven before Ben burst to the surface, his anger drowned in the tub.
Margaret was sitting now, her knees pressed to her chest. He was in for the long haul today. Over at the taqueria, he got a concha and another coffee. On a television bolted to the wall, Eyewitness News was showing a picture of the Santa Elena victim, April Howard, smiling in front of a Christmas tree.
“Freaky,” the man said, handing Ben his pastry. “Complete loco.”
“Lock your windows,” Ben said.
“Got bars on the windows around here,” the man said, laughing. “We already know what’s up.”
Right. This guy’s not hitting poor neighborhoods.
Back at the truck, Ben made a note on his legal pad. Opportunistic. Neighborhoods with low crime rates. You feel safe, you’re dead. Santa Elena: bull’s-eye. He underlined it twice.
His mother was still sitting down, brushing her hand across the stone. He glanced over his notes, three pages of them from the Mission Viejo scene where Emily was killed, another two from last night’s scene until his interview with Wakeland, where his notes became mostly indecipherable. He’d seen Coach Wakeland around in the last four years, sure—once in the Safeway near the school, when Ben left his basket of milk and eggs in the frozen section and walked out; a few times from afar when picking up Emma at school—but Ben lived on the other side of town and could mostly avoid the man. From a distance, Wakeland was abstract, someone from another life and time; standing right next to him, though, the man was as concrete as Ben’s own flesh and bone. Flipping through the pages, Ben found the notes from his conversation with Neil Wolfe. He talked about Wakeland like he was his father. Like he was scared to disappoint him. Ben added to the notes: Emotional leverage.
That fall after summer camp, Ben had pulled a fire alarm during lunch. All the kids standing in lines on the baseball field, the teachers and staff streaming out through the front doors of the school, two fire trucks and three police cars spinning their lights on the blacktop. It was fantastic. All of that, all of that drama—he had caused it. But some seventh-grade goody-goody girl told the principal she saw Ben yank the lever, and before he could revel in the prank he was suspended for three days.
“You’re a fraud,” Ben yelled at Voorhees when he took Ben by the arm that night and dragged him upstairs. “A liar, a loser.”
When Voorhees locked him in his room, Ben kicked through the particleboard door.
“Please”—his mother’s small voice on the other side of the door—“please, Ben, calm down. We need this.” He didn’t realize then what she was saying to him: Ben was hurting their marriage, threatening to throw them back into poverty.
“You’re a bitch,” he said to his mom. “How could you marry that loser?”
Then he punched out the screen, jumped from the second-story window, and ran into the dark across the golf course. He ran to the high school swim complex; the lights were off, the gate locked. That didn’t stop him: He scaled the fence, tore off his shirt and shoes, and dove into the water in his shorts. He freestyled it down the pool, spun, and freestyled it back, the water dark and stinging with chlorine. He didn’t know how long he was out there, but his lungs burned, his muscles cramped. When he finally pulled up, Coach Wakeland was sitting on a plastic chair near the pool’s edge.
“Give me a reason not to call the cops,” he said.
“Call them,” Ben said. “Let them arrest me.” And then, hanging on the edge of the pool, his feet dangling in the dark water beneath him, he spilled it all to Wakeland. Leaving his dad in the ditch. The police never finding the Chevelle that killed his father. Pulling the fire alarm. His asshole stepfather. Calling his mom a bitch. All of it.
Wakeland watched Ben’s face, a sad smile on his lips. “You’ve gotten faster,” the coach finally said. “Get inside and dry off.”
In the locker room, Ben toweled off. His legs were rubber, his arms Jell-O, his muscles shaking.
“You’re hypoglycemic,” Wakeland said. “You need to eat.”
Wakeland found him a pair of shorts in the lost and found, and then they were in Wakeland’s Mustang, blasting down Conquistador Road through the patchwork of fields separating Santa Elena from Tustin. They were silent in the car, Ben exhausted and feeling stupid about all the shit he’d said. When they crossed over into Tustin, Wakeland pulled into a strip mall, parked, and then steered Ben into a booth in a run-down taqueria with brightly colored sombreros hanging from the drop ceiling. Wakeland ordered in Spanish, which impressed the hell out of Ben. His father had spoken some Spanish, but Ben had never met another white man willing to utter a single hola. Five minutes later, a massive burrito was sitting in front of him, soaking in red sauce.
“Lengua,” Wakeland said.
Ben glanced at the cutting board behind the counter, on it a slug of raw meat.
“Tongue?” Ben said. “I’m not eating that.”
“When someone takes you to dinner, you eat.”
Ben bit into it, and damn if it wasn’t the tastiest thing he’d eaten, at least since the mule-deer steaks his father used to grill when he was a kid.
“First,” Wakeland said, putting his palms on the table, “never call your mother that name again. She brought you into this world, and you respect that.”
“Didn’t ask to be born.”
“You sound like a stupid thirteen-year-old kid.”
He was a stupid thirteen-year-old kid, but he didn’t want to sound like one.
“Second, what happened to your father was an accident,” Wakeland said, his burrito sitting before him, untouched. “You were a child. You were in shock. People do strange things when they’re in shock, things that can’t be explained.”
Ben set down the burrito and stared at a Spanish phrase scraped into the wooden table. Chupa mi pito.
“Forgive yourself,” Wakeland said.