by Susie Bright
His contractor tore down the house to a single standing wall, then built it back up into a two-story modern contemporary with dark-gray stucco walls, a second-floor deck that now gave him a full view of the bay, and a red door that his interior designer said was a sign of good luck and prosperity.
But recently, his luck had gone to hell.
* * *
Boone watched the kooks climb the wide set of steps the county had set into a faux rock wall to foster access for the tourists or something. He remembered when Pleasure Point felt like a community instead of a destination resort, when a carpenter or a teacher could afford to rent or even buy a house because there weren’t vacation rentals on every corner—or giant paychecks that allowed people from over the hill to build giant houses only they could afford. He remembered when you had to walk a narrow dirt path and hang onto a knotted rope to get down the cliff to the water, which kept out the people who did not deserve the waves.
He blamed the seawall and its stairs for what had happened to the neighborhood, for drawing crowds into the water, for making it so you had to worship at the altar of money in order to live here.
Sometimes he thought about putting a piece of dynamite in that phony wall and blowing everything back to the way it was. But he was not a violent man. Not anymore.
In his younger days, his anger had driven him to break noses and smash car windows. He’d spent a year in the county jail for a beat-down he’d given to a guy outside the Corner Pocket bar. After that, he found a job at a local tree service, chain-sawing overhanging limbs and view-blocking branches. He tried to get sober but was having trouble because the Point held so many reminders of why he liked to drink. He saved just enough money to get him and his board to Oahu where he’d hitchhiked to the North Shore and lived under a kiawe tree for the next four months while he got clean.
His third week there, he’d awakened to find an old man standing over him with a rooster in his arms. The deep lines on the old man’s face reminded him of a lava field and the rooster looked as if someone had started to pluck him for dinner but quit halfway through the job.
“She talks to you, don’t she?” the old man said. He had bare feet and wore a faded T-shirt and ragged shorts. “She don’t talk to everybody, you know.”
Boone sat up and rubbed his sun-ravaged eyes. He’d pledged to buy himself a cheap pair of sunglasses the next time he was in town but always forgot—consequently, every morning was like having spent the night with sandpaper glued under his eyelids. “I’m not sure what you mean,” he said.
“Heh-heh.” The old man set the half-naked chicken on the ground and they began to walk away. “Next time you have a beer for me, eh?”
It wasn’t that Boone had intended to buy the old man beer, but he’d trimmed a couple of palm trees for one of the landlords who owned a few houses on the beach and had a little money in his pocket. He hitchhiked into town and bought a ten-dollar pair of sunglasses and a six-pack of Miller High Life, along with a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter, his main source of nourishment.
The old man and the rooster came back that afternoon as if they’d known about his windfall. The ancient accepted a beer and Boone scooped out a bit of peanut butter and set it out for the chicken, who ended up with most of it stuck to his half-raw chest.
The old man leaned his back against the kiawe and began to tell Boone the story of Hawaii—the handsome men and women who had lived on the islands, the arrival of the Europeans, the stealing of the land, the fight for sovereignty.
After four beers the old man got up. “Better beer next time, man,” he said and walked off, the rooster following behind, a bit of peanut butter stuck on its breast.
* * *
Boone trimmed more bushes and mowed the landlord’s lawns, hitchhiked into town after a session at Rockpiles, and bought a six-pack of PBR and a package of sunflower seeds.
The old man and the chicken came back, nodding approval of the beer and the seeds, and the ancient told him about the proper way to enter and leave the sea, the way Mother Ocean sometimes allowed you back into her womb, and how you should never take that for granted because how often does a man get to return from where he came?
Over the next weeks, the old man and the rooster returned often, telling more stories of the gods that ruled the island, of Pele, and of what awaited those who did not pay respect to the ocean and the land.
Boone listened and felt something shift inside him. He felt the heartbeat of the soil on which he laid his head and the love of the ocean as she wrapped him in her waves. It was then he decided to never cut his hair.
* * *
One day, the old man arrived without the rooster, spit on the ground, and said, “Follow me.”
Boone got up and trailed him into the brush, asking where the chicken had gone. The old man rubbed his stomach, which Boone took to mean that either the man had eaten the flea-bitten bird or that it had succumbed to some kind of intestinal problem. He vowed to make an offering of peanut butter to a bird that had been noble, even in its suffering.
Boone followed the old man for more than an hour, over land that grew steep and rocky. When the rubber strap on one of his flip-flops broke, he tossed them into the brush, stepping in the exact places where the old man put his calloused bare feet. He was surprised at the lack of pain.
On a promontory that looked over the Pacific, the old man folded a small talisman into Boone’s hand and told him it had been given to him by Tūtū Pele—and that whoever held it and was pure would be blessed with peace and harmony. To those who were not pure, it would bring nothing but suffering and pain.
“That is all I have to say,” the old man concluded.
* * *
It wasn’t long after Jonah moved into the Pleasure Point house that trouble came. First, he lost his wallet and had to cancel all of his credit cards. Then his phone had fallen out of his back pocket on a bike ride. He bought a new phone but half of the numbers he transferred ended up without names attached.
The next day, he parked his BMW at Whole Foods and came back to find a grocery cart resting against its side. From the size of the dent in the rear passenger door, he figured someone must have let go of their cart the minute they walked out of the store and it had rolled unheeded down the entire slope of the parking lot until it swerved at the last minute and found his car.
No one left a note.
After that, he got a speeding ticket driving over Highway 17 and then a notice from the IRS that he was being audited. He was just telling himself that these were only blips in what had otherwise been a good life when a letter arrived from one of the big pharmaceutical companies. It threatened to sue him and his startup over software they’d written that used a simple blood test to determine, with 98 percent accuracy, if a drug would cause certain side effects without a patient having to experience the damage first. He thought of his sister who’d died at fourteen after a chemotherapy drug she took for her lymphoma caused her heart to fail, of how he believed the sale of his ridiculous dating app—four years before—would allow him to do something important with his life, like Bill Gates was doing.
And then there’d been this guy out in the water today.
He made himself a mug of coffee, plugged in his new phone to charge, and went out to the deck with a heaviness he hadn’t felt since his sister died. The wind was picking up.
* * *
Boone hunkered on the crushed-granite path and watched Jonah’s big gray house to see what Tūtū Pele would do. The first tendril of smoke came from an upstairs window an hour later.
He thought of Sandra and his son Nalu.
After she’d sold the house to the kook, Sandra had moved to Portland with their boy. By then, she and Boone hadn’t lived as man and woman for more than eighteen months. The first years were good, but then there had been too many arguments, too many times when she looked at him with pity. But they both loved the boy and so he had moved into the garage and built a small kitchen and a platform
bed where he and Nalu watched The Lion King over and over while Sandra was at work.
Sometimes Boone could still hear that movie in his head.
Then Sandra told him a realtor said she could get more than a million dollars for the house. She said she had no choice but to sell and move to a place where she could afford a good school for Nalu and buy a decent car. She told him it was better if he didn’t come with them, that they each needed to get on with their lives.
They both cried, but not Nalu, who said, “Oh yes, the past can hurt,” which was from his favorite scene in The Lion King. Three months later, the kook’s contractor began tearing down every piece of wood and nail and pipe that held the memory of Sandra and his son.
Boone saw the smoke from the window grow heavier and then the kook jumping up from his chaise longue to run inside. The wind was stronger now. A few heartbeats later, the kook was on the front lawn yelling for help.
The wind whipped the fire into a fury in a way that let Boone know Pele had summoned it for her work. He watched the orange flames lick the sky, the house fall in on itself, wet and ugly. He felt the earth underneath heave a sigh of relief. He had not expected the depth of Pele’s unhappiness.
* * *
A week later, he heard firefighters had blamed the blaze on the kook’s phone, which had caught fire as it was being charged. But Boone knew better. That same night he retrieved the talisman from its spot in the dirt near where the gray house had stood.
He held it for a good five minutes, marveling over the truth of what the old man had said. He tucked the talisman back into his pocket. There was a house, down near the lagoon where he camped, that had just been turned into a vacation rental, with two surfboards in the backyard for its guests.
SAFE HARBOR
by Seana Graham
Seabright
She was standing right at the bar the night Ray walked in—a hairbreadth from skinny and Ray tended to like his women with more meat on their bones. It’d been a long day at work; he’d only come to Brady’s for a drink before heading home.
Her tattoos intrigued him—that serpent that disappeared under her shirt. People had tattoos in Detroit, of course, but Californians seemed to embrace body art with an abandon he hadn’t seen back home. Milder weather? Sheer exhibitionism, the Midwesterner in him scoffed.
Skinny Girl must have felt his gaze, because she turned right around and began her own frank appraisal of him. If she wasn’t actually a prostitute, she wasn’t in this place for the conversation, either.
Ray stepped up to the bar and ordered a drink, offering one to the lady as well. She peered at him with huge green eyes—and accepted. She told him her name was Jazz and that she’d just come down from San Francisco.
Her tattoos might disguise the fact that she was from the South, but it didn’t take Ray long to grasp that she was a long way from home. Caught out, she admitted her real name was Jasmine, that she was escaping some trouble back in Memphis. Everything about her suggested she’d brought a lot of it with her. On that first night, Ray asked Jasmine if she’d come out to California to see the Pacific Ocean. She looked at him strangely, as though he wasn’t quite right in the head.
“No, sugar,” she said, “I came to California for the money.”
It seemed as good a line as any to start their negotiations.
* * *
For as long as Ray could remember, he’d wanted to live by the ocean. Where this idea had come from, he didn’t know—he’d grown up in the middle of Kansas. His parents were no-nonsense Methodist farmers, not given to encouraging flights of fancy or yearnings for anything but one’s hard-earned place in heaven. What they did give Ray, though, was the opportunity to work on tractors and other farm equipment, which developed not only his practical skills, but also his talent for innovation. After college, when the family farm had all but withered away, these aptitudes gave him a foothold in Detroit, where he found his niche in the more experimental foundation of the auto industry. Once Ray was established, he married, and bought a big house on the river, believing it would satisfy his need to be near water. Later, when he realized that it wouldn’t, he told himself it would have to do.
When Ray got the call five years ago from the headhunter about a job at one of the Silicon Valley firms, he believed God had heard his prayers. His wife Maureen objected to the move at first—they knew no one in California. But the money was too good for her to hold out long. So they put the three kids in their big SUV and drove out to San Jose.
San Jose proved disappointing. It was late summer and they’d left green lawns in Michigan. Here, the hills were brown and tired, relieved only here and there by small dark stands of stubborn live oak.
Once they’d settled into the hotel room his company provided for their transition, Ray wasted no time in packing the whole family up for a trip over the mountains to Santa Cruz. As he drove the winding road through the redwoods, he took in one deep breath after another. This was the life he had always wanted, right here for the taking. He tried to share it with Maureen, but the kids were feeling queasy from the twists and turns of Highway 17 and she’d turned around to comfort them. The moment passed.
They came down out of the mountains and got their first full view of the Monterey Bay. Ray caught his breath. Even from this distance, the water was dazzling. They drove straight down to the Boardwalk and plopped their towels on the beach. Ray was just as entranced as the kids. When evening came, they all walked out on the wharf for supper. “Supper”—he would soon learn that this was a word that marked him as a Midwesterner.
They ate at a family-style place called Gilda’s, watching the sun set on the Pacific, with huge pelicans lounging on the pier right outside the windows and sea lions barking under the wharf. Ray ate his calamari and thought, This is it. He would find them a house by the ocean and then they would all live happily ever after.
* * *
Ray kept Jazz in the dark at first. He didn’t want her to realize right off what a big fish she’d landed. He should hold something in reserve. She might be the type who would bleed you dry if you let her. She had an armband tattoo that circled her right bicep which read: Trust me . . . wait . . . Trust me . . . wait . . . Trust me . . . It seemed to flicker back and forth from being just her little joke to revealing some deeper truth. He didn’t know quite how he could think this and want to keep seeing her, but he did.
So for a while Ray wined and dined her, taking Jazz down to Monterey where no one was likely to know them. They had sex for the first time in a discreet hotel on Cannery Row. The sex was good but not great. Ray thought afterward that maybe Jazz was holding something back too. Those green eyes had to mean something.
* * *
Ray couldn’t get Jazz to talk much about herself, not at first. He was an affable guy when he wanted to be, and it came as a surprise to him that she had even less interest in being drawn out than he did. She used her lithe body to great effect, one moment beguiling and winsome, another sultry and seductive. It was like a costume she put on.
She mentioned a man several times in passing, someone back home, and Ray, after a few glasses of wine one night, was more persistent than usual in trying to get more out of her. It amused her to tease him, but when she saw that he was getting sulky, she leaned across the table and kissed him full on the lips, something she hadn’t done in public before.
“Darlin’, believe me when I tell you—you really don’t want to know.”
* * *
A boat was all he’d thought when he first visited the harbor in Santa Cruz. A small sailboat like the one he’d kept back on the Detroit River, or a catamaran with an engine to take him out a little farther. But then one afternoon the CFO took him out on his yacht and the scale of Ray’s dream began to change. He began to look at listings online, poring over the details as other men study catalogs of fine wine.
One day he saw an ad for a fifty-footer moored up in Sausalito. He took a surreptitious day trip up to see it, exactly as if
he were going off to meet a paramour. When he saw the sleek, sexy vessel in person for the first time, Ray thought he finally knew what people meant when they talked about falling in love.
The yacht was the first thing he and Maureen really fought about in California—the first big thing. Everything in her upbringing—and in his, for that matter—suggested that this was just “showing off.” After a week or so, she saw it was pointless to resist and said no more about it. This wasn’t quite the same thing as accepting the idea, but good relations were restored.
Ray was learning about the nautical life. He named his new craft Departure and made improvements to the navigation system and other electronics, as only a man of his skills could. He forgot Brady’s bar for a time and began to hang out at the Crow’s Nest on the harbor, getting to know other boat owners. Maureen went with him the first couple of times but didn’t take to it. He continued going alone.
It took longer than one might think for a good Methodist boy to realize the yacht afforded him the chance to have women. He made discreet inquiries, both at work and here in town, about how to get exactly the kind of thing he wanted. It took Ray longer to figure out exactly what that was. At first he worried about what his wife might find out, or at least suspect. But with the long hours he kept at his job, the crazy commute, there was plenty of wiggle room. She resented the boat and Ray had to bribe her with doing household chores to even get her to even come aboard.
Ray was still trying to be a good family man. But he felt that there had been a divine dispensation that had allowed him to reach California, that somehow he’d been absolved of everything in advance. All the strict rules of childhood, the black-and-white way of seeing things that had followed him into adulthood, had simply dropped along the roadside on the way out west.
Sometimes in the middle of the night, his early childhood edicts would resurface and Ray would wake, sweating. But then he’d turn and see Maureen sleeping soundly beside him and tell himself everything was all right. If she was still here, it must be.
