Because it’s been preternaturally cold (I looked it up; it could mean ‘extraordinarily’ f’ing cold, as in, yeah, it’s been this cold before… in, like, Canada, Siberia, anywhere east of the Cascade mountains, just not lately), I have had some time, afraid, perhaps, to risk the icy roads (“I’ve heard of Quilcene,” the Facebook site our daughter, Dru, started, and Trish helps monitor; had reports of multiple cars in the ditch… and, perhaps, you remember I totaled a car against a tree in black ice two years ago, and, since, have become, I admit, less willing to assert my mastery over slippery roadways), and, anyway, someone has to run around and make sure no more pipes freeze up; BECAUSE OF ALL THAT, and the fact that folks don’t really think about house painting when it’s like this…
…I have had some time to work on my ART, on my NOVEL, on REALSURFERS.NET, what others always refer to as a BLOG. “I call it a WEBSITE.” “Yeah, you would.” “Yeah, and I do, and what I want to present to the tens of people who see it, is CONTENT.” “Oh. Sure. Content. What do you have?”
I HAD PLANNED to post images of recent illustrations, but, even after Dru switched the images of drawings from PDF to JPEG, they came out looking as if someone had placed a piece of frosted glass over them. SO, nope, I’ll get the originals back and rescanned. AND, though I wrote two pieces I might have used in today’s posting, AND wrote them in Microsoft Word rather than, kinda like LIVE, on the Word Press site, I, in the extended darkness of mid-winter night, under a thick pile of sheets and blankets, the heater set at “Roast,” decided they just weren’t good enough to share with you. WHY? CONTENT.
A drawing I didn’t think good enough to use on a t shirt, but, now that I see it after some time has passed; hmmm… maybe put a border on parts, and… yeah, that might be better.
WE, as consumers of ENTERTAINMENT, are constantly looking for BETTER CONTENT. If a TV channel doesn’t provide it… NOPE. We can scroll through the available options on ROKU, Prime, Netflix, whatever you or I have. NOPE; though I spent too many of my cabin fever hours watching one of those binge-worthy (the producers hoped) series(es?), the ending so rediculus (shit- Word has spell-fix, Word Press doesn’t), that I wanted my time back. I could have been doing something useful, like CONTENT.
YouTube; yeah, I’m a bit of an addict; surfing (I am caught up on Nathan Florence exploits, now fast forward paddling out sequences), politics (some I have watched LIVE, like Hunter showing up for sham committee and MTG acting… trashy, and when NSNBC stopped showing it, I, YES, watched some more on, yes, C-SPAN), some historical stuff that looks interesting (Bigfoot- not historical); OH, and I just discovered that, on my tablet (never on the laptop, but some surf stuff has been moved to the BIG TV), if I watch one of those quickies, I can scroll down and watch another, and then… another..
AND eventually, bored or fed up (which typically suggests some sort of anger), or SATIATED (seems more positive), or just OUT OF TIME, we… quit.
NOW, I do PROMISE new illustrations, several I’m really pleased with, and properly scanned, will be posted on WEDNESDAY. Meanwhile, the polishing of my manuscript continues. And, NOTE; I didn’t stop posting excerpts because they weren’t good enough, it was because the content is still changing. Of all the things I am involved in, in all aspects of life (other than surfing, where, still enjoying the hell out of it, I may have peaked a while back), what I’m striving for is to be… BETTER.
SO, other than all of the above (and Microsoft Word would give me a word count), no real posting today. STAY WARM, find some SURF. Oh, and, as always, thanks for checking out realsurfers..net
This isn’t from the most current big wave event at SWAMIS, but, that doesn’t really matter when it’s the same deal any time the news media (and all your instagram surf-adjacent folks) hypes up an incoming swell; every wannabe hero paddling out at one of the only places one can (easily) make it out in San Diego County on those swells that come down from up here in the Pacific Northwest (just incidentally, totally missing the north shore of the Strait of Juan de Fuca); and… yes, getting out at Swamis is easy; not getting in some other hero’s way as they ride a wave they snaked someone else to get, getting more than three waves in a session, not kooking-it up and crashing on a takeoff with 89 scrappers, 19 actual rippers, and five videographers, 105 cell phone or actual cameras, and all the eyes of a bluff and stairway full of tourists and surfers who claim they got the sickest wave ever (or plan to, once they wax up and have another hit or sip… all trained on you. YOU. You.
Don’t blow it.
Damn! FELL OFF AFTER THE DROP!
YES, I have my own not-quite-a-hero stories; already shared. For years. Swamis, Windansea, Sunset Cliffs, Cardiff, Upper Trestles, La Jolla Cove; pretty much the other accessible spots on big days.
AND
But now, leeward of the swell, I just might have overdosed, self-medicating in the long nights of this amazingly warm winter (not arguing global warming while trying not to sound like I’m indulging in geezer-talk, but 50 degrees plus on any December day; not what it was when we moved up here in 1978, haven’t scraped ice in a while) by watching waves and wave riding on YouTube: Some amazing rides among so much disappointingly bad surfing, almost all of the scare-factor coming from the crowds rather than the waves.
Raw footage? No. Please edit the shit out of whatever you put out there.
I do have a few ISSUES, other than the oversold clickbait headlines/come ons, “20-25 foot Blacks,” for example. I only sometimes appreciate the ‘here I am getting a parking spot, here I am putting on my full wetsuit, booties, gloves, hood, floatation vest, compass.” behind or near the camera commentary, having heard enough “Sick,” “Rad,” “Oh no!” “Come out!” “Kook burned the other kook!” “Look at that one!” “Shit; broke his board and didn’t even make it out!” “Can we get pizza, Daddy!” Yeah, I’m looking, but I frequently fast forward and I almost always turn down the volume on the background music/rap.
HERE IS A QUESTION I felt compelled to text-ask of Trisha’s (and, by marriage, my) nephew, DYLAN SCOTT: Okay, two questions: Are you getting any of those waves? Why the hell are surfers wearing so much gear when the water temperature (I checked) at La Jolla Shores (where he lives) is 62.6 degrees. “WHY, back in my day, water got to 58, you put on your short john and…” Dylan did text back a ‘YES,’ and that it is a bit of overdressing, though he has become fond of booties.
ME, TOO; ever since that time at SEASIDE (not the one in Solana Beach, though I have surfed there) when I got bullheads in my feet walking up toward the… the cove. Wheww, almost said too much.
All this SCREEN SURFING may have affected my dreams. YES. So, last night I had this dream… you know how wave height is often compared to multi story buildings? It’s never, “Whoa, the wave was as big as a rambler in a tract out in the valley!” So, someone is giving this woman on a board close to shore shit for getting in the way. I go out (imagine, IF YOU WILL, Nate Florence or JOB with a POV sequence).
WHEN I GET TO THE LINEUP, there’s this multi-story building (imagine the train station at the entrance to Disneyland- I may have been) that is, evidently, a wave. I turn, I paddle; I’m at the peak, ready to drop in from the turret/tower. AND, looking down from something that magically turns back into the biggest wave my mind/memory can muster, I… CHOKE.
THE GOOD NEWS IS no one caught it on camera. It won’t even be one of those shorts that pop up- 29 seconds of dude who shouldn’t have been out considering the multi-story conditions.
THAT’S MY STORY. Hopefully, in the coming year, you’ll have moments and sessions worth remembering; and, sure, hopefully you have many from this year.
I do hate to mention how close I am to totally finishing the manuscript for “SWAMIS.” I am culturally bound not to say too much about when and where I have surfed recently, or where and when I plan to attempt to find waves next. So, I won’t.
Oh, and HAPPY NEW YEAR to all the real surfers! Yes, I am including kooks and posers and hodads and, of course, geezers. I do plan on posting some new click-worthy stuff on Wednesday. Thanks for reading.
A few years ago I wrote a series of stories and, yes, poems that I put together in a collection I titled, “Mistaken for Angels.” Yes, I got a copyright. Vanity. Ego. Just in case. As with everything I have written, my plan for a novel or interconnected stories lost some of the connective-ness, random ideas popping in to complicate matters.
The underlying premise was that the story is more important than the telling, the style and the proper adjectives and structure less memorable than the absolute desire each of us has to tell our story.
It’s not my story; it’s fiction; and my remembering this story caused me to search through multiple thumb drives. The current portion of ancient struggles caused me to remember that I had written it; not about a particular place or time, but of many places and many times.
Tragedy begets tragedy.
I was raised to be a pacifist; yet, turning the channel, turning away, I do nothing. Nothing except, perhaps, to try to calm if not control my own confusion, my own outrage, my own anger.
OH, since the location could be anywhere, on this (new) illustration (sketch if you must), I put in some waves in the background, making, possibly, A GOOD HOUSE that much better.
A Good House
We had a good house. This, you see, was the problem. It was, also, too close to the border. Some, those who think themselves brave, who think others will follow them, they call the disputed land on which the good house sits the ‘frontier.’ I call it ‘bloodlands.’ There has always been trouble. Wars go this way, then back; like waves on a lake.
My Father, he went to war- one of the wars- he pushed forward very bravely (so we were told), but came back very broken. The next wave took him for good.
Wave. Yes. Like a wave. We all knew he was already drowned. He was waiting for the next wave to wash his body away from… This is difficult to explain. “No faith left” he would say, staring toward the horizon.
My Mother, she had faith, and, with it, that certainty… I have heard it called fatalism. Ah, fancy term, that. It’s that knowledge that the darkness comes to each of us, to all of us. Fate and faith, they are, I think, related. “To have faith,” my Mother told us, my Sister and me, after our Brothers went, or were taken, made to fight, “you must have faith.”
This means, I think, that you must believe that having the faith sometimes works. Sometimes what we have the faith in, that things will be all right, can happen. I don’t know if I do believe this. My Mother did. Truly.
The snipers had done damage to the troops from our country. That is why they, our Soldiers, took to the houses. “Like a jar of water,” one of them told my Grandfather, who was weak and old, and had survived, he said, by never flying anyone’s flag, never taking a side. The Soldier held my Grandfather’s head against the rocks of the fireplace. He tapped it with a branch meant for the fire. He, the Soldier, explained this thing to my Mother, who, because she refused to cower as her Mother was, obviously was in charge.
He threw his hands apart to describe how a sniper’s bullet reacted with a soldier’s skull. “pheuuuuuuuh!” Then he laughed and let my Grandfather go.
“Okay,” he said, “your land; you don’t care what country it’s in. Fine.”
There was blood on this Soldier’s uniform. It (blood) dries almost black on the green. He smelled of gunpowder and body odor and death. They all carried sometimes multiple guns, and each had what you might call a machete. They called them something that would be more like ‘sword,’ and attributed a certain righteousness to its use. The Soldiers burned the blood from the blades in our fire, ate our food, complained about my Sister’s crying, and waited.
Soldiers, I now know, spend much time waiting. This is where their brains tell them many stories of why they should be afraid. They tell each other that they are not afraid, should not be afraid, they are and must be men. Yet, I could see these Soldiers had fear. Fear, someone else’s, looks like anger. I could feel my own fear. Like the Soldiers, I would hide it. I made my fear look like calmness. I could see everyone’s fear. Except my mother’s. She had the faith. I wanted to have the faith. I was ashamed to have, instead, the fear.
Fear is like a prayer, I think; or, maybe like a heavy, dark blanket, wrapped like a cloak, ready to be cast off, cast off quickly, when it is bravery that is needed.
Bravery, I’m afraid, is the ability to disregard what is known to be right. Bravery is a vicious thing. I no longer wish to be brave.
For some, it is better to be dead than brave.
Sorry. I must laugh a bit. The brave and cowardly are often thrown into the same grave.
“This is a very nice house,” another of the Soldiers said. He stood close to the window, lit a cigarette. “I think,” he said, “after the war, when we are free, I will take this house.” It was then the sniper’s bullet hit his neck. Both sides at once, it seemed. He was still smiling his dirty smile when his head snapped back. He rocked only a bit, and fell, crumpled, beside me where I sat. The cigarette was still in his mouth.
The first Soldier, and the others, ran outside, then away, leaving the dead one, blood splattered on our walls, making pools on our floor. We could hear guns going off, closer, then farther away. We thought, we hoped we were safe.
Briefly, we were.
These were the, it gets confusing; you might call them counter-insurgents. At dawn the insurgents came closer. Same smell, same uniforms (I thought at the time), different caps. They laughed when they saw how poor we were at trying to drag the body out. They kicked at it, shot it several more times, took things from it, threw it onto a truck with other bodies, some not in uniforms.
You can tell when the soul is gone, when a person becomes a body. Less. Almost nothing.
I don’t know where a soul goes. Somewhere better. I have seen those whose souls are gone, their bodies still…walking, eyes too wide open, too squinted down.
We would have been all right if the war had not slowed, the fighting ‘bogged-down’ in the hills; if the troops of our country had not fought so fiercely; if we had not had such a good house.
We had new guests not of our country. They thought themselves of a better country; bigger, older. This was not actually true, the bigger part, except for this short while. How small and pitiful our country must be, they said, to be so easily conquered.
I have no patience to explain why things went wrong. My Sister cried too much. It became night. Perhaps it was the darkness, the length of the nights. One of the soldiers said his grandfather might have worked on the masonry on our house, back when our country was still grand.
“If so,” my Grandfather said, “I would have paid him well. I always paid the workers well. They ate at our table.”
The mason’s Grandson looked at our table, smiled, but not nicely. Another Soldier, suddenly angry, perhaps because of how his Grandfather was treated, because of where his Grandfather took his meals, grabbed my Grandfather and pulled him outside. My Mother knew what this meant, and begged for her Father’s life. The Soldier slapped her for begging. Because she stood at the door and screamed “Butchers, murderers,” my grandmother was also pulled into the darkness. My Sister, holding onto our mother, kept crying. My Mother did not.
This is the fatalism of which I spoke, the belief that all will be tested.
And most fail.
I also did not cry. This is the faith, faith I had because my Mother had faith. The mason’s Grandson pulled my Sister away, shoved her toward me, told me, in my own language (they are really only slightly different) to keep her quiet. He moved his face close to my Mother’s, touched her breast. He said, Whores beg. Are you, then, a whore?” This was to humiliate her further.
I have learned this from war: To kill is not enough for some. To only, to merely kill is not enough to make the anger and the fear and the hatred cease.
“If I must be,” she said.
At this he laughed. “I am also the whore,” he said.
“My Children,” my Mother said to him. It was like a question. He, and the other Soldiers, now back from outside and leaning against our walls, shrugged and laughed together. The mason’s Grandson took his pistol belt off, holding the pistol in his left hand, moving it close to my Mother’s cheek.
“God will send a miracle,” she said to me. “Turn away,” she said.
I almost cried out at this moment. My Sister did. I put my hand over her mouth and prayed that I could have a man’s strength.
Prayers. Excuse me for laughing; just a little. Prayers are not answered as we expect.
It’s rare, I have learned, that a first mortar round can hit precisely. This one did, precisely where it was intended to land, and when I asked for it. The Soldier’s Grandfather had not been a roofer. No, not at all. Ha!
Like a jar of water, burst.
I kicked at his body when it was over, when the others ran, when more mortars rained down on the houses on the frontier.
Of prayer, I should add, speaking of the partial nature of the realization of prayer; my Mother did not survive this…this…I don’t know what they call this. It’s a tide, a tide, and we are the shore. I carved our Family’s name onto the mantel, underneath, to mark a claim when I return. I took the Soldier’s machete. After I’d chopped him with it; splattered his blood with it, I burned his blood from the blade in the fire.
By the time the Peacekeepers came, the roof was already patched, by my Grandfather and me. We also buried my Mother, dragged the soldiers’ bodies away from the house. My Grandparents would not leave. This was their home. That they were not soldiers was honored. That time. My Sister became one of the many refugees. Refuge means safety, of course. I prayed she would be safe. Yes. I told myself she was safe and fed and happy. That was my hope. Perhaps it is partially true. I became, as you know, a Soldier, a brave one, they say. I am still a Soldier; I wait, but I do not fear. I no longer even hate. I know what bravery is.
Oh, I see you don’t believe there could have been two miracles, two dead Soldiers in one house. Well, perhaps I lie. The results would be the same; the dried blood as black. Prayers answered.
When I was captured that first time, taken like a fool during one of the many truces, they called me John Doe number four hundred and thirty-four. I was, I now guess, eleven years old.
I probably should have split this into two parts. Thank you in advance for reading. You aren’t required to do it in one sitting. I apologize for annoying ads; it’s because, since I haven’t made any money on this (vanity?) project, realsurfers, I pay the minimum to Word Press. Hence, ads. I inserted a photo of, basically, the view from where Julia Cole’s mother’s house would be, to break up the chapter.
Though the manuscript (not a secret) lacks focus, mostly due to a stubborn desire to make side characters seem real, I have been trying to narrow in on the relationship between Joey and Julia. There’s more of that after the sunset photo.
SIDEBAR, with apology- The professor in a watercolor class I took at Palomar Junior College had a habit of grabbing my work before I was finished. “Done,” he would say. Of one painting I was ready to overwork and ruin, he asked if I loved the woman I was trying to render, his argument being that I should concentrate on shading and form, the pieces, or, since I lacked the skills for truly rendering an image, I could go for something impressionistic.
I don’t believe I’ve over-described Julia Cole, and since the narrator cannot know what she is thinking, we (presumptuously including you) have to rely on how she behaves. Yeah, like the way it should be. Maybe. Do I love Julia/Julie? YES, and if any character has to be real, complicated, vulnerable, tough, for me to consider her properly rendered, it is she. Or is it ‘it is her?’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN- SUNDAY, MARCH 30, 1969
I didn’t get up early enough to surf. Rather, I didn’t leave early enough. I got onto I-5 from 76, got off at the Tamarack exit. Eight surfers out at the main peak in front of the bathrooms. Too small for Swamis, too crowded at the main peak at Pipes. I passed by the turn that would lead me to the grocery store, drove through the parking lot at Cardiff Reef. There were waves, but they were cut up by the shifting sandbars, chopped up by water flowing out of the lagoon on a big tide shift. Outgoing. Still, surfers were taking off on peaks, bogging down on flat sections the shorter boards couldn’t float over. I never got out of the Falcon, but I did stop, between cars, when a larger set hit the outside peak. The five surfers in the water were caught inside. Even that wave flattened out, split into two weaker peaks, and got wobbly in the outflow from the lagoon.
Eleven minutes early, I parked the Falcon in the spot closest to the southwest corner, visible from the double door entrance. I grabbed three loose carts, pushed them together, and aimed for the entrance.
Weekends. Easter vacation. Excuses to go to the beach. A higher percentage of the customers at the San Elijo Grocery, Mrs. Tony’s to locals, seemed to be tourists, down or over from somewhere else. The state park across the tracks and the highway, extending along the bluff at Pipes to the lower, flatter area at Cardiff Reef, contributed customers. Suntan lotion and creams for sunburn, floaties and cheap shovel/pail/rake kits contributed to the independent grocery store’s bottom line.
Almost all the west, ocean-facing wall was glass. The view was of the road, the railroad tracks, the highway, the four-year old shrubbery that was just beginning to provide privacy for campers at the state park. The windows started at four feet from the floor, allowing for bags of dog food and fertilizer and compost, cheap beach chairs and portable barbecues, and extended twelve feet, four short of the sixteen-foot ceiling. The rolldown shades that only partially mitigated the afternoon glare were up.
The middle of three registers was empty. Mr. Tony was at the first register, his voice and laugh echoing off the exposed trusses and half-painted plywood ceilings, bouncing off the windows. He was just finishing up a story I had heard enough times to whisper the punchline as my boss revealed it to an obvious camper. “Can’t get that at no Piggly Wiggly!” Someone from the southeast was my guess.
Mr. Tony dropped the smile when he saw me. I dropped my arms to my sides, slightly out from my hips, palms out, to show I was wearing the appropriate clothing: Chinos, sensible shoes, long-sleeved shirt with a collar, no hippie beads. My hair, over my ears for the first time in my life, was slicked back. I would wet it in the customer’s men’s room occasionally.
I stepped toward the counter, ready to bag groceries. Mr. Tony handed the customer his change, watched me place the items in a bag, then nodded toward the back of the store.
Halfway down the center aisle, I couldn’t miss hearing Mr. Tony with his next customer. “All these hippies. Kid’s thinking he’s foolin’ me with the hair; figures I’m okay with the duck’s ass, greaser look. Pretty soon the kid’s gonna look like a pachuco. Huh, Guillermo?”
Mr. Tony and Guillermo both laughed. “Pachuco.”
The grocery store’s office was behind the wall that held assorted beach and camping gear, tents and sleeping bags, lanterns. A string of Christmas lights, always on, framed the entrance to the storage area. A set of smaller lights framed a hand painted sign hung on the area’s most prominent post. “No public bathrooms.” There was always incoming freight in with the stacks of boxes and partial boxes of non-perishables the Tony’s had gotten a special deal on. Frisbees, hula hoops, tiki torches, garden hoses. Seasonal decorations were also stored there: Plywood Santas, American flags. There was a table for painting the paper signs for bargains and produce prices, bottles of red and green and blue and yellow paint, worn brushes stuffed in dirty water in an oversized pickle bottle.
The door to the inner office was unpainted and unmarked other than a fading message in grease pencil. “Not a bathroom.” The door was almost always open because Mrs. Tony was almost always there.
Mrs. Tony was sitting on the far side of her ping pong table desk, straight back from the door. Clear view. She had yelled “Jody” before I entered the storage area. She began moving aside stacks of invoices and customer account cards, each no less than a six inches high, to maintain her view. She looked up at the clock above the door, pulled out my card from the smaller of three stacks to her right, made a note with the pencil she kept in her hair, stabbed between the rollers and bobby pins and a scarf. Mostly red on this day, with white flowers.
“Jody,” she said again, standing up, “Did you see your apron?”
“Oh. I… get my own apron?” She looked at me as if I had said something rather rude or really stupid. “I mean, thank you, Mrs. Tony.”
“Yeah. Go help Doris.” She pointed through the doorway. “Good?” I nodded. I could see my Pee-Chee notebook under a stack of other papers immediately in front of here. She shook her head, waved her pointer finger. “I haven’t gotten a chance yet, Jody.” She glanced at the clock again. I checked it on the way out. 10:03.
…
Doris, late forties, about the same age as Mr. and Mrs. Tony, was ringing a woman up at the middle register. I walked up, trying to re-tie the cloth string on my new green apron. “Mr. Tony’s at the ‘so glad to see you’ register,” she said as I moved into bagboy position.
I looked over. Tony was talking to and laughing with a man, a bit older, dressed in a gray suit, fedora to match. There were no groceries on the counter.
Doris’ hair was also in curlers and covered with a scarf, hers in several shades of light green. Her customer was wearing a dark dress, with pearls, and what I had heard referred to as a ‘Sunday-go-to-meetin’ hat.’ The woman asked, “Saving your good hair for your man, Doris?” Doris smiled and kept ringing up the groceries. Quickly, most of the prices memorized.
The woman nodded toward the man with Mr. Tony, both now at the front windows, each with a foot up on a pile of bags of dog food. She looked at the prepared pie on the counter. “We’re skipping the sermon, Doris, but we’re definitely going to the social.” She looked at me. “That’s where you hear all the good shit.” I did a sideways nod, tried to appear both impressed and mildly shocked.
“Right about that, Connie,” Doris said. She and Connie laughed. I nodded. I smiled. “Careful with Connie’s pie there… Jody.”
Connie looked at the name, hand sewn, in white, onto my green apron. “Jody? JODY. I’ve got a niece in Arizona named Jodie. JODIE.” I pinched a spot on the apron below the name. I pulled it forward. I looked down at it, looked back at customer Connie as if I might have grabbed the wrong apron.
Connie looked at Doris, looked at the total on the register, looked toward a tall, thin, metal shelving unit just to the right of the cash register, equidistant between the middle and south register, and attached with two strands of metal rope to a metal I beam post. Three wide, five high, each of the shelves contained an approximately even number of tan colored cards. The shelving unit itself was set on top of three wooden milk crates. With a metal gridwork inside to hold and separate glass containers, the crates were built to interlock when stacked, “Story’s Dairy” and “Fallbrook” was stenciled on the sides of each of the crates.
Doris stepped toward the shelf. “Pie’s got to pass for homemade… JODY,” Connie said. ”I have a nice serving dish, out in the car. Should work well enough with the hypocrites and sinners.” I looked at the pie, looked at the shelf Doris pulled the card from. Four down, middle. L-M-N. The pie wouldn’t pass. I nodded at Connie and smiled. She may have missed it. She was adding here initials to the card. “I meant the other hypocrites and sinners, of course, Doris.”
…
Mid-day rush. I was rushing between Doris’s counter and Mr. Tony’s; bagging, smiling at the customers; smiling bigger when Tony said something that might not have been deservingly amusing or clever; smiles Tony had to know were fake, smiles few customers bothered to analyze. I nodded at customer comments, most of which didn’t concern the weather, did concern the damn hippies or the damn tourists or the damn surfers. “At least you’re not one of those,” at least one of the customers told me. Smile.
For the third time on this day, Mr. Tony used someone questioning my name as an excuse to break into his version of the Jody Cadence. “Jody’s bagging groceries, bringing carts back, too…”
Mr. Tony stopped, laid his left hand out and open, and toward me, and waited. This was my cue to join in the joke, add another line. This time it was, “At the San Elijo Grocery, the surf’s always in view.”
We did the “One, two, one two” together. Mr. Tony laughed. I tried not to look embarrassed. Part of the job. So glad to see you.
At two o’clock, Mrs. Tony came to the front to relieve Doris. She made sure I saw her shove my Pee-Chee folder into the shelf under the counter. She pulled an oversized watch with half of the wristband from one of the big pockets on her apron, didn’t really look at it. She made sure I got the message. Keep working.
There was a lull around four. I was at Mr. Tony’s register. “Joe DeFreines’s kid,” he was telling this customer, a regular, probably thirty years older than Mr. Tony. “Jo-dy. Joke. Marine Corps cadence, from… Korea.”
The man shook his head. “Army.” Mr. Tony stepped back. “World War Two, Tony, the durn leathernecks stole it. It’s… fact.” The man laughed, took both of his bags from the counter before I could move them to the cart, and held them against his chest. He took two steps, purposefully bumped into me with a shoulder. Friendly bump. “Good man, Joe DeFreines.” He took two steps more steps, and said, without looking around. “Tony’s okay, too, for a fucking Gi-rine.”
“Jo-dy,” Mrs. Tony, at the middle register, said, loudly, sharply, almost like someone calling cattle. Pigs, more like it, emphasis on the second syllable. She was holding my Pee-Chee notebook out and toward me, six customer account cards on top of it. She slid it, several times, toward the credit shelf as I approached. “Lots of regulars on a Sunday,” she said, “putting it on their tabs.” I took the folder. “You might want to learn some of their names.”
“I’m… working on it, Ma’am.”
Mr. Tony stepped toward us. Mrs. Tony gave her husband a message, eyes-only. Back off. He did. I set the Pee-Chee on the counter, spread the tab cards on top of it. Mrs. Tony said, “Ask your mother,” and turned away.
I reshuffled the cards, rearranged them, alphabetically, and put them away as quickly as I could. “It’s a lot of money, Mr. Tony,” I said, tapping the edge of the folder on the slight guardrail at the edge of the counter. “Lost Arroyo Investments. Are you… familiar?”
Mr. Tony looked at the folder rather than at me. He exhaled, popping his lips, slightly. “It’s not dirty. I guarantee you that.” He turned toward his next customer, one aisle away. “You ready, Honey?” She wasn’t. Not quite. Without looking at me, he asked, “You afraid to ask your mom?” Turning toward me, he read my expression correctly.
“Almost four-twenty, Jody,” Doris said as she returned to the middle register. “Your break. Take it or lose it.”
I acted as if I hadn’t noticed that Doris had removed the scarf and curlers and had brushed out her hair. Doris looked as if she wanted a comment. I was bagging, concentrating. Produce, one bag; ice cream, white, insulated bag; several cans of soup, bottom of double bag; one loaf of bread from a local baker, on the top; quart bottle of milk, TV Guide, straight into the cart. I gestured my willingness to push the cart. The older woman at the counter shook her head. Another church goer, I guessed, another dark dress with white pearls.
“Headed that way anyway, Ma’am. Mrs. …?”
“Not Mrs. anything anymore.” I stepped behind the cart. “Jackie, just Jackie.”
“Just Jackie, did you notice Doris’s hair?” Just Jackie turned and said something to Doris I didn’t hear; something Doris, self-consciously primping, pushing up the curls on one side of her face, seemed to appreciate. Doris gave me a different look when Jackie stepped next to me and set her purse into the cart. Embarrassed but appreciative, perhaps.
The shades across the front windows were a third of the way down, the sun just at the bottom line, the light half glaring, half insufficiently muted. Jackie kept one hand on the side of the cart as she and I walked. I was one set of windows from the main doors, even with Tony’s register, when I saw Julia Cole enter.
It would be an over-romanticization if I said that, at just that moment, the sun, full force, dropped below the shade and Julia Cole was bathed in that light. Amber. That is how I saw it; pausing, stopping myself and the cart, and because I stopped, Jackie stopped.
“I can manage from here… Jody,” Just Jackie said, looking at Julia Cole, looking at me, looking at Mr. Tony at the first register, looking back at me. I blinked, looked at Jackie. She was smiling as if she knew something about sunlight and amber and magic.
Julia Cole, walking toward me, had her eyes on me. I was only slightly aware of Jackie pushing the cart toward her. Julia’s expression changed when she turned toward Jackie. Surprised, perhaps, at the woman’s expression. Still, Julia appeared to be no more than polite.
Julia Cole moved to her right, out of the glare. She stopped. She did not intend to walk any closer to me. If it was a dare, I wasn’t taking it. I was replaying the previous seconds.
Julia Cole was very close. She said something, not quite a whisper. I saw her lips move.
“Ju-lie!” It was Mr. Tony’s loudest voice. “Surf up or something?” Julia Cole turned toward the voice. “Jody can take off and go if he wants.”
“No. No, Mr. Tony, it’s not… that.”
With Mr. Tony and Julia Cole in my periphery, right and left, I saw the silhouette in the alcove at the main doors. Only a hand and arm came out of the shadow. The hand was pointed at me. It twisted and flattened. Fingers out, the hand was pulled back. A summons. Duncan Burgess at the corner of the entrance alcove, just in the light, standing next to Julia Cole’s big gray bag.
Julia Cole asked me a question. Before I could process, she repeated it. “Can you come outside? I mean, please.”
I looked at my watch. 4:23. Break time. Ten minutes. I didn’t look around. I did hear Mr. Tony’s voice, mid-range volume-wise. “And how’s Christina and her little one?”
“Margarita. She’s… fine, Mr. Tony. Christine’s…” Julia’s laugh was surprisingly sharp. “Well, you know Christine.”
“Most popular bag girl we ever had.” Julia must have waited for the punchline. “And the worst.” Mr. Tony’s and Julia Cole’s laughs were several octaves apart; but perfectly synced, timing wise.
Julia gave me a look I read as meaning I was to go see Duncan without her.
Reaching under my apron and into my shirt pocket for the pack of Marlboros and the Zippo lighter, I headed for the alcove. I struck the wheel on the lighter at the point where the windows stopped. It flared up. Duncan noticed. I lit up as if this was normal. Duncan picked up Julia Cole’s bag, backed through the right-hand glass door and held it in the open position, allowing me just enough room to pass. I exhaled at precisely that moment.
Dick move.
Duncan Burgess took a roll of photo paper out of the top of Julia Cole’s bag. He removed the rubber band, put it around his left wrist, unrolled and handed the stack to me. He watched me as I went through the first three pages.
“Contact prints,” he said. “Julie gets them… Palomar. College credits.” I nodded. Duncan looked at the cigarette in my right hand. He stuck out two fingers on his right hand. I allowed him to take the cigarette. I took the stack of photos. “Teacher likes her. Probably a pervert. Photographers. They all are. But… free developing.” Duncan took a drag, blew the smoke just to my left. “Julie takes… a lot of photos.”
Unlike the first three pages, 35-millimeter black and white images from sections of exposed negatives, the fourth, fifth, and sixth pages were almost full-page images of Chulo, in his rough and dirty evangelizing robe, and another man, taller, in a robe, barefoot, his left arm in a sling, leaning to his right on a single crutch. Jumper. The mid-section of the Jesus Saves Bus was behind Chulo and Jumper. The image of Jesus was between them.
I looked at the second three pages, shuffled the first three in behind them, and studied each of the larger images. “Chulo is smoking,” Duncan said, moving to my right side. I looked at my cigarette between the fingers of Duncan’s left hand. He took another drag. “Next photo…”
In the next photo, Jumper’s crutch was falling away as his right hand was knocking the cigarette out of Chulo’s mouth. “Julie said they’d been arguing. Like, quietly. Check out the third enlargement. See? She zoomed in. Jumper is pulling something from a pocket of his robe, handing it to Chulo.” Duncan put his index finger on the photo. “There. See?”
Duncan took my cigarette out of his mouth and offered to put it in mine. I declined, possibly backing away too quickly. Duncan blew smoke between me and the photo. Dick move. Payback.
“You can’t see it.” It was Julia Cole. She had come out the entrance door and was looking over Duncan’s shoulder and directly at me. I looked away from the photo and looked directly at her. “They weren’t arguing,” she said. “Not exactly. Chulo was… he was crying.” I blinked. Julia Cole blinked.
Chulo, in the last photo, was smiling. And crying. Jumper was smiling. I let go of the papers with my right hand, allowing them to roll up against my thumb.
“Actually, Julia Cole, I think they both were… crying.”
Julia Cole smiled. I lost focus on Duncan Burgess, directly in front of me, and everything else. “I do think so,” she said. “You’re… right.”
I would like to believe, and still do believe, that Julia and I froze for the same number of seconds. Her eyes were alive, studying mine, and mine, hers.
“Hey, Junior…” Duncan came back into focus. “You gonna help or not?”
“Not.”
I stepped back, handed the roll of photos to Julia. Duncan stuffed the cigarette butt in among many others in the waist-high concrete pipe ashtray at the side of the entrance door. I tapped my watch. “There’s nothing I can do, and… and my break’s over.”
Julia and Duncan exchanged looks. If Duncan looked angry or frustrated, Julia looked disappointed. She held the roll of photos upright, spun it in little circles, looking past it. At me. Disappointed, angry, resolved; then neutral, then a ‘Fuck you, then,’ Julia Cold look.
Duncan moved between Julia and me. He removed the rubber band from his wrist and double wrapped it around the roll of photos, giving Julia Cole a ‘told you so’ look. He turned toward me; moving his face closer, too close, to mine. I didn’t step back. I was trained not to. Duncan made a growling sound as he pushed past me and though the exit door.
Mr. Tony met Duncan ten steps in. Tony gave him the same side hug he had undoubtedly given Julia. “How’s your dad, Yo Yo?”
“No one calls me that, anymore, Mr. Tony, but… he’s, um, better.”
“You’re excited for prom and graduation and all that, I expect.”
“Can’t wait.” Disingenuous.
Mr. Tony slapped Duncan on the back. “Oh, come on, Duncan!”
Julia Cole stepped closer to me to allow a couple, tourists, possibly newlyweds, with matching sunburns, to keep holding hands as they entered the store. She looked past them and at Mr. Tony and Duncan and the couple. The door closed.
“So, Miss Cole, you’re… angry?”
“I had no… expectations. It was Duncan.”
“Oh? But… why does… Duncan… care so much?”
“He has his reasons.”
“You don’t ask.”
Julia Cole turned toward me. Her expression said, “I don’t need to” before she did.
I wanted to keep Julia Cole talking. I wanted her that close to me, close enough that the only thing in my field of vision was her. I was more aware than usual of my pauses, the lapses, the seconds I spent replaying previous seconds, trying to remember, trying to catalog exactly what she said, and how she looked, exactly, when she said it.
“I had one,” I said. “Yo-yo. Duncan.” Pause. “Sparkly.”
“We all did. Phase.” Short pause. “Sparkly? Yours?”
“Mine? Yeah. Sparkly.” Pause. “Walk… walk the dog.”
“Basic.” Pause. “Good trick. Easy.”
“Yes. The, um, trick… the one I liked… most, was…” I moved my hand up and down a few times, palm down, then flipped it over, pantomimed throwing the yo-yo over my fingers, then flipping my hand back over. “It’s like… switching stance.”
Julia Cole was staring. I was a fool. Ridiculous. She smiled. Politely. “It… is.” She held the smile longer than I could comfortably handle. She was studying me. I looked away, politely, allowing her time to drop the smile and continue the studying. “What do… you think?”
I pointed at the roll of photos. “Chulo smokes. I believe Jumper… maybe he doesn’t. Or… he quit.” I pulled out my father’s lighter. “Zippo. That’s… a guess.”
“Zippo?”
“Marine Corps logo. Maybe, if you enlarge it, the image, more…”
“I will.” Julia looked appreciative in the moment before she looked past me and into the store. I took the opportunity to look at her. When she seemed to sense this, I looked where she was looking.
Duncan and Mr. Tony had moved just beyond the first counter. Duncan pulled folded bills from an inside pocket of his windbreaker. “On account,” he said. Mr. Tony took the cash, pulled out several account cards from the rack, top left box, A-B. He shuffled through them, set one aside, took his pen out of his shirt pocket, wrote something on the card and showed the card to Duncan. He looked past Duncan at Julia Cole and me. I looked away. None of my business. She looked away and toward my car at the far end of the lot, then back at me.
That may have been that lapse, the pause that caused Julia Cole to speak. “I have… other photos. Negatives. I could… How late do you work?”
I refocused on Julia. “Today?”
She didn’t wait through the guaranteed pause. “We saw all the red lights, Swamis, from my, my mom’s house. Cops. Fire engines. We went down. It was… you don’t get it, do you, Junior? That… night. After…”
I didn’t get it. Julia Cole looked frustrated, even irritated.
“We saw it. Saw… it. It. Chulo. Portia. Gingerbread Fred was still there. Everything. It was… I just thought… maybe… you… might…”
I wasn’t keeping up. There was something in my mental image file, the view from Swamis and up the hill. It was a photo in an old Surfer magazine. In color. Maybe it was a cover photo. “From my mom’s house” she had said. It would have to be…
“What is… wrong with you?”
Julia Cole moved a hand over her mouth the second after she asked that question. All I could see was the back of her hand and her eyes. All I could hear were the words. “What is… wrong with you? What… is… wrong… with you?”
Three seconds, ten, I have no idea how long I was staring at Julia Cole. She was backing away and into the parking lot. I backed into the edge of the exit door. I took my eyes off Julia Cole, spun around, and pulled it open. Duncan and Mr. Tony both looked in my direction. In twenty-one steps I was even with the counter, with them. I stopped, pivoted, ninety degrees right. “Duncan Burgess, do you know Jesus?”
I pivoted back. I walked to Doris’s counter, everything slightly out of focus, unaware she was speaking. I grabbed a bundle of San Elijo Grocery paper bags, ripped off the paper ribbon that held them together, stuffed as many as I could into a shelf at Doris’s knee.
Doris put a hand, flat, on my chest. “So, Joey, I figured, I don’t have a man at home… currently; why not let my hair… down?”
I looked at Doris, tried to smile. I looked to my right. Duncan was gone. Mrs. Tony was at her husband’s register. Mr. Tony slid the account card and Duncan’s cash toward her. “Two-fifty-five on Burgess.” Mrs. Tony opened the register, took the bills from her husband, and began counting them. Mr. Tony looked at me. Mrs. Tony looked at him. Both looked at me before I could turn back toward Doris. What was wrong with me?
Doris looked at Mr. and Mrs. Tony. Her expression was hopeful. That’s what Julia’s expression was. Had been. Hopeful. Optimistic. Temporarily.
“What is wrong with me,” I whispered.
“Doris; you look… gorgeous.” Mr. Tony’s body language, the raising of his shoulders, suggested he was suddenly aware the compliment had been in his loud voice. He didn’t turn toward his wife for her reaction. He walked toward the front windows.
Mrs. Tony, walking toward Doris and me with the draw from the other register stuffed in one of the pockets of her faded green apron, stopped and looked at her cashier. She looked over at her husband, a shadow in the glare, as he used the pulley to lower the first of the window shades all the way down. Mrs. Tony touched her own hair, let out an only slightly exaggerated sigh, and pointed at me. “Julie. Beautiful girl, huh Jody.” I couldn’t respond. “The money; ask your mother. Huh?”
It was nearly sunset when I walked across the parking lot. 6:32. Daylight savings time had kicked in and the sun would set, officially, at 7:13. The tourists and inlanders and visitors and customers were all headed elsewhere. The wind was, if anything, slightly offshore. There was time to catch a few waves if I made a quick decision and went somewhere close.
Something was stuck, face up under the driver’s side window wiper. It was a flyer for an Australian surf movie. “Evolution.” There was one on the bulletin board on the wall between the entrance alcove and the window wall. Or there had been one. Friday, April 4, Hoover High School, seven pm. Saturday, April 5, San Dieguito High.
There was something under the flyer. More pages. Seven. Photo paper. Stiff. Slight curl. Slightly damp. I looked at the images as if they were flash cards, moving each to the back of the deck, going through them again and again. The photos were so dark that the artificial light of camera flash and flashlights and headlights burned out any details: Firefighters and cops, Dickson and Wendall; a woman in a robe holding back Portia. One photo showed the unmistakable anguish on Portia’s face. Another was of someone’s body, burned, against the wall. In another, the body was being covered with something more like a tarp than a sheet. In the last photo, Gingerbread Fred was on his knees, looking up. Up.
“Tear in the shroud, “I said.
I couldn’t look at any of these images for more than the time it took to move to the next photo. I couldn’t allow any of these images into my memory, a file too easily pulled. Too late. It was imprinted, permanently. I could describe each of the photos now in more detail than the actual photographs showed.
That was what Julia Cole had seen, witnessed, photographed. I tried to look again at each of the enlargements. It didn’t work. All I wanted to see, or imagine, were Julia’s expressions when she was trying to tell me about that night; how sincere, raw, honest she looked; how beautiful. All I wanted to do was collapse.
I didn’t. I went through my ring of keys, separated the one for the Falcon, I rolled up the pages. There was a note on the back of the flyer: “Portia said you are your father’s son, and you might help. I have more…” Out of room, the words went sideways. “…waiting… for you.”
I looked around the lot. Julia Cole wasn’t there. Of course, she wasn’t.
…
Vulcan Avenue runs parallel to Highway 101 and the railroad tracks, and in front of the San Elijo Grocery. There were several cross streets. I took one, went up two blocks, turned left. I looked at the houses, looked toward the water. I went up another block, headed south again. I stopped at the middle of three empty lots, the place where the best view would be. Optimal view. Surfer magazine view. Swamis Point.
Two houses farther south, on the uphill side of the street, a VW mini-bus, grey-green, white top, was parked in front of a house. “Julia’s mom’s house,” I said. Partially hidden by the VW and some shrubs, the back of the Jesus Saves bus was parked in the driveway. “Portia said you are your father’s son, and you might help.” I repeated the phrase. “Waiting… for you.” Me.
A light went on inside the house, behind the sheer curtains. I drove on. I pulled a u turn at the end of the block, coasted by again before I dropped back down to Vulcan and turned right. When I got to D street, I turned left. The Surfboards Hawaii shop was on my right. There were no cars on the block, either side. Several storefront businesses were on my left. David Cole C.P.A. was one of them. No lights. I got to 101 and turned right.
At Tamarack, parked on the bluff, lights to the south to lit the underside of the clouds. There were black lines on a dark ocean in front, breaking from a peak, gray soup to a gray beach. The rights looked better than the lefts. Still, I was replaying phrases. “You are your father’s son.” Portia. “What’s wrong with you?” Julia. “Waiting for you.” I reread the note that had been on the windshield by the light of my father’s flashlight. I straightened the photos, without looking at them, and placed them in a yellow notebook and slid that into a PeeChee.
I stayed on 101 until it curved away from the beach. Carlsbad Liquor was on my right, still open. Baadal Singh’s truck was parked nearby. “Gauloises bleus,” I said, out loud. “Picasso smokes these.” I considered stopping in, possibly buying a pack. I didn’t.
“Swamis” and all revisions are copyright protected, all rights reserved by the author, Erwin A. Dence, Jr, Thanks for respecting this, and for reading,
Permission to use this photo, here, was given to me by a client, Lana. It is pretty much the (or a) view one might get traveling to or from the Olympic Peninsula to or from Whidbey Island. I liked the shimmer on the ruffled water, the too-deep-to-be-real sky color, and the gauzy clouds aimed toward distant, partially shrouded mountains. AH, THE JOURNEY.
If you are someone who occasionally makes this journey, you can probably identify where this is.
What I get to see is, hopefully, a dark road, one traffic light, more road, more traffic lights, school zones, curvy roads, maybe that one forty mile per hour town, curves,, log trucks, the possibility of waves.
OR, big ass and blinding sun just over the horizon, lighting up every highway sign in front of me, and I’m trying to outrun the glaring sun on a stretch that is basically in line with it.
OR, the sun hitting clouds and that ragged ridge lines of the Easternmost Olympics, and I’m trying to race it to the corner. At one point, a twisting S curve, dropping, easing into the uphill recurve, there is a perfectly framed image, trees on both sides, and a mountain impossibly high (this is one of my favorite descriptions, used because it is true).
OR, MAYBE, thinking of going to Westport or down toward Chinook, where my father lived, the journey could be broken into its parts: Hood Canal, McClary cutoff, watching the power plant stacks go from distant to even to behind, and then the roads, the speed trap town, the lack of reception, and/or, bays and bays and curves, and, as always, THE ANTICIPATION.
BEAUTIFUL.
STILL, any beauty along the way is tangential; nice, but. I go surfing to surf, and though I will surf anything I can catch, getting skunked is disappointing. OH, I should throw in traveling with someone else. Not something I do often; my tendency to get caught in the Sequim vortex too well known, my tendency to avoid long, steep hikes better known, but conversation does shorten the trip, even if you’re the one of three in the back seat. There is a social aspect to surfing, and conversations on the beach are often the highlight of a trip. Again, not as great as great waves.
CHIMACUM TIM let me know, recently, that he went to every spot he knew, paddled out at one as far as he was willing to go on this day, and caught it good “For about forty minutes. How’d you do?” I was lucky (luckier, perhaps), got forty minutes of mediocre waves (realistic analysis) five miles from where I was working. I was quite happy to get them.
OH, and, the last time I was skunked, the conditions were perfect: Tide, wind, lack of clouds, swell angle; just no waves. OTHERWISE…
Enough rationalizing. What’s important, and I’m not, hopefully, sermonizing, is, coming, going, in the water, to remember that each of us has had moments on waves that we long to repeat. The few times I forgot this and allowed myself to be over-frustrated, are regrettable. Not that many.
THANKFULLY.
LOOK FOR the next installment of “Swamis” on Wednesday. I have to admit to still making changes in chapters I have already posted. It’s all to make the manuscript tighter, more readable, hopefully, saleable. If I get to an acceptable end, I will print up some advanced copies. A pre-first edition, limited number, signed, of “Swamis” would make a great gift for the holiday season. SHIT, I better get on it1
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.
Left to right: Randy Bennett, George South, Abner Agee, Kent Sunday (aka Cheetah), a Tom LeCompte (RIP). Photo courtesy of Abner Agee by way of Tom Burns.
TEXT from TOM: “Back in ’74 when I came up here. I discovered Westport, my locale ever since. Back then, this was the crew. All these guys had tales to tell of the old Grenville days. TODAY only Cheetah still surfs and now lives in Sequim. He spent 30 years in the Coast Guard as a rescue swimmer. The last ten years at Cape Disappointment where he flung himself out of helos on the Columbia River bar to rescue and recover victims. The stories he had!” Has, not to correct Mr. Burns.
Readers of “Surfer’s Journal” are aware that a portion of each issue is devoted to old stories from back in some simpler time; less crowded, for sure; the remembrances, possibly, sanitized, negative aspects edited out, joyful moments, again, possibly, enhanced.
In my advanced age, I’m as guilty of this as anyone. I’m a couple of weeks older than Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll, and really close in age to TOM BURNS. So, yeah, old-ish.
NOW Tom has stories, only some of which overlap with mine. AND YES, he has a story about running into Pete Carroll on a dawn patrol, in some not-distant past, in the parking lot at Westport. “Wait, Tom, Pete surfs?” “Sure. He asked me how the surf was. I said, ‘Well, Pete…'” “Okay. Makes sense.”
What is different about Mr. Burn is that he remembers names, even names of surfers he has met on the Strait. “That guy, ‘Dumptruck Dave…'” “Big Dave.” “What about ‘Tugboat Bill’ and ‘Concrete Pete?'” Yeah, those guys. Haven’t seen either in a while. We’ll run into each other again.” “Sure. Say ‘Hi’ from me. And, hey, what about old…”
Here’s more texting from this week, Tom doing some of his yearly hanging out and surfing down in Southern California, hitting San O and Doheny on 0dark-thirty strike missions: Ya know, Erwin, in my surfing Westport for close to 40 years, the place I held pretty close to my heart died in 1991 when beach erosion took out the bathhouse, the fog horn, and broke through the jetty at the corner, destroying one of the best waves on the coast. After beach nutritionment the break became like today, inconsistent and, like today, as more folks venture into my old locale, I find it hard to find any solace in the place or even the wave that used to exist there. But back in the days, there was no other place I loved to surf more. April ł987, a great day at the jetty. I was riding a 6’9″ Barnfield and bagging rides like this all day on a great swell. Jim Wallace took this pic of me on that day.
When I texted back that I was sitting in a lot overlooking a cove where I first saw waves in Washington State, 1978, and it was almost, almost rideable, Tom texted back that, even in California, “No waves for me today. No swell and a funky wind. It’s San’O tomorrow!” The next day, I drove farther, got skunked. I didn’t bother to tell Tom about it.
POSSIBLY related side story- I had a dream in which, possibly, I was imagining, or changing a scene from my manuscript for “Swamis.” A surfer comes up to some locals, all of them in their mid-teens, in the parking lot, tries to join in, says he just moved into Encinitas. The locals shine him on, quite rudely. When he persists, Duncan or Rincon Ronny, himself a transplant, says something to the effect of: “It takes more than just being local to be a local,” to which the non-accepted surfer says, “Surfing is just like high school… only worse.” Not a scene that’ll make it into some final draft, but the narrator, Joey, whispers if he doesn’t say it out loud, “More like Junior High.” THEN Joey also avoids the newcomer.
I will be posting the last Chapter 12 subchapter on Wednesday. Chapter 13 is way shorter.
MEANWHILE, remember what you can about your surf adventures, maybe the names of some of the folks you run into (not, hopefully,, literally), on the beach or in the water. Then, later… stories.
I really can’t take too much of the coverage of the Hamas/Israel War. It seems as if a surge in violence was predictable and is reminiscent of historic struggles worldwide. The outcomes, however, have varied. Watching MSNBC at the top of any hour guarantees more tales of terror. One analyst, representing this or that organization studying and/or promoting world peace said he expects the situation “Will get worse before it gets even worse.”
The gesture humans have for wonder, whether we are defeated, shattered and questioning; or we are grateful for some hoped for, possibly undeserved, unexpected gift, some surprisingly marvelous ride on a miraculous wave, for example, is the same. The sentiments behind the gesture could not be more different. Opposites Answers and solutions are rarely forthcoming.
“SWAMIS,” CHAPTER 12, PART THREE- SATURDAY, MARCH 29, 1969
All the surfers and non-surfers in the parking lot were in little groups, locals and non-locals, around vehicles or along the bluff. I was writing in a red notebook on the roof of the passenger side of the Falcon. Petey Blodgett and I were the only ones who looked up or over at the stripped-down and noisy red VW bug with flared fenders, primed with red oxide, going down the far side of the lot, counterclockwise, two people inside.
Petey Blodgett turned toward me, nodded, mouthed “Dickson,” His expression had turned the name into a question. I nodded. He whistled, one sharp, three note blast, and made a sort of ‘circle the wagons’ gesture with both hands. Everyone looked at the VW. The younger kids started loading into the Mercedes. Ronny and Duncan looked at me before, in a pace that didn’t appear as casual as they may have hoped, they headed for the Morris Minor.
Julia Cole stepped into the bluff side lane and followed the VW with her camera. When it got to the far end of the lot, she put the camera into her bag. She said, “Cardiff,” to Petey and grabbed Monica’s arm. They hurried, together, Julia Cole’s bag almost bouncing on the pavement, to Ronny’s car. Duncan held the passenger side door open, allowing both girls into the back seat.
The two detectives, Wendall and Dickson, got out of the VW. They straightened their suit pants, buttoned their coats, and walked forward, very slowly. Dickson had a portable radio in his left hand. He raised it, said something, and lowered it again.
The Mercedes, with four boys and Petey Blodgett, backed out and pulled forward. The Morris Minor backed out. Julia Cole, passenger side, back seat, looked at me as the car passed. Duncan may have. I was looking at Julia. She didn’t blink, didn’t move her head. Her eyes moved, left to right. Two seconds, maybe, watching me. Watching me not move.
Two vehicles, almost instantly, moved from the middle row to the front row. Second tier, now first. Three more surfers headed for the stairs.
With my own fake casualness, I lifted the Falcon’s tailgate, cranked up the back window, locked it. I walked to the driver’s door, opened it. I looked around. I heard three distinct Sirens. One was a two-syllable yelp, the other two sirens, three. A Highway Patrol motorcycle and a patrol car, and one cruiser from the Sheriff’s Office, red lights going on each, were blocking the Swamis lot at 101.
The Mercedes and the Morris Minor pulled quick u turns at the original lot and parked next to each other in the middle row, as close to 101 as the blockade allowed. I got in the Falcon, closed the door, set the tape player on the floorboards, set the red notebook on the dashboard next to my father’s oversized flashlight.
The four boys got out of the Mercedes and started running circles around the car and then around other cars. Ronny and Duncan got out of the Morris Minor. Julia Cole got out and started unstrapping boards on the rack of the Mercedes. Monica got out and loosened the straps on the one board side of Ronny’s racks. Julia placed her board on the rack and reattached the straps. Monica resecured the straps on the Mercedes.
Petey Blodgett got out of the Mercedes when the Sheriff’s Office cruiser pulled in front of his and Ronny’s cars. The Highway Patrol motorcycle pulled in behind them. The officer got off his motorcycle, removed the glove from his right hand, and shook Petey’s hand.
Wendall and Dickson were hanging back. Wendall stopped at the edge of the bushes. He disguised taking a leak by lighting a cigarette, his back to the south wind. Dickson took several steps into the open area and raised his walkie-talkie. There was a loud squelch. Wendall took the radio from Dickson, said something into it. Squelch. Both detectives looked at me. I lowered my head.
I pushed down the vertical knob on the front driver’s side door. As I was reaching over to lock the front passenger door, Detective Dickson opened it. He almost threw himself forward and onto the seat. He reached down and put a hand on my tape deck. With some grunting, he pulled himself and my tape deck backwards and out. He ripped out the loose, overlong, taped together wires from the back, set the player on the edge of the roof. He squatted, his eyes level with mine.
“Obviously stolen,” Dickson said before stepping back and standing up. He flicked two fingers toward the obviously stolen tape player, laughed as it fell to the asphalt. He leaned back in, reached for the red notebook. I pulled it toward me.
“Not obviously stolen, Sir. And, if you don’t have a warrant or a compelling…”
“Suspicion? I do.” Dickson was pretty much out of breath. He, quite awkwardly, dropped to one knee, on top of the tape deck. “Bet you can quote me the law. Huh, Jody?”
“Not verbatim, Detective… Sergeant Dickson.”
“With so many of these tape decks getting stolen,” Dickson said, “it’s really hard to figure out who to get them back to.”
“I would guess so.”
“No, it’s under control,” Wendall, just outside the driver’s door, said into the walkie-talkie. He tapped the radio’s antenna on the window. Three times. I must have turned toward him too quickly, looked at him too hard. He slid the radio’s antenna across the glass. “Out.”
Wendall moved with the door as I opened it. He remained just on the other side of it as I got out. He was looking over the Falcon. Deputy Wilson and a very tall Highway Patrol Officer, standing by between the Mercedes and the Morris Minor, were waiting for further instruction. “This isn’t a game, Jody,” Wendall said, still not looking directly at me.
Monica and Duncan and Julia Cole and Rincon Ronny were taking a cue from Petey, looking quite casual, but they were all, definitely, looking at me.
“Kind of looks like a game, Detective Wendall… Sir.”
“You’re not helping here, Jody.”
Dickson pushed the tape deck into the traffic lane with a series of short kicks. “So, Jody, sales receipt?”
I didn’t respond. One of the dawn patrol gremmies was hanging on the racks on the Mercedes. Duncan pulled him off, the kid’s legs pumping. Petey was laughing, chatting with the Highway Patrolman, his hand on the Officer’s shoulder. Three of the four boys were sitting or leaning on the hood of Petey’s Mercedes, looking, if anything, bored. Deputy Scott Wilson was looking at Julia Cole. Monica and Duncan and Ronny were looking at Deputy Wilson. As was I.
Julia Cole, her knees bent, was leaning over the hood of the Morris Minor. Her telephoto lens was aimed at Dickson and Wendall and me. Wendall yelled, “Hey!” He threw out both hands, more in front of his body than straight out. He waved the radio. It was a ‘this is serious’ gesture meant for the motorcycle officer and Deputy Wilson. The CHP Officer shook Petey’s hand and signaled his compatriot in the cruiser. He tapped Deputy Wilson, still watching Julia, on the shoulder. The deputy looked at Julia’s friends, all giving him the same smile. He acknowledged this with an expression I didn’t see but could imagine. Busted.
Julia Cole stood up, never taking her eyes off Wendall, Dickson, and me. She held her camera with the telephoto lens facing up and made four upward thrusts with it. An unmistakable gesture.
I chuckled. Wendall chuckled louder. Dickson wasn’t amused. “Stay away from that one, Jody,” he said. “A regular prick teaser.”
“She’s seventeen years old, Detective Dickson. Sir.”
“Yeah,” Dickson said, jabbing his right hand, in a fist, toward me. Close. I didn’t flinch. He turned toward Wendall. “That is David Cole’s daughter, isn’t it, Larry?” Dickson didn’t give Wendall a chance to answer. “David Cole’s… other, older daughter; she’s the slutty one. Right?” Dickson’s expression was more of a sneer when he turned back. “Surfer girls, huh, Jody?”
Wendall set the walkie-talkie on the roof of the Falcon. He pulled the flashlight from the dashboard, smacking the palm of his hand with it several times. “Gunny… your dad, he didn’t like the ones we were issued.” Wendall turned it on, shined it into my eyes. “Not… impressive enough.” He maneuvered the light into the car, shone it onto a light blue lunch sack in the middle of the bench seat, then turned the flashlight off, handed it to me, smiled. “Lunch, huh?”
I stuck the flashlight back onto the dashboard, took out the light blue lunch sack, set it on the roof. “Habit,” I said. “I could get something at Mrs. Tony’s.”
“When does your shift start?”
“Not yet.”
Dickson walked over to the tape deck. “You wanna pick this shit up, Jody?”
I stepped toward the back of the Falcon, lit up a cigarette with two matches from a book with “Fallbrook, The Friendly Village” on the cover.
Dickson kicked the tape deck as he walked around the front of my car. “So, Jody, your mother know you smoke?”
I opened the lunch sack. I pulled my father’s lighter, a small tin of lighter fluid, and a tiny cardboard box of flints. “Evidently.” I opened the top of my father’s lighter, flicked the wheel. There was a brief flame. “I’m going to add the fluid… when I get a chance.”
Wendall took out a cigarette from a pack in his coat’s lower right pocket. “I know your mom didn’t supply… those.” He pulled out a matching Zippo, held the side with the Sheriff’s Office logo toward me, and lit my cigarette before lighting his own. Camel, non-filter.
Dickson came closer to me. The Sheriff’s Office cruiser passed us, followed by the Highway Patrol motorcycle. Wendall and Dickson gave very informal salutes. “So, Jody,” Dickson said, looking at the locals, all still hanging outside the two vehicles, “You popular around here with the hippies and the… surfers?”
“Not at all. Is the… show over?”
“Think so, Jody,” Wendall said, “just making our presence known.”
“To what end, Detectives?”
Wendall puffed up one cheek, coughed, blew out some air. The portable radio on the roof of the Falcon squawked. A woman’s voice, distorted, said, “Wendall, Vista sub, come in.”
I slid over and grabbed it. “Betty Boop,” I said, “It’s Joey… Jody; lots of fun here at Swamis. Over.”
A man’s voice came over the radio. “Wendall. Is this a joke? Wendall.”
I almost dropped the radio. Dickson shoved me from the side and grabbed it. Wendall took it from him, stepped away. “No. Not a joke. It’s under control. Over.”
“Put the kid on. Over.”
Wendall, shaking his head, stepped toward Dickson and me. Dickson put his hand on my left shoulder and looked over me, toward the cars and the locals. “I’m going to do you a favor, Jody,” Dickson said, removing his hand and smiling as he punched me; short, straight jabs; very quickly, in the solar plexus. Just the way my father taught me. And him.
My cigarette had landed on Dickson’s shoulder with the first punch. I put a hand on his left shoulder, for balance after the third and fourth blows. After the fifth and sixth, Dickson brushed the cigarette off, removed my hand from his shoulder, took the radio from Wendall, held it up to my face and said, “Just say ‘thank you,’ Jody.” He pushed the button.
“Thank you… Sir. Over.”
“Joseph DeFreines, Junior,” the voice on the radio said, “in real life, there are no seventeen-year-old detectives. Over and… out.”
Dickson turned moved his face close to mine. “Now the show’s over.” Between my breaths, Dickson whispered, “And… you’re welcome.”
Wendall picked the cigarette up, put it back in my mouth. Dickson turned away, yelled, “Yeah. You get that, Missy?” He flipped the bird with both hands, spun his body and his hands around. “Not very… professional, huh, Jody?” I didn’t respond. “But then, how would a hick Barney Fife like me know?”
With no answer that would please Dickson, I shook my head.
Dickson set what was left of the tape deck on the hood of the Falcon. Wendall lit a cigarette with the butt of his last one, looked around the parking lot. I flicked my father’s lighter a few times. No flame. “No flame,” I said, flicking it a few more times.
Both detectives turned away and started walking, slowly, toward Dickson’s VW. I heard the tiny engine of the Morris Minor and the diesel engine in the Mercedes start up. I heard both cars drive away. I hadn’t looked that way. I had been afraid. Now I was angry.
“I have… spoken to someone who was here… that night.” Both detectives stopped and turned toward me. They acted as if they didn’t understand, but both looked toward the compound wall. Wendall grabbed the radio from Dickson and turned it off. “The East Indian guy. From London. Not the pretty part. The guy who got singed… in the fire. Wasn’t taken to a doctor. Nephew of the owner of Carlsbad Liquor; the guy you two, or maybe just Langdon, questioned… downtown, for two days. That guy. Baadal Singh.”
This was a reaction caused by anger, I thought, a mistake. Still, I continued, words coming out fast, uncontrolled. “The possible suspect, definite witness… You told him to disappear. I assume you told Gingerbread Fred the same thing.” Wendall and Dickson were both, instantly, angry. I wasn’t displeased. “This must mean… indicate… that you truly believe the killers, in the black car with the loud tailpipes might… return.”
Dickson stepped toward me. Wendall stopped him with a hand, fingers spread, to the chest. “Go on. Jody.”
“Chulo. Was he your… asset; or Langdon’s?”
Dickson was very quickly in my face. “Don’t give a fuck what you truly believe, Jody.”
When Dickson moved his head back, just a bit, I moved my face close to his. “Chulo and Jumper Hayes; when they were arrested, you had to take sides. Butchie Bancroft was… had been your partner. ‘Dickie Bird and Butchie Boy,’ my father said, ‘red on their heads like dicks on dogs.’ I don’t recall whose side you took… Detective Sergeant… Dickson.”
“I wasn’t there, Jody. I might have knee-capped Jumper fucking Hayes.” Dickson held an aggressive expression long enough to see if I would move back. “Quit your recalling,” he said, taking a step back, checking Wendall’s reaction. He moved his lips back and forth a few times before he smiled. Full teeth. “Butchie was a good cop. He… that time, he went too far.”
Wendall stuck his right arm, cigarette in his hand, between Dickson and me. He pushed Dickson back. “We’re detectives, Jody. We were on your dad’s side in that.”
“Didn’t make me and Larry popular with… anyone, really; takin’ an avocado thief’s side. Especially seeing as everyone knew about the marijuana him and Chulo were stealing from… groves. Bonus for them… and the… landowners. That shit, it got… glossed over.”
Wendall was shaking his head. Not at me. At Dickson. “Butchie wasn’t good for the… the Office. It all blew over. As always. You calm now, Danny?”
Danny Dickson wasn’t calm. “So, you got that all wrong, huh? Jody.”
Wendall stepped between his partner and me. “Asset,” he said, “Source.” He didn’t exactly smile. He didn’t nod. His cigarette moved up and down. “Any other theories, Jody?”
“No theories.” There was a pause. “Okay. If Chulo was your… asset… you’d have a better idea who killed him. Still, you have to know who’s involved, locally. Maybe that’s why you’ve let Langdon take over. He doesn’t live here, and… maybe he’s not telling you what he knows.”
Now Wendall seemed the angrier of the two. He broke off eye contact with me just before I would have. He smiled, pointed at me with his cigarette between his first two fingers. “Theories. I am sure you will keep them to… yourself.” I must have looked as if I agreed. “And, Jody, this is all… you’re… you should…” Such pauses were unusual for Wendall. “Your mother and I…”
Full stop. Wendall turned quickly, toward his partner. Dickson dropped his sarcastic smile. Both looked toward me. I wouldn’t allow either the pleasure of reacting.
“Let’s go, Dickie Bird,” Wendall said, walking away. “So glad we took your death trap dune buggy.”
“Undercover, Dickson said, taking a slight detour to push the tape player off the hood of my car. A family station wagon passing by, with three kids in the far back, ran over it. The car stopped. It backed up. A woman stuck her head out the window. Wendall used his badge to wave her on. “Thanks for being here,” she said, the comment aimed at the detective, though she was looking at me. Suspiciously.
“Doing our job, Ma’am.”
Dickson kicked the tape player toward the center of the parking lot, threw his hands out as if he had scored a field goal, and joined his partner, both walking slowly toward the end of the lot, toward where the Jesus Saves bus would have ordinarily been parked.
NOTE: I couldn’t help it. I went back again on previous chapters to keep the continuity, like, accurate.. I am over 100,000 words, but changes now means, hopefully, that I can cut out more later. Yes, I do realize there is a formula successful writers stick to. It’s just… no, I am trying. Thanks for trying to stick with it. “Swamis” and all its variations are protected by copyright. All rights reserved by the author, Erwin A. Dence, Jr.
Autumn and the opportunity for, rather the chance of multiple swell angles, leftover summer pushes, and, of particular interest on the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the possibility that some errant low might produce something. Some thing. Meanwhile, east winds work magic with what might ordinarily be closeout beachbreak. Westport, perhaps? I can’t be sure. I have heard stories.
What the shorter days do to me is, short term, while I’m busily running from here to there, catching up on leftover projects, trying to finish others, and enjoying the days that are actually perfect for exterior house painting, I’m losing out on the time I could be writing. Or drawing. And I do have projects.
Yes, I know that the shorter daytime hours will soon reduce my time outside, rain and fog and all that, and if I just realize that and concentrate on ‘making hay,’ one of my most heard comments by others who do not make metaphorical hay themselves, not that I do; if I am patient, the time to dabble and write and jump into all the deferred projects will come. This is without even mentioning all the home repair projects I have put off, some for years. That leaky spot on the roof, that… and this, and… okay, I’ll stop whining.
And, no, I’m not forgetting surf. It’s coming. But, if you look at the forecasts we all look at, studying them, searching for the right angle and tide level and wind conditions, that, it just seems tough to figure which of several options to make that one strike mission, always hoping waves might show up at a beach adjacent to a work project. Always hoping.
Now, “Swamis,” the manuscript, though I’ve fine tuned chapters ell past Chapter 12, is currently kind of caught in that space. In my endeavor to focus, novelize the overwhelming and only-partially-plot-centric little insights and stories I long to tell, I am… well, working on it. Once done, it will, or should, or must cut down the verbiage later on. I am committed to keeping the manuscript under 100,000 words. So far, after shortening the time span, successful.
I will be posting the final subchapter on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, here are a couple of sketches. Other than my decorating my Volvo and starting on several other to-be-continued projects, this is what I’ve taken the time to do.
It is probably not worth saying these are copyright protected. I will, anyway.
Good luck in finding the waves you want and the time you need. OH, Maybe I’ll post a couple of shots of my formerly stealth surf rig. Wednesday.
I’m doing the, hopefully, final edit of my manuscript. I am ahead of the chapters I’m posting. But, because Microsoft allows me to go to where I last left off, and because I haven’t had time to write since Wednesday, the file opened to Chapter 12, Part One and… and I just couldn’t help myself. Edit, Edit, Edit.
If you already read this, the changes are subtle. If you haven’t, it is… hopefully, better.
CHAPTER TWELVE- PART ONE- SATURDAY, MARCH 29, 1969
I couldn’t say for certain if I had slept at all. I was outside the house at five. I had my lunch, in its pastel blue paper bag, in one hand, my dad’s big flashlight in the other. The Falcon was pointed toward the road. Getaway position. My new board was inside, my nine-six pintail on the by-this-time rusted-on factory racks. I carefully closed the driver’s side door, rolled the car down the driveway, turned the ignition key, popping the clutch, in second gear, at the county road. I turned on the headlights and retrieved a half a pack of Marlboros from under several Pee-Chee folders, those stacked on top of a four-track tape player, that set in the middle of the bench seat.
Waiting for a truck to pass before I could turn left onto Mission Road, I reached into the inside pocket of my windbreaker for matches. I had considered, briefly, pulling out ahead of the truck. I grabbed the flashlight from the dashboard, shined it on my fogged-up watch. “Should have left earlier.” I passed the truck on the last straightaway before Bonsall.
The wood-sided Mom-and-Pop store in Leucadia, perilously close to the southbound side of 101, didn’t open until six. I parked in the pullout just past it at five-fifty-two. Waiting for the lights to come on inside, I reran the TV coverage from the previous nights through my mind. Images overlapped, words were garbled. I focused on faces. No, just on Langdon, on his face when he said, “Heroes. Some people are.” Langdon’s image froze for a moment. “Can’t help themselves but… to be. Heroes.”
Hostess donettes, frosted, a quart of chocolate milk, a tiny can of lighter fluid, Marlboros, box, not soft pack, and a package of flints. The mom and pop, both at the counter, appeared tired. Pop was going to ask for my ID, but a look from Mom, and he didn’t.
“You. You know how to put those in? The flints?” I didn’t. Pop, only focusing on the logo on my father’s lighter for a moment, installed a flint for me. “You don’t want to overfill,” he said, filling the lighter for me, his wife smiling, watching, making sure I knew that she knew who I was, sending some sort of sympathetic message. I had seen the look before. I responded as I had learned to respond. Thankful. No uncomfortable talking.
“The fluid,” Pop said, “if it gets on you. Your leg, maybe. It… burns.”
Burns.
I pulled into the Swamis parking lot, did a soft left, and looped into a hard right. I stopped the car, shone the headlights on the portion of the wall where Chulo had been killed. It looked the same as it always had. White, not even gray, not even yellowed by the headlights, low or high beams. I backed up and away, made a big lazy arc in the very middle of the empty lot, and pulled into a perfect spot, ten spaces over from the stairs. Optimum location. I leapt out, stood at the bluff. Not loud enough to suggest waves of any height. I exhaled the smoke from my third cigarette of the day. “South wind. Fuck!”
…
The Laura Nyro tape re-running the songs from side one of “Eli and the Thirteenth Confession.” It wasn’t the tape. It was the player. Side one of albums from the bargain bin, Leonard Cohen and Harry Nilsson and the Moody Blues, side one of The Doors.
I looked at my increasingly water-logged diving watch each time another car pulled in, each time car doors slammed, each time a surfer or surfers walked out onto the bluff, peered into the darkness, and decided to go elsewhere. La Jolla shores, perhaps. It was, supposedly, offshore on a south wind.
It was still an hour before sunrise, overcast, almost drizzly. I stuck my father’s flashlight under my left arm and walked straight across the pavement, across the grass. I followed the Self Realization Fellowship compound toward the highway, toward the forty-five-degree curve to where the compound’s original entrance had been. There were two large pillars, gold lotus topped, an arch between them, the wrought iron gates long secured with long rusted chains.
Two bushes had been replaced with full-sized plants. The soil around them, the grass next to them, were new. It would all blend in. Quickly. I touched the wall. I looked at my hand. Dry. Perfect, as if no one had been burned to death there.
Backing away from the wall. I walked across the wet grass and onto the pavement at the entrance to the Swamis parking lot. This was where the crowd had assembled, where the sawhorses and rope had been. Unlike the still almost pristine compound side, there were cigarette butts and candy wrappers and straws and smashed paper cups on the rough pavement, scattered and stepped on and run over.
Clues, I thought. Killers returning to the scene of the crime, blending in, hanging on the ropes. Missed clues. I pulled out the Marlboro box from the inside pocket of my windbreaker, stuck the third to the last cigarette in my mouth, lit it with a surprisingly oversized flame from my father’s lighter. I turned on the flashlight, held each new clue close I had picked up to the beam.
Cigarette butts. Various brands. Lipstick on two of them. A partial pack of matches. “Carlsbad Liquor. Beer, Wine, and Spirits.” I opened it. “Left-handed,” I said. I pulled out several of the remaining matches. They left a red streak when I tried to light them. “Too wet.”
I put selected cigarette butts and the pack of matches into the Marlboro box. I moved back and forth along the de facto line, established where dead center was. I crouched down to study the patch of debris in front of me. “Menthol.” I picked up a butt with a gray, slightly longer filter. I blinked, possibly from my own cigarette smoke in my eyes. “Different.”
There was a noise. Slight. Footsteps. Pulling my flashlight out from under my arm with my right hand, I stood up, right foot sliding back.
“Gauloises Bleaues,” a man, ten feet away, said.
I flipped the flashlight around and into my right hand. The beam hit just below his head.
“Picasso smokes these. Jim Morrison and John Lennon smoke these.” I slid my right foot up and even with my left and lowered the flashlight. The man was holding a push broom. Stiff bristles. “My uncle imports these. I smoke these.” I nodded toward the broom. “You and I spoke… before. You gave me a… sort of… newspaper.”
“I did? Okay. So, no one cleaned… here, behind the… the line.”
“So, you. You. Here. Scene of the crime, eh?”
“Me? Here? Yeah. I don’t know… why.”
The man took two steps, closer. “Joe DeFreines, Junior. You surf. You work at a grocery store in Cardiff, on weekends.” I leaned back. “I look a bit different than… I did.” He nodded toward the west end of the wall. “Meditation garden.”
I flashed to that time. Four seconds, at the most. “Swami,” I said.
“No. Not nearly. Gardener. I was with a Swami.”
The gardener’s beard and hair were tucked into a dark coat. The man’s eyes were almost the only part of his face showing. He had a bandana pulled up and covering most of his face. He had on the type of felt hats older men still wore; probably brown, pulled down around his ears.
“Lost most of my eyebrows. Eyelashes just got a good curling. Singed. Still there.”
“No! Shit!” I took half a step back. “It was… you.”
“No shit.” The man extended his hands. He had a leather glove, dirtied calfskin, on his left hand. He had a white cotton glove on his right hand. His first two fingers taped together, as were the other two, and, separately, his thumb. The bandaging wrapped around the main part of his hand and was taped at his wrist. Three of his fingers showed stains that were either, I thought, something that had seeped through, ointment or blood. I was staring. “Second degree,” the gardener said, “Flash burns. Fools.”
I turned and looked toward the highway. There was a late step-side pickup in the spot closest to the telephone booth on the highway side of the original parking lot. There was a three-legged fruit picker’s ladder on the rack over the bed, gardening tools bundled upright against the cab, the handle of a lawn mower hanging over the tailgate.
“You must have gone to the… hospital, Mister… You know my name. Mister…?”
“Singh. Baadal Singh. Baa, like ‘baa, baa, black sheep,’ sing like… sing.” I nodded. Baadal Singh laughed. “No hospital. They keep… records.” This seemed amusing to Mr. Singh. “I was two full days… downtown. Not in a cell. Interview room. Hallway. Just… Dickson calls you Jody.” I nodded. “Your father… sorry about him, incidentally. Wendall, he calls your father Gunny.”
“They both do. Marines. Wendall and my… dad. Not Dickson. Why would they even mention… me?”
“They didn’t. Downtown detectives. One of them said… I am under the impression he was giving Wendall some… grief. And Langdon, he said…”
“Langdon?”
“Langdon. Yes. Fuck him.”
“But, Mister Singh, you were a witness; not a… suspect.”
“Witness. Yes. Suspects have rights.” Baadal Singh looked at the little pile of cigarette butts and candy wrappers he had pushed close to my feet, then at me. I squatted to look more closely. Baadal Singh lowered the bandana that had been over his nose. “’Nice sunburn’ one of the detectives told me. ‘Hard to tell,” Dickson… said.”
Mr. Singh pushed the broom handle toward me. It leaned against my chest as I turned off the flashlight and stuck it back under my left arm. “Marines, you say?” Mr. Singh pulled the glove from his left hand with his teeth. He pulled back his coat. He took a thin box of cigarettes from the coat’s breast pocket with his bandaged right hand. He laughed. The glove fell to the ground. I slid my right hand down the broom handle and picked up the glove.
Baadal Singh took a cigarette out of the pack. “Gauloisis Bleaues” he said. He showed me a book of matches from the Courthouse Bar and Grill. “Downtown. Langdon treated me to lunch on my… second day. Clientele of lawyers and bail bondsmen and cops and criminals. He told me I would, eventually, be charged with Chulo’s murder.” Though he didn’t laugh, Mr. Singh did smile. He pulled out three matches from the right-hand side with his right hand. “Right-handed,” he said, striking the three matches as one, and lighting the cigarette. “All clues that make me what Langdon called ‘completely convictable.’”
I didn’t react. I was playing back what Mr. Singh had just done. I had, evidently, forgotten to inhale. My Marlboro was down to the filter. I spit it out on the clean part of the asphalt. I stomped on it. Too much information, too quickly. I was starting to hyperventilate. Baadal Singh put his left hand on my right shoulder. “Chulo wasn’t a Marine, though, was he?”
“Chulo? No.”
“You’re calm. Right?” I nodded. “This is how real coppers work, Joe. Blackmail. Maybe. Information is currency. You know that.” I coughed and took in a more normal breath. “Langdon… not really the other guys, he wants everything I know in exchange for my temporary… freedom. What I know is there is too much money around. Cash. Fine for small… purchases. Someone needs to… Do you… understand? Good citizens. Businesspeople.”
“I don’t know anything.”
“You’re looking, though. Langdon was right about that. You get enough clues and you… analyze, you imagine.”
“I don’t… imagine. I… memorize. I… remember. If you knew more about me, you’d know more about why.”
“More. Yes. Some… another day; you’ll have to tell me… more.”
“So, Mr. Singh; you told them what you know?”
Baadal laughed. “Not even close, mate.”
…
It was closer to sunrise. I had been talking with Baadal Singh a while. “White pickup,” he said. “Farm truck. Double wheels in the back.”
“White pickup. Farm truck. Double wheels in the back. Duelies, I think they’re called. The other vehicle, black car, loud muffler. Straight pipes. Made a rumbling sort of sound.”
“Right. And?”
“And Chulo had been in the white truck with a Mexican and a tall, skinny, white guy. Chulo had already been beaten. You believe the Mexican and the skinny white guy were taking Chulo to the Jesus Saves bus. But… Mr. Singh, if they had, they would have had to face… Portia. So, they knew her?”
“Drugs, Joe. You had to have known… that. Portia and Chulo? Marijuana?”
“I told you, Mr. Singh. I just… didn’t pay attention.” Baadal Singh shook his head. “You weren’t a friend… of Chulo’s?” Baadal Singh shook his head. “So, again; why are you telling me all… any of this?”
“Because, if I… disappear, I want someone to know the truth.”
“Not me. Not a good choice.”
“You’re my only choice, though. So… remember.”
“So, the black car pulled in. Lights off. Two guys jumped out. Also a Mexican and a white guy. There was an argument. Between the two… groups.”
Baadal Singh, with me following, stopped between the phone booth and his truck. “Simon’s Landscaping” was painted on the door.
“Not Simon,” Baadal Singh said. “Not Swami, not Simon.” I shook my head. “The two white guys…” he said, “The one from the car pushes the skinny cowboy dude over here. He says, ‘We have customers lined up. They are serious. Call someone. Now! You need change, A-hole?’ Meanwhile, the Mexican guy… from the black car, he kicks Chulo a few more times, drags him across the parking lot.”
“Where were you, Mr. Singh?”
“Call me Baadal. Please.” Baadal pointed toward the concrete shower/bathroom facility. “Cowardly. Yeah.” Baadal stood by the door to the booth. “So, the… let’s call them gangsters… White gangster is outside, cowboy’s dialing. I see him… he’s kind of ducking, looking up…” Baadal stepped away from the booth, looked across the street, past the railroad tracks, and up the hill. “Not sure if that is relevant.” Baadal turned toward me. “I’m just trying to understand this myself, Joe.”
“Okay, Baadal. So, whatever was said on the phone, it wasn’t what the gangsters wanted to hear. Obviously. A-hole, he’s still on the phone, right?” Baadal nodded. ”You’re still thinking it was a joke?” Baadal shook his head. “No. The white gangster goes to… your truck?”
“My truck. It was on the highway. Chulo gets dragged all the way to the wall. Skinny white guy… whoever was on the line must have hung up on him. He slams the phone, chases after the white gangster, meets up with him halfway across the lot. The gangster stops, sets a petrol can which he got from my truck… He sets it down, looks way over where the bus is parked. I sneak over to… here, the phone booth. Chulo, he’s… sitting, back to the wall. He sees me. He yells… something.”
“You couldn’t hear him?”
“I could. He’s saying, ‘No! Not her!’ That’s when I, I ran past the two guys and over to the grass. I yelled out that I had called the cops.”
“Had you?”
“No. That’s when the Mexican gangster poured the petrol; my petrol, on him. Chulo.”
Two vehicles pulled into the lot and passed us. I recognized both vehicles. One from Tamarack, one from Swamis. Both had surfboards on the roofs. The second car’s exhaust was louder. “Rumble,” I said.
Baadal Singh shook his head. “Louder.” We both nodded. “I fancied myself a revolutionary back in London. I didn’t run away so much as I was… banished. Sent… here.” Baadal put his right hand over the place where his inside pocket was on his coat. He looked at me for a moment before he flattened his hand as if it was a sort of pledge. I am not a killer, Joe. Remember I told you… the truth.” He smiled. “Not all of it, of course.”
“This isn’t over, is it?”
“This? No. Here is the… a secret part, Joe. I… so stupid. I walked up to Chulo, got down on my knees.” Baadal took a deep breath. “Do you want… to know?” I closed my eyes. I envisioned something I had seen in a magazine, a black and white photo of a Buddhist monk on fire. I opened my eyes. Baadal Singh was close to me. “The white gangster was talking to the cowboy. He said, ‘You know Chulo is a narc. Right?’”
“Narc. Chulo?”
“That’s how the guys from the truck responded.” Baadal Singh didn’t move his head. “At first.” He kept his eyes on me as he half-forced the calfskin glove onto his left hand. I must have looked away for a moment. I might have been elsewhere for a moment. Seconds.
Baadal Singh was somewhere else.
“Mr. Singh. Baadal; may I ask you… why were you at Swamis… that night?”
Baadal reached for his broom, grabbed it in the middle, and moved it up and down several times. “Another time, Joe. You have a lot to… memorize.” Baadal and then I turned toward the latest car pulling into the Swamis lot, Petey Blodget’s once-fancy fifties era four door Mercedes. It had a diesel engine sound and smell. Five boards were in a single stack on a rack, a browned and battered kneeboard on the top of the pile.
My focus shifted to the girl sitting in the middle of the front seat. Julia Cole. Baadal Singh looked up at the palm fronds, swaying in the trees above us. He hit my shoulder with his left hand. “Another time.”
“Wait. Baadal.”
I wanted more information, but I couldn’t help but follow the Mercedes as it pulled in, clockwise, and backed into a spot two spaces to the left of the Falcon. Kids too young to drive bailed from the back seat. Julia Cole was the second person out of the front door on the passenger side, just behind the guy riding shotgun; Petey’s son. My age. Nicknamed Buzz.
While the others rushed to the bluff, Julia Cole looked at me through the space between the stack of boards on the roof. At me. Not for very long. Petey was looking at Baadal Singh and I from the driver’s seat. He slowly opened the door, slowly pulled his feet out and onto the pavement. Julia Cole pulled her big gray bag out of the floorboards of the Mercedes. Petey walked toward the bathrooms.
Baadal Singh backed up a step. I took two steps toward him. ‘Gingerbread Fred. Fred Thompson, did you see him?”
“Later. Only. I was… busy.”
“But he saw… them?”
“He did.” Baadal lit up another cigarette with three matches and handed me the empty pack. “And they saw him.”
“Did he seem to… recognize… any of them?”
“You mean, did I?” I nodded. “No one I had seen before. But… I will never forget them.” Baadal Singh moved his face very close to mine. “Since you claim you don’t… imagine. Maybe you… guessed. I am not here… legally. More to it than that. I am, in England, legally… dead.”
There was no way to hide or disguise my confusion. “They… Langdon, he let you go.”
Baadal Singh chuckled. “Bait. Yes. It’s a game, Joey; but you were right. Langdon did ask me, as you did, why I was at Swamis… that night.” Baadal Singh shook his head as he backed away. “And… if you know more about me you’ll know more about why.” He laughed as he turned away. He turned his head slightly as he let out smoke from the Gauloisis Bleaues cigarette. “Again, Joe, it’s Langdon I lied to; not… you.”
Real Surfers 