Reef Dance

by John Decure

  Albert sprang up too high again but observed Jackie and slowly lowered himself like a loaded spring. “What’s it like—the tube?” he said.

  “You tuck into the face and the lip pitches over you, not touching you,” Jackie told him. “It’s the purest rush. When you’re in the green room, time stands still. It’s the sweetest part of the wave; you’re one with it. Spending time in the green room is like going back to the womb. It’s the essence, man.”

  “Yeah . . .” Albert said, still in his crouch.

  “Ready bro?” Jackie said.

  “Ready!” Albert shouted.

  Carmen’s eyes were full of concern for her brother. “J.?” she implored me.

  “He’ll be fine,” I said. “I promise.”

  We strapped on our ankle leashes and waded out past the shore-pound. A set broke in front of us, dunking Albert, but Jackie quickly righted him and they paddled off into deeper water.

  “Don’t worry,” I told Carmen. “Jackie’s one of the best surfers that ever—”

  “J., I may not live at the beach,” she said, stopping me, “but I didn’t grow up under a rock. I know who Jackie Pace is.”

  “My mistake,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  Carmen slid onto her board but centered herself too far back, the nose kicking up as she floundered. A tiny line of whitewash rolled through and toppled her. I flipped her board over and held it steady with one hand. “Try it again,” I said. “Move up a little farther, ’til the board’s planing as flat as possible.”

  Standing in chest-deep water, I unfastened my ankle leash and let my surfboard wash in. Carmen whipped back her wet black hair and slid onto her board again, adjusting her weight forward. I put my arm around her so I could grab both rails, my forearm grazing the small of her back. Then I pivoted the board toward shore. When she looked back to watch for an incoming wave our faces were no more than a foot apart. Her lips were wet and her eyelashes and brows glistened in the warming sun. She was so beautiful I had to look away.

  A set wave dumped and a solid line of whitewash rumbled in. “Paddle hard!” I shouted, shoving the board’s tail as the soup bashed into me.

  I stayed with Carmen the first half hour, helping her line up set waves and providing encouragement. She belly-rode several lines of soup, paddling back out on her own each time before deciding to wave me off. “Think I’ve got it,” she called out.

  I went in and collected my board, then paddled farther out and rode a few waves by myself, thinking about how I’d misjudged her. That first time we’d met she’d seemed so strident with her talk about my not speaking Spanish. But she knew firsthand about the kind of shit that people like Holly Dupree sling, knew who Jackie Pace was—and how to put him in his place. She was good to her brother, if a bit overprotective. I wondered how she ever planned to make a break from him.

  Jackie and Albert were lining up farther down the beach, Albert belly-riding line after line of whitewash, laughing the whole time. Another set came through and Carmen caught the largest wave, racing along prone, just ahead of the soup, steadying herself as the whitewater pushed for shore, then springing into a textbook stance while Jackie and I hooted. She rode five or six more re-forming waves in that fashion before hauling her board up the beach and collapsing.

  Albert continued to hop up and flop badly. Jackie took off his leash and ditched his board, which I retrieved in the shorepound as I went in to sit with Carmen. Then he went back to pushing Albert into waves. A solid hour had passed since we’d first hit the surf. Albert’s arms must have been jelly.

  “He looks tired,” Carmen said. She got up and walked closer to the surf as I followed. “Albert? You all right?” she called out. She turned to me. “J.? What do you think?”

  I reached out and took her hand. “He’s all right. He’s with Jackie.”

  A clean, medium-sized peak popped up just outside of Albert and Jackie. “We’re goin’!” I heard Jackie cry as he lay on top of Albert’s legs, paddling furiously. The peak folded behind them as they slid down the hooking face, the whitewash partially engulfing Jackie until they broke ahead of the soup. Albert snapped to his feet with his hands still gripping his rails, wavering like a drunk.

  “You got it!” Jackie shouted as he slipped off the tail. Albert committed his weight too far forward, and I shut my eyes at the instant I thought he would pearl, but he hung on and slowly straightened into an ugly crouch that was so low he could’ve rested both his palms on the board’s deck.

  “He’s doing it!” Carmen cried.

  Quaking awkwardly, Albert spread his arms like a big bird’s wings and somehow found his balance. He rode the soup a good forty feet until it died.

  “Yeah, Albert!” I shouted, distinctly relieved.

  Albert straggled up the beach a few minutes later. “I did it!”

  Jackie slapped him on the back. “You shredded it, Alby!”

  “In the gr . . . green room,” Albert stammered, a huge smile lighting his face.

  “That was great,” Carmen said to Jackie.

  “Thank-ya-ma’am.” Jackie was into his rapid-fire, early Elvis impression, and he bowed his head humbly. “Thank-ya-very-much.” Carmen rolled her eyes and laughed.

  The four of us strolled back down toward the pier and home. The rising tide had improved the shape of the surf and a local crew was swarming the fat Northside peaks.

  “Yo, Jackie! Whas up?” a small contingent of grommets called out from up on the pier.

  “Hey, you little hoodlums,” Jackie called back, squinting into the mid-morning sun. “Go buy me some chili fries and a Coke. Pay you back.”

  Two boys broke from the group and raced off the pier, vying for the dubious honor of fetching an aging surf-hero’s food.

  Bob McClanahan, an old high school friend who now works as a financial planner, walked dripping from the shorebreak. “J.,” he said, shaking my hand, “what’s the haps?”

  I introduced him to Carmen and Albert, describing the waves we’d encountered up the beach. We watched a set pour through while Bob ran down the conditions at the main peak. Two of Britt’s buddies emerged from the lineup and joined us. One of them had been testing a brand new four-fin. We examined the board’s outline, its fin placement, the crescent-shaped channels grooved into the planing area of the tail. Carmen described the first wave she’d ever ridden standing up, the pure buzz she’d experienced. Her story was met with characteristic fervor.

  “Unreal.”

  “You’re stoked.”

  Then Albert took his turn, and we hung on every slurred but passionately spoken word.

  “Insane.”

  “He’s hooked for life.”

  By the time the two grommets returned with Jackie’s chili fries, several more people had stopped just to hang and talk. Bear and Lindy, a young married couple who’d been surfing the pier together every weekend since they met a dozen years ago riding Northside. Rachel, a sunbaked, longboard-toting waitress from the Captain’s Galley, enraptured by Jackie’s tale of a chance surf discovery he’d made on a lost island in the Atlantic. And Magic Man, an old-time character from my father’s era who used to do card and coin tricks for the tourists on the pier to help finance his wave-chasing winters.

  Carmen removed her necklace and handed it to Magic Man, who promptly made it disappear, then reappear from behind her ear. Albert clapped and laughed with pure joy. A set of sparkling lefts peeled away from the pilings. Magic Man reminisced about the failed surf shop he’d once owned, then waxed rhapsodic about his charmed youth and the early days of surfing in Christianitos. “Best days of our lives, they were,” he lamented.

  Jackie stiffed the grommets for the tab on the chili fries, explaining that groms were the lowest life forms on the beach and needed to pay their dues. “Like barnacles under the pier,” he said with a dismissive wave.

  Hearing Jackie, I remembered the time when I was twelve when some older boys lashed me to a pier piling with surf leashes, sprayed whipped crea
m all over me and stuffed a pack of hot dogs down my trunks, then sat back and howled laughing as a pair of hungry, stray mongrels went to town on me. Fortunately my trunks fit loosely enough to shake out the bait before those mutts clamped their teeth on the wrong wiener.

  “Come by later and I’ll pay you,” I told one of the boys who’d gotten Jackie’s food.

  “It’s cool,” he said. “Jackie’s always short on coin.”

  The afternoon onshores came, ruffling the wave-faces and dispersing the crowd in the water. We said our good-byes and continued south, toward home, but Jackie broke off to go have a few clandestine beers in the parking lot with one of his admirers.

  “Later,” he said almost as an afterthought over his shoulder, the willing buddy carting his board for him.

  When Albert realized Jackie was not coming straight home with us his face grew desperate. “Wait. Can I go with him?” he implored Carmen.

  “He’ll be home soon,” I said. “Jack,” I yelled, “we’re eating in half an hour.” Jackie waved a hand but didn’t turn around. Two cute girls in bikinis had stopped him dead in his tracks and he crouched in the sand next to their towels, spinning off a fresh line of dazzle. The girls smiled and turned to accompany him to the parking lot. Neither looked of age to drink beer, a minor detail that I was certain troubled no one.

  We cut under the pier and continued along the sand. “So how did you and Jackie meet?” Carmen said.

  I pointed to the dormant patch of dark water at Holy Rollers. “Out there.”

  “In the ocean?”

  “There’s a reef offshore, a surf spot where big waves break a couple times each winter. That’s where we met. It’s called Holy Rollers.”

  We trudged along in the wet sand, moving slowly so Albert could keep up. “How did it get its name?” Carmen asked.

  “There’s a story to it. I suspect it’s a pack of lies.”

  “Those are the best kind.”

  I told her the tale as I’d heard it from Robert Shepard.

  My father had had a fondness for names and the stories that went with them, and he particularly loved the outlandish piece of surf lore that surrounded the reef at Holy Rollers. As he’d heard it, Christianitos was once occupied by local Indians who’d farmed what they could from the marshy flats, clammed a bit, and fished by tossing nets from handcrafted canoes they launched from the beach every morning.

  “The farming was lousy, though,” I said to Carmen.

  “How come?”

  “Unfavorable combination of sandy topsoil and salt water intrusion.

  “As the tribe grew, it became increasingly dependent upon the sea for its harvests, sending a small fleet forth through the wave-tossed inshore waters on all but the stormiest days. Somewhere around this time, the Spanish missionaries began passing through on northern treks from the mission at San Juan Capistrano. The Europeans would merely stop to rest and water their horses, as they had no formal business with the tribe, but during their brief stopovers they were both mystified and appalled to observe dozens of sick, hungry children milling about, begging for food. The children, the missionaries learned, were castoffs, left alone when their fathers drowned on ill-fated fishing expeditions.”

  “God, that’s awful,” Carmen said.

  “I guess tribal customs were pretty harsh when it came to survival,” I said. “Once a father died, the mother was forced to fend for herself. A single mother could no longer provide for her children, so the children were as good as orphaned.”

  “Didn’t they do anything to help?”

  “When the missionaries wrote the Church describing the situation and requesting instruction, an order of nuns was dispatched to establish an orphanage. They called the orphanage Los Christianitos, after the little Christians orphaned by the sea.

  “Apparently the nuns were not content with indoctrinating only the young ones under their care. They were troubled that the tribesmen engaged in a form of pagan ritual whenever the surf grew too large to launch the fishing boats. The fishermen, it seemed, believed that big surf was a sign that the great spirit of the sea was angry. So they’d load a canoe with flowers, beads and assorted other trinkets, then ceremonially launch it into the maelstrom in a gesture of appeasement. During one unusually large swell, the nuns mustered the courage to step in and intervene, but the fishermen were as unmoved as they were unbelieving. They promptly rewarded the good sisters’ bold advance by crowding them into a large dory abandoned years earlier by Spanish explorers and shoving the poor soldiers of God into waterborne oblivion.

  “The entire village watched as the boat drifted out through the surf-line, teetering on huge swells but refusing to capsize, miraculously liberated by a strong seagoing current. The nuns were beyond the surf now, in deep water, and a few of the fishermen began to talk of rescuing them. Perhaps this Jesus the sisters spoke of, a god who had protected them well this day, was worth knowing. But before anyone could make a move to go after the nuns, a huge, black wall of water rose way offshore, directly in the oarless dory’s path. With one horrible surge, the mammoth wall folded straight over the boat.”

  “Did they all drown?” Carmen asked.

  “No one survived. And no remnants of the dory were ever found. But in the years that followed, on days when large swells rose deep and long-lined far out on the horizon, the fishermen swore they could hear the nuns wailing in the hiss of spray and whitewash on the reef.”

  Carmen shivered. “Creepy story.”

  “Another good reason for haired-out surfers to stay away on big days.”

  I stopped walking when we reached the foot of Twelfth Street, the perpendicular lineup marker for Holys.

  “They say the spot where the nuns went down was the big wave reef out there,” I said.

  Carmen blinked into the sun, squinting at the reef beyond. “Who named it Holy Rollers?”

  “An early crew of local surfers. Sardonic bunch of wags.”

  Carmen stared out to sea. “How sad. Those women gave their lives trying to save the children.”

  “And they died and got a fickle surf spot named after them for their trouble,” I said. “They tried to do too much.”

  Carmen regarded me silently for a time. “You really feel that way? You think those children weren’t worth saving?”

  “That’s not what I said. It just seems to me there’s an order to things, a pre-set measure of cruelty and stupidity we’re stuck with. Seems to me it’s the state of humanity. You do too much, try to upset the balance, you get zapped.”

  “What a bleak picture you paint.” She watched the surf lap around our ankles, foaming and white. “You’re talking about your case, aren’t you?”

  I didn’t answer. We walked on slowly, Albert happily lugging his board as he mumbled something about the green room over and over.

  “You haven’t lost, J.,” Carmen said.

  “You’re right. Trial isn’t until next week,” I said. “That is, if I don’t get the boot first.”

  The Randall case had been nothing but an extended bummer. I wished I could just walk away somehow, take a night flight to another life, find some lonely beach with waves that needed riding. Disappear.

  Standing here at Twelfth, the place where my father passed away, I thought of Marielena Shepard, dropping her flower petals in the break every afternoon for ten years after.

  “You read my mother’s old letters,” I said to Carmen.

  “I did.”

  “Excellent.” I stopped walking, propping my tail block against the wet sand. “So, what do you think?”

  She stood not two feet from my side, surfboard slung low, her black hair trembling in the breeze. Like my mother, I wanted some kind of sign, but Carmen gave me none. “I’m cold,” she said. “Can we go?”

  Fifteen

  There is a certain poise that comes with understanding the ocean’s moods, tapping a pulse borne of a distinct, untamed, unfathomable energy source. An equilibrium, located on a singular track betwe
en the sucking trough and the pitching crest. A sense of perfect balance on a rolling, temporary stage, not a single movement wasted. A spray-blinded late takeoff in roaring Santa Ana winds. A confidence, knowing your instincts won’t let you down.

  Two sunny blocks from home, and I was purely, bitterly lost. Carmen’s reaction down on the sand had sent a shock through me. She didn’t say it, but she didn’t have to say it. The letters were bad news.

  We were a silent trio, shuffling back over the berm, the morning’s waves behind us now. Confronted with an untidy past, my street-smart posturing deserted me. My act was a tongue-tied sham, all lone-wolf bravado, petty sarcasm and restless activity. Could I manage to stand still and cope with what had been—and what was to come?

  I lit some coals in the barbecue and hosed off the wetsuits while Carmen and Albert showered and changed. She came out in her khaki shorts and shirt with a white tank top beneath the half-buttoned shirt. Her bangs were dry and she’d woven her hair into a lovely, thickly braided ponytail. The sight of her kick-started something in my brain, and I found myself over at the wood-barrel planter in the corner of the yard. A wild mess of daisies overflowed the barrel and spilled down the sides. I picked a perfect white flower and brought it back.

  “For you,” I said.

  Carmen wordlessly placed the daisy in her hair above her ear. Thank you, God, I thought.

  “Carmen,” Albert called from the porch, shattering the moment. “TV won’t work.”

  “He brought some videos,” Carmen said. “He takes them just about everywhere.”

  “I’ll go set him up,” I said, handing her the spatula and a plate of hamburger patties. Max, who was sleeping in his favorite spot under the pepper tree, lifted his head and eyed the plate. “Be good, Max,” I called across the yard. “If he bothers you, just give him a patty,” I told Carmen. “Three of them are for him anyway.”

  I showed Albert how to operate the VCR’s remote. “Ready to go, partner,” I said, loading the tape, “but let’s eat first.”

  “Wh . . . where’s Jackie?” Albert said.