Reef Dance

by John Decure

  A car backfired out on Porpoise Way. We watched a white rabbit leap from a bush near the kitchen door and dart across the yard. Some neighbor’s pet, on the loose. Just then I felt tired of the close proximity of these beach lots to one another and wished I lived alone, on some windswept mesa out in the desert. I dreaded the thought of going to work again Monday, swimming into that stream of humanity, breathing through a straw in my teeth. I wanted to turn inward quietly, be left to myself, in need of no one. But I felt that tug in my chest for Phoebe beyond all reason. I wasn’t going anywhere.

  “I like your way,” she went on. “You’ve been good to me, understanding. But my mother’s gone and I’m over it.”

  “Come on,” I said, “that’s not all I have to offer.”

  Phoebe opened the gate and we both stepped through it, the latch clattering behind us. “I won’t argue with you about that,” she said. “But it’s what you do best. Look at these friends of yours. You’re the same with them.”

  I was not prepared to let her drive away without some signal about where we stood. “So then, what do you want to do?”

  She kissed me lightly on the lips. “Good-bye, J.”

  Jackie was slumped against the Formica counter next to the dishwasher when I came back inside. I held up my hands. “A slam-fest to remember? Nice touch, slick.”

  “A minor miscalculation, I admit, Master J.,” he said.

  “Jesus, cut me some slack. No more Pirates of the Caribbean tonight.”

  “The scabbard is stowed.”

  I tried to smile. “The cartoon never ends. Tell me, how long have you been locked into this comic book persona of yours?”

  “Cartoon?” He shook his head. “Nugatory, my friend. I like to think of myself as possessing a fresh perspective on a world that’s lost its capacity to be fresh.” He tipped his shades and shot me a rascally wink.

  “Hey, Meesta Jackaay mon!” a drunken African voice wailed from the breakfast room. “Need more beer, mon. More da hot wings, and da tacos, too!”

  “I want them out of my house—now,” I said.

  “You got it, brother,” he said. “We will leave you in peace.”

  I knew he was playing me but I was too tired to offer up resistance. “You know I don’t mean you.”

  “Ho, thank you, man. You don’t know how much it means—”

  “Save it,” I said, bending to pick up the badly tweaked dishwasher door, then handing it to him. “Here’s the deal. You’re welcome to stay with me until you head off on your next adventure, but this time, you’re gonna pay your way around here.”

  He shrugged as if I was asking for a miracle. “You know I’m operating on extremely limited fundage, boss.”

  “Then you’ll work it off.”

  Jackie tapped his fingers on the dishwasher’s control buttons. “Sorry, man, but fixing appliances isn’t my gig.”

  I smiled at the misguided nature of his gambit. “Oh, no. No way are you getting off that easily,” I said.

  “Then what do you want me to do?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I said, pausing to consider the kitchen in its present chaos. My new client, Sue Ellen Randall, instantly came to mind. Her tangled little mess, an ugly scene for all involved. One child, four would-be, wannabe parents, the irony of such a situation in a court system bursting with discarded minors. No easy resolution in sight, no matter what the great Nelson Gilbride promised on the side, the little snake. If we went to trial he’d be smart and relentless. I would have to do a lot of legwork—not all of it behind a desk—to have a chance. I would need help, maybe from Jackie.

  “Hey, where’d ya go, chief?” Jackie said. “You’re spacing.”

  I snapped back into focus. “Don’t worry,” I told him, “I’ll think of something.” I folded my arms like a parent. “You owe me.”

  I thought he was going to laugh me off, and his head rolled back the way it does just before he flings a comeback at you, but he let it pass. “No shit.”

  That night, long after we put the Africans in a cab to their hotel, I lay in bed and stared wide-eyed at the ceiling, counting empty beer cans in a futile attempt to unwind. Thinking about that last conversation with my friend, thinking . . . Jackie owing me—what a concept.

  Jackie Pace was arguably the greatest and most influential modern surfer California has ever seen. He was certainly the only celebrity that Christianitos, our hometown, has ever produced.

  In the sixties, the long, sliding point break stage at Malibu was the performance epicenter of the West Coast. Longboarders on nine-sixes perched and posed-on-the-nose and arched their backs deep into the Cove like the shiny, winged hood ornaments you see on classic cars. Casual flow was the standard of excellence.

  Jackie bought into none of it. Like my father (and later, me), he’d learned to surf in local beach break that jacked and dumped far more violently than the elegant lines fanning the point at Malibu. Here, the rides were short, steep and intense, requiring a series of quick, hard turns. Maneuverability was essential in a beach break board. At fifteen, Jackie was easily the hottest young rider at the pier, with a forceful, slashing style and uncanny wave judgment, but he was frustrated with the stiffness and excess bulk of the modern longboard. Malibu offered no alternatives—too crowded already, and too tough a hierarchy for an unknown, down-souther kid to crack. Besides, style-conscious cruising was of no interest to Jackie. So he decided on a different approach, a superior approach that would demand a superior wave-riding vehicle.

  Jackie turned to a local shaper, Chas Lingus, to build the equipment he envisioned. Chas, a former navy pilot who shaped out of an old airplane hangar a few miles inland, was a true eccentric, a guy who thought nothing of strapping himself to the wing of a friend’s aircraft to test one of his theories on aerodynamic flow. Another time Chas had sailed a tiny skiff across the Pacific to chart the migration of Southern Hemisphere—bound whales—alone. Though he had a small, hardcore following of customers around town, Chas’s reputation wasn’t such that a collaborative effort with a young upstart like Jackie would harm his credibility, and like Jackie, he loved to try new things.

  The two worked in relative secrecy for months, Jackie test-riding alone at first light while Chas squatted in the sand with an old Nikon 35 slung around his neck, drawing light sketches in a tiny notepad. The first few boards were about seven-six—radically short for the times—with narrower, scaled-down nose and tail areas that departed greatly from the standard longboard outline. Jackie was thrilled with the reduction in length, but the boards paddled poorly and pearled (nosed under) a lot, and when, on the first morning of a big summer south he snapped both boards in an hour following back-to-back wipeouts, he was resigned to starting over entirely.

  But Chas continued to take notes. A few days later, he answered with a board with more rocker (bottom curve) in the nose and tail to counter the pearling effect, and a raked-back skeg that resembled a dolphin’s dorsal fin—the result of a long-time side project—to provide better acceleration out of turns. Jackie took to the new design immediately and on the next sizable swell, beneath a mob of spectators on the pier, he was drawing radical lines that had been as yet unimaginable.

  He surfed with a vengeance on the boards Chas shaped, his deep-carving style virtually redefining the limits of stand-up wave riding. Where before, the best surfers had been content to draw mostly horizontal lines across unbroken faces, Jackie attacked vertically, screeching off the bottom and blasting straight up into the breaking lip, then redirecting with huge power-hooks of frightening force. He was arguably the first surfer ever to attempt to impose his will over a wave, and with his catlike agility and phenomenal sense of balance, more often than not he brought it off.

  Jackie was a competitive machine as well back then. He won the World Amateur Contest in France in ’sixty-six and took the U.S. Surfing Championships at Huntington pier the next two years. Nearly every other lesser event he entered he simply won going away. Every new surf movie d
evoted at least one meaty segment to Jackie’s prodigious riding, and surfers in darkened auditoriums up and down the coast hooted in unison at his astounding moves in California beach breaks and big Hawaiian conditions alike. Orders for “Pace potato chips” poured in, forcing the big-name surfboard manufacturers to embrace the breakthrough technology developed by Chas and Jackie almost overnight. (Rather typically, Chas had developed a newfound passion for mountain climbing by then and wasn’t around to cash in.) By his eighteenth birthday, Jackie was the most widely imitated surfer in the world. “Live to surf” was his unabashed credo. No obstacles, he believed, should ever stand in the way of the quest for good waves.

  The ideal itself was nothing new, at least not in California. In the decades following the Second World War, a lot of disconnected young men cruised the coast, sleeping in old station wagons and panel vans and even on the sand so they could rise early to greet the surf. My own father and his friends spent years chasing waves with few concerns beyond when the next swell might arrive and what the wind and tide would be like when it did. But Jackie carried the quest farther than anyone else, it seemed, never wavering from his stance as the rest inevitably did when adult responsibility came calling. To this day he has consciously foregone any trappings of a conventional life—wife, kids, career, mortgage—to pursue his passion.

  How a man now backing his way into middle age can continue, as he has, to travel the world in search of clean, unspoiled surf, is one of the sport’s enduring topics of debate. Some say Jackie is nothing more than a glorified con man and horrendous moocher. Others mutter about trust-fund dollars (Jackie never speaks of his family, but it’s rumored that they’re moneyed folk). A few who claim to know him believe he gets by as a welcome guest to a legion of well-placed friends who are charmed by his quick wit, his ever-inventive comic verbiage and his status as a bonafide surfing legend. My guess is all of the above, though I know little about his family ties. But to quibble over details is to miss the point, because with Jackie, the stance is the thing.

  One of his early schemes illustrates this truth nicely. In ’sixty-nine, his letter from the draft board came, and with a single, random lottery pick, all the chicks and parties and contests and good times were poised to disappear overnight. But Jack was unfazed; he plotted. A few days later he blew into a packed induction center passing out tiny American flags and saluting everyone in sight. He also sported a pair of black-framed glasses with Coke-bottle thick lenses (on loan from a nearsighted, elderly pier wino) and orthopedic shoes that looked like Frankenstein’s. In his front shirt pocket he carried an inhaler, which he sucked on like a pacifier every minute or so to ward off asthma attacks. His long blond hair was mostly hidden, piled up beneath a chin-strapped vintage leather football helmet on his head. Jackie kept his eyes crossed through two physicals, and wept convincingly when the examining M.D. broke the news that a sight-impaired lad with an eggshell skull would best do his duty by fighting the war on the home front. Despite his dizzying surfing fame, Jackie was certain no one on the army staff would recognize him, and he was right. “Told you Uncle Sam didn’t surf,” he reportedly cracked to an astonished pier crew the next morning as he stroked past them and into a building peak.

  What is not debatable is that I owe him. Major.

  Almost thirteen years ago, Jackie Pace plucked me from a torrential sweep of whitewater as I gasped for breath and clawed at a spinning gray sky. I was alone on a big-wave reef half a mile from shore and had lost my board in a heavy rip. My shoulders ached and my arms hung from them like dead weight. My calves were cramping with vicelike compression from the persistent cold. In all likelihood I was dying when Jackie appeared seemingly out of nowhere.

  Since that day we’ve become odd friends, stalwart in our alliance to each other yet at the same time wary of forming the kind of deep ties that might lead to disappointment and loss. We circle each other cannily, respecting the distance that lies between our disparate existences and content not to press closer. In spite of all the banter, a good deal is left unspoken.

  What more could I have expected from such a famously unrepentant hedonist as Jackie Pace? He’s a loner. But he is my oldest friend, consistent in his loyalty, and through the string of empty years following my mother’s departure, all the birthdays come and gone and holidays passed on without celebration, this has counted for plenty.

  The faint sound of a TV sports report drifted upstairs. Rubbing my tired eyes, I blinked, and in the dark shapes across the ceiling I saw the scene out on the balcony again, Jackie perched on the railings, barking orders, my mother’s quilt pulled taut by twenty grabbing hands and the weight of a happy inebriate. I closed my eyes, ready for sleep, and felt that certain restlessness of the soul that always accompanies my oldest friend’s presence.

  Five

  Holly Dupree’s three-part report on the Rand-all case began Monday night, following a weekend of Channel Six promos hyping the controversy. There was cuddly little Nathan, writhing like an earthworm on a gorgeous Oriental rug in the Danforth home while some announcer’s voice-over spun off an alliterative gem about bouncing baby boys on the black market. Cut to the horrid birth mother, rushing past the camera in a parking lot somewhere, shielding her face like a newly indicted Mafioso. Now back to Nathan’s chubby smile, a drop of drool on his chin, and ponder how his parents could have ever willingly parted with him. Holly would tell all at six and eleven. I was hooked.

  Just watching the little cherub squirm and coo made me feel disloyal to my client, Sue Ellen Randall, the woman who’d relinquished an angel. I felt glad Nathan was too young to comprehend what Sue Ellen had done, the trade-offs she’d made. But there was no give-and-take about Holly Dupree’s dissection of my client. Indian giver, manipulator, baby seller, fraud. Anything but mother. Monday night I sat on the edge of my bed, the walls pulsating with an icy TV glow, and I pasted a few typical Dupree labels on Marielena Shepard for size. Deserter, victimizer, weakling, coward. Anything but mother. My anger left me staring at the ceiling in bed well past 2 A.M. I knew the Matter of Nathan Randall, a Minor, would be my most important case to date.

  Most of my cases are outright losers, so I advocate hard but always keep something in reserve, as if I’m working a trapeze routine with one eye on a safety net below. My clients are usually too confused and distracted by their own fucked-up situations to notice if I should grab for a ring and miss. But in this case everyone would be watching—Holly Dupree, Nelson Gilbride, Willow Reece, old Bill Davenport, Phoebe and Jackie—and I was mildly paralyzed by a newfound fear of heights.

  By Tuesday I had no choice but to sit still and crank out an opposition to Gilbride’s motion for de facto parent status for the Danforths. Court was unusually slow. I’d picked up only two new clients, a waiflike teen mom with a runny nose and a nasty crack habit and a dour Filipino father whose “tough love” methods of corporal punishment had a distinctly medieval flavor. Both detention hearings were decided quickly, Foley ignoring my doomed arguments with equal dispatch. I was back in the Legal Project offices well before noon, determined to blaze into the tiny law library at the end of the hall, clear the mess of unshelved law books and discarded coffee cups from the wooden conference table and conjure a brilliant response to Gilbride’s opening salvo. So ingenious, so spirited would be my motion that it would tilt the balance of the Nathan Randall proceedings in our favor for all time. I was upbeat, even buoyant. No distractions could sway me from my purpose.

  Until I passed the door to my crammed, file-box-laden office and saw the red message button on my phone blinking like a motel sign on a lonely highway.

  Had Phoebe called?

  Fragile, beautiful Phoebe. I’d been ringing her since Saturday with no response, catching only her recorded message—the friendly greeting and banal suggestion that just for today I give miles of smiles. The memory of Friday’s grand fiasco still smarted like hell. Pheebs would be flying to Hong Kong in a few days and I wanted to talk to her so badly I was certa
in my life depended on it. I felt like the guy in the old cartoon poster, the dude with his head up his arse and the wry caption, “Your problem is obvious.” Lonely for a woman who said she didn’t want me. Unwilling to let go of a hopeless situation. Yearning to tell her I loved her yet unsure if I really did. My problem was obvious.

  There was one message on the tape. “Mr. Shepard, h-hey . . . m-man.” A young man’s voice, skittish and probably boosted by an amphetamine high. “It’s me, man. Gotta talk to you about my case, ya know, the program, visitation. Oh, gotta talk about some other shit that came up. Call me.”

  That was it. No case name, no return phone number. Another no-name client who thought my job revolved around his shit that came up.

  Nelson Gilbride knew his motion was shaky. “Equity and the pursuit of justice,” his argument concluded, “dictate that the Danforths, as de facto parents, be allowed to participate in all stages of the proceedings, especially at trial, so that they may readily assist the Court in its fact-finding mission.” Equity is an attorney’s last refuge for argument not supported by law. I’d learned this lesson years ago, clerking for Gilbride’s firm. At times I was tasked with preparing baseless motions with just enough substance to provide a launching pad for the man’s considerable oratory gifts. Equity came in very handy.

  I wrote my response in half an hour, the law on my side. Gilbride’s motion would fail, but he was fighting for something else, which was to keep Nathan Randall with the Danforths for as long as possible. My real battle with Gilbride would be over the slippery concept of “bonding.”

  Young children naturally take to—and depend upon—whoever consistently cares for them. The problem for my typical client is that if her child is removed from her custody, the child will immediately begin to bond with the new caretaker. Some experts believe that as time passes and a strong new child/caretaker bond has formed, removal of the child for return to the parent can be devastating for the child because that new bond is shattered. In cases in which a new bond has formed over an extended period of time, the county has actually argued that the child should not be returned to the parent at all. Because the “best interest of the child” is paramount, judges sometimes listen.