SATURDAY, MARCH 29, 1969     

Still morning. Still overcast. The Swamis parking lot was now filled, mostly with non-surfers. All the doors to the Falcon were open. Textbooks and notebooks, two surfboards, several towels, and several pairs of trunks were spread on the hood and roof. A partially filled burlap grain sack was positioned just behind the driver’s side back door.

I raised the back seats. With the seat up, I dropped to my knees, leaned in, started placing empty chocolate milk containers, packaging from donettes, bags from Jack-in-the-box, crumpled notebook pages and other trash into the burlap sack. I reached under the front seat. Some things were stuck in the springs. I pulled out a dirty white cotton laundry bag with a drawstring. Fairly heavy. I set it on the hump for the car’s driveline and opened it. The bag had the unmistakable shape of a pistol. There was, inside the bag, a towel with “Back Gate Bowling Alley” in red letters on yellow. Marine Corps colors.

There were also several pages of legal sized paper, folded in half. I tossed them over and onto the front seat.

An inner bag was velvet, royal blue, with a gold pull string. Inside with the pistol, was a small key attached by a wire to a slightly curved piece of metal. Stamped into the key was ‘121.’ Stamped into the metal was, “In case of emergency, break glass.” Several small metal objects dropped to the bottom of the inner bag as I placed it on the back seat cushion. I felt them. “Bullets.” I counted them. “Five. Twenty-two-caliber. Probably.”

            The pistol itself was wrapped, properly, in an oil cloth. I spun the cylinder, popped it open. “Empty.” I pulled back the hammer, pushed the barrel down into the seat cushion, pulled the trigger. “Empty.”

There was movement, a silhouette in the driver’s side back window, opposite and above me. In some portion of a second, the pistol was raised and aimed at the window, my left thumb pulling back the hammer. At the very moment I recognized the silhouette in the window as Gary, I pulled the trigger.

Click.

Gary jerked backward and dropped down, nothing but light behind him.

…

For some indeterminate amount of time, I was back on the floor of my father’s patrol car, 1956. So bright. On some level, collapsed on the floor of the Falcon, I had expected an actual gun shot.

            …

            The sun had won out over the clouds. Gary and I were, quite casually, half-sitting on the hood of the Falcon. I had my feet on the crushed tape player. The partially filled burlap sack was on the hood behind us. The Falcon’s side doors were closed.

“You and Roger… not hanging with the horsie girls at the base stables?”

“Later. Yeah. Definitely.” Gary looked over at the SRF compound wall. “It’s way different, you know, like nothing bad happened there.”

“It looks… cleaner. New grass, plants. Paint. So, like, no, nothing… bad. Someone burned, maybe… alive.”

“Jeez, Joey.” Gary took out a cigarette from a pack of Winstons. He offered me one with a gesture. I declined with a gesture. He knew I was a Marlboro man. “Um, so, if your mom sells the… mini-Ponderosa, where would she move to?” I shook my head. “For you, here, the Swamis parking lot, it would be… perfect.”

            “Oceanside makes more sense for her; closer to the base; she has friends there.” I paused. I was thinking about the revolver. “She… we haven’t been to church since the funeral, which is… fine by me. I’m thinking she might want to…”

“You’re thinking you can’t leave your mom alone. With my dad in Vietnam… I get it. And… Stanford’s a long way away. And no surf.”

“I would have gone. My father would have insisted. I’d have failed… Spectacularly.”

            Roger was crossing the parking lot with a large, oil-stained piece of cardboard. “I’m taking your spot,” he said, sliding the cardboard under the back of the Falcon.

I lit up a Marlboro with an oversized flame from my father’s lighter, held it out long enough to light up Gary’s Winston. “Overfilled.”

“If Joey lived in Encinitas,” Gary said, as Roger stood up lit his Marlboro with Gary’s cigarette, “Palomar Junior… Junior College; it’s, like, ‘high school with ashtrays.’”

“Sure,” Roger said, “with other dumbasses from Fallbrook, Vista, and… Mexicandido.”

            “Palomar. Yeah, there might be some cute surfer chicks from… here.” Gary looked at Roger before looking back at me. “Huh, Joey?” I shook my head.

            “Remember, Joey,” Roger said, when your father… I’m sure your mother made him do it; before we went down to Baja; he took us over behind your house. He was, like, ‘if some guy comes up and offers his sister, for sexual… services, says she’s a virgin…’ We were all laughing. Your mom’s looking out the kitchen window. ‘It’s a trap,” he tells us; “you boys should just find a nice girl around here, have sex with her.’ I said…” Roger was laughing. “I said, ‘I’m always looking, Mr. DeFreines, Sir.’ He laughed.”

            Gary and I weren’t paying adequate attention. Roger gave up and joined us, gazing over the Falcon at the water glassing off at the horizon, the waves cleaning up, smoothing out.

The distinctive sound of a Volkswagen engine was unavoidable behind us. Not Dickson’s. Quieter. The car stopped. Gary and Roger turned around before I did. The yellow Karmann Ghia’s top was down. Lee Anne Ransom’s sunglasses were up in her hair, her camera up and pointed at us. Click. Click. She took a photo of the smashed tape deck. “Missed the fun, I hear.”

            Gary moved one way, Roger the other. Roger walked past Lee Anne’s car, ran a palm across the hood, gave her his signature smile, said “getting my car,” and hustled away.

            “I have to go to work,” I said. “Lee Anne Ransom.”

            “Better for my byline, Joey. People know I’m a woman. Possibly white. But, hey, this is me… working. But, in case you’re… interested; Langdon just told the Blade Tribune that Chulo Lopez might have had…”

            “Marijuana… connections?”

            Lee Anne Ransom shut off the engine. “No. Did he?” She didn’t get out of the car. She did look at Gary long enough for him to walk back next to me. “No, Langdon offered a vague allusion to some sort of beef from Chulo’s time in the County work camp. Finding Jesus, according to Langdon, is not always a popular move.” Lee Anne Ransom lifted her camera quickly, not all the way to her face, and took a photo of Gary. “You Gary… or Roger?”

            “Do I look like a Roger?”

            “You look exactly like a Roger.”

            “I don’t want to be in the paper. Okay, Lee Anne Ransom?”

            “No photos,” Lee Anne said, “Okay.” Gary looked relieved. “Question, though, Gary; do you know Jesus?”

            Gary looked from Lee Anne to me, shook his head, looked back at the reporter. “I’m a… Methodist,” he said, his words aimed somewhere between the Lee Anne and me.

            Lee Anne Ransom laughed. She looked in the rearview mirror. Roger, in the Corvair, was behind her. She restarted the Karmann Ghia, dropped her sunglasses over her regular glasses, revved the engine. She pointed at me and mouthed, “You, Joey, you, you, you.” She pointed toward the phone booth near the highway. “Some… reader called the paper, said cops were roughing you up. Well, some Hawaiian dude’s the way he put it. True?” I shook my head.  She revved the engine again, popped the clutch, and smiled as she passed us. “Wish I had a photo of that shit.”

            Gary grabbed my left forearm. I pivoted, grabbed the burlap sack from the hood of my car with my right hand, and swung it. The bag wrapped all the way around Gary’s torso. “Jesus,” Gary said, dropping his hold. I dropped mine. The bag fell to the pavement.

“She thinks you know something… about Jesus. Do you, Gary?”

Gary closed his mouth tightly and smiled. “Maybe Roger and I can stop by and see you at the San Elijo Market on our way out.”  

“No. It’s glassing-off, Gary, and you have Horsie girls… later.” We both blinked. “Sorry about the bag and the, uh gun.”

            “What gun?”

            I ran over the tape deck when I drove out. Gary and Roger did not stop by the market. I did get to hear, later, about how I would have loved the waves mid-afternoon, how one of the girls from the base stable had asked about me. Driving around the lot and out and down the highway, I tried not to think about what my friends knew about the obvious coded message, “Do you know Jesus?” I was pretty sure “I’m a Methodist” wasn’t the proper response.

            …

            When I pulled into the lot for the grocery store, careful not to park too close, I looked at the papers I had pulled out from under the seat. Three pages. I unfolded them and straightened them out. “David Cole, C.P.A.” was printed on the top of each of the pages. Numbers. Dates and numbers. I looked at the number on the bottom of the third page. I refolded the papers, moved the contents of one Pee-Chee to another, put the three pages in the empty Pee-Chee, grabbed my blue lunch sack, and headed for the double glass doors.

Two steps away from the doors, seeing my own reflection, I imagined Julia Cole from earlier, her camera moving up and down. “David Cole’s other daughter,” Wendall had said. “Stay away from that one,” Dickson had said, “A regular prick teaser.” Still, my memory, or my imagination, allowed me to zoom in on her face. Angelic? Teasing? Tempting? Innocent. Perfect.  

Someone pushed a cart into the exit door. I looked at my watch as the person or persons passed me. I looked at my watch, tapped it, looked again. Three minutes early.

SURF REPORT/FORECAST- Strait of Juan de Fuca- Confusing, inconclusive, ripe for skunkings w/downed or drowned buoys, data reptng neg.sw.ht, inappropriate wind, out of context tidal shifts, sw. direction too this or too that, and, incidentally, or coincidentally, not taking any calls from Surfline asking for eyes-on reports from Hood Canal, Quil and Dabob Bays. If they were local, they would know. @surfLouie says, “avoid the frustration, ferry waits, ferry wakes, back=paddlers and snakes, stay on the city-side where your safe.” @realLouiedon’tsurfnomore says, “Wha? F U fake Louie I’m gonna bring my converted school bus slash Super Sprinter, and sixteen converts, and we’re hittin it! Hard! Softops rule?” I wrote real Louie, asking exactly where and when they were planning on hitting it hard. I shouldn’t have given him my number. I didn’t take his call. Message: “So you want to join the East Fremont Freeballers? Well, kook, you have promise eternal fealty, sign an NDA, submit a photoshopped photo so’s we know you’re cool, oh, and a properly wrecked piss sample, and, yeah, I need all your pass words, and you have to pass a rigorless test, selected from ‘the Bachelor’ and ‘Survivor.’ Erwin, that a girl name, boy name, they name? Not that I care so much? So, bro or ho or tho; you in or you out?”

OUT. Block.

The original manuscript of “Swamis,” and all edits to it are copyright protected, all rights reserved by the author, Erwin A. Dence, Jr. Thanks for reading.