Halfway House

by Weston Ochse

  “But you’re off your medication.”

  “Yeah, but only because I’m older. Some people grow out of epilepsy. Other than losing time every now and then, I’ve been okay.”

  Kanga stared at a surfer wiping out before he even got his footing. He shook his head at the amateurish attempt. “Just be careful, Bobby. There’s a lot of power in San Pedro. When I’m meditating, I can sometimes see it—huge pulsing bands of power coursing through the water, air and land. For what reason, I don’t know. But the bands of power feel like live electric lines. I’d never touch one myself, but I know they exist.”

  Noticing the half smile on Bobby’s face, Kanga spread his arms. “If you spent as much time alone as I did, you’d see what I mean.”

  “First I’d have to believe in that Zen meditation crap.”

  “There is that. First you’d have to believe in that Zen meditation crap.”

  Kanga passed the Cluny to Bobby, who took a small sip. The cheap scotch burned all the way down. The old man began to collect the burritos from the fire using a pronged stick. He pulled the foil-covered food onto a stretch of ground, then scooped some sand on top. After five minutes, they’d cooled down enough for them to unpeel the foil.

  They ate greedily, a few grunts of appreciation the only indication that they enjoyed the food; four for Kanga and two for Bobby, who’d already eaten breakfast. When they finished, they drank a little more Cluny.

  Before long, the effects of the day, the food, the booze and the sun wore Bobby down. He found himself nodding, his lids ten-pound weights he was unable to hold up. Kanga pulled out his Vietnamese rice paddy hat and placed it atop his head, the wide circular brim casting his face and neck in shadow. He closed his eyes, his chin resting against his chest. Bobby followed suit, drifting over to a bench. He used his sleeping bag as a pillow, and pierced the veil of sleep.

  Bobby awoke sometime later. By the sun, he could tell that a few hours had passed. A breeze had spun up enough for small whitecaps. Wind whipped at his hair. He wiped the sand and grit from his eyes, then got up and searched for some water to cleanse his mouth of the alcoholic rot that had overtaken his gums during sleep.

  Ablutions done, he looked around for Kanga and found him sitting on his rock, deep in meditation. Bobby began to head there, but stopped when he saw an old Mexican coming down the path, lugging a surfboard in a protective bag.

  When the man reached the sand, he looked from Kanga to Bobby. He finally trudged over to Bobby, breathing heavily, sweat drenching his shirt and running down his face. He stood the board on end, then bent forward while keeping one hand in control of it.

  “Madre del dios. Please, is one of you a Captain Kangaroo?”

  Bobby glanced at the surfboard, then at Kanga, who was oblivious to anything not Zen. “Yeah. One of us is Captain Kangaroo. Why do you want to know?”

  Pulling out a pad from his back pocket and a pen from his front shirt pocket, the Mexican proffered it and said, “Here. I have a delivery. Sign here so I can kill myself going back up the damned cliff.”

  Bobby recognized the logo on the paper from a surf shop in Long Beach. He knew immediately what this was. Laurie had done what he’d told her not to do. Kanga wasn’t going to be happy. Looking at the board and the Mexican, however, Bobby knew that the best thing to do was to let this play out. He scribbled Captain Kangaroo on the dotted line, then took the board from the poor man. Bobby waited until the Mexican had begun his climb back up the path before yelling for his friend.

  “Kanga! Hey man. Look what just came in the mail.”

  “Mail?” Kanga opened his eyes, got to his feet and turned toward Bobby.

  “Yep. Mexican Express.” Bobby pointed to the delivery man scrambling up the path, using his hands to grip roots and plants to help him along.

  Kanga glanced at the Mexican, then turned his attention to the board. He began to frown as he eased himself down from the rock. By the time he made it to where Bobby stood, it was a full-fledged scowl.

  “Where’d this come from?”

  “Says here Petee’s Bike and Boards. We were there, remember?”

  “I remember. Did you arrange this?”

  Bobby spread his arms and tried to sell his smile. “Wish I did, Big Man, but I spent all my cash on Cluny and burritos.”

  “Then who sent this to me? Who knew that I even went there?” Kanga found the Velcro and ripped open the cover. Within seconds he had the bag open, and the mint green Velzy free. The sleek board was a beautiful living beast that almost seemed to quiver, as if it could sense the nearness of the ocean. Kanga stared at it in wonder for a long moment. Even in his anger, he had to give this work of art respect. Then, forcing himself to disavow his admiration, he snarled and turned on Bobby. “You told Laurie about this, didn’t you?”

  “I did,” Bobby admitted.

  “Why the hell did you do a thing like that?”

  “Because she asked me.”

  “And it was as simple as that?”

  “Yep.”

  “I don’t believe it. I think you asked her to buy this for me. Why would you do that? Why would you put her in that position? This board cost nine hundred dollars, for God’s sake!”

  It was Bobby’s turn to get angry. He stepped forward, closing the gap between them so that his nose was close enough to smell the sourness of old Cluny on Kanga’s breath.

  “Listen, old man. Don’t accuse me of nothing. I didn’t want to be in the middle of you and your daughter. It just happened. Furthermore, she asked me what we did yesterday, so I told her. She seemed interested in buying a board for you, I told her it wasn’t a good idea, but it looks like she did it anyway.”

  “Well, I’m not going to use it.”

  “What?”

  “You can take this back and give her the money. I’m not going to use this board.”

  Bobby had never wanted to punch a man more. “How can you throw this away?”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I don’t know? Do you know who you’re talking to? Jesus, but I just want to smack the hell out of you! You spent your life running away from family, friends and responsibility, and now, faced with a new daughter, you’re going to run away from her?” Bobby was shaking hard enough to make Kanga step back. “You’re going to reject a gift, something that she sees as possibly the culmination of a lifetime of missed presents, and you’re going to throw it back in her face?”

  “She shouldn’t have done it,” mumbled Kanga, staring at the board.

  “You might as well tell her you don’t love her.”

  “That’s not true. I love her—”

  “Bullshit. If you loved her you wouldn’t give back the present. Jesus Christ on a Big Wheel, but you have got to be the stupidest Captain Kangaroo, one-man, traveling-surfer show on Planet Earth. One thing Sister Agnes taught me is that gifts aren’t for the people they’re given to. The home got all sorts of gifts, especially around holidays when the rich families began feeling sorry for us poor kids. But do you think they actually thought of us? Hell no. They thought of themselves. They wanted absolution, and if it cost them the price of a toy, what an investment that was, huh?”

  “She wants absolution? That’s ridiculous. She didn’t do anything.”

  “How do you know? Let me tell you, kids without parents have a crazy degree of guilt. Them, me, her, we all feel like the situation we’re in is our fault. Fuckers like you piss me off. You think it’s all about you. You forget there are other people with feelings. Tell you what, you give back that fucking board and then explain to her why, when all she wanted to do was give her daddy a present, you didn’t want it. I’m sure you’re savvy and smart enough to make her understand it wasn’t because of your continental ego.”

  Bobby snatched the Cluny, grabbed a baseball cap from his bag and pulled it low over his eyes, then stalked down the beach. He needed to get away from Kanga before he turned homicidal.

  Chapter 6

/>   Kanga watched Bobby storm down the beach. He’d never seen the boy so mad. Veins had stood out on his neck, and for a second, Kanga had actually feared for his own safety. But Kanga was angry too. He couldn’t get around the fact that his daughter had given him a handout, rather than a gift.

  As time passed, his temper receded and his brain began to reengage. It was ironic how the farther away Bobby walked, the more Kanga realized that the boy was right. The kid’s arguments, his words, they were things Kanga had never thought of. The greater irony was that a boy with no parents could talk sense into a man with a grownup daughter.

  Kanga carried the board over to the nearest bench and sat down. Grabbing a bar of sex wax from his bag, he began to apply a top coat. The base coating applied in the store was still in good shape, but if he was going to surf, he’d need to do the top. Kanga paused as he realized he’d decided to keep it, then poured on the muscle, moving in small circular motions.

  The board was forty years old but in pristine condition, with a Surfboard of Champions logo on the middle of the deck. Nine feet three inches, it had an inlaid ¾-inch redwood stringer on deck, a laminated glassed on wood skeg and original aqua green pigment striping. Young kids might look at this board and pass it up for a cooler, sleeker design, but the older crowd, and the crowd that knew boards, would treat this like royalty.

  The last Velzy he’d seen had been in San Juan del Sur on the West Coast of Nicaragua. He’d hired out as a tour guide for jet-setting surfers with a local agency to make some money for his next big move. Kanga had met a Malibu surf junkie at Managua airport where he’d been chartered to take the boy surfing on some of Nicaragua’s more wicked reefs. No problem finding danger in Nicaragua; if it wasn’t for the paranoid cocainitos, then there were the reefs. Kanga took the boy to a surge called The Killers, and all the blond, bed-tanned surf junkie could say when presented with the day’s events was cool.

  In those days the jungles of Central America were filled with CIA, drug runners, CIA drug runners, and honest people in the wrong place at the wrong time. The locals knew Kanga was purely there for the surf, so when he blew through a checkpoint, the cocainitos with AK-47s didn’t even give him the time of day.

  He’d had it all set up for the boy. Two girls and a beach shack full of enough booze, pot and local quesillos to last a week. What more could a boy ask for? Evidently nothing, because as soon as he arrived, he went in the shack and never came out. After six hours, Kanga thought what the fuck and decided to catch a few waves.

  When he went to get his board, he saw his client’s lying beside it. He opened the cover and discovered he was in the presence of a Velzy. A few glances at the shack assured Kanga that the boy wouldn’t be coming out anytime soon. So Kanga spent the rest of the day dumping, diving, and carving Pacific waves, the client’s board better than anything he’d ever used. Three days later the boy came out of the shack, and Kanga drove him to the airport and sent him back to Malibu. Never once had the boy touched the water. Only his board had, and ever since, Kanga coveted the Velzy.

  There was no way Laurie could have known this. She would have been about three at that time. Kanga sniffed and faced the wind, letting it scour his face. Such a good girl she’d turned out to be. Such a damned good girl.

  He finished waxing the Velzy then took it to the water.

  He said a prayer and paddled out to where he could await the perfect set of waves to christen the wonderful board his daughter had given him.

  Obituary from the Daily Breeze

  Desmond Brian Howard of Long Beach perished in the waves off San Pedro, Tuesday, while surfing. Son of Brian and Rebecca Howard of Crestline, Desmond Howard was training for the Brummel Beach Invitational for which he was one of three Americans invited. He is survived by his parents, wife Johanna, and daughter to be, Rebecca Jo. Memorial services will be held on Cabrillo Beach at sunset on Saturday. Friends and family are asked to bring their boards for a Memorial Surf. A bonfire will follow where all are encouraged to sign a longboard to be given to Dez’s daughter when she comes of age.

  His chest had never felt so heavy. Like an anchor, it had taken his body straight to the bottom. One minute Dez was sluicing out of a trough onto the leading edge of wave, and the next he was flipping head over heels. Then he was underwater and sinking and no matter how much he struggled, he couldn’t get the reverse momentum to ascend.

  Bubbles...life leaving his body in amorphous pockets of air that rose as he fell, until he finally remembered looking up as the last bubble left him and meandered toward the surface, the sunlight winking on the waves.

  Then a splash destroyed the vision. A man swam down to him, grasped him by the hair and pulled him to the surface. He felt the heat of the sun on his cold skin, but nothing more. He couldn’t breathe. Even now he felt his eyes glazing over, the sky dimming as a film descended across his vision.

  Dez was thrown to the rocky scrabble of the shore. The man knelt beside him and cleared Dez’s throat. He pressed his lips to Dez’s. A feeling of warmth suffused him. Then the man’s lips were gone, replaced by the sound of knocks on a faraway door and the feeling of his chest being compressed.

  Wrapped in the embrace of the sun, everything went dark.

  Peace.

  Silence.

  Tranquility.

  The surf came…

  A wave struck him and his eyes snapped open. The sky was a burnished gray. There was nothing but water as far as he could see. It was still, not even a wind to disturb the surface. In the distance was a glowing dot on the horizon.

  He knelt on his surfboard, his butt pressed to his heels. Dipping both hands in the water he began to paddle toward the light. The water seemed heavier than normal and had a tackiness about it. When he lifted his hands from the viscous liquid, it came with him in elasticized filaments that snapped back to the water’s surface.

  He considered just floating for a while, but he felt an imperative to discover what the light was and with no breeze and no tide, he’d never get there without paddling. So he lay his body upon the board and steeled himself for the alien feel of the liquid. Dipping his arms up to his elbows, he began to pull his way through the water with dramatic difference. The light drew closer. He could make out a structure. Within minutes he realized it was the halfway house on South Pacific. He’d never really given the place much notice, other than it was where he drove by every day on his way to the cove. If this was the afterlife, then why was that his destination? Where was heaven? Where was hell?

  Suddenly his fingers scraped against something beneath the surface of the water. With a howl, he jerked them free, the effort almost overturning him. He examined his fingertips as if they’d reveal what he’d just touched, but they were as silent as this strange universe. It wasn’t that the mysterious thing had caused him pain; it had merely surprised him.

  Tentatively he dipped his fingers back into the brine and felt around. He pushed his hand deeper until he finally felt something hard and unforgiving. It felt like a stick, but when it moved and wrapped itself around his fingers in an implausible grip, he knew it couldn’t be a stick.

  It felt like a hand.

  Dez jerked his arm, but it wouldn’t come free. He tried to adjust his position for better leverage, but found the position precarious as the surfboard rocked beneath him. The last thing he wanted was to land in the water and meet face-to-face with whatever was attached to the hand that was, even now, gripping him tighter and tighter.

  But he couldn’t free himself from the mysterious grip. He paddled around it, hoping that like a fishing snag, there was an angle in which it would come free. Finally, with one great jerk, his hand was once again his own, but with the ponderous momentum of a nightmare, he felt himself overbalancing. His arms windmilled for a panicked moment and he hit the water, face-first and sinking.

  His eyes shot open and beheld a vivid green universe of underwater carnage. Gone was the murkiness of brine, replaced by a green-hued landscape of the damned, a
s clear and succinct as vision at high summer noon. An army of the dead greeted him, waving with the tide like seaweed. Legs disappeared into the rocky bottom, seemingly held there like metal sunk into concrete. Some were mere skeletons. Others were decomposing, clothes reduced to rags from the ebb and flow of the water. All of them seemed to watch him, their multitudinous examination filling him with terror.

  He spied his board on the surface and pushed toward it, but got no more than a foot before he felt a tug at his ankle. He pushed against the water again and felt himself held fast. Looking behind, he spied hands from a tiny form grasping his left ankle like it was a baseball bat. He pulled at his leg, but couldn’t gain any traction in the water. What was it that had him? Fear unhinged him as he realized it was the decomposing form of a child that could be no more than two years old, its feet anchored in the soil.

  He flailed madly. Air escaped his lungs. He kicked at the dead child with his left foot and watched as his heel intersected with the tiny skull. Once. Twice. Three times. The grinning face fell to the side as the neck broke. What was left of a cheek rested on the child’s shoulder, but it still wouldn’t release.

  Dez clawed frantically to reach the surface, his chest burning with the desire to live. But he was finally forced to inhale and let the water surge down into his lungs.

  Though he was prepared to die, it never happened. He found that he didn’t need to breathe. He glanced around and saw the child receding.

  Of course. He was already dead. Why did he need to breathe?

  Before he reached the surface, a hand grasped him. Then another and another. Until he felt himself propelled forward as the anchored dead moved him hand over hand just beneath the waves. Soon he noticed the glow once more, a sign he was heading toward the halfway house again.

  An hour passed. A day. A year. Time meant nothing to him, but eventually he came to the roots of the building—great oozing tentacles that were sunk deep in the earth. The hands released him and he floated free for a moment until a smaller, lithe tentacle shot free from the house and grasped him around the waist. Without ceremony, it slammed him into the earth nearest the house, his legs sinking past the ankles. The tentacle retracted and he found himself anchored, just as all the other dead had been anchored.