Bluebird Rising

by John Decure

  We took my car, since the van wasn’t running. “How far along is she?” Carmen asked Kurt as I looked both ways before running the light at Warner and PCH.

  “About seven and a half months, I think.”

  Leanne Bleeker gave birth to a three-pound ten-ounce baby girl by a cesarean section just after two the next morning. The baby, whom they named Whitney, would fight for her life for five days in the preemie ward, but she gained weight steadily and the fluid in her lungs eventually cleared enough for Leanne and Kurt to take her home on a rain-slicked Sunday afternoon. Home meant Porpoise Way for the time being, until Leanne could heal and regain her strength and Kurt could find a paying job and save enough for a deposit on an apartment.

  Kurt wasn’t so bad, just a tad unfocused. In a way, his relaxed manner reminded me of myself at a younger age. We talked about what he could do for work, what kind of jobs had a future and which ones looked like dead ends. I bought him a suit for interviews, paid for a haircut, and took him to a job fair at the Long Beach Convention Center. Computers interested him, but he would need training at night school and that seemed like a more long-range goal. New car sales was the highest-paying noexperience gig around, and Toyotas seemed to sell themselves more than any other car. He applied at every dealer in the area, got on a few callback lists. In the meantime he worked around the house, doing chores and small projects that I just didn’t have the time to get to myself. Several times I offered to take him for a surf, but he always passed. He never spoke of the time he’d spent in the hospital because of me, nor did I offer any awkward apologies for that day in the parking lot at the pier. What was done was done, and there seemed to be little point in talking about it. As for his friends, it was unlikely that they would ever find acceptance with the pier crew, but they were welcome in my home and they came around frequently during the time he and Leanne were my guests.

  Carmen never stopped caring for Leanne and the baby, a timely distraction that temporarily put the brakes on our squabbling and also served to keep Albert and her under my roof a while longer, giving me time to make amends. With Carmen less available, I had more time to look after Albert than ever before. He and I bowled a lot, hit a few G-rated movie matinees, watched our share of Jeopardy on the couch together after dinner, and took Max to the vet for his shots and a flea dipping one weekend. But I surfed alone, early mornings, usually before he was even out of bed. It would not be until later that year on a summer trip to a desolate Mexican beach break that Albert would finally screw up the courage to carry a board down to the water and paddle out again.

  I didn’t see my friend Mickey Conlin in the lineup on any more early mornings at the pier, so when I ran into him one night at the magazine rack in the used-book store on Main, I asked him where he’d been hiding out. He told me he’d always promised himself that if it ever stopped being fun, he’d hang it up. I felt guilty for dragging him back into the surf of late just to have a little company, and for getting him into that scrape with Carlito’s bunch. Mick could only laugh at the notion that I was to blame. For him, the thrill had simply died, a long time ago. He’d always hated being an enforcer, but that was the role people saw him in. It was his legacy, and he no longer had the energy, or the interest, to live it down.

  Miles Abernathy and Yves Pasqual were named in a lengthy federal indictment for conspiracy to commit tax fraud. Although Abernathy eventually resigned from the practice of law with disciplinary charges still pending, the state bar did not fare well in the PR department. The disciplinary review panel remained loyal to their fallen leader and found enough new faults to proclaim the agency to be structurally unsound. Bar opponents devoured the panel’s three-hundred-page report, rejoicing at every nitpicking finding and renewing their cries for abolition. Some things never change.

  I can only assume that Rudy Kirkmeyer stayed in Seattle with his daughter, Kimberley. He called a few days after the ISO hearing and said he wanted to help pay for any funeral arrangements I made. I told him to call me in a few more days when I knew more about how they would proceed. I never heard from him or his daughter again.

  We buried Dale Bleeker in All Souls Cemetery in Long Beach a few days after Leanne and her new baby left the hospital. It was a pristine late-winter morning, the kind that native Californians take for granted. A feisty local storm had pushed through the night before, shaking the dead leaves from the trees and leaving the sky a screeching blue. The mass was sparsely attended. Mick Conlin made it solo. Georgette was a no-show, as were Dale’s coworkers from the DA’s office. A retired judge named Yablonski came and said some stirring words about the man he chose to remember, the legal warrior at the height of his powers. (Later, at the cemetery, Yablonski stepped over to me, the sour heat of Scotch on his breath, and admitted that he hadn’t seen Dale in going on ten years.) I also spoke of the man as I’d first glimpsed him, but I added that Dale had died a meaningful death in the service of others. That latter part got to Leanne, she later told me. She regretted having pushed her father away for the better part of a year, said she never really understood that he’d lost his marriage by standing up for her in his too passive way, not until it was too late. Now that she wanted to fix things between them, he was gone. It isn’t fair, she muttered on the way to the burial site, over and over. It goddamn isn’t fair.

  When we got home Carmen served coffee all around, but I’m not much on java and was of a mind to spike my cup with something smoother than nondairy creamer. Mick followed me to the liquor cabinet, then Kurt, then Albert, then Father Elden, the priest who’d said the mass. From this an impromptu wake evolved, something of a mocha milk-shake throw-down with Stoli and Kahlúa and Baileys Irish Cream doing all the heavy lifting. We toasted Dale as best we could by laughing and joking and fibbing and beating back the inevitability of death through a showing of sheer indifference until someone looked at his watch and said, Whoa, where did the afternoon go?

  Later on, when Kurt and Leanne were holed up with the baby again and Carmen and Albert were crashed on the couch and everyone else had gone home, I put Max on the leash and slid my one-speed bike into the alley. Yesterday’s storm had bumped up the surf overnight, and that glorious rumble was everywhere. But instead of the usual wave check down at the end of Porpoise Way, I pedaled west across town toward a tract of new homes I’d never before seen. Ten minutes later, I was walking the bike up the base of Spyglass Circle, cursing a steep pitch of blacktop that was more like San Francisco than westside Christianitos. When I reached the top I followed the street to the end. Big two-story residences ringed three-quarters of the bluff, but a prime lot to the left remained undeveloped. Still walking my bike, I made my way over to the lone open space and took in the view. Below me, the hillside dropped away precipitously. Clusters of ice plant trailed down from the curbside like stalactites, nothing but mud waiting farther downhill. At the bottom was another street with a sidewalk and a young magnolia climbing out of a concrete planter—La Costa Drive.

  I’d read the news clipping about Dale’s arrest enough times to know what it said, but I removed it from my shirt pocket, unfolded it, and read it yet again. Max sat on the curb and rested, his big jaws open.

  This was the spot where Dale had been when he’d made the colossal mistake of stepping out onto a tricky hillside to relieve himself, a career-ending move of the oddest sort. Observing the setup, one could say it was bad luck the way it all happened, for two schoolgirls to be walking by on La Costa at precisely the same moment that he slipped and fell, his member flapping in the breeze on the way down. But it was not merely chance misfortune that had brought Dale to this high place. He was buzzed, late afternoon on a weekday, not the first time a lawyer has done that but then, why here? He could have got shit-faced at a lot of other spots in town without putting his old Buick through the torture of chugging up Spyglass. The man I’d known briefly the past few weeks was more deliberate than that. There had to be a reason.

  I sat down next to Max and stroked his awesome b
lack head. The sea breeze was light onshore and flaccid, but it still carried a winter bite. In half an hour the reddening sun would skim the water and drop away. Zipping up my jacket, I admired the wide-angle view to the southwest that lay before me: six blocks of Northside real estate, from Fourth Street down to Main, a row of daunting beach homes along Ocean Avenue, and beyond their jagged roofline, a chunk of pier jutting into the blue expanse, big swells thrusting at its underside. And, wait—a sliver of pier parking lot, a few painted white lines, an outer fringe. Perhaps a favored spot for an outsider like Kurt to have parked his dilapidated van. God, it was a good half mile from here, but if Leanne was in that van, to Dale, the draw would be powerful. Yet it was too far to really see much, too removed? … .

  Perhaps the distance told the story, how a lifetime of forward progress could be halted, undone, then roll in reverse, quite literally beating a retreat to higher, safer ground, a hollow place on the outer margins of being. It shook me to think how easily one could lose everything, and suddenly I wanted to be back on Porpoise Way again, in a narrow little beach house with a bathroom full of loose earrings and face-scrubs and henna conditioners and fancy hairbrushes and an upstairs toilet that didn’t flush right because somebody forgot to read the sign and jiggle the handle, and a kitchen with yet another pile of dishes amassing in the sink and an empty box of my favorite cereal piled atop the trash that would need to be taken out before dinner, and a big dog barking and a tiny baby crying and a video no one was watching playing on and on in the living room.

  I mounted my bike and guided Max around the handlebars, but before I put my feet to the pedals, I looked back a final time, studying the ocean’s movements for a hint of what the morning might bring. White water slapped against the pier like silent shell bursts, but the Northside wave zone with its ubiquitous pack of surfers was hidden behind the big homes in the sand. Farther out, in deeper water, a dark lump of swell rolled through proud and unimpeded, a big bluebird gathering energy for its final push. Tomorrow, swell permitting, I might find an hour to slip out there beyond the others, to sit and rest and sort my thoughts and say a small prayer for the future, and wait, eyes scanning every shift and pulse and undulation, muscles twitching at the sea’s first whisper of a new beginning.

  Also by John DeCure

  Reef Dance

  BLUEBIRD RISING. Copyright © 2003 by John DeCure. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y 10010.

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  eISBN 9781429972772

  First eBook Edition : March 2011

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  DeCure, John.

  Bluebird rising / John DeCure.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-312-27308-8

  1. Public prosecutors—Fiction. 2. California—Fiction. 3. Surfers—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3604.E49B58 2003

  813’.6—dc21

  2002191968

  First Edition: December 2003