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Al shuts the door to his office behind him, cutting off the racket of several dozen boys chattering to each other as they shower and dress. He drops into his wooden desk chair and, for just a second, lets his head sink into his hands.
What a disaster this season has been so far. His rowers hate each other, half of them hate him, and he still doesn’t have a clue what kind of boat he could possibly cobble together from this mess to have even a snowball’s chance in hell at Olympic trials next year.
The door opens again.
“Just me,” Tom says. “No need to get up.”
Small blessings, Al thinks. Tom seeing him like this is bad enough; if someone like Bates - or, god forbid, that half-cocked pistol of a coxswain, Moch - walked in on him with his head in his hands he’d lose every scrap of authority still left to him.
“That bad, huh?” Tom says, chuckling, when Al raises his head to glare balefully at his mild-mannered frosh coach.
“Please tell me you’ve got some level heads in that boat of yours. I’m drowning in personalities here.”
Tom pushes aside Al’s unopened logbook to rest his hand atop the desk and cock his head in wry thought. “You’re in luck. There’s Hume, obviously, steady as a metronome and not much more talkative, but Adam’s as stoic as they come, too.”
“Well, that’s something. I’ll fill next year’s varsity with your freshmen and start the resentment up all over again.” Al knows he shouldn’t have asked for cheery news if he’s too morose to hear it, but it’s too late now.
Tom ignores what is, even charitably described, a fit of pique and instead begins flipping back through Al’s logbook. Al doesn’t stop him, even though he ought to protest that those are his private notes. Maybe Tom will be able to make sense out of them where Al hasn’t.
“Do you want what George would say, or my honest opinion?”
Al stares glumly at the slow turn of pages beneath Tom’s fingers. What he wouldn’t give for George’s advice at a moment like this - but that would mean letting George see him at his lowest. “What have I got to lose? Give me both.”
“George would say the right men will make themselves clear over time.” Tom halts in his flipping and turns the logbook towards Al’s view, indicating one entry with his pointer finger. “I’d say the same, but that you should be sneakier about it.”
“Come again?”
Tom reads the upside-down text aloud, as though Al can’t read his own handwriting. “Tuesday. Morris and Day trading barbs on the water. They row better when they fight.”
“So?” Al says, purposefully obtuse. The answer is obvious, but he doesn’t want to admit he didn’t see it before.
“Wednesday. Morris and Day trading barbs OFF the water.” Tom looks up from the logbook to quirk his eyebrows suggestively. “I heard those barbs. It sounded a lot more like pigtail-pulling than real fighting.”
Al can’t help but laugh. “Tom, I can’t tell them to kiss and make up. It isn’t that easy.”
Morris and Day are like oil and water, and moreover they’re half the reason half his rowers hate the other half to begin with. Their rivalry burns hotter than most.
“No, but you can sit them down in front of each other,” Tom says, immovable as always in the face of Al’s attempts to weasel out of confrontation. “They’ve got that competitive spark already. If you tell them it’s their job to work together, they’ll make each other better.”
It’s not the worst idea in the world. But Al isn’t quite ready to let go of his defeated mood just yet.
“And who’s supposed to corral this team of rivals you’re putting together? It won’t be me; my nerves can’t take it.”
“Come on, Al, you know the answer to that.”
Al groans. He does, and he wishes he didn’t. “It’s Moch, isn’t it?”
“You always knew it would be.” Tom places a comforting hand on his shoulder. “Look, you’ve got this whole season to put them through their paces, and then all next fall to think on it. Don’t make the same mistake again by setting your heart on the perfect boat too far in advance. Put Morris and Day in a shell together come September and see what that does for morale, and we’ll go from there.”
It’s solid advice, and Al knows he’d do well to take it. He’s been a coach for too long to let himself get stuck in fits of despair like this for very long. Still, Tom has always been better at pulling him out of them than he has been at lifting them himself. Al’s melancholy temperament is his greatest weakness as a coach, and it’s thanks to men like Tom and George that he has any success in talking to his rowers at all. He doesn’t express his gratitude for that enough.
“Sometimes I’d give an arm and a leg for your way with people,” he tells Tom as he pushes himself to stand and flips the logbook closed again. There will be time to worry over its pages again tomorrow.
Tom flashes him an understanding smile. “You’ve got me and George for dealing with people. We need you to put the fear of God in them every now and then.”
That’s something Al is good at. He attempts a smile back.
“Is it about time for another one of those?”
“I’ll say. Morris and Day nearly came to blows today, and they nearly dragged Rantz and McMillin in with them.”
“Morris and Day, you say?” Al says, pitching his voice low and icy as he opens his office door. It’s louder than it needs to be, intended to carry over the quiet, frosty detent in the lockers, and could be read as threatening or intrigued depending on the inclinations of the hearer. He’s spent years perfecting it. “I’ll keep it in mind.”
The cryptic statement works exactly as intended. The whispers start up immediately and don’t stop, following Al and Tom down the stairs and out onto the dock. Tom is laughing quietly to himself.
“Like a cat among the pigeons,” he says. “Let them wonder what you could have meant by that.”
“If we’re lucky, Day will ask Morris to the soda fountain and they’ll work out their issues on their own,” Al says.
The sunshine is already doing wonders for his mood, and he feels almost able to smile about the whole thing. Between him and Tom they have three good crews, and whatever happens at Berkeley and Poughkeepsie this year, next year will be a fresh start. Al isn’t the kind of man who puts much stock in having a good feeling about things, but with the sun on his face and Tom still chuckling by his side, there’s room for at least a little optimism.
“Shove it up your ass, Morris!” says Chuck Day, loud enough to filter out through the shell house doors and over the water.
Al heaves a deep, weary sigh. Next year can’t come soon enough.