He was also wearing rubber booties. Real surfers don’t wear booties.
The boys waved. The man didn’t wave back, but maybe it was hard to see through the tinted visor. He paddled around us and way off to the outside. Then he turned to face the shore, which is the exact opposite of what a surfer should do. It looked like he was watching us instead of keeping a lookout to sea for the bigger wave sets.
Surprises is known for this mutant rogue wave—which is the surprise, I think—that shows up out the back at least a few times a day. It doesn’t matter what the swell direction is or whether the tide is high or low. If the break is working, you can count on an outside monster every few hours.
I’ve made it a bunch of times, and it’s one of my all-time favorite waves. But it usually catches the shortboarders way inside. Which is a nice payback for guys like me. I was thinking that I should maybe paddle over and warn Mr. Wavestorm that he was sitting in a sketchy spot, but it wasn’t really up to me to be this guy’s waterman.
The first contest I was going to have the boys enter, now that Meagan had designated me the family surf coach, was the Mexican Junior Nationals, coming up at a break called El Tigre. What little I knew about competitive surfing is what I got from watching the World Surf League online.
The WSL is all about “speed, power, flow”—something we used to call “fast, strong, and smooth.” Basic fundamentals. But now there’s also a lot of vertical up and down on the wave face, with big snaps and fins above the lip—but who knows what the judges might be looking for down here in Mexico.
Obsidian was the more aggressive surfer, and his surfing had a lot of pop. He’d paddle into the riskiest takeoffs and go for the biggest airs. But Jade had a natural style, a lighter touch. There was an elflike quality to his surfing. Like a water spider, and he pranced rather than punched, with silky cutbacks and big round rail turns.
Jade took off on a head-high wave and linked up a couple of sweet roundies before snapping an air reverse into the closeout.
Obsidian hooted at his stepbrother, “Sick.”
And we could hear someone else cheering. I looked over to the guy on the foamy sitting on the outside. He was clapping like a seal—and completely unaware of the humongous wave rolling in behind him.
“Out the back,” I shouted. “Go hard!”
The three of us began paddling like maniacs so we wouldn’t have to take this outside bomb on our heads, and maybe one of us might even make it—but it wasn’t going to be me. Because I kept stopping to raise both arms and wave.
“Hey, amigo, look behind you!” I shouted to the guy on the foamy. “Paddle!”
But the kook just waved back—until this mammoth sucked him up like a bug into a vacuum cleaner and he disappeared under a wall of detonating white water.
It was a crazy big wave, but Obsidian was just able to backdoor it into a pretty decent barrel. I took what was left on the head, and Jade belly-rode ten feet of froth to shore.
The DayGlo kook got the Neptune massage—platinum level—and was battered a couple of hundred yards down the beach.
I could see him sitting on the sand, wrapped up in some kelp.
I paddled over to him.
He had a bloody nose, and about the first six inches of foam had been snapped off his Wavestorm. The guy looked Japanese, and I wasn’t sure if he could speak English. I don’t see a lot of Asians down here, except for my stepkid. People tell me it’s because Mexico isn’t clean enough.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
The guy didn’t respond. He was checking for loose teeth.
“¿Cómo está?” I said.
Finally, the guy nodded.
“Bueno,” he said.
He stood up and examined the broken tip of his Wavestorm.
“Do you think the board rental place will charge me for this?” he asked, like a slightly obnoxious American.
Despite his bloody nose, I didn’t have much sympathy for the guy. His energy was a little rude.
“Probably,” I said.
“But wasn’t that surfing?” he asked. “Shouldn’t the board be able to do that without breaking?”
“That was tsunami-ing,” I said, and shook my head. “The boards aren’t designed for that.”
He pointed a bootie at the jagged white foam where the soft top’s nose should have been.
“Is that called a ding?”
“That’s called a broken surfboard. They’re going to make you buy it,” I said.
“That’s not fair,” he said.
“Maybe,” I said.
He started to walk off but then tripped over the Wavestorm’s surf leash. It was still attached to his ankle.
“It’s easier to walk if you take off your leash,” I said.
“I know,” he said, and uncuffed his leash.
He wiped some blood off his nose and looked out at the waves.
“Surfing is hard, isn’t it?”
“Harder than it looks when it’s done right,” I said.
“Like those guys do it.” He pointed toward Jade and Obsidian. They were already paddling back out and effortlessly duck-diving through the breakers.
“Are they your kids?”
“Sorta,” I said.
“They’re good, aren’t they?”
“I think so,” I said, prouder than I had been in years.
27
A few days after our session at Surprises I figured it was time to go grab the rest of my new stepfamily’s stuff, so I woke Meagan up and asked her for the key to Winsor’s casa. Our moving in together was about to go public. The boys needed to change T-shirts, and I wanted my toothbrush back.
Meagan barely opened her eyes, but from her sleepy garble I guessed that she said the key was under the pot to the left of Winsor’s front door—or if I find pot, to please bring her back some more.
I figured I’d better make a showing at Winsor’s place anyway—just so his neighbors would know that the best friend Winsor had in Sabanita was still looking out for him. When Winsor would take off unexpectedly, sometimes he’d send me an e-mail and ask me to check on his place.
He didn’t have any dogs or cats to feed, but one time he left his fancy Sony flat-screen on for two weeks. It had been tuned to one of those around-the-clock religious channels broadcasting a Catholic telethon with special-guest exorcists and singing nuns.
The place didn’t have glass windows. No screens—just wrought-iron bars, so the whole neighborhood could hear the righteous witnessing twenty-four seven. It had nearly turned the guy next door into an atheist by the time I could get in and shut the TV off.
Winsor wasn’t the most social guy around, and except for Meagan and the boys and me, not that many locals bothered to get to know him well enough even to say hola. The Wave of the Day catered to tourists, if it catered to anybody. Winsor was more about the gigantic quadruple-shot margarita than genuine Mexican chow. He’d rather sell i got hammered by the wave of the day T-shirts than read travel blog raves about how authentic his tamales were.
He also hadn’t had a lot of surf buds, because he was such an ampy prick in the lineup. Winsor was forever paddling out and sitting on your inside without waiting his turn, spewing some mysto calculus about being the surfer who was closest to the wave’s peak, which justified his taking two or three or four of the best waves, one right after the other.
“If you just surfed two great waves in a row,” I’d tell him, “one of them wasn’t yours.”
“If you want more waves, learn to surf better,” he’d scream as he barged his way back to the front of the lineup.
Surfing isn’t something surfers do on vacation. It’s not zip-lining. Maybe that’s why some surfers can get so territorial, because they’ve given up so much for it—good relationships and real careers. I started selling Chevys because the car lot was close to Swami’s, and for those guys living off shaved ice and Hapa Browns on Oahu, it’s a way of life. We called them the Wolf Pack because they were so hungry for wav
es and ready to chase off any stranger who got too close. I think Winsor had some of that in him and maybe it’s why he ended up so crazy—and dangerous.
But after I hit that tree with my son in the front seat, surfing became more therapy than obsession, and probably the one thing that helped me survive myself. Dealing with this new head of mine has knocked a lot of the agro out of me. As if that bullet was dipped in aloha. Or maybe almost losing everything turns up the mellow in everybody. It’s hard to tell.
28
Winsor’s casa was a two-bedroom cinder-block pillbox with a steel roof and a small backyard filled with marijuana plants surrounded by electrified barbed wire.
The key was under the pot, but all the pot in Winsor’s backyard had been plundered. The power had been shut off so none of the lights worked. The potlifters probably figured no one was home and trampled down his beloved high-voltage fence.
Winsor used to brag to me about his banana-sized marijuana buds, but there wasn’t one left. If he hadn’t been dead, he’d be in tears. But he was dead, thanks to me and my two accomplices—three, actually, if you count the original perpette.
And Meagan really had wanted Winsor to die—unlike me, your honor.
But then I remembered Meagan’s statistic about how ninety percent of Mexican crime goes unsolved, and I felt better. I was still trying to forget José’s telling me that the statistic was just something the locals made up to spook gringas into the safe arms of Mexican men.
The idea of José and Meagan building castles in the sand—with their feet—pushed my jealousy button a little more than I wanted to admit.
The Town & Country that Winsor had surfed at Gagger’s was on the living-room floor. I had always coveted Glenn Pangs—there was something about the Hawaiian history of his boards that felt magical. But his shapes are too low-volume for a fat longboarder like me.
The two tiny bedrooms were connected off the living-room wall, and opposite was a kitchen nook. A military-style steel bunk bed was in one bedroom, and a plastic waterbed without sheets was in the other. The baño was dark and cramped, with a tile commode–shower combination and a metal wastepaper basket full of poop-crumpled toilet paper.
The whole casa couldn’t have taken up more than five hundred square feet. I couldn’t imagine four people living in this place for more than a weekend without wanting to kill each other.
Oops.
I grabbed a couple of pillowcases and began stuffing them with Meagan’s bathroom junk—hairbrushes and toothbrushes, some black soap, a bag of makeup. Then I raked up a half dozen pairs of surf shorts and T-shirts for the boys, and yanked a few of Meagan’s yoga pants off a bathroom clothesline.
It wasn’t like these people had very much, so it didn’t take me long to do a clean sweep. And on a wicked impulse I decided to snatch the TC Pang for Jade—more spoils from his war with Winsor. The board was a little big, but it would fit him better than the one he was riding, and he could grow into it. I also pocketed the iPhone charger.
Winsor’s brand-new MacBook Pro was half-hidden under a ratty chair cushion at the kitchen table. It supposedly had all this hot new technology, which Winsor had bragged to me about after he’d smuggled it down on his last loop up to the US. He said the solid-state drive was the only way to go in our salty tropical air.
For sure this MacDaddy would get pinched once someone spotted it through the windows. I caught myself zoning out on the shiny white Apple logo for an oblong moment or two. I tried to shake it off and stuffed the laptop into a pillowcase—it felt like a miniblackout, and it made me a little jittery.
Then something started to smell—like wires burning somewhere—and I had this crazy taste in my mouth. It tasted like Bakelite.
The sun was shining directly in my eyes. It was streaming through a barred window, and for a second I wondered if I was in jail. But then I thought that maybe I had slipped in the shower and hit my head, because my face was wet. I wiped at it with both hands. I was a little clumsy, and my fingers felt numb and stiff. The wetness stung my eyes.
I looked at my hands. They were covered in blood.
I sat up.
The table in Winsor’s kitchen nook had been knocked over. His infamous flat-screen was cracked. The two stuffed pillowcases were intact, but one of them was saturated with blood.
I got to my feet, went into the baño, and stared at myself in the mirror. I was white as a snowman. There was a three-inch gash above my good eye, and I had lost my patch. I looked back into the tiny living room.
There wasn’t much space in there for a full-fledged fit thrown by a full-grown man. A bookcase was tipped on its side. The standing water pipe was broken.
That metallic taste and funny smell sometimes happen to epileptics right before a grand mal. Nobody knows why, exactly. What I did know was that I’d just had a really big one.
29
The four of us were sitting around the table at the front of my casa. The sun was setting. That real family vibe was a little strained. A teakettle started to whistle. Meagan had made toast.
I had replaced my missing eye patch with a basic black one. But the boys were staring at the gash on my forehead. My lip was still bleeding a little.
“I don’t think that’s deep enough for stitches,” Obsidian said, breaking the ice and folding up a piece of toast like a tortilla and taking a bite.
“I do,” Jade said.
“This feels like a family meeting,” I said.
“Our first,” Meagan said. “We were worried.”
“Well, it’s nice we’re enough of a family now to worry, isn’t it?” I said.
“Mom was worried,” Obsidian said. “But I wasn’t.”
“I was,” Jade said.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” I said.
Meagan got up, turned off the stove, and poured the boiling water into a teapot.
“I think you owe the boys a better explanation.”
“About what?”
“Secrecy.”
“So I’m the stepfamily expert on secrecy now?”
“We’ll take turns with it, then,” Meagan said. “You first.”
I let Meagan pour me some tea.
“How much do you know?” I asked.
“I know that the binge therapy thing doesn’t seem to be working out so well for you. Winsor told me about that. It sounds like an excuse to get high.”
“Self-medicating isn’t getting high. And it works. Smoking pot is getting high.”
“Smoking pot is maintenance. And if self-medicating works so well, how come you have a big cut on your forehead and your lip is bleeding?”
I tried to laugh, but my throat was too dry.
“Mom says you’re an epileptic,” Jade said.
“Thanks, Mom,” I said, glaring over at Meagan. “I thought you and Winsor weren’t that close.”
“We had our moments,” she said, and then winked at me obnoxiously.
I looked back at the boys.
“Are you?” Jade asked.
“Who cares?” Obsidian shrugged at me like he was a comrade.
“I do,” Meagan said.
“Well, then, no, I’m not—not officially. I mean, I wasn’t born that way. I’m a TBI victim, which means that I can have seizures like an epileptic. But it’s temporary.”
“Sometimes it’s temporary,” Meagan said, like someone who knew how to surf the net. “But you have to take your meds regularly.”
“And I would if they worked,” I said, burning slowly.
“Is TBI like tuberculosis?” Obsidian asked.
“It means ‘traumatic brain injury,’ genius,” Jade said.
“Very traumatic,” I said. “I got shot in the head.” I flipped up my patch and then held open my eyelid with two fingers. “And that’s where the bullet went in—that hole right there.”
My eye socket was an ugly red gouge of scarred muscle and leaky goo. I was hoping to freak the boys out, but they just leaned in closer to get a bette
r look.
“Does it hurt?” Jade asked.
“Only when I cry,” I said.
“Don’t be an ass,” Meagan said.
I took a bite of toast and pointed to my eye patch. “This is private, Meagan. There’s personal stuff in here.”
“Fine,” she said. “But the boys are my personal stuff, and I don’t want you to drive them anymore unless you go back on some medication.”
“This was a onetime thing, Meagan.”
“Two times, actually.”
Meagan stared at me as I winced for an instant and recalled when Marshall and I hit that tree, the smell of sap and the ugly jazz of bending metal and shattering glass. “But you let them hitchhike to cockfights?”
“Bullfights,” Meagan said. “There is a difference.”
I looked over at the boys, and their look was begging me not to bust them. I let the opportunity pass. I was usually on their side, and I should probably stay there.
“What do I get?” I asked.
“You get to not have fits and drive the kids.”
“No. I mean in standard-family give-and-take, what do you kick in?”
“Since when do we qualify as a standard family?”
“Pretend,” I said.
Meagan sipped her tea. “I don’t think I have to do anything.”
I sipped mine and dipped a piece of crust. Dainty and smug.
“You could give up pot, Mom,” Obsidian said.
“That would be great,” Jade said.
“I don’t smoke that much,” Meagan said, as self-conscious as I had ever seen her.
“You’re, like, the wake-and-bake Marley Mom,” Jade said. “We’re not dumb.”
“This isn’t about me,” Meagan said.
“But all of a sudden it is, isn’t it?” I was gloating. It was nice to be out of the spotlight. “It’s something that would really make this family better. It’s just a little thing. Pot’s not addictive. You could do it, right?”
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