The Surf Guru (13 page)

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

“Who's Bobbi?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roy fell once.

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

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

“We should get out of here,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

Who knew airports even had basements?

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

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

T
he skyline of a city you've never visited blazes in night-vision green on your TV screen, and the audio track is all thumps and sirens, pippitypops and batterclangs, and you are reminded of the hiss and spit of sixteen flaming fuses on a pack of jumping jacks on that day twenty years ago when you and your best friend, Bunk, burned six acres of forest to the hot black ground.

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

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

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

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

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

Let it burn
, Bunk says again, and the deadness in his voice scares you. His mesmerized stare at the flames licking, crackling, devouring—that scares you, too. You don't understand the hypnotic allure of destruction. You understood that initial rush, that flood of wonder and adrenaline, but not this flat-eyed stare when everything around you is heat and blaze. Destruction scares you shitless, and you run home, alone. You change clothes. You hide your singed-hairless forearms under long sleeves.

The aftermath? You were not caught, Bunk was not caught, no houses burned, and the woods came back strong and true: first as lush, bright green life springing from the scorched ground, then as trees thicker and straighter than before. This, you think twenty years later, was exactly the wrong lesson for you to have learned. Where were the consequences? Where were the fucking
consequences
?

Today—when skylines burn in night-green, when the president's faits are accompli, when smoke rises from spent casings and molten steel and charred skin and newspaper ink and your neighbor's
Good morning!
—you imagine yourself there again, standing in the woods while the trees are burning, desperately turning to Bunk and finding him lock-limbed in a firegasm, already transformed into someone you don't know.

It is Bunk's crackly, dead-leaf voice that now rasps in your ear:
We lit that place on
fire
, man. We burned that motherfucker
down.

The calliope chuffs merrily as the wooden horses and their child riders bob and spin. The horses are bright, newly painted, white and silver and chestnut and gold. It is warm and sunny, and the air smells of spring—of greening buds and warm gingerbread in the vendors' stalls and rich brown mud churned up by little feet. Thrushes and blackbirds warble in the trees. Laughing children ride in goat-drawn carriages. A soft breeze luffs the pennants knotted to the carousel's spire.

Dr. Gachet's head is light from afternoon brandies with Père Tanguy, the color merchant. He watches as the carousel turns, as the children and their horses disappear from view and then reappear. He is an old man, nearly sixty-one, of uncertain health, and he feels he is entitled to simple pleasures such as this: watching children and horses disappear, reappear, disappear, reappear. Always going, never gone.

Inside his black satchel (along with a stethoscope, six brown-glass bottles of Dr. Gachet's Healthful Elixir, and several packets of dried foxglove) are the seven tubes of paint and two new flat-ferrule brushes he has just purchased from Tanguy. He is not yet sure what he will paint when he returns to Auvers and sets up his easel; perhaps he will attempt that Cézanne winter landscape he has in his vault, or one of the still lifes Émile Bernard sent as payment for treating his ulcers. (Lately, he has derived far greater pleasure from copying works he loves than from wasting supplies on the capricious nothings of his own conception.) Whatever the subject, he will paint, he
must
paint. He is an old man. A lonely widower. Of uncertain health.