by John Decure
“He also says he knows you, you can vouch for him,” Hale told me.
“I can,” I said. “He’s okay.” That wiped the smirk off of Terraza’s face. “I thought he’d be putting the old guy up in his house tonight,” I explained. “He lives not far from here.”
Hale’s handheld radio chirped out a muffled dispatch that he ignored. “Apparently he’s going through a split. Wife’s got him sleeping outdoors, on the pool furniture.”
Jesus, I wanted to say. “They’re not under arrest, right?” I asked.
“Nah. Technically they were loitering, but you know, this is a small town.” My cue to step in.
“What can I do to help?”
Hale folded his arms and sighed, doing his best Andy Griffith. “Well, if you can see fit to get them off the street tonight, I think that’ll be the end of it.”
“Sure,” I said, committing to two more houseguests almost without thinking. As soon as I spoke, I thought … Damn, should have talked it over with Carmen a little. Of course she would have said help them out, because, like me, she’s the helping kind. But this was her first night in what was presently my home but would soon be ours, and I should have checked with her, got a female temperature reading, if only as a gesture of respect. “I mean, just a minute.”
But by the time I turned toward the house Carmen had slid an arm around her brother and slipped back into the living room.
“There a problem?” Hale said.
“No,” I said, hoping I was right. “We’ve got room.” Sure, for me on the downstairs couch.
“Good. We’ll send them in.” The two cops gave me the old sign-off nod and headed for the street.
J. Shepard, probation monitor, career counselor, innkeeper, victim of his own good intentions.
“What a day,” I muttered.
“You have a nice day, too,” Terraza, the Latino cop, called out, matching my latest knee-jerk response with one of his own. He gave me a small-town wave, which I didn’t return, then receded back into the night.
Seven
People surf for all sorts of reasons. To look cool, or at least attempt to look cool. Getting chicks, or—again—straining hard to get there. For sharing a smoke and talking story in the parking lot with friends. For the splendid cardiovascular exercise and a vigorous upper-body workout to boot, old sport—that is, if you tend to be wound as tight as a miser’s ass, count your calories using a chart on the refrigerator door, and are prone to missing the point of things altogether. Or perhaps for a sublime communion with Mother Nature, a pure tap-the-power-source, soul-tripping epiphany and slip-slide boogie back to the watery womb—oh, sure thing, if you happen to be totally full of shit, which is a certainty if this is how you describe your surf sessions. (Then again, if you are one who employs the soul-tripping, liveto-surf, surf-to-live rap with more than an ounce of brio, you are probably also getting your share of chicks, because many an otherwise rational female will check said rationality at the door and go whole hog for this particular brand of Mother Nature’s sun-child beach-boy babble. This I know from years of personal research.)
But really, if you ride waves with any seriousness about the act itself, you do it to catch that familiar—if fleeting—feeling, the adrenaline-buzz high you get from a rail-to-rail, wind-whistling magic-carpet-ride speed dance along a meadow green wall of point-wave bliss. From whipping a tight power-carve in the sweet spot just under the cascading lip—thwack!—like a fulcrum grinding a mill wheel or a revolutionary cracking a Liberty Bell. From groping and tunneling through a sucking, hissing, twilit low-tide chromium-glass cylinder from way, way back. From sacking up and paddling out on a double-thick, tremors-in-the-sand day—a day when everyone else is passing—and meeting the challenge. From locating an inner peace you didn’t even know you had through the exercise and discipline of sustained intense concentration. And, probably most of all, from just having a kick-ass good time.
Friday morning I surfed for yet another purpose: to escape from dry land for a while. Surfing can be good for that as well.
Last night Carmen had been too quiet as we got Dale and Rudy settled. I’d offered her but the briefest summary of Dale’s troubles, rewound the scenes at the law center and the bank, described Rudy’s apparent senility and scheming new baby-doll wife. Tomorrow we would go to the police in Glendale, get in touch with Rudy’s daughter again, begin to sort this thing out. Carmen listened to it all without comment, then told me she trusted me, her brimming lips pursed as if she was withholding on me in more ways than one. The thought of her upstairs in my bed, alone, made the lumps in the couch feel like stones in a riverbed.
I’d wanted to hear Dale’s account of the matter, ask him why he hadn’t told me he had nowhere to go, what he thought his decision to park at the pier could have come to short of a midnight thumping by thieves or a ride in the back of a squad car for trespassing on public property. But he wouldn’t even look at me as we tucked the sheets into the pullout sofa bed in the den, and I didn’t push it. The man was visibly in the throes of something biting and inward and wholly miserable, a rusting Buick out on the curb his outspoken legacy to personal and professional achievement. Across the room on the china cabinet sat a row of bottles—Wild Turkey, Mescal tequila, Dewar’s, Ron Rico, Tanqueray, J.D.—my good stuff on display. I wondered what kind of bonehead principle of home decoration I’d been following with that little touch, hoping Dale wasn’t already jonesing for that one drink he knew he could never take again. Plugging in a spare night-light and clock radio upstairs in the guest room, I had decided Dale could do without a speech from his monitor. But I wished his AA sponsor was around to warn him off of any sleepwalking.
I slept like hell on the couch, tossing all night, thinking of Carmen upstairs without me, what to do about Dale and Rudy, and Eloise Horton and her stupid F-due reports. Listening to the last storm’s slender tailwind blow cold and hollow through the cracks in the house and wondering if it would shift around offshore and make for surfable waves by morning. I didn’t need the alarm clock, for when I heard Albert taking a leak sometime around six-twenty, I was already awake, watching the shadows of leaves tickle the ceiling, and I zipped upstairs and quietly grabbed him before he could stumble back to bed. We pulled on our wetsuits in the kitchen, got our boards down from the garage rafters, and headed down the alley toward the sea. Max was pissed about being left behind. I told him too bad. Although Albert had surfed with me probably thirty times in the two years I’d been seeing his sister, he was still a novice, and I needed to keep a close eye on him. The last thing I needed was Max eating some early-morning carpe diem yoga boy’s bamboo mat or chasing a surf fisherman up a lifeguard tower just as Albert took an unexpected tumble. The big Rottweiler didn’t take it well, turning his back on our expedition by the time we reached the garage, and I made a mental note to make it up to him.
The wind had died sometime before dawn and the air had a bite. It hadn’t poured in hours, but the ground was still damp, the leftover rain puddles swimming with dead leaves. We walked in silence, listening to the upwelling rhythms of the surf, and had to scale a huge protective sand berm on the Southside beach to get a precious first glimpse. No one on the beach or in the water—Max would’ve given me his I–told–you–so look if he’d been here. Southside was thick and junky, the swells shifting and weaving as if the ocean were seriously hungover from last night’s howler. As we watched, the full dawn crept across the sand and striped our shadows down into the shorepound.
“N-n-no good, J.?” Albert asked.
“We’ll check Northside,” I said. “It’s never as big, and it might be cleaner.”
Northside was in fact smaller and better looking, but we had to wait another half hour before it cleaned up enough to ride. Shifting peaks were popping everywhere on the outside sandbars, mushing out, then re-forming into spinning little walls near shore. A few locals were out near the pier, riding the biggest outside peak. I stayed in the re-forming shorebreak with Albert for
about an hour as the sun climbed over the pier railings and the seagulls came looking for sand crabs in the shallows. At some point my session started clicking, and it seemed that everywhere I paddled, a nice line would lift before me and I’d spin and go, spin and go. Inching nearer to the best peak under the pier, each ride was like another groove sliding to center in an LP record. Slowly, I forgot about Albert.
“J., whas hapnin’?” a reedy young local named Stone Me Stevie called out, stroking past me, a wet thatch of blond hair half hiding his face. A wan mustache and the faintest shadow of a goatee had sprouted on his angular face since I’d last seen him in the water a month ago on Southside. It looked funny on him, like a kid playing with a marking pen to make himself Charlie Chan on Halloween. “You see Conlin?” he said. I looked about but couldn’t see my old friend Mick through the blinding morning surface sheen. I shook my head no. Stevie grinned. “Well, he’s out here, man! About fuckin’ time, you ask me.”
But I hadn’t asked him. “How’s that?” I said, knowing what the little prick meant but pushing him to say it. Mouthy little trolls like Stevie have a bad habit of engaging guys like me and Mick in their private little surf-zone battles, expecting us to back their occasionally boorish acts of aggression against outsiders just because we share the same zip code. I don’t surf to fight, nor does Mick, and I resent the suggestion that I am bound by my very nature to repeat myself.
Stevie shrugged. “Kook City out here every day, man. Gotta lay down the law sometimes.”
I met him with a glare. “Wow, Steve. Really taking a stand there, aren’t you.”
His oily blue eyes were vacant before the barb hooked into him. “Whatever, man.” He turned and paddled away toward the pilings, hooting at a rising set of swells.
I needed to reconnect with Albert, so I swung around and dug in for the first swell. Stevie had changed direction and was now coming hell-bent for the same wave, only from farther behind the peak. In surfing etiquette, this meant he had priority, but after our little exchange, I didn’t give a damn about priority, and when he saw the shit-eater on my face he pulled up instantly. Stevie probably knew I was planning to make him pay for his lame remarks with a fading bottom turn right across his shins—which was accurate, by the way.
“Aargh! Fuck, J., hey!” Then, “Go for it, J.!” The quick change of heart shouted in an obvious attempt to save face, as if he’d decided to give an older guy a free pass. I took a steep, rushing drop, thinking, Yeah, right, Stevie, I’ll go for it since you mentioned it. Pier rats like him never, ever share a wave with anyone.
The peak spun off and I rode low and tight to the wave face, powered forward as if cupped in the palm of a giant’s hand. Then the hand disappeared in a patch of deeper water farther inshore, but I pumped my board and stayed with it until the palm rose again over the inside bar, sweeping me through a series of speedy green sections until I was on the sand. Albert was eighty feet up the beach sitting on his board, almost doubled over it and looking winded. I checked my waterproof watch: 9:22. We’d been out a solid two hours by now and I figured he’d had it. My Jeep wagon would be ready at eleven. I unhooked my ankle leash. Time to head home and face the day.
The sand was moist and heavy from the rain, the texture of cold, gritty oatmeal, but it was warming by the minute. Albert was still immobile, head down as if he didn’t see me yet. He did something funny with his hand, like he was trying to blow his nose with it. I say funny because Albert is particular about his habits, fastidious even. He wouldn’t blow his nose on his sleeve, even in a wetsuit. Then I saw the streaks of red flowing out of his nostrils, the confusion on his face, and I began to run.
Dumping my board, I slid in, dropping to my knees. “Albert, what happened buddy? You okay?” Blood oozed through his fingers. He opened his mouth to talk, his teeth outlined in red. “Your stick hit you?” I was guessing he could’ve had an odd tumble in the soup, gotten whacked underwater. Freak accidents happen in surfing. My nose is a little flat in the bridge, like a boxer’s, from a whack I took underwater from a fallen rider’s loose long board years ago. The blow had nearly knocked me unconscious and broke my nose in two places.
“H-he, he h-h-hit me!” Albert sputtered, teary eyed. His shoulders quaked spasmodically.
My temper flashed. I wanted to shout something incoherent in the vein of What the fuck, what kind of cheap-shit, outrageous stunt was … But there was no one around, just Albert and his bloody surfboard and nothing but a shining February morning, a handful of distant heads bobbing like seals in the surf. I glared at the black figures with something approaching pity, the kind you feel when you come across a dying moth fluttering on the patio bricks and crush it under your boot to end its misery. Somebody was going to pay, and pay dearly.
“Who, man, who hit you?” My heart was revving beneath the black neoprene stretched across my chest.
“I … d-dunno, J.” I wrapped my arm around him to console him, but he kept quivering miserably. “Out there!” He pointed to the surf. “I didn’t … . I c-c-couldn’t s-see!”
I studied the wounds on his face and noticed the right nostril was far bloodier than the left. A contusion the size of a dime was swelling his upper lip just above the right corner of his mouth, where the fist had smashed into the thin layer of skin covering the upper gums and teeth. Albert said he hadn’t seen the guy who hit him. The damage to his face had this odd, sideways angle to it, as well. I figured he’d been punched from behind.
My jaw was clenched as I flexed my hands into fists. Pumping up. “I’ll find him,” I said. “Let’s go see the lifeguard, get you feeling better.” I helped Albert to his feet, carrying his board and mine under both arms. “Just keep an eye out for the guy. You see him, you tell me. Okay?”
He wiped his eyes and sniffled hard. “Okay.”
We trudged up the sand toward the pier parking lot. Across the lot at the foot of the pier stood lifeguard headquarters, a plain two-story cinder-block job with a narrow observation tower ringed with slanted black windows. That tower always made me think of prison yards and guards with machine guns, but now I was wondering whether someone up there had seen Albert get attacked, and I decided I would inquire while they fixed Albert up. Goops of blood dribbled down the front of his surfboard as we lurched through the sinking tufts of sand, grim as casket bearers. Christ, this was Albert’s first full day in Christianitos. Some welcome.
The Northside parking lot was sprinkled with cars with empty surf racks on their roofs, their owners at play. A pea green pickup loaded with fishing gear idled two rows back from the beach, a pair of Japanese men smoking cigarettes inside the cab, windows down. Nearer the pier and parked straddling two spaces was a dirty white van that used to be a mail or delivery truck of some sort, the kind with a big, low windshield, high-backed seats up front and double tires in back. Some amateur artist had hand-painted on the side of the van a black serpent hemmed in by a stylized, diamond-shaped border. Vaguely reminiscent of a rock-and-roll band’s insignia, the kind of stuff that was big on heavy-metal album covers in the seventies. A handful of guys milled about beside the van, some in wetsuits, the others in old jeans and faded tees. I didn’t recognize any of them. Inside the van and through the side door, rumpled clothes were piled high and a yellow box of Cheerios sat on a plywood countertop. Two of the surfers’ hair glistened and their feet were wet and sandy, the pavement puddled where they stood. One of them, a thick dark-haired guy with a three-day beard, puffed a cigarette with one foot resting on the front bumper and glared at me as we passed. He shook his head slightly and smiled coldly, as if to say, You can’t touch me, fuck. That was invitation enough for me.
I set down the boards, walked right into their space, and stepped up to the smirking one, startling him.
“You got something to say to me?”
“No.” He sounded defensive. “The fuck’s your problem, man?”
The others stepped back, sizing me up for a fight. Shit, four against one. A little too late
to be calculating odds, but I was still so jacked that the numbers hadn’t made me turn and retreat, as they should have.
“Hey, man, we can surf here if we want,” a tall, longhaired guy in a black Peterbilt ball cap said from behind me, his tone defensive. He looked familiar, like the panhandler from last night, but then, it had been dark by the ATM, so maybe not. “You don’t own the beach.”
“Did you swing on that guy?” I said to the one who’d smirked at me before, nodding at Albert. He didn’t answer. I made mental notes about whom I might be able to hurt first, and how. If I could disable two of them quickly, they’d have me two on one. By now the bravado that had marched me over here and into this thing was fading. Four on one, genius. Better put on your diplomat’s hat before you start eating your teeth.
Common sense was now screaming for me to get the hell out of there with a few strong words and a warning.
“I said, did you swing on—”
But then a third one, a big guy about my size frame with roly-poly arms and shoulders, had to go and pop off.
“Yeah, sure, man.” Nervous, but conjuring a smirk for my benefit. “Look at him, dude’s a retard,” he went on. “Yeah man, we’re real big on beefing retards.” All of it said loud enough for Albert to hear. Someone else snickered.
I hate that word.
The big roly one attempted to stare me down. It didn’t work. Well, fuck diplomacy, I told my rational self.
“You shouldn’t have said that,” I said. With that, the others spread out around me, but I stayed intent on the big one. I might well get worked, but he was going to pay first.
Maybe not—my peripheral vision caught the dark-haired one rushing me from the right. I snapped into a quick cross-step and a side-kick to his chest that cracked his breastbone with a clap and dropped him flat on his back. The big one was on me now with a right that had something on it, but I ducked and it glanced off my shoulder, spinning me. When he followed through on his right too far I stomped on his front foot, trapping him for a hard upper shot to his chin with the butt of my palm. “Kurt, what’s happening!” a girl wailed nearby. Two down and two, maybe three to go, I was thinking as a blow clapped my neck and right ear. My head was dizzy and my ear stung like hell as I fought to keep my feet. Another pair of hands, cold and clammy, clawed at my eyes from behind, and I reached up and broke a pinky, then maybe an index finger, snapping the bones until my attacker cursed and fell away. Someone kidney-punched me and my breath was suddenly gone. I swung viciously, missing, but my free hand caught a handful of long hair on the backswing and I yanked the guy’s head down and punished him with a knee to the face. Pure luck, but I’d take it. Three down.
