Winter Tides (11 page)

“Big swell,” Dave said.

“Biggest in a couple of years, anyway. Are we on it? It’s still early.” He looked at his watch. “What do you say?”

“Maybe you’re on it. I’m maybe a little out of shape for a swell like this.” Dave watched the ocean intently, avoiding Casey’s glance.

“Right. Try a different excuse. That one’s pathetic.”

“I don’t have a board, remember?”

“So you say. I’ve got a feeling you’ve got something hidden up in the rafters. Anyway, I’ve got one. I’ve got that seven-ten Windansea that I bought from Bill sitting right there in my garage along with my own. That’s plenty of board for this swell.” Usually Casey didn’t push it, but would accept Dave’s excuse and back off. This morning he seemed to want to make an issue of it. “Why don’t we just run down to your place and grab your wetsuit?”

“I sold it, too.”

“When?”

“Last year. Garage sale. Twenty-five bucks. I bought a set of chisels with the money.”

“That sounds like a lie, bro.”

Dave shrugged. “It’s all the same. We’ve been through this before, Case. Nothing’s changed. And anyway, the swell’s too big. I’m not up for it. You know how long it’s been. I haven’t been wet for years.”

“Hell, I haven’t been
dry
for years. But I’m stone sober this morning. Never drink before you surf, eh? That’s worse than drinking and driving. And what do you mean,
wet
? You’ve been in the shower, haven’t you? You’re halfway out to the lineup every morning when you turn on the faucet. You’ve been working on a comeback and you don’t even know it.”

“This is no kind of swell for a comeback.”

“We’ll go down the coast and check it out. It’ll be cleaner down south.”

“Actually, I’ve got these sets to finish for Collier. He’s starting to worry.”

“Collier’s like my old man; he doesn’t worry. It’s not in him to worry. This afternoon’s soon enough for Collier’s sets. Besides, we interviewed that new artist. She starts any time now. She’ll knock these sets out in two days. Her
stuff’s good—too good for us, really, but this is what she wants to do, she says, so we’re going to give her a try. She’s a knockout, man.” Casey squinted at Dave and nodded his head to underscore this last statement.

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“If it wasn’t for Nancy …”

“If it wasn’t for Nancy you’d be the biggest derelict in H.B.”

“I won’t argue. Now listen. Here’s the plan. First things first. We grab the boards, rent you a suit, and go. I can’t believe we’re wasting a swell like this. What are we, old?”

“We’re busy. At least I am. Hell, I’m old, too.” He listened to the sounds of the morning—the traffic, a radio playing inside the Java Hut next door, laughter from three surfers out on the street throwing pieces of doughnut at each other. All of it together masked the sound of the ocean.

“Throw it out, Dave.” Casey said this quietly, and then the two of them sat in silence for a moment while they watched an incoming wave.

“It’s not that easy for me.”

“It wasn’t your fault. We’ve been through this before, haven’t we? Didn’t we discuss this once or twice?”

Dave was silent.

“Nancy and I were talking about this last night. If you were blind or had polio or something, then I wouldn’t open my mouth about it. But what you’re carrying around happened fifteen years ago. You’re holding onto it like a suitcase.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“You’re repeating yourself.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“Don’t push me, man. The more you stonewall me, the more I’m going to speak the truth. When you broke up with Kelly it was over kids, as I recall. She wanted kids and you didn’t.”

“I’d be a lousy father.”

“Now
that’s
almost funny. You’re a
shrewd
judge of character.”

“Hard to say.”

“I think it’s easy to say, and I’m going to say it. You didn’t drown that little girl, Dave. You tried like hell to save her. I
know
you did, because I myself
am
a shrewd judge of character. You have been purely screwed up since, whether you want to admit it or not. And if I weren’t your best friend, I wouldn’t be saying what I’m saying.”

“Who says I don’t want to admit it? You think I’m not familiar with being screwed up? I’ve been thinking hard about it for a
long
time. Here’s something else I know. We’re living in a world in which children drown, man, and there’s not a damned thing we can do to save them. If she had been my own kid, I’d be a hell of a lot crazier than I am. I’m never going to find out how crazy.”

“But she wasn’t your kid, and you didn’t let her drown. So quit beating yourself up.”

After a moment Dave said, “How about you? You and Nancy have been together for a few years. Where’s your family? What’s your excuse, as long as we’re speaking the truth?”

“I’m a drunk.”

The silence was heavy for a moment. “Then throw it the hell out,” Dave said finally. “Take your own advice.”

“I’m working on it.”

“Yeah, well, so am I,” Dave said. “And right now I ought to be working on Collier’s sets. In another hour I’m on company time.”

“Company time
,” Casey said, letting the phrase hang there. He looked at the half of a doughnut that he’d been holding in his hand for the last ten minutes and then lobbed it into the trash can by the door. “Morning’s wearing on. In another couple of hours it’ll be blown out.”

“I can’t help that,” Dave said.

O
NE OF THE
E
ARL’S STAKE-BED TRUCKS WAS PARKED AT
the dock now, with the wagon and the fence rails loaded. The warehouse door was open wide, and the hay bales had been shoved out into the sunlight where they waited for loading. Dave could see Edmund talking to someone just inside—a woman who was standing in the shadows—and Dave found himself staring at her, trying to make out her features.

He turned away to watch Casey’s truck pull out of the lot and turn up toward the Highway. There was a slight onshore wind now, and the air carried on it the smell of the ocean, and for a regretful moment Dave recalled the cold feel of the water sluicing down the back of his wetsuit in the early morning, the sun just coming up, the dawn quiet except for the sounds of the waves and the gulls.

Dave had been twenty-two when he had let the girl drown, and in the years before that he and Casey had surfed a hundred breaks between the Oregon border and Puerto Escondido. There were dozens of times when the ocean had let them down, and they had found it calm and flat, but had suited up and paddled out anyway, just to get wet, and sat around watching the horizon, talking about whatever was in the air. Their conversation at the doughnut shop this morning made him feel old, and, what was worse, it made him feel like he’d been living in a closet for the last fifteen years.

He heard the woman’s laugh from inside the warehouse, and he turned around to look. She stood inside the doorway—probably the new sets artist, the woman who could give Nancy a run for her money. Casey had understated her
looks. For a fleeting moment she seemed oddly familiar to him, but he couldn’t say quite why, and right then she said something to Edmund, and the two of them moved out of the doorway and disappeared into the shadows inside the warehouse. Dave was struck with curiosity and apprehension both, as if somehow he had been set up for a blind date with this woman—which of course was pure, stupid, wishful thinking.

Heading inside, he picked up the broken pieces of the Duke’s palace and considered the possibility of patching it back together and retouching it with paint. But the tiki had smashed too much of it to dust and fragments, and so he took the pieces out to the Dumpster and tossed them in. Then he picked up the tiki, levered it over his shoulder, and hauled it back up to the top of the stairs, where he set it down heavily on the balcony. The tiki’s belt was nowhere to be seen, neither down on the floor nor up on the balcony. Obviously Edmund had gotten rid of it. The side of the tiki’s forehead had been dented by the fall, and after thinking about it for a moment, Dave headed back downstairs to his toolbox and took out his three-pound sledgehammer. Back upstairs he straddled the tiki, judged the angle, and then pounded the tiki on the head with a two-handed blow, denting the opposite side of its cranium to make its head symmetrical again.

“What exactly are you doing?” It was Edmund’s voice, full of fake cheerfulness, and Dave looked up to see him and the woman standing at the bottom of the stairs. Apparently Edmund had been showing her around.

“Tiki repair,” Dave said, but it was the woman whom he was looking at when he said it.

“I’m Anne Morris,” she said, climbing the stairs. Edmund followed along behind her. She stepped up onto the threshold and held out her hand. She looked at Dave for what seemed to him to be a moment too long, as if she were thinking about something, and once again Dave was struck with something about her—her gypsy hair, perhaps, which was dark and full.

Dave shook her hand awkwardly, suddenly feeling like a fool for staring back at her. “Dave Quinn,” he said. “I’m glad to meet you. You weren’t out walking, were you, a couple of nights ago, late? I
know
I’ve seen you somewhere before.”

“I don’t think I was,” she said. “Out walking where?”

“Up by the park?”

“No,” she said. “I guess not.”

“Nice try, Dave,” Edmund said. “That line’s been in mothballs so long it smells like camphor.” He laughed pleasantly, to show that he was kidding. “Dave is the all-around handyman and gopher here at the Earl of Gloucester,” Edmund said to Anne. “I don’t know what we’d do without him.” And then to Dave he said, “Strap it up there a little tighter this time, okay? We don’t want a replay of this morning’s little problem, do we?”

Throw it out
, Dave told himself.

Edmund winked hard, like an old uncle handing out sage advice, and then put his hand against Anne’s back and guided her past Dave and into his office.

E
DMUND CLOSED THE DOOR AND MOTIONED TO A CHAIR
on the opposite side of his desk. Anne sat down, looking around at the scant furniture. Besides the desk and two chairs, there was nothing in the room but a file cabinet. There were no pictures on the wall, not even swap meet—quality prints. There was a plastic plant on top of the file cabinet, the leaves of which appeared to be scrupulously clean. The desktop was empty of real books, although there were half a dozen computer manuals to go along with a new Power Mac, as well as three copies of
GQ
, fanned out neatly. Beside the computer lay a stack of CD-ROMs in jewel cases, filed in a wooden box with a hinged glass lid.

“Here’s a couple of forms for you to fill out, Anne.” He smiled at her. “You don’t mind if I call you Anne?”

“Not at all.”

“We’re a first-name sort of company.”

“Good.”

“I hope Dave didn’t bother you … ?” Edmund nodded at the door.

“No, he didn’t bother me. He seemed harmless.”

“I
hope
so.” He looked at her meaningfully, then started shuffling papers, laying out IRS forms and the other paperwork. Anne wondered what he meant with his “I hope so.” Obviously the two men had a problem with each other.

“To tell you the truth, Dave is an old friend of my brother’s. He used to have a lot of potential—degree from a good university, a solid job in advertising. Something happened to him, though. He went off the rails somewhere.”

“That’s a shame.”

“Hell
of a shame. He’s my brother’s best friend, like I said. I’ve known him for years.” He shook his head seriously. “When he was what you’d call in between jobs, my father offered him work here, and he’s been around ever since. He’s got a laid-back work ethic, I guess you’d call it. A lot of ex-surfers are like that. He just kind of comes and goes. I don’t know what he’d be up to if it weren’t for my father. If you run a company of this size long enough, you learn a lot about what I call the virtually unemployable, although I don’t mean to say that he’s gotten entirely to that point yet. Anyway, there’s a small percentage of people who simply cannot work. They’re neurotic, they’re drunks, they’re drug addicts, they’re chronically lazy, they have no sense of time. Such people essentially have to be taken care of. That’s all we can do. And it’s our philosophy here at the company that they’re better taken care of by the private sector than by the government. I don’t know if this sort of thing is common up in Canada, but in southern California a number of large and very successful corporations make it a habit, for example, to lire victims of Down syndrome. They make very good employees once they find their niche.”

“So I’ve heard,” Anne said. “Which category does … is his name Dave?” Dalton nodded. “Which category does Dave fall into? I’m simply curious. Certainly he doesn’t have Down syndrome?”

“No, no, no. Of course he doesn’t.” He sat back in his chair now and looked at the ceiling as if he were working something out. “You know, it would almost be better if he did. There’d be a certain degree of predictability, at least. You could work with him without …” He bit his lip and squinted. “This is rather a private matter, of course, and I’m already out on a limb here, simply having brought it up with someone who’s not a confidential employee. On the other hand, I think that an attractive woman like you has the right to know about any … peculiarities in the personalities of her fellow workers.”

“Honestly,” Anne said, “it was just idle curiosity. I shouldn’t have asked. It’s not my business.”

“On the contrary, it might well
become
your business. You wanted a category? How about ‘emotionally damaged’?” He widened his eyes when he said this, in a way that made it look as if it hurt just a little bit.

“That’s a common enough category.”

“I suppose it is. I don’t know all the details of the case—nobody does, really, except Dave—but some years back he was involved in the drowning of an adolescent girl.”

For a moment Anne was speechless. “That’s terrible,” she said finally. “How many years ago?”

“I don’t know, really. A few.”