Reef Dance Read online

  We untangled the dog together.

  “He’s purebred—aren’t you, killer?” Jackie cooed at Max. “You ask me, J., your client’s mondo estupido. What fuckin’ fool wouldn’t want this big hero?”

  “This fuckin’ fool,” I said. “Careful man, he’s supposed to have a mean streak,” I added just as Max rolled onto his back to let Jackie and me stroke his muscular chest. Christ, even the dog was playing me.

  “Why’d you have to take him?” Jackie asked.

  “The house was a dump and the social worker on the case was considering sticking the kids he lived with in a foster home. Old Max here almost bit the dude in half.”

  Jackie delighted in this tidbit of information. “That is fresh. You da man, Max! Nobody rattles your cage.”

  “This yard’s way too small for a dog this size,” I said.

  “Then we’ll just have to walk him every day, that’s all.”

  I cocked an eyebrow. “We? Pardon me, Jack, but last time I checked you weren’t too enthusiastic about domestic chores.”

  “Bygones, my man. You’re lookin’ at the new me.”

  “Fine,” I said, “but it’s the old you that worries me. Remember me? I’m the guy who spent a week picking Cracker Jacks out of the living room carpet after your little Vegas night marathon got out of hand.”

  “What can I say, we ran out of chips,” he said. “I was up huge. Had to keep the game going somehow.”

  “It’s all a game. Like with those bikini models you finger-painted on the front lawn that time.”

  Jackie shrugged. “Didn’t know the paint was oil-based.”

  I rubbed Max’s forehead gently between his eyes, which set his big pink tongue wagging. “You could’ve read the cans. That little cleanup party killed half the grass.”

  “Oh, that little strawberry blond, what was her name? Chloe, Joey? The one with the freckles . . .”

  “Since when have you been so hot on having a dog?”

  Jackie shook the dog’s club-like front paws and made goo-goo sounds as if he was wooing an infant. “Since I was a kid. I wanted a dog bad, real bad, practically begged my old man to get one, but he wouldn’t let me. Dichondra. Di-fucking-chondra.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Grog told me your old man used to live in the Back Bay, big-ass two-story sitting in the dunes, lots of glass windows. I didn’t hear anything about dichondra.”

  Jackie brushed Max’s jet-black mane. “I didn’t live there when I was a kid, Einstein. But whatever.”

  “Your old man must be loaded. How else could he afford the Back Bay mega-pad? He probably could’ve bought you ten dogs.”

  “He’s not loaded, dim sum,” Jackie said. “The land the house is built on is unsuitable for building, a fucking quagmire if you must know. That’s why he got it cheap. Foundation’s so shaky—huh . . .” He chuckled through tight lips. “One day the earth’s gonna open up and just swallow the fucker whole.”

  In the dozen odd years I’ve known Jackie, I’d never heard him venture even this much information about anyone in his family. I was instantly curious. “How come you told the magazines both your parents were dead?”

  “That was a long time ago,” he said. “In the sixties, parents were a hindrance, man. Mine were definitely uncool.”

  Max continued to lap up the attention Jackie and I were lavishing on him. He rolled onto his back, his tongue sliding sideways over a very serious row of teeth. “I don’t know, Jack,” I said. “Everybody goes through that phase sometime around junior high, their parents embarrassing them. So what? I heard you always did whatever you wanted.”

  “Yeah, and what did any of my accomplishments have to do with them?”

  I looked up from Max. “I heard they bankrolled your act.”

  Jackie sat up, his jaw rigid. “That’s a lie!”

  I stood up, still holding Max’s chain. “A lie, like what you told the mags about them being dead?”

  “Hey, fuck you!” he said, standing and circling as if to orient himself. I’d really tapped a vein. “My mother died in ‘seventy-four,” he said. “Haven’t spoken to the old man in almost that long. If he’s so rich, then how come I been living in the lap of luxury like this ever since you’ve known me?”

  “Most people work for a living, Jack.”

  “Shepard, you’re being a dick right now.”

  “You talk about lies,” I said as he stared at the ground. “I don’t know. Sometimes I think you pretty much say whatever you want, even to your friends.”

  “I’m always straight with you, man,” he said, conjuring a scrap of dignity again.

  I can’t explain it, why I trust some people and not others, but somewhere, in some unconscious corner of my mind, I take a pulse on the truth, and something—a thought, a feeling, a voice, a memory—informs me. And in that instant I know. At least, that’s the illusion. A priest I once described the feeling to told me it was a kind of grace. I didn’t argue with his assessment; whatever the source, I’ll take all the help I can get.

  “I think you stroke me all the time, like the tale of your old man’s dichondra. Only most of the time I let you slide.”

  He held up his hands like a preacher beseeching the Lord. “Okay, okay. I want the damn dog. Nothing deep, nothing Oedipal. No stroke job, no dichondra. Happy?”

  “I don’t need a dog,” I said. “Especially one that might dine on the next bonehead who stumbles into the yard to read my gas meter.”

  Jackie started to speak, but conceded. “That’s fine, boss,” he said, his shoulders drooping. He bent down and stroked Max’s chest forlornly. “No dog.”

  Nice touch, Jackie, I thought as he soothed Max. He thinks he’s got me, doing his Little Orphan Annie.

  The curtains were drawn across the upstairs windows so that the glass reflected the black night sky. The place was as cold and still as a dollhouse, like some child’s abandoned toy.

  “I’ll be back in a few,” I said as I headed for the garage.

  “Where you going?” Jackie called out behind me.

  “To get some food for him. Couple of big metal bowls. He’ll need some rawhide toys so he doesn’t chew the siding off the house. Get the wetsuits off the garage floor before he eats them.”

  “Epic call, J.!” he shouted. He hung an arm around Max’s head. “We’re keeping you, buddy! I am so stoked! Hey, Maxie boy, are you stoked?”

  Exhausted, I climbed back into the Jeep.

  “Hey J.—J.” Jackie’s voice sang out from the backyard, echoing off the ancient Shepard big wave guns that hung in the rafters and along the walls. “Max says he’s stoked!”

  I heard Max bark happily from the yard as I hit the ignition. Good Max, I said to myself, Jackie will entertain you for now. But make no mistake about this. I will be your master.

  Jackie and Max were gone when I got home from work the next evening, a Friday. A bold, late summer westerly rustled the high palms and blew dead leaves down from rain gutters. There would be no surfing in onshores like this, and I didn’t bother to check the conditions.

  The swells this morning had been chest-high and infrequent at the pier. I’d surfed for an hour at dawn with Jackie and Britt, riding paper-thin peaks that the rising sun showered with molten red then drops of brilliant gold. We’d spoken little during the lulls between sets, each of us staking out our own little corners of sandbar twenty yards apart, scanning the ocean surface for the next advancing lump and hoping that the dropping tide wouldn’t further dilute the surf’s power. Had I checked the waves alone I would not have gone out in such delicate swell conditions, but Jackie had insisted—it was always good to get wet, he’d said. I counted back in my mind through the recent spate of waves and tides and ocean moods come and gone. In the week since Jackie had returned I’d surfed six times, about twice my average. The man may have been a bullshitter supreme, but his stoke was powerful, and contagious.

  I slipped into a T-shirt and shorts and laced up my running shoes. On the w
ay out the front gate I stopped to stretch, then dropped onto the cool grass for some sit-ups, keeping up until a cramp stabbed me below the ribs and stole my breath.

  The Southside beach was dry and blustery, sandblasted by a stiff wind that crabbed millions of scars onto the ocean surface and quickly chilled the sweat on my skin. The sunbathers had been driven away hours ago, and a swirl of blowing granules bit my shins as I crossed the pink sand. I dropped down to the hard pack at water’s edge and jogged toward the pier until I was beneath the wet pilings. The boisterous conversation of two fishermen above me came and went as they watched me slip from their view. Reemerging on the wider, flatter Northside shore, I ran hard against the onshore breeze until I reached the jetty marking the north end of town, where warm water from the Edison plant flowed down a long manmade channel and into the sea. A man in a sleeveless undershirt and cutoffs was studying the rocks, stooping to snatch up the small crabs that thrive there in the artificially balmy water. A boy and girl raked long-tailed dragon kites against the sky, darting sideways in the wet sand as they reeled on their spools in a duel for superior position.

  I jogged back to the pier and onto the Southside beach, then sprinted the last hundred-fifty yards down to the long south jetty, where I stopped and did forty push-ups against a huge flat rock, then rested and did forty more. My breath was nearly gone and stars burst before my eyes above the jetty rocks, but the physical exertion felt right in some fundamental way.

  I stared into the face of a curling shorebreak dumper and mind-surfed my way through the tube before the wave disintegrated into whitewash. I could feel the Randall case pushing its way into my thoughts, a slew of loose details pressing in on my temples, but I consciously resisted. It was Friday; I needed a break.

  The surf continued to bang against the jetty, the white foam fizzing and popping as it slanted back into the sea. I sat on the rock with my legs pulled into my chest and my arms locked across my knees to deflect the wind. Once more, the matter of Nathan Randall invaded the moment.

  Every time I prepare for trial, the facts of the case consume me for weeks on end. I’ve begun to resent the intrusion. After all, I’m court-appointed counsel. I’m paid to be sure that those who can’t afford a lawyer get one, not to work legal miracles. Perhaps Phoebe was right to have asked what in hell I was doing in dependency. Coddling sadists and pedophiles, dope addicts and dropouts, dull-eyed children for whom “Daddy” is the government check Mommy cashes every month, that’s what. Obsessing over trials I often have little chance of winning.

  I get too wound up, and for no good purpose. I can’t fix my clients’ problems quickly enough from one progress report to the next, and the repairs I perform are superficial quick-fixes anyway—a pep talk here, a counseling referral there, but nothing truly lasting. I’m also not above playing the savior. J. the Magnanimous, the kind and wise lawyer whose ability to give refuge to Rottweilers can be the difference in a tough dirty house case. Sometimes, in some cases, I manage to check out entirely, inured to the chaos around me. My clients can talk and beg and lie and cry and stamp their feet and feel sorry for themselves all they want, and I see to it that every one of them has his say. But I remain fundamentally unmoved. Their needy wishes cannot compete with the endless spinning waves I swoop through in that perfect lineup in my mind.

  The Randall case was a mess I should have settled without hesitation. With Sue Ellen and Ty as my witnesses, the trial would play like a car crash in slow motion. What was I thinking? We were going down in spectacular fashion.

  For the first time in years I realized how much I missed my father, and I regretted the fact that my memories of him were so timeworn and incomplete. I longed to seek his counsel, to draw from his reserve of low-key confidence. Consumed again by my doubts about the Randall matter, I engaged in a round of self-pity, wondering if Robert Shepard would have equated losing with not giving a shit.

  A kiddie lawyer, Sue Ellen had said. Some rapport. There seemed to be no point any more in attempting to ingratiate myself with my clients; by now they knew I was putting them on. Results were all they wanted—children returned, the county off their backs. No grand, benevolent gestures. No heroics. Just results. I decided I could live with that.

  A gull cried overhead. I watched its flight as it sailed beyond the surf and out along the jetty for two hundred yards or more until it fell in with a flock that was arching against the wind. Beneath the cloud of birds stood a lone figure on the rocks, a quarter mile out from where I rested. He was casting into the deep water inside the long jetty, whipping a thin fishing rod above his ear. It was Jackie, I knew, as this was our favorite spot to fish for halibut during the warm currents of summer. Max’s head bobbed in and out of the rocks not far from Jackie, no doubt terrifying the small crustaceans hiding among the crevices. The gulls circled patiently, watching Jackie make his casts.

  Ten years ago I’d shown Jackie how to fish for halibut here, how to snare live minnows that swim among the rocks with a long-handled net, bait the hook with the minnows still alive, and toss a delicately weighted line toward the reef that lies below in the deep water just off the jetty. That first time had been magic. We’d landed five or six big ones just before dark, which is the best time for catching halibut. Jackie was amazed at my proficiency. Ironic, he’d observed, that I could master the reef at Holy Rollers with a fishing pole, when this same reef had nearly pounded the life out of me the first time I’d ridden a wave across its jagged spine.

  The sweat on my body was dry and a chill rippled through my shoulders. Time to go. I turned and saw Max poised atop the jetty, barking and wagging his stubby tail. Jackie looked up and waved, then yelled something I couldn’t hear. I waved back and gestured toward home, then jogged up the berm and across the empty sand. A week of washing dishes by hand had made fixing the broken dishwasher a priority, and I wanted to be home before sundown. It would be no pleasant task to climb up into the attic and look for the dishwasher’s service manual in darkness.

  I stood on a chair in the upstairs hallway and pushed aside the panel of wood that covered the hatch in the ceiling. Then I slowly lifted myself, flashlight in hand, into the attic space. Stacks of cardboard boxes lined the unfinished wood-frame walls. A string attached to a bare bulb dangled from the ceiling. I tugged and heard a click, then boom!—a flash of light gave shape to the hulking shadows for an instant. Then darkness.

  I flipped on the flashlight and sucked in the stale smell of sea salt and damp lumber. Forget going back down for a fresh bulb—this attic was not a place I enjoyed entering twice on the same day.

  I hadn’t passed through this hatch in a dozen years, since the day I’d set out to dismantle my mother’s bedroom. Wouldn’t it be funny, I remember thinking back then, to pack her things off to this dank space only to have her rattle through the front gate the very next day, demanding in agitated Spanish that it all be put back just as it was, inmediatamente. But there had been no surprise return, no small-scale tantrum to weather.

  The flashlight’s beam illuminated an array of objects stacked against the walls. Above me, the pitched ceiling was covered with rows of aged insulation that looked like pink cotton candy affixed to tar paper, probably oozing asbestos. Great—another costly fix-it job to tackle during a future flat spell. Behind me, a tennis racket with broken strings and a rusted speargun once owned by my father leaned against each other. To their right, a cluster of cardboard storage boxes were nestled like mortarless bricks in a wall. I scanned the felt-pen lettering on each box: X-MAS, KEY DOCS, 57 BEL AIR, CUSTOM ORDERS/RECEIPTS, STATE FARM, and so on. Fourteen boxes of long-forgotten junk.

  A spell of sadness descended on me, and I wondered what I was really doing up here. Christ, I could buy a new dishwasher at Sears and pay it off in monthly installments. But that wasn’t the thing. I was searching for something that had been missing from me for too many years. I’d forgotten the bass note in my father’s voice when he called me in from the street at dinnertime, the effortle
ss tumble of his laugh, the way he braced a screaming planer in his hands as he plowed it over a fresh surfboard blank in the garage. He died early enough to miss most of my youth, never coaching my Little League team or making it to parent-teacher night at Saint Ann’s. Never glimpsing the person I was to become.

  My mother was as gone to me now as my father, but in my mind she still wasn’t dead. I remembered much more of her. She was the one who’d raised me, especially when it was just us. She’d been there through measles and chicken pox and flu seasons and times I lay in bed all day immobilized only by the permanence of my father’s absence from my world. Those first years after he died, my mother and I functioned best side-by-side. Saturday household chores, grocery shopping, homework, ice-cream runs at Grandma’s across from the pier—it didn’t matter. We grieved my father’s passing but honored his memory by relying on each other to make a good life together as his remaining heirs. But of course, I had to grow up, and like a typical teen I did so with all the grace and subtlety of a runaway bull. Experimenting with enough foreign substances to know why Kerouac had trouble finishing his sentences. Falling in love with a thirty-year-old woman who happened to be married at the time. Surfing up and down the coast, staying away a little longer with every trip. By the time my mother left me, I was every bit the surly, headstrong kid you see staring at you from the senior photos in any high school yearbook. I never accepted that she could have simply bailed. For her I’d kept a long-standing vigil, blinking at the shadows on the front walk at night for so many years that by now, Marielena Shepard had become a ghost, loitering somewhere between my dreams and waking prayers.

  I’d never really admitted that for my mother and me, the end had come and gone. I had yet to mourn her passage. If I had learned anything from the work I did in dependency, it was that the world was a place of abject indifference to personal suffering and loss. Nobody cared.