A great pale mass, a few hundred feet high, gradually resolved out of the darkness over the ocean to the west: A fog bank, revealed in lunar whitewash, extended far to the north and the south. Whether it came to land or hung offshore all night, the fog pushed a quieting pressure ahead of it. On silent wings, a formation of pelicans flew low over the peninsula and vanished across the black waters of the bay. As the remaining onshore breeze faded, the long grass drooped and was still, and I could better hear the slow surf breaking along the bay shore, although the sound was less a rumble than a lulling hushaby.
From out at the point, a cry as eerie as the call of a loon carved this deepening silence. An answering cry, equally sharp and chilling, arose from the dunes nearer the house.
I was reminded of those old Western movies in which the Indians call to one another in the night, imitating birds and coyotes, to coordinate their moves immediately before attacking the circled wagons of the homesteaders.
Bobby fired the shotgun into a nearby mound of sand, startling me so much that I nearly blew an aortic valve.
When echoes of the crash rebounded from the bay and receded again, when the last reverberations were absorbed by the vast pillow of fog in the west, I said, “Why’d you do that?”
Instead of answering me at once, Bobby chambered another shell and listened to the night.
I remembered Pinn firing the handgun into the ceiling of the church basement to punctuate the threat that he had leveled against Father Tom Eliot.
Finally, when no more loonlike cries arose, Bobby said, almost as if talking to himself, “Probably isn’t necessary, but once in a while it doesn’t hurt to float the idea of buckshot past them.”
“Who? Who are you warning off?”
I had known him to be mysterious in the past, but never quite so enigmatic as this.
The dunes continued to command his attention, and another minute of mental hang time passed before Bobby suddenly looked at me as if he had forgotten that I was standing beside him. “Let’s go inside. You scrub off the bad Denzel Washington disguise, and I’ll slam together some killer tacos.”
I knew better than to press the issue any further. He was being mysterious either to stoke my curiosity and enhance his treasured reputation for weirdness or because he had good reason to keep this secret even from me. In either case, he was in that special Bobby place, where he’s as inaccessible as if he were on his board, halfway through a tube radical, in an insanely hollow wave.
As I followed him into the house, I was still aware of being watched. The attention of the unknown observer prickled my back, like hermit-crab tracks on a surf-smoothed beach. Before closing the front door, I scanned the night once more, but our visitors remained well hidden.
The bathroom is large and luxurious: an absolute-black granite floor, matching countertops, handsome teak cabinetry, and acres of beveled-edge mirrors. The huge shower stall can accommodate four people, which makes it ideal for dog grooming.
Corky Collins—who built Bobby’s fine house long before Bobby’s birth—was an unpretentious guy, but he indulged in amenities. Like the four-person, marble-lined spa in the corner diagonally across the room from the shower. Maybe Corky—whose name had been Toshiro Tagawa before he changed it—fantasized about orgies with three beach girls or maybe he just liked to be totally, awesomely clean.
As a young man—a prodigy fresh out of law school in 1941, at the age of only twenty-one—Toshiro had been interred in Manzanar, the camp where loyal Japanese Americans remained imprisoned throughout World War II. Following the war, angered and humiliated, he became an activist, committed to securing justice for the oppressed. After five years, he lost faith in the possibility of equal justice and also came to believe that most of the oppressed, given a chance, would become enthusiastic oppressors in their own right.
He switched to personal-injury law. Because his learning curve was as steep as the huge monoliths macking in from a South Pacific typhoon, he rapidly became the most successful personal-injury attorney in the San Francisco area.
In another four years, having banked some serious cash, he walked away from his law practice. In 1956, at the age of thirty-six, he built this house on the southern horn of Moonlight Bay, bringing in underground power, water, and phone lines at considerable expense. With a dry sense of humor that prevented his cynicism from becoming bitterness, Toshiro Tagawa legally changed his name to Corky Collins on the day he moved into the cottage, and he dedicated every day of the rest of his life to the beach and the ocean.
He grew surf bumps on the tops of his toes and feet, below his kneecaps, and on his bottom ribs. Out of a desire to hear the unobstructed thunder of the waves, Corky didn’t always use earplugs when he surfed, so he developed an exostosis; the channel to the inner ear constricts when filled with cold water, and because of repeated abuse, a benign bony tumor narrows the ear canal. By the time he was fifty, Corky was intermittently deaf in his left ear. Every surfer experiences faucet nose after a thrashing skim session, when your sinuses empty explosively, pouring forth all the seawater forced up your nostrils during wipeouts; this grossness usually happens when you’re talking to an outrageously fine girl who’s wearing a bun-floss bikini. After twenty years of epic hammering and subsequent nostril Niagaras, Corky developed an exostosis in his sinus passages, requiring surgery to alleviate headaches and to restore proper drainage. On every anniversary of this operation, he had thrown a Proper Drainage Party. From years of exposure to the glaring sun and the salt water, Corky was also afflicted with surfer’s eye—pterygium—a winglike thickening of the conjunctiva over the white of the eye, eventually extending across the cornea. His vision gradually deteriorated.
Nine years ago, he was spared ophthalmological surgery when he was killed—not by melanoma, not by a shark, but by Big Mama herself, the ocean. Though Corky was sixty-nine at the time, he went out in monster storm waves, twenty-foot behemoths, quakers, rolling thunder that most surfers a third his age wouldn’t have tried, and according to witnesses, he was a party of one, hooting with joy, repeatedly almost airborne, racing the lip, carving truly sacred rail slashes, repeatedly getting barreled—until he wiped out big time and was held down by a breaking wave. Monsters that size can weigh thousands of tons, which is a lot of water, too much to struggle against, and even a strong swimmer can be held on the bottom half a minute or longer, maybe a lot longer, before he can get air. Worse, Corky surfaced at the wrong moment, just in time to be hammered deep by the next wave in the set, and he drowned in a two-wave hold-down.
Surfers from one end of California to the other shared the opinion that Corky Collins had led the perfect life and had died the perfect death. Exostosis of the ear, exostosis of the sinuses, pterygium in both eyes—none of that meant shit to Corky, and all of it was better than boredom or heart disease, better than a fat pension check that had to be earned by spending a lifetime in an office. Life was surf, death was surf, the power of nature vast and enfolding, and the heart stirred at the thought of Corky’s enviably sweet passage through a world that was so much trouble for so many others.
Bobby inherited the cottage.
This development astonished Bobby. We had both known Corky Collins since we were eleven and first ventured to the end of the horn with board racks on our bikes. He was mentor to every surf rat who was ravenous for experience and eager to master the point break. He didn’t act like the point was his, but everyone respected Corky as much as if he actually owned the beach from Santa Barbara all the way to Santa Cruz. He was impatient with any gyrospaz who ripped and slashed up a good wave, ruining it for everyone, and he had only disdain for freeway surfers and wish-wases of all types, but he was a friend and an inspiration to all of us who were in love with the sea and in sync with its rhythms. Corky had legions of friends and admirers, some of whom he had known for more than three decades, so we were baffled as to why he had bequeathed all his worldly possessions to Bobby, whom he had known only eight years.
As ex
planation, the executor of the estate presented to Bobby a letter from Corky that was a masterpiece of succinctness:
Bobby,
What most people find important, you do not. This is wisdom.
To what you believe is important, you are ready to give your mind, heart, and soul. This is grace.
We have only the sea, love, and time. God gave you the sea. By your own actions you will find love always. So I give you time.
Corky saw in Bobby someone who had an innate understanding, from boyhood, of those truths that Corky himself had not learned until he was thirty-seven. He wanted to honor and encourage that understanding. God bless him for it.
The summer following his freshman year at Ashdon College, when Bobby inherited, after taxes, the house and a modest sum of cash, he dropped out of school. This infuriated his parents. He was able to shrug off their fury, however, because the beach and the sea and the future were his.
Besides, his folks have been furious about one thing or another all their lives, and Bobby is inured to it. They own and edit the town newspaper, and they fancy themselves tireless crusaders for enlightened public policy, which means they think most citizens are either too selfish to do the right thing or too stupid to know what is best for them. They expected Bobby to share what they called their “passion for the great issues of our time,” but Bobby wanted to escape from his family’s loudly announced idealism—and from all the poorly concealed envy, rancor, and egotism that was a part of it. All Bobby wanted was peace. His folks wanted peace, too, for the entire planet, peace in every corner of Spaceship Earth, but they weren’t capable of providing it within the walls of their own home.
With the cottage and the seed money to launch the business that now supported him, Bobby found peace.
The hands of every clock are shears, trimming us away scrap by scrap, and every timepiece with a digital readout blinks us toward implosion. Time is so precious that it can’t be purchased. What Corky had given Bobby was not time, really, but the chance to live without clocks, without an awareness of clocks, which seems to make time pass more gently, with less shearing fury.
My parents tried to give the same thing to me. Because of my XP, however, I occasionally hear ticking. Maybe Bobby occasionally hears it, too. Maybe there’s no way any of us can entirely escape an awareness of clocks.
In fact, Orson’s night of despair, when he had regarded the stars with such despondency and had refused all my efforts to comfort him, might have been caused by an awareness of his own days ticking away. We are told that the simple minds of animals are not capable of encompassing the concept of their own mortality. Yet every animal possesses a survival instinct and recognizes danger. If it struggles to survive, it understands death, no matter what the scientists and the philosophers might say.
This is not New Age sentimentalism. This is simply common sense.
Now, in Bobby’s shower, as I scrubbed the soot off Orson, he continued to shiver. The water was warm. The shivers had nothing to do with the bath.
By the time I blotted the dog with several towels and fluffed him with a hair dryer that Pia Klick had left behind, his shakes had passed. While I dressed in a pair of Bobby’s blue jeans and a long-sleeve, blue cotton sweater, Orson glanced at the frosted window a few times, as if leery of whoever might be out there in the night, but his confidence appeared to be returning.
With paper towels, I wiped off my leather jacket and my cap. They still smelled of smoke, the cap more than the jacket.
In the dim light, I could barely read the words above the bill: Mystery Train. I rubbed the ball of my thumb across the embroidered letters, recalling the windowless concrete room where I’d found the cap, in one of the more peculiar abandoned precincts of Fort Wyvern.
Angela Ferryman’s words came back to me, her response to my statement that Wyvern had been closed for a year and a half: Some things don’t die. Can’t die. No matter how much we wish them dead.
I had another flashback to the bathroom at Angela’s house: a mental image of her death-startled eyes and the silent surprised oh of her mouth. Again, I was gripped by the conviction that I had overlooked an important detail regarding the condition of her body, and as before, when I tried to summon a more vivid memory of her blood-spattered face, it grew not clearer in my mind but fuzzier.
We’re screwing it up, Chris…bigger than we’ve ever screwed up before…and already there’s no way…to undo what’s been done.
The tacos—packed with shredded chicken, lettuce, cheese, and salsa—were delicious. We sat at the kitchen table to eat, instead of leaning over the sink, and we washed down the food with beer.
Although Sasha had fed him earlier, Orson cadged a few bits of chicken, but he couldn’t charm me into giving him another Heineken.
Bobby had turned on the radio, and it was tuned to Sasha’s show, which had just come on the air. Midnight had arrived. She didn’t mention me or introduce the song with a dedication, but she played “Heart Shaped World” by Chris Isaak, because it’s a favorite of mine.
Enormously condensing the events of the evening, I told Bobby about the incident in the hospital garage, the scene in Kirk’s crematorium, and the platoon of faceless men who pursued me through the hills behind the funeral home.
Throughout all of this, he only said, “Tabasco?”
“What?”
“To hotten up the salsa.”
“No,” I said. “This is killer just the way it is.”
He got a bottle of Tabasco sauce from the refrigerator and sprinkled it into his half-eaten first taco.
Now Sasha was playing “Two Hearts” by Chris Isaak.
For a while I repeatedly glanced through the window beside the table, wondering whether anyone outside was watching us. At first I didn’t think Bobby shared my concern, but then I realized that from time to time, he glanced intently, though with seeming casualness, at the blackness out there.
“Lower the blind?” I suggested.
“No. They might think I cared.”
We were pretending not to be intimidated.
“Who are they?”
He was silent, but I outwaited him, and at last he said, “I’m not sure.”
That wasn’t an honest answer, but I relented.
When I continued my story, rather than risk Bobby’s scorn, I didn’t mention the cat that led me to the culvert in the hills, but I described the skull collection arranged on the final two steps of the spillway. I told him about Chief Stevenson talking to the bald guy with the earring and about finding the pistol on my bed.
“Bitchin’ gun,” he said, admiring the Glock.
“Dad opted for laser sighting.”
“Sweet.”
Sometimes Bobby is as self-possessed as a rock, so calm that you have to wonder if he is actually listening to you. As a boy, he was occasionally like this, but the older he has gotten, the more that this uncanny composure has settled over him. I had just brought him astonishing news of bizarre adventures, and he reacted as if he were listening to basketball scores.
Glancing at the darkness beyond the window, I wondered if anyone out there had me in a gun sight, maybe in the cross hairs of a night scope. Then I figured that if they had meant to shoot us, they would have cut us down when we were out in the dunes.
I told Bobby everything that had happened at Angela Ferryman’s house.
He grimaced. “Apricot brandy.”
“I didn’t drink much.”
He said, “Two glasses of that crap, you’ll be talking to the seals,” which was surfer lingo for vomiting.
By the time I had told him about Jesse Pinn terrorizing Father Tom at the church, we had gone through three tacos each. He built another pair and brought them to the table.
Sasha was playing “Graduation Day.”
Bobby said, “It’s a regular Chris Isaak festival.”
“She’s playing it for me.”
“Yeah, I didn’t figure Chris Isaak was at the station holding a gun to her
head.”
Neither of us said anything more until we finished the final round of tacos.
When at last Bobby asked a question, the only thing he wanted to know about was something that Angela had said: “So she told you it was a monkey and it wasn’t.”
“Her exact words, as I recall, were…‘It appeared to be a monkey. And it was a monkey. Was and wasn’t. And that’s what was wrong with it.’”
“She seem totally zipped up to you?”
“She was in distress, scared, way scared, but she wasn’t kooked out. Besides, somebody killed her to shut her up, so there must have been something to what she said.”
He nodded and drank some beer.
He was silent for so long that I finally said, “Now what?”
“You’re asking me?”
“I wasn’t talking to the dog,” I said.
“Drop it,” he said.
“What?”
“Forget about it, get on with life.”
“I knew you’d say that,” I admitted.
“Then why ask me?”
“Bobby, maybe my mom’s death wasn’t an accident.”
“Sounds like more than a maybe.”
“And maybe there was more to my dad’s cancer than just cancer.”
“So you’re gonna hit the vengeance trail?”
“These people can’t get away with murder.”
“Sure they can. People get away with murder all the time.”
“Well, they shouldn’t.”
“I didn’t say they should. I only said they do.”
“You know, Bobby, maybe life isn’t just surf, sex, food, and beer.”
“I never said it was. I only said it should be.”
“Well,” I said, studying the darkness beyond the window, “I’m not hairing out.”
Bobby sighed and leaned back in his chair. “If you’re waiting to catch a wave, and conditions are epic, really big smokers honing up the coast, and along comes a set of twenty-footers, and they’re pushing your limit but you know you can stretch to handle them, yet you sit in the lineup, just being a buoy through the whole set, then you’re hairing out. But say, instead, what comes along all of a sudden is a long set of thirty-footers, massive pumping mackers that are going to totally prosecute you, that are going to blast you off the board and hold you down and make you suck kelp and pray to Jesus. If your choice is to be snuffed or be a buoy, then you’re not hairing out if you sit in the lineup and soak through the whole set. You’re exhibiting mature judgment. Even a total surf rebel needs a little of that. And the dude who tries the wave even though he knows he’s going over the falls, knows he’s going to be totally quashed—well, he’s an asshole.”