Andy stood when the wave began to lift him. It was going to break long and fast to the left, I could see. A section of the lip was ready to throw over in a wide barrel. He barely managed the hard drop. His bottom turn was sloppy and sapped his speed, so he pumped like a fool to make the first section. He shouted, like the Southern Baptist preacher he always wanted to be, “Jay-sus!”
It was a perfect wave, and this asshole, feet spread too far apart in a kind of yoga warrior pose, trying to turn like his legs were stuck in cement, went and wasted the gift he’d asked for.
Sammy Ray Gans had continued on at New Hope after I left. I didn’t like coming into contact with my past. I didn’t like anything that would return who I was to the view of who I am. But if anyone could tell me where to find Sammy, it was Andy. He’d said New Hope would always be there for me. Maybe this counted.
I called my old church as soon as I got home from Jimbo’s, still feeling wired and jangly from my conversation with Shaw. To my disbelief, the main line was the phone number I still knew by heart.
“I’m surprised,” Andy said when I got him on the line. “Surprised but happy to hear from you.” I didn’t buy it and bit my tongue. I told him I wanted to get in touch with Sammy.
“Sammy stopped coming here a few years ago,” Andy said. “Why are you trying to find him?”
I wasn’t going to tell him the truth, so instead I said, “Maybe seeing you made me want to dust the skeletons out of my closet.”
He made a strange, throaty sound. I didn’t know what to make of it. Then he said, “The only things I’ve heard aren’t good.”
“Maybe I heard Sammy’s in a bad place, too,” I said, “and I wanted to try to help the guy out. I mean, he was part of my team.” I’d meant to sound dry, but as I said the words they sounded genuine. A lump of feeling wedged in my throat like a cancer, but the emotional chemo switched on as automatic as breathing to keep it from metastasizing.
Andy replied without the usual shit-eating veneer to his words. “I can understand that,” he said. There was a long silence. “I’m not sure you want to find him, though.”
I asked why.
“After he stopped showing up, I met him a few times. Tried to counsel him back onto a path of righteousness. But he was a mess. And he didn’t want help. He made that very, very clear.” His voice brushed against a few raw notes, and he cleared his throat. “And you know as well as I do how little you can do for someone who makes that choice.”
It bothered him that he hadn’t been able to help. It should, but hearing it wasn’t what I expected. “Sure,” I said. “I’d like to find him anyway. He was a friend.”
“Look. I can’t—” Andy said in something of a whisper. “Ah, give me a minute.” He put me on hold abruptly and returned a couple minutes later, now all business. He read out the last address they had for Sammy, and it was a Ramona address. It matched Shaw’s imprecise directions to the general area where the parties were. Then Andy said he had to go and hung up without offering to lead us in some trite closing prayer, even though our halting conversation had led us across what I’d considered an incommensurable divide—had left me considering this weak selah.
13.
I SLEPT RESTLESSLY THAT NIGHT. WHEN I WASN’T SLEEPING I RAN THROUGH Shaw’s tale and tried to puzzle out exactly what kind of trouble Cindy was in—or Emily or whoever that flesh-and-blood person who’d been at my house was. That she was in trouble I didn’t doubt. Why I should take it upon myself to find and help her I didn’t question. I wasn’t thinking about Mike, wasn’t thinking about Aracely, wasn’t thinking about anything, if I could help it, but I couldn’t help myself from wanting to know where Cindy had gone.
When I woke in the morning, my arms were tense and sore like I’d been building a cinder-block wall all night. I made and drank a pot of coffee, fried some bacon and eggs, stuffed them into a tortilla, and drove out looking for Sammy. I knew I shouldn’t go alone but there was no one to go with, so I did.
The drive to Ramona took about an hour. The highway ran through the landlocked towns along the 78 freeway. Inland California all looked the same to me, a boring repetition of stucco, strip malls, industrial complexes, and master-planned communities behind stone-faced walls in which the price of each home could buy a county in most parts of America. I didn’t enjoy coming this far east. I liked the blue of the ocean, the bullshit of beach people. Inland California may as well have been Missouri, as far as I was concerned, and I planned to have a long, happy life of never visiting Missouri.
After a switch to the 15 and a trek down a side road, I was on a long thread of two-lane highway that would take you all the way to the Anza-Borrego Desert, if your interests ran toward dry places, pedophiles, elderly retirees with no income, or the flower bloom that turned out, for three weeks a year, a few colors on that martian craterscape. Threading through two mountains, my ears popped and I passed a ranch-style sign for something called the Lemurian Fellowship, oddballs among oddballs. Then I came to my turn and followed a winding road through half-burned-out oak and sycamore groves and horse corrals. These gave out onto an isolated trailer-park community. Then the landscape turned drier, and the houses were farther and farther apart, until there were moments that, past one place and before the next, none were in sight. I felt good and spooked and alone.
I passed a little tin-roofed place with a mailbox numbered 3779 and knew Sammy’s was next, though I couldn’t see it yet. I felt anxious, jumpy, and a little paranoid. It had been a long time, and everything about this felt wrong—but something kept me going.
On a rogue impulse, I pulled my truck off the road and parked it. I got out and locked the shell of the truck. Inside, the inland heat was melting the wax off my surfboard. The gravel ground beneath my feet as I picked my way through desiccated coyote bush. A quarter of a mile under the summer sun left me feeling like a Death Valley cowboy. My throat was an arid ridge even weeds knew better than to grow on. Maybe if I were wearing a Mexican poncho, maybe if it covered some iron plating tied around my torso, maybe if I were stanching the flow of saliva from my mouth with the stub of a cigar, maybe then I would have thought I was in the right place, doing the right thing. As it stood, I felt outlandish. But I was doing it. I kept walking. Somewhere in the hydroelectric dam of my basal ganglia, someone was throwing switches, opening sluices. It wasn’t me. I never felt less like me. But it wasn’t anyone else.
I crested a ridge and looked down upon a small house with red roof tiles baking in the sun. The house was at the end of a long dirt driveway. Taken together from above, the house and driveway made the shape of an easy-strike match. The house was a two- or three-bedroom. Off the back was a concrete slab bordered with potted plants. To one side was an inflatable teal kiddie pool with vapor rising from it and probably three rattlesnakes drowning in the stew. On the far side of the house was a detached garage with a green Tercel parked out front. Assuming the car was Sammy’s and that Sammy wasn’t just using but manufacturing again, maybe there wasn’t room for the car in the garage. Maybe it was full of chemicals and beakers and barrels. I didn’t know. I didn’t know just about anything. And since I didn’t know, I figured I’d wait and watch awhile. There’d been too many stories in the news about cops raiding meth labs only to find a tweaked-out Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid ready to shoot things out.
I knew Sammy when he’d cleaned up the first time. He used to slick back his hair and button his flannels all the way up and open folding chairs for the parishioners streaming in, used to sing loudly and terribly along to the worship songs, tears on his face—used to convince teenage boys in the full flush of hormonal disaster to hug their fathers, cook for their mothers, and pray on their knees every morning just by his testimony of a life where those things had been impossible, shared once a year on the stage before the whole church and more often for the smaller youth groups and summer retreats. He was a sweet guy. But nobody’s all sweet, and time is a caustic agent, stripping away sugar to u
nveil the bitter core.
After squatting in the pucker bushes for long enough to give my thigh muscles a good burn, a person came around from the front of the house. Even at this distance, I could tell it was him. Sammy was unusually tall, with spidery limbs protruding from a red Hawaiian shirt and blue running shorts. He wore M-frame glasses, just like he’d always done; they were the optical protection of choice among dedicated athletes, he used to say. In one hand he held a watering can, and he shuffled from pot to pot, pouring a bit on each plant.
After making the rounds, Sammy went inside through a back screen door. Okay, I said to myself. Okay. I picked my way back toward the road and then headed up the dusty driveway to the house. No going back. He might have already seen me.
The house could have been any tract home in the area built in the last thirty years, except it was missing its chromatically varied doppelgängers running in rows on either side of it and there were two gas-flame lamps installed by the front door. In the bright daylight I couldn’t see the flames, just a ghostly movement. It was a strange touch.
I knocked hard, three times, on the door. My mind moved to a place like prayer. It was unsettling to be there, familiar in a bad way, like returning to the bridge you almost fell from and then slipping on a stone. The nerves in my arms and legs prickled to life, ready to move—ready to hit something or run away from it. It was the feeling I’d had trying to back out of the machine shop the night Mike was killed, I realized, only now it was too late to retreat. The door opened and Sammy’s face appeared, sunburned and crimson over the muted red of his Hawaiian shirt.
For a man nearing forty, his skin was acne ridden and greasy. His eyes flicked, taking in different parts of me. I began to see myself as he would see me: with longer and grayer hair, the dry and worn skin of a man fifteen years older than the one he was trying to connect me with. Time is the final act of a tragedy that never ends: in Sammy’s mind it created this gaping, vibrating negative space out of the last fifteen years of my life; in mine it let me guess what-ifs about this friend before me, who he might have been if I had done otherwise.
The summer before I’d left the church, Sammy had been my assistant on a summer retreat to Lake Shasta with over a hundred teenagers. He’d run his own small group, took them out for boat rides, made sure the boys stayed away from the girls, that the girls stayed away from two-pieces—all the important things. But it was the last night, when I was giving my final talk from the deck of a houseboat to a group of kids on the beach, that came to mind now: how full and magnanimous I’d felt, tan and healthy after a week in the summer sun, telling these young people, “In Jesus, change is possible—profound, life-changing, life-giving change, if only you hand over the reins to His will instead of your own.” Then I looked over at Sammy, who beamed and nodded yes, yes, yes, like he would never stop. Now we both had, and change had come regardless, and undisguised.
I was starting to feel a dull, desolate tug of regret—at coming here, and for more, I’m sure—when Sammy smiled. His thin lips parted to reveal a set of immaculate, shimmering white teeth: perfect teeth, pristine teeth, the kind of smile you can’t help smiling back into on a face that would cause a dermatologist a spiritual crisis. Then he reached out with those Erector Set arms and took me into an embrace that I was unprepared for. Maybe I leaned into that hug more than I should have, given the circumstances, but I did. I hugged Sammy like the old friend he was, like I had done with the lost kid I’d first known.
“It’s so good to see you, man!” he said. “Oh, fuck, I can’t even tell you. It’s so, so good.” Sammy made an odd, satisfied sound as he squeezed me harder and then let me go. “Jesus Christ, man. Oh”—pointing to the sky apologetically—“sorry, you know me. Come in. Come in, man.”
I followed him, and my eyes strained to let more light in. The blinds were all drawn, and the air conditioner droned in the vents. “Shit, man,” Sammy said, “let me get you a drink. Coke? Water? Beer? What do you want?”
“Water would be great. Thanks.”
While he was in the kitchen, I looked around. It dismayed me to see that the living room was much like my own. The TV was a little bigger. There was a framed poster of Captain Planet on one wall captioned THE POWER IS YOURS! The main difference was the houseplants. They were everywhere. Ferns, aloes, cacti, succulents of all shapes and colors, philodendrons. On shelves, on small tables, on the floor. The only one that didn’t look healthy was the peace lily.
I thought about what Shaw had said. This didn’t look like a place where raging, drug-fueled parties were thrown. It looked like a place to play a geriatric round of pinochle. Cindy had said her last place was a dump, and this was that. But I couldn’t see her living here. Not with Sammy. Sammy, I could remember more clearly now, had always been emotionally needy and unshy about asking for attention and sympathy, and Cindy didn’t seem like the type to cater to that. Maybe this was all a misunderstanding—just me crossing wires, having life kick the legs out from under me, and Shaw being confused about who he’d talked to on the beach that day, which would explain him calling her by another name.
But still I was standing in a strange house in Ramona about to chat with one of the men I most associated with my life before, my god-and-fellowship life, and I didn’t have any choice but to let what was going to happen, happen, now that I was here.
Sammy came back with a glass of water in one hand and a glass of soda in the other. He handed over the clear one and motioned to the couch. I sat. Sammy stayed standing, taking turns holding each leaf of a ficus between his fingers, gingerly turning them over to examine their undersides.
“It’s good to see you, Sammy,” I said. “Nice house you’ve got out here all by yourself.”
“Yeah, it’s good, it’s nice,” Sammy said. “But fuck, man. You. You. I can’t believe it’s you. In the flesh.”
“For the most part.”
“Yeah, I know. We’re not who we used to be. Maybe a little less or a little more than we used to be. I don’t know, but I’ve been thinking about that. The more or the less, you know?”
“Me,” I said and slapped myself on the gut, “more. You, I don’t know. You don’t look too different.”
Sammy walked over to another plant, a Christmas cactus on a side table by the window, and checked its leaves. “Yeah, man, you don’t know. You don’t know.” For a minute he seemed absorbed by the plant, and his face twisted inwardly and his lips moved without sound. “And some things just never change. No matter what.” Then he looked at me and asked, “Why are you here?”
I looked down at my water glass. “I don’t really know,” I said. Sammy left the cactus and folded his arms, staring at me. It was a look I’d never seen on him before, a penetrating, intimidating posture, his chin set and pointed right at me. I could hear his teeth grinding. It sounded like the rubber seals on the shark tank about to give way.
“I ran into Andy,” I said, looking for a way to ease the tension. “Saw him surfing, and he mentioned you. And it had been a long time. So I thought I’d come say hello.” He kept the same posture, like he was waiting for me to continue. “That’s it, Sammy.” But I prattled on like a stammering child: “I guess I’m getting old and sentimental. Maybe I’m just thinking too much these days. I don’t know.” Sammy was motionless for another minute, and then he broke away to examine the soil of an orchid in full bloom, pale yellow with a pink center.
“Yeah, you don’t know.” Sammy laughed to himself bitterly. “Shit. I don’t know, but you. You. You don’t know? That’s something. If you talked to Andy, maybe you do know, you know?”
“He just told me where I could find you.”
“Yeah, well, you found me. Things aren’t exactly great. I’m not ungrateful, you know, for what I’ve got. You know, ungrateful to”—Sammy pointed to the ceiling—“but it’s been different, I’ll say that. Different.”
“That’s all Andy really said,” I lied. “That you could use a familiar face.”
&nbs
p; “If it were only that, Mark,” Sammy said. “Marky Mark! Here in my living room, I can’t fucking—but yeah, if it were only that. That’s the simple part. Stupid simple. I run up some debts, play the wrong horses at Del Mar, step on the wrong toes, and so I go and do what I can do.” He looked at me then, just for a minute—and it was the first real eye contact we’d made, and there was the old Sammy, the neglected boy, the young man who couldn’t help himself, the unofficial mascot of every teenage retreat and summer camp I’d led.
“I won’t lie to you, Marky Mark. I don’t even get lying anymore. It’s just a waste.” Sammy paused and stared at the ceiling. He closed his eyes and his lips moved silently. “But yeah,” he said, “I started helping people get what they were looking for, if you know what I mean. And of course you know what I mean.”
“Sammy,” I said. His name was out of my mouth before I knew it, and it sounded bitter, personal, disappointed. Like a father. Sammy looked like a struck dog. I tried to cover the anger I felt, how much I must have still cared.
“Goddamn, shit, sorry, fuck, I know. I know,” Sammy said. “I do this fucking stuff, I just do it, man. It’s like someone makes me, and I can’t say ‘no’ or ‘fuck off,’ but I can say, ‘You’re a bad person, Sammy Ray Gans, you’re a waste of space, piece of shit, shit for brains.’ That’s all I get to do, for whatever godforsaken reason. That’s the only role I get to play—fucking color commentary on the sinful point guard.”
He was visibly upset, worked up. His skin, already inflamed from sun and acne, grew more purple than red, and white flecks gathered at the corners of his mouth. “Shit, man,” he said, running his hands through his pale crew cut and sending up flakes of dandruff that looked like tiny alert flares in the dim, raking light of his living room. “I wish you’d come around, back then, and set me straight about me. You were always good at that. You were the thing, man. You made it happen. But hey, I got my wheel loose and ended up rolling all the fuck over the place, so now I’m here.” I started to speak, but he kept on. It was like he hadn’t spoken since the last time I saw him. “Shit, though, I’m glad you’re here. Seeing your face, man. It’s like getting sprayed with a fire hose.”
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