Page 130 of Final Drive

“Attention.”

The boat goes still around me. Somewhere to port a bird comes off the water. I hear my own heart and the small movement of water against the hull, and then the horn blasts.

“Row!”

The first stroke is the biggest thing I’ve ever been part of. Eight men who have spent the entire morning holding themselves back put all of it into one catch, and the shell comes off the block hard enough that I feel it in my teeth.

Four strokes are perfect. On the fifth, the rate climbs.

“Lengthen. Lengthen it out. Settle in two. One. Two. Settle.”

The rate comes down and steadies. I count it against my breathing, which is a habit I’ve never told anybody about.

Thirty-seven. Two beats high.

If the notebook were open in front of me, I know what I’d write. Leave it. A crew two beats high off the settle can get away with it, and correcting now means asking eight furious men to watch another boat move away and trust that it comes back. I’d take the four or five seconds later.

“Down two,” Reese says. “In two. One, two.”

She takes the rate off us in a national championship heat while Hampton Hills is already a canvas up.

We drop to thirty-five and immediately lose half a seat. Somebody in the middle of the boat makes a sound that isn’t quite a word.

“I know,” Reese says. “Hold it. Run the boat.”

So we do.

So another crew moves away from us half a seat at a time, and every instinct in my body screams to answer, and I don’t, because the woman looking straight at me said not yet.

The first five hundred goes by. Reese doesn’t tell us where we are. She tells us what the boat is doing.

“Puddles are clean. Blades are square. Tyler, that’s beautiful. Bo, one more inch at the catch and I’ll give you the world.”

At seven hundred she takes a ten for the legs, and the shell lifts under us. At nine hundred she takes nothing, because nine hundred is a trap and everybody in lane three is about to find that out.

Hampton Hills goes at eleven hundred.

I hear it before I see anything. Their coxswain is screaming from the next lane over, loud enough that the shape of the call carries even when the words don’t. Every man in our boat wants to answer.

So do I, and I’m the one who knows what answering this early costs.

“No,” Reese says. “Nobody move. We’re at thirty-five, we’re staying at thirty-five, and they’re going to come back to us in four hundred meters.”

Jackson’s back doesn’t change.

His old crew is walking through us and he doesn’t shorten by an inch. He doesn’t rush the slide or muscle the finish. He gives them nothing, not one stroke, not one sign that anybody in that boat knows his name. I know what those people cost him, and he leaves all of it out of the shell.

Hampton Hills takes a length.

“Fifteen hundred. That’s the trap. Bo, breathe. Zane, breathe. We’re going in five.”

They start coming back at sixteen hundred, exactly the way Reese said they would. Hampton Hills bought speed early and the bill is due.

“Now. Sprint. Rate up two, in two. One. Two.”

What happens next is harder to quantify.

There’s a point in an eight when everybody makes the same decision at once. Nobody drags the rest of the boat there and nobody comes a stroke late. The rate changes, but that isn’t the important part. The run gets longer, the check disappears, and the hull lifts and stays there.