Hawley took in his daughter’s boots and chewed-up hair, the blood splatters on her T-shirt. He hefted the rock in his hands. “It always matters,” he said. Then he went back inside the office and closed the door.
For the next hour Loo sat in the hallway listening to the men’s voices. There was talk about expulsion and suspension and detention and threats and favors, but after a long negotiation, all three teenagers were released with their enrollment and school records intact. The price for this clemency was paid for by their fathers. Strand, Fisk and Hawley were now officially pledged members of Principal Gunderson’s Greasy Pole Team.
—
THE GREASY POLE Contest had been an Olympus tradition for nearly a century. Every June, during the blessing of the fleet, a forty-five-foot wooden mast, planed down from a Scotch pine, was covered with inches of lard and grease and set out over the town pier. At the end of the pole was nailed a tiny red flag. The first team that made it to the end of the pole and captured that flag had bragging rights and drinks at the Flying Jib for a year. Sometimes the contest would take hours. Others it would take days. But they would not stop until the flag was captured. The greasy pole started as a drunken contest between sailors, and was now a serious battleground of old neighborhood rivalries, where generations gathered to watch the men of Olympus receive concussions, twist ankles, break arms and slip off the pole into the ocean.
Loo’s principal had dreamt of winning the Greasy Pole Contest ever since he was a little boy. Each year he inflicted his obsession on his students, lecturing on the history of the contest and his attempts to build a winning team, driven by decades of ribbing by his older brothers, who spent their time out on the water catching swordfish. These brothers had hairy chests and laughed easily and did not have poor vision or fallen arches or wives who had left them. And so each spring Principal Gunderson would attempt to win the flag, and his students and teachers would cheer him on, until he fell, belching, into the sea.
There were three main tactics for winning the contest. The first was slow and steady—the man tried to walk the mast like a balance beam. This usually got him at least halfway to the end, but inevitably ended badly—too much grease would build under his feet and send him flying. The second tactic was the crawl—the man went hands and knees. This nearly always ended with an inverted hug, the man slipping underneath the pole and dangling for a few moments, the crowd joyfully screaming a countdown, before he lost his grip. The last tactic, the most spectacular, was the slide—the man took the pole at a full run and tried to surf the grease to the end. The slide was a crowd favorite, resulting in the most varied wounds, bloody gashes, broken teeth and absurd-looking pitches into the harbor, face-smacks and groin-holds and every kind of belly flop.
On the day of the contest, Principal Gunderson gathered his team on the old wooden pier and went through each of these methods carefully, using a notebook and pen. He had perfected his own style over the years, which involved a combination of balance, crawl and last-ditch slide. Strand and Fisk sat on the plastic cooler they had brought and watched Gunderson diagram all the ways they could fall. The probable injuries to their bodies (and pride) had dampened their spirits, and they were now trying to raise them with beer. Fisk pounded his drinks. Strand sipped his delicately through a straw.
The other men had stripped down to shorts, but Samuel Hawley kept his shirt and jeans on, as if he might back out at any moment. He remained on the pier throughout the day, quietly observing the other contenders, listening to Gunderson and even sharing a drink with Strand and Fisk, though he seemed to take no pleasure in the proceedings. It was clear that he was participating in the Greasy Pole Contest for one reason and one reason only: Loo.
Hawley’s daughter was on the beach just below the pier. She sat alone in her steel-toed boots, piling rocks one on top of the other until she had balanced six or seven. Small stone monuments along the shore. Around her the crowd whispered; there was talk at seeing Hawley and his old adversaries together. Some people were hoping for a fight. But that morning Loo’s father had spent nearly an hour in the bathroom, soaking in the tub and looking at his wife’s pictures. He’d watched Loo solemnly as she made breakfast and then pinched her chin before they left, and the girl knew that meant he was not angry—only worried.
By the time Gunderson’s team took their places for the contest, the sun was high and beating down on the crowd, the water far below the pier looking more and more inviting. The grease had turned rancid, mixed with the sweat and disappointment of a hundred fishermen, and the tiny red flag still taunted them all, waving at the tip of the mast in the breeze. The whole town had come out to watch the show—the harbor was full of motorboats and sailboats, rubber rafts and dinghies, all strung together into a massive flotilla of drunken men and women, each armed with a boat horn, which they blew in appreciation and regret as fisherman after fisherman slid off the greasy pole into the churning waves below. The rest of the spectators were on the beach, settled in with their lawn chairs and coolers, enjoying crab cakes and lobster rolls and Italian ices while they waited for a winner.
Even Mabel Ridge had come to watch the men fall. She sat on one of the park benches, her hands working a crochet hook. The early-summer heat was sweltering, but the old woman was dressed for a chill, her jacket collar turned up and a roll of bright-red yarn unspooling in her lap. She wound the yarn around her finger, then stabbed it with the hook, drawing the metal in and out and around and then tugging the knot into place. She made another knot and then another. One for each man on the mast. And as each team failed, she spun the square she was making and started a new row.
She was well on her way to a full-size blanket by the time it was Principal Gunderson’s turn. He insisted on walking the greasy pole before the rest of his team, too anxious to delay and not wanting to share the glory if he succeeded. He made it past the first ridge, inch by inch, before moving slowly to his knees and pressing his face into the grease, wrapping his arms around the mast and convulsing forward a few feet in an awkward but loving embrace. Then one of his dimpled knees gave out and he was sent tumbling down with a splash.