The Sea Ain't Mine Alone

by Beaumont, C. L.

  The Sea Ain't Mine Alone

  C.L. Beaumont

  The Sea Ain't Mine Alone © 2019 C.L. Beaumont

  ISBN 978-1-948272-16-2

  All rights reserved.

  Published 2019 by Carnation Books

  CarnationBooks.com

  contact@carnationbooks.com

  San Jose, CA, USA

  Cover design © 2019 Lodestar Author Services

  This book is a work of fiction. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  For my dad, who surfed off Cam Ranh Bay

  And for K, who is my marvel

  Contents

  The Sea Ain't Mine Alone Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  About Carnation Books

  The Sea Ain't Mine Alone

  C.L. Beaumont

  1

  The love affair began with salt.

  Thick salt. The kind that coated shivering skin in chalky warmth and crusted like splintering glass in between tiny strands of hair, seeking the water, seeking the sun, seeking the froth.

  Salt that crackled across his tongue and burned in the corners of his tear ducts. That whipped through the valleys of his pruny fingertips and nestled thickly in the thin hair on his arms, the tiny crevices of his big toe nails, the hidden curve just behind his ear. That dried and slithered in shrinking flakes across the skin of his forearms under the baking sun.

  “Jesus, stop licking your skin, Jimmy,” his mom said to him. “You crusty old shrimp.” She had a warm smile on her lips and one hip propped against the metal doorframe of their little red and white seaside mobile home. Cotton balls stuck between her freshly painted coral toenails, hairnet over curlers, and a languishing Lucky Strike perched between her fingers.

  She always called him a crusty old shrimp when she was happy—when her Friday night date after her shift at Lou’s Diner went well, and she came home to James already tucked in his bed with the bowl from his cornflakes washed and drying in the sink. She’d step out of her mint green Baby Doll shoes, her pink and white frilled waitress cap still bobby pinned to her curls, and press a kiss to his salt-free forehead, drowning out the sound of the waves. And James would pretend to be asleep while she rummaged through the hamper of their clothes, all fresh and dry from the laundry line in the sun. She’d search until she found his little pale blue swimming shorts and set them on the bed for him to find as a surprise when he woke up to the clanging of his Bugs Bunny alarm clock—the promise of a full Saturday’s worth of daylight spent waist-deep in salt water and sand.

  When James was ten years and four months old, he shut off the radio during the final credits of Cisco Kid and stood up on his tiptoes to wash his cornflakes bowl in the sink. He checked that the screen door was shut tight and sucked a little toothpaste onto his tongue so his mom would think he brushed his teeth. Then he climbed into his little couch bed, dreaming of the salt that crested and fizzled in the white froth of the waves. Of the way his pale blue swimming shorts floated and swished around his legs in the soft, wet swells and crusted in the hot and heavy Long Beach sun.

  He waited and waited for the bubblegum kiss to his salt-free forehead. Waited and slept and dreamed. Until he woke up in the morning to a blaring Bugs Bunny clock and an empty trailer and no pale blue swimming shorts laid out on his bed. No frilly waitress cap hanging off the metal doorknob.

  James’ aunt took him in after his mom looked the wrong way stepping off the moonlit curb at the end of the pier and met with the hood of a cherry red Chrysler speeding on its way to catch Teddy Edwards at the Lighthouse Café up in Hermosa Beach.

  Auntie Cath lived way out in the San Fernando Valley in some chicken ranch desert called Reseda. Her house wasn’t made of metal and didn’t sit on wheels with a screen door that rattled in the breeze. Her kids Ron and Susan ate Kix instead of cornflakes and didn’t listen to Cisco Kid on Friday evenings. When James asked them if they liked to lick the salt off their skin too after playing sunup to sundown out in the waves, they told him they’d only ever been to the beach once. It had apparently taken Auntie Cath and Uncle Ron almost two hours to navigate the old station wagon through the Las Virgenes pass to make it all the way out to Zuma Beach, and by the time they got there they’d had just enough time to suck on some popsicles, dip their toes in the icy water, pack up, and leave again.

  James didn’t taste the salt again for years. His forehead stayed clean and fresh, salt-free. The little crevice behind his ear was as sterile as a freshly washed palm.

  When he turned seventeen, he hopped in the passenger seat of Billy Madden’s dad’s old Buick and handed him a wad of money he saved bagging groceries to use for gas. They drove and drove until they reached the fizzling licks of salty waves lapping at the Santa Monica sand, baking in pools of golden sunset light.

  There was a bonfire and chilled bottles of Pabst. Girls in little white swimsuits and the same four chords played over and over again on an old cheap guitar. And when James took Lisa Kerny’s hand and lead her away into the quiet, pristine bed of velvet sand and tide pools, and let her drag her coral pink nails across his bare chest, chasing little droplets of sandy water, he licked the salt off her skin at the place where her neck met her shoulder, and it tasted like a crusty old shrimp.

  2

  The air pierces James’ lungs as he gulps it down in heaving gasps, head bursting up out of the water like a rocket. His legs scramble below him, trying to find purchase in the ripping currents as another wave washes over his face, cutting off his lungs from the oxygen with a sharp clash. He needs to find up. Needs to find his board. Needs air.

  His body is hurtling through a churning void, ripped and thrashed by the water’s gripping fingers while the seaweed drags his shins deeper and deeper into the black depths. He has the vivid sensation of an iron black hand tugging his ankle down away from the air, and he fights against it, struggles with all his might, until he realizes it’s the yank of his own ankle strap and board pulling him up to the surface, to life.

  Weathered fingers finally find rough, waxy fiberglass, and the sun and breeze burst across his face in a great blast. They beat away the waves and froth still clinging to his skin and lungs until all that’s left is the salt on his grinning cheeks.

  “Shitty luck, Jimmy!” he hears Rob call out. “Next time you get yourself pitched over, at least have the courtesy not to look like you’re drowning. I missed a fucking primo barrel waiting for you to surface.”

  James hauls himself up onto his board and then collapses on his back, chest heaving.

  “I’ll try to be more considerate next time,” he says. The hot sun feels like a kiss on his chapped lips.

  “Hang ten on a wave like that without getting your ass kicked next week and you’ll be looking at a nice pocket of cash, courtesy of the ISF.”

  James turns his head to look over at Rob sitting idly on his surfboard, wet spine swaying with the rocking waves as they wait for the next swell. The truth of his frien
d’s words sits like a weight on his chest, cutting him off from the cool sea breeze.

  He knows as well as he knows his own name that the International Surf Festival next weekend up in Hermosa Beach is his last chance to finally earn enough points to make it out of the damn qualifiers and up into the pro’s. If he makes it, it means a whole new year’s worth of competitions. Extra cash in his pockets, traveling up and down the coast, sleeping in the back of Uncle Ron’s old station wagon, waking up each morning before the sun with the only care on his mind being how many minutes’ll pass until he drops in on his first barrel of the day.

  If he wipes out, however, it’s back to the Long Beach dockyard until he can pay his way back into a qualifying membership. James’ body goes limp onto the fiberglass-coated wood beneath him as his mind clouds.

  “Hey man, mellow out,” Rob says, cutting through his thoughts. “I can hear your brain flipping out from all the way over here.”

  James yelps when a handful of seawater gets dumped on his face.

  “Buzz off! Can’t mellow out if you’re drowning me all over again, asshole,” he laughs. He moves to sit up on his board and rolls the kinks out of his neck in a long, slow circle. The endless blue stretches out in front of him, a question and an answer all at once. He sighs and runs his fingers through the wet tangles of his hair, brushing back his overlong bangs that’ve turned almost white from the blinding sun. He revels in the way the little droplets of water trickle down his sides and back in a salty race.

  “For real, though, man,” James goes on. “I can’t go back to that dockyard full time. Gotta make at least a grand or two riding this year or. . .” He trails off. Rob hums.

  James leans forward onto his elbows and watches Rob retie his long, curly hair into a loose bun out of the corner of his eye. The wavy, salt-slicked strands look like black silk in the waking sun, and Rob’s chest rises and falls in tandem with the gentle rocking of his board. His stomach muscles clench to keep his balance as he tucks in the last loose lock of wet hair. The sight makes James feel warm and dry in the back of his throat, just like it has every early morning for the past two years, drifting side by side out on the velvet waves.

  “Jimmy,” Rob finally says, staring straight ahead. “You know those guys over at Val’s have been banging on your door since you first turned up on this beach telling you they’ll sponsor you once you’re pro.”

  “They tell every new young punk that,” James interrupts, but Rob fixes him with a hard stare.

  “Been riding the waves on this stretch of beach since I was eight, man, and they’ve never given me a phone call, I’ll tell you that much. And you’re not a young punk either, you old geezer.”

  James forces a laugh and splashes some water Rob’s direction.

  Rob’s right. He isn’t young anymore—not really. Not when nearly every guy in his heats at the competition last month was younger than he was way back when he even first set foot onto a Navy ship.

  “Sorry,” he says, shaking his head once and speaking down to the water. “You know how I get.”

  Rob knows. After two years of constant friendship and near daily pre-work surfs out along the sleepy Los Angeles coast, James knows that Rob has trained himself to look out for the faraway dark stare he sometimes gets in his eyes. The blackness that pulls him down away from the jokes and laughter and joy of flying off the ocean spray on a shiny waxed board, and instead entombs him in its deep, sightless depths.

  Rob sees it, and he doesn’t ask how or why, and he pulls him back up gently, slowly. He offers James his hand without pity. James knows that’s perhaps the only reason Rob Depaul has become his longest lasting friend to date.

  And yet, what Rob doesn’t know could fill an ocean. They’re both well aware that Rob’s only ever tiptoed across the very tip of the iceberg that is James Campbell. Rob never asks, never pries. He tells James the story of his life and his parents, the places he’s been on vacation and the way his girlfriend Lori tilts her head when she drinks a milkshake. He talks steadier than the firm breeze in the patient calms in between sets while they perch on their boards to wait, and he never once asks James a question in return. He fills in the histories for them both, and for that James is eternally grateful. But this—the darkness, the void, the inequality—it’s there all the same.

  Rob doesn’t know that the reason James was sleeping down alongside the beach in the back of a station wagon when they first met was because he’d stepped off a Navy vessel fresh from the Vietnam coast just a few months before with nowhere to go and nothing to do. He doesn’t know that James never once set foot back in the little Long Beach trailer park where his mom’s frilly waitress cap hung off the metal doorknob each night. He doesn’t know that James shot a man face to face at point-blank range and then looked down at the dying body to see that the kid was too young to even have a driver’s license. He doesn’t know that James thinks about the way Rob’s thighs hug the smooth fiberglass and wood of his board. Thinks in the middle of a fourteen-hour shift down at the dockyards of the precise, unchanging process Rob uses to tie up his hair in a bun.

  Rob grins, a little smirk at the corner of his thin lips, and rolls onto his stomach to start paddling out into the smooth vast blue.

  “Yeah, I know how you get, old man,” he calls back over his shoulder. “Crotchety old hodad shit sitting out here on your wrinkly ass, wishing us young kids weren’t putting you to shame on every wave.”

  James rolls his eyes and shakes his head down at his board, then flings himself down onto his stomach to try and catch up to Rob, cutting through the sharp, clear water with his arms as they race out to the rolling horizon.

  Rob’s gone and done it again—pulled him up and out. James’ back feels open and assured, pushing back up against the weight of the world and drying, inch by inch, in the shimmering sun.

  “Gotta head in after this set,” he yells up to the bottom of Rob’s feet. “Shift starts at 9.”

  “Show me what you can do then before you’re late to your fucking bingo game and Odd Couple reruns.”

  James feels the familiar slow burn start to build in his shoulder sockets, spreading out from his core and threading through every vein in his body. It rushes his blood so fast and hard that his body melts seamlessly in with the coursing blue water beneath him. He duck-dives under a nice barrel and smiles as he shoots a stream of bubbles out his nose through the thick churning salt. Then he sucks in a deep breath before turning to watch the very top of Rob’s loose, wet bun bob up and down as he rips down along the glassy shoulder of the wave until his strong, sturdy legs are swallowed up by whitewater along the shore.

  Rob’s victorious whoop echoes out to him across the waver. “Behind you, old man!” he cries, palms cupped around his mouth where he stands next to his board stuck in the sand. “Bomb coming—got your name on it!”

  James’ heart beats double time in his chest as he turns back out towards the endless blue. He spots it immediately. A rolling, rumbling crack of a wave forcing its way across the surface, pushing up from the murky ocean floor to form the biggest set they’ve seen all morning.

  His brain shuts down, and his muscles take over. The low, humming tremble of the wave rocks against his board and wraps around his bones. Crisp air slaps his face as he whips his arms through the water, paddling through the churn and racing against the rushing force of the wave. He can feel it starting to crest behind him, lifting up the tail of his board towards the heavens, towards the take-off, up and away and out of the sightless black depths.

  The froth rockets him forward, bursting off the spray. His hands grip the waxy board as his legs and feet scramble for purchase, fighting against the ocean’s strength. This is his light. His therapy. This is his sitting in a circle in a small beige room and sharing in a monotone voice the horror of shooting a little boy point-blank in the face, leaving his body to rot in the jungle with James’ military-issue bullet in his skull. This is his walking halfway up to the little brown box that A
untie Cath told him was holding his mom while she slept and not being able to walk all the way up to it to peek inside. This is his sleeping alone in the back of a station wagon and wishing Rob’s hand was the one softly pressing between his legs.

  James opens his mouth to let out his own victorious cry as he tips his board for the take-off down the crushing face of the barrel, and the sun-warmed salt whips and crackles across his tongue as he soars.

  3

  James’ nose draws in a deep breath of body-warmed bed sheets and salt-scented air as his eyes slowly blink open into the golden haze. It’s James’ favorite thing about this shitty, hole-in-the-wall, one room apartment—the windows. Ever since Rob helped him enter his first surf competition and the prize money meant no more sleeping in the back of Uncle Ron’s old station wagon, James has blinked awake before dawn to a view through a thin, rattling window of the great vast blue, a deep velvet glass cupping the earth in its wet palms and beckoning James out to its depths with the soft, rolling, even crush of the waves against the shore.

  He props himself up on his elbow and turns to look out of them now, expecting to see the barest hints of dawn peaking up lazily over the sharp horizon. A beach quietly preparing to host a competition in a few short hours. James’ sleep-crusted eyes blink slowly awake against the unexpected glare, and he squints and holds up a palm to shield his eyes from the sun. It’s not the milky darkness hovering over the waters that he sees. Instead, it’s a white-hot beach bathed in sunlight and swarming like an anthill in people, a forest of surfboards sticking up in the sand waiting to be waxed and glinting in the sun, a parking lot full of beat up Winnebagos and Corvettes alike, waiting to bake in the California heat.

  “Shit shit fucking shit!”

  James hurls himself from bed and snatches up his alarm clock in a shaking hand. The dead battery light blinks back at him like a taunt.