Baltimore Blues

The water was rough this morning, making Tess nervous. It was difficult to tip an Alden, but not impossible, and she didn't want to be immersed in the Patapsco's murky middle branch under any circumstances. Once she had gotten a little of the river in a cut on her hand, and the cut hadn't healed for three months. Better to take it easy, warm up, let her morning-tight muscles relax and expand. On the way back she would push herself, rowing as if in a race.

This was Tess's routine, her only routine since the Star had been shuttered. Six days a week she rowed in the morning and ran in the evening. Three times a week she lifted weights in an old- fashioned boxing gym in East Baltimore. On the seventh day, she rested, soaking her long frame in a hot tub and fantasizing about a man who could rub her feet and neck simultaneously.

In college Tess had been a mediocre sweep rower, recruited by a mediocre team because she was strong, with muscular legs and a swimmer's broad shoulders. Switching to two oars had not enhanced her style. Tess knew, or imagined she knew, how ugly she looked moving across the water. Like a beetle caught in the toilet bowl, all twitches and spasms. Even on the easy trip out, she scowled and chewed her tongue, so fierce was her concentration. No, there was nothing natural about Tess's rowing. She didn't do it well. She didn't do it in order to compete. Yet she seldom missed a day. Her friends often said Tess had never met a rut she didn't like. She took no offense. It was true. And her fondness for routine had helped her weather the jobless months.

But this morning, as she tried to feather her oars in air thick as particleboard, everything suddenly seemed futile. The first day of September should be cool, she thought, or at least cooler. She should be good at this by now, or at least better. Abruptly, she pulling her oars out of the water and let the boat drift. She scanned the skies for rain, hoping for an excuse to quit. A thick haze hung over the skyline, but no clouds. From this vantage point Baltimore simply looked dirty and discouraged.

'Welcome to Charm City,' she said to a seagull that was diving for dead fish. 'Welcome to Baltimore, hon.'

Neither Tess nor her hometown were having a good year. She was out of work and out of unemployment benefits. Baltimore was on pace to set an unprecedented murder rate, breaking the once-thought-unbreakable record of 1993, which had broken some previously impossible record. Every day there was a little death, the kind of murder that rated no more than four paragraphs deep inside the Beacon-Light. Yet no one seemed to notice or care-except those playing the homicide tally in the Pick 3. the mayor still called it the City That Reads, but others had long ago twisted that civic motto.

'The city that bleeds, hon,' Tess called out to the unimpressed seagull. The city that breeds. the city that grieves, the city that seethes. The city one leaves. Only Tess never could, any more than she could have swum from the bottom of Chesapeake Bay with an anchor around her neck.

As she stared off into the distance, another sculler emerged from the shadows under the Hanover Street Bridge, moving easily and swiftly toward her as if the water were greased glass. His technique was perfect, his back broad, his white T-shirt already gray with sweat. His image seemed to pop out, the way things did at a 3-D movie. In seconds he was almost on top of Tess, coming right at her.

'Behind you,' she called, confident such an assured rower would have no problem changing course. Her voice carried across the silent morning, but the rower paid no heed.

'Behind you!' Tess called again more insistently, as the boat kept coming right at her. A collision seemed inevitable. She had never watched anyone row from this angle, never realized how fast a boat seemed to move when one was in its path. Flustered, she began making fruitless, tiny movements with her oars, trying to turn the Alden and get out of the oncoming boat's path. Her only thought was to minimize the damage to the other boat, which looked fragile and, consequently, expensive.

The Alden, an amiable shell designed for beginners, moved beneath Tess with all the alacrity and finesse of a large cow. In her haste, trying to steer the boat through the rough water with rushed, incompetent strokes, she didn't seem to move at all. Frantic, Tess slid forward in the seat and pulled as hard as she could, using her legs' full power. Her boat shot across the water, leaving the oncoming boat's path clear. The other rower then braced his oars against his body, executing a perfect panic stop inches from where she had been.

He had known she was there all along.

'That's what you get,' a familiar voice called out, 'for dogging it.'

'Thanks, Rock,' Tess yelled back. 'Thanks for scaring the shit out of me. I thought you were some kamikaze rower, trying to sink me.'

'Nope. Just your personal rowing coach, trying to make sure you give one hundred percent every day. What's the point of coming out here if you don't push yourself?'

'What's the point of coming out here at all? That's what I was asking myself before you sent me into adrenaline overload.'

But Rock considered rowing his true vocation. On weekdays, from eight to five, Rock was Darryl Paxton, a researcher bent over one of the 20,000 microscopes at Johns Hopkins medical school. Tess wasn't sure what he was looking for, as Rock was one of those rare people who never talked about his work. Rock worked to row, putting aside as much money as he could to underwrite his singular passion. He also ate to row, slept to row, worked out to row. Until he got engaged last spring, Tess had suspected he performed no nonessential tasks. It would be interesting to see how his fiancee responded to the fall schedule of head races, which kept Rock on the water twice a day through Thanksgiving. If the engagement survived the season, Tess thought, she'd be happy to dance at their wedding next March. Maybe she'd even dance with the bride. After all, she was going to be the best man.

Funny to think she had been scared of Rock once. He had what Tess thought of as a serial killer's physique: short and broad, his skin crammed with more muscles than it could safely contain. Every now and then one got loose and twitched in some unlikely spot. The veins along his arms were thick and blue, like Bic ballpoints under the skin; his short, stocky calves were so overdeveloped it looked as if softballs had been surgically implanted below the backs of his knees. A premed on the Hopkins crew once theorized Rock could not feel pain, claiming it had something to do with his mitochondria. Tess knew he felt things all too deeply. It was evident in his face, a child's face-clear, guileless, with the round, brown eyes of a cartoon character.

'You look like Dondi!' she had blurted out one morning, five years ago, as he pulled alongside the dock at the end of a hard workout, his blue black hair plastered to his head with sweat. She had known him only by sight, one of a handful of scullers at a boat house dominated by crews of fours and eights.

To her surprise the ferocious face had smiled. 'Now that was a good comic strip. How come the Beacon dropped it? And Mr. Tweedy. I still can't believe Mr. Tweedy is gone.'

'Mr. Tweedy? You poor, deprived Beacon readers, living for such paltry things. The Star has all the good comics.'

So they had gone out to breakfast, sharing the comics pages of Baltimore 's three newspapers. That had been five years and two newspapers ago. Tess, like Mr. Tweedy, had disappeared from the local newspapers. The Beacon, which had subsumed the Light and killed the Star, now had excellent comics pages, three in all, the usual spoils of a newspaper war. But Rock was still her friend, their relationship cemented in one of Tess's beloved routines-rowing, then breakfast at a diner in her neighborhood. Other rowers skipped practice, overslept, made excuses about the weather. Rock, nationally ranked, and Tess, chronically underemployed, were faithful to the boat house and to each other.

She studied her friend, who had been on vacation the past two weeks, rowing. He looked gray beneath his summer tan and the circles under his eyes had only deepened.

'Didn't you get any rest in New York? I thought that was the point of a vacation.'

Rock shook his head. 'All those crickets. And the more I worked out, the less I slept. But I feel pretty good.'

'I feel pretty good myself.' It was only a half lie. She was in great shape physically.

'Well, if you're in such good shape, wanna race back, all the way to the glass factory? Loser buys breakfast.'

'Don't be ridiculous. I'd need a huge head start to make it competitive. Race the cars along Hanover Street Bridge if you want a challenge.'

'I'll give you a five-hundred-meter head start.'