by Jack Lopez
“He’s stupid enough to paddle out, isn’t he?”
“It wouldn’t have been stupidity.” It would have been the smartest move he could have made, I thought. How could he have taken off on that wave? How could he paddle back out through those monstrous waves? If anybody could do it, Jamie could. He was a surfer, unlike me. I had acted like a coward. Jamie had confronted the waves, the entire ocean. I had turned tail and ran.
“We should check the cove,” Amber said.
“Maybe he paddled there.”
We both felt we should remain in the bay of the dolphins, in case Jamie made it to shore. But we knew he could make it back to camp, should he find himself on dry land. Still, I didn’t want to leave. “Let’s walk the beach one more time.”
So we did. It was now thoroughly dark with the thinnest line of purple to the west where the sun had split. As we walked I entertained a fantasy in which Jamie was already back at camp, eating dinner, ready to razz us for our sentimental missteps.
Walking on that dark and deserted beach with Amber I remembered a time when Jamie and I had played Little League. Our team made the playoffs. After our first game, a game we won 5–4, a bunch of the players from the other team showed up on bikes at our park. I had ridden my bike; Jamie had been dropped off by his mother. My bike was surrounded by those boys we had defeated. It seemed as if the park was deserted that Sunday, none of our friends or teammates around.
Jamie and I stayed by the entrance to the gym, watching the boys who came from the next town. They threw us some taunts, and it was obvious what they wanted — blood! We had beaten them, and their season was over. We would play next weekend. So much for sportsmanship, I thought as I looked at my lonely bike. A kid sat on it. At least it was locked, though things weren’t looking good.
To make matters worse, Mrs. Watkins pulled up and honked for Jamie. She idled in the street, not ten feet from the thugs.
“I guess I have to go,” Jamie said. His forehead was furrowed. “What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
His mother honked again.
“Why don’t you call your mom or dad?”
“They’re not home.”
“Uh.”
This time when Mrs. Watkins honked she kept her hand on the horn. The thugs loved that. “Hey, you big baby, your mama’s here!” one of them yelled. Others flipped us off.
Jamie just looked at me and then ran down the steps to the waiting car.
I thought it was all over. I counted the boys around my bike; there were seven, almost a baseball team. As I watched those boys a wonderful thing happened. Not only did Jamie and his mother not drive away, they both got out of the car, Mrs. Watkins opening the trunk. Jamie walked back up the stairs toward me, motioning me to come.
My heart soared as I ran to the bike rack and unlocked my bike. The boys moved back, and didn’t say a word as Jamie walked with me. After we put my bike in the trunk, we drove away with the defeated punks yelling and flipping us the bird.
Jamie had come back for me. And I knew I should paddle back out for him. I knew I should go back for him, however futile the gesture might be, but I couldn’t make myself enter that angry ocean again. Nothing could get me to act, sort of like my non-response when F attacked Jamie on the sand.
Finally, when it was that night-black that must have been the only known vista to pre-twentieth-century people, we climbed out of the bay and onto the mesa. We walked and walked through the black void, unable to find the right cove. The fog bank had come in, hugging the coastline, shrouding each tiny fjord in a cocoon blanket so that we couldn’t see the outline of anything, much less our camping gear. But the most frightening aspect was the sound of waves crashing on the coastline, where before there had been no waves.
When we stumbled upon the right cove we found that Jésus was not there. No sign of him or his boat. Waves crashed close to shore, threatening our camp, in spite of the fact that we had pulled everything to the highest point on the beach. So in the dark Amber and I moved everything up onto the mesa.
I gathered some brush and made a small fire. We sat before it, trying to eat, but neither of us had an appetite. We were more dazed than hungry, and we were on an uninhabited island, far out in the sea. Jamie was lost, our ride back to civilization not here. For the first time I felt the loneliness of that poor girl and her brother, the ones left on the island of the blue dolphins. I thought I heard Amber sniffle, and it could have been because of the fog, because it had made its way onto the mesa, obscuring the world in a wet haze, making you feel like crying. The silence and the pathetic fire and the dampness of the night and the loss of the magical night sky all had the effect of making me want to weep. But I wouldn’t, not in front of Amber.
At some point we both got under the sleeping bag, happy for human touch, human embrace, and it felt as if we were the only two people on Earth, as if no one could ever find us, and that we would never find our way home.
And then we had sex. No preliminaries, no messing around, just fast fierce love, my first time. It was quick and it was so sweet and wet, and when it was over the nightmare reality of our situation set in once again.
Simply because we could, we did it again later. Had things been different … But then I thought of Jamie’s disapproval that Amber and I were together. He wasn’t here; we were together. Jamie wasn’t around.
It was so dark, and the fog was in even thicker, if that were possible, and I was inside Amber, and she breathed hot in my ear. I kissed her neck, her shoulders, her ocean-smelling hair.
After that time neither of us could sleep, thinking of Jamie, so we dressed. Before I could verbalize it, Amber said, “Let’s go back to the bay.” She looked upon me in a different way, I felt. It was as if we were co-conspirators in some magical game, and then Jamie would …
Holding hands, we began the solitary walk back to the bay of the dolphins. Even though a thick fog still shrouded the tiny island and it was black, black out, we sort of knew where to go.
Once back in the bay I began yelling. As loud as my voice would carry, which probably wasn’t that far, since sound bounces off the water molecules — fog. And this: the waves were still huge, and we could hear the massive explosions far out in the bay, though we could only see the whitewater that raced up onto the shore.
We walked back and forth in the cove that dark night, shouting Jamie’s name, walking back up on the mesa, looking, looking for my friend, Amber’s brother. But the fog wouldn’t lift, the dawn wouldn’t arrive; Jamie did not appear. The waves crashed below and the fog endured. Misty air, breaking waves. Nature. Which had no sentimental cares for our well-being. Alive or dead, nature didn’t give a shit. It just kept on going, oblivious to the fact that Jamie was in trouble. Ignorant or cognizant of the fact that Amber and I had hooked up in the midst of all this swirling turmoil. As the guilt intruded, I couldn’t help wondering if our having sex ensured the outcome of our island experience. My fault. Amber’s and my fault. Bad things happen when you’re not married. Jamie must have been right — we shouldn’t be together. It did. It didn’t. Jamie took that drop of his own free will.
CHAPTER 13
Sometime in the early morning before light I awoke. Seeing the night sky in all its starry glory, I knew a change had occurred. The fog had receded, and I could no longer hear the surf. I lay next to Amber, feeling pangs of love and loss, breathing in the pungent damp island air, listening to the vague night sounds, hearing the gentle surge of the waves in the cove below. I could smell the sea, and smell the chaparral; I could smell Amber, I was permeated with her scent.
She stirred next to me. I breathed in the salt smell of her hair, breathed in her earthy smell, and felt the great glow of desire. And comfort. And dread. My best friend was missing. Amber was beside me. Push pull. High tide low tide. Night day. Male female. Life death.
John Needles. John Needles had lived across the street and over from Jamie. His family and Jamie’s family move
d in at approximately the same time, since the tract homes were finished at the same time. Jamie hung out with John when they were younger, even though I was always Jamie’s best friend. It was just that John was right there, whereas I had to ride a bike over, and wasn’t always there, though I was over a lot of the time.
The problem with John Needles was that he liked to see suffering, he liked to throw rocks at cats and liked to taunt dogs in yards and went out of his way to step on snails and in general liked to kill things. I kept my distance from him and so did Jamie, though he was sometimes with us when we did stuff.
When Jamie and I began surfing, John wasn’t much interested in it, which was fine with me because I didn’t want him down at the beach killing sand crabs and other small sea creatures. Not that he would have been included in the whole deal, but he might have. So the obnoxious neighbor kid was left: out.
Until the summer between eighth and ninth grade, when John started surfing. Mrs. Needles came right out and asked Mrs. Watkins if John could come with us to the beach on the mornings she dropped us off. And he did a few times, but by then we were so good, John was embarrassed to surf around us.
So he went on his own to Playa Chica, to areas where there weren’t many surfers. Either the waves weren’t that big or the shape wasn’t good or the tide wasn’t right at the places where John surfed on his own. But, still, he surfed, or claimed he did.
I don’t know if things would have been different had he been in the water with Jamie and me, but when stuff plays out it’s as if there’s no way to change the outcome. Like Mr. Watkins’s traffic accident. It goes the way it goes.
John Needles was surfing on a spring tide in the afternoon, a huge low tide. He didn’t know the sandbars, didn’t know the tide was a minus low, a very low tide, probably didn’t know enough to bail out behind his board, into the wave, when surfing in shallow water.
That’s what I think happened. He fell forward. He ate it in small surf in very shallow water and broke his neck. A beginner long-boarding at Playa Chica and he broke his neck!
The first week after the accident John held his own. Except he was paralyzed from the neck down. Still, there was hope on everyone’s part. Jamie and Amber and Mrs. Watkins had all visited him (F might have gone too, because he was in the picture then, acting human), and they said his spirits were good. Even if John Needles tormented animals, you didn’t want him to be a quadriplegic.
Yet that’s the very thing the doctors told him the beginning of the second week, after they had done a bunch of tests. His spine was messed up, and he wouldn’t ever be able to use his arms and legs again. With intensive therapy they might get him to where he could brush his own teeth. Whoopee! It was pretty pathetic, poor John.
He went downhill fast. By the end of the second week after his surfing accident he was gone. Checked out. I only knew about it peripherally, since only his family could visit him at the end. Jamie had gone that one time right after it happened, and then like that it was over.
It was pretty depressing shit, and if John didn’t want to hang around as a vegetable, then he was right to check out, if you ask me. But, still, his mother and everyone was torn up. Jamie too. Too close to his father, I guessed. But it passed, though every time I surfed at Playa Chica at low tide I thought of John Needles. I didn’t want to think of him.
“You awake?” Amber whispered, bringing me out of my morbid thoughts.
“Yeah.”
She snuggled up to my neck, kissing my face. Then she pushed herself away. “You know the thing with Robert? That he was with someone else?”
“Uh huh.” I wondered why she wanted to talk about Robert Bonham at this time.
“Well, he wasn’t. Not with someone else, I mean. I was.”
I lay there looking at the stars, smelling the dew-covered chaparral, thinking, Fuck.
“Don’t you want to say anything? Do you want to know about it? Do you want to talk? I think I was trying to drive him away. Maybe I was testing him, I don’t know. He’s so good.”
“Does that mean I’m no good?”
“I don’t know anything, Juan.”
As I lay there not knowing what to say, I thought I heard the drone of an outboard motor. Distant, far, far away. Tiny and resonant. What do we do? I thought.
“Jesus?” she said.
“I hope so.” I pulled her to me, feeling her soft warm curves melt over my chest and knee, and didn’t want this moment to end, as Jésus and his boat approached the island.
We were dressed and in the cove by the time it was light enough for the dory to land. Jésus wore a big, I’ve-saved-you-smile, exuding the optimism of Santiago when he first catches the great fish. He jumped into the shallow water and began pulling his dory onto the sand. I helped him.
“It is so good to see you,” I said.
“The swell was so strong I was pushed far south. And then the fog …”
“My friend is missing.”
“Missing?”
“He was lost in the big waves. Can we search for him in your boat?”
“Of course. Let us go.”
First we walked the now familiar route back to the bay. As the sun rose, heat began to infiltrate the island. Amber led, I followed, Jésus bringing up the rear. I watched her walk, pigeon-toed, each foot crossing in front of the other, wearing her cutoff Levi’s. I watched her, feeling excitement and emptiness at the same time.
With great anticipation we made our way toward the bay of the dolphins. Once again color permeated everything, and I could see the succulents’ fecund drippings and smell the earth and the sea all around us. As we stood above the bay, I was again overwhelmed by its simple beauty. Hundreds of dolphins swam below our perch up on the dunes. The shape of the waves was still good, and they were substantial, though only breaking on the inside reef, I knew. From up here, we could see that nobody, no human was in the water; our boards were still on the sand were we’d left them.
We dropped down to the beach, walking to the far point. I climbed the mound so that I could see into the next cove — nothing. No board, no footprints, no waves, even. The bottom wasn’t right, I supposed. “Nothing here!” I shouted to them.
When I got back on the beach I could see Amber’s eyes were red-rimmed. “It’s possible he’s in another cove. He paddled out of the bay, and then the current swept him farther away.”
I said this to Jésus as well. He agreed and said he knew the direction the current would take somebody.
So we made our way back to the landing cove, where we’d camped. Once back in the dory after loading our stuff, we began a long, fruitless search for Jamie. We motored to various coves, Jésus speculating on wind and tide currents, guessing where a surfer on his board in outrageous swells and shrouded in fog might end up. We drifted off the island; we landed in coves that faced different directions from the bay of the dolphins, combing the beaches for any sign of Jamie. In the early afternoon, exhausted and listless, we motored into the dreamlike bay of the dolphins. Ocean mammals surrounded our boat, chattering and flopping and jumping into the air.
I dove in the water, and swam down, down, down, until I could touch the flat reef rocks. It was hard to see, but I swam around, hoping to catch a glimpse of something. Two dolphins swam with me, watching every move I made, their muzzles close. Suddenly the dolphins skittered away, and then Amber was beside me, our eyes open underwater, and in the gathering dark we were surrounded by more and more returning dolphins. Then we had to surface.
We searched and searched for Jamie around the island; we landed in strange coves, walked on beaches that probably had never had another human on them. We dove in bays that had sandy bottoms, we dove in bays that had jagged rock bottoms, we dove in one bay that had a bunch of sharks in it, but we didn’t know until we were in the water. Jésus showed me how to track the ocean current that led away from the island, and we followed it some distance off its shore. Jamie was nowhere. Disappeared off the planet.
Jésus said he
was running low on fuel and that we would have to get back to the mainland. Amber and I didn’t feel like staying on the island either, so we motored back to Ensenada Harbor, arriving in the early morning hours, before light, amidst the bustle of the fishermen unloading their catches and swampers hosing out stalls in the fish market.
We were dazed, in a surreal dream in which things just wouldn’t go back to “right.” But, still, we had to go through the motions. And we did. We would head back home, and tell our parents. They would help us find Jamie because he was still there, of that I was positive.
CHAPTER 14
I was arrested at the border. After an hour in the chaotic traffic line of time-stop darting cars moving from one nonexistent lane to another. Past times I’d joked with the souvenir sellers, even once bought a velvet Jesus dripping velvet blood at velvet Golgotha. This time, Amber and I just suffered in silence the boredom of moving forward inch by inch, thinking about the unknown fate that awaited our return. What would we say to our parents? To friends? Jamie was missing.
I’d assumed that we’d return without him — that was the original plan; he’d be settled at my aunt’s trailer, or in a motel at the least, safe. Amber and I would return. Jamie would come back when things blew over at home.
We couldn’t even find his board. Any time I closed my eyes I saw that mammoth wave, saw Jamie take the drop, saw him airborne, saw his rooster tail after he disappeared in that barrel, and then no longer saw his path on the wave any longer. After that everything becomes hazy. Mostly re-creations not necessarily based upon fact. I don’t remember Amber getting me out of the water. Don’t remember the savior dolphin. Don’t really remember riding the entire night in Jésus’s dinghy out beyond the bay, searching, yelling, shining flashlights onto black fast-moving water.
Hindus say that this life is but a dream. Maybe everything that happened was a dream. Maybe Amber and I had run off to celebrate our new relationship. Maybe Jamie would be home, worried about Amber and me, the same as everyone else.
