by Mike Safe
‘Among other things,’ she replied. She paused, looked at Vargas and smiled, ‘Can I tell him?’
‘Well …’ Vargas hesitated. ‘Okay, but he’s got to understand that it’s off the record. At this stage he can’t say anything to anyone about it.’ He fixed his gaze on Harcourt. ‘I hate to get all uptight with you, Johno, but you’re here from a business point of view, for want of a better way of putting it, and nothing must be said to anyone at this stage about what Poppy’s about to tell you. Agreed?’
Harcourt was confused. ‘Well, I guess.’
‘No “I guess”. Agreed?’
‘Agreed.’
Vargas gestured for Poppy to continue.
‘We’re getting married in LA in a couple of weeks.’
‘Congratulations,’ said a surprised Harcourt for want of anything else to say.
Vargas left his chair, went to Poppy in hers, put his arms around her and kissed her cascading hair. ‘The tricky bit is that we’ve sold the whole thing – magazine, TV rights, yes, I know, chequebook journalism – and so we have to shut up about it for now. Even back in Noosa no one, or next to no one, knew about it. In fact, next to no one there knew we were in a relationship. Kind of happened over the summer while I was there sweating over the movie script. Saw her surfing in that red bikini at Tea Tree all the time. Well, she also had a blue one and a yellow one … kind of stood out, if you know what I mean.’
‘And one thing led to another,’ said Poppy.
‘Eh, yes it did – quite quickly.’ Vargas thought about it for a moment. ‘The thing is I have to get this movie locked down – especially the money, some of the key cast and crew – before the wedding, which let’s face it, will be a production in its own right. But at least we’re a fair way along with the movie stuff now so we should be okay.’
Vargas and Poppy went on to explain it wasn’t going to be a mega wedding. After all, it would be Vargas’s fourth and her second – apparently she had a former husband somewhere, a surf star wannabe who’d never made the pro tour.
‘But it will be nice,’ she said. ‘My family from Noosa, my married sister as matron of honour, her daughter as flower girl.’ She shrugged. ‘More than enough to keep the media types happy and all of it set against the backdrop of Mike’s place at Malibu, the beach, and the house.’
‘And Dexter, the hired hand who ended up all these years later as my indispensable best friend, will, of course, be the best man,’ said Vargas, raising his glass.
‘I’ve got your back, my friend,’ said Dutton, returning the gesture.
Within an hour the others had excused themselves – the two Johns off to the beach shack that they shared adjacent to the main dwelling, Poppy back inside the house to do whatever and Dutton to get on the satellite phone to finalise the flight bookings that would take the couple and him on to Los Angeles.
Vargas and Harcourt sat there for a few minutes, the only sounds the periodic thud of surf out on the reef and the murmur of fronds in the surrounding palms when a breath of wind passed through. Vargas fired up a cigar, its smoke drifting aloft before being whisked away on the slightest hint of a breeze.
‘Okay, the Woodrell brothers,’ said Vargas, no doubt pausing for effect as well as to take a major drag on the cigar. ‘Why are you interested in them and whatever might or might not have happened decades ago?’
Here we go, thought Harcourt. This is the whole purpose for having me deposited on this clump of sand. He recounted the story – Vargas’s relationship with Tommy, Tommy’s drowning, its aftermath, Flipper Woodrell’s anger, the pay off. Vargas listened in silence, staring out into the night, its firmament of stars, the Southern Cross at its centre. He looked completely at ease, lolling back in his chair and swapping hits on the bottle and cigar. As Harcourt talked, his mind was also working: he’s trying to do to me now what he did to those Hollywood money guys, lulling me inside some sort of Vargas world where everything ends up being seen through his self-prescribed prism – like that or leave.
When Harcourt finished, Vargas continued looking off into the night as the two of them sat there. It was as if they were wrapped in the dark’s balmy warmth, almost as if the movement of the planet revolved around this tiny dot of sand surrounded by this vast ocean.
Finally, Vargas sat up in his chair and turned towards Harcourt. He smiled, ‘Yeah, you’re right. Well, most of what you said was right. But why should I want it in the book – my book as we’ve previously discussed?’
‘Like I say, it’s your story,’ Harcourt replied. ‘And an interesting part of it. It humanises you, peels away some of the Hollywood glitz and glamour, for want of a better way of putting it.’
‘Are you trying to flatter me?’ Vargas asked and then laughed. He took a last giant pull on the cigar and then threw its stub into the cooking pit. ‘I mean, all of it is so long ago but the truth is that for all Phil Woodrell’s apparent ongoing angst about Tommy and his grievances towards me he was, and would still appear to be, a pretty sad human. I’ve got no insight into him now – haven’t thought of him in years – but back then he was a drunk and a bully who took it out on his younger brother for reasons best known to himself. It was a different time and Tommy, well, he was different. His big brother was this football hero, or he wanted to be, while Tommy didn’t know who he was, how he fitted in.’
Vargas paused, maybe for dramatic effect. ‘He was a lonely kid, a few years younger than me, and he wanted to belong. I kind of knew how he felt – I was an only child and after my mother’s death my father had trouble coping and so threw himself into his business, leaving me to my own devices if you like and so I got into surfing. It gave me something my old man couldn’t – a purpose, a reason to get out and give it a go, I guess. I was a cocky bugger and ended up falling out with a lot of the other kids – they were mostly dumb fuckers who couldn’t see beyond their noses. Their next wave or dope-smoking session behind the surf club was as good as it got for them. So Tommy and I, the outcasts for different reasons, became friends in a funny sort of way, almost by default.’
Vargas drank the last of the Vonu Lager. ‘I could pull the girls – and that for starters pissed off the boneheads who couldn’t – Tommy was just happy to be along for the ride. I had next to nothing to do with Phil but he didn’t like me right from the get go because I had money and a car and an attitude as well as having influence on Tommy who until then had been beholden to big important footy hero Phil.’
Vargas sighed and shook his head, a regretful smile creasing his face. ‘But then we started doing stupid shit just because we could. Like I say, we were outsiders and soon enough Tommy was happy to piss off his big brother and I was happy to encourage it because I didn’t rate Phil, the bully and drunk, not exactly a paragon of virtue.’
Vargas told that if you knew the right people back then you could score whatever you wanted – amphetamines and barbiturates, uppers and downers were readily obtainable. ‘A lot of them came off the cargo ships down at the wharves and you could buy them up at Kings Cross or from various sleazebags who hung around the inner city clubs and pubs – purple hearts, dexys, black bombers – they had a hundred different names. Anyway, Tommy and I got into those and away we went. Yeah, we had a stupid replica pistol, or at least I did. There was next to no security back then and so we got really stupid and hit a few service stations, a couple of late night corner stores. The truth was it came down to a few weeks of madness, nothing more. It was brainless, beyond brainless … and before long we were both well on the way to realising that, him especially.’
Still, the pair’s recklessness was also being released elsewhere – out in the surf where they took increasing risks. ‘Maybe it was something to do with the pills – stupidity prompting more stupidity. But I’d always been one to have a go and I guess I encouraged Tommy, who was a pretty good surfer, to do the same, anything to shake off Phil’s hold on him.’
Vargas shrugged and said his memory of the day Tommy died was at best va
gue. ‘I’d taken something that morning. I can’t remember what exactly, and he hadn’t. But I still remember enough of what happened out in the water.’ They’d arrived at Boomers to find the beach deserted. After watching for some time – sets of big waves followed by deceptive lulls, the classic setup for surf that had travelled long distances, gathering power along the way – they decided to paddle out. ‘But once we got out there it was nasty and unpredictable, hitting the reef at a weird angle. I was still pretty wacked by what I’d taken, but the reality of how dangerous it was kind of straightened me out, well, at least a bit,’ he said, his voice falling away. ‘I caught a smaller one and managed to make it and as I paddled back out I yelled at Tommy that it was best we got out of there. He was just sitting there on his board – he was scared for sure and by then I was too. So we started back towards the channel, as much as there was one, just a mix of chop and rips, to try to paddle back to shore, but then out of nowhere this big set, easily the biggest we’d seen, rolled in. I screamed at him to dig in, paddle for the horizon as hard as he could, and we made it over the first couple and I made it over the next one, which was huge, and heard it break behind me, boom, like rolling thunder. I looked back and Tommy wasn’t there. It’d caught him, taken him back over. I never saw him again.’
Somehow, Vargas managed to get back to the sand. He searched along the beach for any sign of Tommy – his board, or broken pieces of it, or at worst his body. He had vague recall of Flipper Woodrell finding him crouched and confused on the beach. ‘“He started screaming at me – ‘You killed my brother! I’ll get you for this, you fucker!” I have a memory of him hitting me, slapping me.’
The rest of the day – the police search for Tommy, Vargas’s subsequent departure from the beach with the cops and their questioning of him – were a blur. ‘Yeah, I knew I’d fucked up, fucked up big time, but I’d managed to place my mind elsewhere. I guess I was in shock of some sort.’ He smiled wanly. ‘Maybe they should have drug-tested me there and then, but there wasn’t much of that sort of thing back then, especially at some down-the-coast police station.’
Vargas agreed that Tommy’s death received little media attention. His father and Vinnie Vincenso ordered him not to attend the subsequent burial and memorial service, fearing conflict with the Woodrell family. By the time the inquest came around the newspaper and TV focus had moved on.
He had little memory of the encounter with Flipper Woodrell in the pub about a year later. ‘The best I can remember is that he was drunk and barely able to stand, let alone throw a punch at me and, anyway, I got out of there. By then I was off the pills and had started to get work in advertising, TV and newspaper catalogues. The last thing I needed was to be seen brawling with a drunken boofhead footballer.’
And, yes again, he had been present when Vinnie Vincenso had handed Phil the 20,000 dollars in the car park. ‘For what it was worth, I talked my father into doing that and Vinnie supported me. Yeah, there was that feeling of guilt about having taken Tommy out in that surf and the money was nothing more than a goodwill gesture, there was no provision that Phil stay away from me. He’s lying about that. I also wasn’t hiding in a car supposedly afraid of him – we’d agreed that Vinnie should front him first up. Back then, he was the smooth talker, still is today in his funny old-style way. Anyway, I remember after that, when Phil had taken the cash, I’d come over from our car and told him I was sorry for Tommy’s death, for the anguish to his family … Maybe Phil was too busy thinking about the money he’d just scored to hear me, let alone remember me doing it.’
Vargas stood and stretched his shoulders and back. ‘But what the fuck … it was all those years ago. Yes, I even think about Tommy every now and then, maybe when I’m about to head out into a surfing situation that gets me a little anxious, when I see big waves breaking over a reef. That sort of thing can make you aware of your mortality, your vulnerability. But it can also take you somewhere else, make you want to prove something to yourself … Whatever that might be.’ He stretched some more, twisting from side to side. ‘But I surely know I don’t have to justify myself to some angry guy who seems to have spent most of his life mucking up. For god’s sake, he admitted to you that he spent a large cut of the twenty grand on a car for himself while he bought his parents a TV – and now he seems to want to dump the fault for his messed-up life back on me. I assure you that’s not going to happen, certainly not in my book about my life.’
Harcourt, who had stayed silent throughout the recounting, remained in his chair, but Vargas, a tired look on his face, turned to him and said, ‘C’mon, let’s take a walk.’ They crunched through the shell grit and down along the sand, darkness all around, the torches having been extinguished and the only light a couple of soft glows from within the house.
‘Look,’ said Vargas, as they passed the Beaver, bobbing beside its pontoon. ‘What we’ve talked about can go in the book as far as I’m concerned, but it will be figured by me – not Phil Woodrell. You can include my take on Tommy and his death, you can include the stuff about the pills, maybe even mention the stick-ups – I can’t even remember them or their locations in any sort of detail … is there some sort of statute of limitations on that sort of thing?’ He laughed almost mockingly. ‘Will I end up in jail if I tell all?’
‘I have no idea,’ said Harcourt. ‘Can you be charged with a crime that you don’t remember exactly where and when it was committed? Would the cops even have a record of that now?’
‘Well, hell, I don’t know or even care that much,’ said Vargas. ‘Anyway, not at this stage. Everybody, from you to Montacue Publishing keep telling me how a bit of wow will sell a book – well, there’s a bit of wow for starters.’
He stopped and stared out into the lagoon’s all-consuming night, the inevitable thud of surf on the outer reef. ‘Johno, for me, the real story is that I’m now on my way to being an old man. I’ve maybe got one more full tilt lap around the track – for want of a better way of putting it – and then my race as far as the big stuff is concerned will be pretty well run. This film, this book and, well, Poppy. I’ve got to make all that, especially marrying her, the best I can. Three wives so far, three abject failures, mainly because of my own selfishness. But now I’ve found this wonderful woman almost back where the whole thing started for me.
‘I know I’ve still got the steel in me to make this movie work. Did I tell you I decided my character will die at the end of it? That’s the bit of the final edit of the script that was hard to sell to those Hollywood schmucks – they prefer happy endings, there tends to be more money to be made in them. But it would seem I’ve managed to sway them, well, two out of three of them.’
He halted for a moment. ‘I know also that I can make the marriage work – I’m a lot of things, still full of bluff and bullshit when it suits my purpose, but I know beyond everything else I want to be with her, need to be with her. Earlier, you mentioned that for the book to work it would need to humanise me, look at the not so good as well as the good, and that’s how I want it to be with Poppy. I want her to love me for my frailties as much as my strengths, not just the movie star hype. I owe her that, I owe her the truth. And also with the book I know you can do that, get inside me, the good, the bad and, yes, even a bit of the ugly. I’m up for that. Will you do it?’
Harcourt turned towards him. ‘I’ll do it.’
They shook hands standing there in the night’s stillness, the strip of white sand, the wide sweep of stars against the black sky.
‘I love this place,’ said Vargas. ‘If anywhere, this is where I feel most at home, here and Noosa. When the movie and book are done I hope Poppy and I’ll be spending a lot more time here. Its simpleness concentrates your senses, puts you in touch with what matters, what’s bigger than you.’
His eyes focused outwards into the dark, towards the continuing drum of surf on the outer reef. ‘We’ll hit it in the morning when the tide’s right,’ he said. ‘It’ll be fun.’
SEVENTEEN
The pair of jet skis skipped across the smooth water of the lagoon, Vargas driving the lead machine with Poppy as passenger, Dutton piloting the second with Harcourt hanging on as if he was on a runaway horse. They were headed for “The Passage,” the break in the reef on Lailai Atoll’s southwest corner which provided a wave that could be surfed in the right conditions. Harcourt managed an oblique look over Dutton’s shoulder towards the reef where a mass of white-water exploded across its gnarled surface every so often. As Vargas and Big John had forecast the previous evening, the swell appeared to be on the increase, although at a distance and from the back of the charging ski, it was impossible to tell how big it was.
An hour earlier, Vargas had knocked on the thin wooden door of Harcourt’s room. ‘C’mon, sun’s up, surf’s up. Let’s get out there.’ Harcourt had rolled over, making a snuffling sort of sound before untangling himself from the sheet that had enveloped him for much of the night. After a cup of well-brewed coffee and a couple of eggs on toast, all prepared by Big John, Vargas had taken him out to a shed behind the house. Inside, were the twin jet skis, Harcourt knowing enough about them to realise they were the deep-hulled rough water variety that was favoured for tow-surfing, where surfers on specialised boards were pulled behind like water-skiers before being whipped, almost sling-shotted, into the gathering wave, something he had never tried. Vargas had said they would be using the watercraft merely to make it out to the gap in the reef, which otherwise would have meant a long walk down the beach, which wasn’t drivable all the way in the Mokes, and then a similar lengthy paddle out. Riding one of the jet skis, Dutton would act as a motorised lifeguard while the three of them surfed.
‘Dexter does a lot of things, but he doesn’t surf,’ Vargas had told Harcourt, ‘even though he regularly takes part in long-distance rough water swim comps back in California.’
‘Which no doubt he wins.’