Reef Dance

by John Decure

  “Thanks for the lift, J.,” Britt said. “I know it was pretty last-minute of me to ask.” He slapped the dash. “Can’t believe my dad, man. He was gonna pick me up at eleven last night, then he calls at nine-thirty and bails. Another fucking emergency.”

  Grog Baker had been notoriously inconsistent this year, ever since he started pouring all his time and money into his latest commercial venture, some sort of “must have” golf accessory.

  We stared at another set through the windshield. A thin kid with a serious face and a high-performance surfboard tattooed with industry logos stalked across the sand and began an elaborate stretching ritual at the water’s edge. At this hour, just watching his workmanlike limbering routine made my bones ache.

  “I’m thinking fish,” Britt said. The fish was his loosest, most versatile small-wave board.

  “Those lefts will get fatter with the incoming tide,” I said. “Use the fish.”

  Jackie was awake now. He leaned forward and gazed with us at the makeshift tower in the sand, the advertising banners plastered across the back of the judges’ platform and VIP tent like bright stamps pasted into an album.

  Jackie draped his forearms around both our necks. “Tell me, boys, what do radial tires, alkaline batteries and a Euro beer that tastes like the brewmeister took a leak in it have to do with amateur surfing?”

  “Read the banner on top,” I said. “Windjammer Pro-Am.”

  “Well, ‘Pro-Am’ it is,” he said. “Not just your schoolboys today, but right here with them, the lucrative pro surfing scene, where the purses are so generous you gotta take the whole event just to cover your costs.”

  I’d heard all the stories about the early years of what amounted to pro surfing’s infancy, the years during which Jackie had regularly blown minds. In those days, someone’s girlfriend sewed together the colored jerseys the night before the contest, the judges brought their own pads and pencils to keep score, and the top prize ranged from a thousand dollars or so—if the check didn’t bounce—on down to a new wetsuit which the winner could only hope was his size. But Jackie was the one guy who’d seemingly breezed—he’d won nearly every big event, traveled to all the exotic locales when they were still unspoiled, rather publicly had a hell of a good time, and somehow cultivated the belief in others that just maybe this pro surfing thing had a future. Then he walked away from the whole show.

  I swiveled to face Jackie. “Where do you get off being bitter about the pro scene? You were one of the first and only guys who went places.” And, literally, he did. Australia, France, Brazil, the Islands every winter, that first-ever contest in Puerto Rico. “Whatever you had, they wanted it. Seems to me you did pretty well before you bailed.”

  “You don’t do pro contests for the prize winnings anyway today,” Britt said. “You want sponsors. They pay.”

  Jackie smirked at Britt. “Don’t delude yourself, laddie. If money’s what you’re after, you’d be better off playing slots and keno with the polyester-pantsuit crew in Vegas.”

  “Things have changed since you were on the contest trail, Jack,” I said. “Britt’s right. Surf-wear is a big-time business. The top guys are making six figures on endorsements alone.”

  Jackie rubbed his eyes. “You’re not following me here.” He scratched at his moustache. “Surfing for me has never been about the green, not even the contests. There has to be something more.”

  I frowned. “Don’t start with that business about the search for the perfect wave. It’s tired. And what about Be-boppin’ Beach Bash and Hot Bikini Heaven?” I said. “Don’t tell me you went Hollywood out of a deep desire to communicate the beach aesthetic to the landlocked masses. That was all about the green.”

  Jackie sighed. “Some minor stunt work was all I did, no mas. I never traded off my image.”

  “You’ll grovel at the trough just like the rest when you need money,” I said.

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “My dad says you’d do anything for a buck,” Britt blurted as he stared through the windshield.

  Jackie looked surprised by Britt’s challenge. “Your dad,” he told Britt, “is a world class expert in how not to make a buck.” He nestled his wraparound shades onto his face.

  “You don’t know Grog,” I said. “Where do you get off saying that?”

  “We know each other. From way back.” Jackie cracked a tiny smile. “I know what I’m talking about.”

  “What, you give him the Pace Guarantee on something that didn’t pan out quite like you promised?” I asked.

  An oily-smooth left lifted up and made a fifty-yard dash toward the pilings.

  Jackie straightened his back, grimacing. “I was the first serious pro out of California, man, and I’m not ashamed of it. But my comic sidekick here”—he pointed a thumb at me—“misses the point. No small wonder. When I was establishing my rep on the international scene he was sticking playing cards in his bicycle spokes for kicks.”

  “Point that thumb at me again, Mister Surf Legend,” I told him, “and you’ll be using it tonight up at the freeway onramp.”

  “All right, man, be cool,” Jackie said. He turned to Britt. “Listen, I’ve learned a few things about competition. I know you don’t try to win contests just for the money. You’re an amateur anyway, at least for now. But what I’m saying is, if you want to make your mark, you gotta set your sights on something bigger.”

  Britt was enthralled. “Like what?”

  Jackie leaned close to Britt’s ear. “You gotta have something to prove.”

  The car was silent. A wiry kid in a turquoise spring suit hustled by us on his way to the water. “Don’t you prove something just by winning?” Britt said.

  Jackie rubbed his chin. “You’re getting the chicken and the egg confused here. First, how do you win? You see, when I started out, all the judges cared about was nose-riding, that was it. Didn’t matter if I rode a wave perfectly—late drop, cranking bottom turns, cutbacks, off-the-tops. If some other guy got a wave half the size, stumbled to the nose and hung his toes over the tip for three or four seconds, the judges would cream their shorts.”

  “But they’re the judges—don’t you have to give them what they want?” Britt asked.

  “No, no, you can’t do that! Not if your way is better. Mine was. So I made it a mission, like me against the world.”

  “Your way,” said Britt. “So, it’s like you have to have the right motivation.”

  “It’s key, man,” Jackie said, “absolutely key. A higher purpose.”

  “I’m not sure I’m following this,” I said. “You were the most famous surfer in the world at one time, a contest whiz, founder of the shortboard power school. Where do you get off playing the underdog?”

  Jackie glared at me. “J. here’s still without a clue,” he said to Britt. “Do you really want to win?”

  Britt nodded. “Yes, I do.”

  Jackie’s eyes narrowed. “Good. Then you find someone to prove yourself to, and you show them. You prove ’em wrong, in your contests and on land. You approach each challenge like you were born to win it, like you’re the most righteous son of a bitch on earth and no one can deny it. And then,” he said, the lesson complete, “you will go places, my friend.”

  Britt stared out to sea in silent reflection. A decrepit lime green station wagon with a pile of surfboards strapped to its roof creaked and shimmied into the space next to ours, its pistons clattering loudly as the motor died. Britt opened the front passenger door.

  “Where you headed?” I asked. But Britt didn’t hear me, and he cut in front of the Jeep and strolled down to the shore without looking back, his eyes fixed on the silky peaks that pulsated over the outer sandbar.

  “Do me a favor,” I said, eyeing Jackie in the rear-view mirror. “Consider a few things about Britt before you pop off with another big lesson. He’s going through a difficult spell. His parents just split and he feels like the earth’s moving beneath his feet. Thinks it may be his fault. And
don’t sweat it, he’s already a competitive little shit in the water.”

  “Your point being?”

  “He’ll probably go to college next year, not on the tour. Don’t fuck with his head, Jack.”

  “That how you see it?”

  “He’s pissed at his dad, and what do you do? You call Grog a loser.”

  Jackie shook his head. “I didn’t say that.”

  “You didn’t have to. Hey now, I wonder who Britt’s gonna find to prove himself to. To prove him wrong.”

  “Well, spank my chimp. Try to help a kid better himself and what do I get for my trouble.”

  “We can’t all be world beaters like you.”

  “You mean, we can’t all be winners.” He nodded like he had something on me. “I guess with you, I can understand this.”

  “Understand what?”

  He gazed at the pier without expression. “Nah. You’re my friend.”

  I knew he was toying with me. “Say it.”

  Jackie sighed and sat back, stretching his limbs like a cat. “Let it go.”

  An elderly man in baggy sweats and a U.S. Marines baseball cap waddled by on the sidewalk in front of the Jeep, wrestling with a gangly black dog on a leash as the dog tugged hard to sniff at the gum-stained cement. He caught my eye and waved. I didn’t return the gesture.

  I faced Jackie. “You think I’m holding Britt back?” He didn’t answer. “Well, hey, if it means helping him set himself up for a decent life, one where he might get some education so he can take care of himself without leeching off everyone around him, then—”

  Jackie bolted upright. “You calling me a leech?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  He glared at me. “You didn’t have to. But I wish you had the sack to just say it.”

  “What difference would it make? Wouldn’t change anything.”

  “Say it.”

  “All right then. Sometimes, you can be . . . a leech.”

  “All right then,” he said, mimicking me perfectly. “I appreciate the honest assessment.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  I stacked some loose tapes into the slots in a cassette holder. Jackie sat tight—he wasn’t through with me. “Now I’ll take my shot at a little honest assessment, brother,” he said. “You didn’t get what I was telling the kid, ’cause you lack it too. It’s how you’ve always been, long as I’ve known you.”

  “Come again?”

  “I mean, you’re smart. You know what’s what, but it’s like, you’re just going through the motions, not really digging your scene.”

  I looked for a breaking wave, a surfer whose moves I could follow. But no one was up. A half mile past the end of the pier, a sailboat chugged along on motor power.

  “You saying I don’t know how to win?” I said.

  He paused. “Your problem is you don’t know what you’ve got.”

  The observation seemed well intended, but felt backhanded just the same. “I’ve gotten on with my life,” I said. “But thanks for the pop analysis. You should have your own talk show.”

  He smiled with the mistaken belief that I’d just complimented him. “No problemo.”

  Seagulls glided out beyond the surf line, circling and diving to snatch tiny fish in their beaks. Britt squatted to pick up a shell, skimming it across a shallow pool of reflected gray near shore. The sky cast a leaden gloom, as if the hidden sun had altogether passed on making its appearance for the day.

  Loser. Jackie hadn’t used the word because, as he’d pointed out before, I was his friend. And because consciously, I hadn’t pushed him that far, which I almost regretted now as we resumed our silent perusal of the morning’s waves. I thought of Sue Ellen Randall, the reviled baby seller or would-be mother, but my client nonetheless, a woman for whom I’d barely secured monitored visits with her child. So far I’d been nothing more than an also-ran to Nelson Gilbride in the great Nathan Randall Child Custody Derby. Not a loser yet, but give it time.

  The biggest set of the morning rose up and crashed on the outer bar with a series of brief explosions. Two surfers who’d just paddled out were caught inside and pounded by the lines of whitewash until they were knocked off their boards. Disoriented, they ducked beneath the last advancing soup, towing their boards on their ankle-leashes like anchors.

  My father used to dig conditions like these: the swells fast and critical and verging on unrideable. Robert Shepard had a reputation for charging big, unruly waves, skittering down impossible walls with no more than a few feet of inside rail providing the demarcation between an insane ride and a horrifying hold-down. He would have toyed with a few little beachbreak surprises on a morning like this.

  At that moment, I had a vision of my father squeezing Nelson Gilbride’s puffy pink hand and smiling as he permanently tagged Gilbride with the name Baby Face Nelson. The vision gave me a certain confidence, and an energy I hadn’t felt in years.

  “Something’s about to happen,” I said to Jackie. “To me. To my life.”

  “Is that right?” he said with no apparent interest.

  My mind seemed to quicken. “You know how sometimes you’re waiting for a wave,” I said, “you haven’t had a good one in a while, and you can’t really see anything coming, but you feel it? You don’t even know what’s making you believe, but you know it’s coming. So you paddle to a certain spot, like you’re caught in a magnetic field. And then you see it, biggest wave of the day, bearing down right on you. And all you have to do is turn and go.”

  “Totally dialed in.”

  “I mean it.” I wasn’t sure he was with me. I tapped my hands on the steering wheel and sighed.

  “You seem a little bummed,” Jackie observed.

  “Unsure is more like it.”

  The Randall case, losing a big, high-profile trial. Searching for my mother—and maybe finding her living somewhere else, a new and happier life built up around her like a wall from her past.

  “I don’t know if it’s gonna be really good, or really bad, but something’s gonna pop. It’s strange. I can feel it.”

  “One request, lad,” he said. “If you’re gonna spin out big-time, just give old Jack a little warning.” He strained a laugh.

  I shifted in my seat to face him. “I feel like you’ll be involved, either way,” I said.

  It was not the time to tell him about my mother. Not yet.

  He reached behind him, fished a sweatshirt out of a pile of wet-suits and open bags, pulled it over his head and leapt out of the car. “Check ya later,” he said through the passenger window. “I’m gonna go catch up with the young gun, help him tune up.”

  Spotting Britt, Jackie whistled, then trotted down the beach in the wet sand to meet him. I watched them study the horizon together, Jackie gesticulating like a fervent preacher as the waves rolled through. I could almost hear his voice leaping forth with another fire and brimstone sermon on the psychology of winning.

  Grog missed Britt’s first two heats, which Britt survived with a win and a second place. The sun broke through the haze at noon and the throng on the beach mushroomed.

  “I feel like sliding a few, boss,” Jackie said to me as Britt toweled off and slipped on a pair of shades. The final heat of the day had just ended. “Let’s go for a paddle on the Northside.”

  “I’m gonna take it easy,” Britt said.

  “Good idea, you’re dad’s probably looking for you,” I said.

  Britt lay sideways on a striped beach towel and scanned the crowd up above. “Thought I heard him hoot at me from the pier when I got that long one to the beach. You seen him yet, J?”

  I hadn’t. “He’s around,” I said, hedging.

  Jackie was onto me. “Yeah, right,” he said.

  I quickly shot Jackie a look that said Shut Your Mouth.

  “We’d better hit it now,” I said. “Feels like the wind’s going to kick up soon.”

  I waited for Jackie to pipe up with his assessment of the conditions, but he avoided
my gaze and pulled on his wetsuit in silence.

  Thirty surfers—mostly locals, I figured, by the way they hung together—were crammed into a takeoff zone no bigger than a dance floor, and they looked fired up, tearing into every surfable section as if in a state of frenzy. The presence of a large crowd on both sides of the pier, cheering and jeering the action in the water, added a circus-like element to the ongoing session.

  Jackie was chatting on the beach with a Hawaiian who’d recognized him and run over to say hello. I’d told Jackie I wanted to avoid the Northside crush by jogging up the beach a ways before paddling out, but he wouldn’t hear of it. “Take what’s yours, man,” he’d said. “It’s your birthright.”

  And so, I paddled out not to have fun—which to me is the whole point—but to prove to Jackie that I wouldn’t back down.

  The trouble started immediately. On my first wave I was unceremoniously shoulder-hopped (in surfing etiquette, the rider farthest back gets priority) by a scowling punk whose purposely delayed bottom-turn sent me careening ass-first into the soup. I paddled farther out into deeper water, figuring I’d be better off waiting for the odd larger wave than fighting the pack. To my surprise I was instantly rewarded with a well-formed outer peak. I sprouted to my feet and took the drop, which was steep but routine, then readied to bury my rail into a swift bottom turn. But two surfers were caught inside, splashing through my path of trajectory and scrambling to submerge the noses of their boards for a duck-dive through the back. I took my eye off my turn for an instant to avoid them, just long enough to catch my outside rail and go down with a back-flopping splat. When I surfaced I was greeted with a smattering of groans and catcalls.

  “Give it up, tourist,” a kid half my age said under his breath twenty feet away.

  I climbed back onto my board, adjusted the ankle strap on my leash, and dragged myself over the top of a frothy inside left as two young hotties streaked by below my tailblock, banging rails with each other.

  What a miserable session.