Fight Song A Novel

Strip, jump


“Dad, are you okay?” Margot says.

“What happened?”

“You almost drowned.”

“What?”

“He had to pull you out.”

“Who?”

“Gotthorm.”

“Huh?”

“He gave you mouth-to-mouth.”

“Oh, no.”

“You were dead, I think, for a minute or so,” she says.

“Did you watch Gotthorm give me mouth-to-mouth?”

“Yes.”

“Brent, too?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Jesus, kill me.”

“G-Ma watched with us.”

“Of course she did.”

“Mom couldn’t watch because she was finishing up.”

“Where’s your mom?”

“Talking to those reporters. I filmed it for you.”

“She really made it?” Bob sits up on the pool deck, still in his soaked clothes, and peers over at Jane talking with two reporters.

“Yeah. She finished.”

Gotthorm walks over to Coffen and Margot. “You needed to tread water for five hours and eleven minutes,” he says. “You made it about five hours and two minutes.”

“Thanks for saving my life.”

“I had no choice; your kids were here.”

“Thanks anyway.”

“You made it much longer than I thought you would. You have fight in you.”

“I tried.”

“You succeeded,” Gotthorm says. “She did it. That’s what you were trying to do.”

“I guess.”

“There was some human still inside her. You were right, Bob. Do you want me to call an ambulance? You seem fine to me. I’ve almost drowned about fifty times playing water polo over the years.”

“I guess I’m fine.”

“You’re more than fine. She wouldn’t have broken it without your help,” Gotthorm says.

“Yeah, good job, Dad,” says Margot. “Can I film you?”

“Doing what?”

“Basking in your glory,” she says.

Bob nods and says, “Go ahead.”

“Ro’s going to flip when she sees all this footage. Okay, action!”

Coffen smiles as his daughter shoots him sitting there. He’ll never say it to her because it would ruin everything, but he can tell: She’s proud of him. No doubt about it.

“Do you have any words for your fans?” Margot asks, beaming.

“Treading water is harder than it looks.”



The two reporters—one columnist, one photographer—take pictures, nab their quotes. Both Jane and Gotthorm are interviewed. Bob sits with his mother-in-law, daughter, and son on some metal bleachers, waiting for Jane to finish up the festivities.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” Brent says.

“Me too.”

“Next time, I want to go swimming.”

“Go swimming right now if you want,” Coffen says.

“I don’t have my suit.”

“Are you wearing underwear?”

The boy nods.

“Strip down and go in those. We need to get my shoes off the pool floor anyway. I took them off when I was treading. And your mom’s swim cap is down there, as well. Do you want to go in, too, Margot?”

“Not a chance,” she says.

“Can I really?” Brent asks.

“Strip, jump,” Bob says.

The boy does just that, losing his clothes and leaping in, feet first. He swims down and gets Jane’s cap, then Bob’s shoes. He sets them on the side of the pool and gets to playing, swimming in little circles, holding his breath and diving down.

By the time Brent climbs out, Jane and Gotthorm are done chatting with the press. They slowly walk over to the Coffens.

“I feel like I’ve been hit by a shovel,” Jane says. “I want to eat a pizza and sleep for the rest of the week.”

“Let’s order a pizza,” Brent says.

“You’ve earned it,” Erma says to Jane. “A world champion in our family. Who would have thought that could ever happen? We’re not a bad clan, but there’s never been anything special about us.”

“Now you have a daughter who lives on both land and sea,” Gotthorm says.

“What’s he talking about?” asks Erma.

“Never mind,” Bob says. “Gotthorm, it’s been interesting. You should come over to the house sometime. Do me a favor and wear pants.”

“What about a wet suit?”

“Anything with more surface area.”

“Are we really getting pizza so late at night?” Brent says.

“No restaurants are open,” Jane says.

“We’ll raid the frozen food section of the store,” Bob says.

“I like those mozzarella melts,” Margot says.

“Jalapeño poppers,” Brent says.

“Fish sticks with extra tartar sauce,” says Gotthorm.

“Let’s buy everything we can,” Jane says.

“We can stay up and watch movies,” Brent says.

“I could eat some serious frozen pizza,” Bob says.

“Are we finally ready to go home?” Jane asks.

They are. They do.





The night rainbow


Six days later and Bob Coffen can’t believe his eyes. Björn has lived up to his promise to dazzle their suburb with a rainbow. Normally, Bob would try to dismiss this as a coincidence—it’s just a rainbow, after all. He’d typically liken it to a hack palm reader saying vague things to desperate customers, allowing them to plug the info into their own lives. You say the letter M is important in my future? I have a close friend who moved to Massachusetts last year and I miss her terribly.

But this isn’t your run-of-the-mill rainbow.

This is beyond any rational explanation.

First off, it’s snowing cats and dogs outside and never in the history of this parochial town has a single flake fluttered from the atmosphere.

Second alarming, inexplicable fact is that the rainbow is happening at nighttime. It’s been in the sky for the last half hour. Coffen’s no kind of weather shaman, but he is a decently educated person, which means he knows that rainbows need the sun to shine light through moisture in the sky, triggering some kind of crazy refracting business between the raindrops and the light. This all somehow creates an arc of colors, a daytime sky hosting a rainbow. One at night in a snowstorm, however, is impossible.

A meteorologist might call the conditions cataclysmic.

The snow and night rainbow has prompted panic in the average citizen. The power is out, which means no cable TV, no Wi-Fi. Bob has retrieved their earthquake kit and is glued to the archaic AM radio to see what people are saying about the unexpected storm. Jane attempts to distract the kids with a project. Luckily, their oven is gas and so they prepare to bake chocolate chip cookies. Unluckily, the task is not sidetracking the kids: Margot is climbing the walls, trying to get a wireless signal on her iPad. Brent had been playing a video game on his phone, but the batteries died about ten minutes ago, no way to charge it, and the boy looks confused, a bit scared.

There’s a startling, petrified chatter on the talk shows as Coffen cruises the band, the populous fearing the worst:

“Is it time to use the word ‘Apocalypse’?” a man asks a disc jockey. “Can we safely assume that this is Judgment Day?”

The DJ stays on the bright side: “Why should we assume the worst? So it’s never snowed like this in the history of our beautiful suburb, so what? Maybe this is simply an unexpected respite from our normal weather patterns. I’m not ready to preach doomsday. It’s too early for that. Our next caller is Dwight. Welcome, sir. What do you think of our weather: angry god or anomaly?”

Bob thinks, Please say anomaly, Dwight.

Jane says to the kids, “Don’t eat all the dough. We have to bake some.”

Dwight sounds all mild manners and green tea and multivitamins at first, starting off with, “A couple inches of snow, fine, I can chock that up to a blip.” Then he gets a bit more mania in his voice, “But we’re talking two and a half feet over a few hours?” And finally full-throttle naked obscene chaos rumbles up his guts and throat and rockets out with space shuttles from his mouth, “This is insane! The beginning of the end! My advice to all is buy canned goods and water! Lots of canned goods! Hole up with loved ones and hoard your canned goods! If this keeps up, canned goods will be worth $100 a pop! Listen up, people, canned goods! Buy every canned good you can get your hands on!”

“Thanks, Dwight,” says the disc jockey, “for that public service announcement. You heard it here first, people. Canned goods will be the new currency. Up next is Judy. Hi, Judy.”

“Do you know what I’ve been doing since the snow started?”

“Do tell us.”

“I’ve taken my binoculars out on my patio and have been searching the sky. My eyes have been combing the horizon, which ain’t easy with the poor visibility from the snow, but I’m doing my best. Guess what I’m looking for?”

“Why, I’m sure I don’t know, Judy, but I’ll venture a guess to play along. Is the answer terrorists?”

“Fat chance, my friend,” Judy says. “I’m out scouring the sky for flying pigs.”

“Pigs can’t fly,” Brent says.

“It can’t snow at sea level at this longitude and latitude, and that’s happening,” Margot says.

“Maybe it’s time to turn that off,” Jane says to Bob, molding the cookie dough into dime-sized balls, then placing them on a baking sheet.

“One sec,” says Coffen.

“Brigades of flying pigs!” Judy says. “Squadrons of them. Because believe it or not, that’s the only thing that will make any sense of this. An innocent snowstorm? No way. It’s never happened before. But if I see pigs fly into our town, then I’ll know that this is the end of days and anything is possible. Sit back and wait for the invasion of the flying pigs.”

“You heard it here first, folks. Judy’s got her eyes peeled for pigs. And let’s hope she doesn’t see any. I don’t know about you, but I’m not quite ready for the end of days. My queue is stuffed with classics and I still haven’t climbed Everest. We need to take a quick break so enjoy these messages from our lovely sponsors … ”

“Turn it off, Bob,” Jane says. “We need you right now.”

He clicks the radio off and walks into the kitchen. Coffen says to them, “The cookies smell great.”

They’re all waiting for the first batch to be done.

“Is it dangerous?” Brent says.

“The snow?” Bob asks.

“Maybe,” Margot says.

“Of course it’s not dangerous,” Bob says.

“It’s just like rain, sweetie,” Jane says, “except it’s frozen.”

“Can we play in it?” Brent asks.

Bob and Jane look at each other, shrug.

Once the cookies are finished and they’ve each eaten one, they take the snowy bull by the horns, bundling themselves up and trekking out into the storm. Outside, it surprises Coffen how empty the streets are. He figured at least the subdivision children would be out building snowmen, having fights with mounds of pressed powder, something. Must be the mania of their parents keeping them cooped up inside, forced to stare out windows and wishing for a chance to play in it.

The four of them stand in the driveway, staring up at the night rainbow. It’s showing all the colors of the spectrum, even purple. It’s extra vivid because of the sky’s blackness. The clouds around it light the rainbow with a hazy shimmer.

“It looks like it touches the ground over there,” Brent says, pointing in the direction of the small park in the center of the subdivision’s Y-shape. “Can we go look?”

“I don’t see why not,” Coffen says. “Jane?”

“Sure,” she says.

“This is impossible,” Margot says. “Rainbows aren’t real at night.”

“Maybe there’s a pot of gold at the rainbow’s end,” says Brent.

“It’s an optical illusion,” his sister says. “It doesn’t touch down over there. The rainbow is based on where you’re standing. There’s no such thing as the end of the rainbow.”

“Maybe this one does touch down,” Jane says to her. “According to you, there can’t even be a rainbow at night.”

Margot sighs and says, “This is stupid.”

Coffen says to Brent, “If there is a pot of gold at the rainbow’s end, we’ll split any loot with you.”

“Can I stay home? It’s freezing,” says Margot.

Bob talks in a terrible pirate accent: “You don’t get a cut of the treasure unless you come along for the adventure.”

She doesn’t laugh. But she does sigh and come along. So there’s that …

“Maybe you won’t need a new job,” Jane says, “if we strike it rich tonight.”

“Try to talk the kids out of college,” Bob says. “Then we can squeak by. Plus, now that Ace is teaching me to play the bass, I might become a rock star.”

“That sounds really probable,” she says and smiles at him.

And so the four of them push on into the snowy, rainbowed night. Tough trudging through the powder with their wonky, sinking steps. They walk to the end of the cul-de-sac. Coffen takes in the cars—how they’re hidden under a blanket of snow. He remembers calling himself a fluorescent orange monster, covered in so much of the artificial stuff, hidden under all his failures. He rubs his hand across a car’s bumper, knocking the snow off, inspecting what’s underneath. Then he turns his gaze skyward, looking at all the flakes coming down, all of them white, not one orange flake targeting him.

They get to the park eventually. Smack in the middle of the snowy field is the rainbow’s end. It comes down and kisses the snow.

Bob wonders how the HOA will handle this: Who shall be the recipient of a belligerent, bullying email about an unauthorized rainbow?

The Coffens are the only people out; they’ve got the place to themselves.

As they stand gawking at the thing, there’s a lovely barrage of adjectives, one from each member of the family:

“Unbelievable!”

“Stupefying!”

“Cool!”

“Impossible!”

Then Coffen says, “I want to touch it.”

He starts walking toward it.

His family follows.

They all reach the rainbow’s end. It’s about two feet wide, shaped cylindrically, and Bob puts his hand into the rainbow. For some reason, he’d expected the colors to be hot, like steam releasing from a teakettle, but it’s no different temperature than the cold, snowy air. He moves his hand around in the light, watching it shift from red to orange to yellow, then green, blue, purple.

“Can I do it too?” Brent says.

“We all can,” Coffen says.

And they all do, hands sticking in the colors. They are all deep in the night rainbow. Everyone’s laughing! Margot moves her hand around in a motion like dribbling a basketball.

“Isn’t this better than pretending to be at the Great Barrier Reef?” Coffen asks her, gloating that she’s seeing something in the real world that she’ll never see online.

But she doesn’t answer, watches her colored hand continue to bounce the invisible ball, mesmerized.

“There’s no treasure,” says Brent.

“Yeah, there is,” Coffen says.

“Why is the magic rainbow here?” Brent asks.

“That’s a great question,” Jane says.

“Probably Armageddon,” Margot says.

“What’s that?” Brent asks.

“It’s nothing,” Coffen says.

“I hope it never leaves,” Brent says.

“That would be insane,” Margot throws in, still bouncing her invisible basketball.

She’s not far off. It would indeed be insane if the night rainbow rooted in this spot like some kind of monument. Coffen pauses at this idea: What would it be immortalizing? The plock marks the passing of ten years. What kind of shrine might the night rainbow be, inexplicably landing in their lives without reason or recourse or context or perspective? What’s the big idea behind such wondrous alchemy?

In the end, who really cares?

Point is it’s here.

Point is it’s here and so are all the Coffens.

They stand together, their hands flexing and stretching colorfully in the night rainbow’s rounded light. Bob’s free hand has crept up over his heart again, like it had that first evening on Schumann’s lawn. What’s that ditty he’s now humming? “Hail Purdue”?

No, actually Coffen happens to be performing his family’s fight song: “Rock and Roll All Nite.”

Jane smiles at his selection and says, “Would you have ever guessed something like this could happen to us?”

Bob Coffen looks at all the vibrant, rainbowed hands of his family. “Just lucky, I guess,” he says, then picks up the tune where he left off.





Acknowledgments


I wouldn’t have a career if it weren’t for the tireless enthusiasm of independent booksellers. The work you do often goes unnoticed, so I want to thank you all from the bottom of my heart! We should all try and buy a book from an indie shop this week. Come on: you can do it.

Special thanks to Cooper Edens, author of If You’re Afraid of the Dark, Remember the Night Rainbow. It’s my favorite children’s book, and I wanted to pay homage to it in Fight Song.

I’d also like to thank a couple of Dans: my editor, Dan Smetanka, who has a shrewd eye and a wise spirit: scribbling this book together was a blast. And to my agent, Dan Kirschen of ICM: I know I’m in good hands with you and am stoked to grow a career together.

Eric Obenauf read this book in manuscript form and gave me kickass feedback. Thanks for your continued support, old friend.

On an unrelated note, Bucky Sinister wrote a poem for my wedding, which has nothing to do with what we’re talking about, except I want to say thanks to him one last time.

Thanks to my colleagues in the MFA program at the University of San Francisco, and also at Stanford’s Online Writer’s Studio.

I’m blessed to be surrounded by cerebral, strong, and beautiful women: Diane, Sarah, Margaret, Jessica, Katy, Shana, Rochelle, Chellis, Aubrey, Veronica.

My wife, Leota Antoinette, is my perfect playmate. We have so much fun together it should be illegal, but I’m sure thankful it isn’t.





Photo credit: Kevin Irby





About the Author


Joshua Mohr is the author of the novels Termite Parade (a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice selection), Some Things that Meant the World to Me (one of O Magazine’s Top 10 reads of 2009 and a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller), and Damascus, published in the fall of 2011 to much critical acclaim. Mohr teaches in the MFA program at the University of San Francisco.