Israel, the captain, has pulled up well away from the spectacle. Tells them in broken English he’s not going to die in there.
To Jen the waves look rideable, just barely. They’re rapid shape-changers, sections forming and closing out, towering A-frames offering lefts and rights that form, then suddenly collapse. Some gruesome wipeouts. Jen spots Jamie Mitchell and Jojo Roper and Greg Long out in the lineup, all expected to ride the Monsters in a few short weeks.
Casey and Brock have driven the jet skis across the deceptively glassy quarter mile from shore, and they’re waiting a hundred feet from Magdalena, skis belching white smoke and whining with pent-up horsepower.
Jen and Mahina plop overboard one at a time with the brothers’ boards, the water a cold shock on Jen’s face and down her neck and chest as it cuts under her wetsuit. She paddles hard through the chop to her idling ski, trades places with Casey, who has a smile on his face as he sits on his board and fastens the leash to one ankle. Her heart pounds like a dryer with a bowling ball in it.
“Gonna do this, Mom, gonna do this,” he says. “Thirty feet of God’s love, marching in to hold us!”
“The rights are better, Case,” she says, noting that the right-breaking waves are clean, but the lefts are sloppy. “Never seen waves this fast!”
She steers the jet ski in a wide semicircle, checking back to make sure Casey has the tow rope and his balance on the eight-four gun before she accelerates and pulls him into the lineup.
Waits now, bobbing on the heavy jet ski. High-fives Roper, who high-fives back. The BetUS Sportsbook has good odds and lines on him for the Monsters, she knows. Just behind Brock, who’s just behind Casey, are the big, big boys — Hawaiian and Australian — and that truly miraculous Tom Tyler out of Santa Cruz.
Anybody’s game, she thinks.
Will come down to wave choice, and luck.
Now Mahina cuts out front of a towering peak, towing Brock behind.
Jen watches as Mahina speeds along the forming shoulder and Brock swings high into the wave, well in front of the massive crest. Where he drops the handle, and Mahina, after looking behind at him, speeds up and over thirty feet of still-forming wave.
Brock drops into the deep blue wave as if his board were a gallows trapdoor.
The crest is thick and shifty, rudely cleaving a left and a right, but the right is where he is and Brock rockets across the face of it. Then a blast of speed into a carving bottom turn as he banks and lets the face have him, brakes against it with that reckless cool of his, letting the maw have him as if he’s daring it to. Comes out of it leaning back a little, like he’s bored. Rides the elegant shoulder in sweeping, beautifully composed turns.
John all the way, Jen thinks — John in his last couple of years, when his instinct guided his body and his control submitted to grace.
Brock kicks out, and Mahina glides in.
And, minutes later, when Jen tows Casey into a similar, speeding, near forty-foot wall of water, she watches her firstborn son drop powerfully down that rising face, his legs like shivering pistons, crouched, arms out and flexed, and his bull’s neck clenched, and his big-jawed, heavy-browed face locked in an expression of undefeatable concentration.
John again, Jen thinks. In his early big-wave days, when surfing was survival. A battle of will over fear, of body over mind.
Casey bullies his way along, powers into the barrel and out like a man fired from a cannon.
Rides the smooth shoulder with his arms up in praise — Jen knows, always Casey and his God — then kicks out in a fists-raised victory leap, cartwheeling over the roaring wave.
Jen delivers him into another.
Mahina and Brock again.
Casey.
The waves are pushing forty feet by the time they get back to Magdalena for lunch.
Jen, wrapped in a blanket, still unusually cold, finishes her burrito and looks at the waves, her throat dry, her heart slamming away again, that awful, dark, 3 A.M. fear taking her over. Listens to the booms of the waves, the screams of the jet skis.
Sometimes fear is a friend, and caution a teacher, she hears Dr. Penelope Parker say.
“Mom?” asks Casey. “Ready?”
The words hurt when they leave her mouth. She feels as if a thousand eyes, both living and dead, are on her.
“You know, Case. I’m going to sit this one out. I’m not feeling it.”
“Yeah, Mom,” he says. “And you have to feel it because Mavericks could be fifty, sixty feet. Thicker, meaner, and colder. You have to commit. Or, you know... you could get hurt.”
“I understand that perfectly.”
She sees the looks that Casey and Brock exchange.
“This is a good decision, Mom,” says Brock.
“I’ll pray with you right now for help,” says Casey. “He’ll answer us, Mom. He always does.”
“Shut up, Casey,” says Brock.
Casey looks down at the spark burns on his hands. He’s sitting spread-legged on the bench in his bright orange-and-black wetsuit, his thick hair matted, and Jen sees him at age six, this towheaded first-grader in a Waimea Bay T-shirt with a Batman lunch box, boarding the bus for El Morro Elementary.
Now Casey looks up and gives her a look that makes her feel like she’s being forgiven. It both angers her and makes her want to cry.
“Totally right on, Mom,” he says. “You don’t need to surf today. Brock’s right.”
Jen looks out at Todos Santos Island, the curve of the bay, the blue water, black rocks, and tawny hills.
But what she sees is her husband taking off on the final wave of his life.
“I’ll be ready for the Monsters,” she says. “Ready to win it. And tow you in. Don’t you worry about that.”
That evening at the Barrel, scrubbing away at the once-beautiful stamped aluminum bar, Jen still hasn’t gotten over her Todos Santos chill, and the 3 A.M. fantods that follow her everywhere.
Casey, Brock, and Mahina are helping out. Jen catches their occasional looks — the kind that people cut short when you look back. Even Mae looks concerned.
She pretends not to hear their soft, intense discussion of the freak autumn swell now forming way up in the North Pacific, spawned by an early Aleutian storm and an unusual shift in the Humboldt current. It’s already very powerful, and aimed at the Bay Area coast of California. A late October or early November Monsters of Mavericks is possible.
“Man, I hope so,” says Casey. “Pray to your Breath of Life that it happens.”
“I don’t pray,” says Brock.
Mahina mutters something that Jen can’t quite hear but it sounds portentous.
She’s tired of living in dread. Feels exhaustion right here in front of her, curling a bony finger her way. Maybe Dr. Parker was right: she should bow out of the Monsters and battle her demons on a less deadly playing field.
Just the mention of the Monsters deepens the chill from Todos Santos, but it’s even worse because she publicly committed to the Monsters. Months ago. With some minor fanfare from the surfing media, and from the big-wave riders she’s still in touch with.
Jen bears down with the fine-grade polish pad, demolishing those stains, protecting and serving the Barrel with all her might.
Thinks of tomorrow’s early paddleboard workout, followed by the weights, the breath-control training in the high school pool, maybe a visit to Belle. Then back here to her stinking former restaurant, to her ash-ridden rubber gloves, her brushes, solvents, and scratch pads, her black fingernail sludge.
She knows that swell up in the Aleutians is going to finally break at Mavericks. Knows she’s supposed to ride enormous waves. Knows she’s not going to let what happened to John happen to Casey. That Mahina isn’t going to let it happen to Brock.