by John Decure
I showed myself out and drove home in a deep internal haze. Max was there, cordoned off in the kitchen, and when I opened the back door he rushed me as if he knew I was in a bad way. I sat on the porch step with him in my lap, hugging him in spite of his crushing weight. The strength to do anything more had simply left me, and I just sat there, talking to Max, for a very long time.
Twenty-Three
The sound of large waves breaking floated down my street in a briny mist, and sometime later that afternoon I determined to paddle out alone on Northside. Though I can’t remember how or when I decided to have a go and I didn’t even bother to first check the surf, it turned out to be just what I needed. As soon as I began with the ritualistic preparations one must take before riding waves of consequence, my mind stopped racing and my grief was quieted enough to hear myself think again.
I spent time first in the garage, choosing the right board, a seven-four semi-gun with down rails and a drawn-in tail—a board that had worked well last winter on a scary day at Baja Malibu, a hard-breaking spot just south of the Mexican border. I stripped the spoiled, oil-spotted wax from the deck, working a plastic spatula behind the hot air blasts of a handheld blow dryer. Slowly peeling away the old wax until the fiberglass surface was slick and the board’s bold, airbrushed colors—an orange sunburst on top, bordered by ice-blue rails—shone brightly again. Then I rubbed in a fresh coat of wax from a brand new bar with a root beer scent, employing a tight, clockwise stroke I’d picked up from a long ago part-time job detailing autos. The water was still warm enough to wear my short-john wetsuit, which I pulled on over a gauzy black rash-guard shirt.
I stopped on the beach and stretched, bending and loosening unused muscles. As I arched and leaned, small bursts of seawater rushed the beachhead to nip at my toes, then slid back again, the wet brown sand hissing like a hot griddle.
All of this a return, for me, to the rhythms of the sea, and normalcy. No jive-talking hype, no posturing hyperbole, no damaging secrets to unearth by way of a careful records search or a pointed cross-examination. Paddling out again was like taking a first step toward reclaiming my sanity.
The ocean was sullen and brittle green, a steady westerly wind ripping wild ribbons of frost across the Pacific. Big swells heaved onto the outer bar as if, after traveling thousands of miles, they were angry at finally having to die. It was a quiet afternoon—no surfers in the water, a few anglers on the pier, a schizoid wanderer slumped under an empty lifeguard tower, railing at the cloudless sky, arguing with some higher power. I counted five waves in each set, five-anda-half minute intervals between the onslaughts. Then I waited for another set to dump before making my move through the shore-break.
The side current was strong and the smaller, inshore waves were surprisingly powerful, disdainfully tossing me back as I ducked to elude them. By the time the next big set rose up in deep water, I was stuck in the impact zone, bogged down on a slippery sheet of foam and gripping for a serious drubbing. Caught inside.
The walls that came to clean me up loomed thick and nearly double overhead, and each successive pounding I endured seemed more frenetic than the last. My lungs burned deep and hot and my sinuses loaded up as if mortar was being piled behind my eyes. After the third wave bashed me silly, I dove deep and crawled along the bottom, my board thrashing behind on my ankle leash like it wanted no more part of this little adventure. I surfaced, stole a quick breath and slithered back down among the chilly undercurrents.
Some surf session, I thought. Cowabunga. And yet, I began to take a measure of solace from the ocean’s sheer indifference to my presence. Alone and rolling in the turbulent shadows, nothing about my life could change my situation—not my profession, my IQ, my powers of reason. No room for regret or sorrow, or anger over an old betrayal, no place for shiftless personal longing. What mattered most was a thin breath of oxygen floating beneath my ribs.
The rolling surf released me from its grip and I chugged toward calmer water. Over the next few hours I picked off only five or six waves, passing on dozens of misshapen walls and patiently waiting for the occasional shorter line that might offer a reasonable chance of success. None of my rides were very good. The wind bump on the surface was a hindrance to down-the-line speed, and every wave finished abruptly in a vicious closeout section inside. But they did afford me a chance to indulge in some self-expression, to dance across a canvas of water in a manner that pleased only me. It felt sublime to do something so objectively pointless, so selfish.
The wind backed off just as the sun simmered into the sea. I slid into a racy left that held up long enough to shoot me through a series of looping sections. I carved and banked all the way to shore, feeling the high deep in my bones and hungering for another wave as soon as I kicked out. But it was dark now, too late to stroke outside and play the complicated waiting game again.
I stood on the beach, feeling cheated by the night, unwilling to forfeit my place among the swells. This was where I belonged. A chill descended and a thin mist hung like an apparition above the sand. Shivering hard, I turned and started for home.
I returned to my job the next day unsure of how I would be received, but that was folly on my part, for nothing had changed. Foley was there, eyeing files in his stark black robe, as were Belinda and Lily Elmore. Shelly Chilcott smiled, jockeying her blinking phone lines. Just before calendar call, Ken Jorgensen licked the sugar from the tips of his fingers and kissed the last greasy bite of a glazed doughnut a fond farewell.
I picked up four new clients. A teenage mom on crystal meth. A hot-blooded father who used his belt buckle like a martial arts weapon on his terrified brood. A drug baby with a decent chance of surviving. And my personal favorite of the day, an exhausted working mother who’d loaded her groceries into the car, driven home and run a bath, leaving her screaming child marooned in a grocery cart in the middle of the supermarket parking lot. It was hard not to laugh at such a lightweight predicament, and I ended up talking more that morning about vitamin supplements and the declining quality of late-night TV than the impact of the Welfare and Institutions Code on parenting.
Later, when my cases were done, I went upstairs to see Carmen Manriquez. She was alone in the Las Palomas office, and I sat down again in one of those hard little chairs opposite her desk and began to tell her about everything that had happened in the past few days—except Phoebe’s visit. She told me about Channel Six’s final news installment on the Randall case, which had apparently aired last night while I was stretched out on a lounge chair on my mother’s balcony, listening to the surf rumble in the dark. The Danforths had been questioned but not arrested, since Nathan had been recovered and delivered to Sue Ellen. I hadn’t really expected the Danforths to run into trouble with the law. Though they’d aided a kidnapping, losing Nathan had made them too sympathetic to be burdened with criminal charges. How would a shot of a handcuffed Kitty Danforth look on the Channel Six News, anyway? Like a public relations disaster, and the police knew it. In spite of all that had gone down, I was privately relieved to know the Danforths were free to find a new baby. Perhaps they would get it right the next time.
A shy Hispanic man in a shiny blue suit a size too small came to Carmen’s office, received directions from her in Spanish, and vanished again.
Another urgent call. “I’ll mail you a schedule,” Carmen said into the phone. “But you’ll be enrolled in the meantime, so just start attending. Yes, I’ll call the instructor today for you. You’re welcome.” She smiled and held up one finger for me. “No es nada.”
As if I were going anywhere.
I sat there, fighting the impulse to take over. I wanted to seek out Carmen’s father, to persuade him to back off, to make her safe. Yeah, right. What I really wanted was to help set her free from her brother. Carmen put down the phone and looked at me sadly, as if she was reading my thoughts.
I offered to have a word with the man, feel out his intentions. “It’ll be better if you know,” I told Carmen. “Trust me
.”
“No thank you,” was all she said.
The air felt heavy and stifling. I remembered the first time I’d stumbled into this dinky office looking for an interpreter. The highhanded way she’d schooled me in matters of heritage and familial pride. She’d taken me for someone who just wouldn’t understand. But I’d believed her when she spoke of her menacing old man; I’d seen his shadow in her face that day at my home. I wanted to help, and Carmen wouldn’t let me.
“This isn’t about my father, is it?” she said.
I went to the door and stared into the waiting area. Two pigtailed girls were fighting over a doll just beyond their mother’s reach. Near the big windows, an attorney cradled a manila file, pen in hand, shaking her head as an unshaven father in a wheelchair pleaded his case to her.
I felt tired and out of step, frustrated. It was as if Bill Davenport had just been replaced by Albert Manriquez. “Sorry,” I said. “Bad idea, I guess. I should go.”
“People have problems, J.,” she said. “Problems you can’t fix, okay?”
“You’re not his mother, you’re just his sister.”
“That’s my problem.” She got up and walked over to me. “Maybe you could help me, but right now, I don’t want you to. Can you understand that?”
I honestly couldn’t. Taking care of other people’s business was what I knew. “I’m trying,” I said.
I pictured my father caught on a reef in La Jolla a long time ago, his bare feet bloodied, the surge rushing him at the knees, his next move critical. His friend had died that day, and he had lived. But he had acted without thinking, on instinct. It was all he had to go on, and it had been enough.
I put my arm around Carmen’s shoulder and pointed her back into the Las Palomas office. “Can we sit down?”
Carmen had to help a few more unhappy parents get counseling before we could talk, but I waited. When we were alone again, I revealed the sad and inglorious end to which my mother had come, the letters Carmen translated making perfect sense now. We decided that it would be a good thing for me to go down to Rosarito Beach and search for Marielena Shepard’s grave, that this would be a fine way to say good-bye and move on. This Friday the dependency judges were to attend a conference and the courts would be dark. I asked her to come with me then, to help interpret as we explored the town’s cemeteries.
She smiled cautiously. “That all I am to you, your private interpreter?”
I shook off my little chair, kicked the Las Palomas door shut, and held her in a long, sweet kiss.
We decided to take Albert with us and spend the rest of the weekend camping and surfing. I had gone well over a year without a break and felt dead to the world. According to Carmen, the day she and Albert had spent riding waves with Jackie and me had been the highlight of Albert’s summer. I hadn’t seen Jackie since the hospital, nor had I any desire to see him again. She would have to feed Albert some excuse, for Jackie would not be making the trip. I dearly wished that California’s great surf legend would simply fade away, back into his own bloated myth.
We left at 5 A.M. on Friday. Britt wanted to come along, but he had a few classes to contend with first. “I’m bailing right after my second period quiz,” he promised. I told him that if we didn’t hook up in Rosarito, we could meet that night forty-five miles south in San Miguel, a spot just outside Ensenada. An old friend of my father’s owned a trailer there on a bluff overlooking the right-hand reef, and he’d given me the okay to stay there any time I wanted. It was a nice setup, with toilets and public showers nearby and a simple but good restaurant at the front of the trailer park. Not exactly camping, but San Miguel seemed like a good place to rest before we ventured farther south into the vast emptiness of the Baja Peninsula.
Carmen and I talked quietly while Albert slept in the backseat, snoring with his mouth wide open. She’d been on the phone last night with a relative who’d once briefly lived in Rosarito Beach during the sixties. Back then, there was only one cemetery, the relative had said, a slanted place on a windy hillside a quarter mile above the main highway. We decided to try there first.
Oceanside was head high and a little ugly, as devoid of sun as it had been that morning of the contest. We drove on until I found a nice sandbar a few miles south, in Carlsbad. Carmen and Albert sat on the beach, wrapped in a Mexican blanket as I worked over a few dozen peaks. The tide was on the rise and the surf improved. I kept waiting for someone to paddle out, but no one ever showed.
I bought four days worth of Mexican car insurance at an office just north of the border at Tijuana, and a case of Tecate at the first liquor store in town. We drove the new road that skirts the northern edge of the great, dilapidated city. Across the road through a mile or two of rough scrub and muddy, polluted streams, lay America. As we headed toward the coast we saw dozens of dark-skinned men and women, some carrying tiny children, lining up behind a long dividing wall. They milled about, watching the expanse to the north through the cracks, poised to make a dash as soon as the chalk-green Border Patrol trucks motored out of view.
I smiled. “Future clients.”
“For you and me both,” Carmen said.
Rosarito Beach dozed in a foggy overcast just after one, the garish hotels and motels that lined the main drag showing precious little life. A vendor sat before row after row of plaster birdbaths and piggy banks, waiting. We slowed and Carmen asked him for directions to the old cemetery with the view.
“Sí, la mirada,” he said, pointing to the hills.
The road was narrow and worn, with no divider. A mixture of gravel and disintegrating asphalt pinged against the Jeep’s undercarriage as we sped along, a huge cloud of dust tailing in our wake. We came over a rise and saw an old stone wall stretching in both directions, parted in the middle by the road we were on. At the juncture, a uniformed Federale and a nun sat in folding chairs by a rust-eaten gate. They both stood up to greet us, the nun readying a Red Cross can for our donation. “Hola.”
“Hola, señor,” I said to the Federale. “¿Como están ustedes?” I handed the nun a few dollar bills while Carmen asked the guard if there was a map or registry to be found inside the cemetery grounds. The man turned and pointed to a slab of cement foundation jutting up through some weeds not far from the entrance. They talked in Spanish until Carmen thanked him.
“What did he say?” I asked Carmen.
She nodded toward the cement slab. “That was the caretaker’s house, I guess. It burned down a long time ago. Nothing was saved. He doesn’t know if the records were burned too, but as you can see, they never rebuilt.”
We drove slowly forward, surrounded by gravesites ringed by white rocks and small, flat headstones. No trees. It was an ugly place for anyone to be laid to rest.
“This cemetery’s been full since about nineteen eighty,” she added. “Guess we’re on our own.” There was nothing to do but go from grave to grave.
“I’ll take this side,” I said, waving my hand at a weedy expanse the size of a football field. Below us the ocean lay hidden in a thick gray haze.
A half hour later I heard another car bounce up the road. Britt’s truck. He fed the nun some change, drove forward to where I’d left the Jeep and cut the engine. Jackie got out from the passenger side and walked to the front of the truck.
I stalked over, my hands clenching into fists. “What’s he doing here?”
“Don’t lose it, J.” Britt said. “He came by last night. I told him what you were doing. He said you’d never find it if he didn’t help.”
“What happened to your quiz?”
“No worries, I took it. We bailed right after.”
Jackie planted a boot on Britt’s front bumper and tucked his black T-shirt tighter under his belt. He looked right past me at the hillside before us. Farther up, Carmen and Albert moved slowly down a row of headstones, oblivious to Britt and Jackie’s arrival.
“This way,” Jackie said as he began to walk. I followed him warily. Thirty yards up the hill he tur
ned right, took a few more steps, and stopped. “This is it.”
The headstone was flat and rectangular, larger than those around it and carved from white marble. I knelt down and tugged at the crabgrass that spilled over the edges until I could read the inscription. A simple crucifix had been carved into the stone in relief, and above it, the words “Beatiful Marie Elana, 9-15-76.”
“What the fuck?” I said.
Jackie looked over the headstone. “I know. Guy wasn’t the hottest speller.”
“You did this?”
“The stone? Yeah. Had it done in town.” He looked away.
I waited until he faced me again. “You’ve lied to me so many times,” I said.
He stared at the dirt. “I had to.”
“No, man, you did not. Don’t give me any of your jive-ass bullshit, not now!”
Jackie shot me a quizzical stare. “What would you have done had you known?” he said. He waited for me to consider his question. “That’s right, nothing. She’s been dead all this time. You couldn’t have saved her, man.”
The way he said it seemed to trivialize all my most recent efforts to find her. The bastard thought he knew better.
Standing amid the utter desolation of this place, a rage broke loose in me, a hatred for the father and son whose collective self-interests had delivered Marielena Shepard to this miserable patch of dirt. What happened next I cannot recall with much clarity, but at some point I remember being down on the ground with Jackie, flailing at him with blow after savage blow
My ears rang painfully. Someone was screaming.
“Stop it, J.!” I heard Carmen cry. Behind her, Albert was jumping up and down, shrieking.
I rolled over and lay in the prickly dead grass, panting as I stared up into the blank overcast.
“It’s okay, baby,” Carmen said to Albert, hugging him close. Albert wiped his eyes and regarded me with great suspicion. Then he pulled free of Carmen and slowly approached Jackie.