Kook

by Peter Heller

  Dave was a sport-fishing captain and Leesa was a Realtor and interior designer. They looked to be in their forties, and had been surfing since grade school. They came down here to the bay as often as there was a swell and they could get away.

  “Pretty good front porch,” I said, gesturing at the burning pink layered over a fading blue. “What a color.”

  “That’s Pittsburgh 2247,” Leesa said.

  “Huh?”

  “Pittsburgh Paints. That’s the number of the paint chip. Perfect match.” She said it without a trace of irony. The colors over the ocean had now deepened. They were spectacular.

  I stared at her. She was smiling like a winning contestant. “Wow.”

  She closed both her eyes in a double wink. “I’ve been doing interiors for a long time.”

  I felt like I had just levered myself over a mountain ledge and discovered a guru in a loincloth. These two had something I would never, ever have.

  Standing there on the soft dust, between Dave and Leesa and a whole sky full of 2247, probably muted now to something like 2234, I thought, Damn, Self. What has all your fancy education got you? That finely honed critical sense, that overdeveloped sense of irony? Huh? You will never have what these two have: the ability to take things literally, at face value. The sunset, the wave, the gin and tonic. The tight tarp. The simple limpid contentment that clearly brings.

  I thought, You don’t tighten your tarp to the tautness of a drum, because you are telling yourself, What does it matter in the end, existentially? Well, maybe it does matter.

  Kim had it. Every day she carefully put on sunscreen. She took doctors’ orders literally. Every day after surfing she lathered herself with moisturizing cream. She stopped at all stop signs. She was not worried about anything. Once, on your first camping date, you took her fishing up a mountain creek during the height of fall colors in western Colorado. You took a couple of bikes, and on the second day you biked up a winding dirt road to the top of a pass, and there were ridge after ridge of rocky peaks skirted with blazing yellow aspen forests. The sky arched over it like blue enamel. Kim’s breath made a sound, an involuntary bleat. She said, “Oh. That’s pretty as a postcard.”

  And you, you big idiot, looked at her sideways with the harshest judgment, and considered right there, as you were swamped with beauty, both hers and nature’s, whether you should be seeing a woman who said something so unsophisticated.

  Well, it was exactly like a postcard. You didn’t consider that she grew up in a family that did not speak at meals, that had no real conversation. That as a toddler she learned her English from television because her parents couldn’t speak it. She did not have the verbal arsenal you have, buddy. She never learned the rhetorical hijinx of sarcasm, irony.

  And Dave and Leesa were nice. They listened when I told them the sum total of our surfing experience and they said that if we came out early in the morning, they would line us out on the wave. They said that this, in front, was Third Point, and that Kim might enjoy Second Point more—still a very long wave, but smaller, gentler.

  I thanked them. I was all shook up. I passed the balding guy at the Volvo. He held up his spoon again. He, too, smiled, but with closed lips, with something held back, maybe a hint of self-mockery, for his own protection. I recognized one of my own. I veered in like it was a pit stop.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey.” He put down the spoon. “You from Colorado?”

  “Yeah. We spent a few weeks in Huntington. We’re just learning, making our way south, hitting the best spots.”

  “Cool. Want a beer?”

  “Don’t do it.”

  “You a friend of Bill W.?” That’s code. It’s the Alcoholics Anonymous secret handshake.

  “Yeah. You?”

  “Nah, but my last girlfriend was. Here.” He reached into a cooler, tossed me a Sprite. I liked this guy right away. “Pull up a chair.” He pushed an aluminum-framed folding chair with his foot.

  “Okay, for a second.”

  He covered the pot and turned off the burner, came around with another chair, and set it beside me. “Fuckin’ L,” he said, lifting his can of Dos Equis to the sky.

  “Fuckin’ L.”

  I sipped my Sprite and I felt happy. This guy was my instant friend. This was one of the most beautiful damned places I had ever been. Not just the view, the cliffs, the bay, the desert behind, the coast across the water marching away into territories of the lifting moon, but also the gentle air, the fragrance, a lucid quality to the light. And I felt an immediate kinship with this guy, Jay, though we had traded only a dozen words.

  Kim walked over in her long sleeves and loose pants and Jay got her another chair and a pop. We sat in a line as before a film. It was dusk. Sharp-winged birds flitted and veered in the half-light, peeping softly. Nighthawks. Their white wing bars blinked. Vespertine. We heard the waves breaking along the cliff. It rose in a long ever-renewing hush. Without saying a word, we were reduced to silence, the way a certain church will command it. The colors faded and darkness rose around the swollen barge of the moon like a swift tide and floated her higher.

  “Where are your buddies?” I said finally.

  “Still surfing at Second Point. They are beginners and they’ve caught the fever. With this moon, no telling how long they’ll be down there.”

  Dawn. I stood on the top of the cliff with my instant coffee in the half-light and I believed. In the perfect wave. Dave and Leesa were already out, the only ones. The waves arrived in that flawless long rip. I watched Dave’s shadow rock back on his funboard, spin, nose in the grainy air, lunge forward, and hook onto a wall of water that stretched across the cove and looked like it was smoothed with a mason’s trowel. A bat flitted over me. His leathery wings made the softest flutter on the sharpest cutbacks. He was surfing, too. Then Leesa took off. I timed her. For half a minute husband and wife, shadows only, sledded in tandem down the two waves. Sliding across to my left, about thirty yards apart. She made graceful swooping arcs to the lip and back down to the bottom. Ahead of her, he made sharper, almost slashing cutbacks. Like the bat. They moved, one behind the other, like the elaborations of a single thought. Maybe that’s how they knew what the other was about to say about my camper. Forty seconds. That’s how long her ride was. Forty seconds. Count it, with the full Mississippis between, it’s a hellacious long time to be at peak ecstasy. My longest ride so far had probably been about ten.

  At the end, way down to my left, almost to the beach, the wave subsided until it was swishing against her knees. In the wrung-out shoulder wash, she just sat down on her board. Like stepping off a magic carpet. Meanwhile, the ocean was in a quiet labor. Her voice was in the gulls who whimpered and cried. The bloody sun crowded and breached the surface of the sea like a birth. Hit me full in the face with a wail of light.

  Time, time to go. Before the crowd. Three more surfers were already paddling out.

  This is where Kim drives me crazy. If I was going to have a religious experience today I had to beat all the others to it.

  I trotted across the packed dust to the van. Her bare feet hung down from the top, rubbed against each other. I could tell by the rhythm she was putting in her contacts. She was humming. She still had to braid her hair. Cover every inch of exposed skin with sunscreen. Stretch on her rash guard. Meanwhile, every minute she dallied, another surfer launched from the beach. I could feel them behind me. A steady trickle of barefoot surfers walking up the bluff, boards in hand, hopping over the edge onto the slippery-smooth ladder of broken rock. I could feel the knot of surfers at the takeoff zone growing into a flock, then a crowd.

  “Ting.”

  Break in hum. “Hi, Ting!”

  “Ting, we gotta get moving. It’s already getting crowded. The wave—the wave is like incredible.”

  Taut silence. No hum, no foot movement, not even a twitching toe. The sense that my very survival was at stake. I mean that if I didn’t get down that cliff and out into the water right now I may
miss my salvation. It was that critical.

  Finally, a world-weary sigh floated down. A rare sound from my new wife. Low-register, kinda scary: “Go. Just go. I still have to eat something. Lather up.”

  “But … but … I need to help you down the cliff. It’s pretty steep.”

  “Go! Come back in forty-five minutes and help me. Okay?”

  “You sure?”

  “Go! I’ll wave from the cliff. Scram.”

  “Okay, okay. I love you so much!”

  “Whatever. Jeez.”

  I could tell by the tone of that last exclamation that she had forgiven me whatever it was that I needed forgiving—maybe just being self-centered and compulsive—and I was suddenly gleeful again. I shucked the two 9–0 longboards from their bags, waxed them fast, leaned Kim’s against the wheels, waxed side away from the new sun, grabbed my rash guard from the backseat, and ran to the edge of the cliff trail where I joined three others—and over we went like lemmings.

  BIG BILL

  It was the first time I’d ever seen a surfer hit another. They were yelling. Top of the cliff. Both holding their boards in their right arms. The afternoon wind carried their words out to sea. Bill was a mountain. He lowered his big shaggy head and struck the guy in the chest, left-handed. This guy dropped his board to the dirt, then joined it. Like he’d been shot. Bill just stood there, growling and blinking. The man sat up, shaking his head, wondering how his universe had altered. Bill turned, walked to the notch in the cliff, went over the edge.

  I was just coming in from an afternoon session. Kim was down at Second Point, where she had discovered there were a few other beginners and the waves were easy. Yesterday afternoon, an older, bald man had seen her struggling and paddled over. “Follow me,” he said. “We’ll ride one together.” He pulled her away from the crowd, out onto the shoulder a bit. “Right here, just wait. Okay, here comes our wave, nobody’s taking it, let’s go. Follow me, aim your board a little to the right.” They both paddled, both took off. The wave was just over waist-high. It caught Kim with a gentle but firm push, and before she knew it her board was sledding in a shallow free fall to the right. She just hopped up. The man was just ahead of her, looking back. “Yeah!” he cried. I watched the sweet wave lap at her legs. Out ahead of her was a paradise of smooth green wall. Her board, somehow, stuck to it. She got ahead of the white break and simply glided, hands up and spread wide as if she were embracing the sky. She rode it behind the bald man all the way across the bay, forever, a lifetime. Probably a third of a mile.

  At the end he smiled broadly at her. Because he knew what she was feeling. “That’s it,” he said. “You’re a surfer now.”

  So last night, at dusk, the nighthawk time, I invited our neighbor with the Sprites over for a quesadilla to celebrate and we sat again on the three lawn chairs in a row, watching the unnumbered colors streak the west. Jay told us he was a librarian from San Francisco who quit surfing for ten years because he didn’t like all the aggression in the lineup. Not so much how others treated him, but what he himself turned into in order to catch a lot of waves.

  “It was changing me.”

  “Yeah, I understand totally.”

  “But I loved it too much. I missed it. I found a way to be out there and be kind. I learned to sit just inside and pick up the leftovers.” He smiled. “I actually catch more waves.” I turned and looked at him. Unbelievable aspiration for a surfer: To be out on the waves and still be kind.

  During the day, the fifty-odd surfers at Scorpion split up between Second and Third Point, roughly 30/20. The beginners went to Second because it was much easier to catch, tended to be smaller, and when you were done with your long ride you could pick up your board and walk around the beach back to the point. The bottom was soft sand and shallow, so mild that you could almost wade out to the takeoff point. It was almost as safe and easy as surfing at a wave pool.

  Better surfers liked to come down here, too, because of the sheer fun. Relaxing. The ride went on forever.

  One morning I walked down to Second Point with Kim and we surfed together. We were sitting down from the crowd, waiting for a wave that no one wanted. Often, these were as good as the best, they just developed later, and were a bit smaller. An old pickup drove down the sandy ramp onto the flat beach. A big Mexican man got out. Big, like hefty, generous-bellied, thick across chest and shoulders. And the color of a walnut. Shaped like a walnut, if a walnut weighed 230 pounds and had short legs like tree trunks. The man stood in the sun blinking for a moment, watching the wave. Then he slid his long longboard over the tailgate and walked into the water. No leash. He paddled right through the knots of the crowd, his board surging as if motorized. His arms were almost as stout as his legs; they moved powerfully in a two-cycle rhythm, independently from the rest of him, which was very relaxed. He smiled broadly at everyone he passed, his teeth blaze-white, his black hair gleaming. He went right to the point, right out past the farthest surfer in first position, far enough past him not to raise any hackles. Who, after all, could catch a wave way out there? It was way past the break, in smooth water. Might as well sit on a lake. The bigger the wave, the farther out it breaks, and no set waves today had been nearly that big.

  He galumphed into sitting position on his board, making his own waves. He seemed very unconcerned, three notches past nonchalant. His round head turned side to side as he took in the cliff, the bay. Without haste he turned his board, took four Herculean strokes, and just like that he was standing. He seemed to conjure the wave beneath him. There it was. Nicest set wave all morning. The crowd stared. Here he came, set like a rock, like an Easter Island statue, flying toward the masses. And then he lifted his back foot. The tree trunk of a man lifted it delicately behind him and spread his arms. He did the swan. It was one of the most extraordinary things I’d ever seen. He was sailing down the wave, through the awestruck onlookers, arched back on one foot like a diva.

  He smiled at everyone. Then he dropped his foot, turned backward, and rode like that for a while. Beaming as he passed, hands to his chest in prayer. He was some kind of aquatic monk, something spiritually ascendant, rotund with grace. He crouched and effortlessly stood on his head. His board sliced down the everlasting wave as if it had a mind of its own. He rode on his head looking forward and backward. At the end, with a nimbleness shocking in a man of his specific gravity, he replaced his hands with his feet and stood up. Ta-da. Rode the perfect wave to the beach. Stepped off, picked up the board, walked to the truck chatting to little Mexican kids as he passed them, and drove back up the ramp to the road.

  We laughed. I felt a warm smile roll all through me. The surfer had transformed the morning. Some teenager yelled at Kim, “It’s yours!” and she caught his wave. I went back up to the point below the lighthouse and caught the wave of my life.

  I was floating next to Jay the Librarian, thirty yards down from the big group of surfers at the point, and here came a firm, steep, muscular, rising dark berm of ocean. Someone outside had tried for it and messed up. I saw him wipe out, and then I saw the wave coming at the two of us, clean and huge and empty. I stared.

  “You, Pedro,” Jay said.

  “You mean that?”

  “You better hurry up.”

  I spun and dug into the water as hard as I could, thinking, Angle right, angle right, if you’re gonna catch this, angle right. Lift your chest, lift, lift, dig! Harder! Now drop! Drop head to the board.

  My chin hit the board so hard I got a bruise. The board dove like a bird. Falling. Away to the right. NOW! I popped up possessed. Fastest I’m sure I’d ever made. And I was standing. Oh, man. Out ahead, to the right, was this steep dark wall. It looked too steep. It was going to collapse any second. I could see the lip quivering, unable to sustain itself. When it fell I would be swallowed in white and that would be it. Without knowing where the impulse came from, I weighted heels, released the pressure of the right edge against the wave, and turned down. I sped straight down the face of the wave. T
he rush was spectacular. At the same time, the wave was breaking, falling white, crashing above, about to bury me. I crouched—someone had told me that made you faster somehow—and rocketed beneath the tumbling whitewater, racing it to the right. I had the speed. I aimed for the lip again without thought and shot upward, arcing like a bird peeling out. I felt like a swallow. That’s how swift and free. I’d made it! The break was thundering behind me. Let’s do it again. Release, free fall, skate the bottom out ahead of the break, turn up, hit the lip. This time I experimented with a more radical turn off the top, kind of letting my body lead the board, rotating torso left and letting it fall, and incredibly the board followed. It was my first real surfing turn. This is where one transforms into another animal. Like swimming with the sea lion.

  Finally I slowed—time ebbing back, the cliffs, the brightness returning, the bowl of sky, sphere of the world. The wave was dying out, breathing her last, a low crumbling, a release. I lifted my arms and fell backward into the shallow water. Hoisting the board, which now felt to me less like a Bruno 9–0 than a set of wings, I walked over the sharp lava rocks in the shallows to the beach. Climbing the slippery smooth blocks of stone, I came up over the edge of the cliff, where Leesa and David grinned at me from their lawn chairs. I knew how long my ride had been because I had timed hers the other day: about forty seconds. Really long.

  “Nice ride!” they said in synchrony.

  I smiled at them. Without irony. Without anything. Kinship and glee.

  A shout came from behind me. Like a bark. That’s when we all turned and Big Bill swung and the smaller man sprawled on the dirt beside his own board. Another barked invective and then Bill walked away, disappeared through the break in the bluff.

  That night I saw him in the bar, drinking at a table alone. One beer after another. Didn’t look perturbed, just massive, implacable, ringing with a self-imposed isolation.