Sees the faint orange smoke rising south and west of here, the sparks rising in the black sky like campfire embers.
Brock feels that familiar anger crawling up through him. Knows he shouldn’t have left Casey alone in the apartment.
Knows he should have truly listened to that sick fuck Jimmy Wu and his smarmy, know-it-all daughter making their lame moves on Casey and Mom. Turning Mom’s fire comment into a not-so-veiled threat.
You knew. You let your guard down.
Santa Anas, he thinks: best time to set a fire if you want things to burn fast. Ask any arsonist. They do it all the time.
He gets a break in the oncoming cars, cranks a U-turn and floors it back to Broadway, tells the uniform he’s Brock Stonebreaker, a licensed pastor, lies that he lives right up here on Third Street, kids at home, please let me through, and incredibly the young cadet lets him through.
He screams up the Third Street hill, tires smoking, zigs and zags Bent to Park to Short to Wilson, then down Thalia toward Coast Highway.
He can see orange flames atop the Barrel, leaning back, a rippling, wind-blown wall. Silver rivers fraying in the wind. The second-floor apartment windows belch fire and the roof spits whirling dervishes from between the tiles.
“Brock, this is most very evil.”
He parks in someone’s driveway on Thalia, runs down the middle of the street in his flip-flops and swim trunks and the Go Dogs shirt for Coast Highway, Mahina just steps behind him.
Hits Coast Highway and looks north, where the Barrel burns before him like an enormous bush.
Bottom to top.
All sides.
Flames bent west with the wind.
He gets to the barricade but the cops won’t let him through this time.
He sees his mom, Casey, and Mae standing in mute shock, their faces burnished by the flames.
20
Looking Back—
WHO WAS JOHN STONEBREAKER AND WHAT WENT WRONG AT MAVERICKS?
By Jen Stonebreaker
Remember “Adios,” the Linda Ronstadt song about running away from home when she was seventeen to be with some man on the California coast?
That was me but I had a year on Linda.
I said yes to Cortes Bank.
Which John said was the biggest surfable wave on Earth.
Said it was rough and cold out there.
Rough and cold indeed.
We arrived near Cortes Bank at sunrise, after a punishing journey in a small cabin cruiser, the twenty-two-foot Skipjack, the sky dark with clouds, a biting, six-knot wind out of the northwest.
The boat bobbed like a toy on the swells mounding and passing under us. A few hundred feet from us, the peak of the undersea mountain unleashed the waves in a succession of enormous peaks breaking right. Out on Cortes Bank you’re a hundred miles from shore. There’s no land in sight, nothing to gauge the size of the waves, or the boat you’re on, or even your own speck of a body struggling for balance on the wet deck.
Watching and hearing the waves breaking, I remembered the stories and lore that had surrounded the Cortes Bank for centuries: accounts of when this now-submerged mountain range was an island stretching north toward Catalina, where warriors and fishermen had drowned when their canoes capsized; and later of the wooden galleons and trading ships that had wrecked and sunk with all onboard, of sharks large enough to swallow a man whole, of yard-long lobsters hugging the rocks just below the surface, of compasses sent awhirl and radios jammed by atmospheric anomalies that seemed to arrive on the backs of the monstrous surf.
Nobody onboard Skipjack — there were only five of us — had ever ridden a wave there.
John and I wrestled the jet ski off its home-welded rack and into the heaving sea. He jumped in and climbed on and started it up with a burst of white noxious smoke. Revved the engine against the roar of a wave breaking fifty yards away, a plume of white tearing off its crest as the lip curled over and the face stood upright.
Thirty feet? Forty?
The seasick photographer shot.
The captain kept his pitching boat from being pulled into the waves.
Randy Payne — who had read the centuries-old charts and ship’s logs, and volumes of Navy archives and diaries to pinpoint the location of once mythical Cortes Bank — jumped into this cauldron with a rigid smile and his eight-foot gun, and paddled to the ski. I watched him, bobbing on his board like a praying mantis blown into a rushing river, praying the shark stories weren’t true.
John eased the jet ski into place and threw Randy the handled nylon waterski rope.
They were off in a bark of engine and a billow of smoke, semicircling away from the break. They came to a stop, below and well to the left of the incoming peaks. I could see them through the smoky wave spray, watching the set, and hear their voices yelling back and forth.
Then John eased his jet ski onto the forming shoulder of a giant, turning to see Randy, who threw the rope and dropped onto the face of a wave that looked to be six times his height.
We three witnesses stood mute, silenced by fear, and by a fierce, almost paralyzing hope as Randy bounced down the wave, his legs bent at the knees, his feet locked into straps improvised from wetsuit neoprene fastened to the board’s deck with plastic bolt sleeves and fiberglass.
He rode a smaller wave, then, after a blue-lipped cup of instant coffee back on board, during which he tried to explain through chattering teeth what it had all felt like, Randy looked at John.
“Your turn.”
John’s first wave was the size of Randy’s, but choppier in the growing wind. Randy towed him in flawlessly.
John dropped into the thing, all his cool gone, nothing but survival on his mind. Crouched, arms out, feet locked into his homemade straps. He was too far away for me to see his expression but I guessed it was one I’d never seen.
He caught two more before the wind came up hard and the lumbering behemoths of Cortes Bank were blown out and unrideable.
When I helped get him back aboard, his face was pale and almost expressionless but his blue eyes brimmed with light.
“He was there, Jen. He was there.”
On that rough run back to land I tried to knead the cold from his back and shoulders. We hardly said a thing.
Hours later, by the time we got into his truck in San Diego and cranked up the heater, I looked at myself from above and saw an eighteen-year-old girl in the front seat of a pickup truck, leaning uncomfortably over the center console to put her hand on the shoulder of the young man driving.
But when I looked inside me, I saw that he was mine and his journey was mine. We were us, one wave at a time. Maybe for a week. Maybe for years.
He had seen what he was looking for, and so had I.
I graduated from high school with a 4.35 GPA and gave the graduation valedictory, became Miss Laguna Beach in a pageant, and in the fall started the creative journalism program at UC Irvine.
Getting the grades was tough, but Mom pushed me through to the finish line. She taught me to read early, and I did have a knack for writing, starting with printing, then the cursive script that I tried to make perfect and beautiful.
I entered the Miss Laguna pageant on a dare from one of my good friends, Ronna Dean, who said she’d do it if I did. For the talent part of the program, I played Mom’s slick video of me at surfing contests, several of which I won. Ronna, a beautiful honey-blond California girl all the way — daughter of a US Mail carrier and a waitress at the Ranch & Sea — finger-picked her guitar and gave a sassy, sexy rendition of “Wild Horses.”