The Surf Guru

by Doug Dorst

  Seventeen cigarettes, six cups of coffee, and two bowls of frosted cereal later, she is finished. She reads over her work with pride. She has assembled all the right words in their ordained ritual fashion: compressed nuggets of ideas and opinions and stances, crunchy and wholesome, glazed with a honey-sweet slurry of metaphor suited to the crowd: “chance” and “fate” and “the inside straight,” “split the aces” and “double down,” “loosest slots” and “five-percent vig,” “boxcars” and “baccarat” and “a hard ten on the hop.” It’s a winner. She’d bet her life on it.

  The next day, it rains.

  A red tarp has been stretched over the deck of the riverboat. Hundreds of chairs are filled with the polyestered bottoms of men and women who fix the odds on slot machines and break the thumbs of card counters. A brass band plays a Sousa march. The tarp billows in the breeze.

  Renata takes her place in a chair beside the dais. She is sleep-deprived and feels cotton-headed from seasick pills—she is not one for the water. She watches the small group of supporters gathered on the pier behind crowd-control barricades. Some hold umbrellas and/or children. Some hold home-painted signs, most of which—though her tired eyes can’t read clearly at this distance—appear to lack both verbs and sense. GOD COUNTRY PIE, one seems to say. Others: WE PEOPLE ORDER FORM; LEADSHIP TOMORROW; VALLEY SHADOW OIL ROD; and, curiously, CANIDATE. She listens as raindrops paradiddle on the red plastic above her head, barely notices as the candidate crutches past her and takes his place at the lectern. The band stops, but the tuba player misses the cue and blats out an unaccompanied B-flat.

  The candidate comes across as a new man. Invigorated by the words she has fed him, he delivers the lines impeccably— some incantatory, some gruffly barked, some lilting along with the bob of the riverboat itself. Renata, seduced by her own words, has to stop herself from mouthing along. His skin shines with the fervent sweat of a revivalist. Someone says hallelujah; someone answers with amen.

  After a final fist in the air, he casts away his crutches and hops down from the dais to the deck, as if he has been healed by his own spirit. There are handshakes and thumbs-ups, ties beating frantic semaphores in the wind, applause like cannon fire. The sun comes out, as if on cue, and casts a blush of red light over everyone.

  Renata checks her watch. Five minutes to absorb the glow, then the moorings will be untied and the paddle wheel will turn and they will power down the river while lunching belowdecks. She hopes he does not overeat; at three-thirty he must Charleston at the senior center. She relaxes, lets her head swim freely.

  She does not notice the youth lurking in the gangway. He jumps into the candidate’s path, brandishing a sword as rusty as the ideology he will later profess to the TV cameras. As the sword cuts its arc through the air, the candidate’s legs freeze; he swivels his head, looking for Renata, seeking direction. But what can she say? Run? Get away?

  The hack is a savage one. The candidate slumps to the whitewashed deck. His mouth opens and closes without a sound. The horror—or the revelation, she can’t tell which—in what she is witnessing is this: the motion looks purely mechanical, a clockwork of mandible and maxilla winding down, coming to rest at half-past-gape.

  Renata weaves past the writhing pile of men that pins the assassin to the deck. She pushes numbly through the people who, crying and shouting, surround the candidate. As she kneels in the pooling blood, she sees something rise from the corpse, something curling like smoke in the red light. It plumes straight up to the tarp, then winds outward and escapes into sky, tracing a shape that reminds her of a calla lily blossom. She tilts her head and watches, a strange calm warming her like bathwater. She does not feel herself being jostled, does not hear the keening of grief and the roar of panic; still kneeling, she watches as the candidate blooms into mystery, into romance and tragedy, into something she can make holy.

  What Is Mine Will Know My Face

  I drove Trace to the hospital the day they tried to fix his eye. At the time, I was driving a delivery van for a man called Smiley. It was glossy white and cursed on both sides with a caricature of Smiley’s face, in profile, with a gaping comic-book grin—strangely toothless, and scooped out so deep that his ear looked like a hinge on which his whole head depended. sMILEY FLORISTS, it said, and underneath that, Send a Smile to someone you love!

  Trace was waiting for me in his uncle’s garage, which was his home on the nights he didn’t stay with his girlfriend, Mo. The garage door was open and Trace was sitting at the foot of his bed, lit by the morning sun. Blue smoke curled up from his cigarette. Around the bed were rakes and bags of potting soil and a rusty seed spreader. Clothing hung on a Peg-Board alongside trowels and shears. He got up and slung the garage door shut behind him. He shook his head at the van. “I can’t believe you drive this, Phil,” he said, getting in. “I can’t believe I’m riding in it.”

  His bad eye was barely open. It’d been a few weeks since he got kicked, and the swelling was gone, but the skin around the eye hung slack and was smudged with yellowing bruise. The surgeons were going to replace cracked bone with smooth plastic. They’d told him he might lose sight in the eye. There was always risk, they said. I was the one driving him to the hospital because Mo had gotten stuck at the rehab center where she worked nights. One of the anorexics had opened up her own wrists with something sharp, and Mo had to pull an extra shift to do grief counseling.

  “How’s Mo?” I asked. “Did she sound all right?”

  “Don’t worry about Mo,” he said.

  “A girl died,” I said.

  “Mo will be fine. She’s trained for things like that. Whereas I could go blind today, and I’m not trained for that at all.”

  “Half-blind,” I reminded him.

  “That’s not the point,” he said. “The point is, Mo should be here. I got kicked in the face for her. You’d think there’d be some gratitude.”

  “Think of it this way,” I said. “Those girls need her more than you do. They don’t even know to eat.”

  He nodded, then flicked the butt out the window. He leaned forward and examined his eye in the visor mirror, ran a finger along the bone below his eyebrow. “I’m just nervous,” he said. “Thanks for the ride.”

  “I have to go there anyway,” I said. “I’ve got deliveries.”

  He turned in his seat to check out all the flowers in back. “None of those are for me, are they?”

  “Of course not. You’re an outpatient.”

  “Nobody loves me,” he said. He slumped in his seat and lit another cigarette.

  “Tell you what,” I said. “If any of these people turn out to be dead, I’ll save their flowers for you.”

  “Let me see the names,” he said. I handed him the clipboard. He read the names aloud, then sucked on his cigarette thoughtfully. “Popovich is the one,” he said. “My money’s on Popovich.”

  The van bumped over frost heaves left by the hard winter. We drove past the high school we’d gone to—I’d graduated, he’d been kicked out—and we drove through the double-S turn that killed our friend Crockett while Trace and I were passed out in his backseat. We drove past the golf course where we’d both gotten laid for the first time, up on the thirteenth green, which on clear nights had a view of Manhattan. We drove past the house my parents had to sell when they split up for the first time, and past a marsh where Trace and I had rescued an injured heron when we were little. It was strange, I thought, how much of our lives you could see from this one road.

  “You missed some action at the bar last night,” Trace said.

  “Was Katie there?” She’d left me, and I was avoiding her.

  “She was,” he said. “She called you a useless fuck.”

  “Which way did she mean that?”

  “Whichever way is worse. She was pretty hostile.”

  “She’s a hostile person.” The night she left, she’d thrown her shoes at me, and I threw them out the window. She walked away barefoot. She wanted to go that badly. Her
feet were salmon-pink under the streetlights.

  “This is one way we’re different,” Trace said. “I need Mo. You do better alone.”

  “That’s not true,” I said. I didn’t want it to be true. It was April and warming up, and the smells of the wet piney morning and the flowers in the van made me feel like possibility was in bloom.

  The hospital was a concrete tower the color of good teeth. While Trace finished another cigarette—for all he knew, he said, it could be his last—I took the metal cart out of the back of the van and loaded it. Most of the orders were Smiley Healthy Wishes arrangements. The glass doors of the hospital swung open, and we walked in together: Trace, the patient, about to receive a plastic miracle in his head, and me, the messenger of hope.

  “Thanks again,” he said. “Mo will pick me up when it’s over.”

  “Do you know that for sure?”

  “How much grief counseling could those girls need?”

  “They’re at-risk,” I pointed out.

  “Fuck,” he said, “aren’t we all?”

  That made a certain kind of sense. “Good luck with your eye,” I said.

  “I don’t need luck,” he said. “What I need is less trouble.”

  It turned out none of my people were dead. Mr. Popovich did look pretty bad. He was groggy and his room smelled like creeping fear, but he was still breathing away. His sunken eyes tracked the shiny Mylar balloon that came with his flowers. You could tell he liked the way the sun was shimmering on its surface. I spun the balloon a few times so he could watch it send disco-ball lights sweeping over the walls.

  After that I delivered Smiley Business Is Blooming! baskets to all the suites in the office park out on 128, a Merci! Bouquet to an overperfumed real estate agent, and a cross made of white snapdragons and daisies to the funeral home. In the parking lot behind the funeral home, I shared a bent, skinny joint with a guy I knew called Black Swede, who worked there keeping the carpets clean and the bathrooms sparkling for the grief-stricken. My last stop on the morning run was at a gated estate up on Whippoorwill Road, where I brought fresh irises to a gray-haired lady who was wearing yellow gloves and polishing her silver. She told me she was hosting a prayer group dinner that night, and I guess I said that was nice. She tipped me a twenty that she slipped inside a glossy pamphlet. On the cover, in red block letters, it said, WHAT IS MINE WILL KNOW MY FACE.

  “Do you understand the title?” she asked me.

  I considered. “Does it mean that things work out in the end?”

  “In a way,” she said. “As long as you believe.”

  She waved from her window as I backed the van down her narrow driveway. She was still wearing her rubber gloves.

  I pulled into the parking lot behind Smiley’s just before noon. The store was sandwiched between a beauty salon and a Chinese restaurant, and by that time of day the air stank of burned hair and fried food. I rolled up the windows in the van, so that the flower smell would stay in. One of the Chinese waiters was outside feeding scraps to a skinny gray cat. I yanked open the steel door, freshly tagged with some word I couldn’t make out, and sat at the workbench in the back room.

  Smiley was at the counter with a customer, a tall girl in her mid-twenties, a vision of summertime two months early. She wore a white sundress and had a store-bought tan that made her look orange. She was crying, and Smiley was talking to her softly. His words were lost to me in the refrigerators’ hum, but when he walked her to the door, she hugged him. Smiley was smooth. He knew the things to say.

  Smiley came into the back room and tossed a dozen red roses onto the workbench. “Now, that was a sweet girl,” he said. “Nice-looking, too. I’d tell you to chase after her if I didn’t think you’d fuck her up even worse.”

  “She was orange,” I said.

  “Nice attitude,” he said. “One of many reasons you’re not getting laid.” He opened a cabinet, took out a can of black spray paint, and flipped it to me.

  “You want me to kill these flowers with paint?”

  “They’re cut,” he said. “They’re already dead.”

  “But what’s this about?”

  He spread his arms wide. “It’s about love,” he preached. “Love and desire and jealousy and hurt feelings and orgasms that make your ears ring for days and resentment and bliss and painful but treatable infections and comfort and yearning and our inevitable exposure as the fickle, craven frauds we all are.”

  I shook up the paint can and aimed the nozzle at him. “Are you done?” I said.

  “Of course, that’s just one school of thought,” Smiley went on. “There’s another that says it’s just about some dick-head named Chip who got caught screwing someone he shouldn’t have.”

  The front door chimed open with the first notes of “Edelweiss,” and Smiley went to help the customer. I picked up a rose, wrapped a paper towel around the top of the stem, and sprayed in short bursts while I spun the flower slowly in my hand. Then I rained black on it from above, aiming into the folds where I could still see slivers of secret red. I watched from inside a sweet cloud of fumes as color turned into slick, inky black and paint clogged the soft petals, puddling where I’d oversprayed. I laid the roses to dry in a straight line down the edge of the bench. Twelve dead soldiers. My fingers were covered in paint. I should have thought to wear gloves.

  I walked out front, where Smiley was misting the tulips. I was feeling spin-headed and a little numb. I wiggled my black fingers at him like a cartoon wizard. “Fear me,” I said. “I am evil.”

  He snorted. “You wouldn’t know evil if it crapped in your mouth. Now go clean your hands before you get paint all over my store.”

  The paint wouldn’t come off. I scrubbed and scrubbed, but I was marked.

  Business was slow, as usual. Smiley’s ex-wife Charlotte had opened up her own flower shop a few blocks away, just to ruin him. Smiley was fighting back—he undercut her prices, had his friends phone in fake orders, put sugar in her delivery van’s gas tank. Neither place was doing very well. People could sense that both were trading in spite.

  The roses were still drying, and I didn’t have any other deliveries, so I told Smiley I was going for a walk. He told me to check behind Charlotte’s store and see if any packages had been left there.

  “I’m not going to steal anything from Charlotte,” I said.

  “There’s a fifty in it for you,” he said. His eyes looked lidless, reptilian.

  “Forget it,” I told him.

  I walked a circle around downtown. I watched a swarm of boys play kill-the-carrier on the middle school field until one kid got tackled on his face and came up bloody. I walked past the bank where Katie worked, but I didn’t see her car in the parking lot. I looked into Charlotte’s flower shop and saw her sitting at the counter, her chin in her palms, the place empty except for her. I called the hospital from a pay phone to find out about Trace, and when the girl asked if I was family, I said I was his brother. She shuffled some papers and clacked some keys and told me they didn’t have any information yet. When I got back to the store, Smiley was in the back room, laying the black roses to rest in a long white box. He put the last one in, fitted the lid on, and tied the box with a black bow. I could see he was having fun.

  “These are ready to go,” he said. “Got another one for you, too.” He passed me a delivery tag. It was an order for a dozen roses, red, long-stemmed, in a Deluxe De-Lovely decorative vase. The tag said the roses were for Mo.

  I was about to ask Smiley if Trace could use my employee discount, so maybe he could get back some of what he’d paid, but I stopped myself. Trace couldn’t have ordered these roses. Not while he was laid out in a white room with masked people looming over him and wielding lasers and blades, all to fix the damage done by a steel-toed nobody he’d caught pissing on the rug in Mo’s bedroom during a party.

  “Who ordered these?” I said.

  He went out to the counter and came back with the sales slip. “Guy named Archer,” he said.
“You know him?”

  I didn’t. I’d never met any Archer.

  “Here’s the note,” Smiley said. He handed me a sealed envelope. Maureen was written on the front in bold blue ink. On the other side, this guy had drawn a blue heart over the flap, like it was a seal. He’d drawn badly. The heart was uneven, distended on one side like it had a valve about to blow.

  “Can we open this?” I asked. “I need to read it.”

  “I can’t do that,” Smiley said. “It would be a serious breach of professional ethics.” He took an electric hot pot off one of the shelves above the workbench and filled it in the bathroom sink. He set it in front of me. He plugged it in. “You, on the other hand,” he said, “are not bound by any such code.”

  The water bubbled hot and I waved the envelope gently in the rising steam until I could peel the flap open. On the card inside, the guy had written Mo a poem. A poem that rhymed. Heavy with the platitudes of love. The last line: Til the next sweet time our bodies meet. The whole thing was one big sloppy overshare. I’d have been embarrassed for the guy if I didn’t already hate him, whoever he was.

  “That’s some of the cheesiest shit I’ve ever read,” Smiley said over my shoulder. “She ought to dump his ass on principle. Though I do admire his rhyme of ‘lilacs are mauve’ with ‘plush treasure-trove.’ ”