The trouble with five in the morning is Linda’s ghost. It’s her time, Frye thought, she’s got the run of the place. Ought to charge it rent. Eight o’clock in New York. She’s up...
He went back inside and pulled on a short-john wet-suit — one of his own MegaSuits — and ground some fresh wax onto a board. Then into a pair of red MegaSandals for the steep walk down the hill and into town. Where are you now, Li? What have they done with you? Red tennis shoes. The man who dragged you out was wearing red tennis shoes.
Forest Avenue was deserted. The morning air was cool but already he could feel warmth building inside the wetsuit, and smell the biting, high-pitched smell of rubber and sweat wafting up.
He thought about the ocean and saw himself going down, swirling with dizziness and vertigo, thrashing in panic. Will it happen again, this time? Next?
He walked past the leather shop and the flower stand, boarded up for the night. Then past the post office, where a bum was sleeping under the wanted posters, his shopping cart standing guard above him.
I’ll tell Detective Minh tomorrow: The man had red tennis shoes.
A painting in the Sassone Gallery stopped him cold, a giant blue swirling metallic thing that seemed spring-loaded, ready to act. The longer he stared into the dense psychedelia the more he saw forms of Li’s last show: bodies in mass exit, glass falling like rain, pockets of light marching the walls, a halo of red mist suspended in the stage glow over a dying man’s head.
On the kiosk outside the gallery hung a poster for the MIA Committee — Lucia Parsons’ group for getting American prisoners out of Vietnam. Frye studied the stylized graphic of the silhouette of a man’s head, with a strand of barbed wire behind it. Lucia Parsons, he thought. The Ledger society-page pet, and Laguna’s local heroine: rich, educated, willing to speak her mind. A former U.N. translator, fluent in four languages. She’d worked briefly for President Carter. Since coming to Laguna three years ago, she’d scaled down a bit: delivering food and money to earthquake victims in Guatemala, stopping offshore oil drilling, mobilizing the city to build shelters for the homeless. Then, two years ago, her MIA Committee began quietly getting attention. Now, she’s all over the place again, he thought. Always in the news, in the spotlight, rallying for support, money, publicity. A dozen trips to Hanoi in the last two years and, after each one, more “positive developments” on the MIAs. In last week’s papers she claimed she had evidence that American soldiers were still alive in Southeast Asia. She hadn’t delivered the proof. Frye wondered why. Lucky you missed the birthday concert tonight, he thought, would probably have wrecked a good cocktail dress.
Beside the MIA poster was a “no nukes” poster, below that, something for the whales. There was also a poster for the free clinic. Laguna, he thought, so rich and sated, but so hungry for a cause.
He jaywalked across a barren Coast Highway and arrived at Rockpile with the first light of dawn. The waves slapped the beach hard, indicating size and precision. To the north he could see the cliffs of Heisler Park, the profile of its gazebo, Las Brisas restaurant and a stand of palm trees, all outlined in lazy relief against a lightening sky. The rockpile began to materialize before him, whitewater surging on boulders where the pelicans stand eternal guard: observant, stoic, craphappy. He plopped down his board and sat on the sand beside it. Looking to the water he could see the sets forming outside, shadows within shadows, and feel the frightened beating of his heart.
Frye had once loved being in the sea, and she had loved having him in her. But things had changed since the accident, since Linda. When he went down in her now, he could feel her cold fingers reaching for him with dark intent, trying to hold him there forever. Frye understood, on some primitive level, that he had disappointed this ocean. He wasn’t sure how or when or why. Now she was unforgiving of error, poised for vengeance. To Frye, hell was a small, dark place.
There’s only one path to atonement, he thought.
Try.
In the hissing tube of his first wave, Frye kept seeing himself going under, swimming down through darkness but thinking it was up, his head crunching against the rocks or the bottom. At least it looked like himself, but his hair was longer and his eyes were different. Himself, but not himself.
It was a right — top-heavy, cylindrical and adamant, the sweet-spot rifling toward him as he shot through, rose to the lip and aimed back down for a bottom turn of such velocity that thoughts of disaster peeled from his mind and he finished in a balls-out rush that sent him and his board rocketing skyward, then down with a splash. For a moment he tred the dark water, heart thrashing like a kitten in a gunnysack.
One is enough. Don’t press it.
He sat on his board for a while.
As always, the fear left him hungry for something to hold onto. Something actual. Something warm. Something that won’t go away.
He paddled back in.
A young woman was standing on the beach as he came up. Jeans, a sweater, no shoes. Good face. Frye caught her eye and got an evaluatory glance that measured and classified him in one instant. A big dog with a red scarf sniffed around her, then pissed on a mound of sand for lack of anything more vertical. “You’re Chuck Frye.”
“I am.”
“I saw you in some contests. You were real good.”
“Thanks. Any chance you’d like to go to bed with me?”
“Not a chance in hell.”
“I see. What’s your name?”
She yanked the choke chain, and the dog snapped to her side, red bandana trailing.
A moment later she was gone, blending with the sunrise, her dog a minor blotch of red moving across the sand.
He watched her go. There was always in Frye a yearning for the unlikely.
Newport Beach is six miles up the coast from Laguna, and is rightly considered to be a stronghold for conservative high-rollers. Their children drive Carerras and BMWs, purchase their educations at USC, marry each other, then head into solid careers. Basically, Frye had flunked out. To his mind, Newport Beach was a pain in the ass anyway, though it does have a couple of great breaks.
Frye Island is the smallest island in the Newport Harbor, but the only island with just one house, a helipad, tennis courts, and servants’ quarters on it. When Frye was a child, it was his entire world. Driving up Coast Highway, he wondered at the distance he had come since those days, about the life that had developed. From Frye Island to the cave-house in thirty-three years, he thought. Is this growing up?
According to his father, it was not. Edison considered him prodigal and had abandoned hope that Chuck would, in any Biblical sense, ever come home. Frye grew up with his father’s disappointments like some boys grow up with bicycles: one model always on the way out, another forever on the way in. He had let Bennett carry the family banner. Flagrantly, though often accidentally, Frye had besmirched the family name. As a child, he had been indifferent to adults, given to odd enthusiasms, and always seemed to get caught. A school psychologist had termed him “troubled.” He was the kind of kid who drinks highball remnants at his parents’ cocktail parties, then falls into the punch bowl. Frye knew that Edison had hoped for vindication in his university career, at which he had failed miserably. Instead, he opted for the pro surfing tour, the MegaShop and his line of surfing gadgetry, all a shameful demerit to the Frye name. His high status as a surfer was his nadir with Edison, something on par with sodomy or treason. His marriage to Linda Stowe had been “a dot of light at the end of one helluva dark tunnel,” as Edison had once quipped, but was now coming to a screeching official halt. His stint as an Orange County Ledger reporter — his first real job — was over.