“Sure, I could,” she said. “If I wanted to.”
It was fun to overplay my hand. I was pretty sure Meagan wouldn’t call my bluff.
“Yeah, I mean, she quit eating wheat,” Obsidian said, taking his stepmom’s side.
“Exactly,” Meagan said.
“That’s only because gluten can’t get you high.” I was grinning.
“Okay,” Meagan said. “I’ll quit.”
I stopped grinning.
“It’ll be good for the boys to see that I can do something like this.”
Jade and Obsidian bumped fists. They were thrilled, and under different circumstances I would have been, too. But I had apparently just made a deal to go back on antiseizure medication.
“But you have to put your glass eye back in, too,” Meagan said.
She might have been looking for an out. She was an inveterate pothead.
“How did you know about that?” I asked.
“Winsor told me everything.” She glanced at the boys. “Almost everything.”
“A glass eye?” Jade said. “That is so cool.”
“It’s an ocular prosthesis,” I said. “But I’m not ashamed of the way I look. So what’s the point of wearing it?”
“So you could stop being special?” Meagan snarked, tearing the crust off her toast as if it was a Band-Aid.
“There’s nothing special about not having an eye,” I said.
“Yeah, there is,” Meagan said. “That patch gets everyone to back off. You get to keep your distance and do this whole pirata thing.”
I was pretty stunned that I had let myself get sucked into this conversation and, even worse, agreed to a deal about my meds—and maybe even my glass eye.
“Does it look like a real eye?” Jade asked.
“Sort of,” I said.
“Can we see it?” Obsidian asked.
“Maybe,” I said.
30
I was pissed off. And it wasn’t because going back on Epilim or wearing my fake eye again was any big deal. It wasn’t. It was probably a good thing, even. I had been turning into a grumpy old gringo—one who didn’t really care enough about how he looked or what he did.
What pissed me off was how easily Meagan had outmaneuvered me. How she had me throw in the free floor mats and the extended warranty and make her a deal below dealer cost.
But she was dead-on about the eye patch. It was part of my sympathy brand, and I did use it to stake out the space I liked to keep between myself and everybody else and to push off tedious obligations and that be your own hero bullshit. I wasn’t above faking a slipped disk as an excuse to skip big wave days and their inevitable hold-downs and flossings.
I hadn’t always been like this. There was a time when hunting down sick bombs while scared shitless or hungover was the sweetest kind of winning—like selling an expensive car to a buyer who had a bad credit rating, or cheating on your wife without getting caught. There was an addictive challenge to it all. It was fun to pull off the tricks and pimp the kooks.
Then I got shot—and meeting Mr. Mortality face-to-face changed everything. When I shook his hand, I felt how weak my grip on reality was and how dumb lucky most of us are. If people knew how close we live to chaos and catastrophe—and how random it is—they’d freak. It’s right next door.
I kept my glass-eye kit in this cooler I had stacked on a shelf in the back of my bodega. It was already about midnight, and Meagan and the kids had been conked out for hours. The night was moonless and pitch-black, so I had to be careful of scorpions as I rummaged through all my special stuff—stuff so special that I kept it in an unlocked bodega in Mexico.
It was mostly my passport and birth certificate, an old wedding ring, a fake Rolex, three Car Salesman of the Year awards, a Little League team photo, and a vibrator that I’d found in my ex-wife’s golf bag—she told me it was her caddy’s.
I located my glass-eye kit, which looked like a fake-leather man purse. Inside, there was a little velvet bag for the shiny little box that held the shiny, spoon-shaped ocular prosthesis—a sightless orb whose only advantage was that it didn’t get bloodshot on drinking binges.
It’s okay, officer, I was driving with my other eye.
My OP came with an instructional DVD, a short video that I was encouraged to review regularly in case I forgot how to put in my eye. But putting in a glass eye is about as difficult as putting on a condom. And it gets easier the more you do it—in the dark, standing or sitting, in a public john or in the privacy of your own home. Back in my prime, I could even put one in—or on—while driving.
But now I was probably a little rusty, so I slipped the man purse’s handy strap over my shoulder. I didn’t want to drop my eye in the dark and have it carted off by a tarantula.
I headed up toward Puerto Vallarta and Farmacia Guadalajara, an upstart drugstore chain that was open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It was a great place to score some Vicodin or Percodan without a prescription, but tonight I was just hoping to cop some Epilim. If they didn’t have Epilim, I’d settle for Topamax.
If they didn’t have either, I’d go back to my old booze-and-blow regimen. I was sure Meagan would understand—and immediately spark a fatty.
I stopped at the Pemex about halfway to PV and ran into the baño while the Suburban was being filled up. The baño was spotless. I locked the door and took out my glass-eye kit. It had been a couple of years—at least—since I had worn this thing.
I’d never taken the necessary time to do the eye-socket exercises my oculist recommended, so I hadn’t developed any muscle memory or directional control over my new eye. Whenever I saw myself in a photograph or a mirror, my fake eye always had a weird cast, like I was trying to look around a corner or down some lady’s blouse.
Of course, the eye couldn’t see—it was a decoy. But I still got my fair share of cold-shoulder glares from women who thought I was trying to steal a cheap look at their breasts.
The color of my glass eye matched my real one perfectly, and I had to admit that it appeared authentic—authentically cross-eyed, instead of half-blind, which was sort of a lose-lose.
I was going to give it another try, anyway. I rinsed off my glass eye with some cold tap water, something I was always told never to do.
But señor, this is Mexican tap water.
On the second try, I was able to massage my glass eye into place perfectly, just like the old days. I stared at myself in the mirror. Not bad.
“You look younger with two eyes,” I said.
I tossed my pirata eye patch in the trash can and exited the baño. I tipped the baño lady two hundred pesos, and I winked at her with my new eye.
“Gracias, señora!”
But she just checked the buttons on her blouse.
I paid the gas guy, but he didn’t seem to notice that I was now patchless. Maybe this was only a big deal to me.
I jumped into my Suburban, hit the gas, and headed toward Vallarta and the new Farmacia Guadalajara. I had to wake up the farmacéutico. He was asleep behind the counter, a Padres cap pulled over his eyes and iPod earbuds stuck in his ears. I had to shake him a few times and unplug one of the buds.
“Dude, yo,” I said.
The music was so cranked, I could hear it from the dangling bud. He was listening to a Spanish cover of Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know,” which made me consider, not for the first time, just how universal the getting-totally-fucked-over experience is.
“Por favor?” I asked.
I handed him a plastic pill bottle with a twist-and-turn childproof cap and an old Epilim prescription pasted on it—600 mg, every twenty-four hours.
“¿Seis meses?”
The farmacéutico looked at the bottle, shrugged, and disappeared into a back room. I was hoping that he was going to nod out again.
I did my best, Meagan.
But a few minutes later he returned with a small stack of Epilim sample packages, the kind that doctors get for free from the pha
rmaceutical sales guys.
“Sólo tres meses,” he said. “Lo siento.”
I assured him in fluent Spanglish that I’d probably know before the three-month mark if I had run into any trees. At least, that’s what I thought I told him—by the look on his face, he might have thought I was trying to explain fútbol de fantasía.
Three months’ worth of Epilim samples costs 3,000 pesos, about 150 US, a little more than a dollar a day—pretty reasonable, really, to keep from throwing fits.
And it was nice not to get that what’s-with-the-eye-patch look from the farmacéutico. Now I was just like any other droopy-eyed gringo buying pharmaceuticals without a valid prescription in the middle of the night.
I kept checking myself out in the rearview like someone with a new haircut. I had to admit, I liked the way my eye looked. It made me want to party. So I decided to wash down my first hit of Epilim with a shot of Cuervo Gold.
But then an old alarm clanged in my head. I took one of the Epilim sample boxes out of the bag and read the label: “Do not take with alcohol.”
Shit.
There it was. That insatiable flag of restraint—waving right in my face.
31
Jade and I were playing hooky from homeschooling—off on a sort of stepfather-stepson surfing safari. We had the windows of the Suburban wide open, and a big, brassy Mexican march was blasting on the AM radio.
Obsidian was casa-bound with the Sabanita crud, a hybrid streptococcus–flu combo that victimizes nearly everyone in town at some time during the rainy season. A lot of bacteria floats around in the water systems down here in August and September, but I like to think that it inoculates the local immune systems against the coming gringo invasion—which would begin again at the end of October.
We were heading two hours south to Alacráns, an almost world-class left break when the summer swell is big. Winsor’s old TC Pang would work pretty much like a big-wave gun for Jade, which was good because Buoyweather.com was forecasting fifteen feet. My Red Fin and I would have been thrilled with half that.
“It’s going to be fun to work on your backside today,” I said, and then immediately grimaced.
Jade was playing with a map app on Winsor’s iPhone. It didn’t look like what I said had rocked him much.
“Sorry, dude,” I said. “Poor choice of words.”
Jade shut off the iPhone.
“I’m still a virgin,” Jade said.
I wasn’t sure how to respond.
“Yeah, well, of course,” I said. “Virginity is a state of mind, mostly. I mean, if someone forced you at gunpoint to climb Mount Everest, you couldn’t really count it until you did it on your own.”
Jade looked at me as if I’d just made the lamest comparison in the history of incomparables.
“I mean a virgin,” he said. “A real one. Like Lady Gaga.”
Exactly like Lady Gaga, probably—for appearances only.
“This can be any way you need it to be, Jade,” I said. “No one is going to blame you for how you want to store this stuff.”
Jade was getting frustrated. And I wasn’t making it any easier.
“I was never penetrated,” Jade said. “Winsor never—he never f-worded me.”
He seemed pretty clearheaded about it.
“¿Comprende?” Jade asked.
I could feel the steering wheel getting a little slippery.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“He just wanted me to take selfies without my clothes on,” he said. “Then he took some of himself.”
“That’s what was going on in the cooler?”
“With his iPhone,” Jade said. “He said people do it all the time—politicians. Everybody. Like it’s no big deal.”
“It’s a big deal if you’re thirteen and he’s forty,” I said. “It’s a big-deal felony.”
“I knew it was wrong,” Jade said. “But if we sextexted our own pictures, it’s legal.”
“That’s a lie,” I said. “Why didn’t you tell your mom that that was what happened?”
“Seemed pretty pointless. Winsor already had this hammer sticking out of his head.”
I flashed to Winsor’s execution on José’s panga boat and then shook it off.
“So he didn’t—f-word you?”
Jade shook his head. “He said he got money for pictures like that and he was going to give me some for mine. But he never did. Because Mom killed him.”
“You have to tell her what really happened, Jade.”
“Why?”
“Because the truth matters.”
“Not more than she does. Mom was protecting me. I gotta carry this for her.”
I was very close to telling Jade that his mom didn’t kill Winsor—but I didn’t have the courage.
Jade turned and looked at me. He was pleading.
“You can’t tell her,” he said.
“I won’t,” I said.
32
We hadn’t said anything more to each other for about the next twenty minutes. Then I turned off the highway and onto a narrow jungle path that was barely wide enough for the Suburban. I had to pull in the side-view mirrors.
Jade had slipped back into his Maps app. He seemed to be a pretty tough kid and oddly squared away, given the circumstances and the bullshit in his life. I wondered if my son could be so tough, and how he might be handling the mess I’d left him. But I couldn’t wonder about it for very long—I never could. It just emptied me out.
I busted the Suburban through a grove of dying banana trees and then pulled up to a small, rocky beach just behind the high-tide line. Alacráns was howling. Double overhead. Clean.
Jade and I grabbed our boards. We checked our leashes for frayed loops and waxed up. Jade headed to the sand, and I followed him. He put down his board and started to stretch. It was a pretty serious routine, and I had never seen him do it before.
“When did you start stretching?” I asked him. My idea of a presurf warm-up is bending down to put on the leash.
“I saw it on YouTube. All the pros do it.”
“And you guys want to be pros?”
“Obsidian does. I just love to surf.”
Jade checked his leash one more time and snapped on its cuff. Then he made a special effort to slap-shake my hand with an added fist bump.
“Come on,” Jade said.
“You go ahead. I want to get a good look at your surfing from the beach first,” I said, trying to sound like a legitimate coach.
“Your loss.”
Alacráns looked ready to go off even bigger than advertised on the surf report, so it was a little irresponsible for me to let Jade paddle out on his own.
“You don’t have to surf this,” I said.
“Are you crazy?” Jade said. “Of course I do.” And in two steps he was in the water and hydroplaning down the back of the shore break.
“Surf smart,” I shouted, like a pussy.
I was supposed to be coaching these kids, and we did have the Junior Nationals coming up—but the obvious reason I didn’t go out with Jade was because when Alacráns gets this big, it scares me.
I was surprised that we hadn’t seen any other surfers. Not that they’d be lifeguards. You always have to be your own waterman, but I’d rather Jade wasn’t out there by himself. It wasn’t one of my prouder moments—and then I had this sick-to-my-stomach feeling that maybe it was going to get too big for anybody who actually knew Alacráns, and that’s why nobody was here.
I could see whitecaps about a half mile offshore, south of the point. The big sets were starting to stack up. It was near high tide, and usually that means the waves are smaller. Alacráns is a low-tide break. The wave gets bigger as the tide drops.
Unless the swell is really huge—like it was looking today—and then Alacráns can break gigantic on a high tide, and very close to shore. The place is an elephant graveyard for broken boards, and it’s had its share of broken necks, too. There is blood in the water here.
&nb
sp; It is also the sea urchin capital of Mexico.
Sea urchins are insidious baseball-sized globs of spines and slime that attach to rocks in the shallows. I have had the misfortune of stepping on at least a dozen of these ugly little pincushions over the years, and it has taken months to remove all the syringe-like spines that have broken off in my feet.
Jade was already a few hundred yards offshore, and it looked like he was having some trouble finding a channel out. I signaled for him to go around more to the outside, but I couldn’t get his attention despite jumping up and down like a hired clown in front of a carwash.
A giant set came through, and Jade perfectly duck-dived under the first big wave. Then he barely scratched over the second one. But I did not see him come up after he dove under the third. I waited.
Jesus.
I grabbed my Red Fin and started to sprint toward the shore break. All I could think was that Jade had gotten his leash snagged on a piece of reef—which is how everyone figures Mark Foo drowned at Mavericks. And Foo was a real-deal Hawaiian waterman, not a thirteen-year-old boy whose imbécil of a stepdad let him go out in monster surf all by himself.
I still couldn’t see Jade, and I sprinted about a hundred yards up and down the beach, scanning the ocean and calling out for help. But it was useless. All I could see were whitecaps and closeouts—and what I was really trying to do was strap on a pair and man up. Finally, I just threw my Red Fin into the shore break and started stroking as hard and as fast as I could.
There wasn’t time to try to find the channel. I had to go right at the heart of where I’d last seen Jade and just keep hammering toward the roiling white water and closeouts.
You can’t duck-dive a longboard under a breaking wave the way Jade had on Winsor’s old TC Pang, so getting out in big surf on something as floaty as the Red Fin can be a hard deal.
I had three choices as the sets came toward me. I could turn turtle, gripping the board over my head and angling it in a way that the wave might ride over me—generally a small-wave strategy. Or I could abandon my board and head to the bottom, holding on to my leash until the wave passed overhead, which is the smarter big-wave strategy.
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