“You’re a big deal,” James tries again. “I feel I’m lucky to even get to surf against you here. So thanks, I guess, for volunteering to—“
“We’re not even surfing, for God’s sake,” he cuts in.
James takes a deep breath and prays with every fiber of his being for a swell to come in. He taps his fingertips on his board and swishes his ankles impatiently in the water below.
When the ocean stays mockingly flat, James realizes that apparently the only way to let the excess adrenaline out of his limbs is to take on the challenge of talking to the man next to him. He takes another breath—feels it press out against his ribcage that’s still sore from an eleven hour shift the day before.
“Well, gotta say it’s pretty amazing what you did in Oahu two years ago. I read about it, that piece in the Journal. And you were just a kid—”
“Yes, yes, I’m the young prodigy and you’re the old washed out vet trying to go pro before your knees or your wallet give out. Glad we’ve got those tedious details out of the way.”
“How the fuck do you know about–?” James stops himself before he really lets loose. Righteous anger or no, he’s smart enough to know that the middle of the ocean next to a no doubt champion swimmer is not exactly the best place to go and lose his head.
Danny’s words, old washed out vet, drape over him like heavy ice as his ribs clench.
It’s then that his patience—for the lack of waves, for the man next to him, for the sunburn forming on his cheeks, for the hours and hours of extra shifts he’ll have to work to afford to enter his next qualifying competition—runs out.
“Well, crucify me for trying to have a conversation,” he spits out.
The man finally turns to look at him, pure incredulity plastered across his face, spreading out from underneath the aviators still covering his eyes and cheeks.
“You sat surrounded by so-called friends for an hour before this heat hearing about what an asshole fag I am, and then you walked up to the shore expecting to be absolutely humiliated in front of everyone and having the chance at going pro taken from you by a dickhead who volunteered to annihilate you, and your first instinct when we got out here to this flat water was that you wanted to converse with me? Who the hell are you?”
James bristles. He fights down the urge to slam his fist down onto his board in front of him like a five-year-old who was just reminded of the fact that they’re irrelevant and irrational and small.
“Well who the hell are you?” James shoots back. “What the fuck do you know about me?”
Danny lifts a hand and gestures out before them at the sea, casually, as if the answer to James’ question is written on the horizon line, plain as day for anyone to read.
“I know that you’re considering taking this little swell that’s coming towards us as your first wave in a last-ditch attempt to end this horrible conversation—which, incidentally, was your idea in the first place—and I know that when I tell you that that wave’s gonna be closed out because of a rip current and isn’t even worth paddling out for, you’re going to look at me and go ahead and do it anyway just to spite me and admit to yourself that you don’t have to try and be civil to me anymore because I’ve now proven myself as a verified asshole. And also, tough luck about your alarm clock battery.”
“Jesus Christ, they weren’t exaggerating,” James mutters as he shakes his head out at the flat horizon. He keeps his eyes trained on the little swell Danny mentioned. He’s no idiot. He can see as well as anyone that it’s gonna be closed out. It would be embarrassing to chase after it in front of the finest surfers in the world. It would be mad.
James starts paddling.
He nearly laughs to himself when he hears Danny’s incredulous huff behind him as he cuts through the water towards the oncoming wave, feeling a thrill down his spine as he watches it slowly gain speed to reveal a perfect swell coming in right behind it. The muscles in his shoulder start to groan and spike under the heavy wet blanket of his wetsuit as he pulls his body through the water, and the muscles across his back and sides clench to keep him balanced on the waxy board.
James lets his mind slip away and his body take over as he leaves Danny farther behind with every paddle. He can feel the rushing surge of the wave just behind him now, scooping up the tail of his board and lifting him up towards the sky. It’s going to be a full barrel. He can feel it. With a grunt down in his gut, James grips the sides of his board with trembling fingers and hoists his feet up behind him, toes gripping to find purchase over the power of the wave.
It’s his favorite part—the lift off. The treacherous moment between lying flat against the belly of the earth and being lifted up into the heavens on the wings of the spray. James’ tired legs find a second wind and pump him down the face of the barrel just as it folds into the perfect pipeline, cocooning him in a swirl of water and echoing the sound of his heavy breathing. He reaches the opening of the barrel and clenches his core to turn his board up towards the lip of the wave, tapping the crest twice before cutting back and leaving a rocket of spray.
Just as the whitewater starts to swallow up his legs, James shoots a glance back to Danny Moore perched nonchalantly on his board with his fucking aviators still pulled down over his eyes. James smirks as the sound of the wild applause begins to fill his ears, and he does a full soul arch, face lifted up to the sky as the churning foam swells around his calves.
Danny isn’t even looking his direction.
James falls back into the shallows to end his ride, letting his body melt into the water. His muscles surge with excess adrenaline, lactic acid from holding himself tight on the board during the cutbacks starting to leak its fiery way through his veins. For a tiny moment, he stares straight up at the open sky, cloudless and blue as the waves cradle his back. The same sky he’d closed his eyes against that afternoon in Vietnam. The sky he thought would be the last thing he ever saw on earth.
Foam slaps across his face, cutting off his view.
By the time he clambers back up on his board and cracks his neck, he can hear the distant booming crackle of the announcers going wild. One glance out at the pathetic waves coming in tells James that that ride will be his first and last one of the set. His chance at going pro, his chance at everything, resting on the previous thirty seconds of his life. That and whatever Danny Moore is able to accomplish in the next four minutes between now and the airhorn.
James’ breath catches in his throat as he turns in the glassy shallows to watch Danny chase after his own incoming swell—small, but with promise. The long, lean lines of his body cut through the water like silk. James desperately wants to turn away, but he’s frozen. Riveted as he stares at the way the inky tendrils of the tattoo shift and ripple across the muscles as Danny paddles. He turns to catch the wave, aviators reflecting the glinting sun. He paddles once more, then shoots up all at once to a gasp from the crowd. James convinces himself the burning in his cheeks is just from the sun as he watches Danny’s long, sinewy arms extend for balance, ripping down along the face of the wave and throwing up spray with each half turn up along the lip.
James’ heart sinks deep in his chest.
It’s over. It’s all gone. There’s no way in hell, even with his perfect pipeline, that he could ever compete with this. With the pure muscle and grace and elegance that glides along the water as if gravity doesn’t even exist. As if the waves were begging Danny to ride them. He’s just resigned himself to turn back towards the shore and escape the beach as quickly as possible when Danny looks over to him, mid-way through his perfect ride.
James’ heart beats once, twice, stops.
Danny stares, and he pulls the aviators down off his face as he continues to surf along the crest, all while looking straight at James.
Then he wipes out.
The crowd goes insane. Gasps and wails and cheers and there’s no fucking way that James is really hearing people chanting his name across the hot sand. He wades towards the shore on shaky legs and p
ulls his board alongside him, floating on the water, when suddenly Rob is on top of him, tackling him down into the froth with two warm, soft hands on either side of his face.
For one heart-stopping moment, James thinks he’s going to kiss him. That Rob will pull James into his body and press those perfect, chapped lips to his in front of hundreds of people on the shore. Will let a curtain of long, soft hair fall across James’ chest.
But then Rob’s pulling his hands back and roughing up James’ hair just like he always does, the grin on his face threatening to leap off his freckled cheeks.
“Jimmy, you professional surfing son of a bitch, you just left Danny Moore in the fucking whitewater!”
And James wants to cry. At the saltwater stinging his eyes, and the way Rob is looking at him with his hair falling into his eyes like he just went and hung the sun, and the swell of cheers he can still hear pouring over him from the beach, and the way the sheer thrill of his ride has shocked the scar on his shoulder into being too numb to hurt yet.
It’s all just overwhelming enough to make him wish he was walking up onto a deserted beach instead, just after dawn and a Los Angeles sunrise with only Rob by his side. James looks back once more towards the sea and sees Danny standing in the shallows, pulling his aviators back down over his eyes and running his hands through his hair to smooth down the curls.
James freezes. He swallows hard as a shiver of realization runs through his core, turning his joy into ice.
He’s standing there on the Hermosa Beach shore, having just defeated a two-time Billabong Masters champion. Having just stuck it to the haunted darkness and fucking won it all anyways. And now James Campbell can’t even stop and enjoy it all, because he suddenly realizes two very important things:
One, that the way the tattoo rippled across Danny’s back made James dry in the back of his throat in an achingly familiar way.
And two, that this Hawaii-big-wave-surfing-champion son of a bitch just went and wiped out on purpose.
5
The love affair began with physics.
With crinkled graph paper stolen from the cupboard of a 4th grade classroom in Iowa, covered in sharpened red crayon. Wavelength charts and gravity pull calculations and the effect of wave peel angle versus wave break intensity based on the size and composition of the sand hidden in the water’s depths.
Physics that started with accidentally getting his small, sticky hands on a full color advertisement photograph of a wave breaking fresh and clean on the Hawaiian shore, found on the last page of a copy of Playboy magazine buried deep in a wet rubbish bin just off the little dirt road in the middle of landlocked Kentucky.
That stayed folded up in the back pocket of Sydney Daniel Moore’s only pair of khaki pants until his khakis became three inches too short for his legs, and until Lieutenant Moore announced that after moving eight times in the last five years, they were finally gonna settle down and have a house of their very own. A little slice of paradise on the military base way out at Pearl Harbor, where rumor had it the ocean was bluer than the crayon in the box.
And Danny sat sweating and cramped in the back of their beat-up pickup as they drove across the desert headed straight for the Los Angeles airport, trying to tune out the rattling old cassette tape of a Sunday sermon that his father had made them listen to eighteen times already. Something about fire and brimstone. Something about needing to be saved.
He held the torn and faded photograph in his quiet ten-year-old hands as they drove while his younger brother asked every fifteen minutes whether they could stop to find a Dairy Queen for a frostee and some fries. He closed his eyes and leaned back against the hot leather seat and imagined what the water near Pearl Harbor would sound like crashing against the shore, with the wind in the palm trees and the crystal blue waves and the way the soft, warm sand would feel different than prairie dust against his bare toes. Imagined a velvet beach covered in a blanket of shiny white pearls.
It was almost enough to help him forget that his momma wasn’t in the car with them. That she was still back crying on an Arizona porch with a liquor bottle in her hand and no wedding ring on her finger. With her beloved cross necklace lying on the rough wooden floorboards of the kitchen after she broke it, trying to hold Danny close into her chest, snot covered lips groaning out, “Not Sydney, please not Sydney,” the only voice he’d ever heard call him that name, and his father’s firm grip tugging him clear the opposite direction towards the Chevy, piled high with their packed bags.
It was physics that filled his head and drowned out the sound of the sweating preacher every early Sunday morning, where they bowed and knelt and prayed in the sticky, hot, humid air of the Oahu church, his father’s starched formal uniform on one side of him and his father’s new wife’s traditional muumuu on the other. And it was physics on his mind when he tuned out his dad saying grace for fifteen minutes before each meal while his brother snuck early bites off his plate and chewed soft enough that only Danny ever noticed. Physics that he thought about late on the night of his fourteenth birthday lying on the bunk bed underneath his brother, after he had asked their father if he could have a surfboard for his gift, and instead he’d gotten a lecture and a brand new, too-small necktie.
The day after Danny’s fourteenth birthday, he took apart an old fax machine he found dumped behind the high school where everybody laughed and called him Egg-white, on account of the fact he had the palest skin any of them had ever seen, and he’d committed the social crime of eating an egg salad sandwich packed by his father’s wife on his first day of school there. A sandwich she’d had to ask Danny how his other mom used to make.
Danny tinkered for a week and finally put the fax machine back together so that it only ever printed out Led Zeppelin lyrics. And it was then that he realized that a whole lot of people would pay good money to get a kid to fix their televisions and calculators and radios for half the price it would cost them at a Radio Shack.
On his fifteenth birthday, Danny Moore walked up to the counter of the local surf shop with bulging pockets and purchased his first very own surfboard, just like the ones he watched the older guys ride across the neighborhood beach. He stayed up all night memorizing the rises and falls of the waves—the perfect stance to have on the board in order to surf a smooth barrel. Practiced paddling and popping up on the worn carpet of his small bedroom floor as sweat pooled in the small of his back. Nine years’ worth of handwritten notes on wave physics. Nine years’ worth of observations on the clear, vast blue. The way the ocean breathes and the force of the spray. Angles of the wind and the thick black pull of the deep.
And on the day after his fifteenth birthday, he planted his new board proudly in the sand on the empty local beach right at sunrise. He ran down to the shore just to give himself a first fresh dip in the virgin waves, and, when he eventually walked back up to his precious board, he nearly fell to his knees in the sand when he saw someone had spray painted “faggot” across the face of it in angry red.
He stood there frozen with the icy, curdling realization that Chet Morgan must have caught a glimpse of the photo of a half-dressed sailor he kept hidden in the back of his beloved notebook. Must have somehow seen it after Chet stole it from him in the hallway last week and made him hand over his lunch money to get it back. Something straight out of a cheesy high school bad boy film. And he’d just stood there like a dumb statue thinking of the winking sailor hidden in the notebook’s pages currently clutched between Chet’s thick and sweaty fingers, feeling like some stupid idiot just waiting to get caught and hanged.
And he also realized, kneeling in the sand on the sunrise after his fifteenth birthday, that a group of other just-turned fifteen-year-old’s were currently hiding in the bushes laughing their asses off at him.
In the end, it was impressively efficient how little time it took his father to pack up his entire life for him in trash bags left on the doorstep, with a few yelled parting words and a shocked and embarrassed snicker coming from his li
ttle brother half-crouching at the top of the stairs. It was even more surprising to hear the sound of bare feet running after him down the sidewalk three minutes later. To turn and see his father’s wife Lahela with tears in her eyes begging him to let her know whether he was alright. To not disappear forever. To not turn his back on the Lord.
So Danny found new places to sleep, as far from Pearl Harbor as he could possibly get on the tiny island of Oahu. Quit high school and instead devoured every science book he could get his hands on. He studied the ocean with romantic obsession, chronicling her every quiver and breath. He fixed people’s broken clocks and telephones and primitive computing machines in his little trailer for cash under the table, and he wrote a secret letter to Lahela once a month.
He scrubbed the spray paint off the face of his surfboard. Went out every morning before the sun and stayed out until he barely had the strength to still stand upright on the waxed wood.
And he realized that, since the first time he ever picked up a sharpened red crayon and worked out a physics equation in vibrating, shaky scrawl, he had finally found something he was actually good at.
He was really fucking good at surfing.
6
It’s all very unexpected.
Sydney pauses after throwing his sunglasses back on over his saltwater-stung eyes and running his hands through his soaked hair, still thigh-deep in the waves, with his board floating restlessly by his side. It bobs and presses against his leg, like an anxious pet dog waiting for a pat on the head or a scolding.
The swelling roar of the crowd spills out to him over the surface of the water, mixing with the harsh slap of the waves against the shore. They’re cheering for his competitor. Surrounding him and reaching out to touch his board like a talisman. Clapping their hands all over his wetsuit across his shoulder, where Sydney would be more than prepared to bet, based on the way Jimmy had paddled out to the wave, that there’s a hidden war scar, aching in the Pacific’s icy cold.
The Sea Ain't Mine Alone Page 4