The Surf Guru Read online

  “I’m sure you are,” I said.

  “I have to take a leak,” Trace said. “Can you hold my baby?” He held it out to her.

  She sat the baby in her lap and bounced it up and down. “Hello, baby,” she said. “What a big baby you are. What a bouncy baby.” She kissed it on the top of its head, then smoothed its thin brown hair. Maybe she was a good mother. The baby looked like it was in heaven, eyes half-closed and dreamy. It drooled a little more, and she wiped its mouth with a cocktail napkin. Her eyes were still wet, but she’d started to smile. She was pretty when she smiled. I told her so.

  “You should stop hanging around with that guy,” she said. “He’s holding you back.”

  I told her I knew that. It was what she wanted to hear.

  The baby grabbed her nose, and she wiggled her head from side to side. “That’s a nose you’ve got there,” she said. “That’s my nose.” The baby let go, but kept moving its hand through the air like it still had a nose in it.

  “When are you leaving town?” she asked me.

  “Tomorrow,” I said. “I hope.”

  “Where’ve you been staying?”

  “In the van,” I said.

  Her knee touched mine. “Want to stay with me tonight?” she asked. She saw me look at her ring. “I have money for a room,” she said.

  I didn’t even consider saying no. I swept the baby out of her arms, without thinking, without worrying, like I’d held a baby every day of my life, like I juggled babies in my spare time. That’s when the smell hit me. The kid was ripe. She smelled it, too.

  “Jackpot,” she said.

  I found Trace standing with Roy at the pool table, a fresh drink in his hand. I handed him the baby.

  “Phil, this baby stinks,” Trace said.

  “You’re going to have to change it,” I said. “Maybe feed it, too. You got us into this.”

  He nodded, slowly. “I’ll take care of everything,” he said.

  “For fuck’s sake, Trace,” I said, “why’d you take this thing? You could’ve said no.”

  He steadied himself against the pool table. “I was called,” he said with a stupid smile. “I was called by forces we can’t understand.”

  “Tell the bartender to call the cops,” I said. “The mother’s not coming. The mother is long fucking gone.”

  “I’m going to give her some more time,” he said.

  “I’m leaving,” I said. “I have somewhere to go.”

  “Where? Where is there to go?”

  “The motel.”

  He looked surprised. Then he smiled that same smile again. “Have fun,” he said. “I’ll be fine here.”

  “I can’t give you any more money,” I said. “We’re all out.”

  Roy lit a cigarette and draped his arm around Trace’s shoulder. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Drinks for the daddy are on me.”

  “Yeah, don’t worry,” Trace said, smooth and cool. “Roy’s buying.”

  I went back to the booth. She sucked the last ice cubes out of her glass, then whispered to me, lips cold and wet, that she would leave first and I should wait a minute before following. “It’s a small town,” she explained. I doubt we fooled anyone. People turned to watch me as I walked out. She was waiting in the motel parking lot, money in her hand. She told me to get the room while she waited outside.

  The lobby of the Desert Blossom Motel stank of curry. The desk clerk kept looking out the window, like he expected something to come crashing through it. “What’s wrong?” I asked him.

  “A big party,” he said. “The bikers. They like to make trouble. Always they make trouble.” He offered me a room on the other side of the motel. I took the key and told him good luck.

  She had her tongue in my ear before we got to the top of the cement stairs. We kissed outside the room, leaning on the metal railing. “Look at that view,” she said, extending her arm like she was showing me a whole new world.

  The fog had blown away, but all I could see was the motel parking lot, some scattered lights, dark desert. “There’s nothing to see,” I said.

  “That’s what I mean,” she said, and she kissed me again.

  I had to push her away to unlock the door. The room was decorated in sad shades of brown. Brown carpet and curtains, brown-and-orange plaid bedspread, two brown-cushioned chairs, a still life of a coconut painted on tan fabric.

  It was choking hot inside, and I said so. “It’s the middle of summer, sweetie,” she said. I kissed her long and hard because I couldn’t remember the last time anyone called me sweetie. She took off my shirt. Then she stepped back. “When was the last time you had a shower?” she said.

  I counted back to the day we’d left Durango. “Five days,” I said.

  “Why don’t you clean yourself up,” she said gently. “I’ll go get us a bottle.”

  In the shower it seemed like I could smell everything that was coming off me, layer by layer, grimy souvenirs of our time on the road. Smoke from fireworks, cigarettes, and ditchweed. Sweat from the heat and the alcohol and pushing the van and losing a dozen straight hands in Vegas. Road dust. And, Jesus, my feet. I smelled like I was dying.

  I got out of the shower without drying myself. I switched off the lights in the room. I turned the air conditioner on full and stood in front of it, naked, my eyes closed. At first it wheezed out warm air, but it gradually turned colder, just like I imagined the outside air would as we drove farther and farther north. I imagined me and Trace in Alaska, hauling in huge catches of salmon, soaked to the bone but free and happy in the never-ending daylight and the cold ocean spray. And I imagined myself there in winter, when I’d have a wallet full of money and a head full of stories, ready to endure the long dark and the cold, a cold so deep that it would freeze out everything but your purest self, and finally you’d understand where things had gone so wrong. I stood there in the cold air, thinking, listening to the water drops hitting the thin carpet underneath the air conditioner’s sputter and grind, feeling the goose bumps rise on my arms, then my legs, then along my scalp, until she came up behind me and skated her tongue down my spine, trailed it softly with a fingernail. We made love as much as anyone could in that town.

  I was scared awake by someone pounding on the door. I sat up and looked around, my heart machine-gunning inside me. It was still dark, and I was alone. At first I thought she might be the one knocking, gone for ice or fresh air and trying to get back in. Then I heard Trace. “Let me in,” he said, and in his voice was something that told me he knew she would be gone, and that I should have known, too. I found my shorts in the bathroom and put them on.

  I opened the door. Trace stood there, wobbling, holding the wall for support. Roy stood back against the railing, holding a case of beer and a pizza box. “Come on in,” I said, “but I’m going to sleep.”

  The door closed and it was dark.

  “I can’t see,” Trace said.

  “Turn on the light,” I said.

  “I can’t see,” he said, his voice getting high and scared. “Oh, fuck, I’m blind.”

  I turned on the light next to the bed. Roy stood near the door, still holding the beer and pizza. Trace was lying on the floor on his side, his hands over his eyes, moving his legs like he was running. “I can’t see,” he said.

  “Jesus, what’s he on?” I said to Roy. “What did you give him?”

  “The bikers said it was plain old crank,” Roy said. “But you never really know.”

  I got out of the bed and knelt next to Trace. “Hey, buddy,” I said, “it’s me. It’s Phil. It’s all right.” I pulled his hands away from his eyes. “You’re going to be all right.” I wondered if he was going to die, if maybe I should call someone.

  He stopped kicking his legs. For a few minutes he didn’t say anything, didn’t move, but I could see him breathing. Then he blinked and looked at me. “I got us some pizza,” he said. He said it like he wanted me to say, Yes, yes, you sure did. You’re a hero.

  Roy sat on the e
dge of the bed and opened a bottle of beer. Trace pointed at him. “That guy wants to fuck me,” he said. “He wants to fuck me in the butt.”

  I looked at Roy. He sipped his beer and shrugged. “Well, I do,” he said. “It’s no secret. I told him hours ago.”

  “Get out of here,” I said.

  “Cool it, Sundance,” he said. “I paid for this stuff. I’m staying until it’s gone.”

  Trace crawled over to the pizza box and took out a slice. His hands were shaking like crazy. “Just eat, Phil,” he said. “You gotta eat.” And I was pretty hungry, I realized. So I went and put on the rest of my clothes, took a slice, and opened beers for the two of us.

  Trace and I sat at the table next to the window, and Roy sat on the bed. We ate and drank. Roy tried a few times to make conversation, but I didn’t feel much like talking, and Trace looked busy trying to maintain. Roy gave up, leaned back, and watched us, smoking a clove cigarette. No one spoke, but the room was full of sound: the air conditioner grinding away, the alarm clock humming and flipping numbers on the minute, Trace and I chewing and swallowing, Roy exhaling long streams of smoke. We heard bursts of life from the biker party outside—running footsteps, laughing, a bottle smashed, a country song belted out in three-part discord, a man and a woman cursing each other. A Harley thundered alive and revved senselessly.

  “They’re from Bakersfield, most of them,” Roy said. “They come through here a lot. Best parties this town ever sees.” Then he leaned forward and said, “Bobbi’s husband is down there with them right now, you know.”

  “Who’s Bobbi?” I asked.

  “The woman who brought you here,” he said. “That girl gets around. So does her husband. I hope you used a condom.” Of course I hadn’t. I felt sick. I felt like I’d been stuck in that town forever.

  “Me, I never use them,” Roy said. “I like to feel everything.” Then he rambled on and on about everything he liked to feel, and everything he wanted to do with Trace, and everything was my cock this and my cock that, and Trace just sat and ate and drank and smiled like it was the best joke he’d ever heard. I got sick of it. I told Roy to shut the hell up and leave. “Look who’s Mister Manly all of a sudden,” he said. “I bet I could make you cry.” He unbuckled his belt. “I could make you call for God.”

  That’s when Trace threw a bottle at him. It shattered on the wall. Roy got wet from the spray.

  “Settle down, Butch,” Roy said. “I’m just kidding.”

  Trace took another bottle out of the case and threw that one, too. It barely missed Roy’s head. “Leave Phil alone,” Trace said.

  Roy’s mouth opened and he stared at Trace. “It was a joke,” he said. His voice wavered a little, but he didn’t move.

  “Trace,” I said. “Come on. It’s no big deal.” But Trace wound up and threw another one and this one thumped Roy in the chest. It made a dull, hollow sound. Roy cried out and jumped off the bed, limped toward the door. Trace kept throwing, and even as I was telling him to stop I found myself picking up a bottle and letting fly.

  Roy fell once.

  By the time he got the door open there was blood on his face, but I don’t know if we hit him straight on or if he got cut by a ricochet. For some reason he stopped in the doorway to yell at us. “You guys are insane,” he shouted, his hands in fists. “You guys are sick.” I picked up the pint bottle that Bobbi had bought and I threw it. Roy ducked, and it sailed over the railing. I heard it shatter in the parking lot below. Then Roy was gone, his uneven steps thunking down the stairs, his undone buckle jangling.

  We’d wrecked the room. The carpet, soaked. The bedside light, broken off the wall and dangling from its wires. The mirror, hit dead-on, angry cracks snaking out from the point of impact. Blooms of beer seeping into the walls, into the fabric of the coconut print. I stripped the sheets and blankets off the bed and Trace crawled onto the bare mattress, the only thing in the room not covered with glass.

  “We should get out of here,” I said.

  “I’m going to sleep,” he said. “I’m all of a sudden sleepy.”

  It was only then that I remembered the baby. I asked him if the cops had taken it.

  “Oh, the baby,” he said slowly, like he was remembering the night one frame at a time. “The baby.”

  “Where is it? Did you have it at the party?”

  “I gave it to someone,” he said. He closed his eyes. “Mo would want one that’s her own.”

  Then he fell asleep. I didn’t think that was a good sign. Like maybe his heart was giving out.

  I know I should have tried to find the baby. I may even have wanted to. But outside was a dark town with too many people I didn’t want to face alone. Inside was Trace, who needed me to make sure he kept breathing. I shook the glass off a chair and sat, watching him, trying not to think about the baby, trying not to think about my life. I watched for cops, but they never came. Neither did any friends of Roy’s. No angry husband, no fucked-up bikers. No one. In a way, that made it worse.

  Trace woke up just after sunrise, and we walked through an arroyo toward the gas station so we wouldn’t be seen. We sat inside the van and waited for that bastard of a mechanic to show up.

  We made it to Alaska, but we never got out on a fishing boat. Instead we had to work at the cannery, keeping the drains clear underneath the giant waste pipes, twelve-hour shifts in a chill rain of fish guts. I only lasted a month. I caught pneumonia and had to go home to live with my father and his new wife while I recovered. At the end of the summer, Trace moved to San Francisco with some girl he’d met up there after I’d left. A year later, he would be dead. He hit bottom, and Mo—who’d married the Yankee—offered to f ly him back to New York and pay for rehab. His mom told me he hanged himself in the basement at O’Hare during the layover.

  Who knew airports even had basements?

  One night when we were in Anchorage, Trace won a storytelling contest at a bar. Five-hundred-dollar prize. He told the story of his first kiss—a story that I’d been the first one to hear, that he’d told me the morning after it happened. How he was eleven and she was sixteen, how this older girl had punched her tongue into his mouth and held it there, puffed up like an insult, not moving. How she’d just had lunch and he could taste everything caught in her braces: tuna salad, peanut-butter crackers, banana. It wasn’t so much the story as the way he told it, smiling and flapping his arms and dancing and shining with self-deprecation, offering every word like it was his last cigarette and he was glad to let you have it. He blew the five hundred in an hour, buying drinks for all of us in the house. Trace could be a hero. You just had to be watching at the right time.

  Like the day we destroyed the house he grew up in with sledgehammers. His sister and her husband had bought it from Trace’s mom and wanted to redo the interior, so they hired the two of us to gut the place. I had to stop and rest, but Trace was like a machine, swinging the hammer harder and harder, grunting with every stroke, grunts that echoed louder as one by one the walls fell into rubble. I held the ladder for him as he broke apart the brick above the fireplace, where, for a few years at least, a whole family—mother, father, sister, and Trace—had hung their Christmas stockings. I watched him as the chunks of brick and mortar flew under each stroke, and before long I picked up my hammer again, believing that this was the most honest work either of us would ever do.

  Jumping Jacks

  The skyline of a city you’ve never visited blazes in night-vision green on your TV screen, and the audio track is all thumps and sirens, pippitypops and batterclangs, and you are reminded of the hiss and spit of sixteen flaming fuses on a pack of jumping jacks on that day twenty years ago when you and your best friend, Bunk, burned six acres of forest to the hot black ground.

  Jumping jacks. You buy them on Mott Street from a toothless grocer who natters on about fun-fun and bang-bang beneath a canopy of decapitated poultry. You decide this man is a fool. Jumping jacks may look like firecrackers, but they don’t bang-bang. This man kn
ows not what he sells.

  Tear open the red paper wrapping, and a fine peppery dust darkens those candy-cane swirls. The fuses are woven in a gorgeous lace of potential energy. Don’t you see it? Can’t you feel it?

  It is a drought-stricken September after a rainless August and a dust-dry July. You and Bunk walk along the trail, kicking through brittle, crackling leaves. Bunk stops, and in his hand suddenly is one of the red paper packages. He unwraps it and says, Check this out, and snaps a flame from his fifty-cent Bic and lights it and tosses it into the air, where it becomes a sparkly gunpowder butterfly—eight jacks per wing on a thorax of fuse—and all this before you can say, Wait.

  The sound? It’s a cartoon sound: when a man is startled and his derby hat spins off his head. Fweeee! Math lesson: fweeee! x 16 = the shit you’re in. But for a moment it equals glory: the fireworks spray spark trails of red and purple and gold and blue as they sizzle and wheel and whirl and spit and squeal. It is a chaos of motion and sound and color that to you (a thirteen-year-old suburban goodboy) is epiphany, is rapture, is power and light. And then it is sixteen spinning fire sticks MIRVing through the air.

  And then it is sixteen small fires igniting around you. You try to stamp them out; you dance from fire to fire, but f lames keep springing back up in the places you’ve just leaped away from. The air turns autumn-smoke gray. At first the smoke teases you with chestnut-cart sweetness, but then it turns to black choking guilt, and panic rises in your throat and nose. Bunk is standing still. Let it burn, he says, and you quit trying to stamp out all those fires, because you believe he knows something you don’t. It’s a moment of self-doubt masquerading as trust in someone else, that’s what it is, and then the flames spread, feeding on the forest, chain-igniting, now waist-high, now chest-high, now head-high, now high-high, and you snap back into yourself, knowing that this is fucked up, something is deeply fucked up and about to get a million times more fucked up, and you are a party to all this fucking up, you’ve fucked up, you’re a fuckup, boy howdy you have really fucked things up this time.