Dawn Patrol

by Don Winslow

  The other kind of wave is the sub surface wave, which starts, duh, under the water. If surface waves are your middleweight boxers, dancing and shooting jabs, the subsurface wave is your heavyweight, coming in flat-footed, throwing knockout punches from the (ocean) floor. This wave is the superstar, the genuine badass, the take-your-lunch money, walk-off-with-your-girlfriend, give-me-those-fucking-sneakers, thank you for playing and now what parting gifts do we have for our contestant, Vanna wave.

  If surface waves lack depth, the subsurface wave has more bottom than a Sly and the Family Stone riff. It's deeper than Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein combined. It's heavy, my friend; it ain't your brother. It's the hate child of rough sex at the bottom of the sea.

  There's a whole world down there. In fact, most of the world is down there. You have enormous mountain ranges, vast plains, trenches, and canyons. You have tectonic plates, and when they shift and scrape against each other, you have earthquakes. Gigantic underwater earthquakes, violent as a Mike Tyson off meds, that set off one big honking disturbance.

  At its most benign, a big beautiful swell to ride; at its most malevolent, a mass-murdering tsunami.

  This is a disturbance, a mass transportation of energy phenom, that will travel thousands of miles either to give you the ride of your life or fuck you up, and it doesn't care which.

  This is what's rolling toward Pacific Beach as The Dawn Patrol gets out of the water this particular morning. An undersea earthquake up near the Aleutian Islands is hurtling literally thousands of miles to come crash on Pacific Beach and go Ka-boom.

  6

  Ka-boom is good.

  If you're Boone Daniels and live for waves that make big noises.

  He's always been this way. Since birth and before, if you buy all that stuff about prenatal auditory influences. You know how some mothers hang out listening to Mozart to give their babies a taste for the finer things? Boone's mom, Dee, used to sit on the beach and stroke her belly to the rhythm of the waves.

  To the prenatal Boone, the ocean was indistinguishable from his mother's heartbeat. Hang Twelve might call the sea “Mother Ocean,” but to Boone it really is. And before his son hit the terrible twos, Brett Daniels would put the kid in front of him on a longboard, paddle out, and then lift the boy on his shoulder while they rode in. Casual observers-that is, tourists-would be appalled, all like, “What if you drop him?”

  “I'm not going to drop him,” Boone's dad, Brett, would reply.

  Until Boone was about three, and then Brett would intentionally drop him into the shallow white water, just to give him the feel of it, to let him know that other than a few bubbles in the nose, nothing bad was going to happen. Young Boone would pop up, giggling like crazy, and ask for his dad to “do it again.”

  Every once in a while, a disapproving onlooker would threaten to call Child Protective Services, and Dee would reply, “That's what he's doing-he's protecting his child.”

  Which was the truth.

  You raise a kid in PB, and you know that his DNA is going to drive him out there on a board, you'd better teach him what the ocean can do. You'd better teach him how to live, not die, in the water, and you'd better teach him young. You teach him about riptides and undertow. You teach him not to panic.

  Protect his child?

  Listen, when Brett and Dee would have birthday parties at the condo complex pool, and all Boone's little friends would come over, Brett Daniels would set his chair at the edge of the pool and tell the other parents, “No offense, have a good time, have some tacos and some brews, but I'm sitting here and I'm not talking to anybody.”

  Then he'd sit at the edge of the kid-crowded pool and never take his eyes off the bottom of the pool, not for a single second, because Brett knew that nothing too bad was going to happen on the surface of the water, that kids drown at the bottom of the pool when no one is watching.

  Brett was watching. He'd sit there for as long as the party lasted, in Zen-like concentration until the last kid came out shivering and was wrapped in a towel and went to wolf down some pizza and soda. Then Brett would go eat and hang out with the other parents, and there were no irredeemable tragedies, no lifelong regrets (“I only turned my back for a few seconds”) at those parties.

  The first time Brett and Dee let their then seven-year-old boy paddle out alone into some small and close beach break, their collective heart was in their collective throat. They were watching like hawks, even though they knew that every lifeguard on the beach and every surfer in the water also had their eyes on young Boone Daniels, and if anything bad had happened, a mob would have showed up to pull him out of the soup.

  It was hard, but Brett and Dee stood there as Boone got up and fell, got up and fell, got up and fell-and paddled back out, and did it again and again until he got up and stayed up and rode that wave in while a whole beach full of people played it casual and pretended not to notice.

  It was even harder when Boone got to that age, right about ten, when he wanted to go the beach with his buddies and didn't want Mom or Dad showing up to embarrass him. It was hard to let him go, and sit back and worry, but that was also a part of protecting their child, to protect him from perpetual childhood, to trust that they had done their job and taught him what he needed to know.

  So by the time he was eleven, Boone was your classic gremmie.

  A gremmie is nature's revenge.

  A gremmie, aka “grom,” is a longhaired, sun-bleached, overtanned, preadolescent, water-borne, pain-in-the-ass little surfer. A gremmie is karmic payback for every annoying, obnoxious, shitty little thing you did when you were that age. A gremmie will hog your wave, ruin your session, jam up the snack bar, and talk like he knows what he's talking about. Worse, your gremmie runs in packs with his little gremmie buddies-in Boone's case, this had been little Johnny Banzai and a young Dave the yet-to-be Love God-all of them equally vile, disgusting, smart-mouthed, obscene, gross little bastards. When they're not surfing, they're skateboarding, and when they're not surfing or skateboarding, they're reading comics, trying to get their filthy little mitts on porn, trying (unsuccessfully) to pull real live girls, scheming to get adults to buy beer for them, or trying to score weed. The reason parents let their kids surf is that it's the least sketchy thing that the board monkeys get up to.

  As a gremmie, Boone got his fair share of shit from the big guys, but he also got a little bit of a pass because he was Brett and Dee Daniels's kid, glossed “the Spawn of Mr. and Mrs. Satan” by a few of the crankier old guys.

  Boone grew out of it. All gremmies do, or they're chased out of the lineup, and besides, it was pretty clear early on that Boone was something special. He was doing scary-good things for his age, then scary-good things for any age. It wasn't long before the better surf teams came around, inviting him onto their junior squads, and it was a dead lock that Boone would take home a few armloads of trophies and get himself a sweet sponsorship from one of the surf-gear companies.

  Except Boone said no.

  Fourteen years old, and he turned away from it.

  “How come?” his dad asked.

  Boone shrugged. “I just don't do it for that,” he said. “I do it for…”

  He had no words for that, and Brett and Dee totally understood. They got on the horn to their old pals in the surf world and basically said, “Thanks but no thanks. The kid just wants to surf.”

  The kid did.

  7

  Petra Hall steers her starter BMW west on Garnet Avenue.

  She alternately watches the road and looks at a slip of paper in her hand, comparing the address to the building to her right.

  The address-111 Garnet Avenue-is the correct listing for “Boone Daniels, Private Investigator,” but the building appears to be not an office but a surf shop. At least that's what the sign says, a rather unimaginative yet descriptive pacific surf inscribed over a rather unimaginative yet descriptive painting of a breaking wave. And, indeed, looking through the window she can see surfboards, body boards,
bathing suits, and, being that the building is half a block from the beach, 111 Garnet Avenue would certainly appear to be a surf shop.

  Except that it is supposed to be the office of Boone Daniels, private investigator.

  Petra grew up in a climate where the sun is more rumor than reality, so her skin is so pale and delicate that it's almost transparent, in stark contrast to her indigo black hair. Her charcoal gray, very professional, I'm-a-serious-career-woman suit hides a figure that is at the same time slim and generous, but what you're really going to look at is her eyes.

  Are they blue? Or are they gray?

  Like the ocean, it depends on her mood.

  She parks the car next door in front of The Sundowner Lounge and goes into Pacific Surf, where a pale young man behind the counter, who would appear to be some sort of white Rastafarian, is playing a video game.

  “Sorry,” Petra says, “I'm looking for a Mr. Daniels?”

  Hang Twelve looks up from his game to see this gorgeous woman standing in front of him. His stares for a second; then he gets it together enough to shout up the stairs, “Cheerful, brah, civilian here looking for Boone!”

  A head peers down from the staircase. Ben Carruthers, glossed “Cheerful” by the PB crew, looks to be about sixty years old, has a steel gray crew cut and a scowl as he barks, “Call me ‘brah’ one more time and I'll rip your tongue out.”

  “Sorry, I forgot,” Hang Twelve says. “Like, the moana was epic tasty this sesh and I slid over the ax of this gnarler and just foffed, totally shredded it, and I'm still amped from the ocean hit, so my bad, brah.”

  Cheerful looks at Petra and says, “Sometimes we have entire fascinating conversations in which I don't understand a word that is said.” He turns back to Hang Twelve. “You're what I have instead of a cat. Don't make me get a cat.”

  He disappears back up the stairs with a single word, “Follow.”

  Petra goes up the stairs, where Cheerful-a tall man, probably six-six, very thin, wearing a red plaid shirt tucked into khaki trousers-is already hunched over a desk. Well, she takes it on faith that it's a desk because she can't actually see the surface underneath the clutter of papers, coffee cups, ball hats, taco wrappers, newspapers, and magazines. But the saturnine man is punching buttons on an old-fashioned adding machine, so she decides that it is, indeed, a desk.

  The “office,” if you can grace it with that name, is a mess, a hovel, a bedlam, except for the back wall, which is neat and ordered. Several black wet suits hang neatly from a steel coatrack, and a variety of surfboards lean against the wall, sorted and ordered by size and shape.

  “Forty-some years ago,” Cheerful says, “a bra was something I tried with trembling fingers and little success to unsnap. Now I find that I am a brah. Such are the insults of aging. What can I do for you?”

  “Would you be Mr. Daniels?” Petra asks.

  “I would be Sean Connery,” Cheerful replies, “but he's already taken. So is Boone, but I wouldn't be him even if I could.”

  “Do you know when Mr. Daniels will be in?”

  “No. Do you?”

  Petra shakes her head. “Which is why I asked.”

  Cheerful looks up from his calculations. This girl doesn't take any crap. Cheerful likes that, so he says, “Let me explain something to you: Boone doesn't wear a watch; he wears a sundial.”

  “I take it Mr. Daniels is somewhat laid-back?”

  “If Boone was any more laid-back,” Cheerful says, “he'd be horizontal.”

  8

  Boone walks up Garnet Avenue from the beach in the company of Sunny.

  Nothing unusual about that-they've been in and out of each other's company for coming on ten years.

  Sunny originally flashed onto The Dawn Patrol like daytime lightning. Paddled out, took her place in the lineup like she'd been born there. Boone was about to launch into a six-foot right break when Sunny jumped in and took it from him. Boone was still poised on the lip when this blond image zipped past him as if he were a buoy.

  Dave laughed. “Man, that babe just ripped your heart out and fed it to you.”

  Boone wasn't so freaking amused. He caught the next wave in and found her coming back out through the white water.

  “Yo, Blondie,” Boone said. “You jumped my wave.”

  “My name isn't ‘Blondie,’” Sunny said. “And when did you buy the beach?”

  “I was lined up.”

  “You were late.”

  “My ass I was.”

  “Your ass was late,” Sunny said. “What's the matter, the big man can't take getting beat by a girl?”

  “I can take it,” Boone said. Even to himself, it sounded lame.

  “Apparently not,” Sunny said.

  Boone took a closer look at her. “Do I know you?”

  “I don't know,” Sunny said. “Do you?”

  She lay out on her board and started to paddle back out. Boone had no choice but to follow. Catching up with her wasn't easy.

  “You go to Pac High?” Boone asked when he got alongside.

  “Used to,” Sunny said. “I'm at SDSU now.”

  “I went to Pac High,” Boone said.

  “I know.”

  “You do?”

  “I remember you,” Sunny said.

  “Uh, I guess I don't remember you.”

  “I know.”

  She kicked it up and paddled away from him. Then she spent the rest of the session kicking his ass. She took over the water like she owned it, which she did, that afternoon.

  “She's a specimen,” Dave said as he and Boone watched her from the lineup.

  “Eyes off,” Boone said. “She's mine.”

  “If she'll have you.” Dave snorted.

  Turned out she would. She outsurfed him until the sun went down, then waited for him on the beach until he dragged his ass in.

  “I could get used to this,” Boone said to her.

  “Get used to what?”

  “Getting beat by a girl.”

  “My name's Sunny Day,” she said ruefully.

  “I'm not laughing,” he said. “Mine's Boone Daniels.”

  They went to dinner and then they went to bed. It was natural, inevitable-they both knew that neither one of them could swim out of that current. As if either one of them wanted to.

  After that, they were inseparable.

  “You and Boone should get married and produce offspring,” Johnny Banzai told them a few weeks later. “You owe it to the world of surfing.”

  Like, the child of Boone and Sunny would be some sort of mutant superfreak. But marriage?

  Not happening.

  “CCBHS” is how Sunny explained herself on this issue. “Classic California broken home syndrome. There ought to be a telethon.”

  Emily Wendelin's hippie dad had left her hippie mom when Emily was three years old. Her mom never got over it, and neither did Emily, who learned not to give her heart to a man because men don't stay.

  Emily's mom retreated into herself, becoming “emotionally unavailable,” as the shrinks would say, and it was her grandmother-her mother's mother-who really raised the girl. Eleanor Day imbued Emily with her strength, her grace, and her warmth, and it was Eleanor who gave the girl the nickname “Sunny,” because her granddaughter lit up her life. When Sunny turned eighteen, she changed her surname to Day, regardless of how pseudohippie it sounded.

  “I'm matrilineal,” she explained.

  It was her grandmother who persuaded her to go to college, and her grandmother who understood when, after the first year, Sunny decided that higher education, at least in a formal setting, wasn't for her.

  “It's my fault,” Eleanor had said.

  Her house was a block and a half from the beach, and Eleanor had taken her granddaughter there almost every day. When eight-year-old Sunny said that she wanted to surf, it was Eleanor who saw that a board was under the Christmas tree. It was Eleanor who stood on the beach while the girl rode wave after wave, Eleanor who smiled patiently when t
he sun went down and Emily would wave from the break, holding up one imploring finger, which meant “Please, Grandma, one more wave.” It was Eleanor who went to the early tournaments, who sat calmly in the ER with the girl, assuring her that the stitches in her chin wouldn't leave a scar, and that if they did, it would be an interesting one.

  So when Sunny came to her and explained that she didn't want to go to college, and tearfully apologized for letting her down, Eleanor said that it was her fault for introducing Emily to the ocean.

  “So what do you intend to do?” Eleanor asked.

  “I want to be a professional surfer.”

  Eleanor didn't raise an eyebrow. Or laugh, or argue, or scoff. She simply said, “Well, be a great one.”

  Bea great surfer, not marry one.

  Not like the options were mutually exclusive, but neither Sunny nor Boone was interested in getting married, or even living together. Life was just fine the way it was-surfing, hanging out, making love, and surfing. It was all one and the same thing, one long, unbroken rhythm.

  Good days.

  Sunny waited tables in PB while she worked on her surfing career; Boone was happy being a cop, a uniformed patrolman with the SDPD.

  What busted it up was a girl named Rain Sweeny.

  Things changed after Rain Sweeny. After she was gone, Boone never really came back. It was like there was this distance between Boone and Sunny now, like a deep, slow current pulling them apart.

  And now this big swell is coming, and they both sense that it's bringing a bigger change.

  They stand outside Boone's office.

  “So… late,” Sunny says.

  “Late.”

  Walking away, Sunny wonders if it's too late.

  Like she's already lost something she didn't even know she wanted.

  9

  Boone walks into Pacific Surf.

  Hang Twelve looks up from Grand Theft Auto 3 and says, “There's an inland betty upstairs looking for you. And Cheerful's way aggro.”