First Frost

1

"You're too big to surf."

I took another sip of my Rainier, smiled, and then looked up at the ten-foot surfboard stuffed in the floor joists of my cabin's little-known basement. "I didn't used to be."

Victoria Moretti balanced on the stepladder and stroked a hand over the board, detecting the little scuffs, dents, and scars on the otherwise remarkably smooth varnished surface. "It's a monster."

"The Monolith, as Henry used to call it." I sat on the concrete steps that led down from the Bilco doors into the cellar. "They used to be even bigger back in the day, in Hawaii-the Duke boards."

"The Duke, you mean John Wayne?"

I smiled. "No, Kahanamoku, kind of the father of surfing."

She shook her head. "So, you mean to tell me that when you went to college in California you actually surfed?" When I smiled at her she pushed up, lifting one end of the longboard. "It's heavy."

"About a hundred pounds, stout for the day. It's a Bob Simmons sandwich model, one of his early designs, but it's still got the twin fins."

"Who's Bob Simmons?"

"Another surfing legend."

"And he sold you the board?"

"No, he died back in '54 so I never met him. The smaller, more maneuverable boards were all the rage in the 60s and those big boards were going for a song-I bought that one for thirty bucks and strapped it to the top of a Country Squire station wagon on the Pacific Coast Highway near the Santa Monica Pier."

Pushing her thick, dark hair back from her face and tarnished-gold eyes, she ran her fingers over the fins as if the board might swim away. "You hauled this thing all the way back from Southern California?"

"Not exactly."

"Then what?"

I took another sip of my beer. "It's a long story."

She stared at me for a moment before carefully climbing down the ladder to stroll over and take the beer from my hand. With a final look she lifted the Rainier and downed the whole thing, then handed me back the empty can, but only after crushing it. "You've got to stop saying that."

"What?"

"That long story shit."

"Sorry, I guess I'm kind of distracted." I tossed the crumpled can into the trash by the steps, pulled another one from the sixer by my boots, and offered it to her. "Frosty beverage?"

She sat on the hard steps beside me and took the beer and then pointed toward the surfboard, specifically at the ragged gouge in the front edge. "We'll start small; tell me about that dent in the front there."

I snorted.

"What?"

"That actually is a long story."

She torqued open the can and looked at me with the electrified eyes, transmitting the thought that if my lips didn't start moving pretty quickly my goose was cooked. When I didn't say anything, she stood, turned, and walked up the steps out into the blazing sunlight above.

We'd been living together for over a month, something that neither of us had been used to for quite some time. I'd never thought of my cabin as being small, but with my undersheriff's oversize personality the space was becoming something of a problem. She'd thought that making a home gym out of the little-used basement might help her blow off some steam and maybe inspire me to get into shape, hence what had become known as "the great purge."

I looked around the dim space at the plastic tubs and beer crates that held portions of my life I'd hardly remembered. I called my daughter as a reinforcement, but her response had been that if there were anything down there, she had lived without it for the last twenty years, so she'd be satisfied to continue as such.

My good friend Henry Standing Bear had had a similar response and said I should simply rent a truck, load everything in, and haul it to the dump.

So far, I hadn't been able to do it.

So far, I hadn't even been able to open a single box.

It was almost as if I was afraid of the things I would find there. At this fragile point in my relationship with Vic, I wasn't sure I could sustain throwing away the life I'd had before. Martha had passed almost ten years ago, but if I were to risk opening even one of those boxes, it was possible that decades could disappear in the blink of a dimly lit eye.

I sat there for a moment more and then grabbed myself another beer. I lumbered up the steps after her and turned off the light. It was a gorgeous July morning with the meadowlarks singing and a slight breeze from the mountains keeping it cool. I closed the basement's cellar doors to keep any wayward animals out, and rounded the tiny cabin to find her seated on one of the rocking chairs on the front porch.

I stopped at the bottom of the steps. "Pax Romana?"

"What the fuck is that supposed to mean?"

I lifted two fingers. "Peace, little Roman."

She sipped her Rainier. "Sure, whatever."

I hoisted myself up onto the porch and stepped over Dog as he raised his big, bucket head to check on me and then went back to snoring. I seated myself in the opposite rocker, opened the beer, and took a sip. "I'm sorry."

"It's okay, honest. You're just not ready to go through all that stuff."

"I'm not so sure I ever will be."

"Well, then, there's that." She sat studying me. "Is there anything else?"

"Maybe."

"Like what?"

I took another sip of my beer and thought about the week ahead. "This preliminary hearing tomorrow."

"What about it?"

I breathed a laugh. "I haven't done one in twenty years."

"You didn't do anything wrong."

"I guess I'm worried that I'm out of practice."

"Just tell the truth, and you'll be fine."

I stared at her.

"Prolly." She smiled, reached her can out, and we tipped the edges in a toast. "Now, the gouge in your surfboard?"

Friday, May 22, 1964

"You too big to surf, mon."

Looking at the chop waves rolling in past Point Dume near Malibu as the sun got shouldered out by the grim-looking clouds above the vast Pacific Ocean, I leaned my back against the still warm wall of Marvelous Marv's Snack Bar and let the heat there relax my sore muscles, a trick I'd learned from Henry. "What do you know, Marv? You don't surf."

Marvelous Marv was a transplant from Jamaica, having given up his island paradise for the California coast and specifically Malibu Point. His snack bar was an on-again, off-again operation in a partially crumbling structure of cement block on Pirate's Cove Beach that everybody was pretty sure he'd acquired because the previous owner had abandoned it. Truth be told nobody knew his real name, but Marvelous Marv was painted on the side of the weathered white building in a sweeping turquoise script, so the name had stuck. With dreadlocks and a crocheted hat, he served up cold drinks, chips, ice cream when it wasn't too hot-and from what I was to understand, the finest Lamb's Breath marijuana ever smoked by man. Personally, I'd tried the stuff once but had gotten nothing more than a headache and went back to beer.

I turned toward the ocean, aware that in four years it hadn't lost any of its fascination for me. Maybe because when the wind blew across the grasslands of the high plains the whole world felt alive, and the same could be said about the Pacific. The thing about the ocean was that it never was the same; whether it was the north swell or the rip curls off the point, it was always different. I guess that over time, I never again saw the sea as an adversary but rather as an intimate companion.

"Ain't nobody should be surfin' today, mon." He turned and raised the volume on the tiny transistor radio behind him, bringing in the throaty voice of Richie Barrett singing about "Some Other Guy," one of the Cheyenne Nation's favorites. He looked up at the darkening skies and then at the chop of the waves and at the checkered flag that the local meteorologist had placed on top of the rock cairn at the point, signaling danger to the many fishing vessels that hugged the coast rounding the point.

"Hey Marv, when did that boat go down last year?"

"About nine months ago, mon. The Siesta Royale, working boat, she took eight souls wit her." Marvelous crossed himself and stared down at the scaly, painted surface of the counter that spanned the only window at the snack bar. "Hey, mon, why don you buy a candy bar or somethin'? I got Baby Ruth."

"Not hungry."

He nodded, giving up on the sale and looking out to the sea. "Where that good-lookin' girl you hang wit?"

"Rachael?" I pointed to two fearless individuals who waited on a set not too far out, biding their time in the rising storm to catch just one more maxed-out curl onto the beach. "Over there with Henry."

Marv shook his head. "That Bear, mon-he crazy."

I thought about the celebratory trips the Cheyenne Nation and I had taken down to Tijuana and how many drunken brawls we'd barely escaped with our lives. "Sometimes, yep."

"How long he been surfin'?"

I thought about when the Bear had come down from Berkeley. "About a month now. He finished up early, and to be honest I think they were happy to get rid of him-he majored in political science, but I think he spent more time at protests and sit-ins than he did in class."

"Protesting the war?"

"Yep, but it looks like he's going to be a part of it anyway."

He nodded. "You good on dat ol' board-simple, old-fashioned style, drawing long lines with perfect balance, big man-but dat Bear, he look like he been doin' it all his life."

I sighed. "Yep, he's kind of a natural athlete."

Sensing my feeling of inadequacy, Marv threw me a bone. "Hey, congratulations on that fruit bowl you won, mon."

"Rose Bowl."

"Ya . . . Dat a big deal, mon?"

"I guess."

"You gonna play more dat football?"

"No, both Henry and I graduated and lost our deferment, so we enlisted."

He slid down the heavy sunglasses on his nose and looked at me. "Enlisted?"

"Yep, before we could get drafted."

He shoved the glasses up with a middle finger and looked back out at the threatening ocean, where Rachael and the Bear finally caught what looked to be a premium wave as it feathered, the crests throwing spray as the swells steepened. They had a hard time finding the line, when suddenly the wave looked bigger and more frightening. "Day got dat football up in Canada too."

I nodded, pressing my back harder against the blocks and sliding up to a standing position so I could watch them better. "No, but that won't be the direction we'll be going."

"Mexico?"

The long-period glassy and gray swell lifted them as they stood on their boards. "No, Henry is supposed to go to Fort Polk-someplace called Tiger Land in Louisiana-and I'm supposed to go to Parris Island in South Carolina for some reason." I watched as the questioning look returned to his face and figured I'd cut it off at the pass. "If you're a marine in the western part of the states you go to Twentynine Palms down the road here, and if you're from the eastern part of the country you go to Parris Island in South Carolina."

"But . . . Ain't you a cowboy, mon?"

My two closest friends were silhouettes now, backlit by the one glimmer of the gray sun that threw a single shard of mercury light between the closing clouds. Their boards carved like dark blades, slashing and gliding beneath their balanced feet as Rachael effortlessly cut back behind the Bear. "I am, but for some reason they want me to report to Parris Island, so we've got a road trip ahead of us starting tomorrow."

He shrugged. "Dat should be fun."

It was the perfect wave to finish the season, a gift sent by the sea gods with glowing hooks and tall shoulders, a day of glory on Big Wednesday. "Yep, kind of a last hurrah."

"How long dat trip take?"

"Four or five days in my ranch truck."

"You need some money?"

I turned to look at him, aware that in the four years I'd known him I'd never heard him offer a loan to anybody. "No . . . No, I think we're good, but thanks, Marv."

We both watched as Henry and Rachael made the beach and stumbled onto the sand of the all but empty stretch. Usually, the Pit, as we called it, was full of the surfing royalty, but with the weather being the way it was, the majority had decided to give the middle of the week a pass. Giving each other a high five, they turned to wave at Marv and me, and I waved back, relieved that they'd made it to shore and that they'd gotten one last magnificent sunset ride.

Rachael had been born here in Southern California, and, of course, Henry, even though a native of the high plains, had taken to the sport like surf wax. As my college years had gone by, I'd found myself spending more and more time at the beach, trapped between two worlds, one on land and the other the ocean. I guess it wasn't such an abnormality in that nine times out of ten when you asked somebody from my home state what branch of the service they'd been in, they'd generally say the navy.

That explained part of the thrall, a kid from a landlocked state who till four years ago had never even seen the ocean. During football season my time was pretty much not my own, but in the offseason I'd find myself loading up my board, the Monolith, as Henry called it, and heading up the Pacific Coast Highway in the ranch truck my parents had bequeathed me. Sometimes I camped, sometimes I slept in the bed of the two-tone half-ton, and sometimes I'd spring for a cheap motel, where Rachael and I would ride our own waves.

I'd first met Rachael Weisman in a literature class where we'd squared off on Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment; I'd say it was a spectacular treatise on morality and she'd say it was the most moribund and depressing declination of a novel she'd ever read. I'd never met anybody that used the words moribund and declination in the same sentence, and we never agreed on the subject of Dostoevsky, but we'd both respected each other's ardor concerning the written word.