In the Break (12 page)

“Okay,” Amber said.

Jamie was sent home, and suspended for two days, but I went over to his house right after school to see him. He was sort of
depressed about getting suspended, and felt weird about kicking some guy’s ass for nothing. Claire hadn’t wanted to let me
in at first. Not because of me. It was because she didn’t want to reward him for fighting. When I told her the story, she
relented.

When F returned home from work, he called Jamie into the TV room, where Jamie told him what happened. Things were already
pretty strained between Jamie and F because Jamie resented F’s attempts at fathering him. This time was different, however.

“What’d he say?” I asked Jamie when he returned to his room.

“He said I had a right to defend myself.”

“Are you in more trouble?”

“No.”

“Cool.”

We hung out some more, playing video games and listening to music. When it was almost dinnertime I took off for home. The
really strange thing was, before I got off Jamie’s street, I saw Kent Chambers pass me in his car, which stopped at Jamie’s.
I saw Kent Chambers knock on the door, and someone answer the door, and then the door close again. Then the door opened and
I saw F talking on the porch with Kent Chambers. When F went back in the house and Kent Chambers didn’t leave, I walked back
closer to Jamie’s house.

It was dusk, but you could still see things pretty well. And what I saw shocked me. F and Jamie were now on the front porch.
I was too far away to hear what they said, but Jamie told me later when I called him. Kent Chambers thought it was just luck,
the reason Jamie had won their fight in school. He wanted to fight Jamie again, to see if this were true.

Jamie didn’t want to fight, I could see that much. But then Kent Chambers moved off the porch and F shoved Jamie out onto
the front lawn with Kent Chambers, where they fought again, and once again Jamie kicked his ass. Even better this time, for
Jamie was mad, he later told me, mad at F for forcing him to fight, mad at Kent Chambers for showing up at his house. F said
it would make him a man. What kind of a stupid adult makes you fight? Mr. Watkins would have sent Kent Chambers on his way.
But F was in that house and Jamie had had to fight. More sick shit à la F.

I didn’t want to intrude on Jamie’s brooding, and, besides, he was just crabby from the pot and his hangover, I reasoned,
because he
couldn’t get mad at me. I certainly didn’t want to bother Jésus as he navigated us toward La Isla de los Delfíns, our destination.

It had been late morning by the time we’d left Ensenada Harbor, heading straight into the fog bank that hovered just offshore.
Amber had made for the bow, where she got under the tarp and immediately went to sleep. As I watched her now her bare toes
twitched from underneath a sleeping bag as she slept on. Her feet, even in repose, were pigeon-toed.

On and on the outboard droned, up and down, up and down we moved in the heightened, electrically charged seas. The great expanse
of ocean made me think about my family. And my decision-making process. Were they worried about me? Were they surprised at
my behavior? Shit, had I done the right thing? What were Jamie’s thoughts as he sat with his head down and his shoulders bowed,
contemplating what? And Jésus. What did he think? He’d told me that he lost his wife and child, that he no longer felt the
urge to live, that he did not feel the need to fish. They had died in a bus accident. “It will be good for me to get away
from my memories,” he had told me.

With a bunch of rustling, Amber awoke, making her way back to the stern. “Where the hell are we going? Ugh, I don’t feel well.”

I was slightly queasy from the rolling seas even though I’d been on numerous fishing expeditions with my father.

“Hi, Sheila,” Jamie said.

“We’re almost there,” I said.

“Where is ‘there’?”

“The island with the perfect wave,” Jamie said.

“He never said that,” I said. “Jésus said the waves were good.”

“What, exactly, did Mr. Jesus say?”

I looked Amber in the eye. “He said the waves were very good.”

“Translate what he said exactly,” she said. Her hair was flattened on one side, and she had small bags under her eyes.

“I can’t. He said the waves were big, and the fishermen call the place ‘clouds’ or something like that. It’s on the island
we’re going to.”

Jamie said, “Excellent.”

Amber shook her head. “Instead of the great white whale, you guys are in search of the great wave.”

“Good, Amber.”

“We’re in search of a perfect wave,” Jamie said.

And we were, I supposed. I figured that was what kept me going farther and farther south, getting in bigger and bigger trouble.
The night the shit went down with F, I knew that a swell was building. I knew about the hurricane off Hawai’i. I knew that
it would hit the West Coast in a few days. I knew the swell would be perfect about now, and I also knew the waves would be
best down south, and certainly less crowded.

But what is a perfect wave? The perfect wave? Is my perfect wave the same perfect wave for Jamie? Or does it change from person
to person? And say you did surf
the
perfect wave — what would be left to live for?

The droning engine mesmerized us into some sort of complacency. We sat in our places, pondering our individual situations,
I guessed. Jésus was dry in the tiny wheelhouse, calm and stoic, given
his
situation. My hair was wet, and so was Jamie’s. Amber had gone back
under the tarp, and I could see her feet working back and forth, back and forth, as if she were walking on land in all her
pigeon-toed glory.

At some point the drizzle stopped, and the fog became less thick, and it appeared as if we might ride out of the clouds, but
we didn’t. As the fog became denser and rain began to fall, we were suddenly out of the cloud and right before a small island.
Everything was in Technicolor: the water and sky a heartbreaking blue, a vibrant blue, and the arid island was alive with
magical cacti and succulents. The land was brown and rocky and the coves we could see from the water were calm.

Jamie looked at me.

I smiled at him.

No waves, he mouthed.

I shrugged.

Jésus said that we would make camp in the cove we now approached. Quite narrow and small — I thought of the fjords in Scandinavia
— our landing cove didn’t seem too inviting; it seemed that there were a bunch of such coves, small fingers of land jutting
right into the sea. There was no surf.

“Where are the dolphins?” I said.

“In another cove,” Jésus said.

Amber must have felt the engine throttling down, for she emerged from underneath the tarp, rubbing her face, wearing her cutoff
Levi’s and the Baja jacket. She looked at me and then up into the cove.

“He says the dolphins are in another cove.”

“There’s no surf on this island,” Jamie said.

Silence followed Jésus cutting the engine as we lunged forward when the dory beached itself. Then: a seabird squawking, ocean
ripples lapping the boat’s sides, hard sun warming you. Brown world to the front, blue world above and behind.

After tilting the outboard up on the transom, he jumped in the shallow water. I followed him, though when my feet hit sand
my legs still felt as if they were moving. Amber jumped out, followed by Jamie, all of us helping Jésus pull the dory farther
up onto the beach. And then we began unloading. Sleeping bags, cooler, blankets, surfboards, and shopping bags, all the stuff
that would sustain us, all settled on the sand far up from the high tide line in the dinky cove. The hillside seemed inordinately
steep from this vantage point, and the succulents that lined the cove were oozing a clear liquid from their bright blooms.

We all exerted ourselves, moving our things up the beach toward the dirt cliff, which had a flat sandy plateau on top. Jésus
said that weather conditions and swell conditions changed very rapidly on this island, at this place in the ocean, and that
waves could appear in this cove if the swell changed direction. “The waves are in the next cove,” he said. “Over those sand
dunes is another bay, a place where the dolphins mate. The waves are very big there.”

I explained what he’d said to Jamie and Amber.

“Let’s rip, dudes,” Jamie said.

Amber flipped him off.

We took our boards and began climbing the steep canyon sides. While we climbed we saw Jésus relaunch the dory; he was going
to fish for dinner; we would meet back here at dusk.

At the top of the canyon we looked south and saw dunes about a quarter of a mile off. We marched across the mesa, and then
through the dunes, Jamie with his T-shirt wrapped over his head like Lawrence of Arabia or something.

“Excellent!” he would shout every so often.

“Why don’t you get a new adjective,” Amber said.

She was having trouble keeping up, so I’d slacken my pace, which would make Jamie stop entirely, and that was when he would
bellow, “Excellent!”

When we finally crossed the mesa, the sight we beheld was truly something: a small bay alight with glittering, skittish diamonds.
A peak wave breaking wonderfully both right and left and then walling up into a very fast and steep shorebreak. A slight offshore
wind blew the tops of the waves back upon themselves. And this: the entire surface rippled with dolphin life. Cows and calves
and bulls roaming over the very large waves that broke with a regularity and clarity that I’d never before seen, certainly
never imagined could exist.

“Oh,” said Amber.

“Yeah,” Jamie said.

I stood by them, my friend and his sister, mute with delight and anticipation. I’d been feeling really guilty about my actions,
and hoped that my family wasn’t too worried about me. But when I stood on that mesa, my feet resting in the warm sand, watching
the dolphins and the breaking waves, I was truly glad I’d done all the things that got us here, made the decisions I’d made.
I looked at Jamie and my heart was glad that he was safe. Amber, well, Amber could be my girlfriend!

Dolphins took off on swells, body surfing the drop, dolphin-kicking on the face, riding all the way to the shorebreak, where
they’d dive under, reappearing out the backside of the wave.

I began running down the sand dune’s face, heading for the beach. Jamie passed me, flying down the gentle hill, and I could
hear Amber right behind as we all made for the surf.

Paddling out through the channel and watching the huge waves break was an exercise in controlled anticipation. These were
the largest waves any of us had seen, and it was difficult to gauge their actual size until someone rode one of the mackers.
Here, away from where they hit shallower reef water, the swells would lift you up, up, giving you a drop of weightlessness
as they passed underneath. Even off to the side of the breaking waves in the safe confines of the channel.

In the break the waves were majestic arms of power, swept from God knows where by some out-of-control circular winds. These
waves, though much slower than the winds of the hurricane, were extensions of it — for every action there is an equal and
opposite reaction. There were many waves in a set, the takeoff was steep but makeable, and these waves, I was sure, were the
largest I’d ever ride. I was excited. I was scared. So much for my wish to die before I was eighteen, and to die in waves,
which I’d sometimes fantasized about.

Jamie told Amber to ride waves between sets, smaller things that didn’t have the raw power of the chunkers that hit the rock
reef we neared. She’d agreed, but as I watched her paddle I didn’t think she’d stick to it because she moved forward in steady,
sure strokes, mesmerized by the grace and splendor of the sea.

On the paddle out we didn’t speak for we were too busy sizing up the break. Which cliché would work to describe it? A postcard?
That would work, except there are no surfing postcards with this bay on them, that’s for sure. The sky was a blue I’d never
seen before, a blue that deep-water sailors probably take for granted. Far away toward the mainland, which you couldn’t see,
huge white clouds amassed as they passed over mountaintops. And the water. You could see the smooth rocks way below, see reef
fish darting about, see the high and bending sea grass sway in the balletlike tug and pull of the swell.