by Jack Lopez
Jamie had a double reason for not being talkative. Besides the quiet family thing, he had had a lisp when he was young. He used to get taken out of class to attend a speech class. The therapist told him he had a lazy T, and that he’d most likely outgrow it, which he did. It was most pronounced in kindergarten, though it improved steadily as he got older. I never had any trouble understanding him, but some of our teachers did. So he learned to keep quiet rather than call attention to his lisp. The lisp and his shy nature didn’t make for a very outgoing person when we were younger. But he still preferred not to talk, if given a choice.
Amber was different. She was so smart that most shit wasn’t worth her bother. Whereas Jamie’s silence was genetic and physical, Amber’s was genetic and social. Most people were too stupid to talk to, she’d once said. A lot of kids thought she was weird. She went from cheering squad to yoga. She surfed, though a lot of girls did that, but she could rip. And she was really good-looking. All these things created a sort of unapproachable air, an aloofness that turned off people. So they said mean things about her, said she was stuck-up, said she had a stick up her butt, said she was snotty, said she thought she was better than everyone else (she did), all the stuff jealous people say when they don’t know someone and don’t know how to relate to them.
None of it bothered Amber, and that made things worse, somehow. It’s like if you don’t care, that makes the dolts even angrier. What did Amber care? She and Robert Bonham were inseparable.
And she had Jamie.
Now she had me. Which Jamie was against.
Jamie was doing some weird shit, though I knew he wouldn’t turn on me. I’d never even had such a thought before, but he’d changed so much lately. It wasn’t that I was afraid of him; I wasn’t. I was terrified. Jamie was a really good fighter.
Last year, when Jamie and I were in the ninth grade, this guy who was a junior, Kent Chambers, got in a fight with Jamie. Jamie hadn’t wanted to fight, hadn’t done anything to start it or encourage it. In fact, he’d done everything short of running away to get out of it. It happened like this: Jamie and Greg Scott and I and some other guys were hanging by the eucalyptus trees, away from everyone else, just being freshman, just trying not to cause attention, when the shit broke out. We didn’t even see what happened, but this twerp, Brad Patton, ran by us, charging into the crowd over by the Coke machines. Next thing we knew Kent Chambers and some of his bros are right in our faces.
“Who threw it?” Kent Chambers was pissed. His face was all red and he had food on his shirt.
None of us said anything. We all just sort of looked at the ground, looked off in the distance, anywhere but at the crowd of juniors that now surrounded us.
“Which one of you fuckheads threw it! Who’s eating burritos?” He looked right at me.
Still no answer. Except Jamie had just finished one, and the wrapper lay at his feet. I tried to sidle over and cover it with my tennis shoe, but it was too late — Kent Chambers had seen it as well.
“Okay,” Kent Chambers said, “the tall one,” meaning Jamie, because he’d had his growth spurt before any of us.
Jamie finally looked up, looked Kent Chambers in the eye. “I didn’t throw anything.”
Kent Chambers wasn’t a gangster or anything, wasn’t a tough guy. I think he was an okay guy. But he was older, and I sure didn’t want to fight him. He was just bigger than we were, just stronger.
“One of you assholes did, and it was you.”
And just like that, he came at Jamie. Hard and fast. Throwing down.
Jamie backed around the tree, saying, “I don’t want to fight.”
Kent kept coming, and other kids sensed something going on and began charging over.
Kent pushed Jamie away from the tree, where he had no cover. Some of the eleventh-grade guys thought it was cool, some of them wanted to join in, and one guy shook his head and left. A school yard’s no different from a barnyard, so I’ve heard, and the violent excitement brought kids streaming toward us.
“I don’t want to fight,” Jamie said again.
“You threw a burrito, you dick!” Kent said coming at Jamie for real.
Jamie stood his ground, put his hands up, and sidestepped Kent’s first sortie, hitting Kent in the jaw with a really good blow.
Kent was briefly spun around, but he turned to face Jamie, this time even more enraged, if that were possible. They went at each other again, this time Jamie coming forward, both of them with their fists going off.
Next thing I knew Kent Chambers was on the ground, Jamie was over him, and the campus police officer had a hold of Jamie by the shoulder. Kent’s face had big welts on it. Jamie’s T-shirt was ripped and he looked zoned out, looked as if he didn’t know what had had happened. Jamie was quick, though. And I knew he had had a lot of anger always stored inside because of his father, and then because of F.
Before the end of lunch bell rang, Amber came rushing up to me. We were still under the eucalyptus tree where it had all started. Usually Amber wouldn’t talk to Jamie and me at school. She wouldn’t ignore us or anything, she just didn’t go out of her way to associate with us.
“Is he okay?” she said, breathless. “I heard he fought Kent Chambers.”
I felt really cool, a junior girl seeking me out and everything. And Jamie had kicked Kent Chambers’s ass! “Yeah, he’s fine. Somebody threw something on that guy and he insisted Jamie had done it.”
“He’s okay, Juan? He’s not hurt?”
“Naw, he won!” I couldn’t help chuckling, though I stopped it when I looked over at Kent Chambers’s boys, who didn’t look too happy with us.
“Okay,” Amber said.
Jamie was sent home, and suspended for two days, but I went over to his house right after school to see him. He was sort of depressed about getting suspended, and felt weird about kicking some guy’s ass for nothing. Claire hadn’t wanted to let me in at first. Not because of me. It was because she didn’t want to reward him for fighting. When I told her the story, she relented.
When F returned home from work, he called Jamie into the TV room, where Jamie told him what happened. Things were already pretty strained between Jamie and F because Jamie resented F’s attempts at fathering him. This time was different, however.
“What’d he say?” I asked Jamie when he returned to his room.
“He said I had a right to defend myself.”
“Are you in more trouble?”
“No.”
“Cool.”
We hung out some more, playing video games and listening to music. When it was almost dinnertime I took off for home. The really strange thing was, before I got off Jamie’s street, I saw Kent Chambers pass me in his car, which stopped at Jamie’s. I saw Kent Chambers knock on the door, and someone answer the door, and then the door close again. Then the door opened and I saw F talking on the porch with Kent Chambers. When F went back in the house and Kent Chambers didn’t leave, I walked back closer to Jamie’s house.
It was dusk, but you could still see things pretty well. And what I saw shocked me. F and Jamie were now on the front porch. I was too far away to hear what they said, but Jamie told me later when I called him. Kent Chambers thought it was just luck, the reason Jamie had won their fight in school. He wanted to fight Jamie again, to see if this were true.
Jamie didn’t want to fight, I could see that much. But then Kent Chambers moved off the porch and F shoved Jamie out onto the front lawn with Kent Chambers, where they fought again, and once again Jamie kicked his ass. Even better this time, for Jamie was mad, he later told me, mad at F for forcing him to fight, mad at Kent Chambers for showing up at his house. F said it would make him a man. What kind of a stupid adult makes you fight? Mr. Watkins would have sent Kent Chambers on his way. But F was in that house and Jamie had had to fight. More sick shit à la F.
I didn’t want to intrude on Jamie’s brooding, and, besides, he was just crabby from the pot and his hangover, I reasoned, because he couldn’t
get mad at me. I certainly didn’t want to bother Jésus as he navigated us toward La Isla de los Delfíns, our destination.
It had been late morning by the time we’d left Ensenada Harbor, heading straight into the fog bank that hovered just offshore. Amber had made for the bow, where she got under the tarp and immediately went to sleep. As I watched her now her bare toes twitched from underneath a sleeping bag as she slept on. Her feet, even in repose, were pigeon-toed.
On and on the outboard droned, up and down, up and down we moved in the heightened, electrically charged seas. The great expanse of ocean made me think about my family. And my decision-making process. Were they worried about me? Were they surprised at my behavior? Shit, had I done the right thing? What were Jamie’s thoughts as he sat with his head down and his shoulders bowed, contemplating what? And Jésus. What did he think? He’d told me that he lost his wife and child, that he no longer felt the urge to live, that he did not feel the need to fish. They had died in a bus accident. “It will be good for me to get away from my memories,” he had told me.
With a bunch of rustling, Amber awoke, making her way back to the stern. “Where the hell are we going? Ugh, I don’t feel well.”
I was slightly queasy from the rolling seas even though I’d been on numerous fishing expeditions with my father.
“Hi, Sheila,” Jamie said.
“We’re almost there,” I said.
“Where is ‘there’?”
“The island with the perfect wave,” Jamie said.
“He never said that,” I said. “Jésus said the waves were good.”
“What, exactly, did Mr. Jesus say?”
I looked Amber in the eye. “He said the waves were very good.”
“Translate what he said exactly,” she said. Her hair was flattened on one side, and she had small bags under her eyes.
“I can’t. He said the waves were big, and the fishermen call the place ‘clouds’ or something like that. It’s on the island we’re going to.”
Jamie said, “Excellent.”
Amber shook her head. “Instead of the great white whale, you guys are in search of the great wave.”
“Good, Amber.”
“We’re in search of a perfect wave,” Jamie said.
And we were, I supposed. I figured that was what kept me going farther and farther south, getting in bigger and bigger trouble. The night the shit went down with F, I knew that a swell was building. I knew about the hurricane off Hawai’i. I knew that it would hit the West Coast in a few days. I knew the swell would be perfect about now, and I also knew the waves would be best down south, and certainly less crowded.
But what is a perfect wave? The perfect wave? Is my perfect wave the same perfect wave for Jamie? Or does it change from person to person? And say you did surf the perfect wave — what would be left to live for?
The droning engine mesmerized us into some sort of complacency. We sat in our places, pondering our individual situations, I guessed. Jésus was dry in the tiny wheelhouse, calm and stoic, given his situation. My hair was wet, and so was Jamie’s. Amber had gone back under the tarp, and I could see her feet working back and forth, back and forth, as if she were walking on land in all her pigeon-toed glory.
At some point the drizzle stopped, and the fog became less thick, and it appeared as if we might ride out of the clouds, but we didn’t. As the fog became denser and rain began to fall, we were suddenly out of the cloud and right before a small island. Everything was in Technicolor: the water and sky a heartbreaking blue, a vibrant blue, and the arid island was alive with magical cacti and succulents. The land was brown and rocky and the coves we could see from the water were calm.
Jamie looked at me.
I smiled at him.
No waves, he mouthed.
I shrugged.
Jésus said that we would make camp in the cove we now approached. Quite narrow and small — I thought of the fjords in Scandinavia — our landing cove didn’t seem too inviting; it seemed that there were a bunch of such coves, small fingers of land jutting right into the sea. There was no surf.
“Where are the dolphins?” I said.
“In another cove,” Jésus said.
Amber must have felt the engine throttling down, for she emerged from underneath the tarp, rubbing her face, wearing her cutoff Levi’s and the Baja jacket. She looked at me and then up into the cove.
“He says the dolphins are in another cove.”
“There’s no surf on this island,” Jamie said.
Silence followed Jésus cutting the engine as we lunged forward when the dory beached itself. Then: a seabird squawking, ocean ripples lapping the boat’s sides, hard sun warming you. Brown world to the front, blue world above and behind.
After tilting the outboard up on the transom, he jumped in the shallow water. I followed him, though when my feet hit sand my legs still felt as if they were moving. Amber jumped out, followed by Jamie, all of us helping Jésus pull the dory farther up onto the beach. And then we began unloading. Sleeping bags, cooler, blankets, surfboards, and shopping bags, all the stuff that would sustain us, all settled on the sand far up from the high tide line in the dinky cove. The hillside seemed inordinately steep from this vantage point, and the succulents that lined the cove were oozing a clear liquid from their bright blooms.
We all exerted ourselves, moving our things up the beach toward the dirt cliff, which had a flat sandy plateau on top. Jésus said that weather conditions and swell conditions changed very rapidly on this island, at this place in the ocean, and that waves could appear in this cove if the swell changed direction. “The waves are in the next cove,” he said. “Over those sand dunes is another bay, a place where the dolphins mate. The waves are very big there.”
I explained what he’d said to Jamie and Amber.
“Let’s rip, dudes,” Jamie said.
Amber flipped him off.
We took our boards and began climbing the steep canyon sides. While we climbed we saw Jésus relaunch the dory; he was going to fish for dinner; we would meet back here at dusk.
At the top of the canyon we looked south and saw dunes about a quarter of a mile off. We marched across the mesa, and then through the dunes, Jamie with his T-shirt wrapped over his head like Lawrence of Arabia or something.
“Excellent!” he would shout every so often.
“Why don’t you get a new adjective,” Amber said.
She was having trouble keeping up, so I’d slacken my pace, which would make Jamie stop entirely, and that was when he would bellow, “Excellent!”
When we finally crossed the mesa, the sight we beheld was truly something: a small bay alight with glittering, skittish diamonds. A peak wave breaking wonderfully both right and left and then walling up into a very fast and steep shorebreak. A slight offshore wind blew the tops of the waves back upon themselves. And this: the entire surface rippled with dolphin life. Cows and calves and bulls roaming over the very large waves that broke with a regularity and clarity that I’d never before seen, certainly never imagined could exist.
“Oh,” said Amber.
“Yeah,” Jamie said.
I stood by them, my friend and his sister, mute with delight and anticipation. I’d been feeling really guilty about my actions, and hoped that my family wasn’t too worried about me. But when I stood on that mesa, my feet resting in the warm sand, watching the dolphins and the breaking waves, I was truly glad I’d done all the things that got us here, made the decisions I’d made. I looked at Jamie and my heart was glad that he was safe. Amber, well, Amber could be my girlfriend!
Dolphins took off on swells, body surfing the drop, dolphin-kicking on the face, riding all the way to the shorebreak, where they’d dive under, reappearing out the backside of the wave.
I began running down the sand dune’s face, heading for the beach. Jamie passed me, flying down the gentle hill, and I could hear Amber right behind as we all made for the surf.
CHAPTER 10
Paddl
ing out through the channel and watching the huge waves break was an exercise in controlled anticipation. These were the largest waves any of us had seen, and it was difficult to gauge their actual size until someone rode one of the mackers. Here, away from where they hit shallower reef water, the swells would lift you up, up, giving you a drop of weightlessness as they passed underneath. Even off to the side of the breaking waves in the safe confines of the channel.
In the break the waves were majestic arms of power, swept from God knows where by some out-of-control circular winds. These waves, though much slower than the winds of the hurricane, were extensions of it — for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. There were many waves in a set, the takeoff was steep but makeable, and these waves, I was sure, were the largest I’d ever ride. I was excited. I was scared. So much for my wish to die before I was eighteen, and to die in waves, which I’d sometimes fantasized about.
Jamie told Amber to ride waves between sets, smaller things that didn’t have the raw power of the chunkers that hit the rock reef we neared. She’d agreed, but as I watched her paddle I didn’t think she’d stick to it because she moved forward in steady, sure strokes, mesmerized by the grace and splendor of the sea.
On the paddle out we didn’t speak for we were too busy sizing up the break. Which cliché would work to describe it? A postcard? That would work, except there are no surfing postcards with this bay on them, that’s for sure. The sky was a blue I’d never seen before, a blue that deep-water sailors probably take for granted. Far away toward the mainland, which you couldn’t see, huge white clouds amassed as they passed over mountaintops. And the water. You could see the smooth rocks way below, see reef fish darting about, see the high and bending sea grass sway in the balletlike tug and pull of the swell.
