This Is Who We Are

by Matt Christiansen

suddenly thinking of what to say. “The crown is cool and all, but we’re not kings. We’re just like you guys, but we happen to have a band. We’ll take the crown but it’d be a lie for us to wear it and try to act like we’re better than everybody else.”

  He then handed the mic over to Anne, who said, “I believe you have another song left…”

  The crowd roared and began to chant a mixture of “NoCal, NoCal, NoCal” and “One More Song, One More Song!”

  Anne and Jordan left the stage and both Moses and Lee walked back to the drum set. They spoke a few quick words of agreement before Mo doubled back to the front of the stage to scoop up his electric guitar. The crowd had long since hushed and the entire coast seemed to be listening silently, holding it’s breath to see what happened next.

  Suddenly there came through the speakers a deep thud as Lee struck first a standard kick bass and then his deeper one in succession. “Thud, thudthud.” The noise echoed across the now almost still water, out into the ocean. As he repeated this, Mo plucked a couple soft notes. They continued into “The Minstrel’s Prayer”, a dramatic change from the loud and rapid shredding that had taken place earlier. Now that they had demanded the attention of the entire coast, NoCal had something to say.

  Mo strummed a few chords that were much softer and more melodic, carrying back to their usual lighter territory. Lee provided a steady and unwavering beat as Moses serenaded the now entranced crowd.

  Presently the boys reached the bridge and Lee spiced up the beat as Mo’s voice reached its peak. As Mo sang, he scanned the crowd, searching for EmJay’s face.

  There was five seconds of dead silence as Lee’s drums faded out over the crowd and on into the ocean. It was broken at last by Mo’s plucking and the cheer of the crowd, captivated by the melodic serenade that was different but not stylistically dissimilar to the other songs making up their abbreviated set.

  Mo’s voice faded and stopped as he continued to strum, then fading into the gentle plucking which was accompanied by Lee’s unwavering beat. Presently, even the plucking ceased, leaving only Lee’s drumming and a mesmerized silence over the crowd. Then Lee began to add a beat in between his thuds. Then another. And another until it grew much more complex and the crowd began to move gently. They moved more and more loosely as Lee continued on with his drumming. The crowd finally broke into one last riot as Mo topped off the change of pace by strumming deep and crisp chords to Lee’s improvised beat. The result was a break down that sent the audience into a final frenzy.

  They held the breakdown for a good thirty seconds, breathing life back into the crowd. Then without warning Mo silenced his guitar sharply, leaving the singular “doom” of Lee’s deep kick echoing out across the water.

  - The Graveyard of the Pacific -

  The Phoenix carved its way northward along the coast, weaving this way and that, turning as it pleased at the command of Moses. The hardened brown and orange rock faces to the right of the boat were particularly ragged looking, even more so than usual. The coast was rugged, but not barren. There was life everywhere above the cliff face in the form of trees and vegetation. The water was clear and though the boys couldn’t make out the specifics of the sea bed, there was a crystalline quality to it.

  “Okay, so let’s not total the boat like we did last time,” Lee joked over the din of the twin motors. “You remember where that rock was?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Mo replied lazily, “I remember exactly where it was and I’m telling you it wasn’t a rock!”

  He abruptly killed the motors and The Phoenix lulled to a glide in the water. The boat stopped just as they cleared a point in the coast and without wasting any time Lee picked up a rather jagged, painful looking object tied to a rope and heaved it over the side of the vessel with a plunk. The rope sank down for what seemed to be around twenty feet before snagging onto the bottom.

  “Here we are” Mo said as Lee gazed, awestruck, down into the water, “the Graveyard of the Pacific”.

  Below the boat, in the clear water there could be made out what at first seemed to be white rocks. Upon further examination, however, they could be identified as hundreds upon thousands of bones belonging to all manner of deceased aquatic life. They beheld the seemingly endless underwater graveyard, bleached white bones picked clean by subterranean scavengers. Everything was tinted a watery blue, with wriggling lines riddling the entire aquatic universe as the sunlight penetrated the water. The area was the converging point of two underwater currents that ran parallel to the coast on each side, meeting and redirecting seaward as the shoreline jutted and came to a point. The bodies of animals that died for miles up and down the coastline were carried via the underwater currents to where they would be dropped at what was locally known as the Graveyard of the Pacific.

  As the boys watched, they saw the inevitable sharks patrolling the water, roving in hopes of scavenging a free meal.

  “Did you bring the flowers?” Lee asked, not taking his eyes off of the seabed.

  There was a certain species of flower that Mo’s grandmother had always sprinkled around the water before she would allow the kids to go swimming. She insisted that it was a special flower, the scent of which repelled sharks. Moses had never been able to determine how much truth there was to this myth but the flowers grew abundantly around the house so whenever the boys ventured out they made sure to bring a few flowers for good measure.

  “Sure did.” Mo replied, “Did you bring Page Avenue?”

  The combination of the flowers in the water, the magnetic beads that adorned the boys’ crudely fashioned jewelry, and loud bass seemed to keep even the most curious of sharks at bay and was used as the boys’ default defense.

  Lee produced the CD and as he slid it into the player that they had installed, Moses leapt from the small vessel out over the water, a length of rope tied to his ankle. Just before he plunged into the water he heard the introductory drum beats of the album’s first track (ironically named “And The Hero Will Drown”) thundering through the mismatched speakers strewn around the boat.

  As Mo broke the surface of the water and plunged down into the cool Pacific, he could very well have been in an altogether different universe. The water of Northern California was cold and crisp. Those used to the warmer and safer waters of Southern California often asked the boys why they swam in such cold and shark infested waters. The nature of the coast along northern California was cooler and clearer than the densely populated waters to the south, much like the air. There was more life in these waters. More danger. More reality.

  Moses opened his eyes to get his bearings in the aquatic underworld and after a few moments he heard a dull concussion as Lee entered the water. Seconds after Lee met the water, they could hear the bass thumping from the boat. The Phoenix had, on its underside, a submersible waterproof subwoofer that had been rigged to be raised and lowered by a crude pulley system. It was usually carried up above the surface of the water but was, when diving, lowered so as to directly inject the water with the shark repelling bass.

  The boys then began to swim down into the aquatic graveyard, steadily approaching the seabed littered with bones and carcasses piled atop one another. As Moses descended with the umbilical rope around his ankle, his eyes scanned the seabed until he found what he was looking for. Through the crystalline water he swam towards the remains of a shark atop a pile of bones, positioning himself directly above it before he quickly jutted up for air.

  He was followed to the surface by Lee who, after taking in a deep breath, said “Do you got one?”

  “Yeah, straight below me,” Moses sounded surprised that Lee hadn’t already picked out the shark head.

  “Let’s do it!” Lee gasped as he plunged back down, followed immediately by Mo.

  The two raced to where the shark’s head sat, mouth agape. Both the boys then produced pliers from the pockets of their board shorts and promptly began to work one by one on the teeth of the long deceased shark. Back and forth they wiggled the t
eeth until they were able to rip them out. Lee finished first and stowed the tooth in his pocket. As he shoved off to surface for air, Moses finished his tooth and followed suit.

  Up and down the boys swam, collecting shark teeth and coming up for air. By and by the jaws of the dead shark were picked bare and the boys returned to the Phoenix to empty their pockets and seek out a new shark.

  Being only fourteen years of age, the boys had no jobs and no longer got weekly allowances from Mack, who earned enough to support their family but not much more. They had since taken to “shark toothing”, a term coined by Mo, as a way of bringing in a profit to fund NoCal. The local surf shop in town paid two dollars per shark tooth that the boys brought them (which the shop then used to make jewelry that they turned and sold for anywhere from fifteen to twenty dollars apiece). There were never any questions asked as to where the boys got their teeth and it was often rumored among the more imaginative locals that the boys killed the sharks themselves before harvesting their teeth.

  As the boys treaded water they were approached by a dark blur circling their proximity from below. Noticing the visitor, Mo shot a glance over to Lee and offered, “Dude let’s check it out!”

  The boys ducked under the water to see a small, dark gray shark