“I know you hate me but I’m happy you’re still alive,” Bette says. “That wave will haunt my dreams.”
“Mine, too.”
The MC asks the next winners to stay put until all the awards have been announced. Starts to read from an Oceano bar napkin, holding it close:
Ruby Kaiawalu and Tom Tyler get best rides.
The crowd goes bonkers. Someone raises a beer pitcher to his mouth but drops it. Explodes when it hits the floor. Shrieks. Rene Carrasco slides through the glassy beer in his Ugg boots, arms out, knees bent.
Flip Garrison gets big-wave rookie of the year.
Bonkers again, and loud: “Flip! Flip! Flip!”
Maya gets women’s first place and the $50,000 that goes with it. Then Ruby Peralta and Connie Arnett.
Jen doesn’t podium. Doesn’t care. Knows she couldn’t have surfed any better, and she had the luck — until the wipeout, at least — well, enough luck to live through it.
She’s survived what even her most private dreams had promised would kill her.
Everyone’s standing and hooting, bottoms up and shots down. Jen feels like she’s in a dazed version of high school again, when she won everything in sight and everybody adored her and she was falling in love with John. Before she grew up. Before their blissful Garden and his terrible end. Happy in this moment, as she was then. Blessed by life and smart enough to know it.
Jen is so lost in her memory she zones through the men’s second- and third-place winners, then:
“And now, ladies and gentlemen, girls and dudes, masters and grommets, kooks and locals — it’s time for the winner of Monsters of Mavericks men’s overall. As you all know, it’s based on three waves, judged on points for maneuvers, degrees of difficulty, and style. Style, baby!”
Jen watches Robin take a patient swallow of what looks like a sponsored Pacifico longneck, which brings a horny roar from the crowd.
“Men’s overall — Casey Stonebreaker! This year’s monster man!”
Casey and Brock each take a wheelchair handle and push Jen through the bodies to the base of the stage again. Mahina and Bette and the moms and dads are already there. The other winners and most of the audience flood in, hamming it up for the cameras, selfies galore, “Wipeout” twanging and thumping loud from the PA.
39
After the awards dinner, Casey and Bette Wu walk the quiet streets to Pillar Point Harbor. It’s cold and still, the moon a distant egg in a nest of fog.
They pass Mavericks Surf Company, owned by Jeff Clark, a local who surfed Mavericks for nearly fifteen years before it was “discovered” back in the early nineties. The first guy to really ride it. Alone, because nobody else would dare. Clark is one of Casey’s idols, and the coolest of dudes, too. Tight with his dad. Introduced Casey around Half Moon Bay. Took him out at Mavericks when Casey was fourteen, on a medium-wicked, paddle-in day. Warned him that Mavericks has no conscience.
Casey looks through a window at the handsome Clark boards racked along one wall. Simple and clean, no adorning colors. Above the cash register hangs a blown-up photo of their maker, carving a bottom turn on a fifty-foot face.
“You are him now,” says Bette.
“No, just me.”
“You’re better. I’ve studied all the films and videos. Yours and his.”
“He did it first. I just watched and learned.”
“You’re faster and stronger and more intuitive. A better wave reader. You showed yesterday what you are. You have the royal blood of your mother and father. You are a king. We need to inflate your ego, Casey. We need to make you proud to be the best in the world. Better than Laird. Better than Garrett. Better than all of them.”
“I’m only the best for now. Just at Mavericks. But somebody else will be here next year. Maybe looking through this window. I’m chill with that. It’s all good.”
“More famous. More rich. The best. When they say the best big-wave surfer in the world, ever — it is going to be you.”
Casey turns and smiles at her. “That would be pretty choice, Bette.”
“It is your choice, Mr. Stonebreaker.”
She smiles back. She’s got a seafoam-green beanie pulled over her ears, and matching duster against the cold. Does a funny little skip, ducks a shoulder under his, and presses an arm to his back. They walk on, passing the rental bikes and paddleboards chained up for the night, and the commercial fishing boats cut into planes and shadows by the dock lights. The bait boat crews are already arriving in this early morning dark. A lanyard pings on a sailboat mast.
“You don’t feel so tense when I touch you,” says Bette.
“I’m getting used to you. I’m liking on you.”
He feels her arm tightening against his back and a gloved hand squeezing his elbow. Feels her head on his shoulder and smells that perfume she wore on Sunset, the one that feels sweet and warm in his lungs, puts his sex drive in gear.
“We will be very good, Casey.”
“Totally.”
Bette’s grip goes tight on his arm as a big silver SUV eases into the harbor from Pillar Point Harbor Boulevard. He senses her attention as she slows their walk.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
She rubs his back as if in encouragement, resuming their pace.
“Nothing.”
But as the SUV comes toward them, she firmly adjusts their direction away from it and toward the boulevard. Her hand tightens on his arm again.
The Yukon’s headlights go off and it comes forward and stops, pointed right at them, fifty feet away. No front plate.
Bette stops.
Casey watches all four doors open and four people get out. In the meek interior light he recognizes two of the shark-finning women from his first brush with Empress II — one white, the other Mexican. The other two are Asian women, one big and husky, the other smaller and slender.
“Not in the script,” says Bette. “I have to go.”
“I’ll go with you.”
“Back to your room, Casey. I’ll call.”
“These are pirates.”
“I know who they are. This shouldn’t take long.”
“What shouldn’t? What are you going to do? What are they going to do?”
Bette walks briskly to the big woman and gives her a brief look before climbing into the middle row of seats.
Casey watches the doors slam, hears the pirates arguing inside. He’s thumbing on his video when the Yukon lights blast on, and the vehicle charges right at him. He dives, hits, and rolls.
“Fudge!”
Up on one knee he tries to vid the rear plates but they’re blacked out with something, tape, maybe; he can’t tell.
So he runs with all his strength for the Yukon, which bumps from the marina onto the empty boulevard, speeding for downtown and the exits from Half Moon Bay.
Casey races down the middle of the empty boulevard after Bette, but in shearling boots and a goose-down tube jacket and the slim-fit Dream Coast jeans he’s contracted to wear to all World Surf Federation — sanctioned events, racing isn’t easy.
He catches a toe on an orange reflector, goes down, rolls, and is back up again as the Yukon bends south along the beach and out of sight.
He sits in his room, eating the snack basket crackers, the sliding-door curtain open so he can see the Oceano entrance. He’s got the little fireplace pegged against the chill.
He thinks about waking up Brock, because Brock’s down with the dark side. Like aboard Empress II that day, when he handled Jimmy Wu and his pirates like they were kooks. Because Brock is an eighth-dan hapkido black belt. And a volunteer fighter in Ukraine. And a former Riverside County pot grower with violent competitors. And a big-wave surfer, drowned in a three-wave hold-down at Nazaré until Mahina blew the breath of life back into him. Or God did, thinks Casey: there’s different ways to look at that.