“Pat Curren? The guy who rode Waimea for the first time?”
“The same. He’s about seventy now. Marco snaked the wave of the day from him.”
They picked up Wendy’s camera gear from Isabel’s (old Nikon F2 with motor drive, 500mm lens, tripod, and twenty rolls of thirty-six-exposure Kodak PLUS-X; she wouldn’t be caught dead using digital) and rode out through the green, flowering desert. From a rise about a mile from the break, they could see the ruler-straight ridges marching in from the horizon under a glassy surface, and the break itself was shrouded in spume. A big storm was brewing off Cabo Corrientes, about seven hundred miles south, sending beautiful, regular wave pulses out in every direction.
They negotiated the flooded estero, past the mired jeep, past the palm grove around Garth Murphy’s ranch. Clamato got out to engage the hubs, and they hauled through deep sand ruts to the small village of tents and four-wheel-drive camping rigs in the dry wash short of the break. A crowd had gathered on the sand, silhouetted against a wild backdrop of swirling creamy soup. Nobody turned as they walked up, and Wendy unfolded the tripod and screwed the camera into place. Amazingly, she had the field to herself—there were no other cameras.
Between sets. The surfers were specks almost at the horizon, sitting on their boards waiting for the next one. She could count only four, and Clamato reeled off their names: Doyle with the red gun, Curran with the natural, Murphy on bright green, Marco Blanco with the red nose and the black suit. All veterans.
She poked Clamato in the ribs. “You going out again?”
“Gotta go save the jeep. You?”
“Think I could handle it?”
He gave her a half-smile. “No problem. If you were in shape.”
“Say no more. I haven’t surfed in weeks.”
“It shows,” Clamato said, smiling a bit crookedly, turning back to the ocean. “Ho shit.”
“Outside,” someone yelled, and the four surfers swiveled their boards and scratched for the horizon, up the dark blue face of the first wave like tiny black water striders on a rapid. They all made it, and then the wave feathered, curled, and peeled off in a perfect double-overhead tube. Clamato groaned. “God, I hate to see an empty wave.”
The second wave was bigger, but all four of the surfers made it again. Marco Blanco and Garth Murphy were establishing a lead.
The third wave was about the same size as the second. “Doyle’s going for it,” Clamato said, and Wendy zeroed the camera in to see Doyle sit back, swing his board toward shore, let the peak lift under him, take a couple of strokes, and pop to his feet in a low crouch.
“Get this,” Clamato said. “Backdooring at twenty feet. Don’t see that too much. Around here, anyway.”
Still crouching, Doyle shot straight down the long blue face like a downhill racer. The peak was to his right, and when he reached the flat he cut sharply toward it, trimmed forward, and tucked again as the moving face pulled him up onto it. Easy and fluid, as in a toy wave at Malibu. “Classic Doyle.”
Wendy pressed the shutter button and the motor drive began to click off exposures as the peak feathered and curled ahead of the speeding figure, then a backwash off the beach from the previous wave made it jack. Eye to the eyepiece, camera clicking. “He’s not going to make it. Pull out. Pull out.”
“Too late. He could straighten out and prone it in, but he’s not going to. That’s Doyle.”
Doyle trimmed straight down the line as the peak closed over him and he disappeared in a white explosion. Some of the girls screamed, and Wendy released the shutter button. The wall of churning soup was almost as high as the wave, bright and beautiful in the sun.
Doyle’s red board surfaced first, and finally his black head some distance away. “Broke his leash.” Doyle stroked toward his board as the next wave feathered and broke and another thick wall of soup rumbled down on him. He reached the board just ahead of it, pulled himself on, and disappeared again.
Glimpses of the red board could be seen in the frothing soup, and when it finally rushed up the beach and sucked back, the board with Doyle anchoring it stayed high and dry on the sand. Then Doyle was on all fours, heaving and retching. “He’s your friend. Aren’t you going to go help him?” It seemed to go on and on.
“He’s okay,” Clamato said. “I was with him for a while last night at Shut-up Frank’s. He’s operating with a hangover and four hours of sleep. Just getting rid of the poisons.”
Clamato left with Doyle and the Mexican kid to pull the jeep out of the water and then take Doyle to the Centro de Salud to get his foot sewed up: the board’s sharp skeg had sliced it to the bone. Wendy sat by herself near the camera, hugging her knees and watching Marco Blanco on the waves. A big day. Big Sunday. Portentous, yes, but still … maybe things already had gone too far. Maybe it was too late.
If only Isabel were here to give her advice, support, and love, but Isabel was in Mexico City for a few days delivering a batch of paintings to her dealer.
She smoothed Isabel’s shift over her knees, sniffed it, and felt a ripple of warmth lap over her skin. Her nipples smarted. Sex with Isabel was everything that sex with Marco had not been: tender, gentle, full of understanding and sweet anticipation. Pregnancy aside. Or maybe not aside. That thought was a little prickly. But even the prickle was tender.
Curren and Murphy came in, and four other old-timers went out, so now there were five. She could always tell when Marco was up because of his style, though she didn’t shoot him. He fought the wave instead of going with it like the others, which made for some dramatic encounters but wasn’t pretty to watch. He was getting more rides, picking up the smaller inside waves as well as the big ones outside, never getting caught. Since she’d been watching his etiquette had seemed acceptable, though there had been some grumbling on the beach about the Curren episode.
Not far away from her, a handsome black-haired kid about seventeen was being zipped into his spring suit by an older man who looked like his father. “Look, Tommy,” the older man was saying, “you’re great on the thruster, but I wouldn’t use it today.”
“I used it that big day at Trestles. It worked fine, Dad, you gotta admit.”
“Nobody better that day than you. People still tell me about that tube. But those were twelve feet, these are twenty. Some of them, anyway. Everyone out there now is on a gun.”
“It was fifteen at Trestles,” Tommy said. “Everyone said so.”
“Whatever. This is bigger. And this is a Pipeline wave, no margin. Trestles will always forgive you. Look, that gun of Garth’s? The Bean? It would be perfect for you today.”
“The Bean’s a great board, Dad. I know you shaped it, but …”
The older man cocked his head.
“It’s just not my style, Dad. You know? My board’ll work for me.” He slapped his father on the shoulder and grinned. “I’m gonna make you proud.”
The kid’s board was under six feet, a needle-nosed thruster with black rubber footpads and what looked like a Grateful Dead logo. He struck a pose with it under his arm at the top of the steep sand bank carved out by the surge, waited for a lull between sets, then slid down the bank and charged into the water on the back of the last incoming wave. They watched him paddle strongly, duck dive under a line of soup, paddle, duck, paddle, and finally he was out with the others. No problem. “That kid could paddle all the way to Hawaii,” his father said.
It was a long lull. The father sat cross-legged on the sand, eyes fixed, every muscle tense like a dog waiting for a Frisbee. His hair was thick and curly like his son’s, and every once in a while he pulled the nail of his thumb across his lips. Like Belmondo in Breathless, Wendy thought. There was no mother in sight. Garth Murphy came over and sat down with him, pouring sand from one hand to the other and chuckling about Doyle. Farther down the beach, Curren was playing with his two-year-old son, sliding down the steep cutbank with him, then picking him up and throwing him back to the top just before the soup came in. Curren’s wife or girlf
riend, who looked forty years younger, was always there to grab him. Looking at the child, Wendy could feel a thought trying to sneak its way into her brain and blocked it again. But this was getting harder.
Another set came through, and Tommy picked up an inside wave and wailed on it. His style was as fluid and graceful as the old-timers’, but his maneuvers were more like Marco’s: cutbacks, off-the-lips, laybacks. Opposite Marco, he made hard things look easy, and he did one or two things that looked entirely original. When he pulled out at the end, he and his board flew ten feet into the air, and everybody watching from the beach clapped, yelled, and waved. His father’s face looked like he was in church. Wendy began to shoot his rides with growing excitement: she was getting something special, it was obvious. The torch was being passed right there in front of her camera, and she was privileged to get it all, five rolls and counting.
The first wave of the next set was a monster, bigger than anything she’d seen so far. Three of the five surfers dove off their boards halfway up the face, and two made it over, forcing their way through a curling lip that tried to grab them and hurl them twenty-five feet down onto rock-hard water. The abandoned boards bounced and flew around in the soup like matchsticks, and the heads of the swimming surfers showed black as they stroked for shore. One board had broken in two by the time it was thrown up on the beach. A couple of bystanders dragged the others clear.
As Wendy frantically reloaded, Tommy and Marco scratched over the tops of the next two and finally seemed to be in the clear. Marco took the deep position, with Tommy about twenty feet to his right. They sat and waited, rising and falling on the mountainous swells that made them look no bigger than terns. The telescopic lens determined who was who. “Marco’s too far into the pocket,” Garth Murphy said to Tommy’s father. “Tommy’s in the perfect spot. That’s where I’d be. If I was out there. You trained him good.”
“You were out there,” Tommy’s father said. “You got some good ones. That last one was sweet, the way you got around that section.”
“Shit. I’m getting too old for this kind of thing. I wish I was Tommy’s age again.”
“So do I, baby.” Never taking his eyes from his son. “So do I.”
Then the two of them got to their feet, and Wendy swung the camera at them, clicked off a series, swung it back.
The little crowd silently watched the swell rise, standing out above the rest even at a quarter mile. The two tiny figures turned and began to paddle toward it. “Okay, now stop,” Garth whispered, and the two figures stopped. “Tommy’s wave.” But both figures swiveled their boards as the face began to lift, and Wendy started the motor drive.
They rose slowly as if on an old-time elevator, the peak of the wave between them but closer to Marco, who started paddling two-thirds up the face. Wendy focused on him. “Sit it out, Tommy,” his father said. “Let the asshole kill himself.”
“Marco doesn’t have a chance,” Garth said. “Tommy could go.”
“No,” the father said. “There’ll be other waves.”
Marco took a few more strokes and popped to his feet, angling his board so his take-off was across the face rather than straight down it. The peak was beginning to jack. “He’s going over the falls,” Garth said. “Holy shit.”
A count of two and the peak closed over him. He was gone. Wendy panned to Tommy, out on the shoulder, starting to paddle. He was on his feet, soaring down gracefully as Marco blew out of the tube toward him like a bullet, straining for every last bit of speed while the camera clicked away.
The empty wave continued to peel off perfectly as if in slow motion. The beach was silent. Wendy could see Curren running for his big board, charging with it into the water, struggling against the soup and getting thrown back on the beach, Garth grabbing the nearest thruster and slowly duck diving his way out, followed by two others. The father swimming, ducking, swimming, and getting nowhere. One head was showing in the creamy white water where the huge wave had first broken.
When the lull finally came, there were five rescue people in the water towing their boards by the leashes, diving, resurfacing, diving again. Tommy’s thruster had washed up, cut cleanly in two as if by a Skilsaw. A little way south, Marco’s red-nosed board, intact, floated just outside the shore break.
When Marco came ashore, Tommy’s father was waiting for him. They rolled up and down in the breaking waves until a group of bystanders pulled them apart. The father kept silently struggling until four of them laid him on his back in the sand, one on each arm and leg. Even then he kept lifting his head to look out to sea. Marco got to his feet, glanced up at Wendy, still standing behind the tripod, and walked away down the beach to where his board was still floating.
Her tears came without warning, floods of them, shocking herself. She’d never cried this way before, at least not since childhood. Oh God, the father’s face! Every time she got a grip, she’d see it again and start over. A small group of bystanders, mostly young men, were blaming Tommy for dropping in. Well, sure, others said, but he couldn’t see into the curl. The odds were a hundred to one, against. How was he supposed to know?
And Marco had had time to change course and miss him. “The guy just kept going, straight as a fucking arrow. He could have cut. He could have. You know he killed a guy in a bar fight? One scary dude. You see him snake Curren’s wave?”
“The father’s probably going to file charges. Assuming the kid’s …”
“Oh, he’s gone. It’s been what, an hour? They’ll be lucky to find the body in this stuff. But fucking Marco will get off. We’re in Mexico, right? And he’s half Mexican. Plus his mother’s married to a judge. Plus how do you ever prove he did it on purpose?”
One kid turned to look at Wendy and her camera, then they all were looking. One of them asked if she got the shot.
She shook her head ruefully. A no-brainer. She told him she’d run out of film right at the last minute.
As an onshore wind rose with the waves, one by one the searchers proned in. In an hour the break was impassable, a churning white cauldron as far out as you could see. No sign of the boy. Wendy walked back to town alone on the beach, scanning each incoming breaker and seeing not just the father’s face but Marco’s, as he’d looked up after the fight and seen her standing behind the tripod, watching.
A big day for sure, and now she was going to act on it. You better act fast when you make a decision. It might be the wrong one.
First thing Monday morning in the little phone booth, her gynecologist’s voice from Encinitas seemed rudely loud. “Well … congratulations. But Jesus Christ! What took you so long to call?”
“Well, to begin with, my car blew up and I didn’t want to leave it. It’s still in the shop here, in fact.”
“Your father’s old Mercedes?”
“Yes. The fifty-six.”
“You’re coming up on three months, Wendy. Have you seen anyone there? Any, ah, doctor?”
“No. I’ve been feeling okay.”
“Nausea? Tiredness?”
“Well, yes. But that’s getting better.”
“How’s your weight?”
“I don’t have a scale.”
“I mean, are you showing yet?”
“I don’t think so. Nobody’s said anything. But I definitely am … bigger.”
The gynecologist was silent again. Wendy listened to the hiss of the connection and then said quickly: “I want to terminate it.” She hadn’t even recognized her own voice.
“Terminate it?” The gynecologist’s voice had a frightening edge.
“I mean, I just can’t—I’ve got to. Things, ah … It’s not too late, is it?”
“Almost,” the gynecologist said coolly. “You should have made this decision months ago. Are you absolutely sure?”
Tears were coming. Yesterday seemed to have loosened the floodgates. Crying felt weirdly good, she was di
scovering as she sobbed and sniffled into the phone. Cry your troubles away. Whereas a few months ago she would have despised herself.
“Wendy?” The gynecologist’s voice now sounded a bit impatient. “How soon can you get up here?”
“What? Oh … I’ll have to check the flights. It’s not easy; there’s only this one public phone and no directory.”
“I’ve got a good travel agent here. Call me back in ten minutes, okay?”
Wendy pressed the phone’s disconnect lever, but kept the phone to her ear so people outside would think she was still on the line. “Hello, Claire?” she said into the dead transmitter. “It’s me. Is there something you wanted to tell me?” Listening. “Oh, really? Well, that’s very … Thanks for letting me know. How long has it been going on?” Listening again. “Well, congratulations, Claire. By the way, I have some news of my own.”
She was crying again, or maybe she’d never stopped. Dissolving in tears, like some teenaged girl, some … on and on. What could the people outside be thinking? Woman crying into phone, very natural. Finally she dried her eyes, squared her shoulders, put the phone on the hook, and left the booth. “I’m sorry, Pilar, we got cut off. Can you reconnect me to the same number?” Pilar nodding, with the same impatient, amazed expression she always had with Wendy.
This time, the gynecologist’s voice sounded almost motherly. “Okay, Wendy. It’s all set. You have a reservation from La Paz to LA at 8:30 ayem Thursday on Aero California. You’ll have to buy the ticket, so get there extra early. The flight gets in at 11:35. You have a room at the Standard on Sunset because I know you like it. At two you have an appointment at the Pre-Term Clinic just down the hill on Santa Monica. You can walk there. I had to talk them into it, but one of the doctors is a personal friend and she’ll do the procedure. You have five days reserved at the Standard. Okay? I’ll come up to see you on Friday, the day after the procedure. I’m sure everything will be fine. But you’re going to need to take it very easy for the rest of the time. You’re no spring chicken, you know.” She sighed. “You’re very lucky, Wendy. Couple more days, and not even my friend would have done it.”