Beach Music

by Pat Conroy

  His posture remained low and balanced and I could hear Mike and Capers cheering for him on the shore as a plane of furious white water chased him, carried him, and brought him all the way to the white sands where he stepped off the board as easily and daintily as a woman stepping into her box at the opera.

  As Jordan swam back to me, he would guide the board up over each wave, the board pointing straight up as Jordan was lifted almost completely out of the water. The waves seemed endless.

  “Are these as good as California waves?” I shouted as Jordan paddled up beside me and I grabbed on to the board.

  “These are California waves,” Jordan shouted back. “These waves got lost. They belong in the Pacific. They must be exchange students or something.”

  “That last South Carolina wave gave you all you could handle,” I said.

  “There’s no order to these waves. California waves come in sets of seven. You choose the third or fourth wave because they’re the largest of the cycle. This is chaos.”

  “The Pacific sounds too predictable,” I yelled over the winds and waves. “Simple-minded.”

  “The Atlantic is a cheesy, second-rate ocean,” Jordan shouted back, but he was starting to judge the incoming waves again. “It would be okay if it had a hurricane come up the coast every day. But it’ll never be the Pacific. Now, you ride, Jack. See that fourth wave forming? Don’t be afraid when the bottom drops out of it. That’s the board entering the heart of the wave. Just rise to your knees on the first one. Remember, it’s all about surfaces.”

  “Surfaces?” I asked.

  “Think about it,” Jordan said, sending me off into the wave with a strong push. “It’ll get clear to you.”

  That summer, we became known as the boys who rode the storm, the hurricane riders who learned to surf on some of the largest waves to come ashore that year. I caught five waves that afternoon and it changed the way I felt about water. I fell three times and one of those times changed the way I felt about falling. I was sucked beneath a massive wave, flipped over, struck on the head by the surfboard, and then somersaulted out of control through waters so disorienting that I lost all sense of direction. I panicked as I swallowed water, tumbling wildly, then suddenly popping out of the water standing straight up, surprised, and then flattened by the next wave crashing over my shoulders. The sea on that day was terrifying. But Jordan taught us that if a sea could be ridden, it could not be untamable. He kept emphasizing that one had to honor the surfaces of both the wave and the board. All sports, he insisted, reduced to their simplest physics became easy.

  Jordan’s gift was both madcap and daredevil, and while Capers came to distrust Jordan’s recklessness, Mike and I prized it. Jordan’s love of daring and his rash need to live on the edges of things, his reaching for experiences that went unnoticed by other people gave us adventures that summer that previously would have been unimaginable. Throughout his life, Jordan’s greatest fear was that he would be buried alive in that American topsoil of despair and senselessness where one felt nothing, where being alive was simply a provable fact instead of a ticket to a magic show. It was not that Jordan was a thrill-seeker, but that he found an elegance in action that he found nowhere else.

  That summer, the four of us climbed the water tower in the center of the town because Jordan wanted to get a bird’s-eye view of Waterford. We hopped a freight train and rode it all the way to Charleston, then hitched a ride back on a watermelon truck, laden with the summer-swollen fruit. Jordan loved long-distance swims and surprised Silas McCall by twice swimming from Pollock Island all the way to the Isle of Orion, a distance of eight miles and directly across a shipping channel. But Jordan moved through the water with otter-like grace and playfulness. He was as strong a swimmer as anyone that Silas had ever seen and Jordan had no fear of depths or tides or sharks. When he swam he seemed like part of that same mystery that made the tides move. He seemed moonstruck and water-born as he swam between the islands.

  One midnight, when we all were spending the night at Mike’s house, Jordan got us to pretend we were members of the French Resistance who were sent by Charles de Gaulle on a suicidal mission. Our job was to blow up the Pont Neuf in Paris just at the moment that Hitler would cross it to visit his victorious Armies of the Reich. Jordan had made up fake but realistic-looking bombs that he assigned each of us to attach to the stanchions of the Waterford Bridge with waterproof tape. Into the midnight water we jumped feet first, each of us carrying packets of dummy flares wrapped expertly and looking like sticks of dynamite. Before Jordan let us swim back toward the city marina, he swam to each of us to inspect the job and, not satisfied with any of our performances, he retaped the fake explosives below the waterline to his exacting, perfectionist standards. Finally we watched him set an alarm clock and a fake fuse and then he signaled us to release ourselves into the outgoing tides, which funneled back past the town where we had hidden towels and clothes on the deck of a dry-docked yacht. Jordan planned his joint operations down to the last detail. As we floated back toward the town and our life, Jordan checked his watch and said, “Now,” and we all looked back knowing that the bridge had exploded and that the torn body of the Führer lay on the bottom of the Seine.

  Jordan’s fascination with both anarchy and the fugitive stance caused some dissension too, particularly in Capers’ view of the world. For Capers, Jordan was the only boy he’d met who signaled danger from every pore of his body. Capers had never seen a rebellious nature manifest itself before in his large tribe of cousins. His fascination with Jordan became as scientific as it was personal, for he knew no Elliott or Middleton who was not conservative and gentlemanly to the core of his being. But Jordan pointed out to Capers that their ancestors had once helped get rid of an English king and some had fought with Francis Marion against the Redcoats in the malarial swamps north of Charleston.

  “We began as rebels, as men who went against the grain,” Jordan told Capers. “Our ancestors helped man the cannons when the South fired on Fort Sumter. I’m much truer to the spirit of our ancestors than you are, Capers.”

  “Only time will tell that,” Capers answered, not believing a word of what Jordan said.

  When the full moon came at the end of August, the four of us decided that we would swim out to meet it, going deeper than we ever had before. Jordan paddled his surfboard past the breakers into the black waters a quarter of a mile off-shore. We swam slowly beside him, sometimes grabbing the board and hitching a ride the way a remora does to a shark.

  “This is deep enough,” Capers warned.

  “A little bit further,” Jordan urged.

  “We’re in shark city, U.S.A.,” Mike said.

  “Not part of their food chain,” Jordan said.

  In twenty feet of water, Jordan slipped off the board and the four of us watched the moonlight play on the surface of the water. It enclosed us in its laceries as we watched the moon spill across the Atlantic like wine from an overturned glass. The tides rushed through our legs as we dangled, innocent as bait. Far away, we could see the light of the caretaker’s house where my grandfather would be sitting reading a book and listening to a country music station. We were so far out that the house looked like a ship that had run aground. With the light all around us, we felt secreted in that moon-infused water like pearls forming in the soft tissues of oysters. Our four heartbeats stirred the curiosity of the black drum, the pompano, and the whiting that hunted for food beneath us.

  A porpoise sounded twenty yards away from us in an explosion of breath, startling us.

  “Porpoise,” I said. “Thank God it’s not a Great White.”

  Then another porpoise broke the water and rolled toward us. A third and a fourth porpoise neared the board and we could feel great secret shapes eyeing us from below. I reached out to touch the back of one, its skin the color of jade, but as I reached the porpoise dove and my hand touched moonlight where the dorsal fin had been cutting through the silken waters. The dolphins had obviously smelled t
he flood tide of boyhood in the sea and heard the hormones singing in the boy-scented waters. None of us spoke as the porpoises circled us. The visitation was something so rare and perfect that we knew by instinct not to speak—and then, as quickly as they had come, the porpoises moved away from us, moved south where there were fish to be hunted.

  Each of us would remember that night floating on the waves all during our lives. It was the year before we went to high school when we were poised on the slippery brink between childhood and adulthood, admiring our own daring as we floated free from the vigilance and approval of adult eyes, ruled only by the indifference of stars and fate. It was the purest moment of freedom and headlong exhilaration that I had ever felt. A wordless covenant was set among us the night of the porpoises. Each of us would go back to that surfboard again and again in our imaginations, return to that night where happiness seemed so easy to touch.

  For over an hour we drifted in our own private Gulf Stream, talking of our unlived-in lives, telling jokes and stories that are both the source of intimacy and evasion among teenage boys.

  In his preliminary talks with Ledare and me about the Southern mini-series, Mike would come back over and over again to that night.

  “Who asked the question that night about suicide?” Mike asked me.

  “Capers asked it,” I said, remembering. “He wanted to know how each of us would kill ourselves if we had the choice.”

  “What did I say?” Mike asked. “My memory is shit.”

  “Liquor and pills,” I said. “You said you’d steal a bottle of your father’s favorite bourbon and a bottle of your mother’s sleeping pills.”

  “That’d still be my first choice,” Mike said.

  “I said that I’d put a bullet through my brain. But Jordan had his suicide all planned out.”

  “That’s what I remember,” Mike said.

  “He said he would steal a boat at the Pollock Island marina. He would’ve already mailed his mother and father a letter stating how much he loved his mother and how much he hated his father. He would hold his father responsible for the suicide. After stealing the boat, he would drive out to sea as far as the gasoline would carry him. Then, he would begin slitting his wrists and arteries very carefully and methodically. He would leave his blood all over the boat, because he wanted his father to see his son’s blood. When he began to weaken, he would slip over the side of the boat and offer his body to Kahuna, the god of surf. He knew it would drive his father crazy that there wasn’t any body to bury.”

  Ledare had asked, “He knew all of this in eighth grade? How did Capers say he was going to kill himself?”

  “Easy. Capers said he wouldn’t ever consider suicide. It was the coward’s way out and he preferred to stay and fight through whatever problems he faced.”

  “Oh, noble man,” Ledare said.

  “You’re prejudiced,” Mike said.

  “It’s true,” she said. “Poor Jordan. He must’ve been far more miserable than we ever knew.”

  “It’ll make a great scene,” Mike said.

  But I knew that Capers was the central figure of all of us who had drifted on the surfboard that night. Capers lived perfectly contained within his own deep dream of himself as a work in progress. He was the only one of us who actually observed himself in the various stages as he made his way through life. Self-doubt was unknown to him. He always knew exactly where he was going and he was a master of all the fine points of coastal navigation.

  We would discover that later when we accidentally got in Capers’ way. We came out of that summer with our friendship sealed. But the story of our friendship would bear bitter fruit and would one day bring tears to the eyes of all those who loved us well.

  Part IV

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Fantasy is one of the soul’s brightest porcelains. As the day rapidly approached when I would take Leah into the forsaken realms of my past, I felt the floodgates of recall open up in a ceaseless flow. As a travel writer I had specialized in the artistry of my own escape from what was most intimately mine. I had kept my eye on the horizon and fled all calls for the careful study of my own nest. My entire professional existence depended on the sincerity of my clean break with the past. The world was my subject and my hometown was the stimulant that drove me out to seek the world. In my head shimmered the lights of a thousand strange cities and towns which I could recall in glamorous detail and I could speak easily of ports where peppers and tangerines arrived in open-air markets piled in black boats or of smoky bazaars where young girls were sold as prostitutes and monkeys for meat, or of places where men told stories over tarot cards in languages that seemed to have no vowels.

  But Waterford lay buried and many of its stories moved through my subconscious. Deep within myself, I could hear the distant oratorio forming as I pieced the fragments of my past together like a piece of music and shared them with Leah. Leah had cherished the few stories of Waterford I had told her perhaps because she instinctively knew that they were opening up a history where one day Leah would discover herself. I had always told her that there was nothing more beautiful in the world than a story, yet it is I who had reigned as the chief censor in the text of her imagination.

  In the three months before our flight to America, I tried to tell Leah everything that might help her understand and survive the trial by family she would now endure. And as the stories unfolded, Leah would often seek out Ledare and listen to Ledare’s version of the same remembrance. Ledare’s memory was often harsher and more piercingly focused. With Ledare, Waterford sounded like the county seat of an all-suffocating decorum. My Waterford loomed as a masked ball with the twin themes of lunacy and surprise. Taken together, a two-steepled skyline began to form in Leah’s mind.

  On the trans-Atlantic flight to Atlanta, I took a leather photograph album out of my briefcase, a special one that I had kept under lock and key during those years I kept her past hidden from her. I opened it and showed her pictures of my grandmother and grandfather in front of their caretaker’s house on the Isle of Orion, photographs of her uncles, and I gave small, intimate biographies of each as our plane sailed through a brilliant aquamarine sky.

  A careful, dutiful child, Leah memorized the names and faces of all her relatives, near and far.

  “Who is this, Daddy?” Leah asked, looking at a faded Kodachrome.

  “That’s me and Mike Hess and Capers Middleton in first grade.”

  “You’re littler than I am now,” she said.

  “That’s the way time works,” I said as I studied the image of myself taken over thirty years before. I could remember the moment that Capers’ mother had taken the photograph and I could remember the taste of the Pecan Sandies my mother packed in my lunch box every day that year.

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  “A pretty little dog,” Leah said.

  “Not just any pretty little dog.”

  “That’s the Great Dog Chippie,” Leah cried out. “But Daddy, she’s so small and cute. I thought Chippie must be the size of a St. Bernard.”

  “No,” I said. “She slept with me, on my pillow, every night. My mother would come in, kick her out, and banish her to the downstairs, but Chippie’d always be there when I woke up in the morning.”

  “Is that Mama?” Leah said pointing to a sad-eyed, overly dressed girl.

  I nodded. “It sure is. That’s third grade and she’d come over to show my mother her new pair of saddle oxfords. That’s why she’s pointing at her feet.”

  “Daddy, I’m so excited,” Leah said, squeezing my arm. “I never dreamed I’d meet my family. Do you think they’ll like me?”

  “They’ll eat you up with a spoon.”

  “Is that a good thing?” Leah asked.

  “They’ll love your little Roman ass.”

  “Bad word. That’s a thousand lire.”

  “Not now,” I said. “We’re going to land soon. Now, it’s a buck.”

  “Is Ledare meeting us here?”
r />   “No,” I said. “We go through customs in Atlanta and she’ll be waiting for us in Savannah.”

  “Are you excited about going back to live in Waterford, Daddy?” my daughter asked.

  “I’m terrified,” I admitted, and then added, “But, at least, it’s quiet in Waterford. Nothing much happens there.”

  “Everything happens in Waterford,” Leah said and I saw that she was speaking directly to the photo album.

  Before landing, I looked down at the green hills and hidden lakes of Georgia and tried to address my anxiety.

  Then I watched my daughter move back and forth among the photographs of my past and realized that I had raised a child with a longing for any rumor of home, and that I would have to put aside my own fear.

  Ledare met us at the Savannah airport and drove us straight to Elizabeth on Thirty-seventh for a dinner that I had arranged before I left Rome. I had already begun to worry about how to make my living as a travel writer when my travel was going to be limited to day trips from Waterford, but my editor at Food and Wine had told me about a new generation of Southern cooks who were both classically trained and dedicated to revolutionizing the fundamentals of Southern cuisine. I was told they all preserved their fondness for grits and barbecue despite their desire to sneak goat cheese into the tossed salad.

  In the handsome, high-ceilinged Victorian outside of the historic district, I went back into the kitchen to interview Elizabeth Terry and her staff as they prepared redolent and beautifully constructed meals for tables of conservatively dressed customers. She told me the names of all the leading chefs who were most intimately connected with the new transformation of Southern cooking. That first evening back in America we ate a light, superb meal that would have been impossible to find anywhere in the South except New Orleans during the seventies. Leah dined on pasta Amatriciana, which she pronounced delicious and wondered aloud why her father told her she would never again eat good pasta until they returned to Rome. I admitted my error and described the years I had labored as a food critic tasting ghastly combinations of pasta and sauce in Italian restaurants from Texas to Virginia that all deserved shutting down by the health department at best, a fire bombing at worst.